大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Louise Angell of the CSV Action Desk at 大象传媒 Radio Derby, on behalf of . The author understands the sites terms and conditions.

I was bord at Bedworth, Warwickshire, on the 4th April 1927. I recall the day that war was declared against Germany. My sister (aged 16 years) and I were travelling in my fathers car 2 miles through country lanes to attend Sunday school, when the air-raid siren sounded. My father immediately turned the car round and returned home to make sure my mother was safe! The next incident was almost identical in that we were again travelling to Sunday school. We were approaching a farm, when the farmer, who we knew, wearing an army uniform and pointing his revolver at the car ordered my father to stop and asked for his identity card! He was supported by two farmhands wearing LDV armbands and pointing rifles in our direction. he then said that few minutes earlier, a German bomber had flown over a very low sky and he was checking to make sure a member of the aircrew, who may have been shot down, had not ambushed us! Thus were examples of people's fear and uncertainty in the early days of war.

In the early months of 1939, my father had been appointed an air raid warden instructor, training volunteers in preparation for war. However, in 1940 he joined the Warwickshire Special Constabulary and using his own Rover car, patrolled the countryside in the evenings one ful night per week, armed with rifles or revolvers, keeping watch for German parachutists.

A R.A.F airfield was established about 2 miles across the fields from the back of our house. At night I would look out of my bedroom window and watch wellington bombers taking off or landing. A Polish squadron were eventually based there and one night, German bombers circling Coventry must have seen the Wellingtons returning to base, followed them in and bombed the airfield. My father subsequently learned from the police station that the Polish Commanding Officer had great difficulty in preventing his airmen taking off again in a revenge-bombing raid that same night.

Living within 8 miles from the centre of Coventry, we became used to air raids. However on the occasion of Coventry's second major blitz, we were visiting my uncle who lived within the city boundary. The air raid started about 6pm and my father quickly got us into the car to return home. We spent the night in our air raid shelter, which for my sister and I, was sleeping in two bunk beds my father had built under the stairs, and for my mum and dad, sleeping on a mattress under a large, heavy wooden dining table pushed up against the doorway of the under stair cupboard.

My father was a manager a Courtauld's main works in Coventry. The morning, after the blitz, he set off for work as usual but was stopped by the Army at the city boundary, because Marshall Law had been declared throughout the city . My father had returned home and put on his special constables uniform and was duly allowed to pass the chechpoint. However, after about a mile he had to abandon his car and walk because the roads were littered with building debris from the bombing. When he got to his factory, the five storey mill was burned to the ground and and the two top storeys of the four-storey mill were also burnt out. The whole factory was subsequently demolished and Courtaulds did not rebuild a production plant on that site and my father resigned rather than transfer to Wales where he had worked for six years early in the 1920's. His managerial experience gained him a job as factory Defence Manager of Security and Fire Services at Armstrong Whitworth for the duration of the war.

I left school at the age of 14 years (Easter) and obtained work as a fitter initially assembling navigator's seats for the Whitley bomber (known as the flying pencil because it was so slim) but production quickly ended because the bomber was too heavy and too slow. The factory was then deployed in building under licence from A.V. roe Ltd. the "Avro Lancaster" bomber, on which I worked until joining the Royal Navy on 10th January 1945. After training as a motor mechanic, I was drafted onto a BYMS coastal minessweeper, which was built in America but not included in the lease-lend programme to the UK. My flotilla swept for mines along the French coast from dunkirk to Dieppe. In October 1945 I was drafted via australia, to Hong Kong, where again I served on a BYMS minesweeper, clearing the sea approaches of moored, acoustic and magnetic mines. In Hong Kong it was common for a family of Chinese Boat People who live entirely on a 18foot samipan, to 'adopt' Royal Navy small ships. I was serving on a BYMS coastal minesweeper. Each time we came into port, the samipan would come alongside and the women would come alongside and the women would come onto the deck and for small payment, would wash or iron our clothes. When we were to finally leave Hong Kong for the Phillipines in July 1946, we sailed at 6.30am. Our sampan family came alongside and then as our seamen let go of the final ropes from the quayside, the family let off hundreds of fire crackers under our stern. to frighten away evil spirits so that we could sail away safely. The cost of those crackers from such poor people was so moving that the memory is very real today.

In August 1946, we returned these minesweepers to the USA Naval Base at Subic Bay in the Philippines. Thereafter, until july 1947, I served on an armed motor launch and subsequently Landing Craft (medium), patrolling the coasts around Singapore to ward off Indonesian Terrorist groups who were raiding British shore establishments for food, arms and other equipment, during their fight for independence from the Dutch. This was an indication of some of the tasks the British Services undertook in the post war period. I was demobbed in November 1947.

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