World War Two

A building on High Street, Whetstone

Interviewer: Was there any other industries in the village apart from farming?

Mr Kind: There were just the two shoe factories and a hosiery factory, then there were timber yard which employed quite a number at the top end of the village. No, there were nothing else.

Interviewer: Did they bring a lot of people to the village?

Mr Kind: Well, yes. And people used to walk from Cosby, which were two mile away, to Whetstone station to catch the train for Leicester for seven o’clock in the morning, it’d be seven o’clock when they came back from work at night and they’d got two miles to walk back to Cosby. It weren’t very nice when the floods were out bottom of the village and they’d got to walk through. Oh no, it were just a nice, quiet village until Power Jets came and when they started testing the engines there you couldn’t sleep at nights for them until you got used to it. Frank Whittle, you know he were knighted there, at the Power Jets. Had some security there, it were surrounded by guns you know, in case the Germans came over to bomb it. One afternoon, there used to be one what were termed ‘hedge-hopping’, practising for these guns, you see, as were protecting the Power Jets, and we should be at work in the fields and I remember, we’d said it times, said he’ll come down one of these times because he come up over the hedge you see. This particular afternoon we were busy hoeing in the fields and we heard him coming, about the same time, and we looked round and he’d caught the top of a tree and it brought him down in a grass field and the plane ran along this grass field and through a hedge into a field of wheat and marl [?] and then it exploded. Time we got to him he were dead, but the ‘plane, when we come to cut the corn, we were finding bits of ‘plane here, there and everywhere.

©EMOHA