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I was woken on that first night by Air Raid Wardens running along Southdown Road. On looking through my bedroom window, which gave panoramic view of Bath from Kingswood School to Odd Down, I saw a number of planes overhead. The throb-throb of the Junkers Jumo engine was very characteristic and easily recognised — and it was not that long before the bombs began to fall, incendiaries and HE mixed all together.
My father and his younger brother were two members of their company’s trailer-pump squad and the pump itself were kept in our garage along with my father’s car which had been adapted to tow it. In no time the squad were called out and spent that first night fighting fires in Marlborough Lane, happily surviving to fight the next night elsewhere.
With bombs exploding seemingly very near — though not in fact all that near, though there was an incendiary burning away in the road immediately outside our front gate — and the house shaking, my mother and I took to the garden and lay under a hedge. The sky was still lit up by flares and the fires in the city and suburbs and it was possible to make out the Heinkels as they swooped over and prayed the area with tracer bullets.
As dawn came I went out to see how other members of my family had fared. My grandparents lived at Hillcot, also in Southdown Road and were very shaken and the house damaged, though not badly. The body of a dead man who had been walking home in the road outside had been brought into the house and was laid out in the kitchen.
An uncle and aunt eho lived in a house on
Blackmore and Langdon’s nursery had had on esue of the house blown in by the same stick of bombs which demolished a large part of West Twerton School. The damage it did to the greenhouses on the nursery I leave to reader’s imagination; we were picking up glass for years afterwards and it was amazing no —one was seriously injured themselves.
All this of course is nothing out of the ordinary that thousands of other Bathonians didn’t experience, but I would like to add a postscript. I have just finished reading a fascinating book ‘Most Secret war’ by R V Jones. This covers a history of British scientific intelligence during WW2 and the author’s job was largely concerned with the anticipation of enemy use of radio navigation beams along which enemy aircraft flew to their targets. His sources of information were MI6, Bletchley Park (the since-famous decoding centre), crashed enemy aircraft, secret agents in enemy occupied Europe and the interrogation of German prisoners and though these he had been aware of the enemy use of a new version of the co-called x-beam which the Luftwaffe had developed to circumvent our jamming of the existing beam. Jones had been alerted to the use of this new type of beam which was to be used in the series of Baedeker raids but sadly due to its incompetence on the part of the operators the new British counter equipment was not properly adjusted and as a result the Baedeker raiders got through to their targets and, Jones says, 50% of their bombs were delivered to their target areas. When, eventually, the equipment was properly adjusted and used, the percentage of bombs dropped on their intended targets fell to 13%.
The author goes on to calculate that instead of the 360 tons of bombs which fell in the early Baedeker raids, had our countermeasures been operated properly, the tonnage dropped on target would have been about 80% less and the casualties suffered — 400 people killed and 600 seriously injured — presumably that much less also; a sobering thought indeed. None of this is recorded in the Official History which merely records that after May 4th, by which time the operational mistakes had been corrected, ‘almost everything went wrong for the attackers’.
I commend Jones’ book (published in Coronet Books by Hodder & Stoughton in 1979) to all WW2 students as a riveting account of scientific intelligence from 1939-45)

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