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6 — Beatrice Morgan (born 1918) was interviewed about her and her husband’s War memories:

"My husband was in the fire service, a regular in the AFS (and) was in the Coventry Blitz. He was eleven years older than me so he didn’t have to go in the forces.

The fire station then was in Guild Street, and when the war broke out they had nothing, only their tin helmets and an axe … because they hadn’t any equipment, they hadn’t anything to take the tenders. They had old cars, and somebody gave them a big old — I don’t know if it was, a Bentley, it was a big old car, and they called it the ‘ Flying Bedstead’, and they lost that in the big raid, the Coventry Blitz. But the men all came back all right, there was none of them hurt, but black as coal, as if they had been dumped in a river and put up a chimney, almost speechless; they came home and they couldn’t speak…A terrible night, and that night my sister-in-law’s son was born and I was with her…so part of the time I was in the bedroom helping the nurse, part of the time I was stood looking out towards Coventry and seeing all the fires… I think they left here early evening, eight o’clock time, and when they got there they couldn’t get any water, and by the time they left in the morning all the banks of the canals and everything had overflowed; and there was water everywhere. They came back middle of the next day.

(My husband) said that it was amazing, just as they were trying to get a bit cleared up to come back home, there was an old gentleman came up from a cellar, carrying a bottle of whisky and of course gave them a drink — and they never thought there was anybody alive in this cellar because it was a dreadful night.�

20 — Frederick Wincote was born in Alveston near Stratford in 1907, and here he talks about his time as an Auxiliary Fireman in the AFS:

“I joined the Fire Service in 1939, the Auxiliary Fire Service. And of course I was getting short of work in Birmingham because everything was closed up. So I was down, I was put off, and I worked down by the fire station, called in there one day, down in Guild Street that was, where I used to work. The officer down there he says hello Fred are you out of work? I said ah, I have been put off. You start here tomorrow! he says — I will see you tomorrow morning then, then I was in the Blitz then.

From Stratford we did Coventry, I did the big blitz on Coventry, 14th/15th November.
I have been to Birmingham, Bristol, London, Nuneaton — I used to be on the hose all the time, you know, where the danger was. The Coventry raid, that was dreadful, that was horrible! We took the pump, a mobile pump, with us, towed a mobile pump in there but we lost the car we went in, buried, oh it was horrible, I never thought we would come out alive. I get nightmares from it now. Even after all this time I wake up in the night with a loud bang. We was there all day, all night, we didn’t get back till four o’clock in the afternoon. They wouldn’t let us come through Coventry, you had to come all the way round by Tile Hill, ‘cos (Coventry) was such a mess, all the centre and that, down by the Cathedral and all down there. Of course there was a lot of firemen killed down there, you know, sixty five firemen killed that night, how we got away with it God knows.

You got bombs, you got these incendiaries. The Fire Service bloke came to see me the other week, I had been awarded the medal for my services during the war, the Fire Service Medal. He says what was incendiaries? I said about fifteen to eighteen inches long. He said they brought one in the fire station only it was only part of one. I said we picked up whole ones. We took one apart, ‘cos towards the end they were making incendiaries with the explosives in the tail end, and we picked one up, brought it back, we took it apart to see how it really was made. Right in the tail end, that’s where the….. You see the incendiaries are about that wide, well all up the centre see, the flame, it used to go straight up the centre, as soon as it got to the explosive you see it blew all the magnesium all over the place. Oh, got about 20 or 30 fires going all at once.

We were only getting 3 pound a week and we made a little song up —

‘We are firemen, maybe in a week
We only get three pound
The more we do the more we weigh
Makes no difference to our pay.’

Well you were in a blitz from seven o’clock at night till four o’clock in the afternoon, ‘cos I mean you had to sort out your hose, your hose was buried you had got to sort that out and be ready for the next one. Of course we only came back with three lengths of hose, and that were all punctured, from Coventry. You couldn’t get no more out, they were buried.

We got bombs dropping, we had got the incendiaries. It’s when they let the incendiaries out they didn’t come down one at a time, we had a bunch of them, they opened a case and they all came right out, you had got twenty or thirty fires all at once. All right if they dropped on the roof of a house and they shot off, (but) it’s them that went through the roof. If they hit the roofs in that way they went through the tiles. If they come that way they used to come along the ground, you could deal with them then, but you couldn’t deal with them that got in the roof you see. We had the ladder, yes, but you couldn’t fish ‘em outwards, it’s hopeless, you have got to get inside to deal with them. You couldn’t fish ‘em out, ‘cos once they had got in they were often on the ceiling they was setting fire to.

And after Coventry we were in Tyseley and Small Heath. It was on the Tyseley where they were making the wings of the Mosquitoes. Some of them was working nights, they went in the shelter just outside their factory and the bombing hit the factory on the corner, burst the central heating pipes and that flowed into the whatsit, in the shelter. You see they got down and they — concrete over the top and the water went in there and they were all drowned! We had to pump that out, you can imagine what it was like.

There was one place in Coventry, and we couldn’t make it out; the roof was all burnt and all of a sudden there was bang! Bang! And it was tins of corned beef swelling up and exploding!

One or two fires we went to in Stratford — chimney fires and one at Warburtons that used to be an old scrapyard and there was a little one there, somebody dropped a (match)stick on to a heap of rubbish and we went because we weren’t far away, but no bombs.

I came back from one blitz, Fire Service, and the head one over us he met us in you see, see if we was all right, and he said Fred you had better take a bucket of water up with you today, home, he said, there’s no water up your way, a bomb had dropped and burst a whatsit main. So I went up with a bucket of water and a person over the road had just had a burst that morning, and she hadn’t got water — she said you saved my life!

I can’t do the walking now, I had the operation on my knee, knee joint did go, because it started during the war. I had got a garden wall down on top of me, went on my legs. The hose went over this leg, see, it comes through my legs like that but, of course, this one caught all the weight, the cartilege you see had trouble with the cartilege, that’s why I left the fire service. That was in 1943. I left ‘em in 1943 ‘cos all the blitz was finished on England nearly then.

Nuneaton was one of the last. We went to a paper works there and put that fire out, then we had a street that had been bombed, did one or two jobs there, fires, and I was going off to a garage on fire with a length of hose, and then I heard a cry for help, a big cry. I shouted again, they shouted again back, help, so of course I shouted back to the whatsit, I said I am on rescue. I got four people out of there alive, they were underneath the staircase, and of course there’s all bricks and everything, you see you’ve got to move all that before you get to ‘em, all the roofing and everything, so if you ever have one you want to rescue four, and I says don’t pull anything tight out, move everything loose, if it takes time I says you saves lives, because that’s what I have been used to.

But oh, Coventry and Bristol was the worst I have been in, and Birmingham, Birmingham was bad. At Bristol they tried to bomb the docks, and we were there pulling oil tanks down, on the quayside, we had to cool ‘em down because the fire you see it went….if they started exploding… they came round, asked for volunteers, our leader calls out what about you Fred? OK, I went up the turntable ladder, they put the water on when you got up top, I was up there, yes.

I was going up, going along the street one day when a flying bomb was coming over and this poor (woman) sat there, screaming like hell she was. I went, put my hand on her shoulder I said, madam, don’t worry about that one, that’s gone far away! Aren’t you calm? I said yes, I have been through it love.

When the engine cuts off, count five, is there any explosion? The rockets, the…V2 that was. Oh, they were huge things they were. Had one in Trafalgar Square, stood on its tail end, it was 30 feet high. The first one dropped, they said it was a gas main going up. It was a fin, come on a Saturday by us, and we wasn’t working as it happens that day, I know it was a weekend off I think. They gave us a weekend off so the boys could get home and that see, and it hit a school. And one of the fins was blown off, it was 6 feet long, it was about that thick, it had gone into the middle of the road, cobbles, and it had gone in about two feet deep, and it had gone like that, do you see ‘cos they are hot when they come through the air and it had bent it, and it took a workman to get it out. It was about six feet high and square.

In Coventry we found (there must have been some canal burst somewhere) we was taking the suction out of the drain, the water was coming down the road, we made it so we could drop a suction in there. We could deal with some of the incendiaries that way but not for long at a time you see. You could give them a good boost so they would go out…incendiaries, oh horrible it was. I hope you never see it. We was on one in Coventry in a goods yard and we came out nearly drunk. We was spraying on a truck that was on fire with sugar and of course the water and that we were breathing in the sugar, and we hadn’t got anything like breathing apparatus in those days.

Now this fire service bloke he said why did you leave the fire service, it had got such good reports of you? I tell them I had been through it and I said well, I had this accident with my knee and the doctor said that I wasn’t to ride the fire engines — that was my hobby, get where the action was, I says, that’s all I went for was the action. He says you would have been in the (regular) fire service after that if you’d have stopped on, you was really good in the job. Yes. Some wouldn’t go into houses that were partly bombed to see if there was anybody in there, the others they wouldn’t go in. That’s why I get the nightmares, from the sights I have seen in some of those houses. And the hospitals, oh they were stacked right out — I have put many an arm in splints.

One of the fellows, Bert Bromley, he came to see me, we was all in the blitz and he shook hands with me. Fred, he said, I don’t know how you stick it. We had been there, a night off and to Birmingham and Bristol I think. We were down there and they put us up in the Fishponds Asylum for the night. We went in, what would it be, about midday, then we had a meal, wash up, then they put us in a big room, mattresses on the floor and they gave us like baskets to drop our stuff in. They said put your name, what brigade you are, they gave us the papers and put them away and said, your clothes will be cleaned when you come back, the inmates, they clean them. Of course, you got ever so messy, black, horrible. I went to one fire at this plane crash and this officer, big officer, comes and he says where’s your tunic? You know, the way he spoke to me, I thought, well, bugger him. I hadn’t got a tunic on you see, hadn’t ought to be here he said, without a tunic. I said, wait a minute, you ain’t asked what happened to it. He says what happened to it then? I says it’s in holes — I have been at a plane crash and the petrol tank exploded and I says look at my eyebrows, look at my eyebrows, look at me, I said, I got no eyebrows, no eyelashes. He said I thought your eyes looked a bit red. I said, ah, that’s a plane crash, I said don’t start something. Oh, he said, I’m very sorry. I said yes, you want to approach more pleasantly then, you did. Of course you see the petrol coming burnt holes in my tunic, petrol all round me face, eyelashes gone, eyebrows, all I had got was a bit of hair — look at that.

We went to a plane crash at Wellesbourne, it was a very cold day, so cold that the foam we were using to extinguish the fire froze on the aircraft and on the axes we were using. Anyway we got the rear gunner out alive and he was taken to hospital.
I was interested to know how he got on and visited him in the hospital. He was a very friendly chap and I went to see him most days; there was only one rule enforced, and that was that he was not allowed to look in a mirror because of the horrible burns he had sustained. Then one day after his family had returned to Canada I went to visit and a nurse said I wasn’t to go into the ward, but the sister wanted to see me. She told me that the rescued man had seen himself in a mirror and promptly committed suicide.�

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