´óÏó´«Ã½

When the war started I was 10 years old, and we were living on Wharton Avenue down on the Grovehill Road Estate. The first thing that I can remember about the war was that some time in that August we went to Hornsea on some sort of Sunday school outing and they were filling sand bags on the beach at Hornsea.

Then when the war started. I had 2 older brothers, and I can remember that my second brother came to meet me from Sunday school and that same night we had an air raid warning. It was a false alarm as it turns out.

I can remember August bank holiday around Dunkirk time, and it was the day they bombed Leconfield and RAF Driffield with Stuka dive-bombers. There was 4 of us sitting on the partition wall between the houses in Grovehill Road and Priory Road, on a beautiful summer afternoon with quite big clouds with gaps in.

All of a sudden through one of these gaps in the cloud there was this huge formation of planes and what we didn’t know was they were Stuka dive-bombers. They split in two and one lot started to dive on Leconfield and the others went up to attack Driffield. Leconfield got away with it only lightly but Driffield was where the first WAAFs were killed in the war.

There was a lot killed that day, but at Leconfield they didn’t do too much damage. My eldest brother was a bricklayer and he was working on the roof of one of the hangars when it all happened, they came down a drainpipe on No 6 Hangar and he always recalled this.

I went to Minster Boys School, and Thomas Stratton School in Hull came to Beverley and so our school expanded by half, so instead of 300-odd boys we went up to 400-odd so the classes instead of being 40 or 50 were about 60ish. These boys were all billeted with various families. There was various schools came to Beverley. St Mary’s Boys and Spencer, they took in other schools as well. Some of the billeted boys are still living in Beverley to this day, some of them never went back.

When there as an air raid if the siren of all-clear didn’t go while 4 o’clock you didn’t go to school while dinner time. If it didn’t go while 6 o’clock you maybe didn’t go to school at all. Some days we didn’t go to school at all, depending on when the all clear went was what time we went to school, so our school was disrupted.

When the May blitz that destroyed the centre of Hull was on, William Owen and I sat on the steps of Constitution Hall, which isn’t there now, directly opposite the Sun Inn, and we were counting fire engines and rescue vehicles coming down Eastgate and Flemingate, ‘cos there were no bypasses or anything so they all came through the town. There was all these fire engines from the West Riding and rescue appliances for hour after hour going through to Hull. Then the people from Hull were flocking out and they were sleeping in halls anywhere they could find. I don’t think we went to school for a few weeks ‘cos it was taken over for them to sleep on the floor of the school.

You used to see a lot of soldiers ‘cos not only were they billeted up at Victoria Barracks, they were in all the big halls in Beverley which were commandeered for military barracks. The big building that’s now the Catholic Club on the corner of Railway street, where the CLB in George Street was, were all taken over as barracks. They used the Station Square as a drill square. Wherever there was a hall they were in them, even the ballroom above the Regal. This lasted about a year, until they got round to building these hutted camps with Nissen huts.

One August bank holiday Monday there was one of the few bombing incidents in Beverley. About quarter to six at night I was with my father in the garden, my eldest brother, who by then had been called up had a flight of canaries, and all of a sudden there was an almighty roar and an explosion and we finished up on the floor.

That was Beverley’s lucky day, if it had been a working day the streets would have been full, and the stable block for the cart horses at Hodgson’s tannery would have been full of horses, but because it was bank holiday they were out in the fields, so all the horses escaped but the

One Sunday tea time, we had an attic and me father was decorating. We had those dormer windows, and I saw this plane with red dots coming out of it, and it was a German raider that machine-gunned from one end of Beverley to the other.

If you ever look on the front of the Nat West bank building at the top there are chips along the top of the building where the bullets hit it, although they aren’t very visible now. There’s a block of houses in King’s Square that have pockmarks across where the bullets hit. And if you go in St Mary’s Church and look at the pew on the right hand side as you go in about 5 rows from the back you’ll see a hole in the top of the pew, line it up and you can see the hole in the window where it came in just before evensong.

I remember there was a reconnaissance aircraft crashed up at Bentley, and one of the boys from our school must have lived nearby and he came across a belt of ammunition, cannon shells from this plane. In those days you collected things like shrapnel, perspex from aircraft and bullet cases. Cannon shells you could polish up and make little ornaments from, and this lad brought these shells to school and 2 of them were pulling the ends out and making a fire with the cordite. This lad called Barry Reeves got one of these shells and dropped it on the fire and it exploded. One lad was stood with his legs apart, and it went between his legs, and I think it hit the end of the school building.

One other incident, again in 1941, one night about 9 o’clock a plane dropped a landmine on a parachute which landed right opposite the barracks, about where that big roundabout is now, and killed quite a few men in the guardroom. But most of the troops were saved by a very officious duty officer who made them all go in the slip trenches.

That night my brothers were coming out of the Marble Arch cinema, - if you went to the pictures and there was a warning, they didn’t stop the picture, there was a notice came on the screen saying an air raid warning has been sounded, and it was up to you whether you went out. My brother was just going to open the swing doors and they opened for him with the blast from this landmine.

A few weeks ago I was talking to a Mrs Smith from St Albans who was the granddaughter of the Reverend Crickmer from the Minster, and she was a young girl of 17 then. In those days in the market place there was a tea bar which Gordon Armstrong provided free tea for troops. Mrs Smith told me that she was stood there that night the land mine went off, and the next thing they knew all the crockery in the caravan dropped on top of them.

In 1943 I left school in July and got a job as a telegram boy and then I really started to see things. We were out on our cycles all day long, morning noon and night, we used to work 8 hours a day 6 days a week, 2 hours on a Sunday for the princely sum of 9s6d when I started, plus a uniform. If you worked Sundays you got 1s 3 ha’pence.

One night in 1943 or ‘44 there was two planes coming back from a bombing mission. One was going to the bomber base at Lissett, and I think the other one was coming in to land at Leconfield, but they collided in mid-air and both crews were killed, and the planes crashed at New Holland Farm, which is at the back of Tickton.

I was on early turn, half past seven, going up Hull Bridge Road and there was a girl called Marjorie Weatherill who said, its been a terrible night up there, there’s been two planes crashed, and then she said, oh look what’s coming, and there were two RAF fire tenders and on them they had these parachutes, and they were actually the wrapped bodies of the two crews in the parachutes on these fire tenders, and I can always remember that.

There’s a sequel to that: two men working on one of the ships at Grovehill Yard saw a box floating down the river. They pulled it out and inside was a carrier pigeon that was the only thing that survived out of that crash. [Carrier pigeons were taken on the planes to send messages home in the event of landing behind enemy lines]

We were always up and down to Leconfield. We used to see the bomber crews going for their briefings, and we’d know when there was going to be a bombing raid because we would see the planes on the perimeter of the runway, and if you went up at five or six o’clock you would see the crews going out to their planes from the briefings.

One day I was going up to Leconfield in the summer of 1944 and I was riding up just beyond where that garage used to be at Leconfield, talking to this chap called Gus Holmes. All of a sudden he pushed me and I went straight in the dyke on the side of the road and he followed me in! Apparently there was a bomber taking off and something happened with it. The crew jumped out, and they were that low that they were dropping out of the plane without their parachutes. The plane went over our heads into that field at the back of the garage.

What had happened was, they had a sea mine on it for laying on one of the German estuaries, and this mine had come loose as it took off and unbalanced the plane, and of course it would be primed. So they crashed and the pilot got out and ran away and the plane blew up in the field.

I started as a telegram boy in 1943, and then I saw more than most people would have done. Because we used to go to the barracks quite regularly with telegrams so we used to see various regiments, like the Canadians who were very good for giving us gum.

In November ‘44, the Americans had gone out on a big bombing raid. For some reason they had to abort the raid and couldn’t get back to their own airfields because they were fog-bound but Leconfield was free of fog. It was around two o’clock in the afternoon on a dull day and all of a sudden the sky was full of Liberator bombers landing at Leconfield, Driffield and any other base they could get down in. They’d jettisoned their bombs, I understand.

One of them actually came into land, and I was watching them and I don’t know whether they were running short of fuel or whatever, but they were all trying to get down quick, and this plane landed and its undercarriage collapsed and it slewed across. To the roadside of the last hangar at Leconfield there are some big mounds and that’s where they used to keep all the fuel for the aircraft and there were big tanks, covered. The plane went and rested on top of the petrol dump and never exploded! That night Beverley was full of American airmen in their flying gear which was all they had with them.

In 1944 I think it was, and it was Mayor-making day in Beverley so it would have been May. The mayor walked out of the Guildhall as I rode out of the post office on me bike and I knocked the mayor over on Mayor-making Day so I got a day’s extra duty. You didn’t used to get fined, you got extra duty if you did something wrong. If you didn’t do your belt and boots and that polished that’s how you disciplined you, whether you liked it or not.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.