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THE BLITZ AT BROOMHILL

By the Lynch sisters

Mrs. Cathy O’Donnell (nee Lynch) & Mrs. Mary Thomas (nee Lynch)

We were born in Broomhill and lived at 7 Broomhill Street, Greenock. There were ten of us in the family. Our mother was dead and father was at sea so we lived with our Gran. We were aged 13 and 14 at the time of the Blitz. We had two elder sisters, both married and pregnant, a brother in the Navy, the other at home and younger sisters.
Gran worked as a cleaner at the Greenock ex-servicemen’s club and we both worked — Cathy in a butcher shop and Mary in the Italian chip shop. Italian cafes were smashed up by local people when the war started.

Our air raid shelter was made of stone and accommodated 18 families in sectioned off rooms. On the night of the air raid Mary had to wake up Cathy to get her into the shelter. A neighbour, Mr. McNaughton, went back for his pipe and was killed. Another neighbour, a 16-year old boy, lost an eye. We could hear the bombs dropping all around us. Someone once told us that if you could hear a bomb drop then it wasn’t for you.

When we came out of the shelter the next morning we discovered that our tenement had taken a direct hit so we lost everything. We were left with nothing but the clothes we wore. We had to go back to work that day and after work we were taken to St. Patrick’s Church in Orangefield for temporary shelter and were given a cup of tea and black bread, which tasted awful! Gran went to look after our elder pregnant sisters. The local council arranged for us to be evacuated to Airdrie and on arrival there we went to St. Margaret’s Church. The minister’s wife took us to her home for a bath and gave us fresh clothes to wear. We were then sent to live with a Mrs. Jack in Bathy Road. She had 4 children of her own so once all of us arrived she had ten children in her house. We were sent to work in a local farm, to pick turnips. All Mrs. Jack gave us for our lunch at the farm was a slice of bread and 2 Abernethy biscuits! The farmer gave us milk.
Mrs. Jack was not the motherly type and was rather unfair with us. Taking in evacuees gave her an income — money vouchers for each evacuee. She even asked the council for more money but gave us poor clothes.

Our brother John, on leave from the Navy, came to visit us and could see we were not happy. He managed to get a house for us to rent back in Greenock. We went back there by ourselves on the train. It wasn’t long before we had started new jobs. Cathy started a job at the ropeworks, Tufts, and Mary went to work in a grocer shop. Our father returned and got a house in Bain Street but we didn’t go in with him, preferring to stay in our lodgings. We didn’t realize the moral danger we were in. The manager of the butcher shop asked Mary if she wanted to work for him for 32 shillings (she earned 16 shillings in the grocer’s) and she ended up managing the butcher’s — Gemmells in Hamilton Street.

It was a religious area — we were a Catholic family in an orange area. We used to follow the orange flute band but there was no trouble then. On the 12th of July people put a sheet across the street with a picture of the Pope on it and set it on fire, and painted a picture of King Billy on the side of a building. We went to Mass every Sunday and then to the Gospel Hall nearby in the afternoon! We were given a bun and tea there. Next door was a farm so we took potato peelings from our house to feed the pigs.

After we had paid our rent we didn’t have much money left. We went up to our sister’s house for a bath. After the Blitz, our father was given money to replace the furniture but we got nothing. We were brought up to work for a living and did not accept charity. Our political awareness started the day we left school since we were forced to leave early to go out to work.

A woman at Cathy’s work offered us a room at her house near the French Club in Charles Street. She went out dancing while her husband was in the Army. We decided we couldn’t stay there knowing this, so we left. An uncle in the Canadian Navy asked to take a young sailor on leave up to the Greenock Cut for a walk. We didn’t realise the moral danger we were in and didn’t know about sex then.

Our father joined a ship at Greenock and as soon as it arrived in America he jumped ship and joined his sisters over there. The families of seamen were given allowances while they were at sea so Gran’s allowance was stopped when our father jumped ship.

The war changed our whole life and split our family up. Relationships between our siblings were strained. You feel that you’ve been cheated. People nowadays know nothing of what it means to be a refugee. I hate to see refugees rubbished in the news. We went through hell after the Blitz.

We found out later that one of our school friends, Margaret Kennedy, had been killed. Some people who fled up the hill were machine gunned by German pilots as the bombers flew very low over the town.

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