Island Life Magazine Ltd December 2014/January 2015 | Page 39

INTERVIEW

Toogood and my grandfather Edward
William Toogood, and I remember seeing
their initials scratched on the bricks of
one of the walls at school. My family can
be traced back to living on the Island
since the mid-1600s.”
During the Second World War Peter
recalls how as an eight-year-old he
saw bombs dropped on and around St
Helens. He said: “One hit the corner of the
green, one house was damaged and the
Woodnutt boat yard in Bembridge was
often a target. As kids we virtually lived on
the beach, and I remember watching the
German aircraft bombing Portsmouth.
“We often went down to Bembridge
harbour looking for shrapnel and
souvenirs. We swapped shrapnel from
shell cases like kids would swap picture
cards these days. One German bomber
crashed nearby and my mates and I got
there even before the troops arrived.
“We were also down there one day when
an Icelandic trawler, which had been taken
over by the Navy, was moored out near
Spitbank Fort. Suddenly a German plane
came over from Bembridge direction,
dropped a bomb straight down the
trawler’s funnel, and she sank within five
minutes. All you could see were two masts
above the water.”

"I became a ship’s
joiner, making all the
furniture for a boat
called Perpetua, which
at the time was the
biggest fibre glass boat
in the world."
Peter left school at 14, and after being
told by his mum to remain on land he
worked for painter and decorator Charles
Frederick Wade in St Helens. The firm
expanded when men were demobbed
after the war. He worked with a joiner
named William Taylor, and did a six-year
apprenticeship as a carpenter and joiner.
He continued: “When I reached 20 I
did my National Service in the Air Force,
signing on for three years. I couldn’t be
a joiner in the Air Force, so I worked in
a bomb dump near Andover, servicing
bombs and depth charges. The war
hadn’t long finished, and bombs were

stacked in woodland over many acres.
We had to cut down hedges and
brambles to find some of them.
“The bombs had been placed there
ready for the war, but had never
been used, so we had to put them
on trolleys, take them into sheds,
where they were cleaned, repainted
and I put brass plates on the bomb to
indicate what it was filled with. The
bombs ranged in size from 1,000lbs to
12,000lbs, and when defused a lot of
them went for scrap.
“I was there for two years, and by the
time I left we had still only got about
halfway through the thousands of
bombs that were there. I also worked on
Lancaster bombers for a while, and even
managed to go up for a flight on one of
them.
“After two years, the RAF wanted
volunteers to work in the carpenter’s
shop and I got the job making furniture
for the officers, and even built a bar in
the officers’ mess. I came back to the
Island most weekends. I was with a lot
of Welshmen, who couldn’t afford to go
home for weekends, so I paid them to do
my shift. I was still in the Air Force when I
married Evelyn, in 1952.
“We lived on a house boat in Bembridge
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