Queues a mile long Lewisham market kept reasonably solvent during the war until the V1’s came along but obviously with the population and what have you it really became very sparse for the market to survive, though a few of the old traders did continue. The rationing affected us the same as it did everyone else. You know, where goods were concerned we had an allocation of so many bananas when the boys managed to bring them across, so many oranges and what have you. There were not many imports like that, because the whole of the shipping was devoted to the war effort, but the occasional one got through. Well then of course they were a complete rarity in those days. The young children they hadn’t even seen a banana. When they were offered for sale there used to be queues a mile long. It is one of those things you tell the younger generation about because it’s very hard for them to realise how acute the shortages were. You might get an allocation of perhaps five boxes of tomatoes (Because a few English growers who had not gone into the army were carrying on) and then you’d have to try and match them out by half a pound per person and all that sort of thing. Oh it was quite a performance really. If some of the imports did get here from South Africa or somewhere like that, like grapefruit or something which was a real rarity, of course that was a real bonus. Mr Davis (Market Trader)
Mum sometimes did my fire watching A civilian fire-watch was started in our road from six at night to six in the morning, in one hour stints. You hammered on the door of your relief and handed him or her your tin hat before you were allowed to go home yourself. Many’s the time in the small hours I would not get up out of bed and my mum did it for me! Doris Lawrence.
We were in the shelter and there was a man and his son next door to us. They wouldn’t come out of their shelter. Their house was on fire with incendiary bomb, but we went into his garden – of course all the fences were down – where he’d planted all these lovely Brussels Sprouts. We shovelled up all his garden, including the Brussels Sprouts and all sorts, got buckets and buckets of earth, walked upstairs and put the fire out with the earth and the Brussels Sprouts! The man next door wouldn’t come out of his shelter because he was scared and he had his son there with him. Mrs Darling.
I did fire-watching at the place where I worked on the Old Kent Road, on the corner of Surrey Square. It had a very deep cellar, so other shop keepers along there used it as a kind of fire-watching head-quarters. Sometimes we had quiet nights and sometimes very hectic nights. I had three or four other shopkeepers as companions with me- there were usually four of us. We used to come down once or twice or even three times a week. Other shopkeepers took their turn on other nights. All we had to do was just look after our own premises. At the back of us was the railway goods yard and they had bombed there. There was accidents that happened with bombing around us, and several casualties, but they happened on the nights I wasn’t there, fortunately for me. A couple of people were killed right outside the door and then there was a bit of mess and blood on the ground next day. But that all happened on the night it wasn’t my turn to be on duty. Mr Drury snr.
I started ARP training in 1938. We were never told there was going to be a war, but they were advertising for people to go and train. I just felt that I could do it. I felt I had to train to help out if there was a war. Mostly it was how to do bandages, how to do little jobs. Most of our training was to do with the gas, how to cope in case we had gas. We had to learn how to get the persons out of the building. Daisy Cook.
On the Sunday the warning went and of course we had been told that if there was a warning we had to report at once, so straight away then I lost my job at the brewery – I had been there nine years. I had to go straight away to report to the first aid post. I didn’t even have to give notice. Our post was at Harton Street – that is on the Broadway – and we went from there to Goldsmith’s College. I was in Goldsmith’s College when they dropped the baskets of fire bombs all over the college. We was ordered to get out into the field in case it became dangerous. We were called out to New Cross Station when that had been bombed. I used to go then on the ambulance to help these emergency doctors. I just helped to bandage anyone up, or run messages, because I wasn’t qualified. I did first aid. I had to help where ever I could help, but you saw some nasty bombings during that time. Anom.
I was returning home from Deptford Central Library and was walking in Malpas Road when the explosion occurred. I knew exactly what it was, having been involved in the Shardeloes Road incident some three weeks earlier. I was a messenger attached to post 17 in Brockley. I reported to duty around 1800. The duty warden told me that our Deputy Post Warden, Bob Tatum was at the incident with three or four of our wardens. When bodies were recovered from the debris, as soon as it was established that they were dead, they were put into hessian shrouds and carted across the road to Pearce Signs which was being used as a temporary mortuary. I carted corpses with a warden from Giffin Street almost non-stop from about 1900 to 0300 on the Sunday. Many of the corpses recovered had very severe crushing injuries and were oozing blood which soon seeped through the hessian shrouds. There was blood everywhere, much more than I had ever seen before or since. Some corpses had quite benign expressions and some features as if contorted with horror. Looking back, it seems to me impossible to convey to someone who did not experience it just what it was like. In some ways it all seemed unreal. There was an ever-present sense of danger. Most of the time the weather was cold, but it seemed that however cold it was we were always perspiring and always covered in brick dust. Many of us at times worked twenty hours a day and were usually pretty weary. Les Harding
I used to go out with the doctors and help them. You would have to help them as they were tending to the patients as they came out from the rubble. We went to one house and I think it was Shell Road where we had to stand guard because the house was still on fire. The firemen were spraying hoses and people were trapped in the basements. The bomb had come down and fell not far from where we were standing, but I don’t think they ever got them poor people out. Daisy Cook
I was in Civil Defence based at Nynehead Street School. We used to have to do so many hours a week down there, part time. We were only volunteers. I was walking down Woodpecker Road coming home from being at work and there was a mighty crash-bang-wallop, things flying everywhere, lucky I didn’t get caught on anything. I thought, ‘Now that’s near’. Carried on home, got changed into uniform and went out. I met someone who said, ‘It’s New Cross Road, its Woolworth’s that’s gone’. I’d got my bike so it only took me a few minutes but when you got up there you wanted to turn around and come back because it was just like a battlefield, people laying in the road and rubble everywhere. But you do a double twist and come to your senses and you know that you’ve got to do it. You’d go to people who were injured first. We commandeered a coach of sailors and used it as an ambulance until the real ambulances arrived. All the sailors mucked in, climbing on the rubble and trying to get people out. Those that were screaming you tried to get to them and get them out before their injuries got worse. We helped to get people out, not just the bodies but those that were injured. As it got dark they set up a portacabin and once they started getting a few names through of injured people, the three of us working in there made lists out. Then off course people were coming up saying, ‘My wife’s gone out shopping and she’s not returned home’, people wanting to know if Mrs Brown’s on the list. That carried on all night long. Our neighbour Curly, his mother got killed there and Curly was up there with his Dad. He was only a little boy then with the peaked cap round the side, looking up. And his father was saying, ‘Find my wife, find my wife, I’ll give you anything’. Ethel Long
In September 1940, my fifteen year old brother was a messenger with the Auxiliary Fire Service. When he didn’t arrive home in the early hours of the morning, following the all-clear, we were all worried. We went out locally, walking the streets, but couldn’t find him, so my father went down to the AFS station, and was told that he had in fact left after the all-clear. My father decided to have a look around the building and found him fast asleep on a heap of coke! They told my father he had worked very hard and was obviously so exhausted he just couldn’t manage to walk home. Margaret Kippin
When I was stationed in Deptford, we had quite a few different people in with us of different kinds like Methodists and Salvation Army. One night, I’d changed shifts with this young Salvation Army girl. She was doing my shift because she was going to a wedding the next day. And that same night the whole post was bombed to the ground. It was a land mine. When I reported to work the next morning, the road had all been roped off. The Police came and told me I had to report to the town hall. Well they were a bit surprised when I got to the town hall because they thought I was still there- I was told they was still looking for me because they knew that was my shift. But that poor girl was killed and most of the people I was working with at the time. Daisy Cook
The Sky Was Black With Bombers That tragic day on the Saturday morning, there was me and another party packing out our stalls on the market, and they come over here after they’d done Biggin Hill. They sky was full of them coming in. They was like flies coming over-just like flies they was-the sky was black with them. One bomb drops on that building over there next to the church. It belonged to the Electric Light Company, and one dropped where British Home Stores is now. There was a big warehouse there where you could go down the stairs in the front. We ran down there and that bomb came down and hit the Electric Light Company. No traffic could come through, there was debris all over the road, but they never touched the church, that’s still there today, the church. ‘Bonk’ Walkling
Went hop-picking when the bombing was bad I had one son born in ’41, another one born in ’43. We lived down Legge Street. When the rockets started, my husband and I took the two boys down the shelter in the garden and we sat up all night because we didn’t know what they were. Well, then that day , in the lunchtime, one came down quite near us and knocked all the ceilings down and blew the door off. Before the war like we used to go down to the hop fields in Kent and my Grandad used to cook fish and chips down there. There was a big pub called the Bluebell at Beltring Halt near Paddock Wood and it had loads of ground. We were allowed to sell fish and chips to the hop pickers there. I was only young and I used to have a cockle and whelk stall. I never used to pick hops. When the bombing got very bad in the war, Grandad took us hopping. We went down to the hop fields and we picked hops, you know. He said, ‘Do you girls want to go to come to Maidstone?’ So we said, ‘Yes, alright, we’ll come with you.’ So we went to Maidstone. We went down the toilet and the siren went and the lady said, ‘Oh you haven’t got to worry, we don’t get anything here.’ And that was the day that they were fighting all overhead and dropping bombs everywhere. Well we were very lucky because we got shoved down under these arches and we were safe although a bomb fell very near. So then when it was a bit clear we went and found Grandad and he took us home, but on the way home driving he had to keep stopping and sort of hiding because there was nothing but machine-gunning going on. So it was quite exciting really but not very nice is it? Mrs Waving
Walked the streets all night We was at Blackhorse Road and we got bombed out. The first time we got bombed out one of the aunts put us up, there was six of us. Because one of my sisters had whopping cough she wouldn’t put us up no more so she kicked us out. So we walked the streets all night. I was about four. I remember going in a big hall with stacks of kids and everyone is crying and everything. This was the beginning of the war, 1940. Then we was evacuated, but we couldn’t get on down there and they treated us terrible so the old man brought us home. He said, ‘I’ve got a house for you at Belligham.’ He brought us straight home, put us in there and went straight down the pub. He put us in the house and disappeared. It was like a palace: stairs and a bath. We said, ‘It’s got a bath and toilet!’ A garden. We was over the moon. You couldn’t afford to put anything in them. There was no lino, nothing. Richard White
Bombed out and left to cope It just happened, like a big clap of thunder, as if a thunderbolt had come down. I had to inform the rest of the family that were at work. And just get along. By which time the neighbours had said, ‘Now come along. It’s all right.’ They fortunately had spare bedrooms in their house. You just had to manage from then on. I did go to the authorities at the old Deptford Town Hall, just in Lewisham Road, and asked what would be available and they were very non-committal. They inquired where we were living and I told her and they were quite happy about that – because you’d got somewhere and so why worry anymore about you. ‘Had I got any money? Could I get any money?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Oh well then, we shan’t bother.’ And they didn’t. Didn’t worry about us at all, so we just had to pull ourselves together and pick up the pieces. Miss Applegate
There was this terrific crash.... We lived in the bottom of Malpas Road then. I just got home from work and sat down in the arm chair. I lived on the top floor then. All of a sudden there was a terrific crash and the lights all went out, the ceiling all came down, the party wall of the two rooms came in, the window panes were blown all across the other side of the room. Two front doors, one down in the basement and one at the top, they were blown right up to the bottom of the stairs. That was the most damage that we received except for broken windows before that. And no slates on the roof. Mr Drury snr.
No chance to shelter The procedure in those days was that the warning used to go and the assistants from the stores, from Marks and Sparks and all the big stores were turned out and went into the shelters. There was a series of shelters on what was known as the Green in those days – underground shelters and shelters in Avenue Road. Whenever the warning went, the buses, public transport, used to stop, turn all the public off to take shelter. Well, in the end it became a bit of a joke really because nothing ever happened but then, on that Saturday concerned, it did happen. When we heard the warning we used to cover the market stalls up, empty the tills, get a sheet over the stalls and go down the shelters. On that particular day I remember clearing up with my mother and father, putting the sheets over the stalls and we went down the shelter. Prior to going there I looked up, being a young adventurous young man in those days and the Jerries were coming, and they were just like ants in the sky, wave after wave after wave. The Electric Light Company in Lewisham was the first casualty. They spent a long time building it, but it didn’t take long to knock it down, unfortunately. And it all went wrong from there. The raids continued and there were a lot of bombings in the area where the markets were concerned. Unfortunately the poor souls that were killed on the market the day the V1 landed there was no warning. This V1 came over had cut out way back, glided right over Kent, glided in and dropped on the market. The warning hadn’t gone, and that’s why the casualty list was so high-had they been down the shelter it would have been a lot better you know, a lot would have survived. Mr Davis
I lived next door to my mother-in-law in Friendly Street, Deptford. They knocked a part of the fence down so we shared the shelter with her. It was a case of nipping through the garden fence to the Anderson shelter. You went down there and when it was all quiet you went back to bed. This is the strange thing-there was a family in a Anderson shelter near us and a heavy bomb fell right near where they were. The strange thing was-they were all killed because they were sitting up. It was the blast that broke their necks. Gladys Barratt
There wasn’t a shelter around here to which you could go. There was one dug into the ground in the garden of the house but it wasn’t suitable to use. It was just like a hole in the ground with corrugated over the top. You just slept where you thought you would be safest in the house. Before we were burnt down we had a large mahogany dining table in one of the rooms. I used to sleep under there, keeping awake as much as we could during the night. And the others just had mattresses, blankets, whatever, on the floor. Miss Applegate
Dad had a brick shelter built under the shop at 252 Brockley Road – I presume it’s still there now. It had six bunks each side, an opening in the centre. We used to go in there. Sometimes, if the raids were really bad, they had guns on Hilly Fields. There was a gun site where the putting green is now, near the school. When it was really bad they would be coming over in droves. They used to send mobile guns out in the streets and if they went off, you couldn’t get any sleep because they’d be mobile guns on lorries, firing – ‘Boom! Boom!’ – and you was in the shelter. So we didn’t get any sleep. It wasn’t so bad for us, but more for Mum and Dad because they had to keep going to run the shop. Pat McDonald
