Roach Avenue,
Knowsley Village,
Knowsley
Knowsley Village,
Knowsley
Just 18 months after James Paul McCartney's birth his brother Peter Michael chose to be born, and with Mike, as he quite freely admits in his book Thank U Very Much "preferring to be brought up in Liverpool, Jim and Mary accomodatingly moved back across the water" from Wallasey.
Peter Michael, like Paul, forever to be known by his second name, was born in Walton Hospital "at ten o'clock on the cold morning of January 7th 1944".

Peter
Michael McCartney
Asked
in 2015 what his earliest memory was Paul replied:
“I
remember when we were living in Knowsley, Liverpool having my photograph taken
with my brother. I think it was probably
by a professional photographer for the family album but I remember I was not
all that keen on being made to pose. However, it stuck in my memory ever
since.” (paulmccartney.com)

The
McCartney brothers in 1944. Paul looks
overjoyed.
On
leaving D. Napier and Son, and with the Cotton Exchange still closed because of
the war, Jim found work at ROF Kirkby (Filling Station No.7), the Royal
Ordnance Munitions factory in Knowsley. This was then a rural area on the
outskirts of Liverpool specifically chosen as the site for the new works in the
hope that it would reduce the potential damage from any accidental explosions.


Completed
at a cost of around £8,500,000 the factory was quite staggering in scale,
consisting of more than 1,000 buildings, 18 miles of roads (7 miles of which
could be classified as main roads) and 23 miles of railway lines with a station
for personnel and shunting sidings for goods. Due to the processes involved in
explosive filling, the buildings were widely spaced and in some cases were
mounded up to the eaves to minimize the effect in the event of an explosion
taking place.


ROF
Kirkby (above)

A recruitment drive for ROF Kirkby outside
Liverpool Town Hall
In July
1940 Lawrence Gale from the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich was appointed as Superintendent, taking 9 staff with him to
Kirkby. When the first munitions rolled off the production line in September
1940 there were only between 50 and 100 employees. This had risen to 10,000 by
the summer of 1941 and by the time Jim McCartney started work here he was one
of around 23,000 employees, most of whom were women (see below).

Women
Medical
treatment rooms were built onsite in order to cater to such a large
workforce. In order to house these
employees, 200 houses for key workers were built in the area and a YWCA hostel
was built near Kirkby station to house 1000 women.
With
the new job came another kind of abode for the McCartney family. Whether they
were allocated one of the new purpose built houses is unclear. What is certain
is that following Mike's birth he was promptly taken to their new prefabricated
bungalow home in Roach Avenue situated on the nearby Maypole Estate.
Roach Avenue in 1952

The pre-fab estate lay between School Lane and Knowsley Lane and was known to the locals as "the Bungalow Estate" or simply "The Bungalows". The roads were named Homer Road, Penrhyn Road, Wheat Road, Croft Road, Alt Road , Roach Avenue and the fantastically titled Tingle Peg Lane, and sat behind Maypole Farm, close to where the green is in Knowsley Village today containing the war memorial.

Site of the Maypole Estate, today an industrial estate
The whole estate was demolished in the 1960s, obliterated by the industrial estate and only remembered today by the small cul de sac of new properties off School Lane called Maypole Court, on the left of the screenshot below.


The pre-fab estate lay between School Lane and Knowsley Lane and was known to the locals as "the Bungalow Estate" or simply "The Bungalows". The roads were named Homer Road, Penrhyn Road, Wheat Road, Croft Road, Alt Road , Roach Avenue and the fantastically titled Tingle Peg Lane, and sat behind Maypole Farm, close to where the green is in Knowsley Village today containing the war memorial.

Site of the Maypole Estate, today an industrial estate
The whole estate was demolished in the 1960s, obliterated by the industrial estate and only remembered today by the small cul de sac of new properties off School Lane called Maypole Court, on the left of the screenshot below.



Jim
would have found himself working the three shift system employed in the factory
to ensure that continuous production was maintained. His arrival and
departure from the site was assisted by a railway system which carried the
workers to and from the factory as they began or finished their shift.
The
McCartneys did not stop here long which probably was something of a relief to
both Jim and Mary. Despite the aforementioned safety measures accidents did
still occur. Only a month after
Michael's birth an explosion at the factory killied two people. A second explosion on September 15, 1944
left 14 dead, 11 injured and enough rubble to bury 4,000 bombs. It took three
months of work to clear the site.
As a
result of their short term residence very little is known about the McCartney's
time in Kirkby, Paul and Mike obviously being too young to have formed any
memories of it themselves in later years. Indeed, despite much research I've
only been able to discover that their next door neighbours in Roach Avenue were
called Hilda and Brian Rawson. Neither
they, nor any of the other residents appear to have retained any memories of
the McCartney family as I'm sure somebody would have come forward by now.

Young
Michael in the arms of his father Jim. Paul holds on tight to Mother Mary.
The ROF
closed in March 1946, having been designated a War Duration Only ROF. Remarkably it had produced around ten per
cent of ALL the ammunition used by Britain during the Second World War.
After
the war the site was developed by Liverpool Corporation as an industrial estate
and played a large part in the growth of Kirkby from a population of barely
over 3,000 in 1951 to over 52,000 by 1961. Today only a few remaining factory
buildings can still be found on the industrial estate and the surrounding area.


The
Girls of ROF Kirkby (above) and a poster promoting British ammunition
manufactured at the factory (below)
The
aerial view near the top of this entry and the six below come from the
incredible Britain From Above 1919-1953 archive. Photographed in 1947, the
immense scale of the factory, and the impact it
had on the surrounding landscape is clearly evident.


By
Spring the McCartney's were on the move again, returning to Jim's birthplace,
Everton and another new home, a flat in a tenement block named Sir Thomas White
Gardens.
Sources:
McCartney
family photos (C) Paul and Michael McCartney
Thank U
Very Much: Mike McCartney's Family Album is an essential read, currently out of
print (How about a new version Mike?)
Copies can still be found here:
http://www.amazon.com/Thank-Very-Much-McCartneys-Family/dp/0586049207
English
Heritage: Britain from above is an invaluable source of aerial photographs from
1919-1953, having recently completed the conservation, digitisation and
cataloguing of the earliest 95,000 images in the Aerofilms Collection. You can lose hours on their site here: http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/
The
site of ROF Kirkby today: http://nwex.co.uk/showthread.php?t=5567
Thanks to Peter Hodgson for the map of Roach Ave (We got there in the end!)
Thanks to Peter Hodgson for the map of Roach Ave (We got there in the end!)