Tag Archives: Hartlepool

Scarborough Attack – 1914

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Scarborough Castle, Yorkshire (with “Dramatic” filter in use.

This is an expanded version of the article that appeared on the Facebook page of the Numismatic Society of Nottinghamshire. I thought it would be quick and easy as away of adding a post without much work, as Julia has me down for various household jobs today. It took longer than I thought. Easy things are seldom as simple as they sound.

Wednesday 16 December 1914. 8 am. Three German warships appear out of the mist and open fire, sending 500 shells into the undefended town of Scarborough. Seventeen people are killed and eighty suffer serious injuries, two of them dying in the next few days. 

The ships then sail off to attack Whitby, killing 3 people and damaging many houses. Three shells hit the abbey, including a direct hit on the West Front. The damage they inflicted on Scarborough Castle and Whitby Abbey can still be seen today. The West Front at Whitby was rebuilt in the 1920s, using pre-war photographs and pictures as a guide. The remains of the barrack block at Scarborough were demolished and removed.

Whitby Abbey

Meanwhile, another group of battleships bombard Hartlepool, which, with three guns in coastal batteries, is better able to fight back. According to research done in 1965, 122 civilians were killed and 443 wounded. Five soldiers and two sailors were also killed and 14 military personnel wounded. German casualties, inflicted by the Hartlepool guns, were 8 killed and 12 wounded.

Private Theophilus Jones of the Durham Light Infantry, killed at Hartlepool, becomes the first British soldier to be killed in Britain for 200 years.

Medallion commemorating the dastardly attack on Scarborough, 1914

In military terms little was accomplished. The Germans had multiple aims – to ambush and sink defending Royal Navy ships, to depress civilian morale, to tie up British troops to defend the coast, and to inflict losses on munitions production. They seem to have failed in every one. Equally, the Royal Navy failed to engage the retreating German ships in decisive action and were unable to demonstrate their control of the North Sea to either the Germans or the British public. Politically, “Remember Scarborough!” became a powerful recruiting slogan, and American attitudes began to harden against Germany.

Government propagandists chose to concentrate on Scarborough as it was the best known of the three towns, being a popular holiday resort, and had no defences or military production facilities. It did have radio stations working with the Royal Navy, but that was ignored at the time.

Scarborough would be attacked again, though there is no medallion for the second attack. On September 4 1917, a U-Boat surfaced and engaged anchored trawlers in South Bay. They were being employed by the Royal Navy as minesweepers and, being armed, were able to defend themselves. Shots were exchanged – one British sailor was killed and stray German shells killed two civilians on shore. After four years of war, showing how the nation had become accustomed to death, the reporting showed no more outrage at this news than it did to the rest of the local news.

The reverse of the medallion.

North Bay, Scarborough. Looking North.

 

More Postcodes

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Postcodes today. As usual, all my palns have fallen apart so I’m falling back on the old favourites.

IP 23, CT 17 and TS 25.

We’ll start with TS 25. I used to live in Middlesbrough (note the single “o”), though I was in TS3. It was not the most sought after location and from our ninth floor flat we were able to spend a year watching people dismantle the last vestiges of shipbuilding on the Tees. They replaced it with a retail park. We could see two nuclear plants from our flat – the private one at ICI a few miles down the road (though we had to stick our heads out of the kitchen window to do it) and the one at Hartlepool.

The one at Hartlepool is in the TS 25  postcode area. Normally they put nuclear power stations in desolate areas of the country, often surrounded by open country and beaches. In the case of Hartlepool they got the desolate bit right but put it within easy nuking distance of Middlesbrough and Hartlepool. If the whole thing had lit up it wouldn’t have made a lot of difference to the surrounding area, as a post-apocalyptic urban wasteland was basically the look the town planners had already achieved. The ability to glow in the dark would have been a positive step forward.

Like Heysham, Hartlepool was one of the later generation of nuclear power stations seen as being safe enough to build near towns. This means it is easier to get the electricity where it nweeds to be without damaging the environment with pylons. On the other hand…

IP 23 is in Sufflok and includes Brome, a village containing one of the 38 round-towered churches in Suffolk. I imagine this was because they couldn’t get the hang of corners. It’s probably good for strength or economy, but not much good for furniture. I’ve always wondered how you go about furnishing a windmill after converting one to living accommodation.

There are 185 of them in the UK. That’s out of a total of 16,000 churches.

CT 17 will have to wait as it’s time for a fix of junk TV.

Today’s photo is a large cast iron coat of arms – the state of Württemberg fro those of you who are interested. It’s up for auction and we are prepared to put it in the post if you feel the urge to pay for the stamps.