A Child's War (12 page)

International stars popular in Britain included Abbott and Costello, Bob Hope, Jimmy Cagney, and those perennial children’s favourites, Laurel and Hardy who continued to make films throughout the war, including
Air Raid Wardens
in 1943.

The war took its toll on the stars as well as everyone else. In June 1943, Leslie Howard, the second biggest British box office draw at the time, was killed while travelling in an aeroplane that was shot down over the Bay of Biscay; rumours at the time said that the Germans thought that Churchill was on board. Also thought to have been shot down was the American band leader Glenn Miller, whose aircraft went missing on 15 December 1944.

Then, as now, many children followed sport keenly, having their favourite teams and players. In the 1930s football and cricket players had regularly starred in cigarette card sets, and in the first weeks of the war the newspapers featured star players who had joined the armed services or civil defence. The radio and cinema newsreels covered matches, as well as the newspapers, and many children continued to attend local fixtures.

As soon as war broke out, the government, worried about air raids, banned all events that attracted large crowds. This, of course, included football, rugby and cricket matches. The newspapers announced: ‘All sport brought to a halt’. However, the government soon realised that sports fixtures helped to boost morale and a limited programme of such events was introduced. Of course the black-out meant that there could be no floodlit night-time events; this particularly affected greyhound-racing and speedway motorcycle racing, a sport which had been a pre-war favourite. Large indoor events were also affected as stadiums were taken over for use as ambulance or fire stations, or converted to factories. Even Wimbledon was not exempt: the courts were spared from being used for vegetable growing, but the car park was turned into a farm and the buildings used as an ARP centre.

In football, representatives of the Football League and the Football Association at first decided that all league and cup matches would be suspended. By the middle of September friendlies were being played, but the size of crowds was limited to 15,000 in even the biggest grounds. By now it had become impossible to resume the pre-war competitions; many players had joined the armed forces or civil defence, and fuel shortages meant that team travelling had to be cut back. From the end of October, a regional competition was set up comprising eight groups; South A, made up of London teams, South B, South Western, Western, Midlands, East Midlands, North Western and North Eastern. There was also a series of international matches played between the home countries and our allies.

The FA cup was not played for throughout the war, leaving Portsmouth, who had won it in 1939, holding it until Derby County took it in the 1946 final, but in March 1940 a ‘War Cup’ competition was introduced. Following a knockout format, it took just seven weeks to produce its first finalists, West Ham and Blackburn Rovers, with West Ham winning 1–0 at Wembley. By now the ‘phoney war’ was over; among those watching the match were soldiers, admitted free, who just one week before had been taken off the beaches at Dunkirk. The crowds differed from those before the war, not only in size and in the preponderance of uniforms, but because that standard accessory of the pre-war supporter, the football rattle, was banned – it was too much like the gas warning!

Professional football continued to be played throughout the war, although the standard was often poor due to the lack of available players; there were also many local matches, often fund-raisers for ‘Warship Week’, or the ‘Spitfire Fund’. Usually played between police, fire brigade, civil defence or service teams, they often featured celebrity players.

Cricket was badly hit. The normal three- or five-day matches were no longer possible, and the cricketing authorities, old-fashioned as ever, seemed unable to imagine anything else. Gradually cricket evolved into a series of one-off, one-day games, with new scratch teams springing up – the two most successful being the grandly named British Empire XI, and the London Counties XI.

When all else failed, there were always the bomb sites to play in. The gutted shells of houses made perfect adventure playgrounds, as we might call them today. In the worst-hit areas these bomb sites could cover extremely large areas, as is shown in the post-war films
Hue and Cry
and
Passport to Pimlico
. Barbara Courtney remembers playing on bomb sites: ‘We used the loose bricks to lay out room shapes, and then we built chairs and tables and swept the rooms clean.’ Slowly the bomb sites began to blossom as the wild flowers took root there, especially the rose bay willow herb, which was nicknamed ‘Bombsite’ by London’s East Enders.

At first British toy manufacturers responded to the war by producing a whole range of military toys: tanks, aircraft, ships, soldiers, even barrage balloons. There were several high-quality German toy manufacturers before the war such as Schuco and Bing, but British companies were only too happy to fill the void. Particular favourites were board games and card games, which could be played in the shelter, or during the black-out. However, as the war drew on, raw materials became scarce, and the toy factories were turned over to war production. Like everything else, toys were in short supply. People made their own, or repaired old ones. Charles Harris: ‘I got hold of a big old wooden train, I painted it blue and put a seat on it and gave it to my little brother.’ Many fire stations set up workshops where staff in off-duty periods would build or renovate toys for local hospitals, etc.

The
Lewisham Borough News
in December 1941 reported:

CHRISTMAS TOYS FROM SALVAGE WASTE
‘The finest collection of toys I have seen this Christmas’ remarked the Mayor of Lewisham at a children’s party given by the Wardens of Forest Hill. Out of material salvaged from bombed houses the Rescue Service members had made all sorts of attractive toys, which, in view of the shortage in the shops, were particularly appreciated by the 54 children who had been invited to the party. There were toy engines, train sets, dolls’s cots, rocking horses, bead frames, and other toys. The gifts were distributed by Father Christmas (Rescue Party Leader Mills).

Too much spare time with the schools closed, too little to do, and an absence of parental control could have negative effects – juvenile crime, or juvenile delinquency as it came to be known, was a particular problem of the war. In
It Came to Our Door
, his book about Plymouth during the war, H.P. Twyford explains the problem:

There was, of course, an increase in crime, although I do not think anyone would be justified in saying that it was a serious or alarming increase. I think the greater concern was in the matter of juvenile crime. Many children seemed to be lacking in the old-time home discipline. This was perhaps understandable to some extent, because so much former parental control was missing by reason of fathers being away in the Services and mothers often engaged all day on war work.

It was by no means only a problem in Plymouth. The war record of the Metropolitan Police states: ‘Children neglected or getting into mischief – or worse – through the absence of parents, were abnormally numerous.’ In
Raiders Overhead
, Barbara Nixon, an air-raid warden in London’s East End, gives one example of some of this ‘mischief’:

In one shelter where we cleared a bay of its bunks to make a recreation room, the children themselves helped with the clearance, carefully counted the nuts and bolts, and behaved in an exemplary fashion. The next night, their games became distinctly noisy, and some women protested with vigour. The children retaliated by pouring water down the ventilation pipes onto the bunks below; the women, thereupon, made use of two broomsticks, and the children capped that by resorting to the iron bunk poles. Peace was, with difficulty, finally restored, but the next morning the children had the final word. They threw all the precious nuts and bolts through the windows of the houses. And the ringleader of it all was a chubby little person called Pozzie, who would always proudly announce that he was ‘eleven, rising twelve’.

Ken Kessie remembers high spirits in Moreton: ‘The Presbyterian Minister started a youth club, but we wrecked the place – we were as bad as the youths today really, although there was no violence.’

A certain amount of actual crime was, of course, carried out by youths, but most of it was of a fairly petty nature, usually perpetrated by boys between 16 and 18. The biggest area of crime (60 per cent) was ‘larceny and housebreaking’, followed by ‘theft from parents or employers’ (11 per cent). This extract from the
Kentish Mercury
is fairly typical: ‘James Kemp (17) and a 16-year-old youth pleaded guilty to stealing from a shop articles valued at £4 10
s
. The younger boy’s parents were dead, and both lads had been sleeping in air-raid shelters.’

In June 1941 the Home Office and the Board of Education jointly issued a memorandum on juvenile crime. They pointed out that the number of children under 14 found guilty of offences in the first year of the war had risen by 41 per cent, and for the fourteen to seventeen year old group the increase was 21 per cent. It was felt that a major cause of these increases, besides lack of discipline, was the closure of leisure facilities due to the war; as a result of this, in London, play centres were opened in all areas, and staff were sent to the reception areas to organise out-of-school activities. For older children ‘mixed youth recreation centres’ were opened, for young people to ‘meet in social intercourse and recreation’.

If Britain was going to be invaded, the invaders would obviously land somewhere on the coast, almost certainly in the south or east. Almost from the start of the war beaches in these areas were planted with mines, barbed wire and other obstacles, so swimming, paddling or playing on the sands there were out of the question. From time to time areas of Britain, especially along the coast, were closed to visitors; in April 1944, for instance, all civilians (except those who lived there) were banned from a coastal belt, 10 miles in depth, stretching from the Wash to Land’s End.

Family holidays became a rarity as workers were no longer given holiday time – war production had to be kept to a maximum. Added to this were the travelling restrictions – ‘Is your journey really necessary?’ the slogan asked. Petrol for private cars was almost impossible to get, and anyway most of them had had their tyres removed for the rubber salvage drives, and railways were needed for the transport of troops and war materials. What transport was left for civilians was often in a poor state. Charles Harris: ‘Most of the buses were so old that when they went up Chingford Mount they couldn’t get all the way up with passengers on board, they’d stop half way up, then we’d all get off and walk up to the top and then get back on.’

There was
some
travelling, though. Special cheap-day and weekend excursions were laid on by bus and railway companies, for parents who wished to visit their evacuated children. But on the whole, holidays stopped. If you lived in a blitzed city, you might be lucky enough to have relatives in a country area who would put you up for a week. Other than that, holidays tended to be for children only, organised by clubs, or groups such as the Guides. R.J. Holley of Bristol remembers one camp:

During the war we went as schoolchildren to summer camps helping the farmers bring in the harvest, etc. We, that is, Eagle House Youth Club under the direction of the Rev. Bouquet, the club leader, went to the Duke of Beaufort’s estate. He had a miners’s camp there. During the war the duke let it to the schoolchildren and clubs who went to help on the land.

Eric Chisnall:

An incident I well remember concerned a week’s holiday with our Scout troop. A new vicar came to the church and he took over as our Scoutmaster. He was not over-popular with us lads as he tried to stop our rather boisterous games such as British Bulldog, because he thought they were too rough. He very kindly arranged for several of us to spend this holiday in Rugby, in the parish he had served in before coming to Ipswich. As I had never travelled more than fifteen miles from home, this was a great adventure, and it was probably the same for most of my mates.

In Rugby people were very kind and we were made very welcome even though we did have to sleep on a hard wooden floor in a local hall. Amongst other trips we were taken to see the famous Rugby School and the Rugby railway locomotive engineering shops, and a trip to Coventry was also arranged.

When we arrived our vicar gave us a stern lecture about not being too extravagant with food, as people had kindly given up their rations to feed us. At breakfast the next morning he proceeded to smother his toast with a thick layer of butter, and what looked to me like well over a quarter of an inch of marmalade. He thought he was sparing, but coming from a family of eight children, well used to ‘scraping it on and scraping it off again’, I could not believe my eyes – at home we were rationed by price as well as by ration coupons.

Incidentally we ate most of our midday meals, we did not call it lunch in those days, at the British Restaurant in the town centre.

Carol Smith:

One year twenty of us from the Girls’s Club went with Miss Brown to North Wales for our summer holiday. It took us 24 hours by train because of wartime hold-ups at Crewe. When we arrived at Bangor it was Sunday, we were unable to get any food to eat, everything was closed in Wales, so as there were no buses running either, we had to walk 12 miles to Snowdonia Youth Hostel.

The following year about the same number of us went to Derbyshire for a YHA walking holiday.

In 1942, the Government introduced the ‘Stay-at-Home Holiday Scheme’. Under this industrial workers were given a week’s leave ‘for recuperation’ but were encouraged to spend it at home. Local entertainment and recreation were the order of the day, and to this end local councils and organisations laid on such things as fêtes, concert parties and bands.