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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Chris Foord of the Greenwich heritage Centre on behalf of Angus McColl and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was born in 1931, my father was Scottish, born in Glasgow and his brother had a place on the Isle of Bute. He lived in a little village called Bannatyne. There was a floating dock in the bay for overhauling submarines. Some boats came with deceased soldiers on them and they were buried in the cemetery.

I probably ended up on Isle of Bute from my fathers coaxing. The Isle of Bute, West coast of Scotland is on the direct line from Glasgow using the steam ferry from Wymess Bay (half an hour crossing - on a good day a lovely cruise). Rothesay is the main port on the island. I was evacuated at first to Exmouth in Devon, but had a sad upbringing there, the lady rather ill-treated my sisters and word got back to my mother who came and took us away. We ended up in Purse Caundle in Dorset, not far from Salisbury. I went on a farm and my two sisters lived in a castle owned by Lady Victoria. It was a sleepy village with one pub and a couple of farms. From there, as a small boy, I used to see a lot of the army to-ing and thro-ing through the village in armoured cars. In the air I saw part of the Battle of Britain. I had an idyllic time helping on the farm. My mother’s father died in London and she had to arrange the funeral. She came down to get me a couple of times but I hid on the farm, as I didn’t want to go back with her. On the third occasion she got me and took me back to London and collected her mother. I remember sleeping in an air raid shelter; it may have been Bethnal Green. The next day we took the train up to Scotland. My grandmother was born in 1862 and was a real cockney from the Isle of Dogs.

I remember a huge bonfire on the waters edge at Rothesay lit for VE Day in 1945 and people singing and dancing, but that’s all I remember.

I went to school in the Isle of Bute and eventually came back to London in 1946. I came back with my sister Dorothy on a long coach journey — I was about 13 and was still wearing short trousers. My father met us at Victoria Coach station. We moved to a men’s hostel in Bloomsbury, originally a hotel before the war. I was the only small boy in a place full of grown men. My sister went to a similar place for women and young girls. We were there until my father managed to get hold of some digs near Dalston. We had two rooms in a Victorian house and lived there until my mother came down shortly afterward. She came with the rest of the family, apart from my grandmother who didn’t want to return (she stayed and died in the Isle of Bute in 1953). My mother secured a house in Tennyson Street, York Road, Waterloo, the site that was to become the Festival of Britain. We gradually picked up from where we were at the beginning of the war. We had a basement flat in Tennyson Street and every time the Thames overflowed we were flooded. We had to move out due to the building works for the Festival of Britain in c.1949. We moved to a council flat in Bramwell House, in Elephant and Castle and I lived there until I got married in 1958.

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