The British Army marches on its stomach

6 December marks 80 years since Ruperra Castle was gutted by fire during the second world war. To commemorate the event we are telling stories from our book, Ruperra Castle War and Flames 1939-46.

As soon as the Royal Signals Corps, now trained and ready for action moved out of Ruperra in June 1940, a RASC (Royal Army Service Corps) Unit moved in to be very quickly trained and moved on. The British Army needed to be fed wherever it was in the world. Those men in bakery before the War were now trained to instruct others. Often these units involved, three or four hundred men.

On the East porch of the Castle

​Some had been part of the BEF, the expeditionary force intended to drive the Germans back from France. These soldiers after escaping from Dunkirk came to Ruperra and stayed for a while to recover while their units were being reformed.

Norman Baxter in 1999

N​orman Baxter from Gillingham was in the RASC Army Bakery in Normandy where, although the Germans were advancing, they had to keep on baking bread. Then an order came to drop everything and evacuate; then after a week to go back to find dough was all over the place and still the Germans hadn’t got there! 

​Norman’s unit however was only just in front of the Germans and they came out of Cherbourg on a Belgian ferry. As they were leaving they could see all the smoke from the oil tanks the British Army had set on fire to stop them falling into the hands of the Germans.

​After landing, a train took the unit to Hereford where they slept on the race course in the open air. Moving on to Ruperra in the morning they were given just two blankets to sleep on the floor in the Castle, but they didn’t have to go outside for toilets or washing and their own cooks made the food. No baking was done since all the equipment had been left in France. Unfortunately, because the Germans were expected to invade Brittan at any minute they had to get up in the early hours of the morning, dress in full kit, proceed to sit in the parked coaches for a couple of hours and then have drills to occupy them.
 
As Norman’s unit was lined up ready to move out they saw the Second Field Bakery unit was moving in - also from Dunkirk. John Rogers, a baker from Deal in Kent, a member of the 2nd and 3rd units had gone over to France in 1940 with the BEF and had the same experience. At two o’clock one morning they were called out of the cotton mill bakery and issued with 30 rounds of ammunition for their rifles because the Panzer tanks were coming. Leaving behind the dough in the troughs, they had to get down in the ditches either side of the road with their rifles and bayonets. Then back to the mill where the dough was all blown up all over the floor to start baking again. 

​A week later the Unit was called on parade and divided up into two halves for the evacuation from Dunkirk. Left half to Number 2 Field Bakery and Right half to Number 3 Field Bakery. Many from Number 2 died on the Canberra when an enemy bomb went down the funnel. John’s life was saved because he was in the right hand half of the unit which then came straight to Ruperra. They didn’t do any baking there either. At Ruperra, their billet was in the apple drying room on top of the electricity generating room.             

Generator block

​The NCOs, being away from the main unit, had bedside lights. One of the beds in his two tiered bunk was empty so John fixed a hanging wire so that after lights out he could switch on and lie in bed reading.
 
One night – he connected a screw bulb. Flash! His hand went blue and all the buildings around the Castle went into darkness. There were panic stations and no more bedside lamps!
 
John returned to Ruperra in 1943 after the Castle had been burnt down and slept under canvas in the grounds. He said that this time the mobile bakery equipment was at Ruperra which became the number one bakery training base. Men were being recalled from the Middle East and from various parts of England. We baked under marquees and the ovens stayed on the trailers with canvas over. We did the baking out in the field under canvas.

The illustrations for the Ministry of Defence instruction manuals for Mobile Bakeries were taken in the grounds of Ruperra Castle. The booklet included detailed technical instructions and information as well as pictures of the canvas accommodated equipment. It seems then that the photographs were taken before the fire although the bakery units also returned to the site after the fire.

​John said that they trained a whole American unit at Ruperra. They were sleeping under canvas too but they had their own quarters. Being with the Americans was an interesting experience. There was always plenty of food. Big bowls of sugar and ‘Help yourself!’ packets of Camels, and plenty of chicken!

​At the end of the war, John did some very valuable work in France clearing the airstrips of mines. While they were waiting for bakery equipment to arrive a group were given a three ton lorry, a length of chain, and a sergeant. The retreating German army had put poles in the airfields to stop our planes from landing. We had to fix our chain to the poles so as to pull them up.

John met his wife, then Betty Cage of Machen, when he was a soldier at Ruperra

Previously the fighter planes had had to go all the way back to the East coast of England to refuel. With these airstrips cleared they could refuel and be back again within the hour. However some poles were booby trapped and that was how their sergeant died. We had to pull the poles up and hope for the best. 
​
​And Monty thanked us personally for the very important work we had done and we got priority leave to come home. It was the only time we got thanked for anything in the Army. So we got sent home even before the people who were at D-Day. 

​George Archer himself from Machen had joined up into the RASC when he was twenty, and then worked as a mobile bakery trainer.

“Everything had to be very clean even the studs on your boots and there was an inspection every morning. The lads would watch what I was doing and try to copy me and I would go round to see that they were doing it right. You had to knead two loaves at the same time. Some of them would say they’d never worked so hard in their lives. In the tents were troughs, 3 by 8 feet, and the ingredients would be all ready weighed out for us in buckets by the side. They put lard in the bread in those days and it made it very filling. You had to mix, knead and cut, mix, knead and cut, throwing it each time into the next trough."

"​Then the loaves would finally be put on a rack, wheeled to the oven and gently slid in. The three ovens held 60 loaves each. The mouth part under the canvas but the rest out in the open. Once bakes the loaves cooled off, stacked in tea chests and sent in lorries to all the camps around."

Footpath to Machen – still there today

After a three o’clock am start, work finished at two in the afternoon when time was their own. They would walk through the lovely green woods down to Draethen village and have tea in Mrs Britain’s. Then they’d walk through the fields to Machen on a path already made with all the soldiers walking on it. They were nice times. Everyone was very, very good to them. George met his wife who was from Machen, but two days after they were married he was sent away to Italy until the end of the War.

John Geddes wasn’t at Ruperra very long but his memories were of the wonderful gates with guards on them. He noticed that the dark building where they slept on bunk beds blended in well with the woods around. It was quiet and they could get on with studying their lecture notes. It was a very nice warm summer and they would walk over the fields to Machen and some days would be invited to teas like his own mother did with the soldiers in Lossiemouth where he came from. 

John Geddes

When he spent time in Egypt the mobile bakery was used as there were  a lot of British soldiers still out there after January 1946. He was up near the Aswan dam and it was so hot that the bread used to go bad because it couldn’t cool down properly. They realised eventually that that was why the Arabs ate naan bread!

Iory Pearce from Chirk was already a baker before he joined up aged 18 in 1944, but was sent to join a bakery unit being formed at Ruperra. The Castle was already burned down when his unit was there and they had to fall in and be checked every morning on a bit of square in front of the Castle. A nissen hut along side was used as a dance hall with a piano and drums, an eating place, the mess and the NAAFI shop. 

He didn’t remember doing any baking at Ruperra but from there he visited Barry, Penarth, and the Drill Hall in Caerphilly where he met his brother in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.
 
The 40 men in his unit were sent overseas in 1944/45 or ‘round the world' as he described it. Having hardly been out of Chirk, all these places seemed so strange. They visited India, Ceylon, the South China Sea and Japan. In India, on twenty mile route marches about 7 o’clock at night at sundown they’d often be walking alongside hundreds of camels in a camel train.
 
While at Hong Kong he went up the Yangtze to Shanghai and from there to Kure in Japan where he met his brother again! He took him to see Nagasaki after the bomb. There was nothing there except one concrete building left standing!
 
He wondered how he’d managed to find his brother in Caerphilly, and then amongst all the hundreds and thousands of soldiers in the Far East, in Yamaha and Kure! When at last he got demobbed all he’d done was bake bread in Portadown in Ireland and in Hongkong. 

Roy Dukes

Roy Dukes from Edgware, was billeted at Ruperra at the beginning of 1941.
Inside the Castle itself were the Sergeants’ Mess, the Officers’ Mess and the canteen and many different rooms. His unit had to go have to go up a lot of stairs to get to the room where we slept on the floor on palliasses, and looking out, could see the mountains. He was posted from Ruperra in charge of the cooking for the 80 men in a paratrooper’s platoon and later went to Holland when it was still occupied by the Germans. About 30 of them would do a ‘recce’. The civilians would direct them to the safe houses where they could hide, be fed, receive and also pass on information.

Towards the end of the war, they we were in Weimar where we joined up with the Russians. The Germans were retreating all the time and our job was to clear them out of the houses to ensure that there were no soldiers with ammunition hiding there, and that the owners of the houses were safe when so much looting was going on.

80 years on and Ruperra Castle is still a ruin at risk of collapse - help Ruperra Castle Preservation Trust save the Castle and surrounding buildings and gardens by campaigning to secure them to use for community benefit, and to ensure a better future for our precious local heritage. Help us secure a future for this important monument - become a member before the end of 2021 and we will send you a free copy of our book – Ruperra Castle War and Flames 1939-46. You can also buy the book separately for £6.