AIR RAID SIREN WARNED BRIGG FOR FIRST TIME AFTER WAR BROKE OUT

Cliff Turner, now 91 and living in New Zealand, continues his memories of growing up in Brigg

It was while I was swimming at Castlethorpe Bridge that my mother came along the tow path to fetch me home because the Germans had invaded Poland. Perhaps she thought Brigg would be singled out for immediate aerial attack. 
We knew of course that war was imminent; I think it was in March 1939 (but it may have been September 1938) that every man, woman and child in Britain was given a gas-mask and I remember going to Glebe Road school to get mine. When school broke up for the summer holidays in July 1939 Headmaster Daughton told the assembled boys that he believed in "the power of prayer" and asked us all to pray for peace. On Sunday September 3rd at 11.00 a.m. we gathered round the radio to hear Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain tell us that we were at war with Germany. Our neighbours Horace West and his sister Mary came to listen as their radio needed a new battery and the sight of their anxious faces is one of my most enduring memories.
In the early hours of Monday 4 September the air raid warning siren sounded; we got out of bed and dressed and went downstairs. Mother's reaction was to make a cup of tea; I cannot recall how long it was before the "All clear" siren sounded and we all went back to bed. It was this warning that caused Great Grandma Richardson to go downstairs and die in her chair. It later transpired that the warning was a false alarm; in fact it was several months before bombing started in earnest although a few bombs were dropped near the Forth Bridge in Scotland and at the naval base, Scapa Flow, in the Orkney Islands north of Scotland. 
Later mother took a more optimistic view when the siren sounded, reasoning that the chance of a bomb falling near her was very remote and so she stayed in bed.
Similarly, not much fighting occurred in France where the British Expeditionary Force was sent soon after the war started. Conscription of young men had started in about March 1939, so there were few trained conscripts and the men that went to France were mainly regular soldiers and reservists. Reservists were men who had served as regulars in the armed forces and had then had accepted a retaining fee to stay on as a reserve. Reservists were mobilised a day or two before the war broke out.
The air force carried out raids over Germany early in the war, but instead of dropping bombs they dropped leaflets urging the German populace to turn against their Nazi masters. The period from September 1939 to 1940 became known as the "phoney war" because so little happened in Britain, Germany or France.
By contrast, the war at sea started almost from Day One. The Athenia, a ship carrying lots of children to what their well-to-do parents thought would be safety in America, was torpedoed with considerable loss of life. A German submarine managed to get through the defences at Scapa Flow and sink the battleship Resolution, and in November came the cheering news that the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee had been destroyed off Montevideo in Uruguay by the cruisers Exeter, Ajax and Achilles. The Achilles was a ship of the New Zealand navy. The Graf Spee had already sunk many merchant ships and the crew taken prisoner were put into a ship called the Altmark. I cannot recall how this ship came to be in a Norwegian fiord, but while it was there it was boarded by men from HMS Cossack and the prisoners were taken back to England.
This story seems to be degenerating into a History of World War II. Winston Churchill covered that in about 5 volumes so I will not compete against him but get back to the original purpose of this magnum opus.
Mention of the Wests reminds me that I have not chronicled our move from 5 Princes Street to 4 Redcombe Lane. This took place, I think, in 1938. I know we were still in Princes Street when the Glebe Road headmaster came round in about mid-1937 to tell us brother Ken had passed the scholarship exam for the Grammar School and that we had been there quite a time when the war came. I do not know why we moved, but perhaps the new house was marginally better than the old. It had a separate kitchen and there were three bedrooms on the first floor. At Princes Street we kids had to climb two flights of stairs to our attic bedroom. The front door did not open directly on to the street; there was a fenced area about the size of two table tops between the house and the pavement. One advantage was that it was much nearer to school. An old man had lived there alone for several years and the house was filthy. The owner, Mr Clark, gave my parents two rent free weeks in recognition of the amount of work they put in to clean the place up.
Unlike Princes Street, which did not have a square centimetre of soil, we had a back garden and a pigsty. The copper for washing clothes was not in the back yard but in the kitchen which meant that on wash days the house was filled with steam. Toilet facilities were as primitive as those in Princes Street. The house was very dark; the window in the living room faced north and kitchen window looked to the west. Any Southern Hemisphere readers are reminded that in England it is the north side of a house which never gets any sun. The house was at the west end of a block of four; that was why we had no windows facing east to the morning sun.

Further memories from Cliff to come on Brigg Blog