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A.W. Brand
From 1936 to 1942, when I joined the Royal Air Force as an apprentice engine fitter, I lived at "Cranleigh", King's Coughton.
The autumn of 1940 was an exciting time for a teenage schoolboy; "The Few" had won the Battle of Britain, but the only action near Alcester had been 16 high explosive bombs and an oil type incendiary at Gt. Alne on August 26th causing slight damage to a farmhouse. But activity increased as the longer nights arrived in mid October and the air-raid warning sirens blared their mournful wail, night after night.
There are a few isolated incidents that I remember; the first was on October 23rd, searching for incendiary bomb remains from a large quantity which had fallen on Walcote the previous night and I still have the nose and fin assembly of one of them. The word went around the school like wildfire if there had been any local incidents overnight, and after school some of us boys would race off on our bikes to the site to hunt for souvenirs or stand in awe on the rim of the crater speculating on the size of the bomb, how far the splinters would have gone, whether there might be big pieces deeper below the base of the crater, which way the aircraft had been flying, how high was it and many other intriguing questions.
During the night of October 28th-29th there had been several explosions fairly close, which the school grapevine reported as being at Kinwarton, so after school we went to investigate, and sure enough there were five craters in pastureland between the railway line (now gone) and the road to Gt. Alne,somewhere in the area near what is now Hertford Rd. Some of us started searching for bomb splinters, walking round each crater in turn in ever increasing circles, eyes glued to the ground. Shouts of excitement, demands, questions - let me see, is it hot, let me hold it, cor it's heavy, what would it do to you, and then even more intensive searching! I found a piece of twisted tail fin about 10 inches by 4 inches (which I have lost) but I do still have 2 pieces of bomb casing which I found.
The night of November l4th-lSth was the Coventry blitz, but all we knew of it were distant rumbles and plenty of aircraft noise. The aftermath of the Coventry blitz as far as Alcester was concerned was the arrival on November 26th of 120 boys from King Henry's School, Coventry, who were billeted in the town and shared Alcester Grammar School facilities and incidentally and obviously, upset the boy/girl balance in the area. In the early hours of November 19th I was awakened by a heavy explosion followed by a swish-swish-swish- thud and more explosions further away. I went through into my parents' room; they were both out of bed and my father and I discussed the swishing noise we had both heard and decided it might be incendiary bombs, so we hastily grabbed trousers and shoes and dashed out to investigate, asking each other exactly where the stirrup pump was. All seemed in order, no signs of fire, so we returned to bed. At around 8.30 a.m. I got my bike from the garage to go to school and noticed a small piece of turf lying on the drive; on looking around, I chanced to look up and was astonished to see a strip of turf dangling from the gutter. On looking over the hedge of the garden next door, "Woodthorpe", I saw an object sticking out of the lawn about lOft. from the house. I realised it must be a bomb. With mounting excitement I dashed back indoors to tell my parents and then round to Jack Laughton, apprehensively and very quickly past the object, to tell him the ominous news. Here was real excitement, the war no longer a matter of news reports or someone else's tales, I was there, I was involved, I had found it! I was brought back to earth very rapidly by my parents and packed off to school in double quick time, protesting loudly.
Mid morning,the headmaster, Mr. Caton, sent for me and told me I was not to go home for lunch but to go to Mr. Knight's, the postmaster, who was a family friend and lived in Cross Rd. There I found my mother and spent more time asking questions than eating. It transpired that my father had rung the police and reported what he knew. The local constable1 P.C.Cresswell(?), came out and instructed my parents to take immediate necessities and get out1leaving the windows ajar (to minimise the blast damage?). On return to school in the afternoon I did not have much to report and interest faded. I went back to Cross Rd. after school and agreed with my mother that I would go to Kings Coughton and see what was happening. There was noone about, no barrier, no notice saying 'keep out unexploded bomb' so I went cautiously up the drive of "Woodthorpe" to investigate and there was NO BOMB! I found Jack Laughton and said 'where's the bomb!?' and he replied, casual as you like, 'Oh nobody seemed prepared to do anything constructive about it so we moved it up into the field.' At that time he was in partnership with Geoff Brown who lived across the road at "Greyfriars" and they ran one of the early intensive battery system chicken farms on the site of the present Rugby Club. There was a pneumatic-tyred hand truck about 6ft x 3ft with a handle at each end and removable sides about ift high, used for various jobs around the farm. They had piled this with empty sacks to cushion the bomb. Now the bomb had no tailfin as such, just a piece of sheet metal at the rear and had gone into the ground at an angle of about 200 to the horizontal with the rear foot or so sticking out, so they put a rope round the rear end, pulled it out, loaded it onto the truck and carefully wheeled it up to the far corner of what is now the rugby field, unloaded and left it there. When my father returned from work we moved back into "Cranleigh".
The first explosion which had awakened us was a bomb which exploded only about 20yds from the south-west corner of Mr. Grove's bungalow. At this time, Mr. Grove was running a small-holding on the ground which is now Willoughby Close and the land behind up to the railway, and had a fruit and vegetable stall with parking area at the roadside. The ground was very soft and there was quite a large crater, but no apparent damage to the bungalow (now 2 Willoughby Close), though rumour had it that the kitchen which was the corner nearest the explosion, was a mess with broken bottles, etc. The other explosions which were further away were at Coughton where 3 bomb exploded and were reported as:-
1 in the field between Coughton Court and Park Field House near the main Birmingham Rd.
1 in the field between the river and the road near Coughton Court.
1 in Mr. Parkes' cricket field.
The messages between Stratford ARP Control and County Control Centre at Warwick referred to the bomb at "Woodthorpe" as UXAPB(=unexploded anti personnel bomb) and described it as 6" diameter and 9" long with a green thin attachment showing the mark G.50 and partly buried in the ground. A later message reported that further markings had been deciphered and were:
LIE SERUNG 1, DELEU.DR. SIESTEL, INGESE PT lGT, ATL.1940, 1W.W., 134.40, B.L.C.50.
This report, I am sure was made before the bomb was removed from the ground by Jack Laughton and Geoff Brown as there were no messages referring to its removal at that time, though there is a very neat longhand note at the foot of the message sheet to Midland Regional H.Q. reporting the inscription which reads 'this bomb was removed by occ. of house into field' which I am sure was added later to keep the record straight.
Although I never saw the bomb after it was removed from the ground (I was expressly forbidden to even go into the field), I am convinced from what I did see earlier and from what I was told by Jack Laughton that it was a "normal" small HE bomb which had somehow lost most of its tailfin and consequently came down turning end over end, resulting in the swish-swish-swish noise and also accounting for its shallow angle of impact and failure to explode.
There were several more bombs in the Alcester area that winter, but I did not get involved in any of them and Spring 1941 saw the last bomb in the area.
There was a report from Stratford to Warwick on December 10th that 2 unexploded bombs were removed from Kings Coughton today by Royal Engineers, and a later supplementary message saying the first bomb was the one of November 19th and the second bomb was only found that day. It is not clear from the documents available where this second unexploded bomb was found; I heard nothing of it at the time; maybe it was picked up as part of the same load but from some other site. So the story ends leaving two questions; what exactly was it? and were we living all unaware for three weeks on top of another UXHEB ?