Monte Cassino and a Talk on the Home Guard

Saturday was the 75th Anniversary of the Battle of Monte Cassino, and the British Legion were at the war memorial at 12.30pm to commemorate it. This was organised by Kelvyn Jenkins, who also played the Last Post. Poems and diary entries were read, the piper played, and wreaths were laid.
Also present were these rather fine dogs:

Then George the Town Cryer announced a talk at the Parish Hall at 2pm, about the Home Guard and auxiliary services.
This was well attended, by a mostly older audience, and there was plenty of cake at the interval!
Peter Weston, a military historian, gave the talk which started, inevitably, with a picture of the most famous Home Guard platoon of all, Walmington-on-Sea's Dads Army.
As Peter Weston said, although the series was based on truth, there was far more to the Home Guard than that.
For a start, they began as the LDV (or Look, Duck, Vanish) - the Local Defence Volunteers, and all they had as a uniform were armbands. As time went on they became better equipped and better trained. There was one photo showing the Home Guard in 1940 compared to 1944. The 1940 man is just wearing his own clothes and an arm band, while the 1944 man has a full uniform and kit, and looks every inch the professional soldier. They even had the honour of guarding Buckingham Palace during the War, and were also trained to man Anti-Aircraft guns. The name change, from LDV to Home Guard, was Churchill's idea.
I hadn't known that there were cavalry units of the Home Guard, out patrolling moorland looking for parachutists, and other specialist units on the railways and at factories that were likely to be German targets.
There were also women in the Home Guard, at first in an unofficial capacity, doing the cooking or clerical work, but later official Home Guard members who even got rifle training.

After the interval, Peter Weston talked about the auxiliary units. In every country that was invaded by the Germans in the Second World War, resistance groups grew up to sabotage them, the most famous being the French Resistance. With the threat of invasion in 1940, the British decided to prepare for this in advance, and set up secret auxiliary groups drawn from the Home Guard. They were often gamekeepers and other people who knew the local country well, or doctors, who could travel around unsuspected. They had secret hideouts, and the idea was that they should go into hiding when the Germans invaded (the hideouts were equipped with two weeks' worth of stores) and then reappear behind enemy lines to do whatever sabotage they could. They also had a list of people to assassinate, starting with the local Chief Constable, who would have been one of the few people to know who they were!
They volunteered for this knowing that their life expectancy would only be about two weeks, and that if (or when) they were caught their families and villages would probably suffer reprisals from the Germans as well.
Fortunately they were never needed.

At the end of the talk, there was a presentation to a man in the audience who had been a member of the Home Guard! He had joined the Home Guard in the 1950s, though, when the idea was revived for a few years at the height of the Cold War. Mayor Trudy Stedman presented him with a badge to show his service, which he had not been given at the time.

There were also displays of Home Guard uniform, photos of local Home Guards, a rifle and even a baby's gas mask - the sort that you put the baby completely inside.