ABSTRACT
In november 1996, 56 years after the first German air raid on the city of Coventry in the English Midlands, a story hit the headlines in the local press. ‘Memory of Blitz victims lives on in skies’, reported the local newspaper. It featured the story of a Coventry man and survivor of the infamous air raid who, for a fee of merely £40, had purchased the right to name a universal star situated near the Plough constellation ‘Coventry Blitz November 1940’ in honour of his fellow citizens killed by enemy bombs. ‘Now their memory will live forever in the light of the star’, he told the journalists.1
