Cyril Elsden's Conscription

This is an extract from an earlier post detailing my grandfather's conscription to Newcastle shipyards in World War 2, which forced him to pack in his electrical business for the Wartime period.

The 1941 Conscription Act was to ride a coach and horses through people’s lives and plans as the demands of War hit the civilian population  that was recruited not just for the forces, but also civilian support roles and work in shipyards, coal mines, civil defence, fire and police to name but a few. Cyril and his business was not immune to this. His electrical engineer Jack Wetherell joined the RAF where his electrical expertise enabled him to quickly become a sergeant. My grand-father was conscripted into the shipyards at Newcastle. His father, Frank, took on several roles as air raid warden, auxiliary fireman and special constable. Ada Elsden took on Prudential rounds collecting premiums, despite not being employed directly by the Prudential. The business was effectively closed, or moth-balled by the War.

I find it interesting that as I have moved to Northumberland in 2023 I have walked past old gun emplacements at Blyth where the anti-aircraft guns that were based there helped protect my grandfather as he sat in the complete darkness of black-out in the hold of a ship during a wartime bombing raid unable to see anything other than the glow of his and other worker’s cigarette ends, as they awaited the “all clear” sirens and the switching back on of their lights.

Whilst Spalding did experience war-time raids, damage and death, these were mostly due to German bombers discharging bombs on the return flight from the Midlands on the Nickobein route.[vi] Spalding did not suffer the same deprivations that Newcastle did and food was in a much more plentiful supply in Spalding. I feel that my grandfather’s wartime experience in the shipyards from 1942 to 1945 affected his view on life. It is only as I live in this region that I realise some of the things he said and how he spoke possibly originate from his time in the ship yards at Newcastle. Here are some of his anecdotes:

“There was very little meat available in Newcastle and I saw them queuing around the block at the butchers for what turned out to be whale meat. I tried it once, it was awful.”

“In the shipyards they would bet on anything, even two drops of water running down the window.”

“One day I was working on a ship when the foreman asked, ‘Sparks, can you weld?’ I said I could, even though I had never welded before, I had seen others weld and had gotten them to show me how it worked. So I spent the rest of the day electric welding! One of the pranks by electric welders was to be below the deck and wait for someone to step into a puddle on the deck above and give them a zap with the electric welder. With steel studded boots it made them jump. It’s a wonder we didn’t kill someone with a dicky ticker.”

“All some of them could go on about was the March (the Jarrow crusade). I got fed up of hearing about it so asked which of them had actually gone on the March. They looked around and eventually pointed to some old bugger sat in the corner of the yard smoking a pipe. I never saw him do a day’s work and he sat all day smoking his pipe. But he had gone on ‘the March’ so that was that.”

Cyril described to me a highly unionised environment that as a conscript he was able to avoid. However, he had to be mindful of demarcation of jobs and areas of work. One of his jobs was wiring massive copper coils around the inside of hulls of merchant ships. These would generate an electro-magnetic field that was believed to protect the ships from magnetic mines. The sailors held so much belief in these devices that if they were not working or were damaged they would go on strike and refuse to sail the ship until they were working.

Early in his deployment Cyril’s wife, my grandmother, Edna went to visit him by train. She was only there one night and the bombing raid was so bad that Cyril shipped her back home to Spalding on the first available train south. On another occasion Cyril was given leave to go home to Spalding, but had no available means of travel. So he bought a small old motorbike for £12, bought some petrol that he eked out by mixing it with paraffin, and rode it down to Spalding. To withstand the cold wind of the journey he stuffed old newspapers into his clothes. He rode the motorbike back to Newcastle the following week and sold it for £15. Today I can do this journey in four hours, those days it would have taken double that time on a lot worse roads.

The thing that Cyril was most proud of was working on the battleship HMS Anson. From what he told me he worked on the wiring of the power supply for the ship’s radar. Whilst working on the ship it was understood that if the ship was called to go to sea all those working on the ship at the time would go out with it. This did have its bonus as the ship’s crew ensured the “sparkys” were well fed with food far better than that available onshore at Newcastle and “the best fish and chips ever.” From what I have discovered the radar system was to aid the aiming of the ship’s guns and was installed at the Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson ship yard on the River Tyne.

Despite the fact that Cyril had been self-employed, at the end of the War he could only be demobilized and come home from the ship yards once he had a job offer in Spalding. Edna got him a job at Levertons engineering in Spalding. At that time you could rely upon a job working there not lasting long as they had a reputation for firing people one day and trying to rehire them the next, such was the nature of post-War work. Cyril left and re-established his pre-War business initially at Swan Street before moving to 4 New Road.