Voices
Listen to the voices of local people talking about their experiences of the Second World War.
You can click on the audio recordings, read a short version of their stories, or access the full transcripts.
These recordings come from the National Museums NI Sound Archive held at the Ulster Folk Museum. New research into the archive has been undertaken by volunteers as part of Unlocking Our Sound Heritage led by the British Library and supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The interviews with Mary Carson and Jimmy Sloan were conducted by the Ulster Folk Museum. All the others were undertaken by the Somme Museum.
There are links to Keystages 2, 3 and 4 in the Northern Ireland curriculum in relevant sections, and you’ll find more guidance on curriculum links here.
Preparing for war
#HomeFrontKS2
Norman Kennedy
Friday was the 1st of September, and Chamberlain had given Hitler this ultimatum that if he didn’t retire from his advance on Poland, war would be declared on 11 o’ clock on the Sunday. That was the 3rd.
You were making preparations. You could see lorries or cars or vans had headlights blackened out. People normally had black out curtains. My father was a great do-it-yourself man, and he had a frame made with black cloth tacked onto this frame which we put up every night once war was declared.
Robert McKinley
We were subject to a certain amount of propaganda in the picture houses – the Movietone news, and the Nazis marching in Germany. There was no talk about the Jews or the Holocaust at that particular time. Hitler had reneged on Czechoslovakia, he had invaded Austria, and there was more or less the feeling that Hitler and the Nazis were going to take over the entire continent. There was a feeling of fear. Could Britain and France contain Hitler? Poland and Danzig and the corridor was taken, and that started the war.
Joe Parkinson
Clifton Street was the recruiting office, almost facing Victoria Barracks. When I went in the first time they told me, ‘You’re too young, come back at a later date’. And then when I went to join up the next time, they had all these posters around glamorising the army. You take the oath of allegiance to the King. I always remember a part of it. If necessary, you’ve to give your life in defence of your King and Country.
Bertie Annett
In Newcastle they had some kind of stakes driven in the sea bed in case of an invasion by sea. At Ballymartin Point the radar was there as well, it was the highest point along the coast. There was a lot of Air Force, and especially Welsh stationed there, and you could see it from far enough.
Willie Crea
Ringawaddy in 1939 was a quiet country place. That was good agricultural land that the aerodrome eventually came on. We all were in farming, with an urgency to produce more food.
Pauline Diplock
I remember listening to the radio and hearing the infamous Lord Haw-Haw and his broadcasts to the British people, and I think I can remember my father being very angry about it.
Willie Crea
Nearly everybody had a battery-driven radio, and that was the best, as well as the newspaper. You weren’t too sure what to believe but you had to read between the lines and sometimes you came to the truth, and sometimes you didn’t.
NEUTRAL EIRE
#NeutralEireKS4
Ken McLean
A hell of a lot of Irish lads joined up. Thousands of them. I joined the Royal Artillery in Belfast. I knew people that were in it, a couple of fellas in the insurance company went up there and they had their pick you see being volunteers. I picked the artillery. They joined every bloomin’ thing – infantry, artillery, cavalry.
John Crisp
The German bombing in Dublin helped to decide a lot of guys who were wavering a bit, that they should get involved. It’s difficult to be pompous about it because a lot of it was just for the hell of it, and the fact that a lot of my friends and school friends were all doing the same thing. But I was uncomfortable about neutrality, I didn’t think it was the sort of occasion that you could be neutral. And by the time the war ended, I was content that I had done the right thing – when you see places like Belsen.
Bob Marsden
There was a great relief to know that things were quiet and semi-neutral. It’s like those two Irish lads in the trench in Italy, and the padre comes along and he says to them, ‘Well, what’s going on in Ireland now?’ And then one lad says, ‘Oh, there’s a big general election going on, you know’, and the padre says, ‘If you were home, who would you vote for?’ ‘Oh’ he says, ‘the tall fella [de Valera].’ ‘And why would you do that?’ ‘Because he kept us out of the war’.
But I joined up because it was coming towards a crunch point, and you could feel there’s something big gonna happen, and I didn’t want to get left out of it.
Pauline Diplock
As far as the Republic of Ireland is concerned, I remember that mostly it was resentment, that we felt that we were deprived of so many things, and we were suffering rationing and clothing coupons, and yet over the border, there was a land of plenty.
THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC
Norman Kennedy
My grandfather had a bungalow between Donaghadee and Millisle, at Ballyvester, so we spent the war years there and the post war years until our house was rebuilt. You were able to watch the convoys going up and down the Irish Sea, and them being bombed. You could see the mines or explosives or whatever it was, and the water spouts going up into the air.
John Sinclair
I remember being at Pollock Dock, and I wondered what all the excitement was, and I went and looked out a window, and there was a frigate with her bow blown clean off her. She had tugs that towed her in. She was after a U boat in Donegal Bay, and as she turned the U boat hit her. As far as I remember there were only 88 of her crew left. They landed the wounded and most of the crew at Derry.
THE BLITZ
#BlitzKS4 #HomeFrontKS2
Mary Carson
The government said they had to be evacuated, and I had to get them all suitcases and put their clothes in. And they were neglected because they were there with the cows and all and they got dirty. They were there about three weeks. And when we, Da, my husband, and I went to see them they were living with vermin, and I come home crying my eyes out and told Granda Bob, and Granda Bob went straight down the next morning and brought them home. He wouldn’t have them there. And I had to get the doctor to examine them, to let the doctor see how dirty things were.
Jimmy Sloan
We were evacuated to Newtownards, but it wasn’t for very long, because I do remember the air raid sirens going off. I remember my mother and father, my young sister in the pram, my brother and I on each side holding onto it and going up Castlereagh Street. They were after the shipyard, the ropeworks, so we wouldn’t have went down the Albertbridge Road. We went to the Castlereagh Hills to get away from the bombs. I heard them coming over. I remember running up the Castlereagh Hills.
Norman Kennedy
I had a job. As soon as the sirens would have gone, I would have got up from bed, put the good suit on – I was in charge of the tin box which had the insurance papers – and got under the stairs. I often said, ‘What’s the point of me getting into the good suit?’ ‘Well, if’ she says, ‘anything happens, you’ll be in your good suit. You’ll be well dressed if anything …‘
On the Sunday night, she said she smelt gas, and she would rather have us blown up than gassed, so we went into the air raid shelter. That would have been the 5th of May. A bomb lifted the air raid shelter off its foundations nearly. There were about eight or ten of us, singing hymns as these bombs were exploding. The Easter Tuesday we went into the air raid shelter and those bombs came down. The screams, I can live with that scream yet, and before the explosion, the flash, the smell of those exploding.
Ken Anderson
Belfast was getting bombed. They got it in 41, they got another touch in 44. I would have been eight. Everything was in darkness, they couldn’t put the lights on in the car, and we were taken out, wrapped in a rug, and put into the car. I can still hear and see those bombers, the drone of those bombers going overhead, they were flying very very low.
My father took us out to Magilligan to somebody’s caravan. He drove there in darkness. My mother was up to high doh. We did a load of shipping here in Coleraine in the harbour.
A GLOBAL WAR
#MediaAwarenessKS3
Robert Crawford
We were training to go to the Far East, and Martin and I went down to South Africa on leave, and we were in Cape Town waiting to sail back to West Africa when we got the signal to go to India, to Pune.
We were in West Africa for two years. It was very, very, sticky. We had mosquito nets, food wasn’t too bad. We had to watch about using mosquito nets. Some were bit careless about their health, about the sun. There was quite a bit of malaria there.
Ken McLean
They were all joined together in the 11th East Africa Division, the infantry, artillery, transport. We landed in Africa, and we were stationed in Kenya for about three months. Did a little spell down in Uganda, and by that time we were trained gunners. I won’t say it was easy.
We had to do a three week course on Swahili, because they’d no English, we’d no Swahili. I still have my Swahili book. Even with your European pals you sometimes lapsed into a bit of Swahili, you got so used to it.
Bob Marsden
We were practising to cross the Rhine. Monty had ordered the 7th Armoured Division to be the initial crowd across, and we were the infantry brigade belonging to the 7th Armoured. We practised on the river Maas in Holland, the whole exercise. Monty came up to have a look. And up came the army camera men, and they filmed us going up, getting into the amphibious tanks, going down to the river, plonking in, and coming up the other side.
And eventually, when the Rhine was crossed, the film that they made of us practising went up in the screens in England, with all sorts of crash-bangs and everything on the soundtrack. And one mother of the lads in Birmingham was at the pictures that night, and she saw her son about to cross the Rhine, and she shouted out ‘That’s my son going across the Rhine!’, and the whole cinema jumped up and clapped and roared! She went to it every night while it was there, and did the same thing, got the same enjoyment out of it.
WOMEN IN THE SERVICES
#Women&WorkKS3
Patricia Tate
In Medmenham we were doing the photographs for different campaigns. We made maps for the North African campaign. First of all, the photographs were done with contact printing, and then they were laid out in a mosaic and photographed as a mosaic. Once they were in a mosaic, some of them were re-imposed onto a metal plate. You put the metal plate on a turntable, and you just dripped a little of this liquid onto the plate and it spun round and sensitised over the whole plate, and then it was put on a carbon lamp, and the negative was imposed onto the metal plate. And then it was developed up with black ink. And each colour had to be done separately! They had to go through each colour separately, and they ran off the maps for the North African campaign.
You never talked about your work. If anybody with a little knowledge, looked at our hands, they would know immediately, because there were never enough rubber gloves to go around while you were doing developing. So you just developed away with your bare hands, and you finished up your nails were nearly black with developer.
Angela Neely
Our role was to get the messages coming through on the teleprinter, which was nearly always plain language at that stage, the 1940’s. Somebody higher up would decode and then we distributed them to wherever they had to go. If it was a plain language thing it would just go by telephone.
And then this stuff began to come in from Bletchley. Now I never got to see that. The senior officers, they worked at that. It wasn’t difficult to decode and to decipher. If you could do your sums it was alright. It was mostly numbers and you match them up with different letters and things like that.
Edith Chambers
They were looking for people to go out to relieve RAF wireless operators who had been abroad for a long while, and I thought what a good idea so I went to Egypt. I really enjoyed there. There were New Zealanders, Australians, South Africans, going home, and they were all based in Cairo. I had a ball. It was 45. I spent VE Day in the middle of the Mediterranean on a ship in Algiers port, and we had a big dance under the moon on the Mediterranean.
We dropped 600 WAAFs off in Algiers, 600 off on the toe of Italy, and the other 600 of us went to Cairo.
Constance Baillie
In Belgium I was doing dietician work. I enjoyed it. You just made food to suit their injuries. Some of the boys were coming in with their mouths all shot, and some had stomach problems cause they’d been shot, and they were coming in from prisoner of war camps like skeletons and they had to be built up. If you were going into the hospital and you saw them getting out of the ambulance, it was awful, they were like sticks. You’d no idea. Half of them were too ill really to tell you anything.
Then we moved over to Germany, a new hospital in a forest. They told us it had been built like the swastika. You could see it from the air, you couldn’t when you were on the ground.
PRISONERS OF WAR
Ronnie Cartwright
On one occasion I was a member of the Tally-Ho Club, as someone who was willing to help those who wanted to escape. Unfortunately I suffer from claustrophobia, therefore I could never tunnel. They must have been able to bribe the Germans to get stuff like maps and uniforms.
I tried to escape from Stalag 8B. It was filthy. We were all covered with lice and one of the evening entertainments was to take our shirts off and kill as many lice as we could. Now what we were scared of was a disease that comes from lice known as typhus, and apparently, if typhus had broken out in that compound, we’d all have died.
Rosemary Hay
When Italy came into the war, they did intern some of the Capronis and we thought of them as being as Ulster as we were. We were used to them. We thought nothing of them, we thought it was awful to intern them.
Ben Tilson
We brought a number of the captured U boats in. Some of them were real Nazis, and they were very annoyed at getting the Pioneer boys looking after them when they should have had an officer escorting them. There was two different lots of them, and some of them, I think, though they were on U boats, I don’t think they really liked sinking ships, but that was their job and they did it and they did it exceedingly well.
Then I was posted to Killadeas in County Fermanagh, and charged with the maintenance of the marine craft, and everybody was getting sent home, demobbed. We had 50 German prisoners of war. They were perfectly okay, you’d have no problems.
ALLIED FORCES IN NORTHERN IRELAND
Ann Cameron
Near Larne there were a lot of Belgian soldiers and they were wonderful waltzers. We used to have one or two of them came, my mother used to keep them, and he couldn’t speak very good English, and he always asked for ‘milik’ in his tea!
John Sinclair
I remember going to Ballyhalbert one time and hearing this weird language over the tannoy, and the WAAF officer was near me she said, ‘Oh that’s the Polish Squadron being scrambled!’
Pauline Diplock
I was about 17 when the Americans arrived in Northern Ireland. If we went to dances, we’d meet people in the American and Canadian forces. I remember meeting a very nice Canadian officer called Frank Ney. And it was a standing joke that he said he was the descendant of the famous Marshal Ney who fought with Napoleon. But he was a very very charming man, a good bit older than I was, but he took a shine to me, and he actually wanted to marry me and get me to go back to Canada.
So I have postcards from Canada, because when he went back he sent word, and he sent me information about what his job was, he was a real estate agent. He was connected to the Canadian Air Force. I think he flew Sunderlands from Lough Erne. I have photographs of him standing outside the Grand Central Hotel in Belfast, and also I think he went to the South – how he managed that I don’t know, because of course they were neutral.
REFUGEES
Eva Gross
I came to Northern Ireland on the 11th of September 1936. My father was a Jew, my mother was an ordinary German. Of course he was a German national too, but there was no future for me in Germany. We had a lovely beach, it was a seaside place, and people came there in the summer, but if you wanted to bathe on the beach, you needed to have a pass.
Officially somebody at that time who was 50% Jewish could go on the beach but it wasn’t really safe. My friends were afraid that I might be accosted. I couldn’t go to dances with my friends, and as a teenager, of course we were keen to go dancing. I could go to another beach but then the social life was all on the other beach.
Also in school, all the girls in my form had to belong to the Hitler Youth, because if you wanted to go to the university, or if you wanted to be a civil servant, you definitely needed to belong to it. So I usually was left in school with one or two children whose parents were communists. And so really I was ostracised.
Birgit Kirkpatrick
We had the first Jewish refugees coming to Denmark before the war broke out. They didn’t come in droves. It was the ones who could afford it. My friend lived in a flat and in the flat below her a family with Jewish girls, daughters, moved in. So I was aware of that family, and you heard of others.
Zelda Enlander
1938 was the Kindertransport. Children came to Clifton Park Avenue. They were in a daze. We all helped, gave whatever we could in the way of clothes, money. Then they moved to the farm at Millisle. We couldn’t do a lot. Hard times, you know. The Germans were cruel, but not all. Heart-breaking. The Jewish community helped with money for Millisle. Then we helped them to get to Palestine when they wanted to.
THE HOLOCAUST
Josephine McGrillis
I didn’t stay that long in Riga but the concentration camp wasn’t far away from where I lived, about 10 minutes away. And every day you heard something else, somebody was hung again last night, because of this and that. So one day I said, I must go round that camp and have a look. It was just a camp with wire fencing around it. And when I came up to the main gate, a big lorry had arrived and all the Jewish women – well-to-do people, well dressed, well looked after. They still had their lipsticks on and their fingernails painted. And they wondered why they were treated like animals really.
They were brought out from the camp, put on the lorries, and then put on the streets to pick the ice off the street. So when I stood there I still remember, I felt, really, who am I, really, you know, to have a look, to be, to see other people being treated like animals.
The soldiers were always over them. And, later on, I heard that all those Jews was taken into the forest and all shot. As I say I never was happy there.
Teddy Dixon
When we arrived at Dachau we knew nothing about it. The first thing I saw in Dachau was a death train. The cries was terrible. The smell of it. When we got organised a wee bit, we were told not to let any more out for they were scared of disease spreading, typhoid.
I was one of the first to go in. With the American army, our company was the first.
The train must have been about thirty or forty cars, different types. The bodies were some lying on the ground, some lying inside. There was one man alive in it.
When we went in, they mobbed us. You didn’t know what to do. There was about thirty thousand in the camp. It wasn’t a death camp now, it was a work camp, but they worked them to death.
BYSTANDERS
#EthicalAwarenessKS3
Joyce McLaren
My great friend who was Dutch, she was at school with me, and her father held a very important position in Germany, and he asked me whether I’d like to see Hitler and go to one of his birthday parades in Berlin. I was a little nervous.
All these Germans, and they were obviously very impressed with this man Hitler. He was right opposite us, so I had a very good view, and all the young boys in their tanks, they were very young, were driving past us, and it was very impressive but it was very unnerving, and every so often we had to “Heil Hitler”. I saluted with them because I felt very strongly about this. I thought I should feel the same as they did where I was. I was amazed at this little man who had such charisma. He was an astonishing man, quite frightening really.
Josephine McGrillis
From Giessen we were posted to Riga. And we had a wee boy, he was about 15 or 16, he was a Jewish boy and he done wee jobs, bringing the wood, the coal in. Because it was in the wintertime when we got there and it was very cold. And a few days later, or maybe a week or so later, I couldn’t see the youngster, and I asked where he was. And I was told the officer that came to entertain us, playing the piano, he was able to beat that youngster to death, because he took a piece of bread, because he was a Jewish boy.
Eva Dixon
Frau Mueller was very kind and very good, but she didn’t want to know that there were concentration camps. Her youngest son Hans Martin was very good at English. His oldest brother was in the Nazi SS and tried to get him involved, but Hans Martin didn’t want that, he went to Heidelburg University. Frau Mueller was made to go – the Americans made her go – and see the films of the concentration camps. I don’t remember it now, maybe they didn’t get fuel, they put a force on it. Frau Mueller didn’t want to go at all, she was very bitter about it, and said that they were no good. The older generation in Arolsen did not want to know.
AFTER THE WAR
Angela Neely
On VE Day there was a Canadian ship in and I was friendly with a couple of them, and there was this big celebration in the centre of Belfast. They wanted to get pictures to take home with them. And so we went round to the back of the City Hall, and I got talking to the wee porter man who let us in and there’s a picture of us on the balcony at the City Hall! There were crowds underneath, thousands right the way up Donegall Place. It was great crack.
Jackie McAlister
Bruce had just died the previous September, and I remember it as a very quiet day. My parents were still in mourning really. And my older sister may have gone out, but I didn’t. The only thing that I remember was my sister took me out to see the bonfires in the evening when it got dark, but we just walked down, walked round the Diamond, then came home again. It was not a celebration in our house at all. And I imagine that would be so in many of the houses, where there was a bereavement. They were probably feeling ‘If he had only survived’.
Eva Dixon
My work was handling all the records, photographs that came in, in the Central Tracing Bureau. We had to send them out to different zones. There were four zones: the British, American, French, and the Russian sectors in Berlin. Our work was really in trying to reunite families with the correspondence that came into the Central Tracing Bureau from all over the world, to try and trace the relatives. There weren’t too many, sadly.
Some of the children of displaced people were brought into the camps, and they were very traumatised then, because they had seen their parents killed in front of their eyes. But they were well looked after with all the other Red Cross work and the nurses, and lots of other organisations.
Michael Williams
My bearer, he was in a terrible state. All those servants were, because they relied on the British for their bread and butter, and they saw terrible prospects ahead of them, because they thought that if India became completely Indianised, they would be regarded as being sort of on the same level as the British whom they’d got rid of.
Leslie Baird
After the war people at least were able to get stuff, picks of houses you couldn’t get before. You weren’t living in dread of being bombed, or been overrun by Germans. The unemployment was a bit of a sickener. It wasn’t easy getting work. It was a good long time before things begin to pick up again and bits of businesses started.
Ken Anderson
After the war then, the 50s, I remember my father getting cheques, and he didn’t know what he was getting them for, from the government, subsidies for farmers.
Education was a big factor then, the factories were all springing up, the factories that were looking for secretaries, then the banks started to take on girls, but they’d never done before. My sister was taken on by the Northern Bank which was unheard of. My generation was dead on, the likes of my father’s couldn’t wear this at all. But even his own daughter got the bank, and he would say to me, ‘Ken! That’s no job for a woman!’
Biggest change? Housing. Young couples buying their own house.
To explore the Sound Archive, search for National Museums NI recordings on sami.bl.uk or e-mail sound.archive@nmni.com