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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Ernest Croysdill and has been added to the site with his permission…

On the day war broke out we were walking up Manchester Road towards Oak Hill Park in Accrington, when this man came out of a house and told us that Neville Chamberlain had been on the wireless and that war had been declared.

At the time we were visiting my Grandad who had a chip shop in Church Street in Accrington, the fish came on the train from Fleetwood and I would go on a bicycle with a carrier basket on the front to collect it from the railway station.

As the war moved on rationing almost became a pittance and we would swop tea for jam with neighbours and friends. I remember mum saying to me pretend you aren’t with me when we went into a shop, so that we could get a bit extra. The ironmongers had so little stock he used to only open from 9am to 1pm each day.

I recall when I was visiting going to Clayton-le-Moors nearby where a bomb had dropped, demolishing two houses on the main road, just out of Accrington.

I lived in Moston in Manchester. Of course Manchester was blitzed and we would go under the stairs for safety, the anti aircraft guns would fire at the German planes overhead and the following morning I would collect the shrapnel that had fallen in to our backyard..

When the war ended I did my National Service and following combat training I volunteered to go to Korea, where, after a Mig fighter attack I was wounded. I was a bombadier and received a citation from Syngman Rhee the President of South Korea.

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