It was 18-year-old "Ground Gunner" Jack Davidson, that's who, fresh from his basic training course. He was manning a machine gun tower built on top of Watnall's old covered reservoir on "The Cliff", looking down over Trough Lane and the RAF camp.
In today's "Tale From Watnall Hall" we share some of Gunner Davidson's stories about his time at RAF Watnall. He pulls no punches and while some tales are amusing, some are quite gruesome and show the reality of war with death and destruction coming to Watnall.
This is his hand-drawn gunnery map showing Trough Lane curving round the barbed-wired camp. The gun tower armed with twin Lewis machine guns is on the right and the still-under-construction RAF camp is on the left where he was billeted in a bell-tent until more permanent Laing wooden huts were built. At the bottom of the map is Watnall Hall and the woods.
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| RAF Watnall was ringed with barbed wire and machine gun posts. This map shows the western defences, a water-cooled Vickers machine gun and twin Lewis guns on top of a tower on the old reservoir up on the Cliff. |
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| A twin Lewis machine gun as used on Watnall's machine gun tower |
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| The top of the covered reservoir in Watnall where the machine gun tower was located |
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| Jack Davidson, aged 18 |
He'd joined up in July 1940 and after just 4 week's basic gunnery training his first posting was to Watnall. Things seemed to get off to a great start... "On arriving at Watnall we stood around in an untidy group outside what I found out later was the Guardroom. There was no one about except a couple of WAAFs [a girl in the Women's Auxiliary Airforce] who walked past and looked at us like we were a prize in a raffle. Not surprisingly, for we found out later that up to us arriving there had been 200 WAAFs on the camp and about 50 airmen. What a shock greeted us in the cookhouse, bread and butter on plates, fish chips and peas followed by strawberries and cream served by pretty WAAFs; they were forced to look pretty as we hadn’t seen any females for four weeks."
The accommodation arrangements were not so good though. It wasn't called an RAF "camp" for nothing... "Chiefy (slang for flight sergeant) then took us to our sleeping quarters which was six bell tents in a little field at the top end of the camp; it was ten men to a tent; with the tents being circular we slept with our feet to the pole that was in the centre of the tent. If the man who slept furthest away from the entrance came in late or off a middle of the night guard it caused a lot of cursing and swearing; we didn’t stay in the tents long as there were some workmen already building our huts opposite the cookhouse."
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| RAF ground crew trainees pose by their bell tents |
German Invaders
The newly-trained guardsmen, who had been told to look out for German invaders, soon showed their inexperience when one of Jack's squad spots a shadowy figure moving suspiciously across a field...
"Three of us were taken to a barn on the outskirts of the village; there was a hole in one wall looking away from the village that gave us a good view over some open fields. We had decided to do two hours on and four hours off watching out through the hole, with the one on watch rousing the other two should something happen. Ronnie and I had just dozed off to sleep when Charlie shook us awake and told us to be quiet at the same time. He whispered, ‘There is someone at the bottom of the field’. We looked through the hole in the wall and sure enough there at the bottom of the field was what looked like a figure with two legs, a head and a pack on its back. After a hasty confab about what we should do, Charlie decided that we should do what we had been told, which was shout in a loud and clear voice, ‘Halt, who goes there..?’
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| Davidson's map showing their "barn" just above the Queen's Head. Watnall's main road runs N-S with the Royal Oak and Underground Bunker visible. MG= Machine Gun post |
On the third shout without a reply it changes to ‘Halt, or I fire.’ There was no reply and I was thanking the Lord above that it was Charlie that had the rifle and not me. I heard him pull the bolt back and push it forward then there was an almighty bang. He’d missed and the figure at the bottom of the field jumped up in the air and landed sideways on. It was a horse, and off it went looking as if it was in the last furlong at Ascot. We heard later that it had been found wandering about on the main street in Hucknall.
The following morning the defence officer came to the barn and he brusquely told us that we were lucky not to be on a court martial for firing a rifle without his permission."
The Coventry Blitz
One moonlit and cloudless night in November 1940, Jack was on duty up the machine gun tower on the Cliff...
"The machine gun post at the top of a tower on a covered-in reservoir. This reservoir was on top of a hill behind the camp and from there we could see a great red glow in the sky to the west, forty miles away. It was Coventry burning. The German planes were droning overhead on their way to their target, we opened fire but there was no chance of hitting them at ten thousand feet or so. We had by this time been given the order to fire at our own discretion; this gave us the excitement of firing the twin Lewis guns and allowed the ones in command to stay in their hidey holes under the billiard table."
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| The Coventry Blitz 14th November 1940 |
The old covered reservoir was fed from the distant Derwent Valley outside Sheffield. It wasn't the only time that part of a Derwent Valley reservoir was used as a machine gun post. See the story of Bailey's Tump in the notes below.
Body Parts
However, a bombing raid on Watnall soon showed him the gruesome reality of the war...
"A few nights [before] the Coventry raid they came and had a go at Nottingham. A bomb dropped on a house not far away from the camp. The next morning, which happened to be my morning on drill, Chiefy asked for six volunteers to go and help to clean up the mess in the house, as there had been two people in the front room when the bomb dropped. Our orders were to go into the house and put the bodies into a couple of coffins that the local joiner had knocked together. The house was still standing but in a bit of a mess. The police were in attendance and had cordoned the area off. In we went. It was a minute or two before I could recognise anything resembling a house, everywhere was dust and rubble. We searched half-heartedly amongst the bricks and bits of furniture. The biggest bit of body I found was an arm and hand with an engagement ring on the third finger. If this was what war was all about, I didn’t like it. Two of the lads were sick and it surprised me that I wasn’t, although I felt as if I could have been."
This sounds like the bomb that destroyed a house on Alandene Avenue. Today, a new build house in the row shows where the bombed house once stood and this 1950 map shows the gap...
As they were the RAF station's official security guards, Jack's squad often took part in exercises to test their capabilities. They did not always come out on top...
"One Sunday morning we had an exercise with the Home Guard; they were going to capture the camp so our defence officer spread us out to surround the camp. Our little group was positioned on a railway embankment to the southeast of the camp. It was a lovely Indian summer morning and we soon got settled down in the long grass. We had been told that if nothing had happened by twelve o’clock we were to make our way back.
When we got back the Home Guard had taken over the camp. They had gained entry by concealing themselves in the back of the laundry van that always came on a Sunday morning to collect our dirty washing. When the van pulled up in the middle of the communal site they had all jumped out and captured the camp. As time went on I think we improved; we couldn’t have got any worse but it took some living down in the local pubs."
The Wrong Password
Getting into trouble with the camp authorities was one of Jack's specialities otherwise known as being "on a charge"...
"My next charge was for delaying an officer in the course of his duties. What happened was that one of the sentry posts was down a passageway, then a flight of steps led down to an operation[s] bunker where WAAFs round a big table pushed about little aeroplanes whose height and direction were relayed to them from observation posts located on the east coast...
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| Typical scene from the Operations Room in the underground bunker |
Anyone coming down the passage had to be commanded to halt and asked for the password that was changed at eighteen hundred hours each day. The system that we used for finding out the new password was to ask the first person that came down the passage after six o’clock; the first one that evening was a WAAF and she answered ‘cabbage’ so I let her through; the next person down the passage was a flying officer who answered ‘cauliflower’. At first I was at a loss what to do and the officer was calling me all kinds of things in his posh accent, and I found out that the word bastard has an ‘o’ and ‘r’ in it and is pronounced borstard. While he was ranting on another WAAF came along, gave the password as ‘cauliflower’ and identified the officer as one of her superiors. About ten minutes later two Service Police (SP) turned up with a relief guard to take my place. The next morning I was up in front of the CO again; he read the charge out to me and asked me what I had to say for myself, which wasn’t much; he made a note about altering the method that we had been using for obtaining the password and gave me a seven-day detention."
The following winter was dreadful and Jack's next charge was for stealing coal... "My conduct had improved. I had only been in trouble once throughout the winter and that was for getting caught stealing coal from the compound for which I got seven days confined to camp. It had been so cold that the weekly ration of coal for the stove in the hut never lasted the week out."
Source - The Ragged Trousered Airman by Jack Davidson
Bailey's Tump
The Tump (a mound) is made from spoil out of the excavations for the Derwent Valley aqueduct. This pipeline was installed through the fields to the east of Matlock in the early 1900s. It carries water from the Derwent Dams (20 miles to the north) a far as Leicester (40 miles to the south). The landowner at the time was Ernest Bailey. So the site became known as ‘Bailey’s Tump’.
In 1940, BaiIey’s Tump was fortified as an air defence site. The circular enclosures are the remains of the ramparts which sheltered the equipment and the soldiers. It formed part of the outer defences for Sheffield and its vital steel industry. In 1940-41 the site was equipped with a searchlight, sound locator, electricity generator and machine guns. The concrete crew shelter was made in Derbyshire at Stanton Ironworks. In winter 1940-41, an attacking Dornier bomber was brought down by fire from Bailey’s Tump. It crashed near Great Longstone. In this action, the attacking bomber shot out the Bailey’s Tump searchlight and slightly injured some of the soldiers. It is this incident that is depicted on the site plaque. In 1944 and 1945 the searchlight was pointed upwards to act as a navigation aid for allied bombers attacking Germany.
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| A Stanton air raid shelter repurposed as a machine gun hide out. |
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