Story one, Jack is now living in Australia and was once an evacuee here. In his own words: " I was evacuated from Brighton on the south coast when I was ten, and for me it was a big adventure, and for the others I suppose. I can't give you any dates, I'm hoepless with them, but going by my age of ten it would be about 1941-2, as I said I first went to live with a family called P, in a small stone cottage, downstream from Laverton. I was not there too long because the son was getting married and they needed the room. Then I moved up the hill to the W's. I was in Laverton for four years and never missed home once. I enjoyed my time there even though when I was not at school I was working on the farm. I remember a plane crash (the one below?) and when I went to explore the next morning with most of the villagers there was just a burnt out shell of what I believe was a bomber."

During the latter stages on the second world war, a quite small Canadian aeroplane - troop carrying type - crashed. Someone I know lived here then and remembers hearing a big bang. The next morning he went up to look at the crash site. There were people there looking , and the bodies were laid in the field covered in white sheets. They were taken to Ringbeck and placed in a granary. All men on board died but not sure how many that was. They were young men from Canada who had just come over here to join the war and never made it.

A few weeks ago we had some caravanners here who are great walkers and walk miles whilst they are here. They got talking to someone who said he was a boy in the area at the time and he went to the crash site to collect any souvenirs, he got the identity dog tag from one man. According to him it turned out that person was wanted by the police in Canada for the suspected murder of his wife and her lover. If this is true it seems like he joined up to escape investigation but got more than he bargained for.

I often wonder if any relatives of these young men ever came over to see the crash site. It is on the highest point before the land falls away down to Galphay and then of course down to York. So if they had cleared that hillside it may never have crashed.

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It would be interesting to know if these were these some of the many young Canadian airmen who are buried at the Kirkby Road cemetery in Ripon. Amongst others there are graves of 8 young men, aged between 19 and 25, who all died on 10th March 1943. Their occupations are on the grave stones, and suggest they were a full crew. Perhaps their tragic death occurred in this accident at Kirkby Malzeard. It may have been reported in the Ripon Gazette, if you know more or would like to investigate please let us know at kirkbymalzeard@hotmail.com

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Story three, submerged tank.

I have heard a story that troops were using tanks to train up on Kirkby Moor, when one of the tanks got stuck in the mud and could not be pulled out. As far as anyone seems to know it could still be there, although that sounds unlikely! Please tell us the full story if you know it!

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Story four, Raymond's memories as an evacuee here

I have read a lot about wartime evacuation over the years, but although I may have missed it, I haven’t ever seen any reference to those that were sent in September, 1939, to Kirkby Malzeard near Ripon, Yorkshire. It is also my profound regret that I haven’t a single photograph recording any aspect of this event, but suspect others may have.

I was the only one out of a family of four boys eligible for sending away. Two of these were of working age and therefore too valuable to the family economy, while the other one was just a baby. Shortly before my ninth birthday, I remember being taken apprehensively by mother to a point near my school, Meanwood Bentley Lane, Leeds, to join many others clutching the minimal luggage allowed and where trams were waiting to take us to the railway station. For security purposes, it was said, no one knew where we were going, not even the parents, who would presumably learn where their offspring were when they heard from them. There would have been a few familiar faces no doubt offering me some comfort, not to mention one of my own Infants’ teachers detailed to accompany us. For some the event had already become a great adventure as they scrambled to the upper deck to wave their goodbyes. I simply recall sitting demurely on the tram lower deck, where I could see the Boys’ headmaster, Mr. Jas. Wade (a force to be reckoned with, my elder brothers had always warned me), who had wedged himself between the rear tram driver’s control columns. With his pipe gripped firmly between his teeth, he chatted cheerfully to the conductor all the way, when I remember thinking, it was all right for him, he would be going back home again after seeing us off on the train. At the station we were packed into corridorless compartments and as we steamed our way from Leeds, the rowdy ones amongst us spent most of the journey leaning out of the window shouting to those doing the same in adjacent compartments.

On arrival at Ripon, we were shepherded down the platform crocodile style and as we passed the waiting room open door, someone handed each of us a carrier bag containing a ration of food items. Outside were coaches to take us on the second seven-mile leg of our journey to Kirkby Malzeard. On arrival we were taken into the Mechanics’ Institute, the village community centre, to await collection by those who had volunteered to accept endangered children from the cities and care for them for the duration of the War. I was informed I would be going to live on a farm and would be accompanied by another evacuee whom I knew well. When our wards eventually arrived with their own two children of similar ages to Leslie Newton and me, we were promptly despatched to Ringbeck Farm up Ringbeck Road, just out of the village, though it must have been something of a crush, getting us all into their Ford 7. Mr. and Mrs. Hobson were very kind to us from the start and insisted that we write postcards home immediately to reassure our parents of our whereabouts. I still have that postcard, on which Mrs. H. also invites my parents to visit anytime.

Norman and Joan were quick to make friends and show us around their favourite farm haunts, such as the best conker trees and secret bird nesting sites. Getting used to the more adjacent confines of a working farm was something else and completely alien to the city housing estate where I had spent the last nine years. The cow house only yards from the living quarters; the gungy middin (we had a dustbin at home), the initial trauma of the outside earth closet only emptied when full (after the luxury of our council house bathroom and water closet), plus no electricity and only a cold water tap in the ’dairy’. The radio was powered by a battery occasionally charged up at the village garage, while the parlour was lit by an oil lamp. We saw ourselves to bed by candlelight and three of us slept in one bed; just a few of the baptisms of fire on my introduction to country life. Thereafter, we were well looked after and well fed, albeit we had to help Norman and Joan with their regular chores. These included carrying heavy buckets of grain to feed the hens two fields away and collecting the eggs. The many hens would see us coming and rush to meet us, when we would try to spill the grain to make them form the shapes of our choice. Another duty was regularly scouring the fields for kindling to light the kitchen open fire. Norman, aged nine, was already a budding farmer and assisted with the milking (by hand) and suffered the odd kick now and then. He could also manage driving the farm horse to harrow the ploughed fields.

Almost immediately we were introduced to the village school under the tutelage of Mr. Holmes, the headmaster. Two or three lady teachers were, I believe, also evacuated with us to help out with the now swollen class numbers and at times use of the Mechanics‘ Institute was made. I remember little about these schooling days, but three things are still vivid in my memory. The first is of the day when the village air-raid siren was to be tested. Mr. Holmes and perhaps others seemed to think this would be terrifying ordeal for the children, so he marched the whole school the length of the village and about a quarter mile up the Laverton road until it was over. The second memory is the school pantomime in the Institute, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, in which I had the doubtful privilege of playing a Councillor and was kept below stage for the whole show until it was time to deliver my one-liner. I was further mortified when I learned that my hosts’ two kids, who came to watch the show, also got through a load of sweets and never saved me one. Thirdly, whenever I have needed to remember how many pounds made a hundredweight, I simply recalled the mental picture of Mr. Holmes chalking the equation on a cupboard, where it remained during the whole of my stay.

Being a long walk to school, we took packed lunches, monotonously of egg and bacon sandwiches, the bacon being cut from home produced joints hung from the parlour ceiling beams. The animal had been slaughtered for home consumption shortly after our arrival and though we were spared seeing its execution, we heard the fatal shot. On venturing to see the dead animal, Mr. H. and the man who had come to kill it were scalding and scouring its body with perforated mushroom-like objects to remove the hair. Later Mrs. H. stored the various cuts on stone slabs in the dairy and smothered them in salt. Following the curing process, pieces were then hung in the parlour, presumably to improve in flavour from the smoky open fire. Other manifestations of rural life in the raw I witnessed were forcing rings through frenzied pigs’ noses with pliers; tying a rope around the emerging legs of an about-to-be-born calf and pulling it out; nursing the runts of a litter of pigs before the parlour fire and disposing of another litter of nine that had all been suffocated by their lazy mother rolling on them.

Just outside Kirkby was an Army camp, from which we had the visit of two or three officers and other ranks. We learned afterwards that they wanted to establish a searchlight battery in the vicinity. There were several of these sited in a wide area around Ripon and we would often watch them practicing after dark, shining their beams on the cloud base. Sure enough, to our joyous excitement, we soon had our very own searchlight just a couple of fields away, complete with a number of men who slept under canvas. While we had observed the initial on-site discussion between the army officers and Mr. H., I heard someone calling out my name from the road. It was my dad, who had cycled on his old sit-up-and-beg all the way from Leeds to see me, some 40 miles. When I ran over to greet him, he promptly handed me a welcome bag of toffees and, being a printing machine operator, a good supply of paper off-cuts for drawing on. Mrs. H. also warmly welcomed him and invited him to stay for tea before pedalling the arduous journey back home.

A more regular visitor was mother who travelled on the occasional coach specially laid on from Meanwood, Leeds, to Kirkby Malzeard. The usual bus driver was the jovial Mr. Harriman. On one of these visits she brought my three-year-old brother Alan and on another occasion one of my old street pals to see me. Mother usually returned home with a few eggs, etc., given to her by Mrs. H. Other one-off visitors were my 16-year-old brother and two or three of his friends. They came on their bikes and got permission from Mr. H. to sleep overnight in the granary over the cowhouse, with its wall-to-wall straw and running rats. My co-evacuee, Leslie, also had his visitors and I recall his father missing the departure of the coach back to Leeds. The last we saw of him was setting out to walk the eight miles back to Ripon in the hope he would then find a bus back to Leeds. Leslie cried himself to sleep with worry that night.

We were never bored living on the farm, with its chores and various play areas such as the barn of baled straw; the flooded bottom field which froze over in winter and helping to set rabbit snares or seek them out with ferrets. We also helped gather harvested corn and put it into stooks and, eventually, into hay stacks. Attempts by village locals to get us to attend Sunday School failed miserably after our first visit and on the odd occasion we were sent to church on Sunday, we would deposit our collection money in the village shop penny bar chocolate machine. Bath night was a riot, consisting of filling a tin bath from the fireside boiler and the four of us using the same water, one after the other. It is doubtful if the last one ever really got clean. Food was plentful, locally caught rabbits regularly being on the menu, for these were pre-myxamatosis days and our fields swarmed with them. We were often offered milk not long taken from the cow, but I never could get used to its peculiar taste. Another strange dish to me were cooked brains, but whether from sheep or whatever, I can’t remember.

Pocket money left for us by our parents was doled out carefully by Mrs. H. and it was always fun going to the village shop to spend it, as at that time confectionery was still available, though increasingly in short supply. It wasn’t until the war began to really make itself felt that sweets then ‘went under the counter‘. These would be only brought out for the shop’s best customers, until nationwide rationing was introduced. I fancy the village shop was Buckley’s, while other village names remembered include Thirkill, the plumber, fellow-pupil Roland Thorpe who lived a couple of farms away and Desmond Pickard. The last I heard of Roland was as a bus-driver in North Yorkshire. Then there was Atkinson’s, who collected the local farmers’ milk churns and, I believe, processed the milk through their cooling machines. For many years following my return home and almost on a daily basis as I made my way to work, I was to see their blue wagons making their way to the bottling plants in Leeds.

The two sisters of my co-evacuee, Leslie Newton, were billetted at Peacock’s farm just up the road. I hated visiting them there because of the aggressive farm geese which always attacked us, beating and scratching our short-trousered legs with their strong wing-power. Apart from being picked up by the family car on arrival at Kirkby from Leeds, I can only remember one further trip in it. This may have been because of wartime petrol restrictions, but we did make the trip to Pateley Bridge one day. The moorland road was heavily gated in those days, which meant either one of us youngsters having to get out to open and close these. It was also custom for any farm youngster living near a gate to open and close it for passing cars, in the hope of receiving a tip for doing so. On this occasion, such a gate guardian received a brusque telling-off by from Mrs. H. for his cheeky remark on receiving what he apparently considered a derisory reward for his services. It was always great fun if, when Mr. H. made other necessary journeys to neighbouring villages such as Grewelthorpe and other farms by horse and flat cart, we were all invited to accompany him. Sometimes the four of us children would be seated on the horse itself for the journey of two or three miles to a farm at Sugar Hill where my hosts’ relatives farmed.

On two occasions I returned home for a few days, probably at Christmas and during the summer school holidays. During one of these visits we were visted by Mr. and Mrs. H and their two children. Norman and Joan had hitherto rarely strayed from their countryside environment and and were held in awe at the hustle and bustle of city life. However, I distinctly remember feeling humiliated when, living on a tram route as I did, they guffawed on their first glimpse of a tram car. Nevertheless, this 1940 era was later to become known as ‘The Phoney War’, so-called because following Britain’s declaration of war on Hitler, whose armies were busy invading Poland, little happened for a year or so by way of hostilities between us and Germany. Therefore several evacuees began to drift back home after about six months in exile, Leslie being one of them. I remained for about a year, then did the same, but at whose behest I can‘t remember. The irony is, that those of us returning home found ourselves just in time to experience the onset of enemy air-raids on Leeds, the very thing we had earlier been despatched so as to escape.

As a teenager and some eight years later, I made my first visit back to the farm with a friend on our bikes. We were made very welcome and fed like royalty. My next visit was as a married man with a family, by which time Norman had his own farm locally and Joan was married and living up north. My last visit was many years after Mr. & Mrs. H. had died and to find Norman, his wife and his two full-grown sons running their own spread just a short distance from his boyhood home. Sadly, I have more recently learned that Norman has now gone to join the family on that great farmstead in the sky.

Now, almost seventy years on, my period of evacuation at Kirkby Malzeard is a most fond and vivid slice of my formative years and would like to think the foregoing memoirs might stir others to make contact. Who knows? Maybe we could organise a reunion in the Mechanics’ Institute!

Raymond Hawkshaw,

Harry Hobson c1962

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If you have any information or photos we can add to these pages please contact kirkbymalzeard@hotmail.com.