Robert Beard

World War II – Childhood Memories Robert Beard

The earliest part of my childhood was spent in Grayshott, Surrey, where my father, who had served in France with the Royal Field Artillery in WW1, was by 1940 commanding the Grayshott Home Guard. They started off armed with pitch forks and were later given 303 rifles. My own memories were going out in the mornings to pick up silver paper dropped by German aircraft to confuse our radar. Barrage balloons flying overhead were secured by steel cables. Grayshott Hall had a five-acre front lawn which was normally mown with gang mowers pulled by a pony wearing leather boots. As part of the war effort, my father had left it for hay. After mowing with a horse drawn mower, it was rowed up by a horse drawn rake and I was allowed to ride on the horse, clinging on to the saddle pad.

The Home Guard used to turn out at night to round up German aircrew who had survived being shot down and then they were held overnight to be collected the next morning. My abiding memory of these men was their absolute relief to have surrendered. Most of them were conscripts who did not want to be up there anyway.

The Norwegian government and Royal Family had been rescued and brought to UK ahead of Nazi invasion of Norway. The Norwegian Prime Minister had rented a house for weekends away from London in Grayshott and sometimes the Norwegian King used to join him. They would come to play tennis at Grayshott Hall. I do remember watching a doubles game when the Prime Minister came round the net and told my father that the King did not like to be beaten, so my father had to ease off and let him win.

My father was called one night in ?1943 to go down to the Express Dairy building in Fulham which had been hit by incendiary bombs. He drove down in the pitch darkness from the Hallam Street flat where he had been staying to find the building on fire. The milk floats were housed on the ground floor but the horses were taken up a ramp to bed upstairs. He managed to get the horses out to safety before the roof collapsed. His experience with horses in the First World War gave him the know-how.

There were also times when he spent the night as a volunteer on the roof of St Paul’s Cathedral with the Architects’ Group, armed with a long-handled shovel to reach the lead gutters. Their job was to scoop up any incendiaries which had rolled down the roof and throw them down to the street below, before they could burn through the lead gutters.

One day during haymaking on the lawn, I was with my mother and I was told I said to her, “Look up, there’s a plane without a pilot.” It was a V2 rocket plane which just cleared the top of the house and crashed into one of our fields across the road, leaving a huge crater when it exploded.

My half-brother, Dick, signed up for the AirForce the day he left school. He trained at RAF Cranwell and became a Spitfire pilot. He was killed in 1942 – such a great loss.

Robert Beard April 2025