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Mill Road Hospital
From the wartime website http://liverpoolremembrance.weebly.c...-hospital.html
Today is the 70th Anniversary of this event.
Mill Road Hospital played its part during the Liverpool Blitz helping to treat the injured from bombing raids across the city. On 3rd May 1941 the hospital itself fell victim to the German bombs, leading to large loss of life in one of the saddest chapters of the WW2 bombings.
The bomb that hit caused total devastation when it landed in a courtyard to the rear of the hospital. A maternity ward was hit killing mother's and their new born babies. Amazingly the ward next to the Maternity was full of injured soldiers, yet they recieved no injuries from the blast. Many drivers died in the ambulance room that was in the courtyard and many ambulances and other vehicles in the area were set alight. A number of medics operating on a man were also killed, while the man himself survived. A nurse attending the operation had to scramble through a window to raise the alarm. Many more staff members and patients lost their lives in this tragedy. Three of the ward blocks were totally destroyed.
The rescue workers faced a daunting task with so many people trapped beneath the debris. To add to their struggle bombs kept falling nearby making the rescue even more dangerous. They risked so much to help, they are the unsung heroes. A lot of unaffected patients were moved out to other hospitals as the rescue took hold, the building being too unsafe for them to stay there. Those injured in the blast were helped and if possible transfered elsewhere for treatment. Then the grim task of bringing out the dead was undertaken, hampered by the debris and fires. It became clear that a few of the bodies could not be recovered so soldiers were brought in to lime over and cement the area.What the rescue workers witnessed must have stayed with them forever.
The number of people killed in the bombing will probably never be known. Mill road was a working hospital that was recieving a large amount of casualties from raids across the city. It was hit during the Liverpool May Blitz, one of the most fierce and continuous attacks upon the city. Victims would have died at the hospital from injuries recieved elsewhere, though we have no way of telling how each persons death was caused.
From records I have found details on 78 people that died as a result of the bombing at the hospital and have listed them at the bottom of this page. The true figure however will be much higher.
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Thanks for highlighting these Tony, on this very day, the actual anniversaries of such.
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Thanks Spike as I keep saying - excellent site.
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The Mill Road story is in tonights Liverpool Echo
They interviewed me about this.
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They have now altered the story. They had put Mill Road Hospital, West Derby. All fixed now.
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Just read - excellent! Well done!
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I was talking to a fella I have known for years and it turns out "Baby Connor" was his sister, "Connor" being the surname.
He has seen the interview and showed it to all his family.
Mart
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What a turn up that is mart and what a small world.
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Chatting to him again last night, his mother was badly injured in the raid and survived, in fact, at 94, she's still going strong.
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Great stuff Mart. I got your text about this and was going to get a flight back but they had Shuffle board on the games so I stayed ha ha.
Serious though this is fantastic. Me thinks I need to get to the Weety.
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Spike, the post had me in tears especially the bit about the mothers & babies and the poor ambo's just having a cuppa, as a boy born after the war (may'49) reading sites like this you have to marvel how the mother's & fathers copied during a terrible ordeal like that,
I do know listening to one story from my mum how she felt sorry for my dad he tried & tried to join up and they wouldn't take him due to some rule he was in a reserved occupation, even to the extent he went to Warrington to try, and decided to tell some porkies according to mam everything was going great until a sgt from Liverpool turned up!! I don't know what you call them but dad kept on recieving these WHITE FLOWERS until one time he was set on badly coming home from work, after he recovered he went down with all these flowers/ letters to Liverpool, the Army there decided to get dad to enlist where he did his army service in his reserved occupation in & around Liverpool until he was de-mobbed, The reason I'm relaying this story every boy want's to look up to his dad as a hero and couldn't understand when I was a kid why he woudn't talk about the war and I got into a lot of fight's when they called him a coward
