BABY-KILLING RAID

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume XLV, Issue XLV, 8 June 1917, Page 1

BABY-KILLING RAID

A FATHER'S TEAGIC STOEY. [The Germans, in an extravagant report on the shelling by destroyers of the unfortified towns of Broadstairs and Margate, pretend that they attacked " defences rear the North Foreland." The facts afe;*-&lH>wn in the report of the inquest, printed' below, on the poor woman and two little children who were killed by the bombardment.] The inquest on Mrs Daisy Agnes Morgan and her baby daughter, Phyllis Frances, aged 10 months, who were killed in the destroyer raid, was held at Broadstairs on February 28. The Corouer said there was nothing to boast about in having attacked a defenseless place like that, but the jury would pro-

bably go no further than return a verdict that the mother and child were killed by gunfire, however reprehensible, disgraceful, and criminal was the act by which they iret their end. The husband and father, Frank Horace Morgan, a general laborer, said': "About 11.15 p.m. on Sunday I was downstairs when I heard the commencement of the bombardment. I put it down to a raid of some sort. I stood and listened while the first five or six shells burst. I went to the tr-ck win- , dow, pulled up the blind, and saw the sky lit up by star shells. I thought I had better go to the front, and got to the door, and was about to unlock it, when two si'clls seemed to burst very close, so I went back to the kitchen. I stood still and hesitated a bit, and was about to shout upstairs to my wife; but just as I got to the stairs the whole staircase fell down* and the brickwork fell into the room. I heard the children crying, and went to the stairs and called to the wife, who did not answer. P dent know exactly what I did, but just then the biggest boy came tumbling down. Where is mother?" he said to me. There was biick rubbish all over the stairs, and I/thought she was buried. I first caught hold .of one child who was not injured, and took him io the front door, telling him to go to his grandmother's house. I then went back zo the stairs and caught hold of the other boy. He did not seem to be injured at the time, but he is now in Margate Cottage Hospital. I told him also to go to his grandmothers. I can't say how he got there by tiimself. THE LITTLE GIRL'S CRT. "Another little girl on the top of the stairs was bruised on the forehead, and I sent her, too, to her grandmother's. The girl Doris, who has since died at Margate, got out of bed herself, but could not reach the stairs. I called to her to come, and she cried out pitifully: '" I can't. I'm hurt.' I went upstairs and brought her down, handing her to one of my sons, who carried her to her grandmother's house. Then at the top of the satirs I found my wife dead. I raised her up a bit, and found she had the baby in her arms. The baby groaned, and I took her up the street and handed her over to the postmaster. Then I went back to the bouse. A young man came and helped me, and three doctors afterwards arrived. The firing seemed to come from all round. The house was hit midway dming the bombardment." Several splinters of Bhell were produced. The shell knocked a hole 4ft in diameter in the wall, and threw down a partition inside the house. The witness found the fuse in the rocm. " Where my wife was,*' he continued, " she met the full force of the shell. She was

about 3ffc inside from where the shell came through. She had gone to fetch the baby." Inspector Ford, of the Kent County Police, said that in the immediate neighborhood eijrhfc more shells (one unexploded) -were found, and 40 others further away. The jury returned a verdict of " from Shell Wounds,:' a juror contending that it should be one of murder. Lord Northcliffe headed with £2 a subscription list "for the bereaved family.