Interview with Rudolf Williams about his father, James Raphael Williams

Interview with Rudolf Williams about his father, James Raphael Williams

Rudolph describes his father’s (James) life, from his childhood years in Trinidad, through to volunteering for and serving in the RAF in the UK. After demobilisation, James returned briefly to Trinidad before returning to the UK where he worked for both the General Post Office and British Telecom. Rudolph’s mother was from a German family and her father was in the Luftwaffe. She moved to England after the war, aged 18, where she met Rudolph’s father. He talks about their life in the UK.

2025-07-07

00:56:34 Audio Recording

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AWilliamsR250707, PWilliamsJR2501

DE: This is an interview with Rolf Williams about his father, Jimmy Williams. It is the 7th of July 2025 and we’re at the University of Lincoln. So Rolph, can you just tell me a little bit about, about your father?
RW: Yeah [laughs] yes. He was born in Trinidad back in 1920 we think and he had two brothers. One of them died quite young tragically and so it was him and his other brother Patrick. We think his parents were from India but I don’t know the family name and they had come to Trinidad and then he was born in Belmont which is a part of Port of Spain on the northwest side of Trinidad. It seems he had quite a tough upbringing in that his mother for some reason disowned the two boys and put them in an orphanage and that for an amount of time that he never specified he was in the orphanage. It was a Catholic orphanage and the townsfolk would bring food for them to eat but the nuns wouldn’t give it to the kids. So he had quite an awful time and when I last saw him because he passed away in 2003 of cancer in a hospice in North London on the side of my secondary school oddly enough he was he was in good spirits and I was chatting to him and then he said, ‘Well, is there anything you want to ask, son?’ And I said, ‘Well, yes. You know. What, those years we don’t really know about you know. What happened when you were in the orphanage?’ And he just started crying. Now, my dad was quite a stoic chap and you know that wasn’t really his way. So we guess it was quite awful and I suspect they were abused in some way and so that, and I say that only because that really shaped his whole outlook on life which was to be secure and he would always say to have a roof over your head. He [pause] so when he came out of the orphanage I think he was on the streets of Trinidad and not sure what he was doing especially. He seemed to be a schoolteacher at some point he spoke of because that’s referred to by his colleagues often that he liked teaching. And that his treat at the end of the week was to buy one teaspoon full of Carnation condensed milk and that was a big deal. So that, that’s how he started and so when the war broke out so it’s all a bit of a grey area. He said that the war was the best thing that ever happened to him because Trinidad was absolutely vital to the defence of the Panama Canal and the Battle of the Caribbean 1942-43, four hundred ships were sunk in the region. Seventy percent of all the shipping sunk in the Atlantic was around there and I hadn’t realised until I started researching him quite that Trinidad was at sort of the epicentre of it and the West Indies providing bauxite for aluminium to build the aircraft and fruit, bandages. There was a whole range of resources that were supporting the war effort and Trinidad was kind of an oiling depot. The American aircraft carriers trained offshore to the west in the bay and so it was all happening in Trinidad. And so for my father he said that a US Army captain gave him his first job signing out tools to the men building the wherever he was. Now, there were quite a lot of different parts to the military infrastructure in Port of Spain and I realise some of the Naval bases actually north of it and so I don’t quite know which bit of where that was it was happening. He talks about HMS Benbow which was I think a torpedo patrol station so he might have been there for a bit but basically that was his first job. They trusted him to do this and so on his uniform in the photographs and in our personal possessions now we have this little E for Excellence badge which it appears the RAF were always happy for him to wear on his uniform and this seemed to mean really a lot to him. Almost more than his Defence and War Medal that he got and I think that’s because during those several years he, you know that gave him an income. It gave him his first security and I think for him that military way, knowing you’ve got a roof over your head, that just fitted with him. It worked for him and the company that was awarded the E for Excellence which was, they were given by the US government to the top five percent of industries that were supporting the war effort particularly well. I suppose that gave him that sense of pride that he was making a difference and I realise now that all around him a lot would have been going on. So a substantial number of Americans were brought in to manage all of this to the point there were some tensions in Trinidad that they had taken over the joint. So, but for him it worked and it seems some time around the beginning of the war then he joined The Royal Air Force Volunteers, Auxiliary. They, because they were West Indians, and all the West Indies weren’t called up and I’d always assumed my dad was just called up to the war because it was part of the British Empire but no, they volunteered. So now I’m particularly amazed to think either how bad were things or his sense of duty which he always had to see all of this going on with this war and that it was on his doorstep and stuff was sunk just offshore by the Germans. The U-boats were there. For him to volunteer to the Air Force of all things is really enormously significant because they would have known in the beginning of the war that it wasn’t going well and your odds of survival were slim and also it would mean convoying across to the UK. So he appears to have joined up. When I’m not sure. But there is this one image of him at Piarco which is now the International Airport which was then a Naval Air Station and it’s this one picture we have but in it are at least seven other young men with him who are named and identifiable who through your research we know which ship came across, they came across to the UK. That was 1941 and one of them is photographed with Ulric Cross who’s the most famous and decorated Trinidadian who flew Mosquito Pathfinders. And so the fact that fellow in the picture with my dad was with Ulric Cross in Britain shows that those others came over at that time and my dad was there but he didn’t. So I think that was because and this seemed to be the case with West Indians they weren’t trusted to be their own pilots and fly aircraft but to be a navigator, that worked. So those who flew tended to be in that role as Ulric was. But I think my father not having had a sound education at that time wasn’t clever enough so although he’s there with them in ’41 he’s not actually called up until ’44. So I think those intervening years he was at the Naval base seeing it all happen. So he’s finally called up and one of the reasons then that he didn’t come over was that there weren’t enough ships available to bring the West Indians over. So then they finally secured a vessel which was the Esperance Bay. So I think he took the SS Cuba, was a ship that collected West Indians through up to Newport News in Virginia. He always talked about that so again to think that this would have been a very short period of a few days when they were all assembled to start their convoy and yet of the few things he talked about that, that was one. So I think that was that time. It must have really dawned on him that he was going to war because there would have been lots of other West Indians with him there. Shall I keep going?
DDE: Yeah. Yeah. You are doing fantastically. That’s brilliant.
RW: Okay. So, yeah. So, so having looked up and now that actually that is the International Airport up in Virginia at Newport News. Yes. That resonates why and I think it was it would have dawned on him then that given so few Trinidadians joined up suddenly he’s surrounded by a thousand other West Indians and, and then they board their ship and over they come. So being able to determine by his arrival date with the Air Force in the UK which convoy he was on and from that the vessel and there were three troopships in that convoy. But he always spoke of the fact that shortly after setting off the ship broke down and they all thought they were dead because they were dead in the water. The U-boats were there and looking up the records in the Esperance Bay sure enough she gets into Liverpool and then she had her own deep maintenance period because the engines and that. So the fact that they managed to get it going again is quite something. But you can imagine the uncertainty bobbing around and the convoy left them behind and then to catch up they were full speed and he described the sea sickness and how horrific it was. You can imagine a thousand guys on this ship and that he slept on the upper deck. Well, in those days it would still take them what three or four weeks to cross the Atlantic so, so his war started with, and a thing I find about war stories is there is so much suffering like that that is just passed off because in the big scheme of things that then seems belittled. But the thought to me, being an ex-Navy person of four weeks on a ship throwing my guts up I know what it feels like. That would have been bad enough. So this strange thing that they’re going to war but actually the relief of arriving in Liverpool and when you see the photographs from the arrival of the Esperance Bay with the first one thousand West Indians. They looked jolly happy to be here.
DE: Yeah. Yeah.
RW: Because that was the first bullet dodged and then they all went to Filey. To RAF Hunmanby.
DE: Yeah.
RW: Which was the old Butlins camp and he did his basic training there. And he described how when all the West Indians got on to the ship they all organised themselves out into the islands they’d come from.
DE: Okay.
RW: By dialect.
DE: Right.
RW: So the Jamaicans with Jamaicans, the St Lucians, whoever and all the Trinidadians and then when they got to Hunmanby they realised oh, we’re all just black West Indians so suddenly they were all of one. So there was this strange sort of West Indian racism and then kind of got here and then it was like oh actually, no, we’ve got to stick together. So they were the first thousand and then another group I know were brought shortly after but not as many. So he was in that first batch and his name popped up on some of the Memorials. So from there I think that was their basic training. He never spoke much of it and I’ve not found evidence of him in any of the pictures yet but I’m sure there must be one. He was very dashing. He always wore his hair very smart and again I just think the security and the routine worked for him. He was a very conscientious person always by nature and a perfectionist. And so from there he was selected for Radio School training and so his service record is as I’m sure as anyone else who has tried to study one is just a bunch of meaningless numbers to start with.
DE: Three letter acronyms.
RW: Yeah. And it was difficult to know but we’ve now figured out that he, he went to RAF Egginton which I think, well was the RAF secret alternate headquarters out of London. If London was destroyed then Egginton so it was and it was the main switchboard for the RAF. Everything went through there. So he did basic, I think radio training there. He then went to RAF Yatesbury to do similar. I think that was the Radio School and then to Cosford. So because this was late in the war it seems most of what he was doing during the war was actually learning how to be a radio fitter and radar mechanic and that then he qualified in that and then that’s what he was doing and he was sent to RAF Hendon and then they moved up to just south of Cambridge. He was at another. It wasn’t Duxford. It was the other one. I can’t remember what it was called right now. So I think that’s most of what he was doing and he wasn’t flying during the war but he always spoke very passionately of the Lancaster, the Lancastrian. As a young kid I remember him always trying to explain to me how that was the civilian version of the Lancaster because we grew up in North London. We were on the flight path of RAF Northolt.
DE: Right. Yeah.
RW: So the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight and the Queen’s Flight and a lot of other kit was always flying over our house. So that gave him reason to talk about it and for us to kind of fall in love with these aircraft from a very young age because it was literally straight over us and sort of on the north end. So Lancastrians and the York.
DE: Yeah.
RW: And I think they were all then based at Hendon until they moved. It all got a bit too big and then they moved. Moved up to, to Cambridge way. So his service record then says that he did get his brevet. That he was flying. My brother remembers more. My brother is older than me that he said he was in C-47s, Dakotas which he always loved and spoke a lot of. My brother thinks he was flying to Belfast for some reason. So whether there was some shuttle route or it wasn’t. It was all too early for the Berlin Airlift and so forth but he definitely was doing something with those. But he spoke of Mosquitos too and I think they were for a while at Hendon. I think Hendon had a lot of American influence and then also the RAF. So it’s all a bit, he didn’t really talk in much detail about what he was doing but that’s, that’s sort of as much as we know now. But what really kind of played true to what he said in the beginning that the war was the best thing that ever happened for him was that then and I find this strange 1948 he is suddenly discharged. So, his, his term of commitment came up. I think ’47 there is a reference and then ’48 the RAF sent a lot of the West Indians home. So again by the dates and through your guys and your research I discover that yes they all went together. A lot of them left on the same ship. It was from Southampton and it was the Windrush.
DE: Yes.
RW: And that the Windrush sailed him home and he literally the day he got off in Port of Spain those first immigrants or emigrants to the UK were getting on board the Windrush and she then went and collected everyone else and came back into London. So from what an amazing sort of passing on the gangway that he had decided he would go home.
DE: Yeah.
RW: They had decided they were better off in the UK and he said it took him a week to realise that actually the same was true for him. But when we now look at, we found in his belongings his UK sort of registration papers it was a month. But definitely within a month he realised his future was in the UK. I remember him telling me he only took, when he went home he took his tools with him because he thought, ‘Well, I’ll do something similar in Trinidad,’ and he brought them all back again and he very quickly oh [pause] and in the last year, 1947 the Royal Air Force sent him to the North London Polytechnic where they had a Radar and Radio School set up so they’d recognised that they were building on his expertise and invested in him. That’s why I thought was funny that they sent him home.
DE: Yeah.
RW: Because they’d invested in all of that and then sent him home. Well, he came back and it seems almost instantly he got a job with the GPO. The General Post Office. He had a very good friend called Peter Grant who we’ve not researched who was in, he met in the Royal Air Force who was Ukrainian and Peter Grant, they stayed in touch for years. I think his wife is still alive. He went to America and apparently what happened was AT&T were looking for these radio experts post-war and his friend Peter said, ‘Why don’t you come with me to the States? AT&T will give us a job.’ But it was in the south and my father being aware of the racism down there chose not to. So Peter Grant went to AT&T, worked for them for the rest of his life and my father was with the GPO. He very quickly ended up at Dollis Hill Research Establishment working on short wave radio and microwave radio systems and after five years I think going on to, ’56 or therearound he was promoted out of there. I think into London to Head Office. He married the same year and he basically became an electronic engineer and he worked on the microwave communication system which, which was our way of beaming television line of sight all the way up through the country. But also I now find out had a quite an important Cold War use to it as well which I had never known. He didn’t mention that. So he, there’s reference made in his promotion speech from Dollis Hill to the computer. He often told us that they had one of the first computers in the world.
DE: Yeah.
RW: Got there and it was the size of a room and, and this was all part of this system. So he was up and down the GPO Tower in London and Birmingham and standing on hills around the country with balloons at the height of the Radio Tower so an artist could paint it in. And this was his job so that in the end I think BT were like, ‘You’ve done a cracking job.’ His role was simply to travel around the country meeting members of the armed forces or the emergency services to rent out space on those towers for their communication systems which meant he knew the country inside out, back to front. He just went everywhere. He never drove himself. He always had a driver and he spoke how, because he was important to those people they would arrive and they would assume Mr Williams was the driver because he sounded like an Englishman and because he looked dark they’d assume that he was the chauffeur and that he always got a real kick out of then saying, ‘I’m Mr Williams and actually you’ll be doing business with me today.’ So he, that kind of racist thing, and the Air Force of course in the war did break the mould in trying to be more inclusive. The Navy found ways to avoid it and so the RAF were trying to sort of lead the way but he never really complained particularly of racism but subtly sort of here and there you see how it was influencing his choices and what he was doing all the way through. Even to being one of the few sort of minorities in BT as it became at the time —
DE: Yeah.
RW: Doing what he did. So he retired after forty years and that forty years or thirty eight years it’s evident that takes him right back to 1948 when he came back from Trinidad and that was his life. So despite all of that if he got up in the morning in his little middle class semi-detached house in London he’d tip his slippers out to make sure there wasn’t a scorpion or something in them. He never got out of that habit. He always said, ‘You need to have a roof over your head son.’ He, I think was always nervous that all he had he could lose just like that. As I say he never talked about his early years really and, and the war he seemed to have about the best of time he could of it. I believe Hendon took a hit during the war from a bomb but I think he sort of avoided the worst of that. However, he would have been aware being in the RAF kind of what, what was was happening.
DE: Yeah.
RW: And who wasn’t around. And so once he retired he was one of those sadly who really didn’t know what, he didn’t do much with himself because I think he defined himself by his work and what he did and so few people understood what he did. I think even my mother and even us if you start and try and describe it. But he talked about Gee and Oboe. I remember those words as a child which were the radar systems. The first H2S I don’t remember but he was always kind of doodling trying to explain how radio waves worked. So he was passionate about it and he clearly although some of his early reports, papers and results didn’t look great he definitely for someone who came from no education he really achieved something and BT had enormous respect for him and, and the war did that for him and for us.
DE: Yeah. Fantastic. Can I just go back on a couple of things? You briefly spoke when he was at the place where he made the model P-38.
RW: Yes.
DE: Can you talk a little bit about that and do you know why he made a P-38 model?
RW: Again, what I’ve realised with a lot of what my dad spoke about was the little stories he said. There was normally a connection. This was what my learning from researching my father’s past was I guess many other people might conclude the same. That if he said it it wasn’t random. There were so many war stories you could share but for him it didn’t mean general history. There was a connection. So he always wanted to tell me about the Battle for the River Plate and the Graf Spee and then the reason was that there was this image that we still need to find that he’d seen HMS Ajax in repair after the battle in Port of Spain. So again I suppose that would have been quite impressionable to suddenly see this massive warship that was brutally beaten up as evidence of the Germans. At that point he may have never seen the German Navy but seen what it could do. So he had a thing about the P-38, isn’t it? The Lightning.
DE: Yeah.
RW: I mean it’s unusual as a twin boom aircraft anyway. But I don’t know where, why, whether he, whether, I haven’t studied, were they in at Hendon? Did he see them somewhere? But looking at the workmanship on it he was always very proud that he had designed the Lightning bolt base and chromed it himself and the rest is carved from Bakelite. But and I assumed because now you can buy these metal moulded aircraft that, that perhaps was provided and his job was to make the base. But when I look at some of the tooling on the aircraft I think actually he probably poured that as well and shaped it. So I don’t know whether this was just general workmanship kind of a workshop class they had but that’s sort of the idea I’m getting. That they wanted them to have some basic skills. Can you shape metal? Can you shape Bakelite? Make something. And that he chose to do that and then typical to my father that I think he had such little reward he was very caught up all his life about being recognised for what you do. I think he always felt unrecognised and I think again that was more based from his childhood because in his career he was. So he scratched in the bottom what it is. He was always very keen to, you know, I want you to know I did this. So he scratched in the bottom then that it’s that aircraft. It’s north. He’s put the date, 1947 so I think that’s what that was about but, but he didn’t explain whether it was skills they were teaching them because they might just need to be good at. But he then went on to put all the electrics in our house and put the plumbing in and God knows you know nearly blew himself up a few times under the stairs fiddling. He, he wore glasses in the end and luckily because something flashed and then he found after all these melted bits of copper on the, on the lenses of his glasses.
DE: Crikey.
RW: Which he was fascinated by. So he had this kind of curious scientific mind but it was mate you could have, that was you blind, you know.
DE: Yeah.
RW: But he just thought you just get on and do it practically and the whole road everyone was calling on his services. So again you could see how it had, it had given these, given him these skills that were life skills that he used thereafter.
DE: Yeah. I need to check. I think they used Lightnings, I think they did radio and radar stuff in them so —
RW: Ah, that would, yeah.
DE: That’s something to look at. So, I also wanted to ask you about, you know your mother and how her and your father met and your mother’s story.
RW: Yes. It’s similarly, I mean, the war. So this is the thing about the war is it was, it was everything wasn’t it? So if the whole spectrum of the story be absolute tragedy to absolute joy and for her it was yeah quite a mixed bag in so far as she was, her original [pause] So she was born in Frankfurt. I think, what year? She was eleven around the middle of the war, nineteen, she was ten years, so 1930. She would have been born about 1930. Ten years younger than my father. I believe her real father, father’s name was Hamburger and that he was very senior German running the railway network. And the immediate question people would say well then he must have been a Nazi and I don’t know but he left my mother’s mother and then my mother’s mother put her up for adoption very young. At the age of two or three. She says she remembers. She was born in Munich. Sorry, this is still in Munich. She said, isn’t it remarkable? What do you remember of a two or three year old? But she says she remembers being taken to the zoo by her real mother, being handed over to her adoptive mother and her having no qualms about that whatsoever. She remembers it happening and I’ve been to Munich Zoo with my mother and it was strange to walk around thinking this is kind of how it started. So then her adoptive mother lived in Frankfurt and so her adoptive father was sent to the Russian Front and he became a prisoner of war. So for most of the war my mother and her adoptive mother lived in their little farm which was a vineyard in a place called Berkersheim which is outside Frankfurt and they had a manager, Rudolph [unclear] who I’m named after who helped to run the business for them. And it became apparent years later that her father on the Eastern Front when the war ended the Russians didn’t release them for a long time. But that he had a mistress and he wanted to keep it secret of course and he also then wanted to get shot of his wife, my mother’s adoptive mother so he accused this man Rudolph [unclear] of having an affair with his wife and he was thrown into prison. And this was actually, I think this was still during the war. My mother had to take him food parcels to the bars of the prison while he was in prison and none of this was true. The war ended and my mother explains and I think we have some of it I’ve recorded on a phone interview during Covid the Polish prisoners of war [pause] yes, they had Polish prisoners of war working on this vineyard. Then rebelled and were taking some of the Germans and shooting them against the trees in the orchards and it was all very dangerous. So she talks about this chaotic time at the end of the war. The villagers turned against them because they believed that her mother had had this affair. So her dog was shot by the villagers. Rudolph [unclear] was like a Del Boy character. Larger than life and very authoritative. So in the end they did end up all living together and in the end yeah she, her mother and Rudolph yeah they were like my grandparents. But there was a point because food was short where my mother had pet rabbits and then that Sunday dinner was delicious and they’d eaten the pet rabbit and I think that was a common story at the time. But it took years for the real story to come out and actually later on in my mother’s life where the villagers in Berkersheim were then apologising because they’d realised going right back it was a sort of EastEnders story. So, I think my mother, so she was in Frankfurt. The war had ended. She talks about the German retreat. They blew up the bridge and when you look at the map of Berkersheim you can see that the Americans arrived and she talks of opening the front door and seeing an American tank with a black face. The first ethnic minority person she’d seen but couldn’t talk to them because they were rolling through. They were rolling through but they were friendly and it was like gosh. She had, she had no schooling as a result. The train was bombed out so they would go to school on the train with no windows but then they were strafed by fighters so that was all too dangerous. Her piano lessons she had to stop because of this attack and, and she tells the story which you can hear in her own words of the day she was roller-skating. So she also I think, very little schooling. She’d got a job as a telegraphist I think in Frankfurt but I think also and this is important my mother actually had a learning impairment. I think, you know she was neurodiverse. We would understand about this now.
DE: Yeah.
RW: But I think my mum cognitively struggled with certain types of learning anyway which would have made her life difficult. But she was very driven like her mother and her stepfather and decided to come to England to be an au pair girl. Which she did. So aged eighteen. Now part of her feistiness was she was in a rowing team in Frankfurt and she talks about nearly dying. A lightning bolt hit the water and she was swimming in the river, in the River Mein and a lightning bolt nearly killed her and the rest of her life she was terrified of lightning but she was always go, get it. Go get it. So you can imagine having a German accent, coming over here in the early 50s and she worked for a Jewish family in near Golders Green, North London when we were living near there and so she was walking the children in Primrose Hill and my father was with his mates playing cricket. So my father would have been working for the Post Office by then and I guess he might, yes he would have still been at Dollis Hill which was nearby so it was sort of North London. Hendon. Mill Hill way. And they met in the park and that’s how, six months it took. So she took him to Germany. She met the family there and they got married in Germany and, and then we all came along. So my dad again, very organised. He chose where we lived by where the good schools were which was North London so on the flightpath of Heathrow which was why we all grew up loving aircraft again. As well as Northolt and, and so our German grandparents, or step grandparents would come and visit. So Rudolph [unclear] it then transpired and I remember less than my brother explained that he was an anti-aircraft gunner and that he was on the Mӧhne Dam the night of the raid and that he would often when he told the story because he was that kind of bullish fellow I mean to the point at Christmas you go to the butchers and there would be a British queue and he would walk past all of them straight up the front and be served and the poor butcher wouldn’t argue. Yeah. Because he was huge, a shock of white hair and he just was that assertive. So he was still very upset that people didn’t recognise the numbers of people who died in the flooding which really does suggest he wasn’t just, because in other ways I can imagine making up the story just to wind us up but that really kind of suggested he was there and he would say, ‘Oh, you’re bigging up your squadron guys and your Lancasters but you know thousands of people died.’ So I think he was there and that said my brother reminded me though that he was a great mimic and that he could do a word-perfect impersonation of Hitler. Always had done and had actually been reprimanded in the German Army and I think moved or punished by being moved or disranked or something for doing that at the time. For, for making the joke out of Hitler. So when he wasn’t doing that he also I know was smuggling in oranges and he was, he was like Walker from, “Dad’s Army.” So he always had fingers in pies. He had the gift of the gab and, and he was entrepreneurial so he made their war as comfortable as possible by doing all of that. And he was a scary chap. So even as a child I was quite scared of him and actually sadly towards the end he had a right go at me once when we went to visit him. He was ill. Went with my mother and I got him on a bad day and he, I blanked it actually so he must have really had a right go at me about something I did that you know was immaterial and my mother gave him a right talking to. Apparently, she told me she went in, ‘You don’t talk to my son like that.’ You know. Put him in his place because then he was old. He’d smoked like a trooper. Bronchitis. But he went on for years you know but he was grumpy and gruff but again you could see that kind of survival instinct. I mean what they’d been through. And so, so that was him. And so my mother however living in Finchley our neighbours were Jewish. She explains she was always, she always had to know if she was meeting someone are they Jewish. Are they Jewish? And she had a weird way of speaking so then it would be oh the Jewish lady up the road like and you just wouldn’t say that now would you?
DE: No.
RW: ‘It's the Jewish lady.’ And dare I say it I think, and she suffered and she cried when I interviewed her, you know. She said she has felt guilty all her life for being German and she never lost her accent and she felt so British and she studied British history and she was so knowledgeable about this country and proud of this country but couldn’t shake the German accent unlike my father who you’ll hear sounded like, you know Queen’s English. And she felt ashamed because of this de-Nazification and that she was taken as a young girl to the cinema with her fellow pupils to see the films of Auschwitz because the policy was that all Germans should feel responsible for what happened. Not just those who did and the Nazis. It was believed they should. They were all accountable for it and that absolutely affected her and made her life so difficult and she spoke and she speaks. You’ll hear during Covid she says, ‘You know, here I am now and who are the people who are looking after me and coming to check on me? They’re the Jewish people.’ And she said and she’s never and she said, ‘I’ve never had a bad experience.’ But underneath that I believe, dare I say it but she wouldn’t forgive me for saying it I think was a very deep-seated anger. A kind of this, this anger at the Jews for making her feel guilty when actually of course it wasn’t the Jews who did it it was, it was our government and the de-Nazification process. But you can see how in human nature the minute somebody says they’re Jewish she has to be reminded and is dealing with this pain and then she’d resent that. So it was this. She had lots of wonderful Jewish friends and it was fine and it almost seemed immaterial what their religious beliefs were and yet at the same time underneath was it would always be a problem for her and, and that’s so sad, you know. And it was so that she also then would break down into tears talking about that. The guilt. And she couldn’t, at work, the de-Nazification whoever thought that was a good idea it worked for them with her because yes she lived with that guilt to the day she died. She felt somehow responsible and yet she says, ‘But we were only children. We didn’t know.’ She said, ‘There were no men left in the village anyway. They’d all gone to the war. There were no male teachers. We didn’t know what was happening. Communications broke down,’ she said, so they didn’t really know what was happening in the war. They were I guess like many Germans it was, it was kept a secret from them but she had noticed how it was thinning out in class. Yeah. Places were getting emptier and sort of half aware that it’s all getting a little bit less busy in town but not really understanding that these people were being taken away. So she really struggled with that. So you have this strange, not strange, that’s what it was. My father, the best thing that happened for him. His big loss was his brother dying suddenly. I think he drowned or something in Trinidad. You know for him that was the big loss that we know of but it brought him to Europe. It gave him his education. It gave him a career. It gave him the security he needed. For my mother it was really disruptive like for so many German children but to both their credit and this is the thing isn’t it where some people dig deep and they made the best of it and they really did and to them it was just normal isn’t it? So when you talk to people who had been through that they had few choices and they don’t see the brilliance of how they handled it successfully. To them it seemed the obvious thing. Go to Britain. Right. Go back to Trinidad. No. Stay in Britain. Do this. Work hard. To my father it was always work hard, study, you need [pause] So I worked in the Arts in the end. He saw no value in that. He made my, he paid for it in the end. I mean bless him so he made my life hell for being an artist and wanting to follow the Arts right up to the point though that he still sent me to university and, you know he didn’t impede it whereas my mother was Germany’s second best milliner for her age. A hatmaker. And then her real father when he disowned her refused to pay to send her to college to carry on with that career. My mother would have been, you know really successful. That was something she could do. So they, they just dealt with it and I suppose with all the tragedy around them they could see well actually I’m still here so I’m doing pretty well for that so I’ll carry on.
DE: Yeah.
RW: But quite where that fight comes from who knows, you know. My dad he just fought and made it work for him and my mother was the same and —
DE: It’s a wonderful story of reconciliation. Two people from opposite sides —
RW: Yes.
DE: Joining.
RW: Yeah. Of course you say that. Again, to me that seems normal but think about it. A mixed marriage in 1956. Germany. I mean my mother was Aryan. You know, blue eyes, blonde and yeah to do a [unclear] not bothered by that at all and it’s like so he went six months so she checked him out. Now, my mother very distrustful because of her upbringing so she actually went and met her real father and he didn’t know. She found out where he lived, went to his doorstep pretending she was canvassing for something. He didn’t have a scooby and she left because she wanted to clap eyes on him. Later on she met, and I went with her, his second wife. So I think again she wanted to connect. She wanted to know. She didn’t want to feel like ousted and discovered she had another half-brother and and actually sort of made these connections and learned more about her father after he’d passed on. But yeah so she did her homework on my dad. Checked that he was responsible, reliable. That’s what she wanted. But yeah in those days quite something and you can imagine again at British Telecom you’ve got this Trinidadian fellow and when you listen to his acceptance speech for his promotion there is a, he ends up trying to explain his slight awkwardness. I think he’s feeling slightly awkward that he’s the ethnic minority and he’s been promoted and there are other people who might have and haven’t been because he gets into a little monologue about how one gets promoted and I think that’s part of the driver to it. And they were also chuckling, his boss has sort of said, ‘We know when Jimmy has gone off to Germany. He’s been travelling around Europe and he’s found himself a wife,’ and then they start giggling about how you choose a wife and for them that must have been, sort of quite something that he’s marrying a German. They’d never met her. She came over. But actually he compartmentalised his life so his work was work and very few of his work colleagues came home to us. My mum had very little to do with his work. We only went to see his workplace once as I recall. Sitting very young, sitting in the canteen at Lutyens House in Old Street, London very, and we were very shy children because he was quite controlling and we were playing a game whoever came in next was and then we’d say a celebrity and of course the more they didn’t look like celebrity the more funny we found it. And I remember saying, ‘Ronnie Corbett,’ you know and this guy walked in. And that’s what I remember. But I don’t know how old I was, ten or something. And he once took me to work. To Folkestone. He went to one of his towers and Folkestone was unusual because it was a concrete structure not a metal girder. I don’t know if it’s still there and at the time it was recognised in architecture as quite revolutionary this three pillared radio tower. And I remember going there with him to work one day but that was it. He kept very [pause] so I think he lived a double life and it was work and he went and he loved it and he had meaning and purpose and people understood him and then he’d come home and he’d stop off at Camden Market and he’d bringing us avocadoes and guavas and things you buy now anywhere but in those days no one knew about. So he was trying to bring in in that sense his Trinidadian culture. The West Indian culture home and but he had those friends and a lot of Indian friends because of course he was sort of Indian, West Indian as opposed to African. But my mother couldn’t really relate to that as a German pernickety, what was the word he used to use for her? Fastidious.
DE: Right.
RW: My dad loved that. ‘Your mother is fastidious.’ So he would have this Caribbean side that would come out I think when he was at Camden. Then he would come home to a German wife and this household that was run like the Von Trapp family you see and it says it’s an interesting mix. It’s a cultural West Indian laid back too but Air Force military detailed perfection. You know. Homework. Regimented. But also because his insecurities because he had none of that to my mother German again cleanliness. And my mother she was always collecting little bits of paper because during the war clearly you know paper was a scarce resource and she had this thing that you couldn’t throw paper away so she’d chop it all up into squares and then there would be a stack to use for notes.
DE: Right.
RW: We’d never get through them all and she would because she was on this farm and it was dusty and she didn’t have a choice so everything was always dusted to within an inch of its life. So when we grew up with cowboy and Indian films, interesting how they’ve all gone you know like that was normal. There would be John Wayne shooting it up and then she would dust the top of the television because she felt the dust had settled from all the horses and waggons you see [laughs] on the screen. The dust had settled on the TV. So she’d dust the top of the television. So it was kind of wonderful these little clues all the time back to kind of where they’d come from.
DE: Fantastic.
RW: So I guess the last so talking about being tough is then I meet my partner Shelley Moore and her grandmother growing up in Putney and telling the story of the Putney bombing and that her niece had gone out for the evening and said she wanted to go to the cinema and it was towards the end of the war and so the Blitz was kind of over. People were sort of getting a bit more easy going, moving around London. But this one night two Fokker Wulf 190s, the German answer to the Mosquito, fast, capable I mean they argue don’t they possibly one of the best, if not the best design of the World War Two. Big powerful brutes and that two came in that night and one was going for Putney Bridge. So I went down and this is the fun isn’t it when you discover being an historian like yourself which I haven’t and I just have was let’s go there. Let’s make it real because you get more don’t you?
DE: Yeah.
RW: You see more because there is a church at each end of the bridge and they say the pilot was lining those up to hit the bridge and then you do go and you see and it’s like wow and they’re offset and so in came the bomber and at the same time this young lady she’s not gone to the cinema which was the other side of the road she’s gone to the dance club. Cinderella Dance Hall. And so she was in there, the German pilot releases his bomb, they reckon two seconds late and so it misses the bridge, carries on down the road. Now, if he’s lining up the churches that are offset then it aims straight at Cinderella Dance Club. But if he’s lining up along the bridge to give more chance of hitting it then I found out there was a cross wind that night because we’re in Britain aren’t we, the Brits and we always record the weather. So you can get the wind that night there and that blew it south so instead of hitting the other side of the road it went straight into the dance club and hundreds of people were killed and it was the worst bombing event tragedy for Putney of the whole war and she was in there. But the memoirs as you’ll see are, describe how then the family are in their little bomb shelter at the bottom of the garden and then she’s not home and the police arrive in the morning to say that, you know she’s been killed. That this bomb hit the dance club and she was in there and she’s dead. Only she’s not. So what happened was she’s in a body bag with all the others and because there was a milk bar downstairs and then there was a dance club above so there were lots of people in and she’s alive and she’s called out for her mother and for water and someone just happened to hear that and they unzipped her and got her out. And she had lost an eye and her face was badly injured. She lost a breast and they said she’d never have children and she took a year in hospital to be able to walk again and recover which she did. She had a family. So Shelley met her and, and it’s funny because Shelley’s father blew his own eyeball out as a kid with a firework so you’ve got these two with glass eyes. But they all had a good South London sense of humour about it. I’m not, I’m not sure if they did the, what was it? The old Falk. He had a glass eye didn’t he? Columbo.
DE: Oh Yes. Yeah.
RW: But if anyone sort of messed up apparently he’d pop it out and say, ‘You need this more than I do.’ So, I don’t think they went that far as Richard Falk. Peter Falk was it? But again that kind of get through it and, and so the grandmother she writes, you’ll see the end of her memoir she just sums it all up by saying, ‘Damned war.’ Brilliant.
DE: Yeah.
RW: Yeah. You know. So, and how many other stories and you think that we’ll never know and to them it was normal so it wasn’t a big deal. You think why don’t people talk about it? Well, it was just what you did.
DE: Oh yeah.
RW: Supposedly. Why are you going to make a big deal out of it? What else were we going to do? But what’s the moral of all of that? I suppose we still feel insecure don’t we? The world is still a tricky place. I always feel if we really look at it the world is becoming a better place. You go to the Imperial War Museum. I remember as a kid and that top floor you’d got to be over sixteen to go in and it showed you the numbers dying in world conflict and they’re going down down down, you know. So you need some good news but we still live in a troubled time. The armed forces are as prevalent as ever here in Lincoln. You’re reminded every day as we should be don’t take it for granted but actually you know what? Things are I think despite everything things are getting better and their mental attitude to to have hope, not give up no matter what, you know. Your ship’s broken down or you know that squadron hasn’t come back or your bridge has been blown up, your train’s bombed, you’re being machine gunned and you’re on your roller skates but this instinct just get on with it. We’ll be okay. I think, I think well that message just carries through to today doesn’t it?
DE: Yeah.
RW: Yeah.
DE: I think, I think we’ve covered absolutely everything that I’ve sort of written notes about. Could you just, just for this recording say the story about the roller skates?
RW: Yes. So my mother explains that her mother was working. They were in Berkersheim I think, because she was in a few different little villages actually at that time of the war and part of the road was nicely tarmacked and so she was out roller skating with a friend and she saw these two little planes high up in the sky. It was a clear blue sky and and they were sort of drawn to that and thought oh, you know, how cute. Two little planes. They then dived down to eye view level and strafed the village with machine gun bullets and so she ran on her roller skates with her friend and ran for home to the cellar and their cellar was supposed to be their bomb shelter but their bomb shelter was their wine store so it was full of huge vats of wine. And they ran down the concrete steps in their roller skates because what else were they going to do? Managed to achieve that without falling and killing themselves that way but then sat there all huddled up on their own waiting for this attack to finish realising that if, if the cellar took a hit they would drown in wine [laughs] and eventually emerged. And that she had been on the train and the same thing had happened. She said another clear blue sky, two little planes and then it attacked the train and when they got home explained this and that was the end of them taking the train anywhere.
DE: Yeah.
RW: So, yeah but the innocence of a child fascinated by the sound and the sight and not realising that they were actually the enemy this time. And one has to wonder why they were strafing that village because I don’t believe there was any military interest where she was living. So you do just wonder whether it was someone up there, a bunch of Germans, right. You know, you’re angry. Your mate didn’t come home yesterday from his flight and just give them a bit, a bit of action. Who knows.
DE: Yeah.
RW: So these fleeting, fleeting moments. I don’t know why Mustang comes into mind. Whether more recently when I spoke to her it’s not like she knew what aircraft they were but, but definitely from earlier on something has been sown in my memory that they were the Mustang. What’s that, the PE-58 was it?
DE: 47.
RW: 47. P-47 Mustangs. So American.
DE: P-51.
RW: 51. Ah, there we are. Yeah. So again lost. Lost in the sands of time. But somehow that had always been at some point maybe it was a P-51 and knowing and my mum you know she was interested in militaria to some extent too and I think sometimes you would remember what you’ve seen. So these names. Yeah. Yeah.
DE: Absolutely fantastic. Thanks Rolph.
RW: Pleasure.
DE: Yeah. I’m not sure —
[recording paused]
RW: Well, this is nice that it will live on isn’t it?
DE: Yes.
RW: Someone, who knows, in the future will listen and picture because as you speak it you see it and as you listen you picture it don’t you. You create your own movie of it and that’s lovely as they did so.
DE: Yeah.
RW: So that little moment in time is sort of immortalised isn’t it?
DE: Yeah.
RW: Yeah. But who knows what else we’ll find. I mean my dad and Hendon I’ve got, I think there’s probably more we can find. Why he was flying where and what and I thought maybe Peter Grant. I won’t have any means to get his service record and I don’t know if his wife is still alive to be able to apply for it because knowing where he was and what he was doing could reveal what my dad was doing then.
DE: Sure.
RW: Yeah.
DE: Yeah.
RW: Because he was a lovely chap. All their children, their children are alive. One in America. So that might [pause] might reveal a bit more.
DE: I always think with research it’s perseverance and you make your own luck and good fortune.
RW: Yeah.
DE: And you keep trying. The document will, will arrive.
RW: Arrive eventually. Yeah.
DE: Yeah.
RW: Yeah. There must be more like from Filey and, and I don’t know, like reports and things. Whether they are all kept and get written up saying, ‘You’ve done very well,’ and this that and the other and whether there’s a wodge of paper somewhere of his actual RAF paperwork I don’t know but yeah and, and BT I wonder. I’ve got in touch with their archive but they didn’t have much which surprises me for what he was doing but then I wonder whether it’s classified.
DE: It sounds like some of it probably was doesn’t it?
RW: Yeah.
DE: Yeah.
RW: I think he was on, yeah I think he signed, he must have signed the Official Secrets Act now I’d say. I remember him saying he’d done that so I don’t know how it was used for the Cold War so that’s possibly why there is little [pause] and the Christmas cards. There were names of his other colleagues but I now realise I’m too late because they’d all be ninety or dead so it’s too late to try. And Ken Clarke the guy I went to Folkestone with and his son so it was me and that guy’s little son I thought I’d get in touch with him but no. I’ve left it too late. Yeah. So, yeah I didn’t mention of course my dad lied about his age so we don’t know.
DE: Right.
RW: He made himself two years older when he joined up and I’m not sure why he needed to because I thought we didn’t have a stipulation at twenty-one to join then. The Americans did. Or maybe he just wanted to seem more experienced. But so his service record he’s, he’s nineteen, eighteen and then on his discharge papers he’s become nineteen, twenty. So it was corrected. So I thought, oh that’s interesting that they didn’t just go with that. At some point he’s been honest and said it was but we don’t even know whether that’s true because birth certificate when you were born in Trinidad then to his family he always dismissed when we said it was your birthday. He’d say, ‘Oh, every day is a birthday.’ He always dismissed his birthday. It was like —
DE: Right.
RW: It was meaningless to him. So I don’t even know that he was. We always had a feeling he was older than he was. Yeah. But don’t know and Trinidad is too, I keep looking. It’s not very safe to go to still so. My brother went with my dad and said you know he was like a different person over there he was so chilled. But there’s still people around. There might be some some records to look up but for I think for western people going there it’s all the drug stuff at the moment. They kidnap people and yeah so it’s not doesn’t safe yet to go sadly. So, yeah. So that side of the story and [unclear] might be records I don’t know.
DE: Something for another day.
RW: Yeah.
DE: Right. I shall press stop.
RW: Yeah.
DE: Thank you ever so much.
RW: Thank you. Oh, it’s a pleasure.
DE: Yeah.
RW: But he wasn’t in Lincoln. The whole thing started with was here because I’d moved here obviously.
DE: Yeah.
RW: Was my dad here? There’s Lancasters everywhere [laughs] so but not that. That would have been peachy but yeah not quite.
DE: Right. Thank you.