Looking Back, with Eric Leaver

IT IS hard now to imagine the tension that gripped the country that May night 58 years ago when the Secretary for War, Anthony Eden, came on the radio as Hitler's onslaught raged across the Channel.

In only four days, Holland had surrendered. Belgium buckled in the Blitzkrieg. France was being crushed towards capitulation in just weeks. And Britain's forces were being pushed to the sea at Dunkirk

The dread was that, at any time, England would be the next to be invaded by the Nazis. But what could ordinary people do?

In an instant, Mr Eden galvanised their fear and frustration into a fighting spirit. His appeal for "Local Defence Volunteers" to meet the threat of German parachutists brought forth a new army overnight.

In the first 24 hours, 250,000 men, young and old, swamped the police stations to register for the LDV. Some 2,500 signed on in East Lancashire alone. And by the end of June, Britain had almost 1.5million men in what was soon to be known as the Home Guard.

But in those first hectic days of May, 1940, when this new force was born, its only arms were enthusiasm and what few weapons the volunteers themselves possessed.

The press called them "parashooters," but in Blackburn, as 1,000 mainly mature men - many of them ex-servicemen with medals won "in the last one" - gathered in King George's Hall to sort themselves out into companies and draw up nightly patrols, they had only walking sticks with which to defend the homeland - plus a few revolvers without ammunition. Indeed, the Blackburn Home Guard's first weapons were "picking sticks" - wooden staves that were actually part of the equipment that sent shuttles flying across Lancashire weaving looms. They and 20 antiquated rifles which were found, minus their bolts, in the corporation yard served to train the men in rifle drill until eventually they got real weapons and uniforms - at first, an overall-like denim battledress - to replace their civilian suits and armbands.

But out of that initial confusion of shortages of equipment and make-do methods that turned hen cabins into defence posts and the town's Women's Voluntary Service into the Home Guard's own mobile catering corps, there came eventual order - and plenty of innovation across East Lancashire.

Among the "firsts" that the region's "Dad's Army" battalions chalked up was the homing pigeon corps set up by the Blackburn LDV just weeks after it came into being. The scheme was not only the first in the country, but it was also commended as "brilliant" by visiting top brass.

Pigeon fanciers among the volunteers provided the birds to carry messages and a leading businessman gave the "most modern" pigeon loft that was set up on top of the battalion's headquarters.

As soon as a pigeon entered the loft, it triggered an electric bell in the adjoining orderly room, so that "in a matter of mere seconds any message carried by the pigeons will be in the hands of the central control." At Bacup, the enthusiasm for Mr Eden's call was such that the battalion was soon up to a strength of 750 men - and with the Home Guard's first-ever band to provide them with marching music thanks to several of the volunteers having been in local brass bands and the town's Irwell Springs Band lending them its instruments during its wartime abeyance.

But perhaps the most intriguing homespun Home Guard enterprise was the one unveiled by the Burnley battalion at the start of the War Weapons Week savings drive in January, 1941, for the device they came up with to beat Hitler was...a hearse.

It was no ordinary one either. This was a Rolls-Royce. But where once mourners' wreaths were placed on its top by the undertakers, now there was a rotating turret with a Lewis gun.

And, like Corporal Jones' butcher's van in "Dad's Army," with its special portholes for rifles of the Walmington-on-Sea's parashooters to protrude, the Burnley Home Guard's home-made armoured car was similarly equipped - with 16 slits, each with a movable flap, being cut at intervals around its new body of heavy-gauge steel plates, so that its crew of "about six" would have a good field of fire for their automatic rifles.

But this star of War Weapons Week, the pride of Mr T Bracken, the battalion's machine gun officer, almost failed to make the launch of the event. For by the time its creators had finished transforming the 20-year-old hearse that they had come across in the corner of a local garage, it had grown to 16ft in length, was 7ft wide and weighed a staggering three tons. That was too much for the vehicle's original wheels to bear and the project was stalled for a long time while it waited for stronger ones to arrive. But for the Weapons Week event, a local haulier came to the rescue with the loan of a set from one of his trucks.

Alas, however, all this effort and enterprise was ultimately unnecessary, for despite the alarm when Mr Eden made his plea for volunteers to defend the homeland, the Home Guard was never needed as Hitler never invaded.

Its members, though, did a great job in helping the Army proper to get on with re-arming and rebuilding while Home Guard volunteers took over the dull but vital task of watching over installations such as aerodromes, factories and public utilities.

"Dad's Army" did, however, get to go to war in the many battles which its units waged against each other in mock invasion exercises that often fired the enthusiasm of the participants to the extent that some of the "Germans" storming East Lancashire decorated themselves with the Iron Cross.

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