A Family's War - Part One

Of all wars in human history, the Second World War is unmatched in its horror. It took 27,000 lives on each and every one of its 2,194 days. It shattered families, levelled cities and erased countries. Few people anywhere escaped without loss. Many struggled and failed to keep their humanity and compassion intact. Perhaps our family was luckier than others, but our parents and grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins were changed by the war, with outcomes that affect us still today.

A heavy sense of doom hung over England in the late 1930s. The Great War had ended only 20 years earlier, leaving millions of young men dead or maimed, crippling the economy and reducing Britain to a second rate power. "Never again" people said, and yet another war edged closer with each new crisis.

No one was panicking, but people were uneasy. Newspapers were full of talk about “the invincible bomber,” the horrors of poison gas, and the destruction awaiting London. My father's dad was deeply affected by the popular novel What happened to the Corbetts by Nevil Shute. Published in early 1939, it predicted the devastation that would follow the bombing of England’s major cities.

We were a family of working class Londoners, born and raised and expecting to die in the tiny, shoddy, mold-infested Victorian homes that lined the narrow streets and lanes surrounding the docks and warehouses and factories along the Thames river in the East End neighbourhoods of Woolwich, Plumstead and East Ham. Some of our family, a lucky few, had escaped to the newer suburbs of Eltham and Bexleyheath, but they still weren't far from their roots.

By the summer of 1939 Tom and Eva Napier, known to everyone as Uncle Tom and Aunt Eva, knew war was coming. They were fatalistic about their own chances, but were determined their 11-year-old daughter June would escape. 

One day that summer, Aunt Eva and June boarded a train full with other mothers and children, for the 120-mile journey north to the town of Loughborough. There, in the hoped-for safety of her sister Millie’s drawing room, Eva said a tearful goodbye to her daughter. It was the first time they had ever been separated.

Tom tried to enlist, even though at 38 he was twice the age of the conscripts then being called up. The recruiting officer rejected him, not because of his age, but because his job as a blacksmith at the Beckton Gas Works would be important in the coming war effort.

The decisive moment came in August. After swallowing up Austria and much of Czechoslovakia, Hitler was now massing his armies on Germany’s border with Poland. Britain had pledged to come to Poland's aid if Germany were to attack, so on August 25^th the Prime Minister issued an ultimatum, declaring to Hitler “Invade Poland and you go to war with us.” Hitler ignored this warning: on Friday, September 1^st he invaded.

June was sitting in her Aunt Millie’s garden listening to the wireless on the following Sunday, when a voice interrupted the program. She never forgot what happened next:

“Here is an announcement. At 11:15 - that is, in about two minutes, the prime minister will broadcast to the nation. Please stand by.”

“This is London. You will now hear a statement by the prime minister.”

Then the somber voice of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain:

“I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government the final note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared, at once, to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.”

June really didn't know what ‘war’ would mean for others, but she knew what it would mean for her: separation from her dear mum and dad and an unhappy, uncertain future with Aunt Millie.

In the first rush of fear following the declaration of war, my grandmother Elsie Campbell, Eva Napier’s sister, made the quick decision to evacuate her children - 12-year-old Elsie (“Babs”), 11-year-old Richard (“Boy”), and my mother, tiny three-year-old Margaret - from their home in the East London suburb of Eltham. It turned out to be a gut-wrenching move, and even the safety of Ashford, a town just 60 miles away, couldn’t outweigh the concern Elsie felt when she thought of leaving her children in the care of strangers.

The children were split up. Boy stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Strand, who loved him and treated him as if he were their own son. Margaret and Babs were billeted in a home completely different. Margaret remembers: “The lady wasn’t nice to us at all, and I was really scared when my sister was at school, and I was by myself. We had to eat all our dinner if we wanted desert because she put desert on the same plate, without it being washed first. I was extremely unhappy . . .”

For most of our family, the first tangible sign of war was the blackout, when the streetlights went out, not to come on again for six years. People had to cover every window with heavy curtain material, so that no light could escape. Lorries and cars had to drive with their headlights masked so that only a tiny slit of light would show.

The blackout heightened the palpable fear people felt, but their initial panic started to disappear once they realised that nothing else was going to happen. Over 300,000 soldiers, almost the entire British army, had crossed over to France and rushed up to Germany’s border, where, with half a million Frenchmen, they all sat down and did nothing while Germany completed its lightning conquest of Poland. They carried on doing nothing all through the winter of 1939 and into the spring of 1940. People started talking about the “Phony War” and gradually went back to normality.

Elsie brought her children back home. Margaret was the first to return, after just two weeks, and the others followed soon after. By Christmas 1939 almost all the children evacuated from East London had returned, but there were exceptions: Eva Napier wasn’t going to take any chances – June was doomed to continue her exile with Aunt Millie.

The Phony War ended abruptly on April 9th, 1940, when Hitler suddenly struck north into neutral Denmark and Norway. Denmark fell in a day.

A month later, on May 10th, Hitler hurled his armies south through neutral Holland to smash into the Allies in Belgium and France. Within hours, startled and unprepared British and French troops were in panic-struck retreat. The same day, Neville Chamberlin resigned as Britain’s Prime Minister and Winston Churchill was appointed in his place.

The following six weeks were amongst the most decisive in all of Britain’s long history.

The British army in France collapsed. It suffered massive losses as it retreated to the tiny French seaside town of Dunkirk. There, cut off from supplies and ammunition, with their backs to the sea and the enemy on three sides, the most famous regiments of the British army prepared to make their last stand.

Unknown to most of the world, for five days Churchill and the members of the British War Cabinet debated negotiation and capitulation to Hitler. For some, it seemed the only reasonable alternative in the face of Germany’s overwhelming firepower. In the end Churchill’s arguments and strength of personality won out. Whatever the consequences for its people, Britain would fight on.

The English then proved again that they are at their best in adversity when thousands of weekend sailors, fishermen and ferryboat captains endured relentless German bombing, strafing and artillery fire as they sailed their small craft across the channel to Dunkirk to bring the British army back home. Soon everyone was celebrating the rescue of 200,000 soldiers from the beaches as the Miracle of Dunkirk, in popular perception turning a massive defeat into a victory.

But it was no victory. Most of the British army had been rescued, but it had left behind all its tanks, guns and vehicles in France and half the Royal Air Force’s bombers had been shot down.

And there were no miracles for the French. Demoralized and badly led, they simply evaporated in the face of the German advance. Paris was abandoned; the Germans captured the city by simply marching in. The French government sued for peace on June 16^th.

Now Britain stood alone.

Most people had no doubt the Germans would turn their half-million-man army on England, launching an immediate invasion. With the British army bereft of its weapons, the country seemed to be almost defenseless.

Hitler was confident: “Our enemies are little worms. I saw them at Munich.” On July 16^th he issued “Directive No. 16”, ordering his war machine to prepare for the invasion of Britain.

Initial plans called for an invasion force of 500,000 to 800,000 men. The tanks and soldiers that had swept through the Belgian and French armies and shattered the British Expeditionary Force were already moving to the Normandy coast, where they began training for the invasion of London.

German preparations began with the first bombing attacks on English airfields and aircraft factories.

Churchill’s commanders gathered the few remaining fully armed and unbloodied soldiers and cobbled them into a unit they called 7th Corps. This became the army’s only fully equipped mobile force. It was made up of just 25,000 men.

At the heart of 7th Corps was the 1st Canadian Infantry Division, which included two brothers, Jim and Doug Robb, farm hands from the distant frontier of the Peace River Country of northwestern Alberta. They had volunteered on the outbreak of war in September 1939 and arrived in England three months later.

Here was one of the great ironies of the war. When war was declared, Canada’s full-time army consisted of only 4,261 men, 4 modern anti-aircraft guns, 5 mortars, 92 machine guns and two tanks. Now, nine months later, the Canadian members of 7th Corps were the best-equipped, best-trained, best-prepared troops in England.

Well-trained as they were, it would still be almost impossible for 7th Corps, outnumbered by up to 20 to one, to do more than delay the Germans in the fields of Kent and Hampshire. Churchill’s commanders intended to gather the remainder of Britain’s army behind the General Headquarters Anti-tank Line. Grand as it sounded, this was really nothing more than a big ditch stretching from Bristol in the west to Maidstone in the east.

If the Germans were to break through the General Headquarters Anti-tank Line, the way to London would be open. The city’s final defense would then fall upon the Home Guard. That meant our family.

The Home Guard was an idea of Churchill’s. It was created in May 1940 so that men who were prohibited from enlisting in the army because they were in critical civilian jobs, or were too old or too sick, could still take up arms. The response to Churchill’s idea was overwhelming. Within 24 hours, 250,000 had lined up at local police stations to sign up. My grandfather Jack Nice and my mother’s Uncle tom and cousin Will Hickford were among them.

The British plan called for a defensive line running right through the centre of Woolwich, sacrificing all the suburbs to the south and east, including Eltham, where my mother’s family lived. To stiffen this line the Home Guard dug deep trenches and put up concrete barriers and pillboxes. To prevent the landing of German parachutists, they erected tall wooden stakes at regular intervals on Woolwich Common, Plumstead Common and other areas of open ground. To confuse the Germans on the ground they removed all road signs and street names (confusing most Londoners too: according to The Times, “citizens venturing ‘off the beaten track’ will be able to experience the exhilarating feeling of being explorers”).

I wonder if Woolwich Home Guard volunteer Jack Nice would really have obeyed his orders to fight to the death. He certainly wouldn’t be fighting to defend his own home, 70 Fox Hill, which was on the wrong side of the line.

So too was the tidy home kept by Will and Elsie Canning at 17 Preston Drive in Bexleyheath. It was their pride and joy, purchased new just five years before. Elsie would be safe – she and their two children had evacuated to Leicester, far from the potential battle for London – but Will, normally commuting to an office job in central London, would be fighting a guerilla war. He and his Home Guard unit planned to use their homemade weapons and naive ingenuity to slow the German assault before it exploded against the defensive positions dug into the streets of Woolwich.

Across the river in East Ham, Tom Napier and his friends defended their section of the outermost line. The army had refused Tom’s attempt to enlist back in 1939, but now he was finally bearing arms for his country.

Even though defending London would be a big task, the Home Guard had little with which to do it. They were a bit of a rag-tag army of pirates, with no uniforms and without even weapons, except what they could scrounge for themselves.

One Home Guard unit was equipped with 48 pikes borrowed from the Drury Lane Theatre. Another created a “Cutlass Platoon.” In another, guardsmen wore roller skates. In the East End one unit created grenades by inserting razor blades into potatoes. Most just practiced with wooden guns or simply pretended they were carrying weapons. Eventually most of the Home Guard received rifles – 63,000 shotguns and sporting rifles donated by private citizens and by September some 500,000 ex-World War I rifles contributed by the Canadian government.

Making a commitment to the Home Guard was not easy. Jack Nice, a father of two, was holding down his regular job as a driver on the night shift for the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society, and then spending every third day, more than 80 hours a month without pay, training with his Home Guard unit, the 34th County of London Battalion. The Battalion trained at a local school and at the Matchless Motorcycle works at 44 Plumstead Road.

The Germans reacted to the Home Guard with a mixture of contempt and concern. The Nazi Propaganda Minister referred to them as “rabble” and a “mob of amateurs armed with broom-sticks and darts,” but later he accused them of being gangsters. He also announced that any Home Guard members caught with weapons in their hands by the German invaders would be shot as terrorists.

Hitler’s generals had good reason to worry. In this war so far they had achieved enormous success by attacking civilians and by devastating towns and cities, first destroying each country’s morale and its people’s will to fight, before then turning on the defending armies themselves. Now, for the first time, the civilians of a target country were giving notice that they would fight back. As Winston Churchill said in July 1940, “The vast mass of London itself could easily devour a hostile army and we would rather see London laid in ashes and ruins than that it should be tamely and abjectly enslaved.”

This wasn’t just a politician’s bluster. In the summer of 1940 most people in Britain expected the Germans to come, but they were almost unanimous in their will to fight. One newspaper, the Daily Express, helpfully published an article entitled “How to Receive a German Paratrooper who lands in your Back Garden.” The story included a German translation of the phrase ‘Hands up: you are my prisoner.’

The English didn’t have to wait long before the war came to them. It started in the skies over Essex, Kent, Surrey and Hampshire with the first Luftwaffe bombing attacks of the campaign that became known as the Battle of Britain. The Germans were fighting to establish air supremacy over southern England, so that they could launch their invasion unopposed. They planned to bomb airfields, destroy aircraft factories and shoot Spitfires and Hurricanes out of the sky.

Later, Churchill would say, “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.” The “few” were some 1,100 young fighter pilots, a great number still in their teens. These young pilots took off day after day, sometimes three or even four times a day, charging against the never-ending waves of German fighters and bombers over the skies of England. Within three months a third of them would be dead, their bodies torn by German cannon shells, burned alive by fire, or smashed into the ground in the crumbled wreckage of their damaged aircraft.

The Battle of Britain was also fought by thousands of men and women on the ground, serving in the air force and working in factories around the country.

Aircraft technicians laboured around the clock to patch and re-arm the British fighters and to repair bomb-cratered runways and hangars, sometimes themselves under direct attack from the air.

All along England’s southern coastline young women tracked the German aircraft from primitive radar stations, staying at their posts even while bombs were falling around them. They were feeding vital early warning to “controllers,” again mostly women, who launched and directed the RAF pilots so that they could counter-attack the Germans at exactly the right time and place.

And when the Spitfires and Hurricanes were shot down, RAF aircraft recovery crews rushed to the site of the crash, salvaging all the equipment they could, and shipping it to aircraft factories and repair depots. Sometimes crashed aircraft could be patched and repaired, to fly again just days later.

In factories around the country ordinary men and women worked beyond exhaustion to produce replacement aircraft faster than the Germans could shoot them down. German bombers relentlessly targeted these factories, but no amount of bombing could bring the production of the precious aircraft to a stop.

Beside the Thames in the centre of Woolwich, the Royal Arsenal was the biggest munitions factory in England. Here many thousands of factory hands worked day and night to produce the ammunition the RAF needed in its battle, and to replace the ammunition the army had lost in France, and would need in its struggle to repel the coming invasion. In the days after Dunkirk output at the Arsenal rose by a quarter as production accelerated to 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Workers set a blistering pace, toiling under the stress of constant threat of attack from the air.

All that summer as Dick Campbell made his way home after his shift at the Arsenal he could look up into the sky and see the contrails of the Spitfires and Hurricanes twisting and turning in their desperate battle with the Luftwaffe, perhaps firing off ammunition that had been in his own hands just days before.

One day in July, whole families crowded around a Messerschmitt fighter plane that had crashed on Plumstead Common, just a mile or so from the Arsenal. Jack Nice and other members of the Woolwich Home Guard took turns standing sentry around the wreckage, while ignoring their own families stealing pieces of the aircraft as souvenirs. Jack himself brought his own three-year-old son, Eddie (my father), to marvel at this example of the RAF’s superiority in the air.

While the Royal Air Force fought to hold back the Luftwaffe, Britain’s war leaders prepared for the inevitable invasion. They displayed a brave face to the public, but their private correspondence shows just how worried they were. “The more I see the nakedness of our defences the more appalled I am! Untrained men, no arms, no transport and no equipment,” wrote the commander of the army in his secret diary. “The ghastly part of it is that I feel certain that we can have only a few more weeks left before the Boche attacks!” Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under Secretary of the Foreign Office wrote that “. . . everything is as gloomy as can be . . . Probability is that Hitler will attempt invasion in next fortnight. As far as I can see, we are, after years of leisurely preparation, completely unprepared. We have simply got to die at our posts – a far better fate than capitulating to Hitler as those damned Frogs have done. But uncomfortable.”

In East Ham and Woolwich and Eltham, our family and their neighbours were also preparing for war.

Local borough councils were building air raid shelters in the basements and cellars of most public buildings and in streets and parks. They erected air raid sirens on almost every street corner.

Families were encouraged to build their own bomb shelters too. The government produced millions of “Anderson” bomb shelters. These cost each family £7, but were free to those earning less than £250 a year. At the beginning of the war, few of our family had to pay. Lorries came round dropping off kits full of corrugated iron and a few printed instructions. As June Napier recalls, homeowners and tenants had to “get on and build them themselves,” half burying them in the ground and heaping dirt on top. The instructions certainly left room for individual creativity.

In some areas, including many parts of Woolwich and Plumstead, people found it difficult to dig down far enough to install the shelters. Once they had dug a hole more than a foot or so, water started seeping in. Many always had water in their shelters, which made them very uncomfortable to use. Some people refused to use their shelters, choosing to take a chance inside their homes. For a few, this would turn out to be a fatal decision.

If people lived in homes with no garden, or a garden too small for an Anderson shelter, the local council issued them with “Morrison” shelters. These were big metal cages, with wire mesh on the sides. Many families, like Will and Elsie Canning in Bexleyheath, set them up in their parlours or dining rooms, crowding out the furniture. Some stacked the dining room table and chairs on top of the shelter and began enjoying formal dinners served with a bird’s eye view.

The government worried that the Germans would use gas, just as they had in the Great War. Local councils painted the tops of most red pillar post boxes with a yellow gas detector liquid that would change colour when poison was in the air. Everyone was issued with a gas mask and told to carry it at all times.

People struggled with the masks. They were awkward to put on and uncomfortable to wear. Margaret Campbell was just a toddler, so her gas mask was fitted with Mickey Mouse ears, which made wearing it a little bit more of an adventure.

A quarter of a million Londoners signed on as Air Raid Precautions (ARP) volunteers. They became “wardens” responsible for the emergency precautions in their neighbourhoods and “auxiliary” firefighters, nurses and ambulance drivers.

The ARP wardens could be heard patrolling neighbourhood streets in the evenings on their bicycles, crying “put that light out!” Everyone had been given instructions for making blackout curtains or blinds. Tom Napier made his out of thick black-tarred paper nailed to a wooden lathe. It looked awful until his daughter came up with the bright idea of painting it. June copied a calendar or birthday card and created a huge colourful picture of a country market scene, completely covering the blind and brightening up the whole living room. She remembers that it was her Dad’s “pride and joy.”

Most of the responsibility for the war preparations fell onto the local borough councils. Although not directly involved in the military build-up, they had to organize the local ARPs, first aid posts, stretcher parties, public bomb shelters, clean-up crews, and all the other activities that fell under the category of “civil defense.”

Some borough councils did a better job than did others. One of the least prepared was West Ham, an area that included Canning Town and Silvertown. “Rather Pickwickian” noted one very disappointed government official when he reviewed the borough’s plans and inspected its preparations. He was right: West Ham’s plans would soon be tested, and they would fail.

The barrage balloons were the most visible sign that London was at war. Over a thousand of these great silver blimps hovered over the city, trailing thick steel cables designed to force bombers to fly higher than normal, spoiling their bomb aiming. Giant searchlights were also set up all over the city, strategically placed so that they could trap bombers, illuminating them for the anti-aircraft guns that would fire from parks and other public spaces. It all looked very impressive, but many wondered how effective these defences would be if the German bombers tested them.

All that summer, while people in London were bracing for the coming attack, June Napier was plotting for ways to escape from the safety of Loughborough to her family in East Ham.

Her Aunt Millie was a cold unfeeling woman, never once giving June a hug or a kiss or any sign of affection of any kind. She and her husband, Fred Baxter, had moved to Loughborough to escape from working class London. June believed her Aunt and Uncle had ideas “above their station” and thought they had become “better class.” They looked down on June, tolerating her only out of necessity. They believed if the government was going to force them to take in evacuees from London, it was better to have poor relations living with them than strangers. In all they took in three children and for a while they also billeted a captain from a nearby barracks. As June said, “to Aunt Millie this was rather grand - she would never have considered a private!”

 “Aunt Millie was a real martinet. Everything had to be done just so. I had to come home from school, come in the back way, take my shoes off on the doorstep and change into slippers, put on a pinny, do my homework, etc. At lunchtime I had to go home (if Aunt Millie was going out to the various things she belonged to) and do her hair for her. I had to pin it with great metal hairpins into big fat sausages all round her head. She used to take me to things like ‘Knitting vests for African babies,’ held in the Mayor’s parlour (very posh!), and ‘Rolling bandages for our troops’ and so on. I joined the St John’s Ambulance Brigade (under age at 12, but it was wartime and they turned a blind eye) and gained my First Aid certificate. At night, if I hadn’t had enough calories and vitamins, I had to have a lettuce sandwich with brown bread.

“Everyone had to be quiet for the news at 6 PM and 9 PM, and Uncle Fred used to go apoplectic (really purple, and his eyes would bulge) if anybody dared to utter a word while it was on. He was a strange man, with a shock of hair that stood up on end and very prominent eyes, which glared at me, and they always seemed to be popping out at me with indignation, though I was never sure what I had done to be in disfavour. He was fanatical about cards, and made me play cards with him just to make up the numbers, and if whilst partnering him I dared to do anything that caused him to lose, he would be beside himself. He used to throw his cards down and stomp off into the other room. He was known in the family to be a very bad loser, and everyone was cheating except him!”

While June was suffering in Loughborough and writing to her parents, campaigning to be allowed to come back to London, Dick Campbell was just as determined to get away.

Dick had taken advantage of the rapid build-up in war production by finding a position in Quality Control at the Woolwich Arsenal, escaping from his old job as a “Brickie” (a Bricklayer’s Mate) on construction sites. But now, in the summer of 1940, as it became obvious that war would be coming to Woolwich and Eltham, he started looking for work in other cities.

At one point, he thought there might be something in Manchester and went up there to see what he could find. Not once had Elsie ever spent a night apart from her husband since they had married. Now, with Dick in Manchester, she was very lonely, and, as it turned out, so was Dick.

One afternoon Margaret, who was playing in the front garden, looked up to see her daddy struggling down Glasbrook Road with his huge suitcase. He had lasted just three days. The separation from his family had been unbearable; he had decided to give up on Manchester and come back home.

Dick didn’t stop his efforts to get away from the city, but he now decided he would only leave London when he knew a firm job was waiting, and when his family could join him right away

There were others trying to leave too. In May the United States Embassy had advised all American citizens in Britain to return home as soon as possible. Those who couldn’t leave were encouraged to “seek accommodation in uncongested areas, as far as possible from metropolitan centers and points which might be considered strategical from a military point of view.” The next warning, in June, was much stronger, stating, “This may be the last opportunity for Americans to get home until after the war.”

All through the summer, British intelligence monitored the relentless German build-up. By late July 15 divisions of assault troops, more than 300,000 soldiers, were in the occupied ports facing England. By then, continuous German air attacks had cleared the Royal Navy from the English Channel. Britain’s defences were starting to thin.

The Germans chose Tuesday, August 13^th to be “Eagle Day,” the start of the final campaign of all-out bombing and fighter sweeps that would drive the Royal Air Force from the skies over England, clearing the way to launch the invasion before the end of the summer.

On that day, the Luftwaffe hit southern England with more than 500 bombers and fighters. Thirty-nine didn’t return. The Royal Air Force appeared to win the day, losing just fifteen aircraft, but it was a hollow victory – five British fighter pilots were killed. The system the RAF had established could quickly repair or replace lost fighter planes, but it could not replace fighter pilots.

The weather the next day was bad for flying, thwarting German plans for widespread attacks. Even so, the Royal Air Force lost four more pilots.

On Thursday, August 15^th, the Germans launched their largest and deadliest attacks yet. Almost 1,300 aircraft swept across the English Channel to attack airfields, railway lines, oil storage facilities and aircraft factories, and to draw the Royal Air Force into the air, where the German fighters could shoot them from the skies. In Plumstead Jack Nice sat with his son, Eddie, on their front step, watching the German fighters and bombers and the defending Spitfires and Hurricanes dancing in the skies, drawing intricate patterns of vapour trails, as they fought high over London and southeast England. By the end of the day, the Germans had shot down 34 Spitfires and Hurricanes, and 15 British pilots were dead or missing. The German losses had been much greater – 76 aircraft and 187 aircrew – but the Luftwaffe had more in reserve.

In the five days following Eagle Day, the Royal Air Force lost 68 pilots killed or missing and another 70 wounded and hospitalized, while in all of August to that date, the RAF received only 70 new replacements. By now, the RAF could field less than 800 Spitfires and Hurricanes. The Germans were still opposing them with almost 2,000 aircraft. This war of attrition could not continue much longer.

It was a glorious summer in London, but few were relaxing. The war was creeping closer and the omens of what awaited our family were growing stronger and more obvious every day.

A brother and sister, evacuated from London to Ashford, in Kent, where the Campbell children had been sent back in 1939, remembered watching “endless dogfights take place over our heads. We children would stand outside and watch them, enthralled, until we were driven in by an irate Home Guard man in his tin helmet . . . We were shot at by a low-flying German aircraft . . . when we were biking along an open road and had to take refuge in a ditch. The German pilot waved at us as he took off, and I remember being intensely amazed.”

The first bombs to hit London fell on Woolwich and Eltham in the early hours of the morning, on August 17^th. A few incendiary bombs landed on the roof of Halford’s bicycle store at 81 Powis Street, but the Auxiliary Fire Service quickly extinguished the resulting fire. The other incendiaries only started grass fires and broke a few pavement stones.

It was almost a week later, on Saturday, August 24^th, at 11:30 PM, that London suffered its first night raid – a widespread attack by three squadrons of bombers that hit docks, factories and residential areas in the east and southwest of the city, including the first bombs to fall on East Ham. Although no bombs hit Woolwich, people as far away as Plumstead and Eltham could clearly hear the anti-aircraft guns on Woolwich Common firing at the attackers as they flew overhead. It was a minor raid, with perhaps just 40 German bombers, but the anti-aircraft guns made everyone aware of the attack.

The next evening, London’s 13^th air raid alert sounded, just ten days after the first. For four long hours, people listened to the anti-aircraft guns, the drone of aircraft engines and occasional bursts of machine gun fire. Then, just moments after the All Clear had finally sounded at 1.30 AM, as Dick Campbell and his family were climbing out of the Anderson shelter in their back garden; a lone bomber dropped its load of four incendiaries over Beckenham and Sydenham, three miles away. Two bombs fell into allotments and gardens on a housing estate, damaging 35 homes, but causing only minor casualties. The third crashed into the Columbia Ribbon and Carbon Company factory, setting it on fire, and damaged Baird’s TV Works, in the adjacent building. The last bomb smashed two more homes, bringing down whole walls.

There were actually few bombs falling, but air raid warnings were sounding every day now. This meant people were constantly on edge. On Tuesday, August 27^th, an air raid warning quickly led to hysteria on Mile End Road in Stepney. “Everyone ran. No matter where, they just ran. Shelter! Quick! People running in all directions. People screaming.”

From then on, bombers attacked London every day, flying hit and run raids that targeted docks and factories, but often hit the residential streets and shopping districts clustered around them.

This steadily increasing violence added to the tension and sense of impending doom, but many Londoners were determined that their lives would go on. In East Ham, no threat of German action was going to interfere with twenty-two-year-old Florrie Hickford’s wedding.

Like most of the extended Hickford family, Florrie lived on Roman Road, where she shared a tiny row house with her parents, Albert and Mina, and her younger sister, Dorothy. She was working in a shop close to the docks and factories of Silvertown, north of the Thames. This is where she had met young Sid Wibrow, a butcher’s helper working in the shop next to hers. The war intruded on their romance when Sid received his call-up notice, but it didn’t stop the couple from seeing each other whenever they could. Now they would be married.

The wedding was set for the afternoon of Saturday, August 31^st, at the parish church in East Ham. That day was a bad choice. Air raid alerts sounded at 8.25 AM, 10.40 AM and 1.00 PM. As the guests made their way to the church from Roman Road, from Silvertown and from across the river in Eltham, many wondered when a family gathering like this would happen again.

The last air raid warning interrupted preparations in the church. From there, the explosions of the bombs sounded far away, but for many in the wedding party, including bridesmaids Babs Campbell and Dorothy Hickford, it was hard to be calm. Most of them knew that the docks around Silvertown and North Woolwich were the most likely targets for these bombs, and they knew that Sid and his best man were traveling from Silvertown to get to the church.

Sid was behind schedule, still not finished dressing, when the bombs began falling around the docks very close to the old row house where he was living. Now he crouched under the stairs, destroying the creases in his freshly pressed uniform, and hoping the bombs would come no closer.

The attack didn’t last long, but when the all clear sounded, rubble and debris completely blocked Albert Road and Woolwich Manor Way, trapping Sid on the other side.

Tension was high in the church by the time Sid eventually came through the door. He was safe, work crews had cleared the roads enough for him to climb over the debris, the buses were running up to East Ham, and the war wasn’t going to stop this wedding today.

The ceremony began without the best man. He was still trapped behind the rubble somewhere, with the ring. Halfway through the service the Minister turned to the guests to ask, “Does anyone have a wedding ring?” Elsie Campbell sent hers up to the front and the ceremony carried on.

The Germans obliged Florrie by staying away until 5.45 PM, when the day’s fourth alert sounded. Florrie and Sid had already said goodbye to their family and friends when they heard the fifth alert at 9.45 PM. The sixth sounded at 11.20 PM. The couple spent their wedding night in a bomb shelter.

That afternoon, while Sid had been rushing to his wedding, brothers Eddie and John Nice and their friends were watching the action high in the skies over Woolwich. One vapour trail erupted into a ball of fire that began falling, right over their heads. As the object fell ominously closer, they could see it was a plane out of control, one wing shot off, flames shooting from the fuselage. Their eyes were wide open as they watched the plane spiral into the ground half a mile away, where it exploded in a ferocious roar, sending burning debris and ammunition shooting all over the neighbourhood.

Everyone in the area cheered when they learned it had been a German Me109 fighter, shot down by the RAF, but they didn’t realize that the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots they could see flying overhead were losing the air war.

The RAF’s fighter squadrons were still flying up to four sorties a day, but pilot losses were taking a terrible toll. Many squadrons were at just half strength; three-quarters had lost their commanding officers and were now led by junior pilots with much less experience than the dead men they were replacing. The intense air war was straining the intricate system defending Britain from the Luftwaffe. Radar stations had been bombed, opening up holes in the early warning system; telephone lines were down, so that critical information couldn’t get through to the fighter squadrons; hangars and ground equipment had been destroyed, so that it was more and more difficult to repair and maintain planes. Britain’s defenders were at the point of exhaustion.

By the first week of September, the Royal Air Force was facing collapse. Aircraft losses were now running at twice the rate at which factories could replace them and pilot losses had climbed to a rate of almost 20 a day. Another week of fighting this intense would destroy Britain’s air defenses and the Germans would have the air superiority they needed. They could then launch their invasion, unopposed from the air.

As the Royal Air Force crumbled, the government began preparing for the worst.

British Intelligence was now reporting an ominous picture of German activity across the Channel and the North Sea. On August 29^th, aerial reconnaissance photographs revealed the build up of ships in ports that had been empty two weeks earlier. Over the next few days aerial reconnaissance revealed concentrations of ground attack squadrons opposite Kent and big increases in the number of invasion barges in ports along the coast of Holland. On Thursday, September 5^th, the RAF began large-scale bombing attacks on the masses of ships and supply dumps in the French, Belgian and German ports.

That night, the Germans struck the area around Woolwich. They were probably targeting the docks, but hit Eltham hard as well. Bombs fell on the High Street, gutting the Woolworth’s department store, Simpson’s the home furnishers, and, to Dick Campbell’s great sorrow, ‘The Castle’ pub. Bombs also destroyed Barker’s Garage, set Well Hall station alight and demolished houses in Lynsted Gardens, killing three people. Other bombs fell seemingly randomly throughout southeast London, mostly causing light damage, but destroying a number of homes in Plumstead.

German bombers returned the next night, dropping bombs on Woolwich, Plumstead, Abbey Wood and Eltham, but this time Lewisham bore the brunt of their attention. Bombs fell on the houses along Engleheart Road, just ten minutes by bus from where the Campbells lived in Eltham.

That evening, while Londoners were cowering in their air raid shelters, German propaganda broadcasts were advising, “Hitler may at any hour give the order for invasion to begin.”

During the night, British patrols discovered 60 enemy vessels in the Channel off the coast of France. Commanders alerted all forces that invasion was imminent, perhaps within just 12 hours.

In reality the Germans were far from launching their invasion. They believed they still couldn’t establish air superiority over the beaches of southern England. In fact, it seemed to them that they were losing the Battle of Britain.

The Luftwaffe had by then lost a third of their aircraft, with almost half of their airmen killed, captured or wounded – a rate of loss proportionately far higher than they were inflicting on the British. German aircrews were flying sortie after sortie, deep into enemy territory, all through the daylight hours, day in, day out, with the seemingly certain prospect of eventually being shot down and captured, or even worse, to face a horrible death in the flaming wreckage of their aircraft. After three months of this, the Luftwaffe crews were exhausted and demoralized and close to the point of rebellion.

Despite their bravado and public pronouncements about the destruction of the Royal Air Force, the Germans were frustrated with their inability to inflict a fatal blow. It seemed to them that it didn’t matter how many sorties they flew, and how many aircraft they shot down, there were always more Spitfires and Hurricanes ready to face them again. And so, at the critical moment, when, unknown to them, victory in the Battle of Britain was within their grasp, Hitler ordered a new strategy, one he believed would break the back of the British people, destroying their will to resist and leaving them begging for a humiliating peace.

The story of that decision goes back to the first German night raid on London on August 24^th. At the time the raid had seemed almost minor. Some even believed it was an accident. The scale and circumstance of the attack didn’t matter to Churchill – London had been indiscriminately bombed, and he was determined to respond. He ordered reprisal attacks on Berlin.

In an almost farcical effort, fewer than 100 outdated British bombers made the first attack of the war on the German capital on the night of August 28^th. Only 29 of them found Berlin. They only slightly damaged two buildings – most of their bombs landed in open fields. The RAF followed up with more raids over the next week, eventually killing German civilians.

Hitler’s anger knew no bounds. At the height of his greatest triumph, with Poland, France, the Low Countries, Denmark and Norway all prostrate at his feet, he had been very publicly humiliated by the bombing of Germany’s capital city.

Until then Hitler had spared British cities from the kind of havoc wrought on Rotterdam and other towns on the Continent. The destruction of central Rotterdam by aerial bombing had led to widespread panic amongst Holland’s civil population, leading to the Dutch government’s collapse and capitulation.

Hitler decided he would now avenge the bombing of Berlin by applying the same tactics to London and other British cities. He would rain such fire and fury on the ordinary people of Britain that their will to resist would evaporate. He would bring the English to the point where they would be begging him to make peace.

On September 4^th, he made a speech before a group of nurses and women social workers, all enthusiastic Nazi supporters. His audience was waiting to hear how he would respond to the British attacks. “The English are full of curiosity,” said Hitler. “They keep asking, ‘When is he coming?’ Don’t worry,” exclaimed Hitler. “He’s coming! He’s coming!”

He then gave the order for the destruction of London.

The Nice family in the British Newspaper Archive

Today it’s easy to trace a family through the birth, marriage and death records available online by subscription or for free from various sites. In just a few minutes I can find the records proving that my great grandfather Alfred Nice died in 1952, married in 1899 and was born in 1873. His father, Arthur Nice died in 1899, married in 1863 and was born in 1842. His father, Edward - well, you understand my point.

But to know a birthday or a wedding date is not to know the person - our ancestors weren’t just names and dates. What did they do? How did they feel? What were their personalities? How were they like me, and how were they not? To answer these questions we have to interpret the information in the the birth, marriage and death records and to search for other records to find some insight, however small, into each personality.

Searching for these records is still not easy, despite the power of the internet. Not everything is on line and not everything can be trusted. It can be a tedious job searching for that one name or that one reference that fills in another gap in the jigsaw puzzle.

But now the British Library has began placing its archive of newspapers on line (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk), in partnership with brightsolid, the company that owns findmypast.co.uk. Their plan is to scan, index and publish 40 million newspaper pages, with over five million available now. This is a wonderful source of background information for anyone tracing ancestors in the UK. I believe it will soon become one of the most important sites for genealogical research. It’s already on my top ten list.

Let me show you just how significant this source can be by focusing on one branch of my family for the sixty years they lived in one rural Essex village.

Toppesfield sits in an area of gently rolling hills in the northeast of Essex. The church is on a high point where it can be seen from all directions. The only industry in the village and surrounding parish is agriculture, as it has been for hundreds of years. Toppesfield suffered heavily in the agricultural depression of the late 19th century. Its population drifted down from some 1,000 persons in the 1840s to perhaps 600 at the turn of the 20th century. It's been stable since then: the population in 2001 was 533.

The Nice family arrived in Toppesfield in the 1840s, when Edward Nice, a wheelwright, moved here from the nearby village of Belchamp Walter.

Edward had seven children by two wives: Susan Smee and after she died, her sister Rachel. Miraculously for the time, all seven children survived into their adult years.

Edward’s oldest, Arthur, had ten children of his own, one of them my great grandfather Alfred Nice. Arthur’s brother Harry and his sister Clara both married and had children of their own, but the other four siblings, Susan, Alma, Clara and Jessie, remained single all their lives.

All of Edward’s children, except one, and all his grandchildren eventually moved away from Toppesfield. By the 1890s his son Alma was the last of Edward’s family still in the village. The link was broken when Alma died in 1924.

The newspaper coverage of 19th century Toppesfield is remarkably similar to the coverage I see from our local community newspaper here in the small town where I live now: fund raising events, garden parties and the occasional crime. This makes me think we’re not seeing a balanced picture. Certainly the local papers weren’t covering the impact of the agricultural depression and Toppesfield’s resulting slow decline into poverty, or the vast social upheavals that came with the railway, compulsory education and other 19th century changes.

But we still have a rich picture of life in Toppesfield: a farmer fined for allowing two cows to wander on a public roadway; youngsters caught setting hay alight with matches; a farm workers’ union rally controversially aided by the rector of the church; arson, probably caused by agricultural labourers protesting low wages and high unemployment; farm labourers wandering drunk on the highway; and petty theft of all kinds.

And there’s a surprising amount about my family.

The family enters the newspaper archives with an entry from March 10th 1843. The Essex Standard commented on the uncertainty of life, citing the example of Edward’s father, Richard Nice, who suddenly “fell down in a fit and expired shortly after.” Richard had enjoyed remarkably good health and always maintained an excellent character for honesty, sobriety, and industry. He was just 64.

Edward and Rachel must have instilled a love of learning in their children. Three of their four girls became teachers, all rising to be head mistresses. Emily was the only one of the girls to marry, which meant she had to resign her teaching position, but she passed her passion on to her own children: three of her four girls also went on to be teachers, one remaining unmarried and rising to be a head mistress too.

The first of the children to begin teaching was Emily. Her career was meteoric. In 1871 she was a student at the Whitelands Training School in Chelsea, London (one of the most respected teacher colleges in England then and still today) but according to the Essex Newsman, by the time she married in 1876 at the age of 24, she was already headmistress of St. John’s School in Moulsham, Essex.

Clara was next to take up the profession. In November 1882 the Chelmsford Chronicle was pleased to notice Clara’s name in the list of successful candidates for scholarships. She was second on the list in order of merit amongst those who graduated from the two year program at Hockerill Teaching College.

By then she was already teaching. The National School in Toppesfield had been examined on April 5th, 1882. According to the resulting report, “Reading is somewhat weak in the first standard, but elsewhere, and especially in the second and third standards, it is fluent, distinct, and expressive. Handwriting is fairly good. Spelling is fairly accurate. Arithmetic is weak in the fourth standard, but very fair elsewhere. Discipline is good. Singing and needlework the same. The infants are a fairly good class.” The article reporting these results also mentioned that Clara Nice had finished her apprenticeship as pupil teacher and had been engaged as assistant mistress. She would eventually become Head Teacher at the Effra Street School for Girls and Infants in Wimbledon, Surrey. Toppesfield’s National School would continue to set high standards: in 2011 its successor would be recognized as the primary school achieving the highest academic standards on standardized tests in all of England.

A third sister Jessie successfully passed her entrance examination for Hockerill College in July 1886, winning a first-class scholarship for the two-year teaching diploma program. She figures prominently in the press for more than just her teaching. When she came home for the holidays at Christmas 1887 she took on the challenge of decorating the altar rails in the village church, a job she executed very “tastefully”, according to the Essex Standard. In 1909 and again in 1912 she judged the needlework and drawing at the annual show of the Toppesfield Cottage Garden Society, which was held on the grounds of Toppesfield Hall. By then Jessie was a spinster and the head teacher at the National School in the nearby village of Great Yeldham, so no doubt she was a respected member of the village community.

How ironic then that the sisters’ older brother Arthur, my great great grandfather, appeared before the Heddingham Petty Sessions in November 1885, to be fined 1 shilling, with 4 shillings costs, for neglecting to send his children regularly to school (At the same session young Kate and Arthur Twitchett, niece and nephew of my mother’s grand aunt Ellen Hickford living in the nearby village of Ashen, were each fined two shillings and sixpence for stealing beans and beanstalks with a value of one shilling and sixpence. They were 13 and 12 at the time). Arthur was called before the court again in August 1888 and fined another 1 shilling, with 4 shillings costs, for failing to keep his 12-year-old daughter Lottie in school.

These weren’t Arthur’s first court appearances. He was first called before the Heddingham Petty Sessions on February 13th, 1872, two days after the birth of his fourth child, where he was convicted of stealing three bushels of chaff and two bushels of mangel wurzel (a kind of root beet) from a farmer. He was sentenced to serve 21 days’ imprisonment.

Arthur was caught in another noteworthy event when in 1883 the house where he and his family were living was destroyed by fire. It was owned by his wife Rosavena Hardy’s stepfather James Butcher. According to the Wyyenhoe and Colchester Regatta, the fire was “supposed” to have been caused by a spark from the chimney, which ignited the thatch roof.

James Butcher appears not to have been a very sympathetic figure. He ran the village grocery shop and was also called a higler by some people - a somewhat derogatory term to describe an untrustworthy pedlar - and often came to the attention of the local newspapers.

The first time was in March 1854, when he appeared before the bench to answer to a charge of theft. Then 27-years-old, James was accused of partnering with a 14-year-old farm hand named Jeremiah Hardy to steal half a bushel of beans from a local farmer, James Nunn.

Two weeks before the trial James stopped at Nunn’s farmyard to pick up some fowl he’d purchased. The farm bailiff saw James talking with Jeremiah, who worked for Nunn, and who should have been feeding pigs. He then saw the two disappear into the granary. After James left on his pony and cart the bailiff went into the granary and immediately noticed that some beans were missing.

Nunn found Police Constable Cook and together they went to James’ cottage. James had no objections to PC Cook entering to search the premises, but protested when Cook went to climb into the attic. Upstairs, Cook found a box with various beans mixed together.

James claimed the beans were the remainder of four bushels purchased the previous November from another farmer. When that farmer was called as a witness he confirmed that he had sold the beans to James, but when the prosecutor showed the farmer the beans found in James’ cottage the farmer expressed surprise: “These aren’t my beans; my beans were black, these are white!” which brought laughter to the court.

James then testified that Jeremiah Hardy had indeed given him some beans but only a few - certainly not enough to be considered “theft” - and only to be feed for the birds he'd purchased. His lawyer also argued there was no evidence the beans presented in court were the identical beans taken or received, despite sworn testimony from Nunn to that effect.

James’ lawyer then called up a shop-keeper as a character witness. He would have called another, he explained, but the second one had missed his train and wasn’t in the court.

The Judge summed up by saying that the quantity taken was immaterial - even half an ounce of beans would have been an equal crime, “and with regard to his view of the transaction, how could a man like the prisoner suppose that a boy of 14 had any right to dispose of his master’s property?

“Verdict: Guilty.”

Nunn then recommended mercy for Jeremiah, believing James Butcher had drawn him into the crime.

The Judge responded by saying “the offence of Butcher in teaching a little boy like the other prisoner to steal, was a very serious one. He almost doubted if he satisfied the justice of the case by a sentence of 8 months’ hard labour. With respect to the boy, he should attend with the geatest pleasure to [Nunn’s] recommendation; and hoped a sentence of one month’s imprisonment would deter him from being guilty of similar practises in future.”

James' eight months of hard labour didn’t deter him from all crime. He was back in court in September 1856, charged with “using a pair of unjust scales, 1 ounce deficient against the purchaser.” He was fined 2s. 6d and costs of 9s. 6d., which he paid on the spot.

Fifteen years passed before James again came to the attention of the law. He made history of a sort when he was prosecuted under the Public Health (Water) Act of 1878. This was the first prosecution under the new act in the area, and, according to the clerk of the Halstead Union Rural Sanitary Authority, possibly in all the country.

James owned three cottages in the nearby village of Little Yeldham. The Sanitary Authority twice issued notices to him ordering the provision to the cottages of “wholesome water sufficient for the consumption and domestic use of the inmates.” When he failed to respond to either of these the Authority itself provided this access and passed the cost on to James. Then, in 1881 James was summoned for failing to pay £13 12s., his portion of the Authority’s costs.

In his defence James claimed that one of the cottages was now vacant: the tenant had left without paying him any rent. The clerk of the Authority responded “That is one of the unfortunate results of having cottage property, but it does not affect the question.” James then argued that the cost he was being assessed was too high for the work that had been done. The clerk answered back “Unfortunately for you it has been proved to the contrary.” 

The Chairman of the bench asked James if he could read, as “he appeared to have taken no notice whatever of the notices sent to him.” James claimed that he had been advised to take no notice of them.

The bench found James guilty, ordering him to pay the amount owing plus 12s 6d. for costs. James paid the full amount before leaving the court.

By 1884 James’ son James the younger held an “off” beer license. That year he applied to move it from a cottage on one side of the road to a cottage on the other. There was some question about whether James had complied with the Standing Orders because he hadn’t submitted the license application in writing, but had instead brought it that morning in person. He argued that he only wanted to transfer the license because he needed more room for his growing family, his father owned both properties, and his wife had already moved there. The Committee granted the application.

James passed away in 1892, apparently passing his businesses on to his son. By then the family was well on its way to respectability with only positive stories appearing in the newspapers. For example, in July 1892 James the younger was noted as a major buyer of Shropshire lambs at the annual Haverhill lamb sale and in 1896 the newspapers wrote of James’ support for Toppesfield’s May Day celebrations by providing a wagon decorated to be the May Queen’s carriage for her parade through the village. James’ daughter Daisy appeared in the parade as one of the Queen’s maids.

Other members of the extended family gained some notoriety too. At a meeting of the Halstead District Board of Governors in October 1881 the Board found that a cousin of Arthur’s, George Allen, was guilty of overcrowding, housing eight adults and three children in a cottage with three bedrooms together amounting to just 2,000 cubic feet in area (if the ceilings were seven feet high, this would mean the three bedrooms would total some 285 sq ft in total, or perhaps just nine feet by ten feet each).

The Medical Officer made a report to the same meeting, noting that “there is still not a proper water supply for the cottages in the Chase-lane below Toppesfield church.” He reported that Scarlett Fever had broken out in Toppesfield in October 1880. Twenty eight cases occured, resulting in three deaths. All the effected cottages were disinfected. He went on to remind the Governors that bylaws are still needed to control drainage and the building of privies and pig styes and then reported that there had been four illegitimate births in Toppesfield in the previous year.

William Allen, another of Arthur’s cousins, was charged in 1871 with the odd crime of stealing a sack of guano, which William denied. The allegedly stolen bag of guano was produced for the magistrate to see. Apparently the magistrate decided that the evidence was strong enough (no pun intended) to justify committing William for trial. There is no newspaper record of William’s trial, but the Criminal Registers for England and Wales, available on ancestry.co.uk, record a sentence of four months.

Arthur’s brother Alma Nice was the only one of Edward’s children to remain in Toppesfield all his life. Born in 1856, he witnessed the transformation of his village and the Essex countryside before passing away in 1924. Alma is an intriguing character. He never married, yet we get a sense that he was surrounded by friends. Although a wheelwright, he filled his life with the kind of cultural pursuits we unfairly attribute to the middle class alone.

It seems that Alma was a man well respected in the village: when in 1884 a ceremony was held to bid farewell to the curate of the parish, the Essex Standard specifically noted that Alma had attended.

He enjoyed singing, acting and dancing. The Chelmsford Chronicle records in 1883 that he sang at a “magic lantern entertainment” organised by Reverend Payne in the village’s National Schoolroom. At the 1886 Boxing Day concert Alma had to sing an encore of his first song and then was called up for a rendition of “The Roast Beef of Old England.” He was a leading member of the church choir, nominated to present a gift on behalf of the choir to the schoolmaster on his retirement in 1893.

Alma appeared at the National Schoolroom in a “capital entertainment” in December 1886. He sang the comic song ‘I can’t make up my mind.’ His sister Clara played the opening piece, a pianoforte solo, which the Chelmsford Chronicle recorded as being “well executed.” Others from the village sang and acted, the Band of Hope Drum and Fife Band played a selection of music and Reverend Payne exhibited a “transformation picture,” showing “first the effects of drink and afterwards of water.”

One year Alma helped organise an especially well remembered concert. The highlight was an operetta entitled “The artful dodgers” staring Alma in one of the title roles. The Essex Newsman records that “Mr. Lansdown and Mr. Nice kept things going right merrily, and the audience was convulsed with laughter from beginning to end. The climax came when the policeman (Mr. C. Hardy) endeavoured to take one of the dodgers into custody, the other in the meantime robbing the policeman.”

There are many other references to concerts and other entertainments that Alma organised and starred in. Clearly he enjoyed the performing arts as much or more as his work in the Wheelwright shop, but he was also a sportsman, a member of the illustrious Toppesfield Cricket Club. The Chelmsford Chronicle records many glorious games. Clearly Toppesfield was the team other villages strived to defeat.

Alma was named in a couple of newspaper stories for other reasons too.

In 1878 he was called as a witness in a court case resulting from the death of a farmhand. George Barker, a beer house-keeper, had been charged with permitting drunkenness on his premises. Now the magistrates at Heddingham Petty Session had to decide if the fatal injuries Robert Turbin suffered when his wagon rolled over and crushed him resulted from drunken driving or from hitching an ungelded “entire horse” to the same shaft as a mare in heat.

A number of witnesses testified that they saw Turbin enter Alma’s wheelwright shop and then leave and enter the beer house. Alma testified that Turbin enquired in the morning about some shafts he was repairing. The shafts weren’t ready so Turbin decided he would wait for them in the village. Turbin returned to the wheelwright shop with his friend Charles Barker, son of the beer house-keeper, at 3.00 PM, but the shafts were still not ready and wouldn’t be ready until the next day.

Robert Hardy testified that he met Turbin at the wheelwright shop on Turbin’s second visit. He, Turbin and Barker left together at 3.20 PM to return to the beer-house to share a pot of beer. Turbin only stayed ten minutes, leaving before the pot was finished. “He was not exactly drunk, but he was under the influence of drink”, so Robert told him to take care of himself, believing he wasn’t capable of handling the horses.

A witness testified that Turbin was definitely drunk - he couldn’t sit steady in the wagon - and another witness saw Turbin driving the horses and wagon, claiming he seemed to be “the worse for beer.”

Alma’s brother Harry Nice testified that at about 4.00 PM he heard someone call out “Whoa!” and heard a noise of chains rattling. Harry rushed out to the road to see Turbin crawling out from under the wagon. The horses had escaped their harnesses and were standing there watching him. Harry helped Turbin home. Turbin died later that evening.

The magistrates took some time to deliberate before finding George Barker guilty, fining him £5 plus costs.

Ten years later, in 1888, Alma was recognised as a hero when he rescued a boy who had fallen into the pond near the blacksmith’s shop. The boy had sunk three times before Alma reached him. Luckily a doctor was on the spot and was able to resuscitate the lad.

Through all these years Edward Nice, the patriarch of the family, quietly raised his children and saw them go on to have children of their own, and then watched them leave Toppesfield one by one for Chelmsford, London and destinations beyond.

Edward only came to the attention of the newspapers once, when the Chelmsford Chronicle recorded his passing in July 1897: “The Late Mr. E. Nice - On Saturday the remains of the late Mr. Edward Nice, wheelwright, were laid to rest in the churchyard. The deceased, who was 74 years of age, had been almost bedridden for two years. The service was impressively conducted by the Rector, the Rev. J.J. Baddeley, and many of the houses in the parish were represented at the graveside. The coffin was literally covered with magnificent wreaths.”

There’s a sad and ironic postscript to the story of the Nice family in local newspapers. I wrote above about Edward’s son Harry discovering the farmhand Robert Turbin in the wreckage of his overturned wagon and helping Turbin to his home, where he died. The Essex newspapers of July 27th 1907 all reported Harry’s death in Chelmsford when he was returning from delivering bread on his baker’s cart and lost control of the horse’s reins. When the horse bolted, the cart hit a kerb and overturned. Harry was thrown from the cart and pinned beneath it. A doctor pronounced him dead on the spot. He was just 46.