Cyril Gregory
A soldier serving with the Royal Army Pay Corps
“I was in a squad of ten other eighteen year olds when I arrived at Wolverley Camp, on 15th February 1951”. “We were allocated to Nissen hut No 6, which I will always remember had a filthy dirty floor and cardboard in many of the windowpanes”. “It was a very cold winter that year, the only heating was from a pot bellied stove in the centre of the hut”. “We were only allocated a small ration of coke, and I can remember shovelling it through the door to stop it from getting pinched”.
“We were always hungry, I used to take
bread and knobs of cheese from the cookhouse after tea, to cook on the top of the stove
in our billet, “It was Delicious”. “Thursday was pay-day, £1
the one week but only 15 shillings the following week. On Thursday nights we would
walk across the fields into Kidderminster and call in at the Road House café,
where we would have our weekly helping of cheese-on-toast and a scolding hot mug of
tea, what a treat that was”.
Fred Cooke and Cyril Gregory at Wolverley.
“We drank in some of the local pubs, we would drink cider mostly at The Lock Inn, but occasionally we would go to The Live & Let Live, but never to The Queens head”. “We privates were forbidden to go in, as only sergeants and above went in there”. “The landlord and his wife at The Lock were two wonderful people, and always treated us as their boys, and really looked after us”.
In November, Cyril was drafted and sent overseas to Egypt. On the day he went on disembarkation leave he was ordered to visit a doctor in Kidderminster for his inoculations, and received numerous injections in both his arms. “Afterwards Alan Jones and I walked to the Land Oak, Where we thumbed a lift to Birmingham with an elderly couple in a equally ageing car. We had to sit in the back and hold the couple’s pot plants all the way, so when we finally arrived in Birmingham, we were both in agony.
