Qualla: 1939 Coventry bombing

1939 Coventry bombing: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Elsie Ansell was twenty-one, engaged to be married, and stopping in front of a jeweller's window to look at engagement rings. John Corbett Arnott was fifteen and walking back from his lunch break with his colleague Rex Gentle, who was thirty and also engaged. James Clay was eighty-two and had just stepped out of a cafe. Gwilym Rowlands was fifty and a Coventry council employee at work near the kerb. The bicycle leaning against the wall in front of Astley's shop, in the delivery basket of which somebody had placed five pounds of explosive, detonated at half past two on the afternoon of 25 August 1939. All five of them were killed. Seventy others were injured. A week later Britain declared war on Germany and the bombing was largely forgotten by everyone except the people of Coventry, who never have.

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1939 Coventry bombing: The S-Plan

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In April 1938 the IRA Army Council elected Sean Russell as Chief of Staff. He asked a senior volunteer named Seamus O'Donovan to draw up a plan to extend the campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland onto the British mainland itself. O'Donovan's strategy, called the Sabot...

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1939 Coventry bombing: Broadgate

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Broadgate in 1939 was the commercial centre of Coventry, a busy shopping street lined with jewellers, booksellers, cafes, and the spire of Holy Trinity rising behind the rooftops. The H. Samuel shop window was a magnet, the kind of display where young women browsed in the lunch h...

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1939 Coventry bombing: Clara Street

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Suspicion fell on the IRA within hours. Peter Barnes, when asked by detectives whether he had been to Coventry that day, replied that yes, he had, but Coincidences can happen, can't they? He was arrested on the spot at Canon Row police station in London. On 28 August Coventry Cit...

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1939 Coventry bombing: The Forgotten City

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Coventry was bombed again, much more severely, a year later. On the night of 14 November 1940 the Luftwaffe raid that gave the German military the verb coventriern, to coventrate, destroyed the medieval cathedral and over four thousand homes. The five who died in Broadgate in Aug...

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