Bournville Meeting House in the early 1900s. Photo: Photo courtesy of Anne Giles.
Saving the Meeting house
Stanley Holland tells the story behind a fascinating logbook from Bournville Meeting House
During the second world war a number of British cities came under attack from the air. The most vulnerable were those that were playing the most significant part in the war effort and in the life of the country generally. Such cities included Liverpool, Manchester, Southampton, Coventry (where the Anglican cathedral was demolished) and Birmingham. The war had started in September 1939 and for a time nothing much seemed to be happening. But then the blitz started. Attacks took place almost nightly and many people spent their nights sleeping in a public air-raid shelter or in an Anderson shelter in the back garden.
Bournville
It was hard to see that anything in Bournville, a suburb of Birmingham, would make it an obvious target. The local Cadbury factory was famous for making chocolate rather than munitions, but it could have become known that Bournville Utilities had been set up to help the war effort by filling shells with cordite, while another activity of the company was to coat aircraft fuel tanks with material that would prevent leakage occurring if they suffered battle damage.
Such activities could well have made Bournville a target. So, the main factory buildings were camouflaged. The rest of the village was still vulnerable, however, and several houses were demolished. And a bomb made a neat hole in the aqueduct that carries the Worcester and Birmingham Canal over Bournville Lane, causing serious flooding.
Following incidents of this kind, Bournville Friends became concerned about the safety of their Meeting house, as its loss would have been a great tragedy. There was no other like it in the whole country. It was opened in 1905 and was designed by William Alexander Harvey, as were many other buildings in Bournville. It had, and fortunately still has, a fine electro-pneumatic pipe organ and an unusual kind of hammer-beam roof that could easily have been destroyed along with the rest of the building if an incendiary bomb had fallen on it and a fire had taken hold.
Firewatchers
Accordingly, a rota of firewatchers was drawn up to keep an eye on the premises overnight and to tackle any fire that might be started. It was decided that throughout the blitz three volunteers would be on duty every night. The thinking behind this was that one person would pump water from a bucket using a stirrup pump, another could direct the hose, while a third would keep the bucket filled. It could, possibly, have been done using fewer volunteers but this seemed to be the optimum. Small sacks filled with sand were also provided. The intention was that these would be dropped onto an incendiary bomb to contain the flames. This would be done while running past, in case it should be an exploding bomb.
It was possible that a bomb could have penetrated the top part of the roof over the main hall. A ladder was, therefore, put in place permanently to give access to the loft from the choir gallery and full buckets of water and sandbags had to be provided up there. My father, George Holland, took on the job of seeing to these complicated arrangements and generally organising the firewatching.
The logbook
A logbook was introduced to record attendances, significant incidents that occurred, and so forth. This eventually passed to me after my father’s death in 1948. The inside of the front cover indicated that ‘Mr F Parkes’ was the sector fire officer and said ‘All those who sign the logbook are covered for insurance and entitled to claim’.
The title page introduced a literary touch by quoting the following from William Shakespeare’s Much ado about nothing:
‘We will rather sleep than talk; we know what belongs to a watch.’
‘Why, you speak like an ancient and most quiet watchman; for I cannot see how sleeping should offend.’
(It has to be said, however, that this was not good advice for a conscientious firewatcher!)
The logbook record began on Sunday 16 February 1941, when Tom Osborne, Jack White and Christopher Taylor were on duty, and ended on 9 December 1942, when Kenneth Aldous and John A Brown (both members of the Friends’ Ambulance Unit) were on duty. It seems possible, however, that a continuation book was then used as this entry does not appear to mark the end of firewatching at the Meeting house, to judge from a letter the clerk wrote on 7 November 1943.
However this may be, the record we have is interesting for a variety of reasons: the way in which people who did not normally go to the Meeting house rallied round to assist; the ‘extra-curricular’ activities that firewatchers indulged in, and so on.
Thirteen sandbags
The firewatching proceeded as planned but there was soon a change when ladies took over for the night. Then there was no entry at all for the following night. Perhaps nobody turned up or they just forgot to sign in. There was then an outbreak of hilarity. It started with a suggestion from an anonymous Friend, identifiable from his handwriting as Wilfred Beswick. It said, ‘If disturbed during the night call out “Who goes there, Friend – or attender?”’ On a more serious note, we learned that the volunteers filled thirteen sandbags but there were more to be filled. Wilfred queried whether they were going to be able to carry buckets of water up to the loft.
Meanwhile, it was reported that a third bed had arrived (!), as well as an electric fire, presumably to supplement the heat from the coke-fired boiler in the cellar. It was obviously in the firewatchers’ interests to keep the boiler going and de-clinkered on a cold winter’s night. Several steel helmets were also obtained.
On one memorable night the basic reason for the logbook was overlooked completely. The anonymous volunteers wrote about pretty-well every subject you could possibly imagine, and also found time to indulge in a few pastimes as well, such as playing piano duets, playing table tennis, and so on. The following evening brought further excitement, though of a different kind – the sirens sounded: 8.31pm! It was hardly a major event, however, as the all-clear sounded at 9.24pm.
Absent Friends
On 1 July 1941 I joined the Friends’ Ambulance Unit and by happy coincidence was sent to the training camp in Northfield not far from my home in Bournville. This meant that I was no longer able to join in the firewatching activities on a regular basis but, subject to the agreement of Tegla Davies the camp commandant, could help out if an emergency arose. So, on 1 August, I made my final contribution to the logbook, but other members of the Unit subsequently helped at the Meeting house.
There are some people whose names appear quite frequently in the logbook, and the Meeting’s debt to them must be immense. The very nature of the task that my father had taken on meant that he often put in an appearance. Sometimes he was just checking that all was well, while on other occasions he would be substituting for someone else.
The logbook is to a large extent a record of absent Friends, as there are now few of the firewatchers still alive. Many of them I remember well. It was a privilege to have known them.
