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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of George Brocklehurst and has been added to the site with his permission…

I was still at school at the start of the war and when I was 13 I caught scarlet fever and had to go into hospital, Manchester was being heavily bombed at the time and the air raid siren would sound quite often. I had to help the nurses carry the babies from the ward next door into safety and then go back to my own ward and get on a mattress that had been placed under the bed, this was my personal ‘air raid shelter,’ so to speak; thank goodness we never got hit.

At 14 I joined the Airforce Cadets, then at16 the Home Guard, which was allied to the factory where I was working, the Gorton Tank Locomotive Works.

There were eight in our family, father worked at Trafford Park and he was also in the Home Guard, most people had their own job and a volunteer job as well. Mum had enough to do looking after all of us. We had a girl come and stay with us from up the North East, they used to direct people to where the work was and this is what had happened to her, she stayed with us for quite a while. My five sisters all did various war -work and my older brother was in the Army. My youngest brother went into the RAF just after the war finished and he stayed in the service for 20 years.

I was living on the outskirts of Manchester and we were fairly lucky there. I used to watch the dog fights overhead and we always knew that if we saw one of our boys doing the victory roll, that meant he had shot a German plane out of the sky.

In 1944 when I was18 I went into the Royal Navy, we went to Billy Butlins at Skegness, where first of all we got kitted out. There was another Butlins Camp at Phllwelli, they commandeered them to be used as training camps. My job in the Navy was mine sweeping and wreck disposal, we used to blow up what was left of the wrecks, keeping the shipping lanes clear.

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