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Wartime Schooling

I was a 12 year old when war was declared in 1939 and had attended KLB grammar School, Wotton under Edge for a year.

For most of the first 4 years of the war we had to carry our gas masks everywhere we went but in about 1944 this rule was dropped. Firstly they were in a cardboard box and later I had a leather case with a shoulder strap for mine.

Early in September 1939 there were rehearsals in school for us to learn what to do when there was an air raid alarm. We were taken about 400 yards from school to a grass field beside Wortley Road. A sea of red blazers! Obviously we could not use this arrangement during the winter months and it was changed to dispersing us around the town. Those who lived in the town went home and some took friends with them. The rest of us were dispersed in garages and sheds in the town and I was sent to a run down shed at the back of one of the shops in Long Street.

Later it was all changed again and the whole school was marched the half mile or so to Adeys Lane. Parts of the lane are sunken and the banks covered by trees. Apart from a direct hit it was probably the safest place for us to have gone. We stayed there until the all clear was sounded and then either went back to school or went home if the raid had lasted beyond 4pm.

I remember being there when the Bristol Aircraft Co suffered a daylight raid and hearing the explosions from bombs and anti-aircraft fire. There weren’t that many daylight raids but during the height of the blitz on Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool night alarms were common and we took to the cellar at home. German bombers, based in France and on route to Birmingham and further north frequently flew over. Their de-synchronised engines were easily recognised. Most farmhouses and cottages in the area with rooms to spare were filled with men and their families from the Bristol area. The men were mostly employees of the Bristol Aircraft Co who were in reserved occupations as draughtsmen or aeronautical engineers and were allowed a petrol ration to enable them to get to work.

Bombs were often jettisoned in the area. One of the first incidents was in early August 1940 when a stick of 8 were dropped across Westridge Wood and the last two landed in one of our fields, demolishing a small haycock beside the hayrick which we had just finished the evening before and which we had sat beside and eaten a supper. It left a crater some 6-8 feet across and about 2 feet deep just where we had sat! The only casualties we found were a rabbit and a mouse. Lots of locals came to see the craters and several days later he said ‘I needn’t have bothered. I had 9 bombs on my own farm that night.’

Some male members of staff at school were called up but there was a core of men who had fought in the first world war and a number of women staff so our education was not too badly disrupted, except that in the early stages we spent the early weeks of the autumn term picking blackberries and later going around the town collecting newspapers for salvage. The autumn half term was extended to a week to enable children to be allocated farms on which potato pickers were needed. One summer half term week we were all given sheets on which to record any work we did (obviously a PR exercise to show what the children were doing to help the war effort.) I remember, my hours that week came to 88. I wasn’t believed until I explained what I had done at home. I was up at 6 am to fetch the cows in for milking, then I had to milk my allotted six or so (which I did every morning before cycling to school) by hand. Then it was a short break for breakfast, deliver the churns to the local crossroads where they were picked up by lorry and taken to Cadbury’s depot at Frampton on Severn, and then out into the hay field until dinnertime. Again in the afternoon and evening until it was dark. There was extra summertime then so darkness came after 10 o’clock. Then it was home to milk the cows before getting to bed about midnight. We had no electricity in the area then so paraffin lamps and torches were the order of the night and candles to go to bed.

It was during the war that we had our first wireless set, powered by a dry battery and an accumulator which lasted a week before being exchanged for a recharged one. A local garage owner from Woodford, near Berkeley, provided this service.

Although food rationing did result in shortages of things like tea and sugar we were able to supplement with plenty of vegetables, and wild rabbits provided the extra meat when the ration was very small (at one time I think it was 1 shillings worth per person per week).

Contributed by Mervyn Philpott with help from staff at the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Learning Centre.

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