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Hardly had the fight from the burning truck and the
explosion extinguished themselves than they were replaced by
flames from the nearby gas holders, eerily dancing over the scene
of destruction. The huge advantage thereafter was having so many
trained units at hand to deal with every problem. The Wardens
and Home Guard were swiftly there tending the injured and
comforting the rest and it was they who summoned the other
services needed, all of them on wartime alert. It was a clear
but moonless night but luckily the electricity and water supplies
were not affected and these were soon vital to the work in hand.
The National Fire Service soon put out the fire at the gas works
and they were soon joined by the Local Rescue and Ambulance Party
reinforced by Royal Air Force ambulances, by lsleham Ambulance
Party, Burwell Rescue Party, Fordham Red Cross Ambulance and
Royal Air Force personnel from Snailwell and Newmarket.
Once the seriously injured were away to hospital the minor
cases were taken to an Emergency Rest Centre set up in the
Grammar School, supervised by the Women's Voluntary Services who
worked in shifts throughout the weekend, closing down to allow
the school to resume on the Monday. Damage had been done to the
official Local First Aid Point, but the nurses were able to treat
several cases there. The local police sergeant set up an
Incident Post in one room of Roselyn, the Bradleys' cottage in
Mereside, the church hall was used by the YMCA for serving tea
and a mobile canteen arrived from Cambridge to sustain all who
need more than tea throughout a traumatic night. The Queen's
Messengers; Flying Squad also brought in cooked food and supplies
in large containers from the emergency depot in Over. At the
Rest Centre there was also an Information Bureau using a
travelling van with a loudspeaker and clothes were brought in
from Cambridge and parcels from the Lord Mayor of London's
Distress Fund arrived during the following week and were
distributed in the Baptist schoolroom by the Rotary Club and
representatives of the 'Daily Sketch..' The British Red Cross
also treated many minor injuries and the two local doctors were
kept busy all night and for days afterwards catching up with
minor injuries that might have turned worse.
Gradually the chaos of that night gave way to the relative
order of day, unravelling the extent of the damage and the
miracle of Ben Gimbert's escape from the epicentre of the blast.
Houses and shops as far away as the high street and to the north
of the town in Julius Martin Lane and south to Stone Bridge had
roofs, walls, ceilings and windows shattered. On the same day as
the blast the Wardens took a census of the damaged buildings, as
a result of which about a hundred workmen were brought into Soham
to speed up repairs and many homes were repaired by evening. It
was estimated there had been damage to 761 properties in all, 13
of them beyond repair, 153 seriously damaged of which 36 were
rendered temporarily uninhabitable, these within 350 yards and
the rest within 900 yards of the explosion. The church, only 700
yards away, suffered only damage to glass. Windows were
shattered in Wicken and Fordham.
Fourteen public authorities gave assistance to Soham,
bypassing red tape with admirable enterprise at a time when
emergency plans were constantly being implemented. Many vehicles
were made available to transport the homeless to friends and
temporary homes and very quickly too at such a time the Army
Police set up a guard on the district. Nothing was left to
chance. Rationing had kept people low in stocks of food,
although hoarding had been an early symptom of the war.
Emergency ration cards were provided, entitling the holders to a
week's supply of food and clothing coupons and grants of money
were issued for crisis needs. Even a mobile laundry van arrived
to wash what was taken to it and the dignitaries to arrive
included the Bishop of Ely and the Regional Commissioner and
other top personnel of Civil Defence Control from Cambridge mid
Newmarket. The country was geared for worse than this night at
this and earlier stages of the war.
My kin, the Bradleys, living in Roselyn cottage near the
Station Hotel, who were bombed awake like the rest, found
themselves uninjured but the house damaged. The roof facing the
station had lost its slates but it was the rebound, caused by a
vacuum from the explosion, that hit them harder, forcing in the
windows on the other side and a bedroom door off its hinges,
wedging it firmly in the door frame. Eva Bradley, the mother,
rushed at once to her baby John lying in his cot, flinging
herself over him but finding him unharmed. When she returned to
her bed she found three bricks lying where her head would have
been. She thought later of her china cabinet and its precious
treasurers, but although the locked door had been forced open and
shut and although they removed rubble and dust, not one item of
china or glass had been broken! The Bradleys moved into an empty
cottage next door while theirs was being repaired.
Not far from the station stands Clark and Butcher's Mill,
then in overtime production for the war effort, but only its
steam engine had been damaged in the explosion. The mill's
Managing Director, Jack Clark, recorded his impressions of that
night in 'A Master Miller Remembers' in the 1970s. Shocked awake
in the adjacent Mill House, he trod broken glass to the smashed
window only to be stabbed in the face by a broken curtain rail.
The mill was his responsibility, but in the road he was soon
distracted by people wandering about dazed and dusty as if after
an earthquake. Many had no idea what had happened or what to do
or where to go, so he led some back to his house where his wife,
a native of Wicken, made tea for them, boiling the kettle on an
open fire since gas supplies had been cut off for both Soham and
Fordham. Mr Clark was also a special constable and a member of
the Home Guard.
A Londoner living nearby, Mrs E. Tyrell, said the night was
worse than any she had suffered in the blitz and her neighbour,
Mr Wallace, an ex-naval man, likened the blast to the force of a
typhoon. Another nearby resident, Mr J.T. Skipper, pulled his
three-year-old grandson to safety as part of the roof of their
cottage was crashing down on his bed, the boy escaping with no
worse than a scratch. The flames from the gas works were
unnerving while they lasted and the Maltons, living in numbers
one and two Gas Lane, were relieved to see them put out. The
blast had damaged their cottages but left them uninjured, the
only casualty being the family canary which succumbed to gas
fumes. Two chunks of the station platform landed in the garden
of number two, now called 'The Maltons,' where lives Edith
Canham, nee Malton, and husband Stuart, formerly of Wicken, and
there the chunks remain as weighty ornaments.
There are light-hearted recollections of the night. John
Gilbey, then aged five, of Bushel Lane on the other side of
Soham, recalls waking up and wondering at the strange whirring
sound downstairs, The family gramophone, long seized up, had been
freed by the blast, but once it had wound down it would not wind
up again. John Ford, the Biology and Chemistry Master and Deputy
Headmaster at the Grammar School awoke in the belief, like many
anothers, that this was a bombing from the air, inexplicably
without siren warning. As ARP Post Warden he pulled his trousers
over his pyjamas and cycled down Clay Street over glass - without
getting a puncture - and joined the helpers. For a few days he
was apt to be known as 'Bluey' for the colour of those pyjamas
showing below his trousers. There had to be moments to ease the
strain.
Eric Isaacson, a Soham butcher and, at 24, a Leading Fireman
in the National Fire Service, received directions soon after the
blast to go to the blazing gas works then to the Goods Yard,
which received some damage, to attend a small fire there. When
an American officer asked him if he had seen the fireman, Eric
directed him to the gas works, not realising he meant the engine
fireman. Corrected, he accompanied that officer to the crater
and got down into it with him. An ambulance backed to the crater
using a small searchlight which soon exposed the body of Jim
Nightall. As the smallest of the four men now in the crater Eric
was persuaded to release the body from the rubble near those huge
driving wheels and the hissing locomotive and the scalding heat
of the firebox. He found Jim with his head resting on an arm as
if in sleep. His shirt was open baring his chest where scalding
had peeled the skin. He turned the twisted body so that the
others could pull it out, then he crawled his way out from the
worst ordeal of his life.
There was still some fear at this stage that the bombs on
the other wagons might go up and Eric was one of those ordered to
inspect them, adding danger upon danger to one who was fast
asleep not long before. It would have occurred to no-one on that
night that locomotive W. D. 7337 of the 2 - 8 - 0 'British
Austerity' heavy goods type weighing 128 tons with tender, lying
there stricken, would come to be rebuilt. Yet it was.
Originally built by the North British Locomotive Company of
Glasgow as works number 25205 in 1943, it ran after refurbishment
for many years on the Longmoor Military Railway in Hampshire as
'Sir Guy Williams' and was finally retired and scrapped in 1967.
The Soham line was vital for carrying heavy freight at this
time and it had to be restored as soon as possible. To this end
the Cambridge breakdown crane arrived in Soham at 5.10 a.m. to
rerail the engine and remove the wreckage of the tender. Through
Lieutenant-Colonel C.P. Parker of the Royal Engineers the Railway
Company acquired the assistance of about a hundred United States
engineer troops with two bulldozers to fill the crater and firm
the surface to carry new rails where 120 feet had been destroyed.
This party arrived at 10.50 a.m. about an hour-and-a-half after
the arrival of the Company's ballast train and they worked
throughout the day. The two lines through the station were
reopened to traffic at 8.20 p.m. after a lapse of only
eighteen-and-a-half hours. The station, as such, was opened for
light passenger traffic next day, June 3rd, with temporary
booking facilities, but emergency signalling had to remain for a
further four days.
The Inquiry into the accident was opened on 16th June headed
by Major G.R.S. Wilson for the Ministry of War Transport,
assisted by Captain N. Fawcett the Inspector of Explosives at the
War Office. Ben Gimbert was the chief witness, supported by
Herbert Clarke and Will Fuller, but none of them was fit to give
evidence until 18th July, although Ben was interviewed briefly on
5th June. The first suspicion was that an over-heated axlebox
had caused the fire but every possibility was studied and nobody
was certain at the end.
The Carriage and Wagon Examiner at March, G. Stevens, a man
of long experience, had taken an hour to examine the train there,
feeling all the axleboxes after the eighty-nine mile journey with
the back of his hand, tapping all the wheels and looking round
and under every wagon. Such men were always alert for hazards,
not to mention sabotage, at that time, and were taking no
chances. Stevens found no defects and no axlebox likely to
overheat to cause a fire and none of the wagons was overdue for
oiling. He and two other examiners had seen overheated axleboxes
but had never known one to start a fire. The War Office and the
Railway Police probed for long into the possibilities of sabotage
without finding any reason to believe this was the cause. An
attempt to ignite one of the wagon sheets by using combustible
material and simulated draught such as would fan flames on a
moving train also failed to convince and Major Wilson was forced
finally to summarize thus: 'I think it must be assumed that there
was some substance present in the wagon which was particularly
sensitive to ignition by a trifling spark from the train engine
(or perhaps from the engine of a passing train) which otherwise
would have proved harmless.' Nothing had come of trying to set
light to a dusting of sulphur residue such as might have been
clinging to the wagon and the Inquiry's conclusion must be said
to have been inconclusive.
A 'Salute the Soldier' service had been planned for Soham
church on the following Sunday, to include a parade in the
Recreation Ground, but this was altered to a service of
thanksgiving for the saving of Soham. The church needless to
say, was packed. Tiny fragments of glass were still tinkling
down from the windows as the Reverend Percy Fletcher Boughey
began his address with the wholly appropriate words: 'But for
such men as these . . .' There were big attendances too at the
funerals of Jim Nightall and Frank Bridges on 6th June when
donations to the Tribute and Relief Fund amounted to £1,760.
This money was, however, distributed thinly rather than given to
those who most needed it. Those funerals coincided, of course,
with D- Day and all minds were soon turned to that.
The youngest person living in Soham on the night of the
explosion was six days old. She was Diane, daughter of Gladys
and Roger Turner, living so near at Mill Corner where the ceiling
spilled dust over the bed without causing more damage to the
occupants than leaving a piece of grit in the baby's eye. Her
life was saved by brave men that night. Jim Brown had been the
first Soham man to be called up for active service and when he
and the other survivors came home for good it was, through the
intervention of those railwaymen, to the town he had left behind.
The awards of the George Cross to Ben Gimbert and Jim
Nightall were gazetted on July 25th 1944, the only instance of
the award being made to two railwaymen for the same incident.
The implication that Frank Bridges may not have been aware of the
contents of the wagons when he came forward to assist must be
dismissed, if only because if he had not known he would have
anticipated the worst at such a time. Although drivers and
firemen and others involved along the routes were given no
specific details of the loads they were pulling or controlling
they were seldom in any doubt during the war. The guard was
fully aware since it was his responsibility to inspect the wagons
and the signalmen along the routes were sharp on recognition.
But with awards it appeared to be all or nothing and neither he
nor Herbert Clarke received any acknowledgement of their deeds
apart from being included in the inscriptions on the plaques
placed in Soham church and, eventually, Soham Village College.
We should honour too the conscience and concern of the
Americans present in this area at the time for the people of
Soham after their shattering experience. The American Red Cross
were soon distributing parcels, wonderfully varied in their
contents at such a time of austerity, to all the infants in
Soham. There never was such an interchange of sympathy and unit
of purpose.
- Extract from 'But For Such Men As These' by Anthony Day,
published by S.B. Publications, ISBN 1 85770 060 0.
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