Worthing's Summer Of Devastation
DURING World War Two, newspapers were forbidden by
censorship regulations to identify specifically places that had been bombed
during air raids. This ban included photographs of damaged homes, writes
Freddie Feest.
A Heinkel III
bomber |
The main reason given was
that precise information about the location and time of the incident might help
the enemy evaluate the accuracy of their bombing.
So a picture of, say,
a bomb-damaged house in Lyndhurst Road, Worthing, could appear in the local
newspaper only with the vague caption, “A house damaged during a recent Nazi air
raid on a south coast town”.
Perhaps it was nonsensical not to mention
the town when the picture appeared only in the Worthing Herald, which, in very
slim wartime editions, was hardly likely to publish a picture of a house bombed
in Brighton.
This is the explanation for the caption to one of the
pictures in the recent Bygones features on wartime Worthing, suggesting it
depicted the remains of a house in Lyndhurst Road, Worthing, destroyed by a
German bomber that fell on it during one such raid.
But this was
incorrect, an unfortunate knock-on effect of the wartime censorship that has
left many in a cloud of “information vagueness” when it comes to identifying
exact locations of the many unlabelled pictures of bombing incidents during
those traumatic times.
A Heinkel 111 bomber did, in fact, crash on a
house in Lyndhurst Road, but it was 200 yards further to the east than the
wrecked building shown in the photo published two weeks ago. And, as you might
expect, the plane caused a much wider scene of devastation.
Eight people died when a German Heinkel bomber
crashed on this doctor’s surgery at the corner of Lyndhurst Road and Homefield
Road, Worthing, four Canadian soldiers billeted on the top floor of the house
and the four German aircrew. |
As
my own home at that time was just a few hundred yards away, I spotted the
erroneous caption immediately. What actually happened on that sunny August
Sunday evening in August, 1942, illustrates how just a few yards can separate a
tragic incident from becoming a horrendous calamity.
Second-year student
nurse Winifred Houghton was in the night nurses’ corridor at Worthing Hospital
when she was suddenly startled by the roar of engines.
She hurried to
the hospital windows overlooking Beach House Park in time to see an aircraft
cross diagonally from the direction of the pier towards the north end of Madeira
Avenue.
Later, she recalled: “I was amazed it did not strike the
gasometer, and I shall never forget that its landing lights were ablaze, despite
the brilliant sunshine.
“The plane somehow missed the roofs of Madeira
Avenue houses and, with a sudden loss of power, it crashed through part of the
flint wall on the south side of Lyndhurst Road.
“Crossing Lyndhurst
Road, the aircraft buried itself with a great explosion in the front of Dr
Margery Davies’s house and surgery, on the corner of Homefield Road. There were
four Canadian soldiers billeted on the top floor and spilled fuel from the
bomber’s tanks set this floor alight. The men were brought to the hospital with
severe burns.
“Although several bombs on board exploded, some failed to go off and the area was sealed off until bomb disposal men could remove the remainder.”
Two women members of Dr
Margery Davies’ domestic staff had miraculous escapes from death.
Eva
Collins and Carol Wilson were in different parts of the house when the bomber
struck the building. Carol immediately rushed to Eva’s room at the back of the
house and helped her out, but on reaching the staircase they found it a mass of
flames.
Running to an upper window at the front, their shouts for help
were heard by soldiers who were tackling a blaze that had also broken out in the
house next door.
The soldiers shouted to the women to jump and as they
did so the troops caught them, with no injuries to the women.
As the
women huddled against a wall their one thought was for the doctor’s car, which
was now in flames.
The soldiers searched through the debris for any
other trapped occupants. Some lifted flaming beams of wood with their bare hands
and had to be treated for burns at the hospital.
A nearby resident
visiting a house 150 yards away recalled: “We were engaged in a heated
discussion on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity when there was a loud wumff.
“Going in to the street we saw an enormous blaze. The large house and
big trees surrounding it were burning furiously. Here and there were rivers of
flame and the road and shrubs were festooned with ribbons of fire.”
The
Heinkel 111 was blown into so many fragments that, for a long time, the rescuers
were unaware whether it was a German or British aircraft. Part of an engine fell
in a garden and another piece lodged in a wall. Next morning, bits of the
Heinkel were still littering many surrounding streets.
Miss Houghton,
who continued to nurse at Worthing Hospital for a further 30 years before
retiring as a senior ward sister, confirmed that a distance of 50 yards
prevented the incident becoming a major tragedy. “If the Heinkel had been only
that distance further north, it would have struck Worthing Hospital.”
“It could have demolished the children’s ward on the corner of Park
Avenue, where there were normally at least 20 patients. It also narrowly missed
a big house called Homefield, immediately opposite the doctor’s house, which was
full of troops.”
Fate was also kind in other ways. Dr Davies, one of the
town’s first woman doctors, was away on a Guiding weekend when the Heinkel
destroyed her surgery and most of her personal belongings. Had it not been a
Sunday, the surgery and surrounding streets would have been busy. The casualty
list could have been horrendous.
As fate would have it, there was not a
single civilian casualty. The bodies of the four German aircrew were recovered
from the wreckage and this was noted in contemporary records. The four Canadian
soldiers, billeted at the top of the doctor’s house when the plane hit died as
the result of their burns, but their deaths were never recorded in newspapers at
the time.
But that was wartime censorship . . .
* * * * *
Dodging Bombs On The Way Back From
School
The bomb damage in Harvey Road in
1943 |
PHOTOGRAPHS of
our towns in wartime – published recently in our newspapers – have sparked a
rush of response from readers.
Many have provided a fascinating insight
into the stories behind the pictures.
Retired mechanic David Barrow, 71,
from Goring, has spoken about the day in 1943 when a high explosive bomb landed
just a few houses away from the Harvey Road house he still lives in. A young
family died in the blast, which demolished two houses and seriously damaged
another, the house shown in the photograph.
Mr Barrow said: “I came back
from school that day, it was in the afternoon, and it was just boom, boom, boom,
boom.
“It must have been a fairly large bomb, taking out two houses and half
of another one.
“We disappeared under the stairs, it was our air-raid
shelter. I remember the bodies were in the trees on the right-hand side. The
toys of the family were all around the bomb crater.”
Mr Barrow escaped
again when he visited the seafront in Littlehampton, near the banks of the River
Arun, with his mother and his friend, Dennis Holbert.
David
Barrow |
“My mother used to enjoy
swimming,” said Mr Barrow, “She used to wait for high tide and swim across the
river into town. While they were over there, the air-raid siren went and I saw
this plane come along and drop a bomb.
“I don’t know if it came back or
if there were two planes, but it came down and started to machine-gun where we
were on the beach.
“I grabbed hold of my friend, who was hiding in a
bush, and pulled him into where I was, which was in a bigger bush.
“A
line of bullets went straight across by us and that was that.”
Retired
engineer Phil Quinn, 76, from Seafield Road, Rustington, shed light on a
photograph, labelled simply Rustington.
Although the amateur historian
has lived in the area only since 1993, he has devoted himself to researching
local history and the photograph sparked his curiosity.
He said: “I looked
at it and thought, ‘Where could that be?’ Then it dawned on me.”
Mr
Quinn realised the photograph showed a house in his own road, at the junction
with Seafield Close, which had been bombed in May, 1942.
His research
into the area had uncovered a Littlehampton Gazette report of the bombing from
the time. It told how the attack had claimed the life of 32-year-old Irene Wood
and seriously injured her two-year-old son, Rodney. A woman described as Madame
Jadot, aged 73, also died in the bombing.
Phil Quinn, who has shed new light on
bomb-damaged Seafield Road,
Rustington |
Mrs J. F. George, now
of Lancing, wrote in to describe a terrifying walk home from school in the early
war years in Worthing.
She said: “In 1940, when I was 12 years old, we
had a hit-and-run raid and the siren had not sounded.
“I was walking
home from Davison High School to go home for dinner and along Lyndhurst Road. A
German plane had dropped his bomb on Cobden Road and then machine-gunned where I
was walking.
“I grabbed a large oak tree and prayed. I was lucky. “When
I got home, I found my mother on her knees crying as she had seen the houses
blown in the air.”
