Christine Jones, one of the last surviving witnesses of the Coventry Blitz, dies aged 94

[dutchman]

Christine Jones had vivid memories of the night of November 14 ,1940



Christine Jones, one of the last surviving witnesses of the Coventry Blitz, has died aged 94. For decades she was known as ‘a lynchpin of the Coleshill community’ but Christine’s early life was in Coventry.

Christine Smith, as was, grew up in a close-knit, sporty family at Broad Lane in the city and was 11 when the Second World War broke out. A Girl Guide, keen to ‘do her bit’ for the war effort, she enjoyed being self-sufficient, making campfires, producing ‘feasts’ in an old kettle from any food scrounged from the pantry and vegetables from the family’s allotment beside Hearsall Common.

Her father Priday Smith, chief cashier of Lloyds Bank in Coventry was too old to fight, but became a full-time fireman as German bombers pulverised the city night after night. Christine was evacuated in 1939, during the ‘phony war’, but ironically returned a year later, just as the bombing onslaughts on the city’s engineering factories ramped-up.

Interviewed by her journalist daughter Sally Jones years later, she vividly remembered the night of November 14 ,1940.

She said: “It was like a giant, deafening firework display, the biggest raid we’d ever seen. Waves of bombers roared over, hour after hour, with dad and his brigade in the thick of it, spraying water on the cathedral and the blazing buildings in the city centre.

“Sadly the water supply failed after the mains were hit. By morning Coventry was flattened and the cathedral completely burnt out. Dad arrived home at dawn, unrecognisable, exhausted and grey from head to foot after wheeling his bike over piles of rubble, with no idea where the roads had been. He said one man was frying sausages in the burning ruins of his house.”

The raids made Coventry so dangerous Christine was sent to her grandmother’s home at Hucclecote in Gloucestershire and enjoyed organising bazaars and amateur theatricals like Lady Windermere’s Fan as fundraisers for the war effort.

Rationing of treats like sweets and fruit was tough on everyone and Christine particularly loved cheese so her mother Madeline would post her own ration, two ounces of shrivelled Cheddar, to her each week. Christine joined the Sea Rangers and eventually became a Ranger captain, taking her troop trekking and learning seamanship aboard large rowing boats on the Coventry Canal.

She took a two-year course in domestic science, first working in catering at Coventry Hippodrome on £4 a week. Here she dealt with a drunken head chef and a manager who handled complaints about his kitchen’s cleanliness by bribing the hygiene inspector with whisky or butter.

She met big names – including the Tiller Girls, the young Frankie Howerd and Laurel and Hardy, who offered her a generous tip of 2/6 – which she promptly returned, in embarrassment.

When her father brought a shy young bank clerk called John Jones, recently arrived from North Wales, home for supper, the two bonded over a shared love of hill-walking and sailing. After only three dates however, Christine suffered life-threatening head injuries in a car accident while working as a school meals supervisor in Suffolk.

This left her unconscious for two weeks and she had to learn to walk and talk again - so John sent a stream of joky letters and sketches to cheer her up. He proposed soon afterwards and the couple married in 1953.

They spent the first two years of their marriage in Coventry, living in Wainbody Avenue, and their daughter Sally was born in the old Gulson Road Maternity Hospital.