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Shepway Reminiscence Roadshow Tape Extracts

Tue July 8th Lydd Library 2.30- 3.30 PM

Participating:
Len Prebble
Doris Couchman
Alice Boxall
Liz Francis
Sheila Gaunt
Rob Illingworth

Added to the site with the permission of participants by Rob Illingworth of the Folkestone Heritage Team
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Evacuation from Lydd

LP: We were all sent away. Mother and us two [Len and Doris] and quite a few from Lydd went down. We went to Weston Supermare in 1940. It was August when we went. We lived at Denge marsh and we didn’t go with the school… And when August come there was an invasion scare on and we had to get out of Lydd. They just turned us out. So we went down to Weston Super Mare but we weren’t there long. As soon as the year came on when there was no chance of an invasion, we came back.
DC: It was worse down there! We used to stand at the front at Weston Super Mare and watched them bombing Cardiff and Bristol and Swansea.
LP: Filton they bombed, didn’t they? That was 1942. Then we had to come to Lydd to live…

Doodlebugs

DC: I remember the first one that came over this way. We were on the Camber Rd. There was a flat piece of shingle and grass growing and we used to have a dance there sometimes. We would take the men from the camp. And all the searchlight people had a dance there. And this thing came over- went like that [whoosh!]Everybody scattered. That’s the first one I remember coming over.
LP: [When they used the Bofors guns against them] they just bounced off. They had 4.5 guns in the field all around and they wouldn’t hit hardly anything. After, they dumped all those guns and brought 3.7 radar operated. ATS girls on the radars and they couldn’t hardly miss… The planes were over the sea. And then all around here was one mass of guns and then the planes took over between the guns and the barrage balloons.
DP: You always knew when one was coming because the sheep and cows all started to run. Before ever you heard any sound. When the animals started to run you knew there was one about.
AB: Peter Fender had a bugle which was his uncle’s that he’d had in the first world war. When they saw one coming over, he and his brother used to blow the bugles. They were giving out the early warning.
LF: I was in Buckinghamshire. The doodlebugs were really frightening. You heard this awful noise and then it suddenly stopped and you dived for cover.

ATS Girls

DC: And there was a time after we got back to camp [in the N.A.A.F.I. van] and there was a message to say that we had to load up again and go on the New Romney Rd and it was because the… army were coming in with their guns and they were mainly A.T.S. and they just grew like mushrooms. Further on from here, where the golf club is… all these guns kept arriving. We were there till very late that night and we had to go there every day. There was such a shortage of water that the girls used to say- Don’t wash the cups up. Let us have a bit of water to wash with. So we used to take our sinkful of water but we never could do any washing up ‘cos they used to want a cup of water to have a wash and clean their teeth. We used to bring them up into Lydd to have a bath.
LP: They used to come up where the fire station is now. It’s the museum now, innit? And they used to turn the water hydrant on for the girls to have a wash.
DC: There were hundreds and hundreds of these girls.
LP: They dug slit trenches alongside the guns, put a tent over and that’s where they lived.
DC: They were marvellous those A.T.S. girls
LP: They didn’t hardly miss, did they? That’s why there’s so many you can see on that map you showed us [A map of doodlebugs shot down around Romney Marsh and its coastline]

Doris captures an enemy pilot!

DC: One Sunday morning [the enemy plane] came down. I suppose it was just wide of where the cricket club is, down Dennes Lane. And of course we went out and got the pilot and brought him back to camp and got in terrible trouble over that. We shouldn’t have ever touched him. Supposed to have left him there and gone and reported it, but we didn’t.

The Policeman and the Sea Mine

LP: Sea mine came up near to coastguard cottages. Put a policeman down there to guard it. In the middle of the night when the tide come up the sea hit the mine and put it in action again and it blew up. That’s what wrecked a lot of that [looking at photo of coastguard cottages] And my father went biking down there. We lived a few hundred yards away. And the old copper when he got him says. “It’s gone off!!!” [Laughs]
“Gone off” he says.
RI: Was he in shock?
LP: No No. Didn’t get in shock in those days. We didn’t have counselling nor nothing like that. You got on with things. You had to, didn’t you?

The Greatstone Conundrum

AB: Conundrum [a massive component of the Pipeline Under the Ocean project] broke loose right outside of our place in Greatstone. At the very end of the war we came down. 1946 we came. We had the barricades right down the coast and there was this jolly great “cotton reel” in the middle of the beach and it was there for years and years. It was when Attlee was in power and somebody put great big letters on it: I’M STUCK LIKE ATTLEE!

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