When I was around two years old a bomb was dropped in the back garden. Oddly and luckily, it didn’t destroy the house at all. However, it did move the ...
Julie Barnett wrote a vivid account of her wartime childhood that has been deposited at the Warwickshire County Record Office (Ref. CR 3913/1). The following is the first of a series of ...
We have seen in the previous article that Walter’s war experiences had seen him endure great hardship. Alas, that was not to improve. With the conditions in the camp, it ...
Walter’s wartime fighting experience was brief. It was merely months into the war, when he was taken prisoner on 9th September 1914 at Maubeuge, after the French surrendered. He had ...
Walter Kimberley’s wartime experience is one of hardship, effort, determination… and ultimately death, though not by any bullet wound. His is a story that shows war can claim casualties away ...
There aren’t many places you can see a World War One tank in the centre of a town. Indeed, it appears that Ashford in Kent is the only place you ...
I have many vivid memories of living as a child during the Second World War. We had a coal house which had a door directly into the kitchen, which Dad ...
Born and raised in a farm in Winterborne, far away from the built-up areas in Warwickshire, we acquired the assistance of land-girls to help run our farm, which was needed ...
Walls surrounded the medieval city of Coventry with 12 gateways and 32 towers made from handsome local red sandstone.
The city walls slighted
Just before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, Charles ...
I left the Fleet Air Arm after 12 years in 1960 and joined AWA in July of that year working as an instrument technician in the instrument test lab under ...
I have previously written about Walter Kimberley, a Coventry City footballer who lost his life during World War One. He was not the only former Coventry City footballer to suffer ...
Like many other counties during World War Two, Warwickshire rallied around its wounded soldiers, holding large parties and shows in an effort to keep their spirits up.1 Entertainment at these events could ...
My father, Ernest French, was born in Coventry in 1911 and, apart from a brief period during the war, lived there until my family moved to Kenilworth in 1957/8.
A wartime ...
The Coventry Blitz was a series of bombing raids that took place on Coventry during World War Two. By far the most devastating of these attacks occurred on the evening of 14 November 1940. ...
I married Ken Ashford on 23rd December 1939. He was a Coventry kid. We met at my Grandmother’s house. I moved to Coventry where we lived with Ken’s father and ...
Sunday school attendance dipped sharply after the Blitz when children were evacuated and never recovered to its former numbers of over 100. For several Sundays after the Blitz the Sunday ...
During World War Two George, my husband, was in a reserved occupation tool-making for war factories. I was a housewife and we lived in Three Spires Avenue. Our son Glynn ...
During World War Two I was working as a radio engineer and had already seen many nights of air raids over Coventry.
Everywhere was lit up
The night of the Blitz, I ...