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My School In Wartime

I was thirteen years old when the war started. I was attending The Commonwealth Grammar School in Swindon and we all had very mixed feelings when Mr Chamberlain made an announcement that we were at war. We were torn between feelings of apprehension for what the war would mean to us. and happiness because we had our summer holidays extended by three weeks due to the huge influx of evacuees into the town. When we started back after the extra holiday, we found that our school had been invaded by several classes from east Ham Grammar School, and our space became very restricted. But with very few upsets we soon shook down into a regular routine. We found at first that some of our younger male teachers had been called into the Armed Forces, and had been replaced by married women teachers called out of retirement, it being the policy before the war, not to employ married women.

Soon we settled down to a normal routine, or as normal as possible with the school so crowded, but we managed. The only differences were due to the wartime regulations. We had to carry our gas masks everywhere and our identity cards, regulations about school uniforms were relaxed because of the difficulty of replacements and blackout regulations were rigidly enforced for extra-curricular activities. The only other problem was the Air-Raid Precautions. No air-raid shelters were provided all the pupils and staff were directed to disperse to the houses round the school when the sirens sounded, which seemed to me very foolish as some of the houses were quite a long way away, which left the people very vulnerable. At one time a low flying Heinkel 111 came over the road in which I was walking, following an air-raid warning, but fortunately it dropped no bombs or fired it’s guns, so no one was hurt.

Schoolwork continued without many interruptions, as Swindon was very fortunate in not suffering very much from enemy action, one of the girls in our class had her house damaged in a raid, but no one else was affected. This went on until September 1941 when at the age of 15 I moved into the 5th form, we were ‘volunteered’ for fire-watching duties, which meant that a number of boys had, each night on a rota basis, to sleep at the school, in the charge of a teacher, after having been given some basic instruction in the use of a stirrup pump, and other equipment. How efficient we would have been I do not know, but fortunately we were never called upon to demonstrate.

When I finally left school in June 1942, my father being an Air-Raid Warden, I was conscripted by him into A.R.P. as a Warden Messenger, these duties on top of my normal employment keeping me fairly busy until September 1943 when I volunteered for the Royal Navy. But that’s another story.

S.J. Mitchell

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