“I remember my grandma rocking back and forth on her heels with fear”
BOB WEIGHTON BORN 1908
I’ve spent much of my life interviewing people in their seventies, eighties or nineties, but 110-year-old Bob – who I talked to for my new BBC series – is one of the most memorable of all. He still lives an independent life, offering tea and biscuits when I arrived.
Bob wrote and selfpublished his life story in his 100th year. It is full of meticulous detail – as are his memories of the home front in Hull during the First World War.
Bob was the son of a vet, one of seven children who grew up in an extended middle-class family. His most vivid memories are of the Zeppelin raids on the city between 1915 and 1918.
“My father was an air-raid warden, warning everyone to take cover, so he was often out when the Zeppelins were overhead. I remember, when the sirens went, my mother used to bring me and my brothers and sisters down from the attic where we slept and we were put underneath the dining room table. This was presumably for safety, in case a bomb dropped on us. I remember the atmosphere of fear, with my grandma rocking back and forth on her heels as she was kneeling down and moaning, ‘Oh God, Oh God, Oh God’, because we heard the bombs going off and it appeared that they were coming nearer and nearer and we would be hit.” The worst raid was on 6/7 June 1915, when 13 explosives and 50 incendiary bombs destroyed 40 houses and killed 24. Bob witnessed scenes of devastation in the streets of Hull when he made his way to school on the morning after the raids. Yet his most lasting memory of the aftermath of the raids reveals much about the Victorian values of respectability that were instilled into children of the time.
“I remember distinctly that a bomb had fallen on a house near the main road and had taken off the front of the house. It had collapsed, and as we walked by we could see the wallpaper on the wall of the bedroom and there was a bed hanging partly over the destroyed floor as if somebody had only just escaped with their lives. But I remember what shocked me was the exposure of somebody’s bedroom to the public gaze – I thought that was most shocking.”