Description:Sergeant-Major Percy Bloor in his Home Guard uniform, back garden of Bankside, Cronny Bank, Cheddleton.
Percy Bloor's time with the Home Guard, as told to his grandson Peter Bloor by Percy’s son Roger Bloor
Percy joins the Local Defence Volunteers
Immediately Sir Anthony Eden had finished his broadcast announcing the formation of the Local Defence Volunteers, later the Home Guard, the headmaster in Cheddleton, Jack Hedley, knocked on Percy’s door at Bankside on Cronny Bank, told him that he was taking responsibility for forming the local LDV and that ‘I’ve come to ask you to join me.’ Percy said no, he would not join him, he’d done four years already [1914-18] and what good had that done? ‘Now then Percy’ replied Mr. Hedley, “I need men like you, in fact I need you, you led men in the first one, you know what it’s like and I might have to ask you to do it again.’ Percy then agreed to talk the matter over so the two men went into his greenhouse where the air turned blue with the smoke from their pipes before Percy agreed to join – he would later say that “Dad’s Army” was funny but the real thing was funnier.
“Hitler will send no warning”
As the Company Sergeant Major from September 1940 the one rifle the men of Cheddleton had was kept at Percy’s house, Bankside. Despite the posters telling the populace that “Hitler will send no warning” when men were going out on patrol they would open the door of the house and shout “Can we take the rifle Mrs. Bloor?” [Kaye, Percy’s wife], who would reply “Yes, that’s fine.” This may not have actually mattered, Roger couldn’t remember if there were actually any bullets for it.
Cheddleton is evacuated
One night there was an air-raid (not on Cheddleton) when the night sky above the village was brightly illuminated and something fell to the ground and lay clicking in the grass. A group went out and stood round it, with apparently no notion that whatever it was might go off, and while they were there Kaye suggested that ‘It might be a land-mine that’s arming itself.’ Somehow ‘Mrs. Bloor says it might be a land-mine’ became ‘Mrs. Bloor says it’s a land-mine’ and on the strength of her non-existent knowledge of the armaments of the Wermacht the Home Guard was called out to evacuate the village.
Roger remembered carrying two little girls out of their house on Cheadle Road across to a bath-house Percy had built at Bankside which wasn’t used because it was full of frogs, something none of them liked. When the bomb disposal squad turned up they immediately identified the object as the casing of a flare that a Pathfinder aircraft had dropped to light the way for the bombers behind to follow, presumably to Manchester or Liverpool, hence the bright light in the sky. The clicking was equally quickly explained, the detonation of the flare had made the casing hot and now that it was lying in damp grass it was contracting, not “arming itself.” There had, of course, been no need to evacuate the village so the Home Guard then had to put everyone back in their houses. Roger remembered that none of this was performed with any military precision, it was something of a shambles that Roger admitted he was part of, saying “I was Pike.” Many years later Roger went to the funeral of one of the little girls he had carried out of her house that night.