My own barrage balloon …………..

An occasional series featuring one of those iconic images of the Second World War.

Barrage Balloon, Hullard Park, 1939

I wasn’t born when the last barrage balloon was cranked down and deflated for the last time but they are as much a part of how I remember that war as stories of rationing, my parents recollections and the bomb sites I played on in the 1950s.

So here is the balloon that belonged to Margaret Holmes.  

I say belonged to Margaret, but strictly speaking it was her dad’s, who she writes was "in RAF squadron 924 which was a barrage balloon squadron.

They trained in Hullard Park in Stretford in September 1939”

Adding another picture of her father, "Edmund Woodhead, which was taken in Le Havre in 1940.  He’s on the back row second from the right”.

With 924 Squadron, 1939

But it is the barrage balloon that fascinates me, and reminds me of the one I featured in The Rec on Beech Road recently.

And so to the challenge or the request ….. which is to offer up your picture of a barrage balloon with or without a story.

Now my Wikipedia tells me that “by the middle of 1940 there were 1,400 balloons, a third of them over the London area”.

So that’s a lot of stories and follows on from my prefab series, which explored the remaining estates of this other iconic post war building.

To which John H Parker, has added

"Hullard Park is In Old Trafford bordering Henrietta Street. I lived within 300 yards of the balloon 1940 - 1943. King George & Queen Elizabeth visited the unit very briefly in Autumn 1941 stopping to receive a parade, salute and Three Cheers from The Squadron".

Location; Stretford

Le Havre, 1940

Pictures, from the collection of Margaret Holmes, 1939-1940

* Barrage balloon, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon