Mooltan Street: From Bombs to Evacuation

On 1st July 1944, he was bombed out of his house in Mooltan Street, Fulham. He was 14 and alone in the house at the time; his Dad had been out working in his taxi all day but Granny must have been nearby. Bernard Brown and his mother lived in the upstairs of the house but he doesn't know what became of them. Granny rushed in and threw herself over Dad and they were both covered in dust. He remembered seeing his Uncle Len Jones (Granny's half-brother) standing in the doorway also covered in dust and plaster. Granny wanted some water, so Dad went across the road to get some but when he got back, she'd been taken to hospital in a dustcart. [I think she had a broken collar bone]. So, he went around the corner to Lintaine Grove to where his Granny (Emily Amelia Jones) and his great-aunt Fan (Frances Hannah Burford) lived. They were covered in dust too.

He remembered the fronts of the houses in Mooltan Street were all gone, and he saw a number of pianos whose keys were missing. He went over to the nearby school for a shower. They were all taken to a rest centre for a few days then were moved into the flat on the 4th floor in Churchfield Mansions, New King's Road, where they stayed for many years. It was my first home when I was brought back from hospital in June 1953. Dad thought a Major Mosely owned the flat and he lived in the flat below. The porter was a Mr Wright. He would whistle up the dumb waiter every morning and Granny would order coal from him. In the flat above was a dresser at Wembley Stadium and her niece [maybe he meant Wembley Arena - or as I remember it, Wembley Pool].

Once, the main water tank in the loft burst and water came through into the dresser's flat. Dad helped mop up the water which had also seeped through into their flat too. He was able to claim on the insurance for damage to the furniture. It was the same insurance that Mum had tried to get in her previous home in Melrose Road, Wandsworth, but they wouldn't insure that flat due to the bad fuse box! Anyway, luckily, they had insurance at Churchfield Mansions [I wouldn't be surprised if Mum hadn't been the instigator of this] and Granny's rug was sent to the cleaners and coal was ordered to help dry the room. The insurance company queried this but, in the end, paid up. Because Dad helped the woman upstairs, she gave them tickets to see 'The Dancing Years' on ice at Wembley Arena.

The experience of the bombing really unsettled Dad, so he was evacuated to Blackburn in Lancashire, probably around August time, and initially stayed with Mr and Mrs William Sandham and their son Billy who was an apprentice, aged around 17. He really ruled the roost and would threaten to leave home, join the army, and go to Burma when things didn't go exactly as he wanted. His mother would then beg him not to go, so he always got his own way.

He got friendly with a boy at school, Kenneth Orlando Field, whose parents Mr and Mrs Charles Orlando Field, ran the Fox and Hounds pub in Ewood, Blackburn. They invited him to spend that Christmas with them which he did and stayed for most of the school holiday but, when he returned to the Sandhams, Billy answered the door and shoved Dad's suitcase at him saying that if he liked it so much at the Fields, he should just go and live there! Dad was clearly unsure what to do but, in the end, just went back to the pub where they were happy to have him, and they must have sorted out the financial side of things with the evacuation committee.

His parents came to visit in May 1945. He was in Blackburn for nine months and must have returned home shortly after the end of the war. Dad kept in touch with the Fields and when he was doing his National Service and had a 10-day pass, he visited them (in 1949) before spending a few days in Clacton with Granny. Sadly, a week after he visited the Fields, their son Kenneth contracted polio and died.

He and Mum also visited when I was a baby, and the Fields took them to Blackpool for the day while I was looked after by Mrs Field's sister Ethel who never married. They went on the Big Dipper to be polite but hated it and even had to get off the tram later as they both felt so ill. They visited a weaving shed in a cotton mill to see someone with the surname Eckersley and were met by Mrs Field's other sister, Kitty, who gave them a proper tea and some undyed white fabric from the mill which Dad had made into shirts. [I'm not sure if the tea happened at the mill or at her house].

The story was written down by me from memories of my father, Arthur Bennett, who dictated it a few months before he died in 2020.