Sheffield During Wartime - A Living History Lesson - Part 1 of 4

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Jo Thomas of the ‘Action Desk — Sheffield’ Team on behalf of Frank Carr and David Carrigan and has been added to the site with their permission. The authors fully understand the site's terms and conditions.

On 6th May 2005, Frank Carr and David Carrigan went to St. Thomas More Primary School to speak to Class 3 about what it was like to be children in Sheffield during the war. Throughout this interview the questions were asked by pupils from Class 3.

FC — I was about 7 or 8 when the war started

DC — I was a bit older about 11.

Where did you live during the war?

FC — We lived near the five arches in Herries Road, not far from those at the back of the railway, it was Lamb Road, Parson’s Cross. So the nearest bombs to us fell about half a mile away, down on the Wednesday ground, around that area.

Were you evacuated?

DC — No I wasn’t evacuated, a lot of children were evacuated because the danger of living in a big city like Sheffield, likely to get bombed, so for safety a lot of children were evacuated out into the countryside and stayed with people out there, but no I wasn’t. I stayed at home and looked after my Mum and sister!

Were you a child during the war?

FC — Yes, I was not yet 8 when the war started. At that age we didn’t really understand what it was all about. When the war began, people, our parents and that, were whispering to each other and they were obviously very worried about it, but to me it was all exciting. There were things happening that I’d never seen before — strange objects appearing in the sky, barrage balloons — and then we had this black out when you couldn’t see where you were going, all the lights were off at night. There were no street lights and so on, and it was all exciting at this time. It got less exciting and more frightening as the war went on, but in the early days when I was about your age, it was good I thought!

What was it like in an Anderson shelter?

DC — Oh my word! In an Anderson shelter? I see you’ve been making models of Anderson shelters. I didn’t think you’d know anything about them, but now I see that you do. It was a bit exciting as a child, because you know sometimes when you like to go in the back and stop in a tent or perhaps sleep overnight in a tent, the Anderson shelter was there so that when the sirens went off to warn you that there might be planes coming over, enemy planes, then you were expected to go in the Anderson shelter in the garden and stay there. It was a little bit damp at times, you can imagine because it was half sunk into the ground and you had bunks in there where you could at least lie down. So you used to take some warm clothing in with you and keep wrapped up, and that was it until the siren sounded and it was all clear. Then you knew you could come out and go and live back in a house.

What did your parents do during the war?

FC — Well, my father was in what you called a Reserved Occupation, so he was working and people worked very long hours in the war, he was working from early morning and never got home ‘til about 8 o’clock at night. My mother — I’d got two younger brothers who were two years old when the war started — so she was at home looking after us all the time. People lived differently then, people shopped every day. Nowadays you go shopping perhaps once a week, but you had to go to the shops every day in the war because people had no refrigerators or freezers. Food wouldn’t keep, so you had to go and keep buying it every day, fresh stuff. So that’s one of the jobs I had, going to the shops and fetching the groceries.

DC - Yes, as Frank said your Mum used to have to look after you and provide for you. My Dad went away at the beginning of the war, he had to go down to London to work. I had an elder brother who was in the Army and went straight into France as soon as war broke out, another brother who was too young to go but he was in the Territorial Army and he was on the other side of Sheffield, and then I had a sister. So at the start there was my Mum, sister and myself left at home.

How did you feel when the bombs were dropped?

FC — Frightened! The noise was perhaps the worst thing. The war had been on for some time before the first bombs dropped on Sheffield. The first ones I remember, we were going to the cinema one afternoon when the air raid sirens went and we didn’t know whether to carry on going — it would probably be a false alarm we thought — and then — there were some big anti-aircraft guns at Shirecliffe — and they started firing into the sky so we were frightened then with the noise. We started to run home and then one or two bombs began to fall. I think it was just about one aeroplane that was over dropping its bombs somewhere on Sheffield, it wasn’t the real big blitz that we had.

When we had the two big air raids which lasted all night, we were in the air raid shelters then and it was frightening because you could hear whistling bombs coming down and big explosions, and you thought your house had gone but in fact, the bombs had fallen some distance away. It was scary.

Were you scared?

FC - Yes, as I say, and everybody else in the air raid shelter was scared as well. You wondered whether you were going to survive the night because the noise was so terrible. You could hear buildings falling down and if you popped your head out of the shelter, everything was burning and on fire. When you looked towards the town, you could see all the flames and everything on fire.

Did any of your family fight in the war?

DC — Yes, as I’ve mentioned my eldest brother went to France right at the beginning of the war. In the first week of war he was in France and he fought there and then eventually - you’ve probably heard that there was a big evacuation from Dunkirk when our troops were beaten back by the Germans to the channel, and then they had to escape back across to this country. And certainly for the rest of the war, he was always outside Britain, abroad. He went into North Africa, came up through Italy, and right through Germany when the war was over. So he was out of this country all the time the war was on. That’s a long time.

Now my younger brother who was in the Territorials, because he was only 17 at that time, he wasn’t old enough to go abroad, so when his unit went abroad he stayed behind and thereafter, he was in this country for the whole of the war merely because he was too young to go.

What was school like?

FC — Well there were things in school that you wouldn’t find now. There were buckets of sand all over the place, there were stirrup pumps — this is a sort of pump that you put in a bucket of water and pumped and it would squirt water. This is in case any fire bombs dropped, incendiary bombs that would cause fires. Also you had practices of putting your gas mask on and going into the air raid shelters, as fast as you could. We rather liked going into the air raid shelters in the war. If the sirens went and you had to go into the air raid shelters, they had sweets in there that the Headmaster used to get out and hand around to the children, and you never got sweets in the war, they were on rations you couldn’t get them. So that was one of the bonuses of the sirens going off!

There were a lot of people in classes, they were very big in those days. A lot of the teachers had gone into the Army and were missing, so their wives would come to school in some cases to do the teaching. But otherwise I suppose it was like school is now, we did the normal lessons. Apart from when our school was bombed. The school was badly damaged with bombs and we had to go to Home Service then which was when we went to somebody’s house and a teacher came along to the house — the house was about half a mile away from where I lived — there were probably about 12 or 13 children who went, and a teacher came every day. We were all different ages. But the Home Service lasted for some time, until our school was repaired and was habitable again. I rather liked Home Service though, we didn’t have to stay as long.

Did you like school?

DC — How many of you like going to school? My word! That’s everybody! Yes, we did too. You had to go to school of course, you’d no choice and during the day, generally speaking, the sirens hadn’t gone, so normally during the day, there was never any worry about going out and going to school. One thing is that during the war, everyone, children included, used to have a gas mask just in case the enemy dropped any bomb that included gas. They were in a little square cardboard box and you used to carry that round with you wherever you went. If you went to school, keep it on your desk while you were there, bring it back from school. So wherever you went you always had that with you.

FC — There’s one other thing about school. I went to school on the bus and in the war, all the bus windows were covered with a sticky netting because if a bomb fell anywhere near, the glass wouldn’t fly in and cut everybody — it was to stop the glass breaking all over you. But you couldn’t see through the windows, there was just a little hole cut in the middle and you had to put your eyes right there to see where you were going. So it was hard to find your stop when you got off. We had double summer time — we’ve got summer time now — but in double summer time it used to be very dark in the morning when we were going to school, so it was difficult to find where you were on the buses or trams because of these funny sticky windows. That was a problem.

What did you wear for school?

FC — At primary school we didn’t have a uniform, we wore short trousers, usually a pullover or something to keep you warm. But later on when we went to Grammar School, we had a school blazer and a cap, so it was a school uniform then. We wore short trousers until we were 13, 14 or so even in the winter!

Were you scared when the sirens went off?

FC — At first we weren’t, but after we’d experienced what the bombing and the anti-aircraft gun shelling was like, it was scary. I know that sometimes when we were running up to our air raid shelter, up the garden, there were pieces of shrapnel from these anti-aircraft guns, sort of hitting your slates, knocking slates off and you could hear them whistling around, so that was scary.

What was it like to be at war?

DC — Well I think as children — you just think how old you are now — and you know that even in this day, we have got wars and have had wars in different countries away from here. So as children you don’t really see it as an adult would see it, you don’t realise perhaps how dangerous war can be.

There were certainly exciting things as a child when the war was on. I remember after the Blitz that we had in Sheffield — we had two very big bombing raids — we as children used to go out the following day and start looking around to find shrapnel. Now shrapnel is when a bomb bursts and it all breaks into fragments, so the bits of metal fly all over the place. We used to go out looking for bits and pieces and see who could find most bits of the bomb that was left, so we weren’t that scared as children really. And bear in mind that the sirens went off to warn you that there might be an enemy raid, but they probably went off perhaps 130 or 140 times during the war in Sheffield here to alert you, but there were only two occasions when it was a really bad bombing situation. So when the sirens went off, you were up, you were straight down to the shelter, but eventually you began to think, "Well is there any need to go? Nothing’s happened." Because they weren’t coming to bomb Sheffield, they were going perhaps over Sheffield to go to Liverpool, Manchester and those places. So eventually you didn’t start to worry when the sirens went off.

FC — At that stage too, a strange thing happened one night, there was a sound like a very loud motorcycle. People looked out of the window and there was a light coming through the sky, and people are saying, "Oh it’s one of our aircraft, it’s lit up." But it was one of these — have you heard of Doodlebugs or flying bombs? They bombed London a lot with flying bombs towards the end of the war. Well this was one of the flying bombs that came over Sheffield and if the engine stopped, if this light went out, the engine stopped and you had to take cover quickly because the thing came down and they were very powerful bombs. But it went right over our houses and I think it went over towards Stocksbridge somewhere, and came down on the moors out there, so it didn’t do any damage. That was one of the later weapons that the Germans had that were very, very scary for the London people.

Did places near you get bombed?

FC - The nearest one was probably about half a mile away. The biggest bomb I remember in the war was a landmine — this came down with a parachute and it fell on Southey Green. It was a few days later before I went up there and saw it, but all the houses around it had disappeared, there was just a big hole left where it had fallen and a lot of people were killed there at Southey Green.

You thought bombs were falling near you when you were in the air raid shelter, but they were quite a long way off some of them you know, they were a mile away, two miles away and yet, they still sounded very loud.

Pr-BR

Part 2 of this story can be viewed at www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/A8949900

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