Before the Blitz, emergency planners had estimated that Belfast’s mortuary services would need to cope with around 200 bodies at worst. On the night of the 15th, the number of corpses at the Mater alone amounted to 80. The bodies, or what remained of them (which wasn’t always very much), overspilled into the hospital’s back yard. A strong smell of decomposing flesh lingered across the hospital. Jimmy Doherty, the aforementioned air raid warden, was tasked with the unpleasant job of laying out corpses in the alleyways around the hospital and nearby Crumlin Road Jail.[1]
Additional mortuary facilities had to be found. Falls Road Public Baths was chosen as it could house 150 bodies.[2] Doherty wrote of visiting the Baths:
We had volunteered but we were totally unprepared for the real horror that was to follow. Hundreds of bodies brought in from scattered incidents were lying all around us. They were men and women, young people, children and infants. How could anyone have visualised seeing so many broken bodies in one place? No text books, no training pamphlets, could have prepared us for the grim task we were about to undertake. Some were whole and others hardly resembled human beings.[3]
Image from Atlas of Air-Raid Injuries (London: HMSO, 1944). Compound (open) fracture of Tibia and Fibula (Faked casualty). Courtesy of Northern Ireland War Memorial.
The baths, too, soon filled with death’s stench. As the days passed, the bodies arriving were in an increasingly decomposed state. As an alternative, after three days the bodies from the various mortuaries were moved to St. George’s Market and the public invited to identify their loved ones there.[4] In total, 255 corpses were laid out in the market. Bodies were brought to the makeshift mortuary by any transport available, including furniture vans, lorries and even Corporation bin lorries. Supplies of coffins soon ran out, and the corpses were wrapped in a blanket, if lucky.[5]
Relatives and friends arrived at the market to search for loved ones or identify what remained of them. Many bodies, and body parts, were unidentifiable or simply not identified. Mass graves for the unclaimed were dug in the Milltown and Belfast City Cemeteries.[6] In the First World War, victims had tended to die in hospitals, but ‘total war’, which extended to civilian areas, brought civilians face-to-face with the visceral experience of modern war. During Easter week 1941, encounters with corpses became a regular experience for those living in Belfast.
Red Cross Nurse uniform. Courtesy of Northern Ireland War Memorial.
One of the most vivid first-hand accounts of that fateful evening comes from the diaries of a nurse, Emma Duffin, who was also Commandment of the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) unit of the Stranmillis Military Hospital (on the site of Stranmillis Training College). During the First World War, Emma had served as a VAD nurse in Egypt and France, while her family members served in English military hospital bases. In her diaries, Emma recalls wandering around Belfast on the morning of 16 April. Duffin provided a grotesque description of the 250 bodies at St. George’s Market:
I had seen many dead but they had died in hospital beds, their eyes had been reverently closed, their hands crossed on their breasts. Death had, to a certain extent, been glossed over, made decent. It was solemn, tragic, dignified. Here it was grotesque, repulsive, horrible…with tangled hair, staring eyes, clutching hands, contorted limbs, their grey green faces covered with dust, they lay bundled into coffins, half-shrouded in rugs or blankets, or an occasional sheet, still wearing their dirty torn, twisted garments.[7]
Then another problem arose. Rats began to enter the market. A decision was made that corpses left unidentified by Monday 21 April needed to be buried for reasons of hygiene and because the stench of decomposition was sickening even the more resolute visitors. The bodies were then taken to be laid out on the grass in May’s Fields, an open ground beside the Lagan. In total, 163 unclaimed bodies were placed in plain wooden coffins and transported to appropriate resting places on Tuesday 22 April. Those thought to be Protestant were buried in a single grave at City Cemetery; those thought to be Catholic at Milltown.