Cathedral Crypt and a pub cellar kept pair safe in the Blitz
For young Joyce Matthews’ mum, the Cathedral crypt seemed the perfect shelter to keep her daughter safe on the night of 14 November 1940.
But just a few hours later, 12-year-old Joyce and her friends and near neighbours in the crypt were being led to safety as the Cathedral burned in the Blitz.
Joyce – now Joyce Sutton – had family and friends in St John’s Street near the Cathedral and so they sheltered every night in the crypt – having tea at home and then heading off to the mattresses beneath the Cathedral floor.
Her mum Gertrude and sister were in Hillfields and her dad Alfred was elsewhere in the city, but Joyce was spending the night like any other.
She said: “We each had a mattress in the crypt and we used to go there every evening, we didn’t wait for the sirens to go. We went there because it was safe, it was a big space and there were a lot of people down there.
“You never had a good night’s sleep, there was always noise and the shelters were pretty horrible places, they were quite smelly.
“Then that night I remember the wardens and the people who used to watch for fires came down and said we had to get out because the Cathedral was badly on fire.
“We got out and I looked back and I thought the spire was on fire it was so bright, reflecting the flames, and I panicked and started to run. I was frightened, we all were. There were no lights, but the fires meant it was quite bright.”
Joyce went to the old furniture store basement – now the Spar shop in Hay Lane next to the Council House – and spent the night in their cellar until the all clear. And then she came out to a city that had completely changed.
She said: “We had to walk home to Hillfields and we came up into Broadgate – we weren’t allowed to go near the Cathedral. Most of Broadgate had gone – there was only the bank with the pillars left.
Joyce Sutton
“I remember the heat. We hadn’t heard much at night because we were underground, but there was heat and dust and noise that day.
“I was young and didn’t really know what was going on, but everyone just got on with it. We had to. I don’t know how we did it.”
Joyce’s sister-in-law Dorothy Sutton, nee Wright, of Wyken, also remembers the night of the Blitz, when she sheltered in the beer cellar of the Hare and Hounds pub in Gulson Road as an 11-year-old.
She said: “We had been bombed out two weeks before the Blitz. We had a house in Charterhouse Road and when the sirens sounded one night we went to the shelter. When the all-clear sounded we went to go back home and a warden asked where we were going and what number we lived at and then he said ‘your house has gone’.
“My house was flattened. We lost everything. We just had what we were wearing. My mum had told me off for wearing my new coat, saying it would get dirty in the shelter, but I remember thinking ‘at least I have my new coat’.
“We went to stay with friends in the day and sheltered in the pub at night. We had mattresses near where the beer barrels were stored. It had mattresses and there were about six families down there and we went top to toe. We took our own bedding but never got undressed we went home for a good wash in the morning.
“The day of the Blitz we had walked to see my dad Alfred, who was being treated for consumption at Hertford Hill near Warwick. He died a fortnight later. I never know how my mum coped – we lost our house and everything in it and my dad.”
Dorothy’s mum May managed to get a house in Northfield Street and find bits of furniture, but Dorothy was to have another lucky escape during the air raids.
A few months later the pub she had sheltered in had a direct hit and the landlord was killed. She said: “I must have been lucky – first my house and then the pub, but I was all right. I didn’t think about dying really, I was too young.”
Looking back on the night of the Blitz, she said: “At the time we didn’t realise how bad it was, it was hard to know from the shelters. It was like any other night, but it started early about 7pm and we thought ‘when is it ever going to end?’
“Then I remember walking into town the next day and everything was just smouldering. I remember heat and noise.
“You can’t imagine it now and I don’t know how people coped, but everyone seemed to muck in and never complain. We never went hungry.”
The day after the Blitz, Joyce and her family set off to walk to Kenilworth after being told it was not safe in the city. They were picked up by a truck and spent the night in the ballroom at the Abbey Hotel, but came back to the city again the next day.
She went to Wheatley Street School, near where Sidney Stringer is now, and she remembers having to do lessons with her gas-mask on to get used to it – and how badly it smelled!
Both women lived through many air raids and Dorothy remembers the spring raids of 1941 and how the city burned that night, and how her sister woke her to take her to safety in a shelter because she had thought it was safe to stay in her own bed for once.
And both women remember how much the city changed that night.
Dorothy said: “It was a lovely old world city, with trams. I was only young, but I remember the town.”
And similar to their fathers’ experiences in the First World War, the two rarely speak of the Blitz or the other bombing raids they lived through, but said they wanted to share their story for the anniversary to let others know.