Web Page 1060
21^st July 2012

Top Picture: The SWS sign still to be seen in Langstone Road.

Second Picture:  A wartime parafin heater

Third Picture: Paulsgrove Prefabs

After the Battle

Luckily most of us are just that little bit too young to remember the horrors of the Second World War, BUT if you are like me I can still remember the destruction and the buildings and other things that were left over from the war.  Things such as the first picture the SWS sign painted on the wall to indicate to the fire brigade where there was a Static Water Supply if they should need it if the water main was fractured. These supplies could have been purpose built reservoirs, large garden ponds or swimming pools, they all had their uses.

Most of us can remember air raid shelters the one in our garden was demolished before I can remember but our next door neighbour still had a purpose built brick one where he kept his crop of apples and my Grandfather had two! A brick built one for himself and my Grandmother and an Anderson shelter for his children, he was a vry strange man.! I have heard from amny of you over the years who remember their parents using the air raid shelter as a shed, or a stor, or a chicken run or any number of uses. Whatever it was used for after the war I am sure during the hostilites our parents would have loved to have a parafin heater as shown in the seond picture to heat the shelter, but there again parafin would have been hard to come by.

What else? Ah the air raid siren which was run up and tested every Monday morning at 10.00. Our local one was sited behind the New Inn in Drayton. This went on well into the 1960’s and in fact the ones in the Dockyard were still tested regularly up until a few years ago.

Nissan huts. Who remembers them? They seemed to have sprouted up all over the town to house the military when they were stationed in Pompey. I remember rows of these thngs in Rugby Camp in Hilsea and in fact I think they wre used well into the 1970’s as an overflow teaching centre for Highbury College.

Looking at Portsdown Hill today, apart from the Forts the other wartime site lies just to the west of Fort Purbrook, this is the gun inplacement. It is still there rotting away it was something that I could look out at as I lay in bed at home more than 50 years ago.

I think I am right in saying that we no longer have any Prefabs left in Portsmouth and I know there was a great affection for these modular buildings to replace bomb damaged housing. I know that several of you had experience in living in one after all there were so many. Some on Highbury, some on King George V playing Fields and some in Paulsgrove. In fact some of the two storied Paulsgrove Prefabs which were built as a temporary solution to the housing problem are still in situ 50 years on as people will not leave them, such is their attachment for them. See the bottom picture.

Other, much smaller things were still around when we were young and for the adventurous boy (or should that be nosy?) there was a wealth of stuff to be picked up on the Farlington Marshes. Shell and bullet cases (most discharged but we did find the odd live bullet and tried to set it off. We must have been mad!), rusty ammunition boxes, gas masks, discarded pieces of military hardware and even odd bits of metal with writing or numbers on and if you found a piece with German writing you were a real hero. 

Other items could be bought from the three ex government supplies shops in town but I spoke of those only a few weeks ago.

Wherever we went in Portsmouth in the 1950’s there were bomb sites and some of these were still there in the 60’s. Whole areas in central Portsmouth were flattened and  lot of Lake Road and Arundel Street was wired off with large bomb holes or unsafe houses behind the wire. I am just glad that I do not remember and bomb damage around the area I played in.

Before finishing I cannot fail to mention the war injured men and women around when we were kids. We did not realise what they went through, for example my father in law was a POW in Japan and I cannot even start to comprehend what he went through.  Sometime we would see someone in a long black invalid carriage which was propelled by chain driven handles and the injured man mad his way along the pavement, these vehicles were improved on and soon an electric version was seen about and then the ‘Noddy Car’ was developed. We had no understanding of the pain and hurt these folks had suffered. Very occasionally in Commercial Road there would be a man who had had to resort to begging to live and would be sitting there with a sign saying ‘ex service please help’. At least we don’t see that these days.

Wartime memorabilia is big business today, if only some of us had hung on to the things we found as kids or the war trophies our fathers brought home with them, we would be sitting on a fortune right now. But I am extremely glad that I am just that little bit too young to remember the war!

Stay in touch,

Yours,

Peter

DUSTYKEAT@aol.com

Pj.keat@ntlworld.co.uk

You Write:


Mary Writes:-

Re the Brickwoods article, I went to Brankesmere, a large house in Southsea, for social services meetings, training etc until Portsmouth Social Services upped and moved. It was a beautiful old house wth lovely grounds  including a huge fishpond with some very big goldfish. I was told that it was built by a member of the Brickwood family for a girlfriend. 

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