The Night the War Came to Weston - A VE Day Reflection
By Joshua Keyes, Jill Dando News Correspondent
As Weston-super-Mare commemorates VE Day 80, local resident Joshua Keyes spoke to his great aunt Patricia O’Connell about the wartime nights that remain etched in her memory over eight decades later.
“The worst memories,” Patricia begins, “are of those clear night skies on June 28th and 29th, 1942. That’s when the bombs came.”
Weston was no stranger to the terrors of the Second World War, but nothing could have prepared its residents for the back-to-back air raids that struck the town that summer.
Patricia, then only 14 years old, recalls vividly the ominous hum of German bombers growing louder overhead, followed by the shriek of air raid sirens piercing the still night.
“We didn’t expect them to return a second night, almost at the same time,” she says. “The first night, the bombs came before the warning. The second night, we had just thirty minutes to prepare.”
Her family home—a three-story house—was packed with seven children, including Patricia’s baby brother Hughie, and their mother.
“We grabbed our clothes as we ran down the stairs, and at first, we huddled under our large dining room table, singing hymns and songs to drown out the terrifying noise.”
On top of that table were Hughie’s birthday presents, untouched and fragile reminders of normal childhood in the midst of war.
As the house shook from the impact of nearby bombs and began to fill with black smoke, Patricia’s father, Major P.D. O’Connell, arrived just in time.
He had been out on patrol with the 8th Somerset Home Guard, alongside a local airman. They battled the fires caused by incendiary bombs—one of which had torn straight through the roof into Maureen’s bedroom, setting her brand-new dress ablaze inside her wardrobe.
“They used water from the bathtub, buckets we kept in the bathroom, and a stirrup-pump to put the fire out,” she recalls.
Just metres from their home, the Boulevard Congregational Church was reduced to a shell. Outside, as the family sought safety, they were forced to take cover once more—this time from the machine guns of low-flying enemy aircraft.
“I will never forget those poor people who weren’t as lucky as us,” Patricia says. “The ‘all-clear’ siren, when it finally came, was one of the sweetest sounds I’ve ever heard. Even now, I feel relief just thinking about it.”
Josh adds that his grandmother, Carmel, was one of the six O’Connell children in the house during those harrowing nights. She was just three years old in 1942, yet still remembers vividly where she stood—opposite the bombed-out Lance & Lance shops at the top of Weston High Street—watching her father march past.
That same man, Major P.D. O’Connell, would go on to help organise Weston-super-Mare’s first VE Day parade in May 1945.
On that joyful day, he sat to the right of the Grove Park bandstand pillar, a quiet leader who had seen the war from the ground up—and helped carry his town through it.
