Page 8 - Martin Holmes - Old Derbeian Article

Derby School & WWII
mile and fourth in the half-mile. Ironically in doing so I won the newly created Spray Cup for most improved performance but the decision wasn’t made until after Prize-giving Day and I had left school!
The War
WWII changed life for just about everybody, not just for the duration but for all time. I can only touch on the effects here; to do the subject justice would take a book!
I was first aware of it before it happened as the nation was prepared for the possibility. About the only thing I remember about a summer holiday with Mother at Granny’s in Cardiff in 1939 (a very rare and notable event in itself) was an afternoon in the front room of her house, looking through a book of H G Wells stories while they talked about the possibility of war soon. The picture of aircraft dropping bombs on people running in the street that accompanied one of the stories gave me a vivid idea of what might be coming!
When, shortly after, war was declared it seemed an anti-climax as there was no immediate impact as I had imagined it. Sure, we all got identity cards, barrage balloons were tethered on many of the open spaces around town and Anti-Aircraft (AA) guns, mostly Bofors, were likewise dotted around our parks and the racecourse but raids on Derby didn’t happen for quite a while.
Indeed to start with my first memory is of barrage balloons catching fire and falling after being struck by lightning and when the sirens did eventually go and the AA guns opened fire we seemed in more danger from falling shrapnel from exploding AA fire than from enemy bombs!
Our only personal family experience was of bomb-blast blowing out a window but there were damage and human casualties from bombing and strafing in other parts of Derby during the war. Derby’s were very light casualty figures in comparison to what happened in some other industrial towns.
Our family identity cards were RANZ 146/1-4, Mum being /1 and me /4. RA was the code for Derby, NZ the code for our area and 146 our household/family number.
We were issued a Morrison shelter, a coffin like cage for putting under a table and later still we got an Anderson shelter, a half-sunken, corrugated iron, earth covered shelter in the back-garden which eventually filled with water.
Rationing came into force not just for food but also for clothing and life became that bit more difficult for parents of hungry children though a side benefit was probably that many of them ended up with better diets than they otherwise might have had.
On the other hand, children’s parties and were hard for parents to cater for as there was no leeway in the rations for such extravagances. Rationing did