Plymouth

Synopsis

In the first of a series of programmes telling stories of the Blitz from across the UK, Angela Rippon is in her home town of Plymouth to find out how the city's children lived through the terror of the air raids which Plymouth endured from the summer of 1940.

Angela meets people who survived the most ferocious bombing attacks in the Spring of 1941, and she explores a fascinating archive of school logs - which give an extraordinary picture of daily school life during wartime.

The scene is set by Terry Charman, the Senior Historian at The Imperial War Museum. He explains that at the start of the Second World War, Plymouth was not considered to be a likely target for aerial attacks, and so many children remained there throughout the conflict.

In today's programme, Angela meets some of those children - most now in their eighties - and hears about how they coped with the terror of the bombing, the nights in the shelters and even the loss of members of their own families.

As part of the programme we travel to the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office where Angela is given a unique insight into how schools tried to carry on as normal during the air raids. The city has an extraordinary collection of logs - kept by schools and detailing all the events of daily life during the years when Plymouth was under attack. In these books we discover accounts of the children being sent to the shelters because of an air attack, of the strain on teachers and pupils alike caused by the bombing and records of poor attendance caused by the Blitz. But normal life goes on, with records of exams and school inspections, and the logs provide a moving account of how Plymouth's schools did their best to provide some kind of normality for their children.

Producer: Louise Adamson
A Juniper production for BBC Radio 4.