GEORGE ARTHUR WHITE.

Arborfield Army Technical School

Intake 42B

Contributed by: Trevor STUBBERFIELD (52A)

Browsing the internet I stumbled across the following article about Arborfield Boy, George White 42B. Unfortunately the name of the author and source were not available so if anybody can supply the information I would like to attribute the article correctly.

I have included it in the web site as an example of some of the diverse turns that the careers of Arborfield lads sometimes took.

The Editor

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George White 42B

George White was born locally in Southsea in 1929 and age 11 was sent to the Duke of York's Royal Military School in Dover for his education. Dover was an easy target for German aircraft so George was evacuated several times. Between the ages of twelve and fourteen George was the 4th Euphonium player in the School Band. Joining the Army at fourteen he attended Army Tech School, where he gave up boxing to join the Band and passed all his Army Certificates. VE Day came and George was now a member of the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards Band, he recalled that they played for 24 hours that day, it was non stop celebrations. 1946 saw his first tour, a thirteen week Round Britain Tour where each member of the band was paid 2s6d a performance but got fined £5.0s.0d. if they forgot their mouthpiece, George only did that the once. During the tour the band played three weeks in Glasgow and played all thirty-four parks in the city. George enrolled at Kneller Hall and was given a year to become a soloist. In 1948 he boarded the 'Samaria' at Liverpool to take up his posting to Palestine in the last months and days of the British Mandate. The band toured Libya and Tripoli, the Roman city of Sabratha and encountered desert tribes on many occasions, returning to England at Christmas in 1950. George returned to Kneller Hall as a student in 1956 and qualified as a bandmaster in 1961. He was given the Band of the 6th Battalion King's African Rifles in Tanganyika and had to prepare them for Independence Day. 1964 saw the Mutiny in Tanganyika and George was gaoled along with the rest of the British military personnel out there. The British Army took them to Nairobi but they had to leave everything behind, wives and children following later. They were sent home on indefinite leave and given £1000 each to replace their belongings. George next became bandmaster of the Cheshire Regiment Band based in Warminster. Leaving the Army in 1969 George went to Ayrshire to restart the Music Service in Schools and spent 25 years nurturing and developing musical talent to retire in 1994 aged 65. He became a Chelsea Pensioner in October last year to 'complete the circle'.

Editor’s note.

Further searches showed that George joined the Arborfield Army Technical School with Intake 42B. Several coincidences began to come to light, the first being that the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards Band, which George joined, was based at Arborfield and played the music for parades etc. A bit of poaching? Mention of his post as Bandmaster of the Cheshire Regiment has a link with John Williams 52A who signed up as a boy with the Cheshire’s band as a musician before transferring to Arborfield as an Army Apprentice Tradesman.

Slightly before George 42B joining Arborfield, Brian Conway 42A, another musician from the ‘Dukies’, joined the Arborfield Military Band and became its first Apprentice Drum Major. The lead photo in our Military Band section records some of these events.

Norman Padfield 46B took a similar career turn to George when, in 1948, he joined the band of the 1st Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry as a Boy Bandsman.

George entered the ‘Royal Hospital, Chelsea’ on the 16th October 2006 and was finally recalled to H.Q. on the 27th January 2008.

History is always thought of as ‘cut and dried’ but there are always little pockets that need picking to flesh out the human stories behind the basic facts.

Published: 15th August 2012.

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