The Bombing of James Street in 1941:

From Jim Davidson's 'A Bairn at War'

(In 1941 on the...) 29th September, James Street in Peterhead was bombed. The local press announced simply that a north-east town had been bombed and a large number of civilians who were sheltering in the ground floor of a tenement were killed when the tenement received a direct hit. In some instances, whole families were wiped out. The press went on to say:

"We are not permitted to give the names of all who were killed nor to indicate their number - instead we offer a silent sympathy in the face of what Mr Churchill described as 'a crime without a name.'"

Here are the names of those who died, with their ages:

Isabella Whyte Barron (69)
William Barron (69)
Edith Cormack Cameron (6)
James Lees Cameron (2)
Jessie Scott Cameron (40)
Lorna Cameron (12 months)
Henry Charles Chalmers (7)
Marjory Angus Chalmers (4)
Sheila Chalmers (11)
Jessie Cormack (64)
Agnes Clark Duncan (20)
Isabella Nora Hutcheson Duncan (38)
John McQueen Duncan (19)
Margaret Isabella Duncan (17)
Andrewina Bruce Geddes Lacey (5)
Margaret Buchan Lacey (11)
May Buchan Lacey (3)
Sarah Bruce Lacey (33)
Jane Anne Brown Portes Lawson (6)
Douglas McKay (3)
Gladys Wilson McKay (7)
Jean McKay (36)
Alexander Mackie (47)
Isabella Jane Mackie (48)
Williamina Elizabeth Milne (50)
Henry Charles Shepherd (63)
Margaret Jane Craig Shepherd (60)
Williamina Strachan (45)
Helenora Watson (46)

These are the casualties who died at Nos. 5, 9 and 11 James Street, Peterhead on the evening of Thursday, 29 September, 1941.

William Watson (50) was injured at 9 James Street, and died the following day in the Royal Infirmary, Aberdeen.

That makes a total of 30 victims of that bomb - though some say that it was not a bomb but a parachute mine aimed at the harbour - and of that total, twelve of them were under 12 years of age.

Stories were told of the bombing, of how an elderly man refused to get out of bed when the siren went, and of how he was spared when the part of the building where his family had gone to shelter was hit and they were all killed while his house was unscathed. Or of the girl working in the Regal cinema, when the alert went and the film was shut off and the lights went up, and she had the choice with all the staff and audience of remaining in the cinema or going home, and how she chose to remain. And by choosing so, her life was spared, but she lost all her family except for her father who had gone back from leave only days before to his unit in the army.

It was a black day for Peterhead. The town was shocked into mourning, especially with so many small children being killed. And there was no mortuary in the town large enough to hold all the bodies. The police station or the cottage or fever hospitals could not cope. So an emergency mortuary was pressed into service. This was a disused herring-gutting yard at the top of Ugie Street, next door to the Faith Mission Hall, and only a yard or two up from the one which housed our gang hut.

We bairns, as ghoulish as only bairns can be, were driven by curiosity to explore the new "mortuary". Up Wilson Road we crept, and peered through cracks in the fencing into where the herring used to be gutted and packed in barrels of salt. What had been benches were pressed into service and were now in line and laden with burdens covered with white sheets. These had to be the James Street bombing victims. We were shocked into goggle-eyed silence. Then someone spotted us and chased us off. By strange coincidence, that yard and impromptu mortuary became part of an undertakers premises in later years. It seemed that Tom Hamilton, the first air-raid victim we had seen, had not put us off seeing more victims of the Jerry bombers. But it probably made us hate these Jerries even more if that were possible.

At the end of September, two items were reported which should have been good news for us and been an indication of the way the war was going, though it would have been easy to miss their significance at the time. The first was that the snowfall of the Russian winter had begun in the Ukraine. And the second, that the number of deaths of British civilians from German air-raids in September was again down. But that second item would have been lost on the people of the north-east with the bombing casualties still fresh in our minds.