75 Years on: Memories of the Blitz on Coventry, November 14-15 1940 and after.

This coming weekend, Coventry remembers the trauma it suffered on the night of 14-15 November 1940, when the Luftwaffe destroyed the Medieval centre of the city, including its old Cathedral in its ‘Moonlight Sonata’ raid of three major waves of aerial bombardment which gave a new word to both the German and English languages for this form of blanket bombing, Coventration.

My mother, then nine years old, Daphne Gulliver, had vivid memories of this night, but also the previous significant air-raids on Coventry, and the first use of the communal shelter at Walsgrave-on-Sowe school. The Anderson shelters that people had put up in their gardens by the summer of 1940 had become flooded so they had to go to the shelter at the school, which had been put there for the school children. However, as there were no day-time raids, it had not been used, and was still locked. The…