In the Western Desert German and Italian and British and Commonwealth forces faced each other at El Alamein in a series of skirmishes, with both sides dug in. This week the British targeted the Italians on Ruweisat Ridge, forcing Rommel to use German divisions to prop up the defence. In France, the Vichy regime rounded up 13,152 Jews who would be sent to Auschwitz concentration camp. Also this week, German U-boats were withdrawn from the American coast after the US introduced the convoy system.
Schools in Caithness had just broken up for the summer and this was a time of school and Sunday school outings. The John O’Groat Journal reported that some 200 children from the Barrogill Hall Sunday School had enjoyed an outing to Mid-Clyth: “Games and sports were organised, and there was the usual picnic fare – the wonderful “baggie” and tea. You can’t have a picnic without a “baggie,” and despite paper restrictions these were handed out as usual, but the “empties” were carefully collected for the paper salvage”.
The pupils of Lyth School, meanwhile, “together with their parents and friends”, had their annual picnic at Freswick Mains. The party of about 50 had tea, then games and open air dancing, sensibly followed by more tea. The July weather must have been unusually good in 1942 because “the party returned home about 7 o’clock, tired, sun-burned and happy.”
The Director of Education wrote a rather whimsical letter this week to the Secretary of Leith Nautical College: “I have a boy in Wick High School who is fifteen years of age, is sufficiently tall and well-developed to look seventeen, feels himself ‘kenspeckle’ [conspicuous] in school and wants to go down to the sea in a ship. His family have all been seafaring men and sea is what appeals to him. I think he is a better quality (from what I know of his forebears) to go in through the hawse pipe and I wonder what your college could do for him.” (Going in through the hawse pipe is naval slang for someone who is promoted from the lower deck to be an officer.)
Finally this week, the John O’Groat Journal printed a short poem from the Orkney Herald, joking blackly about the tendency of the air raid siren to sound after a raid had started:
“Ae thing aboot the A.R.P. bewilders ane an’ a’,
“Why should we hae a shoo’er o’ bombs afore the sirens blaw?”
Whether it be a want o’ sense, or just a lack o’ speed,
To me it winna matter which, gi’en I’m already deid.”
