At this time of celebrating the 80^th anniversary of V.E. Day, which marked the end of the Second World War in Europe, I thought there might be some interest in my memories of growing up in Sulgrave during the war years 1939 to 1945.

The notes on the next page are extracts from an account prepared for my two daughters, five grandsons and three great-grandsons. I have very few photos from that era but I have included those that seemed relevant.

Colin Wootton

Click on “Read the rest of this entry”.

 

During the period 1940 to 1942, after the surrender of France, Great Britain stood alone against the might of the German military, re-armed in the thirties after the 1914 – 18 war whilst we did little except hope that it would never happen again. During these early years there was a constant threat of an invasion when we would no doubt have been occupied in same way as most other countries in Europe. As is well documented, in order to invade successfully the Germans needed control of the English Channel so as to transfer sufficient troops and armaments. Whilst the RAF remained active this would not be possible and so they made repeated efforts to destroy it in what became known as the “Battle of Britain”. A handful of brave young pilots, later known as “the few”, fought fiercely to prevent this in their Spitfires and Hurricanes and finally Hitler abandoned his invasion plans and commenced a widespread bombing campaign on British cities.

So, what was it like in Sulgrave for a small boy during these momentous events? I was living with my mother and two of her brothers in Grannie Branson’s council house, 11 Spinners Cottage, Sulgrave. My father was away, initially engaged in airfield construction and then in the army.

The threat of invasion was taken very seriously at every level of government. In the Sulgrave Village School log book it was recorded that the Head Teacher had received a letter from the County Education Authority instructing her to prepare a plan for the evacuation of the children in a northerly direction in the event of a German invasion! The government had control of the movements of every citizen. Those working on the production of materials vital to the war effort were said to be in “reserved occupations”. A good example was the Aluminium Factory at Banbury, some of whose workers lived in Sulgrave. At the start of the war about half of the food needed was imported and by the end most of it was home produced. Agriculture was then very labour intensive and so a large number of farm workers were also said to be in reserved occupations. Many of these were, in fact, elderly survivors of the hideous Great War who had already “done their bit”. Those not in reserved occupations were directed to other necessary works or conscripted into one of the armed services.

The impact of this upon the village was that many of the younger men were away in one of the armed services, often leaving their wives and children to cope as best they could. Home leave was granted to them very rarely. My own father was a rather shadowy figure whom I saw very rarely during that time. The only contact with him was an occasional postcard to my mum.

 

Postcard from my dad to my mum from Richmond in Yorkshire where he was training with the Green Howards Light Infantry Regiment. Note the printed exhortation from the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill “This is a time for everyone to stand together and hold firm” and the cost of the postage stamp – 2d (“old pence”, about one penny in modern currency!)

The active men who remained were formed into a unit of the “Home Guard”, a last line of defence prepared to sell their lives dearly if the German invasion and occupation materialised. These volunteers have been much derided since the war in comedies such as “Dad’s Army” but I have it on the good authority of a former regular soldier who was involved with them that they would indeed have given a good account of themselves. However, there were plenty of humorous stories about them. An elderly lady sadly no longer with us remembered her husband being issued with his army rifle but no ammunition. “What”, she said, “are you going to do if the Germans come – just shout BANG or what?” In 1940 when there were constant scares that German paratroopers were about to land, a keen commander of the Home Guard detachment stationed the men on top of the church tower each night to keep watch. The lady’s mother lived in the little cottage just to the left of the then Six Bells Inn opposite the church in Church Street and her daughter recalled that “Of course there were no lights because of the blackout and my mum would open her curtains and windows and in the darkness play the piano to the men on the church!”

The Sulgrave C of E School Log Book records that I started there on September 6^th 1943, aged 5. The rather gaunt, inhospitable and barn like school building was divided into two rooms by a folding partition. The rooms were called, rather unimaginatively, “the big room” and “the little room”, the latter being reserved for the infants. The Head Teacher was Victoria Cave who, unusually for a minor school like Sulgrave, was well educated and qualified as a primary school teacher. She was necessarily rather strict since some of the boys were pretty unruly. From time to time the Head Teacher and the Vicar would summon the parents of pupils who had misbehaved to attend a meeting to discuss the matter. I don’t think there were any sanctions if they didn’t attend but they usually did. Famously, one mother was summoned to explain her children’s habit of swearing. “I don’t know where the little buggers get it from”, she is supposed to have said!

Unlike one of her predecessors who recorded in the punishment book that he had “given the boy a sound thrashing” she handed out very mild physical punishments, usually a smart smack across the palm of the hand with a 12” wooden ruler. The rougher boys would either move their hands at the last minute or simply take the blow and say insolently “didn’ ‘urt at all!”

Although there were no facilities for organised games, she regularly took her pupils on “nature walks”, explaining things as we went and bringing back samples, such as wild flowers to press in books.

From 1940 onwards she frequently had to deal with a doubling of the school population from about 25 to 50 as the result of the influx of evacuee children from London and Birmingham, escaping the mass bombing of both those cities. There is tendency these days to glorify this event as kindly rural folk making poor city children welcome but that was not always the case. In the School Log Book for September 1942, Miss Cave wrote as follows: “Peggy and Dorothy …… admitted on Monday morning. They have been moved six times during the last two or three months and are in an ill-nourished neglected condition. Peggy’s shoes are in such a state that the toes and heels are on the ground without protection. I have written to the Billetting Authority” On another occasion two evacuee children turned up and were found to be, in her words, “verminous”. She took them across to her house adjoining the front school playground and gave them both a bath. This would have involved her in dragging a large tin bath into her kitchen, getting soft water from the rain water tub, heating it in a large kettle over the kitchen stove, pouring it into the bath and dredging it out afterwards.

1940. London evacuee Betty Hunter meets village blacksmith’s son Bernard Gascoigne. The picture was apparently taken by a passing professional photographer. Betty subsequently moved on and Bernard married and remained in the village. Very sadly he died of cancer in his thirties. Universally remembered in the village as “a lovely man”. 

Photograph: Courtesy the Gascoigne Family

Until he went back to London in 1945 I was good friends with Betty’s younger brother Donald who was slightly older than myself. He re-established contact through this website about fifteen years ago, writing to say that the wartime years spent in Sulgrave were the happiest of his life. I invited him to visit but he said that he would find that it was all changed and wanted to remember it as it was!

Food was rationed from very early on, until1953 in the case of sweets and chocolates. At one time the sweet ration would only provide one Mars bar a week for my mum and I. She would cut it into seven thin slices on day one, each of which was cut in half and allowed to dissolve slowly on the tongue each evening and that was it. In later years when I have frequently had a whole Mars bar to eat during a mountain hike I have found it difficult to finish! Cheese came to the village shop in a large yellow block of unknown provenance and dubious quality. With thin wires it was cut into small pieces of about a cubic inch weighing two ounces and that was the individual ration for a week.

Rationing of all food must have been a real pain for those in urban areas with no alternative sources of supplies. We had a large garden at the back of 11 Spinners Cottages where every inch of space was used to produce vegetables of all kinds. There were no refrigerators or freezers and everything that could be saved was dried or stored in screw topped jars. Potatoes were buried in a mound of loose earth and straw known as a “clamp”. In the early autumn, children spent many hours “blackberrying”, returning with baskets of fruit for bottling or jam making and purple hands and faces!

From the village to the Magpie, except for the first meadow next to the vicarage garden, all the fields on the left hand side of the road were given over to allotment gardens. The average size of an allotment was 250 square metres and there was enough land for at least two per village dwelling. Potatoes predominated and I vividly remember the excitement of autumn potato picking days when families gathered to dig, pick, clean and bag the precious crop. In the October sunshine the air smelt of the smoke from numerous small fires burning “squitch” and other weeds and resounded to the clang of the potatoes into metal buckets and shouts of children throwing the smaller spuds at one another. I still call the two main farm gates between Sulgrave and the Magpie “the first allotment gate” and “the second allotment gate”.

Most dwellings had a pig in a small sty, fed on a mixture of meal and scraps. Pigs will eat anything and so every morsel of unwanted food, cooked or uncooked, went into the pig bucket. The family pig was often given a name and almost became a pet. For the tender hearted such as myself, pig killing day was a dreadful affair. My mum was nearly as bad and would take me for a walk but was skilful with the knife when we returned. Large hams were salted down, covered in a sort of pillow case and hung in chimney corners.

Chickens were everywhere and grain to feed them was assiduously collected at harvest time. Cutting and binding the corn into sheaves for later collection in those days was a hit and miss affair and many ears of corn remained upon the ground. It was an ancient tradition that villagers could collect these and thresh out the grains by hand. This was known locally as “gleaning” and children of all ages were expected to take part. With my help my mum was usually able to fill a small dustbin with grain by this method.

So, unlike in urban areas, for us traditional “ham and eggs” was more of a staple than a luxury.

Rabbits were plentiful and nutritious. They were routinely shot, trapped, or hunted down by dogs and ferrets. Like most village girls my mum could skin a rabbit in about ten minutes and they were delicious in stews. At harvest times, the tractor and binder making the sheaves went slowly round the field, working from outside to inside until only a small strip of standing corn remained. Into this had fled the remaining rabbits and once their cover had gone they bolted in all directions. All hell let loose with men shooting and dogs running hither and thither. The farmer was anxious that none should escape and village boys were expected to arm themselves with with a long stick with a knobbly end with which to dash out the poor creatures brains as they ran terrified from one hunter to the next. I did it, reluctantly, and hated it. I remember the field of about 10 acres opposite the Stuchbury cottages yielding 110 rabbits. They were laid in rows and distributed in order of seniority. I remember taking two home to my mum with their legs tied to my stick. She stroked them tenderly, shed a tear and then skinned them for dinner Pigeons were also shot and made into pies.

Twice a day a large dairy herd was driven in from the field behind what is now known as The Old Farmhouse. The name of the field is, in fact, Whitman’s Dairy Ground. Each cow was hand milked and the milk run through a “cooler” before going into large churns collected by lorry. One of my daily tasks was to take an enamel can to the dairy and bring home milk that had barely cooled since leaving the cow!

Unlike the present day, when any food product can be obtained in a supermarket, whether in season or not (e.g. runner beans flown in from Kenya in January), fruits and vegetables were only picked when perfectly ripe. This apparent disadvantage was really an advantage in terms of taste. No-one who has not dug up, washed, cooked and eaten a new potato within an hour or so has the faintest idea of how wonderful they taste! My birthday being towards the end of June, it was the first time in the year when my mum would prepare my favourite meal – roast lamb with mint sauce, new potatoes and garden peas, followed by strawberries and cream. All vegetables freshly picked in the garden.

So I can truthfully say that during my long life when millions have suffered from malnutrition or died of starvation, I have never once been truly hungry, even for a short time.

There was no mains water supply in Sulgrave until the 1950s. Another task for the children was to get buckets of fresh water from various pumps, wells and even directly from streams. The nearest pump to 11 Spinners Cottages was halfway down Stockwell Lane. It was quite a small affair and had to be primed with water retained in the bucket for that purpose. I have vivid memories of the more unscrupulous boys who had forgotten the priming water, jumping up on the pump and peeing down it until the water would run! The only concession to hygiene was to work the pump handle vigorously a few times before filling the bucket.

 

Sandy Munro, then a navigator on Lancaster bombers, briefly on leave in Sulgrave, drawing water from a pump outside Spinners Cottages.

Water for personal and clothes washing came from rain water tubs at the front and rear of the buildings. In my mind’s eye I can still see my uncles in collarless shirts with the sleeves rolled up, breaking the ice in the tubs and puffing and blowing vigorously as they washed with carbolic soap at the kitchen sink. The ladies carried china jugs of warmed water to use in the large basins in the privacy of their rooms.

However, when we moved to the tiny cottage in Dark Lane (now known as Park Lane) at the end of he war, bath nights were luxurious. A dwelling with only one room on the ground floor, in which was an old fashioned but efficient coal fed open fire, could be said to be centrally heated! A long tin bath was brought in from the former builders’ workshop at the rear and placed in front of the fire. A large kettle over the fire always had water at near boiling point. This was mixed with cold water from the rain water tub giving warm bath water so soft that a small amount of soap would give a wonderful lather. Towels were warmed in front of the fire. Sitting in the bath and being toasted by flickering flames a few feet away was an experience more memorable than any later expensive hotel bathrooms.

The absence of a mains water supply meant that the village had no public drainage system. Toilets flushed with water were unknown and their purpose was served by large buckets with hinged seats over them in little buildings conveniently close to the back doors of dwellings. These were emptied into pre dug holes in the garden. They were frequently full to capacity and to perch over them was to invite a sharp piece of the squares of newspaper which served as toilet paper to stick up one’s bum! Simple peeing was performed in the large chamber pots under all the beds or down the garden. Especially in summer, it was far preferable to perform this natural function close to a hedge in a nearby field, using large dock leaves in lieu of toilet paper.

I had an aunt who lived in the isolated cottage on the right hand side of the road on the way to Helmdon, by the lane to Stuchbury. She loved to recall a Rolls Royce stopping outside and the uniformed chauffeur asking if “Madam could be allowed in to use the toilet”. She greatly enjoyed pointing the way down the muddy path to the small building at the bottom of the garden (a two and a half “holer” I believe).

Whilst mains water supplies and drainage did not reach the village until the 1950s, the first water flushed toilets appeared in 1943, in a rather odd way. For some reason, in 1943, the village was selected to play host to a prisoner-of-war camp. This was constructed a few hundred yards beyond the last dwellings on the left hand side of the road leading to Helmdon. The camp comprised the usual large wooden huts with corrugated iron roofs. Remnants of the brick platforms upon which they were built can still be seen. A well was dug and fitted with a pump so that fresh water was always available. A rotary sewage disposal unit was built down the hill from the camp in an easterly direction. Remnants of this can still be seen. The camp thus had fresh water constantly on tap and rows of flush toilets – luxuries unknown in the village.

Initially the camp was occupied by about 50 Italian soldiers. They had mostly surrendered in North Africa, having no wish to further Mussolini’s colonial ambitions. For many of them, to make a new home in England was, in any case, a long standing ambition. Whilst there was a barbed wire perimeter fence and a handful of guards they were relieved to have finished with the war and had no wish to escape from the excellent quarters provided for them. They were quite happy to be put to work on the surrounding farms. This allowed a great deal of contact with villagers and it soon became apparent that not only were they no threat, they were only too ready to socialise. Discipline gradually relaxed and with many of the village men away at the war, the presence of an influx of handsome young men was, shall we say, not unwelcome to all!

It’s well known that Italians love children and no doubt many of the prisoners were missing their own families. It wasn’t long before we village children were being welcomed in the camp, marvelling at the taps with running water, the urinals and rows of white toilets. Just to flush one of them was an experience. I also remember spaghetti being cooked in massive quantities in large copper wash tubs with fires underneath them. Many of the men were happy to remain in England at the end of the war.

So what did we village children do with ourselves when not at school, potato picking, fetching milk from the farm or water from the stream or pump? Basically we were turned out after breakfast, with the family dogs, and told not to return until evening meal time There were no formal play facilities such as swings and see saws that would be found in a town park.

We formed ourselves into groups of boys or girls of similar ages and roamed the village streets and surrounding fields according to weather conditions. Only about two people in the village owned motor cars and petrol was severely rationed. There was virtually no traffic in the village streets. The farm tractors of the day had steel “lugs” on their wheels to assist traction in muddy fields and so were rarely seen on public roads. We played long games of rounders, with any number of players of both sexes, in what once served as the village square. Basically, the Magpie Road continued without a break down Manor Road (then known as Great Street) being joined at a right angle by the Helmdon Road near to the former School and Shop. There was no need for the present circular road markings indicating that this space is for motor vehicles and so it was safely used as a pedestrian area into which slow moving vehicles occasionally intruded. The “posts” for the game were a telephone pole adjoining the thatched cottage which I know as “Aunt Jessie’s”, the corner of the wall by the entrance to Stockwell Lane, a gatepost at the entrance to what is now known as The Old Farmhouse and the school playground gate. The “batsman” and “pitcher” stood at predetermined points in the square and when the old tennis ball was in the air the children scampered between the “posts”. The game was halted very occasionally by a cry of “car”. In fact, the cars were so few that some children collected their numbers in a book as if they were railway engines.

Dogs were routinely kept in kennels or in a corner of the coal shed. However, having experienced the intense cold of badly insulated and unheated council house rooms myself, I feel that it is entirely possible that a small wooden kennel with old blankets and copious amounts of hay was a better bet! They were fed, if at all, on whatever scraps remained from the preparation and consumption of meals. Since most of them roamed free during the day they would make up for this by hunting rabbits and scavenging any carcases they might find.

Amongst the boys, birds’ nesting was a regular activity, involving a good deal of competitive climbing into the upper branches of the then tall elm trees. To be fair, most boys carefully removed a single egg before leaving the birds to continue sitting. A small hole was pierced in each end and the contents “blown out” before the empty eggshell was placed in the display box. However, it was not unknown for some cruel boys to destroy nests and their contents, a practice known as “ragging”.

Especially in summer, we roamed far and wide amongst the surrounding fields. We knew nothing of “footpaths” which we were supposed to use since these were not marked or signposted. We went where we pleased. Agriculture being very labour intensive in those days, most fields we visited would have men working in them. When the main activities of ploughing, sowing and reaping were over, farm workers spent their winters hedging and ditching. We would be welcomed or told to clear off depending on whether we could help with the farm activities or were likely to be a nuisance.

For example, hay making was a very labour intensive activity. In those days, before the advent of silage and hay bales, the grass was cut and then turned by hand or machine until it was dry enough to be “carried” to the farmyard and stored in hay ricks until fed to the animals in the winter. The dried hay was forked up into heaps, or “hay cocks” and a tractor pulling a trailer with high sides and ends would go slowly from one to the next with many men forking the hay as high as they could throw it. Other men stood precariously on top of the hay with pitchforks to distribute it evenly on the trailer. Almost every tractor was the then ubiquitous Fordson Minor which had a maximum speed of about four miles an hour. It had a hand throttle being a ratchet which was pulled out to increase the revs of the engine. The clutch was worked by a pedal which was kept down by a hook when the engine was idling. The driver sat in a metal bucket seat and when letting the clutch out to engage the engine he would stand on the pedal and let it rise gradually, allowing the tractor to move forward smoothly. Naturally all boys loved the chance to drive the tractor and we were encouraged to do so during hay making because it released a grown man to be busy with a pitchfork. On one occasion when I stood in a queue until I got a chance to drive. Excitedly I pulled out the throttle and the engine revved up. I stood on the clutch pedal and undid the hook. Disaster. I was not heavy enough to let it up slowly. It lifted me into the air, the tractor jumped forward and a worker with a pitchfork fell off the back of the trailer. “Get that bloody boy off there!” I ran home in disgrace.

Another favourite attraction was the Great Central Railway line, crossing the valley of the River Tove between Sulgrave and Weston on an enormous embankment. In the 1940s and 1950s it was still in full use, finally closing in 1966 under the infamous “Beeching Axe”. Both goods and passenger trains were hauled by steam engines. The Great Central was the last of the main lines to be completed, in 1901 and was well engineered. Express trains would have thundered along the embankment at high speed and sometimes we would creep as close to the track as we dared to place pennies on the line. We would usually be spotted and to the unforgettable sound of the steam locomotive at speed would be added the shriek of the warning steam whistle. Gangs of labourers kept the track and its various bridges and structures in good condition. The farm track to Weston used a long tunnel under the embankment (now boarded up) alongside which was a culvert through which flowed the infant River Tove. This was maintained in pristine condition and provided a six inch deep water feature in which we wallowed in warm weather. This feature was known as “The Paddlings”.

So what of the dogs that were also “turned out after breakfast”? They, too, formed alliances with other dogs and roamed at will in the village and surrounding fields, hunting rabbits and occasionally being shot if found sheep worrying. When “in season”, bitches were kept in to avoid unwanted pregnancies and groups of dogs would sit patiently outside for hours waiting their chance. Occasionally a bitch would escape, to be mounted immediately. Men would shout encouragement (“Go for it, Bonzo!”) whilst the women would throw buckets of cold water over them. On one occasion when we were living in the tiny cottage near Caves’ farm, my mum noticed that our scruffy mongrel “Patch“ had not returned around tea time. “You’ll know where to find him” she said and I set off along Dark Lane (now known as Park Lane) to where I expected to see him sitting outside one of the Council Houses with other hopeful dogs. However, I met him coming back of his own accord. Careful observation indicated that he had been successful. It was winter and a bucket of cold water had been thrown over him, turning to ice on his unkempt fur. I swear that he was laughing…..

So it has to be said that basically I enjoyed what can only be described as an idyllic countryside childhood, a few hours from the horrors of the blitz on London and other cities and the dreadful events in other countries. Occasionally, planes with German markings flew over and we would pretend to shoot them down. One such, possibly returning from a raid on Coventry or Birmingham, dropped a string of bombs across the fields between the village and Culworth. There was little damage and no casualties other than a few dead cows. A great deal of excitement occurred when a couple of Horsa gliders crash landed in the big field on the right had side of the Magpie Road. Details of this can be seen on the village website – type “gliders” into the search panel.

 

I should have recorded earlier that at the age of about two and a half years I contracted diptheria, a highly contagious disease that can be fatal among young children. Babies are now routinely vaccinated against it but no such vaccine existed in 1940 and so mothers and children were evacuated to “isolation hospitals” – in our case a wooden building on the slopes of a hill called Staverton Clump near to Daventry. We were there for several weeks, which included 14^th November 1940 – a fateful day for the City of Coventry which on that night suffered the heaviest bombing raid of the war so far. Huge numbers of German bombers passed over the hospital and the sky would have been lit up with countless searchlights. With other patients my mother carried me up to the top of the “clump” to view this disastrous event from a distance of no more than fifteen miles or so. My mum told me about this so often that I feel as if I remember it when I probably don’t. Obviously I have known about the raid all of my life but when I looked at:

The Coventry Blitz: ‘Hysteria, terror and neurosis’ – BBC News

…I was moved to the point of tears.

Eileen Roberts, a lovely lady who lived opposite the school and died recently (2024) in her nineties, once sat by me at some village event and quietly told me about her own experiences on that night. She lived in Coventry and worked as a typist at a Building Society in the city centre. When the air raid sirens sounded during the night she and the rest of her family went into the small, primitive bomb shelter they had built in the garden. Here they endured a night which is difficult to imagine. She talked of the ground around them shaking continuously and the feeling that they would all be blown to bits at any moment. What she didn’t mention but which can only be imagined is the atmosphere in that tiny crowded space, probably lit by a single candle, with desperate fear inducing the need for toilet facilities which could only have comprised something like a bucket.

The wavering notes of the “all clear” sirens must have come as an amazing relief. They emerged to find their house intact but several others in the street had been destroyed, probably with some of their inhabitants. Despite everything, she felt it right to get out her bicycle and ride/walk to the office in the centre of the city over broken glass amidst scenes of utmost devastation. The office had been severely damaged but the manager was there and he contrived to rescue a few typewriters and make a place where some pretence at work could begin. So, to some extent, this was an eyewitness account of the so called “blitz spirit” of “keep calm and carry on” which the government was desperate to promote. Looking at the BBC programme it will become evident that this was not always the case and some people, inevitably, were driven to states of panic beyond endurance.

As I set out in an earlier article, V.E. Day celebrations were held in the courtyard of the large house now known as “The Old Farmhouse” at that time the residence of J.P. Brown. I remember the day vividly because my mum fixed strings of flags to my tricycle so tightly that I was unable to steer it safely down the Spinners Cottages path to the party! On the day that Germany’s surrender was announced on the “wireless” my mum came excitedly to the door calling “We’ve won, we’ve won”! I was with an older boy who told me later that I had said “Who were we playing?” So much for the war in Sulgrave, as far as a youngster was concerned!

However, as I grew older in the years after the war and learned of the true horrors of the conflict I was soon led to reflect how extremely lucky I was to have spent my boyhood in such a safe and happy environment whilst many of my elders fought and died to keep it that way, re-establishing the peaceful and civilised society I have been blessed to enjoy during my 87 years.

Colin Wootton

 

 

 

 

 

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