The Hoglands Park Air Raid

[@montbrehain]

An excellent telling of a little known and sad part of our local history. I have walked by the plaque often and always spare a thought and pay my respects. A few years ago a mate and I went on a "Southampton Blitz" guided tour which took us to many unknown and often overlooked and forgotten shelters. There are many tales like this that deserved to be told and remembered. Thanks for this one...

[@peterw4338]

My mother went to the shelter with her newborn baby, the shelter was packed and she became claustrophobic and ran out to head to her mother’s home. Her living account was that the victims were buried in the shelter and left there.

[@Celticcross688]

They are not forgotten ❤

[@chucks6781]

I remember the yanks at this camp as they always handed out chewing gum to us kids playing cricket on the edge of the park & giving us a Christmas party with a small gift from Santa Claus

[@eric-wb7gj]

With a direct hit like that, I'm not sure quite how they would tell who everyone in it was. Years ago I knew a man who was in the fire brigade in Southampton during the early part of the war. He mentioned this very incident, & said he got there soon after, & it was horrible. He didn't elaborate further. His recollection was that they quickly filled the trench in, with remains inside. He had relatives who worked on the railways, & one was an ARP Warden. He stated;- - Due to all the old medieval cellars, they had been knocked through, so the wardens didn't have to come up from below ground during air raids. - Locomotives sometimes fell into these old cellars around the city, where the railway line had been built over them. - Locomotives & teams were sent out to try & find bombs that had dropped near railways. His relative didn't like this as vibrations could set off bombs. - He was working in the fire brigade when the docks got hit hard. There was a large warehouse with rum which caught fire. Due to the fumes, the fire crews got drunk. Their commanding officer came down & was going to put them all up on disciplinary charges, until it was found out what happened. - He used to go up into the brick towers of the Royal South Hants Hospital, & report the angles of where he'd seen the bombs drop back to the command center. A friend of his in the fire brigade did the same watch on different times, but didn't like the RSH, as when he went there, bombs fell nearby.

[@Craigrd]

An Uncle of mine was a Home Guard who was manning the Home Guard Station that was positioned at a point between Queensway, and Houndwell place at the time of this raid. Whilst you are correct in your summary of the names of those killed in this particular incident, there may have been, and possibly were many other persons who could not be identified afterwards. It is also more probable that no one actually knew how many people were in the shelter at the time of the raid except for the ARP personnel manning the shelter, and how many of those ARP were survivors or victims? My late Uncles own account from this incident indicates to me that the air attack warning sounded less than 1 minute before the detonation of the device that hit this shelter, and that the local Home Guard were given orders to shoot on site any domestic animals in, or about the shelter sometime afterwards. A point I would also make you aware of is that since this incident, basic standard plants and flowers struggle to grow in the ground in this area indicating the possible presents of a heavy duty cement, my Uncle informed me that after the incident the remains of the shelter were filled with a form of cement to seal it up. The trees that were there at the time, and that are still there now are angled outward as they were dislodged by the explosion when it happened. You can still see those trees today, they are straight in trunk up to four or five feet in height, but then angle hard to the left or to the right pending on how they were affected by the blast at the time.

[@davidknowles3459]

Also in that shelter were some Edwin Jones staff,who couldn't get into the Edwin Jones Shelter.Anold man told me that a jacket had been blown up into a tree.It had been left there,but after a few weeks it was taken down as the arms of the jacket were flapping in the wind,and scaring some people

[@markchristian241]

There was a tunnel used to go from the globe pub to the air raid shelter it was sealed up it had all the names above the door who lost there lives how would I know I ived in the globe in the late 70s and use to play in the cellar of me dads old pub the globe in Bernard st

[@southerneruk]

According, relations, the pulled out a number of bodies, many were not complete, bits were missing, they did clear up what they could, but the fear was some will never be accounted for because the bodies disintegrated and there were bits of bodies that were buried in the shelter

[@richardspeed7135]

Sad