Bruce Powell was born in England in 1918, some six months before the end of World War I and served in World War II in the British Army in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. He began his service career in July 1939 as part of a technical workshop with the Anti-Aircraft Command, known as the "Ack-Ack Command."

The AAC, alongside maintaining artillery, also looked after searchlights and, in the early days of the war, hearing devices. “Remember, this was before we had radar. The hearing devices didn’t really do much!" Bruce says.

In 1939, Bruce was sent to France as part of a mechanised cavalry workshop, where he was primarily repairing tanks that might have been hit or had a mechanical failure. “Often it was just a flat battery," Bruce says. “They had the radio and the engine attached to the same battery, so that if they had to make a lot of radio transmissions, it would drain the battery. It was not a very useful set-up.”

When the regiment was on the move along the Belgian frontier, Bruce’s job was to ride a motorcycle beside the tanks. That was so that if the tank came off its track, often when the driver turned too sharply, Bruce was on the spot and able to put it back on. Bruce would have been at Dunkirk with his regiment if he hadn’t been evacuated a few days earlier with meningitis. He was in a hospital bed listening to the radio when he heard the reports of the German invasion of northern France. He knew his regiment would be on its way to meet those forces. It was also via the radio that he first heard of the Dunkirk evacuation and of the men he knew who had died. Post recovery, Bruce went on to serve in North Africa until 1946.

In 1955, Bruce moved to New Zealand with his family, where he built his own home on Wairau Road in Glenfield. Being part of the Glenfield community was important to him, and he became the chairman of the Glenfield Community Centre. In 1990, he found his walk to the centre would take him up Hall Road past the War Memorial Hall. He was dismayed by the state of the hall and its memorial. Overgrown grass, beer cans, and other rubbish had proliferated. The two brick columns of the memorial were beginning to cave in, and the bronze plaques they held, each with the names of local Glenfield men who had given their lives in World Wars I and II, were covered by weeds and damaged with verdigris. 

“The reality of a war memorial is that it is a grave. The majority of those men had no known grave – so this memorial is their resting place,” he says. Bruce joined with the Hillcrest Lions Club to save the hall, doing much of the work on the hall himself, along with other volunteers. They reused the bricks from the existing memorial to build a new one. The bronze plaques were restored and put in place on new columns. With assistance from the council and fundraising, they even made an addition. Bruce had the original plans from 1932, which included a supper room. That room was built to those plans and is now named the Bruce Powell Supper Room.

Bruce attends the Anzac Day services every year. Well, actually, he attends two services: the Birkenhead service, because he is a proud member of the Birkenhead RSA, and the service he initiated at the Glenfield War Memorial Hall. Bruce says, “Anzac Day is a day of honour. It’s important to remember those men we lost and everything they did for us. That’s why we say ‘Lest we forget’.”

Thanks to Birkenhead RSA and Richard Guerra, Veterans Welfare Officer, for introducing us to Bruce.