![]() He saw it actually coming down and he dashed back in again to be with his wife and he was killed too. He was just at the entrance to the shelter when everything started happening. I remember one family, Helen Danziger’s family, her mother, she was the first-aid person in that shelter, and her father, I think he had stepped out of the shelter for a couple of minutes to smoke a cigarette because you weren’t allowed to smoke in the shelters. Then the shelter, sorry the building, the building had fallen on top of the shelter and they were just trapped. They just couldn’t get them out, and I remember them both saying that the people were drowned and they were gassed. They said that lots, hundreds of people had got killed. They were gone all night, and when they came back in the morning my father and Mr Cohen looked terribly grim, very grim. They came back about two minutes later and said a bomb had fallen on Coronation Avenue and had hit the air raid shelter – that lots of people were trapped in there, and they were going out to see if they could do anything to help. My sister, my younger sister, became hysterical, and all the other children and my father and Mr Cohen ran out to see what had happened. Wwii online webmap windows#The windows blew in, bits of not actual masonry but dust seemed to be falling everywhere. There was this huge-sounding vibration and everything shook and we knew it was very near. What happened was suddenly there was this terrible noise, it was like a shlooshing sound, like an express train rushing past. There were the usual bombs and guns – you know, barrages of gunfire and everything like that. Well, the night that it happened they put us to sleep under the table, six of us. The BBC has an eyewitness account here, and below is an extract of our own interview with Mrs Blanche Litwin.Īs the weather got colder in late October 1940, Blanche and her family regularly abandoned the local air raid shelters for the flat belonging to neighbours Mr and Mrs Cohen, in Imperial Avenue, the block adjacent to Coronation Avenue, where the Cohens would make up a bed for the kids under the dining room table. ![]() Recently, transcripts of these were used by Camilla Lowe in compiling the book Just Like the End of the World, which is being used by local charity TimeLine to raise cash to restore the Coronation Avenue memorial in Stoke Newington's Abney Park cemetery.* Bodies were distributed to various mortuaries, some makeshift, and not even dedicated research can fix the final figure.Īround 20 years ago, myself and a colleague, Billy Young, shot some video interviews with survivors and eyewitnesses of the disaster. Just how anarchic things were during the height of Blitz is demonstrated by the Coronation Avenue death toll, which has never been exactly determined. ![]() That the the above examples don't feature on Bomb Sight is, of course, an omission in the original Bomb Census Survey maps, which are incomplete and, given the wartime confusion, often inaccurate. but this is how they looked shortly after over 160 people had perished below, either crushed to death or drowned as water from a burst main flooded the remains of the shelter:īomb Sight shows no results for this incident, the nearest match being a nearby hit on 9 October: ![]() Here are the flats today, courtesy of Street View. At around 8.30pm on Sunday 13 October, a high-explosive bomb plunged through the Coronation Avenue flats on Stoke Newington High Street, and exploded directly above a shelter made up of three interconnected basements. The day before the Balham disaster, though, an even greater tragedy struck Stoke Newington in north London. Famously, a number 88 bus navigating its way down Balham High Street in the blackout fell into the pit caused by the blast: ![]()
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