I GREW up listening to tales of the infamous Blitz on Coventry on November 14, 1940.
My grandfather, serving in the RAF, saw the orange glow on the horizon from his aerodrome near Oxford. My grandmother, an apprentice draughtswoman at the Alvis, had left school months earlier and was still just 15 when she lived through the ordeal.
Apprenticed to the Coventry Citizen and Coventry Evening Telegraph as a journalist in the 1980s, I found the main focus of any Blitz story was always November 14, with the big raid the following April a secondary point of interest.
Few people interviewed – and I talked to many who had lived through World War Two – ever mentioned the numerous other air raids the Luftwaffe threw at the city.
But now, working on a couple of city-centric projects, I’ve been distracted by reports on the bombings and the way they were reported on at the time by the CET’s predecessor, the Midland Daily Telegraph.
Following the bombing of the Rex Cinema on August 25, the Midland Daily Telegraph of Monday, August 26, couldn’t resist the temptation of reporting ‘A cinema which to-day was to have begun showing ‘Gone With The Wind’ was wrecked early to-day when a Midlands town had its second successive night of air raids.’
That was it. Big news for the city that would have struck a chord with its people, given that the newest purpose-built cinema had been written off, but no mention of Coventry or the Rex. Almost like code language. Not that it would have given anything away to the enemy, because they knew where they had been that night.
And I’d have been given a rollicking for the repetition of ‘to-day’!
Three days later the first big raid to cause deaths took place. Sixteen people died in the August 28 bombings, including two at Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital, and a five year old boy in Wright Street.
The headlines in the following day’s edition? Long Night Raid On Midlands; Bombs Over Wide Area; Many Houses Destroyed In One Town.
Always ‘A Midland town’.
It fascinates me that this is how the air raids were reported locally. Given that more than 170 people died in those attacks, that businesses, shops, homes, whole streets were damaged, that readers of the MDT would have seen evidence of the destruction with their own eyes, and would surely have wanted more information, if only to counter the rumours that undoubtedly would have spread.
Yet the only time any actual mention of Coventry was linked with air raids was the quoting of German propaganda, always without comment.
And the only notes of fatalities caused by air raids come in the cryptic ‘sad and sudden death’ of loved ones in the classifieds section.
So, would anyone like to guess when the Midland Daily Telegraph dispensed with the charade of ‘A Midland town’ when reporting of bombing raids?
The irony is that it was in the November 14, 1940 edition, following the visit of the Duchess of Gloucester the previous day.
How many people would have been reading that day’s edition, without really noticing the change in policy, when the sirens sounded?
mark a forster 