At the beginning of the war, the Romsey Advertiser employed a very capable young man, Philip Lovell, as their reporter. His work included a comments column over the byline ‘Uanme’.

Then, like other young men, he was conscripted, so he left the paper. To his delight, he joined the Navy and wrote occasional pieces for the Advertiser about his service life. This included a posting to the north of Scotland and later to Singapore. His columns do not appear in the later years of the war, so I wonder whether he became a prisoner of the Japanese.

The British Library catalogue lists a short book by a Philip Lovell under the title The Story of England which was published in 1946, the author of which may be our erstwhile reporter.

In November 1941, he wrote a piece for the Advertiser about the civilian occupations of naval ratings. Each man had been required to complete a form that recorded his ‘civilian occupation, the type of work he performed, the name and address of his employer, and the nature of the employer’s business’ amongst other details.

Lovell picked out some of the details, such as the self-employed barber, who described his business as ‘First-class all-round gents’ hairdresser’. One of the postmen described his employer’s business as ‘delivering letters’ – something that we see less of in the 2020s.

One of the men had been a road sweeper who described his job as ‘cleansing the City of London’, and a man who had worked for a chocolate manufacturer had been employed in ‘putting in of centres’. I suspect that role is now undertaken by a machine.

Another man claimed to have neither employer nor occupation and his only self-description was that he came ‘from Summerset’. A man who had worked on munitions explained that his employer’s business was ‘Secret ush ush work’.

This same account included news of Rev. J. C. E. Hayter who had served at Romsey as a curate and was working in Singapore Cathedral when Lovell saw him.

The column ended with a short tale about a railway journey of some 25 miles. Since the train made more than a dozen stops the journey took over an hour to complete. Lovell got into conversation with another naval man, who, when they reached their destination commented that that was the worst of his journey over. In reply to the question where he was going, he said ‘China’ so presumably he had several hundred miles more to go.