What became of the Loughborough Zeppelin?

Local actors during 'The Night of the Zeppelin' performances, May 2016 (Lynne)

Last week I promised you an absolute corker of a blog post, and I have every confidence that my friend, Ian, has provided exactly that - and more!! Ian is an expert and published author in the field of aviation history, and is currently specialising in Zeppelin raids over Britain. I am thrilled that Ian has agreed to guest post on this humble blog. 

Please, read on and learn what Ian has to say about -  



What Became of the Loughborough Zeppelin?

Loughborough. I’ve never been to Loughborough. I’ve never been there, yet I feel I know it rather well. I know the layout of the streets and I know what many of them look like today and which ones have changed over time. And the reason I know all this is due to Zeppelins.

I have been fascinated by these early air raids for many years now, initially focusing on the raids on London, then extending my interest to raids that struck right across Britain, from Portsmouth in the south to Loch Ness in the north (we’ll come back to that later!) and all points in between. It’s a period in Britain’s history that has become known as the First Blitz but I prefer to call it the Forgotten Blitz — because many of those I talk to have no idea it ever happened. At a time when aviation was so new — the Wright brothers first manned, powered and controlled flight took place in 1903 and lasted just 12 seconds — it is incredible to consider that just 12 years after that first hesitant flight, airships and aeroplanes were at war over Britain. And in January 1916 that war came to cities, towns and villages across a wide swathe of the Midlands, including Loughborough.

While working on my latest book, ‘The First Blitz in 100 Objects’ (my publisher insisted on ‘First’ not ‘Forgotten’), I was searching for unusual items and places which could add a unique angle to my story. I was aware that Loughborough had commemorated the raid on the town by placing granite blocks bearing a German cross in two locations where bombs had claimed lives. I decided to track down photographs of the blocks for the book. I searched the internet and discovered the ‘Lynne About Loughborough’ blogs, they led me to Lynne and Lynne gave me the photos I needed which now, along with their story, have their place among 100 other objects. They find themselves alongside bombs, graves, souvenir china, postcards, plaques, monuments, clocks, painted animal bones dropped from Zeppelins, a ‘lost’ Tudor building, stained glass windows, aeroplanes, stuffed birds and so much more — each with its own special story linking it to the German air raids of WW1.

Granite square on Empress Road, Loughborough (Lynne)

Plaque on Empress Road adjacent to Morris's Empress Works and opposite the granite square (Lynne)

Granite square in the middle of the road, The Rushes (Lynne)

Location in the middle of the road of the granite square in The Rushes (Lynne)

The wooden mounting board on the wall where the original plaque was sited (Lynne)

The new memorial plaque sited on The Rushes, unveiled on the 100th anniversary of the event (Lynne)

Once I had the photos I needed it was time to revisit all the preliminary research I had carried out on the Loughborough Zeppelin raid of 31 January 1916. And that was when I got to know the highways and byways of Loughborough through the modern research tool of Google Maps Streetview. Streetview allows you to ‘walk’ along the streets of any town and I use it all the time to plot where bombs fell and to understand the geography of any particular area. This I combine with the extraordinary series of online maps available to view free at the website www.oldmapsonline.org run by the National Library of Scotland. Here you can find Ordnance Survey maps of Loughborough, and the rest of Britain, from Victorian times to the mid-20^th century — but be warned, it is addictive.

The Zeppelin raid on the Midlands on the night of 31 January took the country completely by surprise. Through 1915, while the Zeppelin raiders were still gaining experience, other than London they rarely penetrated too far from the east coast. But for this raid, the first of 1916, the commander of the Naval Zeppelin Division boldly selected Liverpool as the target, far further west then previously attempted, and he selected nine Zeppelins, making it the largest raid of the war to date.  Bad weather over the North Sea, however, seriously hindered the raiders, a problem compounded over England by fog, mist and rain. Navigating a Zeppelin in the dark (Zeppelins only attacked during the darkest phase of the moon’s cycle) was never easy and in bad weather such as this it became impossible to achieve with any hope of accuracy. After the raid, Zeppelin commanders reported dropping bombs on Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham, Goole, Immingham and Great Yarmouth, whereas none of these places was hit. Instead, the raiders wandered around the Midlands looking for targets of opportunity. There was no national blackout plan at this time, each town allowed to make its own decision. Loughborough did not have a blackout. While that may seem foolish now, at the time the Midlands had never been raided so the urgency wasn’t there.

Zeppelin L 20, commanded by 34-year-old Kapitänleutnant Franz Stabbert, had come inland over southern part of The Wash at about 7.00pm and headed west. Although he passed close to Leicester, that town’s blackout was effective and he did not see it, but what he did see about 10 miles to the north was a concentration of lights and that suggested a target — the lights were shining from Loughborough. As L 20 closed in, Stabbert realised it was a town but was unaware which one. At the Technical Institute, evening classes were well-attended that night and lights in the classrooms blazed through the sloping glass roof. From where the first two of his four bombs landed, it would appear this was Stabbert’s initial target. To him, high up in the sky, the Technical Institute probably looked like a factory. Zeppelins did have bombsights, but aerial bombing was in its infancy and many Zeppelin commanders were happy to simply release their bombs over any inhabited area and get away as fast as possible to avoid becoming a target of the anti-aircraft defences. But Loughborough, like most other towns in the Midlands, had no anti-aircraft guns to defend them, so it appears Stabbert took his time and tried to aim at this target. Just after 8.00pm those two bombs landed either side of the Technical Institute, the first in the yard at the back of the Crown and Cushion Inn on Ashby Square, and the second in The Rushes. By the standards of the time that was accurate bombing. Those two bombs claimed five lives. Injured by the first bomb while standing in her doorway in Orchard Street, Martha Simpson sat down in an armchair alone and bled to death; jagged flying splinters from the bomb in The Rushes claimed four lives: Joseph and Alice Adkin, Ethel Higgs and Annie Adcock.

It seems that while over Loughborough more bright lights encouraged Stabbert to change direction and head towards the eastern edge of the town. These lights were showing from Herbert Morris’ Empress Works on Empress Road. Again, Stabbert aimed two bombs at the target. This time they both fell short, but it was close. The first fell in an orchard at the south end of Thomas Street, about 140 yards from the works, sending great clods of earth erupting into the sky, while the second exploded right in Empress Road, just the width of the road from the wall of the works. That bomb killed three of the Page family, shopkeeper Josiah Gilbert and Arthur Turnill, a fitter at the Empress Works, who had just appeared in the street.

Keeping the rest of his bombload for other targets, Stabbert and L 20 headed away to the north. Clearly he had not considered the unknown town below as a major target but, somewhat ironically, he was unaware he had passed close to the works of the Brush Electrical Engineering Company, which was in the process of building fifty Avro 504C aircraft under licence for the Royal Naval Air Service who hoped to use them in an anti-Zeppelin role. From there, L 20 went on to drop more bombs on Bennerley, Ilkeston and Burton-on-Trent, leaving the residents of Loughborough to mourn the deaths of 10 of their fellow citizens and sympathise with the 12 who bore the scars of that night of terror. In the morning, however, Loughborough became alive with huge numbers of sightseers who wanted to see for themselves the damage caused by the bombs. 

At the Crown and Cushion, where the first bomb exploded, so great were the numbers who came that the landlord, William Oram, erected collection boxes in aid of the hospital. In two days he collected almost £19 (about £1,600 today).

And so ended Loughborough’s one and only experience of the Zeppelin terror.

Map tracing the route taken by Zeppelin L 20 over England on the night of 31 January 1916, and showing the localities where she dropped her bombs (Ian Castle)

Map showing where the bombs fell in Loughborough on the night of 31 January 1916 (Ian Castle)

But what about Loch Ness, which I mentioned earlier?

Kapitänleutnant Franz Stabbert (Ian Castle)

Franz Stabbert and L 20 didn’t return to Britain for three months. Then, on the night of 2/3 May 1916, eight Navy Zeppelins set out to attack the Royal Navy base and docks at Rosyth on the Firth of Forth. Bad weather again intervened and only two of the raiders reached Scotland, the rest diverting to the Yorkshire. One of those that did reach Scotland was Stabbert’s L 20. But once they crossed the coast, L 20 faced Scotland’s terrible weapons: mist, fog and snow squalls! With no sight of the land below and misjudging the direction of the wind, rather than to the west, L 20 was being pushed north-west over the Highlands. By the time Stabbert came to the shocking conclusion of where he was, he had reached Loch Ness, about 90 miles north of Rosyth. Stabbert ordered L 20 to turn back and head towards the coast, aware that he had consumed a significant amount of his precious fuel on this wasted journey, aware he still had a long way to go to reach his home base at Tondern in Schleswig-Holstein. He didn’t make it.

At about 6.00am on the morning of 3 May, Stabbert established he was still 300 miles from home and, lacking enough fuel for the journey, he headed instead towards the coast of neutral Norway, only 95 miles away, to face internment rather than drowning. His attempt to land on the Gandsfjord, south of Stavanger, went horribly wrong when downdrafts from the mountains tossed L 20 about like a toy. The forward part of the airship smashed violently into the icy waters of the fjord, at which point Stabbert and seven of his 16-man crew leapt overboard. But lightened by this reduction in weight, L 20 shot back up into the air, now completely out of control. Stabbert and another man swam to the shore, while a fisherman rowed out and rescued the other six men floundering in the frigid waters of the fjord. Carried by the wind, L 20 smashed into high ground to the west of the fjord, which damaged the rear of the Zeppelin, spilling out five more of the desperate crew onto Norwegian soil. The broken wreck of L 20 then fell into the next body of water, the Harfsfjord, where the Norwegian navy pulled to safety the final three greatly relieved men. The short career of L 20, the Loughborough bomber, was over.

But what of Stabbert and his crew? The Norwegian authorities faced a dilemma. The country was neutral in the war that had engulfed Europe, but this German Zeppelin had violated her territory and therefore they should intern her crew. But they had caused no harm in Norway. The authorities reached an interesting compromise. Stabbert and nine of his men found themselves interned, but the six men picked up from the fjord by the civilian fisherman were considered ‘shipwrecked mariners’ and a week later repatriated to Germany. Stabbert, however, did not remain in internment long. He escaped, made his way back to Germany via Sweden and in December 1916 took command of Zeppelin L 23, followed in April 1917 by command of L 44.

On the morning of 20 October 1917, French anti-aircraft gunners opened a lethal fire on a Zeppelin returning from a raid on England. It was L 44. Engulfed in fire, she smashed down onto French soil just five miles from the front line. The whole crew, including Franz Stabbert, died in the flames.

   

The man who had brought the terror of war to the streets of Loughborough was himself now a victim of that same war.

The wreck of Zeppelin L 20, stranded in the icy waters of Hafrsfjord, about five miles west of Stavanger (Ian Castle)

Norwegian sightseers get a closeup view of the wreckage of Zeppelin L 20 in Hafrsfjord (Ian Castle)

Author: Ian Castle

If you’d like to know more about Germany’s air raid campaign against Britain during the First World War, visit my award-winning website, which you can find at www.IanCastleZeppelin.co.uk

You can also keep up to date with my work on Twitter @IanCastleRaids and on Facebook ‘Zeppelins Over Britain’.

I have also 'appeared' in an interview about the First Blitz with Dan Snow on his HistoryHit tv channel. [May require a subscription to view] 

And my latest book, ‘The First Blitz in 100 Objects’ is available now from Pen & Sword, and online at Amazon. The book is also available from other online retailers, like Waterstones and W H Smith, or you can order it from your local bookshop.









Ian also offers talks about all-things Zeppelin - see his website for more details. Although most of the talks take place in the south of England, I was lucky enough to catch Ian when he was presenting his research in Lincoln, and I can vouch that Ian's talks are both informative and exciting. 

HUGE thanks to Ian for contributing this excellent piece to the lynneaboutloughborough blog! - Lynne 




And to finish, a few poignant photographs:

The final resting place of Josiah Gilbert (Lynne)

The headstone installed in memory of Josiah Gilbert (Lynne)

And there we must end our discussion of the Zeppelin L 20 raid on the town of Loughborough on the night of 31 January 1916. Thank you for reading. 

PS You can walk, or drive the route that Zeppelin L 20 took across Loughborough if you go over to my Zeppelin trail page.

You are welcome to quote passages from any of my posts, with appropriate credit. The correct citation for this looks as follow:

Castle, Ian (2020). What became of the Loughborough Zeppelin. Available from: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2020/02/what-became-of-loughborough-zeppelin.html  [Accessed 15 February 2020]

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Thank you for reading this blog. 

Lynne