Our section went to the Bull Ring.
Heroes Remember
Our section went to the Bull Ring.
It was a real training camp. Each morning you're up at 6 o’clock
and look after the horses and shovel the stalls, go back and get
all washed up afterwards and go on parade. On parade, we were
taken to various things, taken to a field and we were shown
a little bit about the artillery guns and so on, not much.
But we were shown them and we were given a little position
on the gun crew for a while and we were rotated and so on.
And then after that, we also had to go to work duties,
but we were back again and with that, we had also training in
signalling, semaphore, and flags and so on. Also the Morse
training which didn’t give us very much training, but it did give
us a little idea of what it was. That is, comes to the point
when it was time for us to go overseas and we were on draft
from Whitley. And it came about that we were sent down...
Here it was brought together and all of the men were on parade
and we were divided up and sent. Well, you go here and
you go there and we were sent down to go to... Etaples.
Etaples was then based in France and from there we were
divided into sections. A section for here and there and we went
to, eventually, our section went to the Bull Ring, what they
called the Bull Ring, where they sent the recruits off to various
batteries. And we were there for three or four or five days.
Then, that is the time where I was sort of a misfit, because the
rest of my stuff had already gone before me, you see, and I had
been kept in England with four others and I came on this draft,
went to the Bull Ring. Then we were sent around to various
places. And a funny thing in France, that the four of us that
came late were sort of by ourselves and remained by ourselves.
We were, came there for draft, were being sent around to
various units. We came late and we were taken, the four of us,
around by some officer or a lieutenant of some kind to various
units of the heavy brigade artillery and went to one place and
they went to one place and pretty soon I got hunches to what was
going on there. They had four fellas or five fellas, four I think
it was, and we would go to one place and this lieutenant
would go in and speak to the commander of the place and then
they would drop off a man. And then they would go on and there
would be three of us left, and we would go to another place and
drop off another one. And I found that I was the last one to drop
off. I got dropped off at the headquarters of the second brigade
of artillery, which was the luckiest thing that ever happened.
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