The Home Guard

Bacup Home Guard were based in Holmes Mill the home guard used reject bullets to practice

with given to them by the Munitions workers of Lumb Hall Engineering also based in Holmes Mill. Each division of the Home Guard was responsible for guarding the roads into Bacup. A division guarded Newkin and Weir B company was responsible for Sharneyford, C company Britannia  and D company Stacksteads.

 

Bacup Home Guard

 

Bacup Home Guard D Company (Mainly)

Names on Back of Photograph

 

From Back Left to Right: H Holt , W Walker , H Evans , R Mayes , G Evans ,G Heckingbottom , J Barcroft , A Pratt , C Pilling , R Wilder , J Bell , T Booth , F Rothwell , H Green , J ? , Quarterman

? Yarwood , ? Yarwood , J Collinge , P Egan , W Booth , ? Quarterman , R W Hall , C Kay , B Miles

H Pilling , W Griffiths , A Triplow , R Slater , A Smith.

 

 

Stacksteads Home Guard

 

Written on back of

photograph:

Stacksteads Company 25th Bat. East Lancs Regt.

Home Guard 1943?

Photo taken at Stacksteads

W.M.Club Company H.Q Bowling Green.

O.C Captain R.W.Hall-Pickup-Dwyer.

Others include Milton Ormerod-Mick Toman-Will Barcroft-Roberts- 2nd Row sixth from Left James Yates.

 

Plans For Defence Of Stacksteads

Below is a sketch of the plans

for the defence of Stacksteads by the home guard during the second world war. It was prepared by the Stacksteads Company of the Bacup Battalion of the Home Guard East Lancs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Government had little in the way of equipment for these new service corps and with this in mind another appeal was made on the 15th June asking for any persons to surrender shot-guns and such to their local Police Stations. Only one was surrended to Bacup Central Police Station.

 

 

 

Bacup Auxiliary Fire Service...

 

Formed at the outbreak of World War 2 in 1939  housed at Pippin Bank in the premises of Rossendale Division Carriage Company. The AFS was made up of men as well as women. Auxiliary firemen from Bacup  responded to calls from Manchester and Liverpool for help with putting out incendiary bomb fires.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

"This Country is at War with Germany"

 

This being the speech the nation heard shortly after 11.20am on the morning of the 3rd September 1939.

Blackout orders came in and one of the first signs that Bacup was at war was painters began painting Kerbstones so that they may show through the darkness that the blackout would cause. At 9-10pm on the 14th May 1940 an appeal was made to British subjects aged 17-65 to register at Police Stations to form a Local Defence Volunteer Force ( later to be known as the Home Guard ) within a few days 132 people had registered at Bacup Central Police Station many more having been thanked but politely refused due to them being too old or too young.

 

The War Effort

 

 

 

Recruiting Lorry of the Civil Defence

 

 

During the war people were encouraged to buy War Savings Certificates to raise money for the War effort.

War Weapons week in December of 1941  raised £242.000.Warships Week in 1942 raised £136,000.

Wings for Victory week 5th June -12th June 1943 raised £220.340.£120.000 being the cost of Three Lancaster Bombers.

Salute the Soldier week raised £206,350. Warship week resulted in the adoption of H.M.S Amaranthus, a Flower Class Corvette one of 300 built for medium distance convoy escorts. Built by Flemming and Ferguson in 1940. She was sold on 1946 and crapped in Hong Kong in 1956.

 

H.M.S Amaranthus

 

Bacup Times February 17th 1945

Bacup's Warship Has Survived Bombs and U-Boats

 

 

 

Identity Cards

 

  *Identity Cards were issues to ever civilian registered on the National Register from 1939-1952.

 

 

*Clarence Willcock, a 54-year-old dry cleaner from suburban north London, must rank as one of the unlikeliest David's ever to take on a Goliath. Mr Willcock was stopped on December 7 1950 while driving his car along Ballard's Lane by uniformed police constable Harold Muckle, who demanded to see the motorist's identity card. Mr Willcock refused. Pc Muckle told him to produce the compulsory card at the local station with 48 hours. "I will not produce it at any police station," Mr Willcock replied.


With this act of defiance, Mr Willcock brought crashing down a giant bureaucracy which had, since the outbreak of World War II in 1939, forced an identity card on every civilian in the UK - man, woman and child.
When Willcock v Muckle eventually reached the High Court in 1951, Lord Chief Justice Goddard said the continuation of the wartime ID card scheme was an "annoyance" to much of the public and "tended to turn law-abiding subjects into law breakers".


Mr Willcock was sent on his way.

 

 

 

German Prisoners of War

POW camps were situated all over North England during the war, one story about German prisoners of war that I have heard, related to some photographs donated to the Bacup Natural History Society showing German troops at rest and in combat. The pictures below apparently belonged to a German POW being held at  a camp in Bury. After the war the soldier who the photographs belonged to married and settled in the area and his wife donated the photographs to the Nat. It  is also said that some of these POW'S helped in the building of the houses on Booth road and Osborne Terrace.

         
         
         
Bacup Times Saturday November 18th 1944
Nazis Recaptured In Rossendale
HIDING IN DISUSED PIG-STY ON MOORS
Two of the three German prisoners who escaped from a camp at Bury on Saturday were recaptured on Tuesday morning at Haslingden. They were hiding in a disused pig-sty on the moors at Grane Heights the sharpness of Mr. J.T Nutter, Heights End Farm, Pickups Bank, led to their recapture.
"I was out on the moors at 9.30am " said Mr Nutter " and left my pony tied up in a shippon belonging to a disused farm while I went over the moors. When I came back I noticed smoke coming from a building. "Then a man came out and began talking to me" .He seemed about 28 and said he was a pole. Among the questions he asked me was about the situation of aerodromes. I twigged who he was and came away with my pony, and found Ernest Roundell, a shepherd, who works for me and told him to keep his eye on the man and not go away. "I went to a telephone and rang up the Haslingden police, and in half and hour they came and got the two men, the one I had seen and another that must have been inside the building. The man I had seen was in civilian clothes and wore a green trilby hat. The other was in air force clothing. They had travelled about 12 miles from Bury, a third man who had escaped with them was recaptured on Sunday.
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Civil Defence

During the war  the Baths became the headquarters of the Civil Defence. The big pool was boarded over so that the room could act as a decontamination and first aid area.

 

 

Members of Bacup's Civil Defence outside Maden Baths.

 

Back Row Left to Right:

Renshaw, Wright, Thornley

J Papworth, P Papworth, Greenwood, Bennett, Spencer, Fenton, G Wynn, Overton, Rothwell.

Second Row:

D Law, J Howarth, J Bridge N Pilling, J Denham, J Savoury M Waddington, ??

 E Cox, A Lord, Laycock, Howarth.

Third Row:

??, ??, E Law,??, MGiddings

A McDermott, J Brown, ??

Garvey, Mrs Griffiths

M Lord, M Lambert, Mills.

Front Row:

Sweetman, ??, Brown

Clayton, Mrs C Newsham

H Lambert, B Kelly, Dr McKinney, T Healey, Lambert, G Burke

Mrs Tann, Holden, Mr Tann.

Men Sitting: E Lord, Barker

Taylor, Pilling.

 

 

 

 

Back Row Left to Right:

C Wright, E Overton, Mills

Second Row:

Lord, Thornley, Sweetman, Tann, Papworth, Taylor

Laycock, Pilling.

Third Row:

N Pilling, J Bridge, G Burke, ??, M Giddings, M Lord, Griffiths, J Howarth, D Law.

Bottom:

H Lambert, B Kelly, ?? Brown

Lambert, Holden, Mrs Newsham, Mrs Tann.

 

 

Bacup Air Training Corps

 

 

Boys enrolling in the Air Training Corps in 1941

Bacup had the distinction of being one of the first towns in East Lancashire to start  recruiting for a local unit of the Air Training Corps.

The Major Alderman T Coates received the first recruits in the Electricity boards showrooms. The first to enrol being 18 year old John Dobson, a slipper worker.  

 

 

274 Bacup Air Training Corps 1941 1961

 

Munitions

 

Lumb Hall Engineering Munitions workers taken in 1941

 

76 People who all played a important part during the war even though they stayed at home. They worked at Lumb Hall Engineering works set up at Holmes Mill Burnley Road. The five men in the centre of the second row are from the left: Manager Clifford Stott , Managing Director Mr John Prior and Directors Messer's James Ireland , Mr William Taylor and Mr Harry Jackson.

 

 

Aluminium Collections

Collection Depots set up to collect in all aluminium new or old  to be sent for making planes were set up in Bacup and Stacksteads. Bacup's collection point was  the shop on the corner of St James Square and  Market Street which had been previously occupied by Greenhalgh Grocery and in Stacksteads the Newchurch road shop formerly owned by T.A.Wood and Sons Plumbers.

Housewife's were encouraged to use less paper to light their fires with so as to make more paper available for pulping whilst  lattice girder bridge that had spanned Burnley Road was demolished and used as scrap for the war effort.