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This story was submitted to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Granville Wild and was added to the site with his permission…

I was twelve when the war started and living in Church near Accrington in Lancashire. I was a boy scout at the time and I remember this one particular evening we all arrived in our uniform at Tanpits in Church where our meetings were held over a garage, only to be sent to the local Police Station to help fill sandbags as they were sandbagging the building. It was very late when we finished, but instead of going straight home we went to the big house that adjoined the cemetery on Dill Hall Lane, the house had been taken over as an ARP post, there we proceeded to help them with their sandbagging. My father who was a Police Inspector came and found us and of course we got into trouble as it was so late and home we went.

I went to Central School in Oswaldtwistle, opposite the school there was a row of shops, one of them was a cloggers. He collected army badges and always had a display of them in the window; he also collected scrap metal. There was a disused mill nearby and as lads we used to climb up and get lead off the roof and he would exchange it for army badges. Another thing we collected was ARP cigarette cards, these came out quite a while before war was declared, the pictures on them they showed stirrup pumps and buckets etc. and various tips on how to deal with emergencies, so by the time war did start we should have had all the knowledge we needed. Luminous paint went on sale, the idea was it would be painted on lampposts and the like so that in the blackout you would be able to see them, but it didn’t work, you couldn’t see a thing.

When I was 13 I joined the Army Cadets and went to Cockerham on two occasions where we were put through our paces by the army, we were given demonstrations and rides on Bren Carriers. We played at being soldiers and it was fun living under canvas for a week.

Liverpool of course was heavily blitzed and many of police in the area, my father included, were drafted there for 3 weeks at a time and billeted at Aintree racecourse.
I recall going to visit him on one of these occasions after the city had been heavily bombed the night before and him saying that I was old enough to know just what war was all about. He took me to a big corrugated building with no windows. It was a mortuary full of bodies, a terrible sight. But children are resilient.

The Bristol Aircraft factory was at Clayton-le-Moors nearby and the Pioneer Corp had set up a defence in the form of large metal barrels with a pipe in the centre and a frying pan shaped ‘lid’ on the top. these were filled with diesel and would be ignited to make a smoke screen to conceal the factory should there be a raid. Occasionally one would catch fire and the flames would have to be damped down. They were numerous and all around the area and it depended on which way the prevailing wind was blowing as to which area of them was lit; the fumes were dreadful and they emitted thick black, foul smelling smoke. The soldiers who manned them had to wear celluloid goggles to protect them. Their station was in a building at the bottom of Union St. Accrington and it was awash with jerry cans of the diesel they used, it went absolutely everywhere.

I went to work at the Lancashire Foundry Coke Company in the lab. They manufactured many chemicals being used in the war, including Tolvene the basis for the making of TNT. A German engineer had built two batteries of coke ovens that we used and had returned home to Germany just before war was declared and that is possibly why the Germans dropped three bombs in a line in the vicinity of the works. It wasn’t hit, but two of the bombs landed at Altham one in a garden, the other demolishing two houses and the third making a large crater on Whinney Hill.

I had a cousin who lived in Manchester who was evacuated to Accrington, although not to us, she hadn’t been here long when the bombs dropped and I think this decided her that she was no safer here so she went back to Failsworth. She later told me the story of her walking down the street one day pushing a pram when a German plane swooped low and let loose a flurry of machine gun bullets that rattled straight up the centre of the road, luckily she wasn’t hit, but it makes you think that the pilot must have spotted her.

Later there was a barrage balloon on Whinney Hill they were massive hydrogen filled balloons tethered by steel cables. Unfortunately they easily caught fire if they got hit by lightning. At first the RAF manned them but later the WAAF did a great job in maintaining them. They were dangerous things and I recall a boy loosing a leg after playing near one in a high wind, sadly one of the cables got wrapped around his leg and the damage was done; another casualty of the war.

Later on a lot of my friends were called up into service, but I wasn’t quite old enough. To be honest life was fun and I remember the blackout on a Sunday night when lots of us young people would walk what we used to call the monkey run. It was a section of the main road between the railway bridge and the bottom of little Blackburn Rd. in Accrington. It was a way of meeting the opposite sex and all done in the pitch dark. Eventually Sunday evening concerts were arranged at the Ritz Cinema and the Town Hall to try and discourage this promenading and, although I did attend these, I remember the ‘monkey run’ being much more fun.

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