I'm Norman Chubb, I'm living in a Quaker home for the elderly in Bristol. I've been a Quaker for many years. At the beginning of the blitz I was a congregational minister and I had a church in Heston, which was uncomfortably near the airport, so the evening service was cancelled. But the young people used to bring sandwiches and we would talk about what had gone wrong and what kind of a world they wanted when the war stopped, about seventy of them. That went on for several months and we ended up by spending a weekend at a youth hostel putting down what we felt. It was very useful because I had contact with those young people on telephone and letters ever since, all those years ago. So it did mean a lot to them because it was a real change, looking out on what the prospects were and everything.

Now, one of the things that happened at that time was gradually you became aware of the growing menace of fascism, which people didn't want to face. When the Prime Minister came back with that piece of paper saying that he had made an arrangement for silencing Hitler, as far as we were concerned, there was a lot of rejoicing and some of the churches even had times of Thanksgiving. I felt that it was all wrong, we'd only postponed the crisis and we'd done something terrible to the Czechs. And I refused to have a service.

Well, one of the things that happened at that time was, I was in charge, or I took the chair, at a meeting of young people in the Mansion House. These were young people largely from the East End and were part of the Christian Left movement at that time. This was towards the end, or at the end of the phony war. And while we were there, the warning went and the bombs kept coming and coming and coming over the East End and over the docks, raining down. When we came out on the all-clear, the whole of the East End was alight, and these young people had to go home not knowing whether there'd be a home or not. It was a terrible thought.

Well, that night when I got back home, I had a telephone call from someone who was dealing with the bombed out people and asked whether my church could look after a coach load of people who'd been bombed out. And so they came and we tried our best to look after them in the church. A difficulty was getting food. I remember once a local butcher gave us two trays of stuffed hearts which helped us along for a time, but the main thing there was finding people, their friends and relatives to whom they could go, and so almost, I think this was the beginning of the Citizens Advice Bureau. Well, we did as much work as we could and they gradually went to their various friends and we were able to return to normal.

But by this time many of the young people were being called up and that was the time when I left the church. And I went to work as an engineer, after a short training in the government training centre, and I wasn't much good as an engineer, but while I was there I received an invitation to see the Chief Inspector of Factories and because I'd got a first class honours in philosophy I was invited to become one of HM Inspectors of Factories. But anyway, I had quite a lot of help from other inspectors and I gradually got to control, know what to look for, and I had to deal with Fleet Street and all the problems there, which was very interesting.

Then from that I was moved to work in Woolwich. At Woolwich I dealt with Woolwich Arsenal and Siemens and all the big factories there, and some of the small factories. One of my jobs was to see that factories had proper warning systems because they would go on working, wouldn't stop when the warning went generally, they would wait until it was really dangerous when the bombs were getting close before they would stop work and then they would dive down into the air raid shelters. And also one of the big problems were these incendiary bombs and they would rain down and cause big fires. So I had to arrange that all the factories had people trained to look out for incendiary bombs and to scoop them up and dump them before they led to a major fire. This led me to all these different factories.

Generally, factory life went on amazingly well. I found that I had to inspect factories on the night shift. One of the compensations was that you could get ham from the hambone in one of the canteens in the factory, which was quite impossible otherwise. So, because they tried to keep them going and it was important that accidents should be prevented in factories because it was so important that the work could go on. And so it was quite an important job.

I had to prosecute people, sometimes if they were not guarding the machinery properly or if there was not proper ventilation or proper health arrangements, and this led me after a time - I lost a case, building case, which I shouldn't have lost and I decided I should know more about the law, so I read for the bar in my spare time and became a barrister. And when later on I retired from the Inspectorate, I lectured on law for ten years. This was another branch of experience. But I was more interested in philosophy than in law, but later on I returned to my love for philosophy.

Well now, returning to the Blitz: my first realisation of what a terrible thing was happening was when we had two people come to live with us who'd just come from Austria, they'd escaped after the Anschluss and I was at a church in Felixstowe at the time. And I remember walking along the front with these two people in Felixstowe, one of them was an architect who had designed the famous working class flats in Vienna, and the other, the woman, had been in charge of the TB problems that were there at the time, they were really fine people, but they were Jews and they'd escaped. And I remember walking along the front in Felixstowe and the woman throwing her head back and her hair blowing in the wind and saying, "it's grand to be free". Because she'd spent time waiting for the knock on the door that would take them to the concentration camps. I think it was the first emotional revelation I had of what a terrible thing was happening, with the increase in Hitler’s movement.

Well now, at that time, we, there was camps, every year there was a camp actually at the Christian Auxiliary Movement. And we had this camp in 1938, and we decided we didn't want someone to come and lecture to us, we just wanted to discuss ourselves, what was happening and what we could do about it. We had people like Professor John McMurray, Kenneth Ingram, Carl Pulani and people like that and there were Quakers and there were left-wing church people and there were communists and there were a group of people, refugees from Austria. So we spent the week on this. And we decided that fascism was a kind of throw-back to an earlier stage of evolution. It was an organic philosophy, that is the important thing was not the individual but the survival of the group, of the race. And also like in the organic world the other thing was they had to have a living space and to defend it fiercely. So Hitler talked about blood and soil, and it was this idea that it was good for the world that they should succeed in keeping the purity of the Arian race and the German volk. And so they felt justified in eliminating anyone who would take away the purity of the race or interfere with the development of this particular movement. And so they felt that they were doing good, surprising by eliminating Jews and all other people, anyone who interfered. And some of these people were, thought they were idealists for the good of the world in doing this. It was amazing really, the awful things they could do because they felt that this was the best thing to do.

Well, we organised this movement that started then, groups of us used to issue broadsheets warning, trying to warn the British people of the horror that was approaching, because so much of the ordinary people were just concerned to save their own skins and to keep Hitler away whatever else he did to other people. And we felt this was wrong and we were I think quite right in our analysis and our philosophy, but quite useless. We were far too late.

Now, once it was realised that there was no way of avoiding it, the war was getting closer. Two things happened. One which is familiar now, the building of Spitfires and all that, and the other was the dealing with shelters. Now, there were several different kinds of shelter. I was digging a hole in the garden, you had to go about four foot deep on a very hot September day and then we had these Anderson shelters which were sheets of corrugated iron bent round so that they would form a kind of arch, and you put these into the hole and piled the earth that you'd taken out, over the top to make it safer. And then you tried to make the shelter that you'd got there as comfortable as possible with bunks and so on. But they were damp and cold and uncomfortable places. You had to sort of arrange that the opening was protected by putting some sacks of earth in front.

Well, I got this shelter. That was the first kind of shelter and it was the general one, the Anderson shelter. But then we had an unexploded bomb in the garden next door, so I was invited by my friend to come to share their shelter. Now this was a very posh affair made of concrete and it was very comfortable and warm and well lit. So that was the second kind of shelter.

But the problem was that older people and handicapped people couldn't get out in time to the shelter when the warning went, and it was a great anxiety. And so the Morrison shelter was invented and this was a metal table, very heavy metal, and you could sleep underneath and it was a very great blessing. I remember one of my colleagues had recently got married and we were in Richmond, and he and his new wife were in this shelter. I was downstairs and it was a room with all sorts of swords and relics of earlier, past wars, and when the bombs started coming down these things were rattling and I felt so scared. I went up and asked if I could lie at the foot of their bed under the Morrison shelter. I hope that didn't interfere with their sex life but I don't think many people could think much of sex during a bomb, a raid like that. It was pretty bad.

Well then the other way of sheltering which people had was to go down to the platforms of the underground and of course that was the main one, thousands of people used to go down every night. But the strange thing was the way in which so many people believed that they were quite safe if they snuggled down under the stairs. And somehow they felt that they could do that and be safe. Well I used to - you didn't get a good night's rest in these wretched Anderson shelters, and one night I thought well I'll go up and sleep in my bed, and that night there was a tremendous explosion, I thought it must have been quite close but it was some distance away. It was the first of the rocket bombs and when they came down, you had no warning whatever, we were told that, not to worry they were, it's only gas mains being blown up, so we used to call these rocket bombs flying gas mains. But you couldn't do anything about it.

Now, one of the places I had to inspect was in the area in south London, the, it was a dangerous place because this was the time of the flying bombs. They were like torpedoes with burning gases driving them on. And the difficulty, the really frightening, I think the most frightening experience of the war, was when one of these cut out, when the drive gave out and the bomb twisted and turned, you never knew which way it would go. Well I was inspecting, going to a factory in south London and the warning came and I thought well, normally I would just go on and hope to get shelter in the factory but I could hear this thing coming and so I dived into another shelter which was a street shelter. This was brick with a concrete top to it. And there was a huge explosion very near. When I came out, I saw the factory that I would have been at, had had a direct hit and was a complete mass of rubble, and out of the rubble and the dust a man came holding a dead chicken in his hand. He was determined not to lose his lunch. But that was I think one of the nearest experiences I had to being killed.

So we went on with the work as best we could. Now I've already more or less indicated there were different kinds of bombs that were used. The earlier ones, you had just single aeroplanes to frighten us, driving along, and they would drop a stick of bombs, usually about six, and you'd have one here and then twenty yards over another one, another one, and you could see the straight line. And I was out in the street and I saw this plane dropping these bombs, and I was in the line where the next one would come, so I dived into a porch and crouched down in the porch, and I was saved. Well that was the earliest one. Later on of course it became much more congested, masses of bombs coming down.

At that time I was working in this factory and I cycled to work through the blitz, and that was not a very pleasant experience. But that little factory was making filters for the army or something and I was not much good at it. Anyway, the next kind of bomb that came after the mass bombing and the incendiaries, they started with these fly bombs which I've described, and then after that there were the rockets. But fortunately, by this time the allied armies had got far enough into Germany so that we didn't have them for very long. If they had not, I think the effect would have been tremendous, because these rockets did create a tremendous area of devastation. But they didn't destroy the British people, the people's courage and it was absolutely amazing how they'd sweep up and board up the windows and carry on the next day. You could hardly believe what it was like.

Now, on the positive side, there was a very good comradeship, people helping each other when someone's house had been damaged, they would go next door or they would have friends and lots of cups of tea and so on, helping each other. But I remember that the National Gallery used to run midday concerts, you could go in there and you could get sandwiches and sit down and listen, and I remember particularly, a lovely concert by Myra Hess playing Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring. It was very, very moving and it remains in my mind in contrast to the awful anger and devastation of the world outside.

I don't know there's very much more that comes immediately to my mind, unless you have something you want to ask me.

(That's wonderful, very good. You mentioned --- do you want to talk about that?)

Well it might illustrate what did happen with many people. When I was minister in Heston, my wife… the marriage was not good and she was crouching under the stairs when the Blitz was on. And I was working with other people trying to find homes for these people and one person in particular, Gladys and I became very close friends, working together on this, and although it was terrible for a minister to break his marriage we didn't do anything about it until after the war, and then we got our divorces and I had 40 years of lovely marriage with this friend I'd found during the blitz. And I imagine that it often did happen like that, people broke and found new friends. The personal side was always there but always there was this awful anxiety. My brother was out in Egypt and into Italy and so on, and it destroyed him, he became an alcoholic and so on. The experiences that he went through were terrible. Waiting in fox holes and all that kind of thing.

But he had one good thing. He was in the, driving a truck, taking ammunition up to the front, and when the Italians surrendered they wanted someone to take Italian singers round to entertain the troops, so he used to take these singers around and have a front seat in front of the generals and all the rest. And this was one of the bright sides to it. But it did have a terrible effect.

Now other people went through it in a very different way. My brother in law, he loved it. He came in, he belonged to the territorials, he came in with his tin hat on the back of his head and he went out and he never seemed to realise the dangers. He was in the artillery and I think he loved every minute of it. But when he came back, he was in the bank, he found that younger people had got jobs which he should have had and became very bitter about it. But it was amazing how differently different people took the situations they had to face.

One of my, one of the young people in the fellowship which I'd had in Heston when I was a minister, Ron Johnson, he was in the air force and he was shot down over Germany and when he got back - he started writing poetry during this time - and when he got back he became a teacher and very successful dealing with difficult people, and so there were great changes and new opportunities that came to these young people through the war, they would never have had otherwise.