Mary kindly provided the following account after visiting the website.
Let me try to put some thoughts down about life in North Shields during the war. I was born in North Shields, an only child, my parents were Jane Henighan (nee Turner) and Joseph Henighan. My father was in the Royal Navy, so like many other children, my father was just a photograph on the wall. My mother was from a large family (one of nineteen). We lived on Little Bedford Street, as did my grandmother (maternal) and two of my mother's brothers and a sister. I attended St. Cuthberts School on Albion Road.
1941 was not a very good year for our family - on February 18, 1941, my father's youngest brother Eddie (aged 22) was a casualty on board the S.S. Black Osp that was torpedoed off the Irish coast, also on board was my mother's oldest brother Bill (aged 45), the priest came to my grandparents' house to break the news. Then 11 days later, March 1, 1941, the priest came to visit again, my father's second youngest brother Albert (aged 25) had met the same fate in the same place, on board the S.S. Eff. They were merchant seamen doing the North Atlantic run, Canada to the United Kingdom, they were in convoys bringing essential supplies back home. The Royal Naval vessel my father served on was torpedoed, but he was one of the lucky ones.
From inside our shelters we heard the bomb explode, and I remember my grandmother saying it was very close...
These memories are still quite vivid, even though I was only five, there are some things that stay with you always. I couldn't understand why everyone was so upset, but I knew it was something bad. Of course with no bodies there were no funerals, which meant no closure, my relatives had a hard time dealing with this. As children, we were able to bounce back to normal within a couple of days.
Then came Wilkinson's shelter disaster.
The reason I remember it so clearly is because my aunt and uncle lived on Queen Street, with their three children, and the night of the disaster my uncle Peter ( who worked at Tyne Dock, South Shields) was out at work, leaving his family at home. My two uncles (Albert and Alex) who lived next door to my mother were still at home (one worked at Smith's Dock and the other on one of the tugs on the Tyne). They were both ARP Wardens, and as soon as the siren sounded they were down on what we used to call the bank top at the end of Little Bedford Street, which overlooked Clive Street and the river.
From inside our shelters we heard the bomb explode, and I remember my grandmother saying it was very close, she thought it was down on one of the shipyards. Then my uncles came in and said there had been a direct hit on Wilkinson's Shelter, and they had been told to go over to help with casualties, the ironic part was they had forgotten that my aunt and her children used Wilkinson's shelter.
My two uncles described the scene as something they would never forget for the rest of their lives. They were lined up outside the shelter passing bodies, or in some cases pieces of bodies, as they were being dug out from the rubble. My uncle Peter was one of the lucky ones, his wife had arrived at Wilkinson's shelter and had been told it was full when she got there, so she left and headed to another shelter. My mother's relatives who were killed in the shelter were a family by the name of Chater, they were cousins of my mother's. I didn't know much about them. The feelings of my relatives after the disaster were hard to determine, as they went on about their business, as normal as possible, and kept things to themselves. Of course, it could be that the bad things about the war were not discussed in front of children. Most of the information I gleaned from the odd discussion I heard about the war, was when I was older. They just didn't talk about it.
The war carried on, it seemed like there was a raid every night, no sooner did we go to bed than the siren sounded. My mother tried to ignore it because she hated going into the shelters, but my uncle would come to the back door and bang on the door until she opened it. I remember him saying, "I don't care what you do, but give me that child," and I was wrapped up in a large tweed cape, which had belonged to my father's mother, and hauled down to the shelter, with my grandmother and my aunt. My mother used to turn up eventually. The street we lived on was just above the shipyards, so after each raid we used to go out on the street to look for shrapnel, because most of the bombing was targetting towards the shipyards. Not knowing how bad it really was, to a lot of children the war was like a big game.
I remember after the war was over I was outside playing with friends when I saw a sailor walking down the street towards my house. He walked past us and then went into my house, I had no idea who this was, and obviously he didn't know who I was; when I went indoors I found out he was my father, the person in the picture on the wall. It took a while to get used to him, but I was one of the lucky ones, my father came home from the war.
The information about my three uncles and their ships was obtained from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission site, where their names are engraved on the Tower Hill Memorial, Trinity Square, London. I have searched for more information about the loss of these two vessels, but unfortunately haven't been able to come up with anything