Episode 4 Blitz: The Bombs That Changed Britain

In September 1940,

death and destruction came to the streets of Britain

on a scale never seen before or since.

The noise was deafening.

Bang! Bang! Tremendous explosions, one after another.

They called it the Blitz.

The whole city was aglow.

In the space of just over eight months,

more than 450,000 bombs rained down on British soil.

But in the midst of the chaos and confusion,

meticulous records were kept.

This is a bomb map. Every single dot is where a bomb landed.

Using this untapped archive, we'll identify individual bombs...

That's the bomb that you're looking for.

Oh, it is, yes!

..with consequences which rippled out from the point of impact,

through the lives of people and beyond,

to help shape modern Britain. EXPLOSION

Of all the houses that plane was flying over...

and one bomb.

Why did it hit us?

In this episode: November 1940,

the port city of Bristol is assailed

by a deadly weapon of mass destruction.

That's an incendiary bomb.

They really were killers.

More than 12,000 incendiary bombs fell on Bristol that night.

But it would only take one to reduce a sacred symbol of the city to

smouldering ruins, and to push its spirit to breaking point.

That night, you could say, the soul of the city was wiped out.

But even as the flames rose around them,

Bristolians learned to fight back.

Was it right that my father used to kick off the incendiary bombs,

off the roof?

That's what you did. We knew what we had to do,

and if any incendiaries came down, to get on them.

No-one really knows...

..the inner part of what people

went through, emotional-wise.

And probably people will never know.

In the heart of Bristol today stand the ruins of St Peter's Church,

a stark reminder of the night the soul of the city was seared.

St Peter's had stood for more than 800 years at the top of

Castle Street, a local landmark in a compact neighbourhood

of shops, businesses and homes.

The historic heart of Bristol and its civic soul.

But in November 1940,

this deep-rooted community was under threat.

By then, the Blitz had been raging for nearly three months...

as the Luftwaffe bombers expanded their target list from London

to major ports and industrial centres across Britain.

And on the night of Sunday, November 24th, 1940, it was Bristol's turn.

5pm. As dusk fell, at an airfield south-west of Paris,

Luftwaffe navigator and bomb aimer Martin Reiser

boarded his Heinkel 111 bomber,

loaded with the most destructive weapon in the Luftwaffe's arsenal.

-Oh! Oh, dear.

-HE LAUGHS

That's an incendiary bomb.

I still seem to think

that they were fatter than that,

but that's probably my memory

and my hands.

David Pearce was 13 years old

when the incendiary bomb came to his city.

They had hundreds of these on the aircraft,

and they dropped them at random

when they came down,

and when they hit the ground, they ignited the thermite inside.

They really were killers.

By this stage of the Blitz,

a clear pattern to the terrifying night raids had emerged.

First, elite pathfinders dropped flares and incendiaries

to illuminate the target area.

Then wave after wave of bombers dropped hundreds of high explosives

to destroy water mains and cripple the firefighting effort...

..and tens of thousands more incendiaries to sow countless fires

that grew into an inferno.

By the time Martin Reiser and the rest of his Heinkel bomber unit

took off, heading over the English Channel for Bristol,

the pathfinders, known as the Firelighters,

were already over the city and had begun the night's work.

Like many other Bristolians that Sunday evening,

Geoffrey Serle and his father had been attending church

when the raid began.

It was a nice, quiet Sunday evening, as usual, in the church.

And to suddenly see the sky light up like that, all of a sudden,

with flares and

being November, I said, "Dad, look. There are fireworks still around."

Of course, he knew that was not the case, and they were flares from the

Pathfinder bombers who were lighting up the city

before the main bomber force arrived.

And they were heading towards St Peter's Church

at the top of Castle Street.

If your memory stretches back to the '30s, you'll remember this.

Cock And Bottle Lane really did exist - one of any number of narrow

alleyways that led into Castle Street,

which ran from Old Market to St Peter's Church,

through what has now become Castle Park.

Today, only glimpses of the elegance of prewar Castle Street remain.

But it lives on in the vivid memories of former residents

like Geoffrey Serle.

The centre of the city was Castle Street.

All the famous shops and restaurants were there.

On a Saturday, particularly, the whole of Bristol seemed to

congregate in Castle Street.

The Serle family clothing shop, Yeoman, Serle & Co,

was just one of hundreds of long-established local businesses

which gave Castle Street its particular cachet.

It just had about everything in that road, you know,

fashionable dress shops and tailor's shops.

You could get almost anything in Castle Street.

Among the flagship department stores on Castle Street was a Woolworths,

where Ellice Turner, 18 years old in November 1940,

was proud to staff the tea bar.

Oh, it was lovely.

There were about five of us girls, I think, on the tea bar.

And it was a very, ever such a happy thing.

And one of us would be collecting the dishes and taking them into our

little kitchen to wash those ones up.

And the others were serving.

You could get a complete lunch for sixpence.

Such a bonny bunch of ladies.

Just north of Castle Street, at 9 Merchant St,

was a tobacconist and sweet shop owned by William Hares,

who lived above the shop.

William's daughter-in-law Jan,

and his grandchildren Stephen and Catherine,

have carefully preserved his personal archive.

There's the picture of his shop in Merchant Street, as it was,

with "W A Hare" on the top.

W A was William Andrew.

Everybody knew him as Bill Hares.

I think, with 9 Merchant St, they valued the place, didn't they?

-It was their first home.

-It was home, yes.

-Yes.

Dad was born there, Auntie Margaret was born there.

-It was an anchor in the city.

-Yeah.

St Peter's Church was another anchor for the Castle Street community.

A place of worship, a familiar landmark,

and a civic focal point for residents

like Bill and May Hares.

When Grandma and Grandpa got married,

they went up to St Peter's Church,

to the registry office on Castle Green,

and both of them always referred to Castle Green with a lot of emotion,

really. It was not just a stone's throw away from Merchant Street,

but they could see that from the front of the shop.

In St Peter's Church,

the evening service, called "Light and Darkness",

was drawing to a close when the warning siren sounded at 6:22pm.

AIR RAID SIREN

School teacher Margaret Kane, a member of the congregation,

described the moment the raid began in a letter written to her parents

the morning after.

"During the closing prayers,

"we had light and darkness outside in the shape of flares.

"They lit the stained-glass windows, just like daylight, and almost

"immediately the first bomb fell and the guns started up."

As Geoffrey Serle and his father tried to make their way home,

they were caught out in the open.

With no public shelter in sight, Geoffrey's father had to think fast.

I said, "Where are we going?"

He said, "We must find some shelter, we must find shelter."

We went down these stone steps...

and below there was a pontoon.

We managed to get down there,

then we could hear the bombs coming down steadily.

Incendiaries first,

bursting into flames.

You could see the flares, even from down there.

Tobacconist Bill Hares left a dramatic minute-by-minute account of

the terrifying night when the familiar world

of Castle Street went up in flames.

This is the original diary that was actually written the day after the

first Blitz, on any scrap of paper that he had.

"Suddenly, people are running like hell.

"The sky is now lit up with different coloured flares.

"The barrage is terrific and the air is filled with the constant drone of

"Jerry planes, the scream of falling bombs and the thunder

"of their explosion.

"I've got a queer feeling, myself.

"I'm terribly dry and I don't quite know what to do."

The noise was deafening.

Bang! Bang! Tremendous explosions, one after another.

And shortly after,

a bomb dropped just along there.

About 100 yards along.

And a wave came across and swamped the pontoon we were in.

I thought we were going to drown.

I was petrified. I hung onto my father. He was shaking.

EXPLOSIONS

Fires stoked by a blizzard of incendiaries had taken firm hold.

At St Peter's, the vicar, Reverend Loveday,

told Margaret Kane and other members of the congregation that they must

abandon the church, which, though still untouched,

was by now surrounded by a sea of flames.

Mr Loveday came back and said,

"We must go out across the churchyard and into the shelter

"in the vaults of St Peter's hospital."

About 20 of us left then.

After about a quarter of an hour, it was 8:30, by now,

once again he came back and said

the fire was spreading and very, very near to us.

Martin Reiser and his unit appear over the centre of the city,

and begin their bombing run.

Before them lies St Peter's Church.

As they approach, they release their BSK incendiary canisters...

..each packed with 36 individual incendiary bombs.

It will take only one of these,

designed to ignite on impact and burn white hot,

to melt through the church's lead roof, exposing the ancient timbers

beneath to the scorching flames of destruction.

By the time Martin Reiser's unit crossed the south coast,

after a successful mission, St Peter's,

along with the rest of Castle Street, was in flames.

Tobacconist Bill Hares could only look on in despair.

"The centre of the city is one blazing mass,

"and the Jerries are plastering the fires with all they have.

"Hell is released on our city.

"Many soldiers are doing good work,

"but we've still no fire auxiliaries to deal with the local fires.

"It looks as if the whole block will be gutted,

"but there's still no sign of any firemen.

"Where the hell are they?"

As the incendiaries rained down,

Bristol's firefighters were quite simply overwhelmed.

Drafted in to help them was Les Reynolds,

a night duty police driver.

Bev Reynolds is his son.

My father looked after the family.

He worked hard, he was a van driver before the war.

And then he joined the police.

He drove the first radio-controlled car in Bristol.

He loved his job as a policeman. He absolutely loved it.

But cars were little use that night.

Les Reynolds abandoned his,

and made his way on foot to the chaotic inferno that had engulfed

St Peter's, as his account reveals.

"We could not use any cars or vans,

"because of the many craters left on the roads.

"When I got to Peter Street, I found that Burton's the tailors,

"and the new theatre, St Peter's Church, were all ablaze.

"The water mains had been fractured,

"so we ran some extension hoses down to the river,

"to try and draw water up from there.

"We tried to save St Peter's Church, but it was absolutely hopeless."

From the ancient hospital building next to St Peter's,

Margaret Kane finally made her escape.

"By this time, outside,

"it was like a heavy blizzard of red-hot chunks blowing all around.

"I had no hat,

"so I put my head under the tap and splashed water all over my coat and

"started off with another girl who lives near me.

"I've never cycled like I did then.

"We had been told there was only one way we could go, and we passed by

"numbers of fires even then, but we felt we must risk them and go on."

The all-clear sounded,

and Geoffrey Serle and his father emerged from their improvised

shelter beneath Bristol Bridge to find the familiar face of

Castle Street had undergone a terrible transformation.

We paused for a moment and looked back at the burning city, and it was

such a devastating sight,

to see the buildings tumbling down and the flames still there.

Looking down Castle Street, we could see St Peter's Church was on fire.

You could see through the windows that it was all well alit inside,

so it was obviously burnt out.

As my father said, "That won't... that's gone, the church is gone."

In its final agony, the bells fell inside the church's gutted tower,

and its roof was seen to flow down Castle Street

in a river of molten lead.

It was an eerie sight, it really was.

Etched in my memory, it will be there forever.

That night, you could say the soul of the city was wiped out,

it really was. The heart of Bristol had gone.

But it wasn't just the past that had been destroyed that night.

With the obliteration of Castle Street,

Bristol lost the commercial and economic hub

that had given life to the centre of the city.

We tried to get a bit further, stumbling along through the

rubble and so on. My father said, "I think the warehouse has gone."

Our family business - Yeoman, Serle & Co -

our warehouse was just about here, where you see the smoke coming out.

That's an image that typifies how, how it was after the raid.

Complete, as you can see, complete devastation.

Nothing left of it, right the way through Castle Street,

right the way through.

When Ellice Turner struggled to work next morning at Woolworths, she too

discovered a world turned upside down.

Everything was everywhere.

It was so sad because we'd just had all our Christmas eatables in,

and on the confectionery counter.

It just looked like devastation.

I was going to say, it looked as if a bomb had fallen.

Exactly, it did.

For policeman Les Reynolds,

the trauma of the night only ended when he finally returned home to his

wife and their eight-month-old son, Bev.

"At 11am on Monday the 25th,

"we were dismissed from duty after almost 17 hours of sheer hell.

"I arrived home to find my wife and eight-month son safe...

"..safe and well.

"I looked in the mirror and I would not have been surprised to find that

"my hair had turned white.

"I am not ashamed to say...

"I then sat down and cried my eyes out."

Very emotional.

And I think that

no-one really knows...

..the inner part of what people went through,

emotional-wise.

And probably people will never know.

Didn't know that.

The only thing I knew was that he used to say that, "When I got to the

"top of the road, I used to go on my bike and have a look down

"to see if the house was still there."

He said, "I'd think, 'Thank God it's still there.' "

Others were not so lucky.

During the six-hour raid,

more than 200 people had been killed

and nearly 900 injured.

10,000 homes had been damaged or destroyed.

The next morning, one man took up his camera and began documenting the

devastation caused by the incendiary attack on St Peter's

and the Castle Street neighbourhood.

His name was Jim Facey,

a photojournalist working for the Bristol Evening Post.

For fellow local journalist Eugene Byrne,

Facey's photographs provide a unique record of Bristol

during the Blitz.

Down here we have hundreds of photographs of wartime Bristol.

But it's really only Facey's that are the ones that sort of tried to

tell this human story behind it.

These pictures really were all about what savages,

what barbaric things the Nazis had done to Bristol,

but also about, sort of, the sense of defiance of Bristolians.

So, you know, in this, for instance,

she's lost, by the look of it,

three quarters of her home,

but she's having a nice, calming cigarette.

One of my favourites is this.

This is the girl whose house has been bombed out, and...

..but the...the doll's house is OK.

The young girl with the doll's house was called Ellen Lydia Rich,

whose family had lived close to the Castle Street neighbourhood for generations.

Barbara Walshe is Ellen's daughter.

The first time I saw this photograph, it was my uncle George

had seen it in the Bristol Evening Post,

and, as he was the oldest in my mum's family,

he recognised it to be my mum, and

he also recognised the doll's house.

He remembered her having that.

I looked at all the people, the men in the background,

and I'm sure the man behind her is her dad.

I'm sure that's my grandad there, and they're just trying to collect

some of their belongings.

Just to find themselves without anything at all left in the world,

even though they're still alive,

they must've been just wondering, "What on earth is going to happen next?"

Where are they going to go?

But, for all their enduring power,

many of Jim Facey's photographs were not seen at the time because of

Government censorship.

Control of the press in wartime by the Ministry of Information

was strict.

Denying the enemy intelligence about the effectiveness of their raids

meant that identification of cities badly hit was routinely suppressed.

The censorship has some pretty surreal moments,

and frankly it does end up causing

quite a lot of resentment in Bristol.

So, for example, on the morning of Monday, November 25th,

the lead story in the Bristol Evening Post...

So the biggest news story in Bristol, in the Evening Post's

entire life, and it can't say what everyone picking up a copy of this

damn paper knows fully well -

that the bombs fell on Bristol and not just any old west town.

The martyred city of Coventry.

But there were exceptions to the censor's rule.

Words are hopelessly inadequate to describe the horror and indignation

felt all over the civilised world at this wanton devastation.

Just ten days before the Bristol raid,

the centre of Coventry had been subjected to an attack of such

intensity that its ordeal was given maximum publicity,

in order to stir up national indignation

and international condemnation.

Theses are scenes of the butchery of Coventry.

They came through the ordeal magnificently.

This is their greatest hour.

Watching the newsreels on Coventry that played in cinemas the very same

week of their own ordeal,

many Bristolians must have felt slighted and ignored when only

veiled references to the raid appeared in the local press.

In the immediate aftermath of the 24th of November,

the question of the city's morale came to the fore.

The official line was, "Britain can take it."

But the intensity of the raid had been so great that the question

being asked in the corridors of power was, could Bristol?

To test the resilience of cities like Bristol,

the authorities turned to some unorthodox methods.

In 1937,

anthropologist Tom Harrison and others had set up a pioneering

social survey organisation called Mass Observation.

It sought to gauge how ordinary people lived their lives,

and their attitudes to current events.

Now, in the middle of the Blitz,

it was more urgent than ever to take the emotional pulse

of ordinary civilians.

So the Ministry of information contracted Mass Observation

to do just that.

For historian Dr Lucy Noakes,

Mass Observation's singular approach has proved invaluable in her quest

to dig beneath the surface of the so-called "Blitz spirit"

in cities like Bristol.

Harrison thought the best way to gather information about the British

people was from the ground.

It was sort of living amongst people.

So they would listen to conversations on buses,

in queues, in shops,

and write down everything that people were saying.

He knew that memory can play tricks.

He knew that, if you ask people after the event,

then your memories of the event might have changed,

they might have been shaped by subsequent events.

So they really wanted to kind of get down to live with the people,

to see what the experience was like at the time.

And so Mass Observation investigators arrived on the

bombed-out streets of Bristol

and began to eavesdrop on conversations.

Their conclusions made for alarming reading.

"There's more depression in Bristol than in any other studied city in

"recent months. There's quite open defeatism.

"Also, much more wishful thinking about the war being over than in

"other areas. In itself, probably an indication of depression."

Snatches of overhead conversations

were offered as evidence for this conclusion.

-"I don't see how we're going to win this war."

-"Of course were going to lose. We're only a small country."

Among the most plaintive cries was a lament for the city's historic

centre, now marked by the gutted tower of St Peter's.

"It'll never be the same again."

Tom Harrison believes that, in a city as small and compact as

Bristol, the trauma of the Blitz was intensified.

"I know from personal experience that it is ten times more unpleasant

"to be blitzed in places the size of Coventry or Bristol,

"where every bomb is personal,

"and every piece of bomb damage is a disaster to one's own town,

"instead of the great agglomeration of town which is called London."

But alongside the evidence for depression and defeatism

amongst some Bristolians was the determination among others

to fight back.

Ironically, the opportunity to do so was offered by the very same weapon

that had dealt them such a grievous blow in the November raid.

The Browns at home. Suddenly, the alarm.

Enemy aircraft are here.

But the Browns are prepared to tackle the worst.

An incendiary bomb hits the house.

It burns very violently for the first minute, but after that it can be tackled.

Brown goes to ascertain the damage, and sends to Smith next door...

The incendiary was one of the most effective weapons

in the Luftwaffe's arsenal.

An 1,800kg high-explosive "Satan" bomb

could flatten a street of houses.

It was the incendiary, weighing just 1-2kg, that did the real damage...

..seeding a thousand fires that reduced cities to ashes.

They fell in such great numbers that people in Blitz Bristol would become

all too familiar with their sinister outlines.

This is an incendiary bomb, which was dug up by my father and was very

effective in the destruction in the Blitz in Bristol.

He took it back home, and realised that it hadn't gone off and tried to

drill out the explosive that was in there.

And it's been with us ever since.

For Bristol-born engineer Will Boult,

this singular family heirloom is an object of particular fascination,

as ingenious as it was deadly.

It's a very intricate, it's a very well-designed item.

It's got the imperial eagle on it, it's got a serial number.

You can see here the holes,

that's to let, you know, that's to let the gas out

as the detonator starts to burn.

You know, I'm an engineer, and the thought of this item being designed

by a contemporary engineer in Germany,

just to kill people, is a really strange thought.

A team of engineers has gone to a lot of effort to make sure

this will be a very effective weapon.

So it does have a sort of terrible beauty about it.

But for all their insidious menace,

Bristolians realised that, when it came to the incendiary bomb,

they weren't just passive victims.

Here was a weapon that could be taken on and defeated.

There was so much of this going on, there was a Government campaign,

so, like, we have information posters.

There's this sort of thing, saying, "Beat Firebomb Fritz."

And it says, you know, very defiantly, "Britain shall not burn,"

but actually,

how do you deal with something that, a burning piece of metal times

-12,000?

-All that was needed, according to the propaganda films,

were tools, training and the will to fight back.

The stirrup hand pump is the best to deal with both bomb and fire.

Miss Smith arrives.

She has received training from the local authorities, which you too can receive.

Brown decides to operate the pump away from the heat and smoke.

Note how Miss Smith keeps as near the floor as possible,

and plays a jet of water on the heart of the fire

to get it under control.

But before an incendiary bomb could be tackled, it had to be spotted.

That's where the fire watchers came in.

Civilian volunteers stationed on the roofs of vulnerable buildings,

even in the middle of a raid,

watching out for the firebombs as they fell to earth,

ready with stirrup pumps and sand,

to extinguish them before they could do too much damage.

There had been fire watchers on duty in Bristol on the night in November

when St Peter's had been destroyed,

but nowhere near enough, and none on the church's roof.

After that baptism of fire, more volunteers stepped forward,

determined to save their city if "Firebomb Fritz" returned.

They joined veterans like tobacconist Bill Hares,

who had volunteered as a fire watcher before the November raid,

despite having lost a leg due to a childhood injury.

This is Bristol's Siren Nights, a book that was published in 1943.

It's a collection of stories from the first Blitzes,

and this is the picture that we think is Grandpa climbing the roof

with his wooden leg, his leg's straight.

-I think that's right.

-He was incredibly active.

-He wouldn't be beaten, would he?

-Oh, good gracious, no. No, no way.

Grandpa just wanted to get in, pitch in and do his thing.

-And do his bit, yeah.

-Do his bit for the city, really.

Keep everything safe.

The next big test for Bristol's Fire Watchers came as the Luftwaffe

bombers returned in force to the city.

Among the volunteers that night was 23-year-old Eric Tyley.

Eric and his wife-to-be, Betty,

had witnessed the aftermath of the November raid just nine days before.

It was a terrible shock.

One day the buildings were all there, the next day, nothing.

And it was a horrible smell. It was terrible and still smouldering.

Of course, I remember very well,

going up from the Bristol Bridge

up into Castle Street area, you know.

That was devastated.

On that night, it wasn't just St Peter's that had been destroyed.

In this so-called city of churches, a dozen others had been

badly damaged or destroyed.

But less than a mile south of St Peter's,

one church remained unscathed.

St Mary Redcliffe - Eric's church.

And as the sirens sounded on the evening of the 2nd of December,

Eric and his fellow fire watchers were determined to keep their

beloved church safe through another night.

We did all we could to save it, because we were all brought up

there. I'd been brought up in Redcliffe School.

I started down there in 1926.

1926, so I was picked out then, for the school,

to sing in the choir.

So, I mean, Redcliffe, it was my home.

I wouldn't like to be without it, I think it's a marvellous church.

CHORAL SINGING

Leading the team of volunteer Fire Watchers at St Mary Redcliffe

was its charismatic vicar, Canon Sidney Swann.

-Hello, Eric.

-Hello, Celia. How are you?

-Whether you remember me, I'm not sure.

-A long time ago, but you were quite young, weren't you?

I think I know your face.

Celia Byrne is Canon Swann's daughter.

-Your father was in charge.

-Yes.

We had a group of fire watchers, all of us.

I and my mate were just responsible for this part.

And we got through that doorway there, up onto the roof.

Was it right that my father used to kick off the incendiary bombs,

-off the roof?

-Of course, that's what you did.

He was very busy. If it hadn't been for Canon Swann,

I don't think this church would be here today, quite honestly.

You can't tell anybody today what it was like, really.

The noise...and the shrapnel.

The incendiary bombs lit the city to such an extent, it was like

-daylight.

-Really? I never knew that.

You see, your experience is quite different from mine,

you being an adult and me being a child.

And some of it was exciting for me. It wouldn't have been for you.

No, I suppose it was for you youngsters,

but it wasn't very exciting for us.

Four nights later, on the 6th of December, the bombers returned,

bringing the death toll for the working week to more than 200.

St Mary Redcliffe came through untouched again,

thanks to the vigilance of Canon Swann's

dedicated team of volunteers.

But three heavy raids in less than two weeks had exposed worrying

cracks in the provision of public shelters in Bristol.

At the start of the war,

the Government had calculated that the city's public shelters would

need to accommodate 25,000 people.

But when the raids began,

there was room for only 3,500.

And as for the shelters themselves,

dissatisfaction with them was a source of bitterness,

as Mass Observation investigators reported.

"The main grumbling is about shelters.

"This is often spontaneous, non-political and actually justified.

"Investigators who have a wide comparison of experience in town

"shelter facilities, consider those in Bristol

"to be strikingly inferior and inadequate."

Bristolians had good reason to complain.

The council's brick-built shelters were known to crack or even collapse

when subjected to attacks,

in part because penny-pinching subcontractors had used a defective

mixture in the water.

They were dark, they were dirty, and they smelled.

They were put up quite rapidly, as a temporary thing,

and it was said that, if a bomb dropped on them, they were gone.

Eavesdropping Mass Observation investigators recorded a rising

chorus of discontent on the streets of Bristol.

"It's a waste of time building those doll's houses.

"There's a buggery in them. We want bomb-proof shelters."

"We won't win the war unless we have underground shelters for everyone.

"It's going to drive people scatty unless they have them."

The bitter experience of the Blitz taught ordinary Bristolians to

take matters into their own hands.

They began to search for places of safety in a myriad of tunnels

and caves beneath the city itself.

Word had spread that in the cliffs of the Avon Gorge,

2.5 miles from the city centre,

were disused railway tunnels which could provide the safety

that seemed to be absent elsewhere.

One was called the Portway tunnel.

And it was to here that hundreds of Bristolians from the city centre

fled during the winter nights of 1940.

But, apart from the protection it offered,

the tunnel had little to recommend it.

According to Mass Observation investigators...

..who surveyed it soon after it had been commandeered.

There is no official shelter sign and no indication along the road

that there is a shelter until one arrives at the entrance.

Just inside the entrance is a blast wall of sandbags.

As one enters, the stench is overpowering.

A mixture of sandbags, urine, disinfectant,

stale sweat and bedding.

There's no canteen and no other facilities.

Two closets with sackcloth doors.

Ralph Smith, the youngest of 13 children,

was just six years old when he entered the Portway tunnel

for the first time but the memory of it is still fresh.

The fact was, it was scary.

It was cold, it was damp.

Bearing in mind all those bodies breathing, no air coming in

or going out. It was terrible.

Absolutely terrible.

Because we all went in and the kiddies started bellowing.

One starts, 50 others start.

But then, when we were in there, you've got to bear in mind

people were suffering outside.

People were being blown from here to there.

Sheltering with Ralph in the tunnel each night

was his elder brother Gerald

who later left an account of that traumatic time.

Ralph's grandson, Nathan, is reading it to him for the first time.

"We got down to the tunnel,

"and there must have been about 700 or 800 people.

"It was absolute chaos.

"It was terrible and everybody was fighting for places.

"You couldn't lay out, so you had to kneel,

"cooped up with your back against the wall and it was

"always streaming with water. We couldn't sleep,

"sleep was almost impossible.

"And any sleeping was done during the day."

Correct.

Correct. That is memories.

Well, well, well.

What do you think about that?

How emotional, really.

Exactly as I remember it. Yeah.

It was...

It was all true.

Gerald's account also describes the scenes

that confronted the shelterers when they emerged from the tunnel

after a night of heavy bombing.

"When we got to the main street near our home, all the houses

"were caved in on the street. There were hosepipes,

"dogs barking and sirens going and burglar alarms sounding.

"An absolute cacophony of war.

"I remember blood running from the bodies into the main road,

"and this went down the road,

"as if somebody was tipping buckets of red paint.

"We saw people walking along with parts of torsos, matching them

"with shoes or coats and piecing them together."

That is true. And it was raining.

And it was going down into the drains, red,

I remember that as a little kid.

I'll always remember it.

I can remember seeing a person come out with just one arm.

You didn't realise what had happened to that person.

Another came out screaming, holding her eyes.

And it's not till you sit here and I go back over my memories

that you realise what WE went through

and what THEY went through outside.

Caught between the terror of the bombs and the horrors of the tunnel,

hundreds of Bristolians chose the latter,

ignoring warnings about the possible outbreak of TB.

But, despite repeated appeals,

little was done to improve conditions

for the largely working-class families

huddled in the Portway tunnel each night.

The official view of the shelterers was expressed by Sir Hugh Ellis,

the Southwest Regional Commissioner for Civil Defence,

in a letter to a colleague at the Ministry for Home Security.

"My dear Gater.

"As you remember, we had between 24th of November

"and the 6th of December a series of very heavy raids.

"And after the turmoil was over,

"it was discovered that upwards of 1,500 persons

"had formed a sort of gypsy encampment

"in this undesirable place and had filled it with beds,

"little shelters and the most indescribable collection

"of junk of all sorts."

This letter tells us volumes about what the authorities thought

about the ordinary people

that were trying to take shelter during the Blitz.

There's that phrase about them and us,

and, during the war, the "them" wasn't always Germany.

-NEWSREEL:

-This is the British Broadcasting Corporation.

To make matters worse,

the authorities had arranged to hand over the Portway tunnel to the BBC,

in search of a secure emergency headquarters

in case they were bombed out of their London and Bristol studios.

In January, when the BBC turned up to assess the tunnel,

the shelterers refused to budge and staged a sit-in.

Soon afterwards, according to a Mass Observation report,

the police forcibly cleared sections of the tunnel

with the help of truncheons, in the name of public health.

It can't have been great for morale, can it?

You're trying to take shelter from the bombs night after night,

and the police are there with truncheons to keep you away.

It's unthinkable, really.

And it's not part of what we think that we remember about the Blitz.

But it's an important part and it's something that really happened.

Less than six weeks after the destruction of St Peter's,

a 12-hour raid saw more than 50,000 incendiaries

fall on Bristol in a single night.

At St Mary Redcliffe, Eric Tyley and the other fire watchers

were on duty as usual,

keeping their church safe from another night of flames,

in which 149 people lost their lives.

More often than not, we slept in the Lady's Chapel

because it was quicker to get up onto the roof.

We knew what we had to do and, if any incendiaries came down,

to get on them with the stirrup pump.

And get it down and put some sand it on them, deaden it down.

-NEWSREEL:

-You cannot stop a high-explosive bomb from bursting

but you can stop a firebomb from starting a fire.

Just a few days earlier,

Home Secretary Herbert Morrison had taken to the BBC to chide

those who'd shrunk from tackling Firebomb Fritz.

-NEWSREEL:

-Some of you lately, in more cities than one,

have failed your country.

It must never happen again.

Fall in, the firebomb fighters.

But, by the time of the broadcast,

it seemed Bristol had already become a city of firefighters,

according to the local press, at least.

They made great play with the story of 12-year-old Barbara Horn,

who, it was claimed, put out eight incendiaries

while dressed in her New Year's party frock.

For other kids in Bristol,

familiarity with this deadly weapon

had bred a peculiar kind of intimacy.

Some of them didn't go off,

and we used to collect them and take them back into the garden.

We played with them, we took them apart...

..we got bits of stick and dipped those in water

and then put them in the thermite

and rolled them round,

and lit it, and it made giant sparklers.

And they were fantastic.

But we were stopped from doing that by our mum and dad after a time

cos they thought it was a bit dodgy.

Good Friday.

Bristol suffers its sixth large-scale raid

since its baptism of fire in November, 1940.

The following morning, Prime Minister Winston Churchill

appears on the streets on a morale-boosting visit.

This time, Bristol is permitted a few moments of newsreel fame.

-NEWSREEL:

-Shortly after Bristol received its raid,

Mr Churchill visits the battle-scarred city

and it was to the bombed people of Bristol

that Mr Churchill gave his stirring pledge -

"We'll give it to them back."

But behind the newsreel smiles was a deep-seated bitterness

at the months of relentless bombing.

It was even rumoured that Churchill himself had been booed.

The censored local press came as close as it could

to reflecting a new public mood.

Unrecognisable from the passive despair of just a few months before.

"As the death toll mounted,

"and it became clear that casualties were likely to be heavy,

"the mood of Bristol became one of burning anger.

" 'They will have to pay for this,'

"was the grim pronouncement of people who had lost loved ones,

"homes or businesses, who'd carried on with their firefighting

"and rescue work for hour after hour."

So, the Western Daily here is sort of hinting at the sort of level

of wear and tear that it's taking on the morale of the city.

Because, of course, at that stage, Bristolians had endured a winter

of what must've felt to them like endless air attacks.

AIR RAID SIREN SOUNDS

You know, night after night, the air raid sirens would go,

and it was an awful feeling.

And going to school, you know,

the teacher would call out a name,

"Anna Morgan," and someone would say, "She's not in today, Miss.

"The house was hit last night, a direct hit, they were all killed."

Bristol's emergency services had also learned some harsh lessons

since the chaos of the first major raid in November 1940.

During the raids of 1940 and '41,

the enemy failed in his attempt to break our spirit.

Because of the courage and the determination

of the civil defence services.

But the civil defence services had something more than determination.

They had a plan - a plan based on a simple pattern of action.

In 1942, the city's civil defence system featured in a

Government propaganda film, Control Room,

held up as an example to other cities of the efficient coordination

of the professional fire, ambulance and police services,

with volunteer fire watchers, ARP wardens and rescue workers.

They've done it. A direct hit.

This information goes at once to our report centre.

Its position is plotted on a map...

..and an officer decides what services are needed.

Rescue parties are wanted immediately

to get out the trapped people.

First aid and ambulance parties to attend to the wounded.

It was a precursor of today's coordinated response to

emergency situations.

But after the Good Friday raid,

Bristol's control room would never be required

to go into action again on a major scale.

Of course, nobody at that time would have realised

that that was the last big raid.

This so-called Good Friday raid is the last major German raid

on Bristol, because what happened then was that

Hitler diverted the attention of his air force

towards the forthcoming attack on the Soviet Union.

When the war ended,

the battle for Bristol's heart and soul entered a new phase.

The greatest responsibility the council has today is the replanning

and rebuilding of the city.

The bad must be replaced and the future taken into account.

That future took shape in Broadmead,

the neighbourhood immediately to the north of St Peter's Church.

Badly damaged - but not totally destroyed - by the bombing,

Broadmead was earmarked for wholesale demolition...

..its mixture of shops, houses and public buildings

replaced by a new and little-loved shopping centre.

Well, there's the Greyhound.

So that would've been one of the pubs

in Grandpa's darts league fixtures.

Oh, and then the arcade.

If the people could come back and see it now,

they'd hardly believe it was the same place.

Among the houses swept away in the wholesale redevelopment

of Bristol city centre was the shop on Merchant Street,

where fire watcher Bill Hares once sold tobacco and sweets.

This would have been where it was.

-It'd be 9 Merchant St, now on the corner.

-Yeah.

Castle Green over there.

And the Church of St Peter, where they got married.

I think they must have had a happy life here

because he was so concerned with keeping the family

together and safe.

And I think the trauma of actually leaving the area must've been

quite horrendous, really, because this was his life.

His first house.

And the children were born here.

-Yeah.

-Yes.

-Dad and Auntie Margaret were born here.

Another time, another world, eh, Mum?

Today, little remains of the old Castle Street neighbourhood...

..except the ruins of St Peter's.

On its front is a commemorative plaque

placed there after a long campaign

by Portway Tunnel survivor Ralph Smith,

so that Bristol's darkest hour

would be remembered in the place where it all began.

-Can you read it from here?

-Yes.

-Yeah?

"In memory of the citizens of Bristol and surrounding areas

"who died in the Blitz during the 1939-'45 war."

That there...

represents so much of Bristol's history.

So when people stand here, like me and my grandson,

and we look at that and that's telling the people

that that was the Blitz, that was the war,

and that's dedicated to hundreds of people that died in Bristol.

And I bow my head to them...

..with all sincerity.

And all I can say is, God bless you all.

At St Mary Redcliffe,

which survived the battle of the flames thanks to the efforts of this

dedicated team of fire watchers,

their courage is honoured in a Palm Sunday service.

Across the city, ordinary people did extraordinary things to protect

places they valued and people they loved.

Here at St Mary Redcliffe, the vicar, Sidney Swann,

led a team of fire watchers.

Eric Tyley, a member then and a member still of this church family.

It symbolises their courage.

After the demolition of his shop,

Bill Hares and his family moved to the suburbs, never to return.

Geoffrey Serle became a local TV news reporter,

but his visits to the city centre

are still haunted by his memories of the November raid.

Eric and Betty Tyley don't visit the city centre much these days.

They prefer to keep their memories of the past intact

while still looking forward to the future.

I shall be 100 on the 25th of November this year.

So it's a bit of a struggle to get here,

but I'm getting there, I think!

LAUGHTER

If we can stick together, Bet and I, we'll be all right.

How were the lives of Germans affected by air raids

when the Allies retaliated?

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