A Forgotten Owl

A Place to Remember

Initially erected in 1922, the memorial was reconfigured in 1948, losing its original wooden frame and gaining four new brass plaques to commemorate the fallen of WW2. Almost all the names remembered on the brass plaques fell in combat. Still, others lingered beyond the war years, suffering both physical and mental trauma and disability, their sacrifice no less significant but undocumented. Kenneth Rowntree's wartime painting commemorating the college's sojourn in Scarborough has a contemplative quality, an unintended but fitting memorial for another casualty.

Cyril's Story

One outlier casualty was not a soldier or combatant but a City of Leeds Training College student innocently wandering the Scarborough streets. During WW2, the college and its students relocated from Headingley to the relative safety of Scarborough. A military hospital, training facility, and RAMC Depot took possession of the college buildings at Beckett Park in Headingley. The college would not return until 1945.

Cyril Walter Hutchison was a 19-year-old student from Rotherham. He died on 11 March 1941 from blast injuries after a parachute bomb landed on the school on Queen Margaret's Road, where he was walking. The school was empty. Its pupils evacuated to Castle Howard, and the building used to billet soldiers, but at that time posted elsewhere. The type of mine dropped was probably a Luftmine; once deployed, the parachute would descend at about 40mph; it contained a clockwork mechanism inside designed to detonate a short while after landing. German bombers, returning across the North Sea, often dropped their unused bombs on seaside towns and communities after bombing raids on the industrial cities of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Hull.

Luftmines were powerful weapons for the time. Cyril's death shook the College community. He was unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. However, his death did not fit the criterion to name him as a casualty on the war memorial.