I was 19 years old when on November 15^th 1941, I registered to join the British Army. I had my medical a month later and was formally called up on January 15^th 1942. I had to report to a place in Brandon, Suffolk. 

I then did my six weeks of basic training at Kings Lynn, which was bloody rough doing in January – there was snow up to your ankles and we had to sleep in what was a condemned school. It had no heating, no hot water, and all the windows were broken! They didn’t have any reserve uniforms, so we only wore denim trousers and blouses for about three weeks, they weren’t very thick for the cold weather when we were practicing our marching on the Kings Lynn docks.

After training, we went to Cromer and I passed my signalling course. While I was a signaller, one morning the sergeant asked if anyone could ride a motorbike. By this time, I was pissed off with practicing Morse code twice a day, and since I learnt to ride a motorbike when I worked in a garage at 14, I told him I could ride one. The following Saturday, I passed a test and became a dispatch rider.

I was posted to Largs in Scotland. While I was there, I was detailed for overseas, and went straight from there to Glasgow docks to prepare. I went onboard the ship, a tired old thing called the Dunnottar Castle. It was built in or around about 1900 and had about 40 or 50 coats of paint on it. There were hundreds of us on it, and we had no idea where it was going when we set sail. Only the crew told us we were heading for North Africa.

Eventually, we docked in Algiers. It was horribly wet and windy when we were getting off the boat, and when we formed up on the quayside we were told we had to march up to Algiers racecourse, which was about four or five miles up the road. When we got there, we were told it was full up, and we had to walk 18 miles further to a different place. We started off in three ranks, but by the time we got there, there was people all over the place – there was nearly a mutiny.

We had to wait nearly a week for the transport to arrive. I drove from Algiers to Tunisia, which took me from 4am until 11pm. We were going over a mountain pass, and I asked the bloke I was driving with if he’d take over for a bit. He took over, and within 100 yards we had gone over the side of the mountain pass and were rolling down the mountainside, rolling past four complete turns in the road. The truck landed with its wheels up in the air and a few yards from a river. Luckily, nobody was seriously hurt. As it was dark at night, nobody saw us roll over the side, so we had to wait until the sunrise before anyone realised we had gone missing.

When we got into Tunisia, I had to go to a court of enquiry in front of a colonel. I said to him, “as luck would have it, no one was killed”. He said: “It doesn’t matter if three of you were killed – I can replace you easy. I can’t get a new truck.” Fancy that! He then told me that I could go back to being a dispatch rider and I was that for the entire North Africa campaign.

When I got to Italy in 1943, they asked if I wanted to do a refresher course in being a signaller and I said “too bloody true”. I was fed up of being a dispatch rider – it was one of the worst bloody jobs you could get in the war. So for the rest of the war, I was a signaller in the Royal Artillery. 

And from there we fought the war from Salerno to Naples. The liberation of Naples from fascism was really bad – the Germans had taken absolutely everything from the people and they were starving. It was bloody hard-going, and we’d advance a couple of miles in a fortnight or few weeks if we were doing well. In early 1944, the Battle of Monte Cassino was in full swing, and we went into that for about a week before being pulled out again. We then moved to Caserta, not far from Pompeii. 

Initially, there were rumours about us going to the south of France. They said we had to be ready to move soon. However, when we set off, we sailed past the Isle of Capri. At midnight, we were briefed that we were making a landing south of Rome at a place called Anzio.

“Christ”, we thought. We started our engines at half past one. At 2am, down went the ramps and the doors, we went ashore. They nailed us. I went off into the dark at about 2.20, and all above me was narrow white tapes firing. There was barbed wire all over the place, and by the time I got through, there were two dead blokes lying on the wire. 

The other day, I watched the film Whicker’s War, about the journalist Alan Whicker, and he described the trenches of Anzio as being like a self-contained concentration camp. That’s how I remember it. It was horrible. All the while you were being shelled or shot at, the Germans could see every inch of you, they could see every movement. I had five months of living underground, experiencing all that, and because I was the colonel’s signaller I had to go out quite a lot.

Everyone was shit scared of this colonel. His family owned coal mines in Northumbria, and he looked upon all of us as bits of shit. We called him Gazala Joe, as he always used to say “when I was in [the Battle of] Gazala”. He was a real ignorant prat, but the more I got to know him the less I put up with his rubbish. He used to swear at me and I used to swear at him right back. These types of class divisions were there, but the comradeship between the rest of us was excellent. Everyone was in it together, it was second to none. If you needed someone’s help, they’d help you, and vice versa. 

After Anzio, when Rome fell, we regrouped and re-joined the action just south of Florence. We were in Florence for several days, doing a lot of line laying, as well as collecting German telephone cables, because theirs were much better than ours. From Florence, we kept on fighting all the way up to Bologna. We then went to Palestine to regroup and get ready for action again, but while we were in Palestine, the war ended, and we got stuck there for a good 18 months.

I was able to vote while I was in the forces, and we were overwhelmed with the result when we found out. It was an excellent feeling. My father was a staunch Labour man and a trade unionist in the times when you had to be brave to be those things. Every time he tried to organise his colleagues into a union, employers would give him the sack, and he was always going from job to job. But that never deterred him. I felt that that 1945 was what we, the people, had been fighting for our entire lives. When people say they’re clapping for the NHS, I tell them I did my clapping in 1948! 

I ended up joining the Labour Party in 1952. There was a chap in the village who I worked with, who I used to talk about socialism with. We arranged to have our first Labour meeting in Brantham Village Hall in Suffolk, and we founded the Brantham and District Labour Party. I remember going out canvassing and knocking on the door of a great big house in a nearby village. No one answered, so I thought I’d wrap up all the different types of literature I had together and put it through the letterbox. Christ, someone snatched it from the other side, opened the door and threw it at me, shouting various swear words at me.

I also became the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) convenor at BX Plastics in Brantham, the factory I worked at. I worked outside of the machine room, people who worked out of there were treated like dirt. I was the first shop steward from outside of there – I remember my brother Bill coming up to me and saying “you ought to know better, you saw what happened to your bloody father.” Well, I said I’d push on, and I had a hell of a successful time as a shop steward for 23 years. 

I’d plenty of small victories. I was at a conference once when I got told a bloke from the factory got the sack unfairly. When I got back, they put the papers in front of me. I put ‘failure to agree’ with management decisions. It went all the way up to the business headquarters in London, where I put down the same again. 

Everyone told me that I was going to be taken to the cleaners, and to tell you the truth I was bloody worried I would lose the case. But I’d gone so far with it that I had to go through with it. One barrister was questioning me like I was in court. When I gave an answer I said something like “I assume…” and the barrister shot back at me with “Mr. Nixon, we are not here to assume, we are here to know”. Later on he said the same thing, “I assume…”! So I jumped up and said, “if I’m not allowed to assume then neither are you!” 

When they came back with their verdict and ruled in favour of the union, Christ I jumped up. They looked down their noses at me and we had won the day! It was unheard of, particularly since the company, ICI, prided itself on treating its workers well. It was a massive embarrassment for them.

Another time, we had some contract cleaners in the factory. Our factory had strict working conditions – it was a closed shop. I went over to have a look, then got on the phone to the personnel manager. I told him I wanted those cleaners out as soon as possible or we’re walking out. The manager told the contract cleaners not to take notice of us, so the whole factory marched out of the gates. 

We were on strike for two days. The manager who hired them came over to me and told me he’d punch my snout – I told him that wouldn’t get him anywhere! When we won, I successfully negotiated for us to be paid the two days we were striking, as management had broken the rules and it wasn’t our fault we had to strike.

I remember another time when a lorry driver who wasn’t part of the union turned up at 4am to collect his load. I asked him at 4am to show his union card, and he refused and told me he didn’t want anything to do with the union. So I told him if that’s the case, he won’t be picking up his load. It got to 9am, and I told him that if he’d like to drive to Ipswich and join the union then we’d sort him out. The bloke had to begrudgingly do the hour-long journey just to join the union, and they charged him a £10 fee as they knew he was only joining for that job.

For these sorts of little wins, the TGWU awarded me the Gold Medal and the Slate Man – the Gold Medal was the highest award the TGWU had.

Throughout my life, I’ve seen multiple governments come and go. I’ve survived a war, and some bloody battles of it. I’ve never experienced anything quite like Covid-19, though I have managed to avoid it by spending lots of time down mowing the lawn, fixing up my lawnmowers, and generally keeping my place tidy. As I am partially sighted, it takes me a bit longer to do these things, but it certainly keeps me busy. 

On VE Day, I’ve got a virtual garden party organised by Blind Veterans UK, so I’ll get to have a good chat with my friends – I am particularly looking forward to chatting with fellow veterans I sing with in the Blind Veterans Choir. 

Today, I will be thinking about my comrades and friends who fought to defeat fascism across Europe, so many of whom were just young men who made the ultimate sacrifice for a better world – and we must never forget that. Aside from that, I will keep smiling and carrying on.