How Britain Kept Calm and Carried On
Read How Britain Kept Calm and Carried On Online
Authors: Anton Rippon
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Michael O’Mara Books Limited
9 Lion Yard
Tremadoc Road
London SW4 7NQ
Copyright © Anton Rippon 2014
The right of Anton Rippon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the
publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-78243-190-9 in hardback print format
ISBN: 978-1-78243-236-4 in ebook format
Designed and typeset by Design 23
Illustrations by Greg Stevenson and Claire Cater
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The biggest ‘thank you’ I have to extend to those who helped put this book together obviously goes to those people from all over Britain who responded to my appeal
and took the time to write down their memories and stories – some long, some short and pithy, all of them painting the broad picture – and send them to me. They form the main part of
this book and without them the task would have been impossible. The overwhelming majority were happy to put their names to their stories. In a tiny number of instances, mostly for professional
reasons, contributors asked to remain anonymous and I have respected their wishes rather than not use their stories. Similarly, a few were happy for their name to be included but not their
location.
Thanks are also due to my daughter, Nicola Rippon, who spent many hours reading hundreds of handwritten letters and putting them on to a computer so that I might more easily work with them.
Last, but not least, thanks to my literary agent, Jo Hayes of the Bell Lomax Moreton Agency, who saw the potential in the idea, to Michael O’Mara Books who were ready to publish it, and to
my editor there, Gabriella Nemeth. We all kept calm and carried on.
I
f it hadn’t been for Adolf Hitler, I would be a Yorkshireman instead of a Derbeian. The decision by the Austrian with the comedy moustache to
wage a massive bombing campaign against British cities would prove to be one of the most fateful of the Second World War. It would also change my life for ever, even before it had begun.
At the start of the Second World War, in September 1939, my parents lived in Kingston upon Hull where they had been for four years, ever since my printer father had taken a job on the local
evening newspaper. But, in May 1941, they moved back to my mother’s hometown of Derby. The reason: Hull was busy acquiring a reputation as Britain’s most severely bombed city after
London. The Humberside city spent over 1,000 hours under air-raid alert.
So when I was born, in December 1944, it was in Derby, a town still a target, given that the Merlin engines that powered Spitfires and Lancasters were built there, but for some reason one that
escaped the very worst of the Blitz.
A few hundred yards from where I struggled into that angry world, outside the offices of the Derby Gas, Light and Coke Company, six escaped German prisoners of war were being recaptured by two
policemen and a Corporation bus driver. The Germans had escaped from a POW camp in Staffordshire, but their luck ran out when their stolen car broke down opposite Derby’s main police station.
After a short chase through the town centre, they were rounded up, the last one collared by the bus driver on his way to start the early shift.
As the bedraggled and thoroughly miserable Germans began their melancholy journey back to prison camp, my mother, unaware that the Wehrmacht had been just down the road, laboured away in our
front bedroom with the assistance of the family physician, Dr Latham Brown. My father sat downstairs fiddling with the wireless set, switching between the Bob Hope programme on the General Forces
station and Paul Adam and his Mayfair Music on the Midland Home Service. Eventually, getting on for midnight, I appeared, just in time for Christmas.
Five months later I attended the local VE Day street party. Of course, the significance of grown-ups performing the conga along our street, while singing ‘Roll Out The Barrel’ passed
me by. But it is nice to be able to say: ‘I was there.’
From her home in the Lincolnshire fenland town of Spalding, my Grandma Rippon marked my first birthday with a postcard showing a cartoon of a small boy and his dog, and a quote from Winston
Churchill announcing to Parliament, six months earlier, the German surrender: ‘Let us not forget the toils and efforts that lie ahead.’ It isn’t the sort of sentiment you would
normally send anyone on their birthday, let alone a one-year-old. But, then again, life in post-war Britain was going to be tough. Why wrap it up? Or maybe she was displaying a little bit of
leftover wartime irony. Actually, I rather doubt that, as you will see.
So I don’t remember the Second World War. But as I grew up in the 1940s and early 1950s, ‘the war’ always seemed to be the main topic of conversation in our family. Even when
we went on our annual visit to Grandma Rippon, ‘the war’ was always on the agenda, especially the tale about the night the Germans thought that they were bombing nearby Peterborough but
instead destroyed Spalding Liberal Club. It stood a couple of hundred yards from the Rippons, who, thinking that the Luftwaffe would never bother with an insignificant market town, hadn’t
thought to erect an air-raid shelter. They soon wished they had. When the sirens sounded and it became obvious that this was the real thing, they all tried to cram themselves under the grand piano
that took up half their small dining room. There was much shoving and pushing until everyone was safely installed. All except Gran herself, that is. She was a big woman, a Victorian, and the stern
matriarch of the family. She refused to indulge in such an indignity and, instead, sat in her usual chair, defying Hitler to do his worst. In the post-war years, the grand piano still sat hogging
that dining room, and the tale was retold many times, Gran still overseeing it all, supreme in the same chair that had survived the bombs.
My parents weren’t there to see this comedic episode. They spent the years 1939 to 1941 mostly in the air-raid shelter that they had wisely arranged, with occasional tentative explorations
to see what further damage the Luftwaffe had wreaked on Hull. As the centre of that city was steadily being demolished by Goering’s air force, each morning my father picked his way through
the previous night’s rubble to get to work wearing a
Hull Daily Mail
armband so that the police would let him through cordoned-off streets. I still have a faded newspaper cutting
showing him and his fellow compositors at the newspaper. Actually, I only have his word for it. The purpose of the story was to show them all carrying on with their work while wearing gas masks. So
it seems the most pointless group photograph ever kept as a memento (‘That’s me, second from the left, honest.’). But there was a war on . . .
Each teatime he would return with the news: ‘The docks copped it again last night,’ or ‘There aren’t any houses left in Grindell Street.’ Parts of Jameson Street,
where the
Mail
offices were situated, were badly damaged. Often my father went straight down to work after a hair-raising night spent fire-watching on the roof of the
Mail
building. He never did find out what happened to his porkpie supper that disappeared when a bomb exploded uncomfortably close by. The episode became another of those stories.
Their house backed on to allotments and, long before the nightly warning siren wailed out, my parents knew that another raid was imminent because of the frantic activity around the anti-aircraft
gun that was sited just over their garden fence. One night, tired of huddling in the shelter, they remained in the house. At the height of the raid, my mother got bored and stuck her head out of
the back door to see what was going on. Suddenly there was a high-pitched ‘whooshing’ noise and my father grabbed her by the hair and pulled her back in. I still have the large chunks
of shrapnel that missed her by a few inches.