ARCHIVES
THE MIRROR
OPs who were at School during the Second World War have recalled on many occasion the night the school was bombed . Although thankfully there was no lasting damage to either students or staff , nor to the school itself , one physical reminder of the incident was a mirror cracked by shrapnel during the raid . The damaged mirror remained in school becoming a popular talking point amongst visiting OPs from that era . It was displayed on the dormitory wall in School House at one stage , before being taken down when the boarding house was converted into a new Sixth Form Centre and classrooms in 2008 . The mirror eventually found a new home in the school archives , although by this point its condition had deteriorated and it needed attention . Archivist , Angie Edwards came up with an ingenious plan to rescue it . Now restored and safely preserved for generations to come , Angie explains more .
When I arrived at school 23 years ago , I had no knowledge of the famous mirror . Chris Solomon at some point retrieved it – who knows where from , and when he started gathering archive material from all over the school , he arranged for everything to be stored upstairs in what was formerly a School House dorm room . Fast forward to the building of our archive storeroom and formal archive room , and all the material he had amassed was brought down to be assessed and stored in a safer and more suitable environment . Unfortunately , when the mirror came down to us , it was not as I had first seen it . Initially , it was a fairly circular central hole , with breaks going from it like a sunburst . By the time it came into the archives in 2011 , several of the pieces of glass had disappeared .
After pondering for about ten years , I approached our Design Centre technician , Nathaniel Browning , and asked his advice on how to repair and display the mirror . Technology has now become so advanced that he was able to map the marks on the backing board of the mirror to take the exact shapes of the missing pieces of glass . He then laser-printed replicas in plastic and stuck them back into the original positions . The result is the mirror as it would have appeared in 1941 , with the replacement material clearly different from the original shards .
The following extract from The Pocklingtonian describes the events leading to the damage to the mirror . We do have some slightly different memories from pupils who were contemporaries ( and note that the dates on these two extracts differ ), but this was one version :
The Bombs : I do not think anyone who was at Pocklington School during the war years will ever forget the night the School was bombed . It was early on 21 September 1941 . During that fateful night , a German light bomber , probably a Junker 88 which had a single fin like a Wellington , flew undetected to Pocklington , most likely by following the British bombers returning from Germany . It mistook the school buildings for the aerodrome huts and dropped a ‘ stick ’ of bombs , ie : five or six bombs in a line which was roughly parallel to the railway tracks .
The first bomb was near Dolman House , the last two on each side of the school and near the changing rooms , approximately 20-25 yards from the outer back and front walls of School House . We were all sleeping at the time , the noise of the explosions was terrific , and we all instinctively covered our heads with our bed-clothes . The last two explosions , the nearest and loudest , smashed all the windows and forced our bedroom door ( Dorm 2 ) open . There was an unpleasant smell of cordite in the air ; there was a lot of dust around and we had the taste of dust and earth in our mouths . We got quietly out of bed , in fact nobody uttered a word , the sound of glass falling off our blankets making a peculiar noise . We went down to the changing rooms which we used during the war as shelter . There were only two minor casualties ; one boy could not find his slippers and trod on the glass ; another was cut by the glass from his blanket . Although the sounds of the explosions were deafening , or so it seemed to us , the bombs were fortunately relatively small , probably weighing 50kg each . The craters they made in the ground were small , the last but one bomb , the one at the back of the school , was approximately 20 yards from my bed . A piece of shrapnel smashed the Head Prefect ’ s mirror above his head ; fortunately , he was lying in bed and not sitting up at the time . Another piece of shrapnel hit the dining room clock stopping it at 1.55 am . It was early Sunday .
The Pocklingtonian 1994-95
This poem was penned by the Headmaster , P C Sands , and appeared in the 1944 edition of the magazine :
THE BLITZ INCIDENT 19th September , 1941
The Nazi bomber dropped his load And straddled Dolman ’ s fair abode . Thus , rudely wakened , muffled forms , Like Agag , trod the glass-strewn dorms . At dawn they gazed and wondered still What power had fended off the ill , When shrapnel-studded roof and floor , Old clock and mirror , panelled door Were so disfigured ;
But young and old unruffled hail The morning sun , and on the rail Some waggish youth had summed it all : “ Scarred but not scuttled ” ran the scrawl , “ Jarred but not jiggered .”
Psammoi
The Mirror .
AJE 2.10.23
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