Were you, or someone you know, living in London during WWII?

[lozengeoflove]

I’m really interested in what experiences women had of living in London during WWII. I’ve read so much about the male experience of fighting but I’d like to hear how women found the domestic life in London during this time.

Currently re-reading Sarah Waters ‘The Night Watch’ and would really love to hear about first hand experiences.

My grandfather was in the Navy and was a gunner on the supply ships that went to South America to transport food back to the uk. I still have all of his Naval records, and lots of photos of him having what looked like a great time in Rio!!
I used to ask him about it a lot, but he told me that all the death was horrific, ships being blown up, shooting down planes, he said they were so close you could see their faces in the cockpit,

One of my grandmothers was evacuated as she was pregnant and breastfeeding a 5 month old. I dont think many people know that women in these cirumstances were evacuated too. She hated it and went back soon as possible
My other grandmother lived in a flat with friends and had a job in some offices. She also volunteered as a first aider /auxillary nurse. She had to do a minimum number of hours and it was very full on. She did exams in wound management. They seemed to have a lot of fun out of hours though.

My late DM was born in 1930. She was brought up in South Bucks but well within sight & sound of London. She told me the bus she was travelling on going home from school one day was tracked by a bomber who was waiting to pick off passengers as they got off. Tge bus driver refused to stop & insisted on driving everyone home so they didn't have to walk in danger.

She and my DGM were caught out shopping in tge high street when there was a dog fight overhead, and the German plane strafed bullets all down the high street. The manager of Woolworths got everyone in off the street and took them to the back of the shop for safety.

A doodlebug landed in tge next field from their house and took out all the windows in houses around them. My DGD, who I never knew, was blasted from one side of the garden to the other and must have been knocked unconscious.

My grandparents lived in London (Tottenham I think) and my GM was evacuated during the war because she was pregnant. My Dad was born in mid 1943, in a castle in Derbyshire which had been converted into a maternity hospital! I often think how difficult it must have been for my GM, he was her first child and she was sent miles away from home, family and friends.

Fascinating thread.

My grandparents worked at the Vickers factory at Brooklands racing track during the war. It was bombed with about 200 people killed. Apparently, the Germans had been tipped off by an Italian racing driver who had driven there.
I remember my mum telling me Grandad's story of seeing the German bombers flying over the race track towards them. It was a beautiful sunny day and a lot of people were having their break outside (thankfully, otherwise the death toll would have been even higher). Grandad threw himself on top of my Nana to protect her.

Well, that was his story anyway 🙂

I know it’s only a film but there’s a scene in ‘The Krays’ where an auntie recounts her experience of being in the underground during an air raid and having to deal with a birth going wrong
‘While the men were off playing soldiers’

Even tho that was likely not a true story there must have been many similar real incidents

It was awful for everyone

Both my parents were young adults living in London during WWII. They both had reserved occupations - my DM was a typist at one of the London railway stations. She said they used to get loads of troop trains passing through.

DF was in the Home Guard and was often out on duty at night (doing stuff like firewatching on factory roofs) and DM said that if the air raid siren went off at night, she used to hide under their big oak dining table with the dog. During the day, apparently the V1 and V2 rockets were the worst, because you'd hear the thing approaching and suddenly its engine would cut out. The worst part was not knowing where it was going to land. She had a near miss one day, she sheltered in a bank doorway and the bomb landed in the road round the corner.

My DM's first boyfriend was conscripted into the RAF and he was killed in an accident whilst he was loading bombs onto an aircraft. She told me he was blown to smithereens, and there was nothing left of him to find.

My great uncle was a conscientious objector in WWII.
He told that that because of his religion (Quaker) that he wasn't prepared to sign up. The court said "likely story, you can take it to the higher court if you like, but they'll almost certainly laugh you out. You need to arrive being ready to either go to jail or be conscripted right away."
So he went to the higher court, and they apparently were fantastic.
They listened to what he had to say, and asked him what he was prepared to do to help the war effort. So he told them he wouldn't do anything with weapons but was keen to help in any way that was saving lives, so he was in the Fire Service in London.

I know they were bombed out-and the only thing that survived the bombing was a tiny crystal vase-dm has it now.
I also know that he met his wife -also a Quaker. She'd been sent over on kindertransport from Germany as her parents had made the "mistake" of saying loudly and publicly that what Hitler was doing was wrong. They were sent to a concentration camp and she was brought over to England.

You could hear the V1s coming. If you heard it overhead you knew you were safe, because when it cut out the forward motion would continue until it hit the ground. The V2s just arrived with a large explosion.

Blitz Spirit with Lucy Worsley is really worth watching as pp said. It's on iPlayer at the moment. It's pretty horrifying.

@bagelbaby

My mum was evacuated from East London to Oxfordshire. They didn't know what was happening. They thought it was some sort of school trip. She said she couldn't understand why her mum was crying

Same for my mum! She didn't like her evacuation family, mum was an only child (and very spoiled!) but wasn't pandered to at all! I think her education suffered a bit as there were twice the amount of children with all the evacuees, so they all went to school for half the time. My grandmother went to stay for a while and eventually bought my mum back before the war ended. Mum then had great fun back at home with her cousins, picking up bits of shrapnel etc in the nearby streets that were bombed, and spotting the different planes flying about, when they should have been in the air raid shelters!

My late father volunteered when he was 14. He was 6 foot tall and while he thought he passed for 18 he was kept here rather than sent over to France. He packed parachutes. He told me that to make sure no one cut corners everyone had to do a parachute jump, selected randomly. He never talked about his experience once he was 18, just made a few comments about takeaways were nothing like the food he ate in India and China. Also one day he was slow to react and his CO grabbed him by his collar and floored him just as a bullet whizzed over his head.

Once, when he was about 70 I was concerned about him being cold and he said he was fine. Then said he could cope with being cold and tired, or wet- as in rain- and cold. He had promised himself that he would never again be cold, wet and tired, any combination of 2 of those but never all 3.

My DGF was born after his father had died of wounds sustained in WW1. They lived in Docklands area. He had several older brothers & sisters, some of whom were old enough to work but they were incredibly poor. When WW2 started he was a fire warden as he was still too young to join up at first, although he did as soon as he could. He met my DGM during an air raid; she had been separated from her family, they were decidedly not poor. She was scared so he told her he would look after her, & he always did. They caused a bit of a scandal apparently because she basically did a Lady Sybil. Despite growing up in absolute luxury, she was very, very careful about money, keeping scraps of food leftover for the next day, & clothes were always carefully mended.

My other GPs, who were about a decade younger, also grew up in greater London area. My DGM was always terrified of lightning. One day she got to school to find out her best friend had been killed in a direct hit on her shelter.

My MIL was born a few months after her father was shot down in the war. Her mother was widowed & a parent by 19. Her sister age 21 was in exactly the same situation a few months later. Their other sister was the only one whose airman husband came home from the war.

Thank you so much everyone for contributing. I’m learning so much reading these!

Thank you for all the book and programme recommendations. Going to watch Lucy Worsley’s documentary tonight.

@eddiemairswife - what a birthday memory that is! Fascinating to hear from you. I also read that V1s cut out and then you had a few minutes to hide but that the V2s didn’t offer that luxury.

Few people saying that the pilots were so close that their victims could make eye contact with them: it sounds utterly terrifying!

I didn’t know that pregnant women used to be evacuated. That must have been so difficult, going away and giving birth without any support network.

So many of your stories are really poignant and have made me well up.

@ALongHardWinter your story had me in stitches. As a teacher myself I don’t think I’d ever show the murderous dedication of that gun happy Headteacher!

Your stories are really interesting. Was there any stigma attached to that marriage after the war?

Sorry that question was for @HuntingoftheSnark. Reply button didn’t work.

I live just outside London technically, but within the M25 and very near to north London. My house stands on the site of a very sad event - a V1 bomb fell on the site, killing almost 40 people (it was the worst bomb of the war in the town). There’s a fascinating entry about the bombing in the log book of the school my children now go to, which is just round the corner:

“During the night a flying bomb fell on the houses at the corner of Xxxxxx + Xxxxxx Roads, causing much destruction and damage to property and entailing the loss of thirty nine lives, among whom were two [name of the primary school] children, three old scholars and nine parents. All Civil Defence services were quickly in operation and the school, though damaged was opened as a Rest Centre. Many injuries + homeless people were cared for, and during the day, the school acting as an emergency feeding centre served upwards of 1,000 meals and 2000 cups of tea. This included meals to civil defence workers + workmen brought to the bombed site. The Rest Centre + Emergency feeding arrangements closed down on Tuesday, by which time homeless + other people had been billeted elsewhere. The school + playgrounds became the centre of a re-building operation and the Infants’ dept. continued in use as a feeding centre for workmen and for detachments of Home Guard + Police who were on duty in the area. The meals were sent from the [name of nearby village] Cooking depot and the school staff with the assistance of the W.V.S were responsible for serving etc. During the whole of the “holiday” some teachers were on duty every day and the grateful thanks of the [County Council] + the [Town name] Borough Council were conveyed to them for the great help so loyally given during this very trying period.

28th Aug
As the school was still under repairs the Education Comm. fixed 11th Sept as the date for re-opening.

7th Sept
Workmen’s feeding arrangements were transferred to [Church] Hall, Xxxx Lane.
11th Sept
School re-opened with 80% attendance. Arrangements had been made for 425 children on books, which necessitated the formation of another class.

15th Sept
Forty six children have been removed from the register. The majority of these were from damaged houses and had been evacuated to other areas.”

My lovely neighbour was living in London when war broke out. She then worked at Bletchley, and her stories were so fascinating about the code breakers there. She also kept a diary and used to let me read some of it when I was a teen studying history. She sadly died around 15 years ago, I really do hope that her adult children kept that diary as it's a real part of history.

My DGM, father(only a baby) and uncle were evacuated to Yorkshire from London, but came back within a few months as my DGM couldn't get on with the silence and animals in the countryside! A V2 blew half of their house out in 1944 in London but she apparently preferred to risk the bombs over the cows....

This thread is so interesting btw, thank you OP for starting it.

WRT pregnant women being evacuated, my DH’s granny was moved out of the East End of London in 1946, ie even after the war had ended, to have my FIL. Very amusingly, a grand country house in Hertfordshire had been converted to a maternity hospital during the war, and so my FIL was born there - his mum was an East End girl and very much not “from the top drawer” (a phrase she used to use)!

During the war itself, she moved around London as she got bombed out of various different locations. I don’t know why she was unable to move out, maybe her husband’s job kept them there? (I think he was either too old to be called up to fight, or was in a protected occupation which meant he didn’t have to).

@lozengeoflove

Sorry that question was for *@HuntingoftheSnark*. Reply button didn’t work.

@lozengeoflove I imagine so. It might sound odd but they were married in 1952 and throughout our upbringing (and I'm the youngest - born in 1969) the war was a pretty unmentionable subject. My father was obviously suffering from PTSD but that was never mentioned either. In his mid eighties, he wrote some memoirs which he typed out three times and my mother hand delivered to each of us. That's the most we knew. I can honestly say that I hadn't had a proper conversation with him, about anything, ever. But many of my mother's friends married GIs, in fact her sister did, and her best friend married a Ukrainian. I doubt that my RAF grandfather was too impressed at first, but my German grandfather (I never met him) disowned my father and wrote him out of his Will (calling him the Englander), so the ill feeling was more from that direction.

And here’s a photo of the site where my house now stands, after the 1944 V1 bomb

I vote nominate for Classics. Fascinating!
DGM/DGF married in 1940. DGF was away in the army and DGM lived in a rural village so was protected from bombings but she told us stories of rationing and village life.