Settling in at Marple, 30th May – December 1940
Marple turned out to be very pleasant place indeed, in spite of those unfavourable first impressions en route of grey stonewalls in fields interspersed with rows of back-to-back houses in the populated areas through which the train took us. We were not to know then that it was, in fact, one of the more desirable residential Cheshire areas south of Manchester, and within reasonable commuting facilities. The population of Marple numbered about 12,000. There was a regular bus service to Stockport (the half-hourly North Western Road Car Company No. 27 to Mersey Square) and Manchester (the hourly North Western No. 28 to Lower Mosley Street Bus Station, via Stockport). There was Marple railway station (on the London Midland and Scottish Railway – LMS – into Central Station, Manchester) where we had arrived and which was on the edge of Marple, serving that village and adjoining Marple Bridge, at the bottom of the hill. There was also a second station, Marple Rose Hill, in the residential outskirts on the opposite, Offerton, side of Marple.
Appreciation of the importance of these facilities escaped us at first, but what we did appreciate was the picturesque location, overlooking the Derbyshire hills on the edge of the Peak District, the central park containing the Marple Urban District Council Offices, the Macclesfield Canal with its numerous locks and the little Regent cinema. There was also the ‘shopping centre’ containing one of each of most of the important shops you might need – a Co-Op store, a John Williams grocery store, a newsagent, hardware shop, greengrocers, cleaners etc. plus banks, a post office, an indoor swimming pool which made do as a dance hall during the winter, a library and all those other necessities for a comfortable life. To match these facilities there were, of course, also appropriate houses ranging from the small terraced houses erected during and since the industrial revolution dating back to the late 1800s to the large family residences of prosperous mill owners and Manchester businessmen, for Marple was then still within the cotton industry belt. In short, Marple was a highly desirable location.
In retrospect, another aspect, which probably made our integration into the English way of life much easier at Marple, was the virtual absence of any other foreign refugees. Consequently the few refugees who were there had much better opportunities for developing friendships with those ‘natives’ looking for such relationships. However, to get back to the main plot, it was because of my mother’s brother Hugo and his wife Edith’s presence at Marple that we had made our way there while Alfred was away in France with the Czechoslovak Brigade.
Norwood, Arkwright Road, Marple, Cheshire
Hugo and Edith, and Eva and baby Thomas Alan, – who had been born only a few weeks earlier, at the Marple nursing home, on 1st May 1940 – were living in a nice, large, family house, Norwood, in trendy Arkwright Road. Norwood was a large detached residence, containing mature gardens at the front and in the back, with a gate in the back garden opening into St Martin’s Road. The Slatners were there because the Society of Friends, the Quakers, in Manchester, had converted Norwood into a hostel for Jewish refugees from Europe. There were, probably, about half a dozen Jewish families living there, all of whom had come from Germany, Austria or Czechoslovakia. Each family was reasonably comfortably accommodated in at least one large bedroom. Apart from the Slatners, there were the Kohns, with their little boy Hänschen, the Bergmanns, who had a little boy and a little girl, and two or three others whose names and details escape me after all this time, particularly as we were not to be with them very long.
June 1940 was the time of greatest danger to Britain during World War 2. The remnants of the British Army’s Expeditionary Force in France had just been evacuated through Dunkirk by the hundreds of ‘little ships’ which managed to bring back some 20,000 British soldiers and another 10,000 Frenchmen. France and the greater part of Western Europe was overrun by German armies, or was under fascist, dictatorial control, and there were no allies apparently prepared to defend the freedoms of what was left of Europe. Consequently the authorities were very alert and touchy about foreigners, potential spies and the dreaded German paratroopers who were expected to be disguised in nuns’ habits or anything else equally unlikely. This led to a number of panic measures being taken at the time, one of which was to round up all ‘enemy aliens’ – the men, that is – with the intention of interning them for the duration. That seemed reasonable enough, except that an ‘enemy alien’ was defined as anyone coming, or originating from, enemy countries which were at war with Britain. No distinctions were made, in the first instance, between loyal Germans on the one hand, and German Jews or others political refugees who had been forced to flee Germany or Austria. Thus these Germans in Norwood, Herr Kohn and Herr Bergmann included, found themselves taken away to the great distress of their wives and children. They were interned on the Isle of Man, alongside hundreds of loyal German Nazis as well as German Jewish refugees and other anti-nazi Germans unfortunate enough to have been stranded in Britain. It was not a good time.
By the middle of July, news came through that my father had safely arrived back, at Liverpool, with the remnants of the other Czechoslovak volunteers who had gone over to fight alongside the French Army. Having been settled in at the Czech Army’s camp in Cholmondeley Park, near Malpas in Cheshire, and now an Independent Brigade within the British Army, it was not going to be too long before Alfred was to come home for a visit. The first positive indication was in a postcard he sent from Cholmondeley Castle, dated 25th July 1940, a Thursday. In this card he acknowledged receipt of 10/- (ten shillings) from my mother. That was the day President Beneš visited the camp and he thought that their leaves should be starting the following Monday, or Tuesday, and that, as a married man, he should be one of the first to benefit. A further card, dated 29th July 1940, confirmed Thursday, or Friday at the latest, as the start of his leave. And so it evidently turned out.
That was a happy reunion indeed, even though he was in a pretty poor state psychologically. As mentioned earlier, his experiences amongst the thousands of fleeing refugees on the roads of France had taken their toll of his nerves and he was most unhappy to be in any crowded situation. This problem was brought home to us on one particular occasion when, as a light relief, we all took the number 28 bus and had a day out in Manchester – a rare thrill for me, or indeed, my mother also. As one was bound to do, we went into Lewis’s department store at the top of Market Street. This was one of the biggest department stores in the country at the time (now sadly no longer there, although the building still stands housing some much inferior establishment) and, as usual, was full of shoppers. We had not been there many minutes when Alfred became very agitated, and had an uncontrollable urge to get out of the building and into the street, as he was unable to bear it any longer. At the time we put this down to his ‘nerves’ and no more was said about it. It was some time later, however, before he was able to confide in us his problem. He admitted that he was overcome with a feeling of fear, indeed terror, envisaging the carnage that could have resulted from an air attack and a bomb on Lewis’s. Pictures were brought back to him of dense crowds of countless refugees on the roads of France, being bombed and machine-gunned from the air by German Stukas – the Junkets 87B dive-bombers. Now, even the remote thought of an air attack, here in busy Manchester, was too terrible for him to contemplate. He had seen too much – and this was well before there had been any serious air raids on this country. It was the sight of those helpless hordes of French refugees, fleeing from the advances of the German armies, jamming the roads in France with their meagre belongings and being machine-gunned by German aircraft, that was the picture ingrained on his brain and of which he could not rid himself.
However, he soon settled into the army life under canvas at Cholmondeley from where visits home to Marple were a relatively easy matter. This situation continued until the autumn when, in mid-October, the Independent Czechoslovak Brigade was transferred to Leamington Spa in the Midlands. With the Czechoslovak Army now firmly established in Leamington and the surrounding countryside of Warwickshire, Hugo also took that final step and joined the army.
That summer, and into autumn, two other things happened. The Quakers decided to close the hostel in Arkwright Road as no more refugees were expected in the immediate future now that Europe was at war in a no uncertain manner. And I was enrolled in the Willows Senior School, formally Marple Senior School, on Hibbert Lane, on 5 June 1940. As the residents of Norwood were relocated, Ethel, with Edith – who were in receipt of adequate living allowances from the Czechoslovak Trust Fund in Britain as wives of serving soldiers – decided to go it alone and rent a house in Marple, furnished with redundant furniture and contents from Norwood which were provided by the Quakers at a nominal price. So by autumn 1940, we now had two single-parent families in the house, with the husbands in the army, and both wives facing up to running their shows single-handed for the duration.
2 St Martins Road, Marple
Running parallel to Arkwright Road, onto which also opened the back garden entrance from Norwood, was St Martin’s Road. It was here that Ethel and Edith with Hugo (who was at that time still in ‘civvies’) rented a mid-terrace house, Number 2, at the (village) end of the road, the front of which overlooked the Recreation Ground, the ‘rec’, across the road. On the corner on the opposite side of St Martin’s Road was a grocer’s shop – Mr Garlic’s – and in the distance we had a superb view of the Derbyshire Hills. The rent was 17 shillings and sixpence a month.
2 St Martins Road (now renumbered as 3, i.e. second house on the odd-numbered / left-hand side) dated back to the late 1880s and was owned by Mr Edwards, the Headmaster of the Marple Senior School. It had a narrow hall and staircase, front room (parlour), back living room, scullery, three bedrooms on the first floor and a large, draughty, attic on the next floor. The bathroom /lavatory had clearly been installed some years after the house was built and was squeezed into part of the back bedroom, so that to enter that room one had to pass through the bathroom. Lighting was by gas. Heating was by open, solid fuel, fire – the downstairs back room containing the classic black grate with an oven and back-boiler that heated the water. The scullery beyond contained a stone sink under the window and wash boiler in the corner – under which one would have lit a fire in the olden days to heat and boil the washing. There was also a back yard with coal shed and another similar hut, which would originally have been the outside WC. In addition, Number Two also had a small allotment at the rear and beyond that was a lock on the Macclesfield – Manchester Canal. It was quite a convenient arrangement really.
Ethel’s and Edith’s house actually started off by accommodating three families; Ethel with Heinz, Edith and Hugo with Eva and Thomas and Mrs Kohn with little Hänschen – Mr Kohn being at that time interned at His Majesty’s pleasure on the Isle of Man. It was a little overcrowded but, fortunately, Mrs Kohn – who didn’t actually fit in very well – left before too long. That was once the authorities had accepted the fact that Jewish refugees from Germany, though technically ‘enemy aliens’, were no threat to British security, and released Herr Kohn along with hundreds of others wrongfully detained on the Isle of Man. From then on things began to look up.
I was happy attending and making friends at school in Marple. Eva was attending another, junior, girls, school at Marple Bridge. The Czech Army was stationed in Georgian Leamington Spa and the surrounding Warwickshire countryside, thus allowing Alfred and Hugo to come home at reasonably close intervals. Also, Alfred sometimes brought along our old friend of Krakow days, Kurt Pick, and Hugo brought the Slatners’ old friend from Ostrava, Gustl Huppert.
By and large the circle of friends grew. The Frankls (Gina and Ferenz), Mrs Hauser, Mrs Rosenbaum and other refugees living in Manchester came occasionally (as paying guests) to have a few days’ break and a continental meal or ‘tea’ with us, i.e. coffee, while some of the ‘natives’ also became good friends. There were the Dicksons, Scots living in lower Arkwright Road, also overlooking the rec and the Rumneys, Jessie and Roland, who lived at the other end of the village. We also saw a little of my cousin Käthe, who was working in London at the BBC World Service as a foreign language broadcasts monitor. In due course, as mentioned, the Kohns having departed, their place was taken by Leni, a young woman from Germany. She moved into the attic and turned that neglected room into a reasonably comfortable, home. Thus Number Two also became something of a cosmopolitan refugee meeting place and even nurtured romance, for Leni ultimately married Gustl Huppert, while Kurt and Käthe grew very fond of each other. Unfortunately, Käthe could not bring herself to marry Kurt, as he was barely five feet tall, while she was quite tall, around six foot. Oddly enough, when Kurt finally did marry after the war, he found another tall woman, Maggie, and both enjoyed a long happy marriage.
There was one other regular ‘native’ visitor, namely the local policeman whose name unfortunately is now lost to posterity. He used to come in for a chat regularly over a cup of tea and snacks of food. Edith and Ethel were quite fond of him, but it never dawned on them that it was probably one of his duties to keep a watchful eye on these strange foreigners. Whatever the reasons, he was looked upon as a friend.
Next door to us on either side, at numbers one and three, lived respectable working class people. The ones at Number One we never really got to know. Their house seemed to be full of noisy evacuees from Manchester. This was not at all unusual as Marple was evidently considered a safe place for Manchester children – rightly so as it turned out. At Number Three, on the other side of us, lived a childless couple, probably in their late forties. He had some sort of a job on the canal and worked a long boat, which he tied up alongside our back garden allotments. This fascinated me no end, with its roomy cabin, which was fitted out as a comfortable living area, complete with coal fired iron stove and cooking facilities. Evidently, his journeys delivering cotton, or coal, or whatever it was he usually carried, took a number of days, and the ‘rivers‘ of such barges just lived on board when on their journeys. His wife, on the other hand, was a nurse and looked after their tidy, comfortable house.
But the story must continue in roughly chronological order if it is not to get out of hand. So by the autumn the situation was reasonably stable. Ethel and Edith were financially self-supporting, I was still happy at the School in Marple and 2 St Martin’s Road became quite a lively little household. The war, apart from the fact that the men were away from home, in the army, and our way of life had changed completely, had not caused any great personal hardships either – all things considered under these circumstances.
However, though I was happy at school, my parents decided that I was capable of benefiting from a more demanding school and a better, long-term, education. I, on the other hand didn’t agree. I was doing reasonably well at school, gradually overcoming the language problem and did not think that there was any need to disrupt the status quo. Notwithstanding, my mother arranged an appointment to see Mr Gilkes, the Headmaster of (the private) Stockport Grammar School, the nearest ‘good’ school to Marple, other ’good’ schools being further afield, the Macclesfield and Manchester Grammar schools. Stockport Grammar did, of course, present a totally different impression as compared with the small Marple Senior School, and Ethel was duly impressed. The school at that time probably had about 250 (boy) pupils. Mr Gilkes seemed quite amenable to taking me on for the next term (beginning January 1941) but there was one snag. The fees at Stockport Grammar were then £24.00! a year – which was a lot of money not only for the Vogels but also most other people. So, my mother made an appointment to see Mr Cook (Joseph Cook), the Headmaster of Stockport School, the Secondary School across the road on Mile End Lane. This was a much larger, modern, establishment with some 600 boys, having only just opened the year before the outbreak of war in 1938. Prior to that the Stockport Secondary School had been a co-educational school, near the centre of the town at the junction of Wellington Road South and Greek Street. As that school grew, the decision was taken to split it, leaving the girls at Greek Street, as it became known, and moving the boys to this brand new building on Mile End Lane, out of the centre of the town and roughly half-way to Hazel Grove.
Stockport Secondary School also looked good and had the other great advantage that school fees were only £10 a year – which the Czech Refugee Trust Fund were happy to finance. Ethel was pleased, Alfred was pleased, but I was, stubbornly, not impressed. I was happy at Marple, and so the process of persuasion began and, though I could not mount any logical arguments, I was adamant that I did not want to move. However, my case was not a good one and the combined resources of Ethel, Alfred and, to cap it all, my friend Kurt, finally extracted a grudging agreement from me to transfer to Stockport School. To be fair, Mr Edwards, my Headmaster and our landlord, also supported that decision.
And so the year drew to an end. I was by now positively looking forward to moving to my new school. The Independent Czechoslovak Brigade was still stationed in Leamington Spa and the surrounding Warwickshire countryside and the war was getting even nastier, very nasty. Coventry, the centre of the industrial Midlands heartland had been heavily ‘blitzed’ by the Luftwaffe in late December. The city was virtually destroyed with the local population suffering very heavy casualties. Out of that air raid the Germans invented the term Coventrieren (to Coventrate), meaning the destruction of a town by bombing, something they were threatening to do to every town in Britain. My mother and I went to visit my father for the first time at Leamington during the Christmas holidays, which entailed a train change at Birmingham and Coventry, only a few days after that ‘blitz’. As it was quite late at night by that time, aggravated by delays on the railway and the strict blackout, there was not anything to be seen and the general atmosphere was eerie, but we arrived safely at Leamington in due course. That visit was pleasant but otherwise uneventful, which was the best way for things to be during the war. What we did not know at the time was that by taking that trip to Leamington we would miss another serious blitz, this time the major air attacks on Manchester. These air raids ripped the centre out of the city along with large areas of the outlying housing estates and Trafford Park docklands. This blitz took place over two or three nights but was all over by the time we returned to Marple, not that it had any effects on that village, only 12 miles away.
There was, however, one incident at Marple arising out of the Manchester air raid, and that was the crash of a German Junkers Ju 88 bomber. It had been brought down and finished up in a field at Offerton near the Stockport side of Dan Bank, some two or three miles outside Marple. Also, by the time I got to Stockport School in January, we found that it had been hit by one stray incendiary bomb. This solitary bomb had fortunately fallen in the central, open, quadrangle, the only damage being a neat three-inch diameter hole in one of the paving stones where the bomb had landed and (presumably) burnt itself out. All in all an eventful year, with the war now well under way and going badly.
Vogel Vault 