大象传媒

November 14th 1940 was I think a Thursday, I had not then been called up and was working as an electrician for contractors engaged in the construction of test beds for Aero engines at what was then the Rover works in Coventry.

Two of us were lodging at a home about a mile away with a family of husband and wife and two small sons. We were used to air raids by then, they usually started about seven o鈥檆lock. If we saw a glow over Birmingham then we knew it was 鈥渢hem鈥� that night if not it was probably us.

This particular evening the sirens sounded earlier than usual at about six thirty we had just started our evening meal so we carried on. Shortly afterwards however it got rather noisy so we decided to move to the street shelter just outside. These were brick with a concrete roof and about twenty people could get in. There were only about ten of us as a lot of families used to leave the city at night and go elsewhere. In this stree of about 200 hundred houses only about fifty people stayed at night.

So there we were lots of noise Anti aircraft guns, bombs every few minutes and shrapnel raining down, a typical Air raid in those times.

It was a bright moonlight night and we could see planes now and again as they came to drop their bombs. Then at about three o鈥檆lock in the morning we were 鈥渟traddled鈥�. We heard the whistle of bombs falling, out of five or six one landed in the back gardens of our terraced row, and the next skipped us and fell in the works next to us setting it on fire and blowing the roof off. (I read sometime later that the works engineer was awarded a medal for going into the burning factory during the raid and turning off the main gas valve as the fractured pipes were feeding the fire)

As the night went on things went quieter and it seemed our lodgings were not too badly damaged, after a very weak al clear as daylight came we went to check. Surprise, surprise apart from the wall we could see al the rest was open to the sky the bomb in the garden had blown the roofs of ours and al surrounding houses there was nothing but a heap of rubble.

Thankfully no one had been hurt, our landlady said, 鈥淭hat鈥檚 it we are off to my mothers鈥� and went with the boys and her husband shocked at what had happened to her home. We never saw them again. The two of us decided to search for our cases, which we always kept packed. After moving bricks, we eventually found the handle of one case so we uncovered them luckily intact.

We had an idea of staying in the cabin at the work site so we set off to walk there, picking our way through the streets of houses nearly all wrecked and some still burning 鈥� I remember seeing a piano well alight.

So much for our idea, the cabin was at the bottom of a large crater, with a dead pig from we know not where. The test beds were undamaged but there were large holes all over what had been the sports field. It was pretty obvious that there was no way we begin work so we decided that having no where to stay we would go home for the weekend and return on Monday.
Strangely I have no recollection of how we got out of Coventry, it must have been by bus to Birmingham and then to Wolverhampton. There were no trains running as the station had been hit and in any case; we could not get to the station. We must have walked to the city boundary where buses from outside were arriving.

I was glad to get home, as we had not eaten since the pervious evening. They were pleased to see me as news of the raid had filtered through. After the weekend, though it was back to work

On arriving we shared a temporary hut with the builders, but could not find lodgings in Coventry so, we returned to a previous lodging in Birmingham, which meant travelling but we didn鈥檛 mind that.

The Army bomb disposal team was busy 鈥� they had found fourteen in various places on site. Apart from getting not to near to where they were, we just continued to work.

The bomb disposal team stood one behind the other about thirty feet from where they were digging and took it in turns to dig flat out for about two minutes then run back to the line handing the spade to the next man who then did the same. They cleared all the bombs they found in two days, none exploded. Some others did nearby but not on our site. Three weeks later their team had to come back as a fifteenth bomb was found under the painters hut, a case of ignorance is bliss as far as the painters were concerned. After that work carried on more or less as usual and we left the site about two months later.

536 people died that night, one was a painter we knew, 19 died later 1024 were injured. There were other raids later in which nearly 500 died and over 1000 were injured but I never heard any grumbling or real complaining, there seemed to be a determination to work so that one day the boot would be on the other foot and eventually it was.

Coventry has now been rebuilt and apart from the Cathedral and a Memorial in the park very little remains as a reminder to those days.

Our experience was commonplace at the time not worth a mention, let alone writing about, but I offer it as my remembrance of a city I still have a great affection for,

Eddy Jones

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