大象传媒

On the night that the Luftwaffe targeted a Twickenham factory for a bombing raid, such was the intensity of the onslaught that emergency services had to be called in from several parts of London. Among them was my father, War Reserve Police Constable No. 592, Alec O'Callaghan, stationed at Hounslow. As he and his fellow officers approached the area in a police van, a bomb exploded in the main road some 200 yards in front of them, forcing them to a stop. Eventually, they managed to negotiate their way through side roads towards the centre of the conflagration. The officers were appalled by the ferocity of this particular raid. The whole area was lit up by fires, as many small houses behind the factory burned.

"There was panic in the streets. We were trying to get all these people into a church hall - which I don't think was very wise because if that had been hit, there would have been large casualties. There were women in the streets - I can see them now - carrying their kids in their arms, crying and shouting. It was hysteria."

Alec's memories of his experiences in the police force during the second world war remain vivid. Although Hounslow, the area in which he lived and was stationed, did not suffer the brunt of the bombing , the officers were kept constantly informed about the carnage experienced in other parts of London.

"We used to get the details every morning in a special report. And the casualties in the East End during the blitz were horrific. I could stand there on night duty at No. 7 Box at Cranford and see the red sky in the distance - which was the East End of London burning."

Alec joined the Metropoliton Police in October 1940, at the height of the blitz. He recalls that before the Summer of that year there was little sign of the war in London and a false sense of security prevailed. However, in June 1940, when the news came that Paris had fallen, the mood of the people changed. " We were all very nervous. We thought our turn would be next."

And so it nearly proved. August 1940 saw the Battle of Britain fought in the skies over south-east England and the Channel. Then came the blitz - 57 consecutive nights of bombing. "People automatically went to the shelter every night because they were certain that air raids were coming, which they did - night after night, week after week."

Alec recalls that one of the officers' duties was to man the police boxes where the sirens were controlled. "You'd be on a police box for 8 hours - perhaps all night -and you'd get a telephone call which would say 'Yellow Warning', which meant there was the possibility of a raid starting. And then a few minutes later you'd either get a green 'All Clear' or a red 'Sound Siren', which meant you had to throw the switch. And this siren was on a great pole above you - it woke everybody up and you could hear it for miles because they all went off together round the area"

My father's parents lived in Goldhawk Road, Shepherd's Bush and he used to visit them as often as he could. One morning he arrived to find that a 1000 pound bomb had exploded at the bottom of their garden, forming a crater, the outer rim of which was only feet from their Anderson Shelter. The bomb had damaged the back of their house and there were some big houses nearby that had been half demolished. "That was a very narrow escape and it really shook them up - particularly my mother because she changed after that. She had always been a bright, cheerful, robust type of woman - but that bomb knocked the stuffing out of her."
When the blitz ended, London experienced a quiet period for a while and Alec found himself doing normal police duties. There was little traffic about, and much of the work involved patrolling the streets looking out for break - ins. The police were on a constant vigil for such activity as the strict blackout presented a golden opportunity for would - be thieves.

The blackout also created other problems. When Alec was on the early morning shift, he needed to leave the house a 5.30 a.m. During the winter months, the blackness at this hour was intense and he had to gingerly feel his way in order to avoid walking into lamp-posts or falling into ditches. One morning he was edging his way along, when: "A huge thing came at me and I wondered what the devil it was. The thing snorted and galloped off. It was a runaway horse which had probably got free from a local gypsy camp. I couldn't see it - but I heard it. Frightened me to death."

Another unnerving experience was travelling back at night on the Piccadilly Line to Hounslow West Station. This part of the tube system was in the open air. "All the lights in the carriages were out - but flashes kept coming from underneath the train because of the electric rails. And that's what we were told the German aircraft looked for. When there was an air raid on, it was very scary. You had to sit there with your fingers crossed and it was a huge relief to get off and away from the railway line."

June 1944 holds special memories for my father. One night he was on duty monitoring incoming messages about an air raid. Normally they would get reports that 3 or 4 enemy planes had been shot down - some nights as many as 6. This particular night, however, the count went up and up until it went over 40. Although they didn't know it at the time, the officers were witnessing the beginning of the assault on London by the V1s,or flying bombs. These had been launched in huge numbers and our pilots were knocking as many as they could out of the sky. Later, the policemen would experience the V1s directly: " We heard this unusual sound which was totally different to any aeroplane. It had that distinctive throb and - although we weren't aware of it at the time - when it cut out, it was time to duck"

I was born on June 19th of that year. My father recalls that he was roused from his Morrison Shelter in the early hours to be told that my mother had given birth. He made his way to Queen Charlotte's Hospital, Hammersmith to discover that I had arrived in the middle of a V1 raid. The danger of flying glass from the huge plate - glass windows had prompted the nurses to wheel all the beds out of the ward. I had been born in a corridor!

Although the V1 raids were at their most intense in the middle of 1944, they continued, day and night, for some time afterwards. "They were rotten things, really. In the daylight you could see them and if the engine cut out you could tell which way they were going to dive and take cover if necessary. They were more frightening at night, when you could only hear them. Usually, they would dive at an angle, so if one cut out directly above your head, you were reckoned to be pretty safe. But if it cut out before that, you just had to take cover and keep your fingers crossed. Yes, they were nasty things."

In September of that year, during a period of relative inactivity, Alec was at home one night when: " there was a most weird sound - I'd never heard it before - it was like.....woooosh! It went on for quite a while and then, after a slight pause, there was a huge BANG!"

The authorities put out a story the following day that a gas main had exploded. The police, however, were quickly told the truth. The explosion had been caused by the first V2 rocket to fall on England - and it had landed in Chiswick. Unlike the V1s, there was no warning at all when the V2s arrived: "You never knew. It just hit you - that's all there was to it."

In late 1944, Alec was transferred from Hounslow to Harlington Police Station, a small country station to the West of London. Alec wasn't happy about the transfer - he'd been at Hounslow for four years and had no inclination to move. Furthermore, he didn't have a bike and much of the police work at Harlington involved patrolling country lanes.

"I wasn't a lot of use to them there at Harlington, I'm afraid. But the amazing thing was that here was a remote station which just controlled a bit of countryside on the edge of the metropolitan area....and it was surrounded by market gardens. Miles and miles of market gardens all the way round. And that, now, is Heathrow Airport."

After six weeks of "making a damned nuisance of myself", Alec, to his great relief was transferred back to Hounslow.

Towards the end of the war, Alec found himself doing more and more ordinary police duties. He was once shipped to Cannon Row Police Station and given the job of point duty in Parliament Square. "There wasn't anywhere near the volume of traffic then, of course. But it was quite an experience - only a stone's throw from Downing Street."

Much of his work at this time was routine and often extremely boring. There was a place in Isleworth called Nantly House which, Alec thinks, must have contained electronic, anti-aircraft equipment. The police were required to guard it 24 hours a day and were armed especially for the purpose. " It had a big porch, and when we were on night duty we'd stick ourselves in the porch, shut the door to keep the cold weather out, produce a torch and a paperback and have a damned good read. It was the most boring job -8 hours of nothing happening"

A more exciting event occurred on the night of December 14th 1945, some three months after the cessation of hostilities, when Alec found himself involved in 'Operation Dragnet', one of the largest manhunts ever organised in peacetime. The operation had been secretly planned by the military and civil police, and its objective was to round up deserters in London. The authorities had calculated that up to 12,000 deserters from the British and Allied armed forces might be at large in the city, and the campaign to ensnare as many as possible was carried out with military precision by 2,000 Metropolitan officers, supported by large numbers of Service policemen. Alec's division was assigned to the Charing Cross Astoria in Tottenham Court Road, where Joe Loss and his band were playing. Identity cards were checked, and about a dozen or so people were rounded up and taken back to West End Central to be processed. Alec observes, wryly, "I think we even nicked one of the band - but he turned out to be innocent." This operation was reflected throughout inner London in places of public entertainment.

Alec left the police force in January 1946 and returned to his pre-war job as an insurance salesman. Throughout the war, his father had looked after his 'book' of clients for him, so he was able to return with few problems. During his police service he had been paid 拢3 per week.

Now 97 years old, my father still recalls the enormous sense of relief that came with the end of the war. "Although some of us hadn't suffered as much as others, we were all under a very great strain. It was always on your mind that something might happen - which it very often did. But if you escaped it, you just got on with the job. Yes, dark days some of them were."

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