When Hitler lived in Burslem. by Bob Adams

As a young boy in the early 1950s, a lot of the games we played were the traditional ones like Hide and Seek. And as boys normally did not play with girls we would also play cowboys and army games.

The world war was not over by far in many a person’s thoughts, husbands who were soldiers, sailors and airman as well as brothers and sons. Women who had been in munitions and other essential war work, doing men’s jobs so they could be released for the forces.

The very valuable miners and steelworkers for without them the forces would have been nothing – so everyone was of equal importance.

So we would play at shooting Germans and Japs. World War 2 was still very much in everyone’s minds and the hunt was on for the Nazi hierarchy because nobody really knew what had happened to some of them. It was only years later that it was found that Hitler had committed suicide in the ruins of Berlin in April 1945.

There were regular sightings of these Nazis in South America and Syria and these were in the newspapers very often. Hitler spotted here, Hitler spotted there.

On Park Estate, Burslem, where we all roamed and played, we would spend hours in the park. One day my mates and I saw a man aged about fifty or sixty in the park, walking peculiar. He may have been wounded in the foot because as he walked he kicked his boot out, which reminded us of the ‘goose step’ practiced by the Nazis. He also had a moustache.

We had discovered where Adolf Hitler was hiding, all the world was after him and we knew where he was.

We followed him out of sight and he walked out of the park through the gate leading up n the Park Road and into Macclesfield Street. We followed him all the way up to Wade Street, where he went inside a home.

We rushed home to tell our parents this, expecting them to call the army or police or whatever, but they just laughed it off. In particular I remember my father saying “he’s working at Doultons”.

So there we were, with the most important newspaper scoop of them all.
Hitler living in Wade Street and working at Doultons.