Interview with Gwendoline Thickett
Gwendoline Thickett grew up in Rotherham and was a young girl at school when the Second World War began. She was in Sunday School at her local church when the news of the declaration of war was announced. Her parents had already begun to prepare for possible eventualities by storing essentials in readiness. Gwendoline’s brother was an apprentice joiner until he joined the Army. She recalls her father building a shelter from a water tank, the bombing of Sheffield and the American soldiers who came to the area.
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2023-11-10
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00:45:38 Audio Recording
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AThickettG231110, PThickettG2301
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Interview with Tom Walker
Tom was born in Stainforth, near Doncaster. His father and two brothers were miners. One of his sisters was in the Auxiliary Territorial Service and the other was a qualified nurse; she became a sister in Barnsley Hospital until she joined the Army. She then went to Germany and eventually to Burma before being made a major at Bombay hospital. Tom left school at fourteen and joined the Air Training Corps. A few months later he went to night school at the technical college, gained qualifications and went to work as a tool setter before volunteering for the Royal Air Force. He went to recruit in Sheffield and was given a job making 25lb shells. In about 1943 he received his call-up papers, and was posted at Rotherham, St. Andrews, London, Newquay and then to training at RAF Riccall as flight engineer. His Australian crew was at the Heavy Conversion Unit with 462 Squadron, then carried out carrying out nine operations. Tom married the week before the war ended and while on holiday his plane blew up on the runway, killing all the crew. At the end of the war Tom became a transport manager at RAF Scampton for about three months before being sent to northern Germany. He stayed at Braunschweig for five months on motor transport at a small airport. On returning to England he was demobbed and worked on a building site before moving to the steel works at Rotherham.
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2018-07-17
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
00:49:46 audio recording
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AWalkerT180717, PWalkerT1801
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Interview with Eric Wright
Eric Wright in lived in Rotherham at the start of the war. As a school child he says that he did not really understand the implications of it. The family moved to Nottingham and he describes life there, with the air raids and sheltering under the Morrison table shelter in the living room. He recalls one air raid in which his house was damaged, and he had to be rescued but his friend on the other side of the street was killed. After a year they moved to Lincoln where his father became an air raid warden and fire watcher. One night in 1943 his father took him up to the roof of Lincoln Cathedral, from where he saw a German aircraft drop bombs on Lincoln before it was shot down. During an air raid on Sheffield, his mother was seriously injured and subsequently died. Being a child he was not allowed to go to the funeral. Later the family moved Doncaster. He explains that after the close of RAF Skellingthorpe, live ammunition was dumped in the lake at Hartsholme Park. He also describes how they managed to get cordite from cannon shells to make 'scarlet runners', a type of firework they let off in the school playground. After the war, Eric did his National Service with the Royal Artillery. After training in he was posted to a light anti-aircraft unit. During his service he was based in Germany where he helped to clear Belsen Concentration Camp. He became a driver using a variety of vehicles. He also served for five months in Korea, where he was injured.
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2018-04-22
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
01:00:30 audio recording
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AWrightE180422
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Rotherham [place]
This page is an entry point for a place. Please use the links below to see all relevant documents available in the Archive.