DESTROYED BY BOMBS

Evening Star, Issue 25301, 9 October 1944, Page 5

DESTROYED BY BOMBS

BRITAIN'S ART TREASURES AND HISTORIC BUILDINGS MANY GREAT COLLECTIONS LOST (Rec. 10 a.m.) NEW YORK, Oct; 8.« Europe's historic landmarks and works of art have escaped with little, damage, but (Britain's churches, museums, monuments, and libraries suffered severely, said the director of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mr Francis Taylor, who has returned from Europe, where he collected data on art works pillaged by the Nazis. In Britain 2,800 churches have been destroyed and 4,000 damaged. All London churches designed by Wren, including St. Brides, St. Giles (Cripplegate), and St. Mary-le-Bow, lave been hard hit, and some wiped out. St. James, Piccadilly, was virtually destroyed, and nearly all Grainling Gibbons's seventeenth century woodcavving lost. Exeter' Cathedral was very severely bombed. Rare books and documents had been stowed away, but many libraries were a total loss. Particularly heavy destruction was done to eighteenth and nineteenth century newspaper files, and art and archaeology libraries libraries and many great collections, including famous manuscripts, were lost in the almost complete destruction, of Holland House. Virtually all art treasures in Paris escaped, although there is evidence that the Nazis looted private collections.