‘There is no doubt that the great mass of young people are anxious to have the opportunity to help the national war effort.’
Interdepartmental Conference on Training for Boys, November 19411
Almost as soon as the Blitz commenced, the nation’s youth were active in defying the enemy. The common public perception of children sitting inside the safety of shelters or as evacuees out in the countryside belies the true contribution of large numbers of youths who played an essential role in saving lives, preserving morale and keeping the country running. When the story of the children’s contribution to the war effort is told, the focus is normally on wastepaper collection, salvage of scrap metal and efforts to help their parents grow vegetables. Though these were all vital activities, there were plenty of youngsters whose role was far more active – and dangerous.
Even before war was declared, there were youths all over Britain who were preparing to do their duty. Many Boy Scout troops were integrated into ARP units to offer their services as messengers and lookouts. Girl Guides had assisted in the distribution and fitting of gas masks, showing children how to ensure the seal fitted correctly. They stepped up first-aid training, ready to assist in the aftermath of raids. The instructions they received were both graphic and gruesome, illustrating how to deal with the seriously wounded. The Guides also offered their equipment for ARP use, converting canvas latrine cubicles into gas decontamination facilities. Losing their latrines didn’t matter, once war started many of the Guides’ tents were requisitioned by the Army, so there were few opportunities for camping.
One month after the declaration of war, the government decreed that children under sixteen should not be allowed to serve in ARP posts. This did not curtail the activities of Scouts who continued to assist by helping families to erect air raid shelters. Nor did it stop girls like Patricia Knowlden of West Wickham in Kent. She had actively assisted the ARP since 1938 when she helped her father distribute leaflets. By 1941, aged fourteen and still too young to join the ARP, she sat – and passed – the ARP warden’s examination. In 1944, when she reached her seventeenth birthday, she was finally officially able to commence civil defence work. In Swansea, teenage ARP volunteers were even shown how to use petrol bombs, in case they became the last line of defence against invasion.
In the east London borough of Stepney, local teenager Sidney Ties began preparing for war almost as soon as he left school in 1937. Born and bred in the area, Sidney had attended a local school where the limited curriculum left him with few opportunities. However, deep down he harboured a dream:
I really would have liked to be a surgeon. But it wasn’t possible since I had no education at all. My school was awful. You got hit for even moving in the classroom. I didn’t learn anything and it was not a happy time. It was difficult for people who had potential – you never got a chance to fulfil it. My father was a market trader, selling curtains and things from a stall near Elephant and Castle.
Despite knowing the dream was impossible, Sidney Ties was determined to maintain his interest in medical matters.
Whilst his background offered no openings in the medical profession, Sidney retained an enthusiasm that determined his immediate future. After joining the Boy Scouts as a twelve year old, he had learned first aid, earned his first-aid badges and become his troop’s first-aider: ‘I soon got beyond that and went to a London County Council [LCC] night school where I studied first aid. By the time I was about fifteen I was doing advanced first aid.’ Having learned to treat cuts, bandage wounds, stem bleeding and fit splints, he soon possessed skills that were expected to be in great demand if and when war came. As part of his training he even attended a local hospital where he joined groups of trainee doctors, watching surgery and getting used to the sight of serious wounds. In the final months before war broke out he was even asked by the LCC to offer instruction in first aid: ‘I was sent to see the taxi drivers to train them in giving first aid because a lot of them became auxiliary firemen. Can you imagine a fifteen year old giving lessons to a taxi driver? I was showing them how to stem bleeding and so on.’
Though he had no practical experience of treating serious wounds, he was considered a vital part of the local emergency services:
I was sixteen years old. On the day war was declared I was just told by LCC, ‘Go to the hospital and see what you can do.’ The local children’s hospital that had been closed down and evacuated. I was on duty with one nurse and three girls. The sirens went off and I went up to the roof with my helmet on, with my gas mask, carrying a stretcher and my first-aid kit. I was expecting the worst. Thank God nothing happened because we weren’t ready.
The local medical services were far from ready to deal with what would come in the years ahead, but the enthusiasm of youngsters like Sidney Ties was a sure sign that there were many in the country ready for whatever challenge might arise.
Whilst youths like Sidney prepared for war, others found themselves co-opted in working in civil defence. In late 1939, thirteen-year-old Roy Finch was out cycling with a friend when he was ‘volunteered’ for service. He was of the age group that felt too old for evacuation, yet were too young to leave school. However, with all the schools in the area closed, Roy found his days were somewhat leisurely. As they cycled past their closed school, Roy looked across at their former classrooms: ‘Look, it’s all been sandbagged!’ The boys noticed there was plenty of activity going on:
There was an ARP post with a copper outside. He called us over. We said, ‘But we haven’t done anything!’ He said, ‘You’ve got bikes and we’re looking for messenger boys. Come on in.’ So we went inside and the wardens told us what they wanted us to do.
For Roy Finch this seemed like a golden opportunity to get involved in the war effort. He had already been a member of the local Army Cadet Force, his local unit running a junior group that included boys too young to join the main force. He had even won the award for best-dressed cadet, which he thought was due to his father showing him the correct way to tie his puttees. However, his new role as an ARP messenger did not include a uniform:
We had a whistle and a bicycle and we had to pedal around the area, blowing the whistle and shouting, ‘Air raid warning! Take cover!’ Everyone thought we were bloody ridiculous. But we thought we were great. We had a proper tin hat and a gas mask. Then we’d cycle back to the warden’s post and wait in a classroom until we had to go out again.
It was an interesting role for the boys, who felt they were making a genuine contribution to the war effort. They were not alone: all over the country, children volunteered their services to the ARP. Scouts and Guides acted as ‘spotters’, scanning the sky for bombers then looking out for fires that started in the aftermath of raids. Some boys even established their own informal ‘Junior ARP’ posts, establishing lookout posts, constructing HQs and erecting signs highlighting their role. With homemade armbands and ‘tin helmets’ purchased from local shops, they prepared themselves for war. Some schools also established ARP, fire-watching and observation posts, with children going on the roofs to watch for enemy aircraft. Using signal flags they were able to relay information to messengers who could in turn pass it on to the ARP. All across the country, Boy Scouts, Girl Guides and members of the Boys Brigade made sure their first-aid kits were filled and ready to assist with the expected casualties bombing would bring.
One of the earliest targets was the outer London suburb of Croydon, chosen by the Germans because of its airport. As was later discovered the Germans’ method for locating the airfield was simple: they were guided by Luftwaffe pilots who knew their way from their pre-war careers as commercial pilots who had landed at Croydon Airport. On 16 August 1940 the Luftwaffe bombed Croydon. However, in nearby Norbury, Roy Finch’s ARP career got off to an inauspicious start: he was at home when he first heard the sound of aerial attack. It was only after the sound of explosions and machine-gun fire had faded, and the drone of the attacker’s engines had long passed, that he actually heard the wail of the siren to warn of a raid.
In those few minutes, bombs had hit the airfield, some houses and the factories nearby, causing many casualties among workers who were rushed to hospital. With hospital staff unable to cope with both treating the wounded and carrying out ARP duties, they needed a source of labour. To meet the shortfall local Boy Scout troops volunteered their services. In the late 1930s many Scout troops had assisted in civil defence exercises, often playing the role of the injured, allowing the emergency services to hone their rescue skills. Now, in the hour of need, the Scouts made practical use of their experience. In Croydon, Boy Scouts over the age of fourteen were asked to volunteer to assist at the hospitals, a duty they continued throughout the Blitz. The boys became stretcher-bearers, fire-watchers, telephonists and messengers. They were given steel helmets and trained in fire-fighting, learning how to operate the stirrup-pumps, fire hoses and hydrants. Those over sixteen were stationed on a tower above the hospital to act as observers, watching for the fall of incendiary bombs. Others waited at the hospital with their bicycles, ready to act as messengers. When seriously injured people arrived at hospital, the messengers were sent out – ignoring the falling bombs and the shrapnel of the anti-aircraft guns – to notify next of kin.
In addition to the Boy Scouts, the Croydon hospitals also had assistance from other teenagers. The local Red Cross and St John Ambulance had formed three teams of girls aged between fifteen and eighteen. Many of these volunteered to work in the hospitals or at the blood transfusion service. Assistance was also provided by the teenage boys of the Air Defence Cadet Corps, an organization set up in 1937 to train boys keen to join the RAF. They volunteered to assist at hospitals by filling some 600 sandbags used to protect the casualty department.
The dedication of the Scouts meant that they also assisted with the unloading of ambulances, helping to move the injured into the wards and operating theatres. They helped doctors by pointing out wounds. One fourteen year old later reported that he had to take an amputated leg for incineration. When not dealing with the badly wounded, the Scouts helped to move patients to places of safety: one of their duties included carrying newborn babies down to the air raid shelters. Their efforts were recognized when the town council gave them a commendation in a special resolution to acknowledge their bravery and energy during the bombing. Croydon’s Scouts were also recognized by the scouting authorities. The Scout’s Gilt Cross medal was awarded to Eric Martin and the Certificate of Gallantry was won by John Dyne and Peter Standen. All were recognized for their work at Croydon Town Hall when it was bombed.
These raids were just a taste of what lay ahead. Even light bombing brought casualties rushing into hospitals for treatment, straining the emergency services. Once the raids grew heavier, so too did the need for all available medical assistance. When the sirens sounded in London on 7 September 1940, sixteen-year-old Sidney Ties led his mother, grandmother and two aunts from their home in Jamaica Street to the safety of the street’s brick-built shelter. So far, after a year of war, his contribution to the war effort had been to continue training, giving instruction and setting up an aid post in the basement of the dental technicians where he worked. As they made their way along the street, Sidney made sure he had his small first-aid satchel slung from his shoulder. After four years of training, this would be his chance to prove that all those evening classes had not been wasted.
Sitting in the shelter, he could hear the whine of bombs, the banging of the anti-aircraft guns, the crash of explosions and the ringing bells of ambulances and fire engines. Some 250 enemy bombers flew over London that night. Though Sidney was unable to see what was happening outside, it was clear that the full fury of war was being unleashed:
War started for me when they hit the docks. It really was tough. But when you’re sixteen you just get on with it. You don’t think about it. We just sat there listening to the banging of the bombs and then when the ‘all clear’ went, I went outside and helped.
As he made his way outside he noticed that the street was sticky with a greasy yellow liquid. He looked down and realized it was melted butter that was running out from a nearby bombed warehouse: ‘I had no official duties. I had no Red Cross armband or anything. I was straight out into my street. My first patients were people in the next street. I did whatever I could.’
Everywhere he looked there seemed to be buildings burning and firemen attempting to quench the flames. The sky was lit up with a red and yellow glow from countless warehouse fires: ‘The air was full of smoke and dust. It was murder. The fires raging. The docks were alight. The glow lit up the sky.’ And yet Sidney Ties did not stop to marvel at the scenes, instead he did all he could to help the injured:
I wasn’t affected by the horror and didn’t find it difficult to cope. I had already got an idea of blood and open wounds from observing at the hospital. But there was not much I could do with my small first-aid kit. But I did help by digging people out – this was in my own streets.
That first night was a taste for what was to come. As the raids continued, Sidney made sure he took his first-aid kit with him to the shelter and did all he could to help. He soon grew used to the sights, sounds and smells of a city being pounded with high explosive and showered with incendiary bombs:
When you go into a bombed area, the first thing you notice is that everything is white. There is dust everywhere. You are looking through all this dust on the person’s body before you can even work out where they are hurt. They were so covered in white dust, you could hardly tell if they were alive or dead.
The dust he described surprised all who experienced it, thick clouds of dust and debris that had, in some cases, lain undisturbed for a hundred years or more.
In the battered and burning streets of his home borough, Sidney went out night after night to offer assistance to the wounded. In the first few weeks of the Blitz he went from being a youth with a basic understanding of rudimentary first aid to having a deep understanding of the horrors of modern warfare. Pulling the wounded from the ruins of their homes, treating them and helping them to ambulances, he was doing what he could to defy the enemy. All the time his experience was growing:
You’d find some people without a mark on them. Then you’d have a look, and they were dead – killed by the blast. They looked perfectly fine but were dead. I soon learned that if they had a small wound, the shock stopped it from bleeding too much at first. But if a main artery had gone you hadn’t got much chance of saving them – the blood would spurt up to the ceiling. If you are not there to press the pressure point immediately, they hadn’t got a chance.
His work was made worse by the fact that the bombing had disturbed the vast communities of rats that lived in the warehouses around the docks. As the fires raged and the buildings collapsed, the rats swarmed everywhere. Despite his dislike of vermin, Sidney worked on; this was no time to be squeamish.
After a month of seemingly constant bombing, the war came even closer to Sidney Ties. One night, as they waited for the all clear, the shelter was rocked by a tremendous blast and engulfed in dust. Immediately the people within began screaming, but Sidney was quickly to his feet, shouting into the darkness: ‘Shut up! You’re not hurt, are you? You’re still alive.’ Remaining calm, he checked and discovered that no one was injured. By taking command of the situation, he managed to calm the screaming women, helping them settle down as the bombing continued. The shelter had somehow survived a near miss. With order restored, Sidney once more waited for the all clear when he could safely search for people to assist.
Days later, his career as a first-aider in his home streets came to an end. Leaving the shelter as the air raid came to an end, he stepped out into the street:
I came out of the shelter and saw a big hole. Our house had been flattened by a parachute mine. I didn’t have a thing of my own after that. All my clothes had gone. My mother just saved one photograph of me at school. We met a policeman who sent us off to a rest centre on Mile End Road. We had nothing. Our clothes were in a terrible state, full of dust and blood. We just sat there on the floor, then someone brought us tea. I have no idea how long I was there.
They could not stay in the rest centre for long as there were already too many other homeless people in the area:
They put us on to buses and drove us away in the middle of an air raid. There were bombs were going off around us. There were bangs to the left and right, but I was not looking at anything. I was keeping my head down. They took us out to Guildford.
Though this marked the end of his first-aid work in the East End, it was not the end of his medical career.
Although Sidney had been forced out from his home, other young volunteers remained in the area. At Watson’s Wharf in nearby Wapping a volunteer fire service was formed by a group of local youths. The gang was led by a local docker, Patsy Duggan, who had wanted to serve in the military but was in a reserved occupation. The gang included: Frank Pope, aged 13; Freddie Pope, 16; Oswald Bath, 15; and Jackie Duggan, 17.2 Adopting the name the ‘Dead End Kids’, the boys formed into teams of four and used a handcart to transport their meagre fire-fighting equipment to wherever it was needed. They didn’t have fire axes, but carried iron bars to force open blocked doors. They had a ladder to access windows and buckets of sand to snuff out flames and incendiary bombs. When the sirens sounded the boys watched from the rooftops to see where incendiary bombs were falling, then raced off to deal with them. When they found the smouldering bombs, they tied ropes around the tails, dragged them away and dumped them in the Thames. The boys charged into bombed and burning buildings to rescue the inhabitants and were spotted escaping from buildings with their clothing smouldering. Two of the boys were reported to have died when a burning building collapsed on them.
As the Blitz raged, Britain’s youth played their part in keeping the country running. The Auxiliary Fire Service had accepted large numbers of teenage boys – officially from age sixteen upwards but often much younger – to act as messengers. Equipped with either bicycles or motorbikes, they raced around their local areas, delivering messages, fetching fire crews from one area to another as their services were needed. Some of the boys were shocked – and secretly surprised – to find themselves working as messengers in fire stations which had curiously been issued with antique rifles to defend against invasion. Added to that, they were allowed time off school to carry out their duties. As such, the jobs were greatly prized by youths who knew their mates envied them. During the Battle of Britain, one downside was that they had to remain on duty and could not race off to watch dogfights in the skies above them. Instead, their work took precedence.
Scouts and Guides played an increasing role during the bombing. Guides with ‘Pathfinder’ badges volunteered to use their knowledge of local areas to show people through blacked-out streets to reach shelters. Boy Scouts went out during raids to show firemen where they were needed. Their youthful enthusiasm for the task was sometimes met by officials who did not make their lives any easier. One teenage ARP messenger was cycling through the nightly air raid when he was stopped by a policeman. The constable then asked him, in all seriousness, whether he realized he was riding a bike at night without lights. As they were talking a bomb fell nearby and both the constable and the boy threw themselves to the ground. The policeman stood up and continued: did the boy know he was on the wrong side of the road? More bombs whistled down and yet the policeman continued, lecturing the boy on road safety.
This sense of duty was displayed by thousands of youths who braved falling bombs to ensure they ‘did their bit’. In north London, seventeen-year-old Home Guard volunteer Geoff Pulzer and his mate Derek, were sent to guard a local reservoir:
It was about 500 yards away from my house. My mother was quite upset because I had to walk up there. The planes were overhead bombing and the anti-aircraft guns were firing, but we had no tin hats. When we got there, there was a guard hut covered in sandbags. That was when we were given a steel helmet – there weren’t enough to go round.
This shortage of helmets was initially a problem in most Home Guard units. One section commander was forced to join a queue in a department store in order to secure two helmets. He queued alongside children who were buying the helmets to wear when playing at soldiers.
Despite the twin dangers of enemy bombing and shrapnel from the anti-aircraft guns, the two boys decided to relieve the tedium of guarding somewhere that did not seem to be a target for anyone: ‘It was quite boring, just standing there, so we used to drill each other. We would take it in turns to march up and down, whilst the other was shouting orders.’
Whilst older boys were serving in the Home Guard, the Boy Scouts became active in civil defence. Some sixteen-year-old Scouts helped to collect the corpses of those killed during air raids, stacking the bodies ready for collection and identification. Younger Scouts helped collect and transport furniture from bombed houses, moving it into storage until families were rehoused. Others helped the elderly to erect air raid shelters. In tube stations, Boy Scouts supported morale by leading sing-songs among the underground population.
Some teenagers paid the ultimate price for the dedication to duty. One of these was sixteen-year-old Kenneth Wiggins, a member of the Boys Brigade, who was a fire-watcher with the ARP. One September morning he was on his way to work at the Boys Brigade London headquarters when the sirens sounded. Rather than taking cover, he continued on his way and was killed when the street was struck by bombs.
The story of the destruction of Coventry touched the hearts of a nation, but that one night of bombing was not the only time German bombers visited the city and was not the only time that the heroism of its inhabitants was displayed. Three weeks earlier, Betty Quinn, a member of the St John Ambulance, had been called on to do her duty. She later described the events of that night:
The bombing that night began with a shower of slow-burning incendiaries. We all ran around putting them out with sand and earth. Then a man ran up to me and told me one was smouldering on his roof. He asked me if we could get a ladder and go up into his loft before the house caught fire. I hated heights and was really nervous, but between us we managed to put out the flames with the help of a bucket and a stirrup-pump. Then, as I walked home the main shelling suddenly started. It was very dark, the sirens were wailing and our anti-aircraft guns were blazing as the bombers dropped their high explosives.
As seventeen-year-old Betty near home, a small girl suddenly appeared, calling out for help:
Something was obviously terribly wrong and I told her to run on to the ARP post to get help while I dashed down the road. As I ran I looked ahead and realized a bomb had made an almost a direct hit on an Anderson shelter. As I got near I realized our neighbours, the Worthington family, were all trapped inside. Instinctively I started digging into the rubble with my bare hands. It was too slow to work like that and I frantically looked round for something to use. Remarkably I found a spade lying nearby. I remember hearing moans from inside. I also remember there was no shouting, no screams.
Amidst the bombing a young boy on a bicycle suddenly appeared and Betty sent him into the house, through the back door which had been torn from its hinges, to collect blankets:
I can still see his frightened face. I told him ‘just go and do it’ – then other people started arriving to help. We all worked together, fumbling around in the dark with only light from the shells exploding overhead. Together we got the family free. There were Mr and Mrs Worthington, their daughter Joan, who was a friend of mine, and I think two other sisters and two other girls. Amazingly they were all alive but injured. I helped to give them first aid. One of them was cold and I just pulled off my brand new black coat and laid it over them.3
As anti-aircraft guns continued to fire and bombs continued to fall, Betty comforted her neighbours as they waited for help to arrive. For all her efforts, the entire family died in hospital. The only survivor was the girl who had first alerted Betty. For defying the bombs to save the family, Betty was awarded the George Medal. She received the award at Buckingham Palace in 1941. When she later met Winston Churchill he poked at her chest, moving the lapel that half obscured her medal, telling her: ‘Show your medal … be proud of it.’ With typical modesty, Betty Quinn later said: ‘I still don’t necessarily think I deserved it. I was only brave because we had to be’.4 To her, she was simply ‘in the right place, at the right time’.5
Another brave teenager was West Bromwich schoolgirl, Charity Bick. She had been desperate to join the ARP but, as a fourteen year old, she was too young. She had attempted to volunteer but, arriving at the depot and giving her true age, she had been sent away. Determined to serve, she pestered her father – himself an air raid warden – until he agreed to lie about her age. Returning to the depot he informed them that she was sixteen and she was accepted as a messenger.
During air raids, her job was take messages between various ARP posts, ensuring they knew where their services were needed. Despite the falling bombs, Charity continued to carry out her duties:
There were times when I was close enough to be put off my bike but I don’t think you really get frightened at that age. I’d just jump back on and we’d talk about it when I got back from that message. I suppose there were times when I could have died but you didn’t think about that. The message had to get through and that was all that bothered you.6
She also dealt with incendiary bombs, moving them away so they could burn without doing any damage. In September 1941 Charity was awarded the George Medal for her work in the Blitz. She was the youngest ever recipient of the award.
Charity Bick and Betty Quinn were not the only teenage heroines. In September 1940, sixteen-year-old Rose Ede (later Rose Taylor) crawled into the ruins of the farmhouse at Buttons Farm, Wadhurst, East Sussex, which had been demolished by a German bomb. Earlier she had gone outside to investigate a bomb that had landed in her vegetable patch. As she did so she was blown off her feet by a bomb landing on her neighbours’ home. Along with her father, Rose rushed through the rain to the house: ‘It was pitch black and there were aeroplanes flying overhead so you couldn’t see or hear anything. We found two of the children quite quickly but one of the girls was still missing.’ One child was found still in her cot, which was perched on the edge of the bomb crater. A second was found in the wreckage but the third was buried. As her father lifted a beam, Rose crawled through the wreckage to find the girl: ‘I was crawling around on my hands and knees for a long time and then I suddenly felt a foot. It was such a relief. If they hadn’t been in their beds they would have been dead.’7
The children were pulled clear, but they were unable to save the mother. Rose later admitted:
The sight of the wreckage is something I’ll never forget. No one realizes the damage a bomb can do until they see it … If I had thought about what I was doing perhaps I would have been afraid but I just went into the demolished building and that was it.8
She was awarded the George Medal for her heroism, first hearing of the award when her name was read out on the radio. Rose helped the children’s father care for them for two years until she was called up for military service.
In Canterbury, fourteen-year-old June Mackenzie was travelling on a bus when it was bombed during a daylight raid on Canterbury. She was wounded and her Girl Guides uniform was covered in blood, but she used her first-aid skills to help the wounded. First she covered up the body of the dead bus conductress, helped other passengers from the bus and then set about bandaging the wounded with strips of sheeting. When assistance arrived it came in the form of a Boy Scout carrying a first-aid haversack and wearing a tin helmet. She received the Guides’ Silver Cross for her courage.
As well as having its shipbuilding industry outside the centre of the city, Glasgow’s geographical location, far to the north-west, saved it from the level of attention afforded towns like Coventry. That said, it faced its share of raids. One of the city’s heroes was fifteen-year-old Peter Brown, a grocer’s boy who had volunteered as an ARP messenger. Like so many other youthful ARP messengers, it was his role to keep communications open to allow civil defence work to continue through the air raids. It was whilst he was on duty on the night of a raid that calls came through requesting that rescue squads be sent out to bombed buildings. Then came the awful news that a large basement shelter had received a direct hit. Before the message could be relayed to a rescue squad the telephone line went dead.
This was the moment Peter, like so many other boys, had been waiting for – his chance to prove himself. With the bombs still falling, he set out on his bicycle to find a rescue squad and direct them to the shelter. He made his way through shrapnel-strewn streets, dodging the flaring flames from burst gas mains and taking shortcuts to avoid blocked roads. His route was lit by the flashes from bombs and anti-aircraft guns, and by burning buildings. He could hear the screams of people in these bombed buildings, knowing that some were probably people he knew – maybe his own school friends – all the time fearing that his own home, and his own family, might be victims of the bombs.
Eventually came the one sound he feared above all – the whining of a falling bomb. The blast flung the fifteen year old from his bicycle, smashing him into a wall. Dazed by the blast, he picked himself up and began the search for his bike. He found it nearby, a mass of useless twisted steel. It seemed strange that the bike should be so damaged when he had suffered no more than a deep cut to his arm and bruises to his legs. Despite his wounds, Peter still had a job to do. Dazed, and with blood dripping down his arm, he began to run through the streets. As he ran past his own street he could see devastation where his home had stood. But there was no time to stop. He ran on until he reached his destination and found the mobile rescue squad. He was able to direct them to the bombed shelter before he fainted from loss of blood.
Now safely outside London, Sidney Ties remained keen to resume his contribution to the war effort. His family had been housed in Guildford and he had found a job. Eager to get involved in the war, he volunteered for the RAF, aged seventeen, but was turned down due to varicose veins on his leg. Frustrated, he decided that he would find another way to serve, quit his job and joined the ARP on a full-time basis, initially as a stretcher-bearer before soon being promoted to squad leader.
Though Guildford was spared the attentions of the Luftwaffe, Sidney Ties and his squad were soon called to support the emergency services in Southampton and Portsmouth that were swamped by their workload following heavy raids. Their first destination was Portsmouth, following a police convoy along the A3, towing trailers containing six stretchers behind their cars. As they drove through the night, it was difficult to see where they were going since they had covered headlights that offered little more than a pinprick of light. As they approached the city their headlights became irrelevant: ‘The sight of the fires was awful. When we entered the town the roads were covered in fire hoses and debris. The destruction was terrible.’ Sidney then saw something he would never forget: a bus that had been blown into the air and was hanging out of the front of a building.
Arriving safely in Portsmouth their first job was to evacuate a hospital that had an unexploded time bomb beneath it:
That was quite hairy. We couldn’t use the lifts, so we had to carry them down. On the top floor were people who were a bit mental. So we had some troubles carrying them down on the stretcher. And all the time we were thinking of this bomb under the hospital.
From there, the squad went out to rescue people from the ruins of their homes. Unlike his experiences in Stepney, there was no waiting for the all clear before starting to search for survivors. Instead, they worked as the bombs continued to fall. Armed with a small torch, he searched through dust-filled ruins for those who could be saved. When they found a survivor, their role was to ensure they reached hospital as quickly as possible:
You looked for casualties. You picked up someone covered in dust, had a quick look: if they were alive, you put a label on them saying where they were bleeding from, and put them in an ambulance and sent them to the hospital. You didn’t have time to put splints on or anything like that. Very basic, you just dressed what you could.
Whatever the severity of wounds, Sidney and his team had to ensure they reached hospital: ‘In first aid you never said someone is dead until a doctor had told you they are. So sometimes you had to move people who were dead already. Of course, sometimes you used your own discretion: if it didn’t have a head, you didn’t need to worry.’
In both Portsmouth and Southampton, Sidney Ties and his ‘First-Aid Party’ worked almost constantly, with the days merging into each other:
When we went in there we just had our clothes. We didn’t take anything off for days. We didn’t have a wash. We had nothing to eat. I just remember the Salvation Army. Wherever we were, they appeared with a cup of tea and a bun. We were there for about a week. Then we came home.
Somehow, despite so many hours crawling through bombed buildings and dressing the wounds, the seventeen year old managed to remain calm and complete his duties:
I didn’t get cynical – but I didn’t get involved. In that situation you treat it as a job and just do the best that you can. You have to be detached. The worst thing was dealing with children. Coming back after picking up a dead child, changed everything, everyone was quiet. That affects you, because they hadn’t had a chance to live their life.
Youngsters up and down the country enthusiastically joined in with civil defence duties, whether officially or unofficially. Having moved from London to Oban in September 1940, Anthony Wedgwood Benn joined the local ARP unit where the local men deferred to him: ‘I was fourteen-and-a-half and the only one who’d ever seen an air raid – so I was considered an expert.’ In Ealing Roy Bartlett, still not yet a teenager, began attending the local ARP post with his father. He listened to a lecture on aircraft recognition and attended lessons on the operation of stirrup pumps.
In 1942, he finally got an opportunity to put his training into practice:
I always dreaded having to fight an incendiary bomb. It was my job to be the ‘hose boy’ on the stirrup-pump. My parents’ biggest concern was the paraffin oil we kept for heating. We had two fifty-gallon barrels in an outhouse. So we had buckets of sand everywhere to fight a fire. So it was also my job to keep all the fire-fighting appliances in the shop topped up. I had to make sure the pump worked and the buckets were filled.
One night the sirens started and he made his way to the cellar. As he waited for his mother to join them, he heard a noise from above: ‘Mum was shouting and yelling. I went up the cellar steps and she was shouting, “Incendiary in the back garden!” I went out and, thankfully, the bomb hadn’t landed on the paraffin tanks. But the garden fence was already alight.’
As his mother pumped, he directed the jet of water: ‘However, the magnesium was too hot to put out – it just reignited. And we couldn’t use sand because you can’t cover a vertical surface.’ He realized he needed to obliterate the supply of oxygen with a constant fine spray of water, as he had been taught at ARP lectures: ‘Now was the moment of truth. Dad was out, there was no one else to do it. Just Mum and me, twelve years old. I began to direct the spray and it was working, but a bucket of water doesn’t last too long.’ One of the women from the shelter soon joined them, tripping over buckets of water in the dark: ‘I yelled out, “Water, we need more bloody water!” Then the woman chucked sandbags over the remaining bits of the fire.’ Soaking wet with both water and sweat, he had carried out his duty, extinguished the fire and stopped it from reaching the oil tanks: ‘I felt proud of myself till Mum called me aside and said “I don’t want you using that type of language!” Her sense of propriety didn’t fail.’ Eventually, in 1944, having reached the age of fourteen, Roy made it official and joined the ARP. Having prepared for so long, attending so many classes and lectures, he joined just in time to work during a single air raid, running messages between the local ARP posts.
In north London, fifteen-year-old Stan Scott found himself back at home during the Blitz. Even if they didn’t have any ammunition for their rifles, he had been enjoying training at the barracks in Tonbridge until he was called to the company office:
‘How old are you, Scott?’ ‘Eighteen, sir.’ ‘I’ll ask you again – how old are you?’ ‘Eighteen, sir!’ ‘Don’t tell me bloody lies! I’ve got a letter here from your mother. You are fifteen. Nice try, son. Hand your kit in and come to the office and get a railway warrant back to London.
The disappointed youth discovered that when he had been issued his uniform, his civilian clothes had been sent to his home address. As soon as his mother had found out where he was, she requested his release. As he travelled home he read the official paper that showed he had served ten days but been released on the grounds of ‘Making a mis-statement as to age on enlistment.’ As he later noted: ‘It was October 1940 and I had the one thing thousands of men wanted: release papers from the British Army!’
He returned home, angered by his mother’s actions, and only became angrier when his sister’s boyfriend greeted him with the words: ‘Here he is, England’s last hope!’ When he saw his mother he told her she should not have told the Army his true age. Undaunted, Stan volunteered for the Home Guard – despite being two years underage – and dreamed of the day when he would rejoin the Army. In the meantime he had to deal with living in a blitzed city: ‘I didn’t go into the Anderson shelter. With me mum in there? With all me sisters? It was like a cathouse. Every time there was a bang, they were shrieking.’ Instead, he sat outside in the trench, surrounded by sandbags. He preferred the noise of anti-aircraft guns and falling bombs to the shrieking of the women.
One night his mother sent him and his sister indoors to fetch cushions to make the shelter more comfortable:
We were coming out of the back door and we heard a whizz and a crack. It was an incendiary basket exploding. My sister went loopy, she dropped the cushions and started screaming. I grabbed her, shook her and got her back into the bloody shelter. Freddie from next door came out. We got shovels. There were incendiaries burning everywhere, all over the allotments out back. We put them out. There was a builder’s yard, full of timber. We had to climb over the fence to get in. We dug holes, scooped up the incendiary bombs, put them in, covered them with earth and patted it down. We were running all over the bloody place. Then we went back to the shelter.
They were not there for long. He heard a banging on the front door and answered it. A neighbour shouted to him that a nearby house was on fire. Incendiary bombs had crashed through the roof and ignited among the rafters. Stan Scott and his neighbour Freddie again ran to help:
There was an old couple renting the house. We banged on the door. They couldn’t hear us. Freddie said, ‘Stand back!’ He ran at the door and kicked it in. We went in and found them sitting in the back kitchen listening to the radio. They knew there was a raid on, but didn’t know their house was on fire! We got ’em out.
Once the couple were safely outside, Stan returned to the house:
I went in the front room, opened the window and started chucking out their chairs, rugs, vases – everything that could move went out the window. Freddie shouted, ‘Get out, the roof’s gonna cave in!’ I went out of the window, then a few seconds later it all came down. Next morning it was all burned out. Just the walls were standing.
As they surveyed the scene, the owner of the house asked who had put everything in the front garden. Freddie and Stan, expecting thanks, said they had done it: ‘You bloody idiots! Look what you’ve done to the garden! You’ve ruined it!’
Even out in the rural areas, children played an active role in civil defence. Outside the village of Bleadon in Somerset, a decoy airfield had been constructed to divert the enemy’s attention from more important targets. However, this brought bombs to the village. Twelve-year-old schoolboy Ken Durston recalled the incident:
One night they dropped incendiaries on our village. The house next to ours had an incendiary bomb land on the roof and it caught fire. We had the Auxiliary Fire Service and the ARP come round but because we were close to it – my Dad said to me, ‘Come on, my lad, come and help us.’ I remember manning the old stirrup-pump that night. I was twelve and a weakling but I could do a little bit – and as long as I would do what I was told and I was doing what I could, they were happy. It was exciting for a young lad.
The achievements of the nation’s youths during the Blitz were not only about heroism, but also about taking a responsibility beyond their years. One youngster who took on an adult’s role was fifteen-year-old John Osborne. Whilst working as an errand boy in July 1940, he met a girl, Gina, the daughter of one of his customers. He was immediately attracted to her, but there was one problem. He was not yet sixteen yet she was already eighteen. He decided that, being relatively tall, he could pass as being older and told her he was almost eighteen. The couple began ‘courting’.
However, after less than a month John was thrown into a difficult situation. In August 1940, a lone German bomber dropped its bombs on the factory in Wimbledon where Gina’s father worked. He was among the seven casualties:
That hit me hard. I had only known her a fortnight and there was no other male around to accompany her and her mother as they went to try and find out what had happened. So I took it upon myself to take them to his workmate’s house to find out which hospital he had been taken to. That’s where we found out he had been killed and taken to the mortuary.
Taking on the role of the only male, John acted as their escort, taking responsibility for the two women as they tried to cope with their grief. Although just a boy himself, since he had told Gina he was eighteen he could hardly avoid the role of their protector.
In the months that followed, the couple grew closer but, with nightly air raids, their social life was limited:
We did our courting in her air raid shelter. There’d be her gran and her mother, and the two of us sitting there holding hands – all the time checking how high the water was rising from the floor of the Anderson shelter, then bailing it out with a saucepan. We used to hold hands, maybe have a little kiss in the dark. And there was a terrible smell of a paraffin lamp. How romantic it was!
Since it would not have been seemly to stay the night, John waited as long as possible and then walked back through the air raids to his parents’ house – all the time listening to the ‘Ping! Ping!’ noise as shrapnel hit landed around him.
At Christmas 1940, just before his sixteenth birthday, John Osborne went to Godalming, where Gina was staying with relatives. On 29 December, the night of his birthday, the couple went out for a walk. In the distance, to the east, they could see a yellowy-orange haze in the sky and wondered what it was. It soon became clear: London was being bombed. ‘The next morning I had to go to work. By this time I was working for the Electric Light Company in the City of London, reading electricity meters. I caught a train to Waterloo then walked to Aldersgate Street.’ What he witnessed as he walked to work was an unforgettable sight. It seemed the whole city had been razed to the ground. Whole swathes of the streets that he knew were now smouldering ruins. Some buildings were still burning. There were bemused office workers wandering the streets, weaving in and out of the rubble and the mazes of hoses, avoiding the burst water mains and flaming gas pipes. Familiar landmarks had gone: only St Paul’s stood unmarked: ‘There was this terrible stench, there were hoses all over the road. The area I knew, around the Guildhall, where I did my meter reading, was in absolute ruins.’ As he made his way through the ruins just one thought occupied his mind: ‘What will I find when I get there?’
He was lucky: his workplace still stood and the staff were ready to start work. He was immediately shifted to a new position:
That was when they switched me from meter reading to being an electrician’s mate. I was palled up with an older man and we went round the bombed buildings taking away the electricity meters and cutting off the mains supply. We went on to do this all over the City and in Southwark. We had to make sure there was no live current in bombed buildings.
One of their jobs was to cut off the power in a soap factory that had been bombed. John and his colleagues had to step carefully across the sticky, soap-smothered floors, where the factory’s product had melted and then mixed with the water from fire brigade hoses. Elsewhere, they struggled to identify buildings in streets they knew well:
We had written instructions to go to addresses to turn off the electricity so we’d try to work out which building we were supposed to go to. Sometimes we’d have to guess – you couldn’t work out which number the building was. So we’d go in and do the job and just hope it’s the right building. And hope it didn’t collapse on us.
John Osborne later noted that his role was insignificant: ‘I was called an electrician’s mate, but all I did was carry the toolkit and hold the torch. My cleverest thing was fitting a battery into a torch.’ Though he downplayed his role, John was fulfilling a vital task: the mains had to be isolated to prevent accidents and further fires. Their role was not without dangers. They had to negotiate rickety, charred stairways and search through wrecked buildings to find fuse boxes.
Unlike many other workers in the City, the sixteen year old was unsentimental about what he had witnessed:
I felt a certain pride in the City of London, and it was shocking to see the City like that. I was old enough to understand the destruction. But it needed doing: the City was an old place full of narrow lanes and courtyards. Some of the buildings were horrible – it was a dirty old place. I was happy to see the old buildings got rid of, then replaced with something new.
Whilst boys like John Osborne were tasked with making safe the bombsites of the City of London, there were others whose intentions were less honourable. One fifteen year old was convicted of stealing coins from the gas meter of a house whose occupants were seeking safety in a public shelter. The boy’s crime – though minor – was symptomatic of a growing number of children who used the chaos to their own advantage.
Though housebreaking increased as a result of the long hours of night that people spent in shelters, the one crime to make the most impact was looting. In September 1940, magistrate Sir Robert Dummett queried why looters were being brought before him charged with theft. Since looting could be punished with death or penal servitude for life, it was hardly a deterrent to charge looters with a lesser crime, one for which they faced a maximum sentence of three months. Of course, the reality was that many looters took little of any value; they simply picked up small items that they found in the streets. One man was charged with the theft of a few bars of soap from a bombed factory, others for taking enough coal to light their fires or taking a tin of sweets from a shop.
Among the opportunist looters were some who made the crime a habit. The professional criminals were joined by a number of children, who copied their antics. In the East End of London a group of children were caught stealing toys from a bombed warehouse; elsewhere youths disguised themselves as ARP wardens to commit their crimes. Though, for many, this was no more than childish high spirits and a desire to relieve the drab monotony of rationing and wartime shortages, for some it was the beginning of a career in crime.
The opportunities thrown up by the Blitz tempted even the youngest children. One who was unable to resist was seven-year-old Fred Rowe. With his father away from home serving in the Army, his mother struggled to make ends meet. Whenever the family was short of money she simply defaulted on the rent, loaded a cart with their possessions and did a ‘moonlight flit’. Having moved from Pimlico to Battersea, she had taken the family into an area of heavy bombing. The devastation may not have matched the levels seen in the East End, but the violence marked a turning point in young Fred’s life: ‘It was months of destruction and death. It used to do my head in. I thought I can’t deal with this!’ Amidst the violence of the aerial assault on London, he soon found a way to occupy himself.
Leaving a public air shelter in the aftermath of an air raid, he noticed the results of local shops having been blasted:
I got the idea that there were all these shops with their windows blown out. We were skint. You’d see all this food everywhere, all over the pavement. There wasn’t much, but it was grub. And it was more than we had. So I thought, if I can get out of the shelter a bit quicker, I can get a bit of the grub for Mum.
A thought that was conceived to get a bit of extra food on the table had a profound effect on his life.
Having made his plan, Fred made sure he carried a bag with him ready for the next air raid:
The air raid warning went so I ran away and I hid somewhere. So I could be the first one out. These bombs fell quite near. They suck the air out of you! I was running down the street because I could hear these planes coming. And the blast knocked the legs from under me and pushed me against a wall. It seemed like ages before I could catch my breath. I was gasping. My ears were fuckin’ ringing for days afterwards.
Despite having been blown off his feet, the seven year old soon got to work:
There was a butcher’s and a grocer’s shop that had been hit. So I filled my bag up with food and ran home to Mum. She asked where I’d been. I told her I’d got her some food. She said, ‘You shouldn’t have done that, they shoot looters!’ I said, ‘They won’t shoot a little boy!’ She told me they would, because it was wartime. But she still took the bag of food.
This set the pattern for the weeks and months ahead: his mother told him not to steal food; he stole food and justified it by saying the food would otherwise go to waste; she took the food, cooked it and warded off their hunger.
Fred had to take risks by hiding outside during the bombing and there was one factor that he had not expected when he decided to be the first person out in the streets: ‘The air raid wardens were great: when the “all clear” went, they were straight out there clearing away all the bodies. They knew it would upset people. But because I was never in the shelter – I was hiding outside – I saw it all.’
The things he encountered on the streets of his home area shocked him, revolted him and stuck with him forever:
It was terrible. There were fuckin’ body parts everywhere. The first thing I saw was a shoulder and an arm on the street. People had been blown up into trees. There was legs and heads around. I saw a torso in a tree with all the blood dripping down. The worst thing – the one that really got me – was seeing dead babies. I saw babies in the street that had been blown out of windows. They were horrible. I saw women ripped apart, with half the head blown off. The dress was the only way you’d recognize it was a woman. It was the people that wouldn’t leave their houses to go to the shelter. The blast would blow them out of the houses.
On one occasion, as he ran from the shelter, he was followed by his elder sister. As soon as she saw the bodies she screamed and ran back. Yet Fred continued his work. As he later admitted: ‘I was too young to understand what I was going through.’
He took incredible risks to search the streets for food, running through the streets whilst bombs were still falling, taking shelter when he thought it was too dangerous, then scampering out to bombed shops as soon as there was a lull. He began to realize that one of the greatest dangers he faced was blast: ‘When you were in the shelter it would rock, and the ground would rumble, but when you’re out there, standing by a tree or something – the blast throws you. One time it threw me six feet.’ Recognizing the dangers, but unable to resist the lure of free food, he continued looting. One time he ran across a road to grab food he had spotted. He was later confronted by a local ARP warden, who shouted: ‘You’re fucking mad, Freddy. I saw you out there running across the road to get that bit of meat! You’re a nutter! I was sheltering behind the wall and you’re out there collecting meat! I wouldn’t go anywhere near that.’ For all the horror and the dangers both from bombs and of being caught, Fred was excited by it. The sense of excitement he felt from putting himself in danger would later influence his entire life.
Despite the looting, Fred was also conscious of the need to help people who had been wounded. As soon as he had run home and stored his loot, he returned to the scene of the bombing and offered what help he could. As the emergency services patched up the survivors, Fred asked what he could do to help:
They’d ask us to go to the local hospital, fetch a box of dressings and run them back to them. I did it. But I also nicked sheets from the hospital. There were sheets, blankets and pillows on the beds they had for people who’d been bombed out – I nicked them. Mum didn’t say it was right to do it, but she didn’t refuse them – our sheets were worn out. This was my life. I was just a fuckin’ little street urchin. I didn’t know any better.
When Fred Rowe met a friend who admitted he was always hungry, he offered to take him with him after the next air raid. They hid, then ran out into the streets and collected food from the street, filling their bags with tinned corned beef, tins of beans, biscuits and bread. It was the only night Fred met any opposition: ‘One ARP bloke stopped us. He asked what was in the bags. We said, “It’s food. We’re starving.” He said, “Get on your way. I’ll say I ain’t seen you.” So we ran home.’ It was a close escape, but it did not deter him from further expeditions. Instead, the next day his mate said, ‘My mum thinks you’re a hero, Freddy.’ Further encouraged, Fred decided to continue to risk being caught. Although he never stole from houses, he soon graduated to taking more than just food. One night he spotted a wrecked car standing in the street. Inside was the driver who had been decapitated and had one arm blown off. Unaffected by the sight, Fred approached the car: ‘I nicked his watch.’
Even a child like Fred Rowe, a determined and expert looter, had shown that he was prepared to help out in the aftermath of air raids. Like so many others, he had played a role in helping out when the emergency services were hard pressed to cope with the effects of the bombing. However, he was too young to play any real role in the fight back against the enemy. Others were not. There was a whole generation of boys who went from acting as first-aiders, messengers and fire-watchers in blitzed towns to being active participants in the conflict.
Like so many British teenagers, fifteen-year-old John Longfield was determined to do his bit for the war effort. Intelligent and self-confident, but too young to be called up for military service, there were plenty of other things he could do and so he volunteered for the National Fire Service. Working as a messenger, the youngster soon found his spare time was fully occupied.
On top of regular evening and weekend duties, at least once a week John did an all-night shift at the fire station. Even when he was off-duty, as soon as the air raid siren sounded, he jumped on his bicycle and pedalled furiously to the station to see if he was needed. Whilst there were plenty of false alarms, sometimes he found himself far from home dealing with the aftermath of German bombing raids. Though fewer and far less destructive than the raids of 1940 and 1941, each night of bombing reminded him of the importance of his duties.
As part of the nation’s collective war effort, these long nights and hard work were one small cog in the mighty wheel that had seen Great Britain survive its darkest years. But for all his efforts, not everyone was impressed. As he later recalled: ‘All this may have been good for the war effort, but it didn’t exactly help my studies. However, I did manage to pass my school certificate and went on to the Sixth Form.’
By January 1943, John, aged seventeen, was on a collision course with his headmaster. While the youngster was proud to be a fireman, his headmaster had chosen to offer his evenings to another branch of civil defence. As an Air Raid Warden, the headmaster searched for those breaking the blackout laws. One evening his rounds took him to the fire station where his pupil was on night duty. Banging at the door, the irate headmaster shouted that a light was showing from the building. As the door opened, the headmaster was confronted by a fireman who swiftly replied: ‘Piss off!’ Frustrated by the response, but not waiting to pursue the matter, the headmaster walked off, displeased by the sight of his teenage pupil smirking from behind the fireman. It was a brief victory for John.
The following morning he was called into his headmaster’s study where he was berated for dedicating his time to his fire duties, rather than concentrating on his studies. The pupil found it difficult to understand the headmaster’s reasoning: after all, in less than a year he would be called up for military service where his schoolwork would be irrelevant. Deciding he could not agree with the headmaster, John interrupted: ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on, Sir?’ Shocked, his headmaster replied: ‘If that’s how you think, then you should join the Army!’ Taking the bait, John asked if he could borrow his headmaster’s telephone, called his father at his work and asked: ‘Dad, is it OK if I join the Army?’ Receiving his assent, he left school, travelled to Leeds and volunteered at the local recruiting office. He was then sent home to await notification to commence training. The following day he returned to his school and told his pals: ‘You can call me Private Longfield.’
1. National Archives WO32/9849.
2. Details taken from an unpublished photo – story by Bert Hardy for Picture Post, April 1941.
3. ‘Coventry’s Wartime Heroines’, Coventry Evening Telegraph (7 February 2005).
4. ‘Coventry’s Wartime Heroines’.
5. ‘Wartime women honoured at last’, The Times (10 July 2005).
6. ‘Forres woman’s heroism in the Blitz marked by plaque at her old school’, Aberdeen Press and Journal (22 February 2002).
7. ‘Heroines of War Finally Remembered’, Sunday Express (30 January 2005).
8. ‘Bravery of a very plucky teenager’, Kent&Sussex Courier (28 January 2005).