Waterlooville in the Second World War: 5 things you didn't know
Nightly refugees from Portsmouth, a deep shelter on Portsdown Hill, a flying bomb in a wheat field and a decoy harbour controlled from a fort.
In the Second World War, many people from Portsmouth came to Waterlooville and Horndean each night to escape the bombing, sleeping in sheds, garages and temporary shacks. A V-1 flying bomb also crashed in a wheat field outside Waterlooville on 3 July 1944.
During the Second World War, many people from Portsmouth came out to Waterlooville and Horndean each night to escape the bombing, sleeping in sheds, garages and temporary shacks. That is the picture painted on localhistories.org, and it is the first of five wartime stories from the town and the hill above it.
Thousands on the move
The detail about sheds, garages and shacks is a single-source account, but the movement itself is documented. A wartime Ministry of Information home intelligence report records the nightly trek out of Portsmouth, with an estimate of 90,000 people on one night after a bad raid. We have kept to "thousands" rather than quoting a figure we can't tie to Waterlooville itself.
A shelter in the hill
A deep shelter was dug into Portsdown Hill in 1942 for 2,500 people. The Liberation Route Europe page describes ticket entry, its own generator, a medical section and a children's area, and a Portsmouth News piece agrees, though we could only read a summary. The location is Portsdown Hill generally, and we are not claiming it was in Waterlooville.
Forts with a second life
The Palmerston forts on Portsdown Hill were built in the 1860s against a French inland attack. Wikipedia says they were never needed for their original purpose but proved useful as anti-aircraft gun emplacements during the Second World War.
The flying bomb
Just after midnight on 3 July 1944, a V-1 flying bomb crashed in a wheat field outside Waterlooville. Sources put it about a mile or so from the crossroads, with some damage to property and no casualties. We could not open the main PDF, which comes from the Ward family's history blog, so we rely on that blog's excerpt and a Portsmouth News retro column citing Front-Line Havant 1939 to 45.
The decoy harbour
Portsmouth had Starfish decoy sites, also called Q-sites, at Langstone Harbour, Farlington Marshes and Sinah Common, with fires that were oil-fuelled and lit electrically. The Portsdown Tunnels site says the master control post was at Fort Purbrook, and a Geograph photo caption says the same. On 17 and 18 April 1941, it says, over 140 enemy aircraft were drawn away and over 200 munitions fell on Langstone Harbour and Farlington Marshes, "the most successful Q-site operation of the entire war". A caution: those figures come from that one site, and another source says about 90 per cent of the bombs fell on the Hayling Island site. Wikipedia's Langstone Harbour entry does confirm the decoy use.
What we left out
We didn't include the Southwick D-Day story, the Denmead camp story or Beatrice Shilling, who are covered elsewhere.
Portsdown Hill appears in several of these stories, and Waterlooville's own part in them was as a place of refuge. That is a story worth knowing.
Follow Waterlooville.co on Facebook for a new local story every day.
Share this article