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Although serious bomb incidents were few in the Kirklees area of West Yorkshire, many local people faced danger in other parts of the country eg eg those on essential war work, in the Forces or in Fire and Rescue Services sent to blitzed cities. Isobel, a Wren from Huddersfield based in London during the war, relates some of her experiences:

“The V1 [Doodlebug] started coming over about June or July [1944] and they were frightening because you could hear them coming along like an ordinary small aeroplane now, and then suddenly it stopped, the engine cut off, and you knew it was going to drop. And then suddenly ‘Oh no!’ — a mighty explosion and it had landed somewhere. And you thought, ‘Oh thank God it hasn’t landed on me’. But if you were very close to it you could hear it whistling down. It was frightening. We had to take all our bunks and bedding and sleep down in the cellars at Quarters … it wasn’t very nice and there were cockroaches running about on the floor. We hated it.�
“One of the girls lived in east London, and her mother said, ‘Bring some of them for the weekend’, you know, ‘have a good nights sleep here’ … Her mother played the piano and we all had a good singsong, and we were singing ‘Pedro the Fisherman’ oh, very heartily and loudly when suddenly there was a great explosion. And because we were singing we hadn’t heard the Doodlebug coming you see.

All the lights went out, plaster started dropping from the ceiling and the glass from windows all came in and we were all choking with dust and soot. Course it was black dark … we had to pick our way through the house and out into the back garden where they had a shelter sort of half submerged in the garden, and spent the rest of the night in there … the bomb had actually fallen in the next street where two or three houses had been demolished … people were killed.�

We heard another coming over during the morning … it had cut out but you could hear it whistling and we knew it was coming somewhere very near. In fact it fell on the chapel in Wellington Barracks. It was full of people at a service and many were killed and the place was demolished. It was a real tragedy. Some of our Wrens were there, it was full of service people and their friends. And that’s the next building to ours and of course when it landed there was this terrific explosion and, well I was just swept off my feet … and into the next room …�

“… all the trees were stripped of leaves — they were in full green leaf all the way down and they were just stripped off and all laid on the road with the force of the explosion. And of course the fire engine and the ambulances were all coming to rescue these people who were in Wellington Barracks. It was terrible. So we got on the train and we went up onto Hampstead Heath and we all just laid there on the Heath and we all just cried. After that, well that frightened us, we didn’t go out very much after that. We stopped going to the theatre because we just felt you know we couldn’t take the risk.�
Isobel(born 1923), Huddersfield. Wren

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