Beltingham House
EIGHTY YEARS ON…
T
his year, we commemorated 80 years since the Battle of Britain – the famous and decisive World War II air battle between Britain and Nazi Germany, taking place between July and October, 1940. It was also the first battle in history to take place entirely in the air. Ian Miller, Shipwright and ex-RAF pilot tells us how it felt to be an evacuee during WWII. Eighty years ago, we pupils of Walkergate Junior School boarded a steam train to Brampton Station and a bus took us to a large barn type of building in the town centre. We stood in a group while locals walked around us, some looking for a strong lad and others looking for a smart girl – it was similar to a cattle market. However, because these people had spare rooms, they were obliged to take an evacuee or two to live with them, so they had to be careful.
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Freemen Magazine
Thankfully, I was selected soon along with classmate Bob Matthewson and his brother and sister. The teenage brother missed his pals and the young sister missed her mother and both went home after a week, leaving Bob and I as the only evacuees with poultry farmer Fred Jackson and his wife in their huge bungalow, Culmore on the Tarn Road. As an only child I now had a brother 24/7 and it was great! We had about a mile to walk to school, past Dixon’s Farm and along Tree Road. Our foster mother was a very pleasant lady who fed us well with many extras to our wartime rations. The spare rooms had been used as a B & B so Mrs. Jackson was a good cook too. Often in the evenings she would read stories to us or we would play ludo, dominoes or the Parson’s cat – where we had to go through the alphabet using different adjectives like “the Parson’s cat is an Artful cat, Awful cat, Brown cat Beautiful cat etc.”
