WW2 Civilian casualties

[Malcolm33]

   These photos were taken of our VE Day party.   I'm in one of them, but I post them here so that you can see the kind of air raid shelters we were given in our street.    Nobody ever went to them during a raid, preferring to risk it in the house as the smell inside the shelters was pretty awful.

[Malcolm33]

   There are some bomb sight maps for Paisley though you cannot move around them like the London Bomb Sight Map.   There is one showing the landmine on No.5 First Aid Post.

[pharmaT]

 

     As it happens I have been focusing on this raid for the past 48 hours.    I myself still get an awful frightening shudder whenever the sound of an air raid siren suddenly comes on the television.  I was 6 years old when the war broke out and so 7 years old when the Blitz began and we were then living at Pinner just 12 miles from London.     I can recall just how frightened I was with all the noise of constant explosions and my mother telling me that it was just the sound of our guns firing up at the bombers.   Shortly afterwards I was sent back to live with Aunts in Consett.  The Bomb Sight map is quite amazing and shows how close they fell to our Avenue, in fact all around and they hit my school with two bombs.
    However what has drawn me back to it right now is my deceased second wife had told me that her first husband's father had been killed in an air shelter during a raid on Paisley.    I had no idea of the date, but soon found that on the death registration from Scotland's People.    It was at 2am on 6th May when a Land Mine came down on to the building of No.5 First Aid Post in Paisley killing 92 people.  The death registration shows two other entries both young nurses and of course the same time of death.
    Apparently there are several memorials in Paisley remembering this disaster and the name of Robert Stewart is on one of them.  There are also many website pages with the stories from people at the time who even witnessed the parachute with landmine dropped from a Heinkel 111.    In 2012 there was an unveiling ceremony and one survivor was present - in her late nineties.   Robert's son Dick Stewart was only 8 years old when his Dad was killed and his brother slightly older.    In 1991 when Ede was still alive we visited the family home in Maxwellton Road which is very close to the First Aid Post and so the noise of the explosion would have woken them to the horror that would shake their lives.

That's very interesting Malcolm.  I haven't checked it out myself but my uncle said something about another neighbour being killed when the school that doubled as a fire watching post was hit by the same bomber.

[IgorStrav]

There are many stories telling how frightening the times must have been.  Thank you to all sharing on this thread.

And I know it's rather trite, but I remember being very struck by a comment I read once that of course the people living through the war had no idea it was going to be won by the Allies (like we all take for granted, now) - I'm sure they heard the positive propaganda which said we were 'winning' but knew it for propaganda, and had to endure what must have seemed like endless fear and worry with no understanding of how long it might go on.

My Mum and Dad told stories, but - as always with their stories - they were humorous.

One was when my Mum was cycling to work from East Ham, and heard a bomb drop close behind her. So she turned round and cycled furiously back home to see if everything was ok, to find her Mum in the kitchen with a saucepan in her hand and porridge all over the ceiling.  It had been a near miss, but the blast had fired the breakfast upwards and it was, apparently, a nightmare subsequently to get off. 

My Dad, who was a Conscientious Objector, worked on various labouring works with the ARP which involved demolition, and was posted to Eastbourne in Sussex.  He described one day being on Beachy Head and hearing a doodlebug come over, with its usual spluttering noise.  He was high up on the hill and said that it was so low 'he could have scratched its belly with a clothes pole' - of course you never knew when the motor would cut out and the bomb fall, and he had absolutely nowhere to go on the hillside - but it struggled on and fell just below him in Eastbourne.  He said that he heard it had fallen on a house where someone was already dead, in a coffin, so the Germans had only killed someone who was dead already.

You had to laugh, didn't you.

[Malcolm33]

And I know it's rather trite, but I remember being very struck by a comment I read once that of course the people living through the war had no idea it was going to be won by the Allies (like we all take for granted, now) - I'm sure they heard the positive propaganda which said we were 'winning' but knew it for propaganda, and had to endure what must have seemed like endless fear and worry with no understanding of how long it might go on.

My Mum and Dad told stories, but - as always with their stories - they were humorous.

One was when my Mum was cycling to work from East Ham, and heard a bomb drop close behind her. So she turned round and cycled furiously back home to see if everything was ok, to find her Mum in the kitchen with a saucepan in her hand and porridge all over the ceiling.  It had been a near miss, but the blast had fired the breakfast upwards and it was, apparently, a nightmare subsequently to get off. 

My Dad, who was a Conscientious Objector, worked on various labouring works with the ARP which involved demolition, and was posted to Eastbourne in Sussex.  He described one day being on Beachy Head and hearing a doodlebug come over, with its usual spluttering noise.  He was high up on the hill and said that it was so low 'he could have scratched its belly with a clothes pole' - of course you never knew when the motor would cut out and the bomb fall, and he had absolutely nowhere to go on the hillside - but it struggled on and fell just below him in Eastbourne.  He said that he heard it had fallen on a house where someone was already dead, in a coffin, so the Germans had only killed someone who was dead already.

You had to laugh, didn't you.

    That is something I've wondered about myself.    The talk about the War which as you will understand was constant, was always positive.    I don't think there was any time during the war when I heard any adults saying that the Germans might come.   It is also true that there was a lot of humour.    We often went out to aunts and uncles living in Chalfont and Amersham - Chilterns country - at weekends for a bit of a break and one Sunday morning while Auntie Elsie was preparing Sunday Roast and Dad and Uncles were getting ready to go for a Sunday Pint, there came the grinding grunting sound of a Doodlebug.   (I know now that this was about five minutes to 11 am on the 2nd July, 1944 - see http://www.amersham.org.uk/ww2/).    Uncle Jim had always joked that the next time we had a raid he would be caught on the loo, and he was.   The rest of us headed for his grand piano and dived under it.   But then we heard the engine stop so knew it would be alright for us.
    Also true that the Germans had a penchant for cemeteries either intentionally or unintentionally as was the case with the V2 that fell on the cemetery gates in North Harrow, more than a mile away but still cracked one of our windows.   Then there was the bomb that roused the dead in St Aidan's cemetery at Blackhill, Consett, earlier on in the war while I was still in the north.