Blitz

I make a point of engaging with the elderly citizens of Hull if they have a good story to tell, particularly of the Blitz years of the Second World War.

It is remarkable that the City's suffering on a personal and wider community level has never been recognised within the heroics of that period. The statistics say it all. Out of the housing stock in the war years only 200 houses within a very sizeable urban area escaped any damage. The City was exposed to frontline bombing as the waves of aircraft headed across the North Sea and up the flarepath of the River Humber directly targeting the Port, warehousing, war industries and rail marshalling yards as their primary target or, if any payloads remained on board from a wider attack into the industrial areas of Yorkshire or Liverpool then, they were dumped on the way back over the Gity. An easy target following on from the fact that in the First World War ,Hull was the second most targeted area for Zeppelin bombing after London.

The archives for bomb damaged areas held by the City Council and private researchers is extensive and very detailed. In fact, the only missing information in the records are the names and addresses of  the Luftwaffe pilots although given the process of reconciliation and the emergence of memoirs as that generation fade away there is good potential to fill in any blanks that may still persist.I am sure that a mission to bomb Hull was regarded with as much trepidation for aircrews as for the population below.

I was intrigued to come across a strange feature out in the marshy areas of Holderness some 10 to 15 miles east of Hull. This comprised a series of regular and shallow excavations which from the air would resemble closely, or at least enough to cause confusion, the physical outline of the main dock basins of the large East Hull riverside facilities.

With carefully positioned lighting, a very visible pool of light amongst an otherwise blacked out area, the whole idea of the fabrication was to convince the incoming enemy aircarft that they were already over the docks and too high for accurate bombing. Panic and self doubt in navigation, bomb aiming and airmanship was encouraged by the illusion so that Hull would be abandoned as the primary target and the attack group would go to the secondary and other mission targets. I have yet to find out if this trickery actually worked to the advantage of the residents of the City although they will already have been alerted by the sirens and would hear the vorsprung durch technic engine tones from the damp and musty depths of their shelters.

The older residents, born and bred in the City do have stories to tell and it is only right and respectful for the younger generations to coax these out. It is impossible for us now to comprehend the mortal fear for life and property that would pervade everything from the drone of aircraft overhead and the accompanying sounds and sights of a full attack. An elderly lady on Park Street recalled to me the still vivid memory of her seeing daylight and the back garden of her childhood home from the street frontage as the concussion waves from a nearby bomb actually lifted up the house before carefully depositing it back exactly on its foundation walls.

I have spoken to survivors of the Bean Street incident when families emerging from a communal shelter, given the all clear, were going about their resumed business when a parachute dropped high explosive bomb released itself from temporary entanglement in a tree, fell to the ground and exploded with a significant loss of life. Ordnance which fell at that time, undetected, is on occasion excavated during urban redevelopment from the heavy clay soils of the city flood plain. I attended an exhibition of wartime photos in an East Hull Church, itself rebuilt following wartime destruction. I had not realised that the City was the last mainland target to be attacked in the final days of the war when a lone aircraft strafed and terrorised the population going about their shopping on Holderness Road.

There is also the story, now well set in local folklore, of the two bus drivers who, approaching the central section of Holderness Road from opposing directions had a simultaneous compulsion to pause a while at their last stops for no logical reason. The spooky event saved the lives of both drivers and their contingent of passengers as had the journeys played out to the exact time schedules then both vehicles will have converged on the spot and at a time when a high explosive bomb fell and wreaked tremendous damage across a wide radius or road and buildings.

Given the exposure of the City and its civilian population to war it is baffling that one of the few surviving bombed out buildings in the whole country, the Swan Picture House, about a mile north of the city centre is unable to be reserved , funded and established as a permanent site for a commemorative exhibition and archive of the life and times of the City through that period.