大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Sarah Housden of Norfolk Adult Education鈥檚 reminiscence team on behalf of Roy Baker and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

I was in the Home Guard during the war and I found it a bit of a bind really. We had to do two night patrols at the factory where I worked each week. The factory was Short Brothers in Rochester and we were making Sunderland and Stirling aircraft. There was a small gang of us who all applied for aircrew, but they wouldn鈥檛 let us go. The firm applied for a six month deferment, but there was one man amongst us who they forgot to apply for the deferment for, and he got called up. After about six operations he was shot down over Berlin.

Rochester was on the direct route to London and so we were bombed every night. When the Doodlebugs went over they were right above our house. When the first one went over, I told a neighbour: 鈥淭here鈥檚 no pilot in that one鈥�. He didn鈥檛 believe me, but eventually I was proved right.

I was bombed out twice. Once in 1940 and once in 1944. Both houses were in the same road 鈥� Wilson Avenue. The second time was on November 8th 1944 at about eight in the evening. My baby girl was in the cot in the back room, and when I went through to her the cot was full of debris. I dug her out, but her only injury was a bruise on her forehead. When the bomb went off I had been sitting on the settee with my back to some French windows. I jumped up with the blast, and then immediately afterwards the windows fell in all over the settee. The ceilings all fell in as well.

We had nowhere to move to, so we had to stay in the house, even though we had no windows, doors or roof. My wife decided to have a bath, as the bathroom was still working even though the roof had gone. Being November, when she came out she was blue with cold.

When we invaded France they were afraid that Hitler would practice a scorched-earth policy. Hundreds of firemen were placed in Dover to protect the area, but when Hitler didn鈥檛 act, the firemen had nothing to do. So they sent some of them over to do repairs to houses in Rochester, and it was they who put our roof back on. They were really hard workers and did the job quickly.

I enjoyed my work, which was a good thing because we only got one Sunday off a month. All our jobs were always urgent. We had a box with 鈥榓uthorities to manufacture鈥� forms in it which represented about 3000 hours worth of work. I don鈥檛 think I ever did get to the end of all that work. One of the things I made was barrage cutters, after the Germans started using barrage balloons.

During the 1940 air raid when I lost my home, the factory was bombed too. After that they wanted to send me to Gloucester, but I started work in a new (unfinished) factory in Rochester. Short鈥檚 had several factories in the area making aircraft (and still have a factory in Belfast today).

There were underground shelters which each held 50 鈥� 60 people. These were level with the ground at the top. One bomb dropped on the shelter where I was, but although it shook the shelter it didn鈥檛 go off. I went into work the next day and looked at some of the bombs that had dropped. I looked at one bomb in particular, and held some of the 鈥榚xplosive鈥� in my hand. I was convinced that it was just sand, and later when the bomb disposal people came they confirmed this. I found out later that Albert Goering (Herman Goering鈥檚 brother) had been put in charge of the Skoda factory where the bombs were made. Although everyone thought he was a Nazi, he wasn鈥檛, and had clearly shut his eyes to the Skoda workers sabotaging bombs 鈥� hence the sand!

The worst injury I got was the first time we got bombed out when I stood on a nail from the garden fence which had been blown apart. My wife had the lobe of her ear cut off in 1944. She was in the hallway when the front door was blown in, and the glass shattered and flew down the hall. I got a car and took my wife and an injured neighbour to hospital. We didn鈥檛 get home until 2am and then had a very uncomfortable night as the whole house was covered in broken glass. But we counted ourselves lucky as there had been a number of deaths in that raid.

At the end of the war (after VE Day but before VJ Day) I decided I wanted to leave the factory and move away, but was turned down twice at tribunals. But then the Government passed the B&CE legislation, which meant that anyone who鈥檇 worked in the building trade before the war could change back to this. This included me, so I moved to Essex and returned to working as a builder.

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