We pick up on Jenny’s story as she explores the impact of the Baedeker Raids on Bootham Crescent.
I cannot end this history without returning to the Baedeker Raids of April 1942. The street you can walk down so peacefully today was once a scene of devastation. The Friends of York Cemetery group have meticulously recorded the victims of the Baedeker Raids of April 1942, and the list for Bootham Crescent is heartbreaking.
At Number 16, two people died: Thomas Cyril Adams and Mary Isabel MacMillan. At Number 18, where Mark would later be born, the records show no fatalities, but the 1939 Register told us the family was ‘"Away’". Perhaps their absence saved their lives, for looking at photographs of the damage, it appears that Number 18 was completely destroyed. If you walk down the street today, look at the bricks of number 18. There is a subtle change in the colour of the bricks where the house was rebuilt after the war. It is a scar, healed over but still visible if you know where to look
Other lives were lost that night in Bootham Crescent, including Halbert Ord, a 66-year-old firewarden who was hit directly and his body never recovered, Ernest Atkin, another fire warden, George Colman and Arthur Broadhead, both of the National Fire Service, Florence Little, John Ruskin, Ada Hooker, and Pauline Blenkin, just 11 years old.