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Thread: Living through WW2

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    Default Living through WW2

    We were told when I was young that we were hard done by to live during that time. Now I am 84 I am very glad that I did as it as it made us very thankful for what we now have. Food was short so we got used to eating what was available, there were not many shops except for necessities but that did not matter as you needed points to buy clothes, so mum's made do and mended on mending. Presents had to made by syblings or parents and relatives and really appreciated. We were not spoiled as there was little to spoil us. Travel was very restricted' and most of us spent our first long railway journeys being evacuated.
    I went to sea when I was 17 as an apprentice and into the sometimes rough world of sailorizing. Loved every minute, though our only communications, other than letters, was a short wave radio. The crackling and noises could sometimes blend in with the 'Goon Show'. No tv or computers so we often made our own fun on long spells at sea.
    Some ships had libraries, but these were often very tattered and old unless someone would collect all the books together, hoping the box they came in had not been cannibalised and take them up to the mission if there was an exchange box available.
    Did many voyages at 9 knots to anchor ports, but never felt lonely or despondent. Life was for living.
    Now with a pandemic, we are bombarded by people complaining about not shopping and not being allowed out, and some F..wits even demonstrating.
    It appears that people born after the 1950 are so spoon fed and spoilt that they are unable to take any privation what so ever. God help us if we ever have to suffer any real shortage etc, they will all lie down and cry, poor bastereds.

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    Default Re: Living through WW2

    Born in the middle of it I do not have much in the way of memories.
    But the following years I do recall with deep emotions about the way we lived.
    Rationing that saw us with maybe 4 eggs a week, or maybe 5 ounces of butter, limited amounts of sugar etc.
    It went on until about 1952/3 when meat and confectionary were the last to come off.

    Now here we are in the middle of a lock down, the people complaining about loss of freedom, loss of work, loss of enjoyment.
    I guess many have forgotten what it was like back in 1939/45 or they would not be so vocal.
    The younger ones have no concept of what it was like back then, for many living hand to mouth, limited housing due to the Blitz, limited just about everything that we now consider to be the day to day basics of our lives.

    But for all of that there are still countries that today live in a similar manner to that of 2,000 years ago.
    For all the advancements made by man since 1945 they still live a life way out of kilter with the rest of the world.
    Mainly in the middle east of ten makes me wonder why those brave people fought for a brave free new world.
    Happy daze John in Oz.

    Life is too short to blend in.

    John Strange R737787
    World Traveller

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    Default Re: Living through WW2

    So true Colin and I can echo your thoughts, having been bombed out three times in three different cities and evacuated hither and hither, but I really have Hitler to thank for something, he gave me a taste for travel. Rationing stopped in 1954 John, if I remember correctly flour was the last thing to come off rationing.

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    Default Re: Living through WW2

    A boys view of the Second World War.


    When the Second World War started on 3rd of September,1939, I was five years old, and life as we knew it changed dramatically.
    Suddenly we had no sweets, no fruit such as bananas, grapes or oranges in the shops, our Ice Cream Man, Mr Manfredi, of Italian stock was interned on the Isle of Man for the Duration, so no more ice cream for six years. Food was rationed by the Government, we were issued ration books and when Mum, went shopping the shop keeper cut the coupons out of the book, and that was all you were allowed to have for that week.
    Food Rationing.
    (Quantities shown are per person per week)
    29th September 1939 - National Register set up & Identity cards issued.
    8 January 1940 - Food rationing begins. Bacon, ham, sugar and butter now rationed.
    January 1940 - 4oz. Butter, 12oz. Sugar & 4 oz. Bacon allowed a week for each person.
    March 1940 - 1s.10d worth of meat allowed per person a week (9p today). Sausages were not rationed but difficult to get; offal (liver, kidneys, tripe's) was originally un-rationed but sometimes formed part of the meat ration.
    July 1940 - Tea 2oz 1s 10d (9p). Butter, margarine, cooking fats and cheese rationed. Sugar cut to
    8 oz 1s 10d (9p). The Government announced no more bananas no more fresh or tinned fruit to be imported except a few oranges for children only.
    March 1941 - Jam, marmalade, treacle and syrup rationed. 8 oz per person per week.
    May 1941- Cheese ration increased to 2 oz's per person per week.
    June 1941- Eggs: 1 fresh egg a week if available but often
    only one every two weeks. Meat ration cut to 1s 6d (7.5p) per person per week then to 1s 2d (6p):
    by June 1941 it was down to 1s (5p).
    July 1941- Sugar ration doubled to encourage people to make their own jam during the fruit season.
    August 1941 - Extra cheese ration for manual workers introduced
    December 1941 - Points scheme for food introduced. National dried milk introduced
    December 1941 - Milk went on ration 3 pints per person per week (1800ml) occasionally dropping
    to 2 pints (1200ml). This amount also varied for young children and expectant mothers.
    Expectant mothers, children and invalids were allowed 7 pints of milk per week. Expectant mothers
    and children were also allowed up to 18 eggs per month. Children were allowed orange and rosehip syrup as well as cod liver oil. Household milk (skimmed or dried) was available : 1 packet per four weeks.
    January 1942 Rice & Dried Fruit added to points system. tea ration for under fives was withdrawn. sweets 2 oz per person per week.
    February 1942 Canned tomatoes and Peas. Soap rationed (1 small tablet per month).
    April 1942 Breakfast cereals and condensed milk added to points system.
    June 1942 - American dried egg powder on sale. 1s 9d (9p) per packet (equivalent to 12 eggs)
    Wholemeal loaf
    ("The National loaf") introduced (far more wheat used which meant less wastage.
    Sausages contained less and less real pork or beef , Horsemeat commonly available
    (later whale meat was also available)
    July 1942 - Sweets and chocolate 2 oz per person per week.
    August 1942 - Biscuits added to points system.
    August 1942 - Cheese ration was increased to 8 oz per person per week.
    December 1942 Oat flakes added to points system.
    December 1944 - Extra tea allowance for 70 year olds and over introduced.
    January 1945 - Whale meat and snoek fish available for sale.
    July 1946 - Bread rationed

    Dates Items Came off Ration
    July 1948 - Bread.
    December 1948 - Jam.
    May 1950 - Points rationing ended.
    October 1952 - Tea.
    February 1953 - Sweets.
    April 1953 - Cream.
    March 1953 - Eggs.
    September 1953 - Sugar.
    May 1954 - Butter, cheese, margarine and cooking fats.
    June 1954 - Meat and bacon
    So Rationing was ended after 15 years.
    .
    The first bananas to arrive from the West Indies was in November, 1947, so I had gone 8 years
    without seeing a banana. They came on a ship called `TILAPA` and in 1954, 7 years later, I was a Sailor on that very same ship, we carried 250,000 stalks of bananas from Jamaica. every voyage.
    I joined the Merchant Navy in 1951 and was issued with a M.N. Ration Book, we had double the
    rations of ordinary people at home, and Mother got a lot of abuse off other shoppers in the CO-OP
    when they saw the assistant give her more food on my ration book than they got.

    Clothing was also on ration, you had to use your coupons to buy new clothes, or as we did, we had to wear clothes from older brothers or sisters, when my 8 year old cousin Richard was killed in 1942 and I was 7 years old, I had to wear all his clothes and shoes, nothing was wasted.

    In the gardens we dug up the lawns and flower beds and we had to "Dig for Victory",
    we planted vegetables, potatoes, cabbages, carrots, peas and so on.
    In the council parks they were also dug up for vegetables.
    Every where we went, out playing or going to school, we had to carry our Gas Masks, in a cardboard box and a piece of string that we slung over our shoulder, in case the Germans dropped gas bombs.
    I was always losing mine, the Policeman was always knocking on our door bringing it back, and I would be in trouble for losing it.

    When the Sirens went off we had to go into the air raid shelter, at our old terraced house it was a brick built , concrete roof box about six feet square,
    On night in December 1940 our house was hit by a bomb, a terrifying experience, as the house crashed down on top of the shelter burying us and we were trapped for nearly 12 house before we were dug out by the ARP, and Fire Service.
    We had Nothing, no clothes, no money, no food, no belongings at all, just Nothing. no where to go, no home, Nothing. Today they whinge and whine. when they get Benefits of all kinds.

    I had to gp and stay at my Grandma`s home 3 miles away, the family split up for two years. Then we got a Council house.in 1942 and became a family again We had a garden with aa shelter in the back garden.


    My school was closed and turned into a "Air Raid Wardens Post" which meant that we did not go to school.for a long time. Then sometimes half of us went to school in the mornings only and the other half went in the afternoons only. Then later on in the war we were transferred to another school and joined in the classes there, There were more than 60 children to a class room and some of us sat in the corridor and the teacher kept the door open so we could hear what she was saying. Most of our Teachers were
    called up to go into the Army, Navy or Air Force. My favourite teacher, Miss Dawes, had to go into the Navy or the WRNS. A lot of old Teachers who had retired had to go back to teaching again.
    In the school yard they built air raid shelters, and we had to have air raid and fire drills every week unless there was a real air raid then it was`nt a drill it was the real thing.
    A lot of schools were bombed and a lot of teachers and school children were killed.
    A school in Liverpool was hit and about two hundred pupils and staff were killed, the bodies stayed there, they could not get them out and so they made a memorial park over the site.
    A friend of mine was running to school holding his little sister`s hand and the German fighter plane machine gunned the street and when he got to the end of the street he only had half a sister with him, she was dead and her bottom half was up the street.
    One day we saw a German plane that had been damaged circling around, it passed over my house and in the next road it crashed through the front of a house, killing a lady in the house.
    It came out into the back street in a pile of rubble. My pals and I were the first to arrive on the scene and the smashed up plane was smoking with a few flames coming out of the engine. the Pilot was dead in the cockpit. We were excited because this was the closest we had been to a German plane and it did not bother us that the Pilot was dead. We were scrambling over the rubble to find souvenirs, then the Police, Firemen and Air Raid Wardens arrived and chased us off. It could have exploded and killed us all.
    We collected a lot of souvenirs, such as shrapnel, bullets, bomb tail fins and lots of other objects that fell from the skies.
    At night when the air raid sirens went off to warn us of an air raid, we went into the air raid shelter in the back garden. It was called an `Anderson` Shelter, named after the man who designed it. It was made of corrugated
    iron and was buried in the ground with soil on top of it. Inside it was just big enough for up to six people to hide in there and we had bunk beds to sleep in. One night my Mum was working as a bus conductress and was in the town center in Bolton. She was in a transport cafe with her Driver with a few other transport people.
    The air raid started with bombs dropping and she said to her driver that she was going outside as it would be safer. She just got outside the door when a bomb hit the Cafe and blew it up killing every one inside.
    My Mum was blown up in the air and across the road and hit the church railings. She nearly went through like sliced bread. She was injured but survived.
    We were in our air raid shelter when it happened, about one mile away, and the shock waves from the bomb bounced us out of our bunks, just like an earthquake. We didnt know Mum, had been blown up until next morning when Dad went out to look for her. She was found injured covered in rubble.
    Air raid shelters did not protect you if you got a direct hit from a bomb. Many air raid shelters were hit and everyone killed. One Shelter that was bombed in Liverpool killed 166 men, women and children. In the May, 1941, Blitz, or air raid, in Liverpool in one night nearly two and a half thousand people were killed by the bombing.
    Manchester and districts were heavily bombed and thousands of people killed. Some times at night when the blitz was on we stood on top of our air raid shelter and watched Manchester burning, all the night sky was lit up as bright as day with all the flames.
    In the houses people stuck sticky paper across the windows in patterns. This was supposed to stop broken glass flying around the room if there was a bomb blast. There was a complete `black out`. which meant you had to have a thick black blind that came down over the windows and your curtains so not even a chink of light showed out. The Air Raid Wardens walked around the streets checking all the houses to see if any light showed,
    There were no street lights at all, everywhere was in total darkness. A bit scary as a child walking home at night.
    There were no or very few cars on the road and they had no lights on.
    Some houses, like ours, had a sign in the window saying. "STYRUP PUMP HERE"
    which meant we were issued with a pump so if there was a house on fire in the street we could get a bucket of water put the pump in and push the handle up and down and get water through the hose pipe. They were not very successful, but we had great fun squirting water on each other.
    We had no sweets during the war so some times we made our own kind of sweet.
    We would get some sugar put it on a board and get a red hot poker and roll it over in the sugar, and when it cooled it was like a sweet. or we chewed the wax off a candle and when it melted it was soft like chewing gum, or we had a bag of oats and sugar.
    The best thing to do was when the American Soldiers were over here, driving around town in their jeeps.
    We would run after them shouting, "Any Gum Chum" or "Any Candy Sandy" and they would throw handfuls of candy bars and Wrigleys Chewing Gum out onto the road and all our gang would be scrabbling on the ground after it.
    Some times they threw packets of Lucky Strike and Chesterfield cigarettes, we would then sell these to the grown ups for spending money.
    Near my house was a road, Beaumont Road, about one mile in length, surrounded by fields, no one lived there, in the middle was a bridge over the railway line. Suddenly one day thousands of tanks,armoured cars and self propelled guns appeared and there were armed soldiers at each end of the road to stop people going near them.
    But our `gang` walked along the railway line and climbed up the supports of the bridge and then we climbed into the tanks, fantastic. this was our play ground ,wonderful, we didnt need toys we had the real thing. and we never got caught. Then one day we found they had completely vanished overnight. It was just before D Day, 6 June 1944, the whole lot had been shipped onto the railway and sent down to Southampton for the invasion of Normandy in France.
    Another time we found that some spare ground that is now behind the Bolton Technical College, was full of American bomber planes bodies, the wings were stored somewhere else.
    We could get into the planes and sit in the Pilots seat and pretend that we were on a mission to Germany. We had a great time.

    Below.,
    Here is where our home used to be until Adolf got us rehoused..
    .

    Brian
    Attached Images Attached Images
    Last edited by Captain Kong; 21st September 2020 at 10:39 AM.

  5. #5
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    Keith at Tregenna Guest

    Default Re: Living through WW2

    Apparently, cigarettes and beer, were never rationed,
    due to the effect that might have had on public moral.

    K..

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    Default Re: Living through WW2

    I was six months old when the war started and six years old when it ended, so I knew nothing else, regarding food shortages, never had any
    sweets until after the war when things gradually became available but what you hadn't had you didn't miss, my two sisters were much older
    than me, both were spoilt rotten and treated me with disdain, Dad was in the army, so mum had her hand full, feeding clothing three kids in
    times of rationing was far from easy but as kids we didn't realise how hard it was for her. Because of the constant air raid sirens and bombing,
    Mum wanted us all sleeping together together, perhaps she felt it would be better for us to all go together if we were bombed?, we had a bomb
    sheltr in the garden but it was always deep in water. we had some bombs fall in the next street and Mum took us out to see what had happened,
    I can clearly remember seeing air raid wardens digging with their hands in the rubble trying to reach someone, they had a dog with them, maybe
    this was the time Mum decided to have us evacuated?, I can clearly remember standing with my sisters and many other children outside of the
    school, I had a label tied to my coat and my gas mask in a cardboard box, there was a convoy of red London busses ready to take us to our new
    homes. My sisters and me were taken to a village in Derbyshire where we were allocated to new homes, my sisters stayed in the village but I was
    taken to a farm outside of the village, the Farmer and his wife had no children and I was made very welcome, my time at the farm has some of my
    happiest memories, I can remember riding on the haywaggon, and the farmer lifting me up on to the back of the horse pulling the wagon, the men
    in the fields cutting the corn with scythes and others standing back with guns shooting rabbits as they ran out from the corn, I also remember the
    big Harvest display in the church, a completely different world from London. The I was suddenly told we were to be sent home, it seems my sisters
    had been on form and played up so much they were no longer wanted, we came as a unit and as such, we were returned as a unit, it wasn't so long
    after that, we were bombed, I was in the living room with mum when she heard the dreaded sound of a doodlebug overhead, whcn the engine stopped
    she grabbed me and dived under the heavy table that was under the window, there was a huge explosion and the window came crashing down on the
    table, soot came down the chimney and it was pitch black, I remember somebody pulling us out from under the table and leading us out of the house.
    I will never forget seeing our porch hanging from the wall, glass and debris everywhere, mums bed that we all shared was hanging out of what used
    to be the bedroom wall, we walked up the road to my uncle Fred's house. we were rehoused in a flat above a shop at Friern Barnet, only a few miles
    away. Opposite the flat was a very large building set in spacious grounds, it was being used for soldiers etc to recuperate after being wounded, the
    yanks would hang around the gates and we used to go over and asks them "Got any Gum chum" they were a good hearted lot and always gave us
    a stick of gum, that is the only sweets I can remember in the wartime, the building turned out to be a 19th century "mad house" called Natsbury.
    We still lived there when they held the VE day celebrations, there was a big street party "no food" every child got a present, mine was a small sized
    blackboard and easel, there was two effigies hanging from a lamp post, probably Hitler and Mussolini, our house in Wood Green had been rebuilt and
    we went home, dad was demobbed and my first memory of him is at the age of 6.5 years, seeing him in a brown pinstriped demob suit. cheers













    '

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    Default Re: Living through WW2

    I was seven when the war started, but even so there were things that I had forgotten , then a few year ago I got in touch with a lad who was in the same school as me who had moved to Aus, he had done a lot lot better than me, he invented the tap with no handle, you just put your hands under and the water ran when you took your hands away the water stopped, he made $millions. But that is not the story, he wrote a book about his life that he sent me, and from it I got memories I had forgotten, about the bombing of our village, about what happened in school with my brother fighting etc. Great memories.
    Des
    R510868
    Lest We Forget

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    Default Re: Living through WW2

    Hi. Des just got the computer back after being off since August the 18th. And see yours was the last new post on , haven’t had time to see yet any others. Will never again try and get a 4 bedroom house into a 2 bedroom one , it doesn’t work and after over a month of nigh on near trauma things are becoming clearer. Now have new email address which will have to get tattooed somewhere so as to not forget , the left hand biuttock right upper quadrant sounds feasible but self might have trouble seeing. A tap with no handles sounds a good idea for water rationing , if your friends idea hadn’t worked , so he was a winner either way. Cheers JS
    R575129

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    Default Re: Living through WW2

    Looks like a mangle handle in the fore ground to left of man.
    WE had a battery of light ack ack in the paddock next to our house and the path between us and the paddock was the ammunition store. Had 14 unexploded incendiary bombs one night, very lucky.
    They dug a hole in a hill in the field and spent all day backing guns and ammunition trailers into the hole. Realised in later years that they were practicing for loading onto landing barges.
    We would spend hours watching the spitfires and hurricans trying and often succeeding in turning the V1's around to go back across the channel. We lived close to Biggin Hill and could hear the planes start up and taking off.

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    Default Re: Living through WW2

    My father was stationed in Gibraltar for the duration.
    Mum and I lived with an aunt and uncle in Eltham South London.
    Though I have no memory of it mum told me my uncle used to grab me when the sirens went off and ran down the road to the shelter.
    Apparently with one bomb blast the front door was blown off the house and was missing for about six weeks.
    Later sent up to East Bolden for safe keeping while the bombs continued on London.

    It was several years later we had been moved to Lee Green again South London, and there was a large area where houses had stood.
    All that was left were the water tanks in the roof standing upright on water pipes coming out of the ground.
    It was a very weird sight to see and was like that for a number of years before all cleared to make way for a sports field.
    Funny the things you remember.
    Happy daze John in Oz.

    Life is too short to blend in.

    John Strange R737787
    World Traveller

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