P&K: Years with glassless windows

U.S. Marines on furlough from Guadalcanal with malaria were deployed to Martinborough after the 1942 earthquakes (Magnitude 7.6) to help demolish parts of the main P&K store structure which had been badly damaged and partly destroyed. 

Part of the demolition job called for wire ropes tied to trucks, then the Americans brought in explosives to move some of the wrecked building facade.

David Kershaw said one unintended consequence from the blasts: they blew out all the remaining glass windows on the Square and Jellicoe Street frontages.

Result? At a time of World War, at a time when Europe was using all the glass it could produce to repair war-damaged buildings _ and when all glass was imported _ P&K had no front windows on its building for six years.

Solid wooden shutters improvised for all that time, with glass finally installed in the last months of the 1940s.