Coventry Blitz: 80th Anniversary

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Maggie Throup.)

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for granting me this Adjournment debate to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the November 1940 bombing of Coventry.

The Coventry blitz was, of course, a defining moment in the history of my city, bringing both great hardship and change to Coventry. It is also, I feel, an important event to recall during the current pandemic. In this year of great hardship, many have sought to look back at the blitz as a blueprint for how communities can come together and overcome the toughest of circumstances. I am sure that all would agree that Coventry, the phoenix city which rose from the rubble to post-war success, is an inspirational tale for this time.

As a key centre of wartime production, Coventry, a pioneering engineering and manufacturing city, was a prime target. Indeed, prior to the air raid on 14 November, it had already been the victim of a number of smaller air raids. But the events of 14 November 1940 were different. Over 11 hours, nearly 500 bombers dropped over 500 tonnes of high explosives, 30,000 incendiaries, and 50 landmines on the city. The sheer scale of the destruction would lead to the Germans inventing a new word, Coventration or to Coventrate, to describe the level of devastation. In that one night, just over half the city’s housing stock, approximately 43,000 houses, was damaged or destroyed. There was also widespread damage to factories, shops, workplaces and, as it was in the centre of the city, civic buildings. Most famously, an incendiary device landed on Coventry’s cathedral, destroying the medieval church of St Michael’s. On a visit to the city following the bombing, King George VI is said to have wept as he surveyed the ruins.

There was also an incredibly high human cost. The official death toll from the night was 554 people. A further 865 people were seriously injured. Among the disruption and the building rubble, many more were never accounted for.

I join my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour in paying tribute to the brave people of Coventry’s home front who, on 14 November 1940, endured a blitz that destroyed 15 factories and 43,000 homes. I honour individuals’ quiet acts of courage and selflessness that enabled them to endure devastation, and to rebuild in a spirit of peace and reconciliation. As my hon. Friend has said, during this pandemic we are reminded of what it is to come together and to endure uncertain times. I honour the fortitude and sacrifices of our veterans and civilians, and reflect on how those qualities are still with us today. Will my hon. Friend join me in that reflection?

Of course I will join my hon. Friend in that and I will come on to those qualities, which are renowned in Coventry. People know about the communities in Coventry.

As I was saying, those people would later be commemorated in a number of mass funerals. Today, a monument still stands in the London Road cemetery. Almost every Coventry family who had members present in the city at the time have a story about the Coventry blitz. Those stories live on, often through children and grandchildren, and certainly through many publications. They include stories that range from the incredible to the tragic. There are stories about children and families who had spent 11 hours crouching in shelters. One man recalled being pursued down a street by a knee-high river of boiling butter from a nearby blazing dairy. An abandoned tram was blown clean over a house and into a garden—it landed with its windows still intact. There were reports the morning after of a lone fireman watching helplessly while the buildings were still burning. For one family, all that remained of their home was the washing line pole, which was found streets away in a school playground.

The story of the Coventry Blitz was also important in my family. My parents were both in Coventry on that night. They did not discuss the war very often with us when we were children, but from speaking to my siblings—I have two sisters and a brother—I know that we all had the same recollections of things that they had said about that night. My father was 15 years old in 1940, and he watched the devastation from Stoke Heath common, which is in my constituency. It is not far from where he lived and a couple of miles from the city centre. He always spoke about the sky over the city centre having an immense red glow. He went on to join the Royal Navy when he was old enough to do so, and caught the last year of the war. My mother was just 12, and lived not far from the centre of Coventry, in Howard Street.

Mum spent that night under the stairs, as many did; that was where she spent the nights when there were bombing raids. Amazingly, when she emerged in the morning, she discovered that not one pane of glass had been broken in their house. Many other streets nearby were not so lucky, but this demonstrates just how much the bombing was concentrated in the city centre. My grandad was an ARP warden and was out on duty that night. We still have his white steel helmet with a “W” on it. It also has an “FW” on it, as he was a fire watcher. It is a stark reminder of the dangers faced that night.

The days and weeks after 14 November took a heavy toll on the people of Coventry. Visitors from Mass-Observation noted that the night

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech, and I commend her for securing this Adjournment debate. She was speaking about the psychological trauma that so many Coventrians felt, and I sensed that when I arrived in the city in the early ’80s. She also described the utter devastation, and the obliteration of the city. The fact that the people of Coventry rebuilt their industries and their factories and switched them to munitions, and got aircraft back into manufacture, was an extraordinary feat. That is what says so much about the people of Coventry.

Indeed, and I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention.

It is for those reasons that the phoenix became a symbol of Coventry, symbolising Coventry’s rising from the ashes and renewing itself against the odds. It was this spirit that would be at the heart of Coventry’s post-war revival. Out of the rubble and the ashes of the second world war, Coventry’s industries would thrive. That in turn would drive the growth of the city. A wealth of jobs and opportunities brought many to Coventry, first from the rest of the UK and Ireland and later from the Commonwealth.

As I have already mentioned, the memory of the Coventry blitz lives on in the city. Some of the legacies are physical and tangible, and the most obvious are in the remains of the old cathedral, which stand as a solemn reminder of that night. Some of the names of those who gave so much to the city live on in city landmarks. Many of my constituents may well have been pupils at Sidney Stringer or Pearl Hyde schools, both of which were named after councillors who played a leading role during the war and in the reconstruction of the city that followed. The latter was a councillor for the then Walsgrave ward in my constituency, and she was the first female Lord Mayor of Coventry during the war. She led the Women’s Voluntary Service in the city and was awarded an MBE for her efforts during the blitz.

The blitz has been commemorated regularly in the city. A particular highlight was in 1990 on the 50th anniversary, when Coventry was visited by the Queen Mother. Of course, this year we will sadly not have the opportunity to commemorate and honour the memory of the Coventry blitz in a similar fashion. However, regardless of social distancing, we will be able to honour the spirit and the lessons of the event. It is worth recognising the powerful message of peace and reconciliation that has come from that night.

The experience of the blitz spurred Coventry to look outwards and offer support and solidarity to cities around the world facing tragedy. In 1942, the first twinning of cities happened when Coventry was twinned with Stalingrad in recognition of the plight of that city during the German invasion. Alongside aid, a tablecloth with the embroidered names of 900 Coventry women was sent to the city of Stalingrad. The link between the two cities continues to this day, showing that out of the horror of war can come hope and friendship. Perhaps an even more powerful statement can be seen in Coventry’s twinning with the German cities of Kiel and Dresden, demonstrating clearly a desire to see peace and reconciliation triumph over the hatred of the war years.

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Coventry North East (Colleen Fletcher) for a very moving contribution. I welcome this important debate, and congratulate her on securing it.

Although almost 80 years have passed, as we reflect on what happened that night many people will have in mind the ruins of Coventry cathedral, which the hon. Member mentioned as a poignant reminder of the scars that those raids left on the city. As she will know, Coventry was a major manufacturing centre for the British aircraft industry. It built its reputation, and showed it time and again during the first world war and the second world war, but that manufacturing industry also made it a target. The Luftwaffe raid on the night of 14 November 1940 was designed to stifle that proud city’s history and innovation.

For the Nazi regime, the battle of Britain was not the end of the argument on air power, and, one step ahead of the allies, they had developed a new targeting system to get their bombers on target. Using this very system, on 14 November at just past 7 o’clock in the evening, the first aircraft—KG 100s—flew over Coventry, dropping flares to illuminate the city for the following waves of bombers. As the hon. Member said, for around 11 hours Coventry was shaken by bombs as they fell throughout the night. The last bombs fell at about 5.30 the following morning of 15 November. The devastation left behind was absolutely unprecedented at the time. Firefighters from across the east midlands raced to Coventry to desperately battle the flames that roared across the city, but their bravery saw some three dozen of their own killed, proving fruitless against the rain of incendiaries. The ruins of the Cathedral Church of St Michael stand in mute testimony to the horrors of that evening.

In the aftermath of the raid, our military leaders’ thoughts turned to how the Germans had been able to operate with impunity to such tragic effect over Coventry. Although it is a persistent and widely published claim that Churchill sacrificed Coventry to keep British code-breaking a secret, this is a myth. Enigma and signals intelligence had some prior understanding that Moonlight Sonata—the general name that the Germans gave the raid—would target a midlands city, but they did not know which one. As the events that night showed, even knowing that crucial information would not have been enough to avoid the onslaught. Sadly, that night Coventry paid the price for defences that had proved to be entirely inadequate. Despite a raid lasting for 10 hours on one target, RAF night fighters did not shoot down a single bomber. This was undoubtedly a heartbreaking and frustrating experience for the Royal Air Force, whose heroics only a few months earlier had secured the daylight skies from German aggression in the battle of Britain.