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Title IINTERVIEW WITH MRS YVONNE BUTLER (PREVIOUSLY CHILMAN AND MRS GWYNETH TOMLIN (PREVIOUSLY DANIELS) Description
These ladies attended Hemel Hempstead School during the Second World War
When you first walked into the school today, did you find most things different?
Yvonne -Yes. I have to say it's slightly shabbier which is probably not what you want to hear! And, somehow, much more encroaching - smaller, I suppose.
Gwyneth - The thing was - when we came to the school - there were about 600 pupils and now, I understand, there are a great deal more - about 1200- so things are bound to be very different.
What was it like to be at this school in the time of war?
Yvonne - Actually, it was very prestigious to come to this school. You had to pass the eleven plus examination to get in unless your parents paid for you. Most people were scholarship children. It was considered a very good school at the time and we were lucky to be here.
Gwyneth - It was quite difficult with the exam. I was the only one in six years to pass from the school that I went to and I was just so delighted to come - I don't think I could have borne it if I hadn't been able to get here. That's because I enjoyed mixed school when I was younger and I didn't really want to go to a girl's only school. I wanted to learn languages and to come here.
Were there any teachers that you didn't like?
There's sure to be some, aren't there, but on the whole, I stayed in contact with at least three of the teachers until they were well into their eighties. So, I liked them - or most of them!
Could you tell us when you joined the school and how old you were at that time?
Yvonne -We joined the school in 1943. We were eleven years old at the time.
So you stayed throughout the war years.
Gwyneth - Yes. So we did lessons down underneath the school where the bicycles were kept in amongst the sandbags when the raids were on.
How conscious were you, on a day to day basis of the dangers of bombing?
Yvonne - Very conscious. You could actually see from my bedroom window, the barrage balloons over Wembley so we were conscious that we were pretty close to the action although unlike the people in London we didn't have bombing all the time.
We didn't have many bombs here, did we?
Gwyneth - The junior school that I went to was Nash Mills School in Belswains Lane and the same junior school is still there and whilst we were at school there, we actually had bombs fall opposite the school. A pair of houses opposite were bombed and also the George pub, close to school. If the Germans were coming back from somewhere like Coventry and places like that, they would " stick bomb" down the valley because at that time, this valley had the main canal, the main road - the A41 - and the railway lines all coming through and they would try to disrupt munitions and things coming from Birmingham through to the docks. And, of course, where I lived on Oliver Road, if you looked out of our front bedroom window, which was very high up, you could see the Flying Fortresses flying in and out of Bovingdon - one engine not running, bits off the tail plane and that sort of thing, so we were very conscious of it all of the time.
Were there any attacks on the school while you were there?
Yvonne - This a rather odd question because my sister, who was here before me, said that they were strafing but I've never after all this time had that confirmed so I really don't know.
Gwyneth - The other thing too was that the Ovaltine factory- they made foods and hard rations - that sort of thing - and Dickinsons and the other factories along there - my mother used to pack mortar bombs there. They were trying to hit these factories so it was a very busy way - it was the main route through from the Midlands. There were no motorways or anything like that - it was all just fields in that direction.
The History of Hemel Hempstead published in 1973 and edited by Susan Yaxley reports that 90 high explosive bombs fell in and around Hemel Hempstead. The first was on the Manor Estate in August 1940 and the last on Feldon in July 1944. Nine people were killed and 30 injured in these raids.
What was rationing like?
Gwyneth - Pretty awful, but I don't remember being any more hungry than most growing children are. We grew food on every available space. I still have allotments. Nothing was ever wasted.
Yvonne- I've been a vegetarian all my life not because of my thoughts at the time but because I didn't like the taste of meat. So however many ounces of meat we had, my parents and my sister enjoyed mine and I had cheese.
Gwyneth - But it was very little. My family didn't have eggs because before the war, my father had been a poultry farmer at Hunton Bridge and so, when we moved away from that - because the farm was closed down because of the war and they built Leavesden Aerodrome there - so when we moved to Hemel Hempstead, my father kept a few chickens in the garden so we always had chickens but, if you had chickens, you couldn't get chicken meal for them. If you did have chickens, you had to give up your egg ration so you could have the egg ration or the food for the chickens - whichever you chose to do.
Yvonne - Sweets were rationed and we had the equivalent of one crunchy bar a week. I used to save mine up. The local shop would save me four crunchy bars at the end of the month and that was my sweets for the month.
Gwyneth - When I was at the other school I used to teach at, I put the sweets - which were a month's ration - onto the table and it was about ten ounces I think and one of the boys said, "I eat that much before first break!" But that was a month's ration to last.
How long were the school hours?
The same as they are now. Nine until 3.30. Quarter to nine -registration - until 3.30. We had 40 minute lessons. We had four lessons in the morning and three in the afternoon. And lots of homework!
Yvonne - Some of us used to cycle to school and we were not allowed to take our hats off. We were not allowed to ride up or down Charles Street or Cemetery Hill but we used to see who could get to the top without getting off which was pretty hard work! But that was part of the fun.
Gwyneth - And there was a lack of bikes because you couldn't get anything like that - anything that was needed for the war effort - so they were all second-hand bikes. You couldn't get brake blocks or things like that so that's why you couldn't ride down Charles Street or Cemetery Hill but two of the girls in our year got the book thrown at them once for riding two on a bike down Anchor Lane with no hats on! They were really in trouble!
Did you have to do fire drills, like lining up outside?
Well, we didn't really have fire drills. But if the warning went, the air-raid warning, then you had to file down to the girls' end, underneath the school because, being on a slope, the girls' end had a big area underneath where there was a row of toilets and where we kept all the bikes and they put sand-bags to make alleyways there and you went into those areas and you still did lessons - not very successfully but you did try to do lessons down in the shelter! But it did become a bit like desert because the boys used to cut the sand-bags and the sand used to trickle out.
My understanding is that teachers were a reserved occupation - they were not called up - so did you find that, on the whole, the staff stayed put?
All the young men were gone. There were no young male teachers. There were some older men and there were young women teachers because at that stage - before the war and up to then - if you were a woman teacher, and you got married, you lost your job because you were taking a man's job away if you were married. Your husband was supposed to keep you so you didn't have a job. Really it was the war that led to women's emancipation in a way because all the women did men's work during the war and they'd never had that much freedom before. My aunt was a bus conductress and they did all sorts of jobs that the men had done before and now the women did. When the men came back, the women didn't want to give up this freedom that they'd had. Before the war all the women teachers were maiden ladies and some of them came back into teaching having had to leave it because they were married. And they did come back into teaching because there weren't enough men to do the jobs.
I believe that the Headmaster during the war - Mr Screeton - got quite cross because at least one member of staff did leave to join up.
I remember Mr Boucher being here although I don't remember him going. They came back - later on - at the very end. They came back when we were in about Year 10 - Mr Boucher and Mr Bundy.
Do you think that the Head was very cross?
I couldn't imagine him being very cross! He was a very good Headmaster. He was a very quiet man. The teachers nearly all wore gowns. I remember Miss Duncan used to come in - she was the French teacher - she'd put her books down and she'd lift her gown and she'd brush the chalk off the desk and then she'd perch on the edge. It's funny the things you remember. Mr Attwood always used to clean the board with his eyes shut - he was a very elderly Maths teacher (or we thought he was!).
How many were in your class in those days?
Thirty. We became 30 because we had three evacuees come into the form that I was in so that swelled the numbers because so many children were bombed out in London and moved out this way. We had a three-bedroomed house but there were twenty of us in it at one stage because my mother's family all came from the east end of London near the docks and they were all bombed out. And my mother was safe in the country so they all came out here and we managed to get them rooms with other people.
You mentioned evacuees. It must have been quite difficult for them since their experience was so different from yours?
Yvonne - My grandparents, who lived opposite, had two boys and we had a girl.*
Gwyneth - Our evacuees were all self-evacuated. At the time of the blitz my father sent my brother, my sister and I to his sister in Wales in Caernarvonshire because there were so many people in the house, my mother was nearly going crazy! So my grandmother and great-grandmother and all the aunts stayed here and we went to Wales and I went to school in Wales during one of the summers.
We had a little brown ration book with coupons in it. They used to cut out the coupons when you got your meat or they'd cross it off in indelible pencil so you couldn't rub it out.
Did you have to carry these with you all the time?
You didn't carry them to school but we did have to carry gas masks but not identity cards - not as children. Yvonne - When the air raid warning first came-at 11.00 on 3rd September 1939 - there was absolute panic of course and I lived in Heath Barn cottage** at the time and I was way over on the moor - in those days no-one worried if you were out by yourself and I can see my mother now, coming to the door, in an absolute panic but it was only a practice, warning people what to do.
Gwyneth - We used to listen carefully to the news which is why our generation is so good at geography - we used to get the atlas out and find the places they were talking about that had been bombed or whatever in this country or where the troops were advancing abroad. So children had a great interest in what was going on. We all felt a part of it. We didn't feel that this was something grown-ups were doing and we weren't.
Yvonne - And also, my father (Yvonne) was too young for the First World War and too old for the Second. This shows you what he did about this.
An extract from the Gazette newspaper:
"There was a rush to join. The first volunteer was Mr Arthur Chilman of Herbert Street. By the end of the week, several hundred had registered. In an editorial, the Gazette said the special job of volunteers would be to defeat the machinations of German parachutists who would be dropped from planes to try to capture strategic points. The temper of our volunteers is such that, if the parachutists try their wiles on this country, they will be manifestly be entitled to be called the suicide squad. The paper noted that the Germans had started their invasion of Holland on May 10th and warned everyone to be careful of Fifth Columnists."
Yes. Spies. Dad joined the Home Guard. He later became an ARP ( Air Raid Precautions) Warden because he was a driver and needed to drive emergency ambulances.
Gwyneth - My father went into the Royal Welch Fusiliers because he was Welsh and they were then turned into the 1st Airborne so he became a parachutist and went to North Africa and Greece. He was under siege in Greece for about three months when the fighting against the Germans was going on there.
Did you see him at all during the war?
When they were training at first they used to come on leave but once they were posted abroad they didn't come until the end of the war. So we didn't see him for about four years. He was a stranger to us. In fact, my brother was born in the July before war started and he'd started school when my father came home. My father didn't know him and he didn't know my father. It was always difficult between the two of them because he hadn't known him.
Would you rather have gone to school then or now?
Yvonne - I suppose you'd say the days when we came here because it was a fairly new school then and there weren't so many pupils here.
Gwyneth - Also, people seemed to look after things a lot more then because you couldn't get things. School uniform was incredibly difficult to get. We used to have to go to George Rolph which was a shop in the Old High Street - but clothing was on coupons and you only had so many coupons in a year so you had to wear shoes until they pinched something awful and you had to really look after the clothes that you had. Because my father was away and my mother had younger children, I had a grant from the Council towards my uniform because I'd won a scholarship and I couldn't afford a uniform. But I still think I would rather have been at school then because I made friends then - we've been friends for seventy years nearly - and it was a smaller town. Everybody knew everybody in the town whereas now, you can stand shaking a tin at one of the supermarkets and you never see someone you know. I'd much rather have been then - we've lived through tremendously changing lives - we've gone through bi-planes and just-about pedal cars to this day and age which is an enormous speed to go through life. So awful things have happened but I don't think I would have wished to live in any other time.
Nowadays in school we have a three-strike system for uniform. Did you have anything like that in your day
Yvonne - Towards the end of the war, you just couldn't get uniform anyway. We were allowed to wear other things - I remember wearing a brown pleated skirt - but you can't believe how little there was about really.
Gwyneth - Everything had worn out and you'd grown out of things and you just couldn't get replacements. You learned to sew because you needed to. You learned to alter things, you unpicked jumpers to knit them up into something else. That's something else I did when I was in wartime junior school - we used to knit scarves and sea-boots and all sorts of things. The War Office used to supply the wool for that and the last lesson of the afternoon, when I was at Junior School, we used to sit and knit and the Head teacher had the most wonderful reading voice and he used to read to us. He gave me my love of literature. He used to read 'A Christmas Carol' to us at Christmas time and 'Great Expectations' and all sorts of things. He gave me a great love of books which I have never lost.
Yvonne - We used to knit socks for the sailors and huge scarves using needles and thick wool.
What did you do about food at school?
Gwyneth - We used to sit in the corridor with tables down the middle and pass it along. There was nothing special about it. We only ever got chocolate pudding, rice pudding, semolina. When I went to school in Wales, we used to have to take two little bowls to school with us - little metal ones. In one you had potatoes and gravy and in the other you had jelly and blancmange. It was always the same, every day! But it was quite nice.
It's sometimes said that the spirit of the community was enormously better in those days. Would you agree with that?
People helped one-another out. You used to do all sorts of things - spelling bees, beetle-drives and whist-drives - all sorts of things to raise money to go towards the war effort. Within the school, we adopted a ship called the 'Lord Keith'. It was a minesweeper. And we used to save farthings for this. When I tell you that 2 ½ old pennies was one of a new penny and we used to save farthings which were a quarter of one of the old pennies. And you'd maybe bring in two pence and you collected them in form on a Monday and often it was read out that this form had sent in so many farthings. And we used to get bars of chocolate at Christmas to send to the 'Lord Keith' from our own rations. Our bit towards the men who were fighting for us.
Yvonne - *They were brothers and sister who came from Hackney, Greater London. They found it very difficult to settle and did not stay until the end of the war.
Yvonne - **Whilst living at Heath Barn Cottage my father, who was chauffeur to Colonel Brereton, was instructed to dig out an underground air raid shelter in the field behind the main house. This would have been somewhere above the now hard standing football area. I wonder if it still exists today? We used it regularly. Horribly claustrophobic!
Interviewers: Nick Tate, Freya Martin, Mr J Ross
November 2011
Keywords Air raids; Blitz; Flying Fortresses; Nash Mills School; Dickinsons; rationing; evacuation; Home Guard; Lord Keith; Miss Duncan; Mr Screeton; Mr Attwood Collection Hemel Hempstead School Place Hemel Hempstead Year 1943-1945 Conflict World War Two File type html Record ID number 215 Can you add any more information to this resource?
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