大象传媒

Submitted on behalf of M.J.Butler by Stafford Library.

I was six years old and living in Birmingham when WWII was declared. I clearly recall listening to Neville Chamberlain's radio broadcast and being told by my father that "you must do exactly what we tell you, no questions asked". I was at school in Perry Barr and we all had to go along to Canterbury Road School for arrangements to be made for evacuation. With one or two other children I was put in another part of the playground as we were leaving the area and wouldn't need to be evacuated; my father was works manager of a factory - Streetly Works - making munitions and we were moving to a house near to the factory.

I remember the air raids and Dad coming into my bedroom saying "the sirens have gone so we are going to the air raid shelter" and the bump, bump as he carried me up the garden. The shelter was very big and in reinforced concrete and, when the raids became nightly, my younger brother and I were put to bed in the shelter.

My Uncle Vic Howell (Mother's brother in law) had come through Dunkirk; he was with the South Staffordshire Regiment and had come out on a ship captained by the Spanish Civil War gun-runner 'Potato' Jones. Some of his conversations with Dad were to be passed on to me, and it was when he was on leave that Uncle told Dad that he was more scared during the bombing of Birmingham than had been at Dunkirk!

When being taken to the shelter I remember the engine noise of the German bombers - quite different from those we would hear later when the RAF Wellingtons and Lancasers flew over on their way to Germany. We lived opposite Sutton Park and remember being told that, on moonlit nights, the German bombers could take a 'fix' from the pools in Sutton Park to reach their target, down Chester Road to the Spitfire factory. Am I right in believing that some of these pools were drained in an attempt to foil the bombers? It may have worked as we had both incendiaries and high explosives land just inside the Park with the 'Parson and Clerk' pub across the road from us losing their windows one night.

Dad - who was a Lieutenant in the Home Guard at Streetly Works and blocked, notably by his Chairman, from joining up - took me onto the roof of our air raid shelter on one of the nights, the night that Coventry was bombed; it was something I had to see, he said. We lived well over 20 miles away and I remember clearly the sky being bright red from the flames.

I started at King Edward's Aston in September 1944, as the school returned from Ashby Grammer Shcool where it had been evacuated. Travelling to school was probably the first time I'd seen real bomb damage. Houses mainly, including one which backed on to where we were living up to November 1939 in Epwell Road off Kingstanding Road. Many of the schoolmasters had been called up and school mistresses took their places. After the war one of them who had been a "guest of the Japanese" as he described it, read to his class from his diary at the end of the summer term as his contribution towards ensuring that the world would never go to war again. This man was N. J. F. Craig and by them I was at King Edward's Birmingham.

Going back to wartime; to describe my experiences of the WWII as a game of soldiers is unfeeling, but nothing in my memories brings back any sense of fear. I was a child and the worries of my parents and my Aunt (Mother's sister, who lived with us during the early years of the war and whose husband had come through Dunkirk and was then posted to India as support for the Burma campaign) never got through to me. They succeeded in protecting me. I wanted to watch the German bombers come over (but wasn't allowed to!) I remember hearing 'Big Bertha' the mobile anti-aircraft gun which scared Mother and I remember the tanks on the training area in Sutton Park.

Later on, when the tide of war began to change, I remember heavy traffic (tanks, 'Queen Marys' transporting aircraft) down the Chester Road. It would have been around that time that I was taken by Dad to (I think) the Stafford to Wolverhampton dual carriageway near Gailey where masses of tanks and lorries were parked, filling one of the carriageways.

My wife, 3陆 years my junior and also born in Birmingham, was living in Great Barr and recalls being taken by her mother and father (he too was in 'munitions') to Weston for a short break to get away from the bombing. After living through the Birmingham raids - second only in severity to London - they found themselves nearer to danger on holiday! A number of German bombers, presumably on their return from their target of the Bristol docks, bombed the front at Weston. They returned to strafe the beach where many people had gone to escape from the damaged buildings.

The windows of their hotel had been blown out and my wife recalls her father making up shutters to cover the windows of the hotel owners's bedroom; she was crippled and couldn't move. One bomb had landed on the roof of the hotel and two RAF men, billeted in the hotel, went up to deal with it - they were never seen again. She recalls the fire hoses running out to sea (a long way at Weston!) for water. She also recalls being unable to leave for home as the station had been bombed and the rails were sticking up gruesomely in the air.

This reminds me of an incident during the winter of 1940/41 spent in Abersoch. Dad felt that Mother, my aunt and brother and I would be safer there. A lone raider returning from Liverpool had flown low down the main street of Abersoch; I don't think he did much damage other than scaring the wits out of the villagers. Coming from Birmingham and the bombing, Mother felt very superior!

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