大象传媒

This a summary of a recorded interview with Mr Roger Walter Mathews.
Recorded on the 21st September 2005

My name is Roger Walter Mathews. I was born on the 2nd October 1926. There were 7 in our family. We lived in a two up and two down house in Moorside which is near Swinton. I can remember the East Lancs Road (A580) being built. The first school that I went to was Holyrood Infants School near Ringlow Park Road and I can remember writing on slates, not paper. We then went to live in Hamilton Street in Swinton, this house had three bedrooms and a bathroom! My father built an Anderson Air Raid shelter in the back garden.

I remember the day that war was declared. It was on a Sunday, I had been fishing in the pond on Clifton field, when I returned home my mother was crying and was worried about her boys being called up into the armed forces. My father had been in the forces during the 1914 鈥� 1918 war, they could remember how things were then. In trying to comfort my mother I told her 鈥渘ot to worry, the aeroplanes would not get over the Pennines鈥� 鈥淚 was completely wrong there鈥�

I started work on my fourteenth birthday. By this time we were living at 127 Albert Street in Eccles, this was a larger house, it also had a cellar which we and some of our neighbours would shelter in when there was an air raid. My father and my older brothers were all in reserved occupations working for the Manchester Ship Canal Company at the Mode Wheel Workshops in Weaste, it was the principal repair workshop for the M.S.C. Company repairing the locomotives and machinery on the docks. The M.S.C. Company had the biggest private railway in Europe. My father ran the boiler that supplied all the power for the machinery in the workshops. My eldest brother was a loco fireman, the next brother was an engine cleaner and I went to work as an office boy in the workshop offices. I was the A.R.P. messenger, I was given a black steel helmet with a white 鈥淢鈥� painted on it and a service gas mask, not the type that were issued to the civilian population, mine was in a satchel, not a cardboard box. The office was informed when an air raid was due, various colours were signalled to inform of the likelihood that it was coming our way, they were yellow, amber and red. When the office received the yellow warning it was then my job to put my tin hat on and go and get the men who were the fire spotters. We were given a chocolate bar to go up onto the roof and report where the fires and unexploded bombs were.

I have many memories of life during the war. Memories of having to make enormous detours to work because of unexploded bombs along our normal route. Smoke generators near Buile Hill Park, these were used when the wind was blowing in the right direction to provide a smoke screen over Trafford Park during daylight air raids. The smell of burning grain after the wooden grain silo was bombed during a raid. A coaster ship that was sunk in number nine dock by an enormous steel gate blown off one of the storage sheds by a bomb: it aquaplaned over the water and struck the boat below the water line. 30American servicemen-dockers, the white servicemen were billeted at the Recreation club at Kendal Road while the black servicemen were billeted in the cellars of the wire rope store. Two American locomotives and their crews, American crawler cranes for use on the docks, all loaned under what was called the Marshal Plan. Seeing all kind of military equipment loaded onto ships. Badly damaged ships arriving at the docks. At the workshops we also maintained lorries that were used to deliver goods, some would arrive with their cargo already loaded. When the lorries that were delivering sugar came into the workshop, some of the sugar from 1bag would be siphoned, this was done with a piece of copper piping, one end was cut at a 450 angle, the edges of the cut were sharpened, this cut edge would puncture one of the bags of sugar and the sugar would run down the centre of the tube into the container, when the container was full the tube would be removed and the hole would close. One day my boss told me that there was a ship in dock that had oranges as part of its cargo and that my mate and I could go on board and eat as many oranges as we liked, but that we could not bring any ashore. We had not seen oranges for years! Driving during the blackouts. Jumping off a mobile lighting lorry in the dark and realising the next morning that I had parked so near to the side of the dock that had I jumped off the other side in the dark I could have met a watery grave.

There are too many memories to record on these sheets of paper. The last memory is that on clear nights during the blackout I could see all the stars in the skies, the Milky Way, constellations that can not be seen over Salford now because of the light pollution at night. I even saw the Aurora Borealis: The Northern Lights.

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