MUCH reader reaction has been ignited by our recent feature – Was This the Bombing that Time Forgot?

For the first time – and 71 years on – we revealed rare and previously unpublished photographic evidence of a second German bombing raid on Worcester in 1940.

The photo was brought in by Philip Williams, of Powick, near Worcester, and is telling testimony to a bombing which devastated a house at 5 Highland Road, near Tunnel Hill.

Mr Williams believes a lone German aircraft aimed its bombs towards the major railway marshalling yards at Shrub Hill, but instead they struck Highland Road and also left craters in the nearby recreation grounds at Brickfields.

Mercifully – and perhaps miraculously – no one was killed or injured in the raid.

At the time, Mr Williams was only three years old but he remembers that his policeman father Harold and his mother Dorothy, who lived at 3 Highland Road, gave temporary shelter and comfort to the suddenly homeless family from the bomb-wrecked house.

This property was demolished soon afterwards by the city council.

Mr Williams’s photograph, probably taken by his father, dispelled for many the previously widely held belief that Worcester suffered only one significant German bombing raid during the Second World War.

The seven deaths and devastation to nearby Happy Land housing inflicted by the 500lb bombs dropped on the Meco factory in Bromyard Road on October 3, 1940, have been fully documented.

However, it now transpires that the story of that other bombing raid – at Tunnel Hill and Brickfields – has been kept very much alive down the decades by Sue and Barry Reynolds.

For more than 40 years they have lived at 5a Highland Road – one of a pair of semi-detached houses built on the cleared site of the bomb devastated No 5.

Following the article, Mrs Reynolds wrote to your Worcester News. She said: “We bought 5a Highland Road in 1968, fully aware that a bomb had been dropped on the previous property on the site.

“Mr father had grown up at Rainbow Hill and Mr and Mrs Coley, who lived at 7 Highland Road for many years, including the time of the bombing, often told us about the raid.

“Our daughters have grown up knowing about it and over the years, we have explained to many callers how our address came to be 5a. This bombing may not have been reported to the general public by ‘the powers that be’ at the time, but we are sure that it will not be forgotten yet.”

Mr and Mrs Reynolds said their former neighbours Harold and Amy Coley often talked of the three bombs which fell on the area.

The rare photograph of the wrecked No 5 has in the foreground a gate sign for H O Coley, Decorator.

The Reynolds recall that Harold Coley became a sign writer and his wife was a first aid nurse at Kay’s.

Pete Newman, another Highland Road resident, has also been in touch. He said: “I was born in 1935 at 22 Blackpole Road, which is at the bottom of the park [the King George V Playing Fields].

“Immediately after the war I played as a 10-year-old schoolboy in the bomb crater left by one of the three German bombs that fell in the early part of the war.

“Other lads and I had great fun playing in and around that crater – which was later mostly filled in and grassed over as part of the development of the playing fields.”

He recalls that the crater was about 20ft wide and, unlike Mr Williams, he is convinced the bombs were meant for the Ward’s and Archdale factories which lay in a direct line from Highland Road and the playing fields.

Former football referee Derek Lloyd, of Droitwich, also spoke of his wartime experiences.

He said: “It was shortly after the start of the war that a German plane dropped some bombs aimed at what appeared to be the factories at the Blackpole industrial site.

“When planes came across the sky and we were on our way to or from school along Brickfields Road, we were told to take cover under a hedge because there were no brick walls around.

“This was only to be done in an emergency and fortunately, we never had to resort to this dubious form of safety cover.”

Maurice Francis, of Gilmour Crescent, Claines, sent us details of the Highland Road residents listed in the 1937 Kelly’s Directory of Worcester – including Harold Williams who lived at Aylesmoor, No 3, Frank Cartwright at Edmundville, No 5, and H O Coley at Alwyn, No 7.