Grim reminder of Derby’s darkest hours
Following the discovery on an unexploded Second World War bomb in the Peak District this week, we look at the heavy toll Derby paid as deadly air-raids shattered homes, businesses and lives
AN unexploded Second World War bomb found by a construction worker while digging in the Peak District, reported in yesterday’s paper, had been dropped by the Luftwaffe (Nazi Germany’s air force) in 1941.
It would have been deposited during one of the many deadly raids on cities in our region which claimed thousands of lives.
By the time VE Day dawned on May 8, a terrible loss of life of people from Derbyshire had taken place both in the theatres of war and, just as tragically, while people were going about their normal daily lives.
The town, as Derby was then, was spared much of the horrendous bombing that affected many large cities such as London, Coventry, Swansea and Portsmouth.
Nevertheless, air raids took the lives of 75 people across the county and injured 300 others.
In Derby alone, the death toll was 45, and between 3,000 and 4,000 homes were destroyed or damaged.
The first bombs in Derby fell on the night of June 25, 1940, when two houses in Jackson Avenue, Mickleover, were bombed, injuring Elsie Henson, who later died of her injuries in hospital.
On July 17, seven bombs were dropped on the Melbourne area, killing nine people outright and a tenth died the following day.
August brought nightly raids to the area and, on August 19, some
20 bombs were dropped, killing three people and injuring 18 others in the worst-hit Regent Street and Litchurch Street areas. Troops searched wreckage at Derby railway station after it was bombed during the raid of January 15-16, 1941. The roof collapsed onto the platform in the town’s worst raid of the war. Some 50 bombs were dropped.
Twenty people were killed, 48 injured and 1,650 houses damaged. But the biggest single-event casualty list in an air-raid in Derby came on July 27, 1942, when 22 were killed, 40 seriously injured and 72 had minor injuries after a sneak bomber broke through low cloud to bomb the Rolls-Royce factory in Nightingale Road.