Rescued: May Blakemore Harman
My great grandmother Mary Ann Owen was the first of my family to join the Church, in 1903 in Birmingham. She was a small lady, born in Brecon, Wales, and was married to Harry Blakemore. Harry never joined the Church, but his heart was as big as a house and he loved his wife. From Elder Creer’s missionary journals we know that Harry allowed the missionaries to hold Sunday School in his little house.
Mary made sure that her children were baptised and went to church. They were among those present when the Harbourne chapel in Birmingham, was opened in 1912 in a service presided over by Elder Rudger Clawson (1857-1943), President of the Quorum of the Twelve at the time. But such was the animosity which had been stirred up among the people of Birmingham by local clergy and newspapers that policemen on horseback were deployed to protect the small band of Church members from their persecutors. We know from newspaper reports that there were threats of violence and that stones were thrown.
One of Harry and Mary’s children was my maternal grandmother, May, who married Thomas Harman. They lived in Birmingham with their growing family in a small house in a street next to St. Andrews football ground. Being members of the Church, the Harman family were marked out for more than the usual amount of attention, especially the children. My mother remembers being made fun of. Other children at school called her names and played with the words Harman and Mormon, to come up with little chants and songs which sometimes upset May as a little girl.
War broke out in September 1939. My grandfather volunteered as an air-raid warden and was given the role of spotter. He and his mates would finish work, go home for tea and then assemble to sit in an assortment of high places that overlooked part of the city, watching out where bombs fell, and providing information to the emergency and rescue services.
My mother had a particularly bright recollection of one evening when her mother was ironing after family prayer had been offered and my grandfather had gone to perform his night duties. The children were in different parts of the house.
Suddenly, my grandmother May put down her iron and began to shout instructions to her children – to get out of the house and into the shelter at the bottom of the garden. (Every family with a garden had been given corrugated metal sheets and the instructions to build a rudimentary bomb shelter. It really was no more than a hole in the ground lined with corrugated metal sheets.) The children saw the shelter as exciting and novel. It was like camping out. But they were startled by the behaviour of their normally mild-mannered mother. They offered some protest and resistance—there had been no siren. But she did not relent; she pushed, prodded and dragged them to the shelter.
Just as they entered, they heard loud explosions. A German raid was underway without prior warning. Whether a deliberate attempt to terrorise people or by mistake, the bombs dropped on that street that night, and killed and injured just about everyone that was home except for one mother and her children.
The shelter took the force of the blast and though badly shaken, the family were still alive. A water pipe had fractured but they were trapped due to the rubble that had fallen around the shelter. My grandmother was determined to give them hope; she asked them to imagine how they would design and decorate their new house. My mother also remembers that they prayed.
My grandfather rushed back to the street in which his young family lived and saw the devastation. Someone told the rescue services that there was a family trapped in a shelter at the bottom of their garden. He and others scrambled to remove the rubble to try to rescue his wife and children. My mother remembers being pulled out of the hole and being passed along a line of arms, at the end of which was her father.
The story does not end with the rescue. The local newspaper asked my grandmother how she knew to take her family to the shelter. There hadn’t been any siren to warn her. Her answer has inspired members of our family ever since: “I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We have the gift of the Holy Ghost and the Holy Ghost told me to get my children out of the house to save them.”