TWO Winchester men feature in a television series on a top secret underground resistance army set up by Winston Churchill early in the Second World War.

Roy Budden and Don Beaven were members of the "Auxiliary Units" set up to harass the Germans if they invaded Britain.

Their meeting for the first time 60 years after they enrolled is featured in the second edition of Secret Army to be shown on Meridian TV tonight (Friday) at 11.30pm.

Roy, of Back Street, in the St Cross area of Winchester and Don, of Frampton Close, Colden Common, were both teenagers when they enrolled.

They joined "cells" of farm workers, men in reserved occupations, veterans and teenagers too young to be called up.

Like all members of the guerrilla army, they were trained in sabotage and to kill silently. They were to hide underground if the invasion came and then emerge behind enemy lines to blow up German tanks, aeroplanes and petrol dumps.

They operated in complete secrecy. Wives and families were never told. Most used membership of the Home Guard as a cover story to avoid awkward questions.

Roy, an ex-city councillor, said: "My mother didn't know. It's a good job she didn't look under my bed too often. If we'd been on a training night, my rucksack could contain all sorts of weapons and explosives."

As well as a Commando fighting knife, he was furnished with a .38 Smith & Wesson police-issue revolver. "Not bad for a 17-year-old nipper," said Roy, a retired engineer.

They operated from underground bases, often dug in woodlands. Roy's was at Chandler's Ford, while Don's was based in the woods on the northern slopes of Portsdown Hill. "Access was through a trapdoor concealed by a hinged tree stump."

Both studied for apprenticeships, Don at Portsmouth Dockyard and Roy at a boatbuilders in Northam, Southampton.

"We trained two nights a week and sometimes weekends. We learnt a lot of things, said Roy.

"We knew every bend in the railway line from Romsey to Eastleigh and all the bends in local roads where it would be possible to set up ambushes."

The two men, both 78, never met through the war and were only brought together through research for the television programme.

They were filmed in Winchester near one of the underground operational bases that still exists at Pitt House, on Romsey Road.

In the end, there was no Nazi invasion. But Ron and Don wear their lapel badges with pride. Said Don: "There are several hundred of us surviving today from the auxiliary units around the country, mainly down the east and south coasts, where cells were set up."

After the war, they were told "to disappear into the undergrowth" and banned from joining the Royal British Legion or Home Guard rifle clubs.

It was to be as if they had never existed. Only now, in the eight-part series, Secret Army, is the full story being told.