The Scottish Borders during World War II

Life on the Home Front

Daily life in the Borders changed sharply with war. Food, clothing and fuel were rationed as in the rest of Britain, so Border families grew victory gardens and learned to make do. Schoolchildren were issued gas masks and ARP (Air Raid Precaution) drills were practised, even though actual bombing was rare. Local history records from St. Boswells recall how villagers organised an ARP warden unit and even an Air Training Corps, and how iron railings were stripped out for scrap to make shells. Victorian street lamps and trees were used to camouflage parked army lorries, while village halls served as shelters or military billets. Community war effort activities – from knitting circles and salvage drives to propaganda drives – were common across the Borders.

• Rationing & Recycling: British rationing of food and clothes meant everyone had to scrimp. People planted vegetable gardens (“Dig for Victory”) and used home-grown wool and sheepskins for clothing. Fuel was scarce, so coal was saved. The War Agricultural Executive Committees pressed Borders farms to increase production.

• Air Raid Precautions: Although few Luftwaffe raids hit the Borders, the government still issued gas masks and organised practice drills. One resident’s memoir notes that “schoolchildren [were issued] gas masks… Air Raid Precaution wardens and [an] Air Training Corps” were formed in St Boswells. Villagers took turns as lookouts for enemy planes.

• Home Guard & Defences: Local men too old or too young for overseas service joined the Home Guard. Every bridge, crossroads and factory was watched by volunteers with rifles. In spring 1941 a “nucleus of the Home Guard… was formed from village veterans of WWI” in St Boswells. Similar units were set up everywhere to repel any invasion.

• Women’s Roles: With so many men away, many women worked the farms (as Land Girls) or in war factories, and took on traditionally male jobs. Women’s auxiliaries also served in civil defence roles. Cross-country charabancs ferried billeted soldiers, and nurses and Red Cross volunteers from the Borders tended the wounded at home and abroad.

Daily routines were punctuated by blackouts (towns drew shades or tarred over streetlights), air raid sirens (often false alarms), and news of distant battles. Radio and newspapers brought updates of Dunkirk, Normandy and Pacific theatres – events that felt both distant and immediate. Despite the disruption, Border communities banded together: for example, St Boswells formed a War Service Ladies committee to support servicemen and freed up the village hall for Red Cross activities. This spirit of “all in it together” was typical across the Borders.

Local Men & Regiments

Thousands of Borders men served in Britain’s armed forces. The King’s Own Scottish Borderers (KOSB) was the chief regiment recruiting here, and many Border soldiers joined its battalions. For instance, the 1st Battalion KOSB went to France with the British Expeditionary Force in 1939 and was among those fighting back to Dunkirk. The Territorial 4th and 5th Battalions (Border Regiment) were part of the 52nd (Lowland) Division and landed in Brittany in June 1940 as a second BEF. Others from the Borders served in Highland, Lowland, and even English regiments, as well as the Royal Navy, RAF and merchant navy. Many young Borderers trained at home before shipping out – for example at RAF Charterhall and Winfield (below) or at Army camps like Stobs – and some joined specialist forces (e.g. airborne, commandos or the artillery).

Local war memorials attest to the heavy toll. For example, Hawick’s roll of honour lists 122 men killed in WWII, and Galashiels’ memorial names 118. Losses in every town meant many families had relatives on active service. One Selkirk veteran’s story is typical: Corporal James Johnstone of Selkirk, serving in a home defence KOSB battalion, was killed at age 39 when a German bomber jettisoned a bomb over nearby Greenlaw in April 1941. Such incidents – though few – brought the war home tragically. Many Border regiments and battalions saw hard fighting abroad, and surviving veterans returned to rebuild peacetime lives in the 1940s and ’50s.

War Industries & Factories

To support the Allied war effort, the Borders hosted important wartime industries – most dramatically, the Charlesfield munitions factory at St Boswells. In late 1942 Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) built a massive incendiary bomb plant there with 67 buildings covering 74 acres. It opened in 1943 under the Ministry of Aircraft Production and specialised in assembling 4‑lb incendiary bombs. The workforce swelled to about 1,280 (of which nearly 900 were women). By war’s end (Jan 1943 – May 1945) Charlesfield had produced roughly 25,754,529 incendiaries for Bomber Command – an astonishing two and a half million per month on average. (After WWII it was converted to a Royal Navy armaments depot and remained open into the 1950s.)

Other local war industries were smaller or improvised. Some Border textile mills switched to making military uniforms or blankets. Leatherworkers in Galashiels produced boots and kit for soldiers. Even small village workshops re-tooled for radar parts or repair of engines. The general push was to disperse key war work away from big cities: as one historian notes, Charlesfield was built partly to spread risk, being far from bombing targets. Fuel rationing and rubber shortages also spurred innovation: salvage campaigns collected scrap metal (old household pots, railings, bicycle rims) to melt down for weapons. By war’s end the Borders’ industries had made a sizeable contribution – from millions of bombs at Charlesfield to thousands of uniforms and wires in the factories and homes of the region.

Military Bases & Training Sites

The Borders were chosen as a quiet area to train troops and aircrews away from vulnerable cities. Notable installations included:

• RAF Charterhall (Eccles Tofts, near Gordon): Rebuilt in 1941, it opened on 30 April 1942. For most of the war it was home to No.54 Operational Training Unit, which trained night-fighter crews on Bristol Blenheim and Beaufighter aircraft (many fitted with early radar), later converting to de Havilland Mosquitos as the war progressed. Charterhall was so busy that it reportedly had a high accident rate (nicknamed “Slaughterhall”). It also later hosted frontline fighter squadrons (Spitfires, Mustangs, Meteors) before closing in 1947.

• RAF Winfield (near Paxton): This satellite airfield was built in 1942 to support Charterhall. Winfield served as a relief landing ground for No.54 OTU from May 1942 to May 1945. It also briefly hosted a detachment of No.88 Squadron (night fighters) and Spitfire-equipped No.222 Squadron in 1942. In practice Winfield helped train fighter pilots and provided extra runway capacity for the OTU.

• Stobs Camp (near Hawick): Originally built in WWI, Stobs reopened in WWII as an army training camp. The camp’s remote location and space made it ideal for practice exercises: troops there received searchlight training and even took part in D-Day rehearsal drills. After the war it became a Polish Resettlement Camp (hosting British-employed ex-Polish Army units) until about 1950, reflecting the Borders’ role in the wider European picture.

Additional bases included coastal defences (gun emplacements and radar at places like Eyemouth, Coldingham and Pease Bay), ammunition depots and signal stations hidden in the hills, and innumerable training camps. Units of the Royal Artillery, Royal Engineers and infantry regiments (for example KOSB, Royal Scots Fusiliers, Cameronians etc.) rotated through Border camps. All this military presence brought soldiers into daily contact with local people – billeted in homes, buying from shops and sometimes interacting on leave in town.

Bombings, Blackouts & Air Raids

The Borders saw few German air raids, but there were a handful of notable bomb incidents. In general the region’s small towns weren’t primary Luftwaffe targets. However, border hamlets did suffer some stray or jettisoned bombs:

• Greenlaw (Berwickshire): On 7 April 1941 a German bomber (possibly off course after a raid on Clydeside) dropped a bomb on the War Memorial Hall in Greenlaw. The hall was badly damaged. The very next day (8 April 1941) another bomb was dropped on nearby Townhead House, collapsing part of the building and killing four (including Cpl. James Johnstone of Selkirk). These twin incidents – a rare visit by “Hitler’s bombers” as local recollections put it – left scars (and one unexploded bomb) that the village still remembers.

• Bowden (near St Boswells): On one occasion an enemy bomb landed on farmland close to Bowden farm but failed to detonate. The farmer at the time noted with relief that “only one enemy bomb fell nearby (close to Bowden), but it failed to explode.”

• Walkersburn: The wool town of Walkerburn (Ettrick) once quartered troops in its mill lofts, and in July 1940 there were reports of “thumping” sounds overhead (likely German bombers flying north), but no strikes.

Aside from these, the Borders’ skies were mostly quiet. Even the Hebridean patrols of the RAF and Balloons over the Firth of Forth were far to the east. However, throughout the war towns enforced blackout regulations (curtains drawn at dusk, car headlights masked) whenever feared air raids approached. On the British side, barrage balloons floated above strategic sites (Edinburgh’s docks, Forth bridges), and decoy “Starfish” fire sites were sometimes set up in farmland (though not specifically in the Borders). In practice, most Borderers’ wartime “air raids” were practice drills.

Remnants & Memorials

Today the Borders still bears physical reminders of WWII: pillboxes and bunkers, airfields, war memorials, and even industrial ruins. The giant Charlesfield bomb factory site (now an industrial estate) still has some long buildings and rail lines visible, echoing its wartime past. RAF Charterhall’s runways have mostly been broken up, but parts survive as farm tracks, and a memorial stone marks the old base (used later for car racing). Charterhall’s watchtower was moved to Kelso racecourse and still stands. Stobs Camp’s concrete huts and perimeter walls survive in the forest as a scheduled monument, evocative of the WWI and WWII internments there.

War memorials in every town keep alive the names of those lost. Galashiels’ bell-tower memorial (erected 1924) lists 118 men killed in WWII. Hawick’s elaborate roll-of-honour records 122 names. Other villages unveiled plaques and stones after 1945. Around Remembrance Day each year, scions of those families still lay wreaths and recall stories of the Borders’ sons and daughters at war.

In local lore, specific artefacts are remembered. For example, generations of Gala schoolchildren have heard about the searchlight platform that once stood near the old Burgh School at Gala Park – a concrete base where an anti-aircraft searchlight was mounted to sweep the skies. (Little remains but its foundation.) In Kelso the rusted half of a 40mm Bofors anti-aircraft gun sits in a park as a tribute; in Coldstream one can still spot the concrete supports of the Chain Home radar tower from the war. Italian and German POWs once interned in Hawick left behind barracks and fragments of helmets unearthed by farmers decades later. Even hedgerows trained to grow camouflage nets were a feature – hedges along some Border fields were clipped into a net-like screen during the war, reportedly to cover stored equipment.

All these remnants – pillboxes, factory walls, memorials, and even old newspapers and letters in archives – help Border history enthusiasts piece together the wartime experience. Museums like the Kings Own Scottish Borderers Regimental Museum (Lemington, Newcastle) and local archives hold photographs of local home guard companies, evacuee children, and factory scenes. Visitors can also find plaques at former RAF sites (Charterhall, Winfield) and heritage trails marking Stobs Camp’s site.

Remembering the Borders and WWII

For Borderers today, World War II is both distant history and a recent memory. Many who lived through it (now in their 90s) still tell stories of ration books, air raid drills, and loved ones at the front. Each spring brings anniversaries – the Dunkirk evac, D‑Day, VE Day – that are marked by local ceremonies in towns like Kelso and Jedburgh. School projects revisit the era: kids collect oral histories from grandparents, or study artefacts at the National War Museum in Edinburgh.

Ultimately, the Scottish Borders’ wartime story is one of a remote region pulled into a global conflict. Its people endured shortages and dangers on the home front, its sons and daughters fought and died overseas, and its landscape hosted vital training and production for the war effort. By studying that past – through places like the Charlesfield factory, Stobs camp, Kelso pillbox, and Border war memorials – the Borders keeps alive the memory of how those quiet border hills and valleys helped the Allied victory in 1945. Local historians and museum groups continue researching and publishing this history, ensuring that future generations know how the war years shaped the Borders.