The incredible story of life in Manchester during WWII

In the 1800s, thousands of German engineers, merchants, and even political exiles made Manchester their home.  By 1840, over 3,000 Germans lived in the city, helping power its cotton trade and industry.

But by 1940, that same nation was plotting Manchester’s destruction.

This is the story of Manchester during WWII.

World War II in Manchester

World War Two broke out on the 1st of September 1939. Within days, some 20,000 children were evacuated from the city.

A Frank Walsh, evacuated from City Road school in Hulme, told the story: “We were all lined up in the playground with our cardboard gas mask cases round our neck and cardboard labels attached to our coat buttons by string and carrying a few spare clothes in a case.

“The labels had our name, address, age, and the name of our school written on to them in ink.

“As we neared Victoria/Exchange station, we all began to sing to keep our spirits up. All along Deansgate typists and clerks came to their office windows to wave to us, as did the people walking on the pavements on both sides of the road – and we all waved back.

“There was not a lot of traffic in those days, so we were four abreast as we walked in the road in between the tram tracks and the pavement.

“When we did reach Exchange/Victoria railway station, it was like a football match with other schools as well as our own mingling in a large orderly crowd, along with some of the parents who were assisting, while others who had just come along to try and find out where we were going – no one knew – or at least they were not saying.

“There were a few tears from both children and grown-ups as we trundled along the platform to board the different trains allocated to each group.”

Allan Hartley, a Town Hall clerk in the treasurer’s department, kept a diary at the beginning of the war.

“Friday 1st September 1939. This morning Germany invaded Poland. I heard it at 10.30 a.m. while at the office.

“There was a radio in the café [at the YMCA] which continuously gave forth information from the government re house lights, car lights, evacuation and so on.

“All the Town Hall windows are heavily darkened so that the place seemed empty but there was work going on within.

“The tram had the dim blue light, a man and his child discussed with me and a woman the situation. All agree it’s got to come and that the present state in Europe can’t continue.”

As with the Great War, the outbreak created a host of new laws that people might break without even realising it.

These included buying an unweighed chicken to painting a car light blue. A rector was arrested for ringing his church bells, an occurrence that was supposed to signal German invasion.

The War also brought with it frightening new technology, as most major wars do. Indeed there are arguments that wars follow a sudden lurch in technological progress.

For the first time in Manchester’s history, there was the serious fear that the enemy would appear overhead in bombing planes; what had been considered but failed to happen in the Great War was now a reality.

The Manchester authorities were so worried about Manchester being bombed that at the beginning of the war they built a mock-up version of the city centre in the moors at Burnley out of plywood.

At night, oil drums were lit to make it look like Manchester had already been bombed. But when would the bombs drop?

Conscription comes to Manchester

George Orwell had frightened the public in his magnificent novel of June 1939, Coming Up For Air: “Of course, there’s no question it’s coming soon.”

But when? Conscription tightened. Back in May 1939, the government had passed the Military Training Act, which required men to undertake six months of military instruction. But now it was serious.

However, not all able-bodied Mancunians wanted to join the forces and used a variety of ruses to get out of conscription.

They might register and then fail to attend the medical, thereby holding up the bureaucracy.

They might register and send someone who had already failed the medical to go along and pose as them.

There was a healthy trade in the selling of stolen or forged medical exemption certificates.

At the medical, they might feign epilepsy. Some would simply ignore the summons and go AWOL. Many men spent the 1940s on the run from the military.

Italian fascists in Manchester

No one found it odd that there were several fascist clubs in Ancoats in the early 1930s. On Saturday nights, they hosted popular dances where men would turn up hoping to see women who looked like Laura Nucci while the women searched for an Emilio Spalla.

The word fascism had no connotations until further into the decade. By the time the Second World War broke out, fascism had attained the horrific status it will always carry. Italians had been in Manchester, particularly Ancoats, since the 1880s.

They had earned respect and gained acceptance within Manchester society. That all changed on Monday, the 10th of June 1940 when the Italian fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, declared war on Britain.

Winston Churchill, the new prime minister, was asked what should be done with Britain’s many Italians and infamously responded: “Collar the lot!”

In other words, haul in all males between the ages of 18 and 60 to check their allegiances.

The Allies or the Axis. The Manchester Evening Chronicle reported on how this affected Manchester’s Italians. “As many of the Italians returned from their ice-cream rounds, they were met by detectives, who escorted them to the headquarters … Many who have been taken into custody will be released later when their friendliness to Britain has been definitely established.”

A number of family businesses closed. Some changed their names. Some had English versions prepared earlier, as George Orwell noted in his wartime diaries.

John Pessagno, an Ancoats resident and a British subject, was interned along with his father. He described the process:   “They came round on Monday night to pick up father, then next morning they picked me up.

“I knew the policeman, but they still put me in gaol overnight. My brother was in the army, father was interned on the Isle of Man, and I went to Ascot. I wasn’t involved in anything. I was a member of the Conservative Club, but I wasn’t interested in politics (sic).”

A Serafino Di Felice described how a teacher at St Michael’s School in Ancoats singled out the Italian boys to be ridiculed. “The older Italian boys, aged 10-11, were lined up on the stage in front of the school, and their headteacher stated, ‘We all know you have learned Giovenizza at St Alban’s church.

“So you can do a chorus of Giovenizza [the Fascist anthem… ‘Hail, people of heroes, Hail, immortal Fatherland, Your sons were born again, With the faith and the Ideal, Your warriors’ valour, Your pioneers’ virtue…’] in view of Mussolini’s entry into the war. The boys refused to sing and were punished.”

Hilda McDonald, whose father came to Britain in 1924, recorded how: “Italy entered the war. It came in the 6 p.m. news and straight after somebody passing the front gate insulted father. He went to the police station to find out what might happen and they told him not to worry. At midnight he was counting the money when the detectives arrived, two outside and two inside.

“They said he had to go with them. They asked ‘Where do you keep your private papers? Are you a member of the fascisti?’ He was never a member. He was taken into custody and then he was sent to Scotland. The whole time the family did not know where their father was being kept.”

The crux of the problem was whether or not the everyday Italian in Manchester was a fascist.

Special Branch, MI5 and MI6

Thanks to Special Branch, MI5 and MI6, the British authorities had a list of Italians in the country who were members of the various fascist parties: the British Union of Fascists, the British People’s Party, the National Socialist League and the capo dei capi of them all, the Italian Fascist Party. But membership did not always guarantee support.

For instance when the knock on the door came for Ernani Landucci, a waiter who worked at the Midland Hotel, he burst into tears and explained to the policeman that he only belonged to the Manchester branch of the Fascist party because as a landowner in Sicily it was compulsory, and that was his pension.

The policeman was very sympathetic, and years later explained that it taught him a lot, which was just as well because he was Robert Mark, later to become the most powerful police officer in the land as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

For Landucci, one day he was balancing dishes at the Midland; the next he was peeling potatoes at an internment camp. He was then sent along with other fascio Italians and various Germans on a luxury liner, the Arandora Star, for a new life in Canada. There were 1,564 people on board. On the 2nd of July 1940, the Arandora Star was sunk by a German U-boat, despite flying the Swastika.

Around 750 people drowned, including 486 Italians and 175 Germans. Landucci was a victim, as was Cesare Camozzi, who had left northern Italy to open a number of restaurants in Manchester, including the Monogram Café on St Peter’s Square, where he was arrested.

Camozzi was taken to Scotland, then to Liverpool and put on board the Arandora Star. His body was washed ashore on the Donegal coast. For the authorities who took it in, as well as many others, the mystery was ‘who was he?’ A tin inside his jacket pocket, whose contents had surprisingly not been ruined in the water, answered the question.

There was a letter headed “The Monogram Café, St Peter’s Square”, signed: “Your affectionate wife, Minnie”.

The police knocked on the café door and revealed all to his wife. She now knew his whereabouts.

The Blitz in Manchester

France surrendered on Thursday the 20th June 1940. Also that day, the first Manchester air-raid sirens were heard and there were minor German raids on Lancashire.

On the 29th of July, the first local bomb fell. It dropped on a hut at the corner of Trafford Road and Ordsall Lane, Salford.

A week later, on the 8th of August, an aircraft over Salford dropped not bombs, but Nazi propaganda leaflets: “A last appeal to reason”. It was a translation of a Hitler speech. “In this hour I feel it to be my duty before my own conscience to appeal once more to reason and common sense in Great Britain as much as elsewhere…” One bundle hit a policeman at Castle Irwell.

There was random bombing in the area during the 1939-40 period known as the Phoney War, but on Sunday the 22nd of December 1940 things intensified with the first wave of a campaign of enemy attack that not even the most imaginative of past forecasters, from Francis Bacon to Joseph Wright of Derby, could have imagined, nor even by those from even half a century before. It was the start of the Christmas Blitz.

The first explosion in Manchester came at the corner of Clarence Street and Princess Street (later replaced by Pearl Assurance House). Two minutes later, there were reports that the Royal Exchange and Victoria Buildings were alight.

No one knew how long these attacks would last, how successful they would be, and what the Germans had in store next. One aim was to destroy Trafford Park, the docks and other bastions of industry.

On the first night, 270 aircraft dropped 272 tons of high explosive and 1,032 incendiary bombs.

On the second night, 171 aircraft dropped another 195 tons of high explosive and 893 incendiaries. Around 680 people were killed, with another 2,364 injured.

The Luftwaffe arrive

Seven-year-old Doreen Herring saw a Luftwaffe plane flying overhead as her family, from Pendleton, made their way to an air raid shelter. They looked up and saw the pilot pause and then the plane speed ahead without dropping a bomb.

“I am convinced it was because he could see us,” she later recalled. Her father, George Pinder, refused to go to the air raid shelter: “If a bomb wants to get me, it will get me.”

They were terrified of coming back from the shelter to see their house damaged. “Next door to us had been bombed to bits. All you wanted to do afterwards was to have a cup of tea.”

A Kathleen Shell noted how “the noise of exploding bombs, chains of shells from our guns exploding in the sky, the terrifying screams of bombs falling, made my dash to this shelter a journey of complete horror.

Manchester was a raging inferno, encircled by a wall of fire, the sky for miles illuminated.”

A paper boy lost both parents when a bomb destroyed the family home. His bed was catapulted over the rubble into the street with him in it.

Off Oldham Road, diggers unearthed a man sitting on a lavatory. He was unhurt. One man was shot for looting from a fur coat shop on Oxford Road.

Put Out More Flags

In Evelyn Waugh’s 1942 novel about the Phoney War, Put Out More Flags, a lunatic carrying a bomb is sent from one department to another as the contents of his bag tick away. This was not so fanciful. In Manchester, a warden carried a sack of incendiary bombs into his office and dumped them on the floor. Another walked in with a live incendiary and put it on the desk, asking what he should do with it.

A surprisingly nasty device was the oil bomb, dropped by parachute.

A passer-by might rush towards it, expecting to find a Nazi paratrooper, only to discover too late that there was no incumbent other than a bomb about to explode, flinging out flaming oil as anything touched it.

Badly hit was the grand Watts’ Warehouse on Portland Street, the most spectacular of all the cotton palaces.

That late December, the whole area was hit by incendiary bombs. Cotton bales were blazing at thousands of degrees. Buildings were demolished to prevent the fire spreading.

The firemen were ordered to let Watts go. When the chief fireman, Wilf Beckett, of the company’s own brigade, refused to comply, the authorities cut off his supply of water.

Nevertheless, a small force fought the fires with blankets and sheets until the temperatures outside cooled.

In 1941 the building was again hit, and again Beckett and his team saved the day. It is now the Britannia Hotel.

The city centre was almost blasted out of existence. The city’s civil defence services were overstretched, as many units had been helping out in Liverpool the night before.

Fires burnt well into the next day, thereby guiding the raiders to their target the following night. Parker Street, now filled with buses as part of Piccadilly Gardens bus station, was lined with warehouses.

These were destroyed in on the 22nd and 23rd of December 1940 and are remembered only in an L. S. Lowry drawing.

The day after their destruction, a van from the Ministry of Information toured the streets. Inside, was a Godfrey Baseley, later the originator of The Archers, shouting out instructions to locals through a megaphone.

For the next few weeks, a spade plunged into the site and turned over would set the contents alight.

A week after the bombing, the huge basements of the burnt-out buildings were converted into water storage tanks, so that Manchester firemen would have a ready source of water should more bombs fall.

Almost the entire mediaeval Market Place between St Mary’s Gate and Cateaton Street, also known as the Shambles, after an Anglo-Saxon word for a bench where animals were killed, was destroyed.

For hundreds of years, the site had been lined with black and white timber-framed buildings such as the Fish and Game Market. In the 1820s, many stalls were moved to the new, covered, Smithfield Market.

Its original purpose gone, the Market Place became Manchester’s main drinking spot, home of pubs that included the Bull’s Head, where Bonnie Prince Charlie’s troops stayed during the ’45; the Black Horse, where the young student Anthony Burgess played the piano on a Saturday night in the late 1930s; and the Slip Inn, a favourite of Charlie Chaplin and other theatricals.

All three went up in flames. Only two pubs in the Market Place survived – the Olde Wellington Inn and Sinclair’s Oyster Bar – both later ruined by being needlessly moved after the 1996 bomb.

Manchester Cathedral was hit two days before Christmas.

The Dean, Dr Garfield Williams, recalled how “at 6am the last bomb dropped, and it dropped on the north-east corner of the Cathedral.

The blast lifted the whole lead roof off and dropped it back. Every window and door had gone. The High Altar was just a heap of rubbish ten feet high.

The Lady Chapel, the Ely chapel and much of the Regimental Chapel had simply disappeared. Manchester Cathedral was the second most bombed in the country during the Second World War; only Coventry fared worse.

Whereas in Coventry the bombed cathedral was left as an empty shell, and Basil Spence’s ambitious complement created alongside, Manchester Cathedral was patched up over nearly twenty years by Hubert Worthington.

The work included Margaret Traherne’s Fire Window at the east side in a flaming red to echo the blaze of the Blitz.

What buildings were damaged in the Manchester Blitz

Of the well-known buildings in central Manchester, the following were severely damaged: • The Free Trade Hall • Literary and Philosophical Society’s building on George Street. • Victoria Buildings • Cross Street Chapel • Manchester Cathedral • The Masonic Temple • The mediaeval market • The Corn Exchange • The Royal Exchange • Smithfield Market • The Gaiety Theatre.

There were hundreds of localised stories of bombing horrors.

On Duke Street, Castlefield, residents met to discuss what to do following a warning that the bombs would fall that night.

They voted to go en masse to the Camp Street underground shelter, where there was room for 3,000 a night in a drained section of the Manchester and Salford Junction Canal under the Great Northern Goods Warehouse.

Entrance was at 7.30 p.m. after work and chucking out time was at 7.30 in the morning. In between, the masses were crammed together, lying on damp stone floors, supping Oxo tea, trying not to sniff in the smell of the chemical toilets, wondering whether a bomb might land above, causing the enter edifice to crumble on top of them, unaware that the Nazis were deliberately trying to avoid bombing that area.

What Manchester didn’t realise during the war, and was only discovered much later, and then only by a few, was that the Nazis were only trying to bomb major buildings whose destruction would seriously undermine morale and were deliberately trying not to bomb other buildings that they wanted for their own nefarious use.

The ones they wanted to destroy included the Cathedral and the Free Trade Hall, two symbols of Manchester’s majesty, whose destruction would so upset locals and browbeat them into submission.

At the same time, the Germans were trying to avoid bombing three Manchester buildings they wanted for their own purposes, once they had invaded.

The Nazis had around 70 per cent accuracy as to where the bombs fell. After all, why waste weaponry attacking indiscriminately? Target carefully. And so spare the Town Hall, the Midland Hotel and Central Station.

The Town Hall would be needed, once they had invaded, as a seat of power for the new regime and still run by local figures, the many thousands sympathetic to the Nazi ideology lying in wait for that day.

The Midland Hotel, where the fascist leaders, Oswald Mosley and William Joyce had propped up the bar in the 1930s, would be ideal as a place where the new masters could stay and relax.

Central Station? Perfect for getting away to London.

The Nazis succeeded in saving these three. In doing so, the two new major landmarks in between, the Town Hall Extension and Central Library, were also spared.

This little, but vital, sliver of Manchester, home of five of the city’s most important buildings, was barely touched, despite the devastation elsewhere. Most secret war War meant a vast web of secret service operations, details of which have still not fully emerged.

The Ministry of Information

The Ministry of Information set up an office at 3 Cross Street, at the junction with Market Street. The Ministry issued a booklet explaining how to differentiate between a Chinaman (friendly) and a Japanese (infiltrator).

The clue was the gap between a Japanese person’s big toe and the adjacent toe. With the Japanese, there was a wider gap because of the type of footwear worn by them from an early age.

They also warned people to beware of German parachutists dressed as nuns. There was no end to government-induced farcical events. At 3 p.m. on Christmas Eve 1941, three aircraft appeared over Market Street with their bomb-doors open.

Thousands fled in a panic from what they thought was a Luftwaffe raid that had escaped the warning sirens. But their fears proved groundless, as the planes were British, dropping road safety leaflets, not bombs.

The government requisitioned a number of major Manchester buildings for secret war use.

One was Ward Hall in Victoria Park, now part of Xaverian College, which the visiting American forces turned into a detention camp for American servicemen who fell foul of the law.

Manchester’s very own Guantanamo Bay. Another was Arkwright House, the huge neo-Classical Portland Stone office block in Parsonage Gardens which had recently been built for the English Sewing Cotton Company by Harry Fairhurst.

Before the War, the police and army trained in the basement on how to deal with gas attacks. Once war started, Arkwright House was chosen to be the regional government headquarters that would run the entire North-West if the Nazis invaded.

That fear was real. The Nazis’ plan for invasion of Britain – Unternehmen Seelowe or Operation Sealion – was in place. If the Nazis landed, the authorities would have emergency powers … shoot first, ask questions later.

An entire bureaucracy was set up within. In charge of this secret North-West government in waiting was Hartley Shawcross, a Labour politician who later, as Attorney-General, prosecuted Lord Haw-Haw, the traitor; John George Haigh, the acid bath murderer; and Klaus Fuchs, the spy.

Hartley Shawcross, a descendant of John Bright, later crossed the floor from Labour to the Conservatives in the House of Lords and earned the nickname Sir Shortly Floorcross.

The Yanks are coming!

In 1941 the USA still wasn’t involved in the War. Nevertheless, throughout 1941, the States were supplying Britain with war equipment.

Americans sent across the Atlantic food parcels filled with dried fruit and powdered egg.

Everything changed with the attack on Pearl Harbour on the 7th of December 1941.

The Americans arrived in Manchester a year later, setting up base at National House, at the corner St Ann Street and Cross Street, bringing with them luxuries such as silk stockings, cigarettes, chocolate and oranges that few had seen for years.

But the appearance of some of the Americans shocked the Manchester natives, for their number included black men.

The future prime minister, Harold Macmillan, suggested that black soldiers in the British forces wore a Union Jack badge to differentiate them from black American soldiers.

Meanwhile, in Manchester, an American general ordered that “white women should not associate with coloured men.

They should not walk out, dance, or drink with them”. When one of the black soldiers, seconded to Viscount Cranbourne, was refused entry to a restaurant by white door staff, Winston Churchill, the prime minister, recommended that next time he took his banjo with him.

“They’ll think he’s one of the band.” There were racial disturbances after a black sailor was spotted kissing a white English girl in a railway station, which led the press to call for the city’s councillors to ban all GIs from places of entertainment for a fortnight.

Rows about bigotry and feuding between the black and white American soldiers went all the way up to prime minister Churchill, who was asked in the Commons to make “friendly representations to the American military authorities asking them to instruct their men that the colour bar is not the custom in this country”. Many British women objected to such discrimination.

A NAAFI counter lady explained in what now sounds like an out-take from The Fast Show: “We find the coloured troops are much nicer to deal with in canteen life and such. We like serving them.

“They’re always so courteous and have a very natural charm that most of the whites miss. Candidly, I’d rather serve a regiment of the dusky lads than a couple of whites.”

Ridiculous rumours went round that the “Negro” troops were really white men whose skins had been specially darkened for night operations, and that on their return to the United States they would be given an injection to turn them white again.

Victory!

The Second World War ended in Europe at 3 p.m. on Tuesday the 8 th of May 1945.

This was eight days after Hitler committed suicide in Berlin, replaced by former Withington resident Karl Dönitz.

Winston Churchill in his broadcast stated: “We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing; but let us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead.”

Some 75 million people had been killed, with more to come beyond the continent.

Across Manchester, there were street parties and bonfires lit. The biggest was in Albert Square, amid a riot of Union Jacks, in the days before the flag was seen as something unworthy and suspicious.

The beer, carefully unrationed, flowed. At the George & Dragon pub on Swan Street, the landlord, Ernie Tyson, placed the band on a shelf halfway up the wall.

A Gloria Sutcliffe remembered the scenes. “Simply thousands of people stretched before me until they disappeared out of Albert Square. How we had ever managed to make our way through the great mass of people was beyond my comprehension. The view was amazing! Flags of all different colours and sizes, service hats of every description held aloft on sticks and umbrellas with numerous ones suddenly being thrown high into the air over their owners’ heads.

And the singing! It came from every direction, rising to great crescendos in places, starting or overlapping in others. ‘Run, rabbit run’, ‘White Cliffs of Dover’ and ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.’”

Some wars continued Once the Second World War was over, Jews in Mandatory Palestine, the uncertain hybrid formed in the wake of the nationalist campaign led by one-time Manchester chemist, Chaim Weizmann, demanded the British fulfil their promise to grant Jews a state in their historic homeland.

This eventually happened in 1948, but after considerable bloodshed.

For instance in July 1947, two British soldiers who had been kidnapped in Palestine were found hanged from a tree, which was pictured in the Daily Express.

Within days, there were anti-Jewish riots. A brick was thrown from a car on Rochdale Road at a Jewish-owned shop. Then, word went round that a Jewish meeting was being held at the Assembly Rooms on Cheetham Hill Road.

This attracted a huge crowd of protestors, while similar groups, hanging out at the corner of Cheetham Hill Road and Derby Street in the heart of the Jewish ghetto, went on to smash windows.

In Eccles, a crowd of hundreds smashed the windows of Jewish properties as people cheered each hit. A year later, the State of Israel was created.

Weizmann’s dream, with him as president. “Let’s drop the big one and see what happens”

The very last acts – or rather two acts – of the Second World War were the dropping of bombs on Japan with technology devised in Manchester, first in 1803 and then in 1917.