Photograph by Turner and Drinkwater. Courtesy of Maritime Museum: Hull Museums and Gallery
Where Were You?
- Waller Street
Where were you around midnight on June 6, 1915, when the L9 Zeppelin air ship crept through darkness and dropped chaos through the rooftops of the poor in Waller Street? Explosive bombs blasted bricks into heaps. Red dust coated windows. Incendiaries fell through bedroom ceilings of overcrowded, working-class houses, burning mostly women and children as they slept or tried to flee. It was the first and deadliest air attack of the First World War on Hull, a city unprepared, where 24 citizens were killed outright or died later of shock.
Photograph by Turner and Drinkwater. Courtesy of Maritime Museum: Hull Museums and Gallery
5 Walters Terrace, Waller Street, Hull, taken after the first Zeppelin raid on Hull on 7 June 1915.
Where are you in this aftermath photo of a narrow terrace of back-to-backs off Waller Street where at least 16 houses were demolished? Number 5 is rubble, beams and twisted iron bedsteads. Girls in stained, white smocks watch silently as something unseen happens further down the wrecked terrace. Uniformed men look on respectfully. Perhaps this is when Florence White, age 30, and her three-year-old son, George Isaac, are found perished at Number 3. Or when rescuers enter what’s left of number 4 to pull the body of Eliza Slade age 54, the widow of a fisherman, from the ruins. At number 11, 50-year-old boilermaker Alfred Matthews died too.
I imagine you standing among shocked neighbours, just beyond the frame. You are 19 and had lived at 20 Waller Street, one of ten members of our family crammed into a dingy two-up, two down. You survived to become Olive May Jordan, my grandmother, and when I see these photos, I know I am lucky to be here.
Photograph by Turner and Drinkwater. Courtesy of Maritime Museum: Hull Museums and Gallery
A bedroom in Waller Street, Hull, damaged after the first Zeppelin raid on Hull.
- Compartment 99
As I research the stories of the civilian women in wartime in my own family, I discover those who did not - or were unable to - serve or volunteer are rarely remembered in history books and limited visual anthologies. Yes, the names of the Waller Street casualties are etched into a city centre memorial sculpture, but I feel more stories should be told which speak of war’s disregard for human life, when ordinary civilians - mostly women and children - are killed with impunity.
On the anniversary of 6 June, I try to pay my respects to the Waller Street women I believe you knew, by laying flowers on their graves. I read that the L9’s Zeppelin’s commander, Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Mathy, whose airship dropped more than 60 bombs on Hull that June evening, is buried at Cannock Chase German Military Cemetery in Staffordshire. He was shot down a year later on a raid over Guildford. His final resting place is marked by a significant memorial and headstone bearing his name and rank.
From burial records, I learn the Waller Street women are buried in Hull’s old Western Cemetery among 495 casualties from two world wars. Searching in the shadows cast by lime, ash and cherry trees, I find no visible trace, only Commonwealth War Graves of those who served. Across a busy road in another part of the cemetery, is a tall, stone crucifix to the ‘dead of the Great War’. I ask at the cemetery office and am told that although Eliza rests in a family grave, unmarked, Florence and her son are in Compartment 99, a public hole for the poor. Their grave was never marked. Is this not a war grave too? I ask if something more can be done to recognise the civilians in the ground. A little wooden marker, bearing burial numbers not names, is hammered into the soil among the daisies.
© Lee Karen Stow
(Left) Compartment 99, a public grave containing the remains of Florence White and her son, George Isaac; (Right) Compartment 99 showing the new, wooden grave marker.
- Visual Traces
I visit Waller Street where nothing remains. Even the street name is gone. After the Second World War the houses were demolished in the slum clearances to make way for a supermarket and car park. Also lost is the 1914-18 war memorial to the 30 men who enlisted from here and never returned. I estimate where you once lived, at Number 20. A shopper wheels a trolley piled with groceries to her car and a man pulls up outside the gym. Then I notice the overhead red brick arches of the disused railway line that once ran along the backs of the Waller Street terraces and helped the L9 Zeppelin to navigate its path of destruction. Instead of hitting this infrastructure, the airship unleashed its missiles on people already crushed hard by life, factory work and squalor.
From the overgrown railway banks thick with scrub, wildflowers and apple trees, I gather ten fading bluebells and fragments of a red poppy. I photograph these as the only traces I can find of the place where, one Spring evening, ordinary folk like you climbed the stairs to their beds and never woke to the dawn.
© Lee Karen Stow
(Left) Red poppy and (right) Bluebells, both from the old embankment near to the First World War site of Waller Street in Hull.
With thanks to Arthur Credland, author of The Hull Zeppelin Raids 1915-1918
(published 2014)
Dr Lee Karen Stow is a photographer and visual researcher. This is the second photo essay in Visual Traces, a visual narrative exploring the wartime experiences of civilian, working-class women in her family and birthplace of Hull through the traces they left behind. Read Lee's first article, Unfolding Hankies.