Notes About The Bomb Strike List
Addresses
The Ministry of Home Security bomb census was obviously conducted, at least in part, by people who were not Bath residents, and there is evidence of a problem with local pronunciation and/or handwriting. For instance, I found "Tiverton" where it should be Twerton, and "Curzon" where it should be Crescent. I have noted where I have corrected these.
Other areas of confusion are the roads with unusual names, like Lower Oldfield Park, which is a residential street not a park, and like Brougham Hayes. The census usually added an extra "Road" to these unfamiliar names, which I have deleted without comment.
Similarly, there is often confusion between Road, Way, Place, Hill, View, and Street. By cross referencing to other information, I have managed to correct most if not all of these.
Supplementary Information
In the Bomb Strike List, you may see symbols
and 
.Where these symbols appear, you can display additional text by clicking on the symbol. This will transfer you to a screen where the appropriate information is at the top of the screen. Use your browser's "Back" button or the "Go back" links on the information page to return to the street list afterwards.
Bombs are numbered as follows:
If you are interested in seeing the Bomb List in numerical order, click on the number range in the above table that you are interested in.Number range
How numbers were allocated
Some 40 or so "stray" bombs fell before the main Bath Blitz. I have arbitrarily numbered them in this range. Where records identify a particular bomb as an "Oil Bomb" (see below) the number has been given an "I" prefix, otherwise a "HE" prefix has been used. The dates (where known) include the year.
The Ministry of Home Security conducted a bomb census after the Bath Blitz air raids, and allocated numbers in this range to bombs that fell between dusk on 25th April 1942 and dawn on 26th April 1942. The numbers appear to have been allocated in the order reported to the census point, so they are random in terms of geography and time. Incendiaries were of the "magnesium" type (see below), and have been given an "I" prefix; and High Explosives have been given a "HE" prefix.
The Ministry of Home Security conducted a bomb census after the Bath Blitz air raids, and allocated numbers in this range to bombs that fell between dusk on 26th April 1942 and dawn on 27th April 1942. The numbers appear to have been allocated in the order reported to the census point, so they are random in terms of geography and time. Incendiaries were of the "magnesium" type (see below), and have been given an "I" prefix; and High Explosives have been given a "HE" prefix.
The Ministry of Home Security conducted a bomb census after the Bath Blitz air raids, and allocated numbers in this range to bombs that were added to the census with conflicting or no information about the date. Incendiaries were of the "magnesium" type (see below), and have been given an "I" prefix; and High Explosives have been given a "HE" prefix.
The Bath Clerk of Works conducted his own survey of the bomb damage, and marked all bomb damage on a map now held in the Library archives. Because he spent several weeks surveying, he was much more thorough than the Ministry of Home Security and marked nearly a hundred additional bombs. However, on a few occasions, the census showed that two bombs fell very close together, and the Clerk of Works has recorded only one, so no one list shows the complete story. I have given any bomb that appears on the Clerk of Works map but not in the Ministry of Home Security census an arbitrary number in this series. The Clerk of Works was only interested in bomb damage and not whether it was caused by High Explosive or Incendiary, so no prefixes are used. Also, no dates of bombing appear in these records. If anybody knows date and time information, I would be pleased to receive it.
Types of Incendiary Bomb
In 1940, the incendiaries dropped on Bath were of the "Oil Bomb" type, where a flammable liquid was used with an explosive charge. The idea was to cause some blast damage with the explosive, but mainly to spray the burning liquid over a wide area and cause widespread fires.
By 1942, Oil Bombs had been superseded by a smaller and more intensely burning incendiary made of magnesium. These weighed only a kilogram, so could be dropped in their hundreds. Some were coupled with a small explosive charge which went off when the magnesium was well alight to spread the fire over a wider area.
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