Exhaustive record an online source for all

Local historian John Penny has just made his 40-plus years of research findings on the wartime air raids on Bristol and surrounding area available to everyone online. It is, says Eugene Byrne, an amazing resource for present and future generations.

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MOST of us think we know a bit about the German bombing of Britain in the Second World War, if only from movies and no end of TV dramas and documentaries.

But "the Blitz" is a big subject with a lot of nuances and literally millions of individual stories and family legends. While local historians in the towns and cities that were bombed, be they London, Belfast, Birmingham, Coventry or wherever, can tell you a lot about what happened when and where, nowhere in the UK has a more detailed historical record of its Blitz than Bristol does. Not even London.

Some of this is thanks to efficient record-keeping and a wealth of eyewitness accounts from the time published in books and the local press.

But what really puts us ahead of the rest is the 40-plus years of research carried out by John Penny, not just because he's uncovered a huge amount of information about what happened here, but because he looked into the story from the German side as well.

John has written several books, articles and pamphlets about his findings down the years, but all of his work recently went online, available to all, free of charge. It's a superb resource for academics to casual family historians and everyone in between.

John is an engineer by profession, and when he returned to his native Bristol in 1978 after some years working in London, he decided to enrol in a class run by Leonard Nott, an enthusiastic historian of the Fishponds neighbourhood.

"He often gave his students little projects," John told BT.

"One of mine was to discover as much as I could concerning the two Germans buried in Greenbank cemetery who had been killed when their aircraft was shot down over Fishponds in 1940.

"I subsequently found the graves, but also noticed the rows of civilian gravestones marking the last resting place of a number of the victims of the 'Blitz on Bristol.'