Temporary repairs were done, just to make the building waterproof, but it was not used for services again until 1949.  Until then the two congregations shared the Baptist Chapel in North Row (which is now converted into a private house).  “The Baptists would have a service one Sunday and we would have ours the next,”    Herbert James told the “Argus”.

 

However, as the newspaper reported in 1999, although the church was officially closed for the next seven years, some ceremonies continued there. Stan and Nellie Monk were married in St Thomas’s three weeks before the end of the war in April 1945. “It was a lovely day,” Mr Monk said. “I was in Calais on the Sunday before being married on the Wednesday.”

 

The Home Guard was the first on the scene that night.  John and  Roly Arthur remember that the “Captain Mainwaring” figure in charge of the platoon was a Mr Frank Quick and that the Sergeant was Bill Rees. Mr W. Arthur, Roly and John’s father, was the platoon’s transport manager – because he could drive!  This entitled him to extra petrol coupons – very highly prized in those days of scarce supplies. A number of fire engines attended the blazing cottage (which was close to the junction of Bryn Road, Mead Lane and South Row, roughly opposite Jubilee Cottage). Herbert James remembered that their arrival initially caused more alarm. “I heard the engines and thought it was the plane coming back,” he said.

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Don Humphries was ten at the time and was staying with his grandparents, Mr & Mrs Lewis, who kept the King’s Head in Church Row. At that time the Rose was only a beer-house and the King’s Head was the village’s main pub. It belonged to Hancock’s Brewery. It is now, like the Baptist Chapel, a private house but the place where its name was once displayed can be seen on the gable-end facing the road.

 

Don, who was ten at the time, remembers being woken in the small hours and, frightened, going in with his grandparents. When he returned to his bedroom, he was surprised to find that he could see daylight through the ceiling.  A lady who used to come to stay at the pub at weekends had a lucky escape. Her bedroom window faced towards The Bryn and it was said afterwards that if she had not left her window open, the force of the explosion would have demolished the wall of the building.

When they went out to see the damage to the church they saw that all the birds in the orchard between the King’s Head and the Schoolhouse were lying dead on the ground.  Mercifully, there were no casualties that night. Even the residents of the cottage, Mr & Mrs Prescott, were unscathed. Meanwhile, Don’s mother, cycled down from Llanvaches anxious to see that her little boy was still in one piece !

 

Just across Bryn Road, in the extension to Jubilee Cottage (until 1926 the dairy) the lady known to all as Granny Nind was found sitting up in bed, covered with plaster and dust.  When five year-old David Jones arrived from Magor on the back of his father’s motorbike, they found people throwing out the rubble from the upstairs side window!  At Belle Vue, the home of Mr Hubert Jones which was on the other side of the church and nearly opposite The Rose, the front door had been blown in.

 

The Arthur family, Will and Olive and their three children Joan, John and Roly, lived at Redwick House, about a quarter of a mile from the church, alongside the road to Magor.  John remembers being woken up by something and then hearing the sounds of the plane. Roly thinks there was a flash of light. Both went next morning to see the damage.

 

Despite living so close to where the bombs fell, young Eric Payne of Church House Farm slept through it all.  Somewhat puzzled, he came down in the morning and innocently asked his parents why there was broken glass all over the stairs!

 

It may seem strange that tiny Redwick was bombed that night. It hardly seems an important target. Perhaps the bomber was in trouble and needed to jettison its load before trying to get back to Germany. Herbert James told the “Argus” that there were searchlights and anti-aircraft guns in the vicinity and thought that they might have been the target.  John Arthur remembers searchlights positioned opposite the farm in Mead Lane and says that their concrete foundations are still there.

There were guns at Nash, he remembers, also at the Gaer and Coldra Farm near Christchurch.  Soldiers were billeted at Fir Tree Cottage (between the church and Redwick House).  South of the GWR main line, near the land that was later developed for Llanwern Steelworks, there were decoy railway marshalling yards, specifically designed to be attacked by the bombers.

 

According to the writer Fred Hando in one of his Monmouthshire Sketchbook series, three bombs fell on Redwick that night and twenty-two cottages and also the schoolhouse were damaged to some extent.  As an antiquarian, writing after the war, he was particularly concerned about the damage to the ancient fabric of the church. The roof had fallen in and the medieval rood loft and screen taken down and not replaced in its entirety. The Vicar at the time had apparently said that the screen was not safe after being damaged by the blast and had had to be taken down.  “A relic of such importance should be traced and replaced,” he wrote.  [John Newman in the entry for Redwick Church in “The Buildings of Wales – Gwent/Monmouthshire (published in 2000) writes that “the loft itself is a reconstruction of 1948, the standards and rail are original, but the bressumer a steel replacement. The diagonally-set corner posts and cusped spandrels which support it, however, are late medieval……One can only imagine the magnificence of the screen which these tantalising fragments indicate.”]  Some believe that the pronounced lean of the tower, as seen from outside, is attributable to the bombing but it may well have been like that more or less since the church was built, due to subsidence in the marshy soil of the Gwent Levels!

 

Selwyn Monk thinks heard stories of another occasion when a plane crash-landed in the Bristol Channel near Redwick but is not sure whether it was one of theirs or ours. Can anyone supply any more information about this?

 

At the end of the war VE Night was celebrated with a party at the school.  This was not without some controversy however.  Local people who had family members still fighting in the Far East were unhappy about there being festivities before the war with Japan had come to an end.

 

St Thomas’s Church was officially reopened on March 17th 1949 and the 50th anniversary of that event was marked with a service led by the Vicar in 1999, Rev. Brian Parfitt.  Much of the work of restoration after the war was paid for by the War Damage Commission but villagers raised an extra £200 for other works.  With a new Village Hall under construction at about the same time, the centre of Redwick must have resembled a busy building site back then – just as in recent months!

 

My thanks to Don, John and Roly and others who have contributed information about events seventy years ago. If anyone else can add details, other memories or photographs to the archive, we would love to hear from them.

 

Mike Hall

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