collateral damage
The devastation caused by the crash of JP137 cost nine precious lives. The Moordown Halifax Memorial commemorates those lost lives, and in addition serves to remind us of the many thousands of other lives lost in the cause of freedom.
What the research into the project also revealed was the 'collateral' damage the crash had caused, and how that affected those who lived nearby. Although they had escaped with their lives, some of them lost pretty much everything else....
These images of the 4 burnt out cottages show just how devastating that ensuing fire must have been.(click on the photo to see a larger version - use your back button to return here). Those cottages had been home to 4 different families - Wyeth, Chislett, Fathers and Evans. As is obvious from the photos, no one was going to live in those cottages again.
The one high resolution photo shown here (click on the photo to see a full size version) reveals little details that the other photo simply doesn't show.....
For example, we can see that the whole of the back upstairs room of no.1027 is gone. That was where Percy Chislett lost his life. And yet, if we zoom in, we can see that in the upstairs room at the front of the house - only a few feet away - even the net curtains have survived the fire. It must have been from that window that Percy's wife Mary and their young son John made their escape, in just their nightclothes....
Another detail that this photo reveals seemed, at first, to be a real mystery.... You can see that some of the upstairs windows appear to have been boarded up. Quite why it was deemed necessary to board up windows on such a damaged building seemed very odd. It did not seem, for example, very likely that these buildings would have been taken over by squatters or looters! And why only the upstairs windows?
The answer, strange as it may seem, was for safety. Philip Rougier, a local building consultant and long time supporter of this project, pointed out that with the wooden window frames and much of the roof destroyed by fire, the structural integrity of the upper stories would have been very much compromised, and that could make the building prone to lateral collapse. Although the cottages were clearly going to be demolished, it was to allow for that to be carried out in a controlled fashion that temporary stabilisation - in the form of window boards - was added. Thank you for that information Philip..
In no.1031, two doors up from the Chisletts, Peter Evans lived with his wife and daughter. Fortunately, on that fateful night, Peter's family were staying with relatives in Wales, but he himself was right there, caught up in the terror of that fire.
Peter's grandson, Russell Beard, has located family documents from the time, which show very poignantly the reality of the human cost to those - officially only on the 'periphery' of the real tragedy - whose lives were dramatically changed by events.
Unlike today, where there would most likely be 'counselling' for 'post traumatic stress' following an event like this, in wartime Britain 70 years ago, you were mostly expected to just 'get on' with things!
Russell has let us have copies of some of those family documents from that time, which you can see by clicking on the image below....
From the simple stark telegram sent to his wife in Wales - 'HOME BURNT COME HOME' - to inventories of lost possessions, these poignant documents bring home how lives could be so drastically affected by traumatic events like this.
And with deliberate bombing in towns and cities all over Britain causing immense damage during those dreadful 6 years of war, this kind of story must have been repeated many thousands of times.
I sometimes think we may have forgotten what hardship our parents, and grandparents generation actually suffered, during (and after) that World War.....