‍MAJOR TARGET: Duisberg burns as Daily Express reporter William Troughton risks his life making dangerous second mission

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‍“THE medical officer on this bomber station has just asked me to take a sleeping tablet — and I’m almost asleep on my feet already. It sounded so silly that I had to laugh.”

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‍These were the words of the Daily Express reporter and photographer William Troughton, the first War Correspondent to risk his life by going on two terrifying bombing raids with the RAF in the same day ... one in the morning and back again at night.

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‍Troughton had just returned from the day raid when the medical officer offered him the pills. He wrote: “The boys, who have just come back from Duisburg are all milling around him with their hair dishevelled and their eyes heavy with the need for sleep, and they are taking his tablets. Funny because only seven hours ago we were taking wakey-wakey tablets from him to ward off sleep as we left.”

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‍The Expressman’s action story was the first descriptive colour piece of the Second World War when we bombed Duisberg on the Rhur — to demonstrate to Hitler the overwhelming superiority of the Allied Air Forces.

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‍The city was a major logistical centre for Germany’s chemical, steel and iron industries. A total of 1,013 Allied aircraft took part in the daylight raid on October 14, 1944. More than 500 Lancasters; 474 Halifaxes and 20 Mosquitos supported by a heavy number of RAF fighter jets.

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‍There was no gung-ho about Troughton’s report. Editor Arthur Christiansen only wanted a colour piece based on total fact. There was to be no gloating.

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‍The reporter wrote of the day raid: “When we saw at last the great waterways of Duisburg gleaming in the sunshine, the sky ahead of us was full of the aircraft that were going in with the first wave. They looked like a cloud of gnats. Behind us hundreds more gnats were stretched across the sky.

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‍“Our flying officer put on his best guide voice and said over the intercom to me … ‘and there, Bill, on our port bow, is the great big Happy Valley.’

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‍“Ahead of us ugly black smudges of smoke appeared among the gnats and slowly expanded into big, black blobs. Suddenly a pale blue smoke trail spiralled down from the cloud of gnats in front of us and went down. ‘Somebody’s got it!’ came someone’s voice over the intercom. Everyone was quiet for a few minutes.

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‍“Down in the dock area behind Duisburg’s waterways to the east of the winding Rhine, the bombs were falling. And far down to the right I saw the red flashes of an ack-ack battery opening up on us. Pilot Officer Ken Thomas, from Swansea, cracked: ‘Jerry never could take a joke!’”

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‍Troughton told how as they flew lower the guns were more vicious and black smoke was all around them. There were only a few minutes before they were due over the target, and the layout of the city was as clear as a map. The bombs were raining down on it and the sky around them was filling with smoke smudges – hundreds of them.

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‍“They appeared from nowhere as if they had been painted by an invisible paint brush. Our Bomb Aimer, Flying Officer McEwen, from British Columbia, planted the bombs well on the target,” he said.

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‍“The rest of us had our noses flattened against the Perspex looking down. The Navigator, Flying-Officer Lankester, from Bexhill, pointed to five great black balls of smoke right across the dockside. Someone had found a good mark.

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“Looks like an oil dump” said keen-eyed mid-upper gunner, Flight-Sergeant Gillespie, a Canadian. “Duisburg has had it.”

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‍In a separate piece Troughton took readers through the night attack.

‍“It was grim,” he said. “There was for me a bad few minutes when the first searchlights on enemy territory began feeling for us, coning and creeping nearer and nearer. Any time now I thought. This time I was with Squadron-Leader P.B. Clay, of Sowerby Bridge, Yorks, as skipper. He was a tall young fellow with fair hair and a nonchalant manner but a brain as cool as ice when he sat behind the joystick.

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“When the flak began to flash around us, I thought of the great cloud of smoke puffs we had left behind us in the sky the previous morning. Duisburg was ablaze. Markers showered down and lay on the city like shimmering flower beds.

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‍“Flak of all kinds shattered the darkness. Shells burst over us and showered out coloured stars – a typical German trick to undermine our pilot’s morale – giving the impression of aircraft being blown out of the sky. Bombs were bursting all over the city. I was seeing Duisberg die.

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“The sky was red and angry above the city when we were a hundred miles away. We could not see our boys in front of the Siegfried Line as we passed over on our way home – we were too high for that.

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‍“But we drew great comfort in the knowledge that they could see the glow from the city where thousands of tons of supplies that would have been used against them were going up in flames.”

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When he returned from the raids. Troughton said that he couldn’t sleep because of nightmares of the colours and flashes of the flak and knew then why he had been offered sleeping pills.

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‍•A big thank you to our dear mate Geoffrey Compton of our parish for alerting me to the gutsy story of reporter Troughton.

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‍A HERO AGAIN …

‍REPORTER Troughton was gunned down in the Battle of Remagen Bridge in 1945, after his jeep was bombed with two other press men in it. One of them died and Troughton was shot and badly wounded in the leg as he escaped. All three had been in the thick of the fighting as allied troops captured the crossing.

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‍HAIR TODAY — AND GONE TOMORROW

‍The doctors were baffled. The wife was seriously ill, but they couldn’t fathom the cause. So, when the 30-year-old died in her village they carried out a postmortem and couldn’t believe what they found, the Liverpool Post reported in 1869. What looked like a big black duck, with a long neck, weighing over two pounds. It was a solid lump of human hair. The woman’s sister told them that during the previous 12 years she had been in the habit of eating her own hair every day.

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‍LUST OF AN ENGLISH BEAUTY WHO BLEW HER BRAINS OUT

‍DOGGED by High Society scandals, the London Press described her as the beautiful Lady Atherton, “a fascinating disturber of society”. A woman in search of love and lust who tumbled from one affair to the next and on to the front pages of newspapers worldwide.

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‍She was clever and versatile, with a vivid personality who could dominate any social function. Between 1901 and 1919 much of her private life was reported and she became notable for her relationships with royal figures and noblemen.

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‍But the last story of tall, slender and beautifully gowned Lady Louisa Atherton, finally appeared under the headline: “Why England’s Most Fascinating Beauty Blew Her Brains Out.”

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‍And another said: “This voluptuous, red-lipped enchantress had exhausted every sensual joy of life. She had enjoyed everything and there remained nothing...”

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‍Born Mabel Louisa Paul in 1872, Lady Louisa was the daughter of Edward Dean Paul, 4th baronet, and his second wife, Elisa Monckton Ramsay, the daughter of Major General James Ramsey, brother of the Earl of Dalhousie.

‍Her first husband was Colonel Thomas James Atherton and early in 1900 she followed him to South Africa where he was an officer in the Boer War.

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‍She became one of the High Society ladies who nursed British troops, loved by the wounded men but mostly detested by the War Office because they were a distraction to them and the expected love affairs began to happen.

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‍The society ladies and many of the officers soon established themselves in Cape Town’s Mount Nelson Hotel which became notorious as the centre of adulterous love affairs and sexual escapades of the British aristocracy that were picked up by the American Press.

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‍An aristocrat reported: “Here and there were tables filled by individuals difficult to describe because of their air of irresponsibility. The ladies, as a rule, wore very full dress, or rather I should say undress, with many diamonds.”

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‍The American newspapers told of the amazing ‘gayeties’ at Cape Town, in which Lady Louisa and certain favoured officers participated. The Mount Nelson was the scene of most of these revels but for a time they were transferred to the British headquarters near the Modder River battlefield.

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‍Not much appeared in the pages of the British newspapers because of the libel laws and power of the country’s royalty; land-owning politicians and judiciary.

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‍But it was then that 28-year-old Lady Louisa had an intense affair with Hugh Grosvenor, the 2nd Duke of Westminster. Soon the gossip spread to England and when her husband found out, he divorced her. King Edward VII had tried to pay Lady Atherton off and cover up the scandal but he failed.

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‍Next came an affair with Captain John Yarde-Buller, 3rd Baron Churston, in 1907, and they were to be married. But he wed a music hall singer instead. Louisa sued him for breach of promise.

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‍Lady Louisa was already a household name when she bedded Baron Eckardstein of Germany, who had marriage woes of his own as his wife had given birth to a child from another man. Louisa even went to meet his mother in Germany.

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‍But soon yet another man caught her eye, Captain John Alexander Stirling of the Scots Guards, the Laird of Kippendavie. They would secretly meet at the Cadogan Hotel, Knightsbridge for their nights of love. When they were found out, Lady Louisa was named as the Third Party in his divorce. The Press lapped it up and so did the British public.

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‍The story was fuelled when Lady Louise was ‘beaten up’ by her lover’s angry mother.

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‍Lady Louisa, sick of the public attention her affairs attracted decided to leave England for Cairo. But a few months later her sister-in-law Lady Irene Dean Paul claimed in a British newspaper that she was “at it again”.

‍In 1911, she told how Louisa was unceremoniously thrown out of the Savoy Hotel in the Egyptian city over a man and a matter of disrepute. Louisa sued for slander and won her case but was awarded just one farthing in damages.

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‍In the last months of her life, Louisa, now a wealthy divorcee and weary of bad publicity, finally remarried on April 26, 1919. After a brief honeymoon things went quickly downhill when she found her new husband, the Honourable Arthur Eliot, in bed with his 24-year-old stepdaughter from his second marriage.

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‍A few months later at her house in Mayfair, she locked her bedroom door and barricaded some furniture against it, sat on a chair and shot herself dead with a sporting gun. She was 47.

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‍TERRY MANNERS

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‍8 September 2025

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