Authors: Sean Longden
In Canterbury, fourteen-year-old June Mackenzie was travelling on a bus when it was bombed during a daylight raid on Canterbury. She was wounded and her Girl Guides uniform was covered in blood, but she used her first-aid skills to help the wounded. First she covered up the body of the dead bus conductress, helped other passengers from the bus and then set about bandaging the wounded with strips of sheeting. When assistance arrived it came in the form of a Boy Scout carrying a first-aid haversack and wearing a tin helmet. She received the Guides’ Silver Cross for her courage.
As well as having its shipbuilding industry outside the centre of the city, Glasgow’s geographical location, far to the north-west, saved it from the level of attention afforded towns like Coventry. That said, it faced its share of raids. One of the city’s heroes was fifteen-year-old Peter Brown, a grocer’s boy who had volunteered as an ARP messenger. Like so many other youthful ARP messengers, it was his role to keep communications open to allow civil defence work to continue through the air raids. It was whilst he was on duty on the night of a raid that calls came through requesting that rescue squads be sent out to bombed buildings. Then came the awful news that a large basement shelter had received a direct hit. Before the message could be relayed to a rescue squad the telephone line went dead.
This was the moment Peter, like so many other boys, had been waiting for – his chance to prove himself. With the bombs still falling, he set out on his bicycle to find a rescue squad and direct them to the shelter. He made his way through shrapnel-strewn streets, dodging the flaring flames from burst gas mains and taking shortcuts to avoid blocked roads. His route was lit by the flashes from bombs and anti-aircraft guns, and by burning buildings. He could hear the screams
of people in these bombed buildings, knowing that some were probably people he knew – maybe his own school friends – all the time fearing that his own home, and his own family, might be victims of the bombs.
Eventually came the one sound he feared above all – the whining of a falling bomb. The blast flung the fifteen year old from his bicycle, smashing him into a wall. Dazed by the blast, he picked himself up and began the search for his bike. He found it nearby, a mass of useless twisted steel. It seemed strange that the bike should be so damaged when he had suffered no more than a deep cut to his arm and bruises to his legs. Despite his wounds, Peter still had a job to do. Dazed, and with blood dripping down his arm, he began to run through the streets. As he ran past his own street he could see devastation where his home had stood. But there was no time to stop. He ran on until he reached his destination and found the mobile rescue squad. He was able to direct them to the bombed shelter before he fainted from loss of blood.
Now safely outside London, Sidney Ties remained keen to resume his contribution to the war effort. His family had been housed in Guildford and he had found a job. Eager to get involved in the war, he volunteered for the RAF, aged seventeen, but was turned down due to varicose veins on his leg. Frustrated, he decided that he would find another way to serve, quit his job and joined the ARP on a full-time basis, initially as a stretcher-bearer before soon being promoted to squad leader.
Though Guildford was spared the attentions of the Luftwaffe, Sidney Ties and his squad were soon called to support the emergency services in Southampton and Portsmouth that were swamped by their workload following heavy raids. Their first destination was Portsmouth, following a police convoy along the A3, towing trailers containing six stretchers behind their cars. As they drove through the night, it was difficult to see where they were going since they had covered headlights that offered little more than a pinprick of light. As they approached the city their headlights became irrelevant: ‘The sight of the fires was awful. When we entered the town the roads were covered in fire hoses and debris. The destruction was terrible.’ Sidney then saw something he would never forget: a bus that had been blown into the air and was hanging out of the front of a building.
Arriving safely in Portsmouth their first job was to evacuate a hospital that had an unexploded time bomb beneath it:
That was quite hairy. We couldn’t use the lifts, so we had to carry them down. On the top floor were people who were a bit mental. So we had some troubles carrying them down on the stretcher. And all the time we were thinking of this bomb under the hospital.
From there, the squad went out to rescue people from the ruins of their homes. Unlike his experiences in Stepney, there was no waiting for the all clear before starting to search for survivors. Instead, they worked as the bombs continued to fall. Armed with a small torch, he searched through dust-filled ruins for those who could be saved. When they found a survivor, their role was to ensure they reached hospital as quickly as possible:
You looked for casualties. You picked up someone covered in dust, had a quick look: if they were alive, you put a label on them saying where they were bleeding from, and put them in an ambulance and sent them to the hospital. You didn’t have time to put splints on or anything like that. Very basic, you just dressed what you could.
Whatever the severity of wounds, Sidney and his team had to ensure they reached hospital: ‘In first aid you never said someone is dead until a doctor had told you they are. So sometimes you had to move people who were dead already. Of course, sometimes you used your own discretion: if it didn’t have a head, you didn’t need to worry.’
In both Portsmouth and Southampton, Sidney Ties and his ‘First-Aid Party’ worked almost constantly, with the days merging into each other:
When we went in there we just had our clothes. We didn’t take anything off for days. We didn’t have a wash. We had nothing to eat. I just remember the Salvation Army. Wherever we were, they appeared with a cup of tea and a bun. We were there for about a week. Then we came home.
Somehow, despite so many hours crawling through bombed buildings and dressing the wounds, the seventeen year old managed to remain calm and complete his duties:
I didn’t get cynical – but I didn’t get involved. In that situation you treat it as a job and just do the best that you can. You have to be detached. The worst thing was dealing with children. Coming back after picking up a dead child, changed everything, everyone was quiet. That affects you, because they hadn’t had a chance to live their life.
Youngsters up and down the country enthusiastically joined in with civil defence duties, whether officially or unofficially. Having moved from London to Oban in September 1940, Anthony Wedgwood Benn joined the local ARP unit where the local men deferred to him: ‘I was fourteen-and-a-half and the only one who’d ever seen an air raid – so I was considered an expert.’ In Ealing Roy Bartlett, still not yet a teenager, began attending the local ARP post with his father. He listened to a lecture on aircraft recognition and attended lessons on the operation of stirrup pumps.
In 1942, he finally got an opportunity to put his training into practice:
I always dreaded having to fight an incendiary bomb. It was my job to be the ‘hose boy’ on the stirrup-pump. My parents’ biggest concern was the paraffin oil we kept for heating. We had two fifty-gallon barrels in an outhouse. So we had buckets of sand everywhere to fight a fire. So it was also my job to keep all the fire-fighting appliances in the shop topped up. I had to make sure the pump worked and the buckets were filled.
One night the sirens started and he made his way to the cellar. As he waited for his mother to join them, he heard a noise from above: ‘Mum was shouting and yelling. I went up the cellar steps and she was shouting, “Incendiary in the back garden!” I went out and, thankfully, the bomb hadn’t landed on the paraffin tanks. But the garden fence was already alight.’
As his mother pumped, he directed the jet of water: ‘However, the magnesium was too hot to put out – it just reignited. And we couldn’t
use sand because you can’t cover a vertical surface.’ He realized he needed to obliterate the supply of oxygen with a constant fine spray of water, as he had been taught at ARP lectures: ‘Now was the moment of truth. Dad was out, there was no one else to do it. Just Mum and me, twelve years old. I began to direct the spray and it was working, but a bucket of water doesn’t last too long.’ One of the women from the shelter soon joined them, tripping over buckets of water in the dark: ‘I yelled out, “Water, we need more bloody water!” Then the woman chucked sandbags over the remaining bits of the fire.’ Soaking wet with both water and sweat, he had carried out his duty, extinguished the fire and stopped it from reaching the oil tanks: ‘I felt proud of myself till Mum called me aside and said “I don’t want you using that type of language!” Her sense of propriety didn’t fail.’ Eventually, in 1944, having reached the age of fourteen, Roy made it official and joined the ARP. Having prepared for so long, attending so many classes and lectures, he joined just in time to work during a single air raid, running messages between the local ARP posts.
In north London, fifteen-year-old Stan Scott found himself back at home during the Blitz. Even if they didn’t have any ammunition for their rifles, he had been enjoying training at the barracks in Tonbridge until he was called to the company office:
‘How old are you, Scott?’ ‘Eighteen, sir.’ ‘I’ll ask you again – how old are you?’ ‘Eighteen, sir!’ ‘Don’t tell me bloody lies! I’ve got a letter here from your mother. You are fifteen. Nice try, son. Hand your kit in and come to the office and get a railway warrant back to London.
The disappointed youth discovered that when he had been issued his uniform, his civilian clothes had been sent to his home address. As soon as his mother had found out where he was, she requested his release. As he travelled home he read the official paper that showed he had served ten days but been released on the grounds of ‘Making a mis-statement as to age on enlistment.’ As he later noted: ‘It was October 1940 and I had the one thing thousands of men wanted: release papers from the British Army!’
He returned home, angered by his mother’s actions, and only became angrier when his sister’s boyfriend greeted him with the words:
‘Here he is, England’s last hope!’ When he saw his mother he told her she should not have told the Army his true age. Undaunted, Stan volunteered for the Home Guard – despite being two years underage – and dreamed of the day when he would rejoin the Army. In the meantime he had to deal with living in a blitzed city: ‘I didn’t go into the Anderson shelter. With me mum in there? With all me sisters? It was like a cathouse. Every time there was a bang, they were shrieking.’ Instead, he sat outside in the trench, surrounded by sandbags. He preferred the noise of anti-aircraft guns and falling bombs to the shrieking of the women.
One night his mother sent him and his sister indoors to fetch cushions to make the shelter more comfortable:
We were coming out of the back door and we heard a whizz and a crack. It was an incendiary basket exploding. My sister went loopy, she dropped the cushions and started screaming. I grabbed her, shook her and got her back into the bloody shelter. Freddie from next door came out. We got shovels. There were incendiaries burning everywhere, all over the allotments out back. We put them out. There was a builder’s yard, full of timber. We had to climb over the fence to get in. We dug holes, scooped up the incendiary bombs, put them in, covered them with earth and patted it down. We were running all over the bloody place. Then we went back to the shelter.
They were not there for long. He heard a banging on the front door and answered it. A neighbour shouted to him that a nearby house was on fire. Incendiary bombs had crashed through the roof and ignited among the rafters. Stan Scott and his neighbour Freddie again ran to help:
There was an old couple renting the house. We banged on the door. They couldn’t hear us. Freddie said, ‘Stand back!’ He ran at the door and kicked it in. We went in and found them sitting in the back kitchen listening to the radio. They knew there was a raid on, but didn’t know their house was on fire! We got ’em out.
Once the couple were safely outside, Stan returned to the house:
I went in the front room, opened the window and started chucking out their chairs, rugs, vases – everything that could move went out the window. Freddie shouted, ‘Get out, the roof’s gonna cave in!’ I went out of the window, then a few seconds later it all came down. Next morning it was all burned out. Just the walls were standing.
As they surveyed the scene, the owner of the house asked who had put everything in the front garden. Freddie and Stan, expecting thanks, said they had done it: ‘You bloody idiots! Look what you’ve done to the garden! You’ve ruined it!’
Even out in the rural areas, children played an active role in civil defence. Outside the village of Bleadon in Somerset, a decoy airfield had been constructed to divert the enemy’s attention from more important targets. However, this brought bombs to the village. Twelve-year-old schoolboy Ken Durston recalled the incident:
One night they dropped incendiaries on our village. The house next to ours had an incendiary bomb land on the roof and it caught fire. We had the Auxiliary Fire Service and the ARP come round but because we were close to it – my Dad said to me, ‘Come on, my lad, come and help us.’ I remember manning the old stirrup-pump that night. I was twelve and a weakling but I could do a little bit – and as long as I would do what I was told and I was doing what I could, they were happy. It was exciting for a young lad.
The achievements of the nation’s youths during the Blitz were not only about heroism, but also about taking a responsibility beyond their years. One youngster who took on an adult’s role was fifteen-year-old John Osborne. Whilst working as an errand boy in July 1940, he met a girl, Gina, the daughter of one of his customers. He was immediately attracted to her, but there was one problem. He was not yet sixteen yet she was already eighteen. He decided that, being relatively tall, he could pass as being older and told her he was almost eighteen. The couple began ‘courting’.