The War Years

During the 1939–1945 war, Graythorp had its fair share of events. In 1941, when I was six, two landmines were dropped on the village, fortunately falling in the school playing fields. The resulting damage was to the school, the church, the village hall and several houses that backed on to the school field including our house, No. 13, which took the full force of the blast, blowing out all the windows and all the tiles from the roof.

We had made our front living room into an air-raid shelter - the windows had sandbags in front of them - ­ but the room also doubled as a bedroom for the five **check** boys. The night of the air raid, the blast of the bomb sucked the wall above our heads out into the kitchen. If it had blown inwards, it would have dropped onto our heads. Fortunately, no one was hurt. We were moved into the village air raid shelter, which was not very comfortable, and then Mr. Hutchinson from Greenabella Farm came and took us into his farmhouse. I remember walking across the fields to the farm in the dark and the sky was lit up with tracer bullets as the anti-aircraft guns fired on the German bombers. We were finally rehoused in No. 46 where we remained until moving in 1950 to Haverton Hill.

Early in the war a lone German bomber dropped a stick of incendiary bombs down our street but they didn’t do any damage and were quickly extinguished by the Home Guard and Fire Watch men. The only time I felt really afraid was the night a dive-bomber dropped a whistling bomb and it hit the local electrical sub-station. I can still hear that loud scream from the bomb dropping. One of our favourite pastimes was watching the dogfights between the Hurricanes or Spitfires and the German bombers, especially on sunny days when the sky was full of vapour trails making patterns in the sky. Graythorp lay between the coast and ICI Billingham. The German bombers had to cross us to bomb ICI. To fool the Germans, smoke fires were lit in the fields around the village so the Germans dropped the bombs on us thinking we were ICI – we must have been expendable!

Uncle Dan worked at ICI. One night when cycling home in thick fog he heard a loud rattling noise behind him. Not knowing what it was, he cycled faster but the sound kept getting closer until it eventually caught up with him. He was very relieved to find it was only a barrage balloon dragging its chains along behind it. The balloon had come loose from its moorings near ICI. These balloons were a device to protect ICI from the German bombers. One summer day my mother and I were in the garden of No. 46 when a German bomber came over the River Tees flying very low. The guns opened fire and the plane was shot down. It crashed on the south bank of the river. Many years later, a wreckage of a German bomber was found there with its two pilots still in the cockpit. I wonder if this was the same plane that we watched being shot down.

The Graythorp shipyard was used during the war to build two concrete pontoons for the Mulberry harbours that were constructed to help the D-day landings in northern France; the remains of the harbour is still visible near the village of Arromanches. This project was kept top-secret during the war and the folks of Graythorp thought that they were constructing ships from concrete because of the shortage of steel.

When the war came to an end in Europe on 8 May 1945 the village celebrated with a party and large bonfire on the green. one of the Coles family played the accordion and we sang with gusto all the war-time songs: Roll Out the Barrel, Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line, Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover and We’ll Meet Again, to name but a few.