Manchester at War, 1939-45

by Graham Phythian

  In 1941 there was a massive bombing raid – sorry, a massive incendiary raid – and it was massive. My brother and I went out of the shelter and it was like Blackpool illuminations, lights and fires everywhere. They were aiming for Trafford Park, but a lot missed the target, a lot of them fell on the Lostock housing estate, where we lived. Stretford High School for Girls was completely demolished. I can remember the next day we found bombs that had not gone off; they were on the railway line embankment, embedded in the embankment. Probably still there today, some of them.

  A house four doors from us was set alight, but quickly put out with the sand, etc., they had. Another house on Glastonbury Road belonged to a Mr and Mrs Hurst and their son Geoffrey, that was on fire and that was a serious fire. My brother helped the people to bring out their furniture and put it in the street. The house was gutted, three hours later.

  Also in 1941, when the incendiaries came, one very serious fire in Trafford Park was at a place called Rosser’s, a big wood-yard, which set alight and burned for days. The other place they were aiming for was a power station, the one at Barton Bridge, another one in Trafford Park. And Lancashire Dynamo and Crypto factory [situated just north of the junction of what is now Wharfside Way and Sir Matt Busby Way], which made electric motors, was a prime target for German bombers.

  The morning after the incendiary raid my father was walking over Trafford Bridge to visit his mother who lived in Salford, and all the ships underneath, the barges, were all on fire, and the metal of the bridge was red hot.

  HARRY ABRAHAM

  The Sunday 22 December [1940] was a Sunday I’ll always remember. That was when the Blitz really started …

  They dropped a bomb that we called a ‘Molotov Chandelier’, which was full of flares and bombs. The sky used to light up with the flares, then the bombs and the flares used to explode, showering the incendiaries all over the place …

  All along the Irwell the barges were cut from their moorings and were on fire. The warehouses along the canal were lit up and well ablaze, as well as the streets. It was really terrifying, and anyone who said he was not frightened was lying …

  After that came the heavy stuff: large bombs and landmines. Those landmines used to be bigger than telephone boxes and were dropped by parachute; some went off in the air and some landed unexploded. One landed on the croft on Trafford Road [Ordsall Park, Salford] and when the girls came into work at Howarth’s the next day they had tassels of silk cut from the parachute …

  A lot of men lost their lives running towards the landmines. Because the mines were attached to parachutes they thought they were enemy parachutists. But of course they weren’t, and landmines would explode, killing anyone within easy range.

  (From Memories of the Salford Blitz, Christmas 1940)

  ANNIE GIBB

  We lived in a row of houses [Livingstone Street, Chorlton-on-Medlock, near St Mary’s Hospital] and out of three houses there was four out of four [killed] in one house, my grandma in our house, and my mother and I were badly injured. And next door there was eight in the house, and four out of eight were lost. It was near the hospital, Manchester Royal, it was called High Street, and now it’s called Hathersage Road.

  We got a direct hit by a landmine. Somebody stood on my head, while we were buried. My grandmother was killed, but my mother could talk to me. She’d have been on her own if we’d been evacuated. I was nine, just on my ninth birthday. We were there three and a half hours about, buried. I remember trying to get out, but my mother said, ‘Don’t, you’re hurting me.’ I don’t remember them getting me out, but I remember sat on the top, where they were bandaging me up, and that was about seven o’clock in the morning. Somebody came out of a house and gave me a little box of chocolates. I don’t know who she was, I couldn’t see her or anything.

  My mother was cut in her neck, about seven stitches, cut on the top of her arm, her tendon was cut through, and she was in hospital from 23 December; she was in Christmas and New Year, and right through to Easter. They took her to the emergency at Winwick [Warrington], where the soldiers were, and she was there while about Easter.

  September 1940: high-explosive bomb damage in Medlock Street, Hulme, outside Gee’s, the draper’s shop. The gas main was fractured. (Greater Manchester Police Museum and Archives)

  When I was taken out of the hole that they dug me out of, the bomb site, the rescue men carried me to the ambulance, and I said, ‘I’ve hurt my leg,’ and he said, ‘Yes, you have, love, we know, love.’ And they carried me by my arms, one on either side of me, so they kind of trailed me along, out of the bombing. When I went in the hospital, a lot of the soldiers came in, and that was what’s now Wythenshawe, Baguley Sanatorium, Baguley.

  I was in hospital March, it could have been February, to August. You couldn’t have visitors because it was still part of the sanatorium – once a fortnight you got them, and the soldiers couldn’t talk to any of the patients, they wouldn’t let them. They were worried I might lose my leg, but they gave me skin grafts, Professor Bentley the doctor’s name was, and it must have been about six months, they let me go home.

  And now when I get a bit, in a situation, I think, well I got out of my hole, and you know, my bricks and mortar [laughs], and seventy-two years later, I’m still here!

  If you go to the Police Museum, some policemen there took pictures of all the bombing before it got really bad, but whether they’re still there, whether they have exhibitions, I don’t know.

  But Piccadilly, you couldn’t tell what was burning and what wasn’t, it was terrible. My dad was a fireman, and there was like a lot of big warehouses there then, really posh-type warehouses, where the hotel is now.

  ROY MATHER

  My aunt had a newsagent’s shop on York Street, in Hulme, and they dropped a bomb outside the shop; it was a newsagent’s and tobacconist’s. It wasn’t a direct hit on the shop, but they dropped it and it fell in the middle of the road. It was before the Blitz [probably September 1940].

  In Longsight, where I lived, they were looking for the railway yard on the Manchester-London line. They didn’t drop any bombs there, but they dropped some on Ardwick Green, round there [less than a mile to the west]. That was in 1941, after the Blitz.

  In ’41 they dropped a bomb on Hyde Road, and it demolished the Picturedrome that stood next to the Apollo, and they hit part of the barracks, where the Manchester Artillery was garrisoned. And at the other end of Ardwick Green there was the army depot, which is still there to this day.

  On the Blitz, the sirens went at 6.42 [that evening], and the all-clear went at 6.30 the next morning, so we had twelve hours of it. We all dived in the cellars, of course, wondering when the all-clear was going to go, but nothing happened because it was the next day. They hadn’t built the bomb shelters on the street, not until after the Blitz – wiser after the event! They were built with brick, and concrete on the roof. They were on the street, on the surface.

  The Artillery Barracks on Hyde Road, Ardwick, after the March 1941 bombing. (Greater Manchester Police Museum and Archives)

  When the fires got going, you could read a paper in the street by the glare from the fires in Manchester. We were only a mile and a half from the city. And then the guns were going off, and there was shrapnel from the guns, and after, we went looking for it in the street, and collecting it. It was very sharp, you know.

  MARJORIE AINSWORTH

  I was living in Gorton at the time, and my boyfriend, who I later married, lived in Bradford, Manchester. I remember that we had some sporadic air raids from about August 1940, and then the big Blitz was on 22 and 23 December of the same year. One memory of that is when my husband and I were at a party in Reddish on Christmas Eve, and the fires had been put out by then, but they’d had so many fire engines and fire services called from all the north-west to help. On Reddish Lane a fire engine came down and asked my husband if he knew the way to … somewhere, I’ve forgotten where, and he said, ‘Well I couldn’t tell you from here, but if
you give us a lift, [laughs] I can put you on the right road!’ So we had a lift on a fire engine up Reddish Lane and down Hyde Road, on the right road to get home.

  Another vivid memory: Sunday cinemas weren’t allowed then, but cinemas and theatres were allowed to have sort of special concerts. My husband and I went to Ardwick Hippodrome, and ‘Hutch’ – Leslie Hutchinson – was there. He was all the rage in the 1930s. He was a black man, a great ladies’ man, and he played the piano in immaculate evening dress, and one of his gimmicks was a handkerchief with which he mopped his brow. During his performance the sirens went, and the manager came onto the stage and said, ‘The sirens have gone. Do you want to all go home, or do you want him to carry on?’ So we all shouted, ‘Carry on!’ So he was really mopping his brow! [laughs] It wasn’t for show, any of that!

  We could hear what was going on outside, but when we did finish up, we were walking down Hyde Road – we knew we’d have to walk home – and there were incendiary bombs lighting the pavements up, so were picking our way past these incendiary bombs, and we got as far as Hyde Road tram depot, and Tom was dying for a wee. In those days, in the blackout, we went in the building and Tom said to the man, ‘Could I go to your toilet?’ He said, ‘Yes,’ and pointed him the way. What a difference from nowadays, in the bright lights, people are doing it all over! [laughs] This was in the blackout, nobody could see, but it was still polite, you know.

  One serious incident: my cousin Marion who lived in Gorton in Englefield Grove [near Sunny Brow Park]; the house next door had a fairly direct hit, and Marion and her father – her mother had died – were the sort of people who said, ‘We’re not going to shelter. If it’s got your name on it, you’re going to get it, wherever you are.’ So they were sitting by the fire, listening to the radio, and they were thrown – the house was more or less destroyed – but they were sitting in armchairs with high backs and they were thrown forward, and they weren’t desperately hurt, but Marion’s foot was burned with the embers coming out of the fire, not from the bomb. It was the sofas that saved them. But the gap is still there; if you go to Englefield Grove, they never rebuilt it.

  Just 14in long, the incendiary bomb nevertheless had a devastating effect once detonated. The magnesium fires were difficult to contain and acted as guides for the next wave of bombers. (Author’s collection/Imperial War Museum North)

  ALLEN HAYES

  [The speaker worked at Groves and Whitnall Brewery, near Regent Bridge, Salford.] This warden shouted to me, he said, ‘There’s something happening,’ and somebody shouts, ‘Look up … look up!’ And we looked up and somebody said, ‘Oh, it’s a flare.’ This warden must have known … so he shouts, ‘Groves … it’s a bloody landmine.’

  I took off down Wilburn Street … I think I passed about two entries and I come to the third one and I dived down it and across the road … I got lifted off the floor, crashed down again, and I crouched there, and I could hear things falling over, and something fell, it must have been about as big as a house, and it crashed down not far away from me.

  … I came out and I thought, ‘What the hell’s that?’ Everything’s battered, you know? Everything’s dirty: smoke, soot, I mean these are old houses.

  … And after shaking myself I was thinking to myself, ‘Well I’m safe, I’ll go and see what’s going on.’ There were still guns going off and bombs falling, but they were more distant, you know. This one, I walked on to Regent Road, I was demoralised. I didn’t know where I was. I couldn’t think that I … I stood there: ‘Where am I? Where am I?’ I couldn’t localise anything. That whole building had gone.

  (Courtesy of Life Times Oral History Collection, Salford Museum and Art Gallery)

  ELIZABETH CHAPMAN

  There were many air raids, but luckily none that were seriously damaging in our particular area; but we were always finding bits of shrapnel in the garden and in the road outside the house. It was generally assumed that the Germans were attempting to bomb the Stockport railway viaduct, which was such an important link between the north and the south of the country, and of course we had many prominent aircraft and engineering factories such as the Fairey Aviation plant at Heaton Chapel.

  The new house in which we were living [Brinnington Road, Stockport] was situated in a then rural area and almost at the summit of a fairly steep hill, lined with tall trees and hawthorn bushes. One night, my parents and I were returning home very late from a night out. The last bus had gone hours ago – bus services were very curtailed during the war – and it was a case of using ‘Shanks’s Pony’. Very few people possessed cars in those days, and if one did there was very little petrol to spare for private motoring. So there we were, returning home in the blackout, walking up this hill. The air-raid warning siren had sounded, so we were very anxious to get home to shelter. To our right, the land fell away to a deep valley with the River Goyt meandering through its trough.

  Suddenly the darkness was pierced by searchlights criss-crossing the skies. We could hear the throbbing tones of enemy aircraft overhead and suddenly the valley became illuminated by brightly coloured flares dropped by the German planes. The whole of the valley was lit up. You could see for miles! Then came the staccato chatter of the ack-ack guns. Incendiary bombs began to rain down all around us. We started to run for our lives. Just as we reached the corner of our road we heard the whine of a descending bomb. We flung ourselves down on the pavement to escape the blast. There was a terrific explosion a couple of seconds later. We lay there too terrified to move. Finally we picked ourselves up. Fortunately for us, the bomb had landed not a quarter of a mile away, although it had sounded as if it was almost on top of us.

  By this time there were quite a few Local Defence Volunteers and ARP personnel racing about with stirrup pumps and sandbags to extinguish the dozens of incendiary bombs which were now burning and flaming up in the roads and neighbouring gardens. Luckily our house remained undamaged. We were very glad to get home that night, I can tell you!

  (From One Child’s War: Memories of a Wartime Childhood in Stockport)

  BRYANT ANTHONY HILL

  I came into Victoria Station – we should have gone into Exchange but it had been bombed – on a Sunday, coming back from visiting relations, and we went through the town, and you could see the buildings on fire.

  Near where I lived, we got a plane down, just where Wythenshawe became Gatley, at what we used to call ‘the winking light’ [the amber crossing light at junction of Longley Lane and Altrincham Road]. It was in a field [the site of present-day Sharston Green Business Park]. Of course we all went down to see the German plane, with soldiers surrounding it with rifles, before it was dismantled and taken away. We got no bombs that I know of there, but they dropped bombs on Timperley, but only on a couple of houses, very little. At Northenden they dropped bombs, but they were a bit out with that, they dropped them on the golf course!

  My father was a senior member of the ARP; he joined in 1938 when they first started recruiting. He’d get me up at night, he’d say, ‘Look at this!’ and the searchlights would be shining in the sky and they’d be shooting at aeroplanes. Bits of shrapnel would be dropping all round, and I’d go round collecting shrapnel and bring it home.

  A new hobby was collecting bits of shrapnel or remains of German bombers. (Ministry of Information/Manchester Evening News)

  DIANE SWIFT

  At the end of Walnut Street and Clopton Street [Hulme] were two public houses on the corner. They were called The Beehive and The Town Hall Tavern. They were hit with a bomb heading for Trafford Park. With my neighbour Mrs Ward being an ARP, she was one of the first on the scene. You can imagine the carnage, can’t you?

  The remains of St John the Baptist’s church, Renshaw Street, Hulme, pictured in February 1941. The church was rebuilt and finally closed in 1952. (Ministry of Information)

  MAURICE COWAN

  On one night of the Blitz I was drinking in the Beehive on Clopton Street when the air-raid siren went off. There were only thre
e people in the pub, and I left. As I was walking down Warde Street to the public shelters in the cellars of Alexandra Brewery, the bombs began to fall. The Beehive was hit and destroyed, and so was The Manley Arms, also on Clopton Street. There was a wedding party at the Manley Arms, and fourteen people were killed, including the landlady. Hulme Town Hall was hit, and so was the Radnor cinema. This cinema had recently been opened by George Formby, but it was so badly damaged that it never screened films again. The Beehive was hit only three minutes after I had left the place.

  (From The Old Pubs of Hulme and Chorlton-on-Medlock)

  HUGH VARAH

  [The speaker was an auxiliary fireman.]

  I arrived at London Road, Manchester, in the middle of a raid. We were told to take cover. I thought the best thing to do was to marshal the other passengers and keep them alongside the thick brick wall. I got them nicely settled, some sitting, some crouching, but one man dashed down the slope. He was trying to cross the road to reach an air-raid shelter that he said was up a side street. He arrived at the bottom of the slope at the same time as a falling bomb. If I close my eyes, I can still see his head come bowling back up the slope, like a hairy football.