World War II Firefighters - St Leonard's Street, London, UK
N 51° 31.676 W 000° 00.819
30U E 707142 N 5712763
This firefighter memorial plaque is attached to the wall of a school on the south west side of St Leonard's Street. The plaque is aimed, primarily, at those firefighters that lost thir lives on the night of 19th April 1941.
Waymark Code: WMV5JM
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 02/27/2017
Views: 2
The full wording on the blue plaque reads:
In memory of the 13 London firemen
and women and 21 Beckenham
firemen killed on the night
of 19th April 1941 when a bomb
destroyed the old school being
used as a sub-fire station.
This is the largest single loss of Fire
Brigade personnel in English history.
Details of this tragic incident were recorded in
the wartime diaries of Mr W Somerville,
an off-duty member of the Homerton crew.
It is to him and the many thousands of men
and women that made up the AFS & NFS
1939 - 1945 that this plaque is also dedicated.
The Firemen Remembered website tells us about the incident:
On the night of 19th/20th April 1941 the Luftwaffe launched one of their heaviest attacks on London, so bad that it became known as ‘the Saturday’. Hilda Dupree was on watchroom duty with her friend Winifred Peters at The Old Palace School. Shortly after 1.30am, three crews from Beckenham along with several other more local crews from Hackney and Homerton were assembled in the school playground standing-by to be sent on to where they were needed most when a land-mine, one of the most violently destructive weapons at that stage of the war, landed on the roof of the school and dropped down a stairwell at the bottom of which was the watchroom where Hilda Dupree and Winifred Peters were at work. The two women were killed outright. The men waiting outside were caught by the blast, which also demolished two thirds of the school building, and were buried by falling masonry. Rescue services, already hard-pressed, arrived too late for any lives to be saved.
Thirty-two firemen and two firewomen died at The Old Palace School, the largest number of Fire Brigade lives lost in a single incident, in peacetime or war. In April 1997, Firemen Remembered, along with the London Fire Brigade, dedicated a plaque in their memory. Several years later, Cis Keefe told us of the link between Hilda and Joan. Until that time we had not known of the connection between them and in response to her story, in July 2006 a plaque was unveiled by Cis at Lansbury Lawrence Primary School, now occupying the site of the old school building, in memory of Joan Ridd and those whose lives had been lost with her. Cis Keefe died two months later.