Remembering the Blitz: Was Hull really the forgotten city?

VIEWING THE DAMAGE: Winston Churchill visiting Hull in November 1941

The Way it Was

In partnership with Hull History Centre

Dr James Greenhalgh is an Associate Professor in History in the School of History and Heritage at the University of Lincoln. He specialises in urban and cultural histories of nineteenth and twentieth century Britain, especially urban and domestic environments, and how they are experienced and governed. He has written extensively about Hull’s wartime experiences

Over the last three years, in partnership with Hull History Centre and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, our project The Half Life of the Blitz has been investigating how Hull and its people have changed since the Second World War.

Central to this investigation has been examining the key elements of local identity through oral histories and heritage workshops.  

Although Hull’s citizens set great store by many overlapping aspects of their heritage – the denying of the arsenal to King Charles, the rich history of the maritime industry, or the storied rivalry of rugby league in the city, to name a few – the story of bombing during the Second World War remains one of the most important and frequently commented-upon aspect of Hull’s identity

The powerful legacy of the Blitz’s, even as it fades from living memory, is unsurprising; it is indelibly written in both the postwar neo-classical and modernist architecture that emerged from the rubble of the devastated city centre, and in the soon-to-be-revitalised shell of the bombed-out National Picture Theatre on Beverley Road.

Yet just as evident is a complicated postwar mythology and folk memory. This story contends that Hull, despite being the most bombed city outside of London was ignored during the war, going unreported in the press alongside its people’s sacrifice, whilst only ever referred to as a ‘North East Coast Town’.

It remains one of the most common and enduring components of the interviews our project collected.

REDUCED TO RUBBLE: Hull city centre on May 8, 1941

Was Hull the most bombed city outside of London?

The first component of this diptych of Hull identity is the hardest to establish, as is there is no clear set of parameters against which such a claim might be judged.

If we examine the postwar bombing surveys, Hull was not the city with the highest acreage of damage, nor the greatest acreage compared to either geographical size or population. Moreover, other cities claim a similar distinction, including Liverpool and Birmingham.

In recent times, the media has been happy to circulate versions of the claim about Hull’s status; in 2011 for example, when the façade of the National Picture Theatre was listed, English Heritage’s Maddy Jago claimed that: ‘Together with London, Hull was the most heavily bombed city in the UK, with 95 per cent of its houses damaged.’

A 2015 Yorkshire Post article claimed that: ‘Hull was the most devastated city in the UK per square mile – even more than London – but a Government notice preventing its naming for reasons of national security was only lifted in the 1970s.’

Yet these claims are hard to substantiate and often based on misinterpretations of data. There were, for example, in excess of 100,000 incidents of damage to homes, but these were overwhelmingly incidents of ‘minor damage’, like a broken window or smashed slates, and there were often repeated instances registered at the same property.

Hull was certainly heavily bombed. In 1941 Government observers reported unusually severe damage to the centre of the city, whilst a 1942 Ministry of Housing and Local Government memorandum noted that on a visit to the city, Winston Churchill commented that he had ‘not seen a place which had suffered more than Hull’.

Comparing Government reports and histories of the Blitz makes it possible to say that Hull weathered around 86 raids of any type suffering as many as 900 alerts, with approximately 4,000-5,000 of its around 92,000 homes damaged beyond repair, and c.1200 deaths. Twelve per cent of all industrial space was lost and half the central shops were destroyed.

The ‘North East Coast Town’

Alongside this, arguably more common experience of severe bombing, the truly unique feature of Hull’s wartime memory is the persistence of the idea that the city was only ever referred to as a ‘North East Coast Town’ or similar.

The story goes that Hull was so excluded from Britain’s national record of the Blitz that the city was not even named and thus its contribution to the war remained unheralded.

However, as Philip Greystone acknowledged as far back as 1991, this is a distortion of the truth. First, Hull was not unusual in being referred to in this way; both Bridlington and South Shields were amongst the several towns and cities referred to as North East Coast or Coastal town in press during the Second World War.

Indeed, a city like Manchester might be North West town, Exeter might be South West Coast town and there are hundreds of reports in national and local newspapers that masked exact locations to appease censors nervous about assisting enemy intelligence.

Despite this practice, the public never lacked knowledge of where was being bombed nor how severely cities had been hit. Newspapers were savvy in making clear what locations had been bombed without breaching the censorship rules.

News that a North East Coast town had been bombed might be accompanied by the judiciously placed addendum that the ‘Germans say Hull’ or ‘Hull, claim Nazis’ a practice adopted by both regional and national newspapers.

Nor is it the case that Hull was not explicitly named in the national newspapers of record. In The Times in March 1941 the paper reported a ‘Concentrated Raid on Hull’ with ‘considerable damage to small houses’, whilst on July 19 of the same year the paper told the nation of a ‘Sharp Raid on Hull’ with ‘heavy casualties feared’.

ANXIOUS TIMES: Women reading the casualty bulletin on Holderness Road

In October 1942 in a section entitled ‘Hull After 70 raids’ The Times again detailed the ‘unbroken spirit of the citizens’ acknowledging that ‘Hull has suffered more than most places from bombing’ adding that ‘The Prime Minister…has seen what Hull has suffered and knows its citizens.’

The question is, then, why this conflation of being forgotten and the use of ‘North East Coast Town’ stuck so firmly in local memory.

The North East Coast Town phrase was, as far as newspapers, media and local government sources suggest, not used much, if at all in the immediate aftermath of the war.

The production of Tom Geraghty’s book A North-East Coast Town: ordeal and triumph, published by the Hull Corporation in 1951, seems to have begun the process of popularising the phrase, but even then, it remained rarely used.

Indeed, in local press records the phrase was only used to refer to anything other than Geraghty’s book twice before 1970. Part of the reason for this was that the book received only a limited circulation until a 1978 reprint, after which the phrase and its association with Hull’s reputedly forgotten part in the national story of the Blitz seems to have begun to gain currency.

Letters from the public in the 1990s – many seemingly written as a series of wartime anniversaries rolled around that focused heavily on London and, occasionally, Coventry – reflected both the adoption of the phrase as a synonym for Hull’s forgotten part in the war, but also its attachment to a broader notion of disregard for Hull.

Promotion for John Oram’s play Vital Spark in 1992, though set between 1911 and 1968, referred to the ‘sufferings of a “North East Coast Town” through two world wars’, whilst an advertisement for the 1992 video Hull at War trailed footage of Churchill’s ‘visit to the North East Coast town’.

WHERE THE PHRASE CAME FROM? The book by Tom Geraghty

Moreover, in the letters page of the Hull Daily Mail on December 19, 1992 the video’s producer Ronald Fairfax argued that the ‘veils of mystery’ should be lifted concerning Hull’s sacrifice during the war, adding that ‘such official anonymity has its leftovers even today’.

Fairfax’s comment was both prescient and revealing; over the next 30 years the notion that Hull has been left out of the national narrative of the Blitz has been nurtured against years of broader Governmental neglect, economic challenges and a cultural disregard for the city, even as Hull was christened City of Culture in 2017.

The designation of the North East Coast Town is thus a kind of short-hand means of expressing frustration, even if, as I have argued, its veracity bears only the most cursory of examinations.

Its persistence amongst people for whom the war occurred only in the stories of parents and grandparents tells us not merely about the sometimes-overlooked story of Hull’s Blitz, but a broader story of how local people to this day internalise and reproduce a sense of dissatisfaction that Hull is continually overlooked by the rest of the nation.