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When WW11 broke out, I was nearly nine and to my consternation and surprise had a younger brother, who had been born the previous November. I have no memories of the period before September 3rd. and no premonition of hostilities, except for a faint recollection of being at 31 Central Square when my mother and ‘Aunt’ Lil were listening to the wireless (as we called it then) with solemn faces to what could have been Chamberlain’s return from Germany, bringing his so-called ‘Peace with Honour’: of course, it may have to do with the Edward VIII’s abdication. However, I can remember the Sunday morning when Chamberlain told the nation we were at war with Germany. Playing in the back garden, I listened to the broadcast through the open room window: Our wireless was not moveable and was in the room, connected to its aerial and firmly attached to its wet battery or ‘accumulator’, which was not then a betting term. My father was constructing black out shutters from empty tea-chests. By this time he had been working for The Lindsey Blind Society for nearly two years and tea was one of the items that the Society sold and distributed, so there was no shortage of ply-wood panels. These shutters lasted as long as the black-out. They were stored in the cupboard under the stairs and slotted into position each night and then held there by wooden fasteners screwed to the window frame, which were simply turned round to hold the shutter in position. We had shutters for the living room (4) and the kitchen (2), but not for the bathroom. I suppose we must have had shutters for my parents’ bedroom, because David shared their room then and would need to be tended to and the gas light lit for illumination. My bed room was not blacked out and I could see searchlights probing later from my bed and on some occasions was awake and crept to the window to see a distant glow that was supposed to be the results of a night bombing raid on Hull.
In reality I had a quiet war. Nothing wildly exciting or life-threatening happened and only one of my immediate family was called up. Aunt Ethel joined the WAAFS and served for several years as a cook, eventually earning a stripe. She was stationed at Coningsby, which though in the same county could have been at the other end of the country. She was at Coningsby when Guy Gibson and the Dam-busting squadron were there. She did her usual good job and would put herself out to be of service, cooking food for the air-crews at all kinds of unsocial hours. She was proud of being a WAAF and doing her not inconsiderable bit for the war effort. Grandad Rhodes was even prouder: he was in his eighties and followed the progress of the war very closely. He also displayed a framed photograph of Winston Churchill in ebullient mood on his living room wall. When Aunt Ethel received a commendation in dispatches, this was framed and placed proudly next to ‘ Winnie’s ‘ portrait.
Arthur Sedgewick, who had come to live next door at no.28 Central Square with his wife, Nan, just before the war and who worked at the gasworks down Riverside was called up to join the Army in the middle of the war and served in Burma. Happily he returned safely — unlike many Old Boys of Brigg Grammar School. I well remember many morning assemblies, when ‘Duffy’ Daughton, the Headmaster, sadly but proudly read the names of Old Boys who had been killed or were missing in action. It seemed that those former pupils who became air-crew were particularly vulnerable. After the war I was asked to write up a Roll of Honour in Old English script on vellum. I was about fifteen at the time and did my best, but was not satisfied with the result. I was no good at Art, but enjoyed lettering and was asked by the then new Headmaster, Cale ‘Stan’ Matthews on the recommendation of the Art master, ‘Cabby’ Cabourne, to do it.
During the war Lincolnshire became one vast airfield. Within a twenty mile radius of Brigg in North Lincolnshire there must have been nearly twenty air-stations, ranging from insignificant to major. Fighters were based at Hibaldstow, Kirmington and Kirton Lindsey while Hemswell, Elsham, Binbrook and Scampton housed bombers. The skies overhead were crowded and we soon came to recognise easily Hampdens and Halifaxes and the later Wellingtons and Lancasters among the bombers and Spitfires, Hurricanes and later the American Mustangs and Lightnings among the fighters. We also in the second half of the war came to know Flying Fortresses.
It was the war in the air that most affected our daily lives. We saw khaki mainly on soldiers guarding the airfields or prisoners of war and the occasional naval uniform when townsfolk serving in the navy were on leave, but the predominating uniform was Royal Air Force blue. To which was later added the smartly cut brown uniform of the American Army Air Force. Among the RAF crews I was vaguely aware that some were Australians, and others in considerable numbers were Poles and Czechs. My father was a Special Constable and came into closer contact with these exotic flyers when he had to arrest airmen who got fighting drunk in Brigg on a Saturday night and were taken to cool off and sober up in the cells of the police station in Wrawby Street between the Grand Cinema and the Workhouse/Hospital complex. There they were left to the tender mercies of Sergeant Hatton, who stood no nonsense, before being released to return to their respective airfields.
For at least the first two years of the war our sleep was at a premium and regularly disturbed by the air-raid siren, which came to be called with humorous resignation ‘Moaning Minnie’. (As my mother’s name was Minnie, she didn’t think much of that soubriquet.) However, I can well recall the sound that began with a glissading crescendo and continued for several minutes in a wild ululation before subsiding into a long drawn out metallic sigh. The siren was affixed to the fire station roof opposite the police station and there was a further siren at the Sugar Factory some two miles away and we could hear this quite audibly on calm nights. I don’t know how the villages were warned; I can’t think that Elsham had its own siren, but it did have its own airfield and presumably one sounded there.
Some families had their own individual shelter: they dug out the foundations and erected the ubiquitous Anderson shelter in the back garden. The Anderson shelter consisted of sunken corrugated iron arcs fixed to a central concrete beam and protected by earth and sandbags. Others strengthened outhouses with sandbags and used those. Since our house was barely 200 yards from the air raid shelters built in the grounds of the Girls’ High School in a direct line, we used these shelters. By road these shelters would have been half a mile away, but step ladders were placed at the bottom of the garden to the Leesons’ house in Woodbine Avenue and by means of these ladders we mounted the seven foot high wire fence that surrounded the northern perimeter of the High School. Since David was only one and a bit at the time of the first air raids, he was transported in a carrying cot made out of the handy tea chest panels. I helped to carry the cot, but it must have been tricky to pass over the high fence, especially on the very many occasions when Dad was on special constabulary duty. Presumably mother was helped by neighbours also seeking the assumed safety of the High School shelters. These shelters were simply elongated brick-built boxes with a concrete roof and floor and standing on the tarmacced playground. I can’t think they would have been much protection from high explosive bombs dropping nearby, though they could possibly have coped with incendiaries. Inside the shelters there were three or four lines of slatted benches, each about fifty feet long, and we sat on these and waited for the all-clear to sound. The shelters at the Boys’ Grammar School into which I had to seek shelter when the siren sounded during lesson time were situated along the Glebe Road side of the school playing field and were darker and smellier but stronger, since they were sunken, earth-covered and grass grew well there. The space between the shelters was to make a suitable stage for a memorable production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ after the war in 1945 with the now disused shelters providing the wings and ‘a marvellous green spot for our rehearsal’.
One night I somehow became separated from my mother and brother, probably because there was more panic that night as German bombers were passing overhead on their way to Sheffield or Hull. I was unconcerned when I found myself in a shelter, because I was surrounded by families I knew well as neighbours. My mother, however, must have been frantic and somehow alerted my father who was on constabulary duty as usual that night. We were in the shelters longer than usual and it was some considerable time before my father in tin hat, dark serge uniform and gas mask appeared at the shelter desperately enquiring if ‘anyone had seen our John’. They had and I was soon reunited with my mother in one of the other shelters in the High School grounds.
Because there was no need to suppose that the Luftwaffe would single Brigg out as an important target on which to drop their bombs, people eventually by the autumn of 1942 stopped getting up, dressing and making their way to the shelters. But we were aware that some cities were suffering badly from the bombing. One night when Hull (some 25 miles away in a straight line) across the Humber was under attack, we could see flashes and an unusual red glow from that direction through our bedroom windows. On other occasions we would lie in bed and listen to the unmistakable and different sound of the Heinkel or Junkers engine as German planes headed west to Sheffield. Here much damage was done and many lives lost, but we did not have any first hand knowledge as no pictures of damage were printed in the local papers. The West Riding / South Yorkshire was unknown country.
I suppose I must have seen pictures of damage in Hull, because one of the two local papers was ‘The Hull and North Lincolnshire Times’, but I can’t remember any. The national newspapers carried grainy pictures of successes but more often of reverses in that first part of the war. There was also a fortnightly magazine that recorded the progress of the war in pictures — Hulton Press’s ‘War Illustrated’, was it? I seem to remember some sixteen pages of murky photographs within a yellow and black cover’ The sinking of the Graff Spee comes to mind and the rescue of British sailors from a German prison ship, the ‘Altmark’, by a British destroyer. I also remember pictures of the loss of the ‘Hood’ and the ‘Ark Royal’ with terrible loss of life, but curiously nothing about Dunkirk.
One of the things that did make an impact upon the local community was the arrival and dispersal of the evacuees. In Brigg the majority of the evacuees came from Hull. I can’t remember on what principles the children were allocated, but it seemed that because we lived in council houses children from impoverished backgrounds were billeted on us, whereas the big owner-occupied houses on Wrawby Road were offered more fragrant children. It could not have been an easy relationship for any of those involved. For most of the Hull children to be uprooted from an urban milieu (however unsatisfactory) that they knew well and transplanted to a small market town among new and alien faces must have been traumatic. However, the majority did not stay long and after a few months most had returned to Hull, the danger of frequent air raids notwithstanding. We hosted a boy about a year younger than me called Brian J. The whole family did its best to make him feel at home. With some shifting about he was provided with his own bedroom, he was introduced to our friends and we tried to involve him in our games, games in which other evacuees joined with alacrity. However, Brian was very withdrawn and unself-confident. His nervousness made him prone to bed-wetting, which did not help, although I can’t ever remember him being reprimanded for this and my mother did the extra washing without complaint. His mother came to visit him on one occasion, travelling on the ferry to New Holland and thence by train, changing at Barnetby. It can’t have been much later that Brian returned to Hull, he much relieved and unlamented by me. Peter D., who was the Rands’s evacuee two doors away, was a much more positive character, though some three years younger than John Rands and myself. He revelled in the new experience and was much more content with his lot in Brigg, for it seemed he came from a very underprivileged background in Hull. These are the only two I can remember with any clarity, though there must have been scores of evacuees in the estates surrounding Central Square. One or two evacuees later in the war came from further afield, especially at the time of the London blitz and subsequently when ‘doodlebugs’ (as the V1s and V2s were called) started dropping on the capital. I remember two girls, one a skinny, dishevelled and belligerent lass, whom we disparagingly called ‘Cockney’ and avoided, and the other a small, pert, blonde beauty called exotically Zena (Walker?), on whom we thirteen year olds gazed with admiring passion.
When Coventry was in danger, probably at the time of the blitz on the city, Bablake School, either in part or in whole, was evacuated to Brigg and accommodated in the boarding house at Brigg Grammar School. By this time, 1942/3, I was a ‘grammar gog’ myself, but the senior boys of Bablake were public school with more impressive blazers and an innate sense of their God-given superiority. They can’t have been with us long, but they were certainly there one summer term, taught separately by their own staff, and have remained in the memory. On one memorable Wednesday half-day, in which the afternoons were given over to inter-school matches, the First XI’s of Bablake and BGS did battle. I was probably in UIVA, aged thirteen and fiercely supportive of BGS. We desperately wanted to see ‘the snooty, toffee-nosed types’, from Bablake get their come-uppance. Since we had compulsory Saturday morning school, attendance on a Wednesday afternoon was not expected, but there was a large gathering to see this match. One or two tradesmen from the town came up, as it was half-day closing on a Wednesday. Bablake batted first and we were impressed by their immaculate flanneled appearance — not all our team had ‘whites’. Their star batsman found his form and soon stroked a comfortable and chanceless forty odd runs. This was worrying because on our wicket few batsmen managed to score twenty and total team scores were usually in the fifties or sixties. We were particularly irritated by the polished accents of the Bablakians acclaiming ‘Well played, Peter!’ as their star drove yet another boundary. We were much relieved to hear ‘Hard luck, Peter!’ when he was finally caught.
Bablake scored well over a hundred and twenty runs and we did not think we could possibly approach that score. However, cometh the hour — cometh the man: in the shape of Bob Atkinson. ‘Akky’ was in the fifth form, some three years older than me, but he seemed to be of another generation. Living nearly opposite us in Woodbine Avenue, he was always man to my boy. ‘Akky’ scored 69 not out, an unheard of achievement in my experience at that time and BGS gained a notable victory. We juniors took immense pleasure in greeting each of his runs with loud shouts in affected, cut-glass accents of ‘Well played, Robert!’ No-one ever called ‘Akky’ Robert, not even his parents. Bob Atkinson later played a good club class of cricket locally and was an outstanding centre-half for Brigg Town after the war. He died in his late thirties, much lamented.

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