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Transcription of a group session held at Medway Archives and Local Studies Centre, 23 February 2005. Part Two.

Air Raid Shelters

NC: I would like to ask you now about air raid shelters and how you slept at night.

ET: We had an Andersen shelter. Before the war my husband belonged to the Civil Air Guard and he trained as a pilot. He got called up on the outbreak of war but then was reserved because he had to put up air raid sirens. The girl next door, her husband was in the navy and was in Bermuda or somewhere. She had a baby so my husband put up an Andersen shelter in their garden and dug down six foot and put sand bags in front and these were very bare and very cold made of corrugated metal. So he painted it and I had a new Slumberland mattress being newly married. The whole thing fitted into the shelter and being an electrical engineer he fitted up a light and we had a Teasmade cabinet in there, so we were quite luxurious compared to most! But later on we had a Morrison shelter which was an indoor one. It was like a table and we slept on top of it and just slid under it when there was raid.

NC: The Andersen shelter, was it like a half moon, corrugated iron and you buried it?

ET: The very first accident we went out to from Richmond Road, was to a woman who had jumped into the shelter and because the door had a corrugated piece at the bottom and her legs had gone down into it. It was very embarrassing because she wouldn’t let any of the first aid men attend to her. We had to get some women out from the hospital. The first casualties were not from bombs they were from shrapnel. So many guns in Bellamy Road and the Dockyard went off, we lived by the football ground and the shrapnel used to ping down like rain.

JP: In the hospital where I worked, we had to go down to the basement. They had two houses, one in Knightsbridge, next to the hospital, which acted as a nurses home. Nurses who were quartered there instead of the hospital, went down to the basement and I used to lie on a camp bed and I used to look up at all these pipes and I thought, well if we got a direct hit, we would probably drown. I was going down there from my room at the top of the house one night, with blanket and pillow etc. Suddenly there was a crunch and I found myself at the bottom of the stairs so I picked myself up and carried on down to the shelter. We learnt later that it was a hit on the Library of the Medical School which was next door. The whole hospital had to be evacuated in the middle of the night, regardless of the state of the patients. So patients were going out with broken legs that had been held up in a frame. I went in an ambulance with another nurse with a delirious patient to we didn’t know where to. We were scattered about in the suburbs and outer suburbs of London at various hospitals. It’s surprising that there was feeling against nurses who were training in top London hospitals amongst nurses in outlying districts. They seemed to feel that we thought we were better than they were which wasn’t the case at all, but we weren’t actually received with open arms.
Regarding the shelters, the Londoners used the underground stations as shelters. I used to go through on the tube sometimes to get back to the hospital and you would know when you were coming to a station that was used as a shelter because of the overpowering smell of humanity. They formed very good community groups but there they were absolutely packed onto the platforms. I don’t think people today could have coped.

NC: You were all made of sterner stuff.

VT: Before I joined the fire service, we lived in a top flat in London and down below lived two elderly maiden ladies. Actually I had just got back to London when war was declared by Mr Chamberlain and about 10 minutes later the sirens went off. There was panic. My two old ladies had planned what they would do. They had a Gladstone bag and they had all their family photographs, ration books, insurance policies in there and they picked this up and ran down the shelter and they made me go with them. Then minutes later the all clear went. When the raids then started in earnest usually at about 6pm at night, they used to continue doing the same, but this time they had added a bottle of red wine to the bag. They got down the shelter and used to be drinking the wine and by about midnight they were both sozzled really. One particular night the curtain opened and their cat walked in and they started grumbling to each other blaming the other for not locking the doors and windows otherwise the cat wouldn’t have got out. When we eventually came out at about 6 o’clock in the morning the whole of their house had been blasted and the doors and the windows were no longer there, so that solved the problem of how the cat got out! Quite a funny story, they had a stock of cheap red wine that kept their spirits up during the war. But they were a pair of dear old souls and it was quite sad to leave them because we were so badly blasted that we rented a house at Bexley Heath.

BA: By the time the shelter was built two brothers and two sisters had been evacuated, so that did leave us a bit more room at home. I can remember being told that as the Andersen shelter was being built the siren went and my mother went to tell the workman to come in and have a cup of tea and as he moved away a big lump of shrapnel landed where he had been standing, so he was thankful that my mother had called him in for a cuppa. I remember as well, at nighttime we had one of these metal candlestick holders and mother used to go around making sure there were no spiders or peabugs in the shelter.

VT/ET: They were damp and cold and there was condensation and a damp smell. You had to be pretty desperate to go in there.

NC: You were working at Shorts weren’t you Roland. I think the air raid provisions at Shorts over on the Esplanade were fantastic.

RA: They dug air raid shelters right under the hill through the chalk and under St.Margaret’s Street. Those tunnels are still there. The miners came to dig them. There were 7,000 worked there and when the air raids went that’s where you went. They are very well built, they had seats in there.

NC: We have some photographs of some of them here, taken from glass plate negatives.

RA: We used to have sing-songs down there. There used to be a control room and they used to come over the microphone, somebody used to go up there and sing the songs because sometimes you’d be down there for hours.

NC: I went through the tunnels when Blaw Knox closed the factory there in about 1998. Our Archivist contacted them and they said they had a lot of filing cabinets with old records and so we went across and took a car load of stuff and while we were over there we took a torch and went exploring through the tunnels. It was fantastic, I couldn’t believe it and they are still all lined with those tiles and bricks. Beautiful work.

RA: That one was up at the airport. After the war someone had a brainwave and they grew mushrooms down there.

ET: I have been in Gillingham since 1932 when I was eleven.

JP: You must have some marvelous memories. We went to that suburb in Wigmore when we came in 1957, because we thought it was such a desirable suburb with the countryside just outside our back door. What happened? Five years later they built the largest private estate in Europe.

ET: I have found my husband’s log book when he was in the RAF during the war. It is interesting to see what missions he went on — Liberator, Stirlings.

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