Roach
Avenue,
Knowsley
Village,
Knowsley
Merseyside, L34
Just 18
months after James Paul McCartney's birth his brother Peter Michael chose to be
born, and (as he quite freely admits in his book 'Thank U Very Much')
"preferring to be brought up in Liverpool, Jim and Mary accommodatingly
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 R.O.F. 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 R.O.F. Kirkby outside Liverpool's 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).
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.
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 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.
Although Mike McCartney has written that the McCartney bungalow was a Pre-fab (a pre-fabricated house) other residents I've spoken to insist they were brick built.
It's possible of course that the pre-fabs were later replaced with more permanent brick built structures after a few years.
These photographs show prefabricated bungalows which would have looked similar to the pre-Fab Paul McCartney's home in Kirkby (if it can be proved that he lived in one.) The pictures were taken in Belle Vale and would have been a familiar sight to Paul and Mike after they were transferred to the local Joseph Williams school from Stockton Wood in Speke.
At the R.O.F. 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 R.O.F. closed in March 1946, having been designated a War Duration Only R.O.F. 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
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.
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!)
