This account is one of a series recorded in Look! This is Timsbury – a book that was compiled by a group of people who met at the Cheshire Home in the 1980’s to record the reminiscences of older people in Timsbury. This account is an interview with Mary Pike and Wilf Bridges, both Timsbury residents, and is reproduced by kind permission of the Cheshire Home.
| Q. | Do you remember where any of the evacuees came from Mary? |
| Mary | I think most of them that came here came from the dock area of London. Nothing wasn’t organised beforehand. They all came to the Church room and you just went down and they asked you how many you wanted. You picked the ones you liked and of course some poor little things were left behind at the end. Some wanted just one but they didn’t want to split up the families. I think the Parish Council was in charge of that. |
| Q. |
Do you remember seeing them arrive yourself? |
| Mary | Yes I can. They looked very tired because they’d been travelling quite a long time and it was raining before they got here. They all had a label on and their gas masks on their shoulders and some had little cases and some only had carrier bags with their bits of clothing and that. I think there was a few that came out of Bath, and some from Bristol, but the majority came from London. |
| Q. | Were there many people that stayed on after the raids? |
| Mary | A few settled in the village and never went back to London. Some still live in the village now, some of them married village boys. They weren’t very old when they came, some were tiny tots, 3, 4, 5. Some of them were older, because some were at the big school, in the same class as I was and I was 13 when the war started. Most of them were rather on the small side because they’d lived in town all their life – they hadn’t grown up like the country people. They got into trouble at school for going out with all the boys across the fields. Brenda Moxham and I and a gang of them used to go down across the Batch, down over Conygre and slide down on the tins and I remember someone saw us and reported us to Mrs Greenland the school mistress. She had us in her office and told us ” You shouldn’t have gone down there with the boys.” |
| Wilf | They came from Custom House in London and they’d never been in the country at all so things around here were quite strange. I remember once that the farmer was ploughing out his potatoes and one of these kids was looking down and seeing these potatoes coming out of the ground and when the farmer stopped, the boy said “Hey mister, why did you put those potatoes in the ground? We always get them in bags in London.” Also one farmer named Jimmy, who had a lovely orchard of apple trees (they were the very big type of apple) went out on the Monday morning when the kiddies had moved in. Right at the top of the apple tree there was one boy scrumping the apples and he shouted and the boy in blank amazement fell from the top of the tree. Jimmy said to me “Wilf, I was never more pleased in my life to see that kid run away.” |
| Q. | Coming on to firewatching, Mary, can you remember the names of any other firewatchers in the village? |
| Mary | My father was one of them, I helped the Rev. Rose (the vicar), he was one of them. Brenda Moxham and Wilf Bridges did a bit before the call-up came. But they tried to get different people for different streets so that you looked after your own street and I lived in Rectory Lane then. The Rev. Rose was just over the wall from Rectory Lane. We had a stirrup pump with a bucket – that’s what we had to fight the fire with. We had a fire engine down in the Recreation Ground – just during the war. That was where the St John Ambulance was, right up until they built the Conygre Hall. Then they pulled they palce down, didn’t they? The HQ for the firewatchers used to be at the Temperance Hall. We really thought it was a big joke when we did go out. It was serious I suppose but I think we treated the war as fun in the villages – because we didn’t have the bombing around here really. We used to go out so many nights a week and just sort of patrol about after the sirens went and keep your eyes open in case any incendiary bombs dropped. The church bells were rung one night, it was supposed to be for invasion of gas and one night the Church bells started up and frightened everybody to death, but we don’t really know what for – we never heard why they were rung. |
| Wilf | One night a plane came through the valley dropping bombs. I expect the plane was going to Bristol. |
| Mary | There used to be a Red Cross Unit apart from the St John Ambulance. After the War they went in together. The headquarters was in the Temperance Hall where it is now. |
| Wilf | No, it was really in Billy Wilkins’s cobbler shop. Billy was on the phone. He would be repairing the shoes, so if the call came through Billy would take the call, shut down his shop, call his friend and get the ambulance out. They were pretty good first aid men. They’d also go to Paulton if there was a call from there. |
| Q. | Were there some landmines around here? |
| Mary | Yes, they were dropped up through Paulton. They reckoned it was sea-mines, but the plane was being chased across and they let them drop and they went through Withy Mills way. A lot of them didn’t go off. They didn’t do any damage, although they were big as a pillar box. |
| Q. | Was there any war damage in Timsbury at all? |
| Mary | No – well, there was a bit of shrapnel dropped up in the Square up by Ken Bridges’s shop because my mother was out and she had to dive for cover under the wall. If they got caught in the searchlights, the planes that were doing Bristol or Bath, they’d let any bombs go and they didn’t care where it went. |
| Wilf | We used to watch the searchlights. That was great fun. There was one up on the top of Tunley Hill. They were placed so that the beams could cross. |
| Mary | We were at a dance in the Church Hall when the Welsh Guards were here and we had a terrific raid over Bristol and mum was looking out of the window in Rectory Lane and all the planes were caught in the searchlights, they’d shine silver and they were really having a good bash that night. They used to shoot down the beams. I don’t think we realised how dangerous it was – you don’t when you’re 14 or 15. There was nothing around here that they really wanted to bomb, but they had to come over here for Bristol and Bath. My mother was expecting my brother then and we went to Bristol one Saturday to do all the shopping for the baby. They said to mum “If you like to leave it, we’ll deliver it” and she said “No, we are going to take it with us”. If we’d left it, we wouldn’t have had anything. It would all have been destroyed in the bomb that fell on Wine Street. |
| Wilf | The first year of the War was the Phoney War. Nothing seemed to happen very much then. We’d sort of geared up and wondered what was going to happen and it seemed to be such a qyuiet affair until they started. |
| Mary | Course we had another do on the Sunday when the gliders were going over to Arnham and one blew up. It all fell down around Paulton. We could see everything falling down and somebody thought it was leaflets, but it was parts of people’s boddies. Mum and I went up to Paulton to see where it had come down. It was terrible until the Police could get there to cordon it off and stop people getting through. One family went to Bath from Timsbury and were unfortunately killed in a reaid. They’re all buried in the cemetary here – a grandmother, daughter and son – the Leakeys. |
| Q. | What did you have in the way of sirens or warnings? |
| Mary | The siren we mostly heard round here was at Paulton, up at Purnells, There wasn’t one in the village. You could hear the one from Paulton. |
| Q. | Did you have any Anderson Shelters? |
| Mary | I can’t remember any. Most of us used to get under the stairs or we used to put a table in front of the window and get under the table. |
| Q. | Did you always carry your gas masks? |
| Mary | Well we did to start with. We had to. But as time went on we just didn’t bother. |
| Q. | Can you remember the rationing days? |
| Wilf | If you raised a pig for yourself, you could keep half. The other half had to be given away for the national supply. |
| Mary | We used to go into town and queue up anywhere. If you were going up through town and you saw a queue outside a food store, you joined in and hoped for what you were going to get when it came to your turn. We used to go and queue at the Red House in Bath and if you’d get a cake there, and someone would say “Quick they’re going to have some in Woolworths” and you’d run back to Woolworthss and get on a queue. Oh, it was quite a to-do on a Saturday morning. First of all you had to queue to on a bus to get in there. The bus was terrible the, during the war. They ony ever run every two hours into Bath. We used to have to queue up in the Square. By the time the bus did get here from Paulton, sometimes they might pick up one, then you’d have to wait for another two hours for another one.I used to cycle – I used to work in Bath in the beginning of the War and I used to cycle there. I used to work in McIlroys. When I used to leave there at night the sirens used to go and I used to riding out of Bath with the planes going over. My mother used to be worried to death. We were blacked out – you only had a very faint tiny little light on your bike. I used to work till half past six on Saturday nights. One night it was blowing and raining like mad and my mother made my father come and meet me and I didn’t know he was coming and I met up with someone that I knew coming out, so there were two of us riding, and my father were looking for one, so father went to Bath and I came to Timsbury. When he got back home he said ” Give your notice in, you’re leaving”. I had to and I went to Purnells then. |
| Q. | What do you remember about having identity cards? |
| Mary | We always had them, but I don’t think we ever had to show them. I know there were some soldiers billeted at Hallatrow Court during the War. My husband used to live up the lane and had to pass the Court and his brother was home on leave from the Air Force and he passed twice. The second time he got arrested because they wondered why he’d passed twice. He were hauled in there then. |
| Q. | Do you have any stories about the troops that were stationed around here. |
| Mary | Well, they made a lot of life in the village. We had a YMCA in North Road. They used to get down there a lot and they used to go to all the village dances. |
| Q. | I think the Welsh Guards were here? |
| Mary | Oh yes. They definitely were. Quite a lot of them stayed and married Timsbury and High Littleton girls. |