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This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Maggie Smith from WM CSV Action Desk on behalf of Jacqueline Wilde and has been added to the site with her permission. Jacqueline Wilde fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

This one day I came up Great Charles Street. I was able to collect shrapnel which had fallen. It was hot when you picked it up but I picked up some to take with me and when I got to work they were all very relieved because if I had come the normal way which was along Colmore Row, I should have probably been blown up with the building, so it was a very very lucky thing for me that was.

Another time when I came on duty, in the morning the central fire station button had dropped down on the switchboard and a quiet voice said, "I have a message for you". There had been a heavy raid the night before and the switchboard was jammed with calls from the control room, as they were so busy downstairs they asked me to take messages. So I said to central 鈥測es go ahead I鈥檒l take your message鈥� they said "we have to inform you once again that a bomb has fallen at the rear of your building, please take action immediately". Well I wrote the message down and read it back. I had to put the hooter on quickly, the alarm, which was a Klaxon hooter, made an awful lot of noise and the Assistant Divisional officer came running in and I handed him the message, he said "that鈥檚 strange we had this message last night. We searched the building and we couldn鈥檛 find anything at all". Then he said he鈥檇 go have another look. At the back of our building there was a canal with telephone wires above and apparently the large land line, it was about 6 feet across had come down in a parachute and the parachute had got caught in the telephone wires which were very high because they were high buildings on either side of the canals they were the factories and warehouses, so it was very high up in the air but where the bomb had swung it was so heavy it had caved the whole side of the building in the bricks had gone in but of course in the night time when they鈥檇 searched the building no one had thought to look up in the air over the canal to see. We thought it would have landed on the floor. So we evacuated the building and I was left on the switchboard phoning round all the fire stations notifying them that we were going to secondary control room which was in Hagley Road everything each day was copied from the boards downstairs in the control room to the duplicate one in Hagley Road so that we knew where all the fire engines were and what fires there were and where they鈥檇 been sent out to. This was done everyday so it was quite up to date. I was left on the board phoning round the stations and I thought I鈥檓 sure I can hear something ticking. The divisional officer kept me company and the fire stations kept ringing back to see if I was alright and they said "never mind jack you鈥檒l have a union jack over your coffin" and I wasn鈥檛 worried about the union jack over my coffin
I just wanted to get out of the building. When I finished ringing round the 12 fire stations. We got into the car and locked the front door, why we locked the front door I really don鈥檛 know and went off to the secondary control room. But when we got there we鈥檇 found that in the emergency they鈥檇 forgotten one of the best pieces of equipment we got and that was 鈥楳illicent鈥�. Now 鈥楳ilicent鈥� was our fire float, and there were only three in Birmingham. We were lucky in having one because we had the canal at the back. And they were used for canal fires and they had what was called radial branches in them. They were very powerful hoses more powerful than the normal hoses that were on the fire engines. They had to be held in a clamp because they were so powerful. They were able to get right to the top of the buildings which were three to four to five stories high. So the Water Officer, with the Transport Officer, (who was later my husband) made their way back as fast as they could to Cambridge Street to get the fire float and bring her out of danger. We all kept our fingers crossed because we thought at any moment the bomb would go off. The whole area of the city centre had been evacuated because when a land mine went off it flattened block of shops and offices and buildings. They did get her safely away and we heard next day that a soldier, who was on leave, had come along and said what鈥檚 the matter because the whole place was surrounded by police and they said there was a UXB and were waiting for the bomb disposal squad to come, he said he belonged to a bomb disposal squad and he climbed up and diffused the bomb and then went on his way. We never new to this day what his name was but we were all able to go back when it had been diffused back to our building to our control room.

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