Getting ready
Preparations began in 1937, before most people believed they would be needed. Roadblocks and checkpoints went up on the approaches. The Home Guard was recruited. Air raid wardens were appointed and shelters were dug. Evacuees arrived and had to be found beds. Rationing arrived and had to be lived with. In the workshops, people turned their hands to what the war needed, including making strikers for mines.
The bridge was the reason for a good deal of it. Telford’s crossing was the only one for miles and it carried the road between the Midlands and the Welsh border, which made it something worth protecting and, in the event of invasion, something worth denying to an enemy.
The shelter in the museum garden
One piece of all this survives intact and you can walk into it. In 1940 an air raid shelter was built in what is now the garden of Bewdley Museum, next door to the town’s Post Office and telephone exchange, to protect post office staff and their families. It is one of very few original underground shelters left in Worcestershire.
Its design repays a look. The corrugated metal lining is egg-shaped in cross section, a form chosen to resist blast. It is partly sunk into the ground and covered with earth to absorb flying fragments and debris. At the far end there is a break-out panel marked with a white cross, so that anyone inside could escape if the main entrance were buried. The seating is hard benches, because people might be down there for hours before the all clear.
Why here? The museum’s own interpretation suggests the Post Office may have been considered strategically important, because the telephone lines running to and from Wales passed through the exchange on this site. What the shelter could do was protect people from debris thrown by a nearby blast. What it could not do, and nobody pretended otherwise, was survive a direct hit.
Camp Bewdley
The largest change came with the Americans. A base of around four thousand men was established at Burlish, known to the army as Camp Bewdley and to locals, more sensibly, as Burlish Camp after the nearby farms. One veteran of the area recalled that there were about sixteen American units on the site at its height, and that a good deal of it was medical: ambulance trains brought wounded men to Stourport and Burlish Halt stations, and there was an American military hospital at Wolverley, on the old Wolverley Castle site, now a caravan park. A prisoner of war camp stood on the same ground, out towards the rifle range on the land that is now West Midland Safari Park.
The soldiers were not confined to camp. They used the town’s pubs, they threw a Bailey bridge across the Severn, and they staged a baseball match at Aggborough. In the run-up to D-Day, General Patton came to Kidderminster in late May and inspected his troops, taking the salute outside the Town Hall as they marched down Vicar Street.
The French
At the same time, and a mile out of town, Ribbesford House was serving as the officer training academy of the Free French, with two hundred and eleven cadets who became a familiar and rather glamorous sight in Bewdley’s streets. That story is told separately, because it deserves its own telling.
Paying for it
Some of the most tangible evidence of Bewdley’s war is fixed to the walls of the Guildhall, and all of it is about money. National savings campaigns asked towns to raise sums for a named purpose, and Bewdley kept the certificates.
The first came in 1940, when the people of the Kidderminster, Bewdley and Stourport districts raised enough to gift Spitfire aircraft. The Ministry of Aircraft Production sent a plaque recording that they had “earned the gratitude of the British nations, sustaining the valour of the Royal Air Force and fortifying the cause of freedom”, with a line from Isaiah beneath: “They shall mount up with wings as eagles.”
In Warship Week, from 21 to 28 March 1942, the borough and district adopted a ship. She was HMS Horatio, a Shakespearian class trawler built as a minesweeper, launched in August 1940 and commissioned the following January under the pennant T153. The bronze plaque presented to her, carrying the borough’s own arms, later came back to the town, and a small Worcestershire place two hundred miles from the sea had a warship of its own.
What happened to her is not often told alongside the plaque. That November, Horatio was in the Mediterranean for Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa, escorting a tank landing ship into Oran. On 7 January 1943, less than ten months after Bewdley adopted her, she was torpedoed and sunk off Cape de Garde in Algeria by the German motor torpedo boat S-58. Her commander, Temporary Lieutenant Charles Alfred Lemkey of the Royal Naval Reserve, was lost with her. Only two of the crew survived, Stephen Hooper and George Venables, and they were picked up by the Germans.
Wings for Victory Week followed in 1943, marked with a plaque from the Air Ministry showing a winged figure struggling with a serpent under the motto Per Ardua ad Astra. Salute the Soldier Week came in 1944, and the War Office sent an infantryman in relief beneath the words For Freedom. Four campaigns, four plaques, and a town of a few thousand people paying for aircraft and a warship.
Work and shortage
The wider district retooled. Kidderminster’s carpet industry, the great local employer, turned to manufacturing parts for aero engines, guns and cartridges. In Bewdley itself the war was felt mostly as the accumulation of small deprivations and improvisations that everyone who lived through it remembers: the blackout, the shelters, holidays taken on beaches strung with barbed wire, and the taste of whale meat.
The men who did not come back
The war memorial stands on Load Street, a stone wall with a central panel flanked by curving wings. It was raised after the First World War, and the names of the Second were added to the curved sections afterwards. The inscription in the middle reads: “To the glory of God and in loving memory of the men of Bewdley who gave their lives for their country in the Great War 1914-1919. Pro Patria.”
In 1945 the town breathed out. Most of its young men in uniform came home, and only that one bomb had fallen within the boundary.
Finding out more
The definitive account is David Thomas’s Bewdley at War 1939-1945, published in 2025. Thomas was born in Bewdley and spent forty-two years as a journalist before turning to this. The book runs from the preparations of 1937 to the relief of 1945, records the home front in detail, tells the stories of Bewdley’s soldiers through interviews with their surviving relatives, and closes with a war diary compiled from the pages of the Kidderminster Shuttle. All profits go to Bewdley Historical Research Group. Bewdley Museum also runs Second World War sessions for schools that include the shelter and a genuine hand-operated air raid siren.
