My regular early morning taxi rides to Hull Paragon station are educational. Some drivers are immigrants and I hear about their countries, why they came to Hull and how they find life here. Others are local men (nearly always men) who are full of surprises. One who took me down a few weeks ago was full of rock music trivia and another knew more about our local team Hull City FC than most football pundits.
But this week I learned something entirely new about two houses which are very close to our former home. In the five to ten minutes journey, I got talking to the driver about the changing face of Hull, how the Luftwaffe had obliged with some impromptu town planning during the Second World War and how some of the bomb damaged areas were only being renovated when I first came here 25 years ago. Hull was the most damaged city in Britain, with 95% of houses damaged, during the Second World War.
I told the driver about how a former colleague of mine, Professor Jeremy Crang, had been involved in advising the BBC documentaries Blitz: The bombs that changed Britain a few years ago about the bombing of Britain and how, in the documentary about Hull one particular area, the Avenues, had been left untouched. I speculated that this was because the rich merchants lived there, and they may have had ‘contacts’ across the North Sea. But the driver told me that this was not, strictly true.
Just off the Avenues are the Dukeries, not quite such prestigious housing as the Avenues, probably occupied by the middle managers of the companies owned by the rich merchants. One night of intense bombing in Hull which was mostly focused on the docks, the families of two houses in Blenheim Street took to their air raid shelters, thirteen people in total. In one of the families, two of the brothers fell sound asleep and when the ‘all clear’ was sounded the families returned to their houses but the two sleeping brothers were left outside to sleep.
After a while, the mother of the two sleeping sons decided that it was time they came in and sent her daughter out to wake them. At this point, a stray German bomber ditched its final bomb to enable it to lighten its load and scored a direct hit on the two houses. The daughter and the two brothers in the air raid shelter survived, everyone else—including two babies—was killed. Years later the houses were rebuilt and can be identified by the fact that they are slightly lower than the rest of the street.
I have walked past these houses many times and not noticed them and have still not taken a walk down to identify them. I will this Christmas. I wish I could look at them with relief that events like these were a thing of the past. Sadly, the kind of event recounted to me by the taxi driver must be daily life for the people of Gaza at the moment. This moves me deeply and I cannot put it any better than Theodore Dalrymple did this week in Taki’s Magazine:
“Never mind, as Samson whispered to no one in particular when he began to shake the columns. The Jewish billionaires have spoken and American educators have listened. It took one word—genocide—to do the trick. When pro-Palestinian protesters called for an end to the genocide in Gaza, the billionaires got busy. There is only one thing wrong: Americans decry some deaths but not others, and as we tell the world that we provide Ukraine with weapons because we believe in a “rules-based international order,” we also provide weapons that end up killing children on a huge scale in Gaza. 17,700 dead, 70 percent of them women and children, up to this writing on Dec. 11. What factor must Jewish deaths be multiplied by?”
Roger Watson is a retired academic nurse who lives in the UK.
He is currently engaged in a range of professional consultancies in the UK, Europe and China. He writes regularly for several outlets including The Daily Sceptic, The European Conservative, Country Squire Magazine and The New Conservative.
