An army 48 radio set

Military training

During my time at High School we had Military Drill once a month, on Mondays I think it was. That is, school cadets. This meant that there was no school work done that day as the whole day was given over to Military Training.

We arrived at school in our khaki army uniforms. The day began with drill – "presenting arms" with empty rifles (WW2 variety), marching and doing whatever other drill exercises were appropriate. I don’t remember too much about this part of the programme, but later we split off into whatever specialised skill our teacher-officers had allocated us to and spent the rest of the time until home-time learning or practicing those skills.

I was very fortunate to be in Signals and we did things like running out field telephones and communicating on them, and if chosen we might be allowed to use the military radios, which were ex-army 48’s,  – about the size of a back pack (see picture above) and battery operated. The radio was either placed on the ground, a bench, or carried on the back. Our headquarters was a room in the school building which we called the “Sigs Hutt.” Our senior NCO, one of the senior boys who was made a corporal or sergeant, would sit at a bigger and supposedly more powerful radio set called a ZC1 which operated off the electricity mains. Though the NZ Army gave us about eight 48’s usually we had only enough batteries for about four. To ensure that we were all able to talk and listen to each other we had to tune up our radios so that we were all exactly on the same frequency. The allocated frequency for us was 7.5 megacycles (megahertz as it’s called now), and we had to tune up to the same frequency as the main ZC1. This was called “netting up.” Sometimes we were successful “netting up” and we could talk and listen to each other, and sometimes we weren’t and would spend until home-time trying to do this.

Eventually we had more boys in the Signals squad than they wanted so we had to sit a test to see who was going to be weeded out. I failed the test and was to be taken out at the next drill day. But because of my obvious enthusiasm compared to some others who passed, they allowed me to stay and removed someone else. My enthusiasm was noticed when we were allowed to use the radios during lunch times on a normal school day and I used them as much as I could. Some of the others were not interested enough, so I was allowed to remain in the squad and someone else was removed.

This taught me a lesson in life, that if I wanted something badly enough to go after it.