Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú

Interview with William Leonard Hodson

18/10/2005 by Joe Murphy

Born 23/9/1920 in Meldrum Street, Pendleton. I had a brother, an older brother. 4 in the family. My father worked at Buckley and Brennands as a cloth bleacher and my mother worked doing a bit of cleaning now and again.

I went to Langworthy Road School until I was 14, about 6 weeks before my 14th birthday. I got special relief because my father was unemployed and I had a job to go to. I went into engineering at White’s Injectors on Church Street, Pendleton. I was there until I was about 16 ½ and when I left there I went to Metropolitan Vickers, I was an apprentice turner.

War broke out Sept 3rd 1939, I was working on aircraft at that time. I was working on the Lancasters but it wasn’t the Lancaster then, it was the Manchester. What happened, they built the first one, took it out on a prototype test and they couldn’t feather the engines back. They were Rolls Royce kestrels and they couldn’t feather them back enough and they ripped the undercarriage off. It means cutting the speed down of the propellers. When you feather, when a propeller is rotating, it’s rotating like that, when they feather it back, they move it mechanically, they used to do it on fighters and all. It’s an engineering job in itself a propeller. They got a counter rotating propeller then so they could feather the blades the way they wanted them, cut the speed down.

I was in a reserved occupation. I got called up first because I volunteered for the RAF Volunteer Reserve at Padgate, just before war broke out and we had just finished the flight sailing programme, which took about 4 months, and then they found out I was an engineer and said you’re not allowed to be here, you better go back to your job. I was at Metro Vic aircraft on Mosley Road.

I did a month on nights and a month on days but on the changeover you went on at 7 o’ clock on a Saturday night and finished at 12 on Sunday dinner time. They had special buses on to take us to work. Along the road, the pub the Woolpack, well the trams used to start there and we used to get on the tram there and it used to take us right to Metropolitan Vickers gates. They dropped a load of incendiaries one night right through the roof and an exploding bomb followed it. They didn’t do much damage because we jumped on them right away. We had them sprays, stirrup pumps and a bucket of water and sand. It happened on a few occasions. Fortunately they didn’t do a lot of damage. What happened at the aircraft, we had just finished this Lancaster, it was a Manchester then, and they dropped this bloody bomb and it went straight through the roof and right underneath it. And it went down the wall and underneath the ground, right underneath this bomber. It took the munitions people a few hours to dismantle it. Work continued, you just got on with the job.

The night of the blitz, it blew every bloody window out in the house we had, doors off. There was a row of houses just down the street, Meldrum Street, and there was a street went along there called Boundary Street and they dropped a stick, an incendiary, right outside our door and then the heavies started coming down and I was just going to make my way out of the shelter and there was a shop across the road and the bloke that owned it was a warden, an ARP warden, so his wife, of course he was out, and his wife said would you give me a lift to get the children to the shelter. The shelter was down the street, big with a concrete top and they had an entrance and another entrance at the other end, right on the cobbles in the middle of the street. And well I just got my hands out like that to take the child off her and they started dropping the heavies and the blast caught me and blew me right across the road backwards. When I got up I had no knees in my trousers where I had skirted along the cobbles, you know. I got up and I realised that I was getting married very shortly and all me money was in me suit in the house so I thought bombs or no bloody bombs I’ve got to get back to get that money. I get to the door and it’s piled high like that in sand and plaster, off the walls, I had to climb over the top of this and then find my way to where my suit was and I got my money out and then I managed to get back, you know, to the shelter.

The family made it into the shelter, but as I said, the blast separated us, I had no knees in my trousers and when I got up I decided, as I say, while I’m out here now I may as well get back and get my money out of my pocket. I went back and checked out and they were all right.

There was mobile anti aircraft, used to suck the bloody, you know, the blast and the pressure. They could turn up anywhere, corner of the street, anywhere. Searchlights were mobile too. The barrage balloons were already up, about three I think. The first attack was all these incendiaries that come down right across the pavement, about 10 inches big, with fins on, and the strange thing was, you’d never believe it, but I picked the fins up on one of them after. Now don’t forget, the German bombers are dropping these, right, Metropolitan Vickers Electrical Company, Trafford Park, Manchester, printed on the fins. Must have been before the war began they were made.

You carried a gas mask, otherwise you got pulled up. Blackout curtains we had, make do and mend with what you had, anything, a blanket, anything like that, blankets up to windows. X3 air raid post manned by fire watchers and wardens was near us. Seen a few dead uns, wardens, in fact one was a woman. We were going round after, there was a bit of a lull and someone said shift that sand bag over there, said they might be needed in a bit. I what I thought was a sand bag, it was a woman’s head, the top come up, just like a bloody melon that had been sliced. As I got hold of it like that I thought it was a sand bag and plop it went back you know. I just put it down, you know and plodded on the opposite way. I was involved with the ARP. Sand bags were few and far between at the time so what we were doing was undoing them, scattering on the incendiaries wherever we could. The post was off Ellor Street, toward Seedley, a post called X3.

You could get out to the cinema but if the sirens went they cleared the place.

After the war, most of the friends and family returned. All the place was lit up on VE Day. We had streamers across the street and god knows what. In fact we made an airship out of an old aerial, the old wireless aerials, well we covered it in paper and it looked like an airship and we had it hung across the street. All the kids went and then we had one for the adults later on. It spread over a while.

VJ Day we got a day off work. After that I went on the Merlin Engines at Fords in Trafford Park, it’s now the Trafford Centre, all that land was Fords. You’d get A building, B building, C building and X site. X site was where they tested the engines, the Merlins. You had a badge shaped like a Merlin engine and it had your number on it, mine was B3970 and if you didn’t have that badge on they wouldn’t let you in.

Strangely enough [security] wasn’t the same at Metropolitan Vickers and I’ll tell you for why. I finished at Fords and they were still operating at the aircraft and I’d got my brother and my father a job at the aircraft. I was the first machinist in that aircraft plant. So I went to see how they’d faired, were they finishing. They were still operating. I just walked in. I walked right through the erection shop to where they were working.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.