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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Janet Miller, volunteer at Shropshire Record Office, on behalf of Frederick Westcar, and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

Story title: My war began in Bermondsey

Names of people in story: Frederick Westcar; Beatrice Shaw;

Before the war really got going in Bermondsey, preparations were made for issuing gas masks to people - one of my duties as an ARP warden. My job at the time was making sure they had new filters fitted to their gas masks as the old ones were inefficient. The new ones were taped onto the old canisters. We also had lots of rubber earplugs, but people wouldn’t accept them. Later, rubber became scarce, because it was needed for tyres, etc., because the Japanese had hindered the importing of it.

During the raids, Beatrice, my girl friend and I (we met in an air-raid shelter; she didn't like the name Fred because she said it made me sound like a plumber so she always called me Ric) stood on top of a building, the basement of which was a shelter, and watched enormous bombs falling north of the river around St Paul’s. When I was a AR Warden a friend had a near miss when a bomb fell on his terraced house, killing an old lady and narrowly missing a vinegar factory. We didn’t find her body until the next morning because of the dust. I also remember seeing three men carrying a large bomb between them, taking it out of harm’s way, which was an incredibly dangerous thing to do. We had a few near misses ourselves, but we almost took it for granted, being youngsters.

I joined an engineering firm which made equipment for air conditioning on ships and buildings, and this involved quite a lot of travelling around and I still have the travel permits. I worked on a very large tug boat, the Aimwell, in Glasgow where we worked three days on (with no sleep) and one day off to sleep. In one week there would be only three nights sleep, the rest of the time having to be worked continuously. When I got on a train to return to London, I had to stand all the way and I nearly fell asleep as I was so tired.!

Back in London, I worked on building a generator which was, driven by steam, which turned coal into electricity, the last of a set of four at Battersea Power Station. They are still there.

At night, it was surprising how the eye adjusted to the darkness and could make things out, even on the blackest night.

At the US Army station at Bushey, we had to fit a fan in a large metal hangar which was so hot that people were fainting. It needed to be done quickly, and being extremely heavy, needed really to be embedded in concrete. But this would take too long, so the alternative was to use lead to hold it steady. The commander said he would get some, and got his lads to go and collect every bit of lead piping they could find. We built it up in bits, adding the last pieces while the fan was working. Those girls were so grateful, and we were rewarded with a large packet of cigarettes and a box of chocolates which my wife was very happy with.

Working in ships was incredibly noisy. We didn’t see much of the ship, but were fitting pipes through the armour plating.

One night I was so tired that I resisted my wife Bea’s shaking me and slept through the bombing so I asked my boss if I could be based at home. I was tired of travelling around. So I switched to a job making and testing mine detecting equipment. I had to take off any clothing with metal on. The machine was a bit like a road roller and was so strong that it pushed a tram over. It was never used in battle, as they invented a better one, with flailing chains to set off mines before rolling over them. So all our work on the first prototype was in vain. One of our original models never got to Borneo, being sunk in transit.

After DDay, I found myself making chairs and tables, but I didn’t like this work and got the sack. This was followed by all sorts of rotten jobs and I don’t remember DDay at all. It was a bad time. January 1945 was extremely cold and we couldn’t get any coal and we had a new baby boy, born just before the war ended. Bea had the baby at home, and was very ill. She was one of the first people to be treated with penicillin. It was difficult to find enough fuel to burn the afterbirth. I had a desperate search for anything that would serve as fuel. I borrowed a wheelbarrow and went searching at the training sidings and I found enough coke to make a fire.

While we waited for the midwife, I saw a doodlebug flying past. With the flames coming out of the back, I thought at first in was a plane that had been shot down. Luckily it went past. Bea was admitted to Guy’s Hospital and luckily recovered fairly well.

Drying the nappies was difficult with so little fuel. I made a clothes horse and we kept one room warm with difficulty. Bea made soap using fat and bones. We used to bath in a zinc bath which I emptied by siphoning off the water through the window to the sink below, as we lived on the top floor. We had electricity but the voltage was very low, so I managed to adapt the sockets to take standard light bulbs. We also had radio which ran on the mains. At first we had a special box to take the 112 volts, but I sorted that out too. This was good training in being adaptable, which stood me in good stead for later life. Eventually I became a model engineer and did work for the Queen, Parliament and the Science Museum. I made boats, buildings, cranes — all sorts of things — to scale. Now I can still at least make bread, despite losing the agility in my fingers.
At the end of Maze Pond there were railway arches underneath London Bridge station. The arches had had sandbags placed across either end with only access for pedestrians and were used as shelters during raids. A bomb completly destroyed this area and four of my friends from the Boys' Club football team were killed, along with everyone else in the shelter. Near the Boys' Club itself on a different occasion I saw an army bomb disposal team defuse an unexploded bomb. They removed the detonator, flushed water through the casing to remove the explosive (a white powder) and then took the bomb away.
One morning when I went to Bea's house to check that she and her family were alright I discovered that a bomb had fallen near the railway behind their house. The house was completely destroyed but they were safely pulled from the wreckage. Afterwards Bea's mother lived permanently at an underground station with a bunk reserved especially for her;her nerves were badly shattered and for the rest of her life she suffered from a skin complaint which came about as a result of her experiences.

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