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THE SCENE BEFORE EVACUATION
I think I should start by describing some of the events leading up to the evacuation.
I was ten years old when the war started, I can still remember sitting in the kitchen, (as opposed to the back kitchen), when Mum did the cooking, of 36 Duke Street, New Brighton, listening to Chamberlain explaining why a ‘state of war’ existed between us and Germany.
I remember dashing out into the street with more excitement than fear, but, of course, nothing was happening. The whole family was there except for my recently married sister, Eileen, who had moved to Liscard.
My Scottish mother, who had called out house ‘Dalmuir’, which managed to attract many Scottish visitors in the summer as we, along with lots neighbours, supplemented our incomes by the boarding of visitors.
My father had spent most of the time between the wars in and out of Mossley Hill Military Hospital from the privations and injuries received in World War I in Gallipoli.
My two brothers, Len and George, were also present. George was already in the Royal Air Force, having been unable top get a job even with a School Matriculation Certificate. His last regular job was a summer job on the deck chairs at New Brighton. In the winter, he used to catch fish on lay lines and sell them door-to-door. We used to call the flat fish ‘flukes’ in those days. Dad liked these fish steamed as his stomach was very delicate, having caught typhoid and dysentery whilst in Gallipoli.
We went through the ‘phoney war’ which everyone knows about. As school children we had the bonus of several weeks off school whilst brick and concrete air raid shelters were built in the school yard. We had to call in once a week to get homework, which I can remember scrambling through to get out to play.
The Sandrock Hotel, now demolished, on the corner of Molyneux Drive and Rowson Street, had its basement reinforced and made into a public air raid shelter. The old Tower building basement was also opened up. My Dad wanted to keep us at home so he converted the middle (dining) room into an air raid shelter which he had also made gas proof. He made a ventilator with two old vacuum cleaner motors, gas filters and the outlet side with non return valves. He had a very simple way of making these, which I won’t go into now.
The sirens had sounded ‘the alert’ a few times without any bombing. One daylight alert on our way to school we saw a tiny silver speck in the blue sky, leaving a vapour trail. There was some sporadic anti aircraft fire but no fighters. I don’t think we had any at the time which could reach those high attitudes.
My father was in one of his good periods at that time and, like a lot of other ‘old sweats’, had been co-opted into the A.R.P warden service. Their post was in the basement of the building on the corner of Field Road, Wallasey. The upstairs floor was occupied by a balloon barrage squad. One of the other wardens was a Jewish gentleman by the name of Myah Bennet, who had a jewellers shop on Rowson Street. Through Mr Bennet, I made friends with the first refugee from Germany I had seen, his nephew, I think his name was Mark. I saw Mr Bennet years after and he said the nephew had gone to Canada and made his fortune.
At this time, things were going badly in Europe and two more refugees came into our lives and home. I can’t remember their names, but the man was a University Professor, an Englishman who had been at a University in Paris and his French wife, who was an artist and made a living by painting beautiful flowers on plates. She had a way of painting something over the plates when they were done to give a lovely ‘crackle’ finish. One day, which was very exciting, the Professor went to get her dog out of quarantine, the French lady went crazy with joy, I don’t think I had seen anyone so overjoyed.
The war was beginning to ‘hot up’ now in the winter of 1940.
In January I contracted scarlet fever and went into Mill Lane Isolation Hospital. I somehow picked up diphtheria as well and had six weeks away from home. My brother George had extra leave because he had been home when I went in and had to stay at home for the incubation period of scarlet fever. The only two visitors I had, looking through the open window, were my two brothers. George, when he went to France and Len, when he was called up. In those days we never knew whether you would see members of the forces again. During that summer I had my 11 plus exam and went to Central School in Mount Pleasant Road wearing my first long trousers. I was very tall for my age.
We were beginning to have one or two sporadic raids, single aircraft dropping the odd stick of bombs, usually pretty small bombs. According to records, I was in Wallasey for 30 air raids.
The next significant thing was the series of air raids at Xmas 1940. The excitement had gone and I was getting frightened. The ‘Xmas Blitz’, as it was called, was pretty frightening. We were bombed out of our house in Duke Street, one bomb landing opposite and another next door. This gap in Duke Street is still here, the house was never rebuilt. The top of our house, No.36, was rebuilt later. We had to live with my sister but soon found another house over a shop at 90, Mill Lane, Liscard.
Wallasey Corporation at this time had teams of men and lorries moving and rehousing people without charge. These raids culminated in my being evacuated to Shropshire in early January, 1941.

THE EVACUATION
After following instructions given to my parents from Wallasey Central School, some classmates and myself boarded a train at Seacombe Station. Each had a small bag or suitcase and a gas mask. Maybe, because we were older and aware of the dangers of staying at home, we treated it as an adventure. There was some confusion as to where we were going. We finally arrived at Gobowen Station, the junction for Oswestry. Half of us went to St Martins and the other half to Llanymynech, the other side of Oswestry.
Among our group were Bill and Pete Bukcley, Bill Holmes, Mike McMullan, Ken and Eric Page, Donald Mosses, Bob Scovall, Charlie Baxby and your truly. Mike McMullan and I decided to stick together as we were to be billeted in pairs. We were taken to No.10, Garden Village, a house occupied by Mr and Mrs Ned Hinton. A more opposite couple would be hard to imagine. Ned Hinton was a coal miner and Mrs hinton was an ex children’s governess, a tall, angular woman with hair stretched back in a tight bun. They were a childless couple and, consequently, a bit out of touch with children. The local children had nicknamed Mrs Hinton ‘baldy’ because of her habit of keeping any balls which were kicked into her garden. I had my twelfth birthday two days after arriving and she baked me a cake. We always had to take our shoes off at the back door and be in bed by 9 o’clock. The only time I ever saw the front room of the house was one time when my mother came to visit. We were quite happy, nevertheless.
We went out on the first weekend and met the local children and I must make it clear that we were accepted right away. The local children were great. A few names I remember were Harold Jones, Gilbert Downward, Glyn Thomas, Dennis Whittle, Bill Abbot and Sid Williams, who I got on with right from the start. Another lad I got to know was Dick Grindley, who was mad about boxing. He had a shed at the bottom of the garden where he gave us all boxing lessons. He later but eventually became a professional boxer but was not very successful.
Some of the girls in our mixed class were Edith Hughes, Daisy Davies, Lena Davies, Ellen Williams, Ivy Whittle and Bronwen Thomas, who I had a crush on, in fact we got engaged later but eventually drifted apart.
We found school quite different from home. Mixed classes, three classrooms in all, seniors, juniors and infants. The school was a little Church of England school. Each day started with a visit from the Rev. Marsland, who read from the scriptures before we started. The Headmaster was Mr Bridgewater, a very good teacher. (I kept in touch until he was 83). The junior mistress was a Miss Richards. A plain featured, red headed lady, who was a very nice person. I can’t remember the infant teacher’s name. School wasn’t too bad. We even had a gardening lesson on Wednesdays. Among other things, I learned to bud a rose. We kept bees, taking the honey and making and feeding them sugar candy. We had a special allowance of sugar for this purpose.
The evacuees were absorbed into the country routine and soon we were indistinguishable from the rest of the village children.
Bob Scovall and Don Mosses were billeted to the Griffin Farm with the Holland family and learned a lot about farming. I often helped on the Holland farm myself. They had two shire horses, a mare called Flower and her colt, Derby. Most farms used horses, I can only remember one tractor driven by Dennis Whittle’s father. I mostly spent my time helping out at the blacksmiths. The blacksmith’s name was Dave Everson, a small, wiry man who smoked incessantly.
I learned striking with a 7lb hammer. An interesting job was re-hooping a wheel. We used to cut a couple of inches out of the metal hoop, weld it together by heating both ends to white heat in the forge and hammering the two end s together. We would then build a round fire the size of the hoop, heat it up to expand it, put it on the wooden wheel, hammer it into position then quench it with buckets of water before it set fire to the wooden wheel. The Eversons had a few cows, a field of wheat, a field of ahy, plus grazing fields.
Money could be earned like this, helping out because most of the men were in the forces. We had a card which allowed a few extra weeks off school to work on the farms.
Most of the money I earned went on chips from Grindleys chip shop which was just opposite the school. The only sweets we could buy were Nippets, a kind of cough pastille. We could buy ration biscuits, a very plain biscuit, something like today’s dog biscuits. I also spent money on cigarettes. Yes I learned to smoke at twelve years of age, one of the few bad things that happened at this time. I didn’t give it up until 1978.
The winters in the war were very cold. I saw wheel chains used on vehicles for the first time in my life. The summers were very hot. I can remember the surprise of seeing Victoria plums growing on the trees behind the Cross Keys Pub. I thought plums were only grown overseas.
About halfway through my stay in St Martins, I was transferred to another home. Mike McMullan went back to Wallasey and I went to join an evacuee called Charles Baxby at the home of Mr and Mrs Billy Ashman. This was a very happy home. Billy Ashman was another miner who had been all over the world and married late in life. He had been a boxing champion in his youth, and had fought in the United States Army in the Mexican wars. He had a tin trunk full of souvenirs from his world travels. He gave me a collar badge from his US Army uniform but I lost it eventually. I was very happy in this house and kept in touch with them until they both died in the 1970’s. I could have stayed on and been an apprentice blacksmith, but my parents wanted me to come home.
I could fill a book with tales of St Martins, which is quite a big village today and I can only speak good of the two years I spent there in the 1940’s.
My father died in January 1944, a year after I started work.
I have no objection to any, or part, of this record being published but would like to know if anything is published.
If you would like to know anything further, I would be pleased to hear from you.

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