The unsung heroes of the Second World War – including my dad
With Remembrance Day still in mind, with many wearing well-deserved medals I have always wondered why civilian workers who were in a reserved occupation never received official recognition.
Among these men were those of Portsmouth Royal Dockyard. One of these men was my late father Horace (Jack) Hind who, in later years, became a well know street news vendor for The News. At the time he lived at 28, Crofton Road, Milton.
Born in 1920, he joined the dockyard as in 1936 and became a driller/welder. He always told me of some of the famous ships he worked on including HM Ships Hood, Barham and Nelson. In 1941 along with many other Portsmouth men, he was sent to work in the dockyards of Alexandria and Port Said in northern Egypt.
At that time Alex, as it was always known, was the largest naval base for the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean. It had a large dry dock which was used to repair battle scarred ships that arrived after being bombed and shelled. Many were in a terrible state and it was the Portsmouth dockyardmen whose job it was to set about repairing these ships as fast as possible.
Many times they were attacked by Luftwaffe aircraft so my father told me. He rarely spoke of some of the men’s duties which was to open up compartments that had taken a direct hit and remove the remains of the sailors inside. I will go no further.
One part of the visit he did enjoy was during the later years of the war he visited the Valley of the Kings and the Pyramids. For a boy from Milton it was something he would never had done. He also learned to speak Arabic.
My father left Portsmouth on July 27, 1941, I still have his passport. Like many he thought the war would all be over by Christmas but in fact he and his mates returned home four-and-a-half years later arriving in Liverpool on December 1, 1945, some seven months after the war in Europe came to an end.
Their homeward bound ship had to travel via the Suez Canal to South Africa then up through the eastern Atlantic. On arrival he was shocked to see so much of his beloved Portsmouth was destroyed during The Blitz. He later ran the very successful Judean Boys Club football team.
His girlfriend Mary Sutton a well known singer in Portsmouth theatres whom he had known from birth was waiting for him and they married in 1947.
None of the men were ever recognised for their valiant work. They returned home, had a week off and returned to the dockyard as if the war had never happened.
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