It was the large major bombardment of Bristol during the Blitz
Winston Churchill, Sir Charles Maby and Mrs Churchill visit a bombed area in Bristol, the day after the Good Friday raid(Image: Mirrorpix)
On Good Friday 85 years ago, Nazi forces bombarded Bristol in the last of six major air raids to target the city during the terror of the Blitz.
The aerial assault from the German Luftwaffe under a full moon on April 11 1941 caused extensive damage to the city and killed 180 people. A further 382 people were injured.
A bomb which was dropped on St Philip’s Bridge outside the power station disrupted the tram system’s electricity supply, leading to the permanent closure of Bristol Tramways. The tram network was given a second life during the war effort after the process of abandonment had begun in 1938.
The Good Friday Raid also saw the 17th century buildings in King Street housing the Llandoger Trow pub badly hit. Two-fifths of it were later demolished.(Image: Bristol Post)
The Luftwaffe carried out the night-time bombing campaign in two phases. The first, which began shortly after 10pm, mostly straddled a north and south line from Bristol Bridge to Horfield, according to the University of the West of England’s Bristol Historical Record.
The second phase commenced at 00.06 hrs and lasted nearly four hours, during which time high explosives were scattered over the southern part of the city centre along with St. Augustine’s, Bedminster and Knowle. Avonmouth and Fishponds were also targeted.
Prime minister Winston Churchill visited Bristol the day after the bombings; his private secretary John Colville described how the official party led by the Lord Mayor, “walked and motored through devastation such as I had never thought possible”.
In an archive of World War Two memories collated by the BBC, Gladys Saunders from Bedminster—who was fourteen and working in the Wills Tobacco Factory at the time of the Good Friday air raid—recounted the terrifying ordeal of hiding in a shelter during the bombardment, which destroyed her home and led to the death of her young cousin.
“During this air-raid, we piled into the Anderson Shelter which was in the back garden; my father stayed in the house,” she said.
“Suddenly it felt like a train going through a tunnel but a bomb had fallen just behind the Anderson Shelter. I must have been unconscious and when I came round I could see the stars and my father was calling to us to get out; I got up and ran to the house opposite.
“My mum and sister were taken to hospital, my older sister had a nine month old baby boy who was sat on her lap, unfortunately the bar which was holding the shelter up had fallen on the baby and killed him, my sister had an injured foot, and mum and my other sister were hurt but not too badly.
“The Anderson Shelter had been well built but nothing could have stopped the bomb; the house was almost cut in half.”
Many other houses on Willway Street, where Ms Saunders lived, were obliterated over the course of the Bristol Blitz and a large number of her neighbours were killed.
A piece of the tramline landed within the churchyard at St Mary Redcliffe on Good Friday in 1941 and has remained in place ever since.(Image: PAUL GILLIS / Reach PLC)
The Good Friday air raid was the culmination of a six-month Nazi campaign of aerial terror against Bristol, which was targeted due to its harbour and the city’s status as a hub for aircraft manufacturing, among other industries.
As many as 1400 people were killed between November 24 1940 and April 11 1941 and much of the city centre was destroyed, irrevocably altering Bristol’s landscape.
An enduring testament to the carnage of Good Friday 1941 and the wider Blitz can be found in the churchyard at St Mary Redcliffe. A piece of tramline was flung into the church’s grounds by a bomb which exploded on nearby Redcliffe Hill.
It remains there to this day and a plaque on the chunk of metal commemorates how fortunate the church was to avoid the carnage which befell so much of our city during the Second World War.
“On Good Friday, 11th April 1941, this tramline was thrown over the adjourning houses by a high explosive bomb which fell on Redcliffe Hill,” the plaque says. “It is left to remind us how narrowly the church escaped destruction in the war 1939-1945.”