The Manchester Blitz and a new exhibition at Southern Cemetery

Now the thing about anniversaries is that sometimes there is a danger that in all the hype the real stories are lost.

Manchester bomb damage, 1940

So as we enter the second year of the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War and will be coming up to the 75th anniversary of the Manchester Blitz  it is easy to be overwhelmed by a blur of images and a sleek commentary that just repeat what has pretty much been done before.

And so that is why David Harrop’s planned exhibition on how Manchester prepared and then experienced the Blitz will be a welcome anecdote to the usual material.

I have known David for a few years and am constantly amazed at his collection of the everyday material which people collected during both world wars, including letters and picture postcards home, official communications and the mundane and scary.

So on display will be a leaflet from 1940 advising householders what to do if their house was damaged in an air raid, photographs of Victoria Station after it had been bombed and a series of theatre bills advertising shows at the Palace.

After the Raid, 1940

They are the things we all would have had and seen and are a powerful way of bringing this story of war on the Home Front to people who will only know of the blitz through the odd TV documentary and souvenir editions from the local newspaper.

The added power of the exhibition will be that it is in the Remembrance Lodge at Southern Cemetery where some of those killed are buried.

In Manchester the attacks began in June building up to the horrendous two nights of bombing just before Christmas when late on December the 22nd through to the 23rd and again the following night the raids killed an estimated 644 people and injured over 2,000.

Here in Chorlton 30 people died in the second night of bombing, with 53% of the casualties concentrated on just two roads.

Mrs O'Reilly living on Oswald Road remembers that

“All the windows at the front of the house were broken and the front door blown open by the blast from a land mine that landed on the allotments at the top of Scott Avenue.  Father reckoned they were aiming for the huge water pipe that crossed Manchester Road.

Houses came down at the top of Scott Avenue and Cheltenham Road, two people were killed and a girl I knew had her face badly scarred by shrapnel as she was standing outside the air raid shelter in her back garden.”*

Here in Chorlton, 1940

And Geoff Williams recently revisited the spot of St Werburghs where the night before a bomb destroyed three houses and killed an air raid warden.

Now I had not been prepared for the extent of the bombing here in Chorlton, but the bomb maps which were compiled by the Corporation show the extent of the fires started by incendiary devices and properties destroyed by high explosive bombs.

Today if you look carefully you can match that bomb damage across Chorlton.  In some streets the natural line of late Victorian and Edwardian houses is broken by newer properties some of which only went up in the 1960s.

On the Rec, 1941

In other cases they were never replaced.

So it was with numbers 3, 5 and 7 Wilbraham Road.  You won’t find them today.

They went on the night and early morning of December 24th and 25th and in the process eliminated our post office.

Now that story and others about the bombing have already appeared in the blog and so for now I would just like to make an appeal for any memories, or memorabilia which could be shared and perhaps even displayed alongside David’s extensive collection down at Southern Cemetery later in the year.

Pictures; Blitz bomb damage, 1941, m08608, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council,  http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and barrage balloon on the Rec circa 1941 from the collection of Alan Brown

*Memories of a Chorlton childhood, ....... the Manchester blitz and evacuation, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/memories-of-chorlton-childhood.html

**Chorlton in the 1940s, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Chorlton%20in%20the%201940s