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54 - Beatrice Morgan talks about her life in Stratford during the War:

"I was working along Tiddington Road, and we listened to the broadcast of the war, and we thought oh gosh what are we going to do, we had better build a shelter in the garden. And we started building the shelter and before we got it finished the sirens went, and we said well it isn’t safe for us to go down in the shelter, so we had better still keep on working and get it ready, so we did.
My boyfriend decided as he was a bit old for going in the Army or the Airforce that he would go in the fire brigade, so he went in what was called the AFS fire brigade, and they went to fires at Coventry, Birmingham, Avonmouth. But the one that we remember most is the one that was Coventry’s blitz. And they went off that night, and it was the night that my sister in law’s baby was due to be born, so I was with her and the midwife was there and in between being in the bedroom with her, I was looking out of a window and watching the fires at Coventry and I thought, oh is my husband going to come home safe? Anyway the baby was born, and we didn’t go to bed; my husband came in the morning, late morning, and he was black and wet through and he couldn’t speak to me, he just sort of pointed to the bathroom and he went and stripped off and had a bath and went to bed, and it wasn’t until he had had a good sleep that he was able to tell me anything about the blitz. He said we got there, we had got no water, and then the bombs fell and broke the banks and we had more water than we wanted, it flooded everywhere. He said we lost our vehicle and we thought we were never going to get out of it, but dawn came and the bombing ceased, and out of a cellar came an old gentleman with a bottle of whisky in one hand, and his little tin box with his money in, in the other hand, and he says come on lads and share, have a drink with me, he said, and that was one thing I shall always remember, which was a nice thing to think about with all the horrible things that he’d seen there.
I went to the fire service but I didn’t stay long enough to get uniform, I used to help with the cooking and with the telephone and then I was expecting my son, so that finished my time.
My husband was still there, and he still went on places like Avonmouth, which wasn’t all that good, and he said the food wasn’t very good either down there.

They went down there just to help out because of the raids being very bad and they needed extra firemen, and they went down there and they stayed there for a few days. And on his way back, he had a message to say that my son was due to be born, and when he got home he hadn’t been born, he was here when he was. But he said it’s not for me to risk my life like this and I’m going to leave the Fire Brigade and go and work in a factory, so that’s what he did.
When we were married, we had a spare room and like everybody who had spare rooms, you had to have someone living with you. As my husband was away a lot in the fire brigade, they allowed me to have people like a policeman and his wife, so I had one policeman and his wife and they stayed with me until he was called up for the Navy, I kept in touch with them for a while. But then I had an Air Force man who was at Wellesbourne, and he came to me and said had I got room, could he bring his wife and have a sleeping out pass and I said yes, and the day they came they carried a piece of wedding cake in their hands, they had got married that day and they were so pleased, and it was such a happy time, and I kept in touch with them until (and still do with his wife), he died.
His name was Frank, oh I can’t think of his surname, I have got it in the drawer.
And then he was posted out to the Middle East, and so his wife left me and went back to Birmingham.
I had 3 ladies who …, they had a shop in Birmingham and they wanted to get away for a few nights so that they could have a good sleep, and one of them was Yorkshire and I always remember she wanted us to have a meal like she cooked in Yorkshire where we had the Yorkshire pudding first with gravy.
Quite interesting to have these different people staying with me and to learn about other parts of the country and how other people lived.
They brought some of their rations, and having a shop you see they got a bit extra, so it was a bit lucky that way.
Mother and father lived at a village called Tysoe, and it was near Shennington Aerodrome, and at the aerodrome were three Jamaican lads, and on Sunday night they used to go down to the Chapel and mother and father living on a small farm had a little bit extra, and they used to invite them to come along for a bit of supper after the service. And I got to know them quite well, they were very, very different. The one was educated, the one was a real lad and I took him blackberrying, and he couldn’t believe this, he had never in his life seen anything like blackberries. And then one was not very healthy, and afterwards when he used to write to us we found that he was in a hospital for TB, and he died, but it was quite an experience to meet people who were coloured, because we hadn’t really come across people who were coloured at that time.

And the people who came from Birmingham they were quite frightened when the planes went over. We did have a lot of planes go over here and the searchlights, we use to go out and watch them across the sky but I wasn’t really frightened, because I hadn’t known the bombs like these Birmingham people had and they used to go down the cellar when there was anything on, they was too frightened to stay up. I know when my sister came here and there was the two of us, we got under the table we weren’t worried like they were, but people who had experienced it …
And then we had some relations from who had had 84 nights of bombing, and they came to Stratford ‘cos they were relations, they stayed with one of my relations, because they came for a bit of quiet, peaceful, sleep at nights. My husband went to Alcester, to a factory on the road that you go out to Redditch.

It was a bit awkward as regards clothing coupons. It was alright as regards food, I had the ration book for the baby, but when it came to clothing coupons, we had to use our margarine coupons for the first lot of clothing coupons, well of course he wasn’t born to have margarine coupons, so my mother helped me out with clothes for him. But when I used to go shopping in the town I was there one day and there was an old lady and she was in tears, she had just come out of the grocery store and she said I haven’t got any tea rations left and I can’t get any till next week, and I said oh I said you can have my baby’s, I said my husband and I have got our rations, and I have got tea rations for the baby so I gave her the baby’s tea rations.

One thing we used to do, there was a butchers shop in Bull Street, and on one day a week they made faggots, and faggots were not on coupons, and so we used to go with our basins and queue up for the faggots, and that was a little extra to our meat ration.

I remember around D Day - the noise in the night, and my husband working nights and I was here with my little boy and I thought I wonder what’s going on? So I got him out of bed, got him dressed, and went out, and the Americans were up and down the street, blowing the horns of the vehicles, and it was great excitement, but I was so glad that I had decided to get up and go out in the street and be part of it.

I made friends with some of the Americans, and also before I got married I found out that the Polish officers were in a house in the same road where I was working, in Tiddington Road. But we got friendly with some of the Americans, and one of them used to give my husband socks and jerseys, and he used to come here and have a cup of tea with us and he kept in touch till he went to Italy, and then he wrote (I have still got the letter that he wrote) to say that he was going back to America and then we didn’t hear anything of him, but that was the fault really that once they got back home, things had changed, and they didn’t want to bother to write.
Some of my friends married Americans, and of course the Americans were so smart in their uniform and seemed to be so well off when they were around Stratford, and the girls thought that it was like that back home, well it wasn’t. And I know some of them were very disillusioned when they went and found that their husbands lived in a back place where there was no facilities and they stuck it for a little while, and then they came back to Stratford.

There was one GI Bride in Evesham Place yes and she came back. Some of them stayed and were alright, but I mean seeing the Americans in their smart uniform and the way they talked, you didn’t believe that they probably came from some back place where there was no facilities.

When the War ended we just couldn’t believe it, and we were getting in touch with people, friends and relatives. And my brother had been in the army - a Midlander they put him in the Seaforth Highlanders in a kilt, and he got wounded crossing the Rhine, and he was put in a telephone exchange in Germany, and he met a German girl whose father and mother lived in Hanover, and he brought her over to this country, and they got married.

And the strange thing was that my father didn’t mind a bit, his son getting married to a German, but when his granddaughter was getting married to an American he went berserk! Because he thought the Americans let us down in the First World War and he didn’t want to know. Oh I always can see him walking up and down the room and so mad.

My mother and father still lived at the farm, and my young brothers and sisters ‘cos I was the oldest of six, some of them were still there at the farm.

It was very difficult to get to visit them… We had no transport to start with at all, and the only way that I could get was with a man who lived in Stratford and worked for a shop in Tysoe, and he would give me a lift but he was so keen on preserving his little supply of petrol, that we coasted down all the slopes, but that was the only way that I could get over there. Then there was the carriers who came to Stratford, and my mother and father used to send me things from the farm, and in the one field my father had, it was so good for growing mushrooms, and they used to send me mushrooms, then the war insisted on this field being ploughed up, so bang went the mushrooms, we didn’t have any mushrooms any more.

Just after the War my husband worked at a factory in Alcester, and he had a motor bike at first, and then he had a little car, but he had a bad accident and the car was written off and he had a cut hand, and he wasn’t able to work for a long time. And of course then there was no help like there is today financially, so that the only thing I could do, as I had been in private service, I went and worked at The William and Mary, which was the only hotel that was left open during the war.

Oh another thing that I remember during the war, because this was where he had some flats. On the corner where the doctors’ surgery is now in Chestnut Walk, all that building was used for the girls in the RAF who looked after the RAF officers that were in different hotels in Stratford, and there were two girls who used to come, made friends with me, and who used to come and say can we do our ironing at your house? And I know there was a card in amongst those things of these from these two girls, and they were there in the RAF looking after the people who were at the different hotels, The Falcon for officers, and The Red Horse.
And another thing I remember just after the war finished and all the air force went away from Stratford, that they had a sale at the Red Horse of the things that they had been using. Well it was at the time when my son was just needing a bed after his cot, so I went down to the sale and there was so many of us wanted the beds, but I managed to get friends and myself to put our names in to be drawn out to see if we could get one of these little iron bedsteads, and I was lucky and I got one of the little iron bedsteads that the officers had used down at the hotel during the war, for my son.

There were some bombs fell at Maidenhead Road which didn’t do any harm to anybody. The main thing at Stratford was hearing the bombers go over and seeing the searchlights, and knowing that somebody was getting bombed, but we were lucky enough here to miss it.

Ah, there was a small plane crashed on the island where the traffic lights, pedestrian traffic lights are. [Evesham Place]. It was when I was in the fire service, but I think it must have been because my son was a baby in the pram and I heard this plane making a funny noise, and I went out in the garden and I saw this plane and I saw it dive down and heard the crash and I pushed my baby round and saw it and it was awful, because they came with a lorry and the bodies were just like charred logs that they took out and put in there, yes. But I went to the commemoration of their deaths, and a relation came … We had a service in the Guild Chapel, and we went to Evesham Place and there was a plaque, there is a plaque there commemorating these two air force boys who lost their lives there, and I actually met and spoke to the one from Scotland whose son was one of them.

The plaque's still there, and there usually is a few flowers round it, yes. ‘Cos I see it if I go over the pedestrian crossing there, yes it’s there.
‘Cos I actually saw it dive down and then went round and saw all the remains, yes."

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