Joyce Shrubbs, 88, was preparing to attend the Remembrance Sunday service in the Bedfordshire village of Marston, two miles from her home in neighbouring Cranfield.
A pillar of the Royal British Legion in the county – she is vice-president – she had a remarkable career in the Royal Observer Corps, for decades “the eyes and ears” of the Royal Air Force and then playing a key role from underground monitoring posts during the cold war.
Shrubbs began service as a 17-year-old in 1944, ending it as the corps’ assistant commandant in 1992, the year it ceased operations.
Each year, when the exhortation begins – ‘They shall grow not old/As we that are left grow old’ – and ends ‘We will remember them’ – she remembers her brother Reg.
“That features every time at the exhortation, which I do frequently for the Royal British Legion. The very first person that comes to mind is my brother. You know when you think ‘we will remember them’, that is the first person I remember.
I have a visual image as well, I tend to have a broad picture in my mind, of hundreds of people trying to do the best for their country. I can’t explain. It is an odd sort of picture I have as I stand there.”
Reg died in 1940, when he was 21 and Joyce was 13. “He was in the navy. They had had a really rough time getting the troops off the beaches when they came out of Dunkirk.
“To give them some form of relaxation, the officers, I suppose, arranged they would have a football match on the cliffs of Dover between the army and the navy. To give them a bit of light relief,” Shrubbs remembered.
Reg was playing. “It was during that football match that, after all the dreadful things he had experienced, they were mown down by machine-gun fire [from German aircraft].
“We were farmers in Bedfordshire, doing the harvest at the time, and the kids all had to help. We were in the rickyard when the telegram came. Immediately mother packed her red cross uniform and was off to Dover. He only lasted a few hours when she got there.”
Shrubbs said: “It is sad to think he had done all he had done and then to lose his life like that, but then so did many others. It made a great impression on me, a big impact. That was when I determined, whenever the time came and I was old enough, I was going to do a bit of retaliation, if you like.
“I felt I had to do something but first we had to do something with my education.”
Nearly four years later, she wanted to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air force. “I wasn’t old enough. You had to be 18. But I was still determined to get into the services. I saw an advert in the local auctioneers’ window. It said ‘Join the Royal Observer Corps and live at home’. Underneath it had the age limit – for boys it was 16, for girls 17,” Shrubbs said.
“I was coming up 17. So I thought ‘that’s for me’. It was the same uniform as for a section of the Royal Air Force. I thought that is just as good for me as going into the Women’s Auxiliary.”
She started work at group headquarters in Bedford, plotting the courses of both allied aircraft and “hostiles”, including V1s, the flying bombs or “doodlebugs”, which first were launched by Germany towards Britain in June 1944.
“You didn’t know when the engine was going to cut out. When that happened, they dropped and exploded. I we could catch them early enough, in order to get them shot down into an area which was not particularly populated, that was an advantage.”
Briefly, after the war, the corps was disbanded but it reformed in January 1947. For some years staff continued monitoring British aircraft and looking out for further ‘hostiles’”. “We could be just as useful with our own aircraft as we could when it was wartime. We took part in exercises too. The world was, and still is today, in a pretty difficult state whether it was peace or war,” Shrubbs said.
“It was in the late 50s and early 60s when [the corps] completely changed and it became responsible to the Home Office, even though we still had a serving Royal Air Force officer as our commandant. We were providing a service which we hoped we would never have to use, to report and measure active fall-out should there be a nuclear attack.”
Having served as a group commandant in Bedford, Shrubbs was promoted in 1984, to an area command, covering roughly a fifth of the country, from the Thames to the Tees, and and east of a line down the centre of England through Birmingham. Later she was promoted even further.
“I should have retired when I was 60 but I didn’t and stayed on until March 1992. It was something I enjoyed doing so much. There was such a lot of camaraderie. That meant an awful lot to most of us. When you have been shut down in a headquarters with your comrades for eight hours at a time, it was something you didn’t particularly want to give up. When we stood down, there were 10,000 observers. We still have got the association, though,” Shrubbs added.
Her husband George, a farmer, died 15 years ago but she has a son and daughter and a 33-year-old granddaughter, who was an air cadet, though did not in the end go into the services.
She believed young people were still interested in serving their country. “If you talk to schoolchildren, 10 to 14-year-olds, they ask really intelligent questions and I am always extremely impressed by the cadets of this world. They do such a wonderful job. They really do.
“They are dedicated. I know there are youngsters you wouldn’t give the time of day for. But there are so many more that are genuinely interested in what has happened and want to do something similar.”
