This is an entry in a year-long project to post-blog the demobilisation experience for British servicemen at the end of the Second World War. See here for an introduction to the project and here for a brief overview of the demobilisation process.
Chief Controller Dame Leslie Whateley, Director of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, is being voluntarily demobbed, reports the Times. She will be succeeded early in April by her current deputy, Controller M.J.C. Tyrwhitt, though given the diminished size of the service since demobilisation began the rank of 'Chief Controller' will be suspended. Whateley volunteered for the service in November 1938 and steered it through six years of rapid wartime expansion in which it reached a size of over 200,000 personnel.
The paper also notes a turbulent meeting last night at the Albert Hall of the Vigilantes Action League, the organisation which provoked much commentary (and not a little sympathy) in the summer of 1945 when it began its program of illegally requisitioning vacant houses on behalf of service and ex-service families. Fringe politics has come to overshadow the work of the League since then, however, and the meeting broke up after fifteen minutes when a crowd of Communist Party members stormed the platform, accusing the League of being a pro-fascist organisaion. Shouts of "down with fascism" drowned out speaker after speaker until the police suspended the meeting.
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