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Air raid shelters

P

Peter Walker

gone but not forgotten
Between Grasmere Road and Ashwin Road in Handsworth there is a pedestrian tunnel through the railway embankment. I believe it runs parallel to (and possibly above) Hockley Brook.
I have a memory of one night only in 1940 when I was visiting my Nan at 62 Grasmere Road, being bundled overnight with all the locals in the tunnel, which had had about eight brick "blast walls" built in. These blast walls came in pairs, about five feet apart, across all but five feet of the width, so that you (and perhaps the blast of a bomb) had a slalom to get through.
At home we had an Anderson shelter in the garden, but that tunnel was a very social place, and to a seven-year-old it was quite an experience.
During the day it was fun too, because there was next to no lighting between these barriers, and you (well, I did) needed confidence to charge through these unfathomable chambers.
It was also a challenge to the ear. Kids always loved to shout and stamp their feet going through the tunnel before the blast walls were put in, and afterwards as well. But when the walls were there and I was just a titch, the sounds could be terrifying.
Peter
 
Ah those Anderson shelters. We all went into a neighbours, there were three or four families squeezed in. It was a tight fit, but with the men off fire-watching the women felt happier together. Our shelter, by the time the war was over was dank and mouldy from not being used. I used to slide down it on an old hearth plate - remember those? :D
 
air raid shelters

Seeing Diana's note reminded me that, apart from the Anderson shelters which went into a hole in the garden, there were also the Morrison table shelters. My (great) Auntie Jack had one of those in her living room at 14 Ellen Street, Spring Hill. It was bigger than a normal dining rooms table, about 6 ft x 4 ft in width I suppose, with a flat sheet steel top at table height, and 2 inch mesh between the metal angle legs. How you got in I can't imagine yet alone remember.
Most schools had the brick boxes with concrete tops at the side of the playground.
When I started at Aston Grammar in September 1944 air raid shelters were a thing of the past, but we still had air raid drill, and our class had to go down into the cellar which was part of the school canteen.
Peter
 
Anderson Shelters

Talking about those Morrison Shelters,
When I was in the scouts,we used to go about assembling
them,for folk who had no menfolk to do it,
that way we earned our National service Badge
which was red, oblong and had the initials N.S. with a crown in between
in gold
One side of the shelter was left open for access
 
My Dad used to tell me that he and my Mom used to take cover in air raid shelters in Aston Park. Once as the sirens were going off they thought they may take shelter in the trams which were parked along Trinity Road.
But they decided to go to the shelters anyway, a good job too, when they came out the tram had taken a hit.

Does anyone know where in Aston Park these shelters were ?
 
No Dave, I didn't know there were any. We had an Anderson shelter in the back garden in Woodall Road.
 
IS THIS BIT STILL THERE ?

There was a strange underground entrance and I often wondered what was in there.
You went straight up the hill from the Trinity Road entrance opp Nelson Road. When reaching the start of the steps you turned left, still uphill. As the roadway started to reach its peak, on the right were two right turns, one steps and one a curly steep bend. This entrance was inbetween set into the bank.
I'm going to have a look next time I am in Birmingham.
 
New Stand

:) Dave m8,,Don,t think theres anything left of the old "Bunker" :(

The VILLA new stand is built traversing the road with structural reinforcements embedded into the old Park areas adjacent,, They tore out a lot of the old Park to reinforce the "Footings" prior to
the "New Extension Stand" building,,, Then re-grassed over Ok :wink: John
 
PRIME TARGET

My Dad also told me that they used to stockpile ammunition under the Villa stand. There was the army 'base' at the back of the Villa, entrance off Witton Road, later used by Post office telephones.
What with I.C.I turning out bombs as well, I think it was a very dodgy area to live regarding bombing raids.
 
I had lots of family working at ICI during the war, weren't we lucky the bombs missed. One hit Brian's parents house in Amberley Grove, across the road from the back of ICI, it took the corner of the bathroom right out.

I think my parent sheltered me pretty much, I was never told of bombs falling anywhere near Witton, although I now know that they did. I used to pick up bits of shrapnel quite often, Mom would say they had fallen from aircraft flying over.
 
Bomb sites

I think Witton got off lightly re. bombing raids, but I do remember a big bomb site along Manor Road with a bookmakers at the back. Also living just about there was a school girl friend of mine called Sandra Brookes.
Has anyone heard of her ?

My Dad worked as a caster at Kynochs all through the war, he used to tell me that he did one shift, came home for an hour, then went back and did another shift.
 
UXB

I don't know how true this is but a guy who I used to work with in Smethwick told me that the first unexploded bomb that was recovered in Smethwick had ICI Kynock stamped on it. He reckoned that the Germans were stockpiling bombs before the war and were buying some of them from US!!
 
Re: UXB

Frantic said:
I don't know how true this is but a guy who I used to work with in Smethwick told me that the first unexploded bomb that was recovered in Smethwick had ICI Kynock stamped on it. He reckoned that the Germans were stockpiling bombs before the war and were buying some of them from US!!
Click to expand...

Seems nothing changes... I believe Saddam fought the Yanks with weapons they'd provided when he was the good guy knocking hell out of Iran.

fahr39.gif
 
I worked at the GEC in Electric avenue in the late 60s and they still had several air raid shelters underground, as i recall all sorts of interesting things went on there during the dinner breaks :wink:
 
I'M ONLY LOOKING !

RE. The G.E.C. air raid shelters, were the interesting things compulsory or could you just watch ?
 
Straying slightly off topic,my first job when I left school was at the BSA in Armoury Road. I started there at the beginning of 1961.
At that time they had their own fire engines, two splendid machines which were kept immaculately clean and polished.
They'd be trundled out once or twice a week for various practice exercises and everyone involved was very proud of them.
Well I'm sure you all know that the BSA was heavily involved in arms manufacture during the war and they still had a munitions dump of some sort at that time and one day somebody started a grass fire close to this dump.
Well, the alarm was raised and someone phoned the BSA fire crew and also the fire station at Mosely or Selly Oak
By the time the BSA fire crews had scrambled and made their way to the scene, the city fire engines had already got there and put the fire out!
There were a lot of red faces that day, it would have been worthy of Buster keaton :p
 
GEC

Hi Jerryd, My dad also worked at the GEC, he was a turner/ slotter machinist.
He worked permanent nights from the end of the war until he retired in the late 1980's His name is Tom Collier, and I think he was a shop steward at some time.
 
Hiya frantic
I don't think I ever met your dad but the name seems familiar
I never worked nights so our paths wouldn't have crossed
I worked in Expelair where they made extractor fans
 
Sorry to be a know-all, but I can remember the air-raid shelters in Aston Hall. The ones I knew were at the Aston Cross end of the park, off the top of Park Road. I started at Aston Grammar in September 1944 and the shelters were still there of course, but hadn't been used much for two years or so, because our bad raids were over by 1942. We had air raid drill at school, which involved sitting in the basement canteen.
But the shelters in the park were officially locked, although it was possible to break in. Being a bad boy, I got in a few times. They were inter-connecting trenches about eight feet below ground level, and covered with soil backfill which raised them about four feet above the rest of the ground. I seem to remember one entrance on the Park Road side and another facing the park, not far from the Frederick Road gate.
I have a feeling they weren't cleared until 1946 at the earliest.
Peter
 
I was born in 1942, where would mom have taken me when the sirens went, as we certhainly did not have a back garden. Would there have been a shelter built in the backyard of Nechells Place,Or was there a public one on Nechells Green, I can't imagine she would have been allowed to have a indoor shelter, as we lived directly opposite the Gas works.
Maggie
 
Maggie you was offered a choice...if you had space they gave you a shelter........if not well their was the cellar........each area was different with different needs...some could get to communal shelters
I never saw an air raid shelter in our street people with gardens were lucky but our house did not have one....step straight out of the front door into the street and houses at the back......Morrison shelters were used inside (like a cage) but I have never seen one only in photo's
People were killed in Anderson shelters but more were saved than killed.. it was the "luck of the draw" a lot of families huddled round the fireplace as that was always left standing or hide under the stairs (on the cellar steps)
 
I can't remember much about the raids. We had an Anderson shelter in the back yard but don't think we used it much around then. It's possible that the raids on Brum were over by then. I must have started school by 1943 and I can,t remember any incidents except carrying a gas mask.
 
I do remeber going into our air raid shelter, it was always damp. I have put a link in the link section to a war diary written by a man living in Acocks Green. He writes about his shelter, and how he tried to make it more comfy.
 
We lived in a 1934-vintage semi-detached not far from Witton Cemetery, and got the corrugated iron pressings to build an underground shelter in out back garden. I remember that my dad who was a teacher at Loxton Street Senior Boys' got two lads to come and help him, one warm sunny day (it must have been 1940), to dig the hole and assemble the pieces. I remember that the lorry that brought the stuff came from Cox and Danks, and that he used bituminous paint to make it moreorless waterproof. I have no way of knowing now, but I always thought he had to pay a modest price for the materials - I would have been just seven years old at the time.
We had a 3-tier bunk bed on the left as you went in, a commode at the backwhich I don't think was ever used [why use the commode when you could use the outside drain or the garden?], but it had a candle and a clock on it. We spent several nights in there that year and in early 1941, but not as late as summer that year, I think, when my dad joined the RAF. We didn't take it out until he was demobbed in 1946, by which time it waas not a nice plae to go into - a creepy-crawly mature reserve, as I remember it.
My great aunty Jack in Ellen Street, Spring Hill had a Morrison table shelter, which was intended to replace the dining table in the living room. The trouble was you had to sit side-saddle to eat off the table.
Peter
 
Peter, you certainly have a good memory about your air raid shelter.
Ours, at the bottom of the garden, was already a couple of years old
when I arrived on the scene. A friend of my Dad's from the MEB-Charlie Rowe, who lived close by, helped to dig the hole and assemble the
corrugated sheets and my Dad helped him assemble theirs in Woolmore Road
close to Witton Lakes. At the end of the war they helped to remove each others shelters. My mother, who spent endless nights alone in the early years of the war while my father was off keeping the leccy going at the Bourneville Power Station first, with one baby and then myself, hated going down the garden into this damp, creepy crawly dwelling, when the sirens sounded at Kynochs, especially when Lord Haw Haw had announced on the radio where specifically the German bombers would be aiming for on any particular night, targets often mentioned were the GEC and Kynochs, a little over a mile away. She preferred to hole up in the pantry under the stairs, listening to the radio and knitting. Mom's father had moved in at one point and he wouldn't go into the shelter either. I have already told you the story of how he almost got arrested for shining his torch through an uncovered window at home in the middle of the night on his way to make tea and attracting the local patrolling Air Raid Warden.

When the "Birmingham At War" exhibition was held at the BAGM in l985
I saw an assembled Morrison Shelter set up there.

Peter, do you remember the above ground shelter just in front of Boulton Walk off Marsh Hill? It was there for a few years following WW2. My brother and I used to scare each other in it on the way home from Sunday
School in George Road.
 
We had an Aderson shelter in the garden. It served us kids as a den throughout our childhoods (and probably beyond). It was also used to keep chickens, ducks and rabbits in at various times, and of course, gardening tools. As far as I remember, it was still there when the house was knocked down in the late 60s.:redface:

There were a brick-built, reinforced concrete structures in the yards further up the road for use by residents of the back-to-backs. I also remember a similar one opposite the Railway pub at the bottom of Wellington Street. This appeared very popular with teenage courting couples during the fifties. As a slip of a kid it amazed me how desperate those young lovers must have been for a bit of privacy to want to go into that dirty damp hole. :rolleyes:
 
My Nan and Grandad lived in Holte Road until the late 70's. Grandad kept his pigeons in the Anderson shelter at the top of the garden. It's ironic that we could have done with somewhere like that to shelter from what those pigeons dropped on us.
It's amazing how many of those shelters survived as dens, sheds etc.. well after the war.
 
An air raid shelter? Something to do with the water board..... or a tram terminus?
image.jpeg
opposite view
image.jpeg
 
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There used to be a similar structure to that at the junction of Brandwood Park Road and Moneyhull Hall Road and that I was told was the site of an anti aircraft gun, the circular pieces being the housing of the spigots the guns were mounted on...just a thought.
 
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