In a park in London's East End, there is a memorial which bears
the names of 18 children killed in an air raid.
And I think the bombs fell somewhere around 11 o'clock in the morning, if I remember rightly.
While I was standing there, the caretaker came out with the first of the bodies.
These five-year-old children did not die in the Second World War, but in a much earlier conflict.
In 1915, German Zeppelin airships appeared over Britain and, for the first time,
began an aerial bombing campaign against a civilian population.
See, it's the first time we'd experienced a war.
And we didn't know what it was all about.
You never knew, I suppose, when the raids were going to be on.
And we didn't get the warnings that you had in the Second World War.
When the Zeppelin raids begin, there is no home defence.
Even as late as May of 1915, there's only 33 anti-aircraft guns in the whole country.
This was the start of a two-and-a-half year campaign which claimed the lives
of many hundreds of people, and whose psychological effect
was every bit as powerful as that of the blitz of the Second World War.
These really were weapons of mass destruction, frightening new terror weapons, and nobody was quite sure
how devastating they were going to be.
This is the forgotten story of Britain's first blitz.
90 years ago, the last German airship to be shot down
over mainland Britain crashed and burned in this field.
Was the evening time. They started coming over when it got dark.
They didn't come over in broad daylight.
BEEPING
My mother said, "Come and have a look, there's a Zep going over the house."
Loads of them were coming over,
but they didn't all pass over our bungalow, naturally,
so when one did come so near, she just said, "Come and have a look."
They were firing at it when they came over Thorpeness
and it obviously caught light at the bottom and just blew it up.
Of course we knew it would come down somewhere
and we found out next day it had come down at Theberton and that's where we made for.
95-year old Phyllis Rees was just six when, in 1917, she witnessed
the destruction of L48, a German Zeppelin airship returning home from a bombing raid on Britain.
Nine decades later a team of archaeologists, specialising in the First World War,
have come to the Zeppelin crash site not far from the Suffolk village of Theberton.
It is the first time in Britain a Zeppelin crash site has been archaeologically excavated.
We've used metal detectors to re-establish where the main crash
impact was and that's where we're now working, over here.
We've used the metal detectors really to establish where we've got
the biggest concentration of small metal debris from the crashed Zeppelin.
On a June night in 1917, three British fighter aircraft attacked L48,
setting alight the airship's flammable hydrogen,
sending the Zeppelin and her crew crashing to the ground.
I can just remember the first look at it, seeing this enormous thing.
It looked as if it filled the whole field up.
The crash was the last gasp in a terror campaign
that had dominated mainland Britain for the previous 2½ years.
So these pictures were taken in 1917 by the Royal Flying Corps? Yeah.
But you also get a sense from this of how there's a fairly confined area where it's crumpled up.
Yeah, it's like a telescope shutting on the...? Yes. Absolutely, yes.
I know it was very impressive, seeing the whole thing charred.
It was still in the form of a Zep, it was one huge charred thing,
and we knew that the men, whoever were underneath, wouldn't be alive.
And all these bods hanging around here, who were these?
These are civilians coming to see the site,
and the cordon of soldiers around to stop people from pilfering the bits and pieces off the site.
We know that there was a massive official salvage operation following each Zeppelin crash
and that most of the debris was removed by the authorities.
And much of what remained, we know, was salvaged by souvenir hunters.
90 years later, only fragmentary evidence remains at the crash site.
These are some of the more
interesting artefacts that have been recovered throughout this excavation.
We have good condition aluminium alloy probably from the gondola.
We have a fragment of geodetic structure here of the general framework of the Zeppelin.
Showing slight corrosion, but I think that's again in very good condition.
This example here is an officer's cuff button,
showing the anchor, the imperial crown and the rope twist design
and the standard stamping for all German transport and military buttons.
And also you might just see on the back here, there is evidence of burning, extreme heat subjection.
Finally, probably one of the most interesting things I've seen, is a fired British 303 bullet.
Very difficult to identify a date range of this particular type of round,
but, given the situation, given where it was recovered from,
I'm pretty keen to state that this was one of the bullets that brought down L48.
L48 was huge.
Over 600 feet long, it was bigger than any battleship of the time.
For the Germans, the loss of L48 was the end to an era which had begun nearly two decades earlier.
Three years before the Wright brothers lifted off at Kittyhawk,
the German Count Zeppelin was pioneering his rigid airship.
A solid aluminium framework which was covered
and filled with hydrogen, a gas that is lighter than air.
Manoeuvrable and with a speed of up to 50 miles per hour, the airship was revolutionary.
The great advantage of the rigid airship
is that you can make it much larger, therefore you carry more fuel
and you can come up with a system that is capable of travelling a very long way.
And the great strength of the rigid airship was its range.
The fact it could go a very long way compared to an aeroplane
that even by 1914 could barely hop off the ground and get back home.
A new and glamorous form of transport.
By 1914, Zeppelins, as the airships were now being called, had flown over 100,000 miles.
Carrying 37,000 civilian passengers without incident.
But even as early as 1908, science fiction writers like H G Wells,
foresaw the Zeppelin's potential as an instrument of war.
And it wasn't long before the German military were taking an interest in the Zeppelins.
The German navy rapidly saw the advantages of the airship as a long range reconnaissance platform,
and the navy saw the Zeppelin as the only way they could give themselves that long range eye in the sky
that would prevent their numerically inferior fleet being trapped by the British.
The German navy's fleet of airships were to be commanded by a young officer called Peter Strasse,
seen here with the elderly Count Zeppelin.
It was Strasse who saw the military impact the Zeppelins could have,
boasting that, "England can be overcome by means of airships."
Soon after the outbreak of the First World War,
the British Navy blockaded Germany, attempting to starve her into submission.
The German navy retaliated against British civilians,
shelling the seaside towns of Scarborough, Whitby and Hartlepool just before Christmas in 1914.
But the Germans were to take a more audacious step the following month,
when they extended the conflict from the sea to the air.
On the 19th of January 1915, two airships, the L3 and the L4,
approached the east coast of England.
While the L4 headed northwards, her sister ship turned south towards the seaside town of Great Yarmouth.
L3 unleashed a cluster of bombs.
Oh, it's just over here.
At the Kitchenor Road cemetery in Great Yarmouth,
Joan Roberts and her son, Christopher, are visiting the grave of Joan's great-uncle, Sam.
The family knew nothing of the grave's existence until a local historian recently discovered it.
It is a bit different, isn't it? Yes.
Samuel Alfred Smith,
who was killed by a bomb from a Zeppelin, January the 19th 1915, aged 53 years.
That night, Sam Smith became the first British civilian ever to be killed by aerial bombing.
So my great-great uncle.
So that's Samuel. That's Samuel, yes.
Right. And that is as well.
At 8.25 in the evening, Zeppelin L3 dropped seven high explosive bombs.
It was the bomb which landed here, in the St Peter's Plain area, that killed Sam Smith.
72-year-old Martha Taylor also died.
Three others in Great Yarmouth were injured that night.
This is it.
There we are look, the first house in Great Britain
to be damaged by a Zeppelin air raid, 19th of January 1915.
So Sam's workshop was just over there in that gap. Yes. There.
Yes, cos that's 16, and he was 16A.
Mmm. And he came out of his workshop and stood at the gates,
and was hit by shrapnel.
He was badly injured, His head was injured and eventually he was found
and declared dead on the spot.
An hour later the second airship, L4, approached the Norfolk coast just north of Hunstanton.
30 minutes later, it dropped its deadly cargo on Kings Lynn,
killing 2 people and injuring a further 13.
The fact that people had been killed in their houses, in their streets,
from the air, this was new.
Science fiction writers like H G Wells had written about this, but now it was happening.
This was the full horror of modern war and it was quite a shock.
The first two attacks on Great Yarmouth and Kings Lynn,
showed just how ill prepared Britain was for a war from the air.
When the Zeppelin raids begin,
most of the targets are fully illuminated,
nobody had really seriously thought about air raid precautions.
It wasn't until the summer of 1916 that a full blackout was ordered over London,
paralysing the city by night.
The whole idea of the German offensive against Britain,
both surface ship and airship, was to demonstrate that,
at its core, the British Empire was vulnerable.
In fact Winston Churchill, Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty,
had anticipated the threat posed by the Zeppelins as early as 1910.
And so just over a month after the outbreak of the First World War,
Churchill authorised the bombing of the Zeppelin sheds in Germany,
an event that was to make front page news.
Basically what they did was,
they carried out the bombs in the cockpit and threw them over the side.
The successful, if primitive, bombing of the Zeppelin sheds
caught the imagination of the British press.
Three weeks later another British airman, Flight Lieutenant Reggie Marix, went one step further
when he actually destroyed an airship on the ground.
The whole idea that you could get into an aircraft of the day,
fly 150 miles or so and drop a bomb on what was a strategic target at that time
is quite a significant step in thinking.
A pre-emptive strike if you like, we'd probably call it these days.
And yet despite the success of these pre-emptive strikes,
the war on the western front was the prime focus of the military leaders,
and most aircraft were diverted to support the troops on the ground.
In the spring of 1915, German Zeppelins continued
to attack eastern Britain, with increasing intensity and a growing number of casualties.
The attacks are a novel experience for British civilians.
The last time that anybody, in a sense,
had directly attacked civilians, you could argue, I suppose, was when the Dutch came up the Medway in 1667.
And therefore for some people it's very, very, frightening indeed.
The Zeppelins attacked with impunity and, importantly for those on the ground, with little warning.
We had police round with whistles on a bike.
And also rattles.
When the raids came on,
they used to get us out of bed
and we used to be taken downstairs to the kitchen and just sit underneath the table until the all clear went.
Some of the advice given now seems truly bizarre.
"What to do in an air raid.
"Go in the cellar and take your whisky with you."
A lot of people went over to the local coroner's court,
which was also a mortuary,
because they had reinforced basements.
But we didn't have any shelters, you see.
Some of our houses did have basements which we could use,
but they always had the feeling that they wanted to be with other people.
They'd come out into the street to do that.
As the number of civilian casualties increased,
indignant newspapers published photographs of the innocent women and children who had been killed.
The public, angry and frightened, began to turn on the people meant to protect them.
When Hull is bombed, it is said that army soldiers
are beaten up on the streets of Hull because there is no adequate defence.
There is certainly a case of a Royal Flying Corps vehicle
being stoned in Beverley after a raid on East Yorkshire.
So there is this rising concern that the defences are inadequate.
The problem with Britain's air defences at the start of the war was that the few remaining planes
were old, slow and couldn't operate effectively at the same altitude as the Zeppelins.
The Shuttleworth Collection has the world's largest number
of flying British aircraft from the First World War.
In 1914, air defence was divided between
the army's Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service.
When you look at a Zeppelin, this is a big thing, it's 600 foot long, 60 foot wide or so,
and you'd think they'd be relatively easy to shoot down, but I think the reverse was certainly the case.
Wire, wood and fabric.
This is what made up a typical First World War fighter aircraft.
What you've gotta remember about the state of the air forces
at the beginning of the First World War in 1914 is that the aircraft itself was only 11 years old or so.
So everything is really very embryonic.
Right, here we are, the business end, the office.
So it's basically plywood and canvas and wire.
Not much protection for the pilot as well, as you can see.
It's just a thin covering so up at 18,000 feet, with a temperature down in the minus 20s...
he's not gonna be very warm.
Looking forward, we've got the altimeter at the top, we have an air speed indicator underneath.
An ignition switch just at the bottom there. A level indicator.
Organisation on the ground was virtually non-existent.
You see squadrons being formed with different types of aircraft, rather than single types of aircraft.
You see pilots training themselves or paying for their own training.
If the pilot's life was difficult on the ground, it was even worse in the air.
It's a very basic environment.
You're open to the elements, so you've got a 90 to 120 mile an hour wind blowing around you,
and temperature could go down two degrees per 1,000 feet.
So up at 15-18,000 feet, we're down in the minus 15 to minus 20s.
Coupled with that, at altitude you've got lack of oxygen, reducing the power in the engine
and reducing the motor function of the pilot as well, so you're not thinking straight.
With air defences virtually absent, the Zeppelin attacks continued.
The death toll rose and London, for the first time, became the main target.
On the evening of the 8th September 1915,
a single Zeppelin, the L13, crossed the Wash on England's east coast, and headed straight for the capital.
L13 was commanded by 32-year-old Heinrich Mathy,
one of the most experienced and audacious of the Zeppelin captains.
A skilled navigator, Mathy had become infamous as a result of the impact of his earlier raids.
He had even boasted to a reporter that he,
"Would bomb London three times in succession or perish in the attempt."
At around 11pm, Mathy dropped his first bombs at Golders Green
before heading down towards the centre of the city.
David Warren is a tour guide who leads groups along the route of Mathy's September raid.
One of the more important parts of his tour is in Lambs Conduit Passage in Holborn.
Airship number L30 came straight above us here and dropped a 50kg bomb,
striking a lamp post which killed Henry Coombes, an employee of the Gas Light and Coke Company, outright.
It blasted in the Dolphin Public House,
stopping the clock at 10.40 and it's remained at that time to this day.
The blast then blew its way down Lambs Conduit Passage,
damaging number seven and number ten and setting those buildings ablaze.
Mathy continued dropping bombs, heading towards his primary target,
the textile warehouses around Bartholomew Close, in the City of London.
Aboard the L13 was the biggest bomb yet used in Zeppelin raids.
The L13 was right on target to strike its main objective, the soft goods centre just to the east of me.
But avoiding St Paul's Cathedral that is directly behind us.
Charles Henley, who was the fire brigade duty fireman
in this mews at the time, heard a strange noise in the distance, like the whirr whirr whirr of an engine.
Then all of a sudden there was an almighty crash.
And when Charles Henley came round, he looked around him, and the square was an absolute shambles.
Up there Captain Heinrich Mathy was looking down.
He said afterwards that within the funnel of the explosion
of the first 300kg bomb ever to be dropped on London, all the lights within that funnel disappeared.
The raid left 26 dead and 87 injured.
It also caused £500,000 worth of damage, making it the costliest air raid of the First World War.
Despite the fact that just 26 anti-aircraft guns defended the whole of London,
their effects that night had worried Mathy.
He would later write to his wife asking that, "A good angel will hasten to guard my ship
"against the dangers which throng the air everywhere about her."
Monkhams Hall Hill to the north east of London
provides a clear vantage point over the city.
It's here that the Great War Archaeology Group have come
to investigate the remains of a First World War anti-aircraft position.
This platform was one of the defensive positions constructed in a ring of iron around London.
It was the first attempt to defend the city from an airborne attack.
If this is the first air war that's ever been fought,
therefore this is the first air defence system ever established,
where did the guns come from?
Are they made specifically to be anti-aircraft guns...?
I don't know the answer to that question. No.
The whole thing is a matter of improvisation and working it out as you go along.
It seems these three inch quick firers were an adaptation of an ordinary artillery piece.
These were supposed to be able to fire up to 18,000 feet straight up into the air.
Now maybe that was in optimum conditions but it seems occasionally they could shoot that far.
If they're firing vertically isn't the danger that stuff's gonna come down and land on them?
The records suggest that there's quite a few casualties
by falling fragments of British anti-aircraft shells exploding in the sky.
METAL DETECTOR BEEPS
The anti-aircraft guns were not terribly effective in terms of shooting things down.
They estimated that you probably needed to fire 8,000 shells to get one hit, and not necessarily a kill.
So Zeppelins, generally speaking, weren't shot down by the anti-aircraft guns,
but this kind of ring of iron which built up -
and probably a ten-fold increase altogether in the number of guns over the space of about two years -
meant it was increasingly difficult for the Zeppelins to get into London, which was their prime target.
90 years on, the metal detectors can still turn up frightening reminders of that war.
This time, an unexploded anti-aircraft shell.
Excavations will have to stop while the bomb squad removes the shell.
But the military had developed some less obvious ways of helping to combat the Zeppelin threat.
The German Zeppelins would use radio a lot,
which meant you could find out where they were
by the direction finding technique, DF'ing as it was known.
And you could track them, and they were tracked.
You might even be able to read the codes of where they were going and what they were doing.
And it was often said that the British knew where a Zeppelin was better than its own crew did.
In addition, the airship was beginning to reveal its own fatal flaw.
In France, a low flying Zeppelin had been turned into an inferno by anti-aircraft fire.
With no parachutes, the crew were burned alive as their airship fell.
Despite these dangers, by 1916, the number of raids over Britain significantly increased.
My mother and all the neighbours were very, very annoyed to think
that a big thing like that should be allowed to come across London.
You start getting anti-German riots in the East End. For example,
there's an anti-German riot in Stoke Newington.
There are stories of dachshunds being stoned in the streets.
Anybody who has a German name, their premises is gonna be targeted.
The shopkeepers, of course, were the ones who were the targets.
They were hounded out as quickly as possible.
This made a difference for shopping, because you missed their shops.
The Germans thought to assess the impacts of their raids
by interrogating captured British servicemen.
British officers who were captured tend to say that these are of no military value,
they're not hitting military targets, they're futile, a waste of time.
But what's interesting is that ordinary British soldiers
who are interrogated by the Germans would tend to say that they've heard from their mothers or their wives
that these raids are in fact having a great impact on morale at home.
In March 1916, the British guns started to have some success
when the L15, damaged by anti-aircraft fire, was forced to ditch in the sea off the Kent coast.
CHURCH BELLS RING
But it was aircraft from the newly created Home Defence Squadrons which were to have the biggest impact
in Britain's battle with the Zeppelins.
In the summer of 2006, the standard of the RAF's 39 Squadron,
was laid up at St Clement Danes, the Royal Air Force church in London's Strand.
The squadron has been disbanded after 90 years' service.
Formed in May 1916, as one of four Home Defence Squadrons,
its purpose was to defend London from the Zeppelin threat.
It was to have a dramatic impact on the aerial war over Britain.
One of its first pilots won the Victoria Cross
for his action against the Zeppelins.
Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson became an overnight hero when, on the 3rd of September 1916,
he shot down the first German airship over British soil.
Leefe Robinson flew close to the airship and fired a number of rounds into its hydrogen-filled bags.
As these contemporary photos show, it sent the SL11 plummeting to the ground, killing all of its crew.
For his action, Leefe Robinson was awarded the VC.
But the real breakthrough was technological.
He was using newly developed incendiary bullets
which burned as they were fired, igniting the highly flammable hydrogen in the airship.
The late summer of 1916 should have been the high spot of the Zeppelin offensive.
They carry out some mass attacks.
But the British have the incendiary bullet.
Now the fighters which have got the organisation to get themselves in more or less the right place,
with the Zeppelins illuminated by searchlights, are able to fire large numbers of explosive
and incendiary bullets in a very nasty mix, into the gas bags of the Zeppelins.
It has a tremendous impact, so there's stories of people
coming out into the streets, dancing with joy, singing.
Somebody's playing the bagpipes, it's reported in one place.
The loss of the SL11 was felt hard by the airship crews in Germany.
None more so than the now notorious Zeppelin commander, Heinrich Mathy.
He wrote to his wife, "The war is becoming a serious matter.
"It is my earnest wish that you be spared this most heavy of sacrifice for the fatherland,
"and that I may remain with you, to surround you with love, as a garment."
On the night of the 24th of September 1916, Germany launched
a 12 Zeppelin raid against Britain, commanded by Heinrich Mathy in L31.
The airships were met by heavy resistance from British defences.
EXPLOSIONS AND GUN FIRE
The first victim was L33, which, having dropped incendiary bombs
on the East End of London, was hit by anti-aircraft fire.
Losing gas, she was forced to land in a field in Essex.
So little hydrogen remained that the crew were unable to destroy her before surrendering.
The British forces even managed to salvage one of the engines for later use.
All of the crew of the L33 survived the crash. They were the lucky ones.
For that same night Mathy and his crew up in L31, watched in horror
as they saw their sister ship, the L32, burst into flames and plunge to the earth.
L32 had been hit by the new incendiary bullets,
and crashed here at Great Bursted in Essex.
Because of weight restrictions, the Zeppelin crews were forbidden to carry parachutes.
All of the crew died in the crash.
The pilot who had shot the airship down
was Lieutenant Frederick Sowery, also of 39 Squadron, seen here with VC winner Leefe Robinson.
When Mathy was asked by reporters in Germany whether,
in the event of being attacked he would burn or jump, he replied,
"I won't know until it happens."
In L31, Mathy and his crew were filled with a deep sense of foreboding.
"It is only a question of time before we all join the rest.
"If anyone should say that he was not haunted by visions of burning airships,
"then he would be a braggart. '
It was to be just a week before his dark fears were to become realised.
On one particular night,
my father came and picked me up from underneath the table,
took me up to the front door, lifted me up
and, from the front door we looked due north,
and there was this Zeppelin coming down in flames.
What Jack Brown saw that night was almost certainly the flaming remains of Zeppelin L31,
with Heinrich Mathy and his crew on board.
L31 crashed in a mass of flames, here at Potters Bar in Hertfordshire.
Mathy and his entire crew perished in the crash.
The downing of L31 was carried out
by Second Lieutenant Wulstan Tempest of the, by now, famous 39 Squadron.
Tempest described the final moments of the airship.
"I saw her go red inside, like an immense Chinese lantern."
When Mathy's L31 is shot down by Tempest in October of 1916,
because he has this fear of burning, Mathy jumps.
And there are these famous pictures of the imprint of the body where it landed in the field.
He was still alive, just, when they found him, but he died almost immediately afterwards.
At the funeral of the crew of L31 at Potters Bar in Hertfordshire,
the Last Post was sounded.
The Zeppelin commander's coffin bore the simple inscription,
Commander Mathy,
died on service, October the 1st 1916.
Back in Germany the news of Mathy's death was greeted with disbelief.
As one officer wrote,
"With him, the life and soul of our airship service went out too."
The fact that the British were able to bring down the man who's generally recognised,
both by the British and the Germans, as a kind of the ace of aces is highly significant.
Coming on top of those successes the month before, it marks the end pretty much of the Zeppelin threat.
But head of the Naval Air Service, Peter Strasse, was not about to give up.
He ordered a new flight of super Zeppelins, the height climbers.
The original advantage that the Zeppelins had was their superior operating height.
Once British aircraft could reach that altitude, the airships became easy targets.
To regain their advantage, the Zeppelins needed to fly even higher.
And so by 1917, the first of these high flying Zeppelins was delivered
and the Germans try to exploit that.
Unfortunately, if you fly high, you have oxygen problems,
the crews get intoxicated, they go slightly mad in fact from the effects of no oxygen.
You freeze as you haven't got any heating systems.
You can't see the targets quite often, let alone hit them.
You can't stay up there forever and, when you come down, as you approach your bases,
or as you get even more lost because you're flying so high, then you become vulnerable again.
So vulnerable were these new airships that L48,
which crashed at Theberton in Suffolk, was shot down on its very first bombing raid over England.
I don't think we hoped there'd be anyone survive.
I think there was a sort of feeling that they'd come over to bomb us,
so if we'd got them first we were pleased about it, that was how you looked upon the war.
You don't want them sailing over you and dropping everything.
But even as the Allies toasted their victories over the downed airships,
the Germans were about to unleash their new terror weapon.
The bomber.
And the Gotha was the first bomber with the range to reach England.
The first raid by heavy aircraft is in May of 1917.
It's on Folkestone and you get a lot of public indignation.
One of the great shocks for the British is that aircraft will arrive in daylight
and therefore, in theory, they can see their targets that much better and do that much more damage.
The first daylight bomber raid on London was on June the 13th 1917.
I think the bombs fell somewhere around 11 o'clock in the morning, if I remember rightly.
Jack Brown was six at the time, at school in Poplar, in London's East End.
Our teacher said, "Oh well, let's have some air raid drill."
Which consisted of pulling down the flap of the desk and getting underneath, which we did.
And we'd no sooner got underneath it
than all the glass and everything fell in
and there was smoke and fumes and all sorts of things around the place.
A single bomb hit the roof, passing through two floors,
before exploding in the infant class next door to where Jack was sitting.
It's all silent in my memory, I don't remember a bang as such.
Whether the bang deafened me or what, I don't know.
Even when I remember the glass all... coming in
and smashing down all over the place, I still don't associate sound with it.
I remember there was no panic, no fear,
because it was so new and so sudden and everything
that the children were just bewildered I think, and stunned.
So then we walked out into the playground.
While I was standing there,
the caretaker came out with the first of the bodies.
In all, 18 children from the school died in the attack.
Another 37 were injured.
Then afterwards, when I got home, my mother came tearing down the street
with one shoe on and the other one in her hand.
Always remember her now, tearing down.
And of course, um... Ha.
I don't know, she just stopped and looked at me.
What happened after that I don't remember.
Andrew Hyde's uncle was one of the children killed by the bomb.
Five-year-old George Hyde is buried, along with the other children in a mass grave not far from the school.
Well, the local reaction obviously, was just one of absolute devastation
and probably most of the local area had children at the school, it was a large school.
They just couldn't believe it.
The fact that Germans could come over and kill indiscriminately and without any resistance.
Well, the next morning,
we went back to the school again,
and when we got there,
Mr Denner, the headmaster, was there with the school register
and he stood there, reading the names out from the register,
and I remember
that as he stood there and the names came out, he was crying.
He was also a big man,
so it was making a big impression on me
that a man of his stature and his importance in my life,
to see him actually brought to this, er, stage...
was...quite a shock.
Thousands thronged the route of the children's funeral procession.
It was the biggest London's East End had ever had.
Condolence cards were given to the families.
In addition to the more innocent cards which were presented to each of the victims' families,
was a more general card which quite starkly stated...
Which fairly reflects the mood of the people at that time, especially that stage in the war.
And the total hatred towards which the Germans and the Kaiser were held.
Many subscribed to a fund for a memorial to the children,
which still stands to this day in a park close to the school.
Public indignation remained high.
One chap was recorded as saying, "Fair fighting between men one doesn't mind,
"but making war on women and children just isn't right, it's the work of beasts."
The Upper North Street School almost certainly was not the bomber's target.
The bomb aiming in those days must have been pretty primitive.
And instead of hitting the docks, they hit the school.
A lot of, um,
propaganda at the time.
All the newspapers and everybody was led to believe,
or to assume, that they come over deliberately to bomb that school.
But of course, that sort of thing still happens today, doesn't it?
Compared to the carnage of the Western Front,
the number of casualties from Britain's first blitz was tiny.
But the terror visited upon a civilian population was every bit as horrific
as occurred 25 years later in the Second World War.
First the Zeppelins and then the Gothas,
created a template for future bombing campaigns
where civilians would become integral targets of war.
Do you, or any of your family, have any memories of the first blitz, or that of World War Two?
Log on to our website and share your memories.
Go to bbc.co.uk/timewatch