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Hopefully, it’s my one and only boast that at the time of my eighth birthday in August 1939, I knew the names of both the German and Italian foreign ministers. Perhaps more importantly, I was aware of the enormous problems that their countries were creating in both Europe and Africa.
At home, like most other local mining families, we read the Daily Herald, where pictures of Herr Von Ribbentrop (Germany) and Count Ciano (Italy), who was Mussolini’s son-in-law, often appeared on the front page. They would be shown standing alongside their counterparts in embassies of neighbouring capitals, London included. Inside Germany, Ribbentrop’s leader, Herr Hitler, as he was best known then, was almost worshipped. Elsewhere, he was regarded with the deepest suspicion, even held in fear. This man was dangerous.
As well as the Daily Herald, we had just acquired our first wireless set, a Bush by make, and the novelty of listening to its news bulletins and musical programmes had far from faded. Indeed, we thought that the sun shone from the ´óÏó´«Ã½! The Bush Radio Company had engaged a well-known radio celebrity of the day, Christopher Stone, about who I knew something for he was featured in a series of cigarette cards, to promote sales. In the same set, there were cards of Charlie Kunz, Sir Adrian Boult, Freddie Grisewood, Norman Long, Stuart Hibbert, Lew Stone, Peggy Cochrane, Roy Fox, the two Leslies (Sarony and Holmes) and Harry Roy. In radio-shop windows, Christopher Stone was pictured alongside an owl perched on top of a Bush wireless. The slogan read, ‘A Wise Bird Settles on a Bush.’ We were staunch CWS patrons, but I’m sure that Bush radio came from Palmers, the large Sunderland furniture, cycle and radio store, and was probably paid for at half-a-crown a week. We had no electricity and power came from a large dry battery and an accumulator, which we took to the CWS for re-charging. When a valve became defective not long after the war began, we waited for over a year for the store to obtain a replacement! It was the way of things and the domestic front was pushed into second place by the war.
Visits to the Hippodrome also brought further chances to keep abreast of international affairs. There were always ten minutes of Movietone News and meetings of Neville Chamberlain with Hitler figured prominently at the time of the Munich crisis in September 1938. We did not barrack the German dictator then, but once the war was underway, our boos took off the roof!
In line with every other community in the land, New Silksworth was filled with a sense of foreboding. When Munich turned sour, it was clear that war was almost a certainty. Minds were focused and it was now full-steam ahead to prepare to defend ourselves.
Again, cigarette cards proved helpful. One issue in particular, Air Raid Precautions, gave useful hints on how to deal with incendiary bombs, using a scoop with an elongated handle, once the sirens had sounded and the searchlights were probing the night skies. There were tips, too, on how to fit and adjust gas masks, as well as making shutters to keep in the light during the blackout. For the staff of the Sunderland Rural District Council, then our local authority, there was much midnight oil to be burned. Here was a situation of unprecedented magnitude. Unlike the 1914/18 War, the Germans now had aeroplanes capable of hitting targets anywhere in the United Kingdom and the provision of an air-raid shelter for every family was a major priority. For those homes with a garden, a steel corrugated unit, known as an Anderson shelter, was provided by the Government. A deep hole needed to be dug to accommodate it. Where there was no sizeable garden, or non at all, Warwick Terrace, Somerset Cottages, and Margate Street, for example, brick shelters with reinforced concrete roofs were erected in the back yards.
In addition to the weekly Sunday afternoon walk that we made to the Weightman Memorial Hall, opposite the former Recreation Ground, for Sunday School lessons, an additional visit, this time in mid-week early in 1939, was required. The purpose was to have our gas masks supplied and fitted. Packed into a cardboard box, they had to be carried everywhere once hostilities were underway. For those who lived in Tunstall Parish, the Miners’Hall was the issuing depot.

Of equal importance to the gas masks and the air-raid shelters, was blackout. Here, there could be no half measures, either. How true it was, I cannot say but the claim was that a German pilot would see the light created by a smoker’s match in the streets thousands of feet below! What I do know is that dads had to employ what woodworking skills that they had to put shutter frames together. Miles of black curtain material were on sale in shops to avoid the dreaded Air Raid Warden’s call of ‘Put That Light Out!’

There was no 11th hour peace settlement and I heard the news of Germany’s invasion of Poland on Friday, 1st September 1939 outside of Questa’s ice cream parlour in Blind Lane on my way home to Newport. Two days later my dad hobbled out on his crutch as we played in the street to tell us that we were at war with Germany.
New Silksworth and the world would never be the same again!

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