A Vancouver man who grew up in wartime London will share his memories at Pearson Air Museum on Saturday, Dec. 5. The free 1 p.m. talk will be in the Tex Rankin Theater at the museum, 1115 E. Fifth St.
Peter Stenhouse will present “Surviving the Blitz! A Personal Remembrance.” Stenhouse, a National Park Service volunteer at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, was born in London in 1932. He has vivid memories of living in London during the Battle of Britain in 1940, and during the German aerial bombing campaign — called the “Blitz” — the next several years.
“Some of my clearest memories as a child revolve around spending time in air-raid shelters, seeing and hearing the aerial battles between the RAF and the Luftwaffe, and seeing the resulting destruction of London in the aftermath,” Stenhouse said in a news release. “These harrowing events within a major metropolitan area such as London over a period of years are hard to imagine occurring today.”
Stenhouse went on to serve in the Royal Navy from 1948-1962, and was wounded in action in Cyprus. He studied archaeology and history in Great Britain and in the United States, and emigrated to the United States in 1962.
