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MEMORIES
AND INFORMATION - STAFFORDSHIRE HOME GUARD
41st STAFFORDSHIRE (TIPTON) BATTN.
and
L/Cpl. WILLIAM (BILL) DUNCAN
|
Remembering L/Cpl. William (Bill) Duncan
(27th August 1920
- 13th April 2022)
Bill Duncan was born on 27th
August 1920 in Ardrossan
in Scotland. His father was a blacksmith who worked on the
docks in Scotland and in Ireland. The whole family lived
in Ireland for a while when Bill was around five years of
age. He had a brother and a sister but recalled that his
childhood was tough - he had lost all his family by
the time he was 22.
At the age of 16, he
took a train from Scotland, taking with him the
clothes he stood up in and a reference from his
Headmaster. And so, at some time in 1936 - not the
easiest times to seek a good job - he found
himself in Dudley Port
where he started work in a foundry. In due course
he acquired the skills there to become a tool-setter and, one presumes, continued
in that type of work for the rest of the 1930s and
throughout the war when industry in the Black
Country and elsewhere was working flat out. Such
work was of course essential to the country's war
effort - a "reserved occupation" - and despite his
desire to join the armed forces he could neither
volunteer nor be conscripted.
On 3rd September 1939 Bill would have heard
Chamberlain announcing the state of war with
Germany on the radio. Life thereafter would have
been different but perhaps not dramatically so
whilst the Phoney War progressed for a further 8
months - until everything changed on 10th May 1940
when Hitler attacked the Low Countries and
immediately afterwards, France. Did Bill also hear
Eden's broadcast on the following Tuesday evening,
14th May, when an appeal was made for volunteers
for the new Local Defence Volunteers force as the
prospect of invasion, previously unthinkable,
suddenly loomed as a probability? This gave
Bill the opportunity to serve his country in a
further, different way and it was one he grasped -
and then pursued right up to stand-down on Sunday,
3rd December 1944.
Whatever the precise date on which Bill Duncan joined the Home Guard, as it
rapidly became know at Churchill's instruction, his name is permanently remembered in the
records of the 41st
Staffordshire (Tipton) Battalion, Home Guard,
information about which is contained in this and
associated pages of the staffshomeguard website. The
surviving records all date from a major reorganisation in
early 1944 and we therefore know his function from then
until stand-down at the beginning of December. Prior
to that there would have been several years of service
within the Battalion of which we know little - possibly
including the earliest, desperate days at which time Bill
would have been nineteen or twenty.
In Spring 1944 (following
that reorganisation) Bill Duncan was
a member of the 41st
Staffordshire (Tipton) Battalion's 11 Coy. (Mobile), 7
Platoon, No. 3 Section. He was L/Cpl. in that
Section armed with a Sten
(below) while his comrades
were
allocated rifles (7) and BAR (1). The vehicle allocated to
them and the other two sections was a 34-seater Midland
Red bus (driven by a Midland Red employee). The Platoon
Commander had use of a 4-seater Motor Car, reg. no. OC
7655 (dating from 1934/5) and personally owned by a Private within the Platoon.
Bill had a zest for life which enabled him, even in very
old age, to embrace modern technology and discover, to his
surprise, that information about his Home Guard unit and
its members was available online for all the world to see.
Perhaps this prompted him to delve into a remarkable
memory and to talk about those days to others - and
especially to his grand-daughter, Nicky Stokes: she
recorded much of which he said and has generously given
permission for it to be quoted in this website.
We quote the flavour of one of those conversations, from
2020 when Bill was looking forward to celebrating his
100th birthday:
"He has a wicked sense of humour
and when he saw I was making notes he started telling me
of a particular night guarding the
Drill Hall.......I was
scribbling away making notes when he said they captured
Heinz and his 57 varieties of German......I looked over at
him and he was howling laughing that I believed this tale
of Heinz 57!!!"
Bill was able to remember various other members of his
unit (and no doubt much of the earlier, largely unrecorded
4 years of work of the unit prior to the major
1944 reorganisation covered by various
pages of this website). Men including:
Jackie Barnsdall (Cpl.,
11 Coy., 7 Platoon)
Bert
Dickinson
Jack Fisher (Cpl., 11
Coy., 8 Platoon)
Les Hurley
(2/Lt., H.Q.)
George Smith (Lt., 11
Coy., 7 Platoon)
Harry Smith
(Pte., 11 Coy., 8 Platoon)
Alf Sherwood (see this page of the website)
Gilbert Southall
W. H. Weatherall (Pte.,
11 Coy., 7 Platoon)
and,
pictured left,
Jonny Jukes
(L/Cpl., 11 Coy., 9 Platoon)
Memories included:
......The march from Tipton to
Stourbridge for the funeral
of Lt.-Col. Rainbird
......Being out on manoeuvres and enjoying corned-beef
sandwiches provided by Lt. Les Hurley whose family owned a
local bakery - these were cut up using a bayonet.
......A get-together organised by
Bert Dickinson and
Alf
Sherwood at the Union Street Club: they encouraged the
lads to get up and sing. The laugh was that they all
took turns to sing but then they all sang "Amapola (Pretty
Little Poppy)" - as if trying to outdo each other but they
were too busy laughing at each other, all singing the same
song. (A Deanna Durbin/JimmyDorsey hit from 1941).
.......Harry Smith from No. 5 section, Bill's best friend
and best man at his wedding to Mary on 29th July 1944.
Harry and Bill would go to the old
Bullring Market in
Birmingham on a Saturday to buy whelks, mussels and so on.
Bill Duncan
married Mary in July 1944. Their son, William
John and his wife Jean had two daughters, Nicola and
Paula of whom he was very fond, as well as of their
husbands, Gary and Leigh, and of the three
great-grandchildren who later appeared.
He
continued to work in the Black Country until
retirement in the 1980s. He was a man of many
interests - a keen fisherman, gardener and owner of
Yorkshire terriers and he and Mary had a passion for
ballroom dancing and travelling around Europe in their
camper van (although possibly not at the same time).
Bill's
most striking characteristic was his amazing zest for
life - always making something, always learning
something new (in recent years with the help of laptop
or iPad - his "dotcom", as he called such
devices - and he was doing this up to the week that he
passed away), his mastery of all this new technology
which included the demanding of Alexa to provide him
with the songs of his youth. He even joined a
fitness class at the age of 96. His 100th birthday on
August 27th, 2020, was marked by the arrival of the
Queen's birthday card.
Bill Duncan took pride in his Home Guard service and his
memory of it, 80 years after the event, remained vivid. On
the day of his birthday he cheerily greeted staffshomeguard and the
more than 100 members of the
Remember Britain's Home Guard Facebook Group - all
Home Guard enthusiasts - in recognition of the birthday greetings
they had sent him for that very special occasion.
Bill's grand-daughter ended a note to
staffshomeguard describing one of her chats
with him:
"I’ll leave you for now as he is singing a marching
song '......There
were three jolly fishermen....There were three jolly fishermen.....Fisher,
fisher, MEN, MEN, MEN..... Fisher, fisher, MEN, MEN,
MEN.....There were three jolly fishermen......
The first
one's name was Abraham.....The first one's name was
Abraham.....Abra, Abra, HAM, HAM, HAM.......The first
one's name is Abraham.....' "
For Bill, use of "the dotcom" uncovered, to his
pleasant surprise, the fact that information about his
wartime service in the Home Guard, and that of several
friends and comrades whom he remembered well, was now
available for all to see on the internet. The pleasure
this gave him was at least equalled by that of
staffshomeguard in learning something about such a
remarkable man and being able to create this modest
commemoration of his life and service.
L/Cpl. William (Bill) Duncan, "The Last Man Standing" as
he liked to call himself, died on Wednesday 13th April 2022
at the age of 101.
In Memory of
L/Cpl. WILLIAM (BILL) DUNCAN
and
ALL HIS COMRADES IN
THE TIPTON HOME GUARD
41st Staffordshire
(Tipton) Battalion
Home Guard
1940-1944
|
**********
FURTHER INFORMATION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the many sources of
the information included on this and associated pages of
the Tipton section of this website:
- J, an anonymous Tipton historian; Tipton
Library (Robert Hazel); The Friends of Tipton Library; Sandwell Archives Service (Ian
Gray); Tipton Civic Society (Keith Hodgkins);
"Home Guard List 1941 Western Command" by Jon Mills
(Savannah Publications); "Black Country Bugle";
Tipton in the 50s and 60s Facebook page and its
members; and several individuals including Hazel Jones
(daughter of Sgt. David Blackford), David Barratt
(nephew of Pte. Albert Barratt); Joan Keeling; Kevin
Partridge; and especially, for this page, Nicky Stokes (grand-daughter of William Duncan).
- and any original sources of this material
whose identity is so far unknown to staffshomeguard.
