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The next day - Friday 15th
t 6:16 am Coventry was sent the 'Raiders Passed' signal. However, due to the damaged electricity supply, the most of the 'All Clear' sirens did not sound, and many people had to be told by passing Police and Air Raid Wardens that this raid was over. Gradually, as people came out from their shelters below the ground, they began to realise that virtually everything they once recognised was now gone.
This picture sums up why the Germans couldn't break the British spirit. After all they'd had thrown at them, this couple are still smiling bravely - even if they are cursing the Germans under their breath!
With the town centre of Coventry being relatively small, and the bombing so concentrated, the initial feeling of many people that morning was that "Coventry is finished", and they simply wanted to leave - to get away from it all. The whole event was just too shocking for anyone to take a calm, objective view, and they wondered around feeling helpless. So many places of work were flattened too, and without being able to contribute towards the war effort, there temporarily seemed to be no sense of direction in their lives.
Everyone, whatever their position, was deeply affected by the raid. The loss of so many fine historic buildings was too much for Coventry historian, Frederick Smith, who was also the Town Clerk. He was found in tears by a reporter who went to meet him at the Council House that Friday. (Fred Smith would later write a detailed history of our city in a book called "Coventry - 600 Years of Municipal Life".)
o assist in both clearing up the mess and keeping some semblance of order, hundreds of police and soldiers were brought into Coventry that next day. Initially 600 soldiers arrived, later hundreds more, including many Royal Engineers to help with the safe demolition of the numerous precariously balanced buildings.
This view from St. Patrick's Road was very typical of what many people living near the city centre would have seen from their own streets after the raid.
An rarely viewed scene looking across the garden at the rear of Ford's Hospital, Greyfriar's Lane.
The problems that started to come to light in Coventry that day are almost too numerous to mention, but amongst the most severe issues were the lack of, in virtually the whole of the city, water, electricity and gas mains supplies. Although lack of power was obviously an inconvenience, the lack of mains water was by far the most serious, and the biggest concern was an outbreak of typhoid through lack of hygiene and contaminated water obtained from broken pipes. Initially large tankers of any kind had to be used to bring in water from outside - the largest available being a large Co-operative Creamery milk tanker! Typhoid was still a real risk, however, and over the following few days about 30,000 anti-typhoid inoculations were carried out by dedicated medical staff.
But, as the people of Coventry had always done throughout history, slowly but surely they rallied and bounced back into action. There was a job to be done, and once the shock had worn off, it was time to get back on with it. Nobody was yet aware, but the next day something would happen that would raise morale quicker than anyone could have expected....