A LOVELY new book about life in a North Yorkshire village in the middle of the 20th Century, made from the voices of the people who lived there, is launched today.
Croft’s Crossing has been written by Kate Streatfield who has interviewed nearly 40 of the long term inhabitants of Croft-on-Tees over the last few years to build up a picture of the changing face of the village.
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It is the local picture of a revolution that has been experienced by the whole country. The book opens in March 1930 when there’s a layer of snow on the ground (soon children will be asking “what’s snow?”) and the out-going manager of the Croft Spa Hotel was complaining that there would be few cars on the main road from Northallerton to Darlington to call in and use the petrol pump outside his front door.
People back then lived on the land and foxhunting was bigger, more popular, sport than football.
Then, of course, came the war.
The book, which is launched at 2pm in Croft village hall, tells how on September 1, 1939, Operation Pied Piper began, moving children from big coastal populations, like Sunderland and Gateshead which were expected to be bombed by the Luftwaffe, to the safety of the countryside.
Within a few weeks, 16,160 children had been moved from Wearside to the North Riding, and were being put up in houses where residents had a spare bedroom. The homeowners didn’t have a choice, although they did get 8s 6d per week per child. Most were happy to help, but there was some resentment.
On October 7, 1939, the Darlington & Stockton Times published a letter from an indignant but anonymous householder who complained that city children had been forced upon the country community. “The feeling that liberty is gone,” they wrote, saying how the city dwellers were looking upon the evacuation as a chance to get a holiday before winter.
“Many of the children proved to be verminous and were not even house trained and the mothers were idle, too idle to clean their children,” said the letter-writer.
At least some of the evacuees were under-nourished, had lice and brought other illnesses – Croft accepted 200 which meant that the village school opened in the morning for local children and in the afternoon for the evacuees, although it soon had to shut entirely due to an outbreak of measles.
When the expected bombing campaign did not materialise, the city children seeped back home. By the end of October 1939, there were 9,233 still in North Riding, and by Christmas, most were gone.
Yet in Croft, when Captain Cuthbert Dixon-Johnson died in Tunisia tending his orange groves in November 1939, he gave his large family home of Oakwood, beside the East Coast Main Line bridge over the A167, to the local council “for the reception of evacuees”.
So Sunderland kept a connection with the village. In 1941, when the heating broke down in the nursery school in Hawthorn Towers, Seaham, all 30 pupils were decamped to Oakwood where lessons resumed.
After the war, Sunderland council turned Oakwood into an “open air residential school for debilitated children”. Sufferers of TB, pneumonia or diphtheria, measles or polio were sent there for three or four months to recover in the healthy country air where they got adequate meals.
In 1948, Sunderland even drew up £62,000 plans to enlarge Oakwood to accommodate 100 children, but those plans only received one mention in the local papers, as did a rat which bit a four-year-old child on the face and hand in the dormitory.
Oakwood school closed in 1966 as social and medical conditions improved, and it is now a private house.
Another fascinating story in the book is from January 25, 1951, just after the war. The Canadian airmen had gone home, so RAF Middleton St George had been converted into a major training base for pilots on the Gloster Meteor – Britain’s first fighter jet.
The Meteor had an appalling safety record. In 1950, there were 10 crashes in the North East, in 1951, there were 16 and in 1952, there were 14. Twice in the space of two months in 1952, two Meteors plunged into Morton Palms Farm, on the edge of Darlington, killing their pilots.
Fields from Seaham to Barnard Castle were peppered by Middleton’s Meteors.
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The carnage was so common that the events in Croft on January 25, 1961, merited just four paragraphs in that week’s D&S Times, although they did feature on the front page of its sister evening paper, the Northern Despatch, under the headline: “Jet’s death dive near Croft houses. Children have narrow escape.”
Ian Calvert tells author Streatfield in the book how he was first on the scene. He was leaving school at Hurworth for lunch when “this jet came screaming over so low and so loud it was unbelievable”.
He continues: “I just saw it went over the top of the trees, and then there was a God Almighty explosion. I pedalled like hell to see what it was.
“In the ground there was a big hole, and the earth was heaped up over the road. There was nothing at all you could see, just the hole in the earth and pieces of metal – there was nothing to show that it was a plane. It must have exploded when it hit the ground.”
The Meteor crashed into the steep bank in the field behind the Croft Spa Hotel, just beneath The Terrace, and very close to Richmond Terrace, where the Barkers, Joyce, 13, and Kenneth, 10, were outside their home.
“The children saw the plane coming down with smoke billowing from it and turned to run,” said the Despatch. “When it crashed, the children were still in range of some of the flying debris and Joyce’s coat was splattered with oil and one leg was slightly injured.”
The ground shook and debris hit homes 150 yards away.
Pilot Officer Arthur A McKernan, 24, of Belfast, was killed on impact, and his body was “buried deep in the earth under the flaming wreckage”.
“It is probable that at the last moment the pilot turned his machine into the earth to avoid driving on into the houses which surrounded the field,” said the Despatch. “He seemed to come in over high trees and houses and crash in the field only about 40 yards from the nearest dwellings.”
Kate says in the book: “There is still a local opinion that PO McKernan was a hero, that he steered his plane into the bank in order to miss the primary school which was just a hundred yards to the north of where he crashed.
“That could be true but we don’t have the evidence that would prove it.
“Whatever happened, a young man was killed tragically, and his remains may be there still under the Croft earth.”
A tree grows on the spot where he lost his life.
The day after the incident, The Northern Echo said: “If the machine had hit the houses, loss of life would undoubtedly have been heavy as it was lunchtime and many families were having their meal.”
Through the voices of those who were there, Kate’s book chronicles a very different time when jet planes fell out of the sky on a regular basis and when families left the office, the field and the school and stopped for lunch at home.
Croft’s Crossing: A North Yorkshire parish in the mid-twentieth century, by Kathryn Streatfield is published by Spiral Books for £17. It is launched today in Croft village hall, from 2pm, where it will cost £15. It is also available from the publishers’ website, spiral-books.com. For further information, email kastreatfield@mac.com
At 11am on July 30, Kathryn is giving a free talk in Darlington library about the book and the village. Tickets can be booked at eventbrite.co.uk or by calling the library on 01325-349630.
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