SIXTEEN innocent victims of Warrington’s worst war-time atrocity were today remembered more than 80 years after the Thames Board Mills bombing.
Local resident Derek Vernon laid flowers and paid his respects with a minutes silence in memory of the sixteen men, women and children who were killed at Arpley Meadows at 5.03 pm on September 14, 1940, as he recalled the day that has always stayed fresh in his memory as his late Grandad, who fought at Dunkirk, talked about it regularly.
It was exactly 82 years since the day women and young children were amongst the casualties when a German bomber, on its way back from a bombing raid at Manchester, targeted the factory’s annual fete.
The stray German bomber was travelling along the Manchester Ship Canal and spotted a large crowd of people at the fete and decided to unload its last remaining bombs.
There was carnage as one bomb fell on the canteen burying 150 people in the wreckage, killing 16, and injuring a further 28, 15 of them seriously.
Later there were many conflicting eyewitness accounts from those who had seen the plane swoop over the town, but most agreed that the pilot was low enough to see exactly what he had bombed. The Warrington Fire Officer’s log reported, however, that German radio reports that evening claimed that the “Aluminium Mills at Bank Quay had been bombed.”
The Memorial
Those who lost their lives were:
Donald Ackerley,
Henry Williamson Cooper
Albert Wallace Cox,
Albert William Cox,
Rhoda Hannah Gittings Cox,
May Domville,
Amy Heath Edwards,
Ruth Jackson,
Beatrice Hannah Parker (Canteen Manageress)
Ann Lawson, aged two,
William Stanley Reynolds,
Lilian Maud Springham,
William George Springham,
Williams James Taylor
William John Taylor aged three,
Albert Webb, aged three.
