Age Concern Dorchester - Dorset's Living Memories

Sherborne in the war

Rene Wilton/Blackmore writes...

I met my husband on New Year’s Eve 1935, and then did not see him again until New Year’s Eve 1936. We were married in 1940.
My employer made a lovely wedding cake for me and paid for my wedding dress to be made. By now, the bombing raids had started and so every time the sirens went, the seamstress who was making my wedding dress used to roll the dress up in a big sheet and sit with it in the cupboard  under the stairs until the ‘all clear’ sounded The dress and the seamstress survived!

My husband and I were married in September 1940 although he was nearly late for the wedding because by then he was stationed in Wales and the nearest station had been bombed.

From 1940,  I  had to register with the employment people, so that if I wasn’t in work or wished to volunteer, I would be given a job to help the war effort.
 Although I was married, my husband was in the army so I was still living in with the family but the family started taking in evacuees and we had two little boys from Southampton who were little devils and had never seen a bath in their life and it got too much.

The next time I had to go to the employment office, I volunteered to do war work,  and I was given a  job at Westlands in Bradford Rd. Sherborne.
We were making Spitfires, we had to put sheets of metal in a ‘jig’ , and working in pairs, we had to drill tiny holes in the metal sheets. There were about 300 men and women working in the factory and we were one of 2 Westland factories in Sherborne.  A truck brought all the work to be done in the morning and then in the afternoon took the finished work to Yeovil to be assembled.

I worked there for 4 years and during all that time only had one sheet sent back as it was faulty. We worked from 7am to 6pm and sometimes until 9pm we didn’t have any days off and sometimes worked all weekend.

Part of our duties at Westland was fire-watching  and women had to do this as well as the men. We had to stay overnight at the factory to make sure no fires broke out. Once the sirens went and German bombers came over looking for Westlands, but were intercepted by Spitfires, so dumped their bombs on the town and a family in Lenthay was killed. There was a big crater by the school.

Sometimes word would go round that the shoe shop in town had a delivery of shoes and so we would beg our boss for an hour off to go and buy shoes with coupons we had saved. We all had our bikes outside and we would all rush off together. Once it was frosty and when we put on our brakes at the Halt sign by the post house, we all skidded and ended up in a pile in the middle of the road!

My husband was supposed to be in the tank corps and so had to go to Bovington to train. The first time he drove a tank, he went too fast down one of the steep banks on the range and the officer instructing him in the tank fell out. My husband said that he had never heard so many swear words in such a short time ever!

Then he had to go abroad but could not tell me where he was going, all he could say that it was very hot. He was sent to Burma, while he was out there he had dysentery and came home with malaria at the end of the war and the local GP didn’t know how to treat it
During the war I hardly ever had any news or got letters from my husband, and what letters I did get were censored and there was very little that he was allowed to write.

I carried on working at Westlands and American soldiers started to arrive in Sherborne. Some girls from Westlands  married Americans.The bombing which had started early in the war carried on and some American soldiers stationed at Haydon Park which was part of the Castle were bombed. Council houses in Newland were bombed.

My husband came back from the war in 1946, when the troop ship docked,some other soldiers shouted abuse, saying they were ‘D Day Dodgers’ because they hadn’t been at Dunkirk.He found it very upsetting.

When he came back from the war, he was allowed to wear his Chindit hat he had been fighting with them (3rd Indian Division) in Burma and thought them very clever and brave and his hat always meant a   lot to him.