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This story has been submitted to the People’s War site by Anne Wareing on behalf of Vera Kennedy and has been added to the site with her permission…

When the war started in September 1939 I was sixteen and a half years of age. The Blackpool Illuminations had switched off and the summer visitors gone home.

One of the first priorities was to get our gas masks. We lived in Westmorland Avenue and had to go to Revoe School for ours. There the St John Ambulance people were very busy fitting and adjusting masks for everyone, from babies to very old people.

Going by recent events in Europe it was expected that bombing of places like Manchester and Liverpool would begin very soon. Blackpool was considered to be a ‘safe’ area, so evacuees started to arrive. Every home was visited and children placed wherever there was a spare bed. Hotels and boarding houses were full to capacity with service men, mainly RAF. It became a common sight to see hundreds of them marching and drilling on the ‘prom’ and playing fields and even on the sands when the tide was out.

One day we realized there was something happening on our street (Westmorland Ave.) ambulances were arriving and parking nose to tail, (or bumper to bumper). The queue stretched from Whitegate Drive at one end, up to Park Road and over the hill to Central Drive! Mother enquired, then told us they were filled with patients from hospitals and nursing homes in Liverpool.

All day our mum and neighbours took jugs of tea and sandwiches out to them. The queue moved very slowly as beds were made available in the old Victoria Hospital and several nursing homes along Whitegate Drive. Every now and then one ambulance would edge out of line and race at top speed down our street and round the corner to Glenroyd Maternity Home and another Liverpool mother would have her baby born in Blackpool.

When we went to bed the ambulances were still there. As the front ones emptied others joined the end of the line. The nurses and ambulance crews were very cheerful and caring, the neighbourhood did what they could, but it must have been a very stressful time for all those patients and expectant mums.

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