Wartime Memories of Shoreham

".....sometimes we would listen to Lord Haw Haw on the radio I remember saying that perhaps we should leave the radio on all night as it would waste the Germans electricity" - the childhood reminiscences of John Lyne

My earliest memories of the war years were at about the age of four being wheeled in the pushchair along the riverbank by the airport and seeing small passenger aircraft painted blue parked outside the terminal building. Later I was to find out that they were Sabena airliners that had been transferred from Croydon Airport at the outbreak of war, the planes they used were mainly Fokker but I recollect them being more like DC 2's which they also had...I also remember the distinctive 'Dragon Rapides' which were used by British Airways.

The next memory was of my father wearing Royal Navy uniform. He was a torpedo instructor in the RN who had seen action at the Battle of Jutland and, now in the Reserve, had been in the Dunkirk evacuations on a paddle steamer the 'Medway Queen' that the Navy had commandeered. Shortly after that he was posted away, fortunately he returned unscathed. He would frequently reassure me that we would shortly win the war and that then we would be able to buy chocolate and bananas (things that I had never seen apart from people slipping on them in comics!) There were several Cadbury and Fry chocolate dispensers on Shoreham station platform but they were always empty.

A class at Victoria Road Infants School circa 1939 – John is on the left of the back row four (photo John Lyne)

I also remember collecting my gas mask from the St Wilfrids building,  this to my great pride was a 'grown ups' one, not the Micky Mouse type given to young children...and walking back through blacked out streets past houses with taped up windows and small piles of sandbags. The gas masks were to be taken to school (Victoria Road Infants ) in the morning and hung up with your coat. If there was an air raid warning sounded (an oscillating wail) you picked up the gas mask and filed into the shelters built in the Meads until the 'all clear' sounded.

Our home air raid precautions consisted of taped windows, black-out curtains and a strong timber framework in the living room supporting the ceiling, our neighbours had a large steel table of sufficient size to accommodate the whole family and we shared an Anderson shelter that my Grandfather helped to construct in their back garden, there was also a large communal shelter and water tank built at the northern end of the green in Connaught Avenue. We used the Anderson shelter when there were air raids, mostly aimed at the airport but mostly the warning sirens were not precursors of a raid. Even at our young ages we could tell German bombers from ours by the distinctive sound of the engines from what I remember the Germans had a low 'pulsing' note. The nearest bombs to us fell in Buckingham Place just behind the Swiss - I don't know if there were any casualties but no damage to our house.

I was also a cub, I forget the group but we used to meet at the Huntingdon Hall in Gordon Road. Evocative sounds? - rising and falling wail of an air raid siren and the continuous note of the 'all clear.' Tastes - SPAM! Smells - Farmer Frampton’s yard in the Street, now a square of expensive twee flint cottages! Sometimes we would listen to Lord Haw Haw on the radio I remember saying that perhaps we should leave the radio on all night as it would waste the Germans electricity - the loud laughter no doubt impressed this in my memory. 

One morning a couple of lorries arrived in our street and workmen disembarked together with oxyacetylene cutting equipment and removed all the steel railings and gates from the houses (including ours) then proceeded down the road and cut off the large railings at the Swiss Cottage (you can still see the signs around Shoreham and until recently the melted stumps on the Swiss Cottage wall.) – these, we were told, were to be melted down to make tanks for Russia!

In the Grammar school playing fields (now Greenacres) about 100 yards from our shelter there were trenches, a large searchlight, an anti aircraft gun and heavy machine gun emplacements and on occasions a barrage balloon was floated. I clearly remember one evening there was a raid on the harbour/power station, the searchlight went on and the heavy machine gun/s opened up with tracer bullets we watched it from the shelter entrance, the tracers seemed to weave and float into the sky (very pretty!). I saw a plane diving vertically caught in one of the searchlights to the east of us and thought that it was a German plane that had been shot down only to find out a few years later that it must have been a dive bomber.

My father was stationed at Lowestoft, he was instructing Scandinavian and Dutch merchant seaman and fishermen in the ways of the R.N. and minesweeping techniques. On a couple of occasions I returned with him off leave and spent a short holiday at the house where he was billeted, I can remember being shown over a minesweeper/trawler and having a cup of tea and tab-nabs (a naval term for small items of food at break times) in the engine room. We also had another member of our family in the Royal Navy, my much older brother who initially served on a destroyer on Atlantic Convoy duties subsequently joined the Submarine Service and did duty in the Mediterranean  -  as a consequence I saw very little of him during the war.

At home the wives did war work, my Mother billeted WAAF's and the occasional airmen as we had a spare room. The 'guests' would inscribe the ceiling support timbers with their names and addresses, cartoons etc., - I wish we had not got rid of this timber (probably used as logs in the winter of 1947!). On one occasion one of the airmen brought back the broken blade of a Hurricane that had crash landed, it burnt very well, especially the coating! For war work my friend’s Mother used to sit at a strange hand machine and cut out bits of silver and cellophane into little strips - later I found that she must have been making mica capacitors! Other war work was going round selling savings stamps and us children would collect any scrap paper to take to school, the reward was a small badge with an army rank inscribed upon it.

Living close to the 025 runway approach we would often see damaged Hurricanes coming in to make emergency landings, there would be small holes and bits missing and fabric flapping in the slipstream.  I vaguely remember one occasion when an aircraft fired off some rounds but don't recollect any damage done. Other planes frequently seen were Walruses, Lysanders and Army Austers. There was one Blenheim bomber that did not make the airfield and crashed near Lancing College, I think parts of the cockpit glass and support ended up later as swapping material.

The various bits and pieces we brought to school were incredible and some downright dangerous...we had incendiary bomb fins, 303 cases (some complete with shell and were still 'live') shrapnel shards, military badges and buttons and once someone brought in a complete incendiary bomb with its aluminium case distorted by the impact. Once someone got hold of the sticks of cordite from a shell which was much larger than the cordite in bullets, of similar size and appearance to spaghetti......unfortunately we did not see him ignite it...bullet cordite was exciting enough but that would have been amazing! Less exciting swaps would be pre-war 'fag-cards’ which we also played 'flick' with and if you landed your card on your opponent’s card you claimed it. When cards were not available we would play with the round cardboard half pint milk bottle tops that had a hole for a straw punched in the top.

After school we would often go round to the Grammar school building in Pond Road which had been commandeered by the Canadian Army then wait by the kitchen window which after a while would open and we would be given large square 'hard tack' biscuits - I guess they thought we were starving! Rations were meagre but would be supplemented by keeping chicken and ducks, there was an allocation of chicken feed by the Government and this would be boiled up with old potato peelings and food scraps and 'donations' from non-chicken-keeping neighbours in exchange for eggs, nothing was ever wasted (I can smell the unpleasant odour of chicken feed being boiled up now!)

We would also go into the countryside to collect mushrooms, whatever fruits were in season and rose hips which were sold to chemists to manufacture rose hip syrup. We also went to the river bed near the Norfolk bridge which had a good source of protein in the cockles, mussels and winkles that my Grandfather and I collected. The Swiss Cottage grounds had a good supply of beech nuts but I never found a local source of chestnuts apart from the park, but was always too late for those! Citrus fruits were rationed if you could get hold of any and fruit juices non-existent; we had never even seen a banana apart from illustrations in comics of people slipping on them.....babies had small bottles of concentrated orange juice issued for them.
   
It was a common sight to see masses of twisted and looped contrails in the eastern sky, evidence of furious dog fights over the Channel and often when making our way to school in the morning we would pick up loads of silver paper strips (chaff) and were puzzled as to why it was there. I do not remember the occasions when bombs were dropped on Shoreham or the episodes of machine gunning by enemy aircraft that happened but what stuck clearly in my mind was the occasion when a V1 (doodlebug) crashed onto allotments opposite the park where St Nicholas school is now.

It was early evening on the 5th of November and my Father who was on leave was relating stories of the 5th celebrations in pre war days, the fireworks and processions etc., then we heard a staccato roar gradually getting louder, knowing what it was and not having enough time to get to the shelter we all dived under the table as it got closer, then seemingly overhead the engines cut out and after a few seconds a very large explosion that burst in our French doors against the curtains, the taped glass was intact but the door latch had sheared off. The explosion was about a mile away over fairly clear land, and there was a fair bit of damage to windows in Eastern Avenue. Subsequently there was an increasing number of doodlebugs overflying Shoreham, to my knowledge no more crashed here but it started to be a common sight as they seemed to fly so low, hardly clearing the south downs.

Towards the end of the war I remember some Bren gun carriers and light tanks stopping in Connaught Avenue and tearing up the tarmac a bit. There was also a low carriage holding a very large bomb on display and the idea was to purchase a savings stamp and stick it on and post it to Germany. One soldier told me that it was going to be dropped on Hitler’s house so I stuck my stamp with several others right on the nose tip! Before the tanks moved off we collected a couple of flints and put them between the wheels and tracks and watched them splinter and fly off in all directions as the tanks moved off.

Around this time we saw a scaffolding frame put up in the Grammar School playing fields just south of the cricket pavilion and we would watch the soldiers with heavy packs climb up and cross hand over hand along the horizontal poles - later we went over and did the same on the lower pole. This could have been at the time of the Dieppe Raid as I remember walking over to the Airport with my Mother to deliver something to the guard room and seeing a large number of barges moored under a framework of camouflage netting at the Shoreham end of the toll bridge where there were a couple of armed soldiers patrolling the area 'moving people on.’ On another occasion in this area I could see a lot of inflated rubber guns and tanks parked outside the terminal building, even from that distance you could see that they were not real as they tended to sway in the wind!

Another sight which must have been around D Day was a procession of large gliders being towed by 'Dakotas' over to the west of us. They seemed to be two or three in each tow and looked very large and ungainly flying very slowly. Being so young I had no idea about the progress or details of the war but was assured that we will win! My Grandfather was always tuning in to 'Lord Haw Haw' with his grating nasaly voice 'Germany calling...Germany calling' and the BBC European Service with the call sign of a drum sounding dot, dot, dot, dash 'Ici Londres' I would listen but for me none of it made any sense!

At the end of the war there was a VE Day party for children held at the top of the Connaught Avenue green. I can't remember much about it and I doubt if there would have been much in the way of sweets, jelly or ice cream due to the rationing but I guess that we enjoyed it.

I assume that my Grandfather who lost two sons in WW1 but none of the family in WW2 did his celebrating at his 'local' the 'Hebe'   

Compiled and edited from John Lyne’s posts on the shorehambysea.com history forum
July 2010