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The Second World War brought far-away events close to home and it is eighty years this summer (1940) since Mumbles got its first taste of high explosives and incendiaries, probably aimed at Swansea and the docks, raining down on the locality, lasting spasmodically from August 1940 until June 1941.
The first occurred on Second of August 1940 when, following the siren, my mother-in-law, Doris Powell had to run down the garden to their shelter at Bellevue Road, West Cross, with two small children and a day-old baby in tow. She never forgot the experience and the terror. The following days saw two more high explosives and several incendiaries dropped into the sea off West cross.
On 8th April1941, eight hundred incendiaries landed on Limeslade and Thistleboon setting part of the hill on fire. At that time, Grafton Maggs was serving as a schoolboy-in-the-day and the Home Guard in the evenings. He was called out to play his part and recalled that ' One night in 1941 a load of incendiaries fell across the 3-7 Battery on Mumbles hill and set off a huge fire - a beacon seen in Devon. It was vital that this blaze be controlled as soon as possible, so we were sent up to help. My immediate companions were Frank Martin and Peter Hooper. We beat hell out of that hill with wet sacks, then like Kentucky Minstrels in the early hours, walked home along the Mumbles Railway. To our intense delight we found a stick of unexploded incendiaries near the old lifeboat house. We picked up all we could find as souvenirs!'
Map and additional research by Peter Hall
Michael Llewellyn, then a child of around nine years of age also recalled that night and later described his memories. 'I was asleep downstairs in our front room. A lone plane dumped its bombs on the Mumbles Hill and the Cliffs.
It was Luftwaffe practice to mix incendiaries with the high explosives. One bomb made a large crater in the field, where the cricket club now play and which contained a searchlight battery at about that time, just missing the cottage at the Mares Pool. Two or three others made craters on the cliffs towards Langland.
Surprisingly, there were no casualties and no serious damage, other than large holes in the ground, although one of Woolacotts' cart horses in an adjacent field was never the same afterwards and bore the name of ‘Shrapnel’ for the rest of its life.
When I woke up with the noise, the curtains were not drawn and light from burning incendiaries in the garden and in the road outside, played through the window. I briefly thought that I had passed away and was surrounded by hell-fire, then lots of people with buckets of sand and stirrup pumps restored the situation and the next day my Dad discovered the fin of an incendiary bomb, sticking out of a flower bed in the front garden. It had ignited but smothered itself in the soft earth.'
On 4th March 1941, a dozen high explosives fell on the beach between Swansea and Mumbles and on 26 June 1941, two fell into the sea between Langland and Caswell.
John Pressdee noted, 'The 'ATS and the Observer Corps checked on the identity of the planes overhead. AA shells were fired from Mumbles Hill AA battery and used to land in the cemetery and Thistleboon. During the blitz a piece of shrapnel landed on my sister’s bed’.
Pieces of jagged shrapnel
Mumbles Head Defence Sites, during WW2
An ATS Searchlight Unit
Geoffrey Phillips recalled that 'If you could pull out of your pocket a piece of jagged shrapnel and show it off to the gang, not only were you the envy of your friends, but the owner of a valuable swap. A large or grotesquely shaped lump of shrapnel might be worth several marbles, or alleys as we called them, perhaps even a sixer as well as a couple of oncers! In times when toys were few and far between, shrapnel, alleys, conkers or cigarette cards were much-coveted trading commodities. For boys in Mumbles, the War was fun, with just a whiff of danger'.
Mumbles did not endure the Swansea blitz in February 1941, but the town was close enough to watch and witness its destruction from across the bay.
Swansea Bay and Guildhall, 1939
After fighting the Swansea blitz, Graftom Maggs, then 17 years old, decided to illistrate the event, February 1941
The Swansea Blitz from Townhill, February 1941
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