80 years ago today - Britain Declares War on Germany
Discussion
s2art said:
As an aside it was Bristols work on high temperature alloys for its radial engines that gave us a huge technology lead over Germany for jet engines .
Hello? What technology lead was that? The Meteor was the only jet aircraft Britain had in the air during WW2 and never brought another aircraft down (if we exclude the two which crashed into each other) nor was even allowed over German occupied territory. The Germans had both rocket and jet aircraft active and scoring in the war including the Arado 234, which operated over the U.K. Edited by cardigankid on Wednesday 16th September 15:42
FunkyNige said:
Europa1 said:
Am I right in thinking there was a variant of the Beaufighter fitted with an unfeasibly large gun for anti-ship duties, or have I mis-remembered?
Could you be thinking of the German HS-129 with the 75mm gun?
The Americans also put a 75mm in the B-25 Mitchell
I expect Europa is alluding to the Maritime Strike Mosquitos armed with Molins 57mm/6 pounder gun (aircraft so equipped were nicknamed 'tsetse').
cardigankid said:
s2art said:
As an aside it was Bristols work on high temperature alloys for its radial engines that gave us a huge technology lead over Germanyfor jet engines .
Hello? What technology lead was that? The Meteor was the only jet aircraft Britain had in the air during WW2 and never shot another aircraft down nor was even allowed over German occupied territory. The Germans had both rocket and jet aircraft active and scoring in the war including the Arado 234, which operated over the U.K. Penelope Stopit said:
The Mad Monk said:
I started school today in South West London.
The London Blitz started 5 days later.
Any chance of you sharing your experiences? PleaseThe London Blitz started 5 days later.
World War II Memories – DE1.2
I was born in 1934. When WWII started I was a few weeks short of being 5 years old. I started at Heathfield Infants School in September 1940. The Battle of Britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Britain had been conducted during the Summer of 1940, this was immediately followed by The London Blitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blitz
My Home
My family – Dad born 1902, Mum born 1903, brother Peter born December 1930, and I lived in Warburton Road, Whitton, some 16 km (10 miles) South West of London. Whitton is in Twickenham, which is nowadays in The London Borough of Richmond. Our house was on the corner of Gostling road. My friend Norman Harvey lived next door but one. Other boys that I met through school lived nearby and who became friends were Doug Harrison and Derek (Tich) Benson.
My father worked for the Southern Railway as a signalman, this, being a reserved occupation meant that he was exempt from conscription. I think that during much of the war he worked at Kew Bridge signal box.
My mother worked for a small engineering company based on Twickenham Embankment. The site was bombed and the company - Barnett, Rose and Zallud - moved to Teddington. My understanding is that Mr Zallud was a stateless Jew.
My mother came from a very large family, she had ten siblings, three lived within one hundred metres, so there was always someone around to help with any major jobs.
I don’t remember ever asking any questions, or being given any explanation for the reason for the war. I was never frightened, I found air raids and the bombing interesting and exciting!
Milk and bread was delivered by roundsmen. A man with a horse and cart sold vegetables. Everything else we went into Whitton to buy and carried home. Bigger items were bought in Twickenham, or more often Hounslow.
When he was 13 my brother Peter got a Saturday morning job as a butcher’s boy at Penfolds in Nelson Road, this was a bit of shop work, but mainly delivering orders by bike to customers. When Peter started full time work I took over at Penfolds.
All civilians were issued with gas masks. We had to try them on for size when they were issued. Being only four, I was teased and told I was going to have a babies gas mask, small babies had a thing like a suit which completely enclosed them. Toddlers had a mask with a Mickey Mouse face. Fortunately I had a proper gas mask. Apparently my mother cried when she first saw me in my gas mask.
The novelty of the gas masks soon wore off and people didn’t normally carry them around with them. From time to time we had gas mask drill at school. When you were wearing your gas mask, if you breathed out forcefully you could make a fart sound between your cheeks and the side of the gas mask. How did the teacher always know it was me doing it?
Leisure
When the war started cinemas and theatres were closed, but I think it was felt that the loss of morale was a greater danger than the risk of a bomb on a cinema, so they were re-opened.
Television broadcasts had started in 1937, but were stopped for the duration of the war. The main leisure activities for adults were cinema, music hall, theatre, the pub, or reading.
Children had ‘Saturday Morning Pictures’. We went to the Ritz – later the Odeon- in Whitton. There, for six pence in old money (2.5p) we saw a cartoon, a full length film and a serial. The serial always ended on a ‘cliff hanger’, where the hero – normally – or heroine – sometimes – was in a situation where death was inevitable. Next Saturday we went back to see how they got out of that impossible situation. Even as kids the supposed escapes were too corny for words!
We travelled everywhere by public transport, or bike. Petrol wasn’t permitted for civilians, not that many families had a car anyway. We used to go out for family bike rides. As children we used bikes to get to Black Pond on Esher Common to swim.
Air Raids
At home we had an Anderson air raid shelter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_raid_shelter#And... There were two main sorts of shelter provided for private dwellings – The Anderson and the Morrison.
The Anderson was assembled from sheets of corrugated steel, curved at one end and the curved ends were bolted together, this was half buried in the ground and the excavated earth piled on top of the shelter. My Dad, assisted by various brothers in law did the excavation of the soil and the assembly of the parts. Contractors carried out the concreting in of the steel sheets. There were four bunks in the shelter. My parents had two upper bunks and my brother and I slept on the bottom. During one bombing raid, incendiary bombs landed in our garden, I wanted to rush out to see, but my Dad who was in front of me was so slow! I found that very frustrating. When we got out, one of my uncles, who was a war time policeman, who happened to be nearby was already there. We kept the tail fins of the incendiaries for a long time. After the war, our shelter was taken out of the ground and used as a shed.
The Morrison shelter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_raid_shelter#Mor... was for use indoors. This was presumably for families living in flats, or who, for some reason, did not want a shelter in the garden.
During the Blitz and at other times when raids were frequent we slept in the shelter at home every night. During the war when raids were less frequent we would sleep in the house and go into the shelter when the air raid siren sounded.
At school there were about six air raid shelters. They were in the corner of the school grounds between Cobbett Road and The ‘Rec. They were concrete tubes approximately 1.5 metres in diameter and about 50 metres long. These tubes were half buried in the ground and the excavated earth was placed on top of the tubes. There was a wooden duckboard laid down to walk on. When I started at school I could stand up full in the shelter, by the end of the war I had grown so that I had to bend double to walk through. At each end of the school shelter there was an entrance made of brick and concrete with steps leading down.
In the early days the school shelters didn’t have electric lights. To pass the time we would have sing songs, or recite our ‘times tables’. Later when proper lighting was installed we had ‘normal’ lessons.
At times when air raids were continuous we spent the day in the shelter, having lessons in there and only coming up for lunch and breaks when it was felt safe to do so.
The type of air raid changed as the war progressed. In 1944-45 V bombs, the V1 and V2 which were self propelled rockets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-weapons formed part of the enemy offensive. The V1 had a rocket motor which made a curious spluttering sound, these had the nickname ‘buzz bombs’, or ‘doodle bugs’. We would sit in the shelter listening to them flying overhead and waiting for the rocket motor to stop, they would then glide to the ground and explode on impact We would comment on how close we thought the explosion was! The V2 which was much larger and faster than the V1 was much more dangerous, it flew faster than the speed of sound, so you didn’t hear them coming.
Public shelters were also provided in towns and wherever the public might need them. There was a big shelter in the recreation ground in Powdermill Lane. This was in a zig zag shape and quite a few of the local families preferred to spend the night there, presumably for the company.
Bombing Raids
The Allies carried out many bombing raids on Germany. Some of the most devastating of these were the Thousand Bomber raids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand-bomber_raid... I remember a number of times seeing the sky absolutely filled with our aircraft. I stood in the road and watched this sight, then rushed indoors to tell my Mum. She didn’t seem to be interested. With hindsight, she probably was, but like many of her contemporaries realised the horrors of aerial bombardment.
Prisoners of War (POWs)
There was a small prisoner of war camp in Whitton. This was in Collingwood Close, just off the junction of Nelson Road and Hospital Bridge Road. This had been a housing site, where building work had to stop during the war.
It was occupied by Italian POWs, during the week, they worked on the market gardens in Hospital Bridge Road. At the weekend they walked into Whitton High Street – unescorted – to do their personal shopping. They wore a battledress uniform with large cloth diamond shapes sewn onto the jacket and trousers. Nobody took very much notice of them.
After the war the camp was used by ‘Displaced Persons’ (refugees).
Evacuation
Many of my schoolmates were evacuated during the war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuations_of_civil...
We – my brother and I – were not evacuated. I recall my mother saying to someone who enquired as to whether I was going to be evacuated replied “No. If we die, we are all going to die together”. I wasn’t given a say in the matter.
After one particularly bad nights bombing, many children were absent the next morning. Only two children out of fifty three in our class turned up, Jeanette Searle and me!
Many children were not evacuated for the whole of the war, they returned to their homes from time to time and then went away again if the bombing was bad.
Restrictions.
Many things were either rationed or in short supply during the war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_Uni...
Petrol was reserved for essential services only. No private motoring! I can only remember one of our neighbours who had a car before the war. Private cars were stored during the war and then brought back into use when petrol supplies were restored.
Sweets were rationed until 1953. Meat was rationed until 1954.
At the beginning of the war the local council in Twickenham had just switched from horse-drawn dust carts to motorised. The shortage of fuel caused them to switch back to horses again!
Many foodstuffs were rationed. We kept chickens and my mother sold the eggs. Quite a few of the teachers at Heathfield School bought the eggs. I remember my uncle coming round to kill the chickens when their laying life was finished. My father was too squeamish to do it himself, he tried once, and botched it.
All able bodied men, unless in a reserved occupation, unfit, or over the age of 40, were called up to the services. Of the children that I knew, I guess roughly 50% of their fathers were away in the forces. This meant that in many case women stepped in to carry out jobs previously reserved for men. The grass on the school playing field was cut very infrequently, at times the grass was long enough to play Hide and Seek in!
In the run up to D Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normandy_landings various military vehicles were stored along the A316 ‘Chertsey Arterial Road’. This is a road which runs between what is now the beginning of the M3 and Twickenham. One side of the dual carriageway was closed and was filled with vehicles. The other carriageway carried two way traffic. There was an entrance to Crane Park which was in the closed off area and was guarded by soldiers. If a group of us schoolchildren wanted to get into the Park we used to get a couple of the girls to chat to the soldiers to get permission to pass through the parked vehicles!
Our local recreation ground ‘The Rec’, was cultivated for vegetable growing. There was little or no traffic around, so we could safely play in the road. Occasionally football, but more often, cricket, rounders and ‘Tin Can Tommy’ were very popular.
After the Americans came into the war in 1941, a large camp was built in Bushy Park. This camp remained there until the early ‘60s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushy_Park
My father, brother and I went to Twickenham Rugby Ground in 1942(?) to see a demonstration by the American soldiers of the game of baseball. I thought it was a lot of fuss over what was essentially a game of rounders!
VE (Victory in Europe) Day (work in progress)
VJ (Victory in Japan) Day
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_H...
Edited by The Mad Monk on Wednesday 2nd September 17:49
The Mad Monk said:
Penelope Stopit said:
The Mad Monk said:
I started school today in South West London.
The London Blitz started 5 days later.
Any chance of you sharing your experiences? PleaseThe London Blitz started 5 days later.
Thank you so much for taking the time posting the above, it was a great read
Not wanting to divert too much from your other experiences but, I now know how to play Tin Can Tommy, had never heard of the game, don't know why my mum or dad never mentioned it. My parents were older than thee during the war, they spent it working on military tanks and had few stories to tell due to work, work and more work
Cheers from Greece
Penelope Stopit said:
Not wanting to divert too much from your other experiences but, I now know how to play Tin Can Tommy, had never heard of the game, don't know why my mum or dad never mentioned it.
Another game I enjoyed was 'Bung the Barrel'. You've heard of that?Two teams, perhaps 5 in each team.
Team A. First boy would stand with his back to a wall, legs apart, then the other boys would bend over as though playing leap frog, each boy would put his head between the legs of the boy in front of him. Got it, so far?
The other team Team B would vault onto the backs of the boys in team A. Team B had to get all their boys on the backs of the boys in Team A.
If Team B couldn't get all their boys on, or fell off, they lost.
If Team A collapsed - you put the strongest boys at the back - they lost.
It was very painful in the, er, boys department for the boy in team A who had his back to the wall. The game was banned at some schools because boys broke legs - strange that.
I have been searching online for "Bung the Barrel" and eventually found a reference here (it's a few paragraphs down)
https://www.tes.com/news/no-harm-little-rough-and-...
I have also heard the game called 'Sacks on (or to) The Mill'.
https://www.tes.com/news/no-harm-little-rough-and-...
I have also heard the game called 'Sacks on (or to) The Mill'.
The Mad Monk said:
Penelope Stopit said:
Not wanting to divert too much from your other experiences but, I now know how to play Tin Can Tommy, had never heard of the game, don't know why my mum or dad never mentioned it.
Another game I enjoyed was 'Bung the Barrel'. You've heard of that?Two teams, perhaps 5 in each team.
Team A. First boy would stand with his back to a wall, legs apart, then the other boys would bend over as though playing leap frog, each boy would put his head between the legs of the boy in front of him. Got it, so far?
The other team Team B would vault onto the backs of the boys in team A. Team B had to get all their boys on the backs of the boys in Team A.
If Team B couldn't get all their boys on, or fell off, they lost.
If Team A collapsed - you put the strongest boys at the back - they lost.
It was very painful in the, er, boys department for the boy in team A who had his back to the wall. The game was banned at some schools because boys broke legs - strange that.
The Mad Monk said:
I have been searching online for "Bung the Barrel" and eventually found a reference here (it's a few paragraphs down)
https://www.tes.com/news/no-harm-little-rough-and-...
I have also heard the game called 'Sacks on (or to) The Mill'.
Sorry to have to inform you but, no, have never heard of the game Bung The Barrel. Apart from myself failing miserably, having done a quick Google search, didn't find the games you mention, Google has also failed miserablyhttps://www.tes.com/news/no-harm-little-rough-and-...
I have also heard the game called 'Sacks on (or to) The Mill'.
Not many can beat Google but you seem to have easily done so
About the game
Bung The Barrel sounds real good fun, painful fun yes but everything good has a price
The Mad Monk said:
Got it, so far?
Yes, got it but.....Am thinking that there was the possibility of a boy head butting the wall if not making contact with testicles
Yes, I too find it strange that some schools banned Bung The Barrel, taking into consideration that there were people being blown to bits often enough
These games you comment about would surely be great fun for adults to have a go at
Thank you once again for your efforts, this is education at its best and no doubt much appreciated by those that visit here
Good afternoon
Edited by Penelope Stopit on Friday 4th September 20:15
Eric Mc said:
Thanks for sharing your personal memories. Even though you would only have been 6 years old at the time, do you have any memories of the Battle of Britain period?
Battle of Britain memories? No, not really. I did watch a dog fight between a British fighter and a German, but I can't hinestly remember when in the war that occurred.I have lots of memories, but a lot of them can't be dated - if you know what I mean.
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