From Butterfly Bombs to Metal Detectors

Thank you to Norma White, who sent us these memories of her family, the Second World War and also the ancient forest, which of course is currently being investigated by CITiZAN.My name is Norma White (nee Coulbeck). My grandfather was Thomas Coulbeck and my grandmother before marriage was Maria Appleyard. They lived in a house in Alexandra Road, Cleethorpes, and my grandmother kept it as a guest house named Spurn View. The house is still there and is also a guest house, but it has changed its name over the years.

My grandfather had his own boat and sailed from the Boating Lake area. He had a bed for catching lobsters, etc, which he rented from the Council. He was a Primitive Methodist and held services in his house on a Sunday. He died at the age of 56 and my grandmother at the age of 59.

My father was Leonard Coulbeck and my mother was Rosetta Johnson before marriage, another fishing family. My father left school at the age of 13 and went as an apprentice to a butcher. Later he went to work on the Fish Docks. After he married my mother, she had some savings in the bank and so she gave him the money to purchase fish boxes and start up as a fish merchant. They called his firm Len Coulbeck Ltd. It was a success and he had many customers in Manchester and Billingsgate, selling mostly cat and dog fish.

When war broke out in 1939, the fish dock was closed at first and the fish merchants were all sent to different parts of the country to run their businesses. My father was sent to Dolgellau in Wales. Sadly, owing to the worry of the war and having to take his business to Wales, he had a heart attack and died. The family then had to return to Cleethorpes. The docks opened once more and my father’s manager took over the running of the firm for my mother.

I remember the war years. We had trees in our back garden on Grimsby Road and I can remember the dropping of the Butterfly bombs. When I got up that morning the trees were full of the wings off the bombs. A policeman was killed by one on Grimsby Road on the corner of Manchester Street opposite where I lived. A German plane had been hit and was on its way down to the beach when he fired all the way down Brereton Avenue from the Cleethorpes end before crashing into the sea. A friend at work told me years later that her sister was in bed in Brereton Avenue and a bullet from this plane killed her.

My brother Leonard Coulbeck L.A.C. who had served in Iraq for most of the war, had just been transferred to Waltham Aerodrome, His job was to fix fuses in the bombs when something happened to the bomb dump and it blew up, killing my brother and two more airmen.

We would go out in the morning and collect shrapnel and silver paper that was dropped to interfere with our Radar. I can remember the flying bombs coming over our garden and hoping their engines wouldn’t stop and my brother coming home from Waltham Airfield and watching the Lancaster Bombers flying over on their way to Germany. On V.E. Day we had a party in Bramhall Street school hall for everyone in the area.

I have always been interested in history and in the 1970s I took up metal detecting on Cleethorpes beach. The Council stopped us at first because some detectorists were leaving holes in the sand, which was a danger to both human and animals, but they later brought in a licence system. I went out to the old forest area and after the flood in the 1970s the tide had cleared all the sand away and I could see the old bowls of the forest trees, which at one time ran from Bradley Woods and along the coast to Mablethorpe. I have some nice old finds, not valuable but of historical interest (since writing this article several years ago, Norma has donated some of these finds to Friends of Cleethorpes Heritage).