大象传媒

One of the evacuees from London at the school was Roger Bannister (later to be the first person to run a sub-four-minute mile whilst training as a doctor in Oxford), who achieved record times in the school junior cross-country race three years running. It was a very hilly three mile course that ran to Entry Hill, up across the fields to Fox Hill on the slopes of Combe Down and then down into Watery Bottom before climbing back up to Lyncombe Hill and Beechen Cliff and round to the school. I think my best place in those years was no. 92!
The school also had three uniformed organisations, The Sea Cadets, Air Cadets and Army Cadets. I joined the Army Cadets to pursue my radio hobby and was quickly involved in communications with field radio-telephone sets. We also learnt to drill with and fire the Lee-Enfield .303 rifle, and I acquired marksman status.
I also joined the school choir (I was a treble in the local St. Luke鈥檚 Church choir until I became a bass) and remember making a record for HMV under conductor Alan Bennett and with the sixth former Raymond Leppard (now the internationally renowned conductor) as the pianist. (I once helped him to regain access to his home in Milton Avenue by climbing in a small rear window when he had mislaid his key!).
Another change in our street scene, shortly after the Blitz, was the installation of static water tanks. At the time of the blitz the water supply was quickly damaged and there was no pressure available to fight the fires on the higher slopes of the hills. As an insurance against future raids a pipeline was laid up the kerbside in the Wells Road and in to Hayesfield Park and to the Bear Flat where large concrete tanks were constructed in the roads. One was also built in Chaucer Road outside our house (number 29) and was some 30 feet long by 8 feet wide and 6 feet deep, with walls about 6 inches thick. When first filled it leaked like a sieve, especially at the corners, and was quickly patched until watertight 鈥� although it looked as if it had a large number of carbuncles! It was eventually covered with wire netting for safety 鈥� but was quite a hazard for cyclists on dark nights, especially as there were no street lights.
We found a new hobby in the collection of shrapnel and tail fins from incendiary bombs and similar 鈥渇inds鈥�, which we would swap with each other. A longer-term hobby became the building and flying of model aircraft, made of balsa wood and covered with thin tissue. As we were unable to get elastic for propeller driven aircraft we built mainly gliders, which we would launch on tow-lines from the school playing fields. When we had difficulty in obtaining balsa cement to glue them together we found a way of making some cement from celluloid and nail varnish. My hobby later developed into constructing radios and amplifiers, and even a radio control transmitter and receiver for use with model aircraft.
We also quickly became used to the bombed sites 鈥� which made a large number of extra 鈥減lay鈥� areas. These soon had short-cut footpaths worn across them, and the ugliness was quickly covered by buddleia and other fast growing 鈥渨eeds鈥�.
In Beechen Cliff, off Holloway, one bombed site opened up an entrance into the extensive cave system in the hillside, which we explored with torches and candles. There were caverns and underground waterfalls and some stone lined tunnels leading to the ancient water supply. Bombs had collapsed some of these.
The sight of all of the bomb damaged areas became ingrained into our memories, such that even now we can 鈥渟ee鈥� what they looked like and where they were. The one in Kipling Avenue (now numbers 23, 24 and 24a) was still unrebuilt by the end of the war - so that is where we had our bonfire on VE Day and later VJ Day in June and August 1945, with an effigy strung over the fire. Mr. Pearce from 5 Chaucer Road brought out his film projector and played cartoon films (Mickey Mouse and Felix The Cat) on the blank wall of the top house in Kipling Avenue on the Chaucer Road frontage, using the power supply of the street lamp opposite!
The blitz may have lasted only two full nights, from the evening of Saturday 25th to the morning of Monday the 27th April 1942, but those moonlit nights were a defining moment for us. We had lost the innocence of childhood and had been thrust into full awareness of life and death, of terror and distrust, and of the ugliness of destruction and hate. And yet we learnt how to care for each other and how to pull together in a unison and harmony that transcended the pre-war boundaries of society.
And so we began to celebrate peace and there was a great release of tension, which had been under the surface ever since that night the war had come home to us. Nevertheless there were those known to us who hadn鈥檛 made it and we felt obliged to attempt to make the world a place where what had happened could not happen again.
After the war I finished my schooling at 16 and in that last year, after 鈥渕ock school cert鈥� exams I went to a meeting at St. Luke鈥檚 Church Hall, where Commander Oliver (of 2 Chaucer Road), a former naval Fencing Champion, founded the Bath Sword Club. A number of us went for training under the British Olympic Fencing Coach, Roger Crosnier, and became qualified fencing instructors. The club entered county and national competitions and quickly became established as a leading club.
After school I worked for two years in the family firm before my call-up. I still followed my radio communications 鈥渂ent鈥� and joined the Royal Signals, where I trained as a Telecommunications Technician. However just before the end of my course I was taken ill with influenza, which was rife in Catterick Camp that winter (1950/51), and spent 11 weeks in Catterick Military Hospital. There I was given two courses of injections of penicillin (in the rear!) adding up to a total of 72 鈥渏abs鈥�. I was discharged from there to the convalescent depot at Hereford, which was housed in the camp which was more recently occupied by the SAS! We were the very opposite of fitness to them!
I was given chest x-rays at monthly intervals to check on the slow rate of clear-up of the disease in my lungs, and suffered a relapse in the summer which put me in Chester Military Hospital for another month with suspected TB, which it fortunately was not. There I met some soldiers invalided back from Korea. Returning to Hereford I was eventually discharged from there back to Catterick a year and a day after going sick! On the journey from Hereford to Catterick via Manchester we stopped at Crewe Junction, where I bought an evening newspaper with the headline THE KING IS DEAD 鈥� it was the 6th February 1952. I had started my service under King George 6th, I would now continue under Queen Elizabeth the 2nd.
They allowed me to finish the last two weeks of my course and then I trained to operate, install and maintain, very large and powerful communications transmitters and receivers operating on short wave radio, which in those days was the only way to communicate world-wide other than by cable, which then was very limited. I then spent three years in East Africa on such a station, flying out by a trooping charter 鈥淵ork鈥� aircraft from Blackbushe airfield in Hampshire, with refuelling at Malta (where the welcome heat of the tarmac in the early evening was in contrast to the October mist we had left) and a stop-over at Bengazi for 22 hours, in order to make the desert crossing the following night, refuelling at Karthoum. We heard later that the York did not make it back beyond Malta, where a structural fault after take-off caused it to crash with the loss of all on board.
We arrived in Nairobi two weeks after the declaration of the emergency and I eventually returned home in 1955 just as it was finishing. We enjoyed the climate of the 5000 feet plus altitude (84 degrees F all the year round!), living in sight of two extinct volcanoes 鈥� Mount Kenya and Mount Kilimanjaro. Our leaves were spent either at the coast, on the Indian Ocean, or on 鈥渇arm-guard鈥� leave on the Kinangop Plateau at over 8000 feet, where we would have frosts overnight.
Our return flight was by a Hermes charter aircraft (civil version of the RAF鈥檚 Hastings), run by Eagle Airways, and was accomplished with 4 refuelling stops 鈥� Entebbe, Karthoum, Wadi-Haifa and Naples.
After settling in 鈥渃ivvy street鈥� I joined a mixed voice choir (The Silver Ring Choir of Bath) and was involved, as secretary, in their first trip overseas in 1961 to celebrate their 10th anniversary, by visiting and staying with a German Choir in the Odenwald as a sign of reconciliation between our nations. It was as a result of this that I re-met Naida and we married the next year.
The Blitz had torn apart buildings and exposed their very fabric and construction 鈥� foundations, damp-proof course, cavity walls, roof construction, electrics, services. This gave us the ground-work of understanding, built on by my army training in power supplies, electrics and electronics, plus the ability to think laterally, that gave us the motivation and self-belief to build our own house from scratch when we could not afford to do it in any other way. This we did at Combe Down over a period of four years and moved in in 1966. There our family has arrived and grown up and moved on, and we are happily still there. An outcome we could never have forseen at the time of the Blitz, but which we had had the courage and belief to seek.

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