V1 & V2 Bombs dropped on Lordship Lane.

[helena handbasket]

Shorty I am rally enjoying your stories. :)

[JetSetWilly]

Rumour has it there,s an uxb, buried under kings.

[Only me!]

With German munitions being slightly better than British ones & only having a dud rate at @ 3% there's probably a lot of UXB's buried under an awful lot of London.

[computedshorty]

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[GSJ57]

I think JetSet Willy probably means Kings College Hospital.

[????]

I think he means the Hospital!

[jim_the_chin]

Shorty, great post, really enjoying this info. does the ARP log cover 'ordinary' bomb damage and not just the Vs?

On upper Landells Road there are two 50's houses, breaking the chain of terraced houses, must be bomb damage. Probably numbered in the 60-70 even numbers.

[computedshorty]

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[woofmarkthedog]

Dear Comp.

I'm all typed out here!

Though I bought tis old house some years ago, all the downstairs original fireplaces were missing.

I later visited the old lady who's family owned the house for 70 yrs in a local nursing home, she remembers the bomb dropping across the road and blowing out all the downstairs fireplaces in one hit. We now have a marvelous bright pink tiled replacement in the dining room that they put in.

History read real is very pleasant here.

[macroban]

Thank you for the narrative, Shorty.

You may need to expand "A.F.S.".

I think the instructions for building an Anderson Shelter said to construct a trench in front of the shelter door and build an earth "blast wall" in front of that strengthened by the one straight sheet of corrugated iron included in the kit. I could be wrong on this.

I'm interested in the water tanks you mentioned.

Do you remember where the water tanks in East Dulwich were located?

I'd also like to know if there were concrete and brick street shelters (not the semi-underground communal shelters), and which buildings were designated as public shelters for those caught out in an air-raid.

MacRoban

[computedshorty]

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[computedshorty]

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[Santerme]

On a personal note my father saw a V1 being shot down from a balcony on, I think it was called Gedling House, but memory fades, I will have to ask.

V1's first fell mid June 1944, but went unreported as pilotless weapons until 16th when it was the third item on a BBC bulletin.

The Chief Censor issued detailed instructions that, the locations of all incidents should be entirely non specific, air raid warnings in London were under no circumstances to be reported and that obituary notices for people killed were limited to three people from the same post code.

The reason South London suffered was that many of the weapons had faulty gyros,leaking fuel cells, etc.

Croydon was the hardest hit area of all, I believe.

The effect on morale was both profound and worrying to the Govt as the earlier 'Blitz' spirit had reached an ebb.

The defences brought down almost 50% of the V1's launched.

Actually launching them against London rather than the staging ports for the invasion was a mistake akin to stopping the bombing of RAF airfields during the Battle of Britain.

As to false inforamtion, this was fed back by the agents the German thought were still reporting accurately, in fact, every German agent who reached Britain was working for the XX Committee.

It was a matter of hot debate in the War Cabinet whether to keep the aiming point short by this means.

Dulwich was actually calculated as a mean point of impact, but was dismissed by Herbert Morrison as being unacceptable to keep the bombs off Mayfair by targetting the proletariat.

It was one of the decisions of the War Cabinet that was never minuted throughout the whole war.

During the V1 and subsequent V2 attacks half the housing stock in London was damaged and much of it rendered unfit for human habitation.

The flying bombs and rockets caused fewer deaths in comparison to the ealier Blitz, but caused as much structural damage and greater short term loss of war production.

[computedshorty]

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[woofmarkthedog]

Longton avn/Taylors lane sydenham

[computedshorty]

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[Santerme]

computedshorty Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> Hi acroban

> Can I show you this:

>

> Street communal shelter

> In the United Kingdom, it was being recognized

> early that public shelters in open spaces,

> especially near streets, were urgently needed for

> pedestrians and drivers and passengers in passing

> vehicles, etc. The programme of building street

> communal shelters commenced in March 1940, the

> government supplying the materials, and being the

> moving force behind the scheme, and private

> builders executing the work under the supervision

> of surveyors. These shelters consisted of 14-inch

> brick walls and one-foot thick reinforced concrete

> roofs, similarly to, but much larger than, the

> private shelters in backyards and gardens being

> introduced slightly later. The communal shelters

> were usually intended to accommodate about fifty

> persons, and were divided into various sections by

> interior walls with openings connecting the

> different sections. Sections were normally

> furnished with six bunks.

>

>

> The one of this type was in Jennings Road but not

> as large although our school Heber Road School was

> next door but for the rear Beer Garden of the

> Heber Arms it was sited not in the road back a

> bit.

> I dont think it got used much, we children used

> the Shelter that was made under the three story

> small block in the seniors playgroung, this was

> open on the ground floor supported on brick Piers,

> so they bricked in between to enclose it as a

> shelter, not very big? no there were only a

> handful of us attending as most had been

> evacuated, even then a psrt was for the AFS Crews

> Quarters and the Taxi style Fire Engine outside,

> and all the wet hoses lying in rows drying out

> from their last use. I think that one of a

> different type with an arched roof was in Basano

> Road.

> They stopped building them as they could not get a

> supply of bricks.

There were community shelters in the all the 'squares' of the estates up DKH, I used to play on the one where Petworth House is on Pytchley Road.

One of the main reasons they were discontinued is that roof was caste in one piece and the quality of the mix was suspect from some builders, a near miss used to collapse two or three tons of concrete onto those inside.

[computedshorty]

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[computedshorty]

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[macroban]

Shorty:

I've been digging around and only (so far) found one refernce to East Dulwich non-communual air raid shelters - by which I mean the ones you would run into if caught out on the street in an air raid.

These [sic] are in Michael Smith's books "The Dulwich Catholics 1879 to 1973" and "The Story Of St Anthony's School 1883-1983". The second book just has an edited repeat of the information in the first.

Smith writes from contemporary sources:

[1] Father James O'Donoghue's Parish Notebook,

[2] The St Anthony School's Log Book.

As an aside: I think it was Fuschia who wrote how useful school log books could be for putting a human face on local history and was thanked with a sarcastic comment from one of the usual suspects.

Unfortunately Smith was not a good writer. He muddled chronology and his style is garbled.

In April 1940 one of the St Anthony's School rooms had to be closed for works to build a public shelter. This involved bringing bricks on to the site to reinforce the building.

Later in the war the school windows were blown out several times which suggests to me the shelter was in the basement.

I visited the old school several times in the 1950s and early 1960s but I don't have personal knowledge about the

basements/cellars (if any).

MacRoban

[computedshorty]

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[Santerme]

There was an air raid siren at the top of DKH.

I remember them testing it when I was at school....

I was never convinced even at that tender age, hiding under our desks would protect us from an A Bomb.

[computedshorty]

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[bigblue99]

Read the book 'operation zigzag' - a fascinating book on the most effective and important british double agent during WWII. The Nazis relied on local intelligence to confirm that central london was being hit - 'ZigZag' got them to subtly adjust the trajectory away from the city - and guided them on to Dulwich area in order to reduce impact while still making the Nazis believe that targets were being destroyed... the book explains that among many other fascinating stories. I read it in two days flat.