In the year of the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, Thomas Baldwin looks back through Life and Work’s archive at the Church of Scotland’s work providing for the forces both at home and overseas.

Meeting A Need (Published in April 1940)

Many of the men of the Forces are strangers in the part of the country in which they are stationed, but they quickly make ties for themselves by attending a Hut or Canteen regularly. Their appreciation of what they find there is great, and often each maintains that his favourite canteen is the best. So keen is their loyalty that recently when a batch of men was transferred to a post some miles away, they continued to come to the canteen, and to the lantern services on Sundays. One of those who came had not been to church for ten years previously.

The men talk freely of their homes and even at times, bring their domestic problems for solution. Though it seems hardly credible in these days of education one totally illiterate soldier had to be helped with all his correspondence. Advice was so often asked about the making of wills that at one centre, arrangements were made for legal help for the men… One soldier with a small boy wanted to find a home for his motherless child - not an institution, but somewhere where he would be mothered. Eventually he himself was successful, but had he failed the canteen workers were ready and willing to solve that problem too.

One day a soldier appeared in the doorway of one of the canteens with his wife and little girl and a baby in the pram. He knew no other place to take them; and though that particular canteen did not cater for families they were not turned away. The baby slept, the little girl trotted about helping to carry plates, and the parents talked quietly over their tea. But perhaps the most domestic scene was in another canteen, where, after a soldier had had his baby christened in the neighbouring church, the christening party, wife, sister, and baby in long clothes adjourned for tea in the canteen.

Saturday night entertainments, Sunday dinners, and concerts have proved a great boon to men oflduty, while some canteens allow the men to bring their wives, mothers or girlfriends with them - a great benefit when their limited spending money does not allow the expense of a restaurant. Pianos and gramophones provide entertainment; table tennis, darts, and other games are available, and dances are arranged.

A surprising amount of food - especially sausages - is consumed at the canteens. Housewives will sympathise with the predicament of a canteen over a holiday weekend when apparently ample supplies had been ordered. By Sunday night it was found that there were no pies, no sausages, and only two dozen eggs. A kindly butcher was dragged from his bed on the holiday Monday to make sausages from whatever his shop might contain. Boys’ Brigade officers scoured the town for pies and the dairies for eggs and in the end everyone had enough to eat.

The Sunday night services at the Huts and Canteens are well attended, as also are the short family prayers in the evenings. One of the new huts reported that the first night there were two men at prayers, the second seventeen and now an average of about fifty each night.

The ‘Woman’s Guild’ Mobile Canteen.(Published in February 1945)

Extracts from a letter to the Secretary of the Church’s Huts and Canteens Committee from the Rev J H C Ross, Church of Scotland Huts, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, CMF

I feel that I ought to give you some sort of impression of the conditions under which the ‘Woman’s Guild’ Mobile Canteen has been working.

In North Africa - To delve into the past, in 1941 and 1942 our canteens were attached to the 7th Armoured Division (the famous “Desert Rats”). Perhaps you remember reading about “Mobile columns harassing the enemy”? We used to serve such mobile columns, even during the harassing process.

Let me describe one such journey. We were sent by Divisional Headquarters to a Brigade HQ who asked us to serve a column. We were given a compass bearing and a number of miles and had to navigate our way to this column. Eventually, having gone two miles oflour course and found another column first (needless to say, we didn’t exceed the stated number of miles! The enemy had columns swarming about too!), we found it and sold our tinned fruit and cigarettes and all the good things we had brought.

At dusk we got our canteen into line with the other vehicles, and, just as a forward troop of guns came back for the night, there was some shouting and the guns were all prepared. An enemy column was approaching; but it stopped for the night just out of range. We spread our blankets on the sand, and slept in our clothes. Before dawn the troop went forward again and opened fire on the enemy: and after dawn we drove to that troop, and plied our trade.

A year later, after a winter in the desolate and trying wastes of Northern Persia, where conditions, though peaceful, were bitter, we were landing on the toe of Italy; as far as I know, the first Mobile Canteen to penetrate into the “Fortress of Europe” with a quarter of a million cigarettes and as many odds and ends as we could cram into our bulging cupboards. This period was varied. We sold our cigarettes - on one occasion to Scottish troops who had been smoking oak-leaves and tea-leaves. We went to Bari, the largest unsmashed town, to buy any odds and ends that might be useful: including silk stockings for the men to send home as Christmas presents!

By this time things were getting organised, and the authorities were ready to deal with canteens. Eventually we got a ten-gallon boiler, a tea-urn and ingredients, and opened our first semi-static canteen in a cobbler’s shop in a little village in the Apennines. A local woman baked cakes for us, and though blizzards kept our shop shut sometimes, we felt quite triumphant to have surmounted all the difficulties.

Then we moved with the Fifth Army troops to the River Garigliano. Gradually we enlarged till we had two boilers, several urns, three men, and three thousand cakes per day. But always on the move - from the cobbler’s shop to a tailor’s shop, to a soap factory. Whenever one or other of the battalions in our brigade stopped, we seized a building in their midst, set up shop, and got a local Italian baker to make buns for us, with our ingredients. We furnished the shops by borrowing chairs and tables from neighbouring houses, and with a few hurricane lamps, a radio, and of course steaming tea and succulent buns, we tried to help the men to forget the usual sorddidness of their surroundings.

In the meantime I had a few side activities, such as going into the line with a battalion when their own Chaplain was wounded. And a few good Scots laddies we buried, and a few Germans. But whatever happened, whatever any one of our team did the canteen was open somewhere every day.

In this way my three men ran a canteen with the Divisional rear party while I was on the Anzio beachhead for a couple of months. One could scarcely get further forward than that! There I lived in a dug-out like everyone else - and was glad of it sometimes - and saw that every man in my brigade got a bun a day, irrespective of his location. The Anzio bun became quite a notable delicacy! When the 50th Army linked up with the beachhead forces, my men joined me and we all went on towards Rome.

We came to our present brigade at the beginning of August and we have been doing the same sort of work ever since: moving from place to place, setting up little teashops in farmhouses or in the open air or in battered Italian villages. Since the 7th August we have failed to open a canteen on three days only, and that was because of continued moves.

The terrain and the weather have made things particularly difficult, and there have been occasions when the enemy have been troublesome too. On one occasion they saw the “Woman’s Guild” on a road under their observation and shelled us. But fortunately they missed and, though great lumps of earth hit the canteen, we escaped shrapnel.

At the moment we have our canteen in a cart shed, and a cook I have borrowed from the battalion is making buns in the farmhouse oven. Before this we were in a byre, where, incidentally, our first customer was a deserter from the German Army. Here I was able to hand the men sausage rolls as they marched into the line. Before that we were in a hovel where mules had been stabled. As you can see, on this job one is constantly improvising, constantly surmounting snags - but never giving up.

A NEW DAY DAWNS(Reflections on VE Day, published in June 1945)

The happenings of the past month will always be reckoned as amongst the most momentous in the world’s history. We have been living through experiences too profoundly moving and too important ever to be forgotten. The measured tones of Mr Churchill announcing the unconditional surrender of the enemy, the devout accents of His Majesty The King speaking like a father to his people, the vivid reports from war-correspondents at the Front, the vociferous cheering of the vast crowds before Buckingham Palace and in Parliament Square all brought home to every heart the greatness of the hour.

“The first instinct of millions was to resort to a place of worship and there join in giving thanks to God and in seeking His blessing and guidance for the days to come.

Yet, apart from the natural and wholesome exuberance with which the nation’s relief found outlet wherever people were gathered in any number, the prevailing mood was one of sober thankfulness rather than of exhilaration. The first instinct of millions was to resort to a place of worship and there join in giving thanks to God and in seeking His blessing and guidance for the days to come. For, even with victory in Europe achieved, there is little temptation to light-heartedness or shallow optimism. The cost has been too terrible; there are too many sad hearts at home, too many hungry, suflering, homeless people abroad; and too many difficulties facing the nations in their mutual relations and each nation in its own domestic life.

A recent writer has referred to the autumn of 1918 as the time when “peace broke out”. Peace has broken out again- at least in half the world; and it will make demands on us hardly less onerous than those of war. One great ground of hope that this time the fruits of peace will indeed be reaped lies in the fact that today people realise, as they did not in 1918, that such fruits have to be toiled for and do not of themselves fall ripe into the hand.