‘Start of a movement’ as £500,000 raised by campaign to stop violence
Students plot death and destruction in Leeds when Germans dropped 25 tons of bombs
A MOVEMENT has been unleashed following the murder of Sarah Everard in igniting a fury among women refusing to accept male violence, campaigners have said, as vigils are held to honour her memory.
Jamie Klingler, who helped create the viral Reclaim These Streets campaign, said it had been “hard to watch from afar” as a planned peaceful vigil at Clapham Common ended in clashes between police and attendees on Saturday.
But as fundraising campaigns approach £500,000, she has spoken of a “tidal wave” of feeling among women in standing united against violence.
“This is the start of the movement,” she said, adding that the group was still working out where best to distribute the money.
“I don’t know how exactly to explain what it feels like to be at the centre of a tidal wave.
“But it feels like a tidal wave of half of the population saying, ‘This is your problem, you need to fix it and you need to fix it now – we’re not taking it any more’.”
While the vigil planned for Saturday was officially cancelled, hundreds of people attended through the course of the day, pausing to reflect on tributes, laying flowers and lighting candles.
The campaign group had set up the online fundraiser with a target matching the £320,000 fines they said they would have faced had the planned events gone ahead.
That target was reached within hours, and Ms Klingler said she was “blown away” as the total approached £500,000 around a day after it was launched.
It feels like a tidal wave... saying, ‘We’re not taking it any more’. Jamie Klingler, Reclaim These Streets.
SOME 65 people are thought to have died and 258 injured in a Luftwaffe raid on Leeds on March 14, 1941. But the full details were never published, and the passing years have made them even more obscure.
It has taken some of the city’s present-day students to plot the precise locations of the hits, and to mark the anniversary they have published their findings on a website.
Around 25 tons of explosives were dropped on Leeds that night, with the gasworks and industrial areas surrounding the River Aire taking the brunt of the force. The bombs also damaged the Town Hall, city museum, telephone exchange and many private homes. More than 100 separate fires were reported, with damage to 4,500 buildings.
“Leeds has caught it at last,” some were heard to remark. The Germans had blitzed Sheffield three months earlier, with the loss of at least 660 people, and Hull was next in line. From March to July 1941, large-scale raids over several nights there killed another 200 people.
“Though not as badly bombed as other places, we were all struck by how little had been written about Leeds,” said Dr Henry Irving, senior lecturer in public history at Leeds Beckett University, which led the research with other public bodies.
His team used previously classified security reports, genealogy databases and historical maps to piece together the full story. The Government’s brief confirmation that the raid had taken place begged more questions than it answered. In reality, the city was thrown into turmoil, with the spread of the attacks – from Weetwood in the north to Beeston in the south – stretching the emergency services to the limit.
A mixture of incendiary, high explosive and delayed action bombs were dropped as far afield as Castleford and Holmfirth, but the damage to the phone exchange meant reports were delayed. The greatest impact was on the industrial areas of Holbeck, Armley, Lower Wortley and the railway land between Wellington Street and Wellington Road.
But the official reports of casualties represented less than onefifth of the actual numbers.
The statistics also concealed countless human tragedies, Dr Irving said. “The students worked to connect individual incidents with the people affected, adding details about the legacies of the raid,” he said. “The subject matter was quite emotional.”
English and history student Leanne Speight remembered having heard stories of the raids from her great-grandmother, who worked in a munitions factory.
“She was one of hundreds of thousands of women across Britain who did their bit and it was clear she viewed her contribution as nothing out of the ordinary,” she said.
“Reports published afterwards show women did not hesitate to tackle fires caused by incendiary bombs, even when high explosives were falling nearby.
“Many of these women worked in roles where such actions would not have been expected of them.”
Women did not hesitate to tackle fires caused by incendiary bombs. Leeds Beckett University English and history student Leanne Speight,