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My family moved to Mitcham in Surrey in 1933. My father was working in London for Thomas Cook the travel agents, whom he joined in 1919 after being demobbed at the end of W.W.1 (he had falsified his age when he was at boarding school to go to France where he fought in the battle of the Somme). At the outbreak of war my brother Alan was 12 and was a student at Mitcham grammar School. I was 10 and had failed my grammar school entrance exam and was about to start at Pollards Hill Secondary School. My sister, Jean was 9 and attended Sherwood Park Junior School.

Thomas Cook had to shut down at the start of war but my father got a “temporary” job at the Bank of England, which evacuated to Hurstbourne Priors near Andover. The Bank staff worked and lived in army type huts with no married quarters. From the start of the war he was in the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV) which was renamed the ��ѿ��ý Guard.

Children living in inner London were evacuated at the outbreak of war. After nearly a year of the “Phoney War”, the Dunkirk evacuation and then the Battle of Britain, London started being severely bombed and I can remember how there was a real fear that the Germans would soon invade Britain. The government then decided that children living in the outer London area (including Mitcham) should be evacuated in August and September 1940 using buses, trains and coaches.

My brother’s school was evacuated to Weston-super-Mare. Pupils from my school were scattered widely around the Newbury area where I was billeted in the little village of Ashmore Green. I went to Cold Ash C of E School with a few of my fellow evacuees and one of our teachers from Mitcham. I lived with a family called Haines in a council house with no electricity, an outside toilet with a bucket under the seat and one outside tap for four houses.

Two months after arriving in Ashmore Green, a German plane jettisoned some bombs at night into fields behind the house I was living in. I awoke to the ceiling coming down and broken glass showering the bedroom, but nobody was injured.

My sister’s school was evacuated to Egham in Surrey, but she was billeted with a most “unsuitable family” and was very unhappy. Arrangements were made for her to be moved to live with the family who were fostering me and we both went to the same school. This was a very happy arrangement and we both enjoyed country life even though the amenities were “primitive”. We learned how to pluck pigeons and skin rabbits which were shot or snared by Mr. Haines. We collected the milk each day from a nearby farm. The family reared a pig which was salted and kept in the larder after it was killed. Families who kept a pig had to forfeit their bacon ration. My mother was left alone in Mitcham but she successfully applied for the post of an assistant in the Bank of England’s own hospital at Overton, not far from my father, who she could then see at week-ends!!

In 1941 the Bank of England arranged for families of their staff to have holidays at The George Hotel in Winchester. So during the school holidays that year our family were reunited for a week.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and America declared war on the “Axis” the American Army and Air Force started arriving at Greenham near Newbury. The community, except for the local young ladies, did not initially welcome the “Yanks”. The situation soon settled down, however, and frenetic activity in building up the air base and the subsequent training with gliders demonstrated the serious purpose of their presence.

The village school at Cold Ash was rather primitive and consisted of only four classes to cope with children of all ages. Fortunately my class teacher (Miss Benham, a brilliant refugee from Germany) was the teacher from my school in Mitcham. She was concerned that I had not gone to grammar school so she arranged with my parents that I should be entered for the entrance exam for Wimbledon Technical College which took students aged 14-16. She gave me extra tuition, which enabled me to pass the exam and be offered a place to start at Easter 1942. My mother had to give up her job and she and I returned to Mitcham. Sadly she could then only see my father when he came home one weekend a month. I remember a Morrison steel table shelter being installed in our front room at this time although the Anderson shelter in the garden was not removed until the end of the war. The worst of the blitz was now over and the threat of invasion was lessened so evacuees started trickling back to London and within a year many schools were officially returning. Some children, however, chose to remain in the Newbury area.

My sister had not had a chance to sit for a grammar school scholarship, but Surrey County Council introduced a scheme where children in her situation could be considered for late entry into a grammar school. Jean was offered a place at Wallington Girls Grammar School under this scheme, so she also came home. She eventually went to the Middlesex Hospital to be trained as a nurse under the famous matron Miss Marriott.

After returning to Mitcham in 1942 the area I lived in had a shortage of youths to act as fire guard messengers. Although I was under the minimum age of 15 I took on this duty. I was required to get up whenever the air raid sirens sounded during the night and cycle to the fire guard warden in each street in my area to collect slips saying how many fire guards were on duty and then deliver the slips to the area controller. I could not be issued with a “tin hat” until I reached the age of 15, which was a bit tough as there was a massive anti-aircraft battery at Mitcham Junction, which showered the area with shrapnel during raids. When the flying bomb raids started the sirens would go off as many as five times a night so it was then decided that the messages only needed to be delivered once per night. When my brother’s school returned home, he was old enough to become a civil defence messenger and qualified for a “Defence Medal” at the end of the war. The fire guard service did not qualify for these medals.

During the war school children were asked to collect shrapnel they found and put it in buckets outside each classroom. When bombers or doodlebugs targeted our area in the night we would go out in the morning to see what damage had been done to people’s roofs by the anti-aircraft shrapnel. Occasionally we would see friends houses, which had been damaged or even destroyed by bombs, which we had heard and felt when we were in our Morrison table shelter in the night.

My maternal grandfather was responsible for the maintenance of London’s trams and trolleybuses until he retired in 1948. He was very keen that my brother and I should have careers with London Transport, so my brother left Grammar School to become a trainee industrial chemist. After my two-year course at Wimbledon Technical College, I joined London Transport as a trainee permanent way engineer on the Underground railway, although I was only 15½ and under the official starting age. I started work two days before the D-Day landings in 1944. London was soon to be bombed day and night by V1 and V2 missiles. The V1’s could be seen and heard coming but the V2 rockets could only be heard coming after they hit.

Part of my work on the Underground involved surveying during the night for track work and junction renewals in the tunnels. In 1944 central London residents were still using the Tube station platforms as night time air raid shelters. It was necessary to step over the mass of sleeping families to get into some of the tunnels.

The Bank of England stayed in Hampshire until the end of the war in Europe so after nearly 5 years of separation we were reunited, but it was only temporary.

My parents were founder members of the Church of the Ascension, which was founded when the Pollards Hill area of Mitcham was being developed for housing in the 1930’s. Services were held initially in a school hall while a church hall was built to be used as the temporary church. The proper church was not built until after the war when compensation money for a church destroyed in Streatham was made available.

The second vicar of the Parish appointed in 1938 was a young Reverend Ronald A. Shute. He was responsible for a Boy Scouts troop being formed and affiliated to the church. My brother joined and I followed when I reached the right age. We both re-joined the troop when we returned from evacuation and we were keen scouts and later scouters for many years. The photograph attached was taken on Easter Monday 1945 shortly before VE Day. The troop’s scoutmaster had been called up earlier in the war so my brother was an acting assistant scoutmaster and then formal A.S.M. when he reached the age of 18 in February 1945. A few days after this photo was taken my brother was called up for military service and after training he was sent to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) with the Royal Signals to work on the Radio SEAC transmitters. He was in the army for 3 years. When he returned home he resumed his job as a power station chemist at London Transport.

During 1944 formations of hundreds of American Flying Fortresses set off from East Anglia and the South East on daylight bombing missions to Europe. Some of these formations passed over London heading south and were an unforgettable “awesome” sight. I could not know then that the girl I would marry in 1953 would be tragically orphaned when two of those fully loaded American bombers collided over the village of Weston in Hertfordshire. (Sadly she died from heart disease, aged 41, in 1972).

My recollections of the VE celebrations is, like most families at that time, of a street party for children. A neighbour who ran an electrical shop set up a public address system for announcements and music and tarpaulins were erected to make covers over the tables for the food; a magician entertained during the proceedings.

My most vivid memories of the time around VE Day are, however, of the revelations about the German concentration camps. Everyone was urged to visit a cinema to see the newsreels, especially of Belsen when the British army liberated it. I still remember the terrible shock of seeing scenes of such unimaginable horror. The nation was also horrified by the revelations of Japanese atrocities. The prospect of a long campaign to defeat Japan after the terrible losses of the allied troops in re-taking S.E. Asian countries and the Pacific Islands was very worrying especially for families with relatives in the Far East.

When the two atom bombs were dropped in Japan the scale of the horror was generally tempered with great relief that the war in the East might be over much sooner than expected. We should not now be squeamish about admitting that, at the time, most people felt that the bombing was just and would save lives of countless allied troops and innocent civilians. Fortunately we now have good relations with the Japanese.

My recollection of VJ Day is very clear as I had gone on a scout camping weekend near Downe in Kent (where Charles Darwin had lived). The site was near Biggin Hill fighter station and, although we did not have a radio or newspapers, we knew the war was over as fighter planes took off and flew low overhead performing victory rolls.

My main memories of the period following the end of the war were (a) the way relations with Russia deteriorated alarmingly and it was widely anticipated that a third world war might occur and (b) the protracted extension of food and clothing rationing.

When the Bank of England returned to London my father was offered a permanent post. Thomas Cook was, however, being reformed and my father was asked to go back to them. He was very tempted as he had enjoyed working for them between the wars, but the prospect of another world war convinced him and my mother that he should stay with the Bank.

While I was working on the Underground Railways I was given day release to attend appropriate classes. Although I had obtained a first class diploma from Wimbledon Technical College, this did not give any exemptions from professional qualifications so I decided I needed to study for matriculation with the prospect of studying for a university degree. I was still keen on scouting and was asked to start up a new type of unit for the older boys, called Senior Scouts, and we had some great adventures, including climbing Ben Nevis. I found academic studies conflicted with my interest in scouting and I also knew I would soon be called up for military service. I was keen to join the Royal Engineers railway transportation unit when the time came, but shortly before my 18th birthday the regulations for military service were reviewed. The work I was doing was categorised as “essential work” and I was told that I would be exempt from military service, provided that I stayed in the Permanent Way Department of London Transport, as keeping the railways running in the event of war was considered so important.

This exemption from military service gave me the incentive to concentrate on my studies, so I completed my matriculation at London University and embarked on a seven-year course studying one day and two evenings a week to obtain a BSc degree in Civil Engineering, which I gained with first class honours in 1956. When my brother was demobilised he resumed his studies part-time and gained a BSc in Chemistry. In spite of the disruption to our education during the war my brother, sister and I did achieve professional qualifications in our chosen careers.

This article is written by Colin Anderson

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