A Child's War (10 page)

When the war started I was 10 years old and a member of the 196th Cub pack. Unfortunately soon after the start of the war our cubmaster (Akela) was called up and the pack closed down.

I then had to wait until I was 11 to join the Scouts: the 26th Bristol (Northcote) troop. They consisted of three patrols – the Foxes, the Peewits and the Eagles – and were well into helping the war effort in any way they could. We had a regular wastepaper round and each Saturday one of the patrols would go out with the trek cart. We would distribute empty sacks to the households and collect full ones in return. We would then go back to our HQ and tip out all the sacks in our (now unused) Cub den and sort the paper into various grades. Newspaper, magazines, brown Kraft paper, and general writing and wrapping papers. As you can imagine this was a particularly dirty and messy job as people put all sorts of rubbish in the sacks besides paper and there we were, about eight boys up to their knees in a sea of paper, sorting it into more sacks for collection by one of the local paper mills for repulping and making into new paper.

Besides this, every time there was an urgent drive for metal, and particularly aluminium for making Spitfires and Hurricane fighter planes, we would go out, again with the trek cart, and call at houses in the area to see if they had any old pots and pans or other scrap metal which they would give to help the war effort.

Another thing the Scout troop was involved in was acting as casualties or runners when we had any Home Guard or civil defence exercises in our area. We would go to a certain location and have labels attached to us, such as ‘broken leg’, ‘head wound’, or ‘lacerated arm’, etc., and the first aid teams would then practise on us.

I am sure our troop was only one of many doing things to help win the war but we all like to think that we made some sort of contribution and ‘did our bit’. The Scout Association issued a special National Service badge, worn on the left breast, to Scouts who took part in these various activities.

Geoff Shute:

Just before the war I joined the 24th Ipswich Scout Group as a Sea Scout. There was quite a large contingent of Sea Scouts in Ipswich. An old Thames barge moored on the edge of the channel in the River Orwell, close by Bourne Bridge, Ipswich, was our ‘camp’ and we could spend weekends on board. It was here that I learned to sail and row. The craft we used were whalers and took a great deal of effort to row as you can well imagine. The Scoutmaster on board was a ‘Mousey’ Pearce, who ruled us with a plimsoll.

In 1944 a Work Day was organised and Scouts all over England took part in fundraising activities to finance the Scouts’s international relief patrols which followed the Allied armies into Europe, giving assistance to the liberated population.

Over the course of the war a total of 194 Scouts were killed in air raids while on duty.

Guides and Rangers helped in hospitals and first aid posts and with the distribution and fitting of children’s gas masks. They took part in painting kerbs white and some gave public demonstrations of ‘blitz cooking’ at the request of the Ministry of Food. Some companies started allotments which the girls took turns to work on. In May 1940 the Guides held a ‘Gift Week’ during which they raised money by giving up a week’s pocket money, or through self-denial, while Rangers and Guiders gave up half a day’s pay. Altogether £50,000 was raised for two air ambulances, a lifeboat, rest huts and mobile canteens for the YMCA. The Guides also raised money for the Guide International Service which did similar work to the Scouts’s international relief patrols.

Kitty Pledger was a guide in Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire:

I was a member of the 1st Shelford Guide Company. Besides our Guide work we joined in local fund-raising events to raise money for comforts for the troops. We also collected wastepaper and jam-jars – we were paid a halfpenny for a 1-pound jar and a penny for a 2-pound jar.

These activities were carried out as a company, but we older girls helped at the local military convalescent home. We worked on a rota, two of us going every Sunday morning. We helped with bed-making, cleaning the rooms, serving morning coffee to ‘the boys’, and with preparing and serving lunch. After we had cleared and tidied the dining room we were given lunch with the staff – we had the same as the boys, which was always a roast dinner, much enjoyed, as with meat rationing we didn’t often have a roast at home.

The Guide Association encouraged us by bringing out a War Service badge – this consisted of a gold embroidered crown on a navy-blue background and a separate strip with the year embroidered on it - for each year we did war service we had a new year strip – I did it for two years, 1942 and ’43.

Living in the country and not suffering heavy bombing, etc., we were still able to hold our summer camps. We did not travel very far, just to the next village, Stapleford, where we had a very nice meadow with a stream running through it.

Iris Smith was a Guide in Bristol:

I was in the 38th Bristol (Brooklands) Guide Company. When I joined the Rangers, we went over to St Mark’s Road where we were trained by the ARP wardens to put out incendiary bombs, they also talked to us about gasses that could be dropped, and what to do if a house caught fire. We also had to be able to cater for 100 people, in case they were bombed out, but luckily I never had to put this into practice. One other thing I remember, we were on a rota, and every Sunday morning, four to six of us went to help at the Bristol Royal Infirmary, cooking and rolling up bandages and the like.

We went on camp once during the war, we stayed in the high walled garden of a large private house just outside Bristol. We went in the morning at 6 o’clock and at 10 o’clock that night we went back to our own houses in case of air raids, then next morning we went back at 6 o’clock, and so on. . . .

Another thing was the Bristol Evening Post used to supply wool, you collected the wool and knitted balaclavas and such for the forces. My mother and I used to do it.

Gwendolen Fox was captain of the 30th Eastbourne (Hamden Park) Guides’s Company: ‘When war broke out most units closed as the children were evacuated but they drifted back and we had a very good wastepaper collection going. Raising money to send to the Red Cross and various appeals, also keeping the local army canteen supplied with table-tennis balls and buying wool to knit socks, helped by the parents. When I was called up the patrol leaders carried on, helped by one of the elderly Guiders from another unit.’

The Boys’s Brigade provided the ARP messenger service in many places, such as Birmingham. So did the Church Lads’s Brigade, as Roy Coles of Bristol remembers:

I was in the Church Lads’s Brigade, we mostly did first aid, although the older lads provided messengers for the ARP and the Home Guard and did fire-watching in the evening, not at night. I did it at our headquarters.

I was on the Junior Youth Council which was part of a sub-committee of the local Education Committee. Our purpose was to bring together all the local youth groups, we used to organise parades for things like Warship Week. We also set up a Youth Parliament, and later [after the liberation] tried to arrange a visit to a concentration camp, although sadly this fell through.

The Air Training Corps (ATC) was set up in 1941. Its purpose was to give early RAF training to boys aged 16 to 18. Squadrons were set up in schools and universities, or in local areas. Geoff Shute was one of those who joined:

After the war started, and when I was old enough, I joined the Air Training Corps. At the time I was a pupil at the Northgate Grammar School in Ipswich and we had our own Squadron, No. 786. Our evening meetings were held at the school and at weekends we were taught gliding on Ipswich Airfield. There were two other squadrons in Ipswich, No. 188 and No. 262. Needless to say, rivalry between them was intense, especially in the field of aircraft recognition.

A group of about six of us, all members of the ATC, used to spend our weekends cycling to the many airfields surrounding Ipswich. Once at any particular airfield, we would get as close to any aircraft as we could and make notes of serial numbers, camouflage and, in the case of American planes, the squadron and group colours painted on the fins, cowlings, etc.

Roy Coles of Bristol: ‘The school had its own ATC, it was the school’s cadet force. We used to go to RAF camps in the school holidays for training. We’d always get to go up in a plane, like a Wellington or an Anson.’

For girls there was the Women’s Junior Air Corps, which, like the ATC, was created to give early training for those intending to join the WAAFs. Members were instructed in physical training, games, first aid, morse and similar subjects. Optional subjects included anti-aircraft operational duties, radio location, signals, driving, electrical and engineering work, or clerical and office duties.

Often, one of the first casualties of a raid was the telephone service, the lines being brought down by explosions. The ARP services needed to send messages to tell the rescue services where people were trapped and so on, and any breakdown in communications would be very serious. For this reason, the ARP services used messengers, who ran messages on foot, or went by bicycle. The messengers were usually young boys or girls. Margaret Ladd lived in Southend-on-Sea:

I think I must have been 16 when I heard that the Civil Defence wanted girls and boys, together with their bikes, to do a messenger service one or two nights a week.

Southend was actually a hive of action during raids, mainly because of being on the River Thames and the soldiers at the artillery garrison at Shoeburyness were trying to shoot German bombers down before they continued up the Thames to bomb London. They hoped that bombs or planes might come down in the river, but a lot of them came down in Southend instead. Of course, there was a lot of shrapnel flying about as well. I remember dodging the hot pieces on the road, hoping that the tyres on my bicycle didn’t run over any.

Our activities continued all through the time of the doodlebugs coming over as well. They were OK as long as they kept going but the Ack-Ack fire sometimes caught them over at Shoeburyness and either exploded them or tipped them so that they didn’t get to their pre-determined destination. When you heard the engine stop, you hastily looked for somewhere to take cover.

Carol Smith of Dunstable: ‘When I was 14 I became a messenger for the ARP because I was used to riding a cycle all over the area. I used to go to ARP classes over an electrics shop in Dunstable, we were taught things like how to distinguish different gasses, also first aid.’

At first, these messengers could be as young as 9 or 10, but soon the minimum age was raised to 16 during the raids, with the younger volunteers being used for post-raid work. Working during a raid could be most dangerous, as this report from 1942 shows:

Particular praise is given by wardens to several boys who frankly confessed themselves frightened, but still did not hesitate to go out on long and hazardous journeys, not even when flat tyres could have been used as an excuse. Among the messengers was a small, pale boy who begged to be allowed to take a message, but the Chief Warden, feeling that the danger was too great for him, put him off time after time with various excuses, the final one being that he had no bicycle. ‘Please, sir,’ said the lad eagerly, ‘Billy will lend me his bicycle.’

After some hesitation the Chief Warden finally sent him off. After a long time, he returned, breathless, wide-eyed and bleeding, and covered with dirt. He asked to speak to the Chief Warden privately. ‘Glad to see you back, my boy,’ said the Chief Warden as he bent down to listen to the lad’s agitated whisper. ‘I daren’t tell Billy, sir, but I’ve lost his bloody bicycle. I was blown off it, and when I got up I could only find the front wheel.’

Ken Kessie was from Moreton near Liverpool:

I was 16 when the war broke out. I joined the ARP as a bicycle messenger. I remember one night a piece of shrapnel hit the mudguard and I pulled to a halt, I thought I’d been hit.

Another time a small bomb hit the Rally centre, the ARP headquarters for the village we were in – Moreton. It was a small reconnaissance aircraft that came down in Barnston, it ditched its bombs and one hit the small back room which was used as the messengers’s centre. We lost our personal belongings – I lost an air rifle.

And there were other jobs in the ARP. Barbara Daltrey joined the ARP in Windsor just before war broke out. ‘I was 16 and a half at the time. I was attached to the first aid parties. My shift was from about 10 pm to 6 am, when I was finished I’d go home for breakfast.’ Then there was acting as ‘casualties’ in training exercises; in
Children of the Blitz
, Robert Westall includes the story of one young ARP messenger who did this: ‘There was a label attached to my coat which stated “coal-gas poisoning, not breathing”. I lay there for what seemed an age. . . . I was eventually dragged from the ruins and laid on the brick-strewn path whilst being given artificial respiration. My ribs were bruised both front and back. I did not volunteer again!’

In January 1940, as a response to the massive German fire raid on the City of London, Herbert Morrison had brought in the Fire Precautions and Business Premises Order, drafted to ensure that men between the ages of 16 and 60 registered for forty-eight hours’s fire-watching a month. Many 16-year-olds were brought into ARP work by this. One such was Bill Sherrington, from South London.
The City That Wouldn’t Die
, which chronicles the events of the great London raid of 10/11 May 1941, tells his story: