Cub leader always prepared to help others
Our obituary to centenarian Alice “Pip” Wakefield in last week’s Kent Messenger has prompted memories for Alan Hyde, now living in Malling Road, Snodland, but originally from West Malling.
He said: “What wasn’t mentioned in the article was that in the 1940s, Miss Wakefield and her companion Miss (Sylvia) Whittle used to run the West Malling Cub Pack.
“I was a member and have some fantastic memories of the times we Cubs were taken on trips to London or to Dover Castle, or when we went camping, all clambering into the back of an open-truck for the journey. “Once we went to Bognor Regis and had to walk down Dark Lane to the beach. There was a plaque there in memory of someone who had held back a war-time mine that was threatening to wash up on the shore, while everyone got off the beach. Sadly it then exploded, killing him. It made a big impression on all of us.”
“The Cub meetings were held at our school, West Malling Boys School, at the top of Town Hill, near the Bull pub. Miss Whittle would arrive in her old Austin 7. Other boys in my unit were Keith and John Fagg, whose father was the village butcher, and Ron Martin.
“Miss Wakefield was a teacher and lovely. I think Miss Whittle was actually a school secretary rather than a teacher.”
Slightly less pleasing were his recollections of the Cubs struggling to push a large hand-cart around the town to collect the items that went into the many jumble sales to raise funds for the trips.
Mr Hyde said: “It was a big old thing and we had to have boys on the front and the back - so that when we going downhill, the boys on the back could hold it back and stop it running over those at the front.”
After the Cubs unit closed, both the boys and their leaders, Miss Wakefield and Miss Whittle, transferred to the Red Cross Cadets where they continued with many of the same activities.
Born in 1940, at 1 Wickens Place, Mr Hyde was lucky to grow up to join the Cubs at all. In October of that year, while Mr Hyde was tucked up in his pram, a German bomber flew over the town and dropped its load on Wickens Place, destroying numbers 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11. He said: “I guess I was lucky.”