大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War website by Plymouth Library Services on behalf of Maurice EJ Dart. The author fully understands the terms and conditions of the website.

I was a child living at 16 Tamar Terrace, Higher St Budeaux, Plymouth when war was declared. My grandmother lived with my parents and myself in a house overlooking the River Tamar and the Admiralty Shore base, which I think we called HMS Impregnable.

We heard on the radio about the invasion of Poland and the German atrocities, so received the news of war with a mixture of apprehension and awe. We wondered; What will the Germans do to us if they come?

Preparations for defence commenced. I helped my father pull down a wooden shed in the garden, releasing many large spiders in the process. We then dug a pit and put up an Anderson Air Raid shelter, which reminded me of a huge Meccano set. We covered the shelter with several layers of earth, and Dad built a porch fitted with a side door on to the front of the shelter, to lessen the effects of blasts from bombs. He also installed electric lighting and, being a Joiner by trade, built bunk beds for us.

Sticky tape was placed diagonally across all of our windows, and blackouts made from wood or thick black curtains were fitted to each window. Buckets filled with sand and water were placed outside the back of the house and in the roof space, and we obtained a stirrup pump.

Gas Masks were issued to everyone, and at school Gas Mask drill was carried out twice a day. Great emphasis was placed on this, as we anticipated gas attacks from the air. A Gas Procession passed through Plymouth, which many people watched. Men wearing Gas Masks wheeled handcarts, and tied on to each of them was a Winchester Quart glass bottle. Each bottle contained a different coloured liquid, and each was labelled with the name of a different poison gas. My father found a poem warning of the different types of gas:

Beware Gas

If you get a choking feeling and a smell of musty hay, You can bet your bottom dollar that there鈥檚 Phosgene on the way.

But the smell of Bleaching Powder will inevitably mean, That the enemy you鈥檙e meeting is the gas that鈥檚 named Chlorine.

If your eyes begin a twitching, and for tears you cannot see, T鈥檌sn鈥檛 mother peeling onions but a dose of CAP.

If the smell resembles Pear Drops, then you better not delay, It鈥檚 not the youngster sucking toffee, but that tear gas KSK.

Should you sniff a pungent odour as you鈥檙e going home to tea, You can safely put your shirt on it, they are using 大象传媒.

If you see an oily liquid on the roads be on your guard, It isn鈥檛 where a bus was parked, but the wicked gas Mustard.

Peaceful Geraniums look pleasant in a bed. Dodge their scent in wartime. It鈥檚 Lewisite, you鈥檙e dead.

As an industrial chemist I now know these gases as: Phosgene is carbonyl chloride; Chlorine is chlorine; CAP is chlor-aceto-phenone; KSK is ethyl iodo-acetate; 大象传媒 is bromo-benzyl cyanide; Mustard Gas is dichloro-diethyl sulphide; and Lewisite is chlorovinyl dichlorarsine.

Gas Cleansing Stations were built at various points in the city and suburbs, as were Static Water tanks. Coloured patches appeared on walls to detect the presence of different gases. Hand rattles would be sounded to warn of a gas attack. Parachutists were expected and we would be warned of these by the ringing of church bells.

From 1937 I attended Higher St Budeaux Foundation School. It was up the hill, one mile from our home. I went home to dinner and usually walked each way unless it was raining heavily, when I used a bus. Air Raid practices were carried out and we were told to get to a shelter fast when the sirens sounded. I began to learn Aircraft Recognition, at which I became very proficient.

Then came a few daylight raids, one of which was as I was walking home to tea. We had been told that if we were out doors when the siren sounded to run into the nearest house to seek shelter, in case an enemy plane attempted to machine gun us. During one of the early raids a lone raider dropped one bomb, attempting to hit the Royal Albert Bridge. The bomb landed above Ernesettle, two fields away from our house, and the blast shook our shelter.

After the All Clear had sounded we emerged from the shelter and gazed around the outside of the house to check if any damage had occurred. Nothing could be seen so went indoors and proceeded to inspect each room, as we had been instructed to do. Downstairs was all right so we went upstairs and on entering the front bedroom we found the ornamental ceiling had come down. Large pieces were on the bed, with clouds of dust in the air and masonry all over the place. Our war had arrived. We gazed at it speechless and trembling, and Mum cried a little.

Dad arrived home from the Dockyard and scaled the roof. He came back down with a large piece of shrapnel from the high explosive bomb that had caused the damage. We cleared up the mess, with assistance, and the bedroom was moved to the downstairs front room. The ceiling was repaired within a week, but without the ornamentation.

Dad turned the cupboard under the stairs into a makeshift shelter for use at night in bad or cold weather. As the raids intensified, this was deemed unsafe and we went up the garden to the Anderson. I had a zip-up Siren Suit that I had to don very quickly.

We started collecting souvenirs. These were pieces of shrapnel, incendiary bomb tails, bits of shells, pieces of flares, machine gun bullet clips, etc. Each boy had a 鈥渂ox of bits鈥� some of which were quite heavy and razor sharp.

One afternoon whilst looking out of our downstairs front room window, I heard a plane and machine gun fire. I watched in awe as each of the three Barrage Balloons over Impregnable caught fire and fell earthwards. As the third was igniting the Air Raid Warning sounded. No bombs were dropped and the raider vanished.

From September 1940 I transferred to Victoria Road School down the hill. Dad had become an Air Raid Warden and carried out Fire Watching on the roof of the Victualling Yard at Stonehouse several nights a week, as well as in our locality.

The raids intensified, and two additional signals were given. These were Imminent Danger (short, sharp fast beeps) and Danger Passed (long, spaced out beeps). On several, occasions, Imminent Danger sounded concurrent with the sirens. Very noticeable was the stillness after the sirens had sounded, only broken by dogs howling, until the planes arrived. Also there was a pronounced silence for a while after the All Clear sounded.

Sometimes during a raid one would hear a fighter engaging raiders with machine guns chattering. We had been told that new Boulton Paul Defiant two seat night fighters were at Harrowbeer to defend the city. In March 1941 came the Blitzes; first Plymouth, for several nights and week or so, and later, Devonport and St Budeaux. These were frightening times, although our family escaped injury. We had a couple of incendiaries in our roof, both of which were extinguished successfully.

Imminent Danger would be sounding as the sirens were wailing and we鈥檇 race to the shelter in nightclothes, with planes above and guns firing at them. The noise consisted of planes, gunfire, whistling bombs and land mines exploding, with pauses between different waves of raiders. An Ack-Ack gun had been installed on a piece of open ground a quarter of a mile from our house, near the Royal Albert Bridge, and at times during a raid we would occasionally say 鈥淭hat was our gun鈥�.

In the daytime we would venture out shopping. We would find wholesale destruction, but shops would open again in temporary premises. Areas of Plymouth, especially around Devonport, would be roped off with notices stating 鈥淒anger: Unexploded Bomb鈥�. Emergency kitchens sprung up on street corners in Plymouth, Devonport, and Ford and we went to see a crashed Dornier bomber in the Milehouse area.

Gas and electricity were cut off for days and Gran was in her element. She had been an army cook in the early 1900s at Chatham, and rubbed her hands together and said 鈥淥h, I can get my good old coal stove going and cook on that鈥�. It was her pride and joy, and she used it to cook for eight families for three weeks. We were given extra supplies of coal to keep the stove going.

Our relatives were bombed out three times, at Stoke and Devonport, and that family of four lived with us for several months. Dad would come home from Fire Watching with stories of damage. He would be tired out and sobbing at the destruction, and tell us about different things he鈥檇 seen: all of the dockyards on fire; a double-decker bus upside down on the roof of the Milehouse Depot; a Great Western engine blown on to the platform at Keyham.

A great many schools had been bombed, including Victoria Road, so the decision was taken to evacuate schoolchildren from the city. We had to report to Higher St Budeaux School and take a letter to our parents. The next day I was packed off on a bus with a suitcase, Gas Mask, and identity label, to Friary station from where we departed by train for an unknown destination, which turned out to be Bude.

At Bude, we were taken to a reception centre, split into groups, and taken by car to various houses to find us billets. I was taken in by a farmer and his wife on the outskirts of the town a short distance from the farm. Here I grew up and developed a North Cornish accent. We had a combined school, formed from the two St Budeaux schools. Our schoolroom was on the other side of the town at Flexbury, so I walked a mile four times a day, as I had done at St Budeaux. I told Dad that we seemed to spend large amounts of time going to the beach instead of having lessons. He came up and transferred me to Bude Junior School, where I later took and passed my Scholarship exam.

At Bude we played soldiers, had bows and arrows, toy guns and model aeroplanes, and we all wanted to 鈥渂eat the Germans鈥�. Our parents visited us periodically. Cleeve Aerodrome was nearby and we once saw a flight of Beaufighters practicing low-level flying. On another occasion we saw a flight of Dornier 17 鈥淔lying Pencils鈥� in the distance, but no siren sounded. For a couple of days a Messerschmitt 109 fighter that had been shot down was displayed on the Green at Bude. Many American troops were stationed in the area around Bude. Their large lorries were a familiar sight.

I returned to Plymouth at Easter 1943 and rejoined Higher St Budeaux Foundation School. I remember large water pipes at Mutley Plain, Crownhill, St Budeaux Square and various other places, laid in the gutters on the sides of the roads. We had to step up and over these to board buses. We experienced more air raids. Mum had joined the WVS and worked two days a week in the Food Office, which was near Blindman鈥檚 Wood.

In September 1943 I joined Sutton High School and was evacuated to St Austell until the end of the war. I spent a few months in a billet at Tregonissey, before moving into a large house converted into a school hostel called Trelawny, at the end of Tremena Road, that accommodated thirty-eight boys with one Housemaster and his wife.

Evacuated and living in a school hostel resembled attending a boarding school, and really shaped us up. I became a St. John鈥檚 Ambulance Cadet, and still specialised in Aircraft Recognition. One feature of our school life at St Austell was that our schoolrooms were scattered between various buildings. In the centre of town they were at Trevarthian, the Old Town Hall, Mengu, St Johns, and Church Rooms, whilst we went to West Hill School for Metalwork, Bridge Chapel for Woodwork, and to the County School for Chemistry and Physics. Because of this there were constant streams of Suttonians (from Plymouth) passing through Fore Street en route to lessons. We sometimes returned to Plymouth for holidays, and permanently when the war was over, although not until mid-August 1945, several weeks after the school term had ended.

In 1944 Dad obtained Scamp, a Cocker Spaniel that would accompany Gran in the Anderson shelter. Since the onset of the Blitzes, Gran slept in the shelter each night until the war ended. Early in 1944 Dad went to Gibraltar to work in the Dockyard. He sailed from Greenock and the voyage took about seven weeks as the boat took a devious route to avoid U-Boats.

So in August 1945, with dad in Gibraltar, living at St Budeaux were Gran, Mum and her 鈥淭wo young Scamps鈥�, as she put it. One of them, of course, was me! I had been aged seven and a half when war broke out, and it seems a very long time ago.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.