War Damage
The village was unscathed, but Nottingham was badly damaged on May 8th 1941 ‘We were very lucky really, the only local attack was in Hickling where they had the incendiary bombs’
Audrey Jones
Nottingham
Nottingham was badly hit on the night of May 8th 1941, with many deaths and very severe damage. Yet the Nottingham Evening Post the next day painted an upbeat picture and also avoided mentioning which town it was that had been attacked, merely referring to an ‘East Midlands town’.
Peter Burgon’s Memories of Aunt Olive
“My mother’s youngest sister Olive worked at Players and she lodged with a family called Rushworth on Musters Road, West Bridgford… In May 1941 she decided to take an early holiday and she came down to the Fleece for a week and it was the first week in May… On the Thursday night I was got out of bed… you could see all these flashes in the sky towards Nottingham…the next Morning Olive said to my mother I must go back to the digs I want some underclothes, I’ll take Peter with me’ she said.
When we got onto Musters Road the house where she lodged was on the right. We were walking down there and we get to the house and it had received a direct hit. There were two walls standing with a little bit of floor sticking out from two different levels: on one was a chest of drawers, on one there was a wardrobe and the rest was just a pile of bricks.
Olive was clearly shaken, we went to the house where some of the survivors had been taken. I think old Mr and Mrs Rushworth had been killed, a woman called Olga had been killed and there was a little girl of 15 had been killed there too. That was May 8th 1941.
The sad thing about it was that September Olive took ill with TB and on March 8th 1942 she died and she is buried in the churchyard here at Broughton… She was 20 when she died. She missed being killed in an air raid and died of TB”
May 8th 1941
“That was the night the co-op bakery on Meadow Lane was hit and there were a lot killed in there, Boots printing works was all demolished, a shelter was hit on Daykin Street and there were a lot killed when the shelter was hit, the Technical College on Shakespeare Street was hit; the Masonic Hall on Goldsmith Street was hit.”
Peter Burgon
Whereas Coventry which is 40 miles from Upper Broughton was badly hit on the 14th and 15th November 1940
‘I remember once when we came out of the air raid shelter you could see Coventy burning’ Peggy Barnett
We were awakened by awful thuds, we went to the window and we could see a glow in the sky to the south-west, we assumed it was Leicester, we couldn’t believe it was Coventry. Audrey Jones