Category: World War 2

My father started to salt his own pig, the shoulder, ham and sides of bacon. I would be sent to Wrights the grocers with a wheelbarrow and return with a block of salt 2 & ½ feet long and a foot wide and high. The cold slab would be deeply covered in salt and the hams etc. rubbed in salt every day and covered in […]

Meat. We had to make do with our ration of beef and mutton. Pork products we had by the barrow load. Ordinary people could give up their bacon ration and were allowed to keep a pig instead but at the start of the war the government took half the pig when it was killed. Farmers had to record the number of piglets born and were […]

War Weapons Week. The whole of Crowle, Catholics and Protestants, Women’s Institute, Men’s Clubs, Pubs, Political parties, Sports’ clubs all joined together in a special week dedicated to raising money for the war. The Crowle Show and Gymkhana occurred that week together with children’s sports day with fancy dress competitions etc, etc. All sorts of money raising activities were organised which not only raised cash […]

Later in the war as Sandtoft became a training and then an active bomber aerodrome. Bomber crashes would occur in the surrounding area. The local lads were usually the first to reach a crash site if it was any where near Crowle. They were always efficient souvenir hunters. The day after the crash, the police sergeant, both constables and several specials arrived at the school. […]

Every body had a bicycle, even my mother. Wicks the Cycle shop sometimes had a new one but many second hand plus numerous spare parts. Inner tubes and tyres could be ordered probably with the area being rural the authorities were more generous with cycle parts than in the towns. Garages, barns, old farm buildings were searched and ancient thirty-year old cycles were resurrected or […]

TRANSPORT. In 1939 very few people from Crowle worked at the steel works. There was no workmen’s bus; you had to have your own transport. My father had the Morris equivalent of The Austin 7. He was allowed a petrol ration to go to work and continue his agency supplying oil and grease to the local farmers. This of course meant he had permission to […]

GAS MASKS. These were issued to every body early on in the war; there was a serious concern that the Germans would drop gas bombs aimed at the civilian population. We had to carry the gas mask at all times and did so for the first two years of the war. It was believed that the Germans did not use gas because we were quite […]