PLYMOUTH |
The Encyclopaedia of Plymouth History |
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PORTLAND SQUARE MEMORIAL SCULPTURE
On the night of Tuesday April 22nd/Wednesday April 23rd 1941 a section of the public air-raid shelter situated in Portland Square, Plymouth, took a direct hit from a German bomb. Seventy-six men, women and children perished in what became the biggest, single civilian loss of life in Plymouth during the Second World War. Since the end of the War the area surrounding and including Portland Square has become first the Plymouth Polytechnic and now the University of Plymouth. In 1981 Plymouth City Council erected a bench and small plaque in the grounds, at the instigation of a Mr Arthur Davis, who had witnessed the destruction in 1941. Ten years later there were calls for a more permanent and fitting memorial to be erected and when the last of the original properties on the site, number 22 Portland Square, was demolished in December 2004, Mr Tony Rees, a Senior Lecturer at the University, commenced gathering support, both moral and financial, to bring about such a plan. On Thursday April 23rd 2009, in the presence of the Lord Mayor of Plymouth, Councillor Brian Vincent, that memorial was unveiled by Mrs Barbara Mills, one of the two long-term survivors of the tragedy (the other was another Barbara, Mrs Barbara McLaughlin). She lost her parents, sister and grandfather in the incident. The memorial is the work of Frances May Favata and depicts an adult lifting up a child to be saved, as a parent would do in the devastation of war. Sources:
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