Homefront Yorkshire 1939-1945 by Len Markham

Author:Len Markham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: HIS027100
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9781844683918
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2007-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

Name: Ian Wright

Born: 1929

Wartime location: Cottingham

I was ten years old in September 1939 and my brother was eight. We lived in Carisbrooke Avenue, Cottingham in 1939 and I remember listening to Prime Minister Chamberlain’s broadcast then going out to find the streets deserted.

We boys were sent to Beverley Grammar School. We travelled by bus. Some vehicles towed gas-producer trailers, which frequently supplied insufficient fuel on the hills, causing the conductresses to walk behind poking the fire until it bucked up a bit!

Cottingham quickly became a temporary home to a succession of military units. Two groups of visitors were particularly noticeable for obvious reasons. One morning, we were surprised to notice that the house next door had been taken over by French Algerian troops in red fez’s – all seemingly under five feet tall and perpetually smiling. Conventional French troops occupied Thwaite Hall for a period – and left some embarrassing graffiti and Cottingham played host for a short time to General Le Clerc and his tanks awaiting transport to Europe. The Americans when they arrived turned out to be coloured ‘pioneer’ soldiers all ‘six-feet twelve’ in height with commensurate girth, all dressed in immaculate uniforms and generous with their favours to us children and to the young ladies of the village. At that time, US coloured soldiers were not allowed to carry arms; officers and their military police were all white. As a sideline, dad made a fortune out of the Americans by charging them 2/6d to dance at the King Street Room to the Sylvena Dance Band, (geriatric but lively as I remember) packing the dancers in to the point of suffocation. Dad sat just inside the door, in what little fresh air there was, with his hat and coat on and a Gold Flake in his mouth, often accompanied by a local policeman bored with patrolling in the blackout. Incidentally, we discovered that the Yanks got 3/6d whenever the sirens sounded.

Cottingham, because of its proximity to Hull, had 824 alerts and Hull suffered 82 actual bombing raids, with Cottingham fortunately experiencing only the odd stray high explosive bomb with two near misses of parachute mines and a scattering of incendiaries. [For its size, Hull was the most bombed city in the UK.]

We boys harvested and swopped a rich collection of shell splinters, green parachute cord from the mines and occasional incendiary bombs, the latter carefully avoided later when we learned that the Germans had added delayed explosive charges to discourage tampering. When we were a little older, we made a few bike expeditions to the chalk pits at the top of Harland Rise, which were used as a temporary dump for unexploded bombs. There were usually about twenty in the eastern pit and we amused ourselves by sitting on them and trying to light some of the yellow contents which we scraped out with penknives then carried by all boys; perhaps just as well for us the explosives didn’t burn very well!

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