On Tuesday, August 15, 1939, John Foster of Lawson Street, Maryport, was married to Gertrude Margarete by Pastor Behrmann in Germany. In his address, the pastor said, “Thy people shall be my people.”

It was a pious wish, but one which was not to be fulfilled.

The Hindenburg Zeppelin that flew low over the roofs of Barrow and Walney Island in 1936 was a foretaste of things to come.

In September 1939 Britain and Germany were at war.

The next six years took their toll on Britain and on Cumbria.

Cumberland and Westmorland may have been far removed from the theatres of war, but every town and village played its part in those tumultuous years between 1939 and eventual victory in 1945 and every family found their lives lessened by the consequences.

In Kendal, ‘K’ shoes made 250,000 pairs, that is a total of half a million, service boots.

But they also made other things. They made 100 covers for Avro Anson aircraft manufactured from cloth supplied by Morton Sundour of Carlisle.

They made replicas of Luftwafffe flying officers’ boots. They made kit-bags, gaiters, covers for aircraft and dinghies, and in the last months of the war, demobilization shoes.

Throughout the country, men joined the Home Guard.

There were two battalions in Carlisle, and one each in Longtown, Cockermouth, Workington, Whitehaven, Millom, Penrith, Keswick, Kirkby Stephen, Kendal and Warwick on Eden. The Home Front was prepared to meet whatever might happen.

In September 1940, 300 incendiaries, targeted at the Vickers shipyard, were dropped on the Salthouses part of Barrow.

On October 17, a Wellington bomber returning from a raid on the Kiel Canal ran out of fuel. The crew parachuted to safety over Penrith, and the pilotless bomber crashed on Brown Rigg Hill near Plumpton.

Manufacturers moved their factories from the south-east to Cumbria.

Bata Shoes which had been in Tilbury in Essex, came to Grasslot in Maryport. H Edgard and Sons, civil and military tailors moved from Chelsea to Catherine Street in Whitehaven in 1940, after being bombed in London.

Quarrymen from Alderney in the Channel Islands were evacuated to Shap. There, at the Shap Granite Works, they made castings for the Mulberry Harbours that were to be used in the D-Day landings.

The manufacture of special steel ball-bearings for aircraft was moved from Norway to Chapel Bank in Workington. Short Sunderland flying boats were built and tested on Windermere.

Prisoner of war camps were opened at Calthwaite, Dalston, Brampton and Hethersgill. At Moota, where there were a thousand prisoners of war, the Germans built their own chapel.

Ruth Mansergh records all the many ways in which Cumbria was transformed by the years of the Second World War.

www.bookscumbria.com