1900s-1945
Among the memories sent in for the book 'We Had Everything …' were the wartime recollections of Bernie 'Butch' Baker, who has lived in Queensland, Australia for many years but who remembers his Leigh childhood with remarkable clarity. Bernie spent the war years in the village, arriving in 1938 and remaining until 1945. His family home for the early part of that period was 13 Lealands Avenue, and it was there that the war first came, quite literally, to his doorstep.
The first unexploded bomb fell on the village in late 1940, landing at the junction of Green View Avenue and Lealands Avenue. It came down within six feet of the hedge, close enough to rattle the windows of every house nearby. Not long afterwards a second device dropped behind the fence at number 13 itself, so that the Baker family had enemy ordnance practically in the garden. A third bomb struck the railway line, and a fourth landed in the field beyond the sewage farm. That last one was judged to have gone perhaps twenty feet into the ground, and the Bomb Disposal Squad never dug it out; it was simply left where it lay, deep beneath the field.
The Lealands Avenue bomb was a different matter. It had gone down only six feet, and a disposal man working on it reported finding a note inside the casing. It was written on toilet paper, in a foreign language that nobody could read, and one can only imagine what the young Bernie made of that strange scrap of paper hidden inside a German bomb.
When the bombs came, local households had to leave their homes, and the villagers were taken in at the Village Hall. Around thirty people were evacuated there in all. Among them was an old lady who adored cats and who must have worried terribly about the animals she had left behind. The Buckley family, who lived next door to the Bakers, were among those displaced as well. Looking after the evacuees was a Roman Catholic priest called Hathaway, who did what he could to keep order in crowded surroundings.
Conditions at the Hall were far from comfortable. The building had only one or two toilets between all those people, and meals had to be brought in for the evacuees. The food, by Bernie's account, was poor and mostly cold by the time it reached them. Worse was to follow: an outbreak of scabies spread through the Hall, and fingers were quickly pointed at the children evacuated from the London slums, whom some locals blamed for bringing the affliction with them. The evacuees did little to endear themselves in other ways either; the chestnut trees around the Green suffered damage at their hands.
Help eventually arrived from a surprising quarter. The Government sent down a specially-equipped caravan-like truck, and through it the evacuees were showered and dipped in anti-scabies fluid. Fresh clothing was provided too, and it was believed at the time that the replacement clothes had been donated by the Australians. Whether or not that was strictly true, the treatment certainly worked, and the outbreak was brought to an end.
Not everything in those years was hardship, however. Entertainment came to the village in the unlikely shape of the T.W.E.R.P.S., whose curious name stood for Troops Without Entertainment Require Plenty of Supplies. They were elderly volunteer entertainers who gave their time to amuse the village, and their show drew a packed house at the Village Hall. It formed part of the wider wartime effort to keep spirits up, and by all accounts it succeeded admirably. Fittingly enough, the evacuees were able to go back to their own homes the very day after the show, so the evening stands in memory as the closing chapter of their stay in the Hall.
For the Baker family, the war brought one more change of address. In 1943 they moved to what Bernie always called 'the other' Swiss Cottage. The real Swiss Cottage was a well-known local landmark, built by the Crawfords, and it stood at the top of Hollow Trees Drive. The Bakers' version was a humbler affair: a converted cricket pavilion. Its great glory was a veranda measuring ten feet by twenty feet, which faced the railway, and from it the family could watch the trains go by — including, no doubt, the munition trains that thundered through during the war years.
Bernie's later life took him a long way from Leigh. He has spent many years in Queensland, Australia, where at one time he owned some sapphire mines — a far cry from unexploded bombs and cricket pavilions. Yet the memories he sent for 'We Had Everything …' show how vividly those six years in the village remained with him: the bombs at the lane junctions and the railway, the crowded weeks in the Village Hall, the strange caravan-truck that cured the scabies, the old entertainers who filled the Hall with laughter, and the pavilion with its long veranda watching over the line.
His account is a reminder that the war reached even the smallest corners of the village — a hedge at Green View Avenue, a fence in Lealands Avenue, a field beyond the sewage farm — and that the people who lived through it, whether villagers or evacuees, children or elderly entertainers, each carried away their own piece of the story. It is through memories like Bernie's that the archive keeps those pieces together.