MCrosby

Published at 01:00, Thursday, 25 October 2007

HE WAS a Newcastle lad born and bred, but when he stepped foot back in Whitehaven, 72-year-old Tom Coyne, had a strange sense of homecoming.

Tom was immediately transported back to the 1940s when he was a boy in short trousers, playing on the street with cap-guns and catapults.

He spent five of his childhood years growing up in Whitehaven as a wartime evacuee, sent away from home to live amongst strangers to avoid the bombs.

Memories from more than 60 years ago came flooding back thick and fast especially when he revisited the places he had known in the past.

Sadly, Tom died on October 12, just four days after he had been in Whitehaven telling his interesting story to The Whitehaven News.

It was his fourth and final visit to Whitehaven in recent years, having first returned to the town in 2000, more than 50 years after he had left it as a boy of 10. Something kept pulling him back.

A retired gentleman, a father and grandfather, Tom latterly lived at South Shields with his wife Diane, but retained much affection for Whitehaven, where he was billeted, between the ages of five and 10, with the Finnegans of Ennerdale Terrace.

Tom had been parted from his Mam, who was back in Newcastle, his Dad, who was at sea, his younger siblings and the rest of his family and friends. His elder brother, Bob, was with him at the outset, but after 18 months Bob was returned to Newcastle, needed at home to give help to his mother, coping alone in air raids with two younger children, one a baby.

In 1940, the five-year-old Tom had just started school in Newcastle when news came that he and Bob were to be evacuated. “How this decision was reached I will never know,’’ he said. “We were all trundled to Newcastle Central Station with our luggage tags fixed to our lapels and a pillow case, made to look like a sailor’s bag, containing our few belongings.

“I think it was an aunt or one of my mother’s friends who accompanied us to the station and saw us off. I can’t remember much about the journey but the train was packed.’’

When they arrived at Bransty Station, the evacuees were transferred to a bus that “climbed up a steep hill and stopped half way. This was Ennerdale Terrace, which was to be my home until the war was over,” said Tom, who had been concerned to find the area looking a bit depressed in contrast to how he had known it in the 1940s when all the houses were smart and tidy.

“We all stood on the pavement and those in charge were allocating children to the people who had started to congregate. Me and Bob were waiting anxiously to see who we would be put with. Eventually an elderly lady and gentleman took hold of our hands and told us to go with them.’’

This was Jack and Elizabeth Finnegan, a childless couple in their 50s, who were prepared to give the brothers a good home during those troubled times.

Jack Finnegan had once been a publican, landlord at The Stump (Castle View) on High Road, but by that time was employed at Smith’s paper mill at North Shore and at one time took young Tom on a guided tour of the factory.

“We were starting a new life, and strange as it may seem I can’t remember being sad or missing home. Mr Finnegan was very kind and loving – he wanted to adopt me, as they were childless. Mrs Finnegan, who was very efficient in the house, which was always nipping clean, was less affectionate. I think it was maybe in her mind that I would be going home and she didn’t want to get too attached.

“I started school at St Mary’s on Kells and transferred to St Begh’s. We made many friends among the local boys. I particularly remember George Crellin: his mother would include me if they were going to St Bees for the day or visiting relatives.

“Sadly George’s mother died in November 1944 when she was still a young woman.’’

Tom had recently managed to renew contact with George, who now lives in Yorkshire. He also remembered a lad called Jackson who lived next door and Morton Irving, who was in a wheelchair, but who was always included in boyhood play. Morton’s father drove a wagon delivering lemonade, recalled Tom.

He also had his “evacuee friends’’ who had been placed with families all over town.

“One lad was living at the local slaughterhouse, but I can’t remember his name. And another, Paul Costello, who had gone to the same school as me in Newcastle, only lived a few doors away. Also on Ennerdale Terrace was Billy Connolly, who lived with Mr and Mrs Curnow and their daughter Maureen, who later became a teacher at St Begh’s School.

“I know that Billy was eventually adopted by the Curnows. I recall that when we first went to Whitehaven one of Billy’s parents was deceased, and sadly the other one died, leaving him an orphan.’’

Many experiences stuck in Tom’s mind but one stood out: the day in October 1943 when a plane on a training flight from Millom crashed onto the Brows, killing five young airmen. Tom, then aged eight, was first at the scene.

“I was out on the street playing with one of those toy cap bombs where you throw them into the air and they land with a bang. As I looked up I saw what I though was a load of cardboard floating down from the toy bomb, but I realised it was the plane breaking up and heading into the Brows. I raced along to the Brows; it was not a pretty sight. I could see bits of the broken Avro Anson plane and the bodies of the airmen. I think a policeman arrived on a bicycle and then the crowds started to turn up.’’

As he grew older this long-ago incident became a bit of an unsolved mystery for Tom, until he made contact (via BBC People’s War) with Joseph Ritson and then Joseph’s uncle John McCrickett. In 2005, Joseph, of Valley Park, Whitehaven who had researched the incident, was able to tell Tom all about it, and Uncle John had known quite a few of the people from Tom’s childhood past and was able to track some of them down, including the Toners, relatives of Mrs Finnegan and Maureen Cottier (née Curnow).

“John knew many of the old neighbours from Ennerdale Terrace, such as Mrs Wilson, Mrs Slack and Mrs Wilkinson. And Maureen Cottier and I met up and remembered together the things we did and the friends we had known as children in the war years. It was wonderful.’’

(Joseph and John both travelled over to the North East for Tom’s funeral last Thursday.)

Another escapade occurred on the sea front when Tom almost drowned in a deep rock pool. “You could walk up the street, straight past the Catholic church and onto the sea front then, which was made up of huge boulders and large pools. I must have slipped and fallen into the water – my friends were shouting for help and all I saw were two long legs bounding across the rocks and being pulled from the water. I got a lecture when I got home ’cos me clothes were wet.’’

Sadly, while Tom was a boy in Whitehaven, his father Tom died, one of 36 men killed when his ship the MV Neptunian was torpedoed in the Northern Reach in September 1940, just months after Tom had been evacuated to Whitehaven. But Tom had never been told about it and was to discover the devastating news a couple of years later when he came across a discarded letter at the Finnegans.

“I was eight at the time and no-one ever sat me down and told me my father was dead. And my dad never saw his youngest child, my sister Geraldine, who was born three months before he was torpedoed.’’

In later years Tom was to hang on to the very few memories he had of his father, a merchant seaman – one time arriving home with a huge stalk of bananas and on another occasion bringing a German-made pram (complete with swastika motifs on the side) for the soon-to-be-born new baby!

“My mother in her naivety wondered why people were throwing horse manure at her and we all had a laugh about it when we were older.’’

Mrs Finnegan had relatives who visited from London to escape the Blitz and Tom’s mother also visited a couple of times. Other relatives came from Barrow and would all make a fuss of the little evacuee. The Finnegans’ air raid shelter was a steel table in the front room!

Tom said: “As hostilities were coming to an end I made a couple of journeys home. Mr Finnegan would take me as far as Carlisle and would meet me there on the return journey. Among my last memories of Whitehaven were those of Jim, a nephew of Mrs Finnegan’s who was a soldier and stayed with us before returning to barracks.

“At Christmas Mr Finnegan would take me with him to the pub and one year he got someone to make me a large bus complete with headlamps that I used to pull around on a bit of string.

“Most of the teachers at St Begh’s had come over from the North East and settled here. One who I remember well was Miss Davine (later Mrs Daley). I recall her saying to me after I had been naughty in class and had been on a trip back to Newcastle : ‘I cried when you left, but now I wish you had stayed away!’’

When Tom left Ennerdale Terrace for good he was 10 and it was early 1945. “Mr Finnegan was ill when I left and said he always wished that he could adopt me. Sadly, he died in 1947.’’

Mrs Finnegan was to die later in the late 1960s and Tom regretted he had never returned to see her when he was grown up, though he did correspond.

In adult life Tom spent 16 years in the Merchant Navy before joining American chemical company Rohm and Haas at Jarrow. He retired in 1992. He leaves his wife Diane, one daughter and two grandchildren. It was the family’s wish that following his sudden death we should still publish Tom’s story.

Published by http://www.whitehavennews.co.uk