Silvertown's Missing Son: Reported Missing for 15 Months

By Barry Ross

Silvertown's Missing Son is a gripping yet heart-wrenching, true account of a 22 year old youth from London's East End, who went Missing in Action for 15 months during WW2.
It starts in September 1939 at the onslaught of the 55 day bombing of Silvertown where they lived. It then recalls when the whole family was nearly wiped out by the Silvertown TNT explosion, 22 years earlier in 1917, the largest explosion ever to take place in Britain.
Although WW2 forms a back-drop to the story, its essence is how families and soldiers endured whatever was thrown at them, with fortitude and humour. It is a true story of family togetherness and comradeship, returning nostalgically to a time when families and soldiers stuck together to survive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Ross
• Release date: Apr 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781527265066

Book preview

Introduction

Shortly after my father, Albert Ross, died in 2006, I discovered a box of letters hidden away at the back of his wardrobe. The first letter was written by his Aunty Bella, anxious about her other nephew, Arthur, who was Reported Missing for 15 months during WW2.

I was not surprised that my father had never mentioned his brother Arthur to me, even though all the letters showed how much the family loved him.

Coming from a generation that would die rather than mention feelings, he did once let it slip that he thought people should get over depression by standing in front of the mirror and shouting at themselves that they are all right.

Yet, he did occasionally mention Silvertown, the poor, East End dockland area where he grew up with his relatives. His grandfather David and family lived on the North Woolwich Road while his great-uncle James’s family lived close by, in Amelia Street, with a combined total of 20 children between them.

The discovery of the letters drove me, over the following five years, to uncover the story behind them but, just like the letters, the story was parked in a drawer.

In 2020 I was triggered to publish Arthur’s story after I came across a web site that described numerous, highly moving accounts of Arthur’s fellow soldiers.

You are guaranteed to be gripped by Arthur and Albert’s story, from the first page right through to the last, and absolutely sure of shedding a tear even if you won’t admit to it.

Foreword

This is the heart-wrenching account of two brothers, Arthur and Albert Ross, soulmates as youths but separated when Arthur was listed Reported Missing in France at the height of the WW2 hill-top Battle of Cassel, leaving his family in a limbo of uncertainty for 15 months.

Arthur and his fellow Gunners, many of whom were recruited from London’s East End Boroughs of Silvertown and Woolwich, were transported across France to the Franco-Belgian border to confront Germany’s Blitzkrieg assault of tanks, infantry and dive bombers.

Faced with the French and Belgians armies withdrawing on both flanks, Arthur’s 367 Artillery Battery was ordered to withdraw to the hill top town of Cassel, further south. Their mission was to Stand and Fight to the Last Man to protect a section of an escape corridor through which around 340,000 troops would ultimately manage to reach Dunkirk.

Ironically the whole, heart-breaking story very nearly didn’t happen. Twenty-three years earlier, Arthur’s family came close to being blown to pieces when the largest explosion that ever occurred in Britain took place in Silvertown, just down the road from their home.

Chapter 1

Silvertown on Black Saturday

7th September 1940

News Report:

Black Saturday

On September 7th. 1940, London had its baptism by fire from 365 tonnes of high explosive and at least 800 incendiary bomb canisters, each containing 36 1kg fire bombs….

It took the lives of more than 400 Londoners and injured a further 1600. It was a casualty roll drawn overwhelmingly from the old East End.

Albert soon after Arthur was reported Missing in Action

For Albert, the calm of his studies ended in May 1940, when his elder brother and soulmate Arthur, or Artie as he called him, went Missing in Action in France. From then on time dragged interminably, waiting for information about his whereabouts.

On the 7th September 1940, four months later with still no news, Albert was walking down the North Woolwich Road in Silvertown, with its aisle of big, smelly factories backing onto the Thames. Heading home with a fixed, grim expression he reached the family shop but his mind was weary from turning over the same depressing thoughts about Artie.

Just as Albert stepped into the shop, the long, mournful wail of the air raid sirens started in four locations right across the docklands. Once, twice, three times they sounded out but instead of stopping as a practice should, they continued on and on.

The German Luftwaffe had already started bombing England back in May 1940, setting alight the oil installations further down the Thames from Silvertown and Woolwich. Blazing oil gushed from the storage tanks ruptured by high explosive bombs, then ignited by incendiary machine gun bullets and magnesium fire bombs, sending a great black, greasy column of smoke writhing a thousand feet into the sky.

But Hitler, still hoping to persuade England to surrender, had excluded London as a target after May’s bombing. In spite of this U-turn, on the night of 24th August 1940 two enemy planes lost their way, (the Germans claimed), dropping bombs on the East End and killing nine people. The RAF retaliated by immediately bombing Berlin, which pushed Hitler to authorise the Luftwaffe to start bombing London in strength.

On the 7th September it was a lovely, golden summer’s day with the sun shining from a clear blue sky and the local firemen trying to catch a few hours of sleep, having been continuously busy till four am, damping down the fires from a few bombs that had dropped on Canning Town and the Custom House, close by.

All the street responded to the sirens by heading for the air raid shelter on the Oriental Road. Mary and George, Albert’s parents, set off first across the road and soon reached the entrance to the shelter. Albert, running from what looked like a swarm of black flies on the skyline, was not far behind them with his friend Sean.

With the drone getting louder and louder and the dull thud of high explosive bombs sounding behind them, Albert and Sean raced each other down the road. Only feet from the shelter Albert was lifted off his feet and thrown down the air raid shelter steps, the sharp pain of his ear drums bursting and a stinging feeling spreading out all over his back and shoulders.

In spite of hitting his head against the entrance side wall he remained conscious and crawled into the shelter, now packed with over 1000 people, reaching to wipe what he thought was sweat from the back of his neck.

Albert saw that the shelter was full then turned round to look down the road to see it blocked with rubble, and flames belching from the direction of their shop, with no sign of Sean.

An old man, sitting next to the entrance, winced on seeing Albert’s shirt oozing small beads of blood. The tiny, white hot fragments of shrapnel from the bomb had struck him in the back, cauterising and sterilising the entry wounds but not stopping the slow seepage of blood. For years after, the tiny shards of metal would work their way to the surface of his skin and have to be pulled out with tweezers.

The old man pulled himself to his feet and dragged him further into the shelter, shouting to his father that his son was in a bad state.

Then shock took hold of Albert, numbing his mind to the shaking and the noise of buildings collapsing as high explosive and incendiary bombs continued to fall on the area.

What all the people crammed into the shelter did not know was that on that fateful day, Black Saturday, the 7th September 1940, Silvertown had been totally cut off. A cascade of bombs had first fallen on the Ford Dagenham motor works, soon followed by the Beckton Gas Works, the biggest in Europe, then Woolwich and Silvertown.

Woolwich suffered from the bombing as much as Silvertown. Woolwich Arsenal alone was hit by 194 High Explosive bombs, 12 Oil bombs, and countless Incendiary bombs during September.

Civil Defence Record of bombs dropped on Silvertown

In Silvertown, the sight outside the shelter on Oriental Road was apocalyptic. They were trapped between the blazing Royal Victoria and Royal Albert Docks to the north and half a mile of demolished factories on Factory Road and the North Woolwich Road to the south, with tongues of yellow flames flickering from every door and window.

Just down from the air raid shelter, molten tar from a burning factory had flowed across the North Woolwich Road bogging down ambulances, fire engines and the civil defence vehicles, preventing them from reaching Silvertown. The roads were impassable.

The bombs had wrought havoc, creating fires and dense columns of black smoke from the paint factories, chemical works, timber yards and sugar refineries spread the full length of Silvertown and Woolwich. The fire extending across all the Royal Docks soared even higher than the burning timber stacks of the Surrey Commercial Docks beyond Canary Wharf.

Oil had poured into the Royal Victoria and Royal Albert Docks thirty yards away, igniting to create a continuous pall of greasy black smoke, two hundred feet high, that cut off the light as effectively as a theatre safety curtain.

Looking west, towards the East India Dock, the Air Raid Warden saw an almighty explosion. He would find out later that a rum wharf had exploded, with blazing spirit flowing out of the entrances, driving before it a melee of rats.

In one fell swoop the Ross family had lost both their homes, the cottage in the grounds of Spencer Chapman Works on the south side of North Woolwich Road and the shop opposite where their Aunty Bella ran a hair-dressing business and cafe.

Artie & Albert’s Aunty Bella

Their formidable Aunty Bella, who guarded over her five nephews, was a grim-faced spinster who rarely smiled but would die for her boys. Outspoken and blunt she felt that only the best was good enough for them. This led to a split in the Ross family when she told the wife of one of her nephews that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. They never spoke to each other again.

The shop and the Cottage were badly damaged by the explosion, leaving them homeless, but they comforted themselves with the knowledge that none of the other boys had been hurt. They were safe over in Forest Gate, home of an uncle, whom they had gone to visit.

Resigned to the chaos they decided to stay in the shelter. A wise decision because an hour and a half later, at 7.30pm, about 250 more bombers returned bringing the added terror of parachuted landmines, each packed with a ton of high explosive that landed with a blinding flash of light before demolishing whole streets at a time.

Equally disruptive, the bombs damaged telephone and power cables, fracturing gas and water mains. Since the Fire Brigade had no radios or mobile phones in those days the Officers were unable to call for help, relying solely on motorbike riders and messengers on bikes to keep contact.

Albert, Arthur (Artie), James, George, David

The Ross Family boys at Southend, their clothes made by their Aunty Bella. Arthur with his protective arms around Albert

A procession of bombers continued through the night till 4.30am, killing 430 men, women and children and severely injuring some 1600 people. Most of the deaths were not caused by fire but by the direct impact of the bombs collapsing walls, and bricks and stone as flying missiles.

They found out next day that the shelter on Oriental Road, with over 1000 people huddled together, had received an almost direct hit as Albert ran into it, with Sean’s body never being found. Most of the occupants were suffering from shock, debris was blocking the roads and huge fires were raging in the vicinity so ambulance drivers were unable to get through.

In the early hours of the morning, movement of the population rapidly built up, crowding every road out of West Ham and Silvertown with people who had been bombed out of their houses. The day following, they were gradually rounded up in the outer districts and cared for. Chingford alone accommodated 3000 displaced people and collected another 3000 during the ensuing four days.

The widespread destruction and fire damage was so bad that Silvertown soon had to be abandoned as a residential area and handed over to the army for use as a training area to practice house to house fighting.

The only reassuring thought for the family was that they had run to the right air raid shelter. If they had gone to their Anderson shelter in the factory grounds none of them would have survived. The cottage, rented from the company, had been badly damaged by a massive bomb that had landed on the other side of the sulphuric acid factory.

It was three hours before Albert was carried by stretcher to an ambulance and taken to Stratford General Hospital where he remained for two weeks, when he had to leave to release beds for the 1600 severely injured victims of subsequent bombing. On discharge, he joined his parents at Forest Gate, where the family were forced to move.

It would be a while before they managed to visit their home in Silvertown as bombing raids continued for a further 55 days, targeting the docks and repeatedly reviving the fires that the Brigade had not managed to douse.

Firefighters near the Ross home

When they eventually tried to return they had to zig-zag backwards and forwards across West Ham. Walking half a