Picture prompts Home Guard memories

The photographs had been discovered buried in the bottom of a drawer during a clearout of The Press offices. Some, we suggested, may not have been published for quite some time.

Perhaps the most striking of the photographs, which we reproduce in Yesterday Once More today, showed a troop of mounted Home Guard galloping into action in an exercise near York. “England’s only mounted section of the Home Guard, which nightly patrols 100 square miles of the North Riding,” read the caption.

Well, that might have been a slight exaggeration, admits Noel Hetherton, but certainly the troop did patrol every dawn and evening, even if not quite over 100 square miles.

He knows – because he was one of the young horsemen in the picture.

Now a 91-year-old living in Green Hammerton, back then Mr Hetherton was a young, 18-year-old Cambridge undergraduate, who had returned to York for the summer vacation.

It was the summer of 1940, with Dunkirk in full swing.

On the train to York, he had heard a radio broadcast by Anthony Eden, then the foreign secretary, calling for all able-bodied men not currently serving to join the Local Defence Volunteers – which became the Home Guard.

By the time he got home, he found that his father John, who was the managing director of the Farmers’ Financial Insurance Office in Museum Street, had teamed up with corn merchant William Thompson, who a couple of years later was to become Lord Mayor of York, to form the mounted Home Guard.

Noel and his brother Colin also joined.

In our photograph, William Thompson, who was the troop’s captain, is seen second from right, leading the charge. Noel’s father John, the troop’s lieutenant, is beside him on the pale grey horse.

Just visible between the two is Noel’s brother Colin, while Noel himself can be seen fourth from the right, tucked in behind Mr Thompson. Many of the members of the troop were local farmers who had access to horses, recalls Mr Hetherton, who joined the Royal Navy at the age of 19, a year or so after this photograph was taken.

They were extraordinary times, he remembers.

The news from the war was desperate – and there was a real feeling that Britain could face imminent invasion.

“The Germans had just gone through Europe as though it was paper, and we genuinely thought there was a real threat of invasion.”

So the mounted Home Guard took their duties seriously.

There were dawn and evening patrols around York, and regular weapons training with their Lee Enfield rifles at Strensall.

But there was something comic about the whole thing too, he admits. “Dad’s Army was a lovely television show, but there are a lot of accuracies in it!”

He was the mounted troop’s green youngster, but another member, a Mr Vause, was 70 years old and had served with Gordon at Khartoum.

And while there were patrols at dawn and in the evening, the evening patrols were always the most heavily attended. “You could call in at all the village pubs for a pint!”

There was a lot of fun, he admits – and not a little pomposity, as in Dad’s Army. “But in the background, behind all that, there was this real seriousness. We thought we were going to be invaded.”

Today, we reprint a few more of the wonderful old wartime photographs that we discovered in the bottom of that dusty drawer.

Some may have been printed in The Press before. Others, we’re fairly confident, have not.

We hope some of them may prompt memories as interesting as those of Mr Hetherton.

A line up at York Employment Exchange when girls of the 1920 class registered for National Service on April 19,  1941

Another picture from the past shows the Archbishop of York with a group of soldiers he confirmed at York Minster. An ATS girl , next to the Archbishop, was also confirmed. The date was December 6, 1940