Arthur Mew on Top officers (Churchill?) and the tank during the War

John, our friend, he was about seven or eight and the Army come and commandeered the buildings at Nunwell Farm and his father said to them that how was he going to milk his cows if they had his stable, so they didn’t have the stable, they didn’t have that.

Well the officers took the front room of his house for themselves, the officers did, part of his house and they did these manoeuvres down there. He don’t know for sure but there were all these top officials and they reckon that Winston Churchill could have been one of them what came down there and they had this tank which, they experimented up over Nunwell Downs with and I can’t tell you exactly (laughs) about this tank but it was before it was ever taken, you know, in the War, and they also, they dug the trench for the water pipe which I think went up onto Brading Down and the farmer, John’s father, he’d have just drilled this field of corn, it was just come up about like that he said and they come and they said, “Well we’re going to go right up through that field” and they said, “Don’t worry” and they put hessian bags down and they took the corn out in like squares, whatever it was, laid it on the hessian bag and they went right up through this field with this pipe and then they come back and put this corn on and his father said when it come to harvest, he wouldn’t have known the difference.

There was no difference but they wanted to do it, they did it all night time because they didn’t want Germans coming over to see what they were doing, you know but that was all done night time and they couldn’t believe how they left it and you wouldn’t have known it was a 500 acre.