Looking Back with Eric Leaver

MEMORIES of the wartime Home Guard continue to come in since our peep last month at the Rolls-Royce hearse turned into a three-ton armoured car.

Now, here's the Blackburn Home Guard's home-made panzer division of that era - a wire-wheeled saloon car converted into a battle-bus.

Covered in camouflage paint and with its windows replaced with metal, the car - designed by corporation vehicles service manager Mr FA Farnworth - was armed with an automatic rifle that could be swivelled in any direction.

It also had a no-doubt-unique device designed to take the sting out of enemy shells and bullets.

"The back of the car is protected with a sheet of steel on a spring fitting, the 'give' of which is intended to minimise the risk of it being pierced," reported the Northern Daily Telegraph.

Such enthusiastic and zany innovation was characteristic of the every-ready spirit that prevailed among the homeland's new army of defenders that year as Nazi invasion was threatened.

Another amusing instance is supplied by 72-year-old reader Robert Leigh who, along with his pal Stanley Fox, served with the Signals Section of Darwen's Guard after they gave false ages in order to join.

Bringing to mind TV's Dad's Army, the then-teenage Mr Leigh became the private with a pike.

"We trained hard," he recalls. "Iinitially we were given pikes, which were metal-tipped staves.

"I queried what we were supposed to do with them and, in all seriousness, a sergeant said: 'I suggest that you get to the highest point possible and hurl the pikes at the enemy aircraft as they come over the hilltop. With luck, the stave will get caught in the propeller and bring down the plane'.

Mr Leigh, of Sandpiper Close, Blackburn, writes: "He didn't seem to have worked out that if, by some miracle, that had happened, the plane with its load of bombs would have come down on Darwen."

Evidently, this kind of fighting spirit also carried over into exercises. Mr Leigh, who later served with both the Royal and Merchant navies, recalls the time when the Darwen battalion "invaded" Blackburn.

"The ROF fuse factory at Lower Darwen gave up straight away in order to maintain production and we made our way to Blackburn railway station, where enthusiasm got out of hand," he said.

"Thunderflashes were going off in all directions. Many of the glass shades around the gas lamps on the station were deliberately targeted and broken and panic was caused among the train passengers."

But their Major Carus was so pleased with his troops' performance that, on the march back to Darwen, he bought them all drinks at the Golden Cup - with Private Leigh having, alas, to give his away because he was under-age. THE BULLETS just bounce off: Blackburn Home Guard's answer to the panzers

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.