Denholme Road is a tree-lined street of
predominantly three-storey houses in West Kilburn, formerly in the London
borough of Paddington).
In the map above, Denholme Road is flagged in red in the top left corner, with central London in the bottom right corner.
On the evening of Sunday 8th
September 1940, Elizabeth Bernard had walked the ten minutes from her home at
83 Walterton Road to number 23 Denholme Road to meet her friend, Mary Hart.
They would have had a lot to discuss – the
docklands area in the east end had been the target for the first mass daylight
bombing attack on London the previous day and repeat bombings during the night
had kept the fires burning. Aged 77 and
69 respectively, both were children of the Victorian age, and they must have
looked back to the days of peace and British supremacy when an attack on London
would have been unthinkable. Elizabeth
had spent a lot of her adult life in the east end so would know the areas
bombed. They might even have known about
a local man, Alfred Woolgar, who had been killed when RAF Croydon was bombed a
few weeks before; he had lived at home with his parents at 52 Fordingley Road (Elizabeth
passed the street on her way there).
Mary rented a room from the Wallises, James
(a retired policeman) and Amelia, aged 59 and 52. They had lived there for about thirty years
since they were married, interrupted only by James’s service in the 1914 to
1918 War when he joined the military police and was posted to Egypt.
They might have noticed a neighbour,
19-year old Constance Brown returning home from a lecture on air-raid precautions;
she lived with her parents at number 25, on the corner of Macroom Road. (In the photo at the start of this post, numbers 23 and 25 would have been on the right hand side, where the very obviously newer block of flats stand.)
At 9.50, Elizabeth and Mary were in the
hallway of number 23, maybe as Elizabeth was leaving. The Wallises were sitting at a table. Upstairs, the Clarkes, Wilfred and Dorothy,
had got their baby son to sleep. In Constance
Brown’s words, “About 9pm there was a noise like a train rattling down, then a
shrill whistle and a bang, then we went up in the air and down again.”
This map shows the damage recorded to
houses, the darker colour denoting more damage and black showing complete
destruction:
The damage to the houses in Macroom Road suggests the bomb exploded at the rear of numbers 23 and 25 Denholme Road.
The Wallises were killed where they
sat. Upstairs, Mrs Clarke heard the
sound of the bomb falling and threw herself across the cot but in vain: both
her legs were broken by falling rubble and baby Derek died. Also at number 23, 15-year old Moira Smith
died in her bed; she had been evacuated to Exeter at the outbreak of the war
and had just returned home to her parents, Harold and Rosetta.
In the hallway of number 23, Elizabeth
Bernard and Mary Hart were covered in dust and some rubble. Mary was helped out by two men, probably
neighbours, but Elizabeth was part-buried and not seen.
Just round the corner at 119 Fernhead Road
an off-duty policeman, Richmond Rickards (a 35-year old Welshman), heard the
explosion and ran to the scene. He may
have known Constance’s father, Clarence Brown, or James Wallis, both in the
police reserves. On arriving, he heard
groans and cleared enough rubble to get into the front passage and found
Elizabeth, injured but conscious. As he
carried her out, another bomb fell nearby causing the parts of the building
that were still standing to collapse. He
carried Elizabeth to shelter, then returned to help again.
In the wreckage next door, Constance Brown
remembered, “I did not lose consciousness and was covered by rubble and pinned
down by a dining chair, which had lost its seat and was over my shoulders.” She seems to have been in a pocket within the
rubble. “The gentleman from the ground
floor was injured beside me, but we couldn’t move to help each other.” (Based on the 1939 register this would
probably be Ernest Johns, 24, a delivery van driver.)
It was probably four to five hours later (Constance
said “after what seemed ages”): “I can remember the sounds of men digging and
then calling to us. When the rescue gang
got nearer, they told us to cover our heads.
I put my arms up, and a brick smashed into my elbow, and my face and
hair were covered in glass ... Then the
rescuers said they were going to lower flasks of water on a rope. I managed to catch one but could not get my
head back to drink because the back of the dining chair made putting my head
back impossible. Eventually I was
released, and to add insult to injury the man assisting me said, “You’ll be
alright now, son.” Not very flattering
for a 19-year-old girl.”
It was 5.30 the next morning when she was rescued. Four people were killed, 19 injured. For Constance the sadness was not quite yet
over: “We lost our home and all our belongings.
The hundredweight of coal we’d got in for the winter was looted, along
with some unbroken moveable objects and clothing.”
Constance subsequently married (becoming
Constance Blunsum) and died in Chelmsford in 2015. Strangely her account does not mention her
parents, other than her father’s occupation.
Richmond Rickards was awarded the British
Empire Medal for bravery; there is a photo of him with his medal, but I am
waiting permission to post it.
Strangely, the paperwork for his medal names him as Richard Rickards and
gives his age as 26 rather than the correct figure of 36, but then states the correct home address and
length of service in the police (15 years, which would not have been possible
if he was 26). He moved back to Wales in
later life with his wife Edith and died in 1981.
Elizabeth Barnard was made of strong stuff. She had survived the east end of London where three of
her four children had died by the time she was 27 years old. In her working life she had been a ‘month
nurse’, the nurse who helped a mother with the new-born while they were ‘confined’
for the first month before she was widowed. After being buried
in rubble and rescued by PC Rickards she lived another eleven years, dying at
the age of 88.
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