Life on the Accrington Balloon Barrage

It was January 27th, 1942, and my father, as 1259263 Aircraftman Harold Dewhirst, was fighting an unsung corner of the Second World War at Accrington, on the balloon barrage protecting a Clayton-le-Moors aircraft factory.

By the beginning of 1942, when he reported for duty with ‘A’ Flight, R.A.F. Accrington, my father was a seasoned balloon operator, having served the previous fourteen months with the Scapa Flow barrage. He had requested the Accrington posting as being comparatively near his home in Keighley; although an Orkney colleague who had preceded him didn’t think much of Accrington (“it’s a job to really explain what it is like, it’s a very slack set up, today is the first day we have done any work on the site and then that wasn’t much, everything is all up-side down”) father, however, thought it ‘O.K.’

Aircraftman Dewhirst was allocated to Site 5, at Church on the outskirts of Accrington. “Actually, it’s an old cricket field,” he wrote home, “and we use the dressing room as a balloon store. Outside, by what I’ve seen, is typically Lancashire. Rows of houses, empty shops, etc., with a canal at the bottom of the field.” It was “a lot different” to Scapa Flow. However, living conditions were still inclined to be primitive: “The billet is quite good, with a relay wireless set, but surprisingly enough has no running water and only two oil lamps for lighting. The grub, at least the dinners, doesn’t seem up to the old standard, although I hear that it will all be cooked on the site shortly, and then it should improve.”

‘The bladder,’ it should be explained, was slang for the balloon, also known as the gas-bag!

There wasn’t a lot of spit and polish, but there were ‘bags’ of work. “The way they care for the bladder after Scapa is a revelation,” father confided, “it’s never left alone for a minute. Needless to say, the chaps are equally fed-up with them here as at Scapa and have no love for them.”

‘The bladder,’ it should be explained, was slang for the balloon, also known as the gas-bag!

Life on Site 5 naturally revolved around its balloon. Prior to May, when balloons started being flown on warnings only, this involved what father called a “senseless up and down business at any old time.” Day and night, the balloon was raised and lowered, turned and bedded. Arriving back off a pass one midnight, father was “looking forward to a quick turn in, but instead I met the boys ‘turning out’ in order to bed the balloon, so I had to lend a hand.” This job was finally finished at 1:15 am – and he had to be on guard from 3 to 5, too.

Usually, those early months of 1942, the Accrington climate provided a harsh accompaniment: “Today it’s bitterly cold here. We’ve just been turning the balloon, and a nasty piece of work it is in this weather.

“Yesterday our balloon ripped in half during a spell of gusty weather, and so we had the job of salvaging it, and now today we’ve just finished inflating another one, in spite of the winds being very strong. Inevitably, when the crew went by halves shooting, the range was on the hills overlooking Hapton and by all accounts is a terribly cold spot.”

Taking a turn as orderly for the day became almost a perquisite, including as it did an excuse from other duties.

Dear Mary, 

Once again, we’re having some rough weather, and last night and today have given us a hectic time with the balloon. After being out on various jobs at 10 pm and again at 10.45 pm we turned in, only to be called out again in order to ‘bed it’. 

With almost a gale blowing, it was a difficult job and eventually some of the hauling-down ropes snapped and made the job impossible, and so now the balloon is careering about and likely to break away at any moment, so there’s nothing more we can do about it unless the cable holds until it calms down. For all that, though, we did a good job of work in keeping it all under the circumstances; it was nothing anyone could help, and several other sites have lost theirs, not to mention 3 or 4 casualties with broken bones. It’s been raining a sort of ice all day…

Letter from Harold Dewhirst to his wife, Mary 

“Today I’m once again doing orderly,” father smugly recorded (he had volunteered, in place of a man who had gone down sick). “As it happens, it was a lucky choice for, with several inches of snow and a biting wind, the lads have been fooling around all day with the gas-bag and are all by now properly fed-up, while I have been in the warm.”

A balloon site could foster camaraderie among its crew (“this afternoon your parcel has arrived, so the boys are having one of the cakes for tea”), but wintry off-duty hours hung heavily. There was a good deal of going to the pictures – the Regal was adjudged Accrington’s best picture house – whilst all-in wrestling at Blackburn was much talked about.

Members of a fatigue party that cleaned up a skating rink ready for a Y.M.C.A. dance (“it’s amazing what the poor balloon men fall for”) were each rewarded with a free ticket. Once, during Warship Week in February, father took part in a procession through Accrington, ‘trying to look like a real soldier marching behind the band.’

The balloon men of 1942 felt unsettled, even by forces’ standards, as they could watch extra huts being built for the W.A.A.F.s who were intended to replace them. In view of the complex physical nature of balloon operations, this scarcely seemed wholly feasible, and a colleague of father’s, debating whether to change his trade, was told that “there would always be need for some of us, even though the ‘sweet little things’ were taking over.” Nevertheless, changes and postings were frequent, and my father put in for a flight mechanics course.

By then, my mother was expecting my future sister, which effectively put paid to any imminent overseas posting, it being ‘a pretty general idea that if there’s an addition to a man’s family on its way, then an airman need not go abroad until it’s all over.’ A tale doing the rounds of the Accrington sites (as probably round many another) concerned a balloon operator who produced a doctor’s certificate stating that his wife was two weeks pregnant. This, as father opined, “sounds a bit fishy!”

FROM THE NorthernLife ARCHIVE: Taken from Oct/Nov 2009 issue