Norman Jack Allcorn

Son - Norman Allcorn recalls; "By May 1940 the country was in a desperate situation. Jack joined the L.D.V, (Local Defence Volunteers or as they were nicknamed, the Look Duck and Vanish Brigade. Churchill soon changed this to the Home Guard). He did sentry duty on Brighton Racecourse with some Canadian soldiers who were complaining about the cold. “Surely you are used to the cold,” he asked them. “Yes but ours is a dry cold not this damp cold that gets right into your bones,” he was told. Then he had to come home and milk the cows!

In August things got worse. We were facing a very real danger and Brighton beach was a prime target for landing enemy troops. Winston Churchill ordered the formation of the deliberately bland sounding ‘Auxiliary Units’. These were to be guerrilla bands operating behind enemy line in the event of an invasion. They were to be well armed and have a disguised underground base from which they would emerge at night to harass the invaders from behind. The recruits for these units were mostly drawn from the Home Guard. These were farmers and their sons, gamekeepers and hunt servants and others who knew the local area and how to handle guns. They were asked to sign the Official Secrets Act and were in no doubt about the dangers. After an invasion their life expectancy was just two weeks!

Why do I think my father was one of these brave men and why did it take me over half my life to find out? He was exactly the type of man required. He brought home a Sten gun in place of his usual rifle and blacked up his face for night manoeuvrers. Years later we were talking as a family about the war and my mother stopped my father in mid-flow. “Remember the Official Secrets Act”, she said. She was a ‘stickler’ for the rules. I never thought to ask him again, even after my mother died. The rules were relaxed in 1990 but my father died in 1988. Among his effects was a small shield shaped badge less than an inch high. It had 202 or 203 with a line through it. I had no idea what it was and threw it away. More years passed and I bought the book ‘The Secret Sussex Army’ by Stewart Angell. In there, on page 62, was a picture of a badge exactly the same. I had throw away the only hard proof of my fathers involvement.

The threat of invasion passed but trouble was not over for Lower Bevendean. In December 1940 there was a period of intense frost followed by heavy snowfall. When the thaw came the water from the melting snow could not penetrate the frozen earth. It flowed down the valley and flooded the farmyard. Normally water would drain freely through the chalky soil but now there was a foot in the farmhouse, two feet in the cow stall and three feet in the cart shed. It took 24 hours for two pumps from Brighton Fire Brigade to clear it. My father paid tribute to the toughness of his cows. After standing up to their bellies in icy water for several hours, milk production was back to normal within days. This did not help the farm and now it had come to the attention of the War Agricultural Committee. (The War Ag.) The country needed food and the War Ag. did not think Frank was producing enough. The sheep had long gone, victim of cheap New Zealand lamb. 60 geese were reared for Christmas but they were not a necessity in war time. The West family, at Upper Bevendean, were milking by machine and had a caterpillar tractor pulling a 5 furrow plough. Frank, by comparison, was still milking by hand and using horses. He hired a tractor but by that time the War Ag. had lost patience and served him with a Compulsory Requisition Order to leave the farm in September 1942. So the unsung hero and his family were now out of a job and out of a home.

Next came an ironic twist of fate. This same War Ag. now offered my father the job as farm manager of another farm which had also been Compulsory Requisitioned. We left Bevendean on a grey overcast day in December 1942 and arrived, mid afternoon, at Messens Farm, Ninfield, near. Bexhill. The family were still in the house and the farmer was stomping around the farmyard with a shotgun under his arm. The arrival of the local bobby, on his bike, calmed things down and we moved in the front door while the others moved out of the back.

Jack soon got this farm up to scratch and after 12 months we moved to Priory Farm, Rushlake Green, Heathfield. Here we twice had a close shave with different doodlebugs but survived. My father stayed in this village for the rest of his life, first as farm manager and then in ‘retirement’ as gamekeeper".