During the moonlit night of August 28th 1942, Bramley had German visitors in the shape of aircraft and bombs, which were dropped on ‘our village’. The bombs used were of the incendiary type in general, and if left to have their way they would have set fire to quite a large swathe of Bramley.  Being heavily laced with phosphorous, a highly inflammatory substance, the idea of these bombs was, of course, to wreak havoc by fire.

However, with ‘Bramley-ites’ being a vigilant bunch of people most of the fires which sprang up were quickly ‘doused’ by the ever watchful ‘Street Fire Parties’.  For instance, when an incendiary bomb landed on a garage and found its way onto the petrol tank of a car, sandbags were immediately brought into use and the fire was out before it could reach the car’s petrol.

Luckily, and in spite of the fact that bombs were dropped on a Bramley housing estate (The Fairfields) and an area very close to Town End, no one was seriously injured, which seems quite remarkable.

Several trees were uprooted by the blast but fortunately did not land on any of the neighbouring houses or people.

One particularly remarkable act of bravery occurred when a post office engineer attended a fire, which had broken out in the roof of one house.   He climbed up into the under-drawing, along with another man, and extinguished the flames with a Stirrup Pump.  Many homes and businesses had Stirrup Pumps for just this purpose.

Stirrup Pumps had other uses (although unofficial, of course).  As we were all encouraged to ‘Dig For Britain’, when many people had allotments and those who did not, dug up their lawns and flowerbeds for the growing of vegetables and fruit to give each family the extra food they needed during the Spartan times of food rationing.  It seemed that the Stirrup Pump was an ideal gardener’s tool as it was very quick and efficient when it came to watering vegetables with a sprinkler attached to the end of the piping.

One of Bramley History Society’s members had a very narrow escape.  She was in the house when she saw flares falling all around, at which point she did no more than rush to her baby’s side, covering her with blankets and carrying her outside when she just managed to escape as a bomb then dropped into the garden, demolishing her kitchen and damaging her bedrooms above.  Both she and her baby escaped safely but not without some cuts and bruises.  The bomb went through the house via the kitchen, dining room and also the sideboard cupboard.  A cutlery box was in the cupboard and the bomb caused a spoon to be cut in half before finally landing in their back garden where it exploded!

This was the state of the above mentioned house taken on the day after the bomb dropped and exploded in 1942. The occupants were very lucky to have escaped the house before the bomb hit their property as they would have almost certainly died by the look of the house.

This same lady’s sister-in-law, who was staying at the house at the time, like many of her generation kept her money safe inside her corsets.  This item of clothing would, of course, have been removed at bedtime.  The following day, and much to the amusement of the two sisters-in-law, the said corsets were eventually found down in the local allotments – covered in jam!  Obviously some of their precious food rations had also been hit – not to mention many household items, which by this stage of the war were very difficult to replace.

The parents of the householder, like many others throughout the country, provided them with a home until such time as their own house was re-built.  At this time good friends and neighbours provided them with baking tins and cooking pots, resulting in them no longer being ‘pot-less’. Many other household items were either given or loaned at times like these.

Generosity was at its best during the Second World War, when each survivor appreciated all too well that it could so easily have happened to him or her and, frighteningly, could well do so at some time in the not too distant future!

The old expression ‘pulling together’ became almost a fact of life in those fraught times

2006.