Norwich in the Second World War E-Book

Neil R Storey

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 219

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Norwich in the Second World War is the story of the city and its people, both civilian and military, from the construction of the first air raid shelters in 1938 through to VE Day in 1945 and the return of Far Eastern prisoners of war in 1946. Featuring first-hand accounts of what happened when enemy bombers raided the city, notably during the notorious Baedeker Blitz of 1942, rare photographs and documents make this book a must for anyone who knows and loves the city of Norwich.

Leseprobe

This book is dedicated to Ray Cossey and to all who survived,to all who helped those in need and all who lost their lives inthe City of Norwich during the Second World War.

Frontispiece: and back cover left Decontamination squad member wearing an anti-gas suit with ‘Danger Gas’ sign, Norwich, 1939.

Back cover middle: Photograph of Westwick Street taken by George Swain during the Baedeker Blitz on 27 April 1942.

Back cover right: Safeguard, The Norwich Citizen’s Wartime Handbook published in May 1940.

First published 2022

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Neil R. Storey, 2022

The right of Neil R. Storey to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9979 3

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Introduction

1     Norwich in the 1930s

2     The Road to War

3     City Soldiers

4     The Day War Broke Out

5     The City at War 1939–41

6     The Baedeker Blitz 1942

7     The City Carries On 1943–44

8     Victory

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

The deep rhythmic note of the powerful engines was ominous enough and after a short period of preparation the sound was interrupted by another, the mechanical scream of heavy missiles hurtling down upon our streets and roofs, our yards and gardens. This was followed by shattering explosions, usually in series, as the ‘stick’ of bombs took effect. These were the high explosives of half and a quarter ton dimensions. At the same time a rain of silver fire indicated the course of the incendiaries and in a short space of time, the orange glow of great fires was visible for long distances across the quiet fields outside the city.

In the centre of the town, and far towards the outskirts, one difficulty was overcome by the very intensity of the calamity. We had been trained to move and drive vehicles with the very minimum of light … the baleful glow of flares and blazing buildings eased the hurried journey of police and Civil Defence Workers, medical and other transport … Through it all, by that sinister light, deafened by noise and blinded by clouds of smoke and dust, Norwich sped to its post of duties.

R.H. Mottram, Assault Upon Norwich (1945)

Norwich City firemen in action, c.1940.

So began Ralph Mottram, our city’s literary doyen, in his powerful account of the infamous Baedeker Blitz air raids on Norwich in April 1942.

The city had suffered its first air raid on 9 July 1940, almost two months before a single bomb fell on London. These early raids were often conducted by a lone bomber but the damage caused to factories and homes and the resulting casualties were a sharp awakening for city residents to the nature of modern war; a new warfare where towns, cities and civilians would be subjected to aerial attack by both bombs and machine gunning conducted by aircraft based many miles away in occupied Europe.

Norwich suffered air raids in 1940 and 1941 but, having failed to destroy the Royal Air Force and failing to bring Britain to its knees with the Blitz attacks on London, major arms towns and ports, a new strategy aimed at breaking British morale by bombing the historic cities of Britain was adopted by German military strategists in 1942. Using the popular Baedeker’s Guide to Great Britain to identify targets, a series of raids were planned on historic British provincial cities both as reprisal for damage inflicted on historic cities in Germany by the RAF and in an attempt to damage morale.

Although there were some near misses, and thanks in no small part to the prompt actions of firefighters and local fire guard parties, these raids failed to destroy the buildings that define the Norwich skyline such as the cathedral, the castle and City Hall. There was, however, extensive damage inflicted on numerous churches, historic buildings, businesses and residential areas. Hundreds lost their lives, many more were injured, and thousands had their homes destroyed or damaged. The face of Norwich was changed forever.

The most iconic and enduring images of the city during and after the air raids were captured by Norwich professional photographer George Swain; indeed, he photographed the people and events of Norwich for fifty-five years. During the air raids on Norwich and in the days afterwards, he cycled to the scenes of devastation carrying his Zeiss Super Ikonta pocket camera to record the damage and events of those dramatic times. Years later, George would reflect on those days being the most exciting period of his life but they were scary at times, too. On one occasion he even returned to find he had been so close to the fires of a blitzed area that his camera had been scorched by the intense heat.

The photographs he took of the bomb-damaged city had to be submitted to the Ministry of Information for approval before being released to the press. Swain’s book, Norwich Under Fire: A Camera Record, first published in 1945, contained twenty-five powerful images of the blitzed city but many of his other photographs would not be seen by the general public until decades after the war.

The first book to be published on the city in wartime was by Edward Charles ‘E.C.’ Le Grice, who described himself as ‘a spare-time photographer for the National Building Record’. Le Grice’s book, Norwich: The Ordeal of 1942, containing his evocative photographs from areas of devastation across the city, was published shortly after the Baedeker Raids in 1942 and went into a second edition in 1943.

Swain’s Norwich Under Fire followed in 1945, as did Assault Upon Norwich, which was the first official account of the air raids on the city. It contained a foreword by Regional Commissioner Will Spens and an account of the Civil Defence Organisation by Town Clerk and ARP Controller Bernard D. Storey. The main text recounting events in the city was eloquently written by Ralph Hale Mottram, who had received national acclaim for his Spanish Farm trilogy of novels based on his experiences as a young officer on the Western Front during the First World War.

There are also the undeservedly lesser known The Changing Face of Norwich by A.P. ‘Phil’ Cooper and Arnold Kent, and Andrew Stephenson’s Norwich Inheritance, both published in 1948, which provided timely reminders of what was left of the old city as it embarked on its reconstruction after the war.

There were also press agency photographers and established professional and commercial photographers in the city such as Coe’s, Neale and Baldry who were employed by the likes of the Ministry of Information, Ministry of Works, the police and fire service to photograph incidents and damage caused during air raids for official records. Although these photographs are often good quality and show an artistic eye, they were not originally intended for publication but they continue to come to light from a variety of sources.

There are also instances of American servicemen, particularly those involved as press and publicity officers, who had access to good cameras and film so, in addition to images of life on base and the activities of their bomb groups, there are occasional photographs of places they visited and frequented, too. An exciting discovery I made a few years back was a batch of negatives in the United States that contain high-quality animated scenes of well-known Norwich streets in 1944 that were taken by a USAAF press officer based at Horsham St Faith. These fascinating images are published for the first time in this book.

Wartime security saw restrictions imposed on the use of cameras by private individuals, and photographic film for private use was often in short supply. Small batches and occasional single images still come to light from such sources, however – George Plunkett and Clifford Temple are particularly notable for doing their best to carry on their hobbies of documenting the city in photographs as they had done before and would do for years after the war. Both of these gentlemen shared their knowledge and memories in some excellent books published in the 1980s and ’90s.

In more recent years the sharing of the story and images of wartime Norwich has evolved yet again. Plunkett’s son, Jonathan, has created a superb website of his father’s photographs and research, and Nick Stone has created truly remarkable ‘Blitz Ghost’ images where he skilfully superimposes images of our bomb-damaged city streets in the Second World War over modern photographs of the locations today. Nick has also painstakingly colourised photographs of the blitzed city that add a new and engaging dimension to the images.

The documentary records of air raids on Norwich exist in a number of forms. There were official report forms and records of the fire service, police and the various wartime organisations that came under the aegis of the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) organisation (later known as Civil Defence (CD)), such as the air raid wardens, Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) and the Joint War Organisation of British Red Cross Society and Order of St John. We are fortunate that many of the original ARP/CD reports, or the duplicate copies of them, do survive and can be accessed at the Norfolk Record Office. Air raid damage reports for Civil Defence Region 4 including Norwich have also been deposited in The National Archives. The emergency services and voluntary organisations engaged in war work also compiled their own reports containing statistics and overviews of their wartime activities that have been made available to the author over his years of research and have proved invaluable in the compilation of this new volume on the city during the Second World War.

Beyond the factual reports, the human stories of wartime life, especially during the air raids on Norwich, are brought vividly to life through the personal memoirs, letters, diaries and memories of those who were actually there. When I began to research, document and record Norwich and Norfolk in the Second World War back in the 1980s there were still plenty of people around with memories and stories to tell and my appeals in local newspapers or via Radio Norfolk always received a great response. Be it trying to research a particular incident or name those who had performed a brave deed but had not been named in the press at the time due to reporting restrictions, the readers and listeners never failed to help.

Sadly, as time passes many of those who had such a remarkable fund of knowledge and memories have now passed away. I was not unique in my research and over the decades it has also been my pleasure know and count as friends many of those who were also writing books and articles or creating exhibitions and projects charting aspects of the city at war. Among them are George Swain’s daughter, Judy Ball, and Joan Banger, whose superb book Norwich at War brought the story of the city in wartime to a new generation in 1974 and endures through reprinted and enlarged editions to this day as the key text for anyone researching the subject.

Many of the stories and photographs I collected in the 1980s and ’90s were shared in my books published at that time but, as ever, after each book was published it would generate more correspondence and more new material would come to light, prompting my exclamation, ‘If I only had it in time for the book!’ The years rolled on and through research, purchases at collectors fairs, online auctions and kind folks still donating photographs and material to me at talks and exhibitions, more and more new material began to accumulate. Over recent years online newspapers and official documents that have been released into the public domain at both the National Archives and in local record offices provide new insights into our local wartime history.

I am particularly grateful for two major donations. First came the diaries, wartime memoirs and papers of former city librarian, the late Norman Wiltshire. In 1942 he was serving in the Royal Norfolk Regiment, based at their depot in Britannia Barracks. Among his duties at that time was librarian and drawing maps. It was in the latter capacity that Norman created a hand-drawn map of Norwich that not only shows the bomb damage across the city but names the factories, works, pubs, breweries, schools, wartime centres and other details not usually recorded on printed maps of the time. It is a unique record of the City of Norwich in wartime.

Rampant Horse Street decorated for the Silver Jubilee of King George V and Queen Mary, 1935.

I was also extremely fortunate to meet Ray Cossey at one of my talks. We clearly shared a great passion for our local wartime history and I was deeply honoured when he donated his wonderful collection of photographs and memorabilia to my care. This included a large folder of letters Ray had kept from Radio Norfolk listeners who responded to his appeal for stories for his two-part Norfolk at War documentary that aired on BBC Radio Norfolk in 1989. This wonderful, previously unpublished material richly deserves to be shared and, mindful that 2022 will be the eightieth anniversary of the Baedeker Blitz on Norwich, have been the driving forces for the creation of this book.

Norwich in the Second World War does not pretend to be encyclopedic but I hope it will be a useful point of reference for future generations to see what happened here and provide a timely reminder of the sacrifice of Norwich people and what they endured during the Second World War.

Neil R. StoreyNorwich2022

1

NORWICH IN THE 1930S

In the 1939 the City of Norwich had a population of approximately 126,000 citizens, many of them housed in long rows of terraced houses that had spread out beyond the ancient walls of Norwich during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Often built more for the benefit of the property speculators than for quality, most of the properties had water on tap but many folks still had no bathrooms and their lavatory was a short walk down the back yard. Swish and modern they may not have been, and many were prone to damp, but most folks took pride in their homes and raised good, honest families. Kids played together in the back alleys and neighbours talked to each other. Like any city, there were those who suffered hard times, especially before the days of the welfare state, but communities were strong and people did help one another to get by because, who knew? It could be them needing the help and support next.

Most people who lived in the city either walked or bicycled to work and particular areas saw concentrations of people who worked in major industries local to them. Carrow had Reckitt & Colman’s Mustard and Starch works, the King Street area and Pockthorpe had its breweries and public houses and along the river were timber yards like Jewson’s, Read’s Flour Mills and Boulton & Paul manufacturers. There were also engineering firms including Laurence Scott & Electromotors on Hardy Road and Barnard’s off Salhouse Road on Mousehold. Harmer’s, the clothing manufacturers, had a very fine factory on St Andrew’s and many of those who lived in the terraced streets off Chapel Field Road to the south of the city were employed in Caley’s Chocolate Factory.

The biggest employer in the city, by far, was the boot and shoe industry. Thousands of men and women were employed in huge factories such as Bally & Haldenstein and Sexton, Son & Everard. Some made shoes that became household names such as Howlett & White’s ‘Norvic’ shoes and James Southall & Co.’s ‘Start-Rite’ shoes for children. In 1931, 10,800 Norwich people were employed in boot and shoe manufacture in twenty-six firms. By 1935, Norwich was producing 6 million pairs of shoes a year, some 16 per cent of the total British output.

The new Norwich City Hall and Market Place, 1938.

Advert for Norwich’s famous Norvic brand shoes, 1940.

The city also had three railway stations, a goods yard, a new bus station, gas, electricity and water works, laundries, joineries, coachworks and the General Post Office (GPO), which not only dealt with the post but also ran telephone lines and exchanges. In the centre of Norwich was the Cattle Market that spread across 8½ acres from the Castle Ditches, across the Cattle Market in front of the castle and around to beside Agricultural Hall Plain. In the 1930s, it was one of the largest cattle markets in the country with six firms of auctioneers and thirty-three private dealers selling 212,000 head of livestock and 100,000 head of fowl and turkey every year with an annual turnover of £1.25 million.

There was a provision market and Corn Exchange in the city centre, department stores such as Chamberlin’s, Curls, Bunting’s, Jarrold’s and Bonds and many other smaller businesses and shops. There were also offices in the city, notably the Norwich Union Fire and Life offices that provided the city with its largest white collar employer.

The Corporation of Norwich strived hard to provide employment for those who found themselves out of work in the 1920s and ’30s by undertaking numerous public works projects such as the clearance of tenements, courtyards and slums with their shared outside taps and toilets and the creation of new, good-quality council housing with front and back gardens on Angel Road and garden estates at Earlham, Mile Cross Lakenham and Mousehold that were described as ‘ideal for the working man and his family – complete with electric light and bathroom at inclusive rental and rates of 9/2d per week’. By June 1938 Norwich City Council had demolished 2,280 homes, displacing 7,483 people, and had built 2,346 new homes to more than replace the lost properties. This was in the days when shops in the city would compete for business with such offers as completely furnishing four rooms in a house including pictures for the walls for £40. One enterprising store even offered to include a marriage reception for an extra £20.

There was also a rolling programme of improvement works carried out on city roads and bridges. Under the direction of the Norwich Parks Superintendent, Captain Arnold Sandys-Winsch, numerous beautifully laid out parks and gardens such as Eaton Park, Earlham Park and Waterloo Park were created for city residents to take the air, play sports, sail model yachts in the boating ponds, listen to concerts from the bandstands and enjoy themselves. These projects were well regarded and superbly executed, and in the 1920s and ’30s the Prince of Wales (later the Duke of Windsor) came to Norwich on no fewer than eleven separate occasions to open public works projects.

King George VI and Queen Elizabeth opening Norwich City Hall, Saturday, 29 October 1938.

Norwich City Fire Brigade demonstrating a rescue by fire engine turntable ladder at the Royal Hotel, on Agricultural Hall Plain, for an Auxiliary Fire Service recruiting event, 1939.

By the late 1930s a remarkably harmonious blend of medieval city and modern development had been achieved in and around the fine city of Norwich. Within its walls there really was a church for every week of the year and a pub for every day, not to mention a host of cafes, restaurants, tea rooms and places of entertainment such as the Theatre Royal, Maddermarket and Hippodrome for live theatrical performances. There were no fewer than sixteen cinemas, such as the Regent, Haymarket, Carlton, Odeon, Theatre de Luxe, Ritz, Thatched Theatre and the Mayfair, some of which could seat houses of over 1,000. There were also swimming baths and dance halls, every one of them with their own distinctive features, quirkiness and staff that would leave memories with those who regularly visited them for the rest of their lives.

Those who lived through the 1930s had celebrated Empire Days and Lord Mayor’s Processions every year and saw the city streets decked out for King George V’s Jubilee in 1935 and the Coronation of King George VI in 1937. However, when the new Norwich City Hall, the centrepiece of the redevelopment of the city centre, was opened by Their Majesties King George VI and Queen Elizabeth on 29 October 1939, it took place in front of an unprecedented number of onlookers who thronged the Market Place. Sadly, the storm clouds of war were gathering over Europe, and during the next few years the face of the city of Norwich and the lives of its people would be changed forever.

2

THE ROAD TO WAR

After the air raids suffered during the First World War, Britain was not prepared to let her air defences lapse and their reconstruction was begun in the London area in the 1920s. As the Nazis rose to power and concerns over the expansion of the German Air Force were raised, the Air Defence Intelligence System was extended to include the counties of Dorset, Norfolk and Suffolk in October 1933.

The inaugural meeting for the formation and recruitment of the Norfolk Observer Corps (OC) was held at the Norwich Lads’ Club early in 1934 but the planned recruitment talk was found to be unnecessary because Norwich City Chief Constable John Henry Dain had already spoken to a number of likely local contacts and had mustered all the volunteers initially required for the new OC unit entirely from the offices of Norwich Union. By the end of November 1934, there were thirty-four OC posts across the county and a Central Operations Room under the Norwich Telephone Exchange at the corner of Dove Street and Guildhall Hill ready to communicate the path of enemy aircraft to the appropriate authorities to sound an air raid warning. The area to be known as 16 Group (Southern Area) became operational on 1 March 1935, with S.C. ‘Nobby’ Spalding as the first Group Controller.

In September 1935 Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin issued a circular entitled Air Raid Precautions (ARP) that invited local authorities to set up working committees and undertake measures such as the construction of public shelters to protect the population. Norwich City Town Clerk Bernard D. Storey, the man who would become the city’s ARP Controller, recalled:

Over the earliest preparations for defence against air attacks hangs a kind of unreality … During the whole of the preliminary stages, roughly from July 1935 to the Munich Crisis, local authorities might have been forgiven if they had not taken too seriously the preparation of a scheme, since Whitehall itself added this saving clause to its instructions: ‘These measures in no way imply a risk of war in the near future and they are wholly precautionary.’

The vulnerable situation of Norwich was recognised from early on and the City Council appointed an ARP Committee in March 1936. It held occasional meetings over the next two years, during which it devised an ARP scheme that, Storey pointed out, was ‘to meet contingencies that might never arise and the nature and weight of which nobody could forecast with certainty’.

The bombing of Guernica by the German Air Force during the Spanish Civil War in April 1937 horrified the world and gave new impetus to the development of Britain’s air raid precautions. Britain felt vulnerable; our mass population areas were centred on industrial areas, and predictions by British military strategists led to warnings of ‘knock-out blows’ being delivered to our cities within days of the outbreak of war. Estimates were that if bombing continued over sixty days as many as 600,000 people would be killed and 1.2 million injured, with mass panic ensuing.

Another estimate propounded that 100,000 tonnes of bombs would be dropped on London alone in the first fourteen days. This figure was quite an exaggeration, and exceeded the entire quantity of explosives dropped on London during the entire war, but in the years 1938–39 the threat was taken seriously and thousands of compressed cardboard coffins for air raid casualties were supplied to City and County Council Casualty Clearing Services.

As the threat posed by Hitler and the Nazis cast its shadow over Europe, more plans were instigated to instruct the British public on what they should do in the event of a war emergency, especially the use of gas masks. Extant organisations such as the St John Ambulance, Red Cross, Boy Scouts, Girl Guides and the Women’s Institute staged ARP courses and many members trained as instructors in ther own right. Early in 1938 Stella Isaacs, the Dowager Marchioness of Reading, was asked by the government to form the WVS, which was to act as a support unit for the ARP. By May 1938 its objective was:

the enrolment of women for Air Raid Precaution Services of Local Authorities, to help to bring home to every household what air attack may mean, and to make known to every household in the country what it can do to protect itself and the community.

Handbill advertising one of the first public meetings about air raid precautions, organised by Drayton Women’s Institute, April 1938.

A lecture on personal protection against poison gas attack, held after hours for the staff of Green’s on the Haymarket, 1939.

Norfolk was not backwards in coming forwards to start WVS branches either, and they were soon engaging in local activities.