Manchester at War, 1939-45

by Graham Phythian

  (From Forgotten Voices of the Blitz)

  NORMAN WILLIAMSON

  A bomb fell over the road there [Cavendish Road, Withington], and we’d been in the shelter, and the raid was dragging on. We used to get a warning: there was a cat that lived opposite, and this cat would always come across here, because there was a nice fire. So it used to lay there, and all of a sudden it’d get up, and go under the settee or under some furniture, and you knew that within fifteen minutes, they’d be over, you’d hear the aeroplane engines.

  When we had our Anderson shelter put in the back garden, all the local women said, ‘We’re not having one of those in our back garden, what about the washing?’ There were about ten or fifteen heads looking over the back gate – nobody wanted one, but when the first siren went, there was a crowd – we couldn’t get in ourselves!

  So this night, when the Blitz went off, we’d been down there quite a while, and we thought, ‘we’ll go and have a cup of tea’, and while we were sitting here, there seemed to be three bombs. One was I think in the corner of Northen Grove, I think it hit a house there. One seemed to go off, which we thought was on Tintern Avenue; there’s a café there now, there used to be a shop for gardeners, sort of the smallholdings around there. And then the third one, it wasn’t a big bang, it was more of a crunch. We had a coal fire, and the blast blew tons of soot into the room, we couldn’t see! This last bomb blew all the floorboards up in the front room. There wasn’t a window left, apart from one in the bay window. Of course they came and put some white cloth, oilskin-like, you know, and it was perishing. It was in the middle of winter.

  The water was very low pressure, we could hardly get water.

  We went out the next morning, and sticking out of the house roof in No. 1 [Cavendish Avenue], just on the corner here, was the part of an aircraft! [laughs] Even to this day he doesn’t know what happened. The arms on the old lamps, that used to help the lamp-lighters climbing up, they were blown backwards by the blast, and the trees were all gouged through.

  I remember a parachute flare dropping over Princess Road, lighting up the whole Hough End Fields area. Then we heard the whistling of falling bombs. What they said in the army was, ‘If you can hear the whistling, they won’t get you!’ I don’t know if that’s true or not.

  When the factory where I worked [William Arnold’s] was bombed, on Upper Brook Street, it wiped the complete top floor off! The boss wouldn’t stop, he said, ‘Right – temporary top on!’ They put a tarpaulin cover on, and we were back at work, it was business as usual. The nearby St Augustine’s church, a big church, was hit, and the priest was killed.

  We’d been to the cinema at Withington, the Scala cinema, the one that later got bombed, and the manager was outside and he got killed. You’d go in the cinema and on the screen it’d say ‘Air raid in progress’. Nobody got up, because they’d all paid their money. We never got up. But we were going down Burton Road and there was an air-raid shelter, a brick one, just on the left-hand side beyond The Old House [now known as The Old House at Home], and the warden said, ‘Get in here!’

  We said, ‘No fear!’ Anyway, unfortunately the bomb hit the shelter later, and it killed all the people inside. So we were lucky there.

  MARY CORRIGAN

  When the air raids started the radio was our friend, because that was the only way we could get news of what was happening.

  And then one Christmas, it was coming up to Christmas, and Lord Haw-Haw broadcast to us in Manchester and said, ‘The Manchester people have bought their turkeys for Christmas, but they won’t cook them.’ And then on – let me see – about the 21st, it was a Sunday teatime, and the sirens went to let us know the air raid was starting, and all Manchester was heavily bombed.

  We lived high up on a hill [Prestwich] and we went upstairs, and we could see the incendiary bombs falling and setting fire to everything they touched. We could see every chimney stack, we could see every church steeple; they were all silhouetted in the light of the flames. And this went on for most of the night.

  We didn’t get undressed at all that night; we’d sat around in our clothes in the cellar of the house, and Monday morning we went out to go to work. There were no buses. There was no bomb damage near where I lived, but on the other side of the road, coming up from the city, was a long line of refugee people, who had been bombed out during the night and lost their homes. They were coming up and carrying whatever they could, bringing their pets as well, and it was just like what you see on television, a long line of refugees coming to Prestwich to see who would take them in.

  We had a family of mother, father, daughter, grandmother and grandmother’s sister, and a cat and a dog, and we took them in, because their house was hit and they couldn’t live in it. They stayed with us a long time, until they got their own home.

  (North West Sound Archive)

  JENNY JOHNSON

  We lived in Strangeways, and of course when the sirens went off we all, the neighbourhood, went into the jail. Well, at the front of the jail it was all glass, and the holding cells, they were glass, but they were sandbagged. So we were in the holding cells, and this landmine fell, and it just devastated the whole area, because there was the Woolsack [pub and hotel] there, and that’s where, you know when the judges used to call for the assizes, that’s where they used to stay. We used to look in the windows and there were lace curtains, and the tables were laid with the glass and the silver, and then there was the snug at the front for the ordinary people, you know, for the plebs [laughs].

  And when this bomb fell, I was seventeen then, I had my dog, Peggy, and she was on a lead, and when the bomb fell, it was like a concussion. The windows broke – they just shattered really because they were sandbagged – and it was an awful experience, just like somebody had hit you on the head, and then of course we were all kids, all screaming and shouting, and I had the lead and the collar, but no dog! [laughs] And she disappeared for a few days; she’d gone somewhere, but she was found a couple of days later.

  We were bombed out, but Mum said go to my auntie’s which was in Higher Broughton. But I only stayed a couple of days, then I came back, and well, the house was all full of soot, but they cleared that up. I mean there was the Woolsack, that was damaged, then there was the picture house that we all used to go to, the Arcadia. And then there was all these Jewish shops and the furs and everything you know, and of course they were looted, and the grocer’s, that was looted.

  My mother and father, they’d been in the Woolsack, in the front having a drink, well the bomb fell, it was a landmine, and all the glass at the front shattered. Well they were at the front but they didn’t get cut, they were all right – they weren’t injured at all. And of course when we went home, the house was a mess. The back wall had gone. The house was there, but it was all full of soot, and the thing was, my father, he didn’t care about anything, he went to bed as usual.

  Of course, a lot of people moved out of the area. It wasn’t a nice time.

  DR GARFIELD WILLIAMS

  [The contributor was Dean of Manchester Cathedral at the time of the Blitz.]

  But that night [22 December 1940] the cathedral in its setting was a thing of entrancing, shocking, devastating beauty. I choose these descriptive words advisedly. All around, instead of hideous ugliness, there were flames shooting, apparently, hundreds of feet into the sky.

  Remember that the old Shambles was one vast bonfire, and the wind was driving in the direction of the cathedral – wind so filled with sparks as to give the effect of golden rain.

  … At 6 a.m. or thereabouts the last bomb dropped – and it dropped on the north-east corner of the cathedral. The noise of the fires was so terrific that we did not hear anything. The sensation was just like an earthquake …

  The wreckage of Manchester Cathedral after the bombing raid. The Humphrey Chetham memorial statue remains relatively unscathed. (Kemsley Newspapers)

  An infirmary [MRI] staff nurse was in a ward when an incendiary bomb dropped down t
he chimney and began to set the ward on fire. The nurse calmly dropped sand on the bomb, while the other nurses covered the patients – to protect them from the dust and soot. The action was so calm that John Price, of Towneley Street, Burnley, wrote to Alderman R.G. Edwards, the Lord Mayor, saying ‘If anyone deserves the Victoria Cross, it is that staff nurse.’

  (From Spirit of Manchester, a City News supplement)

  … The blast had lifted the whole lead roof of the cathedral up and then dropped it back, miraculously, in place. Every window and door had gone; chairs, ornaments, carpets, furnishings, had been just swept up into the air and dropped in heaps anywhere. The High Altar was just a heap of rubbish 10ft high. The two organs were scattered about in little bits. The Lady Chapel, the Ely Chapel and much of the regimental chapel had simply disappeared. Showers of sparks still swept across the place, but the old cathedral just refused to burn.

  (From Our Blitz: Red Sky Over Manchester)

  The Shambles area of central Manchester, which contained some of the city’s earliest surviving buildings, after a bombing raid. (Greater Manchester Police Museum and Archives)

  FRANK HARGREAVES

  I left the police station on Newton Street [early on the morning of 23 December 1940] and arrived at the corner of Piccadilly Gardens. Opposite, all you could see was like a wall of flames engulfing the entire row of warehouses, where the Piccadilly Hotel [now a Mercure Hotel] and the row of shops underneath it, is now. There were flames rising from where the roofs had been, five or six floors high. It was an unforgettable sight, like a huge inferno. I could feel the heat from where I was standing, and even the bricks of the buildings near where I was standing were hot to the touch. Firemen were hosing water on them, and I remember steam was coming off them.

  IDA MCNALLY

  The hotels on Deansgate were on fire, and there were firemen up ladders and policemen telling you which way to go, because it wasn’t safe. Woolworths had been bombed, but it was still there. But it was bombed again the following night and completely went then.

  Exchange railway station on fire, at around 10 a.m., 23 December 1940. This photograph was initially censored. (Manchester Evening News)

  We were walking on broken glass, hosepipes and water all over the place. We got to our building and it was still standing, but a lot of the buildings at the back of the Shambles had gone. Most of Corporation Street was flattened. There was a bank on the corner, and that had been bombed. You could see into the cellar and there were loads of rats running about.

  (Manchester Evening News, 10 December 2010)

  JOHN BURTON

  Going to Manchester [from Middleton] when the bombs actually started falling, if I can just draw the diagram: going along Manchester New Road, before you come to Shudehill, on the left-hand side was the goods yard [Oldham Road Goods Station], where all the war effort trains were brought and then hitched up to take them to their destinations. It was a prime sort of target, obviously, for any aircraft.

  People say that airmen bombed houses and so on. That wasn’t a deliberate act, in my opinion; anyway, the equipment that was being used at that time was totally inadequate in many respects, and the thing was, bombs did fall around their particular target.

  One of the targets was about 150 yards away from the goods yards; it was one of the biggest hardware shops in the world. Between the two, they were blazing for weeks and weeks, because bombers came over and kept dropping fire bombs, incendiary bombs, to keep the blaze going. They knew exactly where the fires were, so they could direct the planes over to Trafford Park and the docks, which was a feasible military manoeuvre. But in the process there was a tremendous number of people killed.

  The buses, when they came to this area, more often than not were stopped, as there’d be all hosepipes and things going across the road. So the buses would turn around and return to their destination, and a group of passengers marched with the ARP wardens. They were absolutely fantastic, because they were in the heat of it, and firemen as well, quite a lot of them auxiliary firemen; in other words, they’d received ‘adequate’ training, if you like. There were a lot of special constables, because all the top people were wanted at the front line.

  (North West Sound Archive)

  BOB POTTS

  For the 22 and 23 December 1940 we were in a shelter for two nights, in Flixton.

  Two bombs actually fell on us, on soft ground – one fell in somebody’s back garden on Church Road, and another one fell between the railway station and Stocks View [a row of cottages]. I was talking to the lady a few years ago, and I said, ‘Where did you live during the war?’ She said, ‘Stocks View’. I said, ‘Oh, you were a neighbour of mine. Why did you move?’

  ‘Well, a bomb fell on the road, just a few yards away, and it damaged the foundations of the house we lived in, so we had to move.’

  I never knew that two bombs had fallen on Flixton village. Nobody got killed; some people in Urmston got killed that night, but nobody in Flixton.

  The following day there were rumours that a German bomber had been shot down over Flixton, so we went looking for it. It was just a rumour, it was unfounded, but we went souvenir hunting and we found loads of shrapnel which was still warm when we picked it up.

  The same day my dad came home on leave, on a forty-eight-hour pass, and this is the 24th December, he came down on the No. 12 bus, and he said, ‘I’m taking you into Manchester because I want you to see it.’ And I remember they’d put the fires out, but they hadn’t put them out completely, as the cellars were still on fire, all smoke coming from the rubble. A church on the corner of All Saints’ was struck, because that’s where the No. 12 bus turned left at Oxford Road, from Cavendish Street, that had gone, that had blown up. And then the next damage I saw was on Portland Street; the office blocks, all Victorian office blocks, they weren’t on fire, just bombed.

  Cannon Street during the December 1940 Blitz. This photograph was initially censored. (Press and Censorship Bureau/Manchester Evening News)

  We got to Piccadilly and that was a bloody horrendous sight. First of all I thought it had been raining, but in retrospect it was the water from the fire brigade, the hoses. The whole of one side of Piccadilly was a mass of rubble. Where the Piccadilly Plaza is now – the whole lot, gone. Opposite, near where Woolworths used to be, some of that was burning as well, it was still smouldering.

  MARGARET GREAVES

  I remember going to the offices one day, walking down Portland Street, and there was an air-raid siren. I used to get the train from Didsbury and go to Central Station [now the Manchester Central Exhibition and Conference Centre, formerly the G-MEX] and walk to Granby Row, down Portland Street. The air-raid siren went and everybody shouted, ‘Take cover!’ Of course, I took cover in a shop doorway, the nearest, and there was a German plane, I think it had been hit by shrapnel, but it was on the verge of coming down. It did come down eventually, further along, but I don’t know who was injured.

  Also, another incident about going to work in Manchester during the war: when we had the Blitz, I can remember having to walk – you could get the train so far, and then you had to walk the rest of the way – but coming home, we walked all the way from Manchester. They let us come out early, and I remember walking from Granby Row, and we had to do a detour because of the bombing, near the Royal Infirmary [Chorlton-on-Medlock]. I remember near the Royal Infirmary there was a lot of damage, and we had to make a detour. It took me ages to walk from Manchester to Didsbury. I thought, I’m never going to get home. We had the blackout, we had fog as well, we had the bombs dropping, you name it, we had it! And I think, goodness me, would they do it these days? I suppose they would if they had to do, but I don’t know.

  I can remember another incident: I was with my mother, my father was out, he was a transport driver, and the air-raid sirens went. I think this was when the Blitz was at its highest, and the air-raid warden, a Mr Porter, a very kind man, came round and he said, ‘Are you all right?’ I was sitting on the cella
r steps; we lived in a four-bedroomed house on Osborne Street, off Barlow Moor Road, and all that was bothering me was ‘where was my dad? Where was he?’ I was terrified that he was going to get killed. But he came in, he was quite all right.

  I can remember the absolute terror, and every time I hear an air-raid siren now, I go cold. I can feel my stomach tightening up. I’m not a nervous type, really, but that brings me back to those instances: it was a frightening experience during the Blitz.

  STAN WILKINSON

  [The speaker was a private in the Manchester Regiment.] I had hoped to be issued with a leave pass for Christmas Day [1940]. No such luck. We were issued with picks and shovels yet again. We were taken down the Oldham Road where a large power station had been bombed. The rubble was about 7ft high. We were given two hours off for lunch as a special treat for Christmas and then got back to the barracks at about 7.30 p.m.

  Eventually we were served our Christmas dinner – stone cold. We were so mad – Christmas Day, we could not go home, we had worked like navvies and been given a cold dinner. We banged our mugs on the table but there were no officers or NCOs to take notice; they had probably gone home! Eventually the sergeant cook appeared, so we relieved our feelings by telling him what to do with his rotten Christmas pudding!

  (From The Blitz)

  Firefighters at work at the corner of Silver Street (off Portland Street) during the 1940 Christmas Blitz. (Greater Manchester Police Museum and Archives)

  ARTHUR ROBERT DAVENPORT

  I went into Manchester centre and saw buildings that had been damaged, with smoke still coming from their remains. People still went to work, but ‘the continuous bombing made workers fractious,’ said my dad, ‘and made them argue among themselves.’ When it was pointed out that this was playing into the enemies’ hands, it had a sobering effect on the workforce.