74 years on, city is brought to halt by a Luftwaffe bomb
Hundreds evacuated from homes in suburb
IT was one of the darkest chapters in the history of the spa city of Bath when bombs rained down from Hitler’s Luftwaffe.
More than 400 people died that weekend in April 1942, 1,000 more were injured and hundreds of its Georgian buildings were destroyed or damaged.
It was one of the infamous ‘Baedeker’ air raids – so called because the Nazis used the famous guidebook to target historic cities.
Yesterday, memories of those grim days resurfaced as the chance discovery of a rusting, unexploded 500lb Second
‘About size of a wheelie bin’
World War bomb under what was once the playground of a school caused chaos in the genteel World Heritage City.
Several hundred were evacuated from their homes in the suburb of Lansdown, and three primary schools, 21 roads and a doctor’s surgery were closed as Army bomb experts were called in to defuse the device.
A construction worker unearthed the 4½ft-long bomb – described by witnesses as ‘about the size of a wheelie bin’ – with a digger on Thursday at 4.40pm.
The site was formerly part of Bath High’s old junior school, where Mary Berry was first inspired to learn to cook. It was in use until a few years ago, but is now being developed for housing.
A 300-yard exclusion zone encompassing 1,100 addresses – half of them residential – was set up after the discovery.
People were evacuated throughout the night and during the early hours of yesterday.
A dozen residents slept in the executive hospitality suites at Bath Racecourse. Others took refuge at the Pavilion by Bath Recreation Ground while arranging to stay the night with family or friends. Police advised residents, especially those living in the ‘critical’ zone within 100 yards of the site, to leave. But 24 people within the zone defiantly remained in their homes.
One said: ‘I’ve lived long enough with that bomb next to me and if it was going to go off, it would have gone off by now.’
As the bomb disposal team built a barrier with 250 tons of sand around the device as they prepared to take it away, Jan Lawrence, 67, a retired lab technician, said she and her husband Bob, 70, a former major in the Royal Army Medical Corps, had left their home.
At the racecourse, where they spent the night, she said: ‘I couldn’t believe it when I heard there was a bomb there. I don’t think I slept at all. I wish we’d stayed at home.’ Please post me free & without obligation full details of the Alta2 Pro hearing aid. Tick if pensioner.