- Contributed byÌý
- cornwallcsv
- People in story:Ìý
- Peter Gilson
- Location of story:Ìý
- Falmouth Cornwall
- Background to story:Ìý
- Civilian
- Article ID:Ìý
- A8709186
- Contributed on:Ìý
- 21 January 2006
CWS 180804D 16:12:51 — 16:14:01
This story has been added by CSV volunteer Linda Clark on behalf of the author Peter Gilson. His story was given to the Trebah Video Archive, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund in 2004. The Trebah Garden Trust understand the site’s terms and conditions.
We had all been prepared for the start of the war on September 3rd 1939 and we were all persuaded by my headmaster (a very persuasive gentleman) that we should be doing something for the war effort. As it wasn’t far to walk a gang of us went up to the hospital and spent all day filling sand bags. We didn’t fill them all day, we did go home, but I remember four Thomas’s lorries from Thomas’s building yard down by the Grammar School in Tregenver Road shuttling backwards and forwards to Gyllyngvase Beach with sandbags. I’m surprised there was any sand left on Gyllyngvase Beach because we used the sand to fill the sandbags before taking them to the hospital. We piled them up in great walls but we weren’t very good at that, as after about a fortnight, they all fell down again. They had to get a team of Royal Engineers to pile them up again but we had filled the bags.
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