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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Guard on behalf of Arthur Metcalf and has been added to the site with his permission…

I became a sergeant in the Royal Engineers after volunteering in 1940 through a motorcycle journal. I got a letter from the War Office to go for a medical in Blackburn,I passed A1 and went to the regiment in Mill Hill in London.

I was offered a place in the Irish Guards, but I outfaced the officer who had tried to make me join, turning the offer down in favour of the Royal Corps of Signals.

They put me on a battery in Lyme Regis, in the company office, not on the guns I had been trained for. I just wasn’t suited to office work; I had never used a telephone in my life before and couldn’t cope with it. I ended up in trouble after giving the wrong instructions, nearly sinking a boat in the Channel!

They moved me to the next battery with the T.A.’s from London. They were 6inch naval guns. I wanted to go on a course to be a gun artificer, but the battery sergeant stopped me because I was the best loader. This made me be awkward and I refused to obey an order one day, something about installing barbed wire or sandbags. I was threatened with a charge, from ‘Tiger’ the battery Sergeant Major. I ended up being marched in front of the Captain and the charge was read out, but dismissed, as there were irregularities. I got away with it, but later the Captain had a word. He stopped our landlady turfing out my wife and child.

I got offered a place as a dispatch rider, because I could ride a motorbike. I came home on leave first, but one of the Londoners got the job while I was away.

I made a model of a Lancaster bomber and the Sergeant Major and some of the officers wanted one, so they offered to ease my workload to give me time to make them.

But before I could do them, I was posted to the Royal Engineers in Hampshire, then up to Scotland. I did a training course at Leeds, which I passed with flying colours.

At Longmoor on my return they formed a new company, 980 IWT (Inland Water Transport), which could do anything. I was in my element and stayed with them until 1946.

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