WWII: British Teenage Combatants
Royal Marines Bugle Boy Grows Up at Scapa Flow
Aug 18, 2008 Laura Harrison McBride
Len Chester is a gentle man. This seems odd when one realizes he joined Britain's Royal Marines as a boy of fourteen. He had never had a drink, never smoked a cigarette, never shot a gun and never played a bugle. On May 3, 1939, nonetheless, he was accepted as a trainee bugler in the Royal Marines.
Pre-electronics bugling a necessary task
Neville Chamberlain, British Prime Minister at the time, had an agreement with Hitler that there would be no war with England, but the general population didn't believe the agreement would be honored. More than one young man was eager to "fight the Hun," as Chester puts it in his lovely 2006 memoir, Bugle Boy. As it happens, Britain had a long tradition of boy buglers, and fourteen-year-olds were gratefully accepted. Bugling was a necessary task in the days before digital alarm bells or even intercoms on royal navy vessels.
Len wanted to help in the coming battle, and, typically for a teen, he loved the uniform. To this day, when he appears in parades or other official programs, he is among the few retired Marines entitled to wear the off-white beret of the Northern Convoys. Their berets were off-white to commemorate the fact that blood turns snow yellow when the blood freezes.
Cold, deadly waters
One of the most poignant episodes happened not long into Chester's first posting, to Scapa Flow in northern Scotland, a long way from his London home.
Scapa Flow is a body of shallow water, between 70 and 160 feet deep, in the Orkney Islands. But it is large enough, at 140 square miles, to be very useful to the British Navy as a major northern port protecting the nation from modern-day Vikings--in World War II, the Germans--intent on invading Scotland and England from the north. It was important in World War II for protecting convoys to Murmansk.
The German navy was aware of the importance of Scapa Flow and, on October 14, 1939, sank the HMS Royal Oak in Scapa Flow. Of 1,400 men on board, 833 lost their lives.
Not long after, Chester was posted to the minesweeper HMS Iron Duke at Scapa Flow. In 1940, another minesweeper working in Pentland Firth struck one of the mines it was looking for, sinking in three minutes, and taking the lives of six crewmembers. Chester was assigned for the funeral services conducted in Kirkwall, the nearest town to the sinking.
Chester's CO at the time was Rear-Admiral "Hooky" Walker, an officer so tough that, despite having lost a hand, he continued to serve the Royal Marines in one of the toughest climates.
The funeral mass included a solo, naturally by the green young bugler, Len Chester, all of fifteen by then and never having been to a funeral in his life.
An officer and a gentle man
When it came time for him to play, Chester writes, "I started well but halfway through I could feel my lips turning to jelly until eventually I unashamedly burst into tears." He thought, as they say in England, he was "for the chop" for his lapse. However, " 'Hooky' Walker, gentleman that he was, laid his hook on my shoulder and gently said 'Never mind, laddie'."
Len Chester played for many more funerals during the war, half of which he spent in cold, wet Scapa Flow, or worse. In 1942, he was posted to the HMS King George V, a 35,000-ton battleship that was part of the arctic convoys to Russia. Surviving icy decks was his personal mission, as the ship itself tried to survive German U-boats until it got into Russian waters. Finally, Chester was posted to the Mediterranean to finish out the war; he found Algiers and Oran better suited to human life and limb than the arctic, which he had survived in all its terrors before the age of 20.
Still adventurous
Today, at 83, Len Chester is still adventurous. From his home in Tavistock, Devon, he seeks out adventure on his computer, or in person, traveling to--most often--warm climates more reminiscent of Algiers than Murmansk.
Scapa Flow topographic view
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