Muriel Brown, collected by Hope Valley u3a
Gasmasks, Identity Discs and A.R.P. Wardens
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If I had kept a diary at the age of nine, it would have read ‘8.0.a.m. caught bus to school, 4.30.p.m. came back from school’ but this uneventful way of life changed in 1939 when war was declared, and became much more interesting and to a child, exciting. |
My family was the traditional one of mother, father and two children, girls aged nine and five, living in Newbold on the northern edge of Chesterfield. As the elder, I had been to the local school and passed the entrance examination to Chesterfield Girls' High School in the summer of 1939. The autumn term for the new girl was meant to start on September 4th but on the previous day, we had gathered round the wireless set, with our neighbours, to hear that we were now at war with Germany. It was not unexpected and for weeks householders had been receiving information on how to dig air raid shelters, evacuate their children to safe areas, use stirrup pumps, prepare for gas mask distribution for everyone and 'keep mum' about military secrets.
The previous week my extended family had been on a picnic to Sherwood Forest. The discussion among the adults was about the mass evacuation of Sheffield Notre Dame High School, where my cousins were pupils, to the quiet of Derwent Hall out in the safer Hope Valley. We played among the trees oblivious to the fact that in a week my cousins would be gone to a safe place. This was during the phoney war, in the first few months of the war when little happened in England. They returned to Sheffield in time to experience the first 'Blitz' on the city on the night of December 13th/14th 1940.
My father was quick off the mark building his air raid shelter and dug deep to provide a de luxe one in our garden. We shared with our neighbours who had daughters of our age. The shelter was deep, about ten feet by fifteen, lined with concrete and had an electricity supply. We also had bunk beds, a supply of tinned food and a large water tank. There were six steps down to it covered by a hinged cover which we pulled down after us and at the opposite end, an Elsan toilet in a screened alcove with an escape hatch above it. The entire shelter, apart from the hatch, was covered by a magnificent sand pit which we children thought was for our benefit, but its real purpose was to absorb bomb blast.
The first excitement was the hand delivered letter saying that school was ‘OFF’ for the present. The reason was that huge shelters were being built under the terraces at the rear of the school and massive building works were in hand. They were built to last (and are probably still in place). There were two interconnecting tunnels horizontally bored into the ground beneath the terrace, each with huge, thick metal doors. It was like entering a safe and was cold and dank. Doors were sandbagged to protect the entrances and windows crossed with sticky tape to prevent the glass flying inwards in the case of bomb blast. Fire-watching was organised among the teachers and a night rota established. Water buckets and sand buckets were placed in each classroom, with supplies of candles in case the electricity failed. Soon, a Wardens' Post with an air raid siren on its flat roof appeared in the school drive, permanently manned by a stout lady who sat knitting all day.
When eventually the school reopened, the smaller children were invited to a ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ inside the shelters to accustom them to that forbidding place. Wooden benches lined the walls and there were a few unshaded light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, backed up by even dimmer emergency lighting. We never had to use the shelters in earnest, as German air raids took place mostly at night but every week we had an evacuation drill.
The first thing that brought home the ‘Emergency’ to us was the arrival of the gas mask bus. A single decker Corporation bus had been converted by putting wooden tables over the tops of the seats on which hundreds of black rubber gas masks were arrayed. These included the grotesque all enveloping ‘Mickey Mouse’ ones for babies. Everyone was compelled to own a mask and we tried them on in the bus. With tears streaming down my face, I was shown first how to breathe, then spit on the transparent eye slit (to prevent condensation) and finally put my thumbs in the chin of the mask and put it over my face adjusting the straps over my head. The feeling of suffocation was terrifying and the smell of rubber very strong.
At first the masks had a small filter but later in the war, a round filter about two inches long was provided to be added to the existing one. At school we did lessons for five minutes each day in masks and by the end of that time I was sweating and panicky. Our gas masks had to be taken everywhere, slung over one shoulder in standard carrying cases made of brown cardboard. Later, people began to provide themselves with more attractive cases made of Rexine or material (no plastic then) but whatever colour the case was, the gas mask was part of us.
Other essentials were a thick shelter blanket and rations for twenty four hours which had to be kept in our desks. On a chain around our necks, we wore a metal identity disk engraved with the individual number of the person. This disk number gave the position in the family, i.e. father number 1, mother number 2, eldest child number 3 and so on and later became our national health service numbers. The disk replaced, in my case, an iodine locket about an inch long and made of brown china with tiny holes in it for the iodine fumes to escape and be breathed in by the wearer. The lockets, worn by many Derbyshire children in the 1930s, were thought to prevent `Derbyshire Neck' (or Goitre) which was quite a common condition because the local water at that time did not contain iodine. Later the quality of Derbyshire water was altered to combat the iodine deficiency.
Some men in the area became members of the Local Defence Volunteers, later known as the Home Guard. Television`s Dad's Army, comical though it may be, has a great deal of truth in it. The reality at the beginning was that they paraded with only pitchforks and brooms but there is no doubt that they were dedicated to defending us with every fibre of their being and their advantage was in having local knowledge. Others formed fire-watching rotas and some joined the Observer Corps (aircraft spotters for the anti-aircraft gunners) and made themselves familiar with the shapes of enemy aircraft.
One of the actual Rota books of local Air Raid Wardens
The Air Raid Wardens were the ones we met in the street most often, wearing their dark blue uniforms and wearing tin hats with a white letter 'W' on the front. They patrolled the streets every night in pairs and were in touch with the Wardens' Posts which were placed in strategic positions and were the communication centres through which warnings of impending raids were given to the voluntary Wardens. The siren `alert’, for the raids, would then sound if the planes were coming our way. Of course, there was a lot of waiting about when a Warden was on duty but the boredom was relieved by endless cups of tea or cocoa and much light hearted banter. It led to a very strong community spirit where everyone got to know their neighbours and learned about their lives.
The knowledge of how many people were likely to be in their homes at any given time was important if the occupants had to be accounted for when a house was bombed. This became crucial when the air raids began and incendiary bombs fell like rain in our street. They were intended to flare up with a very bright light when they hit the ground, to illuminate the area for the German bombers as they came onto the target with high explosive bombs. Our athletic Wardens raced about, covering the flaring incendiaries with metal dustbin lids as soon as they were seen, and then putting them out with sand. For years after the war, the pavements in Newbold were scarred with pitted marks where the light incendiaries had fallen. It was a standing joke amongst his neighbours that my father hurdled a row of back garden fences brandishing a dustbin lid to put out an incendiary which had fallen through the roof of a chapel at the end of the road. It had burned through the altar by the time my father had found the key but he saved the building, not that it was very attractive but blazing buildings attracted further high explosive bombs.
In our area, unexpected social talents were discovered and Wardens' Concerts began. These were six monthly events to which whole families looked forward. People who had never been on a stage suddenly blossomed as singers and comedians and the standard was high. We had very happy times and knew and were known by our neighbours.
We recognised the German bombers by the dragging sound they made as they passed overhead and they sounded heavily laden. They were on their way to Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield, searching for heavy industry or railway marshalling yards. We always fancied that they sounded lighter and quicker on their way home. Barrage balloons and gun emplacements had started to appear around Sheffield and when we saw the massive grey balloons go up in the distance, we imagined that an `alert’ was on the way. Early policy was to fly the balloons night and day but in practice they were grounded in bad weather because of the fear that they might be damaged or destroyed, thus depriving the city of protection during a raid. The idea was that the wire cables attached to the balloons would prevent enemy aircraft from diving onto their targets so they were sited in parks, above tips, areas of unoccupied land and usually manned by the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. There were 72 balloons around Sheffield, 42 of which were damaged by enemy aircraft in one night but within twelve hours they had been repaired. Factories and strategic buildings were camouflaged. Little did we know that German aerial maps captured after the war would show every little detail. We thought we would be invisible but very few civilians then had seen the countryside from an aircraft.
A moonlit night was referred to as a `bomber's moon’ and on those nights trouble was expected. The blackout was total as every house had every window covered with heavy black material. When entering or leaving a building, the light had first to be switched off
to prevent even a chink of light showing when the door was opened. It was my job as a child to ensure that the curtains or boards in each room were tightly closed as soon as it got dark. Woe betide anyone whose property showed a chink of light as the Warden's shout of 'Put that light out' would shame one in front of the neighbours.
Another chore that came my way was having to take potato peelings and any food scraps to `the pig bin’. These were metal dustbins placed in prominent positions by local farmers to provide food for the pigs. Farmers were encouraged by the Government to breed pigs to supplement the meat ration. Many unsuitable things got into the pig bins, (especially cutlery) and the metal lids were also useful for covering incendiaries so the farmers were not always enthusiastic about the idea.
I was encouraged to join the Girl Guides and as a group, we gathered rose hips to be made into rose hip syrup for babies, (lots of vitamin C). We also unravelled and knitted any old wool into squares for blankets. The more advanced knitters were provided with thick oiled white wool and knitted sea-boot stockings for sailors on the Arctic convoys; also we knitted operating theatre stockings. We gathered in groups to tease the fibres of old materials into shreds to fill pillows for hospitals, a very tedious business which left one's fingers sore.
My friends and I caught the bus to Guides which started in the early evening in the summer and on Saturdays in the winter so that we could be home before blackout. Otherwise we cycled everywhere as there was little traffic apart from convoys of army lorries. One expedition was to recover metal souvenirs from a crashed British bomber in a field at Cutthorpe but we were foiled by the Military Police. Another attraction in our small world was a Welsh soldier who was billeted with a neighbour and who could carve wood. We used to bribe him to speak Welsh by parting with some of our precious sweet ration.
During the first few months of the war we nine year olds had to find our way round the town to have lessons in the private houses of our teachers, because the school still had builders in. Eventually school life became routine again. Games such as rounders, tennis and netball were played at school but the hockey pitches were at Brampton two miles away. Swimming was a freezing nightmare in cold water at a run-down Municipal open air pool. It was little wonder that people of my generation found it miserable learning to swim!
A few Jewish refugees joined the class and to our annoyance, one French girl who was always top in English. Two hours homework a night was insisted upon but as paper was in short supply we had to share one text book between three pupils. This meant that doing homework in some subjects was only every third night. This led to many excuses and some copying. There were no opportunities for school trips and television had not yet come our way in Chesterfield, so all our learning was from books and the occasional Schools Broadcasts on the radio. The only outside visit in school hours that I can remember was to see Donald Wolfit in The Merchant of Venice at the local theatre, our 'set book' for School Certificate in 1945.
Our education was affected by the gradual leeching of the younger teachers leaving for a more exciting life in the Forces and being replaced, inevitably, by retired staff, most of whom had trained at the end of the nineteenth century.