Lived: Roadwater, Watchet
Recording made: 2001
Length of recording: 1 hr 27 mins
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BOB REED
Born:
Roadwater,
Somerset, 1922
Lived:
Roadwater,
Watchet
Recording made: 2001
Length of recording: 1 hr 27 mins
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Bob Reed was 18 and in the Home Guard when he was recruited for Churchill's Secret Army. Over the next couple of years he spent evenings and weekends training at Treborough Quarry. There were six of them. While they practised blowing up tanks and railway lines and carried revolvers at all times, their families knew nothing about it. It was exciting but dangerous, he says. In 1942 he was drafted into the army.
A carpenter by trade, he did restoration work at Cleeve Abbey after the war, for the Ministry of Works (now English Heritage). He moved to Watchet, with his wife and young daughter, in 1963 when the house they were living in was badly flooded. They never went back.
He makes furniture and walking sticks and does 70 or 80 puzzles a week, a pile of dictionaries at his side. He says a dishwasher is the biggest thing he has ever won.