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Title INTERVIEW WITH LIONEL HOWARD Description
Hemel was very different during the war years.
Hemel was more of a rural farming place than anything. Most of the places round here were farm yards – Belswains Lane, the top of Bury Hill, Wood Lane End – they were all farms rather than industry and houses. I think that is the biggest change. And of course there were a lot of old buildings along Bury Road and Cotterells. There was one house that was quite comical. The footing had subsided because it was near the river and there was a lot of surface water and two houses had collapsed together and used to lean against each other.
Measures were taken to protect the population from air raids.
The war affected us in lots of ways. Of course we had the blackout. What my granddad did was he made some wooden frames and covered them with black cloth and put them in the windows at night. And of course we used to tape the windows to stop the blast damage. Obviously, it was dark walking about at night as there were no lights at all. Even the buses had headlights with a sort of grill on the front so there was just a tiny light pointing downwards. You had to have good eyesight in them days!
I think the first thing I remember about the beginning of the war was the gas masks. They were in a little cardboard box with a string that went round your neck. When we were at school they were forever having practices. You had to hook them under your chin and then stretch them over your head. A great game, being boys, was if you breathed in deeply and breathed out quickly the air used to go out of the sides and made a weird noise. When we were doing the practices all you could hear was the noises coming out of them. They made the bottom of your chin sore and they smelled of rubber. If you were getting hot and sweating all the glass used to mist up and you wasn’t supposed to take them off and wipe the inside.
The main sirens were on top of the water works down Bath Street where the Civic Centre is now. I lived in Bury Hill so could hear them going quite loudly. I think they had ones in other parts of the town. They had them on a tripod and turned the handle which made the noise. Everybody was supposed to go to the shelters but nothing much happened at the beginning of the war as it was mainly to London that they (the bombers) were coming. After a few months people just carried on doing what they were doing apart from if you were at school when you had to go into the shelters. >br>
I was at Bury Road School or Bury Mill End as it was called then and they had the shelters in part of the playground that backed onto the houses in Ashley Hill. They were dark and cold and we used to use them for playing more than actually as shelters. It was later in the war that we seemed to spend more time in the shelters when I was at Crabtree Lane (Corner Hall School). We did some of our lessons out there. The favourite one was you would either have to recite your times tables or do a spelling bee when the master would call your name and a word and you’d have to spell it. There was virtually total darkness down there. There was some light from paraffin lamps or candles but not much. Anyway, he would call out your name and he would know who was talking so you had to behave yourself!
My father decided at the beginning of the war he would build an air raid shelter in the garden and him and his brother dug a massive great hole. He built a wooden place inside and the intention was to cover it back over with soil but it used to flood so it was just a waste of time and they had to fill it all in again.
Bombs were dropped on Hemel Hempstead
Bombs were dropped on Hemel. There was one in Belswains Lane where quite a few people lost their lives but the ones I remember mostly were dropped nearby. One was dropped in Ashley Road, about half way down. I don’t think anybody was killed but some were injured. On the same night another one was dropped on Bury Hill next to Lockers Cottage. The house was called The Orchard – it was a little way from the police station. The house was completely demolished. When we went there to see it afterwards the house was more or less completely in the bomb hole. I don’t think anyone was injured. The third one dropped in Gadebridge Park approximately where they have the underpass for the park and ride. The ground there is all shelved back and that is like it used to be for the bomb hole. I did hear there was another one dropped that same night on the Halsey Estate, just in the fields. They weren’t aiming at Hemel. After they (the Germans) had been in London the fighters would go up to intercept them and the bombers would off- load their bombs as quickly as they could so they could get more speed up and get away. Of course, Hemel was in just the right place for that.
When there was an air raid they said the safest place was under the stairs. We used to be bedded down there when there was an air raid and quite often stayed all night. The night they dropped the bombs we could hear them coming down. It was only a tiny pantry and we children squeezed in but not the adults. They seemed to think the children had to survive.
Towards the end of the war when they were sending the doodlebugs over you could see them even during the day. One day we were in the Churchill swimming pool when this doodlebug came over. Everyone watched it coming through the sky. You knew that as long as the engine was running you were safe. It was when the engine stopped everyone dived for cover. You used to see two or three coming down together with the flame coming out of the back.
My father was an ARP warden on call at night – he used to make sure all the lights were out and so on. When the bomb was dropped on Ashley Hill he went to have a look at it only to be told that one had dropped right opposite his home on Bury Hill. It cracked panes of glass in the house and brought down one of the bedroom ceilings.
Lionel’s family were affected by evacuation. <br>We were involved as far as evacuees were concerned. We had Mrs South at the very beginning of the war. She had two daughters one my age and one a bit younger. When there wasn’t a great deal of bombing at the beginning of the war they went back to London and we had Mr and Mrs Hodges who then bought a house in Sunny Hill Road. They stayed in Hemel after the war. The third lot we had were Mr and Mrs Gay and their son, Charlie. The husband was in the forces. She also had a sister who was in the WAAFs so when they were on leave together there was quite a house full. We already had my father, mother, sister and me and it was only a three bedroom house. The evacuees had the front of the house - one bedroom and one living room and we had the back with 2 bedrooms. My sister had a small bedroom to herself and I used to sleep on the settee. We had to move all our furniture as they had their own and the settee went into the bedroom. I didn’t resent it. It was just what we did. We were all in the same boat. Charlie was 2 years younger than me and we used to go to school together. It was like having a brother. They were also billeting soldiers in Hemel. They billeted one on us but my Dad came home and said, “This is ridiculous.” My sister had to share a room with me and that wasn’t right so the soldier got moved out again. My mother and Mrs Gay shared the kitchen so it was always, “I want to cook mine!”
The hot water was done by a gas geyser over the bath and that scaled up being in a hard water area and eventually bust. You couldn’t get a repair during the war so we had to heat water up in a copper downstairs and carry it up in buckets. As you were only allowed so much water it didn’t make much difference. My grandma used to say, “Clean inside and out.” They used to give you syrup of figs and a bath once a week.
American soldiers arrived in Hemel<br>
The American airmen from the base at Bovingdon used to come into town. There was trouble when the 8th Army, I think it was, came home on leave. The army chaps objected to the fact that the Americans were going out with their daughters and even some of their wives, I think. There were so many fights they used to ban the Americans from the town when they (the 8th Army) were on leave. The soldiers would give you chocolate and stuff and the girls would get silk stockings which you couldn’t normally get during the war. When the American got friendly with someone and they would invite them to tea they’d always bring tinned things we couldn’t get at the time. That was probably part of the reason they used to invite them – to get extra rations!
Rationing caused major problems for most families
Our rations were very lean. People used to make it up by growing their own stuff. My father had an allotment just above the Midland Station at Addeyfield and my Granddad had one opposite the cemetery where the new row of houses is now. When I was 12-13 on my way home from school I used to call in the allotment and do the heavy digging for him. We used to grow all our own vegetables. It made up most of our diet. My Dad kept rabbits and chickens. Rabbit was our basic diet. We had 30 or 40 of them and it was my job to clean them out! We used to also get some wild rabbits off the gamekeepers. The only trouble was when you came to eat them you’d suddenly be chewing on lead shot. My Mum used to cook rabbit in every possible way – bake it, boil it, “pie it,” “pudding it.” I suppose we were lucky because we were out in the country. When the harvest was on in the summer holidays we used to go out to the fields to help. When they were cutting the corn they used to cut it from the outside and when they got nearly to the middle everyone used to stand around and wait for the rabbits to come out.
Leisure activities were limited
The first weekend in May they opened the swimming pool. There was no heating or anything. The first three that got into the pool used to have free passes for the rest of the year – up to the end of September. If you got one you used to go every day. It didn’t matter what the weather was. It was warmer sometimes in the water than what it was on the side.
That was our only real facility though there were two picture houses (cinemas), the Princess Theatre and The Luxor. The Princess Theatre had a Mickey Mouse Saturday club. It was more or less opposite where the Midland Road is now. The Luxor had a better class of film usually. We used to see all the old Will Hay films, Laurel and Hardy, Old Mother Riley and those sorts of things. The Princess had a gas engine at the back to make electricity to run it. It was cluncking away at the back. Some times on a Saturday morning you’d get in with a jam jar because they were trying to save glass and needed jars to make jam. So they let you in free if you had a jam jar.
The buses were unusual!
My Dad was a bus driver during the war. I can remember that when you couldn’t get much fuel they used to have the old gas making machines on the back of the buses. They had a fire inside them – think of health and safety now! But they used to have this thing burning on the back of the bus and tow it along behind them. There was a tube linked to a sort of balloon on the roof which used to run the engine of the bus. One of the main routes was from Watford to Aylesbury and every now and again there was one down at Westbrook Hay. There used to be a pile of coal there. The bus would come along and stop and the conductor would get out and stoke the fire and then they’d go on to Tring and stoke it again. It was quite amazing how they got over the fact that that they didn’t have much fuel.
The war ended when I was 13 and I left school the following year and started a plumbers apprenticeship. I had worn short trousers at school and didn’t have a long pair when I started work. I got hassled so my mother bought me my first pair of long trousers.
No one seemed to be upset by the war. It happened and you had to get on with it. People moaned a bit but we kids used to enjoy it watching the aircraft come over and come back in the morning after night bombings.
Interview : Rory Tinker and Lynda Abbott
January 2012Keywords Blackout; gas masks; air raids; bombing raids; evacuation; rationing; cinema; Corner Hall School Collection Home Front Place Hemel Hempstead Year 1939 - 1945 Conflict World War Two File type html Record ID number 216 Can you add any more information to this resource?
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