Robert Frederick St Barbe Wayne

Bob Wayne, son of Second Lieutenant Wayne has kindly provided the following recollections:

The young couple (Bob's Mother and Father) made contingency plans, if the balloon had gone up Father would have departed to the “woods”. They lived in a fairly remote farm house so they made an arrangement that if a vase was in a certain window it meant – it is safe to approach the house, if it was in another window it meant Germans are here, stay away.

Father would talk about certain incidents in training (like the apocryphal story of the inspecting regular officer who was challenged to find the entrance to the dugout, it was in the middle of a patch of stinging nettles and he was from a Scots regiment) He never mentioned names and never disclosed the sites of the hides to us. We had plenty of paraphernalia, pressure switches, time pencils, a bullet mold, single ball 12 bore cartridges, safety fuse lying about when we were young, I still have some of the original manuals.

At some point my Father became an explosives instructor, possibly a peripatetic bomb man. He always liked to tell the story of doing an explosive course on Fakenham Race course. As a grand finale they put a charge in the middle of a pond at the back of the car park. As anticipated a column of black mud went up in the air – laced with hundreds of flying gin bottles!  

The other story which I cannot authenticate is that according to family folk lore my Grandfather (Fred W’s father in law) Col Q. E. Gurney (Home Guard) was also involved in the Auxiliary Units. The story goes that as well as being the local HG commander he was also to be used as a liaison officer conveying orders, and possibly ammunition and medical supplies. As such he would not have been attached to or would have trained with any of the cells. This is plausible.

They lived about 8 miles from my parents and I assume my mother would have had a lot of contact with her mother but it was only after the war that they acknowledged that they were both in the Auxiliary Units but the mother and daughter had never mentioned it.