History feature:Layout 1
11/12/14
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Saving Bristol from the blitz
HISTORY
Last month we reported on a project researching the history of the decoy town built on Black Down to divert German bombers from Bristol during the 2nd World War. Frank Newbery, aged 90, from Pensford remembers working there. Steve Egginton reports.
HAVING survived the bombing of Bristol Aircraft Works Frank left to start an apprenticeship with Colston Electrical Co. in Bristol. This started on November 26th, 1940 and the first of six major blitzes on Bristol was on Sunday November 25th. Frank worked on all the decoys around Bristol, Weston-superMare, Gloucester, Yeovil and Exeter. Cowlins were the main contractor but all the layout and technical work was carried out by Colston Elec.. He said: “Jock Dewer was our contracts manager and the last work I carried out on decoys was laying out the Cheddar sites, as we called them, in 1941. These were made to look like marshalling yard lights layouts with fire box units, all linked to a generator in a shelter with a concrete roof.” By this stage of the war the German air campaign had subsided and he said the Black Down decoy was never used. But it was a different story elsewhere. “I remember after the Good Friday night raid the fields on the decoy north of Chew Magna were littered with bombs. Earlier in December there were incendiary bombs all over the fields at Downside, where the golf course is now. “When Lulsgate emergency landing site came into use, that decoy was moved to Brockley Woods. There were others at Stanton Lane, near the old Somerset and Dorset Railway, on the estuary at Yeo Mouth, Failand, Kenn Moor, and at Uphill. An RAF man, AC2 Cecil Bright, was awarded the Military Medal for lighting the site there by hand with a flaming torch, as the detonator powder was damp. “Like the bomb disposal team I met at Chew Magna decoy, they were all as ‘mad as hatters’ but very brave men. “It’s no accident the decoys were mainly on the south side of Bristol, because the Germans used the Bristol Channel to navigate, not only to Bristol, but also to Liverpool and Birmingham, dropping any bombs they had left on the way back.” Frank’s job was to install lights that mimicked Bristol’s
docks, railways and other strategic locations and fire installations which would look like burning buildings. He was not involved in building the humps on Black Down put there to stop German gliders landing. He said: “We built two sections on each site, keeping one in reserve if one had to be rebuilt. Some of the lights were in boxes that opened and closed mechanically, simulating the filling of fires on locomotives. We had angle-iron frames built as box-like structures and covered them in rolls of hessian, which looked like buildings collapsing as they fell burning. “The fire baskets were filled with rags and anything else that would burn, all soaked in creosote. When I had to put a detonator into the basket I got covered in creosote and ended up with sores all over my hands and arms. It took a volt and a half to set them off. “Fire baskets were the main units on a Starfish site and were grouped together all over a site that could cover several fields. It was the basic form of a decoy that worked very well at Downside for the second and third major blitz on Bristol and the sixth on Good Friday at Chew Magna. “It was a seven-day-a-week job with a coach always available from Clifton Greys, so when I got to Cowlins down in Broadweir of a morning I could be taken to any site to work. Later if I was working on layouts with Jock Dewer I went to our office in Denmark Street as Jock had a company van.” He then went into Colston’s workshop to work on Admiralty contracts, mainly Asdic (now called Sonar) training units and continued to work on engineering projects after the war, moving to Pensford with his sister Alice about 50 years ago. Since then he’s become nationally famous for growing champion dahlias and is still president of Bristol and District Chrysanthemum and Dahlia Society. But his memories of the war remain as sharp as ever. He said: “I may well be one of the last alive who has such knowledge.”
MENDIP TIMES • JANUARY 2015 • PAGE 51