Great Yarmouth At War

Hello There! During a brief holiday I had the opportunity to visit a number of second hand book shops in the Lincoln area.

At one of these book shops I found this sitting on the shelf.

I have a similar volume on Norwich, but felt as I was born and bought up in Great Yarmouth I would buy it and have a look through it later.

While doing this I was very shocked to find some proof for an old family tale which I had been told nearly fifty years ago!

My parents owned a guest house in Great Yarmouth, during the seventies. One year my Mother decided to start redecorating through the house ready for the Summer season.

Each room had layer upon layer of wallpaper and my job was to soak the wallpaper using a sponge and them strip it off.

The walls that met the house next door, (it was at the end of a line of houses), seemed fine but the walls facing the school which was next door were a problem!

When you got down to the last layer of paper the plaster on the walls just parted from the wall and came off with the paper! This was a property that was built over one hundred years before so exposed horizontal lines of wooden lath running the length of the building.

This weakening of the walls continued through the house until one day the postman came to the door to make a delivery and my mother answered the door looking a mess covered in dust and bits of wallpaper.

The post man asked her what she had been doing and she told him about the decorating.

He told her that he had been working in Great Yarmouth during the war and that a bomb had landed nearby, (he said the Styles school next door), and that the whole house had 'lifted up' with the effects of the explosion. As far as he knew the property had not been fully repaired since that time!

This remained an apocryphal story until I saw this:

The building on the end of the row of houses is where I lived as a child from 1973 to 1987. Next to it is a narrow alleyway and then the playground of Styles School.

This was the result of a raid by a Ju88 which,

'At 2.13pm a Junkers 88, based in France, dropped 13 high explosive bombs in a line east to west from Apsley Road to King Street. Damage was done all along this line and many houses and shops lost their windows and gad roofs damaged, particularly in Kent Square and many people were made homeless.

On the corner of Apsley Road and Rodney Road the garage of Reynolds was destroyed by a direct hit and in York Road another direct hit demolished a house killing a mother and daughter. The Girls school and the Manual school were damaged'

The land in front of the school, on the right hand side of Rodney Road, as you travel towards the Tower on the sea front, remained derelict for well into the 1980's and was used as a carpark for Summer visitors and was owned by Malcolm Scott, (as far as I am aware), who represented the Liberal Party in a number of local elections.

The area now looks like this:

The Trees have grown since the Styles School was knocked down and flats have been built in its place. The wall, although now shorter, is original. In the older photo there appears to be a roof covering some of the school playground but the wall was shortened and then a capping put on the top.

Looking closely at the roof and comparing it to the wartime photo it can be seen that some of the original slate roof tiles are different. Perhaps a result of wartime repairs? Although the chimney flashing is much newer.

Moving back, you can see that it is not possible to get a direct comparison as further flats have been built on the site of the old garage.

The taller wall once ran the remaining length of the road and was always in a poor condition. Many bricks were damaged and in a state of breaking up leaving an imprint of the surrounding mortar.

Looking more closely at the remaining wall, this is the sort of damage that was present. It is easy to believe that this is the remaining damage from 27th February 1941.