Aviva companies in WW2 — Sun Life and the East Hall tragedy
This is the fourth in a series of blogs written to mark the anniversary of VE day by sharing the stories of Aviva companies on the home front.
The Sun Life Assurance Society’s pre-war planning involved dividing the staff in two and setting up two divisional headquarters outside London. I’ve already described life in the Northern Divisional Centre at Delrow House in my previous blog. This is the story of what happened to staff chosen to move to the Southern Divisional Centre.
Sun Life’s Southern Divisional Centre was at East Hall, Skeet Hill Road, Orpington in Kent. It was described in the staff magazine as a dilapidated red-brick Georgian building surrounded by overgrown fields and the derelict buildings of a bankrupt poultry farm.
The hall came with a large estate and many staff reminiscences refer to the grounds. Cecil Holding later recalled ‘those wonderful mornings’ in the bitter winter of 1939–1940 ‘with the frost thick on the grass when we went through the trees to the Manor, across the open to Waterpit Wood, and back over the rise in front of East Hall’. Other staff memories refer less poetically to the ‘appalling stench’ which hung over the hall caused by cauliflowers in the fields which had been caught by the frost that winter and begun to rot.
The editor of the staff magazine chose to write about the snowdrops, and primroses in Waterpit Wood and the aconites under the trees where they used to park their cars. The hall certainly looks idyllic in the surviving photographs we have in the archive.
According to Cecil Holding, the furnishings there were primitive when staff first arrived, and he made several trips into town to search second-hand furniture shops for equipment to make work there easier. The executives in the attics of the main building had to put up with fallen in ceilings and the photograph below, of the Valuation and Benefits department, shows cramped conditions in their new office space.
On the other hand, these photographs of accounts staff at work in East Hall in 1939 show a fairly standard office set up for the period.
Sadly, I don’t know where the Accounts or Valuation and Benefit departments were located on the site, but I do know that the Agency department was allocated the Harness Room which looked out on to the stable yard. According to staff reminiscences, the room was 12ft by 8ft and was occupied by four members of Agency department staff, a huge bureau holding all the agency records, the chief clerks of branches, and the Stationery department. There was a fire at one end of the room but because neither the door nor the window fitted there was nothing to stop the chilling blast from the yard. Apparently, the assistant secretary sat behind a screen improvised from old window shutters, wrapped in a blanket, and with an electric heater at his feet.
Before long the department was moved to a new, bigger, room in the main house with two enormous windows. One member of staff remembered that these were kept wide open in the summer of 1940 so they had an easy escape route ‘when German planes were overhead and we had to dive for №2 shelter.’
The mysteriously named Department 5, which managed premium collections, was allocated one of the wooden huts built in the grounds at East Hall. Their hut was 60ft by 20ft and designed to hold 40 to 50 members of staff. It had not quite been finished when the department arrived, so they found there was no door and no means of heating had been installed. One member of staff later recalled, ‘the hut seemed full of people, books and receipts, no desks, tables or chairs and most of the books and staff were on the floor’. Another wrote in the staff magazine about a rough table covered in cheques, postal orders and cash which were blown to the floor every so often by the wind, until the door was fitted.
In the first winter the hut was cold and draughty to work in and twice the red ink froze in its pots. At once point winter storms stripped the Ruberoid covering off the roof and Ivy Griffin, who worked there in 1939, later remembered arriving at work one morning to find a large bucket placed behind her desk to catch the water coming through a hole above it. Ivy had happier memories of work at East Hall in the summer months when she gathered large baskets of strawberries from local farms and took an eventful lunchtime walk in which she was joined by a litter of little pigs.
The photograph below shows members of staff on a pig-free walk near East Hall. It features Mabyn Schofield, known as Scho, (remembered for her Popeye impressions), Charles Crocker, and Fifi Roberts who was described in a 1940 valentine as ‘five-foot-one of ornamental departmental fun’.
Staff lunches were served, in two sittings, in another of the wooden huts at East Hall. A S Bush, a suburban inspector, later wrote about taking on the menial task of collecting the 9d per head from members of the staff which was their contribution to the cost of the meal. His duties also included driving the V8 Ford estate car to collect staff from Orpington Station and supervising the parking of cars, which were hidden under overhanging branches of trees to make them less visible to enemy planes.
The photograph below shows a special meal, featuring a joint of gammon, which was provided for members of the Gastronomical Society founded at East Hall by Cecil Holding. Those enjoying the feast include Mr Westcott, Cyril Clapp, Betty Hodgkins, Joe Atkins, Charles Crocker, Eileen Lymburn, Freddie Turner, and Leslie Briggs. Cecil himself was at the head of the table.
Cecil Holding also takes centre stage in this series of photographs of the Christmas party held in the dining hut at East Hall on 19 December 1939. According to the description in the staff magazine, ‘an immense Christmas tree reached the ceiling, walls were festooned with holly and the air thick with paper chains of every size and colour’. Cecil appeared during the dinner, dressed as Father Christmas, in a costume made from his wife’s red velvet dressing gown, a tin hat, and a mask.
Other staff featured in the photographs include Mary Monk, Leslie Briggs, Eileen Lymburn, G Spiby, H F Marlow, Fifi Roberts, Charles Crocker, Joan Leaney, Emmie Karnon, Bobby Robinson, Malcolm Brock, A H Bethell, Geoffrey Ives, Jeanne Gant, Cyril Clapp, Dorian Wolfe, H W Jackson, Eileen Cabell, M D Bent, Betty Hodgkins and Lionel Towersey. The evening began and ended with dancing in the recreation hut to records played on the gramophone. Auld Lang Syne was sung sometime after 10.45 when the bus arrived to take the female staff back to their accommodation.
Sun Life had rented a house called Westwood, Derry Downs, Orpington for the women on the staff to live in during the working week. We know a little bit about life in the Derry Downs house from an article which appeared in the staff magazine in 1939. It says the house had 4 bedrooms and that 13 members of staff were living there with a housekeeper called Mrs Fenning. They cycled the 1.5 miles to East Hall to work each morning and took turns at the end of the day to go to Orpington to buy food for their breakfast and evening meals. According to the article, the cycle ride back was a ‘nightmare of trying to balance 7lbs of potatoes on the handlebars, a loaf of bread under one arm and an insecurely packed saddle bag.’
The male staff, meanwhile, were housed in another of the wooden huts in the East Hall grounds. There is no corresponding article in the magazine about their activities, but other staff reminiscences give an idea of what their new communal life was like. We know, for example, that Gilbert Butler had duck egg blue pyjamas and that Sidney Lunnun always wore his vest in bed. Gordon Graham, Basil Southall, Donald Hollands and Gilbert Butler like to play bridge and Freddie Turner tried to encourage everyone to keep fit with cross country runs followed by showers using stirrup pumps. They also liked to play pranks on each other and one night Joe Atkins got in late only to find his colleagues had put three rolled mattresses and three camp beds on top of his bed and secured the tower by tying it to the cross beam with his scarf.
The fun at East Hall came to an abrupt end on 18 September 1940 when the building was completely destroyed by a land mine. According to reminiscences ‘the devastation was utterly complete, there was no semblance of a wall left standing — just a heap of bricks and timber littered by countless papers which resembled nothing so much as an untidy rubbish dump’.
That night 16 members of staff were staying on site; seven were in the house playing cards, five were in the wash house preparing for bed, and four were in the shelter. There were no survivors in the house and all five men in the wash house were injured, one of them fatally.
Gilbert Butler, remembered for his blue pyjamas, was one of those playing cards in the house that night. Aged 18, he was the junior of the Cashiers department having only joined the company in June 1939. With him was Ted Shaw of the Valuation department who had joined the company in August 1939 and was one month short of his 18th birthday. Ted had introduced football at East Hall and was known for his table tennis prowess. He and Gilbert had begun keeping chickens at East Hall, much to the amusement of their colleagues. Another member of the Valuation department, 19-year-old Basil Southall, was also in the house and died alongside them.
Another of the card players was 18-year-old Sidney Lunnon who had joined the company as a messenger in 1936 and was teased by his friends in the dormitory hut for wearing his vest in bed. With him was Leslie Briggs, deputy chief clerk of the Accounts department, who had been with the company since 1924. Leslie was one of the members of the Gastronomical Society and appears in several of the surviving photographs of activities at East Hall.
Forty-year old Frank Westropp was also playing cards that night. Frank had joined the company in 1914 as a messenger and worked his way up to the position of company steward, becoming in the process one of the best-known members of the society’s staff. The final card player was another long-time member of staff, Ronnie Morris. He had joined the company in 1913 and returned to it after service in World War One, including time spent as a prisoner of war. Ronnie was an amateur football international and seems to have been a larger than life character who was fondly remembered by his colleagues from East Hall. He was chief clerk in the Cashiers department and one member of staff recalled him leading rousing choruses of the Farmers’ Boy when the staff in the department were working late. He was also remembered for wearing his mackintosh instead of a dressing gown when he visited the wash house, as in the photograph below.
Five members of staff were in or just outside the wash house when the mine hit and it collapsed. 19-year-old Donald Hollands from the Valuation department was killed. His colleagues, Freddie Turner, Donald Fricker, Geoffrey Ives and John Alexander were all injured. A year later Donald and John had returned to work but Geoffrey Ives was still recuperating. Freddie Turner, who also lost an eye in the tragedy, was still in hospital receiving treatment for his leg and was considered likely to remain there for some time.
Those who emerged from the shelter to the scene of devastation at East Hall were Cyril Clapp, Joe Atkins and the chauffeur Albert Walker and his wife, who lived in a cottage off the stable yard. Albert is remembered for working like a hero that night as the men dug through the wreckage in search of their colleagues. They worked mostly in the dark, so they would not show a light to the enemy planes that were flying overhead, while they tried to free the survivors from the remains of the wash house. A S Bush later wrote about Cyril and Joe arriving at his house in the middle of the night, shocked and too exhausted to be able to remove the thick dust and dirt before they fell asleep.
In the aftermath of the destruction, the East Hall the staff spent days working through the ruins and trying to salvage the records to keep the business running. The agency department, whose room had been in the furthest corner of the building from the explosion, managed to excavate the bureau where they kept all the agents’ details. The bureau itself had been smashed to matchwood but the drawers and their contents were still intact and were taken to the Derry Downs house. Here Hibbs made rough shelves for them in the front room from wood salvaged from the hall.
The Cashiers department also set up a temporary office at Derry Downs in one of the back rooms. Gerry Boswell later wrote about his House Purchase department being assigned the bathroom in Derry Downs for a few weeks and that the bath was full of salvaged loan papers.
Winifred Rushbrook of the Staff Schemes department spent the days after the disaster as part of a team helping to pick up debris from the surrounding fields. According to another staff reminiscence: ‘After the disaster the many acred field in front of the Hall was white with our paper much of which could not be salvaged and had to be ploughed in.’
Some of the proposal registers were buried under the ruins of the building for days, during which the wreckage was hosed and rained upon. When they were finally recovered it was found that although entries made in ordinary ink were still legible any that had been written in special quick drying ink had disappeared. Other records took more than a few days to salvage. The Registration department spent three weeks digging and succeeded in rescuing nearly 90% of their records. Mr Evans drew a series of cartoons of his colleagues W K Boshier, T C Forster, W J Woodcock, and G Phipps during this period.
By the end of November the East Hall staff and their salvaged records had moved to new accommodation at Ribblesdale on the Horsham Road outside Dorking. They spent the rest of the war at their new Dorking base until it was safe to move back to London.
In 1947 the East Hall site was sold along with Sun Life’s other evacuation offices, but it continued to live in the memory of the staff.
The tragic events of that night in September 1940 had a profound impact on all those who worked for the company in this period. The disaster changed how staff at the other divisional centre, Delrow House, felt about sleeping out of the shelter and led to elaborate precautions to protect the records from potential future events. No other Aviva company suffered a hit on one of their evacuated offices or lost staff due to enemy action while at their place of work.
East Hall appears time and time again in the staff magazine, like a badge of honour worn by the survivors who bonded over their shared experiences, both of the good times and the grim aftermath of the disaster. The eight men who lost their lives, colleagues, dorm mates, fellow pranksters, were not forgotten. They remained frozen in time and captured on film in the records of that extraordinary first year of life on the home front.
