Blitz Kids (43 page)
Authors: Sean Longden
Although there was concern that the country was being swamped by a wave of juvenile crime that threatened the very fabric of society, not all were gripped by a hysterical reaction to circumstances that were similar to those noticed during the Great War. As Arthur Norris, formerly the Chief Inspector of the Children’s Branch of the Home Office, stressed in a letter to the
Spectator
in May 1941:
Boys commit mischief because they find nothing else to satisfy their desire, particularly in these days, to be up and doing; their fathers are perhaps on service or employed long hours in munitions or other work, and of even greater import, is that their mothers are also working away from their homes with the result that home influence is lost or diminished and the boys must find their opportunity for activity and adventure, in increasing measure, in the street.
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One single factor threatened to change the face of juvenile crime: the availability of guns. Weapons and ammunition were easily available to many children and teenagers. A Home Office report estimated that some 76,000 guns had entered the UK illegally with returning British soldiers. Some had even been posted home by soldiers serving overseas and with around 120,000 packages entering the country each week, it was almost impossible to check each one. Living in York, Peter Gawthrop recalled how easy it was for a curious schoolboy to access munitions:
We used to cycle out to the air bases. There were ammunition storage places beside the roads. They were supposed to be guarded but they weren’t. Me and my friends would go and look at the shells and cordite. The ammo was kept in wooden boxes. The police would come round on their bikes every now and then to inspect them but they didn’t come very often. We’d use the cordite to try and make fireworks – we got it to burn but we didn’t manage to get it to explode.
In particular there were thousands of households in which guns were stored by members of the Home Guard. In most cases children were able to play with rifles belonging to their fathers. For a responsible child this was like playing ‘Cowboys and Indians’ with a real weapon. Peter Gawthrop remembered his father’s rifle:
My father was in the Home Guard – and so there was a clip of five bullets in a drawer downstairs – and a rifle in the wardrobe upstairs. I wasn’t allowed to play with the rifle, but of course I did when no one else was in the house. Although unlike some I wasn’t stupid enough to put a bullet in it. I knew two boys who’d been injured in accidents involving bullets and explosives. One had tried to dismantle a bullet and the other who lost an eye had hit some explosives with a hammer.
Yet other youths had more serious intentions. In 1942 two teenagers ran away from a remand home, broke into a Home Guard storeroom and stole a sub-machine-gun and 400 rounds of ammunition. In Glasgow a group of teenagers stole a box of hand grenades and threw them at an office building, destroying the company boardroom. Some young criminals put the weapons to use: in 1943 a gang – including two seventeen year olds – robbed a cinema using stolen Sten guns. They were jailed for three years for their crimes.
For some, the access to weapons was lethal. In December 1941 seventeen-year-old Colin Sterne was living with his aunt and uncle, Mr and Mrs Turner, at their Gloucestershire farm. Following an argument with his aunt, in which she called Colin’s sister a prostitute, he took violent action. Losing his temper, he grabbed a police truncheon that his uncle kept in the house, hitting his uncle: ‘Something seemed to go in my head and the next I remember was going to the cart-shed and
getting the rifle.’
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The weapon in question was his uncle’s Home Guard issued Winchester rifle, which was kept in the living room. Though unloaded, Sterne found ammunition in a bandolier hanging in the kitchen. Loading the rifle, he went outside. There he found his aunt and shot her. Enraged by having been beaten by his nephew, Mr Turner rushed outside where he was also gunned down. It was a pointless end to a petty argument: one that was only possible because of the easy access to an Army rifle.
By 1945, delinquency became intolerable in some areas. Liverpool was hit by a juvenile crimewave that appalled local people, while church leaders wrote to the Home Office to complain about crime. They reported that children were entering premises, including homes, churches and schools, and deliberately destroying furniture. Goods were stolen from any unoccupied buildings and some empty buildings had been so badly smashed up by youths that they needed demolition. The teenagers smashed their way into shops through roofs, doors and windows. Describing it as a ‘reign of terror’, the churchmen reported: ‘The young hooligans have taken to beating up individuals where their numbers and the locality make the practice safe, and this for no apparent reason other than bravado and fun. In certain areas females are afraid to go out in the evening without strong male escort.’
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They reported that women, often without the protection of husbands who were away from home on war service, were afraid to complain for fear of reprisals. The problem was compounded by parents who seemed to have no interest in their children when they went before the courts. In October 1945 the Liverpool and District Property Owners’ Association passed a resolution regarding: ‘wanton damage, destruction and thieving which has been done to properties, chiefly by youths and boys who appear to have no respect for law and order, and who are apparently out of police control’.
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The local constabulary admitted that these types of crimes had always been an issue in the city, but had got worse in wartime. Offences of breaking and entry, wounding and robbery had increased almost threefold on pre-war levels. Parental control had all but disappeared in some areas due to working mothers and fathers away in the forces. When central government had responded to the need for scrap metal for war production, and relaxed regulations on the sale of metals,
Liverpool’s youths had responded by increasing the theft of metal. The police also pointed out that some offenders were as young as eight. As the city’s Chief Constable admitted, the juveniles they were dealing with:
become the adults who are responsible for a great part of the serious crime in Liverpool including cases of robbery and serious assaults. They form into gangs which, while not organized as a disciplined body like the American gangs, are yet prepared to assist and protect fellows and at time resort to intimidation.
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Though the newspapers were full of news of the antics of fresh-faced would-be gangsters, there were also genuine tales of bravery,
dedication
and sacrifice by youngsters. One boy who was openly praised was eleven-year old Colin Ryder Richardson. The survivor of the sinking of the SS
City of Benares
struggled to recover from his experiences in the aftermath of the disaster. The boy, described by a fellow survivor as the ‘bravest and kindest boy I’ve ever seen’
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and noted by the
Daily Mirror
as a hero, needed to settle back into normal life.
In the days following his return to the UK, Colin remained very weak. He later described it as if ‘life was passing me by like in a cinema. I was witnessing events as people tried to help me’. Even his arrival in Glasgow, immediately after the Royal Navy had returned the survivors to shore, seemed like a dream:
At Customs, they asked, ‘Where are your passports?’ We laughed, we said, ‘If you want them, they are 600 miles out at the bottom of the Atlantic!’ I had been given the captain’s golfing plus-fours to wear. But even though they are short on an adult, as an eleven year old, they were over my feet. So I couldn’t wear them. I walked into the Central Hotel, Glasgow. I was in my life jacket and pink pyjamas. I was barefoot, I hadn’t any clothes. But nobody raised an eyebrow, or even looked at me. I was just waiting for someone to say, ‘What are you doing in your pyjamas at this time in the morning?’ But it was as if everything was normal.
Those first days were difficult. At one point, the survivors were taken to a shoe shop where they were photographed trying on shoes. There
was, however, one problem: all the shoes were for ladies. There was nothing for an eleven-year-old boy. It was a traumatic time for the whole family. His mother was called north to meet her son. Their meeting was a strange one: ‘She looked at me and I looked at her and she said, “What have you done with all your clothes?” I felt responsible for losing it all. A totally ridiculous guilt came over me.’ Colin’s father first learnt of his son’s fate at a railway station. He was waiting for a train when he noticed someone reading a newspaper that was celebrating the rescue of the survivors of the SS
City of Benares
. He asked to borrow the paper and the reader asked him why. Colin’s father pointed to a photograph in the newspaper and replied: ‘I believe that’s my son.’
Returning home to Wales, life carried on. Colin was visited by American journalists and photographers, but he never discussed the matter with his classmates at the local school. It seemed that, despite the initial press interest, his mother wanted ‘the matter forgotten’: ‘Her attitude was “Least said, soonest mended”. Rightly or wrongly. It was very strange to say a photographer was going to come into school to photograph me in class.’ At times, he thought to himself, ‘Was it all a bad dream?’ because no one talked about the tragedy.
But if his mother thought the incident could be forgotten, leaving her eleven-year-old son to grow up ‘normally’, she was in for a surprise. Out of the blue, in January 1941 a letter arrived for Colin from Buckingham Palace. Enclosed was a small certificate, signed by Winston Churchill, informing the eleven-year-old boy that he had been commended for ‘brave conduct in the Merchant Navy.’
The wording was curious: he had never served in the Merchant Navy and felt he had done little more than survive the sinking of a ship. As he later recalled:
I couldn’t exactly write back to the King and say, ‘Hang on, I wasn’t in the Merchant Navy, I was just a passenger on a liner.’ I believe it was the ship’s carpenter or Professor Day – who had to be tied into the lifeboat to stop him being washed away – who recommended me for the award. I believe Professor Day recommended me for the George Cross. But for that you need to have saved lives, all I had done was help dispose of bodies.
However, he soon received a small badge issued to all recipients of the commendation. The accompanying letter informed him it should be placed ‘immediately above the centre of the position in which any medal ribbons are, or would be, worn’. It was a curious instruction for a child whose only uniform was for school and who was seven years too young to be conscripted. This badge was later replaced by an oak leaf emblem along with a message informing him it should be worn on the ribbon of the ‘War Medal’ – an award he was too young to earn.
The question of how to wear the award was vexing. After all, if in uniform, he would be improperly dressed without his oak leaf: ‘I had to wear it. At public school I joined the Junior Training Corps. I had a problem: Which side do I wear it? Civilian side, on the right. Or military, on the left? I thought, “Bugger that, I’ll put it on the left.”’ Despite his mother’s desire that he should forget his experiences, Colin developed a curious desire to return to the sea. In 1942, at the age of thirteen, he applied to the Admiralty for a cadetship at a Royal Navy academy, in the hope of becoming a professional seaman. He was rejected on health grounds.
Whilst it was the under-fourteens and their schools which were evacuated by the local authorities, private schools also relocated from the cities into the countryside. As a result, many boys between fourteen and eighteen – mostly from solid middle-class backgrounds – found themselves occupying rural villages. Terry Charles spent the middle years of the war with his relocated London school, the Regent Street Polytechnic, in Somerset. When not at school, the boys worked on local farms, picking apples and other fruits.
Just as in 1939 when he had been privately evacuated to Cornwall, he felt like an outsider and had trouble settling into village life. As a result, it was not always a pleasant experience: ‘I didn’t feel we were welcome. The villagers didn’t want a load of Londoners dumped on them – and we didn’t particularly want to be there. It was “us and them”. We were teenagers of sixteen and seventeen – the village kids hated us.’ As he recalled, whenever the price of beer went up, the schoolboys wrote home for extra pocket-money, a luxury not shared by the local youths:
There were always fights. Once one of our masters had been down to the village and he came hurtling back into the school. He told us there was
a scrap going on. He said, ‘Quick, your colleagues are getting murdered down there. They need reinforcements!’ So about eight of us piled into his car and he took us down to join the fray.
There were also arguments over girls, with the locals feeling the Londoners were encroaching on their ‘territory’. In particular, one girl, described by Terry Charles as someone all the boys knew, was very popular: ‘She was very bonny. But she was known as the “village bicycle” – everybody rode her!’ The spread of her affections helped to drive a wedge between the locals and the schoolboys.
Apart from fighting with the locals, Terry Charles and his
schoolmates
found solace in the single village pub, where a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ was established: the pupils had to drink in the public bar whilst the masters used the lounge. Being in Somerset, cider was the favoured tipple of the schoolboys. It was strong stuff: it tasted like apple juice but as soon as the boys stood up and went out into the fresh air they found their legs didn’t work.
In the period leading up to D-Day the village filled up with American servicemen. As far as they could see, there was nothing but tanks, trucks and men in uniform. They too became acquainted with the local cider: