大象传媒

The first line of home defence was the Air Raid Warden and those men who were too old to join the forces had to be a warden. They had their Air Raid Posts in public buildings and our area post was in a vestry at Weelsby Road Methodist Church. Dad and Eric Smith joined out of our street and they were issued with a 'tin' helmet, a badge, a rattle and a whistle. Oh, and a forces type gas mask. In the vestry was a first aid kit, a stirrup pump and a spring loaded grab on the end of a pole for removing incendiary bombs.

When the air-raid siren went off, Dad and Eric had to report in. Eric would dramatise the situation by jumping on his bike, peddling like mad down the street and blowing his whistle all the time. This was quite a laugh and Mother would say, "Stupid fella!" every time it happened.
Later, the wardens were connected with a call system, so that when the chief warden received a 'Red' alert, he pressed a button and a buzzer would go off by Dads' bedside. It often went off half an hour before the air-raid sirens sounded and I think that they got a bit fed up with getting out of bed when an air raid did not materialise.

We all got a bit blas茅 after a few air raids and did not bother to go into the shelter which had been built behind the shed. An 'Anderson' shelter made out of corrugated sheet iron and buried three feet in the ground and covered over with soil, rocks and the like. Ours had a 'Blast' wall made up of large lumps of coal piled up under the bench in the shed. We would have been well incinerated if it had caught light. In the shelter were two bunks for us kids, candles, blankets, a tin of biscuits and a 'potty' for emergencies. We had to use the shelter hurriedly on several occasions when they bombed the docks, using bright parachute flares to light up the town and dropping land mines and incendiaries. Pat had a lucky escape when a piece of shrapnel from the anti-aircraft guns landed a foot away from her as she surveyed the scene. It was very hot when she picked it up and was three inches long. It would have killed her outright if she had been further out of the doorway.

Pat had joined the WRENS, the female branch of the Navy and at some time, lived at home whilst working on the docks. Her office, was a hut on the North Wall of the docks. It had a blast wall made up of sandbags and large corned beef tins, or so Pat told us. One day, Pat brought a tin of corned beef home, carried in the saddle bag of her bike. It was a large tin, there must have been ten pounds weight in it. Unfortunately, the tin had a crack in it and the corned beef had 'blown'. We dare not eat any of it and we dare not throw the tin in the dustbin in case we were caught with government property.
The solution was, to go out at night, in the dark, and while I held the torch, Dad dug a big hole in the garden and we buried the corned beef. What a shame, we could have been eating corned beef for weeks.

Later on in the war, Grimsby was the first town to have anti-personnel bombs dropped on it. They were the 'butterfly' bombs, which, when dropped from the aircraft, would spring out two covers, like wings, which would then rotate up a shaft to propel the bomb like a sycamore seed down to the ground.
They did not explode on landing, but if touched after that, would go off and blow a person up. Thousands of these bombs landed all over Grimsby and people did not know what they were so many got killed or maimed that night.
The next day, bombs were found in roof gutters, gardens and in the streets all over the place. There were so many that they sandbagged round them until the bomb disposal teams could get to them and blow them up.
I was acting as a messenger for the council offices where Pat worked. We had on our Scout uniform and on our bikes, delivered messages to areas all round town. I not only had to find out where to go, but kept an eye out for butterfly bombs or sandbagged bombs in the roadways. I learnt a lot about life and death in those few days.

The best part of being a messenger was the Chocolate drink that the office had. The Americans had sent over tins of chocolate drink, mixed with sugar and dried milk, so you only had to add water to get a nice sweet drink.
If the tin got damp, the mixture solidified to make lumps of chocolate, not seen in those days.
The worst part of that job was trying to find the addresses and getting to them. Some streets were bombed down and you had to make a detour. The reception for bombed out people who had to be re-housed, was in the Town Hall main hall. I had to go there to get the letters for delivery. Along the centre of the hall was a long table with the WRVS. ladies in control. (Women鈥檚 Voluntary Service.) The rest of the hall was filled with families, their rescued belongings, pets, babies, all making a mess all over the place.
I did not think much to that at all, and even less when I asked one of the ladies where Guildford Street was. "Your a Boy Scout," she retorted, "Go and find out." So I asked the policeman on the door where it was, and off I went.

DADS ARMY.

Dad joined the Home Guard, or the L.D.V. (Local Defence Volunteers) as it was known. In this age it has the nickname of "Dads' Army", after a television series about it. The series is a good laugh now, but those things really did happen but were not as funny in those days.

Dad went up the ranks to be a Captain of the Scartho branch. He took quite a few training sessions and would make up mock bombs to train the 'troops'. One was a "Sticky Bomb", used by the army to 'stick' to tanks and vehicles, running off before it exploded. It was not unlike a ball-cock from a cistern, so Dad got one and made a hinged cover over the ball. The ball was then covered with an extremely sticky substance and the cover replaced.
The drill was, to take off the cover, run up to a tank and stick the bomb on the side, pull the pin and run. I do not think that they were any good. Perhaps that was why the Home Guard had them.

On one occasion Dad was taking a training session on rifle aiming. This was accomplished by the rifleman laying down and aiming his rifle at a small round disk held about a yard away. The trainer looked through a hole in the middle of the disk and therefore along the sights of the gun. Blank ammunition was used, with no explosion, just the click of the trigger, followed by, eject and reload. As the rifle clicked, the trainer would say if the rifle had been aimed correctly.
The session was coming to an end, when the Home guard in the next room heard an explosion. Expecting the worst, they crept into the room to see Dad sitting on a chair, shaking and looking up at the ceiling at a bullet hole.
By sheer luck, after stopping the session, Dad ordered "Unload", when the routine was to stand up, unload once and then pull the trigger. The last bullet happened to be a 'live' round and went through the ceiling. It could have been Dads eye and the end of him.
How a 'live' round had found its way amongst the dummies, nobody knows, but it was a lucky escape for Dad.

MORE AIR RAIDS AND 'DOODLE BUGS'

The air raids were pretty intensive from time to time over Grimsby. They were after blowing up the docks and the shipping in the Humber. Sometimes, a stray German plane would fly over the town machine gunning as it went, or would drop its load of bombs as it fled. A 'stick' of bombs, as they were called, was dropped along Weelsby Road. Nearly every other corner house from Heneage Road to Fryston had a bomb dropped on it. Some went off, destroying the house. Some did not go off, the corner of Farebrother Street had one in the garden.

Two unexploded bombs were dropped in the field where Wintringhams had their horses in, at the end of Weelsby Avenue. The horsemen reported finding the holes to the office, but before the bomb disposal crew could get there, Dad and I went into the field to find them. We were just a bit daft for doing this, as the bombs could have been delayed action bombs. We found the two holes, about twelve inches across, the sides quite smooth with the paint from the bomb deposited round the sides. Brown, with traces of blue and white. They did not go off of course, perhaps they had not been primed correctly.

We had the odd German plane crash land near Peakes tunnel. Us lads would try to get near to it, but they were guarded. Sometimes we would pick up the odd piece of aircraft structure or the stray bullet. Most of all, we could find lots of silver paper streamers. These were jettisoned from the aircraft to fool the radar scanners. Lots of silver paper floating down all over the place.
The Barrage Balloons were large silver/grey balloons with tail fins to stabilise them, filled with hydrogen and let out on the end of a wire rope. Each important building or ship would have one suspended over it. The idea was that the attacking plane would hit the wire rope as it came in to bomb the object. They could be brought down by the fighter escorts machine gunning the balloons, and sometimes they would get loose and float over the town. One landed in the fields behind us, most of us had bits of the fabric, but it wasn't much use to us. It made good bike covers though.

One day, a stray plane machine gunned all the way down Freeman Street and over the Peoples Park. There were several civilian casualties, one of them being Eric Chapman who was walking in the park at the time. He lived in Park Drive and was not far from home. That incident made him paralysed from the waist down for the rest of his life.
Eric was a 16mm film maker and, although photography was not permitted during the war years, he took film of the fires on the docks. Further to that incident, after the war, Eric bought a 8mm film camera, as he could not hold the weight of the 16mm one. Some of his 16mm filming remains in the Cine Societies film library and has been transferred onto video since.

Towards the end of the war, the Germans sent over their remote controlled bombs and rockets. The first, we named "the Doodle Bugs". They were transported under a plane and dropped just off the coast. Their guidance system took them over Grimsby and inland to drop on to Sheffield or Manchester. They made quite a noise like a two stroke engine as they went over. If the engine stopped, it meant that it would then fall. So, counting the seconds, you could guess where it would land and explode. The searchlights could pick them up as they flew over the town, and the Anti Aircraft guns would let rip in an attempt to bring them down. They did not have much success over Grimsby and so they went on to their target.
If the "Doodle Bugs" were launched in daylight, the fighter planes would try to tip them up so that they went off course and exploded off target. Some fighter pilots got very good at tipping them with their wings. It was better than firing at them, as if the bomb went off, it would blow the plane up as well with the blast. They did a lot of damage to towns, but not as much as the rockets that came later. These were let loose to land on to London, and did great damage. Nobody could hear them coming, unlike the "Doodle Bugs", and they made great craters and killed many civilians. Luckily, the invasion of Germany progressed so that they were not used extensively.

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