There were three public shelters down the centre of Station Road.  At another shelter, on the roadside by the monumental mason, E.T.Sheppard, on the Reading Road, you can still see its concrete base alongside the pavement.

The town had a couple of anti-aircraft guns. One of them was at the back of where the Esso Petrol station now is, along the Reading Road. Someone we interviewed for the project said that shrapnel, little metal pieces, rattled on the corrugated metal roofs of the garden sheds across the area and made a terrible noise when it fired.

Across the road, on the site of what is now Norman House, was a Primary School, the British School. This was one of the town’s designated ‘Refuge Centres’.  If your house was bombed, you were instructed to go here first for food, shelter, comfort and medical attention. Also in the building, was one of the town’s two Red Cross posts, which were walk-in centres manned by staff trained to give medical attention. Many younger women in the town volunteered for Red Cross training. It was also an ambulance garage for bringing wounded people in.

The tower of the United Reform Church was the geographic centre of the town and its highest building. At the top was the town’s observation point, manned every night for fire watching. The firewatchers had phone connections to the Town Hall ARP control room, which could rush people trained to deal with fires to the spot to deal with incendiaries. The town was divided into eight fire watching areas, and each firewatcher had to get to know how to get through every gate and on to every roof in their area.

If you look up Trinity Lane, there used to be a field to the left of the lane filled up with Nissen Huts housing army units, one of half a dozen such sites within the town. After the war, during a severe housing shortage, the huts were occupied by ‘squatters’, men demobbed from the army with their families without places to live. The huts were taken over the Town Council and supplied with basic services. Eventually they were replaced with new Council housing on the Gainsborough, Abrahams and Waterman estates.

The Henley Standard, was in the building on the corner, on the opposite side of the road. The newspaper was only 4 pages long with no photographs due to paper rationing. Material had to be carefully selected for print, for example, no news about the town’s military activities which might have been useful to the enemy and no weather reports, useful to determine flying conditions.  The editor and owner of the paper, Charles Luker (also the Mayor of Henley), had the crucial job during the war of keeping the town up to date on official pronouncements, and events related to the war. The job of editor of a local paper like the Standard was considered so important to running the war that it was a ‘reserved occupation’, meaning that the person in that job would not be conscripted into the military.