Formation of the Home Guard

The Formation of the Home Guard turns the prospect of invasion into a local duty: a force assembled from people who could not otherwise serve is expected to sound the alarm and hold an attacker at bay. In Pamela Wheeler Fellows’s account, the organization’s early improvisation is visible in its armbands, broom-handle rifles, and night patrols, while the seriousness of its purpose rests on the possibility that the countryside around Clent might become a battlefield.

Background and the threat of invasion

The volunteer force emerges amid a genuine fear that the German army, advancing across Europe, may invade Britain. The South Coast is considered especially vulnerable, but the danger is not confined to the shore. The open ground of the Clent Hills and the extensive woods around Hagley Park are also regarded as possible targets. Enemy aircraft frequently fly over the area, and residents fear that troops could parachute into the open land under cover of darkness and use the woodland to conceal an army.

The account places this preparation within a broader wartime contest of concealment and misdirection. The Government orders the removal of signposts across the country in the hope that an invading force will lose its way, and the British Broadcasting Corporation stops issuing weather forecasts lest they assist enemy airmen. The enemy, too, employs deception: Hitler disguises railway-tunnel entrances in Germany to resemble castles. The Home Guard belongs to this atmosphere of practical precautions, in which ordinary landscape and public information are recast as matters of military security.

Recruitment and local command

The need for a home defence force is sharpened by the shortage of available men. Almost everyone outside a reserved occupation has already been called up, leaving few able to form a conventional force. The initial group, called the Local Defence Volunteers, is therefore drawn from those too young or too old to go to war, as well as people whose essential jobs keep them from military service but who can contribute during evenings and weekends. Their lack of conventional military availability is not treated as lack of commitment: they are rallied from the population that remains.

Pamela Wheeler Fellows’s father is soon put in charge of the local group because of his experience in the previous war. Its battalion consists almost entirely of young men from the village who are not yet old enough to enlist. The memoir contrasts this youthful company with the familiar image of an older volunteer force: locally, it is more a lads’ army than a dads’ army. Their enthusiasm helps compensate for what they lack in equipment, but it does not make their responsibility less grave.

Training, identity, and shortages

At first the volunteers have no uniform. They wear Government-issued armbands marked with the initials LDV, a name frequently mocked as standing for Look, Duck & Vanish. The Government eventually replaces the name with Home Guard and issues new armbands. This change gives the group a more definite public identity, although it does not immediately solve the practical deficiencies of its equipment.

Drill takes place regularly in the field behind the police station, a place Pamela Wheeler Fellows remembers from playing cricket there. Her father’s commands carry from the field through the hotel’s open windows. He uses discipline to bring the young volunteers into shape, and the account emphasizes their growing recognition that the work is not a game: they understand that they may be required to act in a real invasion and are made aware of what could lie ahead. The familiar playing field thus becomes a training ground, and youthful enthusiasm is put under the discipline of military preparation.

Even the command to present arms exposes the shortages. Weapons are so scarce that broom handles have to stand in for rifles during practice. If the volunteers are called upon to capture a German parachutist, shotguns and pistols left over from the previous war, and even pitchforks, are planned for use. The men take turns practising with these weapons. An appeal to the British public brings in a large number of arms, and America later sends rifles, but the unit considers itself properly equipped only some years into the war. The gap between the gravity of the assignment and the makeshift means available to meet it remains a defining feature of its early formation.

Patrols and significance

Despite having neither proper uniforms nor enough weapons, the local volunteers take the protection of Clent and its surroundings seriously. They regularly patrol the hills at night, watching for a possible parachute landing. Their anticipated task is limited but consequential: they are to raise the alarm and delay an invading force long enough for trained, better-equipped professionals to arrive. The memoir presents this not as a substitute for the regular army but as an emergency first line, formed because the regular forces cannot watch every vulnerable stretch of land.

The Home Guard’s formation also changes the meaning of familiar local spaces. The field behind the police station becomes a drill ground; the hills and woods become terrain to be watched rather than merely countryside; and young villagers who were still too young to join the armed forces acquire a collective defensive role. The unit’s early story is consequently one of both inadequacy and resolve: improvised arms and delayed equipment show how thin the preparations could be, while disciplined practice and repeated night patrols show that the volunteers understood the possible cost of failing in their duty.