Service No: 7626505 Royal Army Ordnance Corps
John Elliott Snowball was born in Hedley Hope, Durham on Christmas Day 1919. He was the youngest of six known children born to Robert Valentine Snowball, otherwise known as George, and Sarah Ellen Hall. Some time between his birth and 1939, the family moved to & Hazelhurst Road and at the time of the 1939 census John was working as a motor tyre fitter.
We have no specific information about John’s role during world war 2, but the information we have allows us to construct a probable scenario. John’s records show that he was a member of the Royal Army Ordnance Corp. and that he died in Egypt whilst on war service administration.
The Royal Army Ordnance Corp. created systems of supply, stores and repairs along extended lines of communication. John seems to have played an administrative role probably in organising supplies or stores. The corp. also served in numerous roles during conflicts in WW2, such as bomb disposal and was also responsible for much of the repair of Army equipment and vehicles until that task was made the responsibility of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in later in 1942.
Sue Bridgwater shared the experiences of her father, Ernest Harry Adams, of serving with the Royal Ordnance Corp, in North Africa with an archive of world war 2 memories. His recollections serve to highlight the reality of day to day existence that John Elliott Snowball would have experienced.
“In the desert it was so hot by day that you could mend punctured tyres with petrol and they really did fry eggs on the bonnets of the jeeps. At night it was freezing cold. The desert looked empty and dead from horizon to horizon, unless by chance you stopped your vehicle. Then by the time you’d cut the engine there would be Arabs everywhere, sitting silently on the crests of the dunes and waiting for you to drop something – or drop dead. Bolder spirits would approach:
“You got cigarettes, Johnny?” or; “Monjary, Johnny?” – this latter from the French manger , “to eat”. In Cairo in 1987 children were still asking for “bons-bons”.
“Not only were eggs fried on bonnets and tea brewed on home-made stoves of petrol-soaked sand in half a petrol tin; there were other cordon bleu delights too. Baked beans could be easily heated up by stabbing the tin with the pigsticker on your army knife, and propping it against the cylinder block by means of the electric leads, so that the beans were nice and hot by the time you got to where you were going.
“Things kept disappearing from the barracks at night – clothes, small change, equipment, photos, bedding, boots – everything. One night some of them stayed awake on watch, and they heard no sound at all. Only for a second at a time was each intruder in turn silhouetted against the square of night sky as they slipped in through the window. When the lights went up they were found to have removed the bedding from under a sleeping man, without waking him. Dad lost all his own little personal things at this time, including his photo of Mum. ”
“The name of this barracks was the Creche Gambetta, and while staying there the men had to go on rat-hunting detail, catching monstrous specimens in butterfly nets and dropping them into a fire kept burning in an oil-drum for the purpose. Dad didn’t find this much fun, but the threat of bubonic plague was deadly serious. Because of it, they all had to have the worst inoculation in the world, a giant needle into the abdominal muscle and 24 hours of horrible side-effects. There was a Warrant Officer who tried to sneak off without his after sending all his men in – he did not succeed. The inoculation was called, inappropriately, “half keene”; it should be noted that when the WO had his, he passed out.” ‘Ernest Harry Adams, WW2 People’s War’
‘WW2 People’s War is an online archive of wartime memories contributed by members of the public and gathered by the BBC. The archive can be found at bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar’
John Elliott Snowball died 4th July 1942. He is buried in Port Said War Memorial Cemetery and commemorated on the War Memorial in Castle Bromwich.
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