My granddad, Robert Bambroffe, lived with Aunty Esther [in Newton Heath], but he was very old and not fit enough to be an active warden. He stayed in bed and said he had no intention of being up all night in the shelter. If he were to die he’d prefer to die in his bed, and the Germans weren’t going to disrupt his sleep. His claim to fame was that he’d helped to build Blackpool Tower and he’d put the last nuts and bolts into position after the tower had opened. Next door to us was a very old lady at No. 23, and she also stayed in bed as far as I could remember.
RENEE SMITH
As the youngest I wasn’t allowed out much because of the war. We had an air-raid Anderson shelter in the garden. There was a bad blitz over Christmas and New Year 1940–41. I remember my sisters came over from Hulme and couldn’t get back. You could smell the city was burning. I remember a bomb on Barlow Moor Road just in front of where the Kentucky Fried Chicken place is now. It used to be a cinema and it was burning all day.
T. MARRIOTT-MOORE
Bits of burnt paper – letters and that – were floating down on Sale for three, four days. So it just shows the intensity of the blaze, especially in the region of Piccadilly, at Christmas. And strange to say, of course, they stopped dead on twelve on the second night.
We had a little apprentice from Salford, and I was busy, seeing that the place got gradually tidied up because the blast was terrific and a lot of glass had gone, and I spotted this little lad sneaking past my office, and I could see in his pocket what appeared to be silk cord. I called him across and said, ‘Where’ve you got that from?’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’ve got it from the White City.’ [A greyhound track near to the speaker’s works.]
‘Whereabouts?’
He said, ‘Well there are some things hanging on the wire at the White City.’
‘Hanging by these cords?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Mm. Well, you see that policeman by the Dog and Partridge? Go and tell him there are landmines in the White City greyhound track.’
And it’s a good job he didn’t cut all the strings down or we wouldn’t have been here today! Of course they evacuated us immediately, and right behind the works there was a train stopped. They’d cut the railway, both ends of it. I think they must have been after the Throstle Nest power station [near the present Pomona Metrolink station], but they missed that, fortunately.
I tried to phone a superintendent that I knew, at East Union Street Police Station [Old Trafford, headquarters of a Lancashire County police division], but couldn’t get through, and eventually I got through to Stretford Police Station, and he said, ‘You won’t speak to him again, because they dropped a landmine on East Union Street.’
(North West Sound Archive)
HELEN SEPHTON
When I was one, my mum said they were in Abbey Hey Lane, No. 535 Abbey Hey Lane [Gorton], three doors down from the canal steps. My mum and dad were lying in bed and I was in my cot, she said, holding and drinking my bottle, and they heard this bomb coming down over the roofs. They knew that it was very very near, and it was probably going to be a direct hit, because they both looked at each other and then they looked at me and they said, ‘Poor little soul, she’s only one.’
It flattened the street behind Johnson’s Paintworks, the row of houses at the back there, just off Highmead Street. If you’re ever passing, all the houses on the left-hand side are old, and on this side, all the houses are post-war, all new houses. That tells you where the hit was, it took the whole row down. It was just a breath away from where we were.
My birthday is in November, so that would have been around Christmas 1940.
It was bad enough when the bombs hit the buses, because sometimes there was a direct hit on a bus, but when it was the trams, all the lines were buckled, you see, and that was out for ages because they didn’t have the manpower, you know, the men were off in the army, so it took ages to rectify something like that. There was a big hole in the ground, and all the twisted metal and everything.
I remember the trams because the trams came down Abbey Hey Lane, around the corner, and then it turned right and went down Cross Lane.
PHYLLIS STEWART
I’d been to my mum’s and I was catching the bus back – I have a feeling it was the Monday – and I got into the square [Mersey Square, Stockport] and there was the bus shelter near the old fire station. Everybody used to go in that shelter, who lived up Offerton, and the sirens went and the inspector came and he said, ‘Anybody wanting to go home tonight,’ he said, ‘You’ll have to walk it, because we’re knocking the buses off.’ So I turned round and looked and I said, ‘Is anybody walking up Offerton?’ And a voice shouts, ‘Yes, it’s me, Phyllis,’ and it was my husband’s cousin’s wife.
So we get walking up the hill onto Petersgate. All of a sudden these two aeroplanes go over, and she said – I’ll always remember – she said, ‘Oh, they must be ours, don’t worry.’ I said, ‘I’m not waiting for ’em to find out if they’re ours or not. Come on, let’s go in the shelter in the Market Place.’ So she said, ‘Is there one?’ I said, ‘Well, I think there is.’ And there was all sandbags piled high, so we got in there, and it was very rowdy, and people were shouting at one another and singing and dancing, it was very rowdy.
I remember there were like wooden shelves, where the kiddies lay on, you know, they were like beds for you to lie on, but it wasn’t all that crowded, but it’s just that I have this in my memory that the kids were singing and dancing – you know how kiddies are.
Then we heard this big bump and it shook, and all of a sudden my husband’s cousin comes down into the shelter, and he shouts, ‘Miriam!’ He said, ‘I’ve got some awful news for you. We’ve been bombed. There’s a bomb dropped at the top of the road.’ She said, ‘Which road?’ He said, ‘Hayburn Road.’ [Off the A626 to Marple] That’s where we lived.
He said, ‘Come on, we’ll have to walk back.’ He had a bike, and because it was pitch black, you see, he rides straight into these sandbags and he knocked his head and that, you know.
Anyway, we walked home, and when I got home, my husband had been waiting at the back door for me. He just managed to close the back door, and this bomb dropped. It shook all the bathroom, and he just managed to stand near the kitchen cabinet, but all the roof came in on him. He would have been in a shelter up the road, at a neighbour’s; he reinforced it for them, and it was a marvellous big shelter under one of these big houses on Offerton Lane.
Victoria Station during the Blitz: 23 December 1940. This photograph was initially censored. (Manchester Evening News)
My next door neighbour said, ‘I was sat in the kitchen, and it blew me right down the hall to the front door. We’ve no glass in the house, all the glass is blown out.’
When we got into the house, there was soot piled high. And my husband had only just built that pair of houses. The back door just blew in. There were big paving stones all over the garden.
It must have been about eleven o’clock at night when a bomb fell on the crossroads of Hayburn Road and Montagu Road. It seems that a lady was coming round the corner to go to her daughter’s, and she had a torch on. Whether he saw the torch, the aeroplane, or whether it was one bomb he wanted – they all say it was one bomb he wanted to let go – but it killed her, and it killed a man that came out to have a look at what was going on.
Then we had all the trouble of cleaning up, and my husband had all the trouble of putting all the locks on the doors, new locks, putting the windows in, things like that.
(North West Sound Archive)
PETER ROUGHAN
Well, it was near Baxendale’s [a former mill on Shudehill; a multi-storey car park is now on the site] when a friend of mine was going home, and a policeman said, ‘I wouldn’t go down there just yet.’
He said, ‘Why?’
He [the policeman] said, ‘Just look.’ The buildings were all on fire, and there were thousands of rats crossing the street. He couldn’t have walked down wi
thout walking on rats, there were that many leaving the burning buildings.
(North West Sound Archive)
FRANCIS HOGAN
I was in the house in Newcroft Road [Urmston] one minute, then my mum said we had to come in the shelter. It was just a big building, virtually outside our house. I remember going in, and there was this woman, hysterical, and she was pregnant; and she threw her arms around me and she was screaming her head off, ‘Oh, what are we gonna do, the baby, oh.’ Anyway, what I did, I got out of there, and went looking for shrapnel! [laughs] My dad wouldn’t go in this shelter, he was a bloke out of the trenches, the First World War, and he said, ‘If it’s gonna get me, it’ll get me in here, in bed!’
So the next thing, this stick of bombs came right across the fields at the back of our houses, and I think the final one, there was a big double-fronted detached house on Stretford Road, and the next morning, there was nothing there, just rubble.
I went down to the centre of Manchester after the Blitz, and it was a bloody mess. My dad used to do fire-watching. He worked for the Co-op Wholesale, near the bridge at Old Trafford, the big building there, and to me he always seemed to be on fire-watch. I was at Metro Vicks, and the day after the bombing, where I was working, on the dynamos, there was no roof! So we had these coke fires all over the place, we were still working. We were about that deep in water as well [indicates around 2ft higher than the floor] from all the fire hoses and what have you, but we just got on with it.
There was no way our spirit would have been broken, no way. We were always bloody singing, actually! I remember working where they were making harnesses for the Lancaster, and this was this guy and a female, and they used to sing a duet all bloody day long. They were marvellous singers, but I’m surprised they didn’t get a sore throat. [laughs] We weren’t really frightened, not to the extent of giving up, we were just normal people getting on with the job.
BOB WILD
My brother and I went down to Manchester to take a meat and potato pie to my father, who was engaged in the rescue service. The Deansgate Hotel and the Queen’s Hotel had gone. They were in rubble. I can remember the hosepipes snaking across the roads, and there was a piano shop called Crane’s, and all the pianos had been blown out, and there were bits of them all over the road.
(Manchester Evening News, 10 December 2010)
NANCY DRUMM
My sister lived in Rusholme. She had been living in London, but my mother said, ‘I want you to go back to Manchester, we’re going to get bombed to hell in London here.’ [laughs] Where she lived – she went later to see – she used to live in this street in Chelsea, it wasn’t posh then, it was just ordinary, down by the Embankment, and it was gone! The whole street had been bombed, absolutely, not a stitch left of it. Anyway, she came back to Manchester, and she got a house to rent, and the night of the Blitz we had, she had a young baby, a six-month-old baby in a laundry basket under the stairs, and her little boy was 3. She was baking for Christmas – there was a couple of trays of mince pies in the oven. Anyway, when the siren went she said, ‘Oh Lord, my mince pies are going for a Burton!’ [laughs]
But the window, it was a big window too, and it just lifted out and went out, into the garden. We weren’t bombed, I think it was the blast. And we were there till morning of course, under the stairs. If you didn’t have a shelter, you used to go under the stairs.
MARY MALCOLM GREGORY
While the Manchester Blitz was on, we spent 8–10 hours in the basement [at Hollinwood Ferranti’s] each night. We used to book so many hours air raid on our time sheets.
You’d have to go up to the canteen about eleven o’clock for your dinner, and they would lend you an ARP helmet. You’d put your helmet on, run up and get your dinner, and bring it back. Everybody used to knit – they knit socks, scarves, knit everything. Some of us used to read, others used to go to sleep.
I’ll tell you what upset us most at the time: there were a lot of girls working there – they were Manchester machinists – and they were drafted into the Ferranti’s job, so when they worked nights with us, and they knew the planes were going, the sirens had gone, they were a bag of nerves. They didn’t know whether their home would be still standing when they got home the following morning.
And the only way we’d get to know would be the following night, seeing who was missing, and we’d hear, ‘her house is flattened,’ and they’d have been taken somewhere else. It was upsetting like that, that was the worst part of it, I think.
(North West Sound Archive)
A bomb disposal team deals with an unexploded bomb in the back garden of a house on Victoria Road, Whalley Range. (Greater Manchester Police Museum and Archives)
TREFOR JONES
The space in between Nos 3 and 5 Chandos Road South [Chorlton-cum-Hardy] was where a bomb landed one night. My father was a fire-watcher, and so was Mr Bardsley, who lived in the house opposite. Mr Bardsley and his son, who was my pal, were in the road when they heard [makes whistling sound of a bomb falling] coming down, and they decided to go and get down behind Mr Bardsley’s front garden wall. The bomb landed here [in the driveway between Nos 3 and 5] and the crater, it was right the way round – I’ve never seen anything like it. The next morning we came out looking for shrapnel as us lads did, and there was a huge – I’d say from memory it was probably about 10ft deep, which is pretty deep. It was a big bomb.
We were in our cellar at No. 11. My father was in the building trade, and he got corrugated iron, which he jammed up against the roof with pit props. So down at the bottom of the stairs in the cellar at No. 11, was our shelter, which my dad reckoned that if a bomb landed it would save us. That’s where me, my mother, and two sisters were when the bomb went off. What a noise! As you can imagine.
The same night that the bomb landed in Chandos Road South, a bomb landed on Egerton Road South, and demolished the house [near the junction with St Werburgh’s Road]. Unfortunately the family were killed. What they were aiming at, on the corner of St Werburgh’s Road and Egerton Road South there’s a small sub-station which the Germans had on maps. After the war, maps were found belonging to the Luftwaffe, and it was clearly marked as a target.
EILEEN TOWERS
There was a story – and this is rather laughable, really – that went round, one of the nights when Withington got a bit of damage, you know, because I think near the baths in Withington, that was bombed there, and I don’t know whether that was a landmine. But there was one landmine that came down, and it came down and it stuck in a tree in St Paul’s churchyard. And people said: ‘That’s the old vicar!’ [laughs] You know, he wasn’t there of course, he was in heaven as they thought – ‘that’s right, he’s stopped the thing falling!’ But I think it was that same night when a landmine did hit, somewhere near the baths, on Burton Road. [See page 40: Norman Williamson]
ANN STANSFIELD
We heard Lord Haw-Haw boasting on the radio that this particular pilot knew every inch of Manchester. And it certainly seemed that he did.
My husband came home from work full of the news of this German plane he had seen flying so low over Portland Street that he could see the number on the fuselage very clearly. But I had already encountered the same plane. I was walking along Victoria Avenue in Blackley, in daylight with my son Alan and my father when the plane flew overhead. It was so low, I could actually see the pilot in a black helmet grinning.
Then we heard the phut, phut of machine gun bullets, so I threw myself on top of Alan. The bullets killed some cows in a field just ahead of us.
(Manchester Evening News supplement, 5 September 1989)
HILDA MASON
I remember I used to go home from work – I finished work at five o’clock – just as I got home, my mum used to put my dinner on the table. The next minute the sirens went. We had an Anderson shelter built in the garden; we had a back garden because I lived in Stretford, and when we knew about the war, they came round, my dad dug a big hole, and they brought the Anderson shel
ter and we built it and covered it with soil and we even had daffodils and flowers growing on the top of it. And inside the Anderson shelter we had bunk beds, so when I used to come home from work the sirens used to go, and naturally I had to get my dinner and take it in the shelter and finish eating it in there.
And many a night of course I used to spend in the shelter, because of the sirens, because where we lived, we lived on Derbyshire Lane West, the railway ran at the back. The railway lines were the target, because after a few years we had to move out of there, into Barton Road, because a lot of incendiary bombs had been dropped.
When we moved out, when we had to move out of our house onto Barton Road, they put us into a church hall there, and we had those tables in there, and at night time they used to put palliasses on these tables. Palliasses were made of like a straw, so when you lay on them, you could hear them, and at night time it used to be full of these tables, with people snoring. We were there until they found us somebody local in a house who would take us in, and we spent that Christmas [1940] like that. And then, when they cleared the lines and everything, they allowed us home again.
DENNIS WOOD
On Christmas Eve 1941 the Lord Mayor of Manchester had gone to a church service somewhere out Platt Fields. People had ventured into the city as they felt fairly safe there, they felt the worst of the Blitz was over, and there was some relaxation in the shops, with things you could buy for Christmas. There were crowds in the city centre, crowds of people, when all at once three twin-engined aircraft came over, pretty low as well. All of a sudden they saw the bomb doors open, and there was a big panic along Market Street, Deansgate; all the citizens were running about, bumping in to each other. Somebody got run over, because although there weren’t many vehicles around, it was going dark, about four o’clock in the afternoon, and these vehicles had to have paper over their headlamps. There’d been no sirens to warn of planes coming.
Manchester at War, 1939-45 Page 5
