00:00 JH was born in Shirehampton in 1925, at home at 101 Bradley Crescent. Lived with his maternal grandmother, who moved to the Shirehampton area when she was much younger. Brought up her children (of which JH’s mother was the youngest) in a general store on the corner of Station Road and Pembroke Road. Upon retirement she bought the house on Bradley Crescent. His father moved into the house after marrying his mother and JH was their eldest child. Lived there for five years. Recalls going to the village each morning to get meat and vegetables and doing chores around the house. Began infant school in Shirehampton at five years old and stayed for twelve months. Father’s family lived in Coombe Dingle and paternal grandparents had one of the first houses in Coombe Lane.

05:00 Description of how JH’s paternal grandfather purchased twelve acres of land. Paternal grandparents had one daughter and three sons. Daughter lived with parents and eldest son got married and lived next to the farmhouse. When middle son (JH’s father) and youngest son married, they moved in with their wives in Shirehampton and Westbury respectively, so eldest son was the only one left there when JH’s paternal grandfather died. Brief description of farming requirements of grandfather’s land, which the eldest son could not manage alone and so built semi-detached houses along the front of the market garden. In 1931, aged six, JH and his parents moved into one of these houses and the youngest brother of JH’s father moved into the one next door. The brothers worked together on the market garden, and sister looked after JH’s paternal grandmother. Detailed description of the trees in the market garden. Brief description of collecting water from the pump near the trim. JH joined the Scouts in 1936, aged eleven, and moved onto the Portway Senior Boys’ School in Shirehampton. Description of the boys’ and girls’ schools and the wall that separated them. JH went to school in Stoke Bishop until he was eleven. Moved school at Easter because that was when his birthday was, even though everybody else moved in September. Felt isolated at school.

10:00 JH found out that the boys he was with at senior school had been in his infant school class. JH had one sister who was six years younger. Detailed description of riding his first proper bicycle, aged seven, and cycling to school. JH and friends used to play football together and go fishing on the trim. The building of the Sea Mills Estate started in 1920 and the house in which JH currently lives was built in 1927. Description of the few buildings that were there before JH was born.

15:00 Description of the buses from Avonmouth to Bristol and watching the bus driver. JH left school at thirteen at Easter 1939, just before his birthday on 17th April – everybody left school at fourteen but JH’s birthday fell during the Easter holidays. Got a job as junior office boy at the timber porter’s office in Avonmouth. The job was normally given to a grammar school boy who had to be eighteen and was employed until he was twenty-one. JH replaced the managing director’s son but could not be employed until he had a National Insurance number and so began to work just after his fourteenth birthday.

20:00 Cycled to the farm each morning to collect milk for the office and made tea for the staff. Responsible for post – sticking on stamps and recording incoming/outgoing letters. Description of the layout of the buildings belonging to the company and of the transportation of the timber from the docks to the shelter where it was stored before the orders were collected by lorries.

25:00 Detailed description of several companies that timber was supplied to. Mention of JH’s awareness of the encroaching war. Most people working in the office were sent off to fight in the war. A German aircraft was seen over the docks. Description of the typist who dealt with all the letters and invoices, who disappeared after the first air raid. JH was the only person left in the main office – the other employees were the chief accountant and the two directors. The business was mostly run by JH and the chief accountant. The office caught fire and all the timber was taken to the other side of Bath.

30:00 All the wood had to be checked by the ministry at Clifton before it could be sold. JH worked all day, doing everything from menial jobs to processing orders and invoices, and had to learn typing and shorthand in the evenings. Only JH and the chief accountant worked in the office. Discussion of the importance of Avonmouth in the war. The air raids really began in 1940/41 and JH was up every night. Brief description of the air raid shelter in the garden. Each street had its own group of amateur firefighters, formed of the men who were not fighting in the war. JH took part as a messenger with his bicycle if a fire was reported.

35:00 The young boys on bikes could access damaged streets that cars could not get down. Detailed description of how easy it was for the Germans to bomb Avonmouth. JH’s bike was damaged by shrapnel. Description of an incident in which JH and others witnessed an incendiary bomb land next to them, which they kicked away. One night, they put out forty-eight incendiaries.

Second track TOTV044-02

00:00 JH continued working at the same place until he was called up, aged seventeen and a half. He was called up to join the navy because he could signal. Brief description of completion of training. He was told he was going to be a gunner. Detailed description of the way he argued his way into officer training.

05:00 JH was in charge of torpedoes and depth charges. Escorting convoys of merchant ships off the west coast of Scotland to Murmansk, Soviet Union – explanation of the military situation there. No access to Archangel during the winter months because it was completely frozen up.

10:00 Over Christmas 1943, JH was in Murmansk. Brief description of German occupation of Norwegian coast and comparison with Avonmouth. Each convoy took twenty-one days – ten days to travel to Murmansk, twenty-four hours to refuel and ten days to return to Scotland. On Christmas day, there was a flotilla of British minesweepers in Murmansk who were short of food, so any leftover food was given to them. On the next journey back to Scotland, JH and the convoy travelled much further north so as to avoid the coast, because German artillery was waiting for them just along the coast.

15:00 A coded message from a Norwegian meant that JH’s ship was aware of the German presence and was able to avoid it by taking a different route. As they went to supply the British flotilla with food, they came within torpedo distance of the German ship. They released three torpedoes and then quickly departed. JH’s ship was separated from the convoy and couldn’t get back to it. They were running low on food, fuel and water. Using flour and water which was purified slowly through the condenser, the men were provided with two slices of bread per day. People were so hungry they were eating paper.

20:00 After that they began to eat pencils, cardboard, and then tobacco. Detailed description of how JH believed tobacco was grown. They finally managed to return to Scotland. JH’s ship was a destroyer called Meteor. Upon his return he was given a month’s worth of mail which he had missed, and he couldn’t read it because his sight had drastically deteriorated. When on the ship, the men on lookout had to constantly keep their eyes open; if they closed them, their eyelids would freeze together. JH was put on a Red Cross ship for a week before being given glasses.

25:00 By the time JH left the Red Cross ship, his own ship had departed, so he was sent back to Brighton to the officer training centre. He was told to leave because they would not accept an officer with glasses. Instead, he went back to the barracks and worked with torpedoes, depth charges and demolition of bridges, and became a torpedo man on board another destroyer until the end of the war. After the war finished, he was transferred to the Zambezi to escort a large battleship back. JH’s mother was paid five shillings a month whilst JH was away during the war. JH’s job had been kept open for him so he was able to return to it after the war ended, but the majority of workers did not return.

30:00 Most of the other boys in JH’s class worked as errand boys and so did not want to return to their jobs. There were only two offices left at the timber porters by the end of the war because the rest had been taken over by the army, and the saw mills had been turned into a huge repair shop. Detailed description of how lorries full of oil were used for blackouts in the sky to disorientate German bombers. JH was promoted and was responsible for working out the costs of different orders, sitting in the office. He left the job after six months because he struggled with his eyesight. He took a course and began to work as a plumber, and worked for six years with a firm in Westbury, before working with a gas company for ten years.

35:00 Description of JH’s evening routine at home with his wife and children. Whilst working as a plumber JH was going to be reported to the union for refusing to come to a meeting one evening, but he argued with them about it. Instead, he decided to start plumbing on his own. Detailed description of where the carts were kept on Pembroke Road.

40:00 JH employed a young boy who worked as a tea boy in Stoke Bishop. He also employed his best man, who had recently moved to live nearby. He bought a workshop on Woodwell Road. JH’s business expanded to include eight men and three vans.

45:00 JH purchased a lot of woodworking machinery and his company renovated hundreds of council houses in and around Bedminster for about ten years. Description of the interior of the houses and how they were improved and renovated.

Third track TOTV044-03

00:00 When JH came home from the war, he felt that there was nothing to do in the evenings and the office was dead. His cousin told him to join the Twyford House social club, which he was initially reluctant to do. During the war, his sister gained a scholarship to go to boarding school. If people had spare rooms in their house, which JH’s parents did because he was at sea and his sister was at school, they were given two American soldiers who slept there.

05:00 Detailed description of how the social club came into being. The big firms arranged dances on Saturdays for the local young people. JH also joined a cycling club and would cycle every Sunday. JH’s wife, Audrey (AH), caught the same bus home as him at 9:46, which is how they met one another. He went down to the beach with her on a Saturday night and caught the last train back. His friend was called up to join the British army during the war but ended up touring Europe with the American band. JH and AH married on September 15th, 1951, when JH was still doing night school.

10:00 JH and AH were struggling to find anywhere to live for about five years, until JH’s uncle in Shirehampton said there was a house for sale in Pembroke Road, which was revolting when they saw it, as it was previously owned by a small widow with eighteen cats. The garden was completely full of rubbish. JH and AH bought the house in 1951 for £600, and JH would work all day during the week on the house. JH and AH married once the house was habitable. In December 1953 their first child, Linda, was born, and their second child Shirley was born in May 1959. The children went to school in Shirehampton. JH’s workshop was also on Pembroke Road.

15:00 Brief description of the local area – pub and ironmongers – and of where several bombs fell in Shirehampton. JH’s aunt’s granddaughter was sleeping in a Morrison shelter in the basement when a bomb fell on the house during the blitz and destroyed the roof, bedrooms and shops. Detailed description of the Morrison shelter. Description of how sugar was served in the shop. JH helped rescue the girl from the house, but she survived.

20:00 JH had eight workmen and occasionally hired extras for his business. It was generally accepted that if anything was painted on the outside of the house (e.g. wooden window frames, walls etc.) it had to be repainted every five years. JH realised he hadn’t painted his house for eight or nine years, so decided to repaint it on a Sunday so as not to disturb his work. Anecdote about talking to his friend Jack about painting the house – this is when JH was told that his house was going to be knocked down.

25:00 Detail of how much of each house on the street was going to be knocked down in order to widen the road so that larger vehicles could get down it. Detailed description of two cottages whose gardens virtually reached the middle of the road.

30:00 Continuation of the discussion between Jack and JH about the reasons for knocking down the houses. Church land could not be used for the road as it was consecrated ground. JH and his wife decided that they needed to move house but struggled to find anywhere suitable. One of JH’s workmen was in hospital and asked for two pounds to reimburse him for the paintbrushes he used and cared for, because he wasn’t going to come home. JH ended up buying his house for £2800 in 1960.

35:00 JH decided to sell his workshop on Pembroke Road as he could do all his joinery work in the new house, and there was a local builder who was keen on purchasing the workshop. He sold it for £2022. JH came home one day and all the gas burners in the kitchen were on, and on a different day all the taps in the house were turned on. One day, all the door and windows were wide open. JH’s wife insisted that she had left everything turned off/closed on each of these occasions.

40:00 Ten years later, doctors realised that JH’s wife had a brain tumour, which would have accounted for why the taps and the gas had been left on. Detailed descriptions of the tests she underwent at the hospital, particularly those used to diagnose her sight problems. JH would only sign the paperwork to allow his wife to have surgery to remove tumour once he had asked her if she wanted to have it done. Detailed description of the tumour, which was the weight of a cricket ball and had been growing for forty years.

45:00 When JH’s wife returned home from the hospital she could barely move one side, so JH constructed pulleys with rope hanging from the ceiling to allow her to move her arm and leg. It took five years for her to be able to walk out of the house unassisted. JH’s wife used to play the piano before they had children, so JH bought her an organ with a split keyboard that she was able to play because it required less arm movement. They also went dancing twice a month, although the man who brought the music cut his classes down to once a month. JH and AH brought their organ instead so that everyone could continue to go dancing twice a month.

50:00 JH and AH played music for dances for about fifteen years in several different places, even going as far as Gloucester. AH died in 1992 and JH kept going on his own, bringing the organ with him. Meanwhile, he kept up his plumbing business which gradually wound down. He gave up going out at night and playing the keyboard for people, and his plumbing business, the day before his eighty-fifth birthday.

55:00 The daughter of the people who ran the shop near JH’s house, who was in her twenties, would serve tea for the family at five pm on Boxing Day after the shop was closed. Once tea was cleared away, everyone would sit in the room together and play games until the evening, at which point the table and more food were brought out. The winner of the evening’s games would be given a wooden spoon to keep for twelve months, until the following Boxing Day.

01:00:00 Description of the derelict buildings behind the shop and how they were made usable during the war for the soldiers. People asked around for donations of cups, chairs, a tea urn etc., and it ended up becoming a kind of YMCA that was used by the soldiers. Stamps and envelopes were provided so that they could send letters home.

01:05:00 JH helped to organise an evening of entertainment on New Year’s Eve 1939 for the soldiers, so that they wouldn’t have to sit alone in their accommodation. Everyone pulled together to provide tea and entertainment for them. Everybody was tasked with finding one person who could provide some form of entertainment, such as singing or playing an instrument. JH became involved with this event because he was given a ukulele and asked to play the song ‘Cleaning Windows’ for the soldiers.

01:10:00 JH had to learn to play the ukulele for the event for the soldiers, so he would practise at work in the office if he had spare time. Other people did things like tap dance and sing. After his performance, he was invited by an older girl to join a performance group which rehearsed every Sunday. They performed at concerts, hospitals, army camps etc.

01:15:00 The performance group continued until everyone was old enough to be called up to fight in the war. Brief description of AH’s surgery to remove the brain tumour.

Recording ends 01:17:53