A RELUCTANT bomb hero has been revealed.
Harry Kaye, a father of three, was the hero who leaped into action when a German bomb hit Royds Hall School in 1940.
Mr Kaye ignored other incendiary bombs, grabbed a stirrup pump and a bucket of sand and raced into the school to douse the flames.
His heroics emerged after a feature in Monday’s Examiner about bomb raids on Huddersfield in 1940 and 1941.
Mrs Nancy Solomons, 80, of Cowcliffe, was one of those who read the article. And she revealed that it was her father who put out the school blaze.
“The hero who smothered the bomb in the way described in the cutting you reproduced was not a senior warden, who wrongly got the credit, but Mr Harry Kaye, my father,’’ she said.
“I was only about 10 at the time but I recall my mother Dorothy and my three sisters Shirley, Barbara and Lesley were in the Anderson air raid shelter at the bottom of the garden of our home in Royds Avenue, Paddock. It was just across the road from the grounds of what was then Royds Hall Grammar School.
My dad, Harry, who was not an air raid warden, was in the road when incendiary bombs fell in surrounding woods.
“When he saw one drop through the skylight of the school, he grabbed a stirrup pump and ran into the school dining room where he found a dustbin lid and some sand and quickly smothered the bomb.
“Other people in the street saw what he had done. He did it on his own without any assistance and it has always upset me that he never got any credit for it”.
Mr Kaye, who had served for several years in the Royal Navy, worked as a tram driver in Huddersfield.
He died at the age of 78 in 1976.
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