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Only the four walls of the church were left standing after fire caught hold.

It was another seventeen years before the church on Coronation Road in Bristol was rebuilt and re-consecrated on 23 March 1958.

There is an impressive crypt under the church and during World War Two a section was specially reinforced  for use as an air raid shelter.

The shelter had been fitted out with bunk beds and local residents often spent the night there during the Bristol Blitz.

Lucy Hunt - who is now 86 - was sheltering in the church's crypt the night it caught fire.

Lucy Hunt

"Previously, when the alarm went, my mother, my sister and myself used to go into the cupboard under the stairs in our house - and stay there from six at night until six o'clock the next morning," she said.

"But my mother was so nervous, she jumped every time a bomb dropped. So we decided if we went into the church and sheltered in the crypt we wouldn't notice the noise so much. So that is what we did."

"It was better, because there were bunks and we could sleep in between. It was a magnificent area really. And we were made very welcome."

 She was 19 at the time but she only remembers certain things about the evening in detail.

"I didn't realise there were 300 of us down there that night. We didn't really know what was going on up above until we were ushered out. There is so much noise, you don't know what are bombs and what is gun fire."

"But I do remember that we could see the plane up above as we came out. It didn't go for us though - fortunately."

"We were all taken to a recreation hall, for safety."

The crypt under St Paul's

Diane Henry is the Church Warden at St Paul's. Her father-in-law lived very close to the church and was on fire watch that night back in 1941 when the church caught fire.

" It actually was incendiaries that burnt the church down. They landed on the roof and set fire to the roof," she said.

"There weren't enough people to get onto the roof to put them out so they cleared the things off the altar and got people outside. Because that is all they could do because houses nearby were burning so they had to look after people's homes."

"So that is why the people in the crypt were safe, because it was not actually hit by a bomb in the sense of exploding. It was incendiary bombs that caused a fire so there was time to get the people out."

It was another 17 years before St Paul's was rebuilt and re-consecrated on 23 March 1958.

In the meantime the congregation had moved to nearby St David's on Beauley Road.

Inside St Paul's

The 50th anniversary of St Paul's re-consecration has been marked over the Easter weekend 2008 and continues with photographic displays.

Church Warden Diane Henry said: "We have tried to recall as many people as memory or records permit, who have in any way been part of St Paul's congregation since the war time years."

The Bishop of Bristol, the Right Reverend Mike Hill was part of the congregation at the Easter Praise Service 2008, where he listened as the history of St Paul's was told by the church choir in words and song.

In his address Bishop Mike compared the story of the rebirth of St Paul's to the rebirth of Jesus.

He said: "If you lose a sense of history, you lose something important. It models in a peculiar way what we are on about. From the death of being blitzed, this building rose again."