Interviewer
Could I ask your name?
Idwal Davies
Idwal Davies.
Interviewer
And could I ask what Friends group we are talking about today?
Idwal Davies
It’s the Prince Philip one.
Interviewer
Idwal, how old are you?
Idwal Davies
98.
Interviewer
Excellent. Well can I say you’re looking very good for 98. So, tell me, what was your career? What did you do for a job?
Idwal Davies
When I left school, I went into the butchery business, and I was learning to cut up carcasses of meat into joints for the butcher shop. When I was 15, I joined the Air Training Corps, and I trained with them for three years, until I became old enough to be called. D-day had just taken place, and I received my call up papers, and I was sent to Birmingham to go before an aircraft selection board.
So, I was up in Birmingham, and I was supposed to be there for three days, but on the second day, an order came through to say that we were all to be sent home, because the need now was for not airmen, and not for sailors. They wanted soldiers, and I did read that on the first day of D-Day, there were 10,000 casualties, and 4,000 of them were deaths. So, I got sent home, I was sent to Dering Lines in Brecon where I joined up with 40 recruits. I learned how to be an infantryman.
Now at the end of the six weeks of training, we’d all qualified as infantryman, and we were dispersed to various regiments. Whatever regiment in Europe needed replacements, part of the 40 would go there, and continue their training in whatever that regiment was doing. But two of us, myself and a lad from Merthyr Tydfil, they must have used our school reports, and they decided that we were capable of doing a more advanced course. That advanced course was to be a tank man. So, I got sent to Catterick Garrison Camp in Yorkshire, and I found out there I was going to be a tank man.
So, first of all, I had to learn to drive, started off on 15 cwt vehicles, and then 3 tonner army lorries. Finally, I had to learn to drive the 45 ton Churchill tank. That was an experience on its own, because when you get inside the tank, first thing you notice is there’s no steering wheel. What you’ve got is hand grips, and you pull them one way or the other way. The reason being you haven’t got a steering wheel is because you haven’t got wheels, you’ve got a track. The second thing you notice, then, is no reverse gear. So, how do you go backwards? Well, what you do is you stop the tank, put it in the neutral, and then whichever way you pull the steering column, if you pull it to the right, one track will go forward, the other track will go backwards.
Well, anyway, I completed that training for the tanks, and then I had to learn to be a gunner. So, I fired everything then from a pistol, to stun guns, tommy guns, anti-tank guns, right up to the gun on the tank itself. In the gunnery course, I had to do a wireless operator’s course. I had to learn morse code, and how to send it, and how to receive it. The only thing was that, during the war, they used to have savings weeks in the town, and they would save for various items of war equipment. So, when I got taken out, the very first day, I was taken to have my first lesson on the tank, went up to the tank bay, where about 32 tanks were in a line, side by side. I was told go on this particular tank. So, I walked around it out of curiosity, then, I climbed up to where the turret was. On the third tank, I saw brass plate, and what I read on the brass plate was, “this tank was bought and paid for by the people of Llanelli, South Wales,” my hometown. Now, I was going in the RAF, “how did I end up as a tank driver, and learned to drive a tanker that was bought by my own town?”
So anyway, the course took nine months to do, in peace time to train a tank driver takes three years, I had to do it in under nine months. So, the war in Japan finished, and the month later, I was out in northern Italy and joined the 7th Queen’s Own Hussars. Now, because the two wars that were over, Europe was over, Japan was over, and they had started demobilising the older soldiers. So, we had gone out now, because we finished our training, to replace the ones that took it into March. So, when they got to join the regiment, the 7th Queen’s Own Hussars in Palmanova, Northern Italy, they ignored what I had been trained on for the last four years. They looked at what I had done before I came into the army, and they said, “oh, we see that you learned to do butchery. You learned how to cut meat up into joints and carcasses like that. Good”. They said “our butchers just been demobilised, you can be our butcher from now on”. So, I finished the rest of my army service doing a butchery job. The very job that I learned when I left school. So, I trained for four years for nothing, 1950s, there was the Suez crisis, but when I was demobilised, they put me on Z Reserve. In the 1950s during the Suez crisis, I received call up papers, and I had to go up to Scotland for a month to do a refresher course, in case I was needed out in Egypt.
