A V2 rocket bomb which descended from the sky on the Woolworths and Co-op stores in the New Cross Road Saturday lunch-time 25th November 1944 became the most devastating Home Front disaster caused by the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile.

New Cross experienced mass destruction of buildings and human life.

This catastrophic event happened a stone’s throw from Deptford Town Hall, now an important building used for teaching by Goldsmiths, University of London.

The people’s history dimension of this event is more bound up with the history of Goldsmiths than has hitherto been fully realised.

Goldsmiths now owns the site of the former St James’s Church, which has been converted into gallery and teaching spaces and is part of the memorial and human geography of what happened in the Second World War.

It has not been fully appreciated that people died in the buildings now used as teaching spaces by Goldsmiths such as 286 and 288 New Cross Road. These buildings along with the neighbouring Deptford Town Hall were badly damaged in the blast.

All windows and doors at the front had been blown in. 288 New Cross Road was being used as a ration book issuing office and was busy on the day. Post office sorting was being done behind and people working there were seriously injured.

The other buildings on the corner of New Cross Road and St James’s- numbers 280 to 284 New Cross Road- were completely destroyed and everyone in them either killed or injured.  The prefabricated single storey buildings erected in their place in the late 1940s have continued to be used as Goldsmiths teaching rooms.

The V2 tragedy is an important historical Goldsmiths event and I believe we have a duty to recognise, respect and give commemoration to the people who died on our campus, as well as all the survivors and rescuers.

Goldsmiths is unique in being the site of impact for each of the Nazi vengeance weapons launched against Britain in 1944- the V1 rocket killing two members of the RAF barrage balloon unit on what is now the College Green on Monday 26th June 1944 and the V2 rocket killing 168 people on Saturday 25th November 1944.

As far as I have been able to establish no other university location in the UK has had the misfortune to have been hit by both V1 and V2 rockets in the World War Two conflict and with so many fatal casualties.

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This significant historical image above shows the rescue and salvage operation on the Woolworths site in the New Cross Road 26th November 1944- less than 24 hours after the V2 rocket struck.

A heavy crane, National Fire Service, ARP heavy and light rescue units are all present. The Woolworths store has been pancaked. Half of the Royal Arsenal Co-operative store is demolished. Neighbouring houses in Goodwood Road have been destroyed and wrecked.

There is so much destruction people can now see the Childeric School in the distance where generations of Goldsmiths’ College students did their teaching practice. The photograph’s perspective is from the corner of St James’s and New Cross Road where buildings with people working in them, including Clamp & Son auctioneers have been completely destroyed.

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The founder of the League of Coloured Peoples, Dr Harold Moody, would have taken part in the rescue and saving lives operation. He was in the network of emergency medics drawn from local GP surgeries and hospitals. The historian Stephen Bourne in Under Fire: Black Britain in Wartime 1939-45 published by the History Press in 2020 wrote:

‘On Saturday, 25 Novmber 1944, Dr Harold Moody left his surgery in Queen’s Road, Peckham, to attend the aftermath of a V-2 rocket incident in New Cross Road. This was in the very heart of working-class Deptford in south-east London. It wasn’t far from where 168 people were killed and more than 120 were seriously injured, mainly mothers and their children who were among the Christmas shopping crowds’ (Bourne, 190, 2020).

Stephen Bourne explained: ‘Dr Moody attended as part of a team called in from the surrounding area. They struggled night and day amidst the chaos and carnage to bring comfort to the survivors’ (ibid).

121 people had been seriously injured and needed treatment among the rubble.

The wreckage area covered a wide expanse of the junction between  St James’s, New Cross and Goodwood Roads.  Woolworths had been obliterated along with half of the neighbouring Co-op store.

The office buildings on the corner of St James’s Road and New Cross Roads were also destroyed and the prefabricated 1940s style single story blocks which replaced them and now used by Goldsmiths are evidence of devastation wrought on this side of the explosion.

There is also strong evidence that there was another Black doctor practicing in the area and giving his medical services to the victims of the V2 strike.

In the 1994 publication Rations and Rubble: Remembering Woolworths The New Cross V2 Disaster Saturday 25th November 1944 there is an account by Patricia Blay who was 14 years old and working in the post office of the Co-operative Store next door to Woolworths.

She survived the blast and recalled: ‘We lived in Childeric Road and my mum came looking for me. She came round the front and they were laying the people out in the street that were dead. She went searching for me like mad but couldn’t find [me]. The doctor on the corner came out and sent to the army where my dad was and got him sent home on leave. That was Dr Chundun, the first black doctor that we’d ever seen […]  he was very nice’ (Steele, 1994, 24).

Dr Walter Chundun would have performed a very active role in emergency medical assistance to the victims of the disaster. He was a serving Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps having been first commissioned as a lieutenant in April 1940 with promotion the following year. Dr Chundun practiced at 12 Clifton Rise (east side) New Cross and 102 Foxbury Road Brockley up until 1981. He demobilised from the British Army in 1946 with the rank of honorary captain in the RAMC.

Dr Chundun was born in what was then Dutch Guiana (now Suriname) on 16th November 1906 and travelled from British Guiana (now Guyuna) to study medicine in Scotland where he qualified in 1937  as a licensed doctor of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and the Royal Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow.

Both the Scotsman and Edinburgh Evening News papers described these as ‘Triple qualification successes’ in their editions of 28th October 1937.

Dr Chundun married Sheila A Deakin in Marylebone in 1965 and took British citizenship in 1967. He would have been a witness to the ‘Battle of Lewisham’ on Saturday 13th August 1977 when hundreds of far-right National Front activists tried to march from New Cross to Lewisham but were challenged by thousands of counter-demonstrators.

Violent clashes between the two groups and police took place on Clifton Rise and a plaque was erected on the corner with New Cross Road in 2017 to mark the 40th anniversary of the event.  Dr Chundun passed away in Greenwich in 1994 where he had been a director of the Shooters Hill Residents Association with the address of 63 Shooters Hill Road.

Heroism was also in abundance throughout the Second World War on the part of founder member of the League of Coloured Peoples and decorated Trinidad born Great War veteran George Arthur Roberts.

Between 1939 and 1945 he was a leading fireman at New Cross fire station and attended four bombing attacks and fires at Goldsmiths which devastated the building and left the swimming pool turned mortuary a roofless and blackened shell in May 1945.

Crews and appliances from his New Cross station would have been the first on the scene of the Woolworths disaster on Saturday 25th November 1944. Stephen Bourne wrote: ‘It is likely that George A. Roberts, the Trinidad-born fireman based as nearby New Cross Fire Station, would have attended the scene also (Bourne, 190, 2020).

George would be awarded an MBE recognising his pioneering discussion and education groups in the fire service.

Much has been written about an event which tore the heart out of the local community; largely because so many women and children died. Norman Longmate in his book Hitler’s Rockets: The Story of the V2s devotes pages 207 to 212 to a detailed description and analysis along with eye-witness accounts.

In 1994 there was a major project on the part of Deptford History Group and local organisations to fully commemorate what had happened fifty years before. An exhibition in the New Cross Library, public meetings, the unveiling of the Lewisham Borough Council plaque, and publication of the 55 page book Rations and Rubble: Remembering Woolworths The New Cross V2 Disaster Saturday 25th November 1944, edited by Jess Steele provided an outstanding commemoration to those who died and tribute to those who took part in the rescue operation.

 

Lewisham Council Local History and Archives Centre has provided a list of the details of those who died and could be identified. At present it does not include all of the 168 cited in the street memorials said to have been killed. This ongoing online memorial project seeks to identify them all and to provide more information about the lives of those killed.

The historian of Woolworths, Paul Seaton, has also researched and developed online an outstanding Woolworths museum including an evocative memorial page to the victims of the V2 attack on the store in the News Cross Road. 

There were thirty staff and one hundred customers in Woolworths when the rocket struck at 12.26 p.m. As Paul wrote: ‘They were simply shopping for saucepans and gifts or drinking Bovril and other hot drinks at the Tea Bar on a busy Saturday before Christmas.’

On the outside of the rebuilt Woolworths store, now occupied by Iceland, there are small plaques which briefly state ‘In memory of the 168 people who died and those injured in the V2 rocket attack that landed here 25th November 1944.’

This had been the 251st V2 rocket successfully launched into Britain and counted as one of the worst civilian disasters of the Second World War.

People died in the pancaked Woolworths store and Co-op next door.

An army lorry was overturned and destroyed and everyone sitting in the number 53a double decker bus and those at the bus queue were struck down.

Debris stretched from Deptford Town Hall to New Cross Gate station and it took three days to retrieve all the casualties.

Mrs Barbara Smith told the BBC’s WW2 People’s War Project:

‘One Saturday morning I was visiting a friend near my home. As I arrived at her door, a V2 fell. I said to her, “I must hurry home, that was a V2.” It had fallen at the bottom of my road on the Woolworths store in New Cross. As I hurried home I saw many people who were injured, and others were dead and lying on the pavements and in the road. Ambulances and fire engines were parked nearby, attending to the injured and dying. The air was filled with grit and dust. There was a huge crater on the Woolworth site where the V2 had fallen.

The first four houses in my road [Goodwood Road] were demolished. We were number 9 and my house was badly damaged, a four storey Victorian house, but it was still standing. The tall flight of front steps were damaged, windows fallen out, ceilings down, furniture damaged. How thankful I was that my family was alive and only slightly injured. Unfortunately the dog was missing. She had run out when the V2 fell.

I had been at the Woolworths store visiting every Saturday morning with a friend, but that particular Saturday, I’m glad to say that I hadn’t gone.’

St James’s Church is the nearest church to the location of the disaster.

A new church building is situated nearby. Again the memorial to Deptford’s fallen in the Great War is in tablet form with names inscribed.

The victims of the Blitz in the Second World War are memorialised by an open stone book on a plinth and a garden has been planted in memory.

By 25th November 1944 the media were no longer fully shackled by censorship. Even the BBC’s Audrey Russell was sent to the scene to record interviews and make a voiced report though the acetate discs of her work have not survived and the recordings seemingly never broadcast at the time.

In her autobiography A Certain Voice she wrote:

‘In all some 500 rockets hit London in seven months. In some ways our method of covering these incidents was a bit naïve. The routine procedure was to contact the engineer assigned to the job on arrival at the office, and then wait. Wait to hear an explosion and telephone the police for directions. Sometimes when the police had not yet been informed, we would start out in the direction of the bang. On one occasion, when en route for somewhere else on a Saturday afternoon, there was a terrifying explosion – we were barely four minutes away by car from probably the worst rocket incident in London. This was at New Cross, Deptford, a direct hit on Woolworth’s killing over 100 people. Naturally I always dreaded what we would find when we got there.

There was a certain grim routine marking the beginning, the middle and the end of a mopping-up operation. There nearly always came a point when the extent of a tragedy seemed to be summed up by the number of utility sackcloth shrouds being unloaded from the equipment trucks. (For some years I was unable to look at that particular fabric without recoiling at the memory)’ (Russell, 1984, p. 46).

War Illustrated used graphics in a publication in late December 1944 to explain how the V2 rocket was fired some 60 to 70 miles into the sky and took four minutes from launch to target to come down from space at 2,000 miles an hour.

The rescue and salvage operation was among the biggest to be mounted in London. 100 National Fire Servicemen attended, including George Roberts from New Cross, multiple cranes, and heavy and light rescue squads from Deptford and surrounding boroughs.

The entire First Aid Post operation headed by Dr. Knight and situated in purpose built headquarters at Barriedale to the north side of the Goldsmiths College grounds coordinated the emergency medical services.

By Monday 27th November national newspapers published reports though still avoiding any identification of the specific location.

The News Chronicle‘s headline was ‘Bomb In Crowded Street Killed Women Shoppers- Chain Store Was Demolished.’

“Women and children, busy about their shopping were killed recently when a bomb fell in a crowded street in Southern England. Dead and injured were scattered about the roadway.

A chain store, which was one of two shops demolished, and another large store, which was badly damaged, were filled with customers, mostly women and children.

A large proportion of the fatal casualties occurred in those two shops and in the road outside, where a passing bus was wrecked.

Fire in the ruins hindered the rescue squads, who toiled through the night,  clearing wreckage with the aid of cranes.

Thirty hours after the bomb had fallen bodies were still being brought out of the ruins.

Apart from those killed or seriously injured, many received minor injuries from flying glass and falling masonry.

Mrs Bessie Payne, who occupied a flat over the badly damaged store, with her five-year-old daughter Beryl, was buried.

“I was in the kitchen,” she said, “when the walls collapsed and the ceiling fell on me.

“I was buried almost up to the neck, but by wriggling violently I managed to free myself. Then I hunted through the choking dust until I heard Beryl crying.

“She was nearly buried, but I managed to free her. I have lost everything, but I am lucky to be alive and to have Beryl safe.”

The Daily Mirror‘s front page headline was ‘Bomb Hits Stores’:

“Through a winter afternoon and night and on into the following morning grim-faced men kept toiling to release women and children believed to be buried in the debris of a multiple store in Southern England hit by a V-bomb recently.

The bomb fell when the shop was crowded with mothers and children, many of them doing their Christmas buying. Fatal casualties were numerous, and many injured were taken to hospital.

The same bomb also wrecked another store and families had to be rescued from the explosion-stripped skeletons of their homes facing the store.

Women queuing outside a fish shop nearby were swept over by the blast.

Twenty hours after the bomb fell, rescue squads were still digging in the glare of mobile lighting units.

Red-eyed rescue men who had been working furiously for fourteen hours dug with renewed speed as a woman’s voice drifted up through the debris. She was dead when, later in the afternoon, they got her out.

Two cranes pulled away girders and raised giant buckets of debris, uncovering the last remaining victims amidst crushed saucepans and household goods which the women had been examining when death struck.

Near the rescuers, treated almost with reverence by the grimy men, lay a pathetic little pile of children’s fairy stories, nursery rhymes and painting books.”

The Daily Express reported:

“Ambulances stood silently by as rescuers worked with hydraulic cranes. Nearby lay a little pile of children’s fairy stories, nursery rhymes and painting books. Beside them, salvaged intact, were rows of tumblers, bottles of lemon squash, tins of evaporated milk, packets of envelopes and assistants’ invoice books. Price cards were scattered over the road and trodden underfoot.”

Another dramatic eye witness account was provided to the TimeReel ITN documentary London’s War: The Road To Victory in 2010:

“I remember seeing a horse’s head laying in the gutter. And further on, there was a pram hood all twisted and bent.

And there was a little baby’s hands still in its woolly sleeve. Outside the pub, there was a bus. And it had been concertinaed. Rows of people were sitting inside all covered in dust and were all dead.

I looked over to where Woolworths had been, and there was nothing. There was an enormous gap, clouds of dust and I could see right through to streets beyond.

But there was no building; just piles of rubble and bricks. The only thing still standing was the Co-op. And it was still settling.

And the rubble and debris was still settling down and from underneath all that, I could hear people screaming.”

The South London Press, a bi-weekly newspaper serving south London, published an account of what happened on its front page for its Tuesday 28th November 1944 edition headlined ‘Shop V-bombed: “People heroic”:-

‘It can now be revealed that the V-bomb which recently scored a direct hit on a chain store killed many people on the spot. Others died in hospital.

Many of the dead were women and children, including babies in arms.

Doctors dealt with many injured at the scene of the incident, and others were treated at First-aid posts. Some sought First-aid in nearby houses, and many people were taken to hospital.

The bomb fell when shopping was at its peak. The store was crowded.

Blast wrought widespread havoc to shops and houses.

The blast did a good deal of damage to the interior of a town hall. [Deptford Town Hall]

The incident officer, Mr. S. Burslem said: “I shall never forget the wonderful way in which people struggled to give assistance to others, although suffering and wounded themselves.

On the part of all the services and public involved there has been heroic teamwork all the way through.”

The assistant chief warden for the borough, who is in business nearby as an electrical engineer, said: “On the roadway and pavements were bodies, some terribly injured, including very young children.

Yet in all this hell I never heard a murmur. Those spared and comparatively free from injury were all running to help others, soon sizing the terrible situation up and doing what good they could until the arrival of the services.

The control-room itself was full of smoke. It was barely possible to breathe, yet everyone was calm and the work of restoring some order and putting vital services into organisation proceeded with efficiency.”‘

 

Images of the destruction and aftermath have been archived by Lewisham Council.

These include a view of the wrecked houses on the corner of New Cross Road and St James’s, and what had been the premises of Clamp & Son auctioneers.

Then there is the view of the obliterated Woolworths store on New Cross Road, what is left of the Co-op and being able to see through to Batavia Road.

A few days after the debris clearance the photograph below provides an open view from half way down Goodwood Road to Deptford Town Hall. The entire corner of Goodwood Road and New Cross Road has been flattened. Three huge metal containers are on the roadside which had been used by heavy cranes to clear most of the rubble.

Another photograph shows the devastation and destruction from Batavia Road looking across the flattened Woolworths site over New Cross Road towards St James’s with the church in the far distance. A small piece of the shelving from the ground floor premises of Woolworths has survived.

A fifth photograph presents the scene from the Deptford Town Hall side of New Cross Road, with the tramlines in the road, to half of what is left of the Co-operative Society store and looking over to the flattened site of Woolworths and wreckage of houses on the other side of Goodwood Road.

The Mary Evans picture library licences photographs preserved in the London Fire Brigade museum.

There are six high resolution and dramatic pictures of National Fire Servicemen engaged in the rescue operation working in smoke and debris, and these are curated in the site’s search facility under the reference ‘Goodwood Road’.

There are two panoramic daytime scenes in Goodwood Road and New Cross Road showing the heavy lifting cranes and smoke still billowing up from a fire at the back of Woolworths.  It can be presumed these were taken on the day the V2 struck.

An aerial RAF reconnaissance photograph from 1946 of the junction between St James’s, Goodwood and New Cross Roads provided a sobering depiction of the extent of the V2’s destruction. The black and white image of this area is grey-white waste-land of where buildings had once stood and after the affected site has been cleared of rubble, debris and structures wrecked beyond repair.

Mothers and their children

One of the many unutterably sad aspects of this disaster was the number of mothers and their children killed because they had been shopping on a Saturday in the New Cross Road where the Woolworths and Co-op stores were places for domestic groceries and a little bit of fun in terms of sweets, toys, soft drinks and other beverages.

There were cafés, Woolworths had a popular tea-bar, where friends and families met and socialised. The victims included a young married couple in their twenties.

This means that 42 year old Florence Ethel Banfill died along with her three year old son Brian John Banfill.

31 year old Ivy Brown died along with her her 18 month old daughter Joyce.

45 year old Matilda Caroline Fish  was killed along with her 17 year old daughter Jean Caroline Maud Fish.

31 year old Kathleen Frances Fitzpatrick  was killed with her 3 year old daughter Carol Ann Fitzpatrick.

27 year old Julia Elizabeth Glover  was killed along with her children 7 year old daughter Sheila Glover and 1 month old infant son Michael Thomas Glover.

28 year old Alfred George Messenger was killed at the same time with his wife 23 year old Gladys Vera Messenger. The V2 rocket blast orphaned their two young daughters aged six and four.

38 year old Muriel Phyllis Millwood was killed with her 9 year old daughter Joan Pauline Millwood.

44 year old Lucy Amy Taylor died along with her 9 year old son Laurie John Taylor.

44 year old Dorothy Sarah Taylor was killed at the same time and along with her 15 year old daughter Joyce Doreen Taylor.

31 year old Lillian Florence Tribe died along with her 6 month old infant son Peter Tribe.

40 year old Violet Kathleen Woodland was killed at the same time and along with her 17 year old daughter Barbara Woodland.

On at least two occasions servicemen stationed abroad or in another part of the country would be contacted and told they had lost their wives and children in a V2 attack on the Home Front in London.

The memories of those who survived

Bill Finch remembered he was actually in Goldsmiths’ College when the V2 landed on Woolworths at about 12.26 on Saturday 25th November 1944.

This is because the London County Council meals service was headquartered there during the war and using the kitchens, dining room and other facilities while the College’s Training Department was in exile and evacuated to what is now Nottingham University.

A cheap meal for children in the area was put on at 12 noon and Bill was there because his mother was working in the canteen at New Cross Gate Station and his sisters Stella and Edna were working at the engineering works MB Motors behind the Marquis of Granby pub.

Bill told Deptford History Group researchers in 1994:

‘We had fold-up tables and the blast knocked the legs from under the tables and all the dinners slid down onto the floor. I run out and as I came round the bend I could see all the smoke and debris rising. I thought it was the station which had been hit. This would be three or four minutes after the explosion. I ran down and there was just people laying all over the place. There was a queue of shoppers outside the shoe shop and they’d been cut to pieces by flying glass. I’ve never seen a sight like it. Other bombs leave heaps and heaps of rubble but this looked as though it had been reduced, as though the biggest steam roller in the world had rolled straight over it.’

He found his sister Stella turning bodies over on the road looking for their mother. Fortunately for the Finch family all had survived. The blast did not extend as far as New Cross Gate station and had detonated before Edna, Stella and the other women at MB Motors would usually pop into Woolworths at lunchtime to shop for cosmetics.

Patricia Blay was 14 years old and a junior Post Office worker in the Royal Arsenal Co-op. Incredibly she had been only 50 feet away from seat of the blast. She explained: ‘Nothing. No sound, no nothing. I didn’t feel anything at all. The blast went the other way.’

In later years she treasured the letter sent to her by the Post Office commending her pluck and presence of mind in collecting all the valuables and cash and locking them into the shop-safe in the aftermath of the blast and before she was rescued from the debris.

Sylvia Yeldham’s father, William Chuter, was a postman working in the sorting office just beside the Deptford Town Hall. They were living in nearby St Donatt’s Road. Sylvia was 12 years old at the time and still at school.

She along with her mother, Annie, and brother Michael rushed to the site of the explosion to find out what had happened to him as the rumour reaching them was that the V2 had hit the Town Hall.

They found survivors covered in dust and prams with small children inside bleeding from the flying glass. Sylvia’s father had been injured when the strongroom door fell across the base of his back. He required months of hospital treatment, never fully recovered, and suffered pain throughout his life.

Sylvia Omit’s father, Bill Wakeman, was a clerk in the ration book office at 288 New Cross Road. On that fateful day, which happened to be her ninth birthday, he and two male colleagues had swapped with three women who usually worked in front of the first floor windows.

His face would catch the force of flying glass. He lost two fingers and would be disfigured for life. Years afterwards, Sylvia remembered her mother picking out little slithers of glass coming to the surface. Her birthday would also become known as ‘the New Cross day.’

Yet he certainly escaped death as the three women who took his place and those of his fellow clerks by choosing to work on the ground floor of the building were all killed.

Saturday mornings at Laurie Grove public baths, now used by Goldsmiths as artists’ studios and teaching rooms, was a popular pastime for boys in New Cross. A group of friends would have a swim and then make their way to Woolworths for a hot drink of Bovril and a bun. Consequently, a group of them would be caught up in the V2 tragedy.

Mike Bradshaw was nine and a half and living at 12 Avonley Road opposite the New Cross Hospital where his parents Harry and Gladys ran a newsagents. He would have gone with his friends Norman Wilkins and Derek Millen to the Baths and the Woolworths treat afterwards.

But on that particular Saturday he decided to stay at home because he wanted to read his new copy of Comic Cuts.

11 year old Norman Wilkins died in the blast. Derek Millen survived suffering a broken collar bone and burnt hair. He was lucky to have been standing next to an RAF man who had gone into Woolworths to have a cup of tea.

When buried in the debris, the airman held his hand and told him to shout so they were among the first to be dug out.

The victims and their identification

This is a new work in progress investigating and exploring the ancestry and life traces of each and every one of the people who died in the V2 disaster. These were people who made up the humanity of New Cross and neighbourhood in 1944.

They had heritage and families. They had jobs, lived in homes and had futures. They constituted the very heart of the community. They had voices, dreams, hopes, fears and souls. They were and are much more than mere names and statistics.

They leave an important legacy for living families and deserve memory and commemoration.

The former Deptford Borough Council should be credited with commissioning and creating a large burial plot and memorial for Civilian War Dead in Grove Park Cemetery which bears the inscription:

‘A Tribute To The Memory
Of Those Who Lost Their Lives
By Enemy Action In The
Borough Of Deptford
During The War 1939-1945
And Are Buried In This Plot’

Many of the victims of the Woolworths V2 tragedy in the New Cross Road on 25th November who are buried at Grove Park have their names inscribed on the stone memorial.

Image by Charlotte uploaded on 15 May 2023. Share-linked from Find A Grave

The plaques and memorials in the New Cross Road cite 168 people who died. So far it has been possible to fully identify a total of 167 of the fatalities from public records of civilian and military casualties.

Deptford Borough Council did inter what were described as ‘unidentified remains’ in grave 25 of their Civilian War Dead plot at Grove Park Cemetery. In the official burial register this is recorded as number 2298 ‘Unknown’ killed by enemy action in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944 and buried 7th December 1944.

It could be argued this represents one human being who was never identified. On the other hand this could have been sensitive handling of human remains which may have belonged to any of the other 167 victims who had been identified.

I have decided to list this person as the 168th victim with the identity of ‘Unknown.’

The resonance and implication of there being unknown victims in this event; particularly children, became the confluence of art, literature, tragedy and resilience.

The very thought of such young lives being lost on that day inspired Goldsmiths Creative Writing Professor Francis Spufford to write the brilliant and moving novel Light Perpetual which in 2021 was long-listed for the Booker Prize.

Fiction imagined future lives lost and wrote a moving and beautiful epitaph.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission records names and details of 161 civilian deaths in the 25th November 1944 V2 strike. This includes people who died in hospital afterwards from injuries received.

Six servicemen have also been recorded separately as having been killed in the incident. They were serving variously in the British Army, including the Home Guard, Royal Air Force and Royal Navy.

Consequently, at the time of writing 167 named individuals can now be listed as civilian and service victims who died in the bombing. The issue of one remaining individual to make up the number of 168 has been resolved, unless further information comes to light, with the title of ‘Unknown’ as explained above.

During the London Blitz it was not unknown for people’s bodies to be destroyed by blast and incineration, or indeed, in macabre terms, to be dismembered and mutilated beyond the extent that they were capable of identification.

However, even given the fact we are dealing with forensic pathology of nearly 80 years ago, medical and coroner’s services were usually very skilled in eventually ensuring that every missing person was accounted for.

Where no trace of a missing person’s body could be found, it was law and practice for the Coroner to hold an inquest and issue a verdict as to their fate.

Longmate’s book quotes from a report compiled by ‘the casualty services officer from regional headquarters’ that at Deptford Town Hall ‘an improvised collecting post for casualties and first aid post came into being.’

The report said the  V2 rocket detonated at 12.25 p.m and states ‘the heavy mobile first-aid unit, in charge of Dr Knight, from Barriedale FAP [First Aid Post] was called at 12.38’ and arrived a few minutes later.

The report also says: ‘The original mortuary having been destroyed, a temporary mortuary was established at the premises of Pearces Signs, to which bodies and fragments of bodies were taken.’

It is not clear which mortuary the report’s author is referring to in terms of  ‘having been destroyed.’

The Pearce Signs’ building had been badly damaged and it can be presumed it would have been used as a preliminary collecting point.

Deptford Council had specifically converted the Goldsmiths College swimming pool for the purpose of being used as a mass casualty mortuary. It had been damaged in Blitz incidents, but it was not fully destroyed by fire until May 1945.

Since the Goldsmiths’ College campus was effectively Deptford’s emergency medical services headquarters with the new Barriedale building constructed in the early 1940s to add to the resources, it is possible the converted swimming pool could have been used.

On the other hand the previous damage may have been so great they were forced to find somewhere else to do the distressing work. Such a situation must have been so frustrating and challenging.

To assist with identifying  over 100 fatalities additional mortuary staff had also been seconded from Bermondsey and Lewisham.

Remembering those who died

24 year old Kathleen Alice Adsley lived with her father Joseph, mother Alice and older brother Edward at 11 St. Norbert Green, Brockley, Lewisham.

Born in New Cross on 28th August 1920 Kathleen worked as a dressmaker. Her brother Edward worked as a rent collector and clerk.

Her father worked as a general labourer in the highways section of Deptford Borough Council.

She was clearly successful in her work because at the relatively young age of 24 she left an estate worth nearly £175 which in today’s values is the equivalent of £10,663.63 (13th November 2023).

Kathleen was buried in Section A, Grave 2153 of the Ladywell Cemetery in Brockley on 5th December 1944.

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16 year old Evelyn Lillian Amos lived with her parents Frederick and Edith at 1 Cranbrook Road, Deptford.

Frederick was a bus conductor and Evelyn’s older brothers William, a coal heaver, and Stanley, a shop assistant were also living at home at the time of the late September 1939 Register.

It is presumed Evelyn had been evacuated with her school as she would have been 12 years old.

She is buried in an unmarked Section D Grave 792 of Grove Park Cemetery in Lewisham.

Image courtesy of Charlotte uploaded 5th January 2024 and share-linked with Find A Grave.

Evelyn’s father Frederick passed away in Greenwich in 1979 at the age of 95.

Her mother Edith Florence died in Greenwich in 1970 aged 75.

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48 year old Frances Ellen Axton (maiden name Shorey) was living with her husband Charles Arthur Axton at 34 Oareborough Road, New Cross.

The 1939 Register records that she was born in Deptford on 12th March 1897 and was living at number 5 Oareborough Road with the occupation of ‘unpaid domestic duties.’

There are baptism and birth records in her name indicating her actual birth had been in 1896.

Oareborough Road no longer exists.

It was an L-shaped street of terraced houses demolished to make way for Folkestone Gardens.

She began working after leaving school at the age of 12 and by the time she was 15 she was packing chocolate in a local factory.

In 1921, the year before her marriage, she was an assembler working for the wireless operating company Siemens and Brothers in Woolwich.

She married Charles in 1922 who would outlive her by 34 years when he passed away in Southwark in 1978.

They had three sons. Their eldest took the forenames of his father Charles Arthur and was born in Greenwich in 1925.

As a 19 year old private in the 1st Battalion Gordon Highlanders he was killed on active service in Germany on 21st February 1945– within three months of learning of his mother’s death in the V2 attack.

He is buried in plot 12. B. 22. of the Rheinberg War Cemetery in Germany.

David G Axton was born in Greenwich with registration in the first quarter of 1930, and Derrick E Axton was born in Deptford with registration in the first quarter of 1936.

Frances Ellen Axton was laid to rest with many of the other victims of the New Cross Road V2 disaster in Grove Park Cemetery, in South Lewisham in December 1944.

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71 year old Frederick William Bailey like many of those who were killed, resided only a few minutes walk away at 13 Jerningham Road.  

In 1911 Mr Bailey was working as a grocer’s assistant and living with his family at 24 Oareborough Road- previously mentioned as one of the lost streets of Deptford and now the site of a park.

He was 37 years old and his wife Lily, née Wade a year older. They married in Camberwell in 1895.

The 1911 Census return disclosed that they had seven children living with them. Their three daughters Florence, aged 15, Mable, 5, and Violet, 3, and four sons: Frederick, 12, Edwin 10, Charles, 8, and George who was 6 years old.

Frederick Bailey was buried in Grove Park Cemetery in Lewisham in December 1944.

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45 year old Dora Mildred Grace Baker was the wife of builder Frederick Joseph Baker and they were living at 5 Lewisham Way, Deptford.

Dora died at St. Alfege’s Hospital in Greenwich on 25th November 1944 from the injuries she suffered in the V2 explosion.

5 Lewisham Way is a three-storey terraced Victorian building opposite Goldsmiths College with a shop/restaurant on the ground floor, which at the time of writing (July 2024) was Takeshi-Sushi and Pan Asian.

Dora’s birth as Dora Abbott was registered in Greenwich in 1897 and she was baptised at St James’s Hatcham 13th October 1898, the church closest to Goldsmiths.

In the 1901 census Dora was recorded living with her parents James and Matilda at 6 Walpole Street, Deptford- the house and street no longer exist. James was a 28 year old dock clerk from Devon.

At the time Dora had a younger brother Ernest and sister Violet, then infants aged 2 and a few months.

Dora married her first husband Frederick C Hollis in 1916. In 1941 she married her second husband Frederick J Baker in Deptford in 1941.

She left her second husband probate of £154 15s 2d which at the time of writing had the equivalent value of around £5,761.

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42 year old Florence Ethel Banfill died in the rocket attack along with her son who was only three years old. Her husband Bartholomew was left grieving for the loss of his wife and young son.

They lived in nearby 19 Childeric Road New Cross.  Bartholomew, who was 40 years old at the time, worked as a storekeeper for a builders merchant. Florence had lived in Childeric Road most of her life.

She married Bartholomew in 1929. Ivy Grant recalled to the Deptford History Group in 1994 that she remembered Mrs Banfill had lived nearby to her and that she and her husband had gone years waiting to have a baby.

It was an appalling tragedy that she and her little boy would be killed in these circumstances and with the background of struggling for so long to have a child.

Mr Banfill would pass away in Bromley in 1977 at the age of 75 outliving his first wife and son by 31 years. He did however remarry Constance Brent in Lewisham in 1951.

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3 year old  Brian John Banfill of 19 Childeric Road New Cross as outlined above died with his mother Florence in this air raid disaster.

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30 year old Robert Bass from 84 Douglas Way in Deptford died from the injuries he received in the blast after being taken to the Miller General Hospital in Greenwich High Road.

He was married to Jessie Victoria née Bates who was 31 at the time.

The house they lived in is no longer standing and part of the Margaret McMillan Park.

Robert was a deal timber porter and the V2 bombing left their sons, 9 year old Robert and 7 year old William, without a father.

Jessie remarried in 1946 to 28 year old Leonard Bedford who was a New Cross resident and worked as a ‘reinforced contractor’ in the building trade.

Robert has a memorial in the Grove Park Cemetery with the inscription:

‘PEACE- In loving memory of Robert Bass. died Nov. 26th 1944 aged 30 years.
A dear husband and dad.
You gave us all you had to give
but most of all you gave us love.
Jessie, Roy, Billy.’

His wife Jessie Victoria Bates Bedford who passed away in 1988 and their son  Robert James “Bob” Bass (19134-2015) are also commemorated on the headstone. Jessie and her second husband Leonard (1918-1989) are also buried in the plot.

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61 year old John James Bateman was a Police Sub-Inspector assigned to the Air Ministry living at 203 Rochester Way, Blackheath.

He had a distinguished military career first enlisting in the British Army at the age of 17 in 1901.

He served in the Duke Of Cornwall’s Light Infantry until 1910 with postings overseas to Gibraltar and Bermuda.

While in the British Army he took up the opportunity of education courses in Aldershot and obtained certificates of education in 1901 and 1903 with an additional qualification in gymnastic instruction in 1907.

He then re-enlisted for the Great War of 1914-18 in the same regiment with the rank of Corporal, and Acting Warrant Officer Class 2 and saw active service with the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1915 and Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force in 1917-19.

He was awarded the 1914-15 Star, and British War and Victory medals.

When demobilised in 1920 he had served 18 years and 24 days, was awarded an army pension and declared ‘of Excellent Character.’

On 7th July 1913 he married Renée Victoria Morford in Greenwich.

At the time of the 1921 census they were living at 96 Greenwich Road where John described himself as a teacher of Physical Culture and Gymnastics previously employed by the London County Council, recognised by the Board of Education, but then currently out of work.

John and Renée had four children: Gaston Louis Maxim Jack Batemen born in 1913, Gordon John Charles Pinkstone Bateman born in 1915, Yvonne Elsie Florence Victoria Bateman born in 1916 and Ernest Harry Bateman whose birth was registered in the first quarter of 1926.

It would seem John Bateman joined the Metropolitan Police reaching the rank of sergeant in Lewisham in 1939 where he was listed in the 1939 Register as living at 12 Lewisham Hill.

By this time he was widowed. Renée had passed away at the Miller Hospital in Greenwich on 14th August 1939 leaving her husband an estate of £428 9s 10d.

John James Bateman left probate in 1946 of £1,000 to his two sons- Gaston, a structural engineer and Gordon who was a sergeant in the RAF.

In today’s values his estate had the equivalent of £51,647.22.

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74 year old Elizabeth Lillian Jane Beaton was living at 186 New Cross Road at the corner of Pepys Road. She was the widow of William Beaton and originally came from Hampshire.

Her father John Harris had been a boilermaker for a Portsmouth naval dockyard.

Born in Brighton, Elizabeth’s parents had brought her up on Portsea Island before moving to the Mile End area of the port.

Her late husband William had been a bricklayer and they had married in Portsmouth in 1893. Elizabeth had had two younger brothers Alfred and Arthur who started their working lives as errand boys.

Elizabeth had been a corset maker and she and William moved to Eastleigh at the turn of the century where he got a bricklaying job with a builder’s firm.

They had two children, Lillian Gertrude May and William Edward who were 46 and 43 respectively when she was killed in the New Cross Road V2 attack.

Elizabeth Beaton is buried in grave 19 in the plot for the Civilian War Dead with a memorial erected by Deptford Borough Council at Grove Park Cemetery.  Her name is inscribed on the Memorial’s Panel One.

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31 year old Harriet Amy Bentley lived at 7 Cambridge Drive in Lee. 

Harriet was born Harriet Duffy 17^th May 1913 and worked as a drapery shop assistant.

Her father was a carman working for Lion Cartage in Bermondsey and she was brought up at 28 Reculver Road, Deptford in a large family home with five sisters and two brothers.

The original house is no longer standing and the street entirely rebuilt.

She was only 20 when she married 49 year old printer’s compositor Albert Edward Henry Bentley in Deptford in 1934.

Bentley had been a mechanic in the Royal Naval Air Service and RAF during the First World War and would outlive her by 18 years when he died in New Cross General Hospital in 1962 at the age of 77.

At the time of the 1939 National Register, taken in late September just after the beginning of the Second World War, Harriet was living in 2 Bermondsey Square, with her her younger sisters Norah who was a junior clerk and Bessie who was a mantle machinist.

Older brother Charles, listed as ‘Seaman R28490- last ship Ascania’ was also staying in the same house.

The RMS Ascania was an ocean liner operated by the Cunard Line and on 24th August 1939, she was taken into naval service and converted into an Armed Merchant Cruiser and served in protecting North Atlantic convoys.

Harriet Amy Bentley was buried in an unmarked grave in Hither Green Cemetery on 4th December 1944 in Section X grave number 164.

On the 19th January 2017 the following message was left on the Find A Grave online platform:

‘I never knew you, but you were my great aunt and died far too young. All these years later and I want you to know that somebody who you never met still remembers you. All your loved ones are with you now x.- Yvonne.’

The image below of Harriet’s resting place was uploaded by an anonymous contributor on 10th April 2023 and is share-linked with Find A Grave

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51 year old Theodore Ludwig Berning was a married man living at 32 Downhill Road in Catford.

He had been born and brought up in London’s East End Jewish community starting out his working life in 1911 as a salesman at the age of 17.

This was a part of London experiencing overcrowding, poverty and deprivation at the time.

In February 1909 there is a reference in a local newspaper to ‘a lad of 15’ named as Theodore Berning appearing before the Thames Police court for stealing cash from automatic gas meters. He had told the magistrate he was ‘only looking for a job.’ This does not necessarily mean this was the Theodore Berning being profiled here. It may be the case of another youth with the same name and age.

His German born father William had been a trouser presser and he was brought up in a household with two brothers and three sisters in the St George in the East district of Wapping-Stepney which is now in the Borough of Tower Hamlets.

In 1901 his 15 year old brother William was working as an office boy and his older brother Henry, 17, as a tailor’s apprentice.

It seems Theodore may have been switching his forename in the public records with ‘Frederick.’ If this is the case he married Dorothy Elizabeth Leatham in 1917 and they had a son called Theodore Frederick in 1918.

They were living at 29 Thirza Street, Ratcliff in 1921 and Theodore was working as a cinema attendant at the Ballaseum in the Commercial Road.

Electoral rolls last recorded Theodore Berning living in this part of East London up until 1931.

It seems possible he reappeared in the public records as Frederick Berning, a packer for food produce manufacturers, living with his wife Elizabeth in Waltham Forest in the autumn of 1939.

Their son Theodore Frederick W Berning enlisted in the Army and was posted as a missing but found casualty in France in 1940 with the rank of Acting Corporal in the Royal Army Service Corps.

An Elizabeth Berning, who is likely to have been Theodore’s widow, passed away in Bromley in 1977 at the age of 79. She had survived him by 33 years.

Theodore Berning is commemorated and buried at Deptford Borough Council’s Civilian War Dead plot in Grove Park Cemetery.  His name is inscribed on Memorial Panel 1 with burial in Grave 15.

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60 year old William John Bradford had been living with his wife Catherine at 6 Headley Street, Peckham. The house and street no longer exist.

Headley Street used to run west from Gordon Road, north of Sturdy Road and is now a path in Consort Park.

William was a window cleaner working on his own account and had married Catherine Duff  in Camberwell in 1915. Catherine had been born in Dublin.

They had a daughter Kathleen who was 28 when her father was killed by the V2 bombing.

Catherine Bradford passed away in Camberwell in 1974 at the age of 86. William Bradford is buried in Deptford Borough Council’s Civilian War Dead plot of Grove Park Cemetery with his name inscribed on the memorial.

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67 year old James Henry Bradon was the husband of Louise May Bradon and they both lived at number 42 Comerford Road in Deptford.

The terraced Victorian house is still very much looking on the outside as it was in 1944. James was a Thames Lighterman-who are special boatmen or sailors of the river who carry goods on the Thames. They ‘lighten’ (that is, unload) a ship and transfer her cargo to another vessel, or to shore.

They are also the working brothers of Thames Watermen who carry people and their goods. Both Lightermen and Watermen are members of the same City of London Company which was originally constituted many centuries ago.

James was born in Greenwich in 1877 and baptised at Christchurch in East Greenwich. His father Charles William was a barge builder. James Henry married Louise May Tansley from Portland in 1903 and by 1911 they were living in Deptford Green with their son James Charles and Constance Francis.

By 1921 they were living in Rotherhithe New Road with James working for the Thames Steam Tug Lighterays Company and his son James Charles also working there as an apprentice Lighterman at the age of 17.

By 1939 and the beginning of the Second World War, the family had moved to Comerford Road and they were letting out rooms to a shipping clerk and three people working for a sugar confectionary company.

After her husband’s death in the V2 raid, Louise May continued living at 42 Comerford Road until her death in 1965 and left an estate of £3,102 which in November 2023 was worth £74,069.55. Her son James Charles Bradon was by then a well-established and respected Thames Lighterman and Waterman.

It’s believed James Henry Bradon is buried in Brockley cemetery.

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37 year old Florence Elizabeth Harriet Branscombe was living with her mother Elizabeth Branscombe at 9 Raymouth Road, Rotherhithe.

Her father Frederick James Branscombe, who had been a fish curer, passed away when a pensioner at the age of 76 in 1943 in Camberwell.

The V2 rocket disaster left Elizabeth at the age of 67 grieving for her husband and adult daughter in less than a year.

Florence had been a shop assistant.

Her surviving older brother, also called Frederick, worked in the Lyons Confectionary Company’s chocolate factory in Shepherdess Walk, Clerkenwell.

Elizabeth Branscombe died in Lewisham in 1966 at the age of 89, some 22 years after her daughter’s terrible death.

Florence Elizabeth Harriet Branscombe was buried in Nunhead Cemetery on 2nd December 1944.

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65 year old Andrew Poulton Brazier was living with his 72 year old wife Elizabeth at 43 Manor Avenue, Brockley which at the end of September 1939 had multiple occupancy.

Public documents show his actual age was 67 as he was born 24th October 1877. Lewisham’s Local History and Archives Centre state he was ‘a civil defence worker.’

In 1939 he described himself as a textile commercial trader and throughout most of his working life he had been a commercial traveller.

When he was 23 in 1901 he was working as an assistant in the silk department of a large store. His father, also called Andrew Poulton Brazier, was a hosier manager and the large family, including his mother, three working sisters and one brother were living at 41 Cressingham Road, Blackheath.

His older 28 year old sister Lily was working as a teacher. By the time of the Great War Andrew had volunteered as a gunner for the Royal Garrison Artillery and his army records state he was a widower with ‘one boy’ who served in France in an anti-aircraft company.

The 1911 census had recorded him living with May Lucy (née Potter) in Twickenham whom he had married in the same year and she had been working as a mantle maker. They had a son Andrew Robert Brazier in 1912.

It seems May Lucy Brazier died in Kensington the following year within a year of her son’s birth.  Andrew Poulton Brazier remarried Elizabeth Gooden in 1920 and they were living with his son from his previous marriage in Nunhead at the time of the 1921 census.

He was still working as a commercial traveller specialising in drapery. During the Second World War Andrew Robert Brazier served in the army as a lance-bombardier and his father’s estate of £147 in effects, worth £5,242.01 in October 2023,  was left to his stepmother Elizabeth.

Andrew Poulton Brazier is buried in Grave 22 of Deptford Borough Council’s plot for Civilian War dead at Grove Park Cemetery and his name is inscribed on Panel 1 of the large stone memorial. 

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6 year old Nicholas Oliver Bright was the only son of George, 49 and Grace Bright, 47, who were living at number 44 Peckham Hill Street, Peckham. Their house is no longer standing and is the site of a Burger King fast food restaurant.

Nicholas was born on 28th November 1937 in Camberwell and was actually killed on the day of his mother’s birthday and three days short of his own. It is possible that he could have been a signwriter and painter like his father. It was a family tradition. His grandfather Walter Ellis and great uncle Walter Arthur had been sign writers as well.

George Bright married Grace Millwood in Camberwell in 1920. Grace was a tin worker employed by John Feaver tin manufacturers in the Tower Bridge Road. George Bright passed away in Ramsgate in 1958. He was 63. Grace died in 1992 at the age of 94.

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31 year old Ivy Brown lived at 48 Evelina Road, Nunhead with her husband George Henry Brown who was a soldier in the Eighth Army. They had married in 1941.

It seems Ivy was shopping either in Woolworths or the Co-op with her 18 month old daughter Joyce who was also killed in the V2 bombing. She had been seen walking from the stores towards New Cross Gate Station, but it is presumed she had gone back for some reason.

Ivy was the daughter of a First World War hero- Private William Eastman who was killed in action 3^rd May 1917 in Chérisy, France when a private serving in the 8th Battalion East Surrey Regiment on the Western Front. He had been awarded the military medal for bravery.

The fighting at Chérisy village, was part of the Arras campaign in the Pas-de-Calais area of  France. William had been in the 18th Division which captured it from the Germans on the 3^rd of May 1917, but then lost it the same night.

Ivy was only three when her father was killed. Before the war he was a greenhouse hawker working in the old Convent Garden fruit and vegetable market when it was situated in the Soho area of London. He volunteered for service in 1914 at Deptford Town Hall, and the Imperial War Museum hosts a portfolio of images of him at work as a hawker, in uniform, and a family picture with his wife and children.

This image most likely includes a photograph of Ivy when she was an infant with her mother Alice Maud, sisters Elsie and Alice, and brother William. Her brother can be seen next to her far right.

It is a poignant turn of fate that Ivy’s daughter would be killed at roughly the same age Ivy was when this photograph was taken and three generations of William Eastman’s family, including himself, would be destroyed by the violence of war in the 20th century.

In the case of his youngest daughter and granddaughter this would happen not when they were in uniform in battle but on the Home Front while shopping.

The family lived at 55 Selden Road, Nunhead during the Great War. By the beginning of the Second World War in 1939 Ivy was living at number 22 Selden Road with her two sisters. Ivy was 26 years old working as a wax paper machinist along with her sister Alice. Her eldest sister Elsie was working as a laundry folder and checker. Their mother is believed to have passed away in 1925. The Selden Road they lived in during the first half of the 20^th century has been largely redeveloped.

The family’s grief and consternation over the deaths of Ivy and her daughter Joyce was recalled by her brother Charles Williams for the Deptford History study Rations and Rubble. He explained that Ivy’s husband George had been sent back to Britain because he had contracted tuberculosis.

He had been at a hospital in North Wales and wrongly informed that his mother had been killed. Charles explained: ‘He came home, sick as he was, and we met him at the station and he discovered the real news which was very bad for him. Needless to say he died, about four years [corrected from ‘months’ in Rations and Rubble text] later. The shock of it…his whole life had gone, his wife, his baby. He gave up. The three of them are now buried at Camberwell Cemetery.’

George Brown passed away on 1st February 1948. He was 29 years old.

Ivy Brown is indeed buried in New Camberwell Cemetery along with her daughter Joyce and her husband George Henry Brown.

The headstone for Ivy and Joyce is inscribed: ‘In fondest memory of my dear wife Ivy Brown killed by enemy action 25th November 1944. Also Joyce Brown 25th November 1944 aged 18 months.’

George’s headstone has the inscription: ‘George Henry Brown who fell asleep 1st February 1948 aged 29 years. Sadly missed by all.’

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18 month old Joyce Brown was the daughter of Ivy Brown who died in the same incident and is profiled above.

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12 year old Sylvia Rosina Brown  was the younger daughter of 43 year old Albert John and 41 year old Lilian Gertrude Brown, and they lived at 56 Oareborough Road in Deptford.  Oareborough or Oareboro Road, as has already been explained, is now a lost road or street of Deptford having been cleared to be part of Folkestone Gardens. Lilian and Albert married in Greenwich in 1927.

Sylvia was born in Deptford on 11^th January 1932 to very hard-working parents. Her father was a timber porter and described as ‘heavy worker’, and mother was a factory hand for Armour Mills in Lewisham which manufactured lace and silk goods.

In her young life Sylvia went to Elementary School in Deptford, and would join her mother every summer in the hop-picking holiday tradition of many thousands of east and south-east Londoners. When war broke out in September 1939 that’s where Sylvia was with her mother Lilian staying in the Hopping Huts at High Tilt Farm near Cranbrook in Kent.

She was then only seven years old.

They would have travelled out there and back on one of the South Eastern Railway and London Chatham and Dover Railway Hop Pickers’ Specials from London Bridge which would transport Londoners to the towns and villages at the centre of the hop-growing agricultural industry mainly in Kent, Surrey, Hampshire and Sussex.

The final chapters of W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and a significant  part of George Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter include evocative fictional accounts of London families taking part in the annual hops harvest.

In Orwell’s case his writing could be described as documentary as it is based on his personal experience and the diary he kept of joining hop-picking families one summer in the early 1930s.

While Sylvia, her mother, 11 year old sister Lilian Edith and other relatives were still in Kent finishing up the hop harvest at the end of September 1939, her father Albert was working in London and staying in Trundleys Road, Lewisham.

It is believed that Sylvia was shopping in Woolworths with her cousin Alma Supple, who at eleven years old was around the same age, when the V2 struck the store at 12.26 p.m.

Sylvia’s father Albert was sister to Alma’s mother Rosina Maud née Brown.

The families lived in the same street in Deptford- Oareborough Road.

Sylvia’s sister Lilian was 16 at the time of the V2 disaster, would marry Walter Mackenzie in 1947 and would pass away at Hope Close in Grove Park, Lewisham in 1990 at the age of 62 leaving an estate of £115,000 which in today’s values is the equivalent of £271,761.07.

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40 year old Maud Alice Bush of 27 Pepys Road, New Cross Gate, Deptford was the daughter of Henry Bush.

She was critically injured in the V2 explosion and taken to the Miller Hospital in Greenwich but died from her injuries on the same day.

Public records indicate Maud’s mother Alice Maud Burningham married Henry Charles Bush in Camberwell in 1902. Maud Alice was born in Peckham 20th December 1903 with her twin sister Winifred. She was single and a working woman all her life until it was cut short by the V2 rocket blast.

She and Winifred worked as skilled machinists in the clothing industry for Messrs Rogers, a well-known manufacturer of shirts. Her father, known to his family as ‘Harry’ had been a railway inspector for the South Eastern and Chatham Railway which had a monopoly of railway services in Kent and to the main Channel ports for ferries to France and Belgium before merging with other railway companies to form Southern Railway in 1923 which on nationalisation after WW2 became the Southern Region.

By 1921 Harry appears to be living on his own at 60 Haydock Road, Deptford with his four daughters, Maud Alice and her twin sister Winifred, both 17, Nellie Mabel, 15, Florence Ivy, 13, and 33 year old housekeeper Blanche Frances Charlesson from Cork in Ireland.

There was also a ‘paying guest’ called Elizabeth Marmion working as a cashier for one of the famous J Lyons and Company teashops and Corner Houses. Nellie Bush was an apprentice at ‘Fancy Needlework’ for Haywards. Mother Alice Maud may have moved away or passed away.

By 1939 and the outbreak of WW2, the household was more or less the same at 27 Pepys Road, but now all women and minus Harry. Again, it is possible he had passed or moved away. 51 year old Blanche Charlesson was described as doing unpaid domestic duties.

Elizabeth Marmion, 57, was still there and working as a cashier for J Lyons. Three of the Bush sisters, Maud, Winifred, and Florence were working as machinists, and Nellie was now a full-time needleworker. Another woman had moved in, 58 year old welfare worker Alice Fowler.

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44 year old Reginald Bradford Calder had a dramatic and adventurous life. At the time of his death he was living with his 42 year old wife Violet Hagen Calder and two daughters at Greenways, The Glen, Farnborough Park, near Orpington in Kent.

The Glen is and was a private road of well-to-do houses. Detached homes in this private gated estate sold for more than £3 million in 2023. Reginald was an accountant and auditor.

A track of newspaper articles reveals in 1924 he was acquitted of hitting his mother when she went for him with a dagger in an extraordinary domestic dispute, was hailed a hero for rescuing men from drowning in Barmouth, Wales in 1936, fined for speeding in 1941, and then killed in one of the worst V2 rocket bombings of the London Blitz on 25^th November 1944.

The Bromley and West Kent Mercury published a charming obituary about him on 1^st December 1944 saying he had ‘many friends in City circles and in Bromley and Catford where for many years he lived at 83 Daneby Road as a practising accountant before moving to Farnborough Park.

The Mercury said he was ‘greatly respected for his professional capacity and his personal qualities. He was one of the kindest and most helpful men, as many can testify, and his passing will be sincerely regretted.’

He served with the Gordon Highlanders during WW1 and in 1920 was appointed secretary of the ‘Services Rendered’ Club in Greenwich. He married Violet Hagen Winter in Greenwich 1924. Violet was the adopted daughter of William and Eleanor Greenway and had been brought up at their home, 10 Deloraine Street, Deptford.

William worked as a flusher and then watchman for the London Country Council. Deloraine Street is another ‘lost street’ of Deptford in the sense there are no longer any houses there, just allotments. It seems they were pulled down because of war damage from bombing during WW2.

Violet was a Clerk and Policy Typist for the Licenses and General Insurance Company on Victoria Embankment next to Temple Station when she met Reginald. She found she had married into a family full of domestic drama.

Only a few months after they wed in 1924 there was an explosive row at the Calder family home in Reading, Berkshire. Reginald’s father Herbert and younger brother had been locked out by his mother Winifred. Reginald and Violet had driven from London to try and help sort things out after getting a desperate phone call from his father and arrived at a quarter to one in the morning.

It is an indication of his success that at the age of 24 he could afford to drive a fast car in only the second decade of motoring and had his own phone at home.

A policeman was also outside the house, 197 Cranbury Road,  having been called to the disturbance. Reginald forced back the catch of a window to get in but when doing so, his mother turned to the officer and insisted ‘Constable arrest him! He is wanted for fraud all over London.’

There had been a background of marital trouble between Herbert and Winifred, Winifred accusing him of domestic violence and in the turmoil of families experiencing such internal conflict Winifred’s two daughters sided with her mother and Herbert’s younger son living at home, Dudley, sided with him.

Reginald at 24, having flown the nest and just married, found himself in the middle. After much shouting through the night the battle recommenced in the morning. Winifred insulted her daughter-in-law Violet with ‘a rude and wicked remark.’ Winifred claimed Violet pushed her and thumped her. Reginald claimed Winifred produced a dagger, he held her wrists, asking Violet to take the knife from her, as his mother said nobody would be leaving the living room alive. In the ensuing struggle, mother was disarmed and, said her son had given her a black eye.

She prosecuted him for assault at the Borough Police Court. Every attempt to reach a settlement beforehand had been unsuccessful. Winifred admitted she did have a dagger, but to do herself in if her husband started to ‘knock her about.’ Her youngest son Dudley did not help her case when he said his mother ‘had a mania for daggers and razors.’ The Magistrates dismissed the case against Reginald, and Winifred left the court in tears.

Reginald’s father Herbert was also a larger than life character having been born and brought up in what was then the colony of British Guiana, which on independence in 1966 became Guyana.  In the 1890s he was working as a ‘fifth class clerk’ in the government’s Land Department.

His first marriage to Ida Isabella Calder in Guiana lasted only three months, largely because he travelled to England and met Winifred. In 1898, the Supreme Court of Guiana in Georgetown, Demerara granted an uncontested divorce to Ida for one of the shortest marriages on record there.

At the 1924 court hearing Winifred accused Herbert of being divorced after only three weeks of marriage on the grounds of adultery. Herbert pointed out that if there had been any adultery, it had been 4,000 miles away from the spot and would have been with Winifred when he was in England.

Herbert had stayed in London after his divorce from Ida in British Guiana, lived with Winifred and eventually married her in 1902. He joined the London County Council as a tram conductor operating out of the New Cross Tram Depot. By 1911, they were living at 13 Trinity Grove Greenwich with their six children, Herbert William Leslie aged 12, Reginald Bradford aged 10, Gordon Alexander aged 7, Gladys Vera Anne aged 6,  Dudley Richard aged 4, and the then infant Mona Lily Maria not even a year old.

Herbert’s job as a tram conductor saw him appear in court a couple of times. Once in 1905 when he was accused of overloading his tram in the Old Kent Road and acquitted, and again in 1911 when an unruly passenger was fined for attacking him.

The fight broke out when Herbert had gone to help pick up a child slightly hurt after snatching a free ride and then jumping off and falling over.

The Reading dagger incident of 1924 had not been the first time the Calder family’s fiery domestic rows had played out in court. Two years earlier, the Greenwich Police Court, later Greenwich Magistrates, had to resolve a situation where father Herbert Lindsay Calder had this time locked out Winifred and their two daughters.

Winifred was suing for a separation order on the grounds of desertion. By 1922 Herbert Lindsay Calder had left the trams, served as a clerk for the RAF during WW1, had injured his thumb while in service, received £350 in compensation, and was now ‘an artist.’  Winifred said not very tactfully that he was more of an illegal bookmaker, ‘backing horses and running a book’ by taking bets from punters.

This court case arose from an incident where a local postman had called the police after seeing Winifred out on the street in the rain with two of her daughters and a pile of her clothing that Herbert had thrown out after her. Winifred complained that he had threatened to murder her if she came back.

Herbert Calder told the Greenwich Magistrates that indeed he was an artist but ‘there was nothing doing just now in that direction’ and he was out of work. He said Winifred was ‘an impossible woman’, that they never spoke to each other in the house except when she chose to use ‘filthy language.’

Winifred said that he had fallen for another woman, something he denied, and he said she had told his children that he was not their father and they had ‘another daddy.’

The voice of mediation came in the form of the Calder’s eldest son Herbert William Leslie, then 23 and having been an engineer in the RAF at the end of the Great War. He gave evidence to explain that his father ‘was a very fine man’ and had only struck his mother once some 14 years before due to provocation.

He said his mother Winifred ‘was a good mother in many respects’, but when she lost her temper she had a habit of threatening members of her family with a knife which they often had to struggle to take from her and she had also threatened to poison them with arsenic.

The Magistrate decided to dismiss the summons and let the family sort out and indeed live with their differences. As we know issues came back to court two years later and the question of knives, or in that case, a dagger, arose again. Then the second son, Reginald Bradford, had to intervene.

There is a happy end to the story of Herbert Lindsay and Winifred. They did stay together and live with each other’s temperaments. By the time of the Second World War in September 1939, they were living at 69 Melbourne Grove in Dulwich. Herbert was now 67 years old and working as a ‘wine traveller’ and one of their daughters, Mona, now 28, was a professional dancer and still living at home.

Herbert would pass away in 1948 at the age of 76 having lived four years longer than his second son Reginald killed by the V2 at Woolworths in the New Cross Road.

The sad postscript though in respect of Winifred is that in 1952 she put an advert in the Sydenham Forest Hill and Penge Gazette: ‘Widow (late Herbert Lindsay Calder, traveller) homeless four years, unable to get two unfurnished rooms or one large with kitchenette; over four years on Lewisham House List; old resident Lewisham before being bombed out. Please help- Mrs. Calder, 8 Moatlands House, Cromer Street WC1.’

The 1930s were a boom time for accountant auditor Reginald Bradford Calder and his wife Violet. The cars got bigger, the houses larger and more salubrious and they had two daughters. They were on holiday in Barmouth, North Wales in July 1936 when a swimmer got trapped in seaweed and three men who launched a boat to rescue him got into trouble when it capsized.

Reginald and Violet were on the beach among the hundreds of holidaymakers watching and hearing the cries of the stricken swimmer and then the boat turning over with his rescuers in the choppy seas. Reginald swam out to them with another holidaymaker and brought them all safely to shore. His heroism would be reported in the Daily Mirror and regional press.

The kindness of his personality averred to in his obituary was in evidence during the trial of a nurse prosecuted for stealing Violet’s clothing from their house in Catford in 1933. When Reginald heard the Detective Sergeant who caught her red-handed saying she had pleaded: ‘Please give me a chance. I don’t know what made me do such a thing’, Reginald told the court he had no wish at all to press the charge ‘if it was her first lapse.’

It turned out, however, Iris Mary Good had not been good, had not been a nurse at all, had got the job in the Calder household on false pretences and could have done more harm than good as she had no training as a nurse. She was eventually tried at the Crown Court, found guilty and sent to Holloway Prison for nine months.

It is not clear what business Reginald was on that Saturday lunchtime 25^th November 1944 when he was killed by the V2 rocket. He may have been driving down the New Cross Road in his car on the way to the City or West End, or he had been sitting on the number 53a bus when it too was destroyed in the blast.

His widow Violet would remarry Herbert E Gibbs in 1956 and she would pass away in Bromley in 1979 at the age of 77, some thirty five years after she lost her first husband in the V2 attack.

Reginald Calder’s death in the New Cross V2 disaster was obviously a terrible blow to his family, but the talented Calders more than stepped up to the fight against Hitler and the Nazi regime that was causing so much death and suffering through its indiscriminate bombing of London and the rest of Britain.

Reginald’s two younger sisters Mona Lily Marion and Marjorie Leonora, born in 1911 and 1915 respectively, became professional dancers and performed and entertained in theatres and music halls throughout London and England during the war years. Mona would later recall to her daughter incidents where she was often only seconds from stepping off a tram before an area was bombed.

The contribution of the country’s entertainment industry in maintaining and boosting civilian morale may not have received the same recognition as ENSA’s work with frontline troops. It merits full appreciation.

The Crown Unit’s documentarist Humphrey Jennings recorded for posterity the dimensions of this service in the 1942 film Listen To Britain. From the moment you see two servicemen sitting on a bench overlooking the sea, the gradual fade-up of dance-music montages into the sequence of elegant ballroom style dancing which was a huge recreation and escape for people at this time.

And the culture of sartorial and dignified dancing elegance was exemplified by Marjorie Leonora who in her professional name of Lola Cordell teamed up with Alan Gold whom she would later marry.

People aspired to dance like the enthralling Gold and Cordell. As Pathé News said in 1939, just after war had been declared, Gold and Cordell in their performance of ‘Drawing The Line’ were ‘reminding you of the time when dance was an elegant thing. Judge for yourself!’

Pathé would bring the couple back into their studios in 1941 to film another ‘graceful presentation from that talented pair Gold and Cordell’- and said this with a flourishing emphasis on their names.

The Pathé production in these films was of the highest standard using the latest camera and lighting techniques. The narrator talked about how the dancing ushered everyone ‘into the world of romance’ and said of Gold and Cordell: ‘two stars with twinkling feet.’

Marjorie and her sister Mona lived long and successful lives. Mona passed away in 2014 at the age of 103 and Marjorie in 1997 at the age of 87.

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21 year old Doris Eileen Edith Card worked for the British Red Cross Society during World War Two and her duties could have included being a First Aid Post (FAP) nurse and helping to organise and pack Red Cross parcels for British Prisoners of War abroad.

Her father was 55 year old London Passenger Transport Board bus driver Walter James Card, and her mother was Jane Elizabeth Card who was 47 at the time of the V2 bombing.

Doris lived with her parents and 23 year old sister Gwendolyn at the family’s semi-detached home in number 36 Olron Crescent in Bexley.

Gwendolyn Jessie Alice Card was a shorthand typist and part-time ARP Warden with Bexley Council. She would marry Clifford Langley in 1945.

Gwendolyn would live long enough to enjoy her 95^th birthday before passing away in Bridgnorth Shropshire in 2016. Doris Card’s father outlived her by ten years passing away in Bromley in 1954.

Her mother Elizabeth Jane née Bannister was brought up in a large family with six brothers and one sister  in Deptford where her father had been a railway coalman for the South Eastern and Chatham Railway.

She was 23 years old when she married Walter Card at the end of 1921 and had been working as a general servant in her parents’ home at 50 Railway Grove Deptford, which would ironically also be damaged beyond repair by another V2 rocket bombing at the end of October 1944.

She would outlive her daughter Doris by 54 years and passed away in Shrewsbury in 1998 at the age of 100.

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26 year old Mary Carroll  was an Irish woman living at 24 Girton Road, in Sydenham, Kent.

She was the daughter of James and Norah Carroll, of 15 St. Laurence’s Terrace, Lower Grange, Waterford, in the Irish Republic.

Her family home in Waterford is now part of a convenience grocery store. She is commemorated in Waterford’s Rolls of Honour for people killed during the 20^th century’s two world wars.

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40 year old Joan Ivy Singleton Clamp was killed when working in the offices of her husband’s firm Clamp and Son at 280 New Cross Road- almost opposite Woolworths and the seat of the V2 rocket bomb explosion.

Joan was a successful professional surveyor living with her husband, the auctioneer Ernest Edward Clamp, in the well-to-do neighbourhood of Sandilands in Croydon Surrey. Their house at number 39 is still standing.

In 1944 it was a symbol of the affluent suburban building boom of the 1930s where successful middle-class people bought their own detached houses with large gardens and could still afford to hire a live-in servant.

In the example of the Clamps, the September 1939 Register records that Mary Wells, then 34 years old, was there working and living with them as their domestic servant. Mary would have been their effective housekeeper- cooking, cleaning and most likely doing their shopping. In 1947 Mary would marry John Gallagher in Croydon.

Joan Clamp was born in Uxbridge on 17th November 1904, the daughter of grain merchant Edwin Singleton Brame and her mother was Kate Ivy née Hosking.

Joan was brought up in Surbiton with her three younger sisters Kathleen, Margaret, and Dorothy. All the Brame daughters had the second middle names of their parents.

Ernest inherited his family’s well established firm of auctioneers and estate agents which in 1901 was based at 65 New Cross Road. It had been founded by Ernest’s grandfather in 1849.

In 1901 his father Richard described himself as a furniture dealer and bailiff and Ernest had two brothers and a sister. By 1921 his father had passed away and he was living with his mother Margaret at 98 Maple Road Surbiton which is where he met and married Joan Brame in 1923. He was 33 and she was 18.

In 1923 Ernest inaugurated the opening of the New Cross Gate Auction Mart, built to the designs of architect J Halstead Waterworth at 280 New Cross Road, almost opposite New Cross Gate station.

The new Messrs. Clamp and Son venture was celebrated with a ‘smoking concert’ and included a live music programme. Joan Clamp developed her surveying career in her husband’s firm working as clerk and assistant to the Estate Manager and Surveyor.

Various adverts for Clamp & Son between 1922 and 1955.

By the time of Ernest Edward Clamp’s death in 1953, Clamp & Son auctioneers were still trading from 394 New Cross Road opposite New Cross station– which was the last headquarters of the business. Ernest died at the age of 63 still grieving over the loss of his brilliant wife Joan in the V2 bombing nine years before. It is not believed they had any children.

When Joan was killed she had accumulated an estate reported for probate in May 1945 at £4,168. This is worth £148,630.69 in the values of 3^rd December 2023. Her friends and family decided to raise a bequest for the Croydon General Hospital in her name. It was reported in the 5^th May 1945  edition of the Croydon Times:

‘Memorial to V2 Victim: Plaque in Croydon General Hospital

A plaque will be erected in Croydon General Hospital to the memory of Mrs Joan Clamp, who was killed in November last, when a V2 bomb fell at New Cross. This memorial is the result of a fund which raised £170 as a gift to the hospital from Mrs. Clamp’s relatives and friends.

The words to appear on the memorial plaque will read: “Erected by the friends of Joan Clamp in affectionate memory, 25^th November, 1944- through enemy action.”

The Board of Management are deeply grateful to those who chose this method of keeping her name in memory, and by which the hospital is greatly assisted in its efforts to prolong and save the lives of others.’

Croydon General Hospital joined the NHS in 1948 and the building was demolished in 2004. It is not known what happened to Joan Clamp’s plaque. The site is now the location of the new Harris Invictus Secondary School.

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42 year old Henry Charles Cole was described as a corporal in the Home Guard in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission file on his death by V2 enemy action at 12.26 on Saturday 25^th November 1944.

He was known by friends and family as ‘Harry’ and was the husband of Violet Marie Cole.

They were both living at 20 Revelon Road, a terraced Victorian house in Brockley at the time of his death.

He is buried in Nunhead Cemetery in the London Borough of Southwark.

The 1939 Register records that he was also a volunteer for the Auxiliary Fire Service- clear evidence of his sacrifice and commitment to civilian defence. Harry was working as a ‘motor driver’ with a light vehicle licence and they were living in 73 Gellatly Road, Nunhead.

He had been born 10^th November 1902. Violet was a couple of years younger having been born 4^th December 1904. They married in Greenwich in 1924. Violet née Dinmore had been brought up by her uncle, painter and decorator William Mears in 34 Maxted Road, Peckham with her three cousins William, Sidney and Phoebe.

Harry’s father Charles William was still living in the family home 24 Linden Grove, Camberwell at the time of his son’s death in 1944. He was a widow as Florence Clara Cole had passed away at the age of 45 in 1922.

Harry’s younger brother, also called Charles William, was living with his father and working as a radio despatch clerk.  Henry had two sisters Helen Florence and Florence Kezia. His father had been a machine driver for the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company manufacturing Sub Marine cables in 1921 and in his later life worked as a carpenter.

When Harry Cole was 18 he was working for Leyland Motors. Henry’s widow Violet passed away in Croydon in 2004 at the age of 99, some sixty years after her husband was taken away from her by the V2 bombing in the New Cross Road.

Public records show they had two children born in Deptford- Barbara in 1930 and Geoffrey in 1932.

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71 year old James Alban Cole was a confectioner and tobacco dealer with his own shop at 182 Bellenden Road in Peckham.

It is still a shop, currently a pizza restaurant called ‘Made of Dough’, and previously a hairdressing salon called ‘Chaz Hairdressers.’

At the time of his death he was living with his wife Kate at number 167 Peckham Rye which is no longer a stand-alone house but the site of a modern block of apartments.

James Alban Cole was born in Homerton/Hackney in 1873. His father Fletcher was a carpenter from Suffolk.

James Alban was a commercial traveller and salesman throughout his working life and settled down in what would be most people’s retirement years in Peckham to run the tobacco and sweet shop in Bellenden Road.

James met and married furniture assistant Kate Judges at the Holy Trinity Church in Sittingbourne, Kent in 1902 where her father Frederick was also a carpenter and joiner and gave her away at their wedding. James was 28 and Kate 23.

She was brought up in the family home at 7 Station Street in Sittingbourne. The house is no longer standing and the site has been redeveloped.

James and Kate had one son, Stanley Alban Cole, born in December 1913 and at the start of the Second World War he was working as a clerk in an engineering works. He was 31 when his father was killed by the V2 rocket. He passed away in Stevenage in 1995 at the age of 81.

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45 year old Frederick William Cornford  was a machine fitter and moulder living in a Victorian terraced house at 94A Bovill Road, Forest Hill, Lewisham which is very much the same as it was in 1944 apart from all the modernisations and maintenances expected over the passage of nearly 80 years.

His death would leave a widow and teenage daughter grieving.

Doris Cornford was 41 and their daughter Muriel 16. Frederick and Doris had married in Lewisham at the end of 1927.

Doris née Cooper would pass way in Lewisham fifty years later in 1994 at the age of 90.  Doris was brought up in a huge working class family living in various addresses in Chaplin Street, Forest Hill.

She had four sisters and three brothers. Her father Thomas was a chimney sweep who died at the age of 46 in 1908 when Doris was only 4 years old.

Frederick was born in Lewisham in 1899 and brought up at 9 Dalmain Road Lewisham by his parents William Henry and Agnes Mary.

The street has been rebuilt since the Cornfords were living there in the early part of the twentieth century.

William worked as plasterer for the Pitcher Construction Company in North London. Frederick was always a machine worker- effectively an engineer- and employed by Key Glass Works in Cold Blow Lane adjacent to Millwall’s old football ground when he met Doris.

The Deptford and Lewisham area was still the centre of much engineering and manufacturing industry during the early to middle 20^th century and Frederick was very much part of the large local skilled workforce employed by it.

He had four younger sisters, Florence Emily, Linda Elizabeth, Katie Lilian and Ethel.   One of the cruelties of the V2 atrocity is that Frederick Cornford’s parents outlived him.

His father William Henry died in Lewisham in 1967 at the age of 92, and his mother Agnes passed away in 1960 aged 82- decades after their son’s death on the Home Front.

Frederick’s only daughter Muriel would marry Norman Collett in 1952. How Muriel must have wished her father could have been alive to give her away at her wedding some eight years after the terrible event in the New Cross Road.

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18 year old Queenie Doris Cox was a docker’s daughter, one of three sisters born in Lewisham to parents Reuben and Florence Cox. At the time of her untimely death Queenie had been living with her parents in the London County Council tenement block at 12 Cayley Close on the Honor Oak Estate in Lewisham.

Many of the tenements of this interwar council estate have been demolished including Cayley Close where Queenie was brought up with her sisters Ruby and Iris.

Her father Reuben had to rise early in the morning and attend the wharfs and docks on Thames riverside for what was known as ‘the call-on’ from large gatherings of dockers hoping to be picked for work. This was the tough tradition and insecurity of dockland employment for labourers at this time. Several men were often competing for every job and older men would usually be passed over.

The working conditions were hard and there would be no compensation for injuries at work which were common.

Wages would be paid in public houses with corruption behind the scenes when dockers bribed stevedores to guarantee being hired for jobs. Reuben would ply his docker’s trade at Butler’s Wharf on the south bank of the River Thames, just east of London’s Tower Bridge, now housing luxury flats and restaurants.

Queenie died on 25^th November 1944 at an age when she was promised so much in terms of the life ahead of her. There is evidence she was good at school.

At the time of the 1939 Register census, she and her older sister Ruby were staying with Council Watchman Christopher Balcombe and his wife Maud in their country house called ‘The Sheding’ on the Rabies Heath Road in Bletchingley near Godstone, Surrey.

As Ruby and Queenie were still at school this may well have been the result of their wartime evacuation. Sister Iris, who was eight years old at the time, stayed with their parents in London.

Queenie’s parents Reuben and Florence married in Lewisham in 1924. Reuben was 23 and Florence 28. Reuben was from a working class Bermondsey family closely connected with Thames River trades.

In 1921 his older brother Robert was an unemployed seaman and three sisters, Ethel, 14, Emma, 11, Edie, 9, and youngest brother Alfred, 7,  all living at home with parents Thomas Henry and Alice Sophia Cox at number 52 Enid Street, a house long since demolished to make way for the Neckinger Estate.

Florence or ‘Florrie’ as she was known to friends and family, outlived her daughter Queenie by 31 years, passing away in Southwark in 1975, aged 79.

Reuben lived another 37 years after Queenie’s death by enemy action and also died in Southwark six years after his wife in 1981, aged 80. And what of Queenie’s sisters?

They would both have long lives. Iris Violet, who was only 13 when Queenie was killed, would marry Gerald Donoghue in Deptford in 1950.

She died in Sussex in 2008 at the age of 77. Older sister Ruby Florence married Edwin Pratt in Lambeth in 1948. It seems she married again and passed away as Ruby Florence Scott in Croydon in 2006 at the age of 81.

Ruby Scott was interviewed by the Deptford History Group in 1994 and recalled hearing the crash of the V2 at their home on the Honor Oak Estate at 12.26 not knowing if her sister had been affected.

Her family all thought ‘Oh, someone’s got it.’  Queenie had been on her way home from work having left at 12 noon. Ruby told the researchers:

‘All the weekend we didn’t know where she was but by Saturday night we was getting worried […] We went round the hospitals and morgues but we didn’t find her. Then Sunday night someone come and told us that they’d found the handbag. The things from the bag were missing and also they had taken a ring that she was wearing that belonged to me off her finger. There was a lot of blood, but she was so badly…some of her limbs were missing I was told afterwards…that my mum and dad couldn’t go and see it. It was a woman that married my grandad in later years who identified her. But we never ever saw her, we only saw the coffin’ (Steele, 1994, p. 19).

Ruby allowed a photograph of Queenie aged 17 in 1943 smartly dressed in hat, coat, shoes and handbag and smiling to the camera to be published on page 19 of Rations and Rubble.

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48 year old Horace Alfred Crisford was a veteran of the First World War and WW2 Special Constable.

A year before his killing by V2 explosion he and his wife Edith had received the worrying news that one of their sons, Laurence, had been wounded in battle while serving in the British Army in Italy as a driver with the Royal Artillery.

Horace had been born in Southwark in 1896 and served as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps in France during the Great War receiving the 1914-15 Star, British War Medal and Victory Medal which he wore with pride every Armistice Day and as ribbons on his Special Constable’s uniform.

His family had been working class. His father Robert had been a market basket carrier in Bermondsey. By the time of the 1911 census Horace was 15 years old and had started his working life as a shop assistant.

For most of his working life Horace had been the delivery driver for Elizabeth Handley-Seymour of New Bond Street, distinguished dressmaker to the Court, who designed for the Royal Family, aristocracy and theatrical celebrities of London from the 1910s to 1940, when she retired.

Horace’s employer was glamorous and famous, and best known as the designer who made the wedding dress of the Duchess of York (later Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother) and later, her Coronation dress in 1937.

Horace’s wife Edith Johnson was born in New York City and was seven years older than him.

At the time of the 1939 Register, the beginning of World War II, the whole Crisford family were living at 20 Cranfield Road in Brockley, a semi-detached late Victorian house still standing and looking on the outside as it did when Horace’s widow Edith learned of her husband’s death on 25^th November 1944.

In late 1939, their sons Laurence and Robert were still living at home. Laurence, who had been born in 1918 was working as a clerk in the Royal Victoria Victualling Yard in Deptford, and Robert, born in 1923, was a clerk working for a poultry maker.

The cruelty of Horace’s death at the end of 1944 is that he would be denied the privilege and pride of seeing his sons’ marriages. Robert Edward married Ellen Munck in Salisbury Wiltshire in 1945, and Laurence Alfred married Phyllis Jarvis Humphrey in Newnham, Sittingbourne in Kent in 1947.

Charming reports of the marriage and reception appeared in local newspapers: ‘When the couple left for their honeymoon at Folkestone, the bride wore a grey costume with blue accessories. Her handbag was a gift of the bridegroom (Laurence’s brother Robert). The bride’s gift to the groom was a signet ring. Mrs and Mrs Crisford’s future residence will be London. Many useful presents, money, and cheques, were received by the happy couple, and several congratulatory telegrams. The groom has spent the last five years in the Army overseas, while the bride was for four and a half years a member of the W.A.A.F.’

There is something enormously nostalgic and poignant in seeing the weekly local newspaper for the village of Newnham take the trouble to report: ‘The bride, who was given away by her eldest brother, was charmingly attired in a white satin gown with a full length veil and a coronet of orange blossom, and carried a bouquet of pink and white carnations and fern.’ The loss of local newspaper journalism in recent decades means people no longer have the privilege of this kind of reporting.

Horace left probate worth £461 which in today’s money is worth £25,209.92. When his widow Edith passed away in East Grinstead in 1982 at the age of 93, her estate of £25,000 would be worth £108,807.35 today.

Their sons had long and fulfilling lives. Laurence died in Bungay Suffolk in 2012 at the age of 93 like his mother, and Robert had passed away in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire at the age of 84 in 2007.

Horace Alfred Crisford was buried in Grave 18 of the plot for Civilian War Dead established by Deptford Borough Council at Grove Park Cemetery and his name is inscribed on Panel 1 of the War Memorial.

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38 year old George James Alfred Daniels  was born on the Old Kent Road in 1906 into a family steeped in the traditions of the printing trade.

His father Frederick was a vellum binder working for the Drayton Paper Works in Fulham. George began his working life from the age of 14 as an errand boy and then joined his father in the printing industry and by 1939 he was a printer’s guillotine cutter.

He married Lilian Maud Belcher in Deptford in 1934. Lilian was working as laundry calenders hand at the time of his death and they resided at 36 Burchell Road in Peckham- an end of terrace late Victorian house adjacent to what is now the George Mitchell Primary School.  A calenders hand in the laundry trade was somebody who folded by hand work after it had been taken off the ‘calender’, or ironing machine.

Lilian had had a tough upbringing in Peckham and Bermondsey. Her father Arthur had been a bricklayer’s labourer and died when she was a child.

Her mother Katherine had to work as charwoman at the time of the 1921 census, with her oldest son Arthur Lewis, then 18, working as a porter for Cheamers Furriers and looking after Lilian, her younger sister Hilda and brother William.

Lilian was left on her own when her husband George was killed in the V2 explosion. They had not had any children. George left probate of £187 to her which in today’s money (December 2023) was the equivalent of £10,226.15.

Lilian was 37 years old when George was killed. She never remarried and passed away in Lambeth in 1978 at the age of 71.

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38 year old Kathleen Isobel Davies was a near neighbour of Goldsmiths’ College, University of London.

She lived with her husband, William Frederick Davies, at 23 Barriedale, New Cross, round the corner from the specially built base for emergency medical squads sent to air raid incidents in Deptford including the one which would claim her life.

Kathleen was born in Charlton on January 13^th 1906 and her parents Vincent and Ella Cockram hailed from Somerset and Devon.

Her father Vincent began his working life as a nurseryman and assistant gardener and by the time of the 1901 census he was working in Hayes , Middlesex. He married Ellen Sorton at St Mary’s Church in Uffculme Devon on Boxing Day 26th December 1903. He was 26 and she was 24.

By 1911 the young family was living at number 37 Bolan Street in Battersea. Vincent was a park gardener employed by the London County Council.

The houses in Bolan Street were severely damaged during the Blitz  and the street’s post WW2 demolition led to the loss of the name with the area being incorporated into the new Ethelburga Estate.

During the First World War, Vincent Cockram served in the British Army’s Cyclist Corps and later in the Royal Army Service Corps. He survived the conflict and was demobbed in 1919.

His daughter Kathleen Isobel Cockram married William Frederick Davies in Stoke Newington in 1931. She was 25 and he was 27. William worked as a shipwright.

In 1936 they had a daughter Beryl and at the beginning of the Second World War, Kathleen and Beryl evacuated with her mother to Devon. At the end of September they were staying at 62 Lime Tree Walk in Newton Abbott. William Frederick stayed in London and carried on working while living in Barriedale, Lewisham.

It is presumed Kathleen and Beryl returned to London following the first Blitz of late 1940 and early 1941.  How tragic that Kathleen would be killed in the second Blitz of flying and rocket bombs in 1944, leaving her daughter Beryl, now 9 years old, to be brought up by her single parent father. William

Frederick would carry on living at 23 Barriedale, Lewisham until his death at the age of 84 in 1988. He left a probate estate of £68,090, which in 2024 had a purchasing power of £231,914.39.

Kathleen was buried in Grove Park Cemetery on 6th December 1944 in plot B/473.

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53 year old Rosina Dodds  was born 21st September 1891 and had worked for much of her life in a biscuit and chocolate factories mainly as a quality control ‘checker.’

She lived at 49 Nynehead Street and the site has been redeveloped since the Second World War.  She was the widow of rifleman James Charles Dodds,  a soldier killed in the Great War whom she married in 1915.

It seems likely they met and fell in love at work as the 1911 census shows that he was working as a tin worker in a biscuit factory when living with his parents, five brothers and two sisters at 8 New Church Street Bermondsey.

At the time of the 1921 census, Rosina was 29 years old, head of the household, and living with her brothers Edward and Henry at 31 Adams Gardens, Rotherhithe. It seems the site has been redeveloped as the Adams Gardens Estate. 

She was working in the George Payne’s confectionary chocolate factory in Tooley Street, Bermondsey.

Her late husband James had been killed while serving as a private in the 21st Battalion London Regiment known as the ‘First Surrey Rifles’ in Belgium on 15th May 1917. He was 26 years old and he was buried and commemorated at the Bedford House cemetery enclosure No. 41.1.59 in West Vlaanderen, Belgium.

Rosina received his British War medal and Victory medal posthumously and arranged for the inscription ‘A Good Heart Loved By All’ to be carved into his CWGC headstone.

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64 year old Arthur Thomas Doswell  was living at 45 Endwell Road, Brockley and the husband of Annie Louise Doswell.

Arthur was a veteran of the First World War having served as a private in the Scots Guards in the very first year in France with embarkation there on 11^th November. He was awarded the 1914 Star, British War, and Allied Victory medals which were nicknamed ‘Pip, Squeak and Wilfred’.

Arthur was brought up in a large Camberwell family living at 57 Bournemouth Road. His father, also called Arthur Thomas was a silversmith and polisher and his mother Mary originally from Kent.

At the time of the 1881 census, the Doswell family household included his 15 and 5 year old sisters Emily and Mary Elizabeth still at school, and his three year old brother Henry. There were five other people lodging in the house which has long since been demolished and redeveloped.

His wife Annie Louise Campbell also hailed from a large Camberwell family. In 1901 when she was 19 years old and working as a boots paste fitter she was living with her parents at 27 Graylands Road with seven younger sisters and her 17 year old brother Joseph who was a brass finisher. Graylands Road no longer exists having been replaced by council estate development.

She married Arthur Doswell in 1906. By 1921 Arthur and Annie were living at 59 Kimberley Avenue, Nunhead [The house has been replaced with a modern terraced bungalow]. Arthur was a carpenter and joiner for Wallington Jones Cold Storage. They had two daughters Annie and Alice and a son also called Arthur.

At the beginning of WW2 in late September 1939 they were still living in Kimberley Avenue. Arthur’s son was now working as a railway clerk.

They had moved to 45 Endwell Road during the war and Annie remained living there as a widow until her death in February 1951 at the age of 69.

She left her estate of £316 and 16s to her son Arthur Alfred Doswell, now working as a civil servant, which when taking into account inflation would £8,241.87 at the time of writing (19^th March 2024).

Arthur Doswell was buried at Grove Park Cemetery at Plot D.812 on 1st December 1944. The grave is unmarked. 

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31 year old Doris Violet Drain was the daughter of William and Florence Beverley, of 85 Blackheath Hill, Greenwich.

She was living with her husband Robert Drain in her parents’ home. The house has since been redeveloped as Hollymount Close. It would have been visible to traffic climbing and descending the hill travelling to and from the A2 route to Kent.

In 1939 Doris was a shorthand typist. If she had been born in this century, her academic success at the John Roan School (for girls) would have most likely meant she would have gone to university.

She excelled as a scholar in Greenwich with local weekly newspapers regularly reporting her awards and prizes during the 1920s. Barbara Reed provided an online lecture on the history of the progressive John Roan School in 2021.

In the 1921 census the Beverley family was living in the terraced house 102 Blackheath Hill which is still standing.

This was across the road from their WW2 home. Doris’s father William Jeffrey Beverley was a ‘Wire Worker’ employed by G. A. Harvey and Co (London) Ltd of Greenwich Metal Works, Woolwich Road, London, SE7, which specialised in galvanizing metal industrial tools and objects using copper, zinc, aluminium and other metals.

Also living there was Doris’s younger brother Harold George who was only 2 years old. The household included Mrs Florence Beverley’s mother Jane Marsh, a 62 year-old widow, and Florence’s brother George Harold Marsh, a 24 year old boot and shoe-shop assistant by trade but at the time of the census was under hospital treatment.

Doris married Robert Edward Alfred Drain in Lewisham in 1936. Robert had been born in Rotherhithe, was brought up in Deptford and New Cross and had been apprenticed in 1920 to become a Thames Waterman and Lighterman.

His father, also called Robert Alfred, was employed by the London County Council as a motor engineer on the Tramway system.

By 1939 Doris’s husband was working as a road and water transport haulage contractor. She left him £408 (worth £15,114.89 in May 2024) after she was killed in the V2 bombing in 1944 and he would remarry two times- Iris K Humphries in 1947, and Bebee Levy in 1965 both Thanet, Kent.

He would pass away at 57 Old Dover Road, Capel-Le-Ferne, Folkestone, Kent on 4^th October 1991 leaving an estate valued at £52,523 (worth £116,722.93 at the time of writing).

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39 year old James Dunlop is described in the records of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission as having been the son of Robert and Jane Dunlop, of Tullydraw, Dungannon, Co. Tyrone, Northern Ireland and the husband of Jeannie Dunlop, of Annaghbeg, Donaghmore, also Co. Tyrone.

He was buried in Grave 21 of Deptford Borough Council’s plot for civilian war dead at Grove Park Cemetery on 4th December 1944 and his name is inscribed and commemorated on Panel 2 of the special War Memorial erected there. 

He is also remembered as a civilian victim of World War Two in Northern Ireland on the Dungannon war dead online database.

It is possible he was one of the passengers of the bus caught in the V2 explosion which was travelling on the New Cross Road near Woolworths and the Co-operative store.

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59 year old Henrietta Frances Dyer  was married to William Mark Dyer and they both lived at 88 Hatcham Park Road, a small two storey terraced house off the New Cross Road.

Henrietta was born Henrietta Frances Davies in Bermondsey 3rd April 1884 and was first married to locomotive railway fireman Albert Churchill in 1907.

At the time of the 1911 census, they were residing at 33 Hunsdon Road, Hatcham in New Cross. They had a 3 year old son Albert and. Henrietta was working as a ‘Baking powder packer’ at the Baking Powder Works.

Albert died in 1918. He was only 33 years old.

Henrietta moved in with Brewer’s drayman William Mark Dyer at 88 Hatcham Park Road with his two sons Harold Arthur and William George who were 6 and 4 at the time of the 1921 census.

William Dyer was born in the Parish of Stone, Dartford in 1881 and joined the Army’s Royal Horse and Field Artillery serving from 1900 to 1907. He remained in the Army’s reserve and was remobilized as a lance-bombardier and gunner at Woolwich in 1914.

He served throughout the First World War until discharge in April 1919 when he received a pension and the 1914-15 Star, British and Victory medals.

Henrietta and William married in 1929. At the time of the 1939 Register and beginning of the Second World War, Harold Arthur was still at home working as an electrical refrigeration engineer.

She is recorded by Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) as having been killed in the New Cross Road literally only a few minutes from her home.

She was buried in grave 20 of the CWD plot of Grove Park Cemetery, Grove Park, in the London Borough of Lewisham where her name is commemorated on the Deptford Borough Council memorial to those killed by enemy action during the Second World War.

        Image courtesy of Charlotte uploaded on 15 May 2023 and share-linked from Find A Grave.

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29 year old Edith Phyllis Edwards was living at 25 Rokeby Road, a three storey terraced house including basement in Brockley at the time of her death.

She was the adopted daughter of Mrs. Henrietta Pannifer, of Wivelsfield Road, Haywards Heath, Sussex.

The 1921 Census revealed she had been born in North Street, Pancras, London in 1915, both her parents were dead and the Pannifer family who adopted her called her Renée.

She was also the widow of Sapper (Royal Engineer) William Thomas Edwards who was drowned on the Western approaches to the British Isles on 7th August 1940 when his troopship ‘SS Mohamed Ali El Kebir’ was torpedoed.

The ship was bound for the Mediterranean with six officers and 243 men of the 706th Construction Company, Royal Engineers on board. William had enlisted in the  Royal Engineers on 23rd January 1940.

His name is commemorated on column 24 of the Dunkirk memorial in France.

Edith’s adopted father, William James Pannifer, had died at the age of 76 in Greenwich in 1940 only weeks before they received news of William’s death.

The CWGC records that Edith died at New Cross Road in the V2 attack on 25th November 1944.

A newspaper report in the Lewisham Borough News on 28th February 1939 stated that she had summoned her husband for desertion with the case that ‘he had wanted his fling’ and ill-treated her.

In defence he claimed she had not looked after him properly. The Magistrate ordered him to pay her 20 shillings a week in maintenance.

They had got married in Deptford in the first quarter of 1936 and the certificate bears her birth name of Edith Phyllis Tegg.

The Royal Engineers have a poignant casualty card record that Edith received the telegram on 15th August 1940 informing her that her husband was missing at sea.

She received it at her then adoptive mother’s home ‘2 Fir Tree Cottage, Wivelsfield Road, Haywards Heath.’

It is such a tragedy that this young couple would both become casualties of the Second World War and their children orphaned at such young ages: 8, 6, 5 and 3.

The public records indicate that they had four children- two sons, Brian and Wallace and two daughters, Doreen and Gillian- born in 1936, 1938, 1939, and 1941.

This would have meant Edith was pregnant with her fourth child when receiving the telegram about her husband being missing after the sinking of his troopship.

It is understood that Edith was buried in Brockley Cemetery in early December 1944.

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18 year old Edna Mary Edwards was the daughter of Thomas and Florence Edwards and the family was living at 70 Merritt Road, a two storey terraced house in Brockley.

Thomas Edwards was a police constable with the Metropolitan Police.

He had married Florence Lambert in 1924. Edna was born in Greenwich 1st July 1926.

The couple did not have any other children. At the time of the 1939 Register, Edna was still at school and living with her parents at 70 Merritt Road, Crofton Park in Brockley.

The CWGC records that she was killed in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

It is believed Edna was buried in Brockley Cemetery in December 1944.

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66 year old James John Ellery was living at 53 Shard Road, Peckham.

The road no longer exists. It ran between Meeting House Lane and Carlton Grove, opposite Goldsmith Road in Peckham.

The CWGC records that he was killed in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

Courtesy of  Charlotte uploaded 15th May 2023 and share-linked with Find A Grave.

James John Ellery was buried in the Civilian War Dead memorial plot of Grove Park Cemetery, Lewisham in early December 1944.

His name is commemorated on one of the stone panels of the Deptford Borough Council memorial to people killed by enemy action during World War Two.

 

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55 year old Alice May Elston was living at 15 Bousfield Road, a two storey terraced Victorian house in the Telegraph Hill area of New Cross at the time of her death.

She was born in Deptford on 22nd June 1889. Her father Thomas David Weston was a tram conductor and London County Council pointsman.

The family were living at 47 Billington Road in New Cross at the time of the 1911 Census.

Alice was 21 and her sister Ethel 18. They were both working as telephone operators for the Post Office at St Johns Deptford. These were the new jobs for women in the early 20th century.

The family had moved to 15 Bousfield Road by the time of the Census in June 1921. Alice was still woking for the Post Office.

In 1922 she married draughtsman Alfred Charles Edward Elston who had been living in his parents home at 48 Great Suffolk Street in Southwark.

Alice was 33 and Alfred was 34- employed by R H & I Cook & Hammond Printers. His father George worked as a bookbinder for Moore & Co.

Alfred had enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps in 1916 and remained with them when the RFC was merged with the Royal Naval Air Service into the RAF in 1918.

Alfred was a mechanical fitter servicing the early fighters and bombers in action in Britain and France during the First World War.

The Second World War was a tough period in Alice May Elston’s life.

Her father Thomas had died in Greenwich at the age of 75 in 1937.

At the time of the 1939 Register in late September of that year, her husband Alfred was an inmate patient of the Long Grove mental hospital in Horton Lane, Epsom.

Her mother Alice was incapacitated by poor health and she was looking after her.

Alice Weston died at the age of 76 in Camberwell at the height of the Blitz in the Winter of 1940.

It is not known if Alice’s husband ever recovered from his mental illness. He died in Surrey at the age of 94 in 1982. He had survived Alice by 38 years.

The CWGC records that Alice May Elston was killed in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944 at exactly 12.26.

She was buried in plot B.193 of Grove Park Cemetery in Lewisham on 6th December 1944 where the Weston family have a ground monument.

The Weston family grave in Grove Park Cemetery. Image courtesy of Anonymous uploaded 7th Jan 2024 and share-linked with Find A Grave.

She was laid to rest with her mother and father, and her husband Alfred was buried in the same plot in 1982.

Alice May Elston left probate of £1,512 13s 1d to her sister Ethel Winifred Walters and her husband Charles Phillip Walters- ‘superintendent Royal Mews.’ The Bank of England inflation calculator gives this a value in December 2024 of £55,184.

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55 year old Alice Christina Errington was married to Arthur James Errington.

They were living in a four storey terraced house including basement at 30 Ashburnham Place in Greenwich.

The CWGC records that she was killed in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

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44 year old Winifred Farnish was married to Joseph George Farnish.

They were living at 37 Pilgrims Way, West Otford in Kent which was a two storey detached house with garage.

The CWGC records that she died in the V2 explosion in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

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57 year old William Arthur Farr was married to Mary Ann Farr.

They were living in 14 Batavia Road, New Cross just behind the site of the V2 attack and destruction of Woolworths and half of the Co-operative store.

The original house is no longer standing and the area has been redeveloped.

The CWGC records that he died in the New Cross Road from the affects of the V2 explosion.

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67 year old George Faulkner was living at 131 Douglas Way at the time of his death.

The original building is no longer standing and Douglas Way has been redeveloped.

The CWGC records that he was killed in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

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45 year old Matilda Caroline Fish  was married to Charles Frederick Fish and living at 65 Swallowfield Road, Charlton with her daughter Jean who was killed with her in the V2 strike in New Cross.

She was born on 16th February 1899 in Greenwich and was the daughter of Caroline Warwick of 29 Farmdale Road, Greenwich, and of the late John ‘Jack’ Warwick who had been a lobby cleaner and attendant for the South Metropolitan Gas Company in Greenwich.

Matilda was part of a hard-working Greenwich working-class family.

At the time of the 1921 census her 25 year old brother John was employed as a sheet metal worker and cutter at Mssrs Harvey & Sons in the Woolwich Road, her 20 year old sister Maud Lilian was working as a household servant, and 16 year old brother Arthur Charles was also employed in the South Metropolitan Gas Company with his dad as a barge repairer and riveter.

On 9th February 1919 she married Charles Frederick Fish who was a Metropolitan Police Constable  in ‘R’ division based at Westcombe Park police station in Greenwich.

In the first years of their marriage the couple lived with Matilda’s parents in the family home in Farmdale Road.

Their first daughter, Edith Matilda, died in infancy shortly after her birth in late 1920.

The couple moved to Swallowfield Road on the Greenwich/Charlton border when they had their children Arthur (1922) and Jean (1927) during the 1920s.

At the beginning of the Second World War Charles was a government inspector of aeronautical supplies and equipment.

Matilda was buried in Greenwich Cemetery on 4th December 1944 along with her daughter Jean.

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17 year old Jean Caroline Maud Fish.

Jean was born on 22nd August 1927 and like her mother was buried in Greenwich Cemetery on the 4th December 1944.

She was brought up by her parents at 65 Swallowfield Road Charlton along with her brother, Arthur. who was born in 1922, a machine-tool grinder by day and volunteering as a stretcher-bearer for Greenwich ARP services at the beginning of the war.

In September 1939, Jean was still at school and had been evacuated with her school to the seaside town of Hastings in Sussex where she was billeted with a retired clergyman and nurse.

It is believed she was shopping with her mother in New Cross when they were both killed by the V2 explosion.

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69 year old Henry Abraham Fitch was married to Caroline Fitch.

They were living at number 99 Childeric Road in New Cross. Their house is no longer standing as it was demolished to make way for the development of Fordham Park.

The CWGC records he was killed in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

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31 year old Kathleen Frances Fitzpatrick was married to Warrant Officer Ernest George Fitzpatrick serving in the British Army’s Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. The family home was 14 Manor Avenue in Lewisham. Kathleen and her 3 year old daughter were in the Woolworths store at 281 New Cross Road when it was destroyed by the V2 rocket strike.

Kathleen, née Allen, was born in New Cross on 22nd October 1913 and was a ladies’ tailor by trade. Her husband Ernest was a printers’ machine minder in civilian life and at the beginning of the Second World War they were living in Underhill Road, East Dulwich.

Kathleen’s father George was a postman and she was brought up at 12 Florence Road, Deptford with an older sister Jessie and younger brother George.

Kathleen and Ernest had two children, a son called Hugh born in Basingstoke, Hampshire in 1939 and Carol Ann born Wycombe Buckinghamshire in 1941.

Kathleen would leave £187 in probate to Ernest, which the Bank of England inflation calculator estimates is worth £6,946.24 in July 2024.

She was cremated in November 1944 and her ashes interred in wall niche 10 at Honor Oak Crematorium in the London Borough of Southwark.

Ernest died in 1985 in Waltham Forest, Essex at the age of 72. Public records indicate their son Hugh died at the age of 17 in Basingstoke in 1957.

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3 year old Carol Ann Fitzpatrick was the daughter of Kathleen and Ernest Fitzpatrick and was killed when shopping with her mother in Woolworths at 12.26 on Saturday afternoon 25th November 1944. Her family is profiled in the biography of her mother above.

She was also cremated with her mother and her ashes interred in wall niche 10 at Honor Oak Crematorium in the London Borough of Southwark in 1944.

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60 year old William Charles Fletcher was the husband of Mabel Rose Fletcher.

They were both living at number 21 Grenard Road in Peckham. Grenard Road was renamed Grenard Close. Their house no longer exists and has been replaced by redevelopment.

The CWGC records that he was killed in the New Cross Road by the V2 explosion.

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80 year old William Frank was living at 63 Clifton Rise at the time of his death. His house and the part of Clifton Rise it was situated in was demolished to make way for the creation of Fordham Park.

He was the son of Charles and Carolina Frank from Niederweiler, Germany. William hd been the husband of the late Elizabeth Charlotte Frank.

The CWGC records that he died in the New Cross Road V2 explosion.

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44 year old William Walter French was married to Nellie Beatrice French and they were living at number 61 Cronin Road, Peckham at the time of his death.  Their house was demolished and the street redeveloped in the Postwar period.

He was the son of Mrs. French, of 45 New Town Road, Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, and of the late A. French.

The CWGC records that he was killed in the V2 explosion in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

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69 year old Margaret Gardner was living at number 33 Vance Street, New Cross at the time of her death.

Her house no longer exist as it, along with the whole of Vance Street, was demolished to make way for Fordham Park.  

She was married to John Thomas Gardner. She was injured by the V2 blast while she was shopping in the Woolworths store and dug out of the wreckage.

Sadly, after being taken by ambulance to the Miller Hospital in Greenwich, she died from her injuries on the same day.

She was the daughter of Mr. J. Jones, of Abergavenny, Monmouthshire.

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3 year old Kenneth Albert Gibbs was the toddler son of Driver Albert Hugh Gibbs on active service in the British Army with the Royal Army Service Corps (RAMC).

His mother was Violet Gibbs and she survived the impact of the V2 strike.

They were living at number 12 Sanford Street in New Cross, but their house no longer exists and the street has been redeveloped.

The CWGC records he was killed in the V2 explosion in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

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44 year old May Marguerite Glick was married to Joseph Glick.

They were living in a flat above the shop at number 262 New Cross Road within yards of the V2 strike on Woolworths.

The CWGC records she died in the New Cross Road V2 explosion on 25th November 1944.

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27 year old Julia Elizabeth Glover was born in Shadwell, the East End of London 23rd November 1916.

Her father Henry Smalley had been a carman working for the Midland Railway Company. Her mother Julie was working as an office cleaner.

At the time of the 1921 census Julia Elizabeth was four years old and of pre-school age living at 369 Cable Street with her parents and three brothers: Henry, Thomas and William.

The houses in Cable Street of that period are long gone through Blitz damage and redevelopment. 

The Smalley and Glover families lived and worked practically next door to each other in this part of London.

Julia Smalley married Thomas Walter Glover in Stepney in 1936. They had three children: daughter Sheila born in Shoreditch in 1937, daughter Irene born in Stepney in 1939, and son Michael Thomas born in Deptford in 1944.

At the time of the late September 1939 National Register/Census, Julia was living at 48 Springfield Road, Brighton with her infant daughters Sheila, two and a half years old and Irene who was 9 months old. Julia’s 11 year old niece Florence was also with them. It is most likely this was an evacuation move out of London.

Julia’s husband Thomas Walter was still living in London with his in laws at 369 Cable Street, Stepney and working as a bakehouse labourer. He would enlist as a gunner in the Royal Artillery in 1940 and serve throughout the Second World War.

Julia and Thomas’ daughter Irene died in Deptford when only four years old. At the time of the V2 bombing on Woolworths Julia was living with her 53 year old mother Julie at 57 Nynehead Street, Deptford a house since demolished with a block of flats now standing on the site.

Julia was killed with her remaining daughter Sheila, now 7 years old, and one month old son Michael Thomas when the rocket bomb landed presumably while she was shopping on the New Cross Road and most likely with Michael Thomas in a pram or her arms.

Words seem so inadequate in expressing the shock and grief that must have been experienced by her family; particularly her husband Thomas who would have had to come to terms with losing his young wife and three children in less than a year.

It is assumed he was informed while serving with his Royal Artillery unit overseas. There is a record that a Thomas W Glover married Doris C Rogers in Bethnal Green in 1947.

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7 year old Sheila Glover died with her mother Julia. See above. 

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1 month old Michael Thomas Glover died with his mother Julia and sister Sheila. See above. 

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46 year old Dorothy Elizabeth Griffiths  had been war-time volunteering in the basement at the nearby Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hatcham College School at the bottom of Jerningham Road rolling bandages and other tasks.

It was the custom for each of the ladies to take turns going to the local Woolworths’ store at lunchtime to get coffee and other hot beverages for everyone. It was her turn at 12.26 p.m. on that fateful day 25th November 1944.

We know this because Dorothy Griffiths’ family has been in contact with this project to provide as much information about her as they can, and they have made impressive efforts to commemorate her life and sacrifice in World War Two.

Dot, as she was called, was a mother of two young children, a wife to a member of the war-time merchant marine service and a war-time volunteer herself. She was born Dorothy Elizabeth Fairbrother on 17th October 1898, in Birkenhead, and was the fourth of six children born to Emma and James William (“JW”) Fairbrother.

Dot’s father JW Fairbrother was a man of local fame and accomplishment in Birkenhead. As a young man, he was well-known as an athlete, and later as an entrepreneur, and a very active Freemason. He was one of the first persons in Birkenhead to own a car, and started the first taxi business along with an auto repair business. He rose within the ranks of Freemasonry, becoming a founding member of several local lodges.

Dorothy Elizabeth Fairbrother married Alfred James Griffiths (1897-1952) in 1921 in Southampton. He worked in the maritime industry and as a Depot Clerk for HM Office of Works in Southampton. Southampton was the centre of their married life. But the early years of trying to build a family were marked by the tragedy of losing two daughters in early childhood.  Patricia was born in 1923 but died the same year. Doreen was born in 1926 and died in 1932.

By 1939 they were living at 10 Greville Road Southampton with their third daughter Ann and son Peter.

At the outbreak of the Second World  War Alfred was seconded to the Mercantile Marine War Service at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich.

The merchant marine were the unsung heroes of Britain’s ‘fourth service.’ Winston Churchill said in July 1941: ‘The Merchant Navy, with Allied comrades, night and day, in weather fair or foul, faces not only the ordinary perils on the sea, but the sudden assaults of war from beneath the waters or from the sky.’

He would confess that the only thing that really frightened him during the war was the U-Boat peril. Dot’s husband Alfred played his part in keeping the shipping lanes of freight and supplies open with a cost of roughly one in four merchant seamen’s lives.

2,535 British oceangoing merchant ships were sunk and 36,749 members of the merchant marine died.

Dot’s death in the explosion and devastation at Woolworths would leave Alfred grieving at their home in 9 Greenwich Park Street. Their two children had been evacuated out of London at the beginning of the war. Ann, aged eight, was sent to Romsey in the south, and later up to the Wirral to stay with relatives. Her brother, Peter, aged ten, was also sent to the Wirral. Her family believe it is likely they didn’t see much of their mother from the start of the war until her death.

Ann was 13 years old when her mother was killed in the V2 rocket attack on Woolworths.

Liverpool born Alfred Griffiths had served as a steward in the Royal Navy during the First World War and was based at Devonport (Viking I) and served on the HMS Destroyer Depot ship Blake between 1915 and 1917. He joined the Merchant Marine in 1918, again as a steward, serving on RMS Celtic, an ocean liner owned by the White Star Line sailing the transatlantic route between Liverpool and New York until the end of 1921.

He died from a heart attack on the Belfast registered ship SS Asturias at the age of 54 on 9th June 1952. He was buried at sea at 12 50 N 46 25 E which is in the Gulf of Aden. The Asturias at that time was a passenger liner taking migrants to Australia.

Dorothy Griffiths was buried at Charlton Cemetery, and like many of the victims of the Woolworths V2 disaster, in an unmarked grave. Her daughter Ann trained as a nurse, married in 1949 and emigrated to Canada with her family in 1954.

Her brother Peter also moved to Canada and worked for the Royal Canadian Mail for over 30 years, retiring in the early 1990s before passing away shortly afterwards.

Ann decided to order a gravestone for her mother in the early 2000’s. In the summer of 2009, Ann, along with her son, his wife, and two of Dorothy’s great-grandchildren attended the cemetery to look for the new marker.

They didn’t know exactly where she was buried, so they each took a section of the graveyard and began searching. After exploring the site for sometime, Dorothy’s nine-year-old great-granddaughter found the gravestone.

Ann had five children who were all brought up in Canada. In addition, she had ten grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. Today, there are 23 direct descendants of Dorothy in Canada.

Due to the loss of her mother, Ann had little contact with her mother’s family after she left England. In the 1990s, she ran an advertisement in one of the local newspapers in Wirral asking for any Fairbrother relatives to contact her. The wife of one of her cousins noticed the ad and wrote to her. She eventually visited them. Many members of the Fairbrother family knew about Dot’s story but they had no idea of the extent of her family in Canada.

Special thanks to Dorothy Griffiths’ great grandson Andrew Martin and his father for the kind assistance they have provided in telling her story and that of her family.

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52 year old Agnes Augusta Grout was married to William Henry Grout

They were living in a terraced house at number 49 Clifton Rise, New Cross, but this is no longer standing as this part of Clifton Rise was demolished to make way for Fordham Park.

The CWGC records she died in the V2 rocket explosion in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

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These streets were also subject to a number air raids during the Second World War Blitz demolishing and damaging the terraced housing including the New Cross Wesleyan Chapel which was reduced to ruin.

Illustration of New Cross Wesleyan Chapel 1871 share-linked and courtesy of My Wesleyan Methodists

It is not widely known that an earlier V2 rocket strike on 28th October 1944 hit Pagnell Street, Liadert and Railway Grove- streets that are no longer in the geography of New Cross because of postwar redevelopment.

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36 year old Ivy Josephine Gurr was a Firewatcher volunteer for civil defence during the Second World War.

She was the daughter of James Philip Gurr, of 3 Curlew House, St. Norbert Road in Brockley.

Her mother was Elizabeth Ann Gurr who had died previously.

The CWGC records that Ivy was killed in the V2 enemy action on the New Cross Road at lunch-time 12.26 p.m. November 25th 1944.

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32 year old Thomas James Gushlow was married to Edith Gushlow and they were living at number 92 Crutchley Road, Catford at the time of his death.

He was the son of Mrs. R. Gushlow, of 102 Durham Hill, Bromley Kent.

CWGC records he was killed at New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

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63 year old George Addison Hammond was married to Caroline Hammond and they were living at number 52 Bullfinch Lane, Rivermead, Sevenoaks, in Kent at the time of his death.

He was injured in the V2 rocket blast in New Cross at lunchtime on 25th November 1944.

He was taken by ambulance to Lewisham Hospital but sadly died from his injuries.

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49 year old William Thomas Hammond  was the husband of Jane E. Hammond.

They were living at number 51 Upcot Street, Deptford SE15 at the time of his death. The house and street no longer exist due to postwar redevelopment. 

A high explosive bomb struck number 25 and severely damaged two houses in Upcot Street on the first day of the London Blitz 7th September 1940. 

The CWGC records he was killed at New Cross Road in the V2 rocket attack at 12.26 on 25th November 1944.

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76 year old Ada Ann Hannam was married to Arthur Hubble Hannam and they were living at number 104 Erlanger Road, a two storey terraced Victorian house with basement in the Telegraph Hill area of New Cross.

Ada was the daughter of W. and Emily Chalk, of Ongar Road, Brentwood, Essex.

CWGC records she was killed in the V2 rocket attack on the nearby New Cross Road on Saturday 25th November 1944.

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17 year old Ruby Josephine Hansford was the daughter of Benjamin Robert and Annie Florence Hansford.

The family lived at number 71 Engleheart Road, Catford, which was a two storey Victorian terraced house.

The CWGC records she was killed in the V2 rocket attack on the New Cross Road on Saturday 25th November 1944.

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16 year old William Herbert Hastings was a Sea Cadet and ready to join the Royal Navy when he reached the age of 18.

He was the son of Private Walter Robert Hastings, on active service with the Royal Army Medical Corps.

His mother was Edith Hastings and the family lives at number 13 Ruskin Walk, a terraced two storey house in Bromley, Kent. 

CWGC records he was killed in the V2 rocket explosion in the New Cross Road at 12.26 on Saturday 25th November 1944.

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13 year old Ronald Hawton was the son of James Thomas and Betty Elizabeth Hawton.

The family lived at number 33 Rodwell Road, a two storey terraced house in Dulwich.

Ronald was still at school at the time of his death.

CWGC records that he died in the New Cross Road as a result of the V2 rocket blast at 12.26 on Saturday lunchtime 25th November 1944.

 

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German Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe records are detailed enough to identify the mobile V2 battery responsible for launching the rocket which caused so much death and carnage at 12.26 on 25th November 1944 in the New Cross Road.

Battery number 444 launched the missile at exactly 12.21. It took four to five minutes to arrive in New Cross and do its killing. The German records indicate the launch position from ‘Site 75’ on the Dutch coast.

Battery 444 was an elite unit. On October 27th it achieved  a new launch record of firing a total of nine V2 rockets in one day from Wassenaar and Rijswijk, of which three were activated and launched within only 45 minutes.

On 23rd November 1944, V2 Detachment 271 was incorporated into Battery 444 with the result that additional members brought the unit to full strength.

Battery 444 now consisted of three operational firing platoons, a technical troop section, a fuelling section, and a target acquisition and radio section.

On the 25th November 1944, the V2 444 Battery unit started its work early in the morning at 8.14 and 9.20 from site 18 in the Den Haag coastal region of Holland.

The 9.20 launch struck in Wanstead killing one person and injuring 26 others.

It moved to Site 73 and launched a V2 rocket at 10.29 which only succeeded in creating an airburst above Chislehurst and Sidcup.

The battery moved to Loosduinen, in Holland (Site 18) for launches at 11.12 and 11.24.  The 11.12 rocket landed on Warwick Court in Holborn killing five people and seriously injuring at least 40 others.

The 11.24 rocket fell into a meadow in Great Warley, Essex causing slight damage to 14 houses and injuring two people.

The 12.21 launch on New Cross from Site 73 was its last and deadliest work of that day.

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37 year old Ivy Gertrude Hayes  was living at the Priory, Reigate, in Surrey at the time of her death by enemy action.

She was the daughter of Mr. E. Atkinson, of 16 Sevenoaks Road, Crofton Park, Brockley, and of the late G. Atkinson.

The CWGC records she was killed by the V2 rocket attack on the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

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53 year old Grace Eleanor Hayter was married to William George Francis Hayter.

They were living at number 8 Trim Street, Deptford. The site of their house and Trim Street has been redeveloped since the Second World War.

The CWGC records she was killed in the V2 attack on the New Cross Road.

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51 year old Mabel Hayter was injured by the V2 blast in the New Cross Road on Saturday 25th November 1944.

She was taken by ambulance to Brook Hospital but eventually succumbed to her injuries.

At the time of her death she was living at number 47 Sherard Road, Eltham, Kent, which is no longer a standing dwelling.

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42 year old Alma Ellen Heading was in her terraced house at number 4 Goodwood Road, New Cross directly opposite the Woolworths store on the corner of Goodwood Road and the New Cross Road when the V2 rocket struck at 12.26 pm on Saturday 25th November. 

Her terraced house was completely destroyed and she died in her home.  Her body was recovered from the wreckage later in the day.

The site of number 4 Goodwood Road was redeveloped and replaced with a block of flats. 

She was married to Horace Heading. 

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18 month old Malcolm Robert Herbert was another very young child victim of this appalling V2 attack on civilians.

He was the son of Robert Thomas and Lavinia Rose Herbert.

The family home was 92 Millmark Grove, in New Cross.

The CWGC records he was killed in the New Cross Road on Saturday 25th November 1944. 

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27 year old Dorothy Maud Hill was a Lieutenant and Cadet Leader in the Girls’ Life Brigade.

She was married to Driver Cyril Arthur Hill, on active service with the Royal Army Service Corps.

She was living with her mother at 93 Crofton Park Road, Brockley.

She was the daughter of Mrs. E. M. Coleman.

The CWGC records she was killed in the V2 explosion in the New Cross Road, Saturday 25th November 1944.

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43 year old Emily Holmes was the wife of Joseph Henry Holmes.

They lived at number 28 Woodpecker Road, in New Cross. The site of their house has since been redeveloped.

She was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. E. Percival, of 6 Corston Street. 

The CWGC reports she was killed in the New Cross Road as a result of the V2 blast on Woolworths and surrounding buildings and streets. 

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43 year old Sarah Horn was the wife of George Robert Horn.

They were living at number 9 Kossuth Street in Greenwich.

The CWGC reports she died in the New Cross Road on Saturday 25th November as a result of enemy action. 

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32 year old Maud Ellen Louisa Horrigan was married to Frederick J. Horrigan.

They were living with her parents Mr G. and Mrs. M Woodley at Liardet Street, New Cross, which has been redeveloped since the Second World War period.

The CWGC records she was killed in the V2 strike on Woolworths at New Cross Road, lunchtime, Saturday, 25th November 1944. 

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19 year old Rose Howard was the daughter of Thomas William Howard.

She lived with her father at number 144 Trundleys Road in New Cross.

The CWGC records that she was killed in the V2 explosion in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

Rose was buried in a communal section D of Grove Park Cemetery where many victims of the V2 tragedy lie unmarked by any headstones.

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66 year old Walter Federick Humphrey was the husband of Mrs M. E. Humphrey.

They were living at number 101 Waller Road, Deptford.

The CWGC reports he died at the New Cross Road as a result of enemy action, the V2 rocket strike, lunchtime, 25th November 1944.

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33 year old George Hunt was the husband of Elizabeth Hunt.

They were living at of 54 Shardeloes Road, New Cross.

The CWGC reports he was killed in the V2 explosion in the New Cross Road at 12.26 p.m. Saturday 25th November 1944.

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34 year old Edna Beatrice Jarmaine was the daughter of William Richard Jarmaine.

She was living with her father at number 37 Nynehead Street in New Cross.

Her mother Eliza Jarmaine had passed away.

The CWGC recorded that she was killed in the V2 strike on the New Cross Road on Saturday 25th November 1944.

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33 year old Gladys Rita Jones was married to Alfred John Jones.

They were living at number 16 Bridson Street in Peckham- a street which is no longer in existence. 

The CWGC reports that she was killed as a result of the V2 attack on the New Cross Road on Saturdy 25th November 1944. 

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21 year old Dorothy Jordorson was living at 1 Brockhill Crescent in Deptford.

She was the daughter of Ralph James and Kathleen A. Jordorson.

The CWGC records she died in the V2 rocket explosion in the New Cross Road, 25th November 1944.

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62 year old Florence Jessie Kelsey was the wife of Thomas Henry Kelsey.

They were living at number 12 Sanford Street in New Cross.

The CWGC records she died in the New Cross Road as a result of enemy action on 25th November 1944. 

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11 year old Ronald James Kenwood was another one of the young children killed in the V2 explosion at Woolworths in the New Cross Road.

He was the son of George Frederick and Nellie Winifred Kenwood.

The family was living at number 42 Egmont Street in Deptford. 

He was a pupil at Deptford’s Abbey and Stanhope School and his name is commemorated in a special book produced to remember their alumni who had been killed during the Second World War.

 

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18 year old Ivy Rose King was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Albert King.

She lived with them at number 364 New Cross Road.

The CWGC recorded that she was killed by enemy action in the New Cross Road in the V2 strike on Woolworths at 12.26 lunchtime, Saturday 25th November 1944.

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56 year old Harold Kingsley was the husband of Grace Kingsley.

They were living at number 28 Ackroyd Road, Deptford at the time of his death. 

He received very severe injuries when caught in the V2 blast in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

He was taken by ambulance to the Lewisham Hospital for treatment but later succumbed to his injuries. 

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33 year old Florence Maud Kirby was married to Henry Kirby.

They lived at number 6 Porson Street in Lewisham, a street which is no longer in existence.

The CWGC records she was killed in the New Cross Road as a result of enemy action on 25th November 1944. 

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50 year old Annie Elizabeth Kirby was the wife of Alfred George Kirby.

They were living at number 48 Chipley Street, Deptford. The original house has been redeveloped since the Second World War.

Annie was the daughter of Mrs. Ward, of 61 Marmont Road, Peckham.

The CWGC records she was killed by enemy action in the V2 rocket air raid disaster on 25th November 1944.

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22 year old Kathleen May Knott was the daughter of John Knott, of 31 Brookend Road, Sidcup, Kent.

She had been seriously injured by the V2 rocket explosion in the New Cross Road.

She was taken by London County Council ambulance to the Miller Hospital in Greenwich, but sadly died the same day from her catastrophic injuries.

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24 year old May Lawrence was the daughter of William George and Mary Ann Lawrence.

She was living with her parents at number 518 Lordship Lane, in East Dulwich.

The CWGC records she was killed in the V2 explosion on the New Cross Road, Saturday 25th November 1944.

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42 year old Lucy Mary Lawson was a soldier in the Home Guard Women’s Section during the Second World War.

She was married to Signalman Robert Edward Lawson, on active service with the Royal Corps of Signals.

They were living at number 16 Arbuthnot Road in Deptford.

The CWGC records that she died at New Cross Road as a result of enemy action in the V2 strike on Woolworths at 12.26, Saturday 25th November 1944.

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16 year old William Denis Leberl was the son of Joseph and F. R. Leberl.

He lived with his parents at 95 Newington Causeway, S.E.1. The building and site of his home has been redeveloped since the Second World War. 

The CWGC reports that he was killed by enemy action as a result of the V2 rocket blast in the New Cross Road, Saturday 25th November 1944. 

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36 year old Daisy Freda Lloyd was married to Ronald Lesley Lloyd.

They were living at number 122 Cherry Orchard Road, East Croydon in Surrey.

The CWGC records that she was killed in the V2 strike on the New Cross Road at 12.26, Saturday 25 November 1944.

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45 year old Mary Ann Loader was the wife of Thomas Henry Loader.

They lived at 97 Ardoch Road in Catford.

The CWGC records that she was killed by enemy action in the V2 explosion on the New Cross Road, Saturday 25th November 1944.

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18 year old Winifred Phyllis Lockyer was the daughter of Herbert Rickman Lockyer.

She lived with her father at 37 Parkside Avenue, Barnehurst, Bexleyheath, in Kent.

The CWGC records that she died on the New Cross Road as a result of V2 rocket enemy action on 25th November 1944.

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66 year old James Alfred Longly was living at number 32 Shardeloes Road in New Cross.

The CWGC records he died in the New Cross Road as a result of V2 enemy action at 12.26, Saturday 25th November 1944.

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67 year old William Edward Mackenzie was the husband of Ethel Maud Mackenzie.

They were living at number 62 Jerningham Road in New Cross.

The CWGC records that he died in the V2 rocket strike air raid on the New Cross Road, Saturday 25th November 1944.

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60 year old Florence Ada Madden was living at of number 23 Ommaney Road in Deptford at the time of her death.

She was the daughter of the late John and Susannah Ann Madden.

The CWGC reports that she was killed in the V2 explosion in the New Cross Road, Saturday lunchtime, 25th November 1944. 

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56 year old Ada Martin was the wife of Frederick John Martin.

They were living at number 36 Clifton Rise in New Cross, round the corner from the site of the V2 rocket blast at Woolworths.

Their house and this part of Clifton Rise were demolished in the postwar period to make space for Fordham Park.

The CWGC reported she was killed in the explosion at 12.26 on 25th November 1944.

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48 year old Amy Matilda McCall was the wife  of John Charles McCall.

They were living at number 15 Arica Road in New Cross.

The CWGC records that she was killed in the V2 rocket strike on the New Cross Road, Saturday 25th November 1944.

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28 year old Alfred George Messenger along with his 23 year old wife Gladys were the only married couple killed together in the V2 blast. This tragedy was compounded by the fact it orphaned their two daughters- 6 year old Margaret and Irene who was only four.

Alfred was a brewer’s drayman born on 16th April 1916 during the middle of the Great War. His father was a shipping foreman and at the time of the 1921 census the family was living in Paddington.  Alfred had two younger sisters Winifred and Eileen.

Alfred featured in a news report on April Fool’s Day 1938 when the South London Observer covered the trial of two Peckham and Walworth men jailed one month at Tower Bridge Police Court for stealing bottles of beer from his lorry.

‘Alfred George Messenger, of Downham-way, Bromley, driver of the lorry, said that on March 17, he took a load lorry from the brewery and went to Five Elms’ off-licence, Dagenham. When he unloaded he found he was six pints of lager and six pints of stout short. The missing beer was worth 7s 7d.’

Alfred Messenger married Gladys Vera Horniblow in Lewisham in 1938. Their daughters Margaret and Irene were born respectively in 1938 and 1940. At the time of the September 1939 war-time Register they were living at 22 Sydenham Park, Sydenham and Alfred’s in-laws Frank Beck Horniblow, a retired commercial traveller, and Elsie Horniblow, a nurse, were staying with them.

In November 1944 Alfred and Gladys and their daughters were living at number 56 Armada Street which no longer exists. The houses were demolished through redevelopment in the 1960s and 1970s. The original location is now Armada Court in McMillan Street.

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23 year old Gladys Vera Messenger was born 20th May 1921 in Ormskirk, West Lancashire. Her parents married just after the Great War’s armistice in early 1919. Her mother Elsie G Long was nineteen years younger than her father having been born 12th January 1886.

Alfred and Gladys are buried in unmarked plots at Grove Park Cemetery in Lewisham, but their names are commemorated on the Deptford Borough Council stone memorial dedicated to civilians killed by enemy action during the Second World War.

Gladys’s father, Frank, died in Devon in 1943 at the age of 76, and her mother Elsie passed away at the age of 67 in Swindon in 1953.

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56 year old Charles Edwin Millett was the husband of Emma Millett.

They were living at number 34 Batavia Road in New Cross behind the seat of the V2 rocket strike on the Woolworths store in the New Cross Road.

The CWGC records that she was killed by the rocket blast at 12.26 Saturday 25th November 1944.

 

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38 year old Muriel Phyllis Millwood lived with her three daughters Hazel, Audrey and Joan and son Peter at 24 Ludwick Road, New Cross.

The road has since been renamed Ludwick Mews.

It is believed Muriel was shopping with Jean, who was 9 years old, in Woolworths New Cross Road at the time of the V2 blast.

Muriel was married to Albert Henry Millwood who was a driver serving in the Royal Artillery of his Majesty’s Forces.

Muriel was the daughter of William and Rebecca Pickess, of 1 Bawtree Road, New Cross.

Muriel was born in Ipswich, Suffolk on 22nd October 1906. Her father was an iron moulder and the family was living at 17 Rosebery Road, Ipswich at the time of the 1911 census.

The family moved to Bawtree Road in New Cross and by the time of the 1921 census William was working at the Charlton Foundry Company.

At the age of 14 Muriel was an apprenticed milliner with Nash and Spurgeon at 315 New Cross Road, which is only a few doors down from the Woolworths store where she died 23 years later..

Her aunts Amy, 24, and Emily, 21, were coincidentally shop assistants working in Woolworths in 142/148 Lewisham High Street.

Muriel married Albert Millwood in 1927.  Albert was a career soldier who had joined the Royal Artillery by enlisting in Whitehall in 1919. He was a specialist driver and had overseas postings.

He would see active service throughout the Second World War, and was awarded a general service medal along with medals for his WW2 service.

He passed away in Lewisham in 1975 in his 73rd year having been born in Hendon on 18th February 1902. His was a large working class family.

His father, also called Albert, was working as a carter and in the 1911 census the family of 10 were all residing at 2 Hargrave Square, Bermondsey. He had five sisters and two brothers.

Muriel and Joan are buried in a grave for the Pickess family in Grove Park Cemetery in Lewisham where their names and ages are inscribed on the family monument which is situated at plot H.677.

They are there with Muriel’s parents William who died in 1950 at the age of 79 and Rebecca who passed away in 1960 at the age of 80.

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9 year old Joan Pauline Millwood was the daughter of Muriel Phyllis Millwood and her biographical and family profile is set out above.

She was buried with her mother at Grove Park Cemetery in Lewisham on 12th December 1944 and was later joined by her grandparents when they passed away six and sixteen years later.

Her name and age is inscribed on the side of the monument. 

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41 year old Robert George Moore was the husband of Rose Mary Moore.

They were living at number 136 Sutton Common Road, Sutton, in Surrey.

The CWGC reports that he died in the V2 rocket strike on the New Cross Road, Saturday 25th November 1944.

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52 year old Constance Dora Newell was the wife of Major Charles Wesley Newell of Royal Army Medical Corps.

She was living at ‘Yvonne’, in Lunsford Lane, Maidstone, in Kent.

The CWGC recorded that she was killed in the V2 rocket bombing of the New Cross Road on Saturday 25th November 1944.

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77 year old Thomas Acton Noble was the husband of Mrs A. Noble.

They were living at number 69 Lucas Street in Deptford. 

The CWGC recorded that she was killed in the V2 explosion on the New Cross Road on Saturday 25th November 1944. 

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24 year old Josephine Marice Olivo was the wife of Salvation Olivo and they were living at number 76 Lewisham Way, New Cross.

She was the daughter of Mrs. J. Sims, of 110 Friendly Street.

Josephine was critically injured in the V2 rocket bombing of the New Cross Road.

She was taken by ambulance to the St. John’s Hospital on Saturday 25th November 1944, but succumbed to her injuries and died on the same day.

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23 year old Joyce Kathleen Padbury was the wife of Frederick Charles Padbury who was on active service with His Majesty’s Services.

She was living at number 15 Amersham Road in New Cross.

She was the daughter of the late Frederick William and Nellie Maud Connor.

The CWGC records that she was killed in the V2 New Cross Road explosion at 12.26, Saturday 25th November 1944.

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47 year old Frederick George Harris Pell was the husband of Florence Lily Pell.

They were living at number 8 Dale Park Road in Norwood.

The CWGC recorded that he was killed by the V2 rocket blast in the New Cross Road, 25th November 1944. 

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2 year old Pamela May Phillips was the daughter of Thomas and Violet Maud Phillips.

She was living with her parents at 20 Geoffrey Road in New Cross.

She was one of a number of infant and toddler victims killed in the V2 explosion on the New Cross Road, Saturday 25th November 1944.

Pamela’s niece, Tracey Gilbert, has provided powerful insight into the trauma visited upon her family by the V2 attack.

2 year old Pamela was in the Woolworths store with her 7 year old sister Joan Doris Phillips who survived the explosion and collapse of the building although buried in the debris.

Their father Thomas was an Air Raid Warden and part of the long and exhaustive ARP rescue operation, which was all the more devastating for him in that he was searching for his two young daughters in the wreckage.

Joan eventually recovered though she could not be visited in hospital by her mother Violet who was heavily pregnant with Tracey’s mother, Barbara, who was born soon afterwards.

The Phillips family represent the backbone of the New Cross community; all hardworking people and providing vital services in the national effort during the Second World War.

Thomas and Violet married in 1917 and had twelve children: Thomas W Phillips in 1917 and named after his father; Arthur H Phillips in 1918; Edmund A J Phillips in 1920; Leonard C Phillips in 1922; Robert G Phillips in 1923; Harold A J Phillips in 1924; Violet R L Phillips in 1925; Rose G E Phillips in 1927; Ronald J A Phillips in 1929; Joan D Phillips in 1937; Pamela May Phillips in 1942 and Barbara C A Phillips in 1945.

At the time the National Register was taken at the end of September 1939 there were ten family members recorded living in the household of 20 Geoffrey Road.

Thomas was 40 years old and described as ‘a Boro Council Road sweeper’ and a member of the Air Raid Precaution services specialising in gas decontamination.

Violet was 41 years old.

Her son Edmund was employed as a ‘Fitter’s Labourer’, Robert as a ‘Sawyers Labourer’ and Harold as a ‘Riveter’s Labourer.’

Joan was 2 years old and four other children were still at school.

After the recovery of her body from the destruction of the Woolworths store, Pamela Phillips was laid to rest in Brockley Cemetery near her family home in early December 1944.

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13 year old Hetty Letitia Josephine Plunkett was the daughter of Sydney Richard and Harriet Elizabeth Plunkett.

She lived with her parents at number 162 Malpas Road in Brockley.

The CWGC recorded that she died in the V2 explosion in the New Cross Road on Saturday 25th November 1944.

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28 year old Angus Frederick Thomas Pugsley was the husband of Grace Amy Pugsley.

They were living at 68 Upland Road, in East Dulwich.

The CWGC records that he died in the V2 explosion in the New Cross Road, Saturday 25th November 1944.

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29 year old Iris Ricketts was married to Robert P. D. Ricketts.

They were living at number 37 St. Margaret’s Road in New Cross.

The CWGC records that she died at New Cross Road in the V2 rocket strike at 12.26, Saturday 25th November 1944.

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In 1945 the US Army captured an entire train carrying V2 rockets in Germany which had been loaded for distribution to mobile firing units. A feature in War Illustrated included images of engineers examining the weapon’s technology and components.

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14 year old Ellen Elizabeth Roffe was living with her parents at 28 Stanton House, Thames Street in Greenwich.

She was the daughter of Charles and Elizabeth Roffe.

The CWGC reports that she died in the V2 explosion in New Cross Road on Saturday 25th November 1944.

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19 year old Mary Lavender Rogers was the daughter of Thomas Henry and Daisy Rogers.

The family home was number 1 Merchland Cottages, Merchland Road, in Woolwich.

She was critically injured in the New Cross V2 explosion, rescued from the wreckage and taken by ambulance to the Dulwich Hospital.

Sadly, she succumbed to her catastrophic injuries later on the same day.

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62 year old George Phipps Routhorn was the husband of Elizabeth Routhorn.

They were living at number 1 Ruddigore Road in Deptford. Ruddigore Road has been redeveloped into the southern bend of Sanford Street leading to the junction of Woodpecker Road.

The CWGC reports that she was killed in the V2 strike on the New Cross Road at 12.26, Saturday 25th November 1944.

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43 year old Freida Marjory Mabel Sherwood was the widow of Thomas Sherwood.

She was living at number 6 Oareborough Road. Neither her house, nor Oareborough Road in Deptford exists anymore. It was cleared postwar for redevelopment.

Freida was born on 1st February 1901. Her father Frederick Airey was a steam locomotive driver for the South Eastern and Chatham Railway.

Freida worked as a ‘checker’ for ‘fancy box makers’ Johns Son & Watts in 40 City Road, London.

In 1930 she married Thomas Sherwood. They had a daughter Doris Irene who was born on 20th December 1931. Thomas died at the age of 33 in 1937.

Freida and her daughter were living in the Airey family home in Deptford with Freida’s brothers and sisters and parents Frederick and Alice.

The CWGC records that Freida was killed in the New Cross Road V2 rocket explosion on 25th November 1944. 

Her daughter Doris was 13 years old and still at school.

Freida’s granddaughter Christine Ellis has very kindly informed the Goldsmiths History project that Doris was evacuated to Brixham in Devon in 1940. She explains:

‘She was evacuated with Alma Rose Supple, who lived in the same street as the Airey family (Number 2 Oareborough Road). Doris and Alma were told to say they were cousins so they could hopefully stay together.

My mum Doris Sherwood was told she had to stay in Brixham no matter how much she hated being away from home until it was safe to go back. However, she never returned. She stayed in Brixham where she met my dad and they had five children. Doris died in 2004.’

But Alma Supple did return. It was an extraordinary and tragic coincidence that  Freida Sherwood was on the number 53a double decker bus when it was caught up in the V2 explosion at the same time that Alma was shopping in Woolworths with her friend and cousin Sylvia Rosina Brown.

Alma and Sylvia too were killed by the V2.

It is understood most of the passengers on the bus died from suffocation due to the terrible vacuum sucking out all the air where they were when the one ton rocket warhead struck the Woolworths building in New Cross Road at 2,000 miles per hour.

Because it was travelling at more than twice the speed of sound it was impossible for anyone to have heard its approach.

Freida was buried in the CWD Memorial Plot, Grave 23 of Grove Park Cemetery in Lewisham on 5th December 1944 and her name is commemorated on Panel 4 of the Deptford Borough Council memorial to residents killed by enemy action during the Second World War.

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28 year old Elsie Maud Shirley was the daughter of Mabel Maud Bull Clifford (formerly Shirley) and of the late Walter Alfred Shirley.

They were living at number 48 Barlborough Street in New Cross. The original house has been redeveloped. 

Elsie was born on 12th July 1916 and was a milliner- designing, making, decorating, and selling hats and other headwear.  She specialised in wholesaling and selling.

Her stepfather Lewis Bull-Clifford was a railway guard.

At the beginning of the Second World War she was living in the house in Barlborough Street with her brother Walter, who was a baker’s roundsman, her older sister Mabel, working as a shop assistant, and younger sister Ethel who was also doing the same work in millinery.

The CWGC records was that she was killed in the V2 explosion in the New Cross Road on Saturday 25th November 1944.

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48 year old John Richard Siegert  was living at number 83 Longmead Drive, Sidcup, in Kent.

He was the son of Gustave Siegert. and known as ‘Dick’ Siegert.

He married Alice E Garratt in 1924. In the 1939 Register he gave his occupation as ‘maintenance carpenter.’

Alice had died in Westminster in 1938 at the age of 34.

The public records indicate they had three children: Joyce born in 1928; Ronald born in 1932, and John born in 1933.

‘Dick’ was seriously injured in the V2 blast in the New Cross Road on Saturday 25th November 1944.

He was taken by ambulance to the Miller Hospital in Greenwich, but sadly did not recover and died from the impact of the explosion the following day.

He is buried in Plot E.20/476 of Sidcup Cemetery, Sidcup, in the London Borough of Bexley. He has a headstone bearing the inscription:

‘In Ever Loving Memory, John Richard Siegert. Devoted husband of Alice. Killed by enemy action. 26 Nov 1944. Aged 48 years.’

‘Dick’ Siegert had been a veteran of the First World War serving in  the 11th (County of London) Battalion (Finsbury Rifles) of the London Regiment. He was awarded the British War and Victory medals.

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42 year old Benjamin John Simmonds was a volunteer fire guard for home defence during the Second World War.

He was married to Muriel Watson Simmonds.

They lived at number 57 Tyrwhitt Road in Deptford.

The CWGC reports that he was killed in the V2 explosion in the New Cross Road, Saturday 25th November 1944.

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15 year old Alan Charles Trevor Sinfield was the son of Mr. and Mrs. Charles George Sinfield.

He was living in the family home at 27 Marmora Road in East Dulwich.

He was critically injured when the V2 rocket struck the Woolworths store in the New Cross Road at 12.26, Saturday 25th November 1944.

He was taken by ambulance to St. Alfege’s Hospital where sadly he died later on the same day.

Alan was buried in Camberwell New Cemetery, Camberwell in the London Borough of Southwark.

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19 year old Ellen Irene Smith was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Basil Cyril Smith.

She lived in the family home of 65 Alfred Road, Dover, in Kent.

The CWGC records she was killed in the V2 explosion in the New Cross Road on Saturday 25th November 1944.

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Shops, businesses and original buildings in the New Cross Road in 1944

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Kelly’s London business directory for 1942 provides detail of all the shops, businesses and premises affected by the V2 blast, and indeed why there were so many people shopping in New Cross on this Saturday afternoon.

In the block on the corner of Goodwood Road and the New Cross Road, directly opposite the Woolworths Store these were the businesses being run from New Cross Gate railway station:

267a New Cross Road: William Heatley, Horse flesh dealer.

267 New Cross Road: Edward Phillips Stanley, Confectioner.

269 New Cross Road: Dove Shoe Company, Boot and shoe dealers.

271 New Cross Road: Stubbing and Company Ltd, Refreshment bar.

271 New Cross Road: Albert Arthur Hudson, Coal merchant.

Across Goodwood Road on the western corner of New Cross Road and stretching to the New Cross Inn on the corner with Clifton Rise:

277, 279, & 281 New Cross Road: Woolworth F.W. & Company Ltd, bazaar

283, 285, 287 (& 293) New Cross Road: Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society Ltd.

289 New Cross Road: Singer Sewing Machine Co Ltd.

291 New Cross Road: H. Horne Ltd, Confectioners.

293 New Cross Road: Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society Ltd.

295 New Cross Road: United Dairies (London) Ltd.

297 New Cross Road: Andrew John Kennedy & Sons, Fishmongers.

299 New Cross Road: Home & Colonial Stores Ltd.

301 New Cross Road: Alex Kennedy Ltd, Ham and tongue dealers.

303 New Cross Road: Dolcis Shoe Company.

307 New Cross Road: Charles Dannan, Turf commissioning agent.

309 New Cross Road: M Rosin Ltd, Bakers.

311 New Cross Road: Abraham Krayer, Fruiterer.

311a New Cross Road: Redco (Tobacconists) Ltd, Tobacconists.

313 New Cross Road: David Greig Ltd., Provisions dealers.

315 New Cross Road: Maloney’s Ltd, Butchers.

317 New Cross Road: Harry Hitman, Toilet requisites.

317a New Cross Road: Lush & Cook Ltd, Dyers and cleaners.

319 New Cross Road: Arthur Bowers, Edmond & Co., Tobacconists.

321 New Cross Road: A.B. Hemmings Ltd, Bakers.

323 New Cross Road: The New Cross Inn. Licensee Fran Summers.

On the north side of New Cross Road opposite Woolworths and adjacent shops:

272 New Cross Road: Old Rose Inn. Licensee: Thomas Wilfrid Carroll.

272 New Cross Road: Pearce Signs Ltd, Sign Manufacturers.

Across St James’s and directly opposite the Woolworths store and stretching to the corner of the New Cross Road with Laurie Grove:

280 New Cross Road: Clamp & Son. Auctioneers.

286 New Cross Road: Britannic Assurance Co. Ltd.

286 New Cross Road: John Whittaker Hendrick B.Sc., B. Eng., A.M.I. struct E., District surveyor for Deptford.

288 New Cross Road: District Postal Sorting Office.

Deptford Town Hall, Borough of Deptford.

Church of Christ (Laurie Hall)

304 New Cross Road: Eastman & Sons, Dyers & Cleaners.

308 New Cross Road: W.H. Walker & Son., Estate agents.

310 & 312 New Cross Road: S.C. Russell, Optician.

314 New Cross Road: Economic Tyre Co., Ltd.

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31 year old Margaret Annie Snell was the daughter of William Frederick and Ellen Snell.

They were living at number 9 Mornington Road in Deptford. The house and street has been redeveloped since the Second World War.

Margaret was killed in the V2 explosion on 25th November 1944.

Her CWGC record stated that she died at New Cross Road.

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12 year old James William Snellgrove was the son of James Arthur Snellgrove who was serving in His Majesty’s forces and is mother Mrs A. Snellgrove.

The family home was number 41 Sevenoaks Road in Brockley.

James was rescued from the wreckage and very severely injured in the V2 explosion on 25th November 1944.

He was taken by ambulance to St. Alfege’s Hospital but sadly died two days later from his injuries.

He was buried in Nunhead Cemetery, Nunhead in the London Borough of Southwark.

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72 year old Annie Steer was married to Harry Lee Steer.

The couple lived at 3 Dollings Place in Kender Street, Deptford.

The CWGC reports he died in the V2 blast on New Cross Road, Saturday, lunchtime 25th November 1944.

Annie Steer was buried on 6th December 1944 in Nunhead Cemetery, Nunhead, in the London Borough of Southwark.

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74 year old William Cuthbert Stephenson was living in Carrington House, Brockmill Road.

The CWGC reported that he died in New Cross Road by enemy V2 rocket strike on 25th November 1944.

William was buried in St. Mary’s Churchyard Heworth, in the Metropolitan Borough of Gateshead, Tyne and Wear.

The family headstone has inscribed at the bottom: ‘WILLIAM CUTHBERT
KILLED BY ENEMY ACTION IN ———-
———–1944. AGED 74 YEARS’

His name is also commemorated on the Deptford Borough Council memorial in Lewisham’s Grove Park Cemetery.

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66 year old Edward Frederick Strickland was married to Mrs A. E. Strickland.

They were living at number 336 Evelyn Street, Deptford.

The CWGC recorded that he was killed in the New Cross Road by the V2 rocket blast at 12.26 on Saturday 25th November 1944.

Edward was buried in the Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries in the London Borough of Lewisham.

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33 year old Joseph William Sullivan was a member of the Home Guard.

He was the son of Mr. J. Sullivan, of Battlebridge Farm, Merstham, Surrey. The farm has been remembered by Reigate’s online history group.

Joseph was severely injured in the V2 explosion in the New Cross Road, Saturday 25th November 1944.

He was rescued from the wreckage, taken to the Miller Hospital in Greenwich but died later on the same day.

Joseph was buried in the Greenwich Cemetery in the Royal Borough of Greenwich.

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11 year old Alma Rose Supple was the daughter of William George and Rosina Supple.

They were living at number 2 Oareborough Road in Deptford, which no longer exists as a result of redevelopment.

The CWGC records that she was killed in the V2 blast on the New Cross Road at 12.26 Saturday 25th November 1944.

Alma had been evacuated to Brixham in Devon with her friend and neighbour, Doris Sherwood living at number 6 Oareborough Road.

Like many London children, after the worst of the Blitz between September 1940 and May 1941, Alma returned to be with her parents.

At the time of the taking of the September 1939 National Register, the Supple family were residing at Homestead Hodgson in Whitstable, Kent.

Alma’s father was described as a ‘Heavy Worker.’ Greenwich born, his first job after leaving school had been as a labourer in a saw mill.

Alma’s parents married in 1926.

Alma had an older sister Iris who was born in 1927.

Alma was shopping in Woolworths with a friend when the V2 rocket struck the store in the New Cross Road. .

Alma was buried in Grove Park Cemetery in the London Borough of Lewisham. Her parents commissioned a special stone monument with the figure of a child angel. The base of the statuette has the following inscription:

‘To the sweetest memory
of our beloved daughter
ALMA ROSE SUPPLE
aged 11 years
killed by enemy action on
November 25th 1944.
An angel took my flower away
yet I will not repine.
For Jesus in his bosom wears
the flower that once was mine.
Also in loving memory of
ROSINA MAUD SUPPLE
who died 30th May 1967
aged 62 years.’

The inscription indicates her mother Rosina passed away in 1967. Her father William died in 1980.

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44 year old Lucy Amy Taylor was married to George Coote Taylor and they lived at 56 Tyrwhitt Road, Brockley, Lewisham. She was the mother of 9 year old Laurie John Taylor who died with her in the V2 attack on Saturday 25th November 1944.

Lucy and Laurie were going to the Town Hall to pay rent and it is believed they were killed when in the New Cross Road.

Lucy was the daughter of a Bermondsey Stevedore and married her husband George in 1924 in the St. Olave Southwark district of London.  The public records indicate they had five children: Violet in 1926, George in 1930, Raymond in 1934, Laurie in 1935 and Charles in 1937.

When the Second World War broke out in September 1939 it seems Lucy was evacuated with her youngest children to Holly Lodge, The Ridgway, Woodingdean in Brighton.  But like most Londoners they returned during the following year of phoney war and after the major Blitz of late 1940 and early 1941.

Lucy Taylor is buried along with her son Laurie at Grove Park Cemetery in Lewisham and her name is inscribed on the special stone monument commissioned by Deptford Borough Council to commemorate those killed by enemy action during World War Two.

Lucy’s son George provided a deeply moving account of the impact of this double tragedy on his family in the book Rations and Rubble researched and published by the Deptford History Group in 1994.

George was 14 years old at the time and working in Victoria Street. He was convinced he heard the tremor caused by the V2 explosion. He travelled to New Cross by tram and remembered seeing that Woolworths had disappeared.

He said: ‘I’m not sure how my father coped. There were two or three dreadful days when he searched the hospitals and mortuaries to try and find them. […] The effect of the explosion was so great that my father had to make identification by my mother’s wedding ring and a shoe that my brother was wearing and there was little else from that point of view.’

George kept a letter is uncle wrote to a sister in January 1945 in which he explained: ‘Lucy took little Laurie with her to pay the rent at the Town Hall and, as clear as we can make out, she had just left the building when the explosion occurred. It took us three days and nights to trace them and George identified certain articles belonging to them. We were advised not to insist on seeing the bodies.’

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9 year old Laurie John Taylor was a young schoolboy who had been taken with his mother to pay the family’s rent at Deptford Town Hall when he was killed by the V2 strike on New Cross Road at 12.26 on Saturday 25th November 1944.

He is buried with his mother at Grove Park Cemetery, Lewisham.

His name is also inscribed just above his mother’s on the Deptford Borough Council memorial to those killed in air-raids during the Second World War.

His older brother George said in 1994: ‘There was always that gap afterwards because he was my younger brother, my youngest brother’s older brother. Laurie was the middle one who took care of the young one at school. He was a solidly built lad. We’ve always remembered him and recall on many occasions his character and personality. The void is there but how one describes it I don’t know.’

Laurie’s uncle wrote in January 1945: ‘…they were buried together, mother and son, poor dears, and I hope they find some comfort from their closeness.’

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20 year old Lillian Stella Dorothy Taylor was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William John Taylor.

They were living at number 29 Rokeby Road.

The CWGC records that she was killed at 12.26 pm in the V2 blast in the New Cross Road on Saturday 25th November 1944.

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44 year old Dorothy Sarah Taylor was married to William Henry Taylor and they had been living at 83 Revelon Road, Brockley in Lewisham.

Dorothy was born Dorothy Sarah Simmons in Camden Town on 23rd July 1900.

The 1921 census shows her father Harry was a warehouseman in the carpet department of Harrods.

She worked as an accounts clerk though she was out of work at the time.

The family was living on the Peabody Estate in Vauxhall Bridge Road and Dorothy was then living with two brothers and a sister.

Dorothy married Thames Lighterman William Henry Taylor in the St. Olive Southwark district in 1926. William was just under one year younger.

The public records show they had three children: Edward born in Lambeth in 1927, Joyce born in Lambeth in 1929 and John, also born in Lambeth in 1931.

It is believed Dorothy was shopping with her daughter Joyce, then aged 15, when they were caught in the V2 explosion on the New Cross Road.

At the beginning of the Second World War in late September 1939 Dorothy and William were registered at 83 Revelon Road and it is assumed their three children, all of school-age had been evacuated out of London with their schools.

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15 year old Joyce Doreen Taylor was the daughter of Dorothy and William Taylor of 83 Revelon Road, Brockley and was killed with her mother in the V2 explosion at 12.26 p.m. lunchtime on 25th November 1944 as explained above.

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45 year old Emma Louisa Thatcher was married to Henry Thomas Thatcher.

They were living at number 34 Charminster Road, Mottingham, in Kent.

The CWGC records that she was killed in the V2 explosion in the New Cross Road.

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31 year old Lillian Florence Tribe was married to Frederick George Tribe and they lived at 89 Clifton Rise, New Cross. The house has been demolished to make way for Fordham Park.

Lillian Florence Fowler was born 28th February 1913 and married Frederick George Tribe in Camberwell in 1935. Public records indicate they had two sons, Anthony born in 1938 and Peter in 1944.

At the beginning of World War Two in late September 1939, Lillian and Anthony were registered as living with her in-laws, retired police inspector George Tribe and Lillian Tribe at Fairview, Chichester Road in Midhurst Sussex.

Lillian was buried along with her infant son Peter in Grave 25 of Grove Park Cemetery in Lewisham and their names are commemorated on the Deptford Borough Council stone memorial to residents killed by enemy action during the Second World War.

They are believed to have been shopping in Woolworths at the time of the V2 explosion at 12.26 on 25th November 1944.

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6 month old Peter Tribe  was the youngest son of Lillian and Frederick Tribe who were living near the Woolworths store in New Cross Road at 89 Clifton Rise in New Cross close to what is now Fordham Park.

He died with his mother in the V2 strike on Woolworths and is buried with her at Grove Park Cemetery with his name carved in the stone memorial just below that of his mother.

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15 year old Eileen Muriel Turner was the daughter of Alice Amelia Turner.

They were living at number 22 Desmond Street in Deptford. The original house has been demolished and the site redeveloped after the Second World War.

The CWGC recorded that she was killed in the V2 explosion in the New Cross Road on Saturday 25th November 1944.

Eileen was buried in Plot D.812 of Lewisham’s Grove Park Cemetery.

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48 year old Nellie Hilda Tye was living at number 69 Waller Road in New Cross, Deptford which is a two storey terraced Victorian house with basement.

Nellie was born on the 12th March 1895.

She was the widow of Harry Alfred Tye and the daughter of the late George and Eliza Smith.

She married Harry in 1916. He was a cargo superintendent working in the London docks.

The public records suggest they had five children: Dorothy born in 1920 who died in 1926, Beryl Jean born in 1921, Donald Henry born in 1922 and working as a general labourer in 1939, Eileen born in 1925 and Poppy born in 1927.

The CWGC reports that Nellie died at New Cross Road in the V2 explosion at 12.26 on Saturday 25th November 1944.

She is buried in the CWD plot of Grove Park Cemetery in Lewisham and her name is commemorated on the stone memorial built by Deptford Council in honour of residents killed by enemy action during the Second World War.

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28 year old Winifred Doris Valentine was married to Private Alfred George Valentine on active service with The Royal Berkshire Regiment.

She was born Winifred Doris née Kelsey on 9th July 1916 in Greenwich, and by 1939 at the beginning of the Second World War she was working as a ‘retail stamper.’

She was then living with her parents Thomas and Florence Kelsey at number 33 Oareboro Road, Deptford which no longer exists as a result of post WW2 redevelopment. Her father Thomas was employed as a ‘Gatekeeper.’

Her younger sister Violet also worked as a retail stamper.

She married Alfred Valentine in Deptford in early 1940.

They were living at 12 Sanford Street, New Cross. The house is no longer standing and the street has been redeveloped.

The CWGC records that she died at New Cross Road in the V2 strike on Saturday 25th November 1944.

Winifred was buried on 7th December 1944 in Nunhead Cemetery, Nunhead, in the London Borough of Southwark.

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37 year old Doris Vandyke was the daughter of Philip and Florence Vandyke.

She was known as “Dolly’ and living with them at number 56 Beecroft Road, which is a two storey semi-detached Victorian house in the Honour Oak Park area of Lewisham.

Dolly was born 12th June 1907. By the time of the 1939 Register she was recorded as working as a shop assistant specialising in tools.

The family was residing at 2 Kerry Road in Deptford. She had two brothers, Edward working as a provisions shop manager, and Robert, an electrical installations engineer.

Her younger sister Kathleen was also working as a shop assistant.

On the 1st March 1936, Dolly featured in a Sunday Mirror newspaper article reporting her ‘Bedridden Girl’s Joy Day. Back to Normal Life After Five Years’:

‘A girl who had been bedridden for more than five and a half years returned to normal life yesterday. She is Miss Doris Vandyke, twenty-six of Kerry-road, New Cross, S.E.

In June 1930, she fell down a flight of stairs and injured her back and feet.

She was unable to walk properly and for the next five years attended various hospitals for treatment.

Seven seeks ago she was rushed into Charing Cross Hospital with appendicitis.

While convalescing, Mr Fitzsimons, house surgeon at the hospital, examined her feet and expressed the view that an operation would effect a cure.

This was successfully performed by Mr Fitzsimons and yesterday Miss Vandyke walked out cured.

“It’s so wonderful that I can’t realise yet that it’s true,” she told the Sunday Pictorial.

“The doctors here have been wonderful. Now I’m looking forward to starting work again.”

“That’s the first time I’ve seen her on her feet for more than five years,” her mother said.’

The CWGC records that she died in the New Cross Road in the V2 explosion on Saturday 25th November 1944.

She is buried in Plot CC No. 118 in Hither Green Cemetery and Crematorium in Lewisham with a gravestone memorial with the inscription: ‘In loving memory of Doris Vandyke, killed by enemy action 25 November 1944, aged 37 years.’

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40 year old Lillian Elsie Vokes was a nurse with the St John’s Ambulance Service working with ARP civil defence in the number 19 S.J.A.B. New Cross Nursing Division during the Second World War.

Lillian was born in Greenwich on 15th September 1904 and baptised at St Paul Church, Deptford 0n 5th October of that year.

Her mother Marie Louisa née Stebbing died at the age of 36 in 1909 when Lillian was only five years old.

Her father William Henry Vokes, who was born in Sheerness, Kent, remarried Phoebe Georgina Johnson in the same year.

The family was living at 13 Childers Street in Deptford in 1911 when the census was taken. Father William was working in a government dockyard.

Lillian was 6 years old, her brother William John, 9, and her half-brother George Austin had just been born.

Her father William Henry Vokes died at the age of 65 in 1937.

By the time of the 1939 Register in late September 1939, which was taken just a few weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War, Lillian was still living in 13 Childers Street.

The original house is no longer standing as the street has been redeveloped.

She was listed as working as a military cap machinist during the day and volunteering for Air Raid Precautions as a nurse with the St John’s Ambulance Brigade outside working hours.

Her half brother George was working as a building contractor and her half-sister, Irene, born in 1913, was employed as a switchboard operator.

Bt the time of her death Lillian was living at number 13 Vesta Road, in New Cross.

The CWGC states she was a victim of the V2 explosion and died in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

Lillian was buried in Plot. H 716 of Lewisham’s Grove Park Cemetery on 5th December 1944 and has a stone monument commemorating her service with the St John’s Ambulance Brigade. On its left side it has the word ‘Peace’ carved into the stone, bears the eight-pointed white Maltese cross and has the following inscription:

‘In remembrance of Lillian Elsie Vokes who lost her life through enemy action 25th Nov. 1944 aged 40.

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the Unknown.” And he replied “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God that shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”‘

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56 year old Lillian May Walker was married to Henry Harold Walker.

They were living at number 51 Lewisham Way.

Lillian was the daughter of George and Frances Martin, of Hollingbourne, Kent.

The CWGC records she was killed in the V2 strike on the New Cross Road, Saturday 25th November 1944.

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66 year old Elizabeth Caroline Warren was married to Frederick Alfred Warren.

They were living at number 102 Pomeroy Street.

The CWGC reports that he was killed in the V2 explosion in the New Cross Road on Saturday 25th November 1944.

Elizabeth was buried on 5th December 1944 at the Camberwell New Cemetery, Camberwell, in the London Borough of Southwark.

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44 year old Ethel Watson was married to James Evans Watson who remarried soon after her death.

Their home was a two storey terraced Victorian house with basement at 69 Erlanger Road in the Telegraph Hill area of New Cross. Ethel was born 10th November 1900. 

Ethel née Ingledew married James Watson in Tynemouth, Northumberland in 1924.

Her husband James was an engineer working with heavy machinery, engines, motors and ships.

The CWGC recorded that she had been killed in the V2 blast on the New Cross Road, Saturday 25th November 1944.

Ethel was cremated at Honor Oak Crematorium on the 6th December 1944 and her ashes buried under a rose tree in the memorial gardens.

Her husband James passed away at the age of 83 at Dulwich Hospital and was also cremated at the Honor Oak Crematorium on the 17th November 1982 and his ashes buried with Ethel.

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62 year old Arthur John Weaver was the husband of Kate Adelaide Weaver.

They lived at 17 Picton Street, Lomond Grove, in Camberwell.

The CWGC reported that that he was killed by the V2 explosion in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

Arthur was buried on 1st December 1944 in Camberwell New Cemetery in the London Borough of Southwark.

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56 year old Clara Portobello(w) Weeding was married to Henry Francis Weeding.

Her husband gave his occupation in the 1939 National Register as ‘Fire stripper & wood machinist- heavy worker.’

They were living at number 110 Shardeloes Road, New Cross, which is a two storey Victorian terraced house.

The CWGC reported that she had been killed in the V2 rocket strike on the New Cross Road on Saturday 25th November 1944.

She was born Clara Portobello Barden on 30th January 1888 according to public records and the burial details gave her age as 55.

She was actually 56 years old at the time of her death.

Clara was buried on 2nd December 1944 in Plot Square 29, Grave 41420 of Nunhead Cemetery
Nunhead, in the London Borough of Southwark.

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74 year old Gilbert Oscar Weston was living at number 8 Goodwood Road, New Cross, a two storey terraced Victorian house, only feet away from the Woolworths store.

He was injured in the V2 blast at lunchtime on Saturday 25th November 1944 which destroyed his house.

After being rescued and dug out of the wreckage, he was taken by ambulance to St. Alfege’s Hospital where three days later he later died from the injuries caused by the explosion.

He was buried on 4th December 1944 in Plot D.566 of Grove Park Cemetery, Grove Park, in the London Borough of Lewisham.

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52 year old Thomas George Frederick White was the husband of Mrs V. R. White.

They were living at 85 Kentwell Close on the Honor Oak Estate.

The CWGC reports he was killed in the New Cross Road on Saturday 25th November 1944.

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11 year old Norman Henry Wilkins  was the son of Henry James and Katherine Mary Wilkins.

The family was living at number 28 Leyland Road, Deptford. The house has been redeveloped since the Second World War.

Norman had been swimming at the Laurie Grove Baths with friends.

He was in Woolworths to have a glass of hot Bovril.

He was killed in the V2 blast which struck the store on the New Cross Road.

Norman was buried on 4th December 1944 in Plot D.704 of Lewisham’s Grove Park Cemetery.

Norman is also commemorated in a special book of names recording the pupils of Deptford’s Addey and Stanhope School who were killed by enemy action during the Second World War.

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38 year old Harry Williams was married to Winifred Susan Williams.

They were both living at 43 Worcester Villas, Hove, in Sussex.

The CWGC states that he was killed in the V2 explosion in the New Cross Road.

Harry Williams married Winifred Susan Thorpe in Horsham, Sussex in the first quarter of 1941.

As Harry was not living in the New Cross area at the time, it is possible he was one of the passengers travelling on the number 53a double decker bus caught in the V2 blast.

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37 year old Violet May Willoughby was married to Herbert Douglas Willoughby.

They were living in 43 Howson Road, a two storey Victorian terraced house in Deptford.

The CWGC records that she was killed in V2 New Cross Road rocket strike.

Violet was born on 11th January 1907 in Wandsworth, and in the 1939 National Register taken at the end of September of that year she described herself as a sales assistant in the hardware department.

It is possible she was one of the Woolworths employees serving customers at the time of the V2 strike that Saturday lunchtime.

Her husband Herbert Douglas was ‘a stock-keeper and salesman.’

Herbert Douglas Willoughby married Violet May Gantlett in Lewisham in the third quarter of 1939.

Violet’s Chelsea born father Herbert was a plumber and fitter.

They moved from Winchester Street, Westminster in 1911 to 56 Kneller Road, Brockley in 1921 when Violet was continuing school part-time, but had also started working.

Her brothers Herbert and Alfred were still at home.

Violet was buried in Section A Grave 1980 of the Ladywell Cemetery in Brockley on 4th December 1944.

Public records indicate Herbert Douglas Willoughby remarried after the Second World War. He lived to the age of 100 and passed away on the Isle of Wight in 2002.

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39 year old George Ellis Wincott  was married to Violet Wincott.

George was a heavy worker fitter for the Southern Railway Signal Department and had been born on 20th December 1904 in Bermondsey.  His wife Violet née Mason was 2 years younger.

They married in Camberwell in 1928.

They were living at 215 Romillies Road, Sidcup, Kent, which is a two storey terraced house.

Their son, also called George, was born in 1932 and was only 12 years old and still at school when his father was killed.

George Wincott’s parents, Ellis and Liza Wincott, were living at number 137 Wellington Avenue, Sidcup, Kent at the time of his death.

The CWGC recorded he had been killed in the V2 explosion on the New Cross Road at lunchtime 25th November 2024.

George was buried 1st December 1944 in plot D.15/338 of Sidcup Cemetery Sidcup, in the London Borough of Bexley.

He left probate of £644 16s 8d to his widow Violet, which the Bank of England Inflation calculator gave an equivalent value of £24,408.05 in August 2024.

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40 year old Violet Kathleen Woodland was born Violet Croker in Hoxton, in the East End of London on 13th February 1905. By the time of the 1911 census she was living in Taunton, Somerset. Her mother Phoebe was a laundry hand. Violet married her husband Charles William Woodland in Taunton in 1927. Charles was a millwright, an engineer who installs, dismantles, repairs, reassembles, and moves machinery and was working at the Woolwich Arsenal in south east London where his father was a police sergeant with the Metropolitan Police.

At the time of the national register in late September 1939 Violet and Charles and their family were living at Sulby House in Turnham Road Brockley.

In November 1944 they had moved to a terraced house at number 39 Shroffold Road, Downham, Bromley in Kent.

It is presumed that Mrs Woodland went to the New Cross Road for shopping at Woolworths, the neighbouring Co-op and other shops with her 17 year old daughter Barbara. Neither would return alive.  It is difficult to imagine the unfathomable grief Charles William Woodland went through losing his wife and daughter in this way.

Mr Woodland, who had been born in Devonport on 9th June 1904, would live until the year 2000, passing away in Lewisham at the age of 95. There is evidence in the public records that they had other children in addition to their daughter Barbara.  In the 1994 booklet Rations and Rubble the contributor Bill Finch was quoted:

‘I went to school on the Monday morning at Childeric School and we had a kid there called Joey Woodland who I used to play football with. We were in the classroom and he was sitting there crying. The teacher, Mr Clee, really got stuck into Joey, telling him off. Then the headmaster, Mr Corran, came in and spoke to Mr Clee who went absolutely white. He hadn’t realised that Joey had lost his mother and two sisters. Course there were no words to apologise. They just sent him home and that was it’ (Steele, 1994, pp 46-7). [It has been established that Mrs Woodland and her one daughter died in the V2 incident.]

Violet Woodland is buried and commemorated in Lewisham’s Grove Park Cemetery in the CWD Memorial Plot and her name has been carved on the stone memorial to those killed by enemy action during the Second World War in the Borough of Deptford.

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17 year old Barbara Woodland, as explained above, was the daughter of Violet Kathleen and Charles William Woodland and living at 39 Shroffold Road, Bromley when she was killed with her mother in the V2 strike on the New Cross Road 25th November 1944.

She was born in Lewisham in late 1927.

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34 year old Phyllis Ethel Woods was living in her terraced family home of 87 Wellington Avenue, in Bexley Kent when she was killed in the New Cross Road on 25^th November 1944. She was the daughter of her widowed mother Mrs Lydia Smith and at the time of the National Register taken on 29^th September 1939 they were living in the Wellington Avenue home with her 29 year-old brother Walter who was a telegraph and telephone fitter for the GPO as well as serving as a fireman in the GPO’s ARP.

Phyllis had married Thomas Arthur Woods in 1935 in Lambeth and at the time of her death he was serving in the Royal Navy. Public records show that a year after their marriage they may have had a son called Thomas whose birth was registered to a Mrs Woods née Smith in Lambeth in 1936. If this was the case he would have been only eight years old at the time of his mother’s death.

Phyllis was brought up in a large family and at the time of the 1921 census they were living in 40 Moncrieff Street Camberwell. This part of Moncrieff Street has been demolished and rebuilt.

Her father had worked in the GPO and at that time she was living there with three sisters, Victoria, Lillian and Ethel as well as her brother Walter. Mrs Lydia Smith would pass away in 1953 at the age of 70- some nine years after her daughter Phyllis died in the V2 bombing at Woolworths.

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Unknown. The Metropolitan Borough Council of Deptford formally interred ‘unidentified remains’ in grave 25 of their Civilian War Dead plot at Grove Park Cemetery.  They designated this person as ‘Unknown.’  The individual, for it can be credibly argued that they deserve to be commemorated and respectfully recognised as such, is recorded with the burial number 2298 in the official burial register of the Cemetery.

The record states ‘Unknown’ killed by enemy action in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944 and buried 7th December 1944.

This is a burial representing one human being who was never identified. It is possible that the sensitive handling of human remains by the more than one hundred mortuary staff from at least three London local authorities and their forensic pathologists means the remains could have belonged to any of the other 167 victims who had been identified.

This part of Deptford was densely populated and occupied with shoppers and shop staff and with many people in transit by car and bus along New Cross Road intersecting with two close and very busy overland train stations at New Cross Gate and New Cross.

Despite the infinite care taken to identify all victims of air raids during WW2, the fact that this incident caused the highest number of casualties from a V2 rocket detonation, the possibility that one unknown individual could never be identified cannot be excluded.

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Service people fatalities in V2 strike on New Cross Road 25th November 1944

It was inevitable that a casualty list of up to 168 fatalities would include people serving in the armed forces. They were either living locally and on leave, or simply passing through when caught in the blast.

Private George James Lewis. 19 years old.   Service Number: 14680575. Regiment & Unit/Ship: Army Catering Corps. Date of Death: 25 November 1944. Buried or commemorated at Grove Park Cemetery. Joint grave 6. Commonwealth War Graves Commission – Headstone Placeholder. Son of Frank Hubert William and Emily Florence Lewis, of New Cross. Personal Inscription ‘”Till We Meet Again” It’s not goodbye , Dear son and brother, but only au-revoir.’  Private George Lewis was killed at 12.26 in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944 as a result of the V2 explosion.

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Captain Arthur Edward Barton.  57 years old. Service Number: 120075. Regiment & Unit/Ship: Royal Army Pay Corps. Date of Death: Died 25 November 1944. Buried or commemorated at Enfield Crematorium, Panel 1. Commonwealth War Graves Commission – Headstone Placeholder. Captain Barton was killed in the V2 attack at 12.26 in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

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Vincent William O’Brien. 29 years old.  Service Number: 1068077. Regiment & Unit/Ship: Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. Date of Death: 25 November 1944. Buried or commemorated at Stockport Borough Cemetery. Sec. C.B. Grave 100. Commonwealth War Graves Commission – Headstone Placeholder. Son of William and Hannah O’Brien, of Shaw Heath, Stockport; husband of Annie Margaret O’Brien, of Shaw Heath, Stockport. Personal Inscription: ‘He gave his all his unfinished life.’ Leading Aircraftman Vincent O’Brien was killed in the V2 attack at 12.26 in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

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Thomas Cornish Haysworth. 29 years old.  Service Number: P/LX 26897. Regiment & Unit/Ship: Leading Steward in the Royal Navy serving with H.M.S. Victory. Date of Death: 25 November 1944. Buried or commemorated at Wandsworth (Earlsfield Cemetery) Block 49. Grave 2. Leading Steward Thomas Haysworth was killed in the V2 attack at 12.26 in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

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Stanley Albert Perriman. 38 years old.  Regiment & Unit/Ship: Member of the Home Guard and Air Raid Precautions. Date of Death: 29 November 1944. Buried or commemorated by Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich. Commonwealth War Graves Commission – Headstone Placeholder. Son of Ernest and Minnie Perriman, of 136 Union Street, Maidstone, Kent; husband of Dora May Perriman, of 8 Langley Gardens, Petts Wood, Kent. Injured at the V2 attack on 25th November 1944, at New Cross; died at St. Alfege’s Hospital Greenwich on 29th November 1944. 

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Sidney Taylor. 24 years old. Service Number: 1668068. Regiment & Unit/Ship: Aircraftman 1st class in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve serving in the 55 Repair Unit of Fighter Command. Date of Death 25 November 1944. Buried or commemorated at Birmingham (Brandwood End) Cemetery. Sec. 33. F.C. Grave 673. Commonwealth War Graves Commission – Headstone Placeholder. Son of Albert and Alice Taylor, of Balsall Heath Birmingham. Personal Inscription ‘Loved by all.’  Aircraftman Sidney Taylor was killed in the V2 attack at 12.26 in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

Sid Taylor was born 23rd April 1920 in Birmingham. His father was a builder’s foreman. Sid was a carpenter by trade. Before being called up he was living with his parents and then 14 year old younger brother Charles who was working as an assistant groundsman at Bell Barn Road in the Balsall Heath area of Birmingham. One of his brothers put a memoriam notice on the front page of the Birmingham Mail just two days after his death stating: ‘In memory of my dear brother Sid, killed November 25, 1944. Always remembered by Bill, Beat and Pat.’

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The immediate aftermath

Reading the detailed profiles of all the victims of the V2 bombing of the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944, it becomes apparent how so many local families were deeply affected.

It has been said the heart of the community had been broken and it was never able to recover from the shock, horror and loss.

The RAF flew over this stretch of the New Cross Road in 1946 and it is apparent that there are two large areas of waste-land bomb sites.

The first is at the site of Woolworths, which as we know was obliterated, and the second- not that much further down the New Cross Road, beyond the junction of Clifton Rise in and around the site of the Wesleyan Chapel which was reduced to a ruin.

In 1948, Pathé News visited New Cross to discover that the children of the Blitz were showing their resilience and ingenuity by turning the Wesleyan Chapel bomb site into a speedway bicycle track to develop skills they had every reason to hope could lead to a career in motorcycle speedway.

The remarkable film is shot between the New Cross Road and Achilles Street.

Many air-raids on these terraced streets behind the New Cross Road and between Clifton Rise and the railway line and viaduct leading to New Cross Station destroyed and damaged houses between 1939 and 1945.

You can still see the surviving terraced housing and newly built ‘prefabs’ whose construction was hoping to meet the immediate demand for housing the thousands of Londoners made homeless by World War Two air raids.

 

On 28th of October 1944, about one month before the Woolworths V2 tragedy, another V2 rocket explosion severely affected Gurney Street, Liadert Grove, Pagnell Street,  and Railway Grove.

The following information was recorded in the Deptford Town Hall incident room:

‘Oct. 28, (11.07 hours) Battery 444, V-2 rocket fired, impacted Gurney Street, Liadert Grove, Deptford, Pagnell Street, Brockley and Railway Grove, New Cross. 7 Dead, 35 seriously injured and 22 slightly injured. 7 Properties demolished. Rocket disintegrated before impact. Ref Deptford Incident 2377 4 LR, 2 HR, 1 light FA, 13 Ambulance, 1 CWD 3 cranes, dogs and 1 Canteen sent.’

‘LR’ and ‘HR’ refers to light and heavy rescue units, each usually operating out of single vehicles with ARP specialist teams and their equipment.

The Pathé news archive index has a New Cross reference to this report of the aftermath of a V2 explosion in Deptford.

The specific location and date was not included in the Pathé paperwork and is not included in the commentary probably because war-time censorship obliged the media of the time to withhold it.

It is plausible that images from either New Cross V2 incident could have been included in this Pathé report. At the very least the scenes of devastation and rescue would have been very similar.

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The investigation by Allied scientists into the technology of the V2 in 1945 and its future legacy in the 20th century United States led space programme.

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Most of the scientists and engineers in Germany who created the V2 weapon using slave labour with many thousands dying through disease and starvation escaped War Crimes investigation and prosecution after World War Two.

In fact, the German rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun continued in the USA where he was responsible for developing the rocket technology for NASA space missions including the Apollo programme leading to putting US astronauts on the Moon.

The photograph below depicts Von Braun, including many of his colleagues from Nazi Germany, outside their research facility at Fort Bliss, Texas, USA.

They had been allowed to leave Germany for America under the terms of Operation Paperclip. In return for immunity they agreed to work for the US space and defence programme.

Woolworths historian Paul Seaton recalls the insensitivity of Wernher Von Braun’s remark: ‘The V2 performed well, it just landed on the wrong planet.’

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Remembering the New Cross Road V2 disaster

One of the challenges facing the local community in New Cross in 1944 and the immediate years afterwards is that wider public knowledge and understanding of what people went through was suppressed by war-time censorship.

The tragedy also took place during the last year of a World War when civilians and service people were dying in their hundreds and, indeed, thousands, every month.

Not even the identities of the F. W. Woolworth & Co. Ltd and Royal Arsenal Co-operative stores devastated with their staff and customers inside and people in the street outside could be published in contemporary newspaper, BBC radio news programmes and newsreel cinema reports.

If the event in New Cross in 1944 is compared with the intensity and commemoration of the world-wide media coverage of the Aberfan disaster of 1966 in which 116 children and 28 adults died, it is fair to say the New Cross V2 disaster may not be forgotten history, but to some extent it was certainly neglected history.

Paul Seaton had been head of IT at Woolworths and then became its historian.

He recalled: ‘One of the things that drew me to investigate the incident at New Cross and to do something special was a discussion with my late Aunt, Joy Seaton, who was a Secretary at Goldsmiths in the 1960s and married to my Uncle, a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Imperial College London, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.  She told me the story of the destruction of the neighbourhood forty years earlier and what seemed like great insensitivity by my employers, F.W. Woolworth plc., when she had tried to coordinate some kind of service to remember the fallen. It was clearly a hot topic back then too.’

For the 60th Anniversary of the V2 attack, on 25th November 2004, he arranged for the remembrance of what happened to appear on the screensavers of all 6,400 computers in use at Woolies at the time.

He also persuaded the Woolworths Board ‘into giving some money to charity, including some local good causes near our surviving stores in Lewisham, Lee, Plumstead and Downham.’  He was unhappy that the company ‘had not done enough to remember either the employees or the customers who were killed that day.’

Deptford Community Radio and History Group 1994

As Paul Seaton writes:

‘As the fiftieth anniversary of the disaster loomed, the Deptford History Group formed entirely of local volunteers leapt into action, encouraging others to take advantage of Prime Minister John Major’s short-lived community radio initiative to make sure that they were on the air across Lewisham, Deptford, New Cross and Peckham with the help of Deptford Community Radio (DCR).

They also enlisted assistance from the local MP, the ever-popular hard-hitter Joan Ruddock, as well as the London Borough of Lewisham and its new branch library housed in the former premises of the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society supermarket.

Subsequently more than 200 people came forward with offers of testimony. Despite the passage of time, many had actually witnessed the catastrophe at first hand, while others had taken on the care of elderly relatives who had shared their vivid memories down the years to build an invaluable oral history.

What emerged was a tale of both emergency workers and inpromptu local volunteers working tirelessly around the clock until every bit of rubble and debris had been checked for survivors, human remains had been identified wherever possible and always buried with dignity. During the site clearance that followed much of the tangled metal and many of the bricks and planks were recycled to sustain the war effort and for rebuilding in the local community.

A facsimile of the original plaque was installed outside Iceland (the current tenants of the rebuilt former Woolworths building) on 26 November 1994.

They also arranged a memorial service for Saturday November 26, 1994, when the largest number of local people and dignitaries could attend.

DCR captured every interview that the History Group undertook in the library, providing the primary sources for their publication Rations and Rubble.

They also captured the cherry tree-planting ceremony, and the speeches by the Mayor of Lewisham, Councillor Gurbakhsh Garcha and the local MP Joan Ruddock, who was later appointed both as a Privy Counsellor and a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE), as well as interviews with a number of walk-in attendees who packed St James’s Church, Hatcham to capacity.

To the surprise of attendees, both the Mayor and Ms Ruddock spent more than five hours after the ceremony talking and sharing reminiscences with those present. […]

The organisers enlisted the help of a local printers, Deptford Forum Publishing, to publish a summary of their insightful research in the brochure Rations and Rubble, and to work with the radio team to choose 30 minutes of highlights from the library interviews, and 30 minutes from the service of commemoration, and the speeches and testimony over a cuppa which followed.

They hired Tim Hamilton to introduce the clips on a two-sided hour long cassette tape. Today Tim broadcasts on Resonance FM on behalf of Deptford Action Group for the Elderly.

Deptford Forum Publishing very generously donated their proof copy of the brochure and last remaining sample of the cassette tape to the Woolworths Museum in 2003, describing it as “handing over the baton in the remembrance relay.”‘

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The oral history of the New Cross V2 disaster survivors, witnesses, relatives of those killed and injured and their rescuers

The importance of the 1994 project is that an oral history project led by Jess Steele recorded 50 hours of interviews with those people who had been survivors, witnesses, relatives of those killed and injured and their rescuers and were still alive half a century after the event.

Those recordings have been archived by Lewisham Council’s library and local history and study services. This is a brilliant achievement in preserving social history for future generations.

Jess Steele has subsequently written and edited two further outstanding histories of Deptford- Turning The Tide: The History Of Everyday Deptford and A Working Class War: Tales From Two Families.

The commemorative cassette tape, including extracts from these archive recordings, along with interviews with people leading and taking part in the 50 year commemorative service at St James’s Church, has been curated and made available for the Goldsmiths History Project by Paul Seaton.

Cassette Side One: Interviews recorded at New Cross Library in October 1994 by Deptford History Group

In Order of Appearance Tim Hamilton (host), Jess Steele (Co-Leader of Deptford History Group), Harold Weeden, Reg Haynes, Lizzie Flood, Sid Smith, Kitty Finch, Bob Street, Patricia Bay, Ruth Jenkinson, Kath Roche, Ivy Grant, Charles Williams, Ethel Long, Dorothy Moir, Sylvia Yeldham and Sylvia Olmit. (Running time: 29 Mins.)

 

Cassette Side Two: Interviews recorded in the grounds and upstairs at St. James’s Church, Hatcham on November 6, 1994 by Deptford Community Radio

In Order of Appearance Barbara Hope-Smith, Arthur and Doris Moir, Stella Potter, the Mayor of the London Borough of Lewisham Councillor Gurbakhsh Garcha, The Rt. Hon. Joan Ruddock MP, the Reverend Frank Hung and finally the co-leader of the Deptford History Group and the joint author of the booklet Rations and Rubble, Sef Townsend. (Running time: 29 mins.)

 

 

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Pathé news footage of V2 attacks in London- Evidence that it features the aftermath of the New Cross Road disaster and rescue operation

 

The Woolworths historian Paul Seaton believes there is compelling evidence that Pathé archive news film includes footage of the rescue operation in the New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

He explains: ‘I wondered whether the footage could be of Smithfield [Smithfield Market was devastated in a V2 attack 8th March 1945] given the inside back cover image of Vol 3. of the huge work The Blitz Then And Now, but discounted this as Pathé supposedly logged the footage in January 1945, two months before Smithfield actually happened.

The girder structure of the tall corner property is exactly consistent with the construction technique used for Woolies stores built in the late 20s and early 30s and the unique style that was used for corner properties, just as the long girders would be consistent with the wide frontage of RACS [Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society].

Paul recognises F.W.Woolworth‘s’ and Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society fascia overlays in the wreckage and identifies structures consistent with the building of what was store number 362.

This was one of three branches ‘designed by the same architect and built by the same employed team of professional construction workers from the Metropolitan District Office in the same year 1929,  being stores 313, 362 and 370 respectively.’

Paul is also convinced that the camera pans round to show a view south of the New Cross Road with the outline of the New Cross Inn and what was then the New Cross Kinema (renamed Gaumont Cinema in 1950) in the distance (See at 53 seconds in the Pathé film above).

There is no doubt that there was a likelihood of a Pathé news camera team being on the scene of the disaster on that Saturday afternoon 25th November 1944. They were mobile and in their own vehicles.

The BBC’s home front reporter/observer Audrey Russell certainly got there quickly with the BBC’s  recording truck.

There is also a likelihood that London’s Regional Commissioner Admiral Evans of the Broke, identified in a later Pathé news report visiting the scene of a V2 attack, would have been there.

It was being recognised as London’s worst V2 attack. It remained Britain’s worst. No other V2 attack had so many fatal casualties.

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Remembering the victims and their families 80 year later

Paul Seaton remains deeply moved by what happened to staff and customers of Woolworths in New Cross and the surrounding community and the memories of survivors and relatives of people who died.

His commitment to honouring their memory takes into account the decades of trauma and grief arising for families, colleagues and friends of those affected.

He has created a graphic and online commemorative film to further that purpose, and provide assurance that they have not been and hopefully will never be forgotten.

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1935 Morris Woolworth’s van, shared between stores 57 Deptford High Street and 362 New Cross, and carrying their names and phone numbers on the old NEW and TID exchanges (the latter for Tideway, reflecting the fact that basins from the Surrey Docks came all the way to the High Street). The ‘Nothing over Sixpence’ slogan has been overpainted with ‘For variety and thrift’.

 

 

 

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Never could I hear you when you killed me- Sonnet for the 168

By Tim Crook

(In remembrance of the victims of the New Cross V2 disaster for the 80th anniversary 25th November 2024)

 

Never could I hear you when you killed me

Thunder through sky and space twice speed of sound

Unheard your death and hate when we so free

Laughing playing shopping on New Cross ground.

 

Children infants sauce-pans mothers’ rations

Clouded brick-dust shattered blood-red despair

Revenge cast down on the scattered ashes

Of those many lost dreams do not compare

 

You say you bombed the wrong planet my friend

Perhaps your boast reaching the moon was good

Those lives you took human comets transcend

All your rocket evil streaking withstood

 

All of our souls those named even unknown

We glow we love we live in hearts full-blown

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See: ‘New Cross V2 attack: The professor honouring those lost on SE London’s darkest day’ by Mercury Man published 4th January 2024 by The Greenwich Wire at https://greenwichwire.co.uk/2024/01/04/new-cross-v2-attack-the-professor-honouring-those-lost-on-se-londons-darkest-day/?utm_medium=email 

Some of the content of this posting is duplicated at Remembrance at Goldsmiths- a question of resilience?

It was decided to set out the research and writing on this subject as a separate feature to give focus for the families of the individuals who died in the New Cross Road incident and offer space for additions and more biographical information from descendants. 

Special thanks to the historian of Woolworths, Paul Seaton, who is the creator and author of the online Woolworths Museum for invaluable assistance in research, curating and creating commemorative multimedia,  and kind permission for the reproduction of archive.

Special thanks to Christine Ellis for additional research in respect of her grandmother Freida Sherwood and her family, and Andrew Martin and his father for additional research in respect of their great grandmother and grandmother Dorothy Griffiths and her family and granting permission for the inclusion of archive photographs.

Special thanks to Diane Robb for additional information and research into her relative Reginald Bradford Calder and her family.

Special thanks to Tracey Gilbert for the information about her aunts Pamela May and Joan Doris Phillips who were both in Woolworths when it was truck by the V2. Pamela was killed, but Joan survived. They were part of a large and impressive local family and we gain so much from knowing more about them.

Special thanks to Mark Hughes, Director of Estates & Facilities, Goldsmiths, University of London for providing access to the Geotech survey on bomb assessment for the Goldsmiths campus in 2019.

Special thanks to Charlotte and other volunteers at Grove Park Cemetery, Lewisham for research and uploading of monuments to victims of the V2 New Cross Road disaster.

Many thanks to the staff of Special Collections and Archives at Goldsmiths, University of London including Dr Alexander Du Toit, and staff alumni Pat Loughrey, Ian Pleace and Lesley Ruthven.

The Goldsmiths History Project contributes to the research and writing of the forthcoming That’s So Goldsmiths: A History of Goldsmiths, University of London by Professor Tim Crook.

Bibliography

Rations and Rubble: Remembering Woolworths The New Cross V2 Disaster Saturday 25th November 1944, edited by Jess Steele, Deptford Forum Publishing 1994.

And a very special tribute to Deptford Forum Publishing for maintaining research, interest and publication of the history of Deptford and South East London in its many ages and dimensions.

Hitler’s Rockets: The Story of the V2s by Norman Longmate, first published by Hutchinson 1985, republished by Pen and Sword Books 2009.

Doodlebugs and Rockets: Battle of the Flying Bombs by Ben Ogley, Froglets Publications Ltd; New edition, 1992.

Under Fire: Black Britain in Wartime 1939-45, by Stephen Bourne, The History Press 2020.

A Sixpenny Romance, celebrating a century of value at Woolworths by Paul Seaton, 3D and 6D Pictures, 2009.

The Blitz: Then and Now (Volume 1, 2, & 3) edited by Winston G. Ramsey, After the Battle publications, 1987-1990.

A Certain Voice by Audrey Russell, Ross Anderson Publications 1984.

War Illustrated Volumes 1 to 11, 1939 to 1946.

Newspapers: South London Press, News Chronicle, Daily Express, Daily Mail & The Northern Whig and Belfast Post.

National Archives, Lewisham Borough Council local studies and archives.

NXR- Geotech survey including bomb assessment for site, Goldsmiths Enterprise Hub, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2019.

Graphic of remembrance for the victims of the 1944 V2 disaster created by the curator of the Woolworths Museum, Paul Seaton