‘Report to Paddington Station in the morning’ Admiralty clerks posted to Bath in 1939 as possibility of war increases
This was the instruction received by hundreds of Admiralty workers in September 1939. One of these was my aunt, Beryl Boud, who was 21 and was a clerk in the Admiralty in London. She had been brought up on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent and had attended Sittingbourne County School for Girls where she passed her General School Examinations including English, French, Maths, and then went on to pass RSA in Bookkeeping and Shorthand, before joining the Admiralty.
So, the next day she travelled by train to …where? They had no idea until the train pulled into Bath Spa station where she was allocated a bed in the old Dorchester Hotel opposite the station. This much I knew until I recently undertook a little family history exercise and discovered that under the 1939 England and Wales Register, on the 29th September, she was billeted (with her workmate and subsequent lifelong friend Rosalind Brier) at No.2 Christ Church Cottages just in front of the Museum – which was then a factory for the manufacture of washing powder.
Her landlord was an Arthur Cox with his second wife Dorothy and daughter Pamela who was just 14. He was 58 and had been in the First World War in 1914-1920, a Private in the Somerset Light Infantry, and served in India in the third Afghan War. But what intrigued me was his occupation. In 1939, he is listed as a caretaker at the Assembly Rooms. Knowing that the Assembly Rooms received a direct hit during the Baedeker raids I wondered if he survived but found that he did and in fact lived in Bath until his death in1964, when he was about 83 years old.
Beryl married an airman, Ernest Amner, in 1941 (he saw action in Iraq and Egypt) and although they moved around during their married life they settled in Bath, where she died in 2007 at the age of 90. She remained at the Admiralty until retirement and played tennis, croquet and bridge enthusiastically. She was a friend of many of her generation, maintaining friendships formed in those wartime years. And now I know that she spent some of her life next to the Real Tennis court! Her and Ern were keen tennis players but I wonder if they knew what that strange building was built for?
Barbara Carroll, Friend of the Museum.