By Residents in Warborough & Shillingford
Grateful thanks go to everyone who gave up their time to record their memories to mark VE Day on May 8th in this Springtime of lockdown.
It was a sincere privilege to hear your stories and spend time in the presence of such spirited and inspiring people. Even on the telephone, during a time of isolation, your love of life and your friendliness, was wonderful.
Sandy Chubb May 2020
Geoffrey Turner
Geoffrey Turner of Orchard Close, Shillingford, was 14 on VE Day. His Grammar School in Blackpool gave the pupils a day off to celebrate. “We had been listening avidly to the radio and knew the end of the war was in sight.” He said. “Crowds gathered in Talbot Square, Blackpool, in front of the Town Hall, where on its balcony, all the dignitaries and the Mayor were trying to address us. Down below were a crowd of GIs all the worse for wear having celebrated too freely. One of them climbed up a drainpipe onto the balcony and just as the Mayor began his speech, the GI roared out: “Roll me over in the Clover…” and immediately the entire square joined in the song, drowning out the Mayor, the Aldermen and all the town dignitaries. We all loved it!”
“The war didn’t really end until 3 months later on VJ Day, after the bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. During that time my brother was invalided home. He had spent months in the Indian Seas as part of the naval force assembling for a Malay invasion which never happened and he had contracted TB. Four years later for his National Service, Geoffrey joined the Air Force.
Remembrance Day 1947 passed the war memorial in Warborough
Romey Jameson
Romey, who has lived on Warborough Green for 73 years, was 21 on VE Day. She was doing war work at the Admiralty but she and her sister May lived in Ashtead, Surrey. They took the train to London to join the massive crowds in The Mall, in front of Buckingham Palace. “I’ve never seen crowds like it ever, and we all cheered when the King and Queen and two Princesses came out onto the balcony with Winston Churchill.”
Romey had just come down from Somerville College, Oxford, where she did a 2 years war degree in Languages and Literature (her contemporary was the chemist Maggie Thatcher!) “We were so lucky then to be taught by amazing lecturers like JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and Lord David Cecil.” After Oxford I tried to join the Wrens but was turned down as they knew the war was ending so I ended up as a civil servant. Later we came to Warborough in 1947 and lived in a thatched cottage in Blacksmiths Lane which is now called Quaker Lane.” Romey is now 96 and writing her memoirs.
Women first aiders in front of St Laurence Church, Warborough
Pat Hopkins
Pat, our much loved organist in St Laurence Church, turned 90 in April. But on VE Day she was a 15 year old pupil at Thame Grammar School for Girls. “The Headmistress then was very strict, but she did something unheard of when she gave us a day off for VE Day, although she made sure we didn’t have too much of a holiday because she gave us homework too – which had to be in the next day. I didn’t agree with that at all and didn’t bother to do it and that got me into a lot of trouble.”
Instead, Pat and her sister, Jean, and their father, joined the crowds that night in Upper High Street in Thame where one of Pat’s school friends (unbeknown to the Headmistress) was playing the piano accordion in the band so that everyone could dance the night away to old war time songs.
Pat used to play the piano in school during breaks to give her friends the chance to practice ballroom dancing. Her home was in Tiddington Village which was full of her cousins, uncles and aunts. “On one side of our house was my Grandfather’s public house, The Fox, and on the other, was my maternal grandmother’s house, where she lived with my aunt. She used to be the Headmistress of Waterperry School. So my grandparents lived either side of us and nearby was my father’s garage.
Pat married Grahame on April 1st 1959. They lived in Shillingford until 2000, when they moved to Hammer Lane in 2000.
Micky Bond
Micky Bond was born in Warborough in 1935 and lived in the house on the bend in the road between Warborough and Newington. He was a pupil at St Laurence School throughout the war, when he remembers plenty of bombs falling on the fields. “But I only remember one house receiving a direct hit”, he said. “It was the Quarr Cottage, opposite the Old Post Office, and, in the morning, we were amazed to see a bed hanging out of the upstairs window.” He thinks they got a day off for VE Day but doesn’t recall any special celebrations.
After school, Mickey worked for Norman Belcher, helping to grow vegetables and sell them in his village shop. Later he worked on the farm that belonged to Ian Thompson. He said it took him nearly a year to fill in one of the bomb craters once and remembers how hard the winters were when you were out on the tractor and freezing in the cabs. Mickey moved from St Laurence House last year into housing in Benson. Like everyone, he longs for the lockdown to be over, but has come to like Benson too.
Molly Bailey
Molly was 18 when the war ended. She worked for a local estate agent and her job was to take down all the necessary paperwork in shorthand during their travels to see property. She was a proficient shorthand typist. She says that after work her colleagues sometimes sat on the lawn at the back of the office and one evening a German plane flew right overhead aiming for the local rail station which was next to an old people’s home and a school. The bomb killed 8 people. She lived in Newbury, in her grandfather’s public house called The Wheatsheaf. In those days she had long fair hair which was never cut. “I used to perm the ends so that it turned under and hoped to look like Veronica Lake!” One day her future husband walked into the pub with his brother. “He was wearing a lovely leather jacket with a fur collar. I remember saying to my mother “I’m going to marry that man” and two years later, that was just what happened and Leonard and I moved to Warborough to live with my mother-in-law.
“We were lucky enough to get one of the brand new houses being built in Sinodun View and that’s where we raised our three boys.” Later Molly spent some years very happily in St Laurence House and last year moved to a house in Benson where her boys visit often as one lives in Warborough, one in Wallingford and one in Shillingford.
Jo Case
On VE Day Jo, aged 18, remembers one incident vividly. She was with her parents going to join the celebratory crowds in Birmingham and join in the clapping when the fireworks were set off. At that time, trams with wooden seats still ran on rails in the city. “As we were walking along – it’s never happened before or since – but somebody pinched my bottom!! It’s my outstanding memory of that day!” she said. As a schoolgirl, she used to cycle every morning passed houses bombed in the night. “We never thought it would happen to us.” She says there were so few cars on the road she could distinguish the drivers, just from the sound of their engines. Her family had an Austin 10 with a removable roof much beloved by Jo and her sister Angela, but the car was rarely used because of rationing.
Her father, a sculptor, was a soldier at the end of the first war and ‘could dig a good trench’ but the first bomb shelter flooded. The next one was built of brick. Jo remembers her mother reading PG Wodehouse to her and her sister, while the bombing continued and shrapnel tinkled all around.
Soon after the war, Jo came to Oxford with her first husband who was a Theological student. They lived in a flat in St Aldates in a house with 20 men and no other women, just one lavatory and no bathroom! Eventually her husband was made Chaplain at The Dragon School; it meant their three children were allowed to attend with no fees to pay! Then later most tragically, one of Jo’s two daughters aged just sixteen, was killed in a car accident.
Eventually Jo went to work in the restoration department at The Ashmolean Museum where she met her second husband Humphrey, who became Head of Antiquities. Jo is now 93 and sees her family often, her immensely tall 3 grandsons and 1 granddaughter, and her daughter in Oxford and son in the Cotswolds.
Derek Hawkins
Derek went to Wallingford school until he was 12 and remembers looking east across the railway one day at a great big balloon of dark smoke in the sky and hearing that the dark cloud was the site of London being bombed.
Then he was sent to school in Norwich. “On night German incendiaries kept hitting the school and I don’t mind admitting, it was a bit scary.” He joined the RAF who sent him first to Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge University, to get the qualifications to become a pilot. By the end of the war the RAF had sent him on again, this time to the USA. He ended up in Oklahoma, being trained by American airmen. “I spent a lot of time there, turning upside down and larking about in those days,” he said.
Eventually he settled down in Wallingford and “for the next thirty years or so, I managed the 36 staff working with us in Field and Hawkins – the department store in Wallingford Square until the shop closed in 1980.”
Then he and his wife Beryl came to Warborough with their two daughters who now live in Devon and in Lincolnshire. But recently one of his 4 grandchildren gave him a tablet, so the family regularly meet these days on Skype.
Derek is 94 and suffers from increasing Macular Degeneration but despite the problem with his eyes, still much enjoys life, church and his many friends in the village.
Mary Macdonald
VE day for Mary was spent in Sydney, Australia. She had just finished her Teacher Training Course. “VE Day was wonderful as it meant the war had ended but it wasn’t the jamboree it must have been in the UK because my father was a still a prisoner-of-war at that time, working on the Burma Railways as a member of the Argylls. Our war didn’t end until August. Daddy got a ‘dead meat ticket from a dead man’ i.e: tags needed to qualify for a troop ship home. We all went to meet him and I can’t describe what it was like, seeing the troops come down the gang plank, and all of us overjoyed and cheering to raise the roof. But after that wonderful reunion, my father had to be hospitalized until the end of January 1946.
“We followed him back to the UK where he had to rejoin his regiment and found ourselves in a freezing, icy February in barracks in London. Despite the rationing and cold, the heaven was that there was no war! That was great!”
Mary worked in UK schools as a teacher of basic biology, remedial massage, sports and games, and then returned to Australia to teach. “Then my father, who was now in Java with the Argylls, told me my mother was ill in Java and I went to nurse her. I ended up there working for Proctor and Gamble and met my future husband in Surabaya.” Later she travelled to Singapore where she and her husband, Ian, married and stayed until 1964, when they returned to the UK. Thirty years ago, when Ian had a massive stroke, she moved to her house in Green Lane, Warborough. She is now 93 – “what they call an old bird, I think!” she said.
Jean Forbes
Jean was nine in when war broke out, living in a village near Whitley Bay. She remembers walking over the fields and an old man stopping her to say: “Henny gan home now, the war’s just started!” “Our house overlooked a field, and the mine – where my Dad worked. Nearby was the main railway and our school was right on the line. One day a bomb just missed the school, railway and bridge and the size of the crater that the bomb made was gigantic. We used to watch the British and German airplanes fighting overhead and dreaded the incendiary bombs because they really burnt.”
At the end of the war, Jean was 14 and so grateful when her 3 brothers in the forces made it home safely to join their other brother Bill, who, as a fireman, was exempt from the services. On VE Day she recalls lots of street parties near her house. Jean met her husband when he used to walk passed on the way to the dance hall three miles away. But that stopped when he was 17, because he was called up to join REMY in the Army as an electrical and mechanical engineer in the 1949-1952 Korean war. “It was a terrible and dangerous war and Stewart said they gave their rations to all the starving Korean children.” Jean left what she calls ‘Geordieland’ in 1969 when Stewart became the assistant engineer building the new John Radcliffe Hospital. Later they moved to the two houses on the road to Newington for six years and then to Henfield View in Warborough.” Jean has 3 sons and a daughter, ten grandchildren living in Florida who skype her often, and 18 great grandchildren, the latest one born in April. When we celebrate VE Day this year, Jean also celebrates her approaching 90th birthday on May 20th.
Trixie Tindall
Trixie was 21 and living with her mother and three month old baby in Portsmouth at the end of the war, but she remembers a street party in Dartmouth Road which was a lot of fun. Her husband Robert was away fighting in the Artillery in Burma during that time.
During the war Trixie worked as a nurse at St Mary’s Hospital, Portsmouth. It was a dangerous part of the coast as planes often rid their aircraft of bombs on return journeys to Germany. “I remember 3 blitzes and quite a lot of bombs – all very frightening. A lot of casualties from the bombing and injured soldiers came into the hospital, and doctors from London were sometimes sent down to treat them. I was just a junior nurse but remember it well.”
Later, she and her husband went to the Gold Coast, Ghana and Accra for 8 years as Robert worked for Unilever West Africa. We stayed until Ghana got independence but life was uneasy with a lot of curfews and Gestapo-like people running the country. Finally we returned to the UK where Trixie, became a qualified teacher as a mature student at Reading. She then spent the next 12 years teaching in an infant school. She and Robert came to Warborough sixteen years ago. She now lives in Henfield view and has one daughter living in Warborough, one near Manchester, and two sons in Bracknell. She is 96.
Roger Wilkinson
On his 82nd birthday, despite the lockdown, Roger says his wonderful neighbours, Sally Feaver and Charles Humphries, made him a cake and they toasted him in the street keeping a safe distance apart. Before the lockdown, he’d just celebrated his sister Janet’s 80th birthday in London.
Their father, John, was called up in 1940 and on VE Day he was still in Germany – by now a Major working on the staff of the Education Corps. Roger was a schoolboy living with his grandparents near Doncaster. “One day I remember we lined the streets waving flags because the King was visiting nearby after VE Day,” he says. “Dad didn’t come home until 1946 when my parents had bought a house for us in Abbotts Langley. My Uncle Roger took my sister and myself to London to meet Dad. We came into Kings Cross and I’d never been on a train before, never been to London before, and never seen an escalator. I remember the Inspector coming along, taking me by the hand and leading me up the staircase until we reached the Bakerloo Line to Watford. Dad brought a German Officer’s dress sword for me as a souvenir and I’m sorry to say, I used to use it as a poker!”
Nine years later Roger’s family moved to Ickenham near Uxbridge, and he began a training in Hertfordshire at Stirling Moss’s place, to be a fireman. But then he was called up into the Army for the next two years. In 1975 he moved to Warborough and worked on Ian Thompson’s farm looking after his pigs, having gained experience in pig farming earlier. He first lived in the caravan on the farm where Micky Bond was working at the time. Roger moved to his present bungalow in 1985.
Rosemary Heelas
Rosemary was at Queen Annes School in Caversham during the war and due to the school’s proximity to Reading, remembers bomb scares. The school spent some nights in the air-raid shelter and days on air-raid practice.
But during the holidays when she was at home in Great Milton, she loved to ride and with her sisters, drive a pony and trap to pony club events and work on the farm.
“I can’t remember if the school gave us a day off for VE day but I do recall riding in a field one day and seeing a crater and fish blown out of the river from a bomb which must have been aiming for the railway line between Oxford and Wheatley.”
She left school when she was 17 and took a secretarial course and straight after, went to the Thame Show and met a vet who offered her a job. “Start Monday,” he said, “and I stayed there for the next three years.” Her next work was in London with Livestock Auctioneers and Shippers. Finally she moved to Oxford to work for the Institute of Ornithology which was housed in a building in the Botanic Gardens where she says she enjoyed the chance to go bird-watching.
She married her husband Michael in 1955 and for the first 10 years of married life, says that they moved ten times! Finally they found The White House in Warborough and moved there in 1972, with their 2 sons and 2 daughters.
Last year Rosemary was 90 and her family arranged a party to celebrate her birthday in the garden of her house on the Green, attended by many neighbours and friends.
John Wyatt
John spent 17 years in St Laurence House and knows most of the people in this book, but as he is the youngest person mentioned, and was only born in 1947 in East London, the end of the war meant the stories he heard his parents talk about. He remembers all the bombed out buildings that were around in the early fifties though and how he and his friends used to play on bombsites. His school was West Ham Secondary Modern. “In those days, money was tight, and it wasn’t really the rationing but things were a bit strained. But there was plenty of chocolate, cockles and whelks stalls, and eel pie and mash on Saturdays. And on Sundays, the rag and bone man came around with his horse and cart.”
John’s first job was as a counter assistant in a jewellers and he still remembers putting fine pieces surrounded by cotton wool into little boxes for customers. He is a real Londoner and spent nearly all of his life in and around the East End and the Docks. He married his wife, Carol, in 1984.
For 24 years he was a London Transport Bus driver, being promoted from Bus conductor after just six months. He drove the No 25 from Ilford to Oxford Street and worked on other bus routes too including the No 8 and No 26.
“After Mum died, my Dad and the rest of the family wanted to move out to Milton Keynes, but I didn’t fancy it and moved instead to a B and B in The High Street, in Oxford. Different and strange after London but you’ve got to knuckle down to things, haven’t you?” he said. During his time in Oxford, he asked around and learnt that he had qualified for a place in St Laurence House and this was how he came to Warborough. John, now aged 73, has a progressive disability and these days, finds walking difficult, but he now lives in a bungalow in Benson with a small garden and says he has everything he wants. He gets his food himself by asking for a car to take him to Tesco where the driver gets out his wheelchair so he can do his own shopping. Then the driver helps him back into the cab and takes him home. He may not remember the war as he was born two years after, but he has plenty of Dunkirk spirit!
Ann Hawes
Ann’s parents had a horse and taxi firm in Hythe, Kent and because it was so near the coast, all the children were evacuated. “I was seven when war broke out and wasn’t allowed to go away on my own so my mother and grandmother came with me to a house in Staffordshire where we spent the war. When we returned home, we saw in our front room, a giant metal indoor air-raid shelter which slept 6 people! One day walking by the canal in Hythe, a Doodlebug cut out overhead. We ran for our lives. All the beaches nearby were mined. It took 18 months after VE Day to clear them.” Ann remembers street parties 3 roads up and dancing the Palais Glide and the St Bernard’s Waltz to a piano that someone had brought out onto the road.
Ann trained to be a physiotherapist and helped people in hospitals and in the community for much of her life. “No-one wants to sit on their bottom and do nothing and I’ve always worked and enjoyed it,” she says. All her life she loved sport and was a distinguished sportswoman. When she was 17 in 1952, she represented Great Britain in the Helsinki Olympic Games in the relay sprint. The next year she set a world record as one of 4 in The British Women’s team in an International Match against the Netherlands.
She married Michael who was in the RAF in 1957 and eventually he became Transport Command on the Queens Flight at RAF Benson and she remembers many royal Garden Parties, tours of Buckingham Palace and balls in the Palace and at Windsor Castle. She is now 86, lives in Shillingford and has boy and girl twins, now grown up.
Martin Vaughan
Martin was 8 on May 8th 1945. He remembers a street party in Wilkins Road, Cowley very well, when everyone heaved their dining room tables into the street to form a long table which they covered with cloths, and egg and jam sandwiches. He wore short flannel trousers and a quite special Vyella shirt – “a bone of contention for years with my older brother whose shirt wasn’t Vyella and instead wore an overcoat made from an old winter’s coat of our Mum’s. Martin says he longed for boots like the really tough boys but had to put up with leather shoes instead.
“We had live music – mouth organs, drums, a fiddle – and stayed up until it was dark before we had to go to bed. I remember running in and out of all the dancers and how sunburnt all the newly returned soldiers were. Cowley was a big military base which housed the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry at the top of Holloway. “The song my wife Joyce and I can still sing from that night is the Chickory Chick Song with its great chorus:
Chickery chick, cha-la, cha-la
Check-a-la romey in a bananika
Bollika, wollika, can’t you see
Chickery chick is me?…
Joyce Vaughan
Joyce who married Martin in 1962 at St Mary the Virgin in The High, was also 8 years old on VE Day. She was born in Magpie Lane, Oxford and was a pupil at Holy Trinity Convent where she wore a gymslip over a fleecy liberty bodice to which black wool stockings were fastened by rubber buttons. They were covered by almost knee-long bloomers (“the nuns wouldn’t let us show our legs”, she said). She had long blonde pigtails down to her waist which her two older brothers used to fasten to her chair back when she wasn’t looking! Her family went to two VE parties where both their Grannies lived. The first one was in Percy Street off the Iffley Road where her smiling Granny lived. The best part of the celebration came later that night when her Uncle Bert, a former prisoner of war in Burma, took her to the bonfire in the crossroads in Carfax at 11 pm where everyone had thrown their unwanted old furniture to feed the blaze. The next day was her other Granny’s party in 1 Speedwell Street, St Aldates. Lovely feasts of jelly, jam sandwiches, cake and music and dancing
Martin and Joyce Vaughan were both born in Oxford and now live on Thame Road. They remember that the tennis courts from Morris Motors in Cowley had prefabricated huts built by German prisoners-of-war. (“We kids ran all the way from school up Hollow Road to “the barracks” to look through the fence to see “real Germans!”)
