J.K. Stanford was posted to Tel el Kebir and he offers a description of what awaited the party with whom he had spent the sixteen week voyage from England.
“Tel el Kebir, seventy-five miles from Cairo, was at the western end of a chain of vast hutted camps, base hospitals, depots, workshops and prison camps. These were just springing up in the desert along the Sweetwater Canal and the Suez Road, and for years after the war became the main bone of contention between us and Egypt.
They grew and grew. There were buildings for miles, all with water and electric light laid on…the dessert wilderness blossomed almost as you watched. Units took an army lorry and brought from the canal a spade-deep slice of the rich sludge of Egypt and spread it on the bare sand. Then someone planted and someone else watered it out of a goat-skin…so that the messes were quickly surrounded by gardens of eucalyptus trees and shrubs which grew six feet a year.”
The many RAOC soldiers who served at Tel el Kebir knew it simply as TK. James Heys was posted to 2 Base Ordnance Worksop at TK on 27 April 1941. He was an apprentice painter and, not tall enough for the RAF, had joined the RAOC in September 1940. He’d spotted a notice seeking volunteers to train as mechanics, applied and had been sent on a 10 week course at Aldershot. After TK where he worked on Matilda tanks, he volunteered for the Long Range Desert Group preparing motor bikes.
The image is of Chilwell; does anyone have an image of bikes at TK?
I am a writer working on a book entitled Ordnance telling the story of how the British Army was equipped in WWI, to be published by The History Press in June 2018. My book on WW2, War on Wheels, is available from www.thehistorypress.co.uk and from all good booksellers. I do write more generally on my other blog http://www.philiphamlynwilliams.co.uk
Sunday, 29 March 2015
Tel el Kebir
Labels:
RAOC

His previous book, Ordnance, tells the story of how the British Army was equipped for the Great War. It is to be published by The History Press in June 2018. His first book, War on Wheels, telling the story of the thousands of ordinary men and women who together worked to mechanise the British Army in WW2 was published by The History Press on 8 September 2016. He wrote the story of the MacRobert's Reply collaborating with Story Terrace, published in December 2016. He writes regularly on contemporary issues for a number of periodicals and his own blogs. He is chair of trustees at The Lincoln Arts Trust which runs the Lincoln Drill Hall arts venue. He also chairs The Lincoln Book Festival.
He was awarded an MA in Professional Writing at University College Falmouth in 2009. As a result of the this course, he wrote a novel, Broken Bonds, on human dimension of the Banking Crisis. His He has been writing for fifteen years, having spent much of his career in professional services and the not for profit sector.
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