223332 Sgt. William John Gardiner British Army East Yorkshire Regiment from:Birmingham My father was William John Gardiner, 1894-1941, East Yorks Regiment and his number was 9408. I have his tag. He was a bandsman.
His father, William John Wentworth Gardiner, also know as ‘Buck Taylor’ also served as a bandsman in the East Yorks from sometime in the 1890s till 1913.
My father was born in Preston Barracks in 1894 where his father was serving. He was educated for at least six years in an Army school in India. In his final exam at 14 he was rated ‘Exemplary’. I believe he joined up as drummer boy bandsman at age 15.
In 1914 the Second Battalion was in India, and the First Battalion did not go to France till late September. I am curious therefore how it was my father went to France on 28th August 1914. My guess is that he was at Kneller Hall when war broke out and was sent to France with another regiment, perhaps the Royal Warwicks.
He kept a diary for six weeks, but I do not know where it is. My recollection from reading it when I was very young is that he was in the Retreat from Mons and my recollection is that he told me there were 50 men left in his battalion at the end of the retreat. In the course of his battles he lost the tip of his left thumb and that impaired his virtuosity as a flautist which had been word class. Having had a typically thorough army training he could play any instrument except the harp and the piano, could compose, arrange and conduct.
He was in the Army of occupation in Germany in 1919. He and some chums were in a German Bierkeller with some German officers who had Iron Crosses. The Brits offered to buy the crosses and when that was refused, they took them. My father was, I believe, court martialled, reduced from Sergeant to Private and probably dismissed from the service.
In 1920 he took a job in the Birmingham Small Arms factory in Armoury Road, Birmingham where his father was a warder. For eleven years he also played in the evenings in the orchestra of the Alexandra Theatre, and occasionally conducted it as well as other bands and orchestras. As he was exceptionally clever, he had great success at BSA, and when BSA started making guns again after a lapse of 17 years he was put in charge of the Material Order Department, with a staff of 279. The BSA Group comprised 28 factories, employing 30,000 people, and it was given charge of another 39 factories. He was part of the team which set up production of the Browning Gun. The parts for the Bren Gun were made at a BSA factory but assembled at the government factory at Enfield. One of the Czech technicians who came over from Brno gave me some Czech coins.
In the 1930s he was Secretary of the Birmingham Branch of the ‘Old Contemptibles’ and I met many veterans of the BEF. Unfortunately, I my memory may gave confused their stories with my father’s.
On 19th November, 1940, his birthday, he was fire watching at the Armoury Road factory when it was badly hit, and the barrel mill, the only one in Britain, was destroyed. 53 people died. It was Birmingham’s fiftieth raid, I understand. My school was in the middle of a large concentration of war industries and it was damaged enough to make it unusable for a while. Another big raid followed on 21st November. The raids lasted 12 hours and I remember coming out of the shelter to see the huge glow in the sky to the North. The centre of Birmingham was ablaze. We had been in the shelter all night on 15th November too as the bombers which raided Coventry seemed to be returning over our heads. We could see the glow of their fires. No doubt the Luftwaffe was targeting the factories which made machine tools, Alfred Herbert in Coventry and BSA in Birmingham, and that important barrel mill. Luckily they used many delayed action bombs which very brave people defused. Otherwise the war would have been over, according to the BSA historian.
Bill Gardiner joined the Home Guard when it was formed and then switched to the Air Training Corps in which he was given the rank of Pilot Officer. Although only eleven I was allowed to take part in some ATC activities. In 1941 he was made manager of the BSA factory at Redditch where 2,000 workers made the Besa Gun. The stress of the rearmament programme made him smoke too much. That had dire consequence and on June 26th 1941 he died of post operative pneumonia. He was given a full military funeral. He lived long enough to learn that Hitler had invaded Russia and his response to the news was, ‘At last we stand a chance.’
Bill Gardiner was reckoned to be the cleverest of all BSA’s 30,000 workers.
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