Walking towards town was one of the silliest things I have ever done, as I was walking into a battlefield, walking among the shells that were exploding. Yet I had no feeling of panic whatsoever. Just as I turned the corner into Lumley Street, I saw the body of Sammy Woods, aged nineteen, a school and Sunday School friend of mine; he was lying half in and half out of his doorway, dead of course. He had been caught by a shell that had fallen to my left into the rectory that belonged to St Hilda’s Church. A shell had burst just as he stepped out and a second before I turned the corner.
Images of severe damage after the bombardment. Several affected streets have since been demolished.
I continued walking. I looked at St Hilda’s church. Shells were dropping fairly close but I didn’t see any hit, so I kept on going. I walked down towards the docks and I saw the town gasometer receive a hit and of course, with the gas escaping, it went down and collapsed. The shells were dropping too along the dockside, amongst the pit props on the quayside. Now a pit prop is like a tree trunk and was used in the galleries of coalmines, and as this was County Durham we needed thousands of them. As the shells were dropping in amongst them the props were all going up in the air just like boxes of matches, only of course these pit props weighed over a hundredweight each.
I’d never been under fire before and I didn’t quite know how it operated. I was just walking through an incident, like a spectator to an event, a heavier bombardment than was probably taking place on the Western Front at that time. I can’t remember being frightened. I wouldn’t have been human if I wasn’t but the whole thing was too much of a shock really, so out of the ordinary, and that suppresses fear.
Having exhausted the view, I walked on into the town, past a wall and under the railway bridge, round to the other side of the docks to where Sir William Grey and Company had their marine works. I wondered what was going on there because nobody had turned up for duty or, if they had, they’d gone. I was looking at the docks from the opposite side but there was nothing new, so I decided then I’d better go back and see what had happened to my parents. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that before. As I made my way back I saw plenty of women running around, screaming, with babies in their arms, trying to get rid of them, to give them to somebody who could help, but there was nobody. I saw two women rush up to a soldier who was obviously trying to make his way to the Garrison, and try and push a baby into his arms. Of course he couldn’t do it, he was on duty in any case, so he refused. Then one of the woman came to me, but I also refused. Other people were carrying their most precious possessions. One realist had a mattress on his head as he staggered up Hart Lane.
Top, the rectory, bottom 7 Victoria Place where forty-nine year old William Avery, an adjutant in the Salvation Army, was killed. The insets show the houses as they appear today.
The noise of the shells began to lessen about 8.50 and finally only the occasional explosion occurred and then silence. A proclamation was made by the mayor and delivered through the town crier. He appeared and started shouting for everyone to keep calm, letting people know that the shelling had stopped and that there was no immediate danger, and no landing had taken place. He informed us that the situation was now secure, whatever that meant! I got back to the promenade and asked someone if they had seen my father. They replied that he had last been seen pushing a wheelchair towards the open country with an invalid in it.
Back home, I found mother in the kitchen making cups of tea for anyone who wanted one. I thought, ‘Well, that’s just like mother’. I went in and there she was, as calm as could be, so I began calling on relatives near at hand, and apart from a connection by marriage who had lost a limb in Victoria Place, we had suffered no serious injuries. Later that morning I went and collected pieces of shell. There was debris everywhere. Shell fragments, some weighing several pounds, were being collected as souvenirs and I still have several which came through the roof of our house. They bristle with jagged edges and the mortar is still lodged in the steel. Elsewhere I found a dead donkey that had been grazing in the friarage field, the home ground of the Hartlepool Rovers Rugby Football Club, and I have the piece of shell that killed it.
A collection of German shells that failed to explode.
There was some panic, but not a great deal, as I remember. A lot of people had been killed and wounded and people were being removed from buildings which had been damaged, and taken to hospital. (9 soldiers were killed, 37 children and 97 men and women. 466 were wounded.) I understand that around 1500 shells were fired but they didn’t do the damage they were designed to do. A twelve-inch armour piercing shell was intended to be fired against the sides of a battleship that has perhaps twelve inches of armour plating. But in Hartlepool there was nothing to stop the shells going straight through a house, and many failed to explode.
It wasn’t all one way. The shore battery I had seen pounding away had scored a direct hit on a gun crew of the Blücucher. I later found out that the other ships in the raid had been Germany’s very latest, the Moltke and the Seydlitz.
The bombardment of Hartlepool was hushed up to a certain extent because the press said it was an undefended town. This wasn’t true as Hartlepool put up a good defence with what it had, indeed the first soldier to be killed on British soil in the Great War died with the Heugh Battery and there is a plaque commemorating the event to this day. The Germans had every right to bombard Hartlepool. Whitby and Scarborough on the other hand were undefended. Although only a few dozen shells were fired into these towns, they took the full publicity for this very reason. Later, when I joined the army at Dingwall, I took some of the photographs of the bombardment taken by a local man, and most of the recruits had never heard of the attack.
A fragment of shell casing picked up by Norman. This piece killed a donkey in the field next to the Friary.
A plaque commemorating those who were killed. The name of Norman’s friend Sammy Woods, who was killed as he left his house, can be seen.
CHAPTER TWO
An Edwardian Childhood
I was the second son of Frederick and Margaret Collins and was christened William Norman, although all my life I preferred my second name. My parents and grandparents were good Methodists, clean living, teetotal, and well read. My father, Frederick Collins, worked at the same engineering firm to which I was later to be apprenticed, but his real calling in life was as a lay preacher for over 50 years. His parents had died before I was born but my mother’s parents were both still alive during my childhood: my grandmother Margaret Vint (1836-1911) died a week after her 75th birthday, while my grandfather Thomas Bolton (1835-1914) was spared the bombardment of the town by a little less than a month.
I used to have long conversations with my grandfather, as he lived with us at Rowell Street until he died. He was born in Gateshead and told stories of George Stevenson, inventor of the Rocket. I expect it was his father who had known Stevenson, as my grandfather would probably have been too young to work with the great man. He and my grandmother had had eleven children, seven of whom had survived childhood. My father too had been one of eleven children, so I must have had many more cousins than I was ever able to meet.
Norman’s grandparents stand at the gate of their house at 12 Beconsfield Square.
My mother was the one who looked after the finances. She was very frugal and was able to put down a deposit and take out a mortgage to buy her own house, the family home in Rowell Street, close to where my grandparents owned their home and where I was, in fact, born on April 16th 1897: 12 Beaconsfield Square. This secluded square is off-set from Beaconsfield Street, at the end of which was a small town moor, in reality a headland, as it was only two hundred yards from the lighthouse and the North Sea. The town occupied the whole of a small peninsula that pointed almost directly to Jutland and Germany. On the north side of the town there was a promenade many miles long and a concrete breakwater stretching out for about 500 yards almost due east and dividing the north and south sands. The north sands and se
aweed-covered rocks ran for many miles to the left of the breakwater, while to the right Hartlepool Bay lay sheltered to the south west, close by the docks and harbour where ships were built and repaired, or cargoes loaded and unloaded.
The rhythm of the sea, ebbing and flowing, dominated our whole lives and was a constant background, which we did not notice unless the gales of autumn and winter lashed the seas into a frenzy. The waves then pounded the concrete promenade and swept like Niagara Falls over the breakwater which shook and was a spectacular sight. From the north of the promenade there was nothing until the farthest wastes of Spitzbergen and when the northeast wind blew it penetrated anything we wore. It was said that if anyone could survive in old Hartlepool they could survive anywhere in the world.
The chief occupations of the town were shipbuilding, the building of marine engines, and fishing from the shore. All our family, in fact all the families in Hartlepool, either worked on ships or marine engines or they were marine surveyors. Everything was connected with the sea. And those who didn’t work there provided the ships’ captains, ships’ officers and ships’ engineers. As children we argued incessantly about the merits of different ships. The Mauritania and the Titanic were to become part of my boyhood as we discussed every detail of them, even in school. There was great rivalry between the Cunard and the White Star Line at the time and we boys took sides on this too, the Mauritania always being my favourite.
South of the breakwater we had a magnificent fish quay and as many as forty steam trawlers lined up to unload their fish. The bustle and stir can only be imagined as the fish, cod, herring, eels, turbot, mackerel, and skate were laid out on the quay, packed into boxes and despatched by rail to various destinations, while there was quite an industry smoking kippers.
It would appear that I was quite a loner as a small boy, and I often wandered around the docks on my own just observing the life around me. Sailing ships were quite common and their bowspits jutted over the edge of the quay and one could walk underneath and look at the figureheads that were made of wood and highly painted. One large ship had the huge head and torso of Neptune and in his hands he grasped this trident, gazing at me with his fierce eyes. As I walked I would see the dark skinned Lascars looking over the rails and I fancied that one day I would sail to the southern seas and see where these men and their ships traded.
The Elephant Rock at Hartlepool.
On the seaward side of the sands, there was a ledge of rocks leading into the deep water and it was on this coast that so many fine ships were lost. At one time the rocks near Hartlepool must have been quite high, and the last one, about the height of a small church, called the Elephant Rock, was photographed in the year of my birth. It was called the Elephant Rock because of its shape, and must have been a great landmark. It was with a sense of loss that the inhabitants of Hartlepool saw this great edifice finally washed away by the waves, and nothing remains of it in my memory.
I remember two great steamers being wrecked on the rocks. One carried pit props from Scandinavia and the other butter from Denmark. The pit props were stacked high on the decks and were washed over in large rafts of timber. When the waves engulfed the ship, the local inhabitants rushed down to collect them for firewood. Most were recovered by the police, as flotsam belongs to the insurance company – very different from jetsam, which is public property. The other ship carried butter tubs which were seen to bob about on the waves or become lodged among the rocks. These tubs were raided by the inhabitants and again, while these were largely recovered, I’m sure many a pound of Danish butter found its way onto the breakfast table of the people of Hartlepool.
I don’t think any lives were lost when these ships foundered but it was a thrilling sight to see the men being rescued by a breeches buoy. First of all a light line was fired towards the ship and this was attached to a heavier cable and drawn across and secured at each end. We rushed down to watch the rescue as soon as we heard the commotion. The breeches buoy slid along a cable attached to the ship and carried two or three of the crew at a time. A searchlight played upon the scene making it all the more exciting as the waves were quite high and sometimes the breeches buoy dipped into the water. The great steam hulks lay for years on the rocks, rusting away.
On this, the north side of the breakwater, the rocks reached right up to the promenade and were covered with seaweed which, when covered by the tide, housed many different kinds of fish. At low tide we used to explore this area and we often used to go out and catch crabs with an iron hook.
The house, middle right, at Monk Heseldon where Norman spent much of his childhood.
Sadly, the houses were demolished in the early 1960s for a redevelopment that never materialized.
The promenade stretched for at least a mile in the direction of Sunderland, and when the sea was bad the waves swept over the promenade and one couldn’t walk along there. There was an escape ladder connected to the concrete face of the promenade for anyone who was caught out by the tide. I had to make use of this on one occasion when I was very small. I could hardly reach from one rung of the ladder to the next and when I got to the top of the wall I was unable to reach the railings to pull myself to safety. I had to wait there until I heard footsteps approaching and then saw a pair of legs and shouted with all my might. The man at first couldn’t locate the voice but then he saw the top of my head and reached down and pulled me up, asking my name and sending me on my way. I was more than a little shaken and I dreamt about it for years. It was the horror of waiting, clinging on these steps, forty feet above the waves which were coming to catch me up and sweep me away.
Norman outside the house at Monk Heseldon with members of his family.
We were always warned not to bathe from the north sands, particularly on an ebbing tide, as there was a tremendous undertow and, even when paddling, one had to lean against it as the tide swept out. However, on the calmer side of the breakwater I used to swim in the sea and from the bedroom window my mother could watch my black head in the waves slowly making its way towards the end of the breakwater to the steps, about a quarter of a mile from the shore.
Not far away from here was a part of the town known as The Croft, where the fishermen lived. They were a tough breed and did not mix with the other folk in the town. This was almost a no-go area as it was inhabited by an entirely different race of people from the rest of the town. They had strange names and I think must have been originally French Huguenots. There is an old story that the men of Hartlepool tried and executed a monkey in this part of the town, and it is quite true. During the Napoleonic wars, a monkey was washed ashore from a ship in a storm and was taken for a French spy. Behind The Croft there was the High Street and at the foot of the street there was a large pump and it was from here that the monkey was hung. This was and remains a well known story, and on least one occasion during the Great War I was asked, by a fellow officer, ‘Who hung the monkey?’
The pomp of Empire Day at Hartlepool.
Some of my best memories of childhood took place at a family-owned house in the countryside. In 1887 my grandfather acquired a small cottage in a village called Monk Hesleden, about seven miles north of Hartlepool. I was taken there when I was a few weeks old and, ever since, Monk Hesleden has held a very special place in my affections.
We often holidayed here. The picnic was a highlight because we had all the family with us. They tended to stay on shore and it was rare for anyone to accompany me on my swimming from the rock sands, as father never swam, and mother and my elder brother Bolton couldn’t, although I enjoyed watching them paddle. Father was fond of the Dene but never ventured far into the woods. He usually found a comfortable spot in the shade where he could lie down, put a handkerchief over his face to fend off the midges, and had a little snooze. No doubt on these occasions he composed his sermons, which were very popular in the mining district where he served as a lay preacher in the United Methodist Church. His preaching, I was told, was very powerful.
Like many boys of
the time, I made bows and arrows and catapults, and tried to knock off a few rabbits, quite successfully on occasions. For catapults we used steel ball bearings that would kill a rabbit easily. The farmers used them in the cornfields as the rabbits converged on the centre when the corn was cut. The arrows were really deadly things. We used to get horseshoe nails and put them on the railway track for the train to run over them. Turned into spearheads with the thick end hammered out like a half crown, the metal would be heated and wrapped round the end of an arrow and then feathered at the other end. I remember once firing one arrow straight up in the air and it went up and up and up before turning over to come down. At that moment two old ladies were walking up the path from the church and I could see that the arrow and the old ladies would shortly converge. The arrow buried itself in the ground right in front of them and they stopped and wondered where it had come from. It was a very near escape, but I really had little sense of danger.
Norman, holding the ball, surrounded by the rest of the Saracens rugby team.
A friend of mine, Fred Chiverton, bought a .22 rifle and we used to line up tins, about four feet from the ground, and fire at them with no background whatever. Later, Fred bought a .410 shotgun which I used to shoot my first running rabbit. I completely blew away its insides and I was rather shocked by the sight. I then sent away to Gammages and bought a 9mm long barrelled pistol, which was quite legal in those days, and with it I could knock over small birds.
Kruger, the despised Boer leader.
Last Man Standing Page 2