Manchester at War, 1939-45

by Graham Phythian

  The kitchen had a long sink made of stone, and just the one tap, which was cold. My job was, I wiped the eggs clean, and I can’t remember ever dropping one. I think I would have remembered that! I love eggs to this day, but I swear I had egg for breakfast, dinner and tea when I was on the farm, all done in different ways.

  I had a free run of the farm. I don’t know how I didn’t get into serious trouble, because farms are a dangerous place. I remember seeing Uncle Jimmy in the field, you know, on a tractor, and not realising at that time that tractors have a blind spot; the driver can’t see little things below in front of them because of these big wheels and things going round. I remember running in front, running up to the tractor and shouting, ‘Uncle Jimmy! Uncle Jimmy!’ but of course he couldn’t hear me because of the sound of the tractor, and he couldn’t see me, because I was only a tot, and he was coming straight towards me. And I don’t know how I got out of the way, I really don’t, but well I must have done. And I was horrified, I thought, ‘Why is he coming towards me and not turning round?’ I was probably about four, something like that.

  EVELYN SEYMOUR

  I was brought up in Salford. I was evacuated to Accrington when I was six years old, and because I was so young my sister came with me. She should have gone to Lancaster, but stayed with this lady in Accrington. She looked after us very well: I had my seventh birthday there, and she let me have half a dozen children from school, and we nearly wrecked the place! But she was quite happy, she loved children.

  I only stayed in Accrington from the September until the Christmas, 1939. My mother used to come up every weekend to see us, and she found out it was too expensive. She decided she just couldn’t afford it, and wages were not very high in those days. My father was working, but with three children, we found it very difficult.

  MARGARET GREAVES

  I was fourteen – well, fourteen-and-a-half really – as the war broke out in the September. I went to Fallowfield Technical High School for Girls, having passed my eleven plus, and I was evacuated to Macclesfield. The week before, I’d been on holiday at my aunt’s in Kendal, and she said, ‘Let’s go to Morecambe for the day.’ So my cousin and I went to Morecambe. And then my mother suddenly appeared from Manchester, she said, ‘You’ve got to come home! You’ve got to be evacuated.’ That was the Thursday or Friday before September 3rd, then I was evacuated to Macclesfield with the school. I was billeted in Broken Cross with a very nice family with two little girls; he was the manager of one of the silk mills.

  We had part-time education: one week we’d go in mornings, and the next week we’d go in afternoons. And this continued from the September to the December, and nothing happened. There was no war, I mean, it was just like being on holiday in a way, part-time school, you know, which I didn’t enjoy very much.

  I was a singer, I’ve always been a singer, and the Christmas of that year, 1939, we had a carol service in Macclesfield Parish Church, and I was singing two solos out of the Messiah. There’s a story attached to that, because when a lady who was in the congregation and who belonged to our church – don’t ask me why she was in Macclesfield at that time, I’ve no idea – she came back and said, ‘How is it that Margaret Lord’ – my maiden name was Lord – ‘can sing in Macclesfield, and she can’t sing in our church?’ Ladies were not considered to be part of the choir, you see, they used to sit at the back of the choir stalls. But then, of course, the ladies were much in demand, because the young men were at war.

  So my parents said that as nothing had happened, I came home for Christmas, and then went back to Macclesfield. The girl I was billeted with was called Audrey Long, she was a very tall girl, and she was good at long jumping [laughs], I can remember, and I often wonder what’s happened to her, because I’ve had no contact with her. The lady became ill, and we both had to separate then, and I was put with a young couple who had no idea how to cope with a teenager – by this time I was nearly fifteen – I wouldn’t say I was unhappy, but I was uncomfortable. This was still in Broken Cross. Anyway my parents decided that nothing had happened, so I could go back home.

  RUTH PALMER

  I was only six when they gave me a gas mask, put a label round my neck like Paddington Bear and took me to a big posh house in Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire. And I hated it.

  They had a nanny for their little girl, and a rose garden and a swing, which I thought was very posh. They also had a breakfast room and I couldn’t imagine anyone having a special room just to have their breakfast in.

  The nanny used to scrub and scrub my back in the bath every night. It was all very different and I wanted my Mam, and when she came for me I was glad and I think the posh family were too. My mother was staying in an ordinary house at the other end of the village with my younger sister and the three of us all slept in one bed and I was happy again.

  (Manchester Evening News supplement, 5 September 1989)

  HILDA MASON

  My two brothers were evacuated, to Knutsford, where they lived with a family. I wasn’t, because I’d just started work. They got on very well with the family, because the family they stayed with was connected with Tatton Park. He used to be a gamekeeper there, and he used to take my brothers round the Park. We used to go and visit them at weekends, and we used to play on the heath – football – with them, and they were there a couple of years.

  ROSA SLATER

  Well, I was evacuated first with the school to a place called Wilpshire [north of Blackburn], with a ‘P’ in the middle. I don’t know where it is, somewhere up north, and we were in a schoolroom and people picked you and took you.

  I got picked by this lady and she had quite a posh house, and she put me in the attic on a camp bed – which I didn’t mind, you know, and then she told me to come downstairs and she told me I would not be eating with her daughter or her, I would be eating in the back room with the maidservant or whoever it was, you know, and then I would have certain chores to do before I went to school and certain chores to do when I came back. One of them was black-lead this grate in this pantry affair, which took me all of three or four nights. I mean, I was big and boisterous you know, I had plenty of energy then, but I mean it was such a huge thing – it was ridiculous. And then the food was dreadful.

  Extracts from the evacuation leaflet disseminated in Manchester in the summer of 1939. (Philip Lloyd)

  And then I wrote to my mum, I gave them to the lady to post and she never posted them. And my mother got worried because she never heard from me, and she wrote to the woman, who wrote back and said I’d not wrote. Something like that. Anyway, my mother came and got me. I told her I had written every week, twice a week, and I wasn’t happy and that. So she told her what to do with her fancy house and whatever, so she brought me home.

  I was home [in Cheetham Hill] for about a week I think, and then she took me to my auntie’s in Newton in Montgomeryshire then, I think it’s Powys now. I was there for about a year – I can’t remember just how long – and I went to Penygloddfa Council School and it was lovely.

  (North West Sound Archive)

  ANON.

  I went to St Joseph’s School [Ramsbottom]. We had a class of pupils from one of the Manchester Catholic schools, St Bridgit’s. We all tended to get on well together and mixed in, though they were kept in a class of their own. One of their teachers came with them and taught them all together. There was a spare classroom at St Joseph’s and they used that.

  (North West Sound Archive)

  ROY MATHER

  Where I lived was at Glossop, Derbyshire, and in the evacuation they brought schools from Higher Openshaw, round that area, West Gorton. The children came on the train with their labels and everything else, the gas mask box, and they had a sort of a rucksack thing. They got off the train at Glossop, which is only ten miles from Openshaw, and the local education people from the council took these children to where they’d had a response, where they’d said they’d take the children. The problem, what happened if there was a brother and
sister, or two sisters, they separated them, and that didn’t go down well.

  Manchester Education Committee granted 1 shilling [5p] a head for Christmas treats to evacuated children. Number has dropped from 20,000 last Christmas to 5,000.

  (Manchester City News, 14 December 1940)

  What happened was, we went in our own classes, one week we went in a morning, the next week in the afternoon, and while we was in school they was out. And then eventually the phoney war was on, and they all filtered back home again, because there was nothing happening. It didn’t happen until 1940, and this is 1939 we’re talking about.

  PHILIP LLOYD

  Because my sister was under five years old, of course she wasn’t going to school, so we were able to make our own arrangements and I was able to go along with my mother and younger sister. So we went to our grandmother’s sister’s in Wilmslow – Lacey Green – and I went to a little village school, a little stone-built school at the end of the road, for a term or two. It’s been knocked down, and the Community Centre is there now.

  Things were quiet in Manchester, so we came back here, and in fact we were here just in time for the Manchester Blitz! We were in our own shelter in the cellar, underneath the post office in Upper Chorlton Road. We’d had it strengthened, and my sister and I used to sleep down there during the worst of the Blitz. I can remember feeling the bombs dropping, the blast from them, I think one fell in the road just outside, and one of the shop windows was put through. It couldn’t be replaced at the time, and had to be boarded up.

  TWO

  UNDER

  ATTACK

  Piccadilly warehouses ablaze during the December 1940 Blitz. The Fire Service was temporarily understaffed, as many regular firemen had been called over to Liverpool to combat the results of the bombing there. (Manchester Evening News)

  Although there were sporadic raids on Manchester and the surrounding area during 1940–41, the major bombardment was over the two nights of 22 and 23 December 1940: the so-called ‘Christmas Blitz’. The raw figures are enough to set the scene: over the two nights a total of 467 tons of high explosive were dropped on the City of Manchester alone, as well as around 2,000 canisters of incendiary bombs. Ten thousand incendiaries were dropped on Salford. Nearly 800 people were killed in Manchester city centre and Salford. Some of the buildings completely destroyed were Cheetham’s Hospital, the Corn Exchange, the Free Trade Hall, Smithfield Market, and St Anne’s church.

  ERNEST RIGBY

  It occurred only a few weeks ago – scene: a cosy inn on Manchester’s outskirts.

  Around a table sat a few friends and the writer. We were settling the war between us, each having his own idea of how to do it – as armchair critics will – when a report like 10,000 thunderbolts absolutely deafened us.

  We thought that the building had been struck, but it was the next door premises, which, when we came to look at them, were almost demolished. Fortunately for us, at the inn the only damage was that all the windows were broken. Another 20 yards our way, well, we should not have done much similar visiting.

  The joke was that an ARP man popped his head in and said, ‘Close all those windows.’ We told him that we should have a job as there were no windows to close.

  (Manchester Evening Chronicle, 11 November 1940)

  DENNIS WOOD

  When the Blitz came, obviously the prime purpose was to bomb the city to terrify the citizens. I know they had targets, Metro Vicks and all that, but really it was to try and kill off our morale.

  Every man was doing something. I can’t remember if it was compulsory or not, but there were men who worked in town, in offices and so on, nine to five, and at five o’clock, two or three nights a week, they had to stay in the building as fire-watchers. They were just as they were: no uniform, no unit.

  During a raid they’re on the roof, with a stirrup pump and buckets of water, because what they dropped first were the incendiary bombs, magnesium. If one hit something it would detonate, and if you didn’t put it out the magnesium would burn for about twenty minutes. Apart from being a signal for the next wave of bombers, it might have gone through the roof with that force, and it’s lying in an office, and within twenty minutes it’s an inferno.

  The Manchester Royal Infirmary was partly destroyed by a time bomb, which exploded shortly after the main Blitz had finished. A landmine had previously been cleared from the site. (Manchester Evening News)

  HUGH VARAH

  [The speaker was an auxiliary fireman.]

  A large bomb had dropped straight down the lift shaft [at the Manchester Royal Infirmary], bringing the lifts and cables crashing down and the stairs crashing down with them. There was just a deep and empty abyss with a tangle of cables all the way down to the basement. There was no way either up or down and it was impossible to get a turntable ladder near the building. Before we had a chance to work anything out, there was a shout of ‘Take cover! Bomb coming down!’ Crouched down in the rubble, I looked up into the blackness of the sky and I could see nothing unusual. Then I noticed what appeared to be a dark tent-like canopy – a parachute. Then I saw that there were two of them, so close that they were touching one another. As they came lower, I could make out a long black oil drum suspended between them. It was the first view I ever had of a landmine.

  A swirling gust of wind blew the parachutes sideways, wrapping them around a chimney stack. It was fortunate that they did because I’d left diving for cover a bit late. The landmine came to rest with a thump against the chimney where it hung swaying on its lines, making a grating noise as it scraped to and fro against the brickwork. I’d been told by a bomb disposal chap that these landmines had to roll over to set them off, so if the canopy held it would be safe, but there was no guarantee that the lines wouldn’t tear under the strain. There was a sudden scurrying as everyone made frantic efforts to move away.

  (From Forgotten Voices of the Blitz and the Battle for Britain)

  DR R.A. CRANNA

  In Manchester, I think it was in 1940, at Christmas time, there was a fantastic, horrible, bombing raid. We didn’t get much of that in Bolton, but we could see and hear it. The next day there was no transport. I walked into Manchester, walked to the Infirmary, to see whether I could offer my services, and I remember this little old woman being brought in. She had been dug out of the rubble that afternoon, and all she could say was how sorry she was that she was in this dirty state and usually she was a clean woman, and was so upset that people were seeing her covered in dust.

  (North West Sound Archive)

  JEANNE HERRING

  Sometimes the air-raid warning siren would go and then we sat in the brick shelter on Chorlton Green until the all-clear sounded. One time Father came to walk me home with the anti-aircraft guns from Longford Park firing away. Shrapnel was falling and Father told me to lie down on the pavement against the wall of the houses opposite Oswald Road School. I protested that it would dirty my coat, but Father pushed me down anyway. It was the nearest he ever got to getting cross with me. He lay down beside me, protecting me with his arms.

  DENNIS HUMPHRIES

  It was at that time – late in 1940 – that the air raids commenced, usually late in the evening, and I can always remember it going cold when I heard the first siren; it was almost dusk. We all ran home [to Glastonbury Road, Stretford], and got in the shelter. As I recall, everybody was given an Anderson shelter. It was corrugated, very good quality steel. But we and the family next door – whose name escapes me – we joined our shelter with theirs, to make one big one.

  The first occasion I remember that was really serious was when one particular night – I think we were in the house at the time – the first thing we knew was that there was a massive explosion in a place called Naden’s Farm fields, which was at the end of Old Hall Road [present day Lostock Park], and this apparently was a landmine. The reason we never heard anything was because it came down by parachute. The idea was to hit Trafford Park, which was full of factories like Metropol
itan Vickers, which made tanks. Naden’s Farm wasn’t a million miles from Trafford Park, in a direct line probably 300 yards. It was very close.

  Another landmine landed on Moss Road/Davyhulme Road corner, which was about 400 yards from Metropolitan Vickers main gate; another fell on the corner of Melville Road, which was again very close to Trafford Park, very close to the railway line too. Other bombs fell later – I can’t remember the actual date – one bomb landed on Urmston Lane, about 400 yards from the Robin Hood hotel, a large bomb. Urmston Lane of course was very old property, three-storey, cellars, and this particular bomb demolished two big three-storey properties.

  Fire engine and staff at Park Road Fire Station, Stretford, which dealt with fires in Trafford Park and surrounding areas. The author’s late mother Renee Phythian (née Smith) is seated second from the right. (Author’s collection)

  Another bomb landed during that particular time – probably late 1940, early 1941 – on the place we’re sat in now, Stretford Library. It didn’t destroy the library, but it was badly damaged. Another bomb landed on Victoria Park School, which again was not a million miles from Trafford Park. I believe there were quite a lot of people killed by this bomb that landed on the school, Victoria Park School, because there was a shelter in the yard, it was brick built, with a concrete roof. The shelter was just four walls, a roof and an entrance, nothing inside, you took your own seat and your own blanket, but I believe that they were killed there. And in Stretford Cemetery, backing on to the tramline, there’s this memorial to the victims of that particular bombing. All the names of the people they found are on it except one, and they never knew who he was. But they thought possibly he was a sailor from a ship, probably a foreign sailor, because the docks were close, as was the Ship Canal.