Denis Ellix

Denis Arthur Howard Ellix, younger son of Arthur James Ellix, civil servant with the Geological Survey, of 121 Longwood Gardens, Ilford, Essex and his wife Edith Gertrude Jane, eldest daughter of James Jobson, foreman iron turner, of 38 Blurton Road, Hackney, was born in Leyton on 24 March 1924. His father enlisted on 29 December 1915 and served as an Officer’s Steward in HMS Royal Oak from 30 April 1916 to 21 July 1919. A few years ago, the family visited the Orkney Islands in order to see Scapa Flow, where Arthur was based, from where he sailed to take part in the Battle of Jutland and where HMS Royal Oak is now an official war grave, having been sunk by U-47, commanded by Günther Prien, on 14 October 1939, an event which shocked the Royal Navy and the British public.

Between the ages of five and eleven, Denis attended Valentine’s School in Redbridge, before moving to The Coopers’ Company School in Mile End. With a roll of 400 boys, it was informally linked at the time with Coburn School for girls – the two schools have since merged and relocated to Upminster. Denis explained: "School was not too bad but I was not a particularly brilliant scholar. I was on a family holiday in a house called Barfield in Steynes Road, Bembridge on the Isle of Wight when war was declared. I was standing with friends outside the newsagents when the news came over the radio – I remember it so well.

"I stayed in Bembridge for another couple of months because the school was evacuated to Frome in Somerset. With another boy, I lodged at the Malt House, which has now been demolished, with one of the managers from Frome United Breweries. They had two daughters and we had to call them “Miss Margaret” and “Miss Bridget” – it was not very nice. My father was transferred from the Geological Survey to the Admiralty, based in Bath, and the family lived in a house in Chippenham, until it was damaged by a bomb. Bath is in a valley, you know, and they had Bofors guns on the tops of the hills. Sometimes the German bombers would come in so low that they had to be careful not to depress their barrels too far, otherwise they might hit the houses.

"After I had taken my School Certificate when I was 17, I joined my father and we worked together at the Admiralty in Bath. My first job was allocating fans for different parts of the Flower-class corvettes. Do you remember the The Cruel Sea with Jack Hawkins? The Compass Rose was a Flower-class corvette. When it was time to join up, they sent me a rail warrant and I attested for the RAF at Padgate, near Warrington, on 24 November 1942 and was posted to Blackpool for four or five months of square-bashing, musketry and wireless training. Then I spent four months, until August 1943, at Yatesbury, four miles east of Calne in Wiltshire. I got up to 24 words-a-minute in Morse but I couldn’t do it now. I still know all the letters, though; that’s something you never forget. Two of us were pals from Ilford but Jim [Stevens] didn’t make it – he got polio. 

"After qualifying as a Wireless Operator [WOP or WOp], I was confident that I would end up on a station because I really wanted to be aircrew; instead, I was posted to India. After a week’s embarkation leave in Ilford, it was back to Blackpool, where there was a big Woolworths. The top floor was full of military kit but we were under strict instructions not to tell anyone where we were going. It was a bit silly really because the pith helmets were enormous and had to be strapped to the side of our kitbags, which rather gave the game away! 

"I had a schoolfriend, Pete Unwin [1318328 Sergeant Peter Henry Unwin, 97th Squadron], who also joined the RAF. We had been at school together since we were five years old and were hoping to meet up before my ship sailed. Sadly, though, his plane was shot down on the way back from one of the big raids on Hamburg [on 30 July 1943]. Soon after he had been reported missing, I had a dream. I was walking down a country lane and I saw Pete coming towards me. He said: “Don’t worry about me, I’m alright” – but he didn’t make it."  With no known grave, Peter Unwin is commemorated on the Royal Air Force Memorial at Runnymede, Berkshire: he attended the Coopers’ School and is commemorated next to Cooper’s Hill Woods.

After his embarkation leave, Denis boarded the Monarch of Bermuda [a 1931-built 22,424 GRT Furness Line vessel intended to carry just 830 First Class passengers] at Liverpool. Conditions on the troopship were awful – it was shocking. There were so many troops that you had to join a whacking great queue just to buy a packet of cigarettes. I think that ours was the first convoy through the Mediterranean: there were ships as far as you could see. A lot of the ships would communicate by Aldis lamp in plain language. We used to read the letters out: ‘What ship?’ ‘Where bound?’ We disembarked at Aden and sailed in another troopship to Bombay and then another for the voyage to Calcutta. One was the Ascanius and the other the Ascania – but I can’t remember which was which. We went by sea to Calcutta because the trains were moving troops up as the Japs were coming forward. I saw Ceylon but only from the deck, though. I spent a month in Calcutta before going to Barrackpore. The famine was on and there were bodies everywhere on the pavement.  It was terrible: they had no food and no strength at all.

"Allus WOPs were now split up and I joined 5755 Mobile Signal Unit: point-to-point was what they called it. We operated a three- or four- watch system: either eight hours or six hours on watch. Every third night we didn’t get any sleep at all. We used [Receiver Type] R.1084 sets and changed frequencies by changing coils. The SWAB transmitters were two or three miles away. We had Americans on the camp and they had everything: powered typewriters, bud-keys instead of hard keys and really good clocks – but they weren’t as efficient as we were. We were based at Comilla [Headquarters of the 14th Army in Eastern Bengal, now Bangladesh, on the banks of the Gomti River] which was reasonably far forward so we were all issued with rifles. They were a nuisance and we tried to hand them in to the armoury but we were told to keep them because they were our ‘best friend’. The troops around us were West Africans and Gurkhas – lovely men, the Gurkhas, they could come into any of our canteens. The West Africans had tribal marks on their faces: the local Indians were incredible and they picked up their language very easily and could even distinguish between the different tribal marks.

"There were snakes everywhere in the camp: we used to have silver kraits under our huts. Some of the chaps had pet monkeys which were very vicious. Sometimes the lads gave the monkeys beer and you used to see them on the verandahs, hanging their heads, the following morning. You always gave your clothing a good shake before putting it on because you never knew what had got into it. The rations were interesting: when the cooks were issued with live goats, they took them down to the bazaar and traded them for something different. At any time, about a third of the chaps were down with dysentery, malaria or dengue fever; I had bad skin trouble and spent two or three weeks in hospital in Hyderabad. So we never went forward after all; I was quite relieved at the time but I wish I’d been with them. If we had any leave, we used to go to Shillong in Assam.

"At the end of the war, most people moved away and we became, more or less, civilians. Eventually we went to Calcutta and I then had a nice posting in Peshawar [capital of North West Frontier Province, now in Pakistan]. We were in a big camp with the Inniskillings [Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers] and I remember that we had punkah wallahs to keep us cool with their fans. They had wallahs for everything: dhobi wallahs for laundry, char wallahs for tea, nappy wallahs for shaving. On clear days, there were lovely views of the Himalayas. The chaps up there were very different from the Bengalis: they carried huge rifles; long, thin, pointed daggers; and had bandoliers strung across their chests. After three years in India, I sailed home from Bombay to Liverpool in MV Georgic. We crossed with a ship carrying the English cricket team [to Australia for the 1946-47 Ashes series] and they sent a message to us to thank us for our contribution to the war. When I got home, I was posted to Blake Hall, near North Weald in Essex, part of 11 Group. It was a terrible winter but we weren’t allowed to light our stoves – in the middle of the hut – until the late afternoon."

"After I was demobbed in May 1947, I went back to the Admiralty because they had to keep your job open but I didn’t like it much so joined the Prudential. I didn’t like that much either so took exams for a permanent job at the Admiralty. Since I had left the Admiralty for a short time, I lost all my previous pension but I can’t complain because I’ve now been on pension for forty years. I really don’t know how people manage on an Old Age Pension. At the Admiralty, I worked in Whitehall and in Teddington on officers’ and ratings’ pensions, on contracts for office equipment and on research laboratories. I once had to go to Unst in the Shetland Islands to recover their ‘Top Secret’ documents and bring them back. By the time I got to Lerwick, the ferry had left so I spent a very comfortable night, at Her Majesty’s expense, in an hotel. Ray Lygo was a schoolfriend [he was just nine days older than Denis] but he didn’t make his number with me when I was working at the Admiralty [Admiral Sir Raymond Lygo was Vice Chief of the Naval Staff and Chief Executive of British Aerospace] – but I’ve outlasted him!

"There was a branch of the Burma Star Association in Ashford but their night was Thursday, the same night that our ‘Modern Sequence’ Dance Club met – so I never joined. We used to meet in St. Hilda’s Church Hall and Sunbury Methodist Hall and I was a Club Leader for thirty-two years."

Denis showed me his war medals, which are still in exactly the same condition as they were when they were posted to his parents’ house in 1948. Since he never became a member of the Burma Star Association, he’s never had them mounted. On 27 September 1952 in Ilford, Denis married Doreen Florence, only daughter of Frederick James Robert Hollick, shipping clerk, of 216 Kingston Road, Ilford, Essex, who served in Gallipoli with the 4th Battalion, Essex Regiment, and his wife, Florence May, eldest daughter of Arthur Edward Morris, slater and tiler, of 12 Belmont Gardens, Lawrence Avenue, Manor Park, East Ham. They had two children, Christopher and Valerie, and four grandchildren, Geoff, Jonathan, Philip and Emma. Sadly, Doreen died on 20 May 2015 but Denis is still living alone in his house in Sunbury, to which they moved a year after their marriage. There were 60 people at his 100th Birthday Party at Kempton Cricket Club: as well as family members, there were no fewer than ‘eighteen from my old dance club’. Denis explained: "Both my children live in Sunbury. That’s a bit of luck, isn’t it?"