The day the Luftwaffe targeted Easington Colliery

“I remember this day very well, although I was only seven years old at the time,” she says. “It was a beautiful sunny day. My father and a few other men, miners relaxing in between shifts, were standing at the corner of Station Road, just chatting, when they saw the aeroplanes approaching from inland.

“Suddenly they realised they were German planes and they were starting to attack, so they fled as fast as they could back to their homes.”

Memories 297 told how in his Darlington home, Brian I’Anson has an unexploded shell that was dropped that day on Easington Colliery – it is a souvenir acquired by his grandfather at the time from the bomb disposal squad.

Brian I'Anson with an unexploded shell which was dropped on Easington Colliery on November 15, 1940

It was a day when the Battle of Britain was at its height, when the Germans launched a daring 100-bomber daylight raid against the North-East, believing they were bombing Britain out of the Second World War.

But their navigation went awry, and their intelligence was wrong – they ended up over the North-East which they thought would be relatively undefended, but came up against experienced Spitfire and Hurricane pilots who were supposed to be resting at the airfields of Usworth, Acklington and Catterick after trying to stem the Blitz over London.

Those fighter pilots inflicted such casualties upon the raiders that never again did the enemy attempt such a daylight raid.

How The Northern Echo of August 16, 1940, reported the raid which included the bombing of Easington Colliery

However, the bombs that were dropped that day still caused carnage, particularly at the coastal colliery where 50 houses in the Station Road area were damaged, 12 people were killed and 30 injured.

“My father just managed to get round the corner into the first backyard, taking my brother, aged 13, with him. Every house had an outside lavatory and this is where my father went, pushing my brother's head into the toilet and lying over him to protect him.

“The bombs started falling and one hit 1, Cardiff Street, just yards from where they were sheltering, and directly opposite where we lived in Cornwall Street.

“Fortunately, the family, the Carrolls, had moved out the previous week, so the house was empty when it was completely flattened.

“Our house was badly damaged with windows blown in, ceilings down, everything covered in plaster and soot, shrapnel everywhere in the walls and furniture, but my mother and older sister who had been sheltering in the cupboard under the stairs, were unhurt.

“Sadly, Mrs Goulden, who lived in the house in whose outside lavatory my father had taken shelter, was killed as she nursed her granddaughter, struck by a piece of shrapnel in her throat.

“My father and brother were really lucky – they survived but the outside toilet collapsed shortly afterwards.

“A boy, Jimmy Scott, from 5, Cornwall Street, three houses from ours, was killed too. He was about 15, I think, and was running home when he was machine-gunned by a plane in Station Road, just as he was nearly home.”

Most of the events of the day are seared into Margaret’s memory because they are so awful – she recalls seeing bombed houses with only their staircases remaining standing.

But she recalls one because of it was rather funny. An old lady was stone deaf and so didn’t hear the thunderous roar overhead and so couldn’t understand what was making the pies she was cooking fly out of the oven. Even in the midst of all that carnage, the baking still went on.