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This is the story of the blitz on Bath as told to me by my father, John Dickinson:

During the spring of 1942 Germany unleashed several air raids on Bath as part of the “Baedecker” raids in reprisal for earlier bombing raids by the RAF on Lübeck and Rostock, during which a number of historic buildings had been destroyed, although these had not been specifically targeted. In retaliation the German high command decided to mount raids on towns and cities of historical importance in the UK and these were selected from the Baedecker tourist guide to Britain.

At the time I was 17 and a schoolboy at Kingswood school in Bath. Although by that time Kingswood had already been turned over to the Admiralty who had been evacuated to Bath from London to escape the bombing there, while we in turn had been moved to Uppingham school in Rutland. During Easter 1942 I was back home from school for the holidays at my parents’ house, which was situated behind Lansdown Crescent on the north side of the city. It was about 9 o’clock on Saturday evening, the 25th of April and I was thinking of going to bed when the air raid sirens sounded. I assumed it was another raid on Bristol, as it was being bombed heavily and frequently at the time.

I looked out of my bedroom window and could see the searchlights over Bristol and the ack ack guns started up. The first German bomber actually dropped its bombs on the outskirts of Bristol, perhaps mistakenly thinking he was over Bath, but as I carried on watching, the sky over Bath suddenly lit up like daylight as a German aircraft dropped parachute flares targeting the city for the following bombers. Then as I looked out the front of the house I could see lots of bombs falling and exploding in Combe Park on the other side of the city, in the area of the hospital.

I told my parents what was going on and we headed for the air raid shelter in the garden. I stopped off to fill the bath with water in case of incendiary bombs but as I did so a high explosive bomb landed in the road in front of Lansdown Place East a few hundred yards away and severed the water main that supplied the Lansdown Crescent area. I only managed to fill the bath 3 or 4 inches deep before the water cut off, so I carried on down into the shelter with my parents.

As we were sheltering we could hear the bombs exploding as the raid continued, then finally the raid finished, the aircraft left and the all clear went. We came out of our shelter to discover a stick of half a dozen incendiary bombs had fallen in our garden, including one that had hit a large greenhouse and set it on fire, so I grabbed a stirrup pump and put the fire out. Fortunately our house had not been hit directly but a high explosive bomb had dropped in the next door garden belonging to a Commander Percival. Very luckily it had dropped into a deep dell so the explosion went mostly upward; the only damage to our house was to some leaded light windows, which, although not broken, had all buckled outward, sucked out by the force of the bomb blast.

After the all clear I told my parents that I was going round to see my friend Ian Crudgington, who lived below St Steven’s church, to check on him and his family. When I got there I found they were all right and there was no damage to their house. Ian’s dad ran a bookshop in Green Street while my father ran a chemist shop at 11 George Street, both in the centre of town, I was sure that they must have been hit with all the bombs that had fallen, so we decided to go and see if the shops were still standing. We walked down in to the city, going down Cavendish Road until we got to Marlborough Buildings and were going to go on through Victoria Park, but at the bottom of Marlborough Lane we saw a pub on fire in the upper Bristol Road. We found an Irish chap sitting outside on the pavement, badly shocked. He was a labourer working on building an underground ammunition dump at Corsham in Wiltshire and had been lodging at the pub. He was bemoaning that he had lost everything he had brought with him and had been left only with what he was wearing. We decided the best thing was to help him to the YMCA in Broad Street where they would be able to look after him.

As we reached George Street I was pleased to see that my father’s shop was still standing and was not damaged; even the windows had remained unbroken. In fact amazingly there was no damage in George Street or Gay Street; Milsom Street was also intact. We walked to the bottom of Milsom Street and turned into Green Street to find Gregory’s Bookstore, which belonged to Ian’s father, was also okay, so after all the excitement we decided to go home. As we walked back up to Milsom Street and on up to the Circus, we discovered that a high explosive bomb had dropped in the centre of the green in the middle of the Circus but fortunately it hadn’t gone off, otherwise the world famous Circus buildings would have been demolished. The police and the ARP were there fencing off the crater.

As we carried on walking back up the hill we soon came to Julian Road where we found a lot of houses and shops had been hit and St Andrews church was well on fire. Finally we reached Lansdown Crescent and Ian went on up the Lansdown Road to his home while I headed west along the Crescent. As I walked along Lansdown Place East I found a small group of people, including an army captain and two ladies, standing around near where the bomb had fallen earlier in the evening that had cut the water supply. The captain was home on leave visiting his wife and mother. The bomb had blown the stonework clean off the front of their house and severely damaged it (in fact if you look at the frontage to the houses today you can still see where the damaged houses were repaired with a slightly different colour stone). They seemed at a loss and didn’t know what to do, so I took them home with me where my parents put them up for the rest of the night.

It was now in the early hours of the morning and we had only just got in when the sirens went again and we had to take to the shelters once more. It turned out that after leaving the city the bombers had been back to France to rearm and returned for the second raid of the night. On the two nights of the blitz Bath was completely undefended; there were no anti aircraft guns, and it was only some weeks later that an AA battery was sited on the top of Lansdown hill, where now there is a sports facility on the south side of the road. Also the night fighter squadron stationed at nearby RAF Colerne had been stood down and the pilots had gone off on weekend leave. But by now it was virtually daylight and some of the bombers were shot down between Bath and the south coast on the way back to their bases in France.

Fatefully, on Sunday morning the people that I had met in Lansdown Place East and who we had put up for what was left of Saturday night had decided that they would move to the Regina Hotel in town near the Assembly Rooms, as their house was uninhabitable, even though we invited them to stay. On Sunday evening the bombers were back for another attack, but on this occasion there was just the one raid, which lasted about 45 minutes. However, very sadly the Regina Hotel received a direct hit that night from a high explosive bomb, and all the people sheltering in the basement were killed except for two survivors; the army captain, his wife and mother were all killed.

After two nights of bombing my father decided we had had enough so he moved us out of the city to Marshfield in case of further raids and we stayed there for a few days, but as there didn’t seem to be any repetition we soon returned home.

I discovered later that we had a lucky escape, as a German bomber flying toward Lansdown Crescent had dropped three high explosive bombs that had fallen just in front of the Crescent, in a line directly toward our house; if they had been dropped only a few seconds later they would have fallen across the Crescent and on to our house. Today if you look carefully you can still see a small hollow in the field where it slopes down on the west side in front of the Crescent where one of the bombs exploded. I also found that our shop had had a lucky escape as a bomb had dropped into the basement area of a house in Barton Buildings, just behind the shop, but it failed to explode. The first we knew about it was when my father and I went in to town on Sunday morning; the police let us go into our shop to get a few things but told us to be quick about it because of the UXB. A few days later an army bomb disposal squad came and defused it and took it away.

Despite the extensive damage to the city it was amazing how much of the historic centre of the city was unscathed; much of the damage was done in the suburbs. The High Street, the Guildhall, the Abbey, Pultney Street and so on were untouched by the raids, although the Assembly Rooms were burnt out by incendiaries. It seems that quite a number of the bombs dropped during the raids failed to explode. This was because the bombers approached the city from the south, coming in over Beechen cliff. They dived down into the valley to release their bombs, but as they passed over the city centre toward the north they were approaching rising ground, consequently there wasn’t time for the little propellers on the front of the bombs to unwind and arm the bombs as they fell to ground. As a result quite a few of the bombs that fell on the north side of the city failed to explode due to bombs being dropped at too low an altitude into the rising ground of the valley.

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