Correcting false assumptions

 

                                     There was still a shop that dealt in tobacco at 180 Shooters Hill Road when I visited

 

In my last post, I placed one of my sets of grandparents in Croydon at the time of WWII. I suppose that was because I associated them with the house and area that live in my memory. But that house came later. When war was declared in 1939, they were actually living on Shooters Hill Road in Greenwich. I knew that was their address at one point but forgot that it was during the war period. I really should make a timeline of their movements so that I have a handy reference while I do this look back into the war period.

A check of the Bomb Sight maps shows that this area of Greenwich was also in the bombers' path. The family lived in a small strip of shops which had living quarters above. There were no direct hits to the shopping area but a parachute mine landed about a block away and there was also a cluster of high explosive bombs which fell on an area about 2 blocks away.

As stated in my last post, the other set of grandparents lived close to the docks. So close that the name of the street they lived on was Dock Street. There were no direct hits on Dock Street but many bombs landed in the area and it looks like there were areas close by which received bomb hits that were in such tight cluster that they can't be shown singly on the map. Some of those hits were at St. Katherines Dock which was the dock closest to Dock Street.

At the pub on Dock Street where they lived, I was able to bring up the names of my grandparents and the children who were still living at home on another handy research tool for this time period, the 1939 Register. But there were only four children listed. I'll have to have a look for the rest to see where they were in 1939.

As for the 1939 Register for Greenwich, I can only see the listing for my shopkeeping grandfather and none for my grandmother. I thought maybe she was living elsewhere, but I found no matching listing in the rest of England on the 1939 Register nor did I find any passenger list to show that she had left the country. I'll need to do some more digging.

So far, my initial forays into my WWII family research have given pretty typical results. They have been interesting but inconclusive and have left me with a list of things to do. That list is:

 

Sources:

Bomb Sight http://bombsight.org

Find My Past – 1939 Register

   

Gaining a better understanding of the target area

 

                                                          My grandparents' home in Sanderstead, South Croydon

 

During WWII both sets of my grandparents lived in England. As one of the couples lived in the East End of London, I thought that they would have been more likely to have been affected when London was bombed. They actually lived next to St. Katherine's Dock and the docks were prime targets. My other grandparents lived in a far more suburban setting. It was somewhere that I pictured as being far away from the target zone in a place called Sanderstead which is in South Croydon.

When I checked on Bomb Sight, which shows where the bombs landed, I could see that those grandparents were also in the danger zone. The bombs might not have fallen so thickly in their area, but fall they did. I suppose that makes sense as Croydon was to the south of the Thames, an area that the bombers would have flown across before they got to the city proper.

A casual look at some of the books on my shelves about the blitz shows that, contrary to the usual coverage on the bombing of Britain, London was not the only target. Other English places were affected as well as some in Scotland and Ireland. Industrial and manufacturing centres were prime targets.

I have much more reading to do as I try to find out more from the many books at my disposal. There are also lots of accounts of the war on the website Bomb Sight that add a more personal perspective to the war years. 

But for a War

 

                                                                                  London at War 1942

I've always been fascinated by stories about World War II. It seems that many other people are too. WWII stories and documentaries are still made, read and watched with interest. Stories like these are usually told, at least in the English-speaking world, from the point of view of the victors so it is easy to know who to root for. Narratives with clear forces of good and evil appeal to something in our psyche.

That's the big picture. But I was reminded of the effect of the war on individual lives recently when I read Square Haunting which detailed the effects on Virginia Woolf's life when her London abode in Bloomsbury was damaged by a bomb. As a family historian, my interest is the stories of individuals. The story of how larger events affect those individuals and can be shown to be life altering.

Growing up I was aware that WWII had profoundly altered my families' lives. Just how much, I was not aware until I started exploring my families' history. That's something I'll be looking into in the coming weeks. 

 

Sources:

Wade, Francesca Square Haunting Tim Duggan Books/Random House, New York 2020

 

Images:

By Ministry of Information Photo Division Photographer - http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib//38/media-38885/large.jpg This is photograph D 9314 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24367406