Duty sergeant Robert Anderson Royal Corp of Signals No 3 Company Anti- Aircraft Eaglesham House, May 10 1941.
“You have to bear in mind it was the early days of the war and we were anything but prepared. For instance there was a secret password that signaled the German invaders had arrived. It was ‘Cromwell’ and as I said a secret but everyone knew it! They knew it down in the village of Eaglesham and they knew it in the Eglinton arms pub there. It was all a big joke. So were we soldiers. I guess we were a bit like Fred Karno’s army, I suppose. We would go out for keep fit runs from our base then as soon as we got to Eaglesham we would nip into the Eglinton Arms for a refreshment and as for being defenders of the local community, Well if that word ‘Cromwell’ had been used in earnest there was little we could have done about it for we had only a few rifles between the entire company and what guns we did have had been taken from us. That was because when they had issued them a soldier had accidentally set one off nearly killing one of his colleagues so we were issued with pikes and clubs to defend the nation.
I was Duty sergeant that night Hess’s plane came over and remember seeing it so low overhead then the man dangling on the end of his parachute just up the road a little past Floor's farm. As I had to stay on duty in the camp I sent two of my men unarmed, of course, up the road to see what was happening. They were signalman Emyr Morriss and Danny McBride and they were the first two army personnel to meet the newly arrived pilot who said his name was Horn. And, together with the man from the farm who had first met Hess, they all ended up having a cosy chat with each other. Hess presenting Danny McBride with an inscribed cigarette case which he kept until senior officers heard about it when it was confiscated.
Anyway, while my two men were chatting away to Hess just up the road the panic had set in at the camp. One of the senior officers having seen the plane reckoned it had been a pathfinder flight for invasion force. There was shouting and confusion and the duty officer had guns issued to myself and signalman Sammy McLaughlin who was an ex-Cameronian and ordered us to climb to the top of a heap of telegraph poles which had been stored nearby from where he said we were to ‘await the enemy and hold off an attack’. Orders were issued with their pikes and sticks and ordered to be ready for the worst. I’m telling you when you look back on it all you wonder how on earth we survived and eventually won the war.
If it was Fred Karno’s army at the soldier base it was Dad's army at another point just along the road Eaglesham. There, having been alerted to the possibility of the crashed plane being German, a local detachment of the Home Guard had been mustered and began arriving by car. There Captain Mainwaring apparently had been enjoying his Saturday night in a traditional Scottish way, which would doubtless had him bemoaning the fact that the price of whiskey had just gone up to a record high, being 88p for a bottle or at the local Swan and Eglinton Arms bars it would now be 5 and a half pence for a half or 9p for what the locals called a loud yin.
Fortified by the whiskey and waving a large caliber First world War officer's pistol which was more Howitzer than side arm, he was to lead his squad of Home Guardsman, together with a couple of regular soldiers who had joined them as well as a reserve police constable, into action.
They had practiced converging manoeuvres before and knew exactly what to do when the captain in charge gave the order. After seeing the smouldering wreck of the Messerschmidt it’s big black German cross unmistakable identifying just whose plane it was, they were to converge on Floor's farm, the nearest building to where the parachutist had been seen to fall.
The ensuing scene is not difficult to imagine, the motley semi-military, semi-police, semi-trained and in at least on case semi-sober squad covering each other with a variety of weapons, the officer with his cannon of a revolver hunching forward to surround the farm buildings, then searching the byres and barns and meanwhile the Hauptmann from the heavens is serenely ensconced fifty or so yards away in the ploughman’s little cottage being offered kindness and tea and chatting away to his new found Scottish hosts."
