by Anton Rippon
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Michael O’Mara Books Limited
9 Lion Yard
Tremadoc Road
London SW4 7NQ
Copyright © Anton Rippon 2014
The right of Anton Rippon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-78243-190-9 in hardback print format
ISBN: 978-1-78243-236-4 in ebook format
Designed and typeset by Design 23
Illustrations by Greg Stevenson and Claire Cater
www.mombooks.com
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
PUT THAT LIGHT OUT!
FOR KING AND COUNTRY
LOOK, DUCK AND VANISH
MAKE DO AND MEND
A WOMAN’S WAR
THROUGH CHILDREN’S EYES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The biggest ‘thank you’ I have to extend to those who helped put this book together obviously goes to those people from all over Britain who responded to my appeal and took the time to write down their memories and stories – some long, some short and pithy, all of them painting the broad picture – and send them to me. They form the main part of this book and without them the task would have been impossible. The overwhelming majority were happy to put their names to their stories. In a tiny number of instances, mostly for professional reasons, contributors asked to remain anonymous and I have respected their wishes rather than not use their stories. Similarly, a few were happy for their name to be included but not their location.
Thanks are also due to my daughter, Nicola Rippon, who spent many hours reading hundreds of handwritten letters and putting them on to a computer so that I might more easily work with them.
Last, but not least, thanks to my literary agent, Jo Hayes of the Bell Lomax Moreton Agency, who saw the potential in the idea, to Michael O’Mara Books who were ready to publish it, and to my editor there, Gabriella Nemeth. We all kept calm and carried on.
INTRODUCTION
If it hadn’t been for Adolf Hitler, I would be a Yorkshireman instead of a Derbeian. The decision by the Austrian with the comedy moustache to wage a massive bombing campaign against British cities would prove to be one of the most fateful of the Second World War. It would also change my life for ever, even before it had begun.
At the start of the Second World War, in September 1939, my parents lived in Kingston upon Hull where they had been for four years, ever since my printer father had taken a job on the local evening newspaper. But, in May 1941, they moved back to my mother’s hometown of Derby. The reason: Hull was busy acquiring a reputation as Britain’s most severely bombed city after London. The Humberside city spent over 1,000 hours under air-raid alert.
So when I was born, in December 1944, it was in Derby, a town still a target, given that the Merlin engines that powered Spitfires and Lancasters were built there, but for some reason one that escaped the very worst of the Blitz.
A few hundred yards from where I struggled into that angry world, outside the offices of the Derby Gas, Light and Coke Company, six escaped German prisoners of war were being recaptured by two policemen and a Corporation bus driver. The Germans had escaped from a POW camp in Staffordshire, but their luck ran out when their stolen car broke down opposite Derby’s main police station. After a short chase through the town centre, they were rounded up, the last one collared by the bus driver on his way to start the early shift.
As the bedraggled and thoroughly miserable Germans began their melancholy journey back to prison camp, my mother, unaware that the Wehrmacht had been just down the road, laboured away in our front bedroom with the assistance of the family physician, Dr Latham Brown. My father sat downstairs fiddling with the wireless set, switching between the Bob Hope programme on the General Forces station and Paul Adam and his Mayfair Music on the Midland Home Service. Eventually, getting on for midnight, I appeared, just in time for Christmas.
Five months later I attended the local VE Day street party. Of course, the significance of grown-ups performing the conga along our street, while singing ‘Roll Out The Barrel’ passed me by. But it is nice to be able to say: ‘I was there.’
From her home in the Lincolnshire fenland town of Spalding, my Grandma Rippon marked my first birthday with a postcard showing a cartoon of a small boy and his dog, and a quote from Winston Churchill announcing to Parliament, six months earlier, the German surrender: ‘Let us not forget the toils and efforts that lie ahead.’ It isn’t the sort of sentiment you would normally send anyone on their birthday, let alone a one-year-old. But, then again, life in post-war Britain was going to be tough. Why wrap it up? Or maybe she was displaying a little bit of leftover wartime irony. Actually, I rather doubt that, as you will see.
So I don’t remember the Second World War. But as I grew up in the 1940s and early 1950s, ‘the war’ always seemed to be the main topic of conversation in our family. Even when we went on our annual visit to Grandma Rippon, ‘the war’ was always on the agenda, especially the tale about the night the Germans thought that they were bombing nearby Peterborough but instead destroyed Spalding Liberal Club. It stood a couple of hundred yards from the Rippons, who, thinking that the Luftwaffe would never bother with an insignificant market town, hadn’t thought to erect an air-raid shelter. They soon wished they had. When the sirens sounded and it became obvious that this was the real thing, they all tried to cram themselves under the grand piano that took up half their small dining room. There was much shoving and pushing until everyone was safely installed. All except Gran herself, that is. She was a big woman, a Victorian, and the stern matriarch of the family. She refused to indulge in such an indignity and, instead, sat in her usual chair, defying Hitler to do his worst. In the post-war years, the grand piano still sat hogging that dining room, and the tale was retold many times, Gran still overseeing it all, supreme in the same chair that had survived the bombs.
My parents weren’t there to see this comedic episode. They spent the years 1939 to 1941 mostly in the air-raid shelter that they had wisely arranged, with occasional tentative explorations to see what further damage the Luftwaffe had wreaked on Hull. As the centre of that city was steadily being demolished by Goering’s air force, each morning my father picked his way through the previous night’s rubble to get to work wearing a Hull Daily Mail armband so that the police would let him through cordoned-off streets. I still have a faded newspaper cutting showing him and his fellow compositors at the newspaper. Actually, I only have his word for it. The purpose of the story was to show them all carrying on with their work while wearing gas masks. So it seems the most pointless group photograph ever kept as a memento (‘That’s me, second from the left, honest.’). But there was a war on . . .
Each teatime he would return with the news: ‘The docks copped it again last night,’ or ‘There aren’t any houses left in Grindell Street.’ Parts of Jameson Street, where the Mail offices were situated, were badly damaged. Often my father went straight down to work after a hair-raising night spent fire-watching on the roof of the Mail building. He never did find out what happened to his porkpie supper that disappea
red when a bomb exploded uncomfortably close by. The episode became another of those stories.
Their house backed on to allotments and, long before the nightly warning siren wailed out, my parents knew that another raid was imminent because of the frantic activity around the anti-aircraft gun that was sited just over their garden fence. One night, tired of huddling in the shelter, they remained in the house. At the height of the raid, my mother got bored and stuck her head out of the back door to see what was going on. Suddenly there was a high-pitched ‘whooshing’ noise and my father grabbed her by the hair and pulled her back in. I still have the large chunks of shrapnel that missed her by a few inches.
Things got worse. A young girl was blown into their garden after a bomb fell nearby; the girl survived but her parents, neighbours of my mother and father, were killed. Down the street, three Scottish soldiers died when a blast bomb fell, stripping them naked but leaving their bodies unmarked. Out doing the shopping one morning after a raid, my mother and a neighbour were stopped by an Air Raid Precaution (ARP) warden who told them that a human ear had just been found in the road.
More than 1,200 citizens of Hull were killed and ninety-five per cent of the city’s houses damaged in some way or other. When the houses directly opposite my parents’ house were flattened, with the blast throwing my mother from one end of their hallway to the other, it was the final straw; they decided it was time to return to Derby. And so I missed out on being a Yorkshireman, and it was all Hitler’s fault.
It all sounded rather hair-raising. But what appeared to be a constant theme in all the stories my parents told me was the humour that came through. There was generally a round of laughter when they remembered a neighbour on an outside lavatory, caught with his trousers around his ankles when a bomb fell nearby. There was the woman down the street who wouldn’t go to the shelter until she had found her false teeth. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ shouted her son, ‘they’re dropping bombs, not bloody ham sandwiches!’
They even found amusing the story of the family who emerged from their shelter after one heavy air raid, opened their back door to return to their house, and discovered that the only thing still standing was that outside back wall.
‘They had to laugh,’ said my mother. I rather doubted it. Indeed, I often wondered if it was just my parents who saw the humour – sometimes black – in all this, or whether it had been a common experience for people faced with war. So in 1978, through Britain’s national and regional newspapers, I made an appeal for amusing war stories to be included in a book. The response was immediate. From all over the country, people wrote in with their tales. It turned out that my parents weren’t the only ones with a fund of war stories of the humorous kind.
Interestingly, the overwhelming majority were stories from the Home Front, either of the Blitz or of regular service life. It was obvious that soldiers, sailors and airmen serving abroad were enjoying – that should probably be enduring – a wholly different war from those posted at home. Thus, the stories in this book are much more about what life was like in wartime Britain than what it was like in overseas theatres of war.
But, home or abroad, remember this was only thirty-three years after the end of the war, so the memories were still quite fresh. Some respondents were in their sixties and seventies, and had already reached adulthood when war was declared. Their wartime memories were of work or military service. Others were perhaps only in their forties when they wrote to me and so recalled the war through the eyes of a child. If one made a similar appeal today, it would be impossible to gather a similar archive of memories simply because so many of those who responded in 1978 must have since died. I kept collecting material for some time afterwards, always with the intention of producing this book. Various career commitments prevented me from doing so until now.
What prompted me to revisit them was that ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ slogan that seems to be everywhere these days and which, when I first saw it, I assumed to be from a wartime poster. It was indeed one of three produced by the Ministry of Information in 1939 when it was intended to raise public morale – or at least prevent it from sinking altogether – in the face of mass air attacks on British cities, and possible invasion. The first two in the ‘set’ – ‘Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution will Bring Us Victory’ and ‘Freedom is in Peril’ – were soon displayed across Britain.
Yet despite the fact that some two and a half million copies of ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ were printed, they never saw the public light of day. In fact, until 2012 when someone turned up to BBC television’s Antiques Roadshow carrying fifteen of them, it was thought that only two copies existed outside official archives.
Why weren’t the posters ever displayed publicly? Well, the intention had been to release Keep Calm and Carry On in the event of an invasion, and that threat had receded. Also, heavy bombing and gas attacks had been expected within hours of war being declared. But it was almost a year before the Blitz started, and gas was never used. Civil servants had misjudged the public’s reaction to the war and all its dangers, and the poster would have patronized people who had already shown great courage in the face of the first aerial bombardments. Britons were getting on with their lives. They didn’t need a poster to tell them to Keep Calm and Carry On. They were doing that anyway.
So, at last, here are the stories of those who kept calm and carried on without the poster. The stories remain largely unedited because I want the voices to ring out. My intention was that what little tidying there was to be done should not destroy the freshness of these accounts. They were not written at the time, but they were recalled when such memories were still vivid in the minds of those who had experienced them.
Life was difficult, and not just for people on the front line, whether in the army abroad or facing death from the skies over Britain. Even getting to work and keeping the family safe could be a stressful experience. The problems of balancing a home life around wartime work were never more well illustrated than when MPs discussing manpower problems were told by the Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour that a man sought permission to start work at 8 a.m., rather than 7 a.m., because he had to take his baby to its grandmother’s. His wife had to get up at 5.30 a.m. to be at work for 6 a.m., and Gran didn’t come off nightshift until 7 a.m. You needed a sense of humour to cope with that.
Of course, it was not just the proverbial men and women in the street that found laughter was often the best way to deal with those dark times. In December 1940, even official British sources could not resist a little humour when they dropped propaganda leaflets along the Dutch, Belgian and French coasts. The leaflets were in the form of a travel warrant and invited German troops to make a one-way trip to England where they would find ‘a most cordial reception, with music, fireworks, free swims, steam baths, and many other entirely novel forms of entertainment are provided. Visitors will find their welcome so overwhelming that few are expected ever to return home.’ The leaflets were: ‘Valid for next summer!’
Humour was indeed everything. When the London home and offices of the actor, playwright, songwriter and wartime intelligence officer Noël Coward were destroyed in the spring of 1941, he took himself off to Snowdonia and, in just five days, wrote the play ‘Blithe Spirit’. It premiered in Manchester in June that year, and in London’s West End the following month. To get into the theatre, first-nighters walked across boards from a recently destroyed air-raid shelter. If it seems odd that such a frivolous play could have emerged during such a terrible time, let us remember that its author was the man who also wrote ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly To The Germans’. Winston Churchill enjoyed the song, but the BBC banned it.
Together, all this confirms what we always suspected: that the British have a rare talent for caustic satire, a gallows humour frequently used to draw the sting or fear out of a threatening situation, and, above all, stoicism in the face of even the greatest adversity. It was all put to particularly good use during the Second World Wa
r as Britons strove to rebuild their homes, factories, shops and, most of all, their lives. Almost everyone seems to have kept calm and carried on.
GLOSSARY OF ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THIS BOOK
AA – Anti-Aircraft
AC2 – Aircraftsman 2nd Class
AFS – Auxiliary Fire Service
ARP – Air Raid Precautions
ATS – Auxiliary Territorial Service
CD – Civil Defence
CO – Commanding Officer
ENSA – Entertainments National Service Association
GCO – General Commanding Officer
HE – High Explosive (bomb)
JP – Justice of the Peace
KP – Kitchen Patrol
LDV – Local Defence Volunteers
MEF – Middle East Forces
MO – Medical Officer
MP – Military Policeman
NAAFI – Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes
NCO – Non-Commissioned Officer
NFS – National Fire Service
RAF – Royal Air Force
RAMC – Royal Army Medical Corps
RASC – Royal Army Service Corps
REME – Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers
RNVR – Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve
RSM – Regimental Sergeant Major
SAS – Special Air Service
USAAF – United States of America Air Force
UXB – Unexploded Bomb
VAD – Voluntary Aid Detachment
WAAF – Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
WRNS – Women’s Royal Naval Service
WVC – Women’s Voluntary Corps
WVS – Women’s Voluntary Service
YMCA – Young Men’s Christian Association
PUT THAT LIGHT OUT!
Heinz Guderian invented the Blitz. Sort of . . . The German army general advocated a tactic based on speed and surprise, where light tank units and fast-moving infantry were supported by air power. Hitting hard, moving swiftly, creating havoc, it was the blitzkrieg or ‘lightning war’ that Adolf Hitler adopted to overrun Poland in 1939 and enslave Western Europe the following year. It was blitzkrieg tactics that drove the British Expeditionary Force back to Dunkirk in 1940, and their most awesome use was at Operation Barbarossa – the German attack on Russia in 1941.