The next time Jim saw his father he was a Captain with commando flashes on his shoulders. He was held back until the school settled at Saunton Sands for the duration of the war. Jim Dove was to have gone to the Duke of York's, but by that time the evacuation had taken place and all new entries were put on hold. Jim Dove’s father, meanwhile, went to France and finished up at Dunkirk only to be picked up with haste and despatched back to France in the company of two lieutenants to blow up bridges in the vicinity of Boulogne. Following the first bombing raid on Portsmouth, the family moved to its grandfather's house at Northend, a northern district of Portsmouth. (Imagine such permissive behaviour in today's world.) By this time, Dove the soldier was a WOI (known as a 'conductor'). Jim Dove remembers playing among the stacked ammo boxes scheduled for shipment to France. The family were living at the Tiprior Magazine, opposite Porchester Castle, Portsmouth, at the outbreak. ‘That's where I want to go,’ he told his father.īy the time the war came Dove snr was a sergeant (ammunition examiner). The family was living in Hilsea Barracks, Portsmouth in 1939 when, out with his father one day, Jim saw a Dukie in uniform with three dodgers on his sleeve, marching along the street. Jim's father was a corporal in the RAOC in 1930 when Jim was born. Their stories and backgrounds vary, yet there's a familiarity about them to those of the same generation and era. Jim Dove, Ken Green, Ted Grant, Fred Cockerill and Frank Fendick were in the ranks of the limbo intake. They may indeed have missed these buildings and places perfectly suited to a Dukie experience, yet they survived and left to lead successful careers so that, today, no one would ever have known they never saw the school premises others before them knew – or those who came after them for that matter. The vast majority came from stable, happy backgrounds and thoroughly benefited from their Dukie experience despite their lacking the experience of superbly-designed and amazingly suitable buildings and facilities: that wood-panelled dining hall with its soaring ceiling, its warm and comfortable atmosphere, assembly hall, gymnasium, garrison-church style house of worship in which past monarch’s and school colours were hung alongside those of the Royal Hibernian Military School now no more the playing fields and cricket pavilion. Some, such as Bob Freeman (see The Soldier Boy review) had unhappy childhoods. These were the boys – an intake of about twenty-five - who entered the school during the years it was evacuated from Dover and left before the school moved back to its permanent quarters.Įven so, like all of those who joined the school in the days when admission was restricted to mostly the sons of 'other ranks', they came from a diverse range of soldier fathers. Among the hundreds of Dukies who passed in and out the premises of the Dover School, one group never set eyes on them.
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