大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Graham Lewis for Three Counties Action on behalf of Mrs Frances Palmer and has been added to the site with her permission. Mrs Palmer fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

I was born in Cardiff and eleven years of age when the war started. My father had been in the Welsh Guards during the inter-war years and during World War2 he was in the military police. When I left school I worked as a telephonist in Air Despatch, a company which repaired training aircraft.

Cardiff was heavily bombed. There were unexploded bombs in Queen Street, one of the main central shopping streets of Cardiff. After the raid in which Queen Street was hit, the Englishman who broadcast regularly for the Germans on their radio and was nicknamed 鈥淟ord Haw-Haw鈥� by us broadcast a message saying, 鈥淪orry, Queen Street 鈥� the bombs there were intended for the arsenal in Whitchurch.鈥� (Whitchurch is on the outskirts of Cardiff.)

The men who defused the unexploded bombs in Queen Street were each given a gold watch by a local jeweller.

On Penylan Hill, men on scaffolding who were working on a gasometer were machine-gunned by a German fighter aircraft. A bomb fell straight into the hold of a ship moored in Cardiff docks killing all the men there.

I married a man from St Athan who went to India and Burma.

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