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V1 (Buzz bomb) in Merton Park, London SW20

We lived at19, Springfield Avenue. Dad had won £102 on Littlewoods football pools in 1938 and bought the house with a £100 deposit. (He spent the rest of his life paying off the mortgage!) So we moved from a rented house near Wimbledon Common, which had gas lighting, an outside toilet and a tin bath which was brought up from the cellar and filled with hot water from the gas copper built in the corner of the kitchen. The houses in Merton Park, built in the early thirties, had all ‘mod cons’ of the day, including a bathroom. I spent the first few days playing with the hot and cold taps.

It was about midnight on the night of July1st /2nd 1944.
It was the only time Mum, Rose Hobbs, had ever picked the white Lilies from the front garden and the house smelled of them — she always said it was unlucky to have them in the house.
Dad (Frank Hobbs) was an Air Raid Warden along with Mr Jones from No 5 and men his age who were too old for the army. Their Warden’s Post was in Buckleigh Avenue, at the corner of Beaford Grove, on a little green. It was like a large Anderson shelter covered in sandbags. My friend Greta’s Dad was in the Home Guard, and Mr Nicholas was in the Auxiliary Fire Service.

We had come through the Blitz unscathed, although there had been lots of bombs around us and Dad used to be on duty quite often. At first we used to sleep on a mattress on the floor downstairs, which was safer than the bedrooms; when the bombs started dropping we children hid under the table- a big solid oak one. Later, Mum, Dennis, Michael and I spent many nights in our Anderson shelter in the back garden. It used to fill up with water as there was an underground spring nearby, (which was why it was called Springfield Avenue). Eventually, a concrete inner lining was put in by workmen (presumably from the council) but it was still very damp and miserable. Michael used to do his plane spotting from the top of it. He delighted in watching the dog fights over Croydon, till told to take cover.
My aunt wanted us children to go to live with her in Canada for the duration, but a ship carrying evacuees was torpedoed and the idea was dropped.

There was an anti aircraft gun emplacement on the Joseph Hood Recreation Ground behind Cannon Hill Common and I think the noise was sometimes more frightening than the bombing. There was also a mobile gun on the railway, which was on an embankment behind our back gardens. I remember us all three having whooping cough and coughing all the more when the guns started.

The night of the V1, Dad had just come off duty and was in the bathroom ready to have a bath. We children were asleep in our beds upstairs, but woke up when we heard him shout. There was no air raid warning. He had heard a doodlebug engine cut out nearby and we waited for it to come down. Some of them would glide a long way after they cut out, but others dived directly to earth. This was one of the latter, we were to discover. We must have instinctively covered our heads as the ceilings came down as I remember the lath and plaster and the glass from the windows all over my bed in the box room at the front of the house. The boys shared the back bedroom and got more of the blast, but we were not injured. Mum was in her nightie and did what was recommended — cowered in the doorway of their bedroom on the landing — the door frame would be the strongest place in the circumstances and the door would be some sort of protection. She was not badly injured but had glass in her back. Dad, in the ‘altogether’ had similarly crouched in the doorway of the bathroom and the adjoining toilet, so both doors protected him. But he forgot there was a glass window above the toilet door- luckily that survived the blast. After making sure we were all (reasonably) OK, he got dressed and back into his ARP uniform and went to do his duty and see what he could do. It wasn’t until two days later that he actually got undressed.again and Mum said he was covered in black dirt from the blast !

The doodlebug had fallen round the corner in Cannon Hill Lane, near the railway bridge, in the back garden of the three houses between the bridge and the end of Springfield Avenue. I remember the devastation there , but my younger brother Michael, who was always interested in aircraft etc, remembers that the tail of the V1 with the ‘tail pipe’( where the flames came out) was sticking out of the rubble and was there till it was all cleared away. There was one fatality, John Bungard, aged 16, who was sheltering in the cupboard under the stairs of the middle house and the chimney stack collapsed on him when the house came down. The family in the first house were away, staying with relatives in Portsmouth, to escape from the buzz bombs. The people in the third house were away, but their daughter and her boyfriend were in their Anderson shelter and survived.

The first houses in Springfield Avenue were also badly damaged: there were two flats on the corner, then terraces of 6 houses. The first few were uninhabitable despite tarpaulins over the roofs and emergency repairs by Gleeson’s builders, who seemed to do all the work in the area. Most of the houses up the road had some damage and there was a lot of temporary repair work needed Although it was summer I remembered we had rain as they were covering our roof. The windows were all blown out and there was debris everywhere. Everybody helped each other to get some normality, as the buzz bombs kept coming. Residents did not want to go away and leave their houses empty, having salvaged their belongings. Neighbours took others in and fed them. Our house was always ‘open house’ and Mr & Mrs Jones (he was a Warden with Dad) from No 5, whose only son was in the army, lived in our front room for a while. They had lost most of their furniture and just brought a bed and their clothes, using our settee and armchair. It was a bit of a squash and sharing the kitchen took some organising, but Mum coped. Later, Mr & Mrs Kenney, whose house in Cannon Hill Lane was nearest to the railway bridge, came up from Portsmouth to see what had happened. They had nowhere to live and also stayed with us while the Council found them a requisitioned house. This was not easy but we found out that a house further up the road was empty and eventually they were moved in there.-until their house was rebuilt — it took a long time.
As the buzz bombs were still coming (there were 35 in Merton altogether) Mum and Dad decided to send Michael and I to stay with Granny in the country at Ramsey in Essex. Dennis was older (nearly 16) so I think he may have been working by then. Within weeks, the buzz bombs were coming over Essex, so Mum and Dad came by coach to bring us back. I can remember meeting Mum off the coach and she had a new hat and dress on. She looked lovely !

Mum never brought the Lilies into the house again — they grew every year and bloomed at the beginning of July. I always stopped to smell them as I went out of the front gate.
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I believe that over 9,000 V1’s were launched against Britain, from June till November 1944, of which over 2000 landed on London. As they were being launched from sites in the Pas de Calais and the Cherbourg Peninsular, the south east of England and East Anglia suffered most, although some reached as far as the north of England, Hampshire and the West Country. Others were intercepted in the East of Kent by Barrage balloons, Anti-Aircraft guns and also by some brave fighter planes chasing them and blowing them up or even tipping them over to divert them.

‘Pilotless planes’ or Doodle bugs, the V1’s (the V in German, stood for Vergaltungswaffen, which translates as Vengeance Weapons) were succeeded by the V2’s, the silent Rockets in September 1944. These were launched from bases in Holland and several places well into in Germany, as the Allied Invasion had overtaken the V1 bases. V2’s flew higher and reached further. They also carried 1 ton of high explosive and were more devastating, as there was no warning of their approach. The last V2 landed in March 1945.By then the invasion was well into Germany and the war was nearly over.

Bob Ogley's book 'Doodlebugs and Rockets' (ISBN 1-872337-21-X)is full of pictures,stories and details of many incidents all over the UK.
An interesting read !

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