大象传媒

Life in OLD BRAMHOPE in Wartime
Part 1

I lived from 1934 to 1948 in Old Bramhope, at the top of Pool Bank, at what is now the Hilton Grange estate developed by Redrow from the buildings I knew as a child. In those days, the buildings were the National Children's Home, where my father was the Governor of the Home and the Headmaster of the new school that had been built on the site in 1933-34. I lived in "The Homestead", which still stands, beautifully renovated and enhanced, at the entrance from Old Lane to the site.

The Home housed 150 boys and 100 girls, aged from toddlers up to sixteen years, in four girls' houses and six for boys. It was to an extent self-supporting, as there was a farm, gardens, greenhouses and a bakery; the farm had a dairy herd, chickens and extensive piggeries, and some land was also given to arable produce, the threshing being subcontracted to a unit that travelled the area in season, with a steam traction engine pulling a thresher/baler from site to site. Three magnificent Shire horses powered ploughing until the end of the war, when the farm acquired a Fordson Major tractor. The gardens supplied fresh vegetables in season. The bakery produced fresh bread and simple cakes each day, and we had our own artesian well and pump to supply fresh water. Groceries were bought in bulk and stored in the administration block, from whence they were issued to the houses on requisition.

The "Block" also contained a sewing room, where clothes that were outgrown rather than worn out were repaired, cleaned and re-cycled to smaller children, and at the back was a fully equipped cobbler's shop for the repair or renovation of shoes. There was an excellent carpenter's shop, and a resident decorator/handyman, to deal with essential repairs. All these facilities existed to provide essential services, but also to train the older boys and girls for life when they left the Home at sixteen. The Home had its own small, modem hospital, built in 1934, with a qualified nurse in charge, with separate wards for boys and girls and a south-facing veranda onto which beds could be pushed, through sliding windows, for the patients to enjoy any fine weather. Above the hospital at the northern end of the site, the School served the resident children, and children from nearby farms and the small village at Old Pool Bank, up to the age of fourteen; in the evening the school was the centre of social life for the community, housing Scouts, Guides, Cubs, Brownies, dance classes, amateur dramatics and film shows.

Most of the members of the staff were resident on or around the site; each house had a Sister in charge, usually with a trainee assistant, and the gardener, cowman, carpenter and baker all occupied nearby houses, mostly at the top of Pool Bank at Hiitcrest. The farmer, Mr J Thompson, lived in the farmhouse on Old Lane that has recently been the last building on the site to be refurbished for sale. The teaching staff and my father's secretary came in to work, the latter on a bicycle from Menston, over the top of the Chevin in all weathers, including snow! (They built them tough in those days!)

This was the way in which the Home operated in normal times, but its isolation up on the moors, and the self-sufficiency arising from the provision of training of the older children for work in later life, meant that life continued after the outbreak of war with much less disruption than in the general community. We were accustomed to a fairly simple life style already, and while we missed ice cream and bananas, many of us were too young to really remember them anyway - though I think everyone can remember their first banana when the war was over, I certainly can!

The children were not all "orphans", some were from broken families, and many were there because their parents could not afford to keep them. Many regarded Old Bramhope as their "real home", but in the long summer holiday may of them had the opportunity to meet up with their families for a holiday break, which also gave some of the staff a chance to go away. It is in the middle of such a break that my narrative of World War 2 commences, with the staff and children scattered over the country on their holidays....

WARTIME
The outbreak of war in 1939 caused a flurry of activity, as the majority of the children were on holiday and had to be returned post-haste. We were on holiday in Morecambe, and I recall a slow and hazardous journey home in Dad's Rover 12, on sidelights in the dark. As we came through Clapham village, my father took a wrong turning and drove through the old ford rather than over the bridge; I remember kneeling up in the back and looking out at the water splashing up the side of the car in the dark.

Everyone had to be issued with identity cards and gas masks, and we practiced gas mask drill at school and carried our gas masks with us in cardboard cubes hanging from our necks with string. We had to learn the warnings; for gas it was a wooden rattle that was swung round by the warden to produce a noise like the call of a magpie (football fans use them these days), while the warden shouted "Gas, gas, gas'. The warning of an impending air raid was a siren like a factory hooter, which was set to give an eerie undulating signal (which for years after could strike terror into anyone who had lived through the London Blitz, as 1 saw on holiday in 1951 when a seaside show violinist imitated the air-raid warning using a violin and two girls from Southend collapsed in tears) and when the raid was over the same siren emitted a steady high note to report "All Clear". Air Raid Precaution (ARP) teams were set up, and my father was Chief Warden for Old Bramhope, and was identified by a white steel helmet with a black "W" at the front. Fire drills were carried out, and training was given on how to put out an incendiary bomb with a bucket of sand, or extinguish a fire with a stirrup pump and a bucket of water. Red-painted buckets containing water or sand were placed in prominent positions in all the buildings, and inspected frequently to ensure that they were full and ready.

Fire-watching teams took turns to be on guard each night, with the telephone exchange manned constantly; my sister recalls taking her turn on night switchboard duty, and the older boys took turns to act as "runners", which was a prized job, as the runner got cocoa and sandwiches at regular intervals through the night. Blackout double curtains, blinds and close-fitting window covers were constructed and fitted, and safe areas were designated for each house, to provide refuge in case of air raids; if the safe area had a window it was fitted with a substantial wooden cover to serve as both blackout and blast protection, and strips of linen were glued to windows to prevent splinters flying. If any chink of light showed, the wardens would blow a whistle, bang on the door, and shout, "Put that light out!' The sirens went a number of times, usually for raids on Leeds or Bradford, which attracted attention as centres of production, but we were only seriously menaced once, on the night of 19m. August 1940. A Heinkel 111 of Kampfgeschwader 53 dropped high explosive and incendiary bombs on the Chevin, near to the site now occupied by the Chevin Lodge Hotel. We all thought at the time that the target was RAF Yeadon and the Avro factory that was under construction nearby, but apparently the pilot was off course and thought he was bombing Leeds, according to post war studies (by Gerald Myers for his excellent book "Mother worked at Avro") of LufiwafFe records. It appears that he was so surprised at the reception he received when searchlights and the light ack-ack battery at Carlton crossroads opened up, closely followed by the heavy ack-ack at Adel, that he reported on his return that there must be something important in the area. So a week later they sent a Junkers 88, a much faster light bomber, which came up Wharfedafe and round the Chevin, and dropped some more bombs, roused the reception committee and fled. After the first raid, the Home was scattered with shrapnel from the airbursts of the anti-aircraft fire, and my father found one of the canisters that had held a batch of incendiaries, known as a "Molotov Cocktail", on the hockey pitch. We felt that we had had a close shave, but I only recently found out how close when I received a copy of the official plot map of the bombs that fell. There were about 60 incendiary bombs, ten high explosive bombs, not all of which went off, and two very unusual bombs that were high explosive and filled with oil for greater effect which fortunately failed to detonate and were taken away by bomb-disposal experts for examination. The incendiaries fell in a wide grouping to the east of the main cargo, and came within a few hundred yards of the Home, so we had quite a near escape. The sound of the bombs falling, getting nearer and nearer, was quite scary, but I remember being alert and wary, rather than terrified, as I lay wrapped in a quilt under a substantial mahogany table.

The light anti-aircraft batteries at Carlton crossroads were on either side of Harrogate road; the one above Green Gaits farm was very accessible, and was on the site what is now the animal rescue centre, and the living accommodation, in a wooden hut, was just through the field gate which is used for access to the car boot sale in the big field to the south of the crossroads. I went there several times, as it was only a quarter of a mile away, and was allowed to sit on the seat of the Bofors gun and rotate and elevate the weapon.

The other site was larger and less accessible; probably far this reason it is 'Listed' and still well preserved, in the field between Otley Old Road and Carlton village, near Penny's Farm. This site also had a barrage balloon later on in the war, which was used for training paratroopers when the Airborne Division was formed. Many years later, when I was showing some pictures to friends, one of them, Andy Clements, revealed that he had done his basic parachute training at Carlton, being billeted at RAF Yeadan and jumping from the balloon basket. He told me that his platoon was assembled every evening at dusk, put into the back of a three-tonner and taken up to the Avro factory, where their task was to move the artificial cows around, to maintain the illusion that it was still a farm field - we were aware that something of the sort was going on, but it was only after the war that the activities of the camouflage experts of the film industry became known. He also told me that the three-tonner dropped the lads off at the "Peacock" at Yeadon Fountain to slake their thirsts before going back to base.

The site also had an interesting wire-mesh net mounted an poles surrounding the guns, which in the moonlight looked like a sheet of water. As Yeadon Dam had been drained at the outset of war (which gave us the opportunity to catch all sorts of fish, including pikelets, and the adults to net big pike as the water receded), we thought that the net was a decoy, and noted with some unease that the distance and bearing of the Home from the net was almost exactly the same as that of the Avro factory from the Dam. In fact the net was meant to be an aircraft-spotting device, to pick up and magnify the sound of an approaching raider. It came to light after the war that the Luftwaffe was unaware of the existence of `The Avro' and had in fact been briefed to attack Leeds on the night of their near miss. The worst damage the factory ever suffered was when the roof fell in under the weight of 10 ft. of snow in the 1947 winter.

Pr-BR

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