How Stanley Unwin and Uncle the elephant won the war

Before he became a performer, Stanley Unwin worked on the technical side of radio:

In 1940, Stanley successfully applied for a job at the BBC working on transmitters as a 'key thumper'. The Second World War was now underway and the Corporation desperately needed Morse operators across the country so he went off to do his bit at the Borough Hill transmitting station in Daventry.

Writing the foreword to the history of the station - Daventry Calling the World - in 1998, Unwin remembered that:

All of us at Daventry belonged to the Home Guard, having daily drills and rehearsals for potential air raids. A password was given each time a shift changed.

And there were air raids:

In 1942 a daylight raiding German plane strafed the buildings where we were ensconced, causing me to dash under the desk in the transmitter room. Mr Bill Gilbert, of Middlemore Farm, Daventry, informed us that it was a Dornier 215 fighter bomber. 

During the blitz on Coventry the drone of the raiding bombers accompanied the sound of the BBC monitored programmes as the incendiary bombs illuminated the horizon. Even the buzz of falling shrapnel from the anti aircraft fire could be heard on the transmitter site.

But Stanley Unwin wasn't the only giant of the British nonsense tradition at Daventry during the war. 

One of his grandchildren write about the Rev. J.P. Martin, author of the Uncle books:

With the beginning of the second world war he was minister in Daventry to the BBC engineers who were transmitting to the Empire at war and across occupied Europe.  Before the war they had secret experiments in the development of radar, the weapon which enabled the Spitfires to win the Battle of Britain. German planes crossed his Northamptonshire skies to destroy Coventry and its cathedral. ...

My mother Stella with my brother Andrew and myself was evacuated at three hours notice because Colchester was the initial target for Hitler’s Operation Sealion for the invasion of Britain in 1940. We were the most fortunate of refugees in Daventry with Nancy and J.P Martin. As a child one was always being told Uncle stories which J.P. Martin had dreamed up in the night.

It was exciting to see J.P. Martin collected in a jeep as a chaplain to conduct services at the army munitions depot at Weedon, which had been built in the Napoleonic wars. He was preaching again to men who again were fighting for freedom, dying in yet another war. Little did he think when he had volunteered as a chaplain in 1918 that he would be talking to his own sons, both born in the first world war and now of an age to be killed for their country.

Did Unwin and the Revd Martin meet? Were they friends? I'm sure they would have got on.

How the Ministry of Defence stiffed Weedon Bec Parish Council

Last year I blogged about the discovery of live hand grenades on a recreation ground at Weedon Bec in Northamptonshire.

Then the BBC said the Ministry of Defence was examining ways to "provide financial support to the parish council".

Now BBC News says it has given the council £500,000 to pay for the clearance work.

That sounds generous, but it is not. Since the discovery, the site has needed 24-hour security, which the parish council has has to pay for.

This has meant an extra £250 a year in council tax for each household.

The BBC quotes the council's chairwoman Zoe O'Toole:

"I have lost hours and days of sleep over this. It's horrible as we have had to increase council tax in the village and that has made people cross."

Weedon is a village with strong military connections. It was the site of a barracks and of the Royal Ordnance Depot.

Weedon Bec's military history comes back to haunt it

Back in July 2013 I photographed the former Royal Ordnance Depot at Weedon Bec in Northamptonshire.

Today came news that there is still ordnance in the village - under a children's playground.

BBC News reports:

A parish council fears it could be facing bankruptcy over the £1m cost of clearing a mound where two World War Two hand grenades were found. 

The mound near a play area in Weedon Bec, near Daventry, was being cleared by the parish council in July when the explosives were found. 

The bomb squad was called but the council found the cost of clearing the site had risen to more than £1m.

The report goes on to say that the mound is thought to contain waste from "nearby Weedon Barracks," though these were demolished in the mid 1950s. They stood next to the Royal Ordnance Depot.

It also reports the Ministry of Defence says it is "examining ways" to "provide financial support to the parish council".

And quite right too.

I'm all for grazed knees, but live hand grenades are probably going a bit far for a playground.

Patrick Leigh Fermor at Weedon Bec

While in Shropshire I read Artemis Cooper's Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure. Cooper has clearly succumbed to the Paddy Fermor legend, but the biography is so good that it provides ample material for readers to form a less favourable view.

Because of one of my recent days out, I was struck by the opening sentences:

The village of Weedon Bec in Northamptonshire was an unlikely setting for paradise, but for Patrick Leigh Fermor the years he spent there as a small child were among the happiest in his life. The people he lived with were not his family. While surrounding him with love and warmth, they imposed no constraints and made no demands.

This is typical of the strange arrangements that Empire required of children and parents - often with less happy results. Artemis Cooper is unable to establish the relationship between the young Paddy's parents in India and the Martin family in Weedon with whom he stayed.

But she does provide a good picture of the complicated geography of Weedon Bec:

It was a big village divided into three parts. The cottages and smallholdings of Upper Weedon were sunk in green fields. The church and village school were in Lower Weedon, whilst busiest of all was Road Weedon, which straddled the old turnpike between Northampton and Daventy. This was where the Martins lived, on the main road ... with shops and pubs on either side.

And she writes about the Royal Ordnance Depot:

Road Weedon was dominated by Weedon Barracks and the huge complex of the Royal Ordnance Depot. Set up for the storage of arms and ammunition during the Napoleonic wars far from possible landing sites on the coast, t had its own well-defended branch of the Grand Union Canal to secure safe delivery of its stores. ... 

When the First World War ended in November 1918 Paddy-Mike was almost four and Margaret almost twelve. They stood in the road and saw the German prisoners in carts on their way back to Germany - they wore rough grey uniforms with big red diamonds on their backs, so they would be easily identified if they tried to escape.

And her (and Fermor's) last word on the village is this:

His memories of Weedon became greener and more rural as they receded into the past. The Royal Ordnance Stores faded, as did the parade ground and the shops, the pubs and traffic of the High Street. 

What was left was "a background of barns, ricks and teazles, clouded with spinneys and the undulation of ridge and furrow ... I spent these important years, which are said to be such formative ones, more or less as a small farmer's child run wild: they have left a memory of pure and unalloyed bliss."

The building that's afraid of the dark

Medieval buildings in Weedon Bec

This is the Old Bakehouse in Church Street, Weedon Bec. Parts of it date back to the 16th century.

The village church is hemmed in between canal and railway embankments and suffers from an unsympathetic modern extension, but the west tower in Norman and its doorway and window are striking. The body of the church was rebuilt from 1825 and manages to look more interesting in this photograph than it did in the flesh.

Visible Vinyl, Road Weedon

The village of Weedon - or Weedon Bec to give it its full name - has a complicated history and geography.

The medieval part is divided into Upper Weedon and Lower Weedon, while the settlement along the A5 is known as Road Weedon. The Royal Ordnance Depot once stood in fields between them.

I love the A5, with its hotels placed at every major junction - a relic of the days when a road journey from the provinces to London often included an overnight stop.

Road Weedon, which stands on it, was clearly once a major coaching centre. Today it is a centre for the antiques trade, which keeps most of the shops in its unexpectedly urban high street occupied.

I was particularly taken with the little building that houses Visual Vinyl. The owner (from whom I bought an Ashley Hutchings DVD) said it was once a bank, and that looks right to me.

Royal Ordnance Depot, Weedon

I was so entranced by the glimpse of the long-vanished Weedon station at the end of my Deltic video that I went to see the village today.

The station has long vanished, but there are substantial remains of the Royal Ordnance Depot there and also traces of the railway and canal branches that served it. The village once had a barracks and 'pavilions' that were rumoured to be intended as a place of safety for the Royal Family if Napoleon invaded.

Modern housing development has encroached on the site, but the existence of public roads has the effect of making the far end of the site (where the explosives were once stored) easier to approach.

The first photo shows the gatehouse for the complex. I was pleased to find that its clock still chimes the quarters.

Deltics at Weedon - and a lot of other places

Pardon my anorak but, following last week's short film of five Deltics at Stalybridge, here is some footage (rather a lot, actually) of them in their pomp.

My favourite spot for watching them was Retford, where the boys taking numbers called each other "thee" and "thou".

There is a point of interest right at the end of the film where you see Weedon station still standing. Wikipedia says it closed in 1958 and was demolished soon afterwards.

Weedon is the site of a military complex from the Napoleonic era that was used as an ammunition store in World War II. Hence, perhaps, the substantial station for a rural era.