|
Monica Southard: Wartime Memories of Rudloe Manor Rachel Keegan Photos Rachel Keegan February 2019 I was very interested to read the various articles about Rudloe Manor because my mother Monica Keegan (nee Southard) worked at the underground headquarters of no 10 Group RAF Fighter Squadron during World War II as a telephone engineer helping to maintain the equipment (she always called it ‘Hawthorn’ when she was talking about it). Sadly she passed away at the end of 2018 but I printed out the articles for her to look at and she talked to me about her time there when I visited her in the care home where she spent the last three months of her life. Monica was the granddaughter of Box residents Isaac and Elizabeth Southard whose story was told in an article by Jan Tapscott in May 2014. A few years ago I discovered this article quite by chance when I did a Google search and was thrilled to find a photograph of Isaac and Elizabeth with their children. Mum had never seen this photo before and it was the first time she had ever seen a photo of her father as a young child (he was the eighth of the ten children). I made contact with Jan and we exchanged other photographs and information. Left: Monica as a young woman |
Monica was born in 1922 in Bristol where her father Alfred Victor (known as Vic) Southard was a police officer. At the beginning of the war she was working in the telephone manager’s office in the centre of the city and she often talked about her experiences during the Blitz. I remember her saying that when you went to work in the morning, you always wondered if your office would still be there.
I was born after the war and I find it impossible to imagine the horrors of the Blitz. Mum and her friends were sheltering under a billiard table in a church hall during the raid in November 1940 which wiped out the city centre. When the all clear sounded, they came out and saw the city on fire – she said that she never forgot the smell. In another severe raid on Good Friday 1941 the Southards’ house was damaged and three houses a few doors along were destroyed. Winston Churchill, who was Chancellor of Bristol University, was attending a degree ceremony the following day and before he went to the University, he was photographed walking along their street inspecting the bomb damage. This photograph appears in several books about the wartime history of Bristol and Mum used to enjoy showing this to people.
I was born after the war and I find it impossible to imagine the horrors of the Blitz. Mum and her friends were sheltering under a billiard table in a church hall during the raid in November 1940 which wiped out the city centre. When the all clear sounded, they came out and saw the city on fire – she said that she never forgot the smell. In another severe raid on Good Friday 1941 the Southards’ house was damaged and three houses a few doors along were destroyed. Winston Churchill, who was Chancellor of Bristol University, was attending a degree ceremony the following day and before he went to the University, he was photographed walking along their street inspecting the bomb damage. This photograph appears in several books about the wartime history of Bristol and Mum used to enjoy showing this to people.
|
I think that Mum went to Rudloe Manor in about 1942. She had to attend a training course in London where she learnt things like soldering and cleaning relays. It may have been at this time that she met my Dad who worked with one of her uncles at the Foreign Office. She told me how she used to travel by train from Bristol to Box (putting her bike on the train at Temple Meads station), walked up Box Hill, across a field, past an RAF man and then ran down a lot of steps because it was very cold. I told her about the escalators which are mentioned in one of the articles about the underground aircraft factories but she said that they didn’t have this luxury. During the week the workers stayed in huts which had been built by Billy Butlin (two to a room). There was a NAAFI canteen and facilities for sun lamp treatment because they had long shifts underground. She remembers the period leading up to D-Day when they could sense that something big was going to happen and the sudden realisation that her fiancé Bob Keegan might be involved. She knew about the underground aircraft factory and the Central Ammunition Depot which was also housed in the quarries. In the 1930s she often saw buses with C.A.D. on the front and at that time she had no idea what it stood for.
Although these were horrible times, it was always clear from talking to Mum about the war that there was a great community spirit and she was very proud to have done her little bit for the war effort. |
Still a proud woman in later years
|