Past Lives; Remembering the great bombardment

"It's one of the first things I learned in this game," he said to his passenger, a journalist who asked why he had not stopped. "Never get involved with a loose horse because you'll get landed with him for hours." Much the same might be said about going to the rescue of a lost child. Humanitarians among you will be relieved to hear that I overcame the temptation to look the other way this week when my path was crossed by one such. He looked the sort of seven-year-old, a tough from his bovver boots to his crew-cut, whose usual preoccupation was probably the mugging of grandmothers.

But now he was sobbing uncontrollably and more than anything in the world he wanted to find his own grandmother.

On this occasion the loose-horse syndrome was confounded. Nanna turned up within minutes. She thanked me, although if truth be told she'd have preferred a rather longer respite, and proffered a reward. It was advice: I mustn't miss, said she, that which had made her neglect her responsibility towards the young hooligan.

And nor should you miss it, if you can get there in the next two days.

All this happened at the Museum of Hartlepool, which must anyway be one of the most comprehensive and best presented of its kind - or it may simply be that this much-maligned town, with its glory days in shipbuilding, shipowning and steelmaking long over, has a more fascinating story to tell than most - but just now there is a marvellous extra.

A special exhibition about the Bombardment, the terrifying half-hour in 1914 when German cruisers shelled the Hartlepools mercilessly, killing 131 people and devastating whole streets in the twin towns, closes tomorrow afternoon. The drama is compellingly told, not least in the recorded voices of those who survived it, but also in many fine photographs and other memorabilia.

The more alert will know that the exhibition (free, as is entry to the museum itself next door to the Historic Quay theme attraction) has been on for weeks. It would, however, have passed me by had I observed the Piggott Law of Non-Intervention.

WITHIN hours of the catastrophe that, with a thunderous clamour which rolled inland through Darlington and Bishop Auckland to be heard as far away as Middleton-in-Teesdale, befell the Hartlepools on Wednesday, December 16, 1914, this statement was issued in London:

"The Admiralty takes this opportunity of pointing out that demonstrations of this character against unfortified towns or commercial ports, though not difficult to accomplish, provided a certain amount of risk is accepted, are devoid of military significance."

Oh, that's all right then, they will have said on the Headland as dead children were dug from wrecked homes. I expect, too, that in Scarborough and Whitby, where another 22 people were killed by German shells during that same breakfast hour, they were cheered up by the linguistic put-down the Sea Lords had dealt the Hun by the dry use of "demonstrations."

It may be, of course, that something has been lost in the translation of an English language that has evolved over the 86 years since that pompous piece of prose wafted heartlessly northwards. Perhaps to 1914 readers compassion and comfort are glaringly apparent, although unsaid.

After all, on same grim page of that weekend's D&S Times today-unsuitable words like "exciting" and "thrilling" are in headlines above reports of death and destruction elsewhere as the war nears its first Christmas.

A couple of days later the First Lord of the Admiralty tried harder in a letter to the mayor of Scarborough: "Whatever feats of arms the German Navy may hereafter perform, the stigma of the baby killers of Scarborough will brand its officers and men while sailors sail the seas." Well, yes, but to a later generation weaned on stirring speeches by the same man in the next world war it now sounds like him, Winston Churchill, trying too hard to be Churchillian.

The sang froid of the War Office was also a bit odd. Its bulletin at 1.45pm on the day of the bombardment said: "The fortress commander at West Hartlepool reports that German war vessels engaged that fortress between eight and nine o'clock this morning. The enemy was driven off. A small German war vessel also opened fire on Scarborough and Whitby."

That fails even as a ploy to deceive the enemy. The Germans knew they weren't driven off, at least until their three cruisers had loosed off more than 1,000 shells at the Hartlepools, some of them one-tonners. And they also knew their warships off the North Yorkshire coast were large ones, as did the people of Scarborough who saw them only 600 yards offshore.

But when the next day's newspapers gave the whole ghastly story in detail, the population at large quickly realised that the bulletin is like the 13th chime of the clock - it casts doubt on all that went before. No doubt some of the German pork butchers whose shops throughout the North-East were wrecked when the pubs turned out at nine on the night after the bombardment were tempted to bundle off the press cuttings to the Fatherland.

This is not an argument for censorship, merely for consistency and efficiency. Nor is it to accuse the newspapers of worsening the alarm and despondency that, whatever the propaganda put about, must have at first afflicted the three shattered towns; reporters seized on examples of heroism and resilience wherever they found them.

They wrote about the obvious determination of ordinary people not to be beaten; about the bravery of a 10-year-old boy who, until a short while before his internal injury killed him, did not trouble his already distressed mother with his plight; about the jurymen at a multiple inquest immediately held at Hartlepool who gave their fees to the mayor's fund for the bereaved and the many maimed among the more than 400 injured.

They wrote about King George's prompt despatch of "a large number of pheasants" to people made homeless in the Hartlepools and said it was a much appreciated gesture; there was no attempt at ironic comment on what today might be seen as a tactlessly litist gift. The wounded were given a pheasant's feather each, I learned from the bombardment exhibition.

They wrote about Baden-Powell's letter to the youngster who had "the honour of being the first Boy Scout to be wounded in the war." And they went to the family of Pte Alex Liddle, of Sylvan Grove, Linden Avenue, Darlington, who was among soldiers killed when shells hit the Heugh battery on the Headland, to hear how proud the former Pease's Mill worker had been to join the Darlington Pals company of the DLI.

They wrote in patriotic vein, too, about Pte Theo Jones, whose name is to this day on a plaque near the remains of the Heugh emplacements. He is remembered as the first British soldier of the war to be killed on home soil. The battery, caught unawares as the German ships emerged from the early morning mist and from close inshore unleashed their massive firepower, could only get off a few dozen rounds in reply - but one of them smashed into the bridge of the leading raider, killing nine German sailors.

The damaged ship, which promptly moved into the lee of the Headland lighthouse out of the line of fire of the shore guns, was the Blcher. Just months short of a century earlier, the field marshal of that name led the Prussian army that gave crucial help to Wellington at Waterloo.

But so soon after the bombardment the names of the German ships were not known to the newspapers, although they were alert to another bit of history: that it was off Scarborough that other enemy warships had wreaked havoc, the American flotilla led by John Paul Jones in 1797.

Over the decades, much more has gradually emerged about the bombardment, including the startling disclosure that the North-East coast was, in effect, left to take its chances by an Admiralty which two days earlier had intercepted a signal telling of the Germans' intentions.

Rather than try to head off the raiders and so let the enemy know we had broken its naval code, the plan was to ambush the six cruisers as they returned to Germany - but fog on the Dogger Bank enabled them to elude the Royal Navy. In his memoirs Churchill writes of his hope that the decision not to warn the coastal towns of the approaching danger was justified in the wider strategy of the war.

It takes us back to that Admiralty statement about "demonstrations of this character" being 'devoid of military significance.'

l Thousands of Hartlepool people fled to open spaces like Ward Jackson park when the onslaught began. Louina Laws, aged eight, got no farther than the street near her home. She received head injuries and was carried to the mortuary before it was realised she was breathing again. At 94, with silver hair hiding her scar, she still lives in the town.