A Child's War

by Mike Brown

  Obviously, people had to go out – work, shops, school, church and so on – and could not always be near home when the air-raid warning sounded. For this reason a number of public shelters were set up. These might be converted basements in shops, cinemas, etc., or specially built shelters. They were usually marked with a large ‘S’ in white on a black background, or vice versa, and there would be similar signs, painted on walls or hung from lamp-posts, which showed the way to the nearest shelter. Failing this, when the warning sounded, the local air-raid warden would grab any strangers and push them into the nearest public shelter, or, if there wasn’t one, into the nearest private shelter where there was room. David George recalls the public shelters in Ealing: ‘There were two big surface shelters built in our street. We spent many nights in them. The wardens woke us up and we used to go down for the whole night.’

  The councils made use of whatever local facilities existed; in places like Dover and Chislehurst, the caves were used – bunks were set up, as well as first-aid posts, toilets, and other facilities. In London, after first refusing to allow it, the government agreed that the Underground stations be used as shelters; at the height of the Blitz over 140,000 people were sleeping in the stations – so many that special three-tier bunks were put up, and ‘tube refreshment’ trains were laid on, selling tea, cakes, etc. But in the early months of the war, precautions were still makeshift.

  GAS MASKS

  One of the weapons introduced in the First World War had been poison gas. As far back as 1935 the government had decided to build up stocks of gas masks to be given free to all members of the public, so that at the time of the Munich crisis many civilians were issued with one. During the summer of 1939 almost everyone else received theirs, except for babies and small children, who needed special masks; these were mostly issued later that year. Posters encouraged people to take their gas masks with them wherever they went – one of the first problems created by gas masks was that vast numbers of them were absent-mindedly left on buses, trains and the Underground.

  The gas mask developed for babies was actually called a gas hood, or protective helmet (it was generally known as the baby-bag). It was designed for children up to the age of about 18 months and an official leaflet, produced in July 1939, described it as follows:

  The helmet consists of a hood, made of impervious fabric and fitted with a large window, which encloses the head, shoulders and arms, and is closed around the waist by means of a draw tape. A baby when it is in is thus able to get its hand to its mouth. The hood is surrounded by and fastened to a light metal frame, which is lengthened on the underside and fitted with an adjustable tail-piece, so as to form a support and protection to a baby’s back. . . . The metal frame and supporting strap may be varied in length to suit all sizes of babies and children up to about five years of age.

  The reason for this higher age of 5 was so that it could be used for children ‘temperamentally unsuited for wearing a respirator’.

  Last to be produced was a mask for young children below the age of 4–5 years; officially called the ‘Small Child’s respirator’, it was commonly called the Mickey Mouse mask. Similar in style to the adult mask, it was produced in bright red and blue, to try to make the toddlers more keen to wear it. The official leaflet pointed out that it fastened with a hook-and-eye fitting at the back, to make it more difficult for a small child to take it off. One book, published in 1942, advised parents on how to encourage their younger children to wear their gas masks:

  Particularly children under six should be accustomed to wearing their gas masks through play. If you wait until there is an emergency it is going to be very difficult indeed to get them to wear them for any length of time. If you make it a game they will be much more inclined to lose all fear of the mask and they will be willing to wear them for longer and longer periods. Whenever you get a child to wear his mask, be sure to wear yours at the same time. That will make it imitative play and they will feel they are being ‘grown up’ in wearing one. I should not use the words ‘poison gas’ in explaining to the child the purpose of the mask, but say that one day the Germans might try to use ‘nasty smells that make us feel ill’ and that we can avoid these by use of our gas masks. Also they should be taught to carry them from an early age, and for this we must set them a good example.

  And that was not all; the sight of Mum or Dad in their gas mask was enough to send some smaller children into floods of terrified tears. The BBC broadcast the following advice: ‘Are your little ones used to seeing you in your mask? Make a game of it, calling it “Mummy’s funny face” or something of that kind.’

  All masks were issued in a cardboard container, which could also be used, with the addition of a string handle, as a carrier. However, the boxes neither looked good nor wore well. Children typically found a thousand and one uses for them, such as goalposts, wickets in cricket, etc. Although the masks were issued free, you could be fined up to £5 if your mask was damaged or lost due to negligence, so many parents bought hard-wearing metal containers for their children’s masks.

  When the feared poison gas raids failed to materialise, people began increasingly to leave their gas masks at home as David George from South Ealing recalls: ‘I was born in June 1939, so my memories are only of the last years of the war. I don’t remember gas masks at all, I don’t think anybody used them by then.’

  ID CARDS

  On 1 September 1939, before war broke out, the National Registration Act was passed in Parliament, requiring all citizens of the country to register their details: name, address, age, etc. Registration duly took place on Friday 29 September 1939, when the war had begun, and over the next few days every person in Britain was issued with an identity card, green for adults and brown for children under 16 (cards were issued within a few weeks of a baby’s birth). This was partly due to fears of German spies and parachutists; ID cards had to be shown at checkpoints set up by policemen, Home Guards or the armed services. But the information was also later used to issue ration cards, and the ID card had to be produced and stamped in order to obtain a new ration book when the old one ran out. This made it valuable, and forgeries and thefts were common – this report in the Kentish Mercury of March 1942 gives one example:

  YOUTH WITH THREE IDENTITY CARDS

  Leonard Eldridge (17) . . . was charged at Woolwich . . . with being in unlawful possession of an identity card. Det. Sergt. Davis said [he] gave a name other than Eldridge, and produced an identity card in that name. Two other cards were found on Eldridge in the same name, and the youth said he had picked them up at ‘the Salvation Army place’. The Sergeant added that when they were alone Eldridge offered him £1 to let him go.

  THE BLACK-OUT

  At night cities can be seen from miles away by aircraft, due to the lighted buildings, street-lights, vehicle headlights, etc. In 1935 the government decided that, in the event of a war, lighting restrictions – or the black-out, as it soon came to be called – would be brought in to make life more difficult for enemy bombers.

  In 1938 plans for the black-out were made public. Houses had to mask doors and windows so that no light was visible from the outside; this was usually done by the use of heavy black-out curtains. Street-lights and shop lights had to be turned off. Cars, lorries, and even bicycles had to have special headlight covers. An extract from an evacuee’s letter home said: ‘I hope you can get rear lights for bicycles in London. I could not send any money for it as the front light cost me 3/8d and 6d for a black-out for it’. Even a pocket torch had to give out only a small amount of light; this could be achieved by wrapping tissue paper over the front. A house showing a light would soon be visited by the police or air-raid wardens – ‘Put that light out!’ was one of the more famous cries of the Second World War – and repeated offences would land the culprit in court.

  The black-out measures were very successful, but they had unexpected drawbacks; in November 1939 road deaths were up over 50 per cent on the previous November, even though over
half a million cars had been taken off the road because of a severe rationing of petrol. And there were other dangers, as Charles Harris from Chingford remembers: ‘We used to go to the youth club in the evening. I was running there one night in the black-out and ran straight into another boy running the other way. He was shorter than me and his head hit me right between the eyes. Next day my eyes were closed right up.’ To try to improve matters the government urged people to wear something white at night, white lines were painted down the middle of roads for the first time, and white stripes were painted around roadside trees, street-lights, pillar-boxes, etc.

  On 10 May Germany launched the Blitzkrieg. On 21 June France sued for peace – in a mere six weeks Germany had over-run the whole of western Europe except Britain. But Britain expected an immediate German invasion. The Local Defence Volunteers had been formed a month earlier, on 14 May; soon to be renamed the Home Guard, or, more commonly, ‘Dad’s Army’. They were a volunteer force made up of men too old or lads too young for the services – at first the minimum age for joining was 15, later raised to 16. What the Home Guard lacked in expertise was often made up for in enthusiasm; as a Boy Scout, Michael Corrigan was involved in Home Guard and ARP exercises in Bristol:

  During one exercise, in which the local Home Guard were involved, the only tank in Bristol was supposed to be the enemy and the Home Guard were to defend one of the roads into the city and pretend to stop it. Well, the local Home Guard knew how to stop tanks, you put a large piece of wood between the tracks and the sprocket wheels, and the tracks snap. In their enthusiasm the Home Guards actually put this knowledge into practice and disabled the only tank which we had to defend Bristol. As you can imagine, with all this going on we ‘casualties’ were soon told to get off home before black-out.

  Britain prepared for invasion: signposts at crossroads and corners, railway station name-boards, etc., anything that could help the enemy know where they were, were hastily removed. Mike Bree from Penzance remembers:

  As well as perfectly ridiculous suggestions such as handing in any maps we had of Britain, any postcards or the like which might aid the enemy, and removing all road signs, station names, even the town names from pub landlords’ licensing boards, etc., we were told not to keep any personal diaries or records. It was suggested that any cameras or films be handed over to be used by HM forces. This was no joke for, in no time at all, it was almost a case of being arrested as a spy should one be seen anywhere strategic with a camera, which could result in its confiscation; also, it was impossible, very soon, to get films for cameras.

  Sylvie Stevenson: ‘You never saw a motorbike. One day I saw a man on his motorbike with a leather hat and coat on – I ran home as fast as I could – I thought the Germans had invaded.’

  Leaflets were distributed telling people what to do in the event of an invasion. Road-blocks were set up, concrete gun emplacements called pill-boxes were built at crossroads and in other important positions, and along the south and east coasts where the invasion was expected the beaches were planted with mines and defended by barbed wire and more pill-boxes.

  Carol Smith from Dunstable recalls: ‘As a teenager in wartime I had a reasonable time. The most annoying restriction was not being able to go to the coast because of bunkers and barbed wire on the beaches. However, we had the Girl Guides and the Girls’s Club.’

  During July and August German air attacks on Britain focused on the south and east during the day, and the manufacturing towns at night, but London was left alone. The next step came in August: because the German army could not invade while the RAF and the Royal Navy could sink their ships and troop transports in the Channel, the RAF had to be destroyed.

  Herman Goering, chief of the Luftwaffe, flung his planes into an all-out assault on the RAF, attacking the airfields, command posts and radar stations. This became the crucial period in what Churchill called ‘the Battle of Britain’. Heavily outnumbered, the fighter pilots of the RAF went up time and time again to take on the Luftwaffe’s massed attacks. All over the south of England people watched the dog-fights going on overhead. George Parks of Deptford vividly remembers them: ‘We used to stand and watch the dog-fights, way up in the air – vapour trails weaving in and out. Then one of them would come down in flames – we’d all cheer like mad – of course we didn’t know who it was, but we were sure it must be a German!’ But of course they weren’t all Germans – John Merritt of Virginia Water, Surrey: ‘A vivid memory of those early war years concerns a Hawker Hurricane fighter that flew over the school one playtime. Suddenly, and to our horror, the whole tailplane fell off and the Hurricane spiralled down and crashed into the local gravel and sand pit. The pilot was later found dead, still in the cockpit. Of course that sand pit became famous as the Thorpe Park Leisure Centre.’

  Then the target changed: the bombers turned north towards London. At teatime on Saturday 7 September 1940 the Observer Corps (whose job it was to keep track of enemy aircraft) watched a large force of over 300 German bombers as it flew north over Kent to the Thames estuary, turning westward to follow the river into London. In the late Saturday afternoon, Londoners watched as the planes flew steadily on; then, over the dock areas of the East End, they began to drop their bombs. Smoke billowed as one warehouse after another was hit and caught fire; then, as night drew on, other waves of bombers came, using the fires started by the first wave as a target. And what a target – the flames could be seen for miles, warehouses full of spirits, sugar, wood, and other inflammable goods blazed. Barbara Daltrey lived in Windsor: ‘I remember when they bombed the London Docks, we were 25 miles away but the whole sky was lit up with a red glow.’

  Sylvie Stevenson from Chingford saw the devastation at close quarters: ‘My grandfather was a fire-watcher at Lyon’s Corner House in Piccadilly. The morning after the first big raid on London he didn’t come home, so Mum took me on a bus down there. He was all right, and I remember he took me up on the roof, it was unbelievable – over to the east there was smoke and rubble everywhere and buildings were still on fire.’

  Derek Dimond lived in Tottenham: ‘I remember going up to Liverpool Street from Stanstead with my Dad. I was deeply struck by the bomb damage – smoke and ruins everywhere.’

  That night 430 civilians were killed and 1,600 injured. The next evening the Luftwaffe came again, and the next. The RAF fought back – the Battle of Britain reached its peak in mid-September. London was to be raided almost every night from 7 September to early November. But it is all too easy to think that London was the only target – on 14 November, instead of hitting London, the bombers flew on into the Midlands; this time the target was Coventry. The destruction was appalling; one third of all the houses in the town were destroyed, and the Germans started to use a new word, to ‘coventrate’: it meant the destroying of a city.

  Carol Smith saw, and heard, the planes going over Dunstable: ‘The night Coventry was bombed planes came over our house in droves, it was a continuous drone – we could see the sky lit up like a bonfire, it was like it was just down the road. Next day we couldn’t believe it was as far away as Coventry, all of 70 miles.’

  Eric Chisnall witnessed the after-effects, when he visited the city with a party of Scouts:

  I shall never forget seeing the state of Coventry Cathedral after the German bombers had done their worst. On small pieces of walls that were still standing we could see where the lead guttering, hoppers, and downpipes, had melted and run down the walls, piles of rubble were everywhere, and yet the main tower was still standing. We were able to climb the stone spiral staircase to the top and look over the scene of devastation. I remember feeling quite dizzy when I reached the ground again – could this have been because we had a bit of a race down the steps? Another memory of Coventry was having our mid-day meal in a hotel which had an altar at one end of the room, as the local church had been either damaged or destroyed, so church services were held there.

  Being inside a house or shelter that was hit did not always mean inst
ant death. People were often buried under the rubble and had to be dug out by ARP rescue parties, as this report from 1943 shows:

  When a rescue party set to work to see who might be buried in the debris of a demolished house, they were warned of life to be saved and guided to their mark by the notes of ‘God Save the King’ sung at the top of his voice by a little boy of 6. It turned out that he was trapped under the staircase, where he had to stay for six hours until rescued. He was singing most of the time. His rescuers asked him why. He told them: ‘My father was a collier, and he always said that when the men were caught and buried underground they would keep singing and singing and they were always got out in time.’

  Christine Pilgrim from Peckham: ‘Later, people stopped using cellars, they realised that if the house was hit you’d be buried down there, under the rubble, so we used to go to the street shelter up the road. I remember in one heavy raid a neighbour who was an Irish lady, I never realised she was a Catholic before, loudly repeating her prayers – “Hail Mary” – over and over, as if she was trying to shut out the noise. I just wanted her to shut up!’

  The raids, with their noise and the constant danger, could indeed have dreadful effects on older people, but most children took them in their stride. In The City That Wouldn’t Die, Richard Collier relates the following story. It is the early hours of 11 May 1941, and London’s worst raid is at its height: