At No. 31 Julian Street Plymouth my father, having experienced the Great War in France and Belgium, was well aware of the widespread damage which resulted from the use of high explosive devices and he set the family busy with the right tools to dig down into the back yard to a depth of three feet. I think he must have borrowed the pick and shovel because our back yard was concreted all over except for a narrow, brick-built border filled with earth. We would only have had small gardening hand tools. If put together at ground level the shelter would measure six feet tall and about five feet wide. The length depended on the number of side pieces bolted together which, in turn, depended on the number of people to be accommodated - in our case five.

Father wanted a shelter deep enough to step down into; a compromise depth of two feet six inches was finally deemed to be acceptable, thereby reducing the height above ground level to three feet six and the length was about six feet. A spirit level was brought into play and the channel bars formed a good foundation for the sides. It did not take long to erect the shelter with its back exit up against the brick wall which separated our back yard from No 29's. The plan was that if the front entrance became blocked in a raid the top half of the rear exit could be unbolted from inside the shelter and the brick wall then attacked with hammer, chisel and crowbar - these tools having been designated by Dad as part of the shelter's equipment.

After the rapid fall of France, the Home Guard (formerly the Local Defence Volunteers) were placed in locations thought to be targets in the event of a German invasion. The road bridges over each end of the railway cutting, suddenly being considered as "strategic", were protected by armed sentries - night and day, to start with. Knowing that the sentries involved were gathered from the ranks of men who had avoided being called up for military service, or were too old (and hence were probably not too good in the eyesight department), we decided that the railway cutting was not a good place to play in. Or it may have been that our parents decided. Whichever it was, the railway cutting was a place to keep clear of.

Later on, when the probability of an invasion had receded, several passenger coaches unexpectedly arrived on the branch line and were used as accommodation for Italian prisoners of war for several weeks. The POWs wore various items of clothing - of British and Italian origin - with circular patches sewn on for identification purposes, but there was no sign or suspicion that any of the POWs had any great desire to escape from such luxurious captivity. After a while they were even allowed out unescorted to walk the streets of Cattedown in their spare time; their official purpose in life was, I believe, to act as labour forces on farms and other agricultural locations.

Our very first sight of a German bomber happened during a daylight raid when we saw a Heinkel 111 flying towards us as we looked out of the shelter's entrance; it seemed to drop low out of a cloudbank and into a patch of clear sky and was (we surmised) following the path of the railway track. The plane was immediately surrounded by black puffs of anti-aircraft fire and, simultaneously, it released a bomb which landed on the post office at the corner of South Milton Street and Cattedown Road, killing the postmaster's wife and, I think, two or three other people.

This clear demonstration of what was likely to come prompted my father to build a blast wall in front of the Anderson shelter but independent of it; this wall measured about two feet thick at the bottom and tapered to about nine inches at the top, where a recess was filled with a few inches of earth and planted with flowers. A horizontal piece of corrugated iron was then used to span the gap between shelter and blast wall; this we covered with a thick layer of earth. The wall stood high enough to stop stones, masonry or shrapnel from coming in the front entrance which we now left open for ease of entry and exit. This was considered more important when the increased use of incendiary bombs made it essential to be able to get out and check the house during pauses in the bombing. Many a house burned down while the families stayed in their shelter or sheltered elsewhere than on the premises.

It was only the work of a minute or two to climb out of the shelter, check for fire back and front, then get back in again - the back and front doors of the house were left open for this purpose during the lengthy air raids. We only had one steel helmet between us - Dad's Home Guard issue. When checking for incendiaries the only danger was from anti-aircraft shrapnel which rained down long after the incendiary and high explosive bombs had landed. We seldom needed torches out of doors because either the moon was pretty well full strength ( a "bombers' moon", as in the film "Dangerous Moonlight", but without the "Warsaw Concerto" being played in the background) or the place was still illuminated by German flares which sometimes hung around for five or six minutes after all the bombs had been dropped.

Mention of my father's Home Guard steel helmet prompts me to explain that his membership of "Dad's Army" was only due to be brought into effect in the event of the German forces arriving in strength. His job then would have been to ferry British forces around from place to place in his double decker bus. Apart from the steel helmet his only equipment was a pair of shiny black gaiters and a "Home Guard" armband - no uniform clothing.

By now the shelter equipment included a kettle full of water and tea-making necessities; as soon as we heard the siren, the drill was: get dressed - down to the shelter - flash up the stove and put the kettle on. The "stove" was an open-topped circular metal gadget of about four inches diameter and three inches high; methylated spirit was poured in to a depth of about half an inch and ignited with a match through one of a series of ventilator holes around the circumference. The kettle sat on top and enough heat was generated to boil the water in about half an hour plus, of course, warm up the atmosphere in the shelter at the same time. The heater would be left on for the latter purpose because some of the raids lasted five or six hours.

Sometimes there would be two or more light raids in one night, separated by the length of time it took the participating aircraft to get as far as Bristol, Cardiff or Liverpool and back; it was widely believed by us civilians that aircraft sent to bomb targets other than Plymouth deliberately kept a few bombs for the return leg of the journey. The city doubtless stood out like a sore thumb against the background of the English Channel - especially when parts of it were still on fire from the previous raid - and was a kind of milestone to the German aircrew anxious to drop the rest of their bombs and get back to the other side of the water.

As soon as the "all clear" siren went after a night raid it was usual to get back to bed except when there was any local damage; I well remember that, on a night when Holborn Place, St Johns Road and Brunswick Road took a pasting, several of us hastened along to see whether "School " had been bombed. Guided by the smoke and orange-coloured sky we discovered that It had indeed been totally burned down, although the adjacent Infants' School was not the least bit damaged. The latter had been built fairly shortly before the outbreak of war with a four inch thick flat roof of concrete. Although adjoining the Junior Mixed School building it had survived the incendiaries thanks to that particular feature. I'm not sure whether it still stands today.

On the same night, while the fires were still burning and people stood around in groups talking about the raid, I recall that Ernie Babb the dairyman, after being told which houses had been blown up, offered to drive along in his Vauxhall Twelve-Six Saloon car with a supply of milk for the bombed-out people; this would have been about one-thirty or two o'clock in the morning, such was his generosity and good nature. The police and wardens stopped him from going because of a nearby unexploded bomb ("UXB"); the people involved were being looked after by one of the voluntary services already.

At Friary Station marshalling yard one night a train partly loaded with small arms ammunition was set on fire and was still well ablaze by the morning. From the pavement of the main road on Friary Bridge it was possible to look down and see the blaze, but probably, in retrospect, very unwise to do so. Boys will be boys and quite a few of us on the way to school ignored the police signs "UXB -Do not look over the bridge". Despite the rounds of ammunition being detonated and thrown into the air, no one was injured.

During daylight hours the only British aircraft to be seen in the sky were the Coastal Command Short Sunderlands; they were huge machines compared to the Heinkels and Dorniers of the Luftwaffe and it was always comforting to see them soon after take-off passing overhead loaded with depth charges. The four engines produced a totally different sound when the planes were returning empty from the Western Approaches. They were manned by the Royal Australian Air Force and bore the squadron letters "RB". Everybody got on well with the Aussies and they were frequently to be seen at the local dances and social occasions, not to mention the pubs !

It was also a worthwhile experience to see the Sunderlands take off in the waters of Plymouth Sound. The crew would be ferried out to the flying boat from their billets at Mount Batten and the boat's crew would disengage the plane from its mooring. A few minutes' work of starting up the engines and, once the flying boat was pointed in the right direction, i.e. to slightly south of Drake's Island, all four engines would be revved up and the taxiing would begin. In very little time the surface of the water would be churned up into an arrowhead pattern increasing in size as the speed built up and the plane would take to the air majestically. A most enjoyable sight to see from the top of Plymouth Hoe. Some of us schoolboys would decide there and then to join the RAF when the time came !

After one of the March or April 1941 heavy night raids a group of us cycled into town to have a look at the damage; at the top of Old Town Street there was a wall of flame opposite, enveloping the whole of the Spooners building. Neighbouring shops were also ablaze, making a wall of fire the whole length of the block and there were water hoses snaking around everywhere, firemen working like mad and the whole area full of choking smoke and fumes. Even the road surface was on fire in places, thanks to the tarred wooden blocks which adjoined the tram lines. One of the more memorable features of this night was the almost incessant drone of the German bombers; there was very little respite in between the hundreds of explosions. There was nothing we could do except to pedal home and get back to bed - we still had to be up in the morning for school.

An earlier raid which is still imprinted on my memory resulted in the oil fuel tanks at Turnchapel being set on fire and a number of people being killed. We didn't hear about this until the following day, when a huge live column of smoke remained over the area and the news soon spread. The Germans used the smoke by day and the flames by night to guide their aircraft right into Plymouth to drop more bombs. I remember our chemistry teacher at Emergency High School mentioned that the oil tanks fire, (by then in its third or fourth day), could easily be extinguished by pumping oxygen into the blazing tanks. He then asked us why that remedy could not or would not be applied. Guess which pupil's hand went up to point out (correctly) that it would be too expensive !

(One of the Admiralty fuel tanks at the Thanckes Oil Fuel Depot, Torpoint was also set on fire later in the war and it is said by members of the staff there that even as recently as 1999 a spell of really hot weather could bring sunken oil to the surface of the surrounding ground, even though the tank involved was completely rebuilt, complete with its concrete wall.)

Sutton High School occupied a large building in Plymouth's Regent Street until, in the early forties, a large percentage of its pupils were evacuated en masse to St Austell, about fifty miles away in Cornwall. Concurrently, many of the pupils being taught at Devonport High School were evacuated to Penzance, even further out in Cornwall. The remaining pupils of both schools were thrown together as Emergency High School, retaining a mixture of teaching staff from the two formerly separate schools. The unprecedented merger of two of the city's biggest boys' schools made little, if any, difference to those who merged.

Those of us who remained were still bombed and still went home each afternoon wondering whether we would be back tomorrow. Once a month we would form up a class at a time to walk to the A.R.P. (Air Raid Precautions, later Civil Defence) Headquarters in Mill Street to have our gas masks tested, this being regarded mainly as an hour or two away from lessons.

Another welcome treat was to unload Ministry of Food lorries bringing 28 lb cases of margarine, lard, baked beans, corned beef and other goodies for storage in the basement of the building. This floor was modified by the addition of internal blast walls to provide shelter for those pupils doing carpentry or metalwork classes in the basement itself at the time when the air raid sirens were heard; another type of alarm was sounded by whichever teacher heard the siren and was close to one of the bell pushes; that teacher would ring the bell repeatedly for ten or twenty seconds or until discretion became the better part of valour.

One of the Coxside gas holders was pierced by a bomb and set on fire in one raid, and the gas flame remained for several days, the whole structure giving the appearance of a candle or, more appropriately, a night light. I do not know how that particular fire was extinguished, but the gas holder was eventually repaired and is still there today in 1999.

One more long-burning victim of the blitz was the Reckitt's warehouse at Shepherd's Lane (colloquially "Candleworks Lane" at the time). The warehouse was situated on the site now occupied (1999) by a car parts supplier fronting on to Commercial Road, Coxside. The contents of the warehouse when it was set on fire included a lot of well-known brands of chemical products such as Reckitt's Blue, Brasso, cleaning liquids and other household potions. As the fire on the top storey spread it burned the floor, which collapsed on to the next and, over a period of several weeks, continued to smoulder. I believe the structure was of three storeys originally but finished up in the cellars, below the level of the cobbled road surface.

Both bus depots in Plymouth - Milehouse Corporation Depot and the Western National one at Laira Bridge - became victims of the blitz. Although my father (bus driver) and my sister (bus conductress) were both on the staff of the Corporation buses and were not on duty that night, the bombing of the Laira depot caused a lot of grief locally. Two of the men who died at Laira that night were friends of the family; they were on firewatching duties when the building was blasted to pieces. At the Milehouse depot a whole double-decker bus was blown bodily on to the roof of a bus garage and remained there for several days; most of the fleet of buses suffered damage and were driven around on their routes with patched up, non-transparent windows for some time.

Every morning following a raid it was the custom to go out and pick up the shrapnel, literally by the bucketful. At first the pieces were regarded as souvenirs, but now there was so much that it became part of the "war effort" to pass in the collected metal for recycling. With hindsight, I expect the shrapnel was as much use as the cast iron railings which formerly adorned our front walls. Corporation workmen came along and deliberately smashed the railings before loading the resultant scrap iron into their lorry. Those railings were still piled up at Cattedown Quarry in 1946, never having been taken away or shifted from the spot.

The shrapnel was dumped at a different location - possibly at sea, where no one could accidentally find it and complain to the Corporation about not re-cycling the stuff. Most of it originated from anti-aircraft shells although often we found bomb nose cones and, of course, dozens of incendiaries. Yes, dozens. Those which landed in the streets were harmless enough and simply burned weird shapes into the tarmac of the road surface; only the tail fins survived as recognisable souvenirs because the body of the bomb itself was highly combustible, composed of a magnesium alloy. They, too, soon ceased to be souvenirs as we piled them up; only our school friends who lived outside the city tended to show any interest in them.

After a succession of heavy raids parts of the city were without gas or electricity or water or all three of these essentials. Cattedown, for a time, came into the "all three" category. Thus it was that my father and I set out to obtain a cooking range; we found one among the ruins of a house in Tresillian Street and used Ernie Babb's three-wheeler milk bike to carry it back to No. 31. I believe the official description of this activity was "looting", but we regarded it as doing something useful for the war effort with an item which would otherwise have been dumped, along with the rubble.

My mother and sister found the range very useful for cooking and heating but also supplied hot water to neighbours who were prepared to obtain water (for cleaning purposes) from the static water tank at the top of the street. Water for drinking or cooking purposes was regularly stored overnight in containers such as buckets and saucepans, as a precaution against possible bomb damage cutting the water main somewhere close by. Sometimes it would be days before full water pressure could be restored. The cooking range itself was still in good working order when we sold the house in about 1959.

Unlimited fuel for the range and for the other domestic fires was obtained (again borrowing the milk bike) by collecting it from bombed houses. In those days the only method of sawing wood at home was by hand; even homes with primitive power tools found the frequent absence of electricity a bit of a nuisance. Coal was rarely in short supply, there being huge heaps of it at Coxside, also at Tothill Park where it could often be seen smouldering. This was not as a result of enemy action but by spontaneous combustion.

The Astor Playing Field was equipped with a barrage balloon, manned by the R.A.F. The balloon was called "Hector" by the Julian Street residents and, during daylight hours, one would hear a loudly shouted chorus of "Hector's going up !", suggesting that the air raid siren would shortly be sounding, with a daylight air raid being imminent. (We always presumed that the R.A.F. balloon people would be told about incoming enemy aircraft before we, the civilians, would; most times this proved to be correct.)

In spite of all the many thousands of anti-aircraft shells sent up from the various gun batteries and ships in Plymouth Sound (notably HMS "Newcastle", which was moored there for a very long time) I only ever actually saw two German aircraft brought down; I must have been in the shelter when any others met their fate. One was during a heavy night raid and it caught fire nicely, last seen heading east towards Plympton - I believe it crashed somewhere in Ivybridge; the other was in daylight and it was losing height rapidly, trailing blue and black smoke as it went out south over the breakwater. Both these events were heartily cheered by those able to witness them, something like a goal being scored at Plymouth Argyle's football ground, but louder and more sustained applause !

As bombing raids began to become more of a threat than at first supposed, and as they increased in severity and frequency, people on the receiving end began to think about getting out as far as possible from the city at night. The roads north and east of Plymouth became more and more popular, with families putting as much distance as possible between them and the next raid. Many made the nightly journey on foot, pushing bicycles or prams laden with their food, extra clothing and so on. Some settled down as comfortably as possible on the western edge of Dartmoor, others sheltered in farm buildings and haystacks in the areas which would, in the fullness of time, become housing estates in post-war Plymouth.

There was no such thing as broadcast weather forecasts and these travellers had to decide for themselves, on a daily basis, whether or not the Germans would be likely to come during the night. In the Cattedown area quite a few families had access to commercial vehicles such as coal lorries, builders' vans and the like; the owners allowed the drivers to take these vehicles home overnight in order to disperse them from their premises. They would be loaded up with people complete with baggage and would set off, picking up other people - sometimes complete strangers - en route to comparative safety. In Julian Street we would gather at the street corners shouting "Yellow Convoy ! ! !" at the top of our young voices as they gathered momentum. There were probably some amongst us who also would have preferred to leave the city, but these thoughts were closely guarded secrets.

Most of the adults who chose to stay did so because they wanted to be on hand should their homes be wrecked or set on fire. It fell to these people to look after the unoccupied properties belonging to the ones who had moved out for the night, because one burning house in a terrace was almost certain to set other houses on fire unless dealt with quickly. Other people would have got out if they could, but transport to the countryside was not easily arranged, especially for the larger families. As luck would have it, although probably seventy per cent of the houses in the street were affected by bomb damage to some degree, none suffered a direct hit by high explosive and only a dozen or so were hit by incendiaries, those being dealt with by the use of buckets and stirrup pumps.

The cause of a great deal of damage in Julian Street was a land mine which exploded, fortunately as it turned out, in the allotment area about a hundred yards from the odd-numbered houses of Oakfield Terrace. Had this device landed on more solid ground or a row of houses, the damage would have been substantial and widespread; as it was, all the damaged and partly demolished houses turned out to be repairable and were re-occupied within weeks.

House owners were entitled to compensation for the cost of repairing bomb damage and I still have a copy of a claim which my father submitted in respect of our first lot of damage. There were other, later occurrences, but although they were equally serious there were, by then, gangs of workmen who could be called upon to repair minor damage without any fuss, bother or red tape. The copy of the claim referred to forms a page of the documents I put together into a binder as a record of my father's life story.

Unexploded bombs were a very dangerous hazard until they were found and dealt with. On the way to school (again) a group of us had to divert by about a quarter of a mile, the cause being a UXB in the Cattedown Corner off-licence, which had a wool shop as neighbour. As we got to the end of the diversion and regained our normal route, the bomb was detonated; we had the unusual (for daytime) view of two premises being converted from buildings to bombsites in a matter of seconds.

At the top of a row of terraced houses in Cattedown Road which backed on to the top of Home Sweet Home Terrace, there was a flattened bombsite which had been left there for some time. A bunch of us found a pile of rubble which had recently been disturbed and started to investigate; hearing the gasworks lunch hooter blowing, most of us made our way home for our meals. As we arrived home there was a very loud explosion and we later found that a UXB had landed on the bombsite during the previous night's raid and had now exploded, twelve hours later. One of our classmates was killed.

At Home Park, Plymouth Argyle's football ground, the main grandstand was closed to the supporters and was used instead for storing the furniture of people whose houses had been demolished by high explosive bombs. Some time later, the whole grandstand and its contents were destroyed by incendiary bombs.

The Astor Playing Field was hit by two German bombs, both of which left huge craters. These became places for the smaller youngsters to play in, complete with several feet depth of water in the rainy season; the craters were not filled in for a long, long time. The districts of Cattedown and St Budeaux were mentioned specifically by "Lord Haw-Haw" (William Joyce) during his nightly "Germany Calling" broadcasts in English from Hamburg and Bremen. This was well before he got hanged at the end of the war for treason, of course.

Obviously, by the end of the war in Europe, air raids on Plymouth were a thing of the past and it became difficult to remember the approximate date of the last one but, with V1 and V2 rockets still being launched against London and the south-east, no one allowed themselves to become complacent.

More than a square mile of Plymouth city centre was subsequently (and eventually) rebuilt, but it is not for me to approach that subject : it would certainly be "beyond our Ken" !

SEND E-MAIL TO KEN ROBERTS    

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