大象传媒

I want to tell of 2 incidents in my late father's war. He was Robert Frederick Pearce and had served in the Royal Engineers in Gallipoli and Palestine and Egypt in the First World War. In 1939 he was aged 50, and as a coachbuilder on the Southern Railway, he had to help maintain the coaches for the troop trains and also the goods trains. It was a very essential job and he travelled all over the region to various depots and sidings.

In 1940, along with so many others, he fire-watched at night - when did we ever sleeep during those war years? - and I have a letter from the curate of the Old Parish Church in Bermondsey Street, thanking him for all he did to save the Old Church and saying that he did more than was asked of him. 12 shillings (60 pence in today's money) was enclosed as a small 'thank you' from the parishioners.

Later in the war, on leaving the C.M.E. Depot at New Cross Gate at noon on Saturday, 25 November, 1944 (when I was on leave and had come up to Clifton Rise to meet him at the Rose Inn opposite Woolworth's), he became involved in the terrible V2 incident in the New Cross Road. As a railway-trained St. John's First Aider, he instantly volunteered to help care for the injured who were being taken to the Rose Inn, and after dressing wounds, etc., he accompanied many of those injured to Guy's Hospital. Mother and I waited anxiously, with no news of him, and he did not return home until well after midnight. His name does not appear in Jess Steel's book, 'Remembering Woolworth's' but I told her about him later when we met at St. James Hatcham when a plaque to commemorate this event was placed on a wall on the spot where Woolworth's once stood.

So many people were like this, doing what had to be done with complete disregard for their own safety and comfort. I like to think this was our finest hour. Such selflessness was displayed. Special mention has to be made of all those wives and mothers who queued almost endlessly for a modicum of food, women who received no medals and must have ended the war absolutely worn out.

I am now 82, and at that time our home was in Rotherhithe New Road, S.E.16 in railway-owned flats. The comradeship I experienced during my war service has lasted for me up to the present time and I look on that as a blessing.

Incidently, Bermondsey is on record in print - see 'Riverside Story' - as having received the heaviest tonnage of bombs in the Blitz. Only the East End is ever mentioned on T.V. and radio.

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