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Last modified: 18 October 2026
Between 2003 and 2006 the BBC gathered 47,000 wartime memories from the public on its WW2 People’s War website. Many of them are about Wandsworth, Battersea, Clapham, Balham, Tooting and the places around. The site has been archived, but it is now hard to find anything on it, so the local stories are being collected here, a few at a time.
The stories are given as they were posted. I have added only headings, paragraph breaks and a few notes in square brackets. The copyright in each story stays with its writer.
People’s War: local stories (private research tool)All 810 BBC WW2 People’s War stories touching Wandsworth, Battersea, Tooting, Balham, Clapham, Streatham and the surrounding places. Searchable, filterable by place, and sortable. For the Wandsworth Common history group only — noindex.
Bevin’s Babes: wartime memories of the girls of Upper Tooting High (a collection of fourteen pages)A group of old girls of Upper Tooting High School, on Trinity Road, born in the war, remember their earliest years and their mothers’ stories. Searchable. Remarkable.
Keep Smiling Through, Part One: A Child in Wandsworth, Digging for Victory, and First Bombs (Bill Clavey)September 1939 in Wandsworth: the declaration of war on the wireless, evacuation from Plough Road School, Battersea, to Somerset, the return home, and digging for victory.
Keep Smiling Through, Part Two: London Ablaze (Bill Clavey)The night raids of 1940: the cellar shelter, his father with the Slumberland fire crew, East Hill Congregational Church fire-bombed, West Hill fire station hit, and Christmas 1940.
Earlsfield, London During The War (Eileen Bicknell)Eileen Bicknell of Wilna Road remembers evacuation, the shelters, the bombs on Earlsfield, the 77 bus disaster at Clapham Junction, the doodlebugs and a V2 in Holborn.
My War Years 1939–1945 (Part 1, 1939–1942) (Peggy Edelston)From Melton Mowbray to Southfields: Fulham football, Wimbledon tennis, a wartime wedding in Wandsworth, and shopping in Clapham after nights of bombing.
Wartime Hardships: Rationing in London (Joan Styan)Shopping for her grandma with the ration books, and the hardships of wartime London.
Victory Celebrations and Epilogue (Joan Styan)VE Day: a train from Clapham Junction to Victoria, the crowds in the West End, and a night ride home locked in the guard’s van.
From London to Bampton – a Wartime Childhood (Jean Jeffries (née Ralph))A house opposite Clapham Junction, nights on a tube platform, and evacuation to Bampton in Oxfordshire.
A Wartime Child Refugee: From Poland to Balham (Mark Krymer)Mark Krymer, born in Paris in 1936, escapes from Warsaw with his Polish parents through the Baltic states, Sweden and France, and joins them in Balham in November 1942.
Doodlebug Days in Wimbledon (Victor Spink)Summer 1944 in Craven Gardens, Wimbledon: the V1s, a narrow escape, and evacuation by bus from Wimbledon Station to Riddlesden in Yorkshire.
More to come.
If you wrote one of these stories, or belong to the family of someone who did, I should be very glad to hear from you. Send me an email.