Remembering the terrible sights and sounds of a day of devastation

IT WAS four minutes to four on February 4, 1944.

“I saw a flame, shaped like a big bat’s wing, come from the loading area – it must have been 50 or 60yds across,” recalled Len Cockerill, the chief goods clerk at Catterick Bridge Station.

“Then there was a terrific explosion, which burst my ear drum. Next thing I knew, I was sailing through the air.”

John Weller, an ammunition truck driver, still sounded incredulous about what he had witnessed three weeks later.

“There was a vivid red flash and a terrific bang. My lorry disappeared,” he told an inquest, “and the railway truck, in which the four men were, also disappeared.”

Twelve people were killed and 102 were injured that day.

Devastation was widespread – seven houses, a hotel, a cafe and the goods yard offices were destroyed. The four men, all soldiers, did quite literally disappear – their bodies were never recovered.

The terrible events began at about 3.50pm, when Mr Weller pulled his laden lorry into the station goods yard. It was a busy day. A passenger train had just left, and another was due any minute to collect the 25 people – largely schoolchildren making their way home or servicemen heading off on leave – on the platform. A packed double decker bus was picking up its last passengers – RAF and Army men – from the Railway Hotel to take them on a big night out in Darlington.

Nine soldiers were loading explosives onto railway trucks. They’d been at it for days – they didn’t know it then, but they were assembling the weaponry that would be used in the D Day landings in Normandy four months later.

In fact, there was some concern locally about the amount of explosives building up in the goods yard. The night before, at the bar of the Railway Hotel, the landlady, Mabel Cockerill, had said: “I’m worried about having all this ammunition so near.”

Stationmaster Walter Gibson replied: “If that lot goes up, none of us will have any worries.”

Within 24 hours, the poor fellow wouldn’t.

Lorry driver Mr Weller arrived at the goods yard with ammunition from the Hornby Park dump, near Bedale. As he parked up and walked away, Mr Cockerill noticed from a window in the Railway Hotel that four soldiers began unloading it.

“I remember thinking that, a month ago, they were handling those things so gently, two men to a box,” he told The Northern Echo, sister paper to the D&S Times, in 1967. “Now, they’re throwing them.”

Bang! And the big bat’s wing flame fanned out, followed by a noise so loud it was heard ten miles away.

Six six-ton trucks of anti-tank grenades had exploded, followed by tons of incendiary bombs which shot off like fireworks, sparking lots of smaller, satellite fires.

Amazingly, the petroleum depot over the road wasn’t hit. Even more amazingly, the 20,000lb blockbuster bomb in the goods yard did not go bang. Instead, the 14-ton railway truck in which it sat was blown into the air and landed on top of stationmaster Mr Gibson. Despite an Army doctor’s six-hour battle, there was no saving him.

There were extraordinary episodes of bravery.

“Though her husband was dying and her home was wrecked, Mrs W Gibson, the stationmaster’s wife, warned people in the vicinity to leave their homes,” reported the D&S Times.

“Mrs Mabel Cockerill defied her own injuries to drag an elderly guest from the ruins of her home.

“The signalman, 47-year-old Fred Robinson, was one of the heroes. Although severely injured, he stood by his post in the wrecked box by the level crossing. He saw his cottage across the road collapse and knew that his wife and daughter were inside, but duty demanded his remaining by the signal levers. He got a colleague to open the gates to let through a train ...

and when it was clear, he allowed himself to be taken to hospital.”

Said the Echo: “One of the local heroes is a taxi driver who ran along the line waving a flag to stop an approaching train. The roof of his car was torn off and all the glass shattered.”

But 12 people died. Six were civilians: William Tindall, 40, contractor’s labourer; Lancelot Rymer, 41, motor driver; Richard Stokes, motor driver; Mary Wallace Richmond, 43, railway clerk; Nancy Georgina Richardson, 19, railway clerk; Walter Gibson, 46, stationmaster.

Six were servicemen: Leading Aircraftman Euan Jenkins, 31, of Barry, South Wales; Lt Lawrence George King, 29, radio/telephone operator, of St Albans; Pte David Reed Hopkins, 23; Pte Norman SCENE OF DESTRUCTION: the ruins of the Railway Hotel after the massive explosion on February 4, 1944 Day, 18; Pte William Thomas, 18; Pte George Stares, 34, of the Pioneer Corps.

The last four were those who just disappeared before Mr Weller’s eyes.

“The coroner ... called Police Inspector Atkinson,” said the Echo, “who testified to finding a piece of spine on the grass verge opposite the Railway Hotel and to finding pieces of skin, bone and clothing stretching for a distance of 500yds from the scene of the explosion. He took the remains to a county pathologist.

He later submitted a piece of Army shirt, which he found on the south side of the explosion, to ultra-violet rays which revealed the name Day on the collar.

“Dr William Goldie, county pathologist, expressed the opinion that the remains came from at least three persons.

One portion of skull had black wavy hair, and the other two had brown hair.”

The four soldiers are buried in a tiny grave in Hornby churchyard, about five miles away.

So what caused the explosion?

An official court of inquiry was held immediately, but its classified conclusions were not released to the inquest.

The coroner was told that the inquiry was satisfied that there was no negligence and that all precautions had been taken. The jury returned verdicts of accidental death on all 12, and the cause was officially regarded as an unsolved mystery.

Sabotage, though, was ruled out – a group of Italian prisoners of war were said to be working nearby.

Reports from the Echo in the 1960s suggest that a grenade with its detonator primed had somehow got in the load. The rough handling would have set it off. Another theory was that contractors working on Catterick airfield had a bitumen furnace near the ammunition trucks and it was regularly seen tossing red hot coals out of its chimney.

Catterick Bridge Station was one of those confusing stations that was in a settlement of another name – a bewilderment that the Richmond branch line specialised in.

The branch line was nine miles and 62 chains long and opened on September 10, 1846. Catterick Bridge Station was originally in a settlement called Citadilla, which is now part of Brompton on Swale.

About 250yds south of the station was the Railway Hotel (between the station and the hotel was the goods yard where the explosion happened).

The hotel was on the crossroads where the B6271 Scorton to Richmond road met the Great North Road.

The explosion ruined the Railway Hotel, and that night soldiers were supposed to have salvaged what beer they could from its open cellars.

The ruins were demolished a couple of years later, and its site beside the Great North Road has had light industrial uses since. Because the hotel was so badly blown to bits, no-one bothered to annul its liquor licence, which remained valid until February 1984. Old hands in the district still know the hotel’s crossroads as Haggie’s Corner after Robert Haggie, who was landlord there from 1916 to 1932.