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'I was not able to get home to Ventnor, Isle of Wight until about 6 months after starting work in Wandsworth, London.' remembers Sydney Partridge who, born in London in 1922, lived with his parents on the Island, now greatly popular with holidaymakers. 'This was because we had to work on Saturday mornings and it was not worth the long and expensive journey to spend only one night at home.
The journey was made more awkward by the limited hours of working of the ferry from Portsmouth to the Isle of Wight, which did not operate after a certain time in the evening, especially with the restrictions of the blackout and other wartime requirements.
When passengers arrived at the terminal too late for the last ferry of the day, the ferry owners used to allow them to go on board the next ferry and sleep in its saloon, and the ferry would sail next morning without waking all the passengers. I did that on several occasions during the winter of 1939/40. However, around 1940 one of the ferryboats was destroyed, along with all its passengers (number unknown) by a sunken delayed-action bomb, while steaming past Southsea.
After that they did not allow passengers on board until the ferry was about to sail. Instead, they allowed waiting passengers to sit and doze in a railway carriage in Portsmouth Harbour station until boarding time, then issued each person with 2 cards before they boarded the ferry. One card was to be handed over on embarkation and the other, when disembarking at the other end of the journey (so that they knew how many passengers got on and off the ship).
I was able to get home at Xmas 1939 and also when I had accumulated sufficient days of annual leave entitlement to take a week's holiday, during the winter of 1939/40. This was the period of 'the Phoney War', before the retreat and evacuation from Dunkirk (in May 1940) and hostilities had been mainly on U-boat attacks on the Atlantic convoys etc.
Because the island is so near to Portsmouth it was a good recruiting ground for youths to join the Navy, even in peacetime, and so their families were involved whenever one of the Portsmouth-based warships was in action. The loss of HMS 'Hood', 'Barham', 'Courageous' and other lesser-known ships, cost the lives of many sons and husbands of the local families. Some families lost all their sons during the war in one or other of the Armed Forces, and several of my school friends were killed.
At Ventnor post office my mother used to deal with the telegrams addressed to families whose sons/husbands were wounded, missing or killed, and, when my brother (Eric) and I were both in the Forces overseas, she could not help fearing that both of us couldn't possibly survive the war. However, at that time (1940) I was still only 17 years old and too young to volunteer for the Forces.'
How relieved Sydney's mother must have been to have at least one of her sons safe.
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