Memorial to Mr and Mrs F W Gill and the German air crew

Image: © Duncan Graham Taken: 20 Feb 2018

This stone is in a small memorial garden in Clacton, on the northern corner where Victoria Road and Albert Gardens intersect. On 30th April 1940, a German Heinkel bomber carrying sea mines crash-landed on the house in Victoria Road belonging to Mr Frederick W Gill (b. 1888), a retired wool merchant, and his wife Dorothy (b. 1894). The house was utterly destroyed and they were both killed. They were the first civilian casualties of World War II on the British mainland. The memorial commemorates both them and the four members of the German air crew. The crash also made fifty houses uninhabitable and 156 people were injured. The Gills' 19-year-old son William survived with head injuries. The memorial was refurbished and a new memorial stone added in April 2017, paid for partly by money remaining from an air disaster fund set up in 1940 following the crash by the Rev H G Redgrave, the chairman of Clacton Urban District Council. [Sources: bbc.co.uk; Chelmsford Chronicle, 3rd May 1940, from the British Newspaper Archive and courtesy of the British Library Board; National Register 1939 entry for the Gills].

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