Looking Back, with Eric Leaver

ONE of the oddest recorded casualties of World War Two was an East Lancashire pensioner's false teeth.

But as Britain stood alone in 1940 and Germany launched the Blitz in a bid to batter us into submission, humour was a popular defence on the home front against the terror from the skies.

So it was that, when the first Nazi bomb landed on Blackburn 57 years ago this month, wrecking the kitchens and back yards of two houses in Bennington Street, the chirpy, unscathed 67-year-old woman occupant of one of them - whose husband actually slept through the blast - was jokingly telling the Northern Daily Telegraph the next morning that her dentures, lost in the rubble, counted as a war casualty.

Yet, East Lancashire, coping with the black-out, food rationing and the increasingly frequent wail of the air-raid sirens, had only a short time to appreciate her humour.

For the next night, the Nazis responded with the town's first fatal bomb attack.

It came 20 minutes before midnight on August 31 in town-centre Ainsworth Street just as the day's last trams and buses were coming to a halt.

The driver of one of the trams died from shock. The conductor died nearly three weeks later from his injuries. Four others were treated in hospital and another four were less seriously hurt. Two shops were wrecked and the fronts of several others were smashed. Three trams and four buses were also damaged.

Yet, while the horror of Hitler's Blitz was now brought home to Blackburn, the town was perhaps fortunate that the death toll had not been worse.

For if that Nazi raider had flown over even less than an hour earlier - when the town's cinemas were emptying and the public transport was packed - that single bomb might have caused widespread carnage. Nonetheless, the town was stunned. The German plane had turned around on its homeward path to deliver its attack out of revenge for anti-aircraft fire that never was. A witness who heard the attack was Lewis Gollop, of Pasturelands Drive, Billington, then a 17-year-old hospital worker on patrol with the Local Defence Volunteers, later to become the Home Guard.

"We were up above the New Inns, on the road down to Sunny Bower," he recalled. "There was a sergeant, three or four 'old sweats' from the First World War and me.

"What on earth the plane was doing, I don't know. But at that time the trams were in the middle of Ainsworth Street, changing their trolleys over on the overhead power lines - something that often created electric sparks.

"I am sure that lone plane was on its way home when the crew saw the flashes and decided it was gunfire.

"We heard it turn around and the next thing we knew he had dropped a bomb in the middle of Blackburn. We heard it all right - from up where we were that was no problem, though it was actually quite a mild explosion."

Yet, if the region's largest town had suffered, the reality of the air war had been brought home to East Lancashire two months before when six bombs were dropped on June 20 at Altham West.

One scored a direct hit on a house in Fielding Crescent, killing three people and damaging the houses on either side so badly that they had to be demolished. It was a dreadful overture to the total of 47 bombing raids that were to hit East Lancashire before its term as a target ended in January, 1942. In all, 16 people were killed and more than 120 bombs and half a dozen land mines were dropped on the region - along with hundreds of incendiaries.

But if this was a negligible compared to the devastation and carnage in major cities and ports, two things contrived to lessen the impact. One was the fact that many bombs fell harmlessly in remote areas, jettisoned by the bombers on their way back from raids on targets like Manchester, Liverpool and Barrow-in-Furness, and the events were simply not reported in the newspapers.

Another was the strict news censorship on the more serious incidents. For instance, in the last but one raid on East Lancashire on October 12, 1941, an air raid shelter at Crown Point near Burnley took a direct hit and one man was killed and others were severely injured. But he only clue that the Northern Daily Telegraph was permitted to give was the vague reference of "at one place" in a composite report of raids throughout the North West.

The town that suffered most was Darwen, when three bombs claimed the lives of seven people in a daylight raid on October 21, 1940. Two days earlier, it had a lucky escape when one of four bombs just missed the Model Lodging House with 50 people inside and another wrecked a house in Alice Street without seriously injuring its two elderly women occupants.

But the next time the raiders struck, they dropped three bombs that killed six people instantly and demolished houses in Crown Street and nearly Holme Street. The seventh victim died later.

That October was East Lancashire's blackest month of the Blitz. On the 30th, in another daylight raid, a lone Nazi plane unleashed two bombs on the Ribble Valley village of Chatburn.

One completely flattened a house and the other exploded on the main road in the village centre, wrecking the post office and several homes nearby. A petrol lorry was hurled into the driveway of a house and blazing fuel ran down the highway. The tanker driver and two other people were killed; five others were detained in hospital and more were treated for minor injuries. Even so, although it was to be more than a year before, the threat from the bombers ceased, the backs-the-wall spirit prevailed. For on May 6, 1941, when eight bombs straddled three rows of houses in the Manchester Road, Rossendale Road and Rossendale Avenue area of Burnley - though without scoring any direct hit - the NDT's reporter referring to the raid on a "North West inland town" found one occupant of one the 100 homes that were damaged still smiling.

With her home covered in dust and broken plaster and the interior doors of the house blown off, she said: "We could do with a lot of vacuum cleaner fellows coming round giving demonstrations today."

But it was not until January 11, 1942, until East Lancashire could smile with relief that the Blitz had ended as the Nazi four bombs that fell that day at Siddows, near Clitheroe, turned out to be the last - though not quite.

For Hitler's final fling against our region came on Christmas Eve, 1944, when two V1 "flying bomb" rockets came down. One exploded on farmland near Haslingden Old Road, Oswaldtwistle; the other damaged two cottages at Gregson Lane, Hoghton, burying their occupants beneath the debris, but not injuring them - though one of the families lost the chicken they were cooking for their Christmas dinner.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.