大象传媒

This is the account Beryl Lovett who was born in Iron Bridge in 1933;

During the war we lived on Church Hill, near the Church. We had learnt from newsreels shown at our local cinemas, the Central or Plaza, that the German planes sounded different to our planes. One particular Saturday morning we were playing out on the road when we heard the sound of a plane coming up the valley. The sound of the engine was not like we usually heard. I looked up and directly over me i saw a plane with the German cross n its wings, and underneath I could see three bombs dropping towards me. My mother quickly pushed all her children in doors. I don鈥檛 remember any explosion, just the aftermath. All the stain glass windows in our Church, and a mirror my mother kept in the wash house were shattered. The windows in the Co-op and shops on the Wharfage had lost their windows.

The first few days we were not allowed near as the crater as guarded by the military but we eventually got to see it. For years afterwards my brothers and sisters used to go over the Iron Bridge to the woods where the bobs had dropped to see the crater it had made.

Later we lived at the school house and there were two air raid shelters by our garden. My grandmother had an evacuee boy from Liverpool, he had two sisters who were housed near to my grandmothers house, in fact there were quite a lot of evacuees in Iron Bridge, most of them went back after the war, But a very few remained in Shropshire.

Iris Humphries account of the same day. Iris is Beryl鈥檚 younger sister;

I am a little younger than my sister, but I do remember the bombs dropping, we were all horrified to think that bombs would drop on our little village, but then I remember the large cities all over England were bombed daily and I think how lucky we were.

We think their reasoning for dropping bombs on our little village may have been because they were trying to blow up the Power station which was located a few miles away and they obviously missed. It was reported that it had later been seen heading for Whitchurch and was aiming at a petrol station. I'm not sure what eventually happened to that plane I assume it was shot down somewhere, there was an American Air force base at Atcham, and they may have shot it down.

I remember listening to German propaganda on the wireless. Lord Haw Haw who, I believe, came from Whitchurch, was a regular broadcaster for the Germans. He used to come on the wireless saying; 'Germany calling, Germany calling' and tell us that England would soon surrender under the force of the mighty German army. It had not effect on us at all. Surrender? Never.

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