BOB POTTS
What happened was, there was an air raid in August 1940, we were taken out of bed at eleven o’clock at night in the pitch dark, and taken to this house round the corner. People just sat there in an unlit room, sitting on hard chairs, all looking glum because they’d all had their sleep interrupted. I was only four, and I can remember sat in a chair, cold, miserable, looking at the other miserable people, resentful at being taken out of the warmth and comfort of my bed, and thinking, ‘This doesn’t seem any safer than 50 yards away!’ I couldn’t see the point of it, and I was four!
Flixton Home Guard (44th Lancs.) The photograph was taken at the Drill Hall, Flixton. (Peter Spencer)
They built three proper air-raid shelters at the end of our street [The Grove, Flixton]. Now our street was next to two farms, on high ground, and in 1940 the Home Guard were digging rifle trenches at the end of our street, on the school field. They were strategically placed, because they overlooked a huge meadow [nowadays the William Wroe Golf Course], where the Home Guard thought that maybe that was where the paratroopers were going to land.
Our next door neighbour was the ARP warden, and he was the grapevine for our village. He was saying, in October of 1940: ‘The Germans are going to invade – any day now!’ Well, you know – God!
I used to go to the cinema with my next door neighbour, a kid aged ten; we’d go to the cinema in Urmston, and you’d get all the war news on the newsreels, so I was fully aware of what was going on, and I used to listen to the news at home with my Mam every day – I didn’t start school until December 1940 – so I was clued up on the Battle of Britain and all that. They gave the scores, like: how many aircraft had been shot down, how many British, and it always seemed to me that there were more Germans going down in their aeroplanes than there was British, you know. It was all morale-boosting, wasn’t it?
The author’s late mother, Renee (née) Smith, with protective helmet and gas mask case. (Author’s collection)
NOW IS THE TIME TO ASK FOR A HELMET
Manchester Police today received from the Home Office 10,000 forms of application for steel helmets. The forms are to be distributed to firms who have completed their fire watch plans under the Government orders.
Completed forms must be returned to the police, who pass them on to the Home Office. As helmets become available the ministry will send each applicant a permit to buy from local distributing centres the required number.
They will be sold at 5s 6d each on a basis of sufficient helmets for one shift of fire watchers only, with additional helmets up to 50%.
(Manchester Evening News, 21 March 1941)
And the newspapers: I couldn’t read, really seriously, but what got me were the cartoons that lampooned Hitler. They absolutely ridiculed him: bombs chasing him, they called them ‘The Hitler Gang’ in the press.
HARRY PEXTON
I was already in the North Staffordshire Regiment during the Phoney War. I was a painter and decorator by trade but I did a lot of athletics. This officer said to me, ‘I like the look of you, son. I’m going to have you with me.’ I asked what that involved. ‘You are going to be an airborne commando.’
So I asked, ‘What does an airborne commando do?’
‘He jumps out of an aeroplane,’ he said. And I thought, ‘Christ, I’ve made a dreadful clanger here.’ About a fortnight later I was in Ringway.
We’d fly out from Ringway and make our drops over the grounds of a country house, Tatton Park. At first you’d jump from the back gun turret. You’d pull the ripcord and when it developed you’d let go of a bar and you were pulled off. Some of the guys took a dim view, because if you did not let go at the appropriate time you’d leave your arms behind. The solution was to make a hole in the floor of the planes for the men to drop through.
We’d trained hard for six months or more, and it was time something was happening. So when an officer addressed us and said, anybody who wanted to volunteer for an operation from which we might not return, take two paces forward. Everyone stepped forward and thirty-six of us were chosen. All we knew was we were going to blow a bridge up, but we didn’t know where.
(The Guardian, 14 January 2002 – Peter Lennon)
Ringway Airport, base for No. 1 Parachute Training School. The smaller aeroplane is an Avro Anson which was used, after early combat experience, mostly for rescue and training purposes. The three larger ones are Lockheed Hudsons, American-built RAF light bombers used primarily for parachute exercises. (Greater Manchester Police Museum and Archives)
BRYANT ANTHONY HILL
You see, these things were never spoken about. There was a little piece of modern housing – when I say modern, built probably 1937/38 – a private estate. I used to do that as part of the milk round and then go into Royal Oak [Wythenshawe]. There was one house, quite a big house [on Beechpark Avenue], about four or five bedrooms, and if they put a note out saying they wanted extra milk they got it, with no questions. Now you couldn’t get extra milk, because of rationing. But when this note appeared, they got it. I don’t know whether it was police or a school for spies, but they were putting people there short-term.
They were perhaps paratroopers, who were training at Ringway.
I’ll tell you a story that might be of interest. Just before the war started, they were building a bypass that passed Timperley village: footpath, cycle track, road. And it never opened. Eventually they put the military at each end: at the far end there were houses off it, and they had to have a pass to go in. And all of a sudden vehicles started to arrive: tanks, Bren gun carriers, some of them were American, some of them were English. How many were there I don’t know; you’re looking at over a thousand. They were parked sideways all the way along this mile bypass. It ran from Baguley Station to the Hare and Hounds in Timperley [Shaftesbury Avenue]. We went down one Sunday for a walk, and they’d gone! Of course, we were coming up to D-Day.
T. MARRIOTT-MOORE
At the beginning of the war there was a collection of iron gates and things, for metal, and we were told we would get them back after the war – lying sods! – because of course they were melted down. They collected anything they could lay their hands on, really, in the metal line.
There used to be iron railings round Ashton Park [Ashton-on-Mersey]; they were the first to disappear, and afterwards of course they had to plant a hedge and wait for it to grow – hopefully!
(North West Sound Archive)
THE PARKS GO ALL CONTINENTAL
• There is a Continental air about Manchester nowadays – with some of the parks stripped of their railings.
• In the heart of the city you can walk from one pavement right across the roadway and sit in the Whitworth Street Park without hindrance.
• Its railings have gone to make up the 660 tons of scrap the Park Committee estimate they will get from 25 of the city’s parks and recreation grounds.
(MEN, 25 June 1940)
DENNIS HUMPHRIES
In 1939 the RAF turned up on what is now the playing fields of Lostock School, and put up a barrage balloon, to which hundreds of people turned up for this event, to watch it being blown up and attached, by Winchester Road.
I remember some time in 1941, my father was on nights working in Trafford Park; my brother and I had gone to bed to get some sleep. There was one hell of a bang which rattled all the windows, and the next thing the wardens were coming in to tell us there was a gun firing, and the gun was on a hillock right opposite the Moss Vale pub on Lostock Road, Davyhulme. I believe it was a 5.5 anti-aircraft gun, because there was a circle of guns all round Manchester, to protect Trafford Park. That was the one at Moss Vale. There was another one in Edge Lane, the playing fields just off Edge Lane [Stretford], Turn Moss.
Kellogg’s Factory had a Home Guard – I think it consisted of six members; these were all people off the shop floor, and the major of course was the director [laughs], a bit like Captain Mainwaring! They had a Lewis gun, a machine gun [mainly WWI issue], on the
roof, to protect the factory. My brother was in the Home Guard, and he brought a gun home, with live ammunition; perhaps there was nowhere to store them in them days.
Audenshaw Home Guard on manoeuvres. The First World War-issue Lewis machine gun as mentioned by Dennis Humphries may be seen. The 51st Lancs. Division also included detachments from Ashton-Under-Lyne, Denton, and Stalybridge. (Manchester Evening News)
EILEEN TOWERS
If the air-raid siren went we used to go, we had a shelter – an Anderson shelter – in the garden, but my father, who hadn’t been too good, he said, ‘We’re not going out there’, so he made a place where we’d go: under the table [laughs] downstairs! I remember going down under the table. But in the air raids, these guns used to come round, anti-aircraft guns, they’d come down onto Cotton Lane [Withington] and you could hear it, you know, going off. That was quite awful, during the war.
Mr Lee, the man who I stayed with in Todmorden, he was lovely, a very educated man; he’d been a reporter, but he used to say, ‘You go down into that –’ and it was like in a larder that they had in the house, you know, like a little room, and it was a bit lower. ‘You go in there when the siren goes,’ he said, ‘because that’s the safest place in this house. And I shall sit here.’ And he had a big round cushion, and he said, ‘and I shall sit here and just put this on my head! Because I’ve had my life now, really,’ – he’d be in his eighties then – ‘I’ve had my life, and you’ve got yours to come!’ [laughs]
BRIAN SEYMOUR
At first we had to sit under the stairs, my grandmother and me, because my grandfather had a small blue attaché case in which he kept the valuables, which were insurance policies, birth certificates, rent books, and so on, and as soon as the siren went for the raid he used to put his hat and coat on, pick up his case and go to the nearby communal air-raid shelter, which had been dug into the local playing fields. That was between Tenerife Street and Arrow Street [Salford]. He got the feeling that that wasn’t safe, so there was a local secondary school called Broughton School, who had had their cellars converted into air-raid shelters. He used to go in one or the other, leaving my grandmother to suffer the bombs!
Then workmen came and built a brick air-raid shelter in the back yard [No. 7 Perkins Street]. When the war was over, that became a coal shed. It wasn’t an Anderson shelter, it was a brick shelter, with a 6in concrete roof. And they had a bed in it, and a couple of chairs. We were eventually able to use that, instead of under the stairs. But my grandmother thought that under the stairs was the safest place to be, because whenever you saw houses that had been bombed, the staircase always seemed to be there amongst all the ruins.
(Manchester Evening News)
There was an ARP post at the corner of our street, and that’s where wardens used to congregate when the sirens went. They had bikes, and they used to ride round with messages while the Blitz was on.
I remember incendiary bombs dropping in the street, without any damage to the houses. They used to bounce – I remember seeing one bouncing along the street. I don’t know what happened to it. I remember searchlights combing the skies.
But they built, on this croft that was a football pitch where the air-raid shelters were [by Tenerife Street], they had built a big tank for an emergency water supply. On the street in great big letters they had painted in yellow: EWS, with an arrow, so that if there was fire, then they could use the emergency water in that tank. It was 6ft deep, and I can remember in the winter it froze, it had barbed wire round it, but we used to climb over the damn barbed wire and slide on the ice! It was never used, but I suppose if there had been a raid, they would have had to break the ice.
I can remember on the wall outside Louis Goldstone’s house, which was the last one on the street, there was a wall by the side of the house, and they put on it a board about 2ft square which was a sort of yellowish-green colour. There was a notice underneath which said if the colour changed, there was gas, mustard gas, about, and underneath it said: in that case report it to the police, and it was signed by a Major Godfrey, who was the Chief Constable of Salford.
I can also remember putting strips of brown sticky paper criss-cross across windows. They reckoned it would stop the window breaking or shattering with the blast from the bomb.
I remember my mother, who lived in Chorley with my stepfather, coming home after that [the Christmas Blitz 1940] and telling my grandmother to make sure she had a bottle of whisky [laughs] so she could drink it and forget what was happening!
HELEN SEPHTON
I was at Abbey Hey School [Gorton] whilst the war was on. They started to do breakfast, dinner and tea for children whose parents were both involved in war work. So, my father was in the Royal Marines, my mother was nursing.
I remember the sirens going off, I remember us being ushered out of the classroom into the air-raid shelter in the grounds of the school. I’m not quite sure, I think there were two or three. Ours was at the nursery end, and we were ushered in there, and we used to sit there singing ‘Ten Green Bottles’ until we got the all-clear sound. With hindsight, I think that was a dangerous thing to do, because you’re alright if you’re in a bunker under the ground, but if there was a direct hit, all those children would have been killed.
I remember the gas masks; mine was green, with the thing at the front, with the holes in it. There was one blue, and a red. They were like metal, and they had these holes in it where you breathed. You just snapped it over your head like that. They were all kept in the gas masks cupboard, at home.
Gas mask training at a Manchester school in 1938. (Manchester Central Library Local Images, Collection, M09903)
ANON.
Our house in Holland Road [now Zetland Road], Chorlton [-cum-Hardy], had an attic and a skylight which afforded access to the roof. One night during the Blitz I climbed the ladder onto the roof to watch the fires in town. Naturally I didn’t take a light with me. However, once on the roof I noticed a couple of flashlights on an adjoining rooftop. I crept back down and told my father, who contacted the ARP warden.
It transpired that the flashlights were being used by a couple of German spies, who were providing guidance to the Luftwaffe bombers on their way to Liverpool. The two spies were arrested, and, I found out later, after a spell in Strangeways, were hanged.
(Greater Manchester Police Archives)
JUNE COWAN
The local Home Guard had their headquarters in Broadway [Didsbury] where I lived, in a house on the right, just past the first island. They met every Sunday morning to attend lectures on drill, etc. One Sunday morning they placed ‘landmines’ at the entrance to Broadway, plus a sentry, and everybody had to show their identity card (which we all had of course) when entering or leaving.
The boys had the ATC and the girls had the WJAC – the Women’s Junior Air Corps. This met twice weekly: Friday evenings and Sunday mornings, at a school in Clyde Road.
FRANK HARGREAVES
Sometimes when they heard the air-raid sirens, they set light to large oil drums full of old tyres and oil-soaked rubbish – anything flammable – in the fields to the west of the city: Astley Moss, Chat Moss, and Worsley Moss [also on the moors near Burnley]. This was done to try and fool the Luftwaffe into thinking that that was where factories had been hit, and hopefully to divert the next waves of bombers approaching to drop their bombs where they could see the fires coming from, and not on their real targets: the docks at Salford, the works at Trafford Park, and Manchester city centre.
Another ploy was to have several mobile anti-aircraft guns driving around from place to place during the air raid. A lorry towing a gun would stop somewhere, they would set up the ack-ack gun, loose off a few rounds, then load up and move somewhere else to repeat the process. This was to give the impression to the Luftwaffe that there were many more anti-aircraft guns than there actually were.
JOE MARLOR
A mock aerodrome was just past Hyde Hall Farm. As you went past the farm you couldn’t go any further a
nd the mock aerodrome started [South of Ross Lave Lane, near to where the M60 motorway is now]. It was all barbed wire up to about 6ft high, all the way down to the Vale on the high ground.
They used to have thousands and thousands of tyres there and, as you went down the lane, you came to a big gate and there were always sentries there and, past the gate, a Nissan hut. When they had these raids on Manchester, they could set these tyres alight as a decoy. When you looked over the fence you couldn’t see anything but tyres. The only time I remember them setting the tyres alight was when they had the big raid on Manchester.
Manchester at War, 1939-45 Page 7
