Killed by enemy action, aged 9, on the eve of the Blitz

Today, 7 September 2010, is the seventieth anniversary of the start of the bombing Blitz on Britain by Nazi Germany. The Blitz lasted from 7 September 1940 until 11 May 1941, killing just over 20,000 civilians in London alone. The German bombers' main target on 7 September 1940 was the Port of London, and although London was to bear the brunt of the Blitz, approximately 43,000 people were killed in Britain as a whole, of which around 5,000 were children.*

Although it is uncertain whether she was counted among these statistics, nine-year-old Sheila Esther White was ‘killed by enemy action’ on 6 September 1940 – the eve of the Blitz's beginning – and is buried at Shorncliffe Military Cemetery. Shorncliffe lies near Folkestone and Dover, areas of Kent that were under constant attack during 1940, including from heavy-artillery guns positioned across the Channel in the Calais area of France, which means that Sheila must have died as a result of enemy bombardment of some kind.

Below: The grave of Sheila Esther White.

Shorncliffe itself has been a British Army camp since around 1800, when Napoleon, rather than the Nazis, threatened Britain. A number of army children are buried alongside Sheila at Shorncliffe Military Cemetery, some of whom would have lived in the camp’s married quarters (click here, and scroll two-thirds of the way down the page, to see a terrace of such army-provided accommodation at Shorncliffe as it looked a century ago).

Below: A sketch of the camp grounds at Shorncliffe dated 1801.

*For more on the Blitz, see Juliet Gardiner’s article in the Daily Telegraph, ‘Anniversary of the Blitz: “I thought, I cannot be alive”’.