- Contributed byÌý
- junior_hammer
- People in story:Ìý
- Leslie George Rushbrook
- Location of story:Ìý
- West Ham, London
- Article ID:Ìý
- A2062801
- Contributed on:Ìý
- 19 November 2003
I was born in Stratford, West Ham, in late 1930, and was in some part of London every day when enemy action took place. When a schoolboy aged nine I was a mock causality, with a label attached saying I had serious burns, taken to hospital in an ambulance which started life as a saloon car - until, that was, the back part was cut off and a large metal box put in its place. Another treat was to ride along Stratford Broadway in a Bren gun Carrier. In the pre-blitz days, before there was effective AA balloons or guns, the German aircraft flew so low I could see members of the air crew; one day while delivering newspapers, a rear gunner sent a burst of machine gun bullets my way and I would probably not be writing this if a low garden wall had not been a couple of feet away. One November night in 1940 I watched a parachute landmine, picked out by searchlights, drift west towards Bow, I went into our dining room to sleep on the floor with mum and dad, but unbeknown the mine drifted back and landed two streets away. The blast hurled our galvanised-iron dustbin-lid through the dining room window; this time when taken to a first-aid post it was not as a mock casualty. Next day on my way to school I saw a man cutting away the silk? parachute from an unexploded landmine. We did not completely go without fireworks on November 5th 1940, my father came home with sheets of paper with pyrotechnics embedded that tracked from one event to the other when a cigarette was placed at the start position, however the pyrotechnics outside were always more dramatic
In late 1940, schooling was reduced to mornings only in the caretaker’s front room. I remember being sent to get books from our classroom and having to pick my way between beds containing air raid victims. I was milk monitor when all the one-third pint milk bottles were withdrawn to be used to culture penicillin and replaced by beakers filled from regular one-pint bottles. One December night one of many incendiary bombs fell in the road outside old man Bull’s house, near to the lorry he drove during the day, as I approached with a bucket of sand he came out of his house also carrying sand, but in an ornate black and gold coal scuttle, he started to pure the sand when mingled with sound of bombs and AA gunfire a strange clatter approached from adjacent streets and then around the corner came about a dozen galloping horses. Old man Bull dropped the coal scuttle and dived under his lorry just before horses kicked the scuttle the length of our road - about 100 yards. When retrieved, the scuttle was a sorry sight. (Notes: 1. When fire took hold at the local Co Op dairy, the horses were turned loose. 2. We children called him old man Bull, but he was probably younger than I am now). Later in the war, mainly at night, I cycled with messages between the local Fire Point and West Ham Fire Station.
I watched the first V1 flying bomb on it’s way towards the Bethnal Green railway bridge and thought it was something new. A few minutes later the phone rang and my father, a member of the LNER accident and emergency crew, was on his bike towards the Stratford Works. When he got home next morning he told us that no pilot had been found; what rubbish said old man Bull, he had met a man who had been told by a rescue worker that he had dragged the pilot clear. A couple of days later he said he must have been misinformed. When V1 were arriving in too great a frequency by day and night to make it practicable to sound air raid warning and all-clear sirens or klaxons, I would spend some of my school holidays listening for approaching V1s and blow a whistle to warn local housewives and factory workers - I still have the whistle. The most scary moment in WW2 for me was a V1 on a day of very low cloud and drizzle. This was one of a number which descended in a large spiral, several miles across, passing over our house six times getting lower each time, at first under power then in silence except during the last pass I could hear the sizzle of rain hitting the hot metal, but could not see the beast. On reflection it now seems selfish, but then I was hoping it would land before it got back to us - it did with a loud bang. What annoys me now is that documentary makers only mention the initial V1s that cut-out before diving (said to be a design fault due to fuel starvation) because they claim that type has more public interest. The majority of V1s in London hit the ground under full power; others glided for miles and as mentioned above some spiralled down.
With V2 rockets the big public interest myth loved by the media is that for months Londoners thought V2s were accidental gas main explosions. In fact rumours had been rife for a long time that the Germans were working on rockets and also the second V2 to fall on the first day fell in a part of Epping Forest nowhere near a gas main. (NOTE: During the Blitz we had first hand knowledge what an exploding gas main looked like). If it had not been for the huge craters, used by us ’dead-end-kids’ as walls of death on our cycles, one could be forgiven for thinking the first V2s were in fact gliding V1s like the one that cut out over Woolwich and landed on a trolleybus in Forest Gate killing about 60. (Did anyone ever try to sue the Gas Light and Coke Co - I doubt it)
I have seen this bit of history rewritten over and over again in the cause of ’public interest’, usually belittling to achievement of Londoners trying to do their bit to free the enslaved peoples of Europe ; what faith can I have in history programmes about event before living memory?
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