Parliament Home Guard

In 1940, a Parliamentary Home Guard unit was set up, and about 100 Members and staff, including Hansard reporters, joined. Duties included fire-watching, manning observation posts and military drills. Training helped to boost morale, as Hansard reporter Leslie Bear explained in a letter to his wife Annelise on 3 March 1941: “Oh—and the Home Guard course was all very pleasant and interesting—flamethrowers and grenades and land mines, interspersed with lectures by Spanish Civil war people, plus a very good free lunch and a very good tea, a speech by the Commandant of the place and a speech by our own Brigadier General, lots of press cameras and so on, and more Generals messing around than Home Guards!''