- Contributed by听
- CSV Solent
- People in story:听
- Samual Charles Humphry
- Location of story:听
- Southampton, Hampshire.
- Background to story:听
- Civilian
- Article ID:听
- A6583962
- Contributed on:听
- 01 November 2005
SOUTHAMPTON IN THE BLITZ
The war started in 1939 when I was 14 years old and I had just left school. The bombing started in 1940.I lived at Wodehouse Road in Woolston, Southampton. Vosper Ship Repairers and Fairy Aviation where Spitfires were made, was only a quarter of a mile away.
My Mum and Dad had gone out on Sunday afternoon and suddenly there was all this banging outside. I went outside and saw twin-engined air crafts, zigzagging between the barrage balloons. The planes were flying very low and dropping bombs onto Super Marine. Guns were going off and the raid went on for half an hour. The barrage balloons littered the sky, they were everywhere, over Pear Tree Green, the Verasity Ground and the Common. The Library in Woolston, all of the buildings at the bottom of Manor Road and Pear Tree Green were bombed. The air was full of gas and the bombs left huge craters in the road. The Luftwaffe dropped live shell bombs and incendiary bombs. The whole of Southampton was burning. At Weston, there was a barrage of guns facing out to sea.
My Father was an air raid precautions warden and I ran messages for him; between the Woolston and Bittern stations. One night when I was delivering a message, It was a black out and there was an air raid on, a car came towards me, I was riding a bike when the car hit me head on. This happened when I was 15 and I was in hospital for two weeks with concussion. The bombing would start at 6.00pm in the evening and go on until midnight on Saturday and Sunday. A family who lived opposite to us went to stay in Scotland at the beginning of the war, but returned to Southampton in 1940 as nothing had happened.The first night they stayed there was a direct hit on their air raid shelter and they were all killed. You could hear the bombs whistle over head but you didn鈥檛 know where they were going to land.
My Father had a window cleaning business and I worked for him. I would go and clean windows on Tuesdays and go back to collect the money on Fridays but as often as not, the windows would have all been blown out yet I still had to collect the money.
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