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Sydney Partridge, born in 1922, had his first job at the Post Office in Harrogate, Yorkshire.
'After a few more weeks at Harrogate, training an older man to take over my office job, I was instructed to report to 'RAF Padgate' (near Warrington Lanes), and was 'kitted out' with uniform. I was then posted to Blackpool during 1941 for 6 weeks of drill and arms training ('square bashing' we called it).
Padgate was a huge camp handling thousands of recruits, and it was my first sight of a military camp, with wooden huts spaced at regular intervals along the camp roads. There were about 30 men to each hut, equipped with iron bedsteads (bunks) with three square horse-hair mattresses which, when placed end to end, formed one mattress the same length as the bed. In the daytime the mattresses (called 'biscuits' because of their square shape, like Jacob's Cream Crackers) were stacked on top of one another and the blankets and pillow were folded neatly on top, with one of the blankets folded around the others like a flattened Swiss Roll. This stack was placed at the foot-end of the bed spring, and the remaining 2/3rds of the spring was left bare all day until the evening when beds could be made up, and eventually, at 11 p.m. 'lights out'.
At 7 a.m. we would hear 'Wakey-wakey, come on you lot, get out of bed'. Then to the ablutions before the last washbasin is occupied. There's probably no plug in your washbasin, so you use a screw of paper to plug it. Somewhere in this country there must be small mountains of washbasin plugs, pocketed by successions of troops and discarded by them only when they were demobilised some years later! The 'personal plug' for a wash basin is the emblem of success and a symbol of the Forces' motto, 'Blow you, Jack, I'm all right'.
Then there's the WC's - with poems scrawled on the walls and doors, the least offensive of which reads 'It's no use standing on the seat, 'the crabs of Padgate can jump six feet!' I don't think I'd ever before seen anything but schoolboys' names written on the wall of a WC - I certainly didn't know what was meant by 'crabs', but I soon worked that one out! Ever afterwards I was careful to inspect the pan of a WC and wipe it before sitting down. I never again sat on a wooden loo-seat; the porcelain was much safer.
After six weeks of 'square-bashing' training at Blackpool, I was sent to the Radio Training camp at Yatesbury near Calne (Wiltshire), where my new mates and I learned what we had joined up for. They called it 'Radio/Direction Finding' (RDF) 'hush-hush' phrase which should not be mentioned even by its initials, to anybody else. A few years later, the U.S. Forces called it RADAR - for 'Range and Detection' but the UK Press, when they were allowed to talk about it, called it 'Radio-location'.
It was still secret for several years after I joined up, and we were still called 'Radio Operators' and wore the same 'Sparks' arm-badge (a hand grasping three streaks of lightning, which some people called 'that spider thing on your arm') as Wireless Operators. If we were captured the enemy would assume we were Morse-operators and so not interrogate us about the secrets of 'RDF'.'
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