Seven Years In Forces – Then has to Register for National Service

July 1946

South Yorkshire Times, July 13th, 1946

Seven Years In Forces
then has to Register for National Service

Complete seven years’ war service, at home and abroad, enjoy part of your demobilisation leave, and then receive an instruction to register for national service, is the experience which has befallen 25-year-old Mr. Gordon Webster, only son of Mr. and the late Mrs. C. E. Webster, the Lord Conyers Hotel, Conisbrough.

Mr. Webster, who is married and has a daughter, told a ‘South Yorkshire Times’ reporter yesterday that he was amazed when he received the notification. He reported at Mexborough Employment Exchange and was invited to express a preference either for the Army, the R.A.F., the Navy, or indicate a willingness to volunteer for the mines. He replied by producing his discharge book from the Army.

‘Apparently intimation had been received at Mexborough from elsewhere that there was no record of my having registered, and they were asked to make enquiries,’ Mr. Webster said. ‘The matter is now in the hands of the authorities.’

Mr. Webster, who assists his father in the management of his hotel and his Conisbrough New Hill business, actually joined the Territorial Army in May, 1939, with the 57th Lt. A.A. Battery at Denaby, and was called up for active service on August 24th. 1939. He served with the Battery until September, 1942, in the blitz areas of Britain, when he transferred to the Palestine Police, with whom he served in the mounted and Criminal Investigation Departments until December last. He then returned to the United Kingdom for his two months’ leave, was recalled to the Army in April last, and served a month before being discharged in the normal way under his age release group.

He was 17½ when he commenced his Army associations.