Though he turned 90 on January 27 this year, Major Stanley Clews is still very active, and I found him to be surprisingly alert when I interviewed him on his wartime experiences at his residence in Sliema a couple of months ago.
Clearing mines was a tricky affair as the enemy had removed the warning signs. On all fours, Clews painstakingly defused the cleverly concealed bombs in the desert sand by using bayonets
Clews was born in Plymouth in 1923. He was the youngest of three siblings – the others being Charles, born in Malta, and Eileen, born in Portsmouth – born to Alice Clews and Henry Aquilina (who adopted his wife’s surname in 1939).
Since Clews’s father had joined the Royal Navy, he was posted to Malta and the family lived in St Vincent Street, Sliema. He was educated in England and Malta, completing his studies at the Lasallian St John’s College in Portsmouth (where, incidentally, I did my training for school headship in 1995).
Clews then proceeded to Portsmouth Technical College. From there he had hoped to take up Civil Engineering, and being fond of sports, he tried his hand at rugby and cricket, and made it to the second soccer team: the days were indeed full.
The occasional part in a dramatic play and joining the dancing club made those days the happiest of his life before the outbreak of World War II on September 3, 1939.
That day all the family except Charles, who was in Malta, having joined the religious order of De La Salle Brothers (where he took the name of Bro Hilary), had just returned from Mass and heard Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s announcement on the radio that Britain had declared war on Germany after the Nazis had invaded Poland. Almost immediately they heard over the radio too the sound of an air-raid warning coming from London, the first of the many over Portsmouth,
At 16, Clews became a junior air-raid warden, doing duty as an aircraft spotter. Portsmouth, being a major naval base, came in for its fair share of raids, and on one particular night a bomb dropped across the road from the family’s house and their front room was destroyed. Luckily they were all safe in their ‘Anderson’ garden shelter.
In the summer of 1940, Clews joined other students who volunteered to help out on the farms and so they went off to a farm in Crowthorne, Surrey, gathering the wheat and piling it in bundles. During their rest periods after a meal provided by the farmer and his wife they would lie back looking skywards watching the dogfights between the British and German fighters.
Many of Clews’s older colleagues on the farm were to be up there themselves before the year was out.
Clews decided it would be the Army for him. He had passed his intermediate exams for university but he decided to apply for a short service commission, the examination for which was coming up in January 1941, for entry the following July. In the meantime, his college days having ended, he found a job with the National Westminster Bank.
Eventually, he sat for the Army entrance exam at Winchester College. He opted for the Royal Engineers (REs). Having obtained a good placing, he was given his first choice of regiment. He was to report to the REs recruit training depot at Newark in Nottinghamshire on August 21 for nine weeks of recruit training, the first of an 18-month programme. His family were overjoyed; his father told Clews: “This will make a man out of you.”
The majority of his fellow recruits came from public schools and had been part of cadet training units. They were to some extent an ‘elite’ group and had all received a certain amount of drilling, weapons training and other military activities. So hitting the target was easy for them but not for Clews. However, the instructor was a very patient man and showed him the works.
Eventually Clews became a good shot but never got to fire a rifle in anger. In fact, when he was commissioned, he got a Webly revolver, a weapon he had never fired before. Of course, the recruits also learned how to polish their boots, sew on buttons and were given a bag containing needles, thread and a thimble for darning socks also. No zips in those days!
Nine weeks later they graduated as full-blown sappers (a private in the Royal Engineers). In October 1941, they started a six-month crash course at Birmingham University on some aspects of civil engineering – strength of materials, field engineering, road work, bridge-building (later bridge destruction) and theoretical aspects of their future trade.
Being under Army discipline, their every move was being closely watched by their lecturers at Edgbaston. In March 1942 they had to sit for their final exams before being commissioned. All made it except one who had to return to his unit and was made a sergeant. Unfortunately he was the first of the group to lose his life in North Africa in July of that year.
Early March 1942 saw the end of the student days at Birmingham University. After seven days’ leave at home they reported to 2nd Training Battalion RE at Barton Stacey. There were tough route marches, physical training, map reading, and their introduction to mines and booby traps. They had an introduction to explosives, and from that point onwards the serious work on unexploded bombs.
They were fast becoming soldiers and beginning to learn to take responsibility for themselves and for their colleagues and took it in turn to act as platoon commanders. They learned about their weapons and their transport, and had their first taste of driving motorcycles.
Their class commander always drummed into them that they were “never to order their men to do anything that they could not do themselves”. The main emphasis was still on the handling of weapons and men and with plenty of route marches thrown in. Finally there was drilling on the parade ground – getting to give and take words of command – chest out, bellies in.
Before finishing off as officer cadets at Aldershot, they learned about mine-laying, mine-clearing, tank mines, personnel bombs and some German bombs in case they were ever to join the Bomb Disposal Squad — obviously all this with well-prepared and life-like dummy bombs and mines. But they thought it great fun when preparing booby traps to find one such harmless bang going off as one of their colleagues was caught out lifting a lavatory seat. It paid put to his marriage prospects. Driving three-ton lorries in a convoy of 14 at night was particularly gruelling and the first time they lost their way as they took it in turns to lead. The last month was full of excitement as tailors’ representatives turned up from London (including Savile Row) in their barrack rooms with offers to make their uniforms as 2nd Lieutenants in HM Royal Engineers. Also boot and shoemakers came over to fit them for brown boots and shoes which would replace their black ones.
Their pay was to be increased from 2s/6d to 10 shillings a day, but they would have to pay £18 10s towards their new uniform, and during the year ahead, one shilling a day would be deducted from their pay. Clews would later realise that some of his friends commissioned with him did not live long enough to pay off the debt.
The cadets spent their last night in camp in the various Junior NCO and sergeants’ messes as equals but, next morning, they would be saluting their former charges. They were all veterans, some already battle-weary and who had taught them all they knew.
At night they went to sleep in their barrack as cadets and rose the next morning (it was October 31, 1942) to wear their brand new uniform as 2nd Lieutenants. Then their commandant took that final parade and the 48 cadets became commissioned officers.
On November 10, Clews, then aged 19, received his posting to 279 Field Company Royal Engineers with the 15th Scottish (Lowland) Division) at Morpeth, just outside Newcastle. No sooner had he arrived than he and another subaltern were transferred to the Divisional Battle School at Ainwick Castle in Northumberland.
They were told that there they would get fit. And fit they did get as they stumbled, climbed, ran, stumbled again up and down those cold Northumbrian hills in full battle kit and under the assault courses. The tough assault course instructors would give them the warning: “Keep your heads down, gentlemen, we are using live ammunition.” Life at Ainwick was fast and furious but the end came too. Back to Morpeth he went to clear the mines on the beach there with his platoon of 26 men.
Twenty days later, Clews’s commanding officer informed him he was to go on 10 days’ embarkation leave for posting overseas. Where he was to go was anybody’s guess. Back to Portsmouth for what was to be the last meeting with his family for four years. He was, of course, not to know that at the time. For his parents this was quite a blow and his mother was particularly upset by the fact that he would not be home for Christmas as he had to report to the RE depot in Halifax by December 16.
After those 10 days full of parties, another tearful departure from Portsmouth Town Station saw him naturally pretty miserable as well, heading for London to meet the rest of Field Company consisting of a mixed platoon of REs, Royal Artillery and infantrymen at Euston Station, heading for Yorkshire.
After three days in Halifax they still did not know their destination. However, on the morning of the 18th they got their first clue when they were ordered to collect a tropical kit. Of course, it was known that sometimes this could be a decoy and that they were heading for the North Pole! Nevertheless that night they entrained for ‘the North’ in a blacked-out troop train.
They disembarked in Glasgow on a cold and misty morning. From there they moved to Greenock on the Clyde where they saw about 30 troopships of all Allied nationalities, escorted by warships, preparing to embark thousands of troops for either the Far East or the Middle East.
And so at about 1pm they found themselves heading for the Queen Mary, which they boarded with another 14,000 troops as a recording of Bing Crosby singing White Christmas was played in the background.
As the battle for the Mediterranean was still raging around Malta, which by then was the most bombed place on earth, they had to endure 28 days at sea, travelling south into the Atlantic, round the Cape, up through the Red Sea and eventually arriving at Port Tewfik at the southern end of the Suez Canal in Egypt and travelling by train to the RE depot in Ismailia.
“We were all aware of what was ahead in the Desert War, which by then was in the vicinity of Tripoli in Libya, as the battle for El Alamein had already been won,” Clews says. But at Tobruk he was ordered to proceed to Malta, on urgent bomb disposal duties, where he stayed for a three-month posting, detecting and clearing unexploded mines with three other men at Valletta and Cottonera where there had been heavy bombing.
“How different life in Malta was from my boyhood years, living now on the rubble of this wonderful little island,” Clews reminisces. “In early 1943 I lived among the brave Maltese, some dead and some dying, but despite all this they finally won through.”
Back in Ismailia and eventually heading for the Eighth Army with a field company, they cleared the mines at Castel Benito (now Tripoli airport), by then in the hands of British troops. German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, dubbed the Desert Fox by the British, was then retreating westwards with his Afrika Korps towards Tunisia.
Clearing hidden mines was an extremely hazardous and tricky affair as the enemy had removed the warning signs. On all fours, Clews and his men painstakingly defused the cleverly concealed bombs in the desert sand by using bayonets. They had to be extra careful not to be blown up and at the same time dodge enemy fire.
One rainy day, as Clews was leading a convoy of lorries at Wadi Akarit near the Tunisian border, his driver Willie Robinson skidded, the right front wheel of their Dodge utility truck hit an anti-personnel mine and it blew up. Robinson bore the brunt of the explosion which critically injured him.
Clews was more fortunate. He was catapulted out of the roof hatch of the truck which was open and landed metres away, suffering bruises all over his body, concussion, a dislocated shoulder and a punctured right ear drum. He remained unconscious for three days and was hospitalised for a month in Tripoli. Later he was sad to hear that Robinson didn’t make it, as happened to some of Clews’s colleagues who never returned home from the front.
Clews was not sent back to his former regiment but transferred to Khartoum in the Sudan to bring up a platoon of Royal Engineers to prepare to return to the Western Desert. Clearing minefields left by the enemy was a top priority to enable tanks, heavy guns and vehicles to push up into Tunisia, where the Eighth Army was joining the British First Army and the Americans who had landed north of Tunis.
With Italy’s surrender in September 1943, Clews was posted to Sicily as Acting Captain with his platoon again to clear mines with the Eighth Army at Messina. After serving again in the Sudan, he returned to Malta on leave. It was then that he met Vera Grima, whom he married in December 1944.
Since he was still young, Clews was not demobilised, but he applied for and was offered a regular commission as captain with the British Army and posted to the War Office in London. He was later promoted to major. However, Vera felt homesick as she could not settle in England with their six-month-daughter Lauren and so Clews resigned from the old British Army and they returned to Malta on May 7, 1947.
With his army experience Clews felt he could contribute more to society and at the same time help the family financially. After three years hunting for a job he was appointed sports editor of The Sunday Times of Malta. At the end of 1959, when Bailey Ltd took over the Dockyard from the Admiralty, Clews applied for the post of welfare officer there and was accepted. He was to spend the next 25 years at the Dockyard until he retired in 1984, after becoming personnel manager in 1963.
Nevertheless, he became chairman of the Industrial Tribunal. In 1989 he continued with the publication of the Malta Year Book with the help of Ronnie Chalmers, Twanny Azzopardi and Charles Briffa after a serious illness hit the editor, his brother Charles (Bro. Hilary). That year he also became secretary and later chairman of the Malta branch of the George Cross Island Association.
Due to the latter’s efforts, in 1992 the Siege Bell monument was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth near the Lower Barrakka in Valletta to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Santa Marija Convoy. As a result of the MGCIA’s success, Clews received an Honorary MBE from UK High Commissioner Sir Peter Wallis in June 1994.
Two years later, Clews was appointed chairman of the Golf Course Steering Committee and in June 2005 MMDNA board chairman.
Clews and Vera, who passed away in 1983, had two children, Michael and Lauren, and the couple have also been blessed with a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
As yet there seems to be no mention of the word ‘retirement’ for Major Stanley Clews.