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This account remembering World War Two is given by Mr John McCrickett of Whitehaven, Cumbria and posted on his behalf. He has read and understood the terms of the ´óĎó´ŤĂ˝ "People's War" website.

Introduction

My name is John McCrickett and these are a few of the memories I have about my home town of Whitehaven, in what is now Cumbria, during World War Two. During the war Whitehaven was then in the county of Cumberland. The surrounding area was probably doing well in ways that we had not had before the war when the coal mines had been closed down for some time.

There were always lots of things to do and looking back, there were many good memories. I have written down some of these memories as younger family members sometimes ask about what happened all those years ago.

Before the war

I was born at Bardy Lane, Whitehaven in December 1929. My parents were Edward and Cecilia McCrickett. I had one elder sister, Sally, who was born two years before me. Bardy Lane was next to Whitehaven harbour, near the Electric Lighting Station and Quay Street Church. My parents had moved down to Whitehaven from Cleator Moor. My Dad had changed his job from working in the iron ore mines at Cleator and had started in the Whitehaven coal mines. Lots of my mother’s relations lived nearby, including my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Even if they weren’t related, everyone seemed to know everybody else.

In 1933, just before I was four years old, everyone moved up from Bardy Lane to a new council house at Fell View Avenue, Woodhouse. A lot of our neighbours from Bardy Lane moved up to Woodhouse at the same time, or just afterwards. We had lots of relations: aunts, uncles and cousins, who lived at Woodhouse. Next door was my Grandma Sarah Jane and other relations. By then, both my grandfathers who had lived with us had died, one in 1931 and the other in 1932.

At Bardy Lane we just had bath tubs for washing and outside toilets. When we moved to Woodhouse we had electricity, running water, an indoor toilet and a fixed bath. It was a big improvement.

A few months after we moved to Woodhouse, when I was about 4½ years old, the School Board Man called to say I should have started school when I was four. So I started school at 4½, going down to Quay Street School near where we had moved from. We used to walk to and from Quay Street every day, and usually with my best friend who lived nearby who was about six months younger.

I think it was in 1936 when they opened St Mary’s Catholic school at Kells and I was one of the first to go there. One of the nuns who used to teach there was Sister Hermengild from the convent at Corkickle. She taught at St Mary’s for about thirty years until she retired. I then moved on to St Begh’s school on Coach Road until I left school altogether at the age of fourteen, towards the end of 1943.

When war broke out

When war broke out in September 1939 I was nine years old. My Mam and Dad had just bought a wireless for the first time. Not everybody had a wireless, so we used to get friends and relations who came in to listen to it. On the third of September we listened to Neville Chamberlain speaking and he said we were at war with Germany. It was a Sunday morning at eleven o’clock. Everybody had been to church. Grandma Sarah Jane, aunties, uncles, cousins and some neighbours came in to listen to this. It was expected in a way, but everybody was a bit sombre the day war broke out.

It was announced there would be some evacuees coming over from Newcastle in the North East. They were going to come to St Begh’s on Coach Road. Families who were going to take them in were told to meet them there. We couldn’t take any evacuees because we had no bed space or accommodation for them, but lots of our neighbours did.

I went down with my best friend to meet them. His mother was going to collect two brothers to stay with them. It turned out there was another brother, a bit younger, who was pining for the other two. He was supposed to go with someone else, but went with his two brothers. So my friend’s family took three in.

Refugees

Some refugees from Europe came to Whitehaven and all around this area. They seemed to do quite well. There were Jewish families from Austria, Germany, Hungary and elsewhere. People like Fred Marzilier, Frank Schon and Nicky Sekers who started the Marchon and Sekers’ factories came up to Cumberland about then. They employed a lot of townspeople for years afterwards. There were a lot of Danish fisherman who came into Whitehaven and based their fleet here during the war. They’d probably remembered Whitehaven from when they’d been fishing in the Irish Sea.

In the First World War a lot of Belgian fishermen had done the same when they had been invaded. Many of them had married and were still living at Sandwith village, near we lived at Woodhouse. After 1945 some of the Danes stayed in Whitehaven although some went back home.

Probably because their countries had been invaded they didn’t like Germans very much. After the war, in about 1951, I went to Denmark on holiday. I had a fair complexion, fair hair and I had a Cumbrian accent which the Danes likely don’t think sounds like an English or Scottish accent. I was in this café and the staff were obviously talking about me. But as I couldn’t understand Danish I didn‘t know what they were saying. They were a bit slow or reluctant to serve me, it turned out because they thought I was German. When they found out I was not German, but British and from Whitehaven, well they couldn’t have been more friendly and I got really good service!

The Home Front

Because my Dad, uncles and some other relatives worked in the Whitehaven pits none of them were called up to the Forces. Those of our neighbours who did get called up were those who were with the Territorial Army, even some miners. Some of the Territorials had gone away on ‘Summer Camp’ in the August and then they were more or less sent straight off to the war. A number of these never came back home because they were killed, while others were made Prisoners of War at Dunkirk and came back home six years later in 1945.

From what I remember, unless you were an ARP or Conscientious Objector, there were three types of service that men had to do on the ‘Home Front’. There was the ‘Home Guard‘, who wore a khaki uniform, the ‘Pit Guard’ who also wore khaki and ‘Fire Watchers’ who wore blue. From what I remember the ‘Pit Guard’ were more or less like the ‘Home Guard’ but were stationed at mines like Haig Pit at Kells. The ‘Home Guard’ seemed to exercise more and looked after places like the harbour.

My Uncle Michael (McCrink) had been in the First World War, volunteering for the Border Regiment in 1914 and was one of the few men who came back home to Whitehaven after going right through that war. Funnily enough, he wasn’t in the ‘Home Guard’ but was a ‘Fire Watcher’ the same as my Dad. Although they worked at Haig Pit down at Kells, they used to do ‘Fire Watching’ at Ladysmith Pit. Likely, this was because it was a bit closer to where we lived at Woodhouse. So Uncle Michael and my Dad wore a blue uniform and did this Fire Watching duty as well their job working down Haig Pit. Of course everybody had a gas mask.

Sheltering from German aeroplanes

There was an air raid shelter in the ‘Back Field’. This was behind the houses across the road from where we lived and down a path next to Woodhouse Mansion. When you heard aircraft flying overhead at night you could tell when they were German planes because the sound was so different from British planes. The Germans were likely on the way to bomb Glasgow or Belfast.

While we were in the house, we had been told the safest place in the event of being bombed was under the kitchen table. Sometimes my mother or grandmother made us get under the table until the German planes had passed over. At St Mary’s school, Kells they dug actual bomb shelters under the ground where you had to climb down a metal ladder to get in and out. I think they only filled them in at the end of the 1960s when they did some extensions at the school.

There was a blackout enforced and the ARP Wardens used to go round shouting “Put that light out!” We had to buy blackout curtains and make sure there was not even a chink of light shone through. We still went out to different places when it was dark as long as we had no light with us.

I don’t remember anywhere in Whitehaven actually being bombed. In the First World War a German submarine had fired on Lowca Pit. That time the Germans thought they'd had a direct hit. But what actually happened was a man called Mr Spedding released a lot of steam from the pit boilers. From where the German sub was at in the sea this must have looked like smoke. There was always the chance the Germans might shell Whitehaven like that in World War Two with all the coal mines round here and the steelworks at Workington. A little further down the coast Millom and Barrow-in-Furness got bombed so there was always the chance we would as well. So we were quite lucky that way. Of course we heard all the bombing in the big cities on the ´óĎó´ŤĂ˝.

Plane crash

There was one of our own British planes that crashed. One day we were walking back home from St Begh’s school up the ‘New Road’ when we saw an aeroplane flying to our right towards Kells. There was probably something wrong with one of the engines. There was smoke coming from it. Then it went out of our sight as it come to earth and there was a bang. The plane had crashed.

From where we were standing we couldn’t see where it had come down. But later on we found out it had crashed on ‘The Brows’ just below Arrowthwaite. There was a pub there run by two sisters (Toole’s). I think the plane was on a training exercise from Silloth and the pilots were Canadians. It missed all the houses otherwise it could have been a lot worse than it was.

Food rationing

My mother and grandmother looked after the ration books. Everybody had to stand in a queue to get just about anything. In fact, if people saw a queue they would stand in it and only find out what they were queuing for when they got to the shop counter. It didn’t matter what it was, but you knew that if there was a queue it was for something that would come in handy!

In a cake shop you maybe got one large cake and six ’fancies’. At a chemist shop, you maybe queued for ‘Victory V’ cough lozenges. Nobody saw a banana during the war, at least in Whitehaven, but there were lots of British apples for sale. Occasionally we got an orange. There was a lot of American stuff like ‘Spam’, powdered egg and potatoes. We used to grow things in the back garden at home, such as spring onions, lettuces and potatoes. There were always lots of posters about saying we should “Dig For Victory”.

Wartime activities

Because we had a wireless, we used to listen to the ´óĎó´ŤĂ˝ a lot, especially the news. There were lots of popular programmes such as ‘I.T.M.A.’, ‘Worker’s Playtime’ - a show from the big factories around the country- singers like Vera Lynn and Anne Shelton and ‘Big Bands’ like Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman.

Sometimes people used to listen to ‘Lord Haw Haw’ (William Joyce), especially after Dunkirk because he maybe had some information about a local lad that had been made a Prisoner of War, or so they said. If people had someone in the Forces who was ‘missing’ and they could get information they were at least alive it was something.

There was one time ‘Lord Haw Haw’ mentioned Whitehaven. He said something like: “Sleepy little town of Whitehaven, don’t think we’ve forgotten about you!” He maybe knew about Whitehaven because his wife came from Carlisle. I think they’d even maybe been to Whitehaven for a march before the war. We heard about all this after the war, but somebody must have known about them then. People used to think he was a joke and lots of them used to mimic his voice saying: “Germany calling, Germany calling”.

When I left school, I went to work at Tommy Cowan’s on Mark Lane, Whitehaven, just by the harbour. We made firelighters in what was an old candle factory. Tommy Cowan also had a shop in the Market Place.

It was some time in 1944 when I joined Whitehaven Sea Cadets. At that time it was run by Mr Percy Silbertson, who was a factory owner at Cleator making military uniforms. My sister Sally had started work at Mr Silbertson’s factory when she left school at fourteen. I think the Silbertsons had moved the factory up to Cleator from London to get away from the bombing. Mr Silbertson used to drive down in his car from Cleator to Whitehaven in his own car. He was likely allowed a petrol ration because of his work in running the factory for the military.

When V.E. Day came, 8 May 1945, we went round lots of celebrations dressed in our Sea Cadets uniform. Then, after dark we had a big bonfire in the ‘Back Field’. This was the first bonfire that we’d had for six years, and we burnt all kinds of things. It was an exciting day, enjoyed by all.

I think it was just after the war when I was still in the Sea Cadets, one of the Pit Deputies who lived on Fell View Avenue, Mr Walker, took my photograph in my Sea Cadet uniform. Photography was his hobby and you could give him something to cover his costs and have your photograph taken by him. There were portrait studios in the town centre where you could go. But films were in short supply and probably too expensive for most families to have photographs taken, unless there was a wedding or something special like that. Even then, they’d only take one or two photos.

Looking back at the war

Looking back to the wartime years in Whitehaven many years later it seems like a different place. There were lots of good memories about what we did even though in many ways the times were bad.

It is difficult to write down everything that happened in those days. Although times were hard in some ways they seemed fairly settled. There must be a lot of things I have forgotten. Still, perhaps there are others who would like to read some reminisces about the ‘sleepy little town of Whitehaven’ during the war.

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