Dramatic home front photos show life of a family at war

At the height of the Blitz, the Roden family went to bed with steel helmets at the ready. Their living room ceiling was braced with stout oak beams to try to prevent a collapse in case of a bomb hit.

Young Sylvia was already well practised in wearing her gas mask. And dad Walter, a grocer in Bridgnorth, was doing his bit for the war effort as a Special Constable.

And we owe a debt to Walter, a keen photographer, for a remarkable legacy in the form of evocative images which capture the spirit and drama of those dark days.

The danger was very real. One picture shows a bomb site in Bridgnorth – in August 1940 a German raider unloaded a string of bombs over the town and two people were killed.

Others show family members on the edge of a massive bomb crater near Broseley.

We can bring you these photos thanks to Walter's daughter, who is now Mrs Sylvia Stubbs, living in Ellesmere – she celebrated her 91st birthday on October 2 – and also her son Jonathan, who is from Shrewsbury.

With their help, and also that of Jackie Gurden, of Shrewsbury, the middle daughter of the late Geoff Parfitt, a former curator of Shropshire Regimental Museum, we can piece together the background story to the photos.

A little while ago we published wartime scenes featuring crashed German bombers in Shropshire during the Blitz, and a Messerschmitt 109 fighter on display in the car park of Bridgnorth's Majestic cinema.

These had been shared with us by Shrewsbury aviation historian and photographer Michael Davies. Michael recalled he had copied them at the request of Mr Parfitt in the mid-1990s, but did not know where they had come from originally.

It turns out these too were part of Walter's collection and the little boy prominently featured in many of the images was his son, Roger Roden.

Geoff Parfitt was a long-time friend of Sylvia and her husband Peter and was at the time liaising with Sylvia for a supplement showcasing her dad's wartime photos. This was published in the Bridgnorth Journal in December 1995.

Alas, much of Walter's collection has mysteriously disappeared relatively recently.

"I'm afraid the bulk of his work has gone the way of all flesh now," said Jonathan, who recalls there being five or six other albums, all full, at his mother's home.

"It's a crying shame. I've been through the house and I can't find them. We just don't know what's happened to them."

The Rodens were dad Walter, mum Daisy – "real" name Ruth Caroline Roden, nee Jones – and children Sylvia, who was born in 1927, and Roger, born in 1933, who both attended Bridgnorth Grammar School.

Their grocer's shop was at 72 High Street in Bridgnorth, and the family lived at the back of the shop.

"My father bought us all very posh gas masks which we never wore in action, but had to take to school," recalled Sylvia.

"For a couple of years we had to sleep every night on the sitting room floor. We had air raid warnings night after night in Bridgnorth, and my father would be on patrol with newsagent Bob Foxall and butcher Tom Wormington.

"They used to get very tired and it was decided that they would take alternate nights on duty. On the first night of the new pattern my father stayed in bed and Bob Foxall was on duty – it was the first time for nights that my father had slept in his own bed.

"We were woken by one hell of a noise. My mother dashed up the stairs and said 'they have come' and my father came downstairs with his trousers on back to front.

"I can remember a stirrup pump, sand and buckets of water in the hall at the time.

"As my father came downstairs Bob Foxall shot up the side entry of the shop telling us to come to the air raid shelter which was under the Palace Ballroom (later Woolworths) and we were shepherded across the road."

A stick of bombs had fallen across the town, the largest of which landed on Squirrel corner.

"Every time there was an air raid warning afterwards over the next few weeks we used to go to the shelter over the road."

Sylvia's father died in 1989, and her younger brother Roger, who features in so many of the pictures, died in 2009.

Jonathan said: "He moved to south Shropshire, around Cleobury Mortimer, and then to North Wales, and since his death Roger's wife has gone back to Cleobury Mortimer.

"He worked in the steel trade, as a seller, I think."