Gryphon Gallery: A Personal Remembrance—With The Help of a NHS Student

I was born two years after the end of WWII. We lived in Sutton just south of London. Some of my indelible memories are of the stories my mother told me about her experiences during those awful times. The story of the house across the street that was bombed during a night raid, killing her close friend, only a matter of a few yards from where mum was living. While pregnant with my brother, how she would bus and sometimes have to walk 5 miles to her secretarial work in Wimbledon and if she heard the air raid sirens, having to run for shelter. Of her writing to my dad serving in Africa that he had a son, and he not receiving the news until three months later. Of putting my older brother in his pram in the backyard for some fresh air and then hearing a V-1 bomb, a “doodlebug’, making its terrifying noise as it passed over. If it went silent it would be making its way down to earth and indiscriminate destruction and mum would rush out back, grab my brother and run into the concrete air raid shelter at the end of the garden. I also have the last ration book which Mum had kept for years as a memento of the very limited food choices she had to make every month. Shortly after I was born, we moved to Southampton. 

The reason why I wrote this little personal memory is to segue into an actual personal account written by a young girl who came to Victoria and Norfolk House School from Southampton, evacuating to safety from the immediate horrors of this awful conflict. You can see the bomb count in the map, incredibly there was more residential damage than in the dockland or industrial areas. As a child growing up in Southampton, I still remember seeing areas of complete destruction – areas that took more than 10 years to clear and rebuild.

Shirley Harrison arrived from Southampton and was a student at NHS from 1940-42. She wrote: “At eleven-fifteen one night, just as I was dropping off to sleep, the sound of the sirens rang out through the still night. They were situated in a school and nearby church on the next road. We jumped out of bed and dressed as quickly as possible. All the time we were dressing, we could hear people’s doors opening and closing, and the sound of the air-raid warden’s feet as he ran up and down the street blowing his whistle. We could also hear the people rushing to the shelters – those who had their own shelters went to them, and others took shelter under their stairs.

For a time silence reigned, then came the sound of approaching enemy planes. Flying very high they circled around Southampton several times, and then dropped their deadly cargo. They aimed at the docks but they only succeeded in damaging the houses alongside and a nearby lumber yard. 

Even though the raid ended at 3:45 a.m., no all-clear sounded until 4:30 a.m., when enemy planes passed over Southampton on their homeward journey across the Channel.

The next morning on the way to school, which was 11 miles outside Southampton, we had to pass the docks where we saw scenes of the previous night’s damage. Fifteen houses were completely demolished with their household goods strewn around the road. The windows in several more houses were shattered and the slates were off many roofs. In a cemetery close by tombstones were wrecked and trees uprooted; there were also huge craters in the ground near to an air force station. The people’s morale was not harmed by Southampton’s first air raid, one of many more to come. On the contrary, it was higher than usual; in fact, the night’s happenings were scarcely discussed the next day!”

Clearly there was more discussion than Shirley remembered because not long after this first raid on Southampton, Shirley set sail from Liverpool for Montreal, part of over 6500 children evacuees to Canada during WWII. They were known as British Guest Children. She wrote this account for the school’s 2nd Edition of the fledgling NHS Review towards the end of her first year at the school.

During the war, 57 bombing attacks were made on Southampton. 1,500 air raid warnings were issued. Air Raid Precautions (ARP) estimates the town was struck by 2,300 bombs holding more than 470 tons of high explosive ordinance and more than 30,000 incendiary devices. According to ARP, nearly 45,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed,

This is just one example of millions of personal reasons why on November 11, people not only respectfully honour those that served to defend our freedoms, but also remember a personal connection to a conflict.