The Penn's of Chiswick Products 4

Cherry Blossom Shoe Polish

Dan & Charles Mason, pioneers of the shoe polish industry in Chiswick

The Penn's of Chiswick Products 4

THE PENN'S OF CHISWICK PRODUCTS Ltd Page 4 of 5

My visits to the various departments as part of my duties, brought me into contact with all kinds of interesting people. Because most of the able-bodied men and young women were in the services, many of the men were partly incapacitated and majority of the women were quite elderly or just out of school. The man in charge of the polish mixing department only had one eye, and with his polish stained skin and clothing and a black patch over his missing eye, he had the appearance of a particularly vicious pirate of bygone days (and often had the manner to match his appearance). One of the few men in the filling department had two eyes, but one of them continually rolled around in its socket and it took a long time before I could talk to him without watching his eye going round and round. Actually, he was a very nice man, who helped me a great deal in learning about the polishes I was testing. Many of the women in the factory had worked for the company for many years, and because they had known my father for such a long time, they took it upon themselves to "mother" me, which was very nice, but sometimes kept me in the factory longer than necessary.

Sometimes it was quite an adventure even to get to or from work. As there was not a convenient means of public transport between our home and Chiswick Products, Dad and I rode our bicycles to and from work. It was a distance of about twelve kilometres from our home at Twickenham to the Chertsey Road factory where Dad was the foreman of the cardboard box printing and manufacturing department and another two kilometres to the Burlington Lane factory. Unfortunately, as we started and finished work at different times, we seldom travelled together. In June 1944, the infamous V1 flying bombs were proving to be quite a problem and on a number of occasions I was forced to abandon my bicycle in a hurry when one was too close for comfort. Icy and snow-covered roads, and almost impenetrable fogs also created difficulties in cycling to and from work, but it was a black car, parked in a section of a blacked out main road on a dark night, that caused my only accident. In this accident, pedalling hard with my head down, I ran into the back of an old model car and was thrown over the handlebars through the canvas-covered hood of the car, finishing up against the back of the front seat. The car, bike, and myself were all quite a bit worse for wear after the accident. I suffered quite nasty cuts to my mouth, the crossbar on my poor bike was severely bent, and the car had a big hole in the hood and a fair amount of my blood on the back of the front seat. I was unable to establish who owned the car and who parked it is such a stupid place (probably because I did not try too hard), but I often wondered what the owner thought when he eventually discovered the condition of his vehicle.

I can recall very clearly my first sight of a V1 flying bomb (or doodlebug, as they were quickly named by the recipients). Dad and I were standing in the street outside 107 Ellerman Avenue on one of our firewatching evenings. The air raid sirens had sounded and we were watching the searchlights and anti-aircraft gunfire in the sky. Suddenly we heard an aeroplane approaching that had a very strange engine noise and as it passed quite low overhead, we saw that the tail of the aircraft was on fire. A day or so later, we realised that we had seen one of the first V1 flying bombs to be sent over England and the flames that we thought were from a fire, were from the jet engine, a type of propulsion of which at that time we had never heard, let alone had seen. The onset of the V1 flying bomb doodlebug buzzbomb on 13th June, 1944, brought a new dimension of attack on civilians. Those that were sent over in the first few weeks of the campaign, dropped immediately the jet engine stopped running, so as soon as the engine was heard to cut out, there was a general scramble to get into a safe place in a fairly similar manner to that experienced in a conventional bombing. Later the V1's were redesigned to enable them to glide on after the engine stopped. This made them a very damaging to morale, the natural tendency being to hope that the V1 would go elsewhere to explode. This was a natural, but very selfish attitude, so different to the concern for other people that had always been so evident previously. A total of twenty seven flying bombs exploded in Twickenham, a larger number than in most other outer western suburbs of London.

On 8th September, 1944, Staveley Road, a street adjoining Burlington Lane, Chiswick, entered the history books by being the place where the first V2 rocket propelled bomb landed and exploded. To minimise the alarm caused by the unheralded explosion, the official explanation was that it had been caused by an exploding gas main. After several more gas mains exploded in various parts of London, it was admitted that the Germans had a new secret weapon which, as it travelled faster than the speed of sound, could not be heard approaching its destination. The damage done to property and morale by the V2 rockets was quite extensive and it was a relief when the rocket launching sites were put out of action by the advancing allied forces.

At the start of my employment with Chiswick Products, I left the Air Raid Precautions Service and joined the branch of the National Fire Service at my father's factory and became his partner in one of the six man crews based there. The main job of the fully trained fire crews was to patrol the factory and grounds at night and during the weekends, and to attend to any fires that may be caused by enemy action. In a week, each crew was usually on duty for two weeknights and one day at the weekend and during these periods, two man partners in the crew were rostered to be on patrol for two hours at a time, unless the whole crew was required for firefighting. The efficiency of the two hourly patrols carried out day and night to all parts of the factory were monitored by keys at specific locations that had to be inserted into a brass and leather cased clock carried by each patrol and handed over to the next patrol at the end of the two hour period. I became quite a hero among the other firemen when I accidentally dropped the clock when climbing a ladder to the roof of the factory and the clock was broken beyond repair. Unfortunately, due to the war, it was impossible to get a replacement clock and the patrols had to operate on an honesty basis.

A rather amusing incident actually occurred before I joined the fire crew at Chertsey Road, but it is worth recounting. As I have mentioned elsewhere, the Chertsey Road factory adjoined the company recreation ground on the banks of the Thames, an important part of which was a beautifully maintained bowling green. One night when German aircraft were targeting nearby factories and railway sidings, etc., a bomb was heard to fall and explode in the direction of the recreation ground and the duty crew rushed on foot to see where it had landed. Although the bowling green appeared to be between the spot where the bomb was thought to have landed and the factory, the members of the crew (all except one, keen bowlers) made sure they kept to the paths around the green to get to the bomb site, but the non-bowler decided to go the shorter way in his heavy boots straight across the green. Unfortunately for the non-bowler (and ultimately for all the bowlers in the company) a relatively small bomb had landed in the centre of the bowling green and the crater had quickly filled with river water, into which he had fallen. After being pulled out of the crater, he received very little sympathy from his fellow crew members"

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