Blitz Kids (17 page)
Authors: Sean Longden
Portsmouth also fell target to enemy bombers. In January 1941 the raids hit the city, bringing the usual destruction and costing the lives of 756 people. As in so many other locations, the local youth were soon at the heart of the efforts to save the city. Fourteen-year-old Arthur Harvey witnessed the bombing, which followed him from home to work. Born in November 1925, he was typical of the youths who had thought little about war, drifting along with the circumstances as they changed. By August 1940 the biggest change in his life had been his father being called up into the RAF and that, in 1939, his education had come to an abrupt halt. However, living and working in the city centre, he was soon affected by the bombing. He had first seen bombers overhead as he delivered newspapers in the suburbs. Then he experienced fire-watching at his workplace as the Germans attempted to bomb the dockyards. As he later recalled, even when homes in his own street were bombed, he wasn’t frightened:
I don’t think I was old enough to appreciate it. At night I’d walk down the main street and see the city still in flames. It was just part of life. If you lived in Portsmouth, you couldn’t avoid it really. You started to wonder if we were going to win.
He soon became more closely associated with efforts to defend the city:
One night we saved the local pub, the Tramway Arms. We were in a big public shelter. They came in and said an incendiary bomb had landed and the storeroom of the pub was on fire. So me and some soldiers went round there. We put the fire out. But I was too young to get a drink for it.
Whilst his first rescue work had been relatively easy, his later endeavours were more daunting. On 24 August 1940 German bombers struck as children settled down to watch a matinee at the Prince’s Theatre, a cinema in the city centre. The bombers were overhead for just five minutes. By the time they had gone the cinema was a smouldering wreck, with many children – the living and the dead – still trapped inside. Arthur Harvey and a friend rushed to help. Though just fourteen years old, they set to work shifting rubble, helping to make space for the rescue teams and first-aid teams to do their work. There was little the boys could do, but they continued, making sure they weren’t a nuisance to the emergency services. As Arthur recalled: ‘We done what we could.’ He also noticed that, though appreciative of the assistance, the men made sure the two youngsters were kept away from the horrors of what was found in the wreckage: eight children had been killed in the cinema. For Arthur one thought soon came into his head: just months before, he had been a schoolboy attending matinees in the same cinema.
Despite the legendary comradeship of life on the ‘Home Front’, Arthur Harvey witnessed the dark side to the war. When the war had started Arthur had been part of a gang of eight schoolmates: ‘One was killed when an ARP post near our old school was bombed. He was aged fourteen. One was lost when he was serving in the Army. One became a bugle boy on HMS
Hood
. He was on it when it went down. Just four of us survived the war.’
For the population of Portsmouth, the close exposure to death became part of everyday existence. Each time bombs hit the city, it seemed someone from the street had been killed. With so many local men away at sea, every maritime disaster seemed to affect another local family. Yet the spirit remained high. Arthur watched his mother and
the other women from the street. Their husbands were away – mostly in the Royal Navy or the merchant fleet – and those remaining were working in the docks that were the target for enemy bombers, yet they seemed undeterred: ‘Life went on, there was a wonderful spirit. You could go out and leave your door open – mind you, we didn’t have a lot for anyone to pinch. People were resilient. They didn’t have a lot in life, but they had a comradeship that was fantastic.’
The sense of defiance, as espoused by those who refused to go to the shelters during air raids, was noble. But for some it was a practical necessity, rather than out of any sense of duty. When fourteen-year-old Reg Fraser moved to Plymouth to be with his mother and grandparents he found his grandmother unable to use the Anderson shelter in the garden: quite simply, she was too fat to get through the doorway. Instead, she remained in the house and he chose to stay with her, rather than leaving her alone or making her walk uphill to the nearest public shelter.
The effect of the bombing of Plymouth was far-reaching, with more than 1,000 fatalities. At the height of the bombing some 50,000 people were believed to have left the city by night. They were known as ‘trekkers’. Some went to relatives in nearby towns and villages each evening. Unofficial convoys of lorries, tractors and delivery vans ferried the population to safety in the countryside. Policemen were seen stopping cars and telling drivers to give lifts to the transient population.
If it were not enough that the boys of the Merchant Navy faced the full fury of war at sea, they also experienced it when ashore. Many were originally from port cities that were a frequent target for enemy aircraft. Even those from other areas had no choice but to pass through ports on their way to and from their ships. As ship’s apprentice Alan Shard recalled:
Things changed on 20 March 1941 whilst anchored in Plymouth and I experienced a Blitz. I had just returned from four days leave and as I stepped out of North Road station an incendiary bomb landed across the street. I beat a retreat and went in the tunnel under Platform 6 along with about fifty others. Shortly thereafter a bomb landed at the entrance of Platform 8 and filled the tunnel with blue acrid smoke. Fortunately no
one was hurt. The ‘all clear’ went at 0130 and I went up to the street. It was devastation with fire hoses strewn all over. There were no taxis and I had to hump a sea bag over my shoulder and, with an attaché case in one hand, headed for the dock a mile away. It could have been worse: it might have been raining. At the dock I had to wait for the ship’s boat to pick me up at 0700.
Alan had been lucky to reach his ship in safety: that night 250 enemy bombers had hit Plymouth, dropping more than 150 tons of high explosive and 30,000 incendiary bombs on the port city. Christian Immelman had a similar experience in Liverpool:
The worst experience I had of air attack was being in dock across the river in Birkenhead the week the Liverpool docks had their worst air raid of the war. After that experience I came to the conclusion I’d rather be out at sea tucked in the middle of a large convoy than be in a big UK city during heavy air attacks.
Fortunately for Glasgow, much of its industry was spread out along the banks of the Clyde, meaning that the heart of the city was saved from the appalling fate of other cities. However, one local town, Clydebank, did become the target of the bombers. On the night of 13 March 1941, seven-year-old Moyra Reid was asked to accompany her father to his post as a fire-watcher on the roof of a school outside Glasgow. As the sirens sounded, Moyra and her father climbed the stairs to the roof. She felt uncomfortable wearing the heavy steel helmet, but excited to be going upstairs rather than down to the shelter. One thing she could never understand was why her father would take a young girl outside to witness an air raid. ‘My father was a gentle person – and why he decided to take me out there that night I’ll never know. I think he said something about me seeing what it was really like. I think he wanted for me to see the carnage. He never took me again.’
What she saw from the roof was unforgettable:
I was terrified – the noise was tremendous. I could hear the incredible noise of the anti-aircraft guns and I could see the glow and the searchlights. I know I was scared, but I didn’t really know what I was
scared of. I’d heard about people being killed in air raids but at that stage I couldn’t really understand being killed or dying.
As the guns fired, the searchlights waved through the skies and the bombs fell, seven-year-old Moyra stood and watched, her head weighed down by the steel helmet: ‘I can still see it now – the red, red glow of all the fires.’
What she had seen was the result of 236 enemy aircraft attacking the nearby town of Clydebank. Their targets were the shipyards and factories of the town, both vital to the war effort. First came planes loaded with incendiary bombs to mark the targets for those that followed, dropping their high explosive on the town. It was one of the most concentrated raids of the war. Around 400 bombs fell within two square miles, right in the heart of the town, with a further 96 falling on oil storage tanks to the north-west of the town.
Though there was damage to both the factories and shipyards of the town it was the residential areas that suffered the most. The devastation was appalling, with whole streets blasted or burned out. Even the sturdy stone tenements that made up so much of the town’s housing stock were no match for high explosive. Inside one such tenement was eight-year-old Ella Flynn. With her was her young cousin Sheila, who had been sent from London to Clydebank to escape the bombing:
My dad was listening to the nine o’clock news on the radio. I heard the siren go off and told him but he was so busy listening to the wireless that he didn’t hear it. So I ran over and switched it off so he could hear – and it was then we heard more than just sirens – bombs were already falling.
They rushed downstairs to the middle-floor flat that her father believed would be safer:
When we got there other people were already in the lobby of the flat – as the windows had already been blown out the lobby seemed the safest place.
We were there for some time before my mum and sister joined us – they had had a terrifying struggle along the streets from the cinema as bombs were already falling. Mum insisted on going back up to our flat
to get proper clothes for us and collect the big bag in which she kept the insurance policies and other valuables. Just as my mum returned to the house, the door was blasted off its hinges on top of her.
As the children watched, the adults discussed what to do next and decided to move to the ground-floor flat of the building next door. They ran from the safety of the house into the street:
My dad sheltered my sister, putting his coat over their heads – and my mum put an arm around me and Sheila, trying to prevent us from seeing the flames which were roaring up from the houses opposite, where our friends lived. I will never forget that sight or the noise, the terrible noise of the bombs falling on our town.
Also witness to the carnage was a local teenager, Jeanie,
5
who was living in the heart of the bombed area. She had seen the hard times in the town, growing up when unemployment was high and prospects low:
We came through the Depression – there were lots of men standing on street corners with nothing to do. We lived in a tenement on Gordon Street. We had one room and kitchen on the top floor. Even as tenements go it was a poor one. There were three families on the landing – sharing a single lavatory – but it never seemed a problem to us. You didn’t know it was tough times.
And if the 1930s had been tough, the 1940s were about to get tougher. So far war had not touched the town, indeed the biggest change was that the shipyards were working at full capacity. The prospects for the local population were actually quite good, as Jeanie remembered:
War had started but we were unaffected except that everyone in the shipyards had work. That was a good thing about it. There was a confidence in the town – no more men hanging round street corners. I knew bombing was happening elsewhere but there were no visuals – you just heard about it and used your imagination.
On 13 March 1941, Jeanie was at home when the bombing started:
I ended up in the concrete open close of our tenement – under the stairs. Out the back, there was a washhouse. On that night the close was crowded from front to back with people who lived in the tenement. Things had started to happen. Some people went in the washhouse to shelter thinking if there was a problem at least they wouldn’t have a whole building land on them. They thought it was more secure.
She listened as bombs whistled down and exploded. Blasts came from near and far. They could hear the awful sound of buildings collapsing and the crackle of flames as other ones burned. As it grew worse Jeanie went to the front door to see what was happening outside:
I remember looking up Bannerman Street and that was on fire. The sky was alight – it was yellow and orange. Looking up, it was like a picture. It was all black but there were squares with orange flames shooting up from them. I remember thinking I mustn’t ever forget this.
Within minutes she was no longer a spectator:
There was noise all the time you could hear bombs dropping. There was no fire where we were, just dust and dirt. You were enveloped in it. There was a man in the close. I thought he was dying but he was asthmatic and he couldn’t get his breath because of the dust. He was all right in the end, but I thought he was dying.
Suddenly there came a crash as a bomb landed outside. Next came the shouts: ‘They’ve all been killed in the washhouse.’ It soon became clear it had taken a direct hit. People attempted to help those within and Jeanie was given a grim task:
I was handed a dead baby from the washhouse. Someone had gone out and brought the baby in. I suppose they wanted somebody to hold it, but the baby was dead. I didn’t know the baby; it looked about 6 months. As far as I know the mother had died.
Looking back on the incident, Jeanie tried to understand why she had been chosen to cradle the dead child, after all, she was herself just a teenager:
I can remember women being distressed but there was no panic. There weren’t many men there. I wasn’t scared because of my age. It wasn’t that I was being brave about holding the dead child. It was probably that I would be less affected than a mother would have been – they had their own children to look after.
As the bombing continued, Ella Flynn’s family tried to make themselves comfortable in the crowded flat. Sitting in the dark, they listened to the falling bombs, and the crackle of the fires as the houses opposite were engulfed in flames. Mrs Flynn tried to keep spirits up by singing. There was nothing more they could do but await the morning.