Bombs over British Towns and Cities

by Peter Liddle and Cathy Pugh

Rationing, shortages, improvisation, restrictions, ‘make do and mend’, savings and fund-raising, factory work and heavy industry, the hunger for information by Press and Radio, the maintenance of public utilities and services under wartime constraints, aspects of schooling such as evacuation, allotments, queues, cinema and dances, such experiences would feature in the lists of most people who lived through the years of the Second World War if asked to highlight what life was like in Britain’s towns and cities during the 1939-45 years.

Dr Ian Whitehead dealt with many of these topics in an excellent article in the Journal in 2002 and  in depth and in precise location some of these topics and others on the Home Front were comprehensively covered in that issue. There would however probably be widespread agreement that if one were to search for the defining moment of a person’s Second World War experience on the Home Front, most townsfolk would focus immediately on an incident related to the bombing of their locality or even of their home.

The authors of this article have access here in the Centre to rich original and retrospective testimony in respect of air raids over Britain and did not hesitate in choosing to share with readers those sections from far wider accounts of life on the Home Front, specifically dealing with the experience of air raids.

We have decided against ensuring that we presented from someone’s unpublished memoir a detailed description of an Anderson or a Morrison Air Raid Shelter, of the way in which A.R.P work was conducted and coordinated or specifically of the work of the Fire Service and of agencies of Civil Defence. This was quite a difficult decision not least in that it meant that we could not select documentation of unexploded bomb disposal work or bringing medical attention to people trapped in buildings likely to collapse. In the main, though not exclusively, we were after the victims.
Then, from a wealth of such evidence, we have used two further criteria for choice; first that we should reflect that urban communities throughout the United Kingdom were subjected to air raids and second that the accounts themselves had to hold special qualities, the conveying of graphic detail, evidence of the leaving of an emotional mark across the years, drama, fear, excitement, humour and yes sometimes, of literary qualities in the re-telling of the story.

There were diary accounts which might have been used but they were usually abbreviated and of course by definition requiring context and further details; there were original letters and we have chosen one, but letters are affected by self-censorship and others are so interspersed with text beyond general interest that we have concentrated upon manuscript and typescript recollections and transcriptions of tape-recorded interviews. In this respect, the importance of Carolyn Mumford’s work as a member of staff transcribing tapes, was again confirmed, the significance of her role in this piece, incontestable.

However this still leaves acknowledgement to be paid to the interviewees or writers themselves; they are at the heart of our work. If the Centre flourishes, as it does, they are to a considerable degree, the seed, the sun, the rain and the fertilizer. That brings us to the interviewers. They are not named. Of course each interviewer brings individual qualities, capacities and perhaps eccentricities to his or her work, but he or she metaphorically wears Centre team shirts and follows an agreed procedure. Here we pay tribute to the work of all our interviewers. The Centre appreciates you now and, in due course, future generations will recognise that you have have saved that which otherwise would have been lost, ‘voices from the past’. We have chosen interview extracts which when edited for publication to exclude hesitation and limit ambiguity, we judge to be, exceptionally good in respect of the chosen field of the experience of bombing. We hope our readers will endorse our judgement.

In our drawing together of this presentation, the authors ‘feel’ for every person in the laying out of his or her account. In a different sense, we feel for others whom we have in the end not chosen. May we mention in particular a lovely lady, Lisbeth David, a WREN, after her Llandaff Cathedral emergency experiences here recorded. We have learned recently of her passing but she left a wholly positive mark on those of us who worked with her.

Rosemarie Heggie in West Acton, London

Rosemarie was born in 1926 in Islington. Her father had a confectionery factory in Acton. Rosemarie was evacuated to Weymouth at the start of the war but her parents brought her back to West Acton when South Coast air raid warnings became more frequent. Then there was a blessed pause in the bombing and we were lulled into a false sense of security. It was wonderful to spend the evenings in front of the fire, listening to the radio or reading. Best of all was the luxury of sleeping in our beds which, by this time, were downstairs, Mum and Dad’s in the dining room and mine in the sitting room.

I don’t think the air raid siren sounded on the night of the 11 December, 1940, otherwise we’d have gone to the shelter. We kissed goodnight as usual, I undressed and poked the fire to get a good blaze as it was a cold night. Then, on impulse, I went to my parents’ room. Dad was already in bed but my mother was kneeling in front of the gas fire undressing. I kissed them both again and as I left the room I said “God bless you and keep you safe”

– something we always said to each other at night. Instead of going straight to bed I sat down on the sofa and decided to cut my toe nails. It was very quiet but some instinct made me jump to my feet, then the whole house erupted and I was buried under the rubble. I fell on my left side with my right leg stretched out and it was impossible to move. The dust was choking and when I tried to call out my voice was muffled. After several hours I heard sounds and a voice calling to me. Rescuers had removed the rubble of the house above me but they were hindered by a beam which had to be sawn through. Then a doctor was able to reach down and give me an injection. I never lost consciousness and was amazed when I was finally lifted out and saw the stars shining brightly and breathed that cold crisp air – an unforgettable experience. I didn’t know then that the whole road had been flattened by a land-mine. I was amazed at being carried across our neighbours’ back garden to an ambulance waiting in a side road. I asked about my parents and was told they were safe.

In hospital I was put under an arc of electric bulbs and asked a lot of questions. My right leg had been badly burned by the embers of the coal fire. One day the ward sister put the screens around my bed and told me my parents had been killed. She gave me a leather handbag of my Mum’s which contained a fluffy powder puff attached to a silk handkerchief; there was a lingering smell of L’Aimant perfume and a propelling pencil inscribed with the name of a hotel where we’d stayed one Christmas.
I was in hospital for four months. The worst part was the daily dressings which were indescribably painful. Ultimately I was told my leg would have to be amputated below the knee. I was assured the pain would go after surgery but that wasn’t the case.

I was discharged in April 1941 with a big send-off from the staff. I was really upset to be leaving as everyone there had been so good to me.

Lawrence Edison in the East End of London

Lawrence J Edison was born in the Brick Lane area of the East End of London, his father a Jewish immigrant from Bessarabia. The family moved to Stoke Newington and opened a grocery shop in 1938. At the other end of the block of buildings in which our house was situated, was the Vogue cinema. One night a bomb landed on a trolleybus outside the Vogue making a huge crater and bursting a water main. Although it was quite a distance away water started to come into the cellar. As we were hearing a lot of noise from the guns firing and bombs dropping, it was decided to go across the road to a proper shelter under the buildings opposite called Coronation Avenue. We came out and saw the sky was criss-crossed with searchlights looking for bombers, and as we went over the road a bomb landed behind us with an enormous bang on West Hackney Church. The blast blowing out of the windows of the Star Furnishing Company which was opposite our shop. The glass just crumbled and fell to the ground like a beautiful waterfall. Amazingly all of us were untouched.
One night there was a lot of banging up above. The following morning I went up to see numerous buildings in Oxford Street on fire. Going home from Liverpool Street and going through Shoreditch, all I saw were burning buildings, among them Jeremiah Rotherhams a large old established wholesale warehouse. But the trolleybuses were still running, the theme at the time was “business as usual”. Looking around for shrapnel when I arrived home I went down Glading Terrace and saw an Anderson shelter that had a direct hit, it was just a heap of twisted metal.

The London Underground: a place of shelter but “business” as usual. [The papers of Dorothy Wakeley at the time working for an overseas press agency]

The bombing was very heavy, so it was a pleasant surprise when the King and Queen visited Stoke Newington, they came to Dynevor Road which had suffered enormous damage from a landmine. These were dropped by parachute and had a delayed action device. That was the occasion I had my photograph taken talking to the Queen. My sister saw it sometime later on a poster in the City and got some copies from a newspaper, it was also in the Everybody magazine. A water main had been hit nearby again, and as nothing was coming out of the taps, my sister and I were taking some kettles to be filled from a bowser lorry. When these lorries arrived in the area, word soon got around where to find them. We heard cheering and were told about the King and Queen, so I ran to Dynevor Road and managed to squeeze in front of the crowd. It always surprises me how little mention there is of how the Royal Family boosted the morale of the population during those bad times.

Peggy Sealey in Brixton

Peggy Sealey worked for the Post Office in the City until she married in 1938 and became a housewife in Brixton. Her husband worked delivering repaired vehicles abroad – a reserved occupation. In 1939, her brother was called up into the forces and Peggy agreed to continue collecting the contributions on an insurance book he had bought. I can remember the daylight raids. Once I was in Camberwell heading for Peckham and the siren went and, oh so quickly, the noise of the planes came over and I was frightened and just looked around for somewhere to hide. I did the stupidest thing and ran under this bridge. There was quite a heavy air raid and a dog fight. I was all by myself under this bridge and I was petrified. When the ‘all clear’ came, I started on my way to Peckham and found the little row of houses I collected from had been hit. I just stood rooted to the spot and I didn’t know what to do. It was so terrible, they were just flat. I couldn’t ride my bicycle and walked back home.

There was one family I called on and they lived in a block of flats near Westminster Bridge, quite near to the railway station. This little family, grandparents, auntie and uncle and two or three grandchildren were so afraid they would be hit, they took bundles of bedding and enough food for the night to a building called Morley College and they spent the nights there. There were fifty-seven consecutive night of raids and on one particular morning I went to their flat to collect some money but a policeman was there. He told me that Morley College had taken a direct hit and all the family except the granny and granddad were lost.

My daughter was born in 1942 and I found someone else to do the insurance round.
I had a Morrison shelter in my home. It was a big metal thing with an old mattress in it. When the sirens went, I used to get in there, on the mattress and I always used to lie on top of my little daughter to protect her. One day the milkman came for his money with his horse-drawn float. The siren went and I said, “oh dear, you had better come in”. He wouldn’t leave his horse so I told him to bring it in. He un-harnessed the horse and brought him over the doorstep so his front half was over the doorstep and the back half was in the porch. It’s funny now but it wasn’t then. We didn’t laugh, the milkman stood holding the horse, talking to him to keep him calm and I ran to the shelter with my daughter until the raid was over. Then he backed the horse out and off they went.

After Janet was born I was in that house virtually on my own all the time. There was an elderly lady called Tilly who used to come and see me every Tuesday. One day, my friend Anne came to see me with sad news, Tilly had been killed by the blast of a bomb while having something to eat in a shop on Acre Lane in Brixton. Anne stayed for a while, then she had to go down the road to get a bus back to work. I put Janet in her pushchair and walked with her. Anne got her bus and the siren went. I couldn’t hear any planes or anything, but of course it was a buzz bomb – they just came, then he engine stopped then they fell. I grabbed Janet in my arms and ran into an oil shop. There was no-one there, and I stayed until the ‘all-clear’. The bomb dropped and it was absolutely shattering, but it was a bit further up the hill. I held Janet in my arms, left the pushchair, and ran home. When I got there, all these people were milling about. I lived on the corner of Hewlick Road and my house had been blasted by the bomb. I was left with no door, no roof and all my furniture was upside down. The house was still standing, if you could call it that.

Ella Anderson in Glasgow

Ella Anderson (nee Livingstone) was born and brought up in Glasgow. During the war, she worked for the Co-operative Society’s sewing machine factory making uniforms. At the weekend we girls would get all dressed up in our long dresses and with our hair out of curlers to go dancing. On Saturday afternoon we would go on the Glasgow Subway, or take the tram car and walk the rest of the way but we would be looking forward to the dancing ahead.
We went to the Locarno Ballroom, or to the Greens Play House and we would listen and dance to Joe Loss and his band, tunes such as ‘In The Mood’, and we did a quick step to that. We danced all the dances that were popular in Glasgow, and probably everywhere else too, such as the quick step, the slow waltz, the tango and the rumba. We danced with Jimmy and Alex who were not boyfriends, just boys we danced with every week. Mind you, we also went to the Kingston Halls once a week, to do Scottish dancing where we would do the Eightsome Reel, Strip The Willow, St. Bernard, Dashing White Sergeant and the music would be both Highland and Old Time.
One Saturday night in August 1940 my friend and I had been at the dancing at the Locarno Ballroom. We bought chips and were eating them along the street on our way home when we walked past two soldiers. My friend dared me to ask them if they wanted a chip (which were rubbish anyway) and as I

PICTURE
One of the injured children getting refreshment after his ambulance journey to a Surrey hospital. (Joan Dillon, an ambulance driver
with the Mechanised Transport Corps)

PICTURE

Eileen Alexander [nee Clements] in Leytonstow, aged 11 ‘I heard the sound of the doodlebug approaching then the dreaded sound of
the engines cutting out then as I got to the door of the shelter there was a dreadful explosion and I was thrown to the end of it. I
opened my eyes and couldn’t see a thing. The air was full of brick dust, soot and smoke. I just stayed there for a long time and I
was frightened. After a while a fireman found me and helped me from the shelter, and what a terrible sight to see. The whole road
including my home was one big debris. I started to cry then. The fireman held my hand to guide me over the debris but I was so
frightened I would step on a dead body that he picked me up and carried me and that is when this photo was taken.’ (E. Alexander,
press photograph)

turned round, the soldiers also turned round and I plucked up the courage to ask if they wanted one. This is how I met Robert Norman Anderson and ten months later we were married. Norman used to sing a special song to me, by changing the words of ‘That’s where I met you, down Mexico way’ to ‘that’s where I met you, down Scotland Street way.’
When the Germans started to bomb Clydebank, the sirens would go off and, if we were at home, we would go with all our neighbours across the street to a big Glasgow Corporation Garage where they had an underground shelter.
One time Mum and I had been to the pictures and were walking back home. The sirens went off but we didn’t try and find a shelter because all we wanted to do was get home. Clydebank was getting badly bombed and there as a lot of shrapnel coming down around us. Mum and I weren’t aware of just how dangerous shrapnel can be so all we did was run through the falling shrapnel until we got home where we stayed under the kitchen table until the All Clear was sounded.

Alan Goldfinch, in Belfast, Northern Ireland

Alan Goldfinch grew up in Wanstead, London during the Second World War. The son of a schoolteacher, he was evacuated first to Weymouth and then to Belfast, Northern Ireland. He returned to London later in the war when a German V Rocket damaged his home. Belfast had three bad raids, and I was there during the first two. The first obvious difference I recall (and it produced a lot of criticism at the time, I remember) was that unlike Weymouth and London, the authorities seemed to have made no preparations to defend the city. No barrage balloons, no AA guns, apparently no RAF response
– the only defence was that during that raid a smoke-screen appeared over the docks and city centre.
My grandparents lived in a northern suburb, and from the first floor at the back of the house we had a grandstand view of the city centre and docks with shipyards about a mile and a half away. During the first raid, most destruction was in that area and I still have a vivid picture of a great mass of fire where there were major timber yards.

The second raid was different, and I guess was strategically less serious because of the above mentioned smoke screen which we could see from my grandparents’ house. Somewhere under it were the city centre and the docks, and Harland and Wolff’s shipyard (at that time the biggest in the UK and we kids knew well it was crammed with new ships and repair jobs) and Short Bros and Harland who were making bombers which we saw being flown off to join the war. The bad news was that in our area there were several old reservoirs which had been part of the city’s public water system. These were clearly artificial and the general opinion was that from the air they must have looked like docks, and that explained why our area got a pasting. Just beyond our garden boundary there was one of these reservoirs and the Air Raid Wardens reported something large coming down on a parachute and splashing in, but not exploding. Investigations revealed a sea-mine, hence our hurried departure in the morning.

The outcome of all his, as far as I and family were concerned, was that the travel authorities ceased calling Northern Ireland a safe area and we were permitted to return to England.

Lisbeth David in Llandaff, Cardiff

Lisbeth David was born in 1923 in South Wales. At the start of the war, she joined the WVS Ambulance Service and served with them during the January 1941 Blitz raid on Cardiff. 2 January 1941, the first heavy raid on Cardiff was a most concertedly dramatic experience altogether. I think it was about 6:15 when the sirens went and by
6:30 the Blitz started. We had two anti-aircraft guns just down the road, and when they fired we didn’t know if it was bombs or guns. A blanket dose of incendiaries far off on to the hills and all over Cardiff and some in our front garden. I think we were lucky. We didn’t have any that lodged onto the house itself but there were incendiaries everywhere, flames and I heard an almighty crash which I later learned was a parachute land mine that had hit Llandaff Cathedral a glancing blow. The parachute caught on the spire and the bomb swung round and exploded in the south churchyard. Amazingly, no-one was killed.
The Dean and the Verger were both in the Cathedral. The explosion brought down the roof and the timbers that came down did most of the damage. The windows in the south side had blown in. The Verger was trapped under some beams, he was badly burnt but they got him out and he survived. The Dean was in another part of the Cathedral and the impact of the bomb blew the West Door open and blew the Dean, who was no lightweight, through the West Door. Not only did he live to tell the tale, but was back on his feet and caring for the parish the very next day.

‘On 1 April 1941, 156 Section, 15 Bomb Disposal Company, Royal Engineers removed a 1400kg [2950lbs] armour-piercing bomb from underneath the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington. This bomb had penetrated to a depth of 34 feet vertically and had travelled 20 feet in a horizontal direction. 156 Section commenced work on 11 January 1941.’ [W A Wootton]

‘On this particular day I’d had quite a lot of difficulty with my homework, or indeed I probably hadn’t done it and I cycled to school through the village to find one or two boys heading home. I asked, “What’s the problem?” “Oh, the schools been hit. There’s no school today”. So almost a sigh of relief at the thought of that! The bomb hit the armoury itself and a lot of the boys, particularly the boarders spent the day dragging rifles and things and stacking them with the uniforms.’ [Derek Clark, a schoolboy at Dulwich College.]

It caused great excitement and much was to be done in the way of tidying up. The morning after the blitz I spent salvaging the library belonging to the Warden of St Michael’s College from under the plaster of the ceiling as the college was heavily damaged.

R J Paxton in Coventry

Mr Paxton worked as an apprentice engineer prior to the Second World War. In 1939 he began work at the Coventry Gauge and Tool Company, servicing and repairing machines used to produce Merlin aircraft engines. He also served as a Fire and Rescue Volunteer during the Coventry Blitz.
I was detailed to take a doctor on his rounds in my little sports car. Once, we were off to the outskirts of Coventry to find a lady that had lost her baby. It was blown out of her arms, and I was taking this doctor to this district. When we got there it was in shambles. I was talking to the warden and asked him if there were any more incidents we should attend to. He said, “Well, there will be one.” I said, “Why?” and he said, “You are parked over a delayed action bomb!”

A cousin of mine was a senior fireman and he was killed just by the cathedral, the lead was pouring off the roof and you couldn’t do anything about it. The whole city was in flames. It actually filled me with great anger. I was very, very frustrated. If I had got a pair of machine guns in my hands I would have loved it, I could have fired back at them. But we were charging around the city knowing we were going to be bombed with no retaliation. We left the bodies for the people who would take them to the mortuary, we didn’t have the time. We were looking for the living and the wounded, to see what the doctor could do for the wounded. We were too busy to see the German aircraft – I didn’t see one. I had my eyes to the ground, looking for people who needed helping.
It was a shocking experience, but people just got on with their lives. I never saw any loss of morale. I saw a lot of people determined like I was – I had a friend who was a little Welshman and I said to him one day, “You didn’t need to be here, you could have gone back to Wales.” He said, “No. In the depression Coventry gave me a job and I am not leaving!” And that was the spirit of the people.

Nan Wheeler in Canterbury

Nan Wheeler worked for the Post Office in Dover. During the war she also served as an Air Raid Warden. Canterbury had endured a great concentration of bombs on the night of the Baedeker raid. In Dover we heard wave after wave of bombers passing over to attack and then returning. About 3:00am my father came to me – sleep was impossible with the noise – and asked if I could catch the 7:00am train to Canterbury to help out. He’d phoned the Head Postmaster at Canterbury to see how they were getting on and offered any help. He thought that any staff that could be spared would be welcome. I was once again spare duty and could leave my post at Dover. As I got off the train at Canterbury to walk through to the office, I could see plumes of smoke still rising here and there and very tired firemen among the snakes of hoses.

En route there was a huge crater in one street which went from one row of houses to the others across the street, all badly damaged. I climbed down one side of the crater and someone had put some boards across the bottom and I climbed up the other side and carried on to the office. Canterbury was a teleprinter centre so they had dozens of them and they were all pouring tape which was collecting on the floor and each one had a great wad waiting to be sent. They had put a table in the street to take telegrams in as they had mile long queues in the office. The engineers had run all the water off the radiators to give us for “gumming up” as the tape came through and they drove out into the villages to get water so we could keep working. There was no water left in Canterbury. Finally a girl came to gum-up for me so I could carry on sending and I just glanced up to greet her and saw she was all black and blue. Her arms, face and legs were all covered in nasty bruises. I just said, “are you okay?” She said, “I’m a bit sore, but they’ve only just dug me out. They dug my Dad out first and he’s not too bad and he said I should go straight to work as they’d need me. They are still digging for my Mum.”

Elizabeth Ross in Bootle, Liverpool

A letter sent by Mrs Elizabeth Ross of Bootle, Liverpool to her daughter, Muriel. Muriel was a civil servant in London. 56 Elm Road
Sunday 4 May, 1940.

Darling,

Here we are after 3 nights of it. Oh what a do last night. I hope we never have to go through it again. Friday was bad enough, they destroyed all that nice Parker Avenue (opposite the anti-aircraft guns) (27 killed), Lime Street Station on fire, Exchange out of action and lots of casualties in L’pool and Bootle, so we were all feeling very pleased that we had got over it yesterday. I think Con told Pat that we were all quite happy. But darling, last night!!! Siren at 10.30 & immediately 4 land mines then for 4 hours never a moments lull, they just came one after the other without a stop – all sizes. We just, in the end, lay flat on the slope of the cellar steps waiting for one to finish us. I just can’t describe things. Today it is all chaos. We never expected to see our house whole. It just rocked and shook & seemed to be shedding parts all night. Anyway, his morning, apart from soot, plaster, broken windows, doors and slates, it is still standing. All Ewart Rd and Bedford Place were wiped out. Star of the Sea Hall just a heap of rubble. Bridge Rd all roped off, all the block of 48 from Carrolls to Irwins just rubble in the road. They were standing at 48, but not a window & most of the doors gone & ceilings down. 58 were worse, the shop just a shambles & windows and doors etc gone, but they were all ok. The dairy opposite had got a direct hit so that was another heap of rubble. You will be sorry to hear Sid Owens was killed, also Mr Moss and his sister, Mr and Mrs Kelly and the children, Mrs Carroll from the shop in Bridge Road and a lot in Croxteth Avenue. This is all I have gleaned up to now, no-one seems to be wanting to do anything but patch themselves up so when there are more details I will write again.

Nora has just been & said she will try to get through to you (via Mrs Shaw) to let you know we are alright. She has only just gone home so I will have to hurry for the post. What made it worse the electricity failed so we just waited in the pitch dark. 48 had a baby of 2 weeks old handed to them in the shelter, it was black dark & no water, gas or electric. We are going to S’port to sleep tonight. We are going after tea, then we will see whet happens. I will write again tomorrow.

Love to you all
Mummy

Michael Lee in Bath

Michael Lee was a schoolboy living in Bath, Somerset, during the Second World War. He and his family survived the bombing of their house during heavy raids in April 1942. I never did hear separately the bombs which so narrowly missed us and destroyed two pairs of houses immediately behind us and in the process tearing apart our house. The front door was blown in and the kitchen door was torn off its hinges (just outside our cupboard) and pulled to the bottom of the kitchen – towards the explosion – by the inrush of air into the vacuum created. The back wall of my bedroom was bowed into a semi circle – again towards the explosion – and the whole roof of slates was lifted and dropped back in disarray, followed by a great deluge of debris. However we were unharmed!In the morning, when it was finally quiet and daylight arrived, Dad went to get our Austin 8 from the Chaucer Road Garages (he had a tiny ration of petrol for Home Guard duties) and I wandered round and up Milton Avenue to look at the back. The pair of houses immediately behind us was a heap of rubble and swathes of timber, most of it cascaded into our back garden.

As we set off, early that Sunday morning, I saw that there were houses missing in Kipling Avenue, the 2nd to the 4th down from Chaucer Road on the city side, which were just a heap of smoking rubble.
We also quickly became used to the bombed sites – which made a number of extra ‘play’ areas. These soon had short-cut footpaths worn across them, and the ugliness was quickly covered by buddleia and other fast growing ‘weeds’. In Beechen Cliff, off Holloway, one bombed site opened up an entrance into the extensive cave system in the hillside, which we explored with torches and candles. There were caverns and underground waterfalls and some stone-lined tunnels leading to the ancient water supply. Bombs had collapsed some of these.
The Blitz may have lasted only two full nights, from the evening of Saturday 25 to the morning of Monday 27 April 1942, but those moonlit nights were a defining moment for us. We had lost the innocence of childhood and had been thrust into full awareness of life and death, of terror and distrust and the ugliness of destruction and hate. And yet we learnt how to care for each other and how to pull together in a unison and harmony that transcended the pre-war boundaries of society.

Tom Corner in Sunderland

Tom was an apprentice tinsmith at William Doxford and Sons shipyard in Sunderland. When he was seventeen, he joined the Auxiliary Fire Service to help the war effort. On Sunday night, 23 May 1943, the sirens went at one o’clock in the morning. So I got out of bed as usual and went back down to the fire station. Flares had been dropped over the river and I could hear the bombers coming in and dropping everything they could think of. Within seconds I was on an appliance, a lorry with a trailer pump on the back. Off we went to deal with incendiaries here and there. Then we back to the station and out again to stand by at Thorneholme, an emergency wartime fire station in Sunderland. Our leading fireman Bob Charlton went in to report. He came running out “okay lads Sunderland docks, South dock”. This was a problem, we had to go through Sunderland centre and down Holmeside and past the museum. On the Binns corner the Binns shop had already been bombed. Another bomb fell there just before we got there and we couldn’t drive through the crossroads so we had to turn left into Union Street, sharp right at the south end of the railway station to cross Fawcett Street to head for the docks. When we were crossing Fawcett Street we were thrown violently about and we thought the driver had jammed his brakes on, but he had not touched them. He got out of his cab. The bomb which fell at Binns had blown the overhead tram cables down and we were caught completely in the wires. They were on our wheels and the pump so we had to hack and cut and pull. Of course they were dead fortunately, and we cut these electric cables off until we were free. We finally managed to get to the docks.

At the docks and there was a wood building well alight, there was not much you could do about a building like that, but we got some water on. Just then a dispatch rider came along “leave that, pack up, go further along the dock here there’s a ship on fire”. Now a ship on fire is a dangerous thing, the worst fire you could imagine. Well, alongside this ship and we had to get our hosepipes out, get the pump working out from the river. Brought the hosepipes up on to the deck, and on the deck there were big ventilators, real big domed ventilators. We had to hose those down to cool them and screw them up, jam the hose nozzles down into the combing to pour the water into the ventilation system. That was the only way to get water into it. And we were crouched there with no breathing apparatus on, no eye shields on or anything and it seemed for ages. The deck was hot, and after a while a leading fireman comes along and he said “come on Tom and you Bob, go on the dockside there’s a mobile canteen there. Have yourself to a cup of tea and a sandwich and come back, these two lads will take over”.

Sure enough, there was a canteen at the dockside and we had a cup of tea and a spam sandwich. I believe the girls were Women’s Voluntary Service and they were covered in white dust. They said they had been outside the railway station when a great bomb fell there. One of the biggest bombs fell behind the Sunderland Empire Theatre. Anyway they were loading up to come down to us when this bomb hit and they were covered with, completely with dust. They must have been very brave ladies to come through the town centre. Back at the ship, at half past seven the buzzer went. We had to be at work at half past seven so another fire crew come down, a full-time fire crew. By then the fire was nearly out but the ship had been filled with water from our hoses and it was starting to list on the side. Of course, they were pumping the water out again to get her straight. But we were worried about getting back to work. We arrived back at the shipyard about ten minutes to eight, I had to walk through the centre of the shipyard from the West gates to the East gates where my workshop was. The foreman said “well, you’re late”, and I said “Late? I’ve been up all night!” He said “I know where you’ve been, I’ve got a message from the Management. Anyone in the Fire Service please go to the canteen”. The canteen was at the Depford end of Doxford’s shipyard and it had been badly damaged. A bomb had been dropped just outside the gate, it had missed the Alexandra Bridge by a few feet, and a policeman was killed there. We made it safe and got it presentable for the workmen’s dinners at dinnertime, then it was off home to bed.

Myfanwy Khan in Exeter

The youngest of three girls, Myfanwy Khan (nee Harris) lived with her family in Exeter, Devon during the Second World War. Her father was a local doctor and a Senior ARP Warden. I remember being woken up and wasn’t dressed. There was no time to get dressed because the sirens were coming and the bombers were coming in straight away. My mother and I were dressed in our nightdress and dressing gowns throughout the whole thing. I said goodbye to my father and went in to the shelter. He went off and my mother and myself and the dog, we shut ourselves in to that cage [the Morrison Shelter] and the noise was horrendous but again we were use to it, whining and screaming. The drawing room was lit up. You could read because of the flames which my mother realised were in the garden. So she went out to see if she could put the flames out in the garden and then she looked up and she realised the house was burning. So she came back and said we have got to get out and I knew that if we got out we wouldn’t go back and I begged her to stay so to keep me happy she stayed. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes and then she said, come on, we have got to go. I was on her right and she had the dog in her arms. We walked from the drawing room through in to what was called a lounge which was huge, right out in to the hall and the stair case on the left was burning as we walked. She left the front door open and shouted to the cat, there was no chance of looking for the cat. We crossed the drive and there was a shrubbery opposite the drive and we lay there as we had been told, you had to lie flat but your chest had to be slightly off the ground. You shouldn’t be completely flat. Then we were dive bombed. A couple of times people tried to rescue us. The air raid wardens tried but they couldn’t hear our shouts because of the noise of the raid. Eventually, one of the wardens came to rescue us and told us to run. I stopped to look back to see a huge sheet of flames come out of one of the attic windows. Then I knew that the house was gone.

My father had been told of a report that our house was burning and my mother and I hadn’t been found. He got in his car and put his foot down. He stopped to drag two bodies to the side of the road and to confirm that they were dead. Then he had to stop again to beat out the flames that had fallen through the car and were on the back seat. When he got home he could see the house had gone. He went in to the garden and opened his mouth to call for us and he lost his voice. He couldn’t shout, he couldn’t do anything. When he found us next door, I greeted him with what later he thought terribly funny. I said, “Hello daddy. We have been blitzed.”
The next morning my mother and I sat and watched our house disintegrate. It was still smouldering as we watched the dawn come and we heard the most glorious dawn chorus. It was a perfect day. It was a beautiful May that year and we had a lilac in full bloom and I can remember the brilliant blue of the lilac, the sky gradually getting blue, the sun mounting, the birds singing and our house collapsing.