大象传媒

This story was added by Olivia Cubberley at the 大象传媒 Open Centre, Hull with the kind permission of Mr W Gell.

I attended Osbourne St School from August 1934 until it was bombed in 1941. I remember refugee German Jewish children arriving in England before the war and, as Osbourne Street was a Jewish district at that time, our school was attended by some of them. I remember that, by junior school, one of the boys, Manny Graber, came first at English, for which we were given a rousting by the head master.

I lived at English Street from 1940 and remember the first bombs dropped in our area were in Great Passage Street and Edwards Place. The house in which we lived was approximately one hundred yards from a railway marashalling yard and a further hundred yards from Albert Dock. Not a very healthy spot to be in at that time in history. For some reason I was never evacuated and spent the whole of the war living in Hull.

The early air raids on Hull, once the fear of the sirens had been overcome, settled down into nuisance raids. Just a few aircaft dropping bombs and keeping people from getting the required period of sleep. My pal Clarence Jackson and I had kitted oursleves out with overcoats and warm clothing and would settle ourselves on the wall to the railway marshalling yard, which gave us a clear view down toward the mouth of the Humber. Apparently the German aircraft used the Humber as a datum for their approach to the city and the docks. We treated our air raid watching as good fun, not really being aware that it was other peoples disaster. The biggest danger to us was from shrapnel that fell from the anti-aircaft fire.

Things started to change one night, when, after the air raid siren had sounded we saw in the sky towards Spurn Point, what looked like half a dozen gigantic chandeliers, we heard the aircaft but nothing happened until some time later when we again heard an aircraft and saw a similar spectacle but right over the city centre. What we had witnessed was the first time, to our knowledge that the Germans had used Pathfinder methods to guide the bombers onto their targets. That raid was much heavier than most of the others had been and was to be a forerunner of things that were to come.

For some reason, raids on Hull were reffered to in the newspapers as raids over a North East Town, other cities such as Coventry, Southampton, Liverpool and London were named but we were anonymous. We were to learn later that some of the air raids upon Hull were intended for Sheffield or Liverpool but if conditions turned bad over the original target, Hull was a very handy place to offload.

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