Dr Carl Chinn produced an article carried in the Birmingham Mail on Wednesday 23rd October. He has been kind enough to allow us to reproduce it below. It follows him unveiling our new Memorial stone in the Civilian Garden area.
Friends of Brandwood End Cemetery Memorial Blitz Victims
Birmingham’s people and their industries were crucial in the British effort to defeat Nazi Germany in the Second World War. In a secret paper written before the evacuation from Dunkirk in May/June 1940, the Chiefs of Staff told the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, that “Germany could gain complete air superiority unless she could not knock out our air force and the aircraft industries, some vital portions of which are concentrated at Coventry and Birmingham”.
They were right. Castle Bromwich became the most important factory making Spitfires, the iconic British fighter plane, with the BSA contributing its Browning machine guns. The Rover turned out Bristol Hercules engines; Fisher and Ludlow manufactured Lancaster wings, shell cases and bombs; and Reynold’s produced Spitfire wing spans and light alloy tubing.
Up to the Battle of Britain, all the aero-carburettors for the RAF’s Spitfires and Hurricanes came from SU Carburettors – and if it had been destroyed the air force would have suffered a mortal blow; whilst the Serck was responsible for all their radiators and air coolers.
Bur Birmingham was not only essential to the aircraft industries as its array of war work was staggering. Workers at the Dunlop, Kynochs, the Norton, James Cycle, Lucas, the Metropolitan-Cammell, Morris Commercial, the Wolseley and many more all strove hard for victory.
By 1944, 400,000 Brummies were involved in war work, a higher percentage of the population than anywhere else in the UK. It was their vital contribution that drew bombing from the Luftwaffe, ensuring that Birmingham would be the second most heavily bombed city in the country. And along with the whole of Merseyside, it lost more of its citizens to enemy action than any place outside London.
The Blitz killed 2,241 people, some of whom are buried in the Civilian Garden of Remembrance at Brandwood End Cemetery, Kings Heath. It holds sixty-three bodies, nine of whom are unidentified but all of whom are now honoured with a memorial thanks to the Friends of Brandwood End Cemetery. Most were killed in the three months of death and destruction at the end of 1940.
On the 14 October, Clementine Churchill, the wife of the Prime Minister, went to two Birmingham factories and a neighbourhood badly damaged by bombing. One of the local women placed a Union Jack on a pile of tiles and Mrs Churchill then spoke to Mr and Mrs Hartle whose house was in ruins. They told her, “Our house is down, but our spirits are still up”. The reporter added that “the demonstration of unflinching courage in this typical working-class suburban district was the same everywhere”.
The next night, 15/16 October, fifty-nine people were killed when over one hundred high explosive bombs, several delayed action bombs, and hundreds of incendiaries blasted the city. Rowton House lodging house in Alcester Street took a direct hit. About 200 working men were in the dining room having their evening meal, but “by a merciful chance only one death and no more than ten injuries were caused by the explosion”.
Nearby, ninety-five people sheltering in the basement of the Jewish school in St Luke’s Road, off Bristol Street, were also fortunate to survive when a bomb came through the ceiling. Sadly, round the corner in Belgrave Road, the O’Neill family suffered indescribable sorrow with five killed: Christopher was forty-five; his children Margaret and Neal were both five, his son Thomas was four, and the youngest, John, was eighteen months.
Belgrave Road-The result of bombing
The next month, the Germans announced they’d “plastered Birmingham, the centre of the British armament and supply industries, with bomb”. According to the enemy High Command, “in a succession of attacks hundreds of bomber planes discharged more than 500,000 kilogrammes of bombs (nearly 450 tons), some of the heaviest calibre”. Fires and explosions were visible at a great distance and they “were even more widespread than those in the raid on Coventry”.
This horrific raid began at 7.17 p.m. on Tuesday 19 November when the first of 350 planes dropped flares and incendiaries, lighting up their targets for the heavy bombers to drop their loads of death. Scenes of destruction abounded in Birmingham and on Holloway Head, the whole of Grant Street was laid waste. Amongst the victims was the Bramham family.
Sixty-year-old Charles was a clerk and volunteer with the Auxiliary Fire Service; his wife, Eleanor fifty-eight, was a retired clerk; and their daughter Joan, aged twenty, was a designer and first aid volunteer with Air Raid Precautions.
Allah Ditta Shamsuddin was also killed. Aged 45, nothing is known of him except that his name indicates that he was a South Asian Muslim and that he was a pioneer of his people’s migration to Birmingham. Intriguingly, in 1939, four-year old Ben Abdullah Shamsuddin was living with Fanny Baker in a back-to-back in Latimer Street, close to Grant Street.
There was no let up for the people of Birmingham as air raid followed air raid. Then, on the evening of 11/12 December, they endured the longest night of bombing in the war. Two hundred bombers blasted the city for over thirteen hours, killing 263 people and badly injuring 245 others.
One of the lucky ones was my Great-Granny Florence ‘Brockton’ Chinn at 54, Alfred Street, Sparkbrook. Our Dad told me that Billy the Fire Watcher from Gorton’s Woodyard came chasing down the street to Our Grandad’s at number 19, put his head round the door and shouted: “Alf! Alf! Brockton’s house has been hit”.
With great-uncle Wal, Granddad set off up the road and found that the back of their mom’s house had been blown away. Digging furiously through the rubble they found her alive, hidden beneath a sheet of corrugated iron which her sons had put under her stairs to protect her.
Across the street at number 4, the Budd family were not so fortunate as all of them were killed. Alfred Sidney was thirty-seven and a window cleaner and his wife, Ethel, was five years younger. They’d recently moved from Stratford Street, Sparkhill and unhappily, it led to their deaths and those of their four children: Ronald Sidney, eleven; Barbara, seven; Dennis, four; and Doreen, twenty-two months.
Overturned bus in Highgate Street near where the Budd family lost their lives.
The last major air raid pounded Birmingham during Holy Week in 1941, halfway between Palm Sunday and Easter. On the night of 9/10 April, 200 bombers dropped 650 high explosive bombs and 170 set of incendiaries. The first bomb fell on Bordesley Green at 9.35 pm and within minutes reports were coming in of high explosive bombs landing in Aston, Small Heath, Stechford and Kings Heath.
By early the next morning, much of Birmingham had been battered. Clusters of bombs had also struck Saltley, Spring Hill, Ladywood, Holloway Head, Sparkbrook, and Hockley. A trail of explosives followed Summer Lane from Constitution Hill to Gower Street, Lozells. Another line of explosives had been strung out along Long Acre and Cromwell Street, Nechells. And a mass of bombs and incendiaries had thundered upon Deritend, Highgate, and Digbeth.
Closer to the city centre the whole of the Midland Arcade was a mass of flames from High Street to New Street. The road itself was ablaze and “a molten stream of blazing tar pushed its way downhill towards New Street Station”.
On the recently built Dawberry Estate, five people living on Dawberry Road were killed. Thomas Joseph Orme was eighteen and a machinist and his sister Alice May was three years younger. Other family members came through the horror alive.
Their next-door neighbour, Bertram Olaf Battista, also died. Aged thirty-seven and from an Italian family long established in Birmingham, he was survived by his wife, Elizabeth nee Hill and formerly Holyoak. Her daughter, Kathleen eighteen and a press worker, was another victim, although her three siblings lived, as did her half-brother, Bertram Battista.
The last person killed was Reginald Hands aged seventeen and a GPO telephone messenger, carrying out an important role for Air Raid Precautions. He lived with his mother, father, and three siblings in Waldrons Moor, running off Dawberry Road.
Reginald Hands, Bertram Battista, the Ormes, the Budds, Allah Ditta Shamsuddin, the O’Neills, the Bramhams, and the others in the Civilian Garden of Remembrance at Brandwood End Cemetery are now honoured with a memorial naming them. Lest we forget.
Lee Bank , Holliday Street Five Ways.I pay tribute to the Friends of Brandwood End Cemetery for commissioning the memorial. Thanks also to Deacon David Fairbotham of the Catholic Parish of St. Dunstan and St. Jude and the standard bearers of the Federation of Birmingham Ex-Service Associations for their attendance at the unveiling.