Doodlebug over St. Helier
A personal account
By Gordon Jones
Gordon Jones's daughter Glynis standing next to a Doodlebug at the Canberra War Museum
Donated by Gordon Jones
Amidst the death and destruction of the Doodlebug raids there occurred some strange and comical events. In the early hours of one morning,whilst I was asleep in our family's brick above- ground air raid shelter at 72 Wendling Road, I was awoken by an enormous explosion. I was seventeen at the time and I was in the shelter by myself as my mother didn't like our shelter and preferred to go with her neighbour to the public shelter situated on the corner of Wrythe Lane and Tweeddale Road. My father at the time was fire watching at Mitcham Post Office, where he worked as a postman.
When I looked out of the door of the air raid shelter I could see, from the flames, where the doodlebug had hit, which was further down Wendling Road where my friend Denis Marchant lived. So I decided to run down to see if he and his family were OK. When I went through the back door of our house in order to get to the front door I could see that the plaster from the ceilings had come down and was littered all over the floor and furniture. When I reached the front door. it had been blown off of its hinges. I picked it up and quickly took it further down the hallway to get it out of the way, then went down to my friend's house.
When I reached where my friend lived, which was the end house of a block of four, (I think the number was 42), I could see that the whole end wall had collapsed. Denis and his family were all OK but he laughingly took me upstairs and told me to look into the toilet bowl, which by this time was teetering on the edge from where the wall had collapsed. In the toilet bowl there was a china hen's egg, the type that was put into chicken nests to encourage the hens to lay. What had happened was that when the doodlebug landed in the back gardens of Wendling and Welbeck Roads and exploded, the china egg from somebody's chicken run went flying up into the air and came down as the house wall was collapsing.
When I arrived home at my house to start to clean up before my mother came home, I went to pick up the front door from where I had taken it, to bring it back closer to the front. To my amazement, I could hardly lift it, it was that heavy, yet I had had no trouble lifting it before . Which goes to show that when I came out of the air raid shelter I must have had adrenaline pumping through my body and when I arrived back it had subsided.
On another occasion, on a Sunday morning, three of my friends and I were out having a walk or I suppose to be more accurate just mooching and joking around as seventeen year old boys were wont to do. We had reached the shops at Rosehill when we heard a doodlebug. Looking up we saw it high over Wrythe Lane coming towards us. When the engine cut out we knew that it was on the down so we all dived for shelter in the shop doorways. In retrospect that was crazy as the doorways were of shop windows and if the glass had blown out we would have been cut to ribbons. The doodlebug didn't reach the Rosehill shops but exploded in the grounds of St. Helier Hospital. As one of the friends, Arthur LeHec, lived in Westminster Road and backed on to the hospital we all made a mad dash to his place. His family were unhurt but there was damage to his house and Arthur's mother said that one of the upstairs bedroom doors was jammed and couldn't be opened. A couple of us went up and put our shoulders to the bedroom door in an effort to open it without success. We pushed a bit harder when suddenly the door was opened by someone pulling on it from within the room. The person was one of us who had run from Rosehill. We looked at him in amazement and said 'How did you get in there?' He said that he had walked into the other bedroom where the door was open and walked through the dividing wall that had collapsed from the blast.!! Both Denis and Arthur with their families had to be evacuated until their houses were repaired.