"ITALIAN PRISONERS IN CADBURYHEATH" written by Betty Lock nee Ayres
Everyone has their own idea of Colditz, but few residents in the Kingswood area knew of the existence of an Italian P.O.W. camp, at Cadbury Heath. Our Camp was somewhat less 'forbidding vith no machine-gun towers or minefields, but a rather pleasant rural retreat.
During the summer of 1944 there was an Italian P.O.W. camp in Gays Field, Wraxall Road. One summer evening I arrived home from work to find the whole of Cadbury Heath, Wraxall Road and Barrs Court Road swarming with Italians.
Truly it was an amazing sight, for usually it was very quiet. I could see this camp from my home in Barrs Court Road.
During the day, seventy prisoners had arrived in Gays Field. An English Major was in charge of the camp. They lived in tents and there was much activity as the men went about their daily chores. The English Major soon let it be known that these men were quite harmless and could be trusted. So they were given the freedom of the immediate area.
As the days passed it wasn't long before I began to understand words like 'buon giorno', 'buon sera', 'buon notte', 'grazie', 'scusie', and 'arrivederci'. We were allowed to invite the prisoners into our homes and soon made a number of friends. Among them were Giuseppe Negro from Lecce and his cousin Giuseppe Rizzo from Como, Dante Mare from Rome and his friend Luigi Punzo.
These men were of very good character and would never enter my home unless my father was present. Our front parlour was often crowded and we chatted away as best we could. I would play the piano for them and we spent many enjoyable evenings with these Italians.
Some of the prisoners were Sergeant Majors, so we taught them to sing a very popular song called, 'Kiss me Good Night Sergeant Major'. This song proved to be so popular that soon the whole camp was heard singing this song, much to their own amusement.
On Sunday mornings sixty-nine of the prisoners marched off to Roman Catholic Mass at the church near Kingswood. The one remaining Italian came to church with my parents and me. We worshipped at the Independent Methodist Church in Mill Lane. Every Sunday morning and evening Dante Mare would wait for us on the corner of Cadbury Heath School and Joined us on our walk to Mill Lane Chapel. He had a very good singing voice and could speak good English so I taught him to sing that very popular sacred solo 'Bless This House'. One Sunday evening Dante sang this solo during evening service and I accompanied him on the organ.
Dante could often be found in our kitchen nattering away to my mother and father. After he went home to Italy he always referred to my mother and father as his English mother and father. These Italian prisoners had been fighting in the desert for many years and were war-weary soldiers. They had been taken from their homes and Jobs and sent straight to the desert to fight. Dante was a school teacher and had refused to teach Fascism, so he was put straight into the Italian Army.
I well remember Giuseppe Hegro taking hold of an English dictionary and finding the word Duce (Doo-cha) written there, he crossed it out angrily and said: 'He, the Duce, he no good'.
One Sunday morning on our way to Church, Dante stood perfectly still in the Cadbury Heath Road and looked around him. It was so quiet, with very few people about. He said quietly, 'There can't be many places in the world where there is such peace as this'.
Before Dante Mare left the camp in Wraxall Road, he wrote in my autograph book in Italian, he also wrote the translation, which is as follows:-
'Your people and mine were one against the other, but following and adopting the Christian precept that tells us to love our enemy, I am able to establish the following paradox: Betty Ayres, as well as her parents, are my best enemies.'
October 4th 1944
The Italians could often be heard singing in the camp and as the summer days of 1944 gave way to autumn it was much too cold for P.O.W.'s to live in tents.
One autumn morning the tents were taken down and lorries arrived to take the Italians away. Before driving out of Gays Field all the Italians stood to attention in the lorries and sang that beautiful Neapolitan Barcarolle called, 'Santa Lucia'.
Their beautiful voices rang out over the countryside as they sang that lovely song before waving good-bye, or should I say; Arrivederci?
I can confirm that the people of Cadbury Heath were held in high esteem by these Italian P.O.W.'s. They had experienced a haven of peace in a war-weary world, they found kindness that they never expected or even knew existed.
A few years ago when the late Giuseppe Rizzo was working in Rome with Dante Mare they spoke together of their days at the Camp in Wraxall Road and agreed that it was one of the happiest experiences of their lives.
Even now I still exchange greeting cards with Dante Mare, a friendship that has lasted for 43 years.After leaving the Camp in Wraxall Road the Italians were taken to a camp at Wapley, near Yate. When Christmas 1944 came around Luigi Punzo and Dante Hare got special permission to visit our home in Barrs Court Road on Christmas Day. They walked all the way from Wapley for the occasion and afterwards walked all the way back again. Something Dante has never forgotten.
It is interesting to note that Luigi could not speak one word of English and never did, but we all got along happily together. Fortunately, Dante was able to interpret to Luigi the English that was being spoken.
AN ITALIAN PRISONER OF WAR REMEMBERS
One of our former foes, who only stayed in our aidst for but a brief period, retained such powerful memories that they have spanned the years, he recalls his own story.
(A letter written by Dante Mare) (Rome, Aug. 6th, 1987)
After a three-year prlsonershlp in Kenya (Africa) we asked to go back to Italy in order to fight against Nazi forces. This was not allowed by the English authorities, but as an alternative it was proposed to go somewhere in Europe and there to co-operate with the Allied forces. We accepted and on the first days of June 1944 we were sent by sea to a port in Europe.
After thirty-days travel we found ourselves in the port of Liverpool. A strong, strange sensation was (and it still remains) that I had seen that same place in a previous life. From Liverpool we were sent to Manchester and after a month, we were directed to a camp situated in a village called Cadbury Heath, near Warmley, Kingswood and Bristol.
We stood in tents, just in the centre of the village. As co-operators we were allowed to frequent English families, cinemas, but not public-houses.
Soon we felt free to go, to come, to know people, to try to speak their language. We worked during the whole day in farms threshing, picking up potatoes, mangolds and so on.
We had the advantage to live in the open air, felt to be useful to English people, but also to the Italian cause. Villagers, farmers, occasionally friends were very kind, generous to us, spoke or tried to speak with us. Once a kind, middle-aged person invited me to his house. I was grateful to him and so I knew Mr. Ayres, Mrs. Ayres his wife, and Betty, their only daughter. With them I really felt at home: we had tea; played at cards, listened to the piano played by that gentle, beautiful girl Betty.
Other people organised musical parties on my behalf in Warmley, calling there a very good tenor from Bristol: the artist sang some arias from Verdi's, Puccini's, Rossini's and other operas.
Other gentle invitations came from other people in Cadbury Heath. At Yate, when we were transferred to that place, at my farmer's house we were among other kind, joyful people, and in Yate when on a Sunday afternoon I went sadly walking with a fellow prisoner, behind us came up a couple. They reached us and the lady put in my hand something soft and white: six or seven cigarettes. Other friends, other houses I visited there in Yate, specially John Mill's house: a real young gentleman!
But in my mind and in my heart remain the sweet memories of Ayres family, their smiling faces, their goodness, generosity, affection and love, which I returned doubled, if possible. Over all I cannot forget the sweet, gentle question on the part of dear Mrs Ayres who, looking at me smiling asked 'Dante, would you like a cup of tea?' And in the offer, the taste and flavour of that cup of tea, I felt benevolence and love: was it my dead Mother's love?
SAFELY THROUGH THE PARK - memories of Joan King) (July 28th 1987
those that lived through the Second World War have their own unique aeaories, and tales to tell, here follows a selection.
I was 12 years old when war was declared on September 3rd, 1939. 1 attended Hanham Road Girls School now called Beacon Rise, When there was an air raid we all had to go in the cellar of the infants school, but a little later on the authorities dug an underground shelter on the school playing field.
I remember double summer time very well when the clacks were put on two hours, it was daylight until 11 o'clock, I think this was to help the farmers so that they could work a lot later during the summer months.
In Holly Hill Road which was near where I lived there was a farm which housed a searchlight battery. When the soldiers were off duty they walked up the lane past our house to the pub, we all got to know them quite well; the local people invited them into their homes for a meal. I remember the soldier which we befriended once mended a watch for my father.
In the garden we had an Anderson shelter where we went when there was a really bad air raid. Inside they were quite dry in the summer, but not very pleasant to stay in all night during the winter. Later on we decided to use a big cupboard which was under the stairs, we kept a mattress and bedding in there and we slept there during the air raids, Early in the war many evacuees from Birmingham were sent to Warmley, My aunt had two boys, their names were Keith and Owen Jender. Another aunt who lived in Church Avenue, Warmley, had a girl called Christine.
We all played happily together and were very sorry when they had to return home. They had to go back when the bombing started in the Bristol area. When I started work at fourteen I worked in the Hanham Road office of Aero Engines Ltd., now called Westinghouse, even at that age we were expected to work over, sometimes until 8pm. In the winter when I walked home, with no street lights, I walked through Kingswood Park, there were no gates as they had been taken to make munitions. I wasn't afraid to be out on my own in the dark, you were allowed 'to carry a small torch.
As the war progressed there were convoys of lorries, jeeps, tanks and hundreds of American soldiers in a continual stream coming up Warmley Hill and making their way to Avonmouth. We didn't know at the time but they were massing for the D-Day landings. About the same time the old Tram Depot at the top of Warmley Hill started assembling Jeeps for the American forces, they came from America in crates and then they were put together by a few Americans, but mainly British workers.
These are just a few of the many things that I remember of the war.
SIRENS AND SHRAPNEL - memories of Roy King
At 11.30am on Sunday September 3rd, 1939, I left the small Methodist chapel in Poplar Road, North Common at the end of the morning service. A lady standing at her garden gate told me that England was at war with Germany, It had been! on the 'wireless' at 11 o'clock.
Nothing much seemed to have altered, I think I felt somehow cheated!, although as I looked across the fields towards Bristol I saw the barrage balloons rising into the skies above.
At this time 1 was still a month away from my twelth birthday and was not to know that by the time hostilities had ended I would have become a (very Junior) member of the Merchant Navy.
I lived, at this period, with my parents and grandparents at Tower Road South, Warmley, and was a pupil at the Council School at Cadbury Heath. For a while the war had little local impact except for the fact that some local men who were Reservists, or members of the Territorial Army would disappear, to later return on leave as unfamiliar figures in uniform.
Other neighbours would be encountered as Special Constables, as members of various Air Raid Precautions organisations, or the A.F.S. (The Auxilary Fire Service later to become the National Fire Service, as A.R.P, was to become Civil Defence). The corrugated Y.M.C.A. 'hut' in Cadbury Heath Road became a sandbagged First Aid Post for the duration of the war.
An early wartime regulation which affected everyone was the 'Black-Out', intended to make it almost impossible for enemy air-craft to find their targets by night. Street lighting was extinguished, cars and cycles had to reduce their headlights to the merest glimmer and homes and factories had to cover their windows to show no light at all during darkness. There were panic dashes to buy black material to make 'black-out curtains'. This material became very difficult to obtain as did torches and torch batteries, essential for pedestrians abroad at night as certainly in the beginning, falls or road accidents were greater hazards than enemy bombs. Blacking out the large chapel windows proved a real problem for local congregations.
School children were obliged to take their gas masks to school as a precaution against gas attacks. These masks had been issued before the war. I remember being taken to collect mine at the Y.M.C.A. hut, there were some with coloured patches, giving a 'Mickey Mouse' effect for small children and a sort of incubator affair complete with hand pump in which babies were expected to survive a poison gas raid. Thankfully, they were never needed.
The Warmley Rural District Council had, prior to the outbreak of war, dug some trench shelters for public use, at the Coronation Playing Field at Cadbury Heath. Being dug over a spring they were promptly flooded and were, therefore, useless as air raid shelters, which was probably Just as well as one of the few high explosive bombs later to fall on Cadbury Heath hit the shelters. A similar shelter dug in the grounds of Cadbury Heath School proved drier, and safer, although it was also used for various unofficial purposes by some adventurous scholars. The winter of 1939-40 was exceptionally severe bringing fuel shortages and much hardship. With the coming of summer also came the end of the 'phoney war and the start of the air raids.
I recall that much of ray final months at school were spent sitting on a chair in the playground listening for the spine chilling sound of the Air Raid sirens. On hearing it I had to run to tell the Headmaster who would then dispatch the pupils to the shelters.
I vividly recall the first massive daylight air attack on the aircrait factories at Filton which caused many casualties. I had a Saturday and holiday job as a van boy with a local oil and hardware merchant. His round covered many country villages and on this particular day we were delivering near Winterbourne Down.
I remember that it was a cloudless summers day and as 1 was walking down a long cottage garden path 1 heard a deep drone like thousands of bees. The drone soon became a pulsating roar and looking up we saw a huge mass of German bombers and fighter bombers flying overhead in perfect formation. There appeared, on this occasion, to be little anti-aircraft fire, or fighter interception. Soon we heard the explosion of bombs from the direction of Filton. We prudently abandoned our delivery round and sped home. It was only later as shocked local people who worked at Filton returned home that we began to appreciate the devastation caused that day.
About this time air raids began to become a nightly occurrence. The raids were directed locally at the cities of Bristol and Bath but we were also in the flight path of German bombers heading for Birmingham and the Midlands. It soon became clear that the main danger in this area came from bombs being jettisoned by aircraft damaged by anti-aircraft fire, or unable to reach their targets. Nights were very noisy because of anti-aircraft fire, not least from mobile anti-aircraft batteries which were always liable to appear in a local field, or street, and open fire.
People and property were at risk from falling shrapnel. The skies were a remarkable sight illuminated by searchlights searching out German bombers and also by parachute flares dropped by the Germans to light up their targets. To this was added the tracer shells from the anti-aircraft guns and the sinister red glow from burning buildings.
It all seemed a bit of an adventure to young boys and there quickly developed a 'swop market' in the school playground at which pieces of shrapnel could be exchanged for the nose cone of a shell, etc. Particularly prized were pieces of shot down enemy aircraft and there was also a brisk trade in British Army regimental cap badges which would be used to adorn belts. I had a fine collection of badges supplied by young men from my father's bible class who joined up early in the war.
The local population sought what protection from air raids that they could find, huddled in cupboards and pantries under the stairs. Later people became fatalistic about the danger and slept in their normal beds, except during very heavy raids. The main local danger came from incendiary bombs, small bombs with.a magnesium base which burnt with an eerie white glow. Quite a number of these were dropped and to guard against them local householders were organised as 'fire-watchers' (later to be known as fire guards) on a rota basis to Watch for these bombs and to extinguish them before they could start a fire. The method used was to smother the bomb with a sandbag to exclude air from it and to fight any fire by means of water from a stirrup pump until the Fire Service took over.
I was too young to become an adult Fire Guard, but was a messenger, running messages to the Civil Defence Control Centre (in our case, the local Post Office) during air raids. I know that food rationing was in force and that unrationed food was in short supply, but I don't remember going hungry. Possibly, if I had been a woman who had the responsibility of standing in the queues and doing the cooking, I would have been more aware. I suspect that with full employment and unlimited overtime the working class standard of living may have actually been better during the war than it was before.
At the age of 14 I left school and started work at Frys chocolate factory, at Somerdale Keynsham. Starting work is a major experience for a young lad, and in my particular case the strangeness was added to by war-time conditions. The huge factory, previously entirely used for the manufacture of confectionery, was in war-time shared with an aircraft firm and later with another chocolate company (bombed out) from Norwich. Most of the factory's production was for the Ministry of Food, Armed forces, ²etc., and was performed under difficult conditions, eg., labour shortage caused by men 'called-up' , the competition from armament factories, material shortages and the black-out. The latter was particularly onerous because some processes were continuous at high temperatures and the inability to open windows at night must have resulted in great Discomfort.
During my first years at Frys I spent quite a bit of time in the basement beneath the factory during air raids. Several bombs hit the factory, but I believe that, fortunately, none of them exploded.
In common with other lads of my age group I Joined one of the cadet forces preparing for war service. In my case I Joined the Sea Cadets Corps based on the then Kingswood Grammar School. Ve were issued with Naval uniform and attended weekly drills and various training camps. I reached the dizzy heights of (acting) Petty Officer. Most local people were engaged in war activities such as Civil Defence, the Home Guard.
