| Evening Telegraph, Tuesday, July 24, 1984
DEADLY CARGO...
REG Adams was hard at work at the John White factory in Newton Road, Rushden, when he heard the explosions. It was October 3, 1940, and a lone German bomber had unloaded its deadly cargo onto the town.
His first reaction was to remain indoors — the electricity had failed and the production line was halted. Then someone shouted that a school had been hit.
At the time Reg's nine-year-old son Douglas was a pupil at Alfred Street School, and as he rushed from the factory he feared the worst.
When he arrived he found that the bomb had scored a direct hit on the school, ripping apart the school attendance officer's room and a senior school classroom below.
Four children had been killed in the raid, but Reg found that Douglas had only a leg injury.
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Bomb damage at Alfred Street School
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"I dragged him away from the rubble, thankful he was alive," Reg recalls. Douglas though, had quite a different reaction. "All he could do was tell me off because he had lost a shoe and wanted to find it!"
Our picture (right) shows the classroom demolished by the bomb. Observers at the time said the scene was heartrending, with pencils and books scattered among the debris.
One book, The Little Children's Bible, lay open at the text: "I reckon the sufferings of the present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed to us".
"The children behaved perfectly," one teacher said. "I threw myself down on the floor and the rest did the same in a moment."
The school was not the only place to suffer casualties. Four clickers were killed at John Cave's boot factory in College Street. One bomb had fallen straight through the glass roof of the men's department, and girls were being led out from the factory "cut and blackened" — victims of flying glass.
The daylight raider, the first to drop bombs in Rushden, had claimed eight lives and 20 casualties. The town was given no warning of the raid — no sirens were sounded — but the emergency services coped efficiently.
A nursing superintendant at the first aid post said: "Not one of my staff fainted, though they were absolutely untried. It was a baptism of blood."
Mr Adams, now aged 87, lives with his wife Florence in Birchall Road, Rushden.
He has a piece of the first bomb dropped in the Midlands earlier in 1940. He thought it had fallen somewhere near Rushden, but after cycling through north Bedfordshire found the crater in a field near Pertenhall and Swineshead.
Lots of other people had come to gape at the damage, but Mr Adams was able to dig up a piece of the bomb and he has kept it ever since as a souvenir.
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