John Nichol
speaker
413 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 27 Jul
John Nichol’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
If we die during the war, we'll die together at home.
That's the two things I remember about my mother's wartime experiences.
And the air raid shelter was under the Wilkinson's Lemonade factory in North Shields, very famous landmark, a wartime landmark.
And on the night of the 3rd of May 1941, there was 192 men, women, and children sheltering in the air raid shelter, which was just the basement in this lemonade factory.
And a bomb hit it.
One German bomb hit the factory.
And it went through all of the floors, exploded, and it brought all the machinery and all the floors down into the basement where 192 people were sheltering.
And 107 people died that night.
107 in one incident, Dan, including 43 children.
And whole families perished.
And that was the incident that my mum mentioned in passing and never spoke about.
And that is where I start with the book.
How could this happen?
How could I not know?
about this, one of the largest losses of civilian life during the war in one incident.
How could I not know about it?
And that's where it all starts and where my interest started.
Well, like all of those major industrial sites, whether it was Liverpool, whether it was Glasgow, whether it was Tyneside, it was the heavy industry.
So the shipbuilding, all of the heavy steel metal industry of, you know, when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, of which Tyneside, Liverpool was famous for its shipbuilding.
When I was going to school, the train went along the Tyne from North Shields to Newcastle.
Showing 41–60 of 413 · page 3 of 21
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