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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by a volunteer from Northumberland on behalf of Peter Sanderson. Mr. Sanderson fully understands the site’s terms and conditions, and the story has been added to the site with his permission.

We lived at 31, Rodsley Avenue, Gateshead very near Saltwell Park. I was nine years old and my Brother, John, was four years of age in 1939. I went to Corpus Christi Roman Catholic School.

The children to be evacuated, together with some mothers going as “helpers”, and several teachers, assembled at the school with their belongings and most importantly, their gas masks. We left the school and walked to Bensham Railway Station in Elysium Lane, watched very solemnly by parents and children who were staying at home, and many other onlookers.

The train arrived, and we set off, travelling through Durham, Darlington, and then, at Northallerton, turning to the Ripon and Leeds line where, at the small station of Melmerby, the train reversed onto the single line branch to Masham, our destination.

At the station, everyone was given a brown paper carrier bag containing, among other things, a tin of Libby’s Corned Beef and a large “Kit-Kat” before being “sorted” into pre-arranged groups. My group was then taken in a van fitted with seats in the back, one mile to the small village of Swinton. Swinton Park was the country home of Lord and Lady Swinton. In 1935, Lord Swinton had been made Air Minister with the job of building up the Royal Air Force as quickly as possible, and he established the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve.

We were to stay (be billeted) with a Mrs. Kilvington and her son, who worked in Watkinson’s Grocer’s shop in Masham. There were three of us, Michael and another boy whose name I can’t remember and myself. The house was the first in a row of five or six down a little lane and from the back garden gate we could see farm buildings and nothing else but fields. None of the houses had electricity, gas, running water, or a lavatory. There was a two-seat communal earth closet at the other end of the row. Drinking water, which came through a pipe from a spring into a little room built into the Park boundary wall, was carried in a bucket a short distance back to the house. We washed in rain water ladled into the Kitchen sink from an outside water butt!

In the back garden, were apple and plum trees and, from an upstairs window, deer could sometimes be seen over the wall in the grounds of the Swinton Park Estate, a sight which we’d never seen before. Neither had we seen a horse drawn reaper and binder cutting a field of corn, nor a steam traction engine driving a threshing machine, nor skeins of geese flying overhead as we stood outside the house on very peaceful country summer’s evenings away from the worries our parents must have been experiencing.

However, one week later, more evacuees arrive at Masham. Among them were Mother, Agnes by name, and Brother, John, who at first stayed in a house on the main street and then moved in with an old lady, Miss Horner, in Red Lane where I joined them.

Nearby, now, was the gate into Fleetham’s Farm and, about a hundred yards along the road was Theakston’s Brewery. Major Theakston, who had lost a leg during World War 1, the “Great War” as it called then, dressed in his tweed suit and trilby hat was often seen riding his bicycle around the town. The bicycle had only one working pedal, which was on fixed wheel, the other pedal didn’t turn and the foot of his artificial leg was placed on it.

It was about three weeks, I think, after our arrival before schooling began. We then shared the school just off the market place, with the Masham children. Our classes were in the mornings and theirs in the afternoons, which as far as we were concerned was a very good arrangement.

I spent many afternoons and early evenings after tea “on the farm” under the watchful and, no doubt, very patient eyes of Wallace and Ivan Fleetham and their Sister, Muriel.

There were more new sights and experiences to come: Seeing cows being milked by hand; Sitting on the wide bare back clinging to the mane of one of the big farm horses going to the Blacksmiths at Fearby; Potato picking in the field, and eating roast potatoes cooked in the burning potato tops; “Helping” to drive a rather large pig to the slaughter house; Riding in the horse drawn trap to the top fields where the cows were milked, and bringing the milk back to the farm dairy.

Father, William Sanderson, came to visit us twice, I think, while we were there, riding most of the journey on the pillion seat of a motorcycle belonging to a friend who was visiting his family in Rainton, and then on a “United” bus from Ripon arriving in Masham on the Saturday afternoon, leaving on the Sunday afternoon for the return journey to Gateshead.

Then, our parents must have decided that we should come home, as the expected bombing air raids on Tyneside and other industrial areas immediately the war started, had not happened. So, on day in December 1939, we left Masham on the bus to Ripon, changing there to the Newcastle bus, finally arriving after dark and in the blachout near the old Shipcote Cinema on Durham Road, Gateshead. Within a few minutes walk, we were back home in Rodsley Avenue, about four months after leaving.

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