TELLING THE KING

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 61, Issue 69, 2 January 1941, Page 8

TELLING THE KING

STORIES OF LONDON BOMBING.

INJURED MAN WHISPERS STORY

Bending low to catch the words, the King and Queen, touring the London Hospital, heard from an injured man a remarkable tale of the heroism of an A.F.S. demolition squad. They listened intently as the man, an A.F.S. worker named Garrett, whispered through his bandages. His face, legs and back had been badly injured. “I was trying to put out a blaze with a couple of other chaps,” he said. “Bombs were falling round us as we worked. We would have got it under, but a bomb fell too near. A blazing wall collapsed on top of the three of us.” “What happened to the other two?” asked the Queen. In the Next Bed. Garrett pointed to the next bed. “Palmer is over there,” he said. “He got us out. The other chap, Jack Fannin, was taken out unconscious and died in this hospital.” The King and Queen stepped over to the other bed, where Clarence Palmer was being fed by a nurse. His hands, badly burned, were wrapped ; n bandages. “I was able to shout for help when the wall fell on ns,” he said. “All three of us were buried. My hands were sore, but I managed +o push aside some of the bricks round Garrett. “The demolition fellows were brave. They had a tough job, but they dug us out.” A Tragic Family. The King and Queen heard at first hand the tragic story of Gunner Albert Charles. His mother and sister had been killed in a raid and he was on his way to visit another sister, who had been badly hurt. “I was walking in the street with my fiancee when I heard a whistle,” he said to the Queen. “I threw my fiancee to the ground and covered her with my body.

“There was a crash and I felt something fall heavily on my back and here I am. My fiancee was not badly hurt.”

In the same ward lay George Raider, Stepney bookmaker. “Funny name, isn’t it?” he said to the King and Queen, tie told how, as a member of a stretcher party, lie went to the rescue of 14 people buried under a bombed house.

“Something Big” Falls.

“Wo could hear them and I shouted to them,” he explained. “I called to the demolition squad, but just then I saw something big come down. I grabbed a hammer and ran over to it. It went off with a bang before I could get to it and it got me.” The King and Queen talked for some time with a party of 36 men and women of the hospital lay staff—porters, scrubbers and laundry workers—all of whose houses have been wrecked and who .are homeless.

Yet they carry on their work at the hospital. Some spend the nights in shelters. Others go put to the country in lorries, in which they sleep and which bring them back to the hospital in the early morning.