See inside Ferring pillbox and hear what it was like for soldiers serving there
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00:00Welcome to the pillbox. We would have had four people in here, being nice and cozy.
00:08Essentially, you would have done a 12-hour shift in here. Those four people would have been one NCO
00:14and three privates. Potentially, one private would be a gunner on the Bren gun. The second
00:21one would be a loader on the Bren gun, so you could change the magazines really quickly.
00:25The third one would be a runner. He'd help get the magazines out of the ammo boxes, ready
00:31for the loader to change magazines. The runner would also have the task of he'd actually run
00:39off and get messages. He'd get more ammunition. It's the sealed telephone that got down. Generally,
00:47if he was running, I think he'd have a note going, help. If you're actually standing in
00:55or surrounded by one metre of concrete around you. In theory, this is supposed to be able
01:03to withstand a 15-inch naval shell. I wouldn't really want to be on the receding end of that.
01:13That's a real 1940s word. So, amenities. Your cup of tea, your boiled water, a little hexamine
01:21block. We can't use those today because they're carcinogenic and they're really horrible. They
01:26make a horrible mess of the bottle of the mess tin. So, you boil your water, you put in your
01:31tea leaves. Add cooked condensed milk and then add loads of sugar because you can never have
01:39too sweet a tea. Your Russian pack. That would either be corned beef or Spam. Hardtack biscuits,
01:49chocolate and you've got an OXO so you can make beef tea and boiled sweets. Each man would
01:56have one of those. A bucket in here, you would use that because you really didn't want to
02:05go outside at night because you're surrounded by a minefield and the last thing you really
02:13want to do is tread on the mine.
02:26They had troops in Worthing who had come back from India to defend the home front. They had
02:34drivers but unfortunately they were mule drivers, not car or vehicle drivers so there were no
02:41driver lines between them. They could herd mules and pack mules. The problem was we didn't have
02:46any mules so they were useless. So, in June 1940, about that time, they started to beef up the
02:53fences and build lots of hill boxes including this one here. They panic-laid mines on the
02:59beaches and then had to take the mines off the beaches because with shingle it moves. If the
03:05shingle moves, the mines move. Also, the weight of shingle on top of the mines set the mines off.
03:11And unfortunately, three engineers were killed in Worthing clearing those mines to bring them off the
03:17beach. One guy was trained to do it. The other two were what we call in the Army, loosely, volunteers.
03:24To help them. And they dropped the mine on the beach and they were killed outright. It took them two
03:29days to recover the bodies and don't lose tread to go to the minefield to clear off. So, how do we
03:35defend the beach? So, in the gazebo there is a model of this beach as it was today.
03:41So, out at sea, there was the Navy. In the air there was the Air Force. That was our first line of defense.
03:56We tried to take them out before they landed. Then, about midway between high tide and low tide,
04:03the sea called Admiralty Scaffoldy, which is basically three meter long scaffold poles
04:09dug into the sand at an angle with a framework underneath them. They were there to stop landing
04:15craft and also to certainly be able to stop a tank. Now, they stretched right from Pogner through to
04:21Brighton in terms of West Sussex. They would continue around the coast. A massive amount of steel
04:26work went in. Then, behind that, you had the pillbox. Now, traditionally, a pillbox would overlook
04:33a minefield to put the fire onto the enemy when they're in the minefield. So, the pillbox is here,
04:39manned by four guys. And those of you who have been there already realise how tight that is.
04:43With machine guns in there. There's artillery placements as well along the beach. Our nearest
04:50ones were Rushington and, sorry, Angling-on-Sea, as it's called, and in Worthing. There's two artillery
04:57placements there to bring fire onto this beach of the Nubit. There's also artillery up in the hills as well.
05:04Behind the pillbox where we stood now was a minefield. Don't worry, it's been cleared. I've got
05:09certificates to prove it. There's minefield along here. And then, behind that, there was barbed wire
05:19around the minefield and then the edge tank blocks behind this fence now. So, these houses weren't here.
05:24There were big houses here at the time. These weren't. Now, the minefields, there's one other side
05:31of the plantation down there. All the air was mined. All this air was mined. There's 750 metres from here
05:39to the Bluebird Cafe. I reckon it contained about 250 mines. Each weighing 20 kilograms each. So, that's
05:48five tonnes of material had to be deployed and carried along there. It wasn't a footpath in those days.
05:55It was quite rough ground on it. So, back on the line of roughly the A259, there were other roadblocks and
06:04other defenders, a thing called a flame-through gas, which was basically an oil drum, which,
06:09where the Germans were held up in traffic or a junction, they'd be fired over the hedge,
06:13would land on the road and spread fuel over a wide distance and further.
06:16There's also adding tank dishes around Worthing and Littlehampton. And Adelbrooke, in his memoirs,
06:25said he was prepared to use gas on the Germans on the beach if it landed. And that's not very
06:31well publicised that we had gas. We were prepared to use it. So, the Type 26 pillbox. We call it Type 26
06:40because there were 26 types. There was Type 20 to 29 only. What happened to 120? God, goodness knows.
06:50Typical military thinking. Don't confuse the enemy. Don't worry about 120. That pillbox is one
06:58piece of meat. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it.