James Robert Ward

We are indebted to Philip Pattinson and his family for permission to publish the following extract from James Robert Ward’s unpublished memoir “The Low Street Boy”.

Mr Ward lost two cousins and a half-sister in the bombing disaster. Elizabeth Lindores Donkin, Elizabeth Ann Donkin and Maureen Ward.

He writes about the heartbreaking task of identifying their bodies at the Church Way mortuary.

The last time I saw Mrs Gibson and Ethel was in the old Wash House on the corner of Church Way and Saville Street, opposite the Alnwick Castle pub, I was looking at their faces, but they could not look at mine; they were dead, victims of the bombing of Wilkinson’s Air Raid Shelter. The Wash House was utilised for a Mortuary. I was in there with my brother Bill, looking for three of our family, they were there with many more we knew.’

It seemed that somebody up there did not like our family. Then came that terrible night of the 4th of May 1941. I think that the Repulse, “King George the Fifth” and the destroyer Khandhar, had left the River before high-tide. At the time of the high-tide and with a “Bomber’s Moon” the hordes of enemy planes came in. They dropped their incendiary bombs on Osbeck’s Timber Yard and it was full of props at the time, and this blaze lit up the river. So that the bombers could drop death and destruction.

We got news that Wilkinson’s Shelter had been hit. My sister and my two nieces died there. My uncle Ossie Henderson was there helping to dig them out. If only my sister, sister-in-law and their three children had stayed in my sister’s house. It was only twenty yards from the shelter and was undamaged. My brother Bill and I went through the Wash-House, to identify our dead, we managed to get Bill’s wife Lily out and their eldest daughter Lily. As we went into the Mortuary, the attendant offered us a cigarette, Bill took one, I don’t smoke. The attendant had a cigarette case with a lighter attached, the first that I had seen. He could not keep his hands still as he tried to light Bill’s cigarette. This man had the worst job in Shields at that moment. Bill steadied his hand and he took us around. The children and small adults were on the top bunks and the big people on the bottom bunks. It was like walking down “Memory Lane”, there was everybody I knew by name or sight, Mr Gibson and Ethel, the Broans from Tyne Street, and one woman in particular, her big black eyes used to make me uncomfortable when I was a kid, and there they were staring at me as before.

I was going to go around the back of the bunks, when the attendant said, “Don’t go around there, there is nothing there for you”. He was wrong. I did go around and found my sister Lizzie. She had a black eye and I think that she had been pregnant at the time. The back of the shelter was like a butcher’s shop, all of the corpses were wrapped in burlap, that kind of muslin that the butcher’s used. Bill had found Ann, Lizzie’s daughter, but could not find Maureen his own daughter. We climbed up the ladders to examine each child. One did look like her, but the attendant showed me, three chalk crosses on the side if the bunk. “Three people had identified this child as their own”. It was so hard to tell the difference. We went home to find out what his daughter had on at the time of the raid. What had happened was that my sister, having been a “Fisher Lass” did a lot of crochet and that night she dressed my brother’s daughter in some of her own daughter’s clothes, they were dressed identical, but when we went back and further explained what outer garments she had on, the man showed us her siren suit and patent leather shoes. I won’t explain further. These attendants must have had a terrible and heart breaking job. I don’t know the true statistics of that raid, but I was told there were 109 killed out of the 190 that were in the shelter. We went to the burials at Preston Cemetery, there is no need for me to describe the scene there. True to our family tradition, I went on duty that night.’

Flora Smith (nee Henderson)

[images courtesy of Mr P Pattinson and family: 1) James Robert Ward in naval uniform and 2) Flora Smith (nee Henderson), his mother who lost her daughter, Elizabeth Lindores Donkin and two grandchildren Maureen Ward and Elizabeth Ann Donkin.]