Evacuated from Westcliff

Evacuated from Westcliff (Extracts)
by Brian Mendes

When World War II was declared I was twenty-five days short of my eighth birthday, and living with my parents in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex. Home was flat B-1 in Argyll House, a modern apartment block overlooking the sea-front promenade. Like our family, most of the occupants were original tenants as Argyll House was a new building, and for it's time considered to be very modern with it's central heating, tiled bathrooms and rooftop games room. Preparations for wartime conditions were soon taking place.

One of the ground floor flats, empty at that time, was designated as an air-raid shelter, and tenants under the guidance of the caretaker were soon filling sandbags to protect the outside windows. Government issue sandbags were in short supply, and one of the tenants who ran a wholesale potato business in London, obtained a quantity of potato bags from his contacts in Lincolnshire and these were filled and piled alongside the regular sandbags. I was attending a small preparatory day school, with the prestigious name of Hadden Court College, which was in Valkyrie Road.

Click to enlarge

Apart from carrying gas masks, which had been issued the year before during the Munich crisis, I can recall very little change in routine during the first part of the so-called phoney war. No doubt we had practice drills to prepare us for evacuating the building and making an orderly exit to the Anderson air raid shelter which had been erected in the rear.

As the war situation deteriorated in north-west Europe, the school's headmaster and owner, Mr. Metcalf, with the help of some concerned parents, notably the Davis' who were estate agents, sought and found a suitable property inland away from the Essex coast, which was soon to be declared a restricted zone. The property, Clave Hall (pictured left), which was to be the new home for the school was located in the village of Manuden, not far from Bishop's Stortford. It was owned by a London stockbroker who was serving in the Army, and was prepared to rent the premises for the duration of the war.

I do not remember much about the day we were evacuated except that we travelled in one or possibly two chartered buses, and that we arrived in Manuden in the early afternoon on a bright and sunny day. One inconsequential event associated with that first day as an evacuee does stick in my mind - the smell of Palmolive soap! I remember being assigned a bed in the hastily arranged dormitory, and unpacking a bar of Palmolive soap that my mother had packed in my toilet bag. The clear image of the soft green paper wrapper and the familiar odour have become imprinted in my memory, and to this day remain associated with my first night away from home.

The spacious house stood amid extensive and well kept grounds and had at one time been the Rectory. There was a large garden tended by a gardener who came with the property, so to speak. He had lost an eye and we soon learned that it was the result of being kicked by a horse, the culprit in most stories retold by rural folk suffering any type of physical injury.
At one end of the property there were buildings which had served as stables and they formed the boundary around a cobblestone courtyard. In one of the converted stables there was a large kerosene-powered engine which drove a D.C. generator used to charge a room full of lead/acid batteries. This was the electricity supply for the house.

One of the senior boys assisted Mr. Metcalf in running this generating station once or twice a week, when the batteries needed recharging. The battery room was strictly out of bounds to us boys because of the danger from contact with acid or from breathing in the hydrogen fumes.

The gardens backed onto a small field bounded by hedges, and through it ran a public footpath leading to the village church. The field was used for organised sports events, but is better remembered as the battlefield for our make-believe war games. It was from this field that I first sighted a formation of enemy bombers returning from one of their daylight raids.
Soon after we had settled into the school routine and became accustomed to living away from home.
We found the village store and blacksmith shop which became regular stops on our compulsory walks.

Manuden Church

Not far from the smithy there was a dairy farm and there in the milking shed, standing back at a safe distance we found out, like so many other evacuees, where milk came from.

A bus service ran from Manuden to Bishop's Stortford, and we were permitted to go there on weekends. I was in Stortford that I saw my first adult motion picture show (I had seen Snow White, but since then had not been inside a cinema). Memory is strange, for I can remember quite clearly titles and scenes from films seen then, and yet can barely recall more significant events from the more recent past. We saw Convoy - a film about the defence of the north Atlantic shipping lanes, and also a cavalcade type film called This England starring John Clements in which he played roles in periods of history spanning from Saxon times right up to the modern era.

The plots of two "B" pictures still linger in my memory. One was about strange deaths of patients in a hospital, and the other was about a logging company threatened by unscrupulous competitors who erected temporary road barriers in the path of their trucks as they rounded a dangerous curve causing their drivers to swerve and topple down the mountain side. Perhaps there is someone with a mindful of movie trivia who could identify these two pictures. On the other hand, the scenes I remember could have come from one of several Hollywood pictures where variations of the same basic storyline was reworked time and again.

Parents made visits to see their sons on weekends, making the journey by train and bus, or by car for those still able to obtain petrol coupons. My parents had to journey from Richmond, Surrey, where they had moved soon after my brother and I had been evacuated from Westcliff-on-Sea. How this move to Richmond came about is interesting to retell. Sometime in the summer of 1940, I believe, the authorities went around door to door explaining to the occupants the facts pertaining to living in a restricted area. One of these was claimed to be that children could not return to their parents homes for the school holidays. This piece of information, presented as fact, was so effective in emptying properties close to the sea front, that when it came time to establish the shore training base, H.M.S. Westcliff, there were not too many occupied properties to be requisitioned in the block bounded by Seaforth Road, Crowstone Avenue and Station Road, the area familiar to so many wartime naval personnel.

Faced with the prospect of finding holiday accommodation for my brother and me, my parents moved out and rented a flat in Richmond, Surrey. I suppose at the time, being located on the very outer limits of the London area, it appeared to be a place reasonably safe from aerial attack. Later experiences proved this to be incorrect, and in fact Richmond was subjected to far worse bombing than Westcliff, where shrapnel from A.A. shells did more damage than enemy bombs. My brother always claimed that Richmond was my mother's choice, simply to be near her hairdresser, Kristina Keeling, who had relocated her business in Twickenham, a town across the river.

The blitz led to my parents seeking a place where they and my grandparents could stay and have a safe night’s sleep when not required for fire watching duties.

With my Mother and Brother at Hazel End

With this in mind while travelling in the car to visit me at Manuden, my father on an impulse turned into the driveway of a farmhouse which was next to a picture postcard duck pond. After talking to the occupants he returned to the car and announced that he had found a safe haven from the bombing. My parents and grandparents subsequently spent several periods in the autumn of 1940 through to the summer of 1941 at the farm managed by Alf and Hilda Gillman. This arrangement permitted me to spend Sundays with them and my family enjoying excellent farm meals and to find out, without realising it at the time, the true joy of living in the country. I have maintained contact to this day with the Gillmans of "Hazel End" and treasure the memories of the time when they opened their home to us.

In the summer of 1941 Mr. Metcalf found it impossible to run the school with the help of his ageing parents and a diminishing staff. It was through one of his staff that my parents found a place for me at Dunstable, a direct grant grammar school which had facilities for boarders. I lived in residence and studied from September 1941 through to June 1949. Apart from the presence of U.S. servicemen who used the gym for basketball practice, wartime shortages, the blackout, and rationing, my wartime schooling was probably not much different from that experienced by previous Dunstable school-boys.

Back