The Blitz: The British Under Attack
Juliet Gardiner
In a series of powerful accounts drawn from diaries, letters, sound archives and interviews recorded during the period of devastation, discovery and transformation that make the blitz such an outstanding event in Britain's recent past, "The Blitz" brings to life the intense experiences, as they happened all over Britain.The blitz proved to be a highly effective laboratory constructed out of necessity, and intense forcing house for change.Yet, compared to other great events of the Second World War – Dunkirk, D – Day, and even VE Day, the Blitz remains curiously unexamined.A type of cleansing resulted from it. It soon became evident that many of the attitudes in society were outdated.The most obvious inequalities between British society also became clear, and yet with everyone sharing the same devastation, these differences slowly began to lose their importance.As well as a social laboratory, the Blitz was a medical one too. Overworked doctors and scientists were forced to experiment and improvise. It was during the Blitz that the embryonic blood transfusion service grew to become a nation-wide institution. Psychoanalysis took on a new meaning too: the enemy was now external, someone different from "us".It gave coherence to artists and writers at the time such as Cecil Beaton.The Blitz is arranged as a series of chronological chapters, each focusing on an aspect of key importance.The perspective will primarily be that of those who had actual experience of those tumultuous months, when no one knew when or if the bombings would stop.Above all, it will be recounted in the words of the many "ordinary people" across Britain who were caught up in the Blitz, their stories, entries that are taken from the journals that they kept during this difficult time and also interviews with those who are still alive today.
JULIET GARDINER
The Blitz The British Under Attack
Dedication (#ulink_39fc7c18-d473-5331-befb-7b10dea655f7)
For Martha
Contents
Title Page (#u170a5c83-f99f-5cbc-980e-a8774406c560)
Dedication (#u0d192188-e8f5-5999-ac3e-0d030952ef69)
Preface (#ubaf471f8-37c7-54d3-834d-d897a7623d8a)
Before (#u7188dbdb-4d55-5f1c-8e28-3a055d65d3a5)
1 Black Saturday, 7 September 1940 (#u84227c77-e10e-5007-873b-88ff9e1939c3)
2 ‘The Most Grim Test in its History …’ (#u0678045a-d564-5c57-a6be-8691c9d86ece)
3 Sheltering (#u21eedd9d-7ecb-54af-a3d5-60c6a582dfe3)
4 Underground (#u50524775-c6f2-5ec4-8e22-bdafebdf7b41)
5 Front Line (#ufa5cf98e-d5a7-595b-9768-1a947a87c587)
6 The Test of War (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Guernicaed (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Britain Can (Probably) Take It (#litres_trial_promo)
9 The Fear of Fear (#litres_trial_promo)
10 The 1940 Provincial Tour (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Peace on Earth? (#litres_trial_promo)
12 Long Shall Men Mourn the Burning of the City (#litres_trial_promo)
13 Standing Firm (#litres_trial_promo)
14 Spring Offensive (#litres_trial_promo)
15 The Far Reach (#litres_trial_promo)
16 Attrition (#litres_trial_promo)
After (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Preface (#ulink_8ce0a0e4-a1dd-5dc0-bbff-75c9a6dbc2b2)
These are the facts, observe them how you will:
Forget for a moment the medals and the glory,
The clean shape of the bomb, designed to kill,
And the proud headlines of the papers’ story.
Remember the walls of brick that forty years
Had nursed to make a neat though shabby home;
The impertinence of death, ignoring tears,
That smashed the house and left untouched the Dome.
Bodies in death are not magnificent or stately,
Bones are not elegant that blast has shattered;
This sorry, stained and crumpled rag was lately
A man whose like was made of little things that mattered;
Now he is just a nuisance, liable to stink,
A breeding-ground for flies, a test-tube for disease:
Bury him quickly and never pause to think
What is the future like to men like these?
People are more than places, more than pride;
A million photographs record the works of Wren;
A city remains a city on credit from the tide
That flows among its rocks, a sea of men.
Ruthven Todd, ‘These are the Facts’
‘Blitz’ is an abbreviation of the German word ‘Blitzkrieg’, meaning ‘lightning war’. It all too accurately describes Hitler’s advance through western Europe in May and June 1940, as Norway, then Holland, Belgium and France fell to the German forces within weeks; but it hardly seems appropriate for the almost continual aerial bombardment of the British Isles that started on 7 September 1940 and continued with little relief until 10 May 1941. Yet ‘blitz’ is the name by which these eight months were known. It was a German word, and like lightning it came from the sky, and could and did kill. Indeed, an air raid was in many ways like a terrible storm – the sky livid, rent by jagged flashes, obscured by black clouds rolling across it or lit up by the reflected glow of fires, while the noise of bombs and guns echoed like the thunder of Mars, the god of war.
The blitz was the test of war for the British people: it touched everyone’s lives, it mobilised the population, and in phrases that have become time-worn but are nevertheless true, put civilians on the front line and made the home front the battlefront. Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, which preceded it, had essentially been military operations. The blitz was total war. Its intensity and inescapability made it possible to call the Second World War ‘the people’s war’, in which, in the words of the poet Robert Graves, a soldier ‘cannot even feel that his rendezvous with death is more certain than that of his Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher’.
The blitz was the war that everyone in Britain had been expecting, and fearing, since that warm Sunday morning in September 1939 when Neville Chamberlain had announced that ‘Britain is now at war with Germany’. Although there had been sporadic raids throughout the ‘phoney war’ that followed, it was not until almost exactly a year after that declaration that the Luftwaffe bombers arrived in force over London. Although England’s capital was bombed more heavily and more continuously than anywhere else in the country, the blitz was an attack on the whole United Kingdom: few places escaped its direct effects, none its indirect ones.
In January 1941 George Orwell wrote to the editors of the American journal the Partisan Review, to which he would contribute a ‘London Letter’ throughout the rest of the war: ‘On that day in September when the Germans broke through and set the docks on fire, I think few people can have watched those enormous fires without feeling that this was the end of an epoch. One seemed to feel that the immense changes through which our society has got to pass were going to happen there and then.’ But he went on to say that these feelings had been erroneous: ‘to an astonishing extent things have slipped back to normal … When all is said and done one’s main impression is the immense solidarity of ordinary people, the widespread yet vague consciousness that things can never be the same again, and yet, together with that, the tendency of life to slip back into the familiar pattern.’
Just a month later, Orwell was demanding that ‘either we turn this war into a revolutionary war [against privilege and influence, and for equality and freedom] or we lose it’. Neither happened. The equivocation and ambivalence of wanting change and wanting things to be as they had always been would persist, and politicians consistently declined to define Britain’s war aims other than by the simple word ‘victory’.
Yet the blitz was a defining moment in Britain’s history. More than cityscapes were reconfigured in those eight months. The attrition that had been anticipated for over a decade revealed both the incompetence of the authorities, and their misunderstanding of the nature of such warfare and of the needs of the people. But at the same time it demonstrated their sometimes grudging, usually tardy, willingness to accommodate, compromise and innovate. And perhaps, above all, eventually and imperfectly, to listen. To keep the people ‘on side’ as much as possible, since it was recognised that civilian morale was vital in maintaining full-scale war production and thus Britain’s ability to prosecute the war at a time when victory was very far from assured. For this reason, and others, the blitz did prove to be a forcing house, a laboratory, the intense distillation of how an external threat could weld together a nation while at the same time failing to resolve many of its tensions.
The blitz has given the British – politicians in particular – a storehouse of images on which to draw at times of crisis: the symbol of an indomitable nation, united in resolution. The true story is, of course, more nuanced and complicated than that, cross-hatched as it must be by the freight of the prewar years, of differing experiences and expectations. There were thousands of examples of extreme bravery, fortitude and selflessness. There was also a pervasive sense of exhaustion, uncertainty and anxiety, and acts of selfishness, intransigence and contumely. The words that best sum up the blitz are probably ‘endurance’ and ‘defiance’. And arising out of that, a sense of entitlement: that a nation that had been exhorted to ‘take it’ could reasonably expect, when the war was finally over, to ‘get [some] of it’, in terms of greater equality, more employment, better housing, education and life chances in general.
In 1940 the use of the transitive verb ‘to blitz’ signified ‘to destroy by aerial bombardment’. Seventy years later it is sometimes used to mean ‘to deal with something energetically; to concentrate a lot of effort on something to get it done’. Both meanings resonate in our understanding of the blitz of 1940–41 and its aftermath.
Juliet GardinerJune 2010
Before (#ulink_63d1b207-dc00-53c7-9c68-0e4a632a455c)
I think it is well for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can prevent him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through … the only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.
Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin, speaking in the House of Commons in 1932
Robert Baltrop was sitting on the roof of a Sainsbury’s store in east London on Saturday, 7 September 1940. It was a warm late-summer afternoon, the rays of the sun stretching across the concrete rooftops. The air-raid alert had just sounded, so Baltrop, who worked as a porter in the store, ‘humping and cleaning and that sort of thing’, had clambered out to take up his post on lookout duty. ‘It wasn’t bad being a watcher during these daytime warnings, sitting up there in the sunshine and smoking and watching the sky, and looking down at the people going about their business as usual in the streets below. I wasn’t really sure what I was watching for, anything dangerous – fires or bombs falling or planes getting near, and I don’t really know what I could have done about it. I suppose I should have had to go down the steps and tell them in the shop that a bomb had fallen on them!’
The war was more than a year old by this time. It had been another lovely summer day when Hitler had failed to respond to Britain’s ultimatum to withdraw German troops from Poland, and the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had broadcast to the nation at 11.15 on 3 September 1939 to tell the British people that ‘despite all my long struggle to win peace … this country is at war with Germany’. Within minutes the air-raid sirens sounded, and Londoners scurried to take shelter. The war that everybody had been expecting had started. Only it hadn’t. That first alert was a false alarm, and a metaphor for a long autumn, winter and spring of expectation and fearful anticipation. But until the summer of 1940 there was little sign of the Armageddon that had been feared – except at sea, where the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’, which would take the lives of more than 30,000 merchant seamen by 1945, had been raging since the outbreak of war as Germany sought to stop supplies reaching Britain to enable her to keep fighting. By the late spring hardly anyone was carrying their gas mask any more, shelters were filling up with water through disuse, a ban had been put on recruiting any more Air Raid Patrol (ARP) wardens, and many volunteers, bored with the endless waiting around, drinking cups of tea and playing darts, had resigned, since there didn’t seem to be much for them to do other than act like martinets when any chink showed through the blackout curtains on their patch. Housewives were already beginning to feel fed up with rationing, and the endless queuing and ingenuity in the kitchen that wartime shortages would demand, and more than 60 per cent of the mothers and children who had joined the government’s evacuation scheme on the eve of war had drifted back home to the cities by January 1940, no longer convinced that their homes would be bombed, or their children killed, which had been the compelling reason for the exodus. It truly did seem to be a ‘bore war’ – all the regulations, restrictions and privations of wartime, with few of the dangers on the home front that would make them seem justified.
On 4 April 1940, in what Winston Churchill, recalled to the Cabinet on the outbreak of war as First Lord of the Admiralty, thought was ‘a speech of unusual optimism’, Chamberlain sanguinely told a Conservative gathering that Hitler had ‘missed the bus’ in seizing the offensive. Five days later German forces moved to occupy Norway and Denmark, and on 10 May, as Baltrop recalled, ‘quite suddenly the Germans invaded the Low Countries; there was the evacuation from Dunkirk [which the British press largely treated as a victory rather than a defeat]; and on 22 June France signed an armistice with Germany. I remember at the Sainsbury’s where I worked, somebody coming into the warehouse and almost with satisfaction rubbing his hands together and saying, “Well, we’re on our own now” … There was a feeling that we were in the war now, and a certain feeling of resolve about it. Dunkirk had its effect. There were Churchill’s speeches – “We will fight on the beaches and we will never surrender” – and very quickly daytime air raid warnings started. Again, there was this curious thing just like at the beginning of the war. We expected the worst and it didn’t happen like that. We started getting air raid warnings by day and night. [Sainsbury’s] agreed with the other shops round about, they would put up the shutters immediately. But nothing happened, and people didn’t go home. They stayed in the streets. So the “gentlemen’s agreement” between shopkeepers was dropped, and the shops started to open again even when the air raid warnings went, and … life went on through the summer. But they were getting nearer.’
Italy had entered the war in support of Germany on 10 June, and six days later the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, resigned and Marshal Philippe Pétain, a military hero of the First World War, took over, and shortly afterwards signed an armistice surrendering northern and western France to the advancing German forces. From across the Channel, Winston Churchill, Prime Minister since Chamberlain had resigned on 10 May, surveyed the defeated British Expeditionary Force evacuated from Dunkirk, and on 18 June, the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, he addressed the House of Commons. Whatever had happened in France, he assured MPs, would make ‘no difference to the resolve of Britain and the British Empire to fight on if necessary for years, if necessary alone’. He predicted that:
the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States [he added pointedly, since America was still pursuing an official policy of neutrality] will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age … Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say ‘This was their finest hour.’
The swift fall of France had not been foreseen by the German high command, and for several weeks they were at something of a loss to know what to do next. In mid-June, as German forces made their final assault on Paris, 120 German bombers attacked eastern England, killing nine in Cambridge,
(#ulink_db2a3a6b-fb4f-5cd9-8805-a67965cdc09c) and the first bomb in the London area fell on Addington near Croydon, though at that time Hitler had expressly placed London off-limits for attack. Throughout June and July there were intermittent random, small-scale daylight raids around the capital and on coastal towns in the south and east, and as far north as the Tyne. South Wales was bombed and shipping in the English Channel attacked, and on 12 July twenty-nine Aberdonians were killed and 103 seriously injured in a raid for which no warning had been given. On 16 July Hitler issued Directive no. 16, Preparations for the Invasion of Britain, and such an invasion seemed a real possibility to the British. There were rumours from all over the country of sightings of German parachutists (maybe dressed as nuns) floating down, of barges massing in the Channel, of flotillas of gliders conveying troops from occupied France to East Anglia and Kent. On 18 August the Sunday Express suggested that 18 September would be a good day for a German invasion: ‘The tide would be high, the nights longer than at present, and sea mists and fogs are prevalent at the equinox. Therefore, unless the Nazis come between the eighteenth and twenty-third of next month, they will be wise to postpone their visit until next spring.’
Towns along the Kent and Sussex coasts were evacuated, beaches were mined, piers dismantled and barbed wire uncoiled. An appeal by Anthony Eden, Secretary of State for War, broadcast just after the BBC nine o’clock news on 14 May, for volunteers ‘to serve in the defence of their country in its hour of peril’ had resulted in a stampede that had reached one and a half million by the end of June. For many months these Local Defence Volunteers (soon to be renamed the Home Guard at Churchill’s insistence) had no uniform other than a brassard, and since all military equipment had first to be channelled to re-equip the denuded army, nothing to fight with other than a pitchfork or broomstick, or if they were fortunate, a First World War Lee Enfield rifle. Nevertheless, the band of under-resourced men was evidence of a willingness to ‘defend our island whatever the cost may be’, as Churchill had demanded.
Hitler hoped that Britain could be persuaded to abandon the fight and sue for peace when faced with the success of the blitzkrieg that had swept through the Low Countries and France and now threatened its shores. However, a final peace offer was rejected by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, on 22 July, and since it was clear that, despite the odds, Britain intended to fight on alone (though of course supported by Empire and dominion forces), various means were considered of bringing the country to its knees, including invasion. But it was obvious that there could be no successful invasion until German planes enjoyed air supremacy, and the aim of what has become known as the ‘Battle of Britain’ that summer was to wipe out the country’s defences. By early July the Luftwaffe was dive-bombing British shipping and ports along the south coast and engaging RAF fighter planes in aerial combat; on 8 August it switched to trying to knock out Britain’s fighter defences, with attacks on airfields, radar stations and other targets such as repair sheds and anti-aircraft guns and equipment.
It soon became apparent to Hitler that this strategy on its own was not working. ‘The collapse of England in the year 1940 is under present circumstances no longer to be reckoned on,’ he told his HQ staff on 20 August. The dogfights over southern England and the bombing raids on RAF targets had not succeeded in putting Britain’s air force out of commission. The battle continued, although 15 September 1940 has since been celebrated as Battle of Britain Day, the day on which in retrospect it became clear that against the odds Britain had retained mastery of its skies.
However, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Air Minister and Commander-in-Chief of the German air force since 1935, assumed on the basis of inaccurate intelligence that Fighter Command was all but annihilated, and was anxious to attack London in the hope that this would draw RAF fighter planes to the capital, where they could be picked off. On 24 August, in contravention of Hitler’s orders, the Luftwaffe dropped several bombs on London. Although this was most likely an error, it gave Churchill the opportunity to order raids on Berlin, in the expectation that Hitler would retaliate and send his bombers to London, where they would be expected – and supposedly dealt with – thus relieving the pressure on the Western Front in France. On 2 September Göring ordered the Luftwaffe to switch to bombing Britain’s industrial and administrative centres and transport and communication links, while the strategy the Kriegsmarine (the German navy) advocated, the blockading of British ports and attacks on her shipping, continued unabated.
So the war entered a new phase. The ‘Battle of Britain’ was to be carried on by other means. Germany’s targets were now industrial installations and transport and communication links around major cities. It was hoped that this would ‘cripple’ Britain and compel her to seek peace. The home front would become a front-line battlefield for the next five years. And on 7 September 1940, ‘Black Saturday’, the first day of the war of persistent aerial attack that became known as the blitz, it was the London docks that were in the Luftwaffe’s sights.
(#ulink_bc15c555-cb87-51c2-bc80-a60694e46014) The first civilian British bombing death had in fact come on 16 March 1940, when an Orcadian labourer was killed as he stood by his croft door in the hamlet of Bridge of Waithe. It was presumed that the German plane had lost its way, or had mistaken the hamlet for a nearby airfield.
1 Black Saturday, 7 September 1940 (#ulink_69e0ca86-c8e3-5158-aef4-706e72bff105)
[The British] will understand now, as night after night, we give them the answer [to RAF bombing raids on Germany] – when they declare they will attack our towns on a large scale, then we will erase theirs.
Adolf Hitler speaking in the Berlin Sportspalast, 4 September 1940
‘The Reichsmarschall is leaving his train and is coming past us. He sees us. Is this what he was intending? Is he really coming? Yes. He is coming! The Reichsmarschall is coming from his train and is coming to the radio,’ the German announcer reported excitedly on 7 September. Hermann Göring, a large, heavy man, clad in a greatcoat, wearing the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross, which he had been awarded as a result of the French campaign, at his throat, strode to the microphone to address his fellow countrymen and women. ‘I now want to take this opportunity of speaking to you, to say this moment is a historic one. As a result of the provocative British attacks on Berlin on recent nights the Führer has decided to order a mighty blow to be struck in revenge against the capital of the British Empire. I personally have assumed the leadership of this attack, and today I hear above me the roaring of victorious German squadrons which now, for the first time, are driving towards the heart of the enemy in full daylight, accompanied by countless fighter squadrons.’ So saying, the Commander of the German air force clambered back into the carriage of his personal train, ‘Robinson’, and resumed his journey back from the Channel coast where he had stood on the cliffs of Cap Gris Nez, binoculars trained on Britain, watching the German aircraft set out on their mission and maybe hoping to catch a glimpse of the effects of the havoc their bombs would wreak in their ‘major strike on Target Loge’ (the German code name for London).
Sitting in deckchairs, mowing the lawn or visiting friends that sun-filled afternoon, people in Kent looked up as the drone of planes grew louder and louder – ‘like the far away thunder of a giant waterfall’, thought the American journalist Virginia Cowles. She was having tea in the garden of the Palladian Mereworth Castle, the home of the press baron Esmond Harmsworth, eldest son of Viscount Rothermere, in Kent, forty miles from London. ‘We lay on the grass, our eyes strained towards the sky; we made out a batch of tiny white specks, like clouds of insects moving north west in the direction of the capital. Some of them – the bombers – were flying in even formation, while the others – the fighters – swarmed protectively around … during the next hour [we] counted over a hundred and fifty planes. They were not meeting any resistance.’ To the urbane diplomat turned journalist and author Harold Nicolson, now a Junior Minister at the Ministry of Information, sitting with his wife Vita Sackville-West in their garden at Sissinghurst, also in Kent, the ‘wave after wave of enemy aircraft planes looked like silver gnats above us in the air’.
The siren had sounded at 4.43 p.m. that Saturday. Londoners had got used to its ululating note: the sound of ‘Wailing Winnie’ or ‘Moaning Minnie’ had been frequent during the last few weeks of constant ‘nuisance raids’. ‘We are growing accustomed to sudden warnings, and we have developed a quickening of our sense of danger … we are not panicky, but we are, at any rate subconsciously, more on the look-out than had hitherto been the case at any time during last year,’ the Harley Street psychologist and BBC producer Anthony Weymouth had written in his diary back in August. Harold Nicolson would have agreed. ‘People are becoming quite used to these interruptions,’ he wrote in his diary as he heard the siren wail on 26 August. ‘I do not think that that drone in the sky means death to many people at the moment. It seems so incredible as I sit here at my window, looking out on the fuchsias and zinnias with yellow butterflies playing around each other, that in a few seconds I may see other butterflies circling in the air intent on murdering each other.’
Yet despite the increasing frequency of the alerts, the mournful notes could still send a shiver of dread down people’s spines. ‘Whoohoo go the goblins, coming back at nightfall/Whoohoo go the witches reaching out their hands for us … Are we sure we will be the lucky ones/ … They have come back, we always knew they would after the story ended,’ wrote the author Naomi Mitchison in one of her ‘blitz poems’.
The planes droned on. As Robert Baltrop sat on the roof of Sainsbury’s, ‘all of a sudden on the skyline coming up the Thames were [black specks] like swarms of flies … weaving their way through puffs of smoke … and my reaction was one of astonishment and … well, what’s going to happen now? They were flying across my line of vision, and sitting up there on the roof, I had a perfect view of them, watching them fly across the Thames … coming in … past Dagenham and Rainham and Barking, and they were heading straight for London, and it was going to be the docks that were going to get it … I began to hear loud thumps, and those were bombs falling, and clouds of smoke were rising up – clouds of black smoke floating away until you couldn’t see anything but a huge bank of smoke, and still they were coming.’
The operational orders issued to 1 Fliegerkorps for that afternoon informed the pilots that ‘The purpose of the initial attack is to force English fighters into the air so that they will have reached the end of their endurance at the time of the main attack.’ To achieve ‘the maximum effect it is essential that units fly as a highly concentrated force … The main objective of the operation is to prove that the Luftwaffe can achieve this.’
‘We have had many air-raid warnings during the last week, and as soon as the sirens have sounded we have invariably done what we’ve been told to do – go to a place of safety,’ noted Anthony Weymouth, whose ‘place of safety’ was the hall of his ground-floor flat. ‘It is well inside the building, and between us and the blast of bombs are two sitting rooms and the hall of the building. The only windows in the hall have been shuttered and we have been told to leave all the windows open to avoid, so far as possible, broken glass.’ So on 7 September Weymouth and his family ‘waited for an hour or so, some of us sitting on the mattresses which are now a permanent part of our hall furniture, some squatting on the floor. Audrey [his wife] put on her [ARP warden’s] tin hat and went round her sector to see if she was needed. She returned to tell us that a big fire was raging in the City.’
But it wasn’t the City of London that three hundred German planes were converging on that late afternoon: it was ‘Target G’, the docks that lay in the bight of the Thames where it loops around in a U shape like a small child’s badly built wooden railway, a lazy-looking attempt to encircle not some pleasant riverside picnic place but Silvertown, a jumble of docks, warehouses and small houses built for workers in the docks and the nearby factories in days when industry and home were hugger-mugger in the poorer parts of towns and cities.
The German pilots had no difficulty in identifying their targets in the clear afternoon light. The first bombs fell on the Ford motor works at Dagenham, closely followed by a rain of high explosives and fire bombs on Beckton gasworks, the largest in Europe. Below them now lay the great Thames bight at Woolwich Reach, enclosing the three Royal Docks, their warehouses and sheds stacked with foodstuffs and materials vital to the war effort. Within minutes the huge warehouses and factories lining the river on both sides from North Woolwich to Tower Bridge were on fire. Two hundred acres of timber stacks, recently arrived from North America and the Baltic, burned out of control along the Surrey Commercial Docks, the main timber-importing centre in Britain: within twenty-four hours only about a fifth of the two and a half million tons was left. Burning spirits gushed out of the rum quay warehouses at West India Dock, a tar distillery flooded North Woolwich Road with molten pitch, and rats swarmed out of a nearby soapworks. A rubber factory was hit, and the acrid black smoke rolling through the narrow streets of Silvertown mingled with the escaping fumes from the damaged Beckton gasworks and started a rumour that the Germans were dropping canisters of poison gas as well as bombs. Fire burned through the ropes of barges tethered along the quayside and the burning boats drifted downstream, only to return several hours later on the incoming tide, still smouldering, while the intense heat blistered the paint on buildings in areas untouched by the bombs.
A fireman stationed at Pageant’s Wharf Fire Station stared in horror as magnesium incendiaries lodged in the wood stacks and oil bombs ignited the timber like kindling on a bone-dry bonfire. It seemed as if ‘the whole bloody world’s on fire’ to Station Officer Gerry Knight as he yelled to the fire station telephonists to call for urgent reinforcements. The regular London firemen were joined by men from the four wartime Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS) substations on the docks, their trailer pumps drawn by vans, taxi cabs – 2,000 had been hired by the start of the war, often with their drivers coming along as part of the deal – or anything that could be pressed into service to get to the blaze.
The AFS, an adjunct of the fire brigade, had started recruiting in March 1938, and had expanded after the Munich crisis, when large posters had appeared on walls and on the sides of fire engines urging: ‘Keep the home fires from burning’. By the time war broke out, for every regular fireman there were fifteen auxiliaries, and ‘it was quite a big job getting them all trained’. AFS members had received sixty hours of basic training, but most had never been called to a major fire before. Now it seemed that all the drill they had carefully learned was for another world: as soon as they trained their hoses on one outbreak, another flared up feet away. Damped down by the water jets, a pile of wood would sizzle in the heat, then burst into flame again. The firemen worked fast to screw together the sections of hose and run them into the river so there was no shortage of water, but soon telegraph poles all around the dock were combusting in the heat, and even the wooden blocks that surfaced the roads were igniting. Grain spilling out of the warehouses made a sticky mess that stuck to the firemen’s boots, bogging them down as if they were walking through treacle in some sort of nightmare. Gerry Knight realised that the inferno was burning out of control, impossible to put out, and that if he didn’t withdraw his men were in real danger of being trapped by the sheets of flame.
Peter Blackmore was a successful playwright who had become a volunteer fireman after seeing a ‘Join the AFS’ poster in the London Underground, showing ‘a firelit fireman holding the branch of a hose, an exciting picture which stirred the imagination and at the same time in small print set out the glorious benefits of such service, the exceptional wages, the food allowance, the uniform and the leave days’. He had grown used to the sound of the siren, ‘more popularly known as the “sighreen”. In those days this was the signal for us to rig fully in helmets, boots, leggings, belts, axes and spanners, tear to the appliance-room and man the pumps, there to sit and grumble until the “All Clear” sounded and we could return to an overcooked or cold meal. This seemed to occur many times day and night. We were certainly always ready. Still no blitz came.’ But on the night of 7 September 1940 Blackmore was wondering what to make of the ‘ominous red glow in the sky, which, had it not been in the east, could have passed for an indifferent sunset’ when a colleague came to tell him, ‘They’re bombing the docks.’ ‘Down went the bells,’ and Blackmore and his colleagues set off eastwards.
As they approached the docks they joined ‘an endless queue of appliances, all steadily moving and being detailed to their exact positions. Bombs were falling fast and heavy. We did a great deal of ducking … and my heart was in my mouth. The journey towards a blitz, like most apprehension, can be the worst part of it … Eventually we came to a standstill at the wharf where we were to spend the endless night. Everything seemed to be on fire in every direction, even some barrage balloons in the sky [winched up in the hope that low-flying enemy aircraft would become entangled in their metal ropes] were exploding. The cinder-laden smoke which drifted all around made us think of the destruction of Pompeii.’
Cyril Demarne, a regular fireman stationed at Abbey Road School in West Ham in London’s East End, was in the school yard when soon after the alert had sounded he heard ‘the drone of approaching aircraft rapidly swelling to a roar. Suddenly squadrons of bombers appeared all over the eastern sky, flying very high and escorted by hundreds of fighter planes glinting in the sunlight as they weaved and turned over the bomber formation … I dived for the safety of the Control Room, where calls for assistance were already flowing in from Dagenham, Barking, East and West Ham. The electricity mains were damaged in the first minutes of the raid and [as it grew dark] the fire control had to operate by the light of candles set in jam jars.’
‘I was frightened out of my life. Bombs coming down, screaming – the row they make, it’s a sort of warning saying, “Look out, here comes death.” And when they landed they went off with a terrific roar – not one but dozens of them – bang, bang, bang, bang, all the time, everywhere. And then there was the drone of aircraft … the noise was the sort of thing that got to me. It … dulled the senses … you couldn’t think clearly.’
‘That day stands out like a flaming wound in my memory,’ wrote Bernard Kops, a London schoolboy who would grow up to be a playwright.
Imagine a ground floor flat [in Stepney Green Buildings], crowded with hysterical women, crying babies and great crashes in the sky and the whole earth shaking. Someone rushed in, ‘The docks are alight. All the docks are alight.’ I could smell burning … The men started to play cards and the women tried a little sing song, singing ‘I saw the old homestead and faces I loved’ or ‘Don’t go down the mine, Daddy, dreams very often come true’ or ‘Yiddle mit his fiddle’. But every so often twenty women’s fists shook at the ceiling cursing the explosions, Germany, Hitler … Yet cursing got my mother and my aunts through those early days. I sat under the table where above the men were playing cards, screwing my eyes up and covering my ears, counting explosions.
‘We’re all gonna get killed, we’re finished,’ one of my aunts became hysterical.
‘Churchill will get us through, he’s a friend of the Yiddisher people.’ With these words she was soothed.
Len Jones, an eighteen-year-old Poplar resident, went outside when he heard the first German planes overhead. ‘It was very exciting because the first formations were coming over without any bombs dropping, but very, very majestic, terrific. And I had no thought that they were actual bombers. Then … the bombs began to fall, and shrapnel was going along King Street, dancing off the cobbles. Then the real impetus came … the suction and the compression from the high-explosive bombs just pushed you and pulled you, and the whole of the atmosphere was turbulating so hard that, after an explosion of a nearby bomb, you could actually feel your eyeballs being [almost] sucked out … and the suction was so vast, it ripped my shirt away, and ripped my trousers. Then I couldn’t get my breath, the smoke was like acid and everything round me was black and yellow. And these bombers kept on and on, the whole road was moving, rising and falling.’
By 6.30 the planes – Dornier and Heinkel bombers escorted by Messerschmitt fighters – had turned back and wheeled across the Kent countryside, flying over Romney Marsh and back across the Channel to their bases in France. The All Clear sounded, and East Enders emerged from their homes and public shelters and peered about them at the raging fires, the broken glass, the destroyed and damaged houses, debris everywhere, a pall of greasy black smoke enveloping the scene as firemen desperately tackled massive fires with tangles of hoses snaking across the roads and water sloshing into the gutters.
But this was just a lull. ‘Black Saturday’ would set the pattern for the next eight harrowing months. First the Luftwaffe would drop showers of incendiary bombs that would start fires. The blazes would both act as a beacon to guide the subsequent formations of bombers with their loads of highexplosive (HE) bombs to their target, and also occupy the Civil Defence services – fire, rescue, medical – so they would not be standing by ready to engage immediately with the crisis when the heavy bombs began to fall.
Just over two hours later, at 8.30 p.m., the siren wailed again. This time the raid would continue relentlessly until dawn, adding further chaos and devastation to the already stricken East End, and widening out to other parts of London. Chelsea and Victoria were hit that night too, but it was the area of the tidal basin around the docks – the Isle of Dogs, Silvertown and Rotherhithe – that took the brunt of the devastation. Bermondsey, Canning Town, Woolwich, Deptford – fanning out to West Ham, Plaistow, Bow, Whitechapel, Stepney and Poplar – also suffered heavy loads of bombs.
Squadrons of Heinkels and Dorniers – 250 in all – came in waves to drop high-explosive bombs onto the still-blazing wharves, the ruined houses, the cratered streets, the terrified east Londoners. AFS despatch riders on motorcycles made their way through the chaos and rubble to report the immensity of the situation to local fire controls. Columns of fire engines raced east, their bells clanging, men called on duty fastening their helmets and doing up their jackets as the engines sped to answer the urgent calls from the East End. When they arrived there was often nobody in charge to be found, and men were simply deployed to fight the nearest fire to hand. Five hundred engines converged on West Ham alone after a request to the London Regional Fire Control Headquarters at Lambeth, where the map of London pinned on the wall, usually dense with markers indicating the availability of fire engines, was ominously clear. There were already nine fires designated as ‘conflagrations’ (when fires coalesce, burn out of control and spread rapidly), nineteen requiring thirty pumps, forty needing ten, and over a thousand smaller incidents.
By now Surrey Docks was a square mile of fire. The paint on the fireboats attempting to douse the flames blistered in the intense heat, as cranes buckled and crashed into the river. At the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich many of the buildings on fire contained live ammunition and highly flammable nitroglycerine. Water mains had been damaged, and when the hydrants ran dry water had to be pumped from the Thames, reservoirs, even ponds and ditches. At Woolwich a fireman aboard one of six fireboats which had been ordered to return to London from a fire at the Shell-Mex Thameshaven oil refinery on Canvey Island at the mouth of the Thames, its 2,000-ton-capacity tanks ablaze after a bomb attack on 5 September, saw ‘an extraordinary spectacle. There was nothing but fire ahead, apparently stretching right across the river and burning on both of its banks. We seemed to be entering a tunnel of fire – no break in it anywhere. All the usual landmarks were obliterated by walls of flame. Burning barges drifted past. For many hours no contact with the shore was possible. We did what we could where we could. At one time we were just getting into position to fight a fire in a large warehouse when the whole of the riverside front collapsed into the water with a mighty splash. The contents of the building, bags of beans, pouring into the river made a sound like a tropical rain storm. Soon after, we were surprised to see two firemen and three firewomen picking their way along the shore in the direction of Southwark Bridge; they told us they had been cut off in a control room for several hours’ by the fires.
During the raid, that lasted for over eight hours, 250 German planes had dropped 625 tons of high-explosive bombs and at least eight hundred incendiary bomb canisters, each containing 795 pounds of explosive. A thousand fire pumps were fighting the blaze at the Surrey Docks, with three hundred pumps and over a thousand men trying to contain just one of the largest fires. The firemen wrestled to control their heavy hoses, sending arcs of water through flames that seemed scornful of their efforts, their faces blackened by smoke and soot, their eyes pricking from the heat, their throats and lungs irritated by the smoke and the dust of falling masonry, their uniforms scorched and singed by flying sparks and heavy with the water from the hoses, hungry, thirsty, exhausted.
F.W. Hurd, a member of the AFS stationed at East Ham fire station, was ordered to a fire at Beckton gasworks at nine o’clock that night.
Chaos met our eyes. Gasometers were punctured and were blazing away, a power house had been struck rendering useless the hydraulic hydrant supply (the only source of water there). An overhead gantry bearing lines of trucks communicating with the railway siding was also … alight. And then overhead we heard [the German planes], the searchlights searching the sky in a vain effort to locate them. Guns started firing, and then I had my first experience of a bomb explosion. A weird whistling sound and I ducked behind the pump with two other members of the crew. The others, scattered as we were, had thrown themselves down wherever they happened to be. Then a vivid flash of flame, a column of earth and debris flying into the air and the ground heaved. I was thrown violently against the side of the appliance.
… After a time things quietened down and we went out again. It was now about 10 o’clock and the fire had been burning unattacked by us for lack of water [when] a local Fire Officer arrived and informed us that he knew where we could obtain a supply! Our ‘heavy’ was sent about half a mile from the fire to ‘pick up’ water from three other pumps which were being supplied from hydrants. We relayed the water thro’ a chain of pumps to the fire. And then there was nothing to do except watch the hose and guard it where it crossed an arterial road (from being burst by cars proceeding at speed across it), so we had time to look round. What a sight. About a mile to our right was the riverfront. The whole horizon on that side was a sheet of flame. The entire docks were on fire! On all other sides it was much the same. Fire everywhere. The sky was a vivid orange glow … And all the time the whole area was being mercilessly bombed. The road shuddered with the explosions. AA [anti-aircraft] shells were bursting overhead. A Royal Navy Destroyer berthed in one of the docks was firing her AA equipment, as were other ships. The shrapnel literally rained down. It was now about midnight and still the racket kept on. It surprised me how quickly one got used to sensing whether a bomb was coming our way or not. At first we all lay flat every time we heard anything, but after an hour or so we only dived for it if one came particularly close … At 3am a canteen van arrived and served us tea and sandwiches. It was the first ‘bite’ any of us had had since mid day the day before, 14½ hours ago.
Just then the bombing became more severe and localised. A brighter glow in the sky immediately over us, then we saw the flames. Another fire had started in the gas works, which by now after 6 hours concentrated work by us, had been got well under control. Then a huge mushroom of flame shot into the air from the docks followed by a dull rolling roar. An oil container had exploded. The whole atmosphere became terrible again with the noise of gunfire. Afterwards when London established its famous [AA] barrage we got used to it, but on that first night it was just Hell.
Water mains had been fractured all over the East End, as had gas pipes and electrical and telephone cables. With no radio communication between the crews and control, messages had to be relayed by AFS and London Fire Brigade messengers, most of them teenaged boys with tin hats, riding motorbikes or yellow-painted bicycles. Sixteen was the statutory minimum age for such work, but checks were cursory, and many of those undertaking this hazardous and courageous work were younger. They set out to apprise District Control of the situation on the ground, to report the progress of the firefighting and request reinforcements, skidding through wet and cratered streets as the bombs fell, narrowly missing being hit, falling from their machines as girders fell in their path, negotiating piles of rubble, accelerating away to escape walls of fire, disorientated by the noise, the smoke, the confusion.
One of ‘Gillman’s Devils’, teenaged boys organised by Bill Gillman, Assistant Controller of Operations at West Ham, found himself riding through ‘a patch of burning paint on the roadway in Silvertown from the burning paint works on the corner. Paint stuck to my tyres and set them alight but I rode on the pavement until the flames were out.’ ‘You’d go round a corner and there’d be a great big hole in the road where a bomb had fallen, or half a house had fallen and the debris was blocking the road, or there might be an unexploded bomb,’ remembers Stan Durling, an AFS despatch rider. ‘But that night when I reported for duty at Millwall, you just didn’t know where to look. The chemical works had been hit. Everywhere you looked was fire. Across the water, north, south, east and west, everywhere. It seemed as if the whole East End docks were on fire. It was unbelievable.’ Sixteen-year-old Stan Hook was in the bath when the bombs started to fall. ‘They scream through the air, and then crump, crump, and the bath shook and I thought Christ, bombs. I don’t remember drying myself. I don’t remember getting dressed. But I was on my bike and back to the [fire] station [on the Isle of Dogs] and that’s when I came to. That was the beginning at five o’clock and from then until five o’clock the next day I just lived in a daze. A smoke-filled haze covered everything and orders were flying around in all directions, and you were charging around, and bombs were falling and fires were starting, and it wasn’t until the next morning that I really thought, well this is war.’
Uncontrollable by any blackout regulations, the river Thames served to guide enemy aircraft to their targets night after night during the blitz. A.P. Herbert, the lawyer, humorist and Independent MP for Oxford University, who had seen active service with the Royal Naval Reserve in France and at Gallipoli in the First World War, joined the River Emergency Service in the Second. This in effect mobilised the Thames as part of London’s defences. On the night of 7 September, Herbert was detailed to take his converted canal boat Water Gipsy from its mooring at Tower Bridge to pick up some wire from a Port of London Authority wreck lighter and take it to North Woolwich. Rounding Limehouse corner, he and his crew
saw an astonishing picture. Half a mile of Surrey shore … was ablaze – warehouses, wharves, piers, dolphins, barges.
The wind was westerly and there was a wall of smoke and sparks across the river. Burning barges were drifting everywhere but there was not a soul in sight – the small police boat ahead of us had turned back to report – and we had been ordered to Woolwich. [As ours was] a wooden ship and petrol driven, we didn’t like the look of it much; but we put wet towels round our faces and steamed at half speed into the torrid cloud. Inside, the scene was like a lake in Hell. We could hear the hiss and roar of the conflagration ashore, but could not see it, only the burning barges and the crimson water that reflected them. It was not as alarming as it had looked outside, the main whirl of sparks and smoke went over us. We took off our towels and felt quite happy. It was something to be the only boat in Hell. We steamed on slowly, using the compass and dodging the barges, and at last the Water Gipsy came out safe, but sooty, the White Ensign [of the Royal Navy] nearly black, the other side. After that, all the other fires we passed seemed no more than nightlights, though there were some brave ones.
I now had the feeling that nothing could touch us – a thing I never felt in a house. At the top of Blackwall Reach a bomb fell fifty yards ahead of us. I ducked down behind the wheel, I know, but truly I felt no fear and this delighted me. We delivered our wire at Woolwich – I hope it was some use – and came back through the smoke to Westminster.
On the shore of North Woolwich adjoining King George V Dock, residents had the terrifying ordeal of being trapped between the dock fires on one side and a row of factories ablaze on the other. Debris spilled from burning buildings, impeding the passage of fire engines and rescue vehicles. There seemed no escape as families rushed through the streets, found their way blocked and agitatedly ran back again. Some sought cover in the public shelter at the Oriental baths – until that was hit by a bomb. The entire population of the area had to be got away as quickly as possible before they were engulfed by the flames. No vehicles could get to them, so, coughing and spluttering in the smoke, and in terror of the fire and the bombs, they groped their way on foot to Woolwich Pier, where they scrambled into small boats and were rowed to safety along the Thames. It was much the same for the inhabitants of Rotherhithe, trapped between walls of flame that were engulfing their houses by the dock walls and the river. While some managed to get to safety by road, others were evacuated by boat.
Kathleen Rylatt was a member of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS), started by Stella, Marchioness of Reading at the request of the then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, in May 1938. Its original purpose was to recruit more women into the ARP service, but it was now called upon to help in almost any home front situation, no matter how hazardous. On the night of 7 September Rylatt was helping with the evacuation of residents of the flame-engulfed areas around the Surrey Docks. Five people had been found in the midst of the blazing buildings, unable to get out of their shelter as sandbags had fallen in on top of them during the raid. ‘The [residents] were horror-struck at the idea of leaving their homes. The road was literally burning and many of them had to be treated for badly-scorched feet.’ Rylatt led the terrified people to St Olave’s Hospital in Rotherhithe, where those who needed it were given first aid and everyone was comforted with blankets and cups of tea. The leader of a stretcher party who watched the procession streaming out of docklands was ‘absolutely amazed. They seemed to come like an army marching and running … they looked in a very bad state … dirty and dishevelled. Many had superficial cuts and their skin was pitted with tiny slivers of glass from blown out windows … and all had a “ghostly pallor” since they were covered in plaster dust from falling walls.’
Bert Purdy, an ambulance driver stationed at Moorgate, was just about to start his meal of tinned salmon and a cup of tea when the raids started. He abandoned his food and set off with the rest of his crew. ‘It was chaos, buildings, houses all in a collapsed condition. At times my driving was erratic, I was driving up and down the bomb craters. We saw several mutilated bodies lying in the road. At one point we stopped and moved several limbs and two bodies to a point off the road, covered them with sheets of corrugated iron, intending to remove them later. It was terrible – people trapped, severely injured. People were lying about everywhere. We began to collect the people, render first aid if and when possible; take them to Poplar Hospital. Private cars were waiting outside the hospital for attention. We saw patients with severe head injuries lying on the roof of the cars, blood running down the back window … We worked hours; removed patients to Poplar, Mile End and London Hospitals. It was terrible … so unexpected and tragic.’
At one point in that terrible night the brother of Gladys Strelitz, who lived in East Ham, urged his sisters, ‘“Come on girls, get all the children’s clothes in a bag, and we’ve got to get out of London, there’s a lull.” And so we got in this bus, and we went to Bow. And when we got to Bow the bombing was going so badly that the conductor pulled the bell and said we wouldn’t go any further. So the only place to go was to run into the crypt under this big church. And there the sight that met my eyes, it overcame me. Because there was people praying, and crying and asking God to help us, because there was bombs going on and the crypt … was actually shuddering … It was too much for me, I just passed out.’
The Communist journalist and typographer Alan Hutt, at the time assistant to the editor of the cooperatively-owned Reynolds’ News (he later rejoined the Daily Worker, which had employed him at its inception in 1930), had been sent down to the shelter at 4.30 that afternoon, as he and his colleagues were arguing about whether the caption to a photograph of roadblocks damaged by an attack in south London the previous day – ‘Knocked ‘em in the Old Kent Road’ – was insensitive. ‘Not funny when people’ve been killed,’ one objected. All that night as the journalists were trying to put the paper to bed, they were sent down to the shelter again and again. ‘Damned nuisance,’ thought Hutt, until he saw the cause of the alarm from the roof.
I can see the fire along the waterfront and a rolling bank of grey smoke twice as high as the barrage balloons. Estimate distance and plot it out on the map which indicates Millwall, Surrey Docks as the beginning (infinite arguments in the office, but it turns out that this is right). Both sides of the river were plastered as far as Woolwich and the fire stretched for miles – eight or nine I shd. say. As dusk fell about 9 o’clock, the sight from our roof was incredible, a fantastic Gustav Doré piece, a gold and grey smoke-canopied flaming glow stretching thickly as far as one cd. see, the skyline silhouetted sharply black against this infernal Technicolor piece. Blackout was dead for the rest of the night and the bombers came back by the light of the fire to blast the East End … David has got a magnificent shot of the fire from London Bridge but the censor refuses to pass any pictures – ‘nothing that will confirm the enemy’s claims’… Jenkins goes to the Borough and gets an awe-inspiring view, also seeing the folks trooping to the Southwark tunnel in their thousands. We have to fight to get his stuff in the paper, for the new editor, jittery and helpless as usual says we’ve no way of getting this to the censor; but then he doesn’t want to send anyone out in this – leave it to the agencies – they’ve got special passes blah blah. O God O Fleet Street …
The fire, which has gone down a bit, picks up fiercely and at 1am towards the east there is a leap of flame and … clouds of black smoke. A big fire … We’ve all had a scornful sneer over the Private & Confidential Memo to eds [editors] giving a MoI [Ministry of Information] interview with the PM – optimistic stuff … ‘this has been expected … damage may be somewhat serious from a local viewpoint, but seen on the background of our general war effort &c & c … ‘
All Clear at 4.50; a coffee at the milk bar, a taxi to Kentish Town, & a rambling walk home through the dawn, the fire glow melting strangely into the light of day.
A young woman, Ida Naish, was caught in the raid on her way home to East Ham from visiting a friend. When she had arrived at Euston after hours of delays and detours, the station was deserted. ‘I came out into the street and there was no sign of [her mother, who was supposed to be meeting her]. The fire was getting steadily brighter, and overhead there were sounds of gunfire with an occasional dull thud in the distance as the bombs dropped. I have never felt so alone in my life.’ She managed to get to Aldgate, but
they wouldn’t let me book through to East Ham as Bow Road station was no more and Stepney Green had been heavily bombed. I came up to the bus stop and waited with about twenty other people, but it was hopeless. A few taxis came by and we tried hailing them but of course we had no luck … I suppose I’d been standing there about forty minutes when providentially my mother walked by right in front of me. She, poor soul, had been turned away from Euston at 8.30 and as the raid was still in progress had started to walk home. She’d already come all that way on foot when I met her but despite that suggested that we should walk on … I think if we’d both been feeling hale and hearty, we wouldn’t have gone but we seemed so numbed that nothing much mattered.
… The whole of Thameside from London Bridge to Woolwich was a raging inferno. You could have seen to read by the light – if you’d felt inclined – and unfortunately for us we had to go by the East India Docks. Commercial Road was the only route open to the East because owing to the damage done to Bow Road, traffic was being diverted … And just before we got to Burdett Road, the bombs started falling. The shelters seemed to be absolutely non existent so we just went on … At one time we were made to go round back turnings because a delayed action bomb had fallen in the main road and nothing could pass. What was so maddening was the persistent drone of enemy planes which, I might mention, are easily distinguishable from our own. We couldn’t get away from it, and felt so completely helpless.
Fires were breaking out everywhere … a chapel that lay back about thirty yards from us suddenly burst into flames. It was dreadful. The streets were littered with glass and the pavements pitted with shrapnel from the raid [that afternoon]. Far away down the Barking Road we could see the glare of an incendiary bomb that had landed in the roadway and we decided to take to the back streets. A pale flickering light over towards Barking turned out (so we found later) to be the power station which had been hit. I think something must have hit the gas works, too, because we still haven’t got any gas and at the moment [the next day, Sunday, 8 September] our Sunday joint is swinging on an improvised spit in front of the fire.
… We were going down one turning when [an ARP] warden stopped us from going on and insisted that we stayed in his house. We were really very grateful and from 11pm to 5am we sat on the stairs in the dark gazing out through the open door to the street which was incessantly lit up with explosions. And how those bombs fell! Canning Town library was hit, Forest Gate got it too, and all around us seemed to be shaking. Dante had nothing on Hitler, believe me.
… At last, at 5 o/c, the All Clear went and we finally reached home to find some windows out and the ceiling down in Mummy’s room …
When I looked from my window I could see that one of the fires on Thames side was still burning and great clouds of black smoke were covering quite a large area.
‘Then quite suddenly it ceased,’ recalled Fireman Hurd, fighting a fire amidst the noise of screaming bombs and droning aircraft. ‘The silence was almost overpowering for a time. At about 5 o/c am the “All Clear” went. We had been subjected, without any real cover, to 8 hours of continual bombing! … Relief crews began to arrive (they came from Enfield) … we stayed there until 10 o/c on Sunday morning when our Sub Officer handed over to another officer. This officer and his ten pumps … had come from Brighton! Our crew proceeded home [then] and what a scene of desolation we passed through. Debris everywhere, confined to the East End though, but I was too tired to care much about what I saw then. We had been on our feet since 6.15 pm on Saturday until 10 am on Sunday, with only one snack in 21 hours.’
The All Clear ‘sounded a beautiful symphony’ in Bernard Kops’ ears:
everyone relaxed, the men arguing politics and the women talking about food, But the younger people wandered out to see the fires and I went with them along the Commercial Road. The closer I got the more black and red it became with flames shooting higher than the cranes along the dockside. Sparks were spitting everywhere and tongues of flames consumed the great warehouses along the black and orange waters of the Thames. Everything was chaos except the fire which was like a living monster with an insatiable appetite. And I was afraid of being devoured … so I left and wandered back towards Stepney Green where black smoke covered the sky.
Yet, with all this, there was a feeling of unreality. I couldn’t believe it, it was like a film being shown before our eyes, Men were rushing around selling newspapers, screaming about the amount of German planes that were brought down, and there had been a family wiped out where I had been standing …
That first night of the blitz, 436 people were killed and 1,600 seriously injured.
(#ulink_54b922ef-4f02-59d6-8239-8902bfc2a038) Among the dead were seven firemen. Thirteen men were killed when the corporation depot in Abbey Road, West Ham, which was being used as an ARP Cleansing and Ambulance station, received a direct hit. Cyril Demarne, who was nearby, hurried round to find a hand he recognised as that of his friend Wally Turley sticking out from under a huge slab of concrete. Turley, a fireman, had been attempting to put out a fire at the station when it collapsed, burying him, his fellow firefighters and other ARP workers stationed there. It was impossible to move the concrete to free the bodies until heavy lifting gear arrived, so Fireman Turley’s arm remained sticking out of the debris, a tragic signpost to one of the many instant burial grounds that night.
Soon after the first raid of the blitz had begun the previous afternoon, the manager of Robert Baltrop’s Sainsbury’s had decided to close the shop and send all his staff home. Baltrop set out to keep his date with a girl.
She turned up – it sounds daft but perhaps we all thought it was a bit romantic meeting in an air raid, all this was going on very close to us. We could smell the smoke and hear the bombs, but she had orders to take me home immediately if I turned up so we went to her home and they were all in the Anderson shelter in her back garden, her parents and the lady from upstairs, and we huddled in there, it was pretty awful all squashed in there together with the raid going on and her father talked in gloomy tones about H.G. Wells and how we should all have to live underground, and every time there was a thump her mother screamed … The man from upstairs came in straight from work, and he tumbled into the shelter breathless with these stories of roads blocked, streets in ruins, named places that I knew, and it was almost unbelievable to hear someone say, you know this place or that place, well, it’s been bombed.
Baltrop finally became ‘fed up’ with this talk and the confined space, and walked home. His father had been out, ‘picking up what news he could about the East End, because we knew it so well, we knew people and places, and he’s heard this place had been bombed and that place … and we sat and had a cup of tea and he talked grievingly about the East End and the people and how they must be suffering, and then we went to bed and the raid was still going on and we wondered, would we wake up in the morning? What would tomorrow be like? And when I did wake up it was a lovely, sunny Sunday morning, lovely except that I think that four hundred and fifty or more people had been killed in East London, and a huge number injured, terrible, terrible destruction, and the Germans were coming back again that night …’
(#ulink_bfca9713-a027-512a-a0d1-7f01d154da30) ‘Seriously injured’ described those who were admitted to and kept in hospital; a person receiving first aid treatment at the time, or subsequently presenting at an outpatients’ department or at their doctor’s surgery, was categorised as ‘slightly injured’. Of course many people sustained minor injuries for which they did not seek medical help, so they do not show up in the figures. Indeed, the Ministry of Home Security was concerned that reporting officers should be clear about what were ‘regarded as casualties, or to classify them in some way so that our published figures may represent the true gravity of the situation (i.e. not old ladies removed to hospital from near an incident “for their own comfort”)’.
2 ‘The Most Grim Test in its History …’ (#ulink_619af8bd-bf3a-5008-88f6-384b0336ca75)
With our enormous metropolis here, the greatest target in the world, a kind of tremendous fat cow tied up to attract the beasts of prey.
Winston Churchill speaking in 1934 about the prospect of an aerial bombardment of London
Darling Kat, You little know what you say when you tell me to write for the papers. I am not, as you know, made of the stuff Londoners are made of. My instinct is to flee. I cannot report on scenes in shelters. There are hundreds of keen, nerveless people out all night pursuing fires and demolition … Still it is endurable and my greatest fear is being forced by Duff [her husband, the Minister of Information] to leave the city. It is so utterly unlike what I imagined the raids on London would be. I thought of a bigger, suddener attack, with the whole population blocking roads, Ministries evacuating to their pre-arranged dispersal stations, frightful dislocation, worse perhaps than this cold-blooded waiting for destruction. Most people don’t see it so. They have confidence in a defence being found. ‘This is only a phase of war. We’ll stick it out all right.’ There is not a street that does not show some assault. The curtains flap dismally out of Londonderry House and most of the big Piccadilly houses. I try to avoid the places where the cruellest gashes have been inflicted, but one has to take the way that cut-off streets, encumbered with bombs ticking to explode, allow.
Lady Diana Cooper writing from London to her friend ‘Kaetchen’ Kommer in New York on 23 September 1940
Around the time the ‘big blitz’ on London started in September 1940, the War Damage Survey of the Architects’ Department of the London County Council (LCC) started to record bomb damage to the capital. Using sheets of Ordnance Survey maps from 1916 that had been updated in 1940 to show boundary changes, new buildings etc., on a scale of 1:2,500 (25.34 inches to the mile), the architects marked incidents of bomb damage across the city’s 117 square miles, using different-coloured pencils to indicate degrees of severity. Black denoted those buildings that had been totally destroyed, purple those damaged beyond repair. Those that had sustained ‘serious damage, doubtful if repairable’ were coloured dark red, while properties ‘seriously damaged but repairable at cost’ were light red. Orange indicated ‘non-structural general blast damage’ and those in yellow had escaped all but minor damage – broken windows, or roof tiles dislodged, for example. The architects kept up their meticulous work until the end of the German V-weapon offensive on 27 March 1945 (V-weapon damage was indicated differently), and today their maps make sombre viewing.
The docks consist of little other than large slabs of black, with small infills of purple round the edges. Even more shocking are the narrow streets edging the quays, where dock and factory workers lived in small terraced houses in the shadow of the heavy industries, their lives dominated by their proximity to their work. They often paid the ultimate price for that proximity, as ‘collateral damage’ to the industrial targets of the Luftwaffe. Most of the Isle of Dogs is black and purple, with the occasional flash of orange. There is not a single house that was untouched, and most were totally destroyed. It is much the same in Stepney, Bermondsey, Wapping, Poplar and Woolwich. East Ham, West Ham, Canning Town, Barking and Beckton are all outside the LCC administrative area, but they suffered grievously too, with people killed, seriously injured, bereaved, made homeless. Although of course not all the damage was done in those nightmare early nights of September 1940, the toll then was chillingly high. In that month 5,730 Londoners were killed, 9,003 were seriously injured, and countless others received minor injuries: the worst totals of the blitz. By November 1940, 2,160 houses in Stepney had been demolished or were beyond repair, while 13,480 were damaged but repairable. A little further north, in Hackney, where the Home Secretary, Minister for Home Security and former leader of the LCC, Herbert Morrison, was an MP, 1,349 homes had been destroyed in the same period and 3,654 badly damaged; in Poplar, eight hundred homes were lost and 13,200 badly damaged. South of the river suffered too, with Lambeth losing 1,758 houses and Lewisham only slightly fewer, though a staggering 23,370 houses there were damaged but just about repairable. There is also a list of those houses ‘receiving first aid repairs’, with bits of wood, roofing felt and tarpaulin pro tem, a roof over the residents’ heads, but hardly a home any more. Fourteen thousand nine hundred Lewisham houses had had emergency repairs by November, Poplar, 8,500 and Wandsworth, 9,898.
Len Jones had spent the night of 7 September in a brick and concrete street shelter in Poplar which had ‘lifted and moved, rolling almost as if it was a ship in a rough sea. And the suction and the blasts were coming in and out of the steel door, which was smashing backwards and forwards, bashing us against the walls … The worst part was the poor little kids; they were so scared, they were screaming and crying, clutching at their parents. The heat was colossal; the steel door was so hot that you couldn’t touch it. And everybody was being sick, and people were carrying out their normal bodily needs, and the smell was terrible.’
The next morning, Jones ‘went to see how our house was, and when I got there the front door was lying back, and the glass of the windows had fallen in, and you could see the top of the house had virtually disappeared. Inside, everything was blown to pieces, you could see it all by the red glow reflecting from the fires that were raging outside. Then I looked out the back and I suddenly realised that where my father’s shed and workshop used to be, was just a pile of rubble, bricks. Then I saw two bodies, two heads sticking up, I recognised one head in particular; it was a Chinese man, Mr Say, he had one eye closed, and I began to realise that he was dead … I just convulsed and couldn’t get my breath. I was shaking completely. Then I thought, well I must be dead, because they were, so I struck a match, and tried to burn my finger, I kept doing this with a match to see if I was still alive. I could see, but I thought, I cannot be alive. This is the end of the world.’
All that morning the East End was a scene of chaos and despair as people stumbled through the streets searching for family, friends and neighbours in rest centres and hospitals, wondered where to go for food and assistance, scrabbled through the rubble to locate their possessions in houses that had been bombed, attempted to patch up the damage if that was possible – or simply got out. A Thames pleasure steamer was pressed into service to evacuate women and children from the narrow, ruined streets of the Isle of Dogs, where most had lived all their lives and which few had seen any reason to leave – until now. What journalists called ‘the mean streets’ of the East End were full of what one of them, Hilde Marchant of the Daily Express, described as ‘a ragged sleepless army whose homes had been smashed’; a ‘civilian Dunkirk’ fleeing the enemy. ‘Little houses, four rooms and a bath tub, eight shillings a week [rent to a private landlord] had taken the attack … at daylight [the people] came up [out of the shelters] and many saw the roots of their homes turned to the sky.’ Families pushing perambulators or carts, clutching suitcases and bundles crammed with all they could carry – clothes, bedding, household goods, food – ‘climbed through streets that had once been two neat rows of houses and were [now] like a ploughed field’, either trekking east to the open spaces of Epping Forest or heading ‘up West’, where it was believed to be safer. Anywhere to get away from the East End before another night of hell.
At midday on Sunday, 8 September, the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, came to the East End with Duncan Sandys MP, who was married to Churchill’s daughter Diana, his brother Jack, and his Chief of Staff, Major-General Hastings Ismay,
(#ulink_e225ea05-2219-5985-bcc2-9a037ed59e07) to inspect the damage for himself. They found the destruction much more devastating ‘than they had imagined … Fires were still raging all over the place. Some of the large buildings were mere skeletons, and many of the smaller houses had been reduced to rubble.’ Clambering over the debris, Churchill went first to visit an air-raid shelter in Columbia Road, Shoreditch, home of the flower market, where ‘about 40 of the inmates had been killed and a very large number wounded. The place was full of people searching for their lost belongings when you arrived,’ Ismay reminded his boss later when Churchill wanted to include the poignant occasion in his History of the Second World War.
The Columbia Road bomb had been a particularly tragic introduction to the events of the next few months. In what the Daily Herald journalist Ritchie Calder called ‘a million to one chance’, a bomb had crashed directly through a ventilation shaft measuring only three feet by one foot, below which lay a shelter containing more than a thousand people.
Mothers were killed outright before they had a chance to protect their children. Babies were swept from perambulators. Three or four support pillars were torn down and about 50 people lay in stunned heaps … Perambulators and corrugated iron lay entangled at the scene.
… Although explosions could be heard in all directions and the scene was illuminated by the glow of the East End fires, civil defence workers laboured fearlessly and feverishly among the debris, seeking the wounded, carrying them to safe places, tending their injuries.
Nine doctors answered an S.O.S. and saved lives by improvising tourniquets. They dressed wounds by the dim glow of torches. In one family three children were killed. Their parents escaped. One man, when the smoke and noise had died down, searched for his wife, found her lying on the ground and turned her over. She was dead.
However, as Ismay noted of ‘the big crowd, male and female, young and old, all seemingly very poor[, while] one might have expected them to be resentful against the authorities responsible for their protection … They stormed [Churchill] as he got out of the car with cries of “It was good of you to come Winnie. We thought you’d come. We can take it. Give it back.” ‘Or so Ismay remembered. ‘It was a very moving scene. You broke down completely and I nearly did, as I was trying to get you through the press of bodies, I heard an old woman say, “You see, he really cares, he’s crying …” Later we found many pathetic little Union Jacks flying on piles of masonry that had once been the homes of poor people.’
The point of the visit was to boost morale and show the nation that its leader was sympathetic to the East Enders’ ordeal, and Churchill was snapped by press photographers as he bounded tirelessly from one bomb site to the next. But the Ministry of Information, anxious that no information on the effects of the raids should be seen by German Intelligence, scratched anything from the negatives that might indicate the location and the full extent of the damage before a select few photographs of the prime ministerial tour appeared in the press.
It was getting dark when Churchill set off back to Downing Street, although the flames of the previous night’s fires still illuminated the sky. The Prime Minister’s car ‘had a long job getting through the narrow streets, many of which were blocked by houses having been blown across them’. While the East End had taken the main impact of the bombs, some had fallen elsewhere – near Victoria station, along the banks of the Thames from Vauxhall Bridge to Putney Bridge (Battersea Power Station was put out of action), and in parts of west London. The seat of government was bound to be a target, although Churchill was extremely reluctant to leave his official London home (he had been obliged to shut his family’s country house, Chartwell in Kent, during the Battle of Britain that summer). But 10 Downing Street was no longer regarded as a safe haven for Britain’s inspirational wartime leader, even though, in a flurry of works that had necessitated Churchill moving for a few nights to the Carlton Hotel in nearby Belgravia, a shelter had been built in the garden, and a dining room and sitting room set up in the basement, which Jock Colville thought resembled ‘third-class accommodation on a Channel steamer’. The question of where to keep Britain’s principal wartime asset led to a tussle that would continue between the obstinate Prime Minister and his staff and advisers throughout the early days of the blitz.
That Sunday, the second night of the blitz, bombs fell again on the docks, reigniting fires that were still smouldering, starting new ones, and stretching the line of fire and destruction along the banks of the Thames: soon twelve conflagrations were lighting up the sky, and testing the resources of the fire services to their limit once again. The two hundred German planes pounded the City too. Every railway line out of London to the south was put out of action, and factories and offices were destroyed, as were more homes. Four hundred and twelve Londoners were killed that night, and 747 seriously injured.
Gerry Knight, who had memorably thought ‘the whole bloody world’s on fire’ the previous night, was on duty again at Pageant’s Wharf fire station when the bombs started to drop. One fell on the station killing Knight and a colleague, Auxiliary Fireman Dick Martin. All that could be found to identify the forty-four-year-old Knight were his standard issue thigh-high fireman’s boots.
When the photographer Bert Hardy visited the East End two days later, ‘he said it was like the end of the world’, reported Alan Hutt. ‘Whole streets down and gone. East End soldiers deserting to rush home and frantically try to find their folks … A man and a woman sitting on a pile of wreckage staring listlessly in front of them without speech … Revolting stories of official red tape in dealing with refugees and bereaved survivors … climaxing in the hideous affair of the refugees bunged into one East End School on Saturday night to be all bombed to death on Sunday [sic].’
This ‘hideous affair’ made unbearably raw all the fears and many of the tensions of the blitz just a day after it started. A rest centre had been established at South Hallsville School in Agate Street, Canning Town, and it was there that six hundred men, women and children had been led on Saturday night after it had been decided to evacuate the local area. The refugees were in a state of acute shock. Most had lost their homes; for some, members of their family had been killed or wounded, or were missing; they had few if any possessions; their clothes were torn and dirty, their faces blackened by smoke and soot, often caked with blood, their feet burned and lacerated. They clung to each other, terrified, confused, some hysterical, others racked with uncontrollable anger, others traumatised and unable to speak. Rest centre staff, hopelessly unprepared for such a sudden influx, themselves shocked and anxious, bustled around offering cups of tea – that ubiquitous British panacea – trying to find blankets for the refugees, many of whom were only wearing thin nightclothes, offering reassurance as bombs crashed all around and shrapnel grazed the walls: ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be all right. We’ll get you away.’
That day Ritchie Calder had sought out the Reverend Paton, a popular East End priest known locally as ‘the Guv’nor’, whose dockland church had been bombed the previous night.
His pulpit still stood, but the roof and front wall had gone … I found ‘The Guv’nor’ at last, he was ashen grey with the anguish of the night. He had been out in the raids, helping his people throughout the night. His lips trembled and his eyes filled with tears when he spoke of his friends who were dead, injured or missing. But his main concern was for the living. He was dashing round the streets seeking out the survivors whose homes had been wrecked.
I went with him. We found many thousands sheltering in a school in the heart of the bombed area. I took a good look at the school. From the first glance it seemed to me ominous of disaster. In the passages and classrooms were mothers nursing their babies. There were blind, crippled and aged people … Whole families were sitting in queues perched on pitiful baggage waiting desperately for coaches to take them away from the terror of the bombs which had been raining down on them … these unfortunate people had been told to be ready for the coaches at three o’clock. Hours later the coaches had not arrived. ‘The Guvnor’ and I heard women, the mothers of young children, protesting with violence and with tears about the delay. Men were cursing the officials who only knew that coaches were expected. ‘Where are we going?’ ‘Can’t we walk there?’ ‘We’ll take a bus!’ ‘There’s a lorry we can borrow!’ The crowds clamoured for help, for information, for reassurance. But the officials knew no answer other than to offer a cup of tea.
One mother complained that her children had been forbidden to play in the playground … [the official showed me why]. In the playground behind the school was a crater. The school was, in fact, a bulging dangerous ruin. The bombs which had rendered these people homeless had also struck the building selected by the authorities as a ‘Rest Centre’… the school had already been bombed at the same time as ‘the Guv’nor’s’ church had been bombed. So had the parish church … So had other buildings and streets within a direct line with it. And then I knew that Sunday afternoon, that as sure as night would follow day, the bombers would come again with the darkness, and that the school would be bombed.
And so it was. ‘Filled with foreboding’, Calder ‘hastened back to central London. Three times I warned the Whitehall authorities during that evening that the people must be got away before more bombs dropped and certain disaster overtook them. Local folk back at the school were making equally frantic efforts to force the local authorities to act.’ But the displaced East Enders were still huddled in the ‘shelterless school’ at 8 p.m. on Monday when the alert sounded. At 3.45 on the morning of Tuesday, 10 September ‘the inevitable bomb’ scored a direct hit on South Hallsville School. Half the building was demolished, and hundreds of tons of masonry crashed down on its occupants. Rescue workers, frantically digging and scrabbling in the ruins, tried to free the injured, while a cordon was thrown around the area to keep people from seeing what was happening, and the censor warned the press that there were to be no reports or photographs of the tragedy, so injurious was it feared that it would be to the morale of the already disquieted city.
The rescue services dug for twelve days, trying to find survivors under the slabs of concrete and piles of bricks that filled the crater where the bomb had fallen, before they had to concede defeat. The dead – or parts of the dead – were carefully transported to an emergency morgue at a nearby swimming pool. Soon the rumours flew as fast as the fires had taken hold: hundreds were dead, and the authorities had ordered the site to be concreted over with bodies still entombed in the wreckage. Calder was incandescent with rage at the authorities, not only for failing to organise transport for the refugees, but also for failing to provide what he and others, including most vociferously the scientist and author of the book ARP, J.B.S. Haldane, had urged was essential for London: sufficient deep shelters to provide safety for all those in vulnerable areas. Calder went again to the scene. ‘I saw the gaping bomb crater, where stood a school used as a shelter centre, containing still uncounted bodies – families wiped out while they waited for transport which never came … I saw the rescue men descending perilously into it, with ropes around them, saw them pause, every now and then, in a hushed painful silence listening for the sound of the living, saw the tomb of whole families … I spoke to the men, fathers of families, who had been cursing on the Sunday. They were speechless and numbed by the horror of it.’
It has never been established why the coaches did not arrive: maybe the address they had been given was inadequate. The George, a well-known pub in the area from which coaches from all over London set off for Essex, had been designated as the rendezvous point – but there are more pubs than one in the capital called The George. Maybe the coaches had been misdirected to Camden Town, rather than Canning Town. Or maybe the drivers, caught in the raid and seeing the devastation in the East End, simply turned back. Certainly it was a grievous dereliction of duty on the part of the West Ham authorities to leave so many people unprotected in the eye of the raid. And whatever the reason, the result was fatal – 450 dead, Calder claimed in the bitter account that appeared the following year in his admonitory book The Lesson of London. West Ham Council announced the death toll as seventy-three, but locals still believe that nearer two hundred people perished in South Hallsville School on the third night of the blitz. Many of the bodies remained unclaimed, despite the fact that the Metropolitan Police circulated photographs in the area of those it was still possible to identify, and were buried in a communal grave in the East London Cemetery at Plaistow.
‘They call it crater London now,’ read the trenchant journalist Hannen Swaffer’s column in the Daily Herald. Traffic in the capital was at a standstill, with streets roped off because of unexploded bombs, fires still smouldering and many City businesses closed. It was the King’s turn to go to the people on Monday, 9 September. Accompanied by Captain Euan Wallace, Senior Regional Commissioner for Civil Defence, George VI paid a visit to Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Stepney and Poplar before crossing the river to see the devastation of Bermondsey, Southwark and Lambeth. In places a path had to be hastily cleared through the debris so the royal party could proceed. At one point the King peered down into a crater ringed with ‘backless houses, showing bedrooms and sitting rooms with furniture shattered, and every curtain hanging in shreds’. Twenty houses had stood there the previous night, but there was now nothing but a hole large enough to hold three or four buses. George VI – not at all displeased to have a clear-cut wartime role at last, as part of the ‘morale-boosting’ posse – conscientiously insisted on a thorough tour, taking in the docks as well as the devastated streets. Later that day, as he was working in his study at Buckingham Palace, a random bomb fell on the north side of the building, but did not explode until early the next morning, shattering windows and badly damaging the swimming pool. Each night the King and Queen trekked to Windsor Castle in an armoured Daimler. It had been planned that they would go to Worcester in the event of an invasion, and the by-now elderly Queen Mary, the Queen Mother, had decamped the previous year to Badminton, the Gloucestershire residence of her niece, the Duchess of Beaufort.
Monday night’s raids lasted for nearly ten hours, killing 370 people and injuring 1,400. But the next night, for the first time, it seemed as if the fightback had begun. ‘We had depended on anti-aircraft guns … and apart from a solitary salvo loosed at the beginning of the raids, no gun had been shot in our defence … we felt like sitting ducks and no mistake,’ wrote Violet Regan, wife of an ARP warden, who had sheltered in a Poplar school throughout the raids. ‘It was difficult for civilians to understand why there should be no more than spasmodic gunfire [from the anti-aircraft (AA, or ‘Ack-Ack’, from the staccato noise they made) guns
(#ulink_804a0aee-b7d0-52a5-a983-c43dc41acf86)] when hordes of enemy aircraft streamed over London most of the night,’ wrote the Commander-in-Chief of Anti-Aircraft Command, General Sir Frederick Pile. ‘The intricate and enormous problems of night shooting were unknown to them, and impossible to explain. Londoners wanted to hear the guns shoot back; they wanted to feel that even if aircraft were not being brought down, at least the pilots were being made uncomfortable. It was abundantly apparent,’ the C-in-C concluded, ‘that every effort must be made to defend the Londoner more effectively, and to uphold his morale in so doing.’
Pile fully appreciated that ‘anti-aircraft guns take a little time to become effective after they have been moved to new positions. Telephone lines have to be laid, gun positions levelled, the warning system co-ordinated and so on.’ But as he lay in bed during those first nights of the blitz, when ‘despite the … very considerable increase in the number of guns by the second night of the battle, there did not seem to be much more anti-aircraft fire’, he became ‘both angry and frightened at the same time [much like the rest of the population of London] that our system was no good’. He lay awake ‘for the rest of the night thinking how to deal with this business’.
What Pile decided to do, though, had rather more to do with upping British morale than downing German planes. He gathered the senior AA officers together in the Signals Drill Hall in Brompton Road, and instructed them that ‘every gun was to fire every possible round. Fire was not to be withheld on any account. Guns were to go to the approximate bearing and elevation and fire. Searchlights were not to expose. R.A.F. fighters were not going to operate over London, and every unseen target must be engaged without waiting to identify the aircraft as hostile.’
The result, Pile found, was
as astonishing to me as it appears to have been to the citizens of London – and, apparently, to the enemy as well. For, although few of the bursts can have got anywhere near the target, the heights of aircraft steadily increased as the night went on, and many of them turned away before entering the artillery zone … It was in no sense a barrage, though I think by that name it will always be known.
Anyway, it bucked up people tremendously. The midnight news said some nice things about us, and when I put a call through to my wife the telephone operator said: ‘By God this is the stuff. All the girls here are hugging each other.’ Next day everyone said they had slept better, and for the first time A.A. Command hit the headlines. Apart from comforting the civilians, it stimulated the gunners, who had been feeling pretty frustrated during the long nights when they had been compelled to hear aircraft flying overhead and dropping their bombs without being engaged.
Although the barrage made sleep impossible in the crypt of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s official residence, Lambeth Palace, ‘with the noise continuing almost without intermission until 5.40 am’, those sheltering there were ‘much cheered by this offensive action’, which in the view of the Archbishop’s chaplain, the Reverend Alan Don, ‘had turned back many German planes and fewer bombs were dropped – at any rate in central London’.
The press was enthusiastic too. The Daily Herald wrote of ‘a curtain of exploding steel’, or ‘an effective patchwork quilt protecting the capital’, with ‘London really baring its teeth … Londoners sat up in their shelters and listened … “Spotters” on London roofs looked at one another and smiled. “That’s lovely music,” said one of them,’ while a nameless man taking shelter felt that it was ‘D—d heartening … it sounds like the answer to night bombing.’
Not everyone was pleased, of course. Spent shells falling back to the ground were hazardous, and ‘some angry voices were raised … in the southern and eastern suburbs, upon which the retreating Luftwaffe jettisoned their bombs’, while in another suburb the vibrations caused by the Ack-Ack guns were apparently cracking council-house lavatory pans, and ‘Would we mind very much moving the barrage elsewhere?’
‘The Blitzkrieg Spreads’, announced the press on 11 September: ‘Hitler’s murder squadrons make their most widespread attacks on the London area’. That was how it would be every night until fog and low cloud on 3 November made it impossible for the Luftwaffe to locate their targets, and for one night the capital was silent – no alert, no bombs, no Ack-Ack fire. Fifty-seven nights of continuous raids with no respite. ‘What a fantastic life we lead these days,’ wrote Phyllis Warner, a teacher who lived at the Mary Ward Settlement Centre in Bloomsbury, in the ‘Journal Under the Terror’ that she kept during the blitz and sent to the Washington Post to give the still neutral America some idea of the quotidian realities of wartime London. ‘Every night as the siren goes regularly at eight o’clock we scuttle down into the cellar, and are marooned there until six the next morning. My bedroom has never looked so invitingly comfortable as on these evenings when I hastily dive into a “siren suit” [an all-in-one outfit modelled on a workman’s boilersuit and much favoured by the rotund Winston Churchill] and retreat to the basement … And here we must spend every evening. Farewell to theatre, films, dances, dinner-parties and such pleasures; we pass our evenings in dugouts trying to read, write, talk or play bridge, so far as the rattle of planes and the crash of bombs will allow. Yet this part of the night is better than the long hours of darkness when we try to sleep through the horrors that surround us. This is the front line, this is the “Journey’s End” of this war, and men, women and children, we are trapped in it.’
In shelters much less congenial than the one at Mary Ward House – in domestic cellars, under the stairs, in damp Anderson shelters in back gardens, in public shelters in reinforced basements or on the surface, on tube platforms or in muddy trenches dug in parks or other open spaces, in a margarine warehouse, under bridges and arches – those who remained in London through necessity or choice sat out those long, dark, dangerous nights. By the end of September, the month of the supposed ‘knock-out blow’ that the Luftwaffe hoped to deliver to Britain, 5,730 people had been killed in the London region. In July the War Cabinet had taken the decision that it would be ill-advised to make casualty figures public, but once the blitz started it became clear that rumours often exaggerated the number of deaths and serious injuries, so stark notices were posted outside town halls giving the number of those killed and injured, but without identifying the location of the ‘incidents’, and insisting that the information ‘must not be published in the press’, lest it prove helpful to the Germans by informing them how successful their raids had been.
On some nights that September and October the raids were relatively light, with as few as seven bombers coming over (on 6 October). On others there were as many as 410 (on 15 October), but usually between two hundred and three hundred Heinkels, Dorniers and Junkers filled the sky. The main targets were still the City and the docks, but poor visibility, not entirely reliable navigational aids, and encounters with fighter planes, barrage balloons and searchlights (both of which forced the planes to fly higher) and Ack-Ack fire, meant that it was impossible to be certain of hitting a specific target, particularly by night. By early October Luftwaffe pilots were being issued with maps that indicated a target area – that is, a zone of several square miles within which several targets lay, such as the land within the U loop of the Thames – rather than a specific building or installation, such as Battersea Power Station or the West India Docks, as had previously been the case.
‘Indiscriminate bombings’ is how Churchill referred to the blitz, declaring that Hitler hoped, ‘by killing large numbers of civilians, and women and children, that he will terrorise and cow the people of this mighty Imperial city and make them a burden and anxiety for the Government and thus distract our attention unduly from the ferocious onslaught he is preparing’. But although the bombing did seem indiscriminate, and its intention might have seemed to be to kill and maim civilians, in fact its intention was to devastate the London docks so that the food and matériel essential to the prosecution of the war could not be imported, and to destroy government offices in central London from where the war was being directed.
On 9 September, ninety bombers reached the capital and dropped some of their load on the suburbs: Kingston, Richmond, Malden, Surbiton, Purley, but as the Daily Express put it, ‘Acacia Avenue clips its hedges beside a crater and carries on.’ The first of the many London hospitals that would be devastated by the blitz, Queen Mary, in West Ham, had been bombed on 7 September, killing two nurses and six patients. On the night of 9 September a bomb fell on the London Hospital in Whitechapel Road, and St Thomas’s Hospital on the Thames hard by Westminster Bridge, which had been designated as a wartime casualty clearing station, took a direct hit. Three floors of a nurses’ home on the north side collapsed, and two nurses and four masseuses were crushed to death under the falling masonry. One of the masseuses, thirty-two-year-old Barbara Mortimer Thomas from Australia, was covered in debris and trapped in her bed forty feet above ground by a steel girder, with only her head and shoulders visible, and the floor supporting her likely to collapse at any minute. Her cries alerted the rescue squad, who started the hazardous task of building a scaffolding tower among the dislodged masonry to reach her, and carefully cut a hole in the wall so that drinks and a hot-water bottle could be passed to her and morphine injected into her one free arm. Mortimer Thomas joked with her rescuers, but just as they were about to free her after sixteen hours, a doctor crawled through the wreckage and found that she had died. The hospital’s X-ray department was put out of action, and twenty-five patients were carefully carried to another ward. Seventy others were moved to other hospitals or sent home, while the entire staff repaired to the basement – a ‘most incredible sight – one could hardly move without stumbling over a sleeping form’.
The next day, since the water supply had failed, all the remaining patients – except one who had been brought in as an emergency appendicitis case that morning – were evacuated to sector hospitals in the country,
(#ulink_1ce8c66b-481d-570a-a404-58fa62f37337) with medical students carrying the stretchers to waiting ambulances. St Thomas’s was hit again on 13 September and again on the 15th, when two surgeons and a nurse were killed and four were seriously injured, including one in charge of the first aid post who subsequently died. The outpatients ward, the dispensary and the hospital chapel were badly damaged, and the electricity supply was cut off, so doctors and nurses had to tend the patients by candlelight or using the few battery-powered nightlights available. The hospital was hit three more times during the blitz. It was, in the words of its historian, ‘for most of the war little more than a heap of ruins; yet it never closed entirely. When things were bad life was carried on in the basement … when things were better … a semblance of normal life and work miraculously took over in hastily cleared out rooms and wards.’
An air-raid shelter had been established in the basement of Buckingham Palace by appropriating one of the housekeeper’s rooms. The ceilings were reinforced with steel girders, the high window protected by steel shutters. The furniture came from all over the palace, while the decoration consisted of valuable Dutch landscapes, many featuring canal bridges and ruminant cows. An axe and an emergency escape ladder lay ready alongside a bottle of smelling salts. Members of the royal household sheltered in an adjacent room with a piano – but the King vetoed its use for rousing singsongs.
‘My darling Mama,’ Queen Elizabeth wrote to Queen Mary on Friday, 13 September, ‘I hardly know how to tell you of the horrible attack on Buckingham Palace this morning. Bertie & I arrived there about ¼ to 11, and he and I went up to our poor windowless rooms to collect a few odds and ends.’ As the Queen was removing an eyelash from the eye of the King they heard a plane, which caused them to remark, ‘Ah, a German,’ as a bomb screamed down. ‘I saw a great column of smoke & earth thrown up into the air. And then we all ducked like lightning into the corridor. There was another tremendous explosion, and we & our 2 pages who were outside the door, remained for a moment or two in the corridor away from the staircase, in case of flying glass. It is curious how one’s instincts work at these moments of great danger, as quite without thinking, the urge was to get away from the windows. Everybody remained wonderfully calm, and we went down to the shelter … I was so pleased with the behaviour of our servants. They were really magnificent.’ Three of those servants, working below in the chapel, were badly injured, and one subsequently died of his injuries.
That same afternoon, the royal couple toured the East End. ‘The damage there is ghastly,’ the Queen told her mother-in-law. ‘I really felt as if I was walking in a dead city … All the houses evacuated and yet through the broken windows one saw all the poor little possessions, photographs, beds, just as they were left. At the end of the street is a school [South Hallsville School] that was hit and collapsed on top of the 500 people waiting to be evacuated – about 200 are still under the ruins [as was believed locally]. It does affect me seeing this terrible and senseless destruction – I think that I mind it much more than being bombed myself. The people are marvellous and so full of fight. One could not imagine that life could become so terrible. We must win in the end …. PS Dear old BP is still standing and that is the main thing.’
Harold Nicolson, now working in the Ministry of Information, had been concerned that it would not play well with East Enders if, while they were suffering so grievously, ‘the toffs up West’ got off lightly. ‘There is much bitterness. It is said that even the King and Queen were booed the other day when they visited the destroyed areas … Clem[ent Davies, Liberal MP and post-war party leader] says that if the Germans had had the sense not to bomb west of London Bridge there might have been a revolution in this country.’ Fortunately (in this context) the Germans displayed remarkably little such sense, and had ‘smashed about Bond Street and Park Lane and readjusted the balance’ (somewhat) on 9 September. Four days later ‘an aircraft was seen coming down the Mall … having dived through the clouds and dropped two bombs in the forecourt, 2 in the quadrangle, 1 in the Chapel & the other in the garden. There is no doubt that it was a direct attack on the Palace.’
The attack allowed the press to caption a photograph of the Queen meeting one East Ender: ‘Two women whose home has been bombed chat about the experience’. And the King told his mother that in his view, the couple’s visits to bombed areas ‘helped people who have lost their relations & homes & we have found a new bond with them as Buckingham Palace has been bombed as well as their homes, and nobody is immune’
If nobody was immune – which indeed few were – at least the royals could dress the part for their important role as morale-boosters, as their siren-suited Prime Minister fulfilled that of warrior-leader. George VI chose a series of uniforms, ‘wearing in turn the dress of each of the high ranks he bore, as Admiral of the Fleet, a Field Marshal, and Marshal of the Royal Air Force, [making] no further public appearances in mufti [after the outbreak of war] he gave visible notice that he considered himself as continually on duty as any man in the fighting services’, in the words of an admiring booklet published after the war.
The Queen had the right to wear a number of uniforms, including those of the WRNS, the WAAF and the St John Ambulance Brigade, and by 1945 her elder daughter Princess Elizabeth was entitled to wear the uniform of the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service – the women’s branch of the army). Presumably the Queen could also have considered agreeing to don the bottle-green-and-beetroot garb of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS). But instead the royal dressmaker, Norman Hartnell (who had made her a gown ‘especially for air raid nights’, and ‘a black velvet case for her gas mask’), turned his mind to the problem. He had considered that he ‘might perhaps have been useful to the War Office in camouflage, for I had many years of experience in the very antithesis of the art. It had been my special task to make figures stand out in sharp relief to the background, as has to be done in the case of Royalty.’ ‘What,’ he pondered, ‘might be appropriate wear for bombed sites and the devastated areas all over the country? How should [the Queen] appear before the distressed women and children whose own kingdom, their small homes, had been shattered and lay crumbled at their feet? In black? Black does not appear in the rainbow of hope. Conscious of tradition, the Queen made the wise decision in adhering to the gentle colours, and even though they became muted into what one might call dusty pink, dusty blue and dusty lilac, she never wore green [presumably for reasons of superstition] and she never wore black. She wished to convey the most comforting, encouraging and sympathetic note possible.’ Her hats, ‘made by Mr Aage Thaarup’, were always ‘innocent of veils’, so the populace could gaze on this sympathetic countenance without hindrance.
‘A sense of invasion,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary on 14 September, ‘that is lorries of soldiers & machines – like cranes walloping along to Newhaven. A raid is on … workmen on the hangar haystack – disguising a gun – said “Wish I was as sure of a thousand pounds as of winning the war.” ‘ 15 September 1940 was the day on which it was expected that German forces would invade Britain. ‘It may be this weekend,’ the Daily Herald had warned on the 12th, reporting that Hitler ‘has been accumulating shipping in the Channel ports, Hamburg and the Baltic, and obviously does not intend to let them rot. As the Prime Minister said last night, this invasion may never materialise: equally from present indications, it would seem that its attempt will not be long delayed. It may come anywhere in several heads from the coastline which is now in German hands. It is certain that everywhere it will meet with terrific opposition.’
There had already been an invasion scare on the night the blitz started. The previous week barges, motor launches and larger vessels had been photographed massing on the other side of the Channel, to such an extent that, according to the official history, ‘by the morning of the 7th there was much evidence from reconnaissance alone to suggest that an early landing might be expected’. In addition, German troops and dive bombers seemed to be moving into position ready for an attack, a rowing boat containing four Germans who confessed (or claimed) to be spies gathering intelligence for an invasion was captured off the English coast, and as the final clincher the moon and tides were in the right conjunction for such a crossing. The Chiefs of Staff were informed that an invasion might be imminent.
At 8.07 p.m. the signal ‘Operation Cromwell’ went out to all formations in London and the South-East for ‘immediate action’. Other commands were also told, but for information only. However, several zealous Home Guard commanders in various parts of Britain summoned their units by ringing church bells. These had been silenced after Dunkirk, and were only to be rung when it was clear that an invasion had started. In the febrile atmosphere of expectancy, heightened by notices flashed on cinema screens recalling soldiers to their barracks at once, rumours rapidly spread that the skies were already full of German parachutists, and flotillas of German motorboats were speeding towards English beaches. Members of the Home Guard hurried to their recruiting stations or carried out their jobs with rifles slung over their shoulders, householders paraded outside their homes with brooms, garden forks and spades, and the challenge ‘Who goes there?’ rang out throughout the land.
After this panic, General Sir Alan Brooke, Commander-in-Chief of Home Forces since July, tightened up procedures: in future no church bells were to be rung until he had personally counted a minimum of twenty-five German parachutists floating down onto British soil, and communicated that fact.
But the invasion did not come that night, nor any other. It was doubtful if the Germans could have mustered the 20,000 parachutists that the British government feared. The Kriegsmarine did not have any special landing craft at the time, and its commander, Admiral Erich Raeder, did not consider that a seaborne invasion was remotely feasible, while General Alfred Jodl, deputy to Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OBW), the high command of the German armed forces, advised Hitler that invasion should only be contemplated when Britain was paralysed and ‘practically incapable of fighting in the air’. On 12 October Hitler postponed ‘Operation Sealion’, the planned invasion of Britain, and in January 1941 effectively cancelled it. But at the time, of course, no one in Britain could be sure that this was the case, and that the blitz was not the final ‘softening up’ prior to an invasion. A state of alertness was maintained, and would be reactivated on occasions both as a defence and to encourage the war effort.
London was not alone in those dark days of September and October 1940 in experiencing death, injury and destruction from the air. There were spasmodic raids on the Home Counties, Liverpool had been attacked sixty times by the end of the year, and German bombs had also fallen on the Midlands, Scotland, Wales, the south coast ports Southampton and Portsmouth, the West Country and the North-East. But the capital took the brunt of the Luftwaffe attack, with 27,500 high-explosive bombs and countless incendiaries and parachute mines dropped between 7 September and 13 November.
In those two months London became a city pockmarked with ruins and rubble, its streets assaulted, private spaces ripped open to public gaze, landmarks that had stood for centuries instantly made jagged and fragile, the aftermath of the previous night’s onslaught evident in the pall of smoke and dust that hung over the capital, the smell of burning that lingered in the autumn air, roads closed, the snaking coils of fire hoses, the weary, soot-blackened faces of the firemen, the ARP wardens, the heavy rescue squads, the numbing sense of exhaustion. Vere Hodgson, a Birminghamborn woman living and working as a social worker in west London, had come back to the capital ‘to face the blitz’, as she put it on 10 September 1940. ‘This was the night the anti-aircraft barrage took on a formidable tone, and gave Londoners some satisfaction. They had more to listen to than bombs falling one by one. I shall never forget the next fortnight as long as I live … sleepless, terrified nights, and days when you could fall off your chair with weariness, and yet somehow held on … the tense look on the faces of the inhabitants of Notting Hill Gate – for of course I ventured nowhere else!’
With newspapers forbidden to mention the precise locations of bomb damage, Londoners discovered the topography of destruction for themselves. Anthony Heap, a local government official living with his mother not far from King’s Cross station,
heard of all sorts of places near us which were supposed to have been bombed but on walking round this afternoon, observed that it was the usual pack of false rumours. With one exception Harrington Square where we used to live … I could see that two houses on the north side of the square had been completely demolished and a bomb had dropped in the roadway and blown a bus up against them. The bus was still there standing lengthways against the ruins. Furthermore the roofs had been blown off two houses on the corner of Lidlington Place and thirteen houses in Eversholt Street … Most of the square’s inhabitants had been down the shelter and escaped injury but one or two people had been killed and they were still trying to get out someone buried in the basement.
The volume of gas in our stove very slight today. Presumably some of the borough’s supply is being transferred to other districts where the mains have been hit.
I heard that Tussaud’s cinema caught a packet last night. So as soon as the All Clear went at 6.25 [on 9 September] I dashed along to see. And by gosh it had too. Only the front of it in Marylebone Road and the proscenium was left standing. The rest was completely demolished as were some buildings behind it as well … not a single window in any building in the vicinity remained intact. Huge crowds thronged along the Marylebone Road to see the ruins. It was one of the sights of London today.
10th Spent entire afternoon going round sightseeing in the raid devastated areas … Holborn was easily the worst of the lot. Most of the centre between it and Chancery Lane and Red Lion Square was laid waste …
‘Only two theatres kept open last night – the Coliseum and the Criterion. The West End and local cinemas kept open but hardly did any business,’ reported Heap, who by 16 September had got a job in Finsbury Council’s Borough Treasurer’s Office, and reported that ‘Every time anyone in the office goes out wage paying or rent collecting they come back having witnessed some fresh scene of devastation.’ Over the next few weeks he chronicled the damage to central London: St Paul’s Cathedral, where
broken masonry was still piled up in front of the altar and sun streamed in through a hole in the roof; Temple Bar, St Clement Danes Church, the statue of Richard 1 (‘only the sword bent on this’) outside the House of Lords … the whole area around Cambridge Circus on the south side is in a terrible state now. Practically every street is blocked with debris which the Army Pioneer Corps have now been detailed to clear away. Next week 5,000 of them start work on this all over London … Bomb almost demolished 145 Piccadilly the house in which the King and Queen used to live when they were Duke and Duchess of York … London Palladium burnt inside nothing visible outside. St James Church, Piccadilly partly demolished. The Fifty Shillings tailor opposite burned down … The Carlton Club in Pall Mall stopped a direct hit. Also Carlton House Terrace … opposite the former German Embassy … Bomb in Blackfriars Bridge Road hit five trams held up by traffic lights during the rush hour. Many casualties … Looked at bombed out theatres Brewer Street, Saville Theatre, Drury Lane theatre only just missed a bomb, alleged Queen’s Theatre bombed.
But on 10 November Heap was able to report that just a week after London’s first raid-free night since 7 September, ‘no raids at all today – till evening. Some people inclined to link this with [Neville] Chamberlain’s death’ – since ‘the now-derided champion of peace died today [in fact the previous day] a broken and disappointed man’. Though in Heap’s view, ‘Whatever the bellicose little upstarts in power today may think of him, history cannot but judge him as a fine statesman and a great gentleman.’
Lambeth Palace, which was perilously close to the river, had received a direct hit on 20 September. Alan Don recorded:
Bomb entered roof just above large drawing room window – drawing room, parlour, little drawing room are wrecked and bedrooms above are a mass of ruins, the pantry etc. a mass of rubble. Four airmen sleeping under a table in the knife room next to the coal hole were only saved by the fact that they had a table over their heads, the contents of the drawing room fell on top of them, but they crawled out unhurt … the people in the basement passage were covered with dust and got a severe shaking but were uninjured … the crypt was full of people, some 200 of them: had the bomb landed on the other side of Cranmer’s Tower they would have received the full force of the explosion. That no one was injured is a miracle. The force of the blast was terrific – the furniture, panelling etc. is reduced to matchwood, the shutters were lying in fragments on the lawn, some of the pieces landed beyond the terrace, the wall of the house is bulging dangerously and great blocks of masonry fell onto the grass … a gaping hole in the roof yawns above the landing … the whole place is covered in white dust and much of the glass is broken.
The Archbishop of Canterbury was not in residence that night, but when Canterbury Cathedral was bombed for the second time in October, Don began to wonder, ‘Are the Germans deliberately trying to kill the Primate? They have had shots at the King and the Prime Minister and they doubtless have no love for CC [Cosmo Cantuar].’
By mid-October ‘the Bishop of London reported that between 20–25 of his churches have been put out of action entirely while another 250 have been more or less damaged. St James Piccadilly is a serious loss … There is scarcely an historic building in London that remains entirely unscathed and yet we are told that three years of such bombing would be needed to destroy a quarter of London!’ wrote Don.
The sight of their ravaged city would imprint itself forever on Londoners who lived through that intense time. On 26 September Phyllis Warner went shopping in Oxford Street: ‘I almost wish I hadn’t, the sight of that fearful destruction makes me feel so much worse tonight. [It had been severely bombed in the early hours of 18 September.] The less one sees of the result of the bombs the better. The big stores are carrying on gallantly in spite of their troubles. I bought a dress at D.H. Evans, there wasn’t a pane of glass in the shop, and the models were all nakedly exposed to the street, but the shop girls, wrapped up in big coats, were models of helpfulness, and I got just what I wanted. John Lewis’s great building was bombed and burned until it is only a blackened shell, but it bears the defiant notice “Reopening on October 5th”. The other big stores are running “Business as Usual” in such corners as remain.’
Virginia Woolf also observed the destruction of ‘that great city’, the love of which was, as she wrote to her friend the composer Ethel Smyth, ‘my only patriotism’: ‘to see London all blasted … raked my heart’. On the same day that Vere Hodgson returned to London, the Woolfs, Virginia and Leonard, came up from Sussex to spend
perhaps our strangest visit. When we got to Gower St. a barrier with Diversion on it. No sign of damage. But, coming to Doughty St. a crowd … Meck Sq. [Mecklenburg Square, where the Woolfs had their London home] roped off. Wardens there, not allowed in. The house about 30 yards from us struck at one this morning by a bomb. Completely ruined. Another bomb in the square unexploded. We walked round the back. Stood by Jane Harrison’s house [the classical scholar and anthropologist who died in 1928 had lived at number 11]. The house was still smouldering. That is a great pile of bricks. Underneath all the people who had gone down the shelter. Scraps of cloth hanging to the bare walls at the side still standing. A looking glass I think swinging. Like a tooth knocked out – a clean cut. Our house undamaged. No windows yet broken – perhaps the bomb has now broken them. We saw Sage Bernal [the scientist J.D. Bernal, who worked as Scientific Advisor to the Research and Experiments Department of the Ministry of Home Security during the war] with an arm band jumping on top of the bricks – who lived there? I suppose the casual young men and women I used to see, from my window; the flat dwellers who used to have flower pots and sit on the balcony. All now blown to bits – The garage man at the back – blear eyed & jerky told us he had been blown out of his bed by the explosion; made to take shelter in a church – a hard cold seat, he said, & a small boy lying in my arms. ‘I cheered when the all clear sounded. I’m aching all over’… we went on to Grays Inn. Left the car & saw Holborn. A vast gap at the top of Chancery Lane. Smoking still. Some great shops entirely destroyed: the hotel opposite like a shell. In a wine shop there were no windows left. People standing at the tables – I think being served. Heaps of blue green glass in the road at Chancery Lane. Men breaking off fragments left in the frames. Glass falling. Then to Lincolns Inn. To the N.S. [New Statesman] office: windows broken but house untouched. We went over to it. Deserted. Glass on stairs. Wet passages. Doors locked. So back to the car. A great block of traffic. The Cinema behind Mme Tussaud’s torn open: the stage visible. Some decorations swinging. All the R[egent’s] Park houses with broken windows, but undamaged. And then miles & miles of orderly ordinary streets – all Bayswater, and Sussex Sqre as usual. Streets empty. Faces set & eyes bleared … Then at Wimbledon a raid – people began running. We drove through almost empty streets as fast as possible. Horses taken out of shafts. Cars pulled up. Then the all clear.
‘One of the oddest things about our everyday life,’ mused Phyllis Warner on 19 September, ‘is its mixture of ruthless horror and every-day routine. I pick my way to work past the bomb craters and the shattered glass, and sit at my desk in a room with a large hole in the roof (a block of paving stone came through). Next to a house reduced to matchwood, housewives are giving prosaic orders to the baker and the milkman. Of course, ordinary life must go on, but the effect is fantastic. Nobody seems to mind the day raids, which do little damage. It is the nights which are like a continuous nightmare, from which there is no merciful awakening. Yet people won’t move away. I know that I’m a fool to go on sleeping in Central London which gets plastered every night, but I feel that if others can stand it, so can I.’
(#ulink_cedcbc9f-1d95-5808-b905-48a6aa122a64) Usually known as ‘Pug’, since, according to Churchill’s private secretary John (‘Jock’) Colville, he ‘looked like one, and when he was pleased one could almost imagine he was wagging his tail’.
(#ulink_58560389-63ce-5635-b76d-f3845aaba0b1) Most Ack-Ack guns had been deployed to defend factories and airfields during the Battle of Britain, so when the Germans suddenly switched their attention to London, the capital was highly vulnerable, its defence resting on an entirely inadequate total of 264 anti-aircraft guns.
(#ulink_987dabee-627f-58e5-9bfd-690c8e8c01a9) On 28 August 1939 the Ministry of Health had ordered that since at least 25,000 casualties a day were expected when the blitz started, hospital admissions should be restricted to emergency cases only, and those should be monitored carefully, since the patients might well have to be evacuated. On the day war broke out the Emergency Medical Services came into operation. Under this scheme the capital and its outlying districts were divided into ten sectors, with one or more of the London teaching hospitals at the head of each. St Thomas’s, for example, was the key hospital for Sector VIII, which included fifty-one voluntary hospitals and homes and miscellaneous other institutions scattered around south-west London and adjoining parts of Surrey and Hampshire, with the matron of St Thomas’s responsible for all the nursing staff in the sector.
3 Sheltering (#ulink_e669e90a-8d59-58dd-ae58-0d8df3652fcd)
What a domestic sort of war this is … it happens in the kitchen, on landings, beside washing-baskets; it comes to us without stirring a yard from our own doorsteps to meet it. Even its catastrophes are made terrible not by strangeness but by familiarity.
John Strachey, Post D (1941)
On the night of 12 September Whitehall was hit during a raid, and the Ministry of Transport was damaged by high-explosive bombs. Plans had already been made to move the Cabinet and the chiefs of staff to a citadel in the basement of the GPO’s research centre in Dollis Hill in north-west London (code-named ‘Paddock’) if Whitehall were to be bombed out, though other options had been considered, including various reinforced-concrete buildings close to Whitehall, such as a rotunda in Horseferry Road. On 20 September Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine, accompanied by Jock Colville, went to look over what might be their new London home. They inspected the flats and the ‘deep underground rooms safe from the biggest bomb, where the Cabinet and its satellites (e.g. me) would work and if necessary sleep’, wrote Colville. ‘They are impressive but rather forbidding; I suppose if the present intensive bombing continues we must get used to being troglodytes (“trogs” as the PM puts it). I begin to understand what the early Christians must have felt about living in the Catacombs.’
In fact the PM would prove to be only an occasional and somewhat peripatetic ‘trog’, as in the early days of the blitz he experimented to find what suited him best, somewhat to the alarm of his staff. One member of his private office, John Peck, wrote a spoof memo under the Churchillesque heading ‘ACTION THIS DAY’:
Pray let six new offices be fitted for my use, in Selfridge’s, Lambeth Palace, Stanmore, Tooting Bec, the Palladium and Mile End Road. I will inform you at 6 each evening at which offices I shall dine, work and sleep. Accommodation will be required for Mrs Churchill, two shorthand typists, three secretaries and Nelson [the resident black cat at No. 10, of which Churchill had grown fond]. There should be a shelter for all and a place for me to watch air-raids from the roof. This should be completed by Monday. There is to be no hammering during office hours, that is between 7am and 3am. WSC. 31.10.40.
In the event Churchill spent most of his working day at 10 Downing Street, occasionally repairing for the night to the underground Cabinet War Rooms, just off Whitehall, the nerve centre from which, in his words, he ‘directed the war’, or to London Underground’s offices housed in Down Street underground station in Mayfair, on the Piccadilly Line between Dover Street (now Green Park) and Hyde Park Corner stations, which had been closed in 1932 and adapted as offices for the Railway Executive Committee. This was considered to be safe, and boasted a large dining room where the food was reputed to be excellent, though it could be noisy as underground trains rattled past.
In December 1940 the Churchills moved into a ground-floor flat in the No. 10 annexe above the Cabinet War Rooms. It was hardly bomb-proof, but it was more robust than No. 10 itself, and was at least fitted with heavy steel shutters that could be closed during an air raid. Apart from Winston’s occasional excursions underground, it was in this ex-typing pool that the couple largely saw out the war.
The question of how best to protect the public during air raids was one that had exercised government and civil servants for some time. It had long been estimated that each ton of high-explosives dropped on a congested area would cause as many as fifty casualties, and the RAF had reckoned that on average seven hundred tons of bombs would be dropped daily, although in the first few days in an effort to achieve a ‘knock-out blow’ the figure was more likely to be nearer 950 tons; or perhaps the Germans would decide on a week-long attrition that would deliver as much as 3,500 tons on London in the first twenty-four hours. An indication of the effects of intense air raids was brought sickeningly home to many British people as they sat in their cinema seats watching newsreels of the bombing of Barcelona and Bilbao during the Spanish Civil War.
A vital matter was to give the public warning of an impending air raid. The country had been divided into 111 warning districts (based on telephone areas rather than local authority boundaries), and messages about approaching enemy aircraft were originated by RAF Fighter Command, which, using direct telephone lines, cascaded the warning to control centres. These would then transmit the message in strict order of priority to those on the warning list: government offices, military establishments, the police, Civil Defence HQs, fire brigades and large industrial concerns in particular areas.
Each stage of alert was distinguished by a different colour code-name. A yellow message was the ‘Preliminary Caution’, meaning that enemy planes were estimated to be about twenty-two minutes’ flying time away. This message was confidential, and the public would not have been aware of its receipt since those receiving it were instructed ‘to take the necessary precautions in as unobtrusive way as possible’. A red message, the ‘Action Warning’, was relayed when the planes were twelve minutes’ flying time away. This was the signal for the police to activate the air-raid sirens in their district, which emitted a low, moaning sound that rose to a querulous wail (a ‘wailing banshee’, in Churchill’s phrase), alerting the public to the fact that a raid was imminent and that they should seek shelter. Fighter Command finally sent the green message, ‘All Clear’, indicating ‘Raiders Passed’; for this the sirens sounded a steady two-minute note.
In July 1940 the government shifted the balance from safety first to production first, as the war effort was being disrupted by workers unnecessarily spending unproductive hours in shelters, particularly during daytime raids, when an alert might last for three or four hours. The Home Secretary and Minister for Home Security Sir John Anderson announced that ‘Workers engaged in war production should be encouraged … to continue at work after a public air-raid warning until it is clear that an enemy attack is actually imminent in their neighbourhood.’ This was to be made practicable by the recruitment of roof spotters, who would alert the workers when enemy planes were sufficiently close for them to need to take shelter.
On 25 July another colour was introduced into the spectrum: a purple message would be sent to districts which, although they might be on the raiders’ flightpath, were not expected to be a target. On receipt of this, all outside lighting had to be extinguished, but factories were allowed to continue to work at night after the red message had sounded (since there would be no lights to attract raiders). It did have other effects, for example slowing down rail transport and reducing outside work.
Once the blitz started, the duration of the ‘alert’ and the ‘All Clear’ warnings was halved from two minutes to one.
In December 1937 the Air Raid Precautions Act had laid on local authorities the responsibility for ‘the protection of persons and property from injury and damage in the event of hostile attacks from the air’, and required them to submit ARP schemes for approval. There were few guidelines, though a small number of ‘model scenes’ were circulated. Part of the problem was that no one seemed entirely sure what would be needed, since there was little conclusive evidence of the effect that high-explosive bombs would have, and much more concentration was focused on the effects of poison gas than on what could be done to protect people from bomb splinters, for example. Local authorities received assurances that government funding of around 60 to 75 per cent of the cost (as much as 85 per cent in the case of poor boroughs) of ARP preparations – including shelters – would be forthcoming, providing their schemes were accepted.
In April 1938 Sir John Anderson, who was then Lord Privy Seal, had recognised that the shelter problem was ‘probably the most difficult of all the questions with which [local authorities] were confronted’. The government initially acted on two money-saving assumptions: the first was that most towns and cities would have ‘a large amount of accommodation which by adaptation and strengthening and by the use of sandbags could be made to give reasonable protection’; the second that all householders needed was advice from local officials, and that they would ‘generally do what they could to increase the natural protection of their homes’ – though in fact many of the houses in the most vulnerable target areas were poorly and cheaply constructed, and their ‘natural protection’ was all but nonexistent.
Nevertheless, the government’s policy for protection of the population during air raids was and would remain one of dispersal: it feared the consequences of hundreds of frightened people sheltering together in one place, and the effect on life and morale if such a shelter received a direct hit. This consideration was inextricably linked to the policy of evacuating ‘useless mouths’ – that is, women and children who could not materially contribute to the war effort – away from urban and industrial centres as soon as war broke out, and also led to the closing of cinemas on the outbreak of war (though most soon reopened), bans on large crowds at places of entertainment, football matches and other sporting events, and the implementation of a shelter policy.
Local authorities were required to undertake a survey of buildings in their area that could be strengthened to provide shelter accommodation, and to put in place plans to dig shelters in public open spaces. It was, however, considered inadvisable ‘to immobilise open spaces during peacetime by turning them into a trench system’, which might have been frighteningly reminiscent of the Western Front in the First World War, bearing the suggestion that the home front would indeed become the battlefront.
Meanwhile, householders were advised in a government-issue booklet, The Protection of Your Home Against Air Raids, to designate one room as a ‘refuge room’ against poison gas or bombs – ideally a basement or cellar, but if neither of these was available, ‘any room with solid walls is safer than being out in the open’. In the event of an air raid, the ‘head of the household’ should send all those under his (the male role was assumed) care with their respirators (gas masks) to the refuge room, and keep them there until he heard the ‘raiders passed’ (or ‘All Clear’, as it became known), and had satisfied himself that the danger had passed and the neighbourhood was free from gas.
The Munich crisis at the end of September 1938, when Neville Chamberlain desperately parleyed with Adolf Hitler in an attempt to find a solution to German demands for parts of Czechoslovakia, ratcheted up the need to find ways to enable Britain to ‘stand the test of imminent war’. On 24 September the Home Office issued directives to local authorities in heavily populated areas to construct deep trench shelters to accommodate 10 per cent of their residents – this work to be completed within an entirely unrealistic three days. The trenches were dug in public spaces such as parks, playing fields and recreation grounds, while householders who had sufficient space were encouraged to get digging in their gardens. A leaflet was circulated setting out how the trenches should be constructed, and owners of private land such as golf courses were approached for permission to slash into their greensward. By early October something like a million feet of trenches had been dug, but these were only ever intended to be used by people caught in a raid, not as somewhere to go to when the alert sounded – a misapprehension that was to endure throughout the blitz. The government constructed or adapted shelters for short-term use: a person’s proper place during a raid was considered to be in their home. But for many of the population, their homes offered little or no protection, and they sought refuge in public shelters – or anywhere that they believed was safer than their own usually shelter-less, basement and cellar-less homes.
Although the survey of buildings in London with a view to adapting them as shelters was more or less complete, no structural work at all had been started at the time of Munich, though sandbags started to be piled up around government buildings to protect them. By the time the crisis passed, some unsystematic work had been done in shoring up basements, but there was a general shortage of materials and a lack of precise technical information. Besides which, even if suitable buildings had been identified for shelter use, if they were privately owned the local authorities had no power to requisition them. In the majority of London boroughs, as in towns and cities throughout the country, there were still no public shelters by late September 1938.
But at the end of that year the government finally gave some substance to its policy of dispersal, announcing that ‘standard steel shelters’ – constructed of corrugated eight-hundredweight curved steel sheets, and soon to be universally known as Anderson shelters – were to be issued to two and a half million households in large towns in the most vulnerable areas. This number of shelters was reckoned to be capable of sheltering ten million people out of a potential vulnerable population of nearly twenty-seven million. The distribution started in February 1939, and anyone earning less than £250 a year could receive their shelter for free. When these had been distributed, it was intended to produce more for sale. Anderson shelters were six feet high, six feet long and four feet six inches wide, and had to be dug two feet into the ground and covered with earth or sand. Each could accommodate up to four or, at a squash, six persons, and they were fairly easy to erect. They were not bomb-proof, as the government pointed out, and would not save their occupants from a direct hit from an HE bomb, but if correctly positioned and well covered, they did offer protection against bomb fragments, blast and falling debris. But of course Anderson shelters were not suitable for everyone: you needed to have a garden.
Trenches dug at the time of Munich were inspected and, if suitably sited, were redug if necessary to four feet deep, lined with concrete or steel and their entrances closed. But they had no sanitary arrangements, or even duckboard flooring, making them unsuitable for night-long occupation – though this often happened – were cold, and apt to become waterlogged. In any case, once the Munich crisis had passed, many local authorities had filled in their trenches and were reluctant to start digging again.
On 15 March 1939 German troops occupied Prague, in direct contravention of the Munich Agreement. Civil defence measures in Britain were immediately escalated. A new Civil Defence Bill conferred wide-ranging peacetime powers on local authorities that included the right to designate buildings as public shelters – shops, for example: Dickins & Jones in Regent Street had a much-sought-after basement shelter, as did D.H. Evans in Oxford Street – or clubs or institutes, against the wish of the owner if necessary, and to do whatever structural work was required, paying compensation if appropriate. Those people with incomes that entitled them to a government-issue Anderson shelter were supplied free of charge with materials to strengthen their ‘refuge room’ if they had no space for an external shelter, and the local authority would be reimbursed for the cost of doing the work. New buildings had to incorporate spaces for shelters, and employers with a workforce of fifty or more in a designated target area were obliged to provide shelter accommodation (and to organise ARP services) for their employees; they would receive government funding to help pay for this. Smaller firms in the same areas could apply for funding to safeguard their workforces.
Anderson shelters and reinforced basements were not going to provide protection for all those in vulnerable areas, so in May 1939 money was made available for materials for local authorities to build public outdoor shelters (though they had to foot the bill for the construction costs). For blocks of flats where there was no suitable shelter accommodation for all the residents, and where most were not eligible for free shelters, the landlord could be compelled to build one if petitioned to do so by more than 50 per cent of the tenants, and could recoup the cost by raising all the rents.
Despite these initiatives, by September 1939 shelter provision was lamentably behind schedule. There was a shortfall of about a million of the promised Anderson shelters (those delivered were optimistically pronounced to provide protection for 60,000 people), meaning that even in what were believed to be the most dangerous areas many people had no shelters, and none were offered for sale until the following month. These cost between £6.14s and £10.18s – easy terms available. However, the take-up was limited – by April 1940 fewer than a thousand had been bought, while the basement-strengthening programme had hardly started.
In some places the provision of public shelters was more advanced: about three-quarters of the trenches dug at the time of Munich had been reinforced, the City of London reported that its public-shelter-building programme was complete, and on the eve of war most cities exercised their power to requisition suitable sites. Notices proclaiming ‘Public Shelter’ appeared on various buildings – some more suitable than others. At the end of August 1939, in tardy recognition of this unsatisfactory provision, the government urged local authorities to provide purpose-built public shelters, above-ground ‘heavily protected’ brick and concrete constructions capable of holding up to fifty people.
Fortunately, the eight-month respite of the ‘phoney war’, which effectively lasted until May 1940, meant that shelter provision could continue in wartime. However, the materials needed for shelters were now urgently required for military purposes. Smaller Anderson shelters, only four feet five inches long, were now produced and pronounced suitable for four persons, while the original ‘standard’ Anderson was redesignated as large enough for six people, with an ‘extension’ tacked on to allow it to accommodate up to ten if necessary. Finally, in April 1940, the production of Anderson shelters was suspended altogether, but by the start of the blitz nearly two and a half million had been distributed, theoretically providing shelter for 12.5 million people. Many gardens, however, were littered with unerected Anderson shelters, now rusting and near to useless. Some enterprising boroughs such as Hackney in east London, under its redoubtable ARP Controller Dr Richard Tee, organised teams of council workmen or volunteers to help householders, and the Bristol Civil Defence Area had taken a similar initiative, but the government decided that sterner measures were needed to compel self-help. From May 1940, under the terms of Defence Regulation 23B, everyone who had been issued with an Anderson shelter had ten days in which to erect it and cover it in the requisite manner, or to report to their local authority that they had not done so. If they did not, and could not show that they were genuinely incapable of doing so, the steel sheets would be collected and issued to another household.
Meanwhile the government was pressing forward with the provision of public communal shelters, intended to accommodate twelve or so families from nearby properties, which it fully funded. After the Russian bombing of Finland in the winter of 1939–40 it was decided that railway stations would be likely targets, so shelters capable of sheltering the equivalent of ten minutes’ flow of passengers at peak travel times needed be provided at them. These were started at all London termini, but were far from completion when the blitz started.
By the start of the blitz, of the 27.5 million people living in ‘specified areas’ (that is, those urban and industrial centres considered particularly likely to be attacked, from which evacuation had been recommended), 17.5 million had been provided with some sort of shelter, domestic or public, at government expense. A few householders had provided themselves with shelters at their own expense, and an additional five million could use shelters at work. These figures were produced by the government when it came under attack – as it had since the mid-1930s – for the slow, patchy and often inadequate shelter provision. There was still an obvious shortfall, and those people not in a ‘specified area’ were left to their own devices, though issued with a booklet, Your Home as an Air Raid Shelter. Moreover, the shelter experience of many was very far from satisfactory.
People with rooms in their homes that they could make as bomb-proof as any domestic arrangement could be were, generally speaking, the most fortunate. BBC producer Anthony Weymouth and his family used the hall of their ground-floor flat in a mansion block in Harley Street in central London: the hall was the most sheltered part of their home, as it had rooms on either side, and its only window, which looked into an inner courtyard, had been fitted with an asbestos shutter. Citizens without such shutters were advised to leave their windows open, to reduce the risk of injury from shattered glass. The Weymouth family spent night after night in their hall, ‘lying in the dark on our mattresses for … hours listening to the drone of German bombers’. When he worked late at the BBC, Weymouth was obliged to sleep on one of the six hundred mattresses provided at Broadcasting House, ‘for the AA barrage besprinkles the street with pieces of shrapnel’.
Patrick Shea, a Northern Irish civil servant who had been put in charge of producing a top secret ‘War Book’, a manual for senior staff telling them of ‘the role and responsibilities assigned to each and every one of them in a great variety of preconceived situations’, was living in lodgings in Belfast. The household had a clearly defined ‘blitz drill’.
When the alert sounded the more active ones saw to it that the shutters were securely bolted, the bath, hand basins and sinks filled with water in case of fire, candles brought out lest the electricity supply should fail, fires extinguished. The assembly point for the whole household was the large ground-floor living room. Miss Mack, an elderly, socially superior person who normally kept herself to herself in her first floor bedsitter, would make one of her rare appearances amongst us. She would come downstairs draped in her fur coat and carrying her jewel case. Tenderly she would be manoeuvred into a recumbent position on a mattress under the large dining-room table; for the period of the alert she would lie there, her furs wrapped around her, her jewels clasped to her bosom. The Dublin couple, from whose mealtime conversation one deduced a background of tweedy opulence, would appear carrying two large suitcases colourfully decorated with the stick-on labels of famous shipping lines and faraway hotels. Having chosen their resting-place, they would inflate their two airbeds, settle down on them and with apparent indifference to the sound and fury outside, while away the time scrutinising the pages of out-of-date copies of the Illustrated London News and the Field.
Coffee would be made. Those not lying down or on a fire-watching tour of inspection of the top floor, sat or stood around the empty fireplace. In the tense atmosphere, with so diverse a company, conversation tended to be intermittent and trivial … From the darkness beneath the large mahogany table an observation about the brutality of the Germans or the splendid behaviour of the British Royal Family would remind us that Miss Mack was still there.
Phyllis Warner considered that ‘We are lucky in having our own shelter [in Mary Ward House in Queen’s Square, Holborn, in what would be among the worst-bombed boroughs in London] so that we can have mattresses and even a table or chair or two down there, but even so, with the bare girders and rough planks of its reinforcing, it resembles the worst kind of steerage.’
Those who were supplied with Anderson shelters did not, or could not, always dig them in properly, or failed to cover them with the requisite amount of sand and earth – which was what really gave protection – or to bank up a mound of earth at the entrance to act as a ‘baffle wall’. Even those Andersons that were correctly sited were less than ideal. Many filled with water when it rained, and they were cold and cramped, while the noise of bombs and falling shrapnel echoed alarmingly around their tinny walls if they were not properly insulated with soil. The problem, as with all government shelter initiatives, was due to a category error. Air raids had been expected to be sharp and above all short: no one seems to have anticipated that many would last all night. The alert would commonly sound at about 8 p.m., and the All Clear was often not heard until five or six the next morning. So shelters that might have been perfectly acceptable for the half-hour or so that daytime raids often entailed were profoundly unsuitable for an entire night – night after night. The family tensions that must have been engendered by such close and fearful proximity, exacerbated by boredom and exhaustion, are almost too dreadful to dwell on.
On 19 September 1940 Picture Post wrote that ‘long winter nights are ahead [but] with a little ingenuity you can make them tolerable by fitting your Anderson shelter with home-made bunks’. It showed how Mr Stuart Murray of Croydon had ‘turned his shelter into a family bedroom’ by nailing a double layer of chicken wire across a wooden frame to provide two upper and two lower bunks, transforming the tin shelter into ‘if not a bed of roses, a tolerable resting place’. Other families made several treks each evening before the alert went off, carrying eiderdowns, rugs, deckchairs, pillows and cushions from the house to the shelter. The effect of all this, of course, was to make things even more cramped.
‘This going up to the shelter is not as simple as it sounds,’ wrote Sidney Chave, a lab technician who lived in Upper Norwood, south London. ‘It entails five or six journeys up and down carting the necessary articles, and finally our precious bundle [the Chaves’ daughter Jillian, who was just over a year old at the start of the blitz]. As the journeys are made along a wet garden path, in complete darkness accompanied by sporadic bursts of gun fire and with the planes droning overhead, and as one’s arms are full up with cushions, blankets and the like – it is not such a jolly affair, this Shelter life!’
Then there were the cold and the dark. A few enterprising handymen ran electric cables to their back-garden shelters so that a bar electric fire could be used, but this could be hazardous. Oil or paraffin heaters were not recommended, since they could start a fire if knocked over, as could a paraffin lamp, and torches were not the answer to the dark, since within weeks of the outbreak of war, batteries had become all but unobtainable. A candle in a flowerpot was suggested, but that carried a fire risk too, and the flickering light was hardly adequate for reading or knitting.
Herbert Brush, a seventy-one-year-old retired Electricity Board inspector, lived in Forest Hill, south London. Clearly something of a handyman, he had managed to fit up some rudimentary bunks in the family Anderson shelter, rig up an electric light for reading, and kept ‘half a dozen books on various subjects on a small shelf I have put up’. But it still wasn’t entirely satisfactory. ‘As usual we spent 12 hours in the shelter last night,’ he wrote on 31 October 1940. ‘We have got used to hard lying now and go to sleep as easily there as in bed, though I must own up to stiffness in the morning, when I am able to double up on my bed for an hour or so. I can’t double up much on two 11 inch boards; that with cushions makes my bed less than 2 feet in width. I can’t lie with my face to the wall because if I double up at all my posterior overhangs the bed and that is not a comfortable position: the other way round my knees sometimes overhang but that is not such an uncomfortable position.’
The ever-resourceful Mr Brush continued to try to make sleeping in a tin hut in the garden as acceptable as possible. By December, when it had grown bitterly cold at night, the family lit a paraffin heater in the shelter for an hour or so before the alert was expected, took hot-water bottles in with them, hung a curtain over the entrance and ‘fitted shields to keep the draughts off the bunks on either side of the dug out. It is quite a comfortable place now,’ Mr Brush conceded, ‘when one gets used to the cramped space and the inability to turn over without falling out, for folks of my size.’
Eighteen-year-old Margaret Turpin’s family had a brick-built shelter in the garden of their East End home. ‘It was so small. My brother was nearly six foot, there was my father, myself, my sister, my mother and a baby, and somehow we were all supposed to be able to sleep in this shelter. But it was impossible. It was only about seven feet long and a few feet wide. We had to sit up all night because there just wasn’t room to lie down. I suppose my mother thought my father ought to be the one that lay down [because he had to go to work] and my father thought my mother ought to because she had a little baby. And my brother was tall and had to fit in somehow, and that was the reason that eventually we went to a public shelter, because there was no way we could have slept through a prolonged blitz.’
Others, less in the eye of the storm than East Enders, tried to find somewhere they considered safe in the house, rather than spend the night in an uncomfortable garden shelter. And invariably people would leave their Andersons as soon as the All Clear went, usually in the early hours of the morning, to snatch at least a couple of hours in bed before they had to get up to start the day.
No wonder that as the blitz went on, more and more people declined to use their Anderson shelters at all, even though they proved pretty effective. If correctly sited they were able to withstand the effects of a hundred-pound bomb falling six feet away, or a two-hundred-pound bomb falling twenty feet way, those inside usually suffering little more than shock. Nevertheless, by mid-October 1940, when the raids on London had eased off somewhat, more and more people opted to crouch under their staircase, which was considered to be the safest place in most houses, or drag a mattress under the dining-room table for the night, or even stay in bed and take their chances.
The Prime Minister was the first recipient of a government-issue and much more robust version of the dining-room-table shelter which went into production in January 1941. This was the Morrison shelter, a rectangular mesh steel cage six feet six inches long, four feet wide and about two feet nine inches high, bolted together with a steel ‘mattress’ and top, named after the then Home Secretary and Minister for Home Security, Herbert Morrison. It proved much more popular than the Anderson, though it was less effective, since it offered no protection from lateral blast. The Morrison was suitable for flats and houses without gardens, it was situated indoors (as in fact had been the original intention for Anderson shelters), it offered protection against falling masonry, could accommodate (snugly) two recumbent adults and two young children, was simple to put up and could be used as a table in the daytime. By this time the minimum income for eligibility for a free shelter had risen to £350 a year, but the distribution of Morrison shelters in London and other cities and large towns did not start until the end of March, just over a month before the ‘big blitz’ was effectively over.
In theory, local authorities could compel factories and commercial premises to make their shelters available to the general public outside working hours, but in practice this did not happen very often. Employers only had to plead that they did not wish to disrupt war production, which was accepted as paramount. Government departments were also urged to admit the public to their basements, but again this was often resisted on the grounds that the employees might need to sleep on the premises overnight during the blitz. Gradually throughout the winter months more basements were strengthened, but most people who had no suitable refuge at home had few options other than specially constructed public shelters. Again built in the belief that raids would be short and mostly in daytime, most offered no seating, lighting or sanitation, and no facilities even for boiling a kettle for a cup of tea.
Barbara Nixon was a thirty-two-year-old actress and graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge. When most of the theatres closed during the blitz, she volunteered as an ARP warden in Finsbury, north London, ‘which in those days stretched from near Liverpool Street due westwards to Smithfield, covered the area north of King’s Cross Road and back along Pentonville and City Roads to include Moorgate and Finsbury Square’. She wrote later: ‘During September 1940 the shelter conditions were appalling. In many boroughs there were only flimsy surface shelters, with no light, no seats, no lavatories and insufficient numbers even of these; or railway arches and basements that gave an impression of safety, but only had a few inches of brick overhead, or were rotten shells of buildings with thin roofs and floors.’ In Finsbury
we were well provided as regards numbers; there were almost sufficient for the night population, and they were reasonably safe … In my [ARP] Post area we had two capacious shelters under business firms which held three or four hundred, also fifteen small sub-surface concrete ones in which fifty people could sit upright on narrow wooden benches along the wall. But they were poorly ventilated, and only two out of the nine that came in my province could pretend to be dry. Some leaked through the roof and umbrellas had to be used; in others the mouth of the sump-hole near the door had been made higher than the floor, and on a rainy night it invariably overflowed to a depth of two inches at one end decreasing to a quarter of an inch at the other, and rheumaticky old ladies had to sit upright on their benches for six to twelve hours on end, with their feet propped up on a couple of bricks. Four or five times during the night we used to go round with saucepan and bucket baling out the stinking water; as soon as Number 9 was reached, Number 1 was full again. It was hard, wet and smelly work … There were chemical closets usually partially screened off by a canvas curtain. But even so, the supervision of the cleaning of these was not adequate. Sometimes they would be left untended for days on end and would overflow on to the floor … Then there was the question of lights. I have been told by wardens that, for the first two months [of the blitz], shelters in some boroughs had no lights at all. We had one hurricane lamp for about fifty people. How often in the small hours, if the raid had started early, there would be a wail of ‘Warden! Warden! The light’s gone out!’ and children would wake up and howl, women grow nervous and men swear. It was expecting altogether too much of people’s nerves to ask them to sit through a raid in the dark. The one paraffin light also provided the only heating that there was in those days. It was bitterly cold that winter, and naturally, therefore, the door was kept shut. Some of the bigger shelters had ventilation pipes, but the smaller ones that held fifty people only had the door. In some, the atmosphere of dank concrete, of stagnant air, of the inevitable smell of bodies, the stench of the chemical closets was indescribable … But if conditions in many of our shelters were bad, in some other districts they were incredible. They belonged more properly to the days of a hundred years ago than to the twentieth century.
Joan Veazey, newly married to the vicar of St Mary’s Church, Kennington, in south London, went with her husband Christopher to visit a number of local public shelters in September 1940. ‘It is amazing what discomfort people will put up with, some on old mattresses, others in deck chairs and some lying on cold concrete floors with a couple of blankets stretched round their tired limbs. In nearly all the shelters the atmosphere is so thick that you could cut it with a knife. And many of the places – actually – stink! I think that I would prefer to risk death in the open to asphyxiation. Mothers were breast feeding their babies, and young couples were making love in full view of anyone who passed down the stairs. In one very large shelter which was made to hold about 300 persons … only two buckets as latrines were available … and the result was that the whole floor was awash … the smell was so awful that we tied hankies around our mouths soaked in “Cologne”.’
Not only were such shelters cold, lacking in facilities, damp and malodorous, many were also dangerous. It seems almost beyond belief that a brick box standing out in the open, above ground, could be imagined to offer protection against serious attack. The best that could be said was that it was probably better to be in one of these than to be caught out in the street during an air raid, as you would at least be protected from shrapnel and flying debris. But public shelters had their own hazards. Government instructions for their construction had stipulated that the mortar to bind the bricks should be two parts lime to one part cement, but subsequent directives were more ambiguous, and local authorities bent on saving money, and cowboy builders bent on making money, started to substitute sand for cement – which anyway was in short supply due to the various demands for defence construction – in the mixture. A heavy blast near such an ill-constructed shelter could turn it into a gruesomely named ‘Morrison sandwich’ when the walls blew out and the heavy roof collapsed on the occupants, trapping and often killing them. In the London area it was found that at least 5,000 such potentially lethal public shelters had been built, while in Bristol 4,000 had to be demolished or radically strengthened for the same reason.
Margaret Turpin’s family had started to use a public shelter, along with a number of the families living near their East End home, since the one in the garden had proved unbearably cramped. ‘Of course you had to go there early, about seven in the evening, and then come home in the morning.’ One night the shelterers had been listening to the wireless when it went off, which ‘happened with almost every raid’:
The next thing I remember was coming to and trying to move my head, which I couldn’t, and as fast as you moved your head, you got a fountain of dust coming down, and it filled your nose and it filled your mouth, and I thought I’m going to die. I tried to shout, but the more I shouted and the more I moved, the more dust I brought down. I must have had lots of periods of unconsciousness, because I remember hearing people, and then a long time after, I remember seeing an ARP helmet, and it was way, way up, a long way away. And then suddenly it was quite near. I do remember the man saying to me, ‘We’ll soon have you out.’ He said, ‘All we’ve got to do is get your arm out.’ And I looked at this arm that was sticking out of the debris, and I said, ‘That’s not my arm,’ and he said, ‘Yes it is love, it’s got the same coat’… I don’t remember coming out of the shelter. I do remember being in the ambulance, and I think for me that was probably the worst part … I felt somebody’s blood was dripping on me from above, and I found that awful – mainly I think because I didn’t know whose blood it was, whether it was someone I knew and loved or not. And I tried to move my head, but of course it was a narrow space and I couldn’t get my head away from the blood. And I heard a long time afterwards that the man was already dead. But it couldn’t have been my father because he was taken out of the shelter and he didn’t die till two days later … He died, my mother died, my baby sister died, my younger sister died. I had two aunts and they died, and an uncle died … I knew almost immediately because when I came home from hospital – they sent you home and you were in an awful state really, and you had to find your own way home from hospital and I’d had … most of my clothes cut off to be X-rayed and I couldn’t use the arm that had been trapped. When I got to the house, there were milk bottles outside and I just knew then that nobody had come home to take them in …
The seven were all buried on the same day. My brother said that they put Union Jacks on the coffins. He didn’t know who did it … I didn’t go to the funerals … They sent me to Harefield [near Watford] of all places. It was quite a decent place to send me to. But unfortunately the people at Harefield could see the raids on London, and they used to come out to watch, to view it like a spectacle, and I couldn’t stand that.
4 Underground (#ulink_ef7f3344-7da1-51ef-9700-5ec89fe8fc42)
… Those first fell raids on the East End
Saw the Victorian order bend
As scores from other districts came
To help douse fires and worked the same
With homeless folks to help them flit
To underground that ‘wait-a-bit
In Government, ruled out of bounds.’
But bombs and those sights and sounds
Made common people take the law
Into their own hands. The stress of war
And most of their common sense
Ignored the old ‘Sitting-on-the-fence’
They fled to the Tubes, the natural place
Of safety. Whereupon ‘save-face’
Made it official. Issued passes,
Being thus instructed by the masses
Folk lived and slept in them in rows
While bombing lasted: through the throes.
From ‘In Civvy Street’, a long poem by P. Lambah, a medical student, about the home front in the Second World War
When the alert sounded at about eight o’clock in the evening of Sunday, 13 October 1940, most of the residents of Coronation Avenue, an austere-looking nineteenth-century block of flats in Stoke Newington, north London, built by a philanthropic housing company, the Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Society, dutifully trooped down the narrow stone steps to shelter in the basement. There they were joined by a number of passers-by, since the basement had been designated as ‘Public Shelter no. 5’. The Daily Express journalist Hilde Marchant would call what followed ‘the greatest bombing tragedy of the whole of London’. A heavy bomb fell on the centre of the building, penetrated through five floors and detonated in the basement. The entire solid-looking structure collapsed. The floors above caved in, choking smoke and brick dust filled the air, and those who had not been killed by the weight of masonry falling on them found the exits blocked by rubble and debris. The water mains, gas mains and sewerage pipes had been ruptured by the explosion and effluent poured in, drowning and suffocating the shelterers. The rescue squads that rushed to the scene were unable to dislodge the heavy masonry that was trapping the victims.
Screens were erected to keep the gruesome sights from the view of the public, as Civil Defence workers helped by soldiers drafted in from demolition work nearby laboured to rescue any survivors and retrieve the bodies. One member of the Finsbury Rescue Service had persuaded his reluctant wife to take their children to the Coronation Avenue shelter while he was on duty that night. ‘For days on end he watched the digging, although there was no hope at all. They tried to persuade him to go away but he only shook his head’ as rescuers excavated to find the bodies of his entire entombed family. The rubble was so compacted that it took over a week to extract all the victims. The eventual death toll from that single incident was 154; twenty-six of the bodies could not be identified. There were a large number of Jewish people using the shelter that night: the dead of the Diaspora included a tragic number of husbands and wives or siblings who perished together – the Aurichs, Copersteins, Danzigers and Edelsteins, Hilda Muscovitch and her sister Golda Moscow. The Jewish dead were kept separate from the Gentile, most of whom were interred in a mass burial in nearby Abney Park Cemetery.
So terrible was the incident (as locations where bombs had fallen were blandly called) that an observer from the Ministry of Information arrived the next morning to check on how the borough was coping. She reported that the council was ‘rising to the problem in a magnificent way and is acting with breadth of vision and initiative in coping with the endless and acute problems which are being thrown upon it’, though the Town Clerk warned her that people’s morale was very dependent on how soon homes could be ‘patched up’, satisfactory billets found or, in the case of older people, they could be evacuated away from the area – though this was proving ‘heart breaking’, as most of the elderly who desperately wanted to leave had nowhere to go. ‘The bill that is being run up for all these extra things [such as transport, food, overnight accommodation, storing the furniture of those bombed out, demolition and repair work] is tremendous, but none of the officials feel that at the moment anything matters except helping people as much as they can, but at the same time preventing their kindness being taken advantage of,’ she added in the reproving voice of bureaucracy.
Just over a month after the start of the blitz, the Stoke Newington disaster acutely pinpointed several stark realities of the situation. How well equipped, resourced and prepared were local authorities for major ‘incidents’ that not only left many dead and injured, but also threatened to confront them with the overwhelming challenge of housing the homeless? How would it be possible to feed the hungry, repair buildings, demolish dangerous structures, get utility and transport systems functioning and ensure that war production was disrupted as little as possible? How would the various Civil Defence organisations – the ARP, the AFS, the rescue and demolition squads, the medical services, plus essential voluntary bodies such as the WVS (Women’s Voluntary Service) – cope? And how successful would those in authority – in central government as well as locally – be in tending to the social and emotional needs of the people, to their morale as well as their physical well-being?
But the primary question that preoccupied most Londoners in the early days was: where would they be safe? And the answer seemed to be: nowhere. Anderson shelters were reasonably satisfactory if there was room for one, though they were often damp, cold, cramped and generally uncomfortable, while their metal surfaces magnified the crash and whistle of bombs, and fragments ricocheting off them clattered alarmingly. Moreover, sheltering in a tin ‘dog kennel’ in the garden could be a terrifyingly lonely experience, and many people preferred the ‘safety in numbers’ illusion and the camaraderie of communal shelters, where the raid outside could be partly drowned out by talking, singing and playing music. Yet brick-built surface shelters were increasingly distrusted, and shared all the drawbacks of cold, damp Anderson shelters, while adding some of their own when it came to sanitation, general comfort and cleanliness. And, as the Coronation Avenue disaster showed, reinforced basements, the government’s cost-saving preferred option, were not necessarily safe – indeed, as onlookers speculated, had the building’s residents stayed in their flats rather than going down to the basement to shelter, they might well not have been crushed, and would certainly have been unlikely to be killed by water, effluent and gas seeping into their lungs – an aspect of the tragedy that particularly horrified those who witnessed its aftermath.
In London, and later in the rest of the country, people sheltered where they felt safest – even if this safety was often illusory. As the Ministry of Home Security found, the public showed ‘a strong tendency to be irrational in their choice of shelters’. In Shoreditch, residents hurried to the reinforced-concrete hall attached to St Augustine’s church, even though it had been refused designation as an official shelter since no part of it was underground. The vicar of Haggerston, whose church it was and who had had the hall built himself, felt that since there was not exactly a ‘superabundance’ of shelters in Shoreditch, he could not refuse entry to those who wished to shelter there. He displayed a large notice warning, ‘THIS IS NOT AN AIR-RAID SHELTER. They who use it as such do so at their own risk,’ but still his parishioners and more flocked in.
Molly Fenlon lived in a block of flats near Tower Bridge in Bermondsey. On the first night of the blitz her father, who was a policeman, was on duty in the docks. Her mother, driven frantic by the falling bombs, decided to seek shelter. ‘A small party of us from the flats piled our bedding into an old pram and trailed off to 61 Arch, which is a series of arches under London Bridge railway station. It used, in years gone by, to be an ice well, and it felt as though all the ice had been left there, it was so cold. The walls were very damp too, but we were glad enough to go anywhere. Many homeless people, white and shaken, came in from Rotherhithe and the local district.’
The next night Molly’s father was off-duty, so the whole family
accordingly, about seven p.m., put its bedding on a pram and marched off. 61 Arch was full, and as it was cold, and damp as well, we decided to go along to the next Arch which is a through road converted into a shelter. That was full too. All the pavement down both sides was taken, so our little party slept in the gutter that night, except me. As there wasn’t even room for me in the gutter, I wriggled into the pram. It was a tight fit but I slept … Suddenly I woke up to find that a bit of the pram must have grown up and was sticking in my back. Looking at my watch I discovered that it was two a.m. All our party was asleep except Miss N…, she was reading a thriller! I found that I ached all over, so struggled out of the pram and spent the rest of the night walking up and down the Arch, smoking and thinking about my fiancé (as he was then) who was … in the R.A.F. I remember wondering, a trifle morbidly, if I should live to get married.
We were an assorted lot there: as I walked up and down, I studied the … people as they slept. There was a tiny baby, a fortnight old, like a little rosebud in its pram, and an elderly man, bald headed, snoring fit to wake the Seven Sleepers, spread eagled on the ground with no blanket between him and the asphalt … Next morning I discovered that I had collected six flea bites on my person, and Miss N … was horrified to see a bug crawl across the collar of her raincoat as she was packing up.
After that I struck: told mother that she could please herself but that I would rather be done to death by a German bomb, than bitten to death in an Air Raid shelter. She agreed about that.
From then on the Fenlons slept at home throughout the raids – though they had to move flats when theirs was badly damaged by a twenty-eight-pound AA shell that crashed through the roof. When Molly married her airman fiancé on 17 November, it was in the vestry in the churchyard of St Olave and St John’s, since the church had been burnt out in a raid in October.
On 14 October 1940, one of the large trench shelters in Kennington Park received a direct hit. ‘They are still digging,’ wrote Joan Veazey, wife of the vicar of the nearby St Mary’s church, in her diary, ‘and there are all sorts of rumours going around as to how many are trapped inside. We know that one of our church families always shelter there … So far we can get no news. There is nothing we can do but wait and pray for all those who are listening for the scratch of the rescue shovels.’
The next day the Veazeys ‘heard that they have found the Potters who were in the park shelter. If what we are told is true, this family were sitting with their backs to the wall of the shelter, reading and knitting, when there was a sudden blue flash and the earth and concrete started to cave in … the blast turned the little daughter upside down and her legs were caught in the concrete of the roof … her mother took her whole weight on her shoulders until she was rescued … but as they took her out she died of shock and her injuries. Christopher [the vicar] will go to see the others who are badly burned in hospital … We do not know how many were killed … but the wardens say about 179 persons died in the shelter.’
At Ramsgate on the Kent coast, caves provided natural shelters which the local council had started to improve access to as Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939, and which were completed by the outbreak of war. According to Picture Post, the three miles of tunnels that lay between fifty and ninety feet underground made Ramsgate and Barcelona ‘the only towns in the world that have deep shelters’. There was natural ventilation, and electricity had been run from the town’s supply – and there was an emergency generating system if that should fail. Signposts were erected so shelterers would not get lost in the labyrinthine corridors. There was space for 60,000 people (twice the population of Ramsgate), none of whom would be more than five minutes away from one of the complex’s twenty-two entrances, and seating for 30,000. Dover strengthened the entrances to its caves too, and bored connecting tunnels and installed bunks, though ‘as there was no current of air, you can imagine what it was like when slept in night after night by those with no homes, and little facility for washing. Rather like a rabbit hutch.’ Or, as the Inspector General of Civil Defence, E.J. Hodsoll, described the scene in February 1941, ‘the equivalent of a gypsy squatters’ camp’.
An estimated 15,000 Londoners nightly colonised Chislehurst caves in Kent, which had been used as an ammunition dump in the First World War, with special trains being laid on to convey shelterers there each evening and return them to London in the morning. At first the caves were primitive, with bare earth floors and flickering candles or torches the only light, a single water tap and an oildrum filled with creosote for sanitation. But soon electric lighting was organised by two private individuals – one of whom had been renting the caves for the cultivation of mushrooms; donkeys carried away the ash bins that were used as lavatories; the local council provided bunks; and a Red Cross medical centre was opened, complete with emergency operating theatre and canteen. So safe were the Chislehurst caves considered that the children’s ward of a local hospital was moved there. At first shelterers were charged a halfpenny a night, but as the facilities grew more sophisticated – dances and singsongs were held, and a cinema screen erected; church services were held, with an improvised altar positioned under a ‘natural dome’, and the congregation joining in the appropriate hymn ‘Rock of Ages’ – this rose to sixpence, and a team of ‘captains’ was appointed to oversee things and keep order. By November the local council had taken over responsibility for the caves, but used a light touch for fear of stifling the ‘self-help’ initiative that had got them organised in the first place.
Existing tunnels below the streets of Luton in Bedfordshire were strengthened, as was the Ouseburn Culvert in Newcastle upon Tyne, while the Victoria Tunnel in the same city was also used as a shelter. In Runcorn, on Merseyside, where leakage from chlorine gas holders was considered a particular potential hazard in a raid, a network of underground tunnels was constructed. During raids on Plymouth, people trekked across the fields to take shelter inside a tunnel hewn in a quarry. It was cold and dark and water ran down the walls, but it was a haven, and every Sunday the local vicar conducted a service there. In Bristol, an old railway tunnel that had been used to take goods from the port into the city was taken over by ‘men, women and children huddled together sleeping on mattresses, planks or straw. Some had corrugated iron sheets or pieces of sacking and canvas placed overhead to catch the water that dripped from the rocky roof of the tunnel. The air was thick with the fumes of oil stoves, oil lamps and various odours of cooking food … When the Corporation employees opened the doors in the morning, the stench and fumes came from within like a fog. It was a picture of Dante’s Inferno. Many of the people were nervous wrecks. People stayed in the tunnel by day, afraid to lose their places. There was hardly any room between the rough beds. Some performed their natural functions alongside their beds. It was unbelievable that people could be driven by fear to endure such conditions.’
Conditions were as bad, if not worse, in London’s most notorious shelter: the Tilbury in Stepney. For the Daily Herald journalist Ritchie Calder, it was ‘not only the most unhygienic place I have ever seen, it was … definitely unsafe … yet numbers as high, on some estimates, as 14,000 to 16,000 people crowded into it on those dreadful nights when hell was let loose on East London … People of every type and condition, every colour and creed found their way there … men from the Levant and Slavs from Eastern Europe; Jew, Gentile, Moslem and Hindu. When ships docked, seamen would come to royster [sic] for a few hours. Scotland Yard knew where to look for criminals bombed out of Hell’s Kitchen. Prostitutes paraded there. Hawkers peddled greasy, cold fried fish which cloyed the already foul atmosphere. Free fights had to be broken up by the police. Couples courted. Children slept. Soldiers, sailors and airmen spent part of their leave there.’
‘It was an enormous place,’ remembered Robert Baltrop. ‘I’ve seen figures like 6,000 sheltering in it every night. It wasn’t even properly underground, [much of it] was simply a surface building, and it was almost like a village; people sold things, ladies of the street carried on their business there … a whole nightlife went on in the Tilbury, all through the blitz.’
The Tilbury, situated off the Commercial Road, was part of Liverpool Street station goods yard, and was owned by two different bodies. On one side lay vaults and stores; on the other was an underground loading yard, partly below ground, and above it a massive warehouse supported on steel girders. The vaults had been taken over by Stepney Council as a shelter for 3,000 people, but the Home Secretary refused permission for it to requisition the warehouse and the loading bays – by far the larger part. However, the site had been an official shelter in the First World War, and ‘It was known to older people as “the place to go”.’ And that is what happened. When the desperate hour came, they crowded there from all parts of east London, often coming from miles away. The limited capacity of the official section was quickly filled, and thousands overflowed into the rest of the site. There was nothing the owners could do to prevent the torrent of humanity which took possession. The borough council disclaimed responsibility for those who took shelter in the ‘unauthorised’ areas, on the grounds that it had been refused powers and would be trespassing on private property. Even the police could not at first gain access, except when called in by the harassed policemen of the company concerned.
As long as Calder lived, he wrote, he would
never forget the stampede when the gates were flung open and the swarming multitude careered down the slope, tripping, tumbling, being trodden on, being crushed and fighting and scrambling for the choice of sleeping berths – in the valleys between the gigantic bales of newsprint. Expectant mothers and even children were crushed.
Sanitation barely existed. The only provision was for a handful of workmen usually employed there. The result was that the roadways were ankle deep in filth, which was trodden into blankets on which people were to sleep. Great stacks of London’s margarine were stored there. Hundreds of cartons were hopelessly fouled every night. It was over a fortnight before the margarine began to be moved out, by the intervention of the Ministry of Food. People slept among the filth. They slept in the dust between the rails and on the cobblestones of the roadway. They slept on the wooden bays amongst the food. It was appalling.
Hilde Marchant, who visited the Tilbury for the Daily Express, was equally appalled: by the sour smell of rancid margarine that pervaded the vaults, by the strong odour of horse in the loading bays, by the ‘confused mass of bodies strewn everywhere’, but above all when she came to ‘the canvas partitions at the end. These were the latrines, twelve chemical lavatories helped by a few buckets for the children. I went into the six latrines reserved for women. They were overflowing, and a woman worker was standing over the door, saying they could not be used any more that night.’
Euan Wallace, Regional Commissioner for the London Civil Defence Region, thought it was ‘no use spending a lot of money on things like water closets’, as the government lacked the power to requisition the part of the Tilbury owned by the railway company, and in any case, ‘It does seem … very doubtful whether it is worth putting new wine into such a very old bottle. It can never be anything but a very indifferent shelter and it presents peculiarly difficult health and sanitation problems.’ However, by mid-October ‘The Prime Minister has been hunting Morrison very hard on the Tilbury shelter question,’ reported Wallace, and though ‘the City was being unreasonably sticky on providing basements in commercial buildings’, accommodation was eventually found so that 4,000 shelterers could be moved from the railway-owned part of the shelter, and conditions improved for those who stayed.
Until then, though, it was largely due to individual unofficial initiatives that things got better. There had not been even a first aid post in the unofficial half of the Tilbury, but a local Jewish doctor volunteered his services and spent his evenings attending to the shelterers’ needs, then ‘slept the night at his self-appointed post. There were women there – genuine motherly souls with a passion for well-doing – who spent the whole twenty-four hours, for weeks on end, ministering to this vast unruly family. They were self-appointed shelter marshals, without authority and without resources. It was they who brought urns of fresh water into the unofficial shelter, rationing the water as sparingly as though they were the keepers of an oasis in the desert … Any minister or official or influential visitor who ventured into that shelter would be button-holed. With evangelical fervour, they would be told of the miseries these people had to endure, of what grand people they were if only they had a chance, and a whole catalogue of all the things that needed to be done.’
It was not only officials who beat a path to the Tilbury shelter: it soon became a tourist attraction for people from ‘up West’ to gawp at the hellish conditions their fellow Londoners were suffering a few miles away. Rachel Reckitt was in charge of the emergency Citizens Advice Bureau set up at Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel – a ‘university settlement’ where middle-class workers lived among the poor, hoping to share knowledge and culture, and alleviate the poverty of their neighbours – to offer advice and practical help to East Enders suffering during the blitz. In October 1940 she had a ‘night out with [the distinguished American lawyer] Mrs Goodhart [who] wanted to see the Tilbury shelter, so, as it was no good early in the evening [when no shelterers would have arrived] I offered to take her later. She said should we go and get some dinner at the Savoy, or have it at Toynbee? I believe she would have liked Toynbee, but saw I wouldn’t, so we had a drive round Wapping and Shadwell and the Isle of Dogs … it looked lovely in the fading light, especially the river. Wapping church and the school have gone … all but the Church tower … Then we had a good dinner at the Savoy, with Leslie Howard [who played Ashley Wilkes in the film Gone with the Wind, which had opened in London a few months previously, and who would be killed when the plane in which he was a passenger was shot down in June 1943] and Anthony Asquith [the film director ‘Puffin’ Asquith, son of the former Liberal Prime Minister] at the next table … Afterwards we went back to Stepney to the Tilbury shelter. Entry there is by pass only as they, naturally, dislike sightseers (especially those who come East after a good dinner to see how the poor live!). However, as I know the wardens, I was able to get Mrs Goodhart in. I especially wanted her to see it in case she goes to America; as she will be asked to lecture there [and] it would be very bad if she had to admit she’d never seen a shelter.’ The next month, Rachel Reckitt was taken on
a personally conducted tour of the famous Tilbury shelter, a great honour I gathered, as Lady Astor [MP for Plymouth Sutton] had been down a few nights ago and [the District Warden] refused to take her round. He said he was tired of West-Enders getting an evening’s entertainment sightseeing in East End shelters. I should hardly call it ‘amusement’ but I could sympathise with him as he is very busy. Anyway the people resent being exhibited to sightseers.
… They have reduced the numbers in Tilbury shelter from 12,000 to about 6,000 and made some improvements, though it is still very bad and many people sleep on the stones. It is a strange place, vast and very confusing as there are many parts to it. Most of it is under railway arches and there are trucks and sidings in it too. People have been known to park their baby’s pram in a truck, and found it gone to Birmingham or somewhere in the morning!
The District Warden is full of ideas and hopes the war will last long enough to get hot water laid on and proper feeding. It will have to last a long time at the present rate!
Ritchie Calder had greatly exaggerated the number of people taking refuge in the Tilbury shelter, as he had inflated the number killed in the bombing of South Hallsville School. He did so because, as a campaigning journalist, he had an urgent agenda. In his view the government was culpably negligent of the safety of its citizens – particularly its poorest citizens, who had not the resources to make their own arrangements. What Londoners (and indeed all those living in vulnerable areas) required were deep shelters. And these the government had consistently refused to provide.
The scientist Professor J.B.S. Haldane had paid three visits to Spain during the Civil War, which had made him something of an authority on defence against air raids – particularly since most British scientists were still using data from the First World War to frame their expectations of Second World War bombing. Haldane had spent weeks in Madrid and Barcelona (where there was ‘an extensive system of underground refuges … capable of accommodating altogether about 350,000 people’, according to the city’s mayor) gathering information and making statistical calculations, and what he discovered made him a passionate advocate of deep shelters. While he was not himself a member of the Communist Party – though he was a Marxist, and was the science correspondent for the CP newspaper, the Daily Worker – this was a campaign supported, indeed often led, by members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), who argued that it would be the working classes living in poorly-built accommodation, clustered around inevitable targets such as docks and factories, who would take the brunt of German aerial attacks. What some might call governmental incompetence in failing to make proper provision, the CPGB regarded as a conspiracy against the workers in a class war that made them in effect the ‘poor bloody infantry’ of the home front.
Haldane argued that gas was no longer the main danger – he was an expert on poison gas and had designed a gas mask during the First World War – but that the real threat came from high-explosive bombs. He believed that the government policy of dispersing the population into reinforced basements, surface and Anderson shelters, rather than constructing networks of mass underground shelters, was misguided, irresponsible and penny-pinching. In October 1938 he published a paper in the scientific journal Nature in which he demonstrated mathematically that there were no grounds for assuming that bombs dropped at random would cause fewer casualties if people were dispersed than if they were concentrated. Later that year his book, called simply ARP, was published by Victor Gollancz, founder of the Left Book Club. It advocated a two-year programme of excavating sixty feet under London to build 780 miles of seven-foot tunnels that could hold the 4.4 million population of the LCC area. These should be built of brick rather than concrete, since in Haldane’s view ‘The concrete industry is now in the grip of monopoly capitalism, and for this reason prices are likely to be higher relative to brick than would otherwise be the case.’ Following the book’s publication Haldane stumped the country speaking, usually on CP platforms, and writing articles for the Daily Worker demanding better protection for the British public against the blitz. He argued that some of Britain’s unemployed – of whom there were still 1,800,000 in the summer of 1939 – could be given work constructing the deep shelters he believed were required, a scheme he costed at an estimated £12 for each person who would be able to take refuge in them.
The Architect and Building News had voiced its readers’ concerns in October 1938, just after the Munich crisis, about ‘sandbagged basements … half finished trenches in the parks and squares … uncomfortable reminders of the ludicrous inadequacy of the eleventh-hour scramble of three weeks ago’, and demanded, ‘What is being done?’ That same month Finsbury Borough Council, in charge of one of the poorest boroughs in London, provided an ambitious answer. On 4 October Alderman Riley, Chairman of the Finsbury ARP Committee, recommended that the modernist émigré architect Berthold Lubetkin and his firm Tecton, which had designed Finsbury’s vanguard Health Centre, opened earlier that year, should be asked to come up with a solution to protecting ‘the whole of the population [of Finsbury] in the event of war’. Lubetkin and the civil engineer Ove Arup (who had proved so valuable in solving the construction problems of the Penguin Pool at London Zoo, designed by Tecton in 1934) worked out a ‘danger volume’ to measure scientifically the comparative protection afforded by different types of shelter, and came up with a plan for fifteen shelters (each housing between 7,600 and 12,700 people) deep underground, approached by spiral staircases that would permit everyone to be safely ensconced within the seven minutes it was reckoned would elapse between the alert sounding and the first bombs falling.
Although Arup greatly exaggerated the night-time population of the borough who would require shelter, it was an elegant solution to stowing the 58,000-odd residents of Finsbury plus essential services deep underground at the cost of ten guineas a head – a sort of Maginot Line of the air war. Finsbury Council organised an exhibition in the Town Hall to show how it would work, complete with chilling illustrations by Gordon Cullen (whose murals adorned the Health Centre) showing the frailty of other forms of protection, and on 15 February 1939 Lubetkin appeared on the infant medium of television to demonstrate the plan’s virtues. But the Home Secretary Sir John Anderson, to whom the plans had to be submitted, prevaricated, waiting for the recommendations of a group of experts including engineers and trade unionists; their White Paper, ‘Air Raid Shelters’, was finally published in April 1939. Winston Churchill, to whom Tecton had also sent a copy, was not ‘favourably impressed … it appears to be inspired by the wish to exaggerate the danger of air attack and to emphasise the futility of basement protection in the interest of some particular scheme in which you are associated. The wide circulation of such a book would not be helpful at the present juncture.’
On 18 April 1939 Tecton/Finsbury’s scheme was rejected on the grounds of impracticality – experience of building the London Underground indicated that it would take at least two years to build – of cost, shortage of materials, accessibility – it was reckoned that people would need to be within 150 yards of a shelter to get to it through congested streets in sufficient time – and of the fact that the plans were fundamentally opposed to the principle of dispersal. However, in the autumn of 1940 the government changed its mind, ostensibly for technical reasons, since German bombs were getting heavier. Herbert Morrison announced in an upbeat broadcast, ‘We Have Won the First Round’, that a limited number of deep shelters would be provided in the London region by tunnelling under the tube system at selected stations. But, he insisted, ‘It is quite certain that deep shelters cannot play more than a limited part in our plans … anything like a universal policy of deep shelters for the whole people or the greater part of it, is beyond the bounds of practical possibility.’ Morrison, who had been implacably anti-Communist as leader of the LCC, then launched an astonishing attack on Haldane (without naming him) and other deep-shelter campaigners for being ‘political schemers’ engaging in ‘defeatist agitation’. He accused them of seeking ‘to destroy our will to take risks in freedom’s cause’, and of ‘playing Hitler’s game’: ‘These people are not numerous, but they are mischievous; Hitler is no doubt delighted with their manoeuvres. He knows that if our people could be stampeded into putting a narrow personal safety before success, he would win.’
Plans for eight huge shelters, each holding 8,000 people and most constructed beneath existing tube stations, were approved in October 1940. But the first of three purpose-built deep shelters available to the public (others were used for telecommunications and similar facilities), in Stockwell in south London, was not opened until 10 July 1944 – more than three years after the end of the blitz. One hundred and thirty feet underground, it could accommodate 4,000 people and was equipped with canteens, lavatories and washing facilities, and even arrangements for laundry. By that time Haldane, who had usually taken shelter in a deep trench on Primrose Hill, near where he lived with his journalist wife Charlotte, and after that had been hit, in a shelter below London Zoo at the invitation of his friend Julian Huxley, the Secretary of the Zoological Society, had removed with his laboratory to Harpenden in Hertfordshire.
Even though the government had been resistant to sanction deep shelters, it was a visceral human instinct to seek refuge underground when attacked from above, and that is what many of Britain’s urban population sought to do. As well as basements – Anthony Heap and his mother spent the blitz moving from basement to basement near where they lived in Bloomsbury, ending up most nights in the cavernous cellars of the Quaker Friends’ Meeting House in the Euston Road – the crypts of churches were popular. At St Peter’s church in Walworth in south London, the Reverend J.G. Markham found that his crypt, which had been designated as a public shelter for 230 people, usually housed at least double that number, with shelterers
lying like sardines on a variety of beds, mattresses, blankets or old carpets which they brought down with them. Some sat on deckchairs, some lay on the narrow wooden benches provided by the borough. The stench from the overflowing Elsan closets and unwashed humanity was so great that we had to buy gallons of Pine Fluid … the shelter wardens had a whip round among their flock to buy electric fans which did stir the foetid air a trifle, giving an illusion of freshness … You can get used to those sort of conditions if you stay in them 12 hours a night, night after night. At least one family stayed there almost 24 hours rather than go home and risk losing their place. Places were as precious, to the regulars, as seats in some theatres, so that queues formed outside hours before the sirens wailed, and I had to provide wardens to regulate the flow of would-be shelterers, some of whom came from some distance, even by taxi.
Lambeth Palace’s crypt could accommodate 250 people, and being so close to the Thames and across the road from the thrice-hit St Thomas’s Hospital, it was popular with the local community. But not with the Archbishop himself, his chaplain the Reverend Alan Don reported. During the September raids ‘sleep was, for most people, out of the question – and even CC [Cosmo Cantuar] descended into the basement for a while. He avoids the crypt – the people there frighten him more than the bombs!’
The Canadian photographer Bill Brandt, who had settled in Britain in 1932 and had established a reputation as a sensitive photo-journalist of English life and mores, was commissioned by the Ministry of Information to photograph London’s underground shelters. He spent the week of 4–12 November 1940 capturing the ‘drama and strangeness of shelter life’ until he caught influenza and had to abandon the project. The most compelling – and also the strangest – of the photographs he took are of people sheltering in the crypt of Christ Church, Spitalfields. Some show people sleeping in stone sarcophagi, while a bewildered-looking Sikh couple and their child huddle in a damp alcove. Ritchie Calder visited the same crypt, taken by the Shelter Marshal ‘Mickey the Midget’, in civilian life an optician, and he too was struck by the sarcophagi: ‘massive stone vaults. In them the bodies of the centuries-old dead had mouldered away. Now their heavy stone lids had been levered off. The bones and dust had been scooped out. The last resting-place of the dead had been claimed by the living.’ Others, unable to lever off the lids, lay stretched out on top of the tombs, while more lay in the aisles. There were ‘rows of old men and old women sitting bolt upright in paralytic discomfort on narrow benches. Some had “foot muffs” made out of swathes of old newspapers or were hugging hot-water bottles, their heads lolling in sleep. The vaults were bitterly cold. A draught full of menace blew through them – menace because it came from half-submerged windows, not blocked up, just blacked out.’
In the inner vaults, ‘stretched on the rough floor was a tall figure of an ex-Bengal Lancer, his magnificent shovel beard draped over a blanket, his head turbaned and looking, in sleep, like a breathing monument to an ancient Crusader … Life in this crypt, as in dozens of other crypts … in the early days of the “blitz” was worse than primitive. It made the conditions described by Dickens seem like a comedy of manners by Thackeray. The Fleet Prison and the Marshalsea were polite hostelries compared with conditions which existed when the “blitzkrieg” first hit London and drove most [sic] people underground.’
Not all underground people suffered the same discomforts and indignities. Brandt’s photographs show a couple coyly snuggling under an eiderdown in the basement of a department store – most West End stores had cleared out their basements to accommodate sleepers. The Savoy Hotel had a commodious basement, though this was often closed when water threatened to flood in if bombs fell on the Thames, which flowed past. On 14 September 1940 a Communist councillor (and later MP) for Stepney and ARP warden, Phil Piratin, who had been active in converting pre-war East End tenants’ associations into Shelter Committees to keep up the battle for deep shelters, and to press for better facilities in public surface and tube shelters, led a party of seventy of the borough’s residents to the Savoy to demand access to its shelter. ‘We decided what was good enough for the Savoy Hotel parasites was reasonably good enough for Stepney workers and their families. We had an idea that the hotel management would not see eye to eye with this, so we organised an “invasion” without their consent. In fact there was no effort to stop us, but it was only a matter of seconds before we were downstairs, and the women and children came streaming in afterwards. While the management and their lackeys were filled with consternation, the visitors from the East End looked round in amazement. “Shelters?” they said. “Why, we’d love to live in such places.” ‘
The recently built Dorchester was considered all but bomb-proof with its reinforced concrete structure, but it turned its basement first into Turkish baths and then its basement gymnasium into an air-raid shelter, a ‘funk hole’ in which the beauteous Lady Diana, wife of Duff Cooper, who had resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty at the time of the Munich crisis, felt ‘quite secure’ as she lay ‘hugger mugger with all that was most distinguished in London society’. ‘No one snores. If Papa makes a sound I’m up in a flash to rearrange his position. Perhaps Lady Halifax is doing the same to his Lordship [the Foreign Secretary] … They each have a flashlight to find their slippers with, and I see their monstrous forms projected caricaturishly on the ceiling, magic lantern style. Lord Halifax is unmistakable. We never actually meet,’ she wrote to her son, John Julius Norwich, evacuated to safety in Canada.
Should a person wish to dance and dine at the Hungaria restaurant in Lower Regent Street, they could book a shelter place in the cellar for the night as well as a table. If the raid lasted all night, breakfast would be served in the morning.
However, the most obvious place in London to shelter underground was the one the government refused to sanction. Although tube stations had been used as shelters during air raids in the First World War, this was forbidden at the start of the Second. The reasons were several: the first was the necessity of keeping people and goods moving during the blitz, of ferrying the injured or homeless away and of bringing essential supplies to the stricken areas. Another was the restricted access to many tube stations: the deep, narrow stairways and escalators would be hazardous if a panicking mass of people converged on them (a fear that was to be realised not during the blitz but in the Bethnal Green tube disaster in March 1943, when 173 people were killed in such a crush). Fear of flooding if the Thames was bombed was another real concern: before the war twenty-five heavy, electrically operated gates were installed at stations on either side of the river at Waterloo, Charing Cross and London Bridge which could be closed within a minute of the order being received from the control room at Leicester Square. And a fourth concern was the fear of a ‘shelter mentality’ when thousands of people would crowd underground and, feeling safe in their troglodyte existence, would refuse to re-emerge, with disastrous consequences for war production.
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However, on the first night of the blitz East Enders defied official policy and appropriated their own deep shelters by buying a penny-halfpenny ticket for a short journey on the tube, and refusing to come up again, camping in their thousands on the cold stone platforms with no sanitation or refreshment until morning. It was a fait accompli which, predictably, the Daily Worker celebrated as a people’s victory when on 13 September 1940 2,000 people swarmed down the stairs at Holborn station as they had done on previous nights, and ‘The LPTB [London Passenger Transport Board] officers seem to have given up on any attempt to keep them out.’ Some stayed in stations near to where they lived, others travelled ‘up West’ until they found less crowded platforms. All felt safer down the tubes, particularly since the sounds of air raids raging overhead were all but blotted out, but in the early days all were uncomfortable, often cold and frequently hungry.
Since so many children were evacuated at this time, some London schools were closed, including ten-year-old Irene Moseley’s in the East End. ‘So during the day I was sent off with my suitcase to get in the queue for a place on the platform [at Old Street station]. We had to disguise ourselves as travellers, not shelterers, so any bedding that we took down had to be in suitcases … I used to make a place on the platform for the rest of the family so that when they’d finished work they’d come down and a place was already secured. Otherwise, there would be arguments and quarrels with people who used to push your suitcase or your bedding out of the way, because it was every man for himself down there.’
Whole families arrived bringing blankets, rugs and pillows, bread and cheese or sandwiches and a bottle of tea – or beer – and milk for babies to drink, sweets, and sometimes, hazardously, a small spirit stove to brew up on, though official advice was to keep drinks warm by wrapping the container in layers of newspaper, or constructing a ‘hay box’. Some brought playing cards to pass the time, a ‘book’ (magazine), even a wireless or a wind-up gramophone, and invariably a small box or bag containing their savings, insurance policies, saving cards, ration books and identity cards – their paper wartime lives. Deep underground they were packed like sardines, with no air circulating, nowhere to get food or drink, or wash, and with the only lavatories – if there were any – in the booking hall. Fierce territorial disputes raged over places to sleep, and when every inch of platform space was occupied, latecomers arranged themselves in the corridors and on the escalators, or even in the booking hall, which offered little protection, particularly as many had glass roofs, or large skylights that would have sent shards of glass crashing onto the recumbent forms below in the event of a nearby attack.
A local reporter went to see conditions at Elephant and Castle tube station at the end of September 1940, and what he described sounds as grim as the notorious Tilbury shelter:
From the platforms to the entrance the whole station was one incumbent mass of humanity … it took me a quarter of an hour to get from the station entrance to the platform. Even in the darkened booking hall I stumbled across huddled bodies, bodies which were no safer from bombs than if they had lain in the gutters of the silent streets outside. Going down the stairs I saw mothers feeding infants at the breast. Little girls and boys lay across their parents’ bodies because there was no room on the winding stairs. Hundreds of men and women were partially undressed, while small boys and girls slumbered in the foetid atmosphere absolutely naked. Electric lights blazed, but most of this mass of sleeping humanity slept as though they were between silken sheets. On the platform when a train came in, it had to be stopped in the tunnel while police and porters went along pushing in the feet and arms which overhung the line. The sleepers hardly stirred as the train rumbled slowly in. On the train I sat opposite a pilot on leave. ‘It’s the same all the way along,’ was all he said.
The Reverend Christopher Veazey and his wife Joan visited the same Elephant and Castle tube station, where some of their parishioners were settling down for the night. ‘I had not realised just how many people were sheltering there,’ wrote Joan Veazey after their visit on 17 September 1940. ‘They were lying closely packed like sardines all along the draughty corridors and on the old platforms, so that people who wanted to get on the trains had to step over mattresses and sleeping bodies. There was a picnic feeling about the whole set-up, families were eating chips and some had some fish … others were singing loudly. Tiny babies were tucked up in battered suitcases, and small children were toddling around making friends with everyone. We tried to chat with some of the folk, but there were too many to be able to help very much. The noise was terrific … both of trains running to a standstill and of people shouting above the noise.’
Families would usually stay in the tube until the All Clear went (not that they could hear it), and they were usually cleared out by station staff at around six in the morning, to allow cleaners in to prepare for the day’s activity. ‘It was frightening … because you never knew what to expect, whether you had a home or not to go to. Sometimes the fires were still raging, the fire engines were there, you were picking your way across rubble and lots of water in the streets from the hoses, and all the time you were wondering “have I still got a home?”,’ remembers Irene Moseley. ‘When you did get home, there was probably no gas or water. So I was almost reluctant to leave the Tube, it was a home to me … there were a lot of other children down there and we’d play hide and seek along the platform and up the escalators. It was a haven, you felt safe down there.’
Barbara Betts (later Castle, the Labour Cabinet Minister), who was trying to scratch a living as a journalist – writing mainly for Picture Post, which rarely paid, and trade papers such as the Tobacconist, which paid, but not much – and was also an ARP warden in St Pancras, joined one of these ‘troglodyte communities one night to see what it was like. It was not a way of life I wanted for myself but I could see what an important safety valve it was. Without it, London life could not have carried on the way that it did.’
Since the blitz, the picture of a mass of humanity sleeping in the tube, as portrayed by Henry Moore in his chalk drawings of underground shelters, has become one of its most iconic images, along with the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral wreathed in smoke during the raid on the City on 29 December 1940. Some accounts seem to suggest that the entire East End was nightly crammed into the underground. In reality a ‘shelter census’ of London’s central area at the height of the blitz showed that there were 177,000 people sheltering there – that is, around 4 per cent of London’s population, which compares with 9 per cent in public shelters and 27 per cent in Anderson shelters. One hundred and seventy-seven thousand is still a large number of people, but despite this large-scale colonisation, the government retained an equivocal attitude towards the tube being used for shelter.
In mid-September 1940 the Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, accompanied by the Minister for Aircraft Production and newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook, and Lord Ashfield, chairman of the LPTB (who had previously expressed a preference for closing down the entire underground system) had visited Holborn tube station. They had talked to shelterers, many of whom from the East End were literally living down there, having been bombed out of their homes in the first raids. It was by now obvious that it was simply not possible to enforce a ban on the tube being used as shelters unless the authorities were prepared to risk a collapse of home-front morale and very ugly confrontations, with the police reinforced by the military barring station entrances and keeping angry and fearful people in the streets during a raid. The government grudgingly changed its policy, though it insisted that the underground was primarily for transport, and that shelterers must not interfere with that. But gradually some order and regulation – and some facilities – were introduced.
At the beginning of October 1940 Herbert Morrison replaced Sir John Anderson as Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security. The Home Secretary, the senior Secretary of State, was essentially responsible for law and order, whereas Home Security, a ministry canvassed at the time of Munich as a wartime essential and attached to the Home Office when war broke out, was in charge of all civil defence against air attack. This included responsibility for air-raid wardens, the firefighting services, first aid, decontamination and rescue squads, as well as facilities such as civil defence equipment and shelters, and arrangements concerned with blackout and air-raid warnings. Moreover, the Minister had to coordinate all those ministries that would be affected by air raids and their aftermath: Transport, Food and Health, among others. And soon Morrison would also be Chairman of what a Labour Party pamphlet described as ‘the Blitz Team’, the official title of which was the Civil Defence Committee of the War Cabinet, taking on an absolutely pivotal role in the prosecution of the war on the home front and the well-being of the people in acutely testing and hazardous times.
He was well placed to do so. The son of a Lambeth policeman, Morrison had left school at fourteen, and had been active first in the ILP (Independent Labour Party) and then the Labour Party. He had been a conscientious objector in the First World War, and in 1920 became Mayor of Hackney in east London, at thirty-two the youngest in London. Two years later he was elected to the London County Council (LCC), and in 1923 as Labour MP for South Hackney. Appointed Minister for Transport in the second Labour government from 1929 to 1931, he also led the LCC from 1934 until 1940, though he effectively abandoned this role when he was appointed Minister of Supply in May 1940. Morrison had a deep commitment to and knowledge of his native city – and undoubtedly more of a common touch than the rather grand and austere Anderson – and his time as an MP in Hackney had coincided with the borough’s notably energetic ARP activities. Before the war he had been a member of the ARP (Policy) Committee, and he would have seen the papers relating to the problems of future air raids.
Ritchie Calder was ecstatic at the appointment. In an open letter published in the Daily Herald he wrote:
Dear Herbert Morrison, When I heard you had been appointed Home Secretary I went home and slept soundly … I have seen men and women, these tough London workers of whom you and I are proud, whose homes have gone but whose courage is unbroken by the Nazi bombers, goaded by neglect and seething with resentment and furious reproach. THEY LOOK TO YOU … Much of the breakdown which has occurred in the last month could have been foreseen and avoided; or having arisen could have been mastered by anyone who understood the human problem of the Londoners and the complications of local government … you have a task as great as your abilities. Go to it Herbert …
Improving the shelters was only part of Morrison’s task: there were many other pressing administrative problems that needed urgent attention, but he made shelters a priority, though some changes were already in hand, with local authorities empowered to provide bunks, sanitation, drinking water and first aid, and to enrol voluntary shelter marshals, while a paid ARP warden would be assigned to each occupied tube station.
In the afternoon of 3 October 1940 the new Minister went to Buckingham Palace to kiss hands with the King and receive his seals of office. That done, Morrison set off to inspect shelters in south London, starting at Southwark tube station, where a raid was in progress and Ack-Ack guns were firing constantly as he and the inevitable retinue of journalists toured the non-facilities and spoke to shelterers. The next day it was the East End, where, accompanied by Admiral Sir Edward Evans in full dress uniform and wearing his medals and white gloves (Evans had been second in command to Captain Scott on his Antarctic expedition in 1910, but was always known as ‘Evans of the Broke’, after the ship he had commanded in the First World War), one of the two Regional Commissioners for London, he headed straight for the notorious Tilbury shelter. After a quick tour of that wartime Hades, Morrison ordered structural improvements that would cost £5,000. ‘What does money matter?’ he exclaimed. ‘There are thousands of lives involved! Get it done at once!’ He had called in on the unfinished Bethnal Green tube station on the way, and on hearing that ‘at least 4,000 slept there nightly’, declared it an official ‘deep shelter’ sixty feet below the street.
Morrison immediately appointed the diminutive Labour MP ‘Red’ Ellen Wilkinson – so named for her ginger hair and her radical politics, which included leading hunger marchers from her shipbuilding constituency, Jarrow, to London in 1936, and who may have been Morrison’s mistress at one time – as one of his three Parliamentary Secretaries, and gave her direct responsibility for shelters. The appointment of this ‘dumpy, energetic little woman’ as Morrison’s ‘liaison between the shelters and his Whitehall desk’ pleased another critical journalist, Hilde Marchant of the Daily Express, who was now described as one of the newspaper’s two ‘Commissioners for the East End’. ‘I met [Wilkinson] several times in the shelters and Whitehall and liked her. She is direct and decisive, a busy vigorous woman who has impressed the men she works with, and she has got her practical hands firmly on the subject.’ Harold Nicolson, currently ensconced at the Ministry of Information, would also become a fan of Wilkinson’s ‘realism’. ‘She said to me: “You deal with ideas and one can never see how an idea works out. I deal in water closets and one can always see whether it works or not.” I do so like the little spitfire. I should so like to see [her and Florence Horsbrugh at the Ministry of Health] made Cabinet Ministers.’ Wilkinson turned out not only to have ‘nerves of fire and steel’ as she toured shelters all over Britain during the first months of the blitz, but a personal empathy with the shelterers: she had been bombed out of her flat in Guilford Street, not far from King’s Cross, in October 1940.
Every day a straggling queue could be seen outside most underground stations from mid-morning, with people clutching their cushions, blankets and other night-time necessities, waiting for the gates to open for them at 4 p.m. The government, concerned that this could have a serious impact on war production as well as the regular life of the capital, was anxious that the concession, as it saw it, to use the tube as shelters should be regarded as that, and not as a right. The underground should not be depicted as a destination of choice, and the Home Office issued memos to newspaper editors requesting them to be circumspect in their coverage of people sheltering there. Articles such as one in the Sunday Dispatch on 22 September, which reported that ‘by 6pm there seemed no vacant space from St Paul’s to Notting Hill, from Hampstead to Leicester Square … types varied much from the trousered, lipsticked Kensington girls to the cockneys of Camden Town; but all were alike in their uncomplaining, patient cheerfulness’, could only fuel the overwhelming desire for platform space that the government feared. Representing the underground as a sanctuary only for those unable to deal with the raids in any other way might limit the numbers. The Ministries of Transport and Home Security issued a joint appeal to ‘the good sense of the public and particularly to able-bodied men to refrain from using tube stations as air raid shelters, except in cases of urgent necessity’ – though presumably an air raid was an urgent necessity. The notion of it being ‘unmanly’ to use the tube was reiterated by notices on the platforms urging: ‘Trains must run and get people to their work and homes. Space at the Tube stations is limited. Women and children and the infirm need it most. Leave it to them!’ The Daily Express reported that on the night of 28–29 September 1940 twenty unattached young men were directed by police and station staff at South Kensington to find somewhere else to shelter. But men – some of whom might have been troops on leave – needed safety and sleep too. ‘I am 29 and though I am not in the army yet I am just as much in the frontline as any soldier in this country,’ complained a twenty-nine-year-old working man. ‘It really is unreasonable to abuse chaps who are waiting to be called up.’
Grudging recognition may have been forthcoming, but since there was so little official enthusiasm for tube sheltering, improvements lagged. On 24 September it was announced that a million bunks would be fitted in London’s shelters, so that ‘whatever type of shelter is used, whether private or public, the aim is now that all the people of London shall have a definite space allocated in which they can sleep at night … when the [large basements, street and trench] shelters are fitted with bunks they will look something like American sleeping cars … Families would be allocated a specific space with [two- or three-tiered] bunks and sanitation … and encouraged to think of it as their own property and make it as comfortable as possible.’ However, ‘no bunks are to be fitted into the underground stations, although the use of the stations for night shelters has been recognised and they are now being used under police supervision’. There were reports that ‘police supervision’ included quizzing would-be tube shelterers and turning them away if they were considered to have other options – even if they were mothers with babies or small children in tow.
But on 4 October 1940, after a three-hour tour of underground stations, Admiral Evans announced that he intended to introduce a system of ticketing so that regular users could be allocated a space, which would obviate the need for hours of queuing – and also wipe out the thriving black market operated by ‘droppers’. These racketeers would ‘persuade’ a sympathetic tube worker to let them in ahead of the patient queue waiting until 4 p.m., on account of their supposed poor health, and would then ‘bag’ the best pitches by placing bits of bedding on them, and charge unfortunate shelterers the exorbitant sum of 2s.6d for them – at a time when the average wage was around £3 a week. Evans also promised that bunks would be provided, and that ‘the problem of sanitation has been solved in most cases’ – though this was disputable, since ‘sanitation’ usually meant a few overflowing chemical toilets, or people using the rail lines as a public convenience.
The first of the three-tier metal bunks were installed at Lambeth North station on 25 November 1940; by early March 1941, 7,600 had been erected in seventy-six stations. Most of them were allocated to regular shelterers, though 10 per cent were to be left free for those caught out in a raid. There were still, however, people who had to sit up all night, as they did in some public shelters. Latecomers had to cram in wherever they could – in corridors or the booking hall, or on escalators (switched off). The two platforms at Holland Park station would be almost full by 5 p.m.: by 7 p.m. the only space left was at the bottom of the emergency stairs. That same spring local councils were authorised to provide water-borne sanitation in place of the easily-knocked-over chemical toilets, and that reduced the stench a bit. At Old Street station, Shoreditch Council provided a laundry and disinfecting service for bedding free of charge to the ‘tubeites’. Washing facilities other than the occasional small handbasin were not provided: people either had to go home to spruce up before a day’s work, or use a nearby public bath (though many of those had been taken over by the Civil Defence services, often to be used as mortuaries). ‘We didn’t have bathrooms and facilities like that in our houses. We were used to going to the public baths, and when they were taken over, you just had to go home and if the water was still on, you’d just have a quick wash and off to work. But if the water was off, then you had to get it from a standpipe in a jug … It was very hard to wash your hair or anything like that. Personal hygiene rather went out of the window, but you just got used to it.’ In West Ham, Lever Bros equipped a van named ‘Lifebuoy Boys’, after one of its soaps, that toured the shelters offering people a chance to have a shower as they came out.
Local authorities, private caterers and voluntary organisations such as the WVS and the Salvation Army organised platform canteens in larger stations where shelterers could buy tea and buns, and sometimes hot soup, pies or sausage rolls, and cigarette-vending machines were installed in some stations. The LPTB equipped six tube trains to carry buns, cakes, biscuits, chocolate and urns of tea and cocoa around the network, served by staff wearing red armbands bearing the letters ‘TR’ (Tube Refreshments). Robert Boothby, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food, who had been ‘astonished’ by seeing ‘at least 700 people’ disgorging from one tube station at the end of the night to begin what could be a long trek home, commandeered coffee stalls and vans and had them positioned to sell tea, cocoa and soup to shelterers as they emerged blinking into the light of early morning.
‘It was better after that,’ concedes Irene Moseley. ‘The bunks weren’t comfortable by any means, but it was better than sleeping on the platform. Things became a bit more organised … a lady used to come round with biscuits and buns, and down one end of the platform were portable toilets. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was an improvement. And the best thing was that you were entitled to be there, and that made you feel a lot better … it gave you a sense of belonging really.’
A week after the start of the blitz, the King’s physician, Lord Horder, had been appointed to head a committee to look into shelter conditions both above and below ground. Father John Groser, the ‘turbulent priest’ of Stepney, was one of the members, as were the elegant Rose Henriques, wife of Basil Henriques, Warden of a Jewish settlement in the East End, and Alderman Charlie Key, MP for Bromley and Bow, who was soon to play a key role in the defence of London. The committee reported informally within four days and more formally at the end of September, though MPs complained that there was no full written record of its findings that they could consult. This, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, Florence Horsbrugh, intimated, was because it was highly undesirable that the enemy might find out what dreadful conditions Londoners were suffering as a result of its attacks.
Horder’s recommendations to reduce overcrowding, and various other measures, were largely followed – but slowly. They included providing a first aid post with a nurse in eighty-six shelters, the appointment of Shelter Marshals in the larger ones, prohibiting smoking in public shelters unless a separate section for smokers could be provided, the issue of masks to guard against infection, improved sanitation and lots of scrubbing with disinfectant, and using blowtorches on crevices to kill bugs – and regular inspections by Medical Officers of Health and their staffs to make sure all was as it should be. The greatest fear must have been of a diphtheria, measles or whooping cough epidemic, but fortunately this never happened; the main health hazards were impetigo, lice and scabies: most shelters were soon regularly sprayed with sodium hypochlorite or paraffin to try to deal with this, and any wooden bunks were replaced by metal ones, as wood was hospitable to lice. Hilde Marchant, in her unofficial role as ‘East End Commissioner’, was all for people being required to pass through a ‘Health Ministry hut’ at the entrance to every shelter, with disinfectant liberally used, and any unfit person being weeded out and sent to hospital, while bunks would be disinfected daily too, and bedding inspected and carted off to be fumigated if necessary.
Bedding was a touchy subject, since obviously it was likely to harbour bed bugs and worse. The Ministry of Home Security advised that it should be ‘aired daily so it keeps sweet and fresh’. The Swiss Cottager, a news-sheet produced by and for those who sheltered at that particular Bakerloo Line station, urged shelterers to ‘PLEASE stop the evil habit of shaking out blankets, mattresses etc., over the track each morning. The spreading of dust and germs over people, many of whom suffer from coughs and colds and “shelter throat” is little more than criminal. One of the gravest dangers we face is the spread of infection. Take your bedding home and do the shaking in your own back yard.’
While shelterers were being warned that ‘Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases’, and that they should always use a handkerchief, the chemist Sidney Chave, who had been drafted into the Emergency Public Health Laboratory Service, ‘set up primarily to protect the health of the civilian population under the stresses of war’ at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was trying to produce ‘a simple snuff which could be widely distributed to prevent the spread of diseases among the people who crowd into the underground … each night’. In December a mosquito prevention squad started work, since in the warm, damp atmosphere these were a constant irritation, and experiments started with disinfectant sprays incorporated into ventilation systems in case an epidemic did take hold.
Getting people to and from work was regarded as a wartime priority, and police patrolled the tube stations to ensure that no one took up residence before the official entry time of 4 p.m. There were two white lines painted on the platform: until 7.30 p.m. shelterers were obliged to stay behind the first one, eight feet back from the platform edge, so passengers could get on and off the trains. After that they could spread out to the second line, four feet from the edge of the platform, and also occupy corridors and stairways. Although most people were sympathetic to the plight of the tube troglodytes, some found it a ‘terrible hindrance … it is practically an impossibility to get anywhere quickly these days’.
Behind those white lines, a great deal went on between 4 p.m. and 11 p.m., when most adult shelterers retired for the night. Some entertainment was generated by the shelterers themselves: sedentary pleasures such as reading, writing letters, knitting, playing cards or board games, gossiping, playing the mouth organ or wind-up gramophone, having a communal singsong or dancing. Parties, quizzes and play readings were organised to pass the long air-raid hours. Bermondsey held a weekly discussion group at which the topics included travel, unemployment and ‘Should women have equal pay for equal work?’ The introduction of bunks was rather regretted by some, since it reduced the space available, but gramophones fitted with loudspeakers donated by the American Committee for Air Raid Relief to five of the largest shelters could make an evening spent in them seem more like a concert. Collections were taken for first aid equipment or towards a Christmas party, or presents for the children at Christmas.
Some shelters produced monthly news-sheets, including Holborn, Belsize Park, Goodge Street and the Oval, as well as the Swiss Cottager. There was also the Subway Companion, which was short-lived in its ambition to be distributed to all tube stations being used as shelters. ‘Greetings to our nightly companions, our temporary cave dwellers, our sleeping companions, somnambulists, snorers, chatterers and all who inhabit the Swiss Cottage Station from dusk to dawn,’ ran the Swiss Cottager’s first instalment. Each issue offered information and advice: ‘a Committee of Shelter Marshals has been formed. It hopes to act as a bridge between you and the London Passenger Transport Board, and also do what it can for each and every person using this station at night. If you have any suggestion or complaint – if you think something should be installed, provided or remedied, please let us know and we shall do our best to meet your wishes.’ ‘To guard against colds and infection … a face mask can be made with a few inches of surgical gauze, or even butter muslin. Sprinkle it with a little oil of eucalyptus and tie over the face with a strip of tape at bedtime. We understand the government intends to do something about face masks. Unfortunately, intentions are a poor medicine and instructions a useless preventive.’ Exhortations: ‘there is still far too much litter in the station at the “All Clear”. It is the prime duty of each and every one to leave the station in a clean and decent condition. Dustbins are provided in the station for refuse.’ ‘Do not bring camp beds into the station. Three camp beds occupy as much space as four blankets or a single mattress, so the available space is reduced by one fourth. YOU might be that fourth person turned away for lack of room.’ ‘Don’t expect home comforts or plenty of elbow room. Suffer a little inconvenience to make room for the next person.’ ‘Vibration due to heavy gunfire or other causes will be much less felt if you do not lie with your head against the wall.’ ‘Please do not contribute to any unauthorised collection. Members of the Committee may be recognised by their carrying a yellow armlet with the letter “C” in black.’ ‘It is your duty to report anyone spitting to a member of the Committee or a Warden.’ Jokes: ‘Our morning paper tells us that one person in every eight snores. This station seems full of eighth persons.’ (Government-issue earplugs were supplied at stations: proof against the noise of Ack-Ack guns, perhaps, but maybe not snorers.)
Aldwych station, on a branch of the Piccadilly Line, was closed at the end of September and converted into an underground shelter. It had been reckoned that it would be able to accommodate 7,500, but although this was over-optimistic, once the walls had been painted, the rails removed and the track covered over with sleepers, and two hundred bunks and lighting installed, some 2,000 people were able to shelter in the tunnel that ran from Aldwych to Holborn. The space was extended in the spring of 1941, taking over part of the tunnel where the Elgin Marbles and other treasures from the British Museum were being stored. Westminster Council donated 2,000 books from the borough’s libraries for the shelterers’ use, educational lectures were arranged to pass the time, the left-wing Unity Theatre put on the lighter sketches in its repertoire, and ENSA (the Entertainments National Service Association, or ‘Every Night Something Awful’, depending on your point of view) imported entertainers such as George Formby, as well as Shakespearean plays and a projector for films underground. A local vicar conducted a regular service at the Aldwych shelter, and a play centre was provided for small children at Elephant and Castle, with a qualified teacher to provide handicraft lessons. Such diversions spread to other shelters during that long winter underground (soon fifty-two stations had a library), and at the request of the Mayor of Bermondsey, one of the most-bombed boroughs in London, the LCC sent instructors to the shelters to teach drama, dressmaking, handicrafts and first aid, while children were provided with paper and paints, and produced ‘violent masterpieces in which Spitfires bring down Heinkels amid sheets of flame’.
But there was one thing that no one could provide: any guarantee of safety. On 7 October 1940 seven shelterers were killed and thirty-three injured at Trafalgar Square station when an explosion caused the concrete and steel casing over an escalator to collapse, bringing down an avalanche of wet earth. The next day nineteen were killed and fifty-two injured – most of them refugees from Belgium – at Bounds Green station in the northern suburbs, when a house next to the station was hit by a bomb and toppled over, causing a tunnel to collapse and bury the victims in masonry and debris.
On 14 October a heavy bomb fell on Balham High Road in south London just above a point where underground tunnels intersected. It caused a sixty-foot crater to open, and immediately a double-decker bus fell into it. Below ground a deluge of ballast and sludge, dislodged by the explosion, engulfed the platforms where six hundred people were sleeping, and gas from fractured pipes seeped in. Sixty-eight were killed, including the stationmaster, the ticket-office clerk and two porters. Many drowned as water and sewage from burst mains poured in, soon reaching a depth of three feet. The toll would have been even higher had not two LPTB staff wrenched open the floodgates. Seven million gallons of water and sewage had to be pumped out before salvage work could begin. For weeks afterwards those sheltering in nearby stations along the Northern Line were aware of a ‘ghost’ train that slipped quietly along the track around midnight clearing the debris of the Balham disaster, a tragic cargo that included shoes, bits of clothing, handbags, toys and other heart-stopping possessions.
At a minute to eight in the evening of 11 January 1941 a bomb fell on the booking hall of Bank station in the City, and a massive explosion tore through the station. It blew a massive two-hundred-foot crater in the road, which was so large that a bridge had to be built over it to get traffic flowing again. Many passers-by were killed, but in attending to them the rescue services did not realise at first that there was even greater carnage underground. The blast from the bomb ‘travelled through the various underground passages, and in particular forced its way with extreme violence down the escalator killing those sleeping at the foot of it at the time, and killing and injuring others sheltering on the platform opposite the entrances’, while some people were hurled into the path of an incoming train. A total of 111 people were killed at Bank, including fifty-three shelterers and four underground staff. An inquiry into the disaster opened on 10 February 1941. ‘It is difficult to convince people that even when they are 60 or 70 feet underground, they are not safe,’ remarked the chair. It had been alleged that inadequate sanitation was a key factor, as there were only a few chemical toilets in the station, and since these were soon overflowing, many declined to use them, and were queuing to use the conveniences in the booking hall when the bomb fell. The inquiry found that in fact no deaths and only a few minor injuries could be attributed to this. There was no first aid post on the platform, and there was no emergency lighting. There had been other recent ‘incidents’ in the area (notably on 29 December 1940), so roads were closed and access to the station was difficult, while fallen debris cut off access to the Central Line (both the Central and Northern Lines pass through Bank), meaning that it had taken doctors and stretcher parties more than an hour to reach it. While the injured waited for the medical services to arrive, a Hungarian refugee doctor, Dr Z.A. Leitner, who had himself been injured in the blast, gave more than forty morphia injections as he ministered to the injured single-handed in the gloom and choking dust. At the inquiry the hero doctor paid tribute to those he had helped. ‘I should like to make a remark. You English people cannot appreciate the discipline of your own people. I want to tell you, I have not found one hysterical, shouting patient. I think this very important, that you should not take such things as given – because it does not happen in other countries. If Hitler could have been there for five minutes with me, he would have finished the war. He would have realised that he has got to take every Englishman and twist him by the neck – otherwise he cannot win this war.’
(#ulink_4b9ffcb5-7dc2-5b96-a4eb-f0c3a336d68d) In fact the much-feared ‘trogs’ would be found in the Ramsgate caves; with the approval of Herbert Morrison they were forcibly ejected.
5 Front Line (#ulink_dfa03a63-1ae5-565d-bfb1-b4888343b12c)
The Warden. For some time before the blitz he was regarded by most of his charges with anything from cool indifference to active suspicion as a Nosey Parker.
But it’s ‘Saviour of ‘is country’
When the guns began to shoot.
Front Line 1940–1941: The Official Story of the CIVIL DEFENCE of Britain (1942)
I detect in myself a certain area of claustrophobia. I do not mind being blown up. What I dread is being buried under huge piles of masonry and hearing the water drip slowly, smelling gas creeping towards me and hearing the faint cries of colleagues condemned to a slow and ungainly death.
Harold Nicolson’s diary for 24 September 1940
‘There is no public record of the labours of the inter-departmental Committees, of the Boards of Inquiry, of the Treasury minute, of the final Cabinet minute, which settled upon the word “incident” as the designation of what takes place when a bomb falls on a street,’ wrote John Strachey. ‘Yet how important it was to select such a word … So when the time came, Whitehall had a word for it … “Incident” cannot be held to convey very graphically the consequences of a bomb. Just the contrary. The word is wonderfully colourless, dry and remote: it touches nothing which it does not minimise. And this, it may be supposed, was what recommended it conclusively to the authorities. It formed an important part of their policy of reassurance. For while anyone might be frightened of a bomb, who could be frightened of an incident?’
Strachey, the son of the owner and editor of the Spectator, was an old Etonian, highly intelligent and with a chequered political past. In February 1931 he and his fellow Labour MP Oswald Mosley had resigned from the Parliamentary Labour Party when Mosley’s expansionist plans to end unemployment were rejected, but by July, repelled by Mosley’s growing fascism, Strachey had left Mosley’s New Party. The following year his application to join the Communist Party of Great Britain was rejected, probably because he was regarded as an unreliable intellectual, but he called himself a Communist and wrote as one throughout the thirties. His extremely influential (and best-selling) book The Theory and Practice of Socialism, for Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club (of which he was one of the founders), was published in 1936. By April 1940, disillusioned by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Strachey broke with the CP, and on the eve of the blitz he signed up as an ARP warden, an experience he would lightly fictionalise in his book Post D, published while the blitz was still raging. It is a detached, controlled, probing account, infused with what W.H. Auden called ‘the surgeon’s view of pain’, and the New Statesman thought it so good that it ‘killed anything else in range’. In his ARP role Strachey attended many ‘incidents’. Ford, his alter ego in the novel, had got into ‘this ARP business’ by doing a few night-time watches at the suggestion of his formidable Chelsea landlady, herself an ARP warden.
At first he took part in watches and patrols on the next night and on subsequent nights. At first his equipment consisted in a borrowed tin hat – the one real necessity. But gradually other pieces of equipment came his way: a badge, an armlet; a borrowed torch. At a certain point in this development he was duly enrolled. Later it was suggested that he should become a fulltime paid warden (wages £3.5s a week for men, £2 for women). This involved being on duty every night but one a week, and being available for duty in the event of a raid (‘on call for sirens’) all day. At that period raiding was continuous every night, and there were usually three or more raids each day. Hence full-time wardens could not do anything else. As Ford had several other activities which he was loth [sic] to abandon, he decided to become an unpaid warden, on duty four nights out of five, but not on duty during the day. After enrolment he was duly provided with uniform and full equipment. In his borough, this consisted of a suit of overalls, a webbing belt carrying on it a message pad and a couple of bandages for first aid purposes; a torch hung round his neck by a strap; a steel helmet; a civilian duty gas mask.
He had taken this decision largely because
the main trouble of being a pure civilian during a prolonged air bombardment is that as such one’s only duty is to seek and to maintain one’s own and one’s companions’ safety. And this is inevitably demoralising. The instant that an individual is given even the simplest objective function, and becomes a member of an organised (and uniformed, this is notoriously important) group, the whole burden of deciding whether or not on any particular occasion to seek his or her safety is automatically removed. While one is functionless one is continually irritated by such questions as ‘Isn’t it really very silly to stay upstairs (or to go out) in this degree of Blitz?’ The instant the individual has become a warden, ambulance driver, member of the auxiliary fire service, rescue and demolition squads or stretcher bearer, this question is, nine times out of ten, settled for him or her … the enrolment of tens of thousands of men and women in the various Civil Defence Services would have been fully justified for psychological reasons alone, even if, as was by no means the case, their functions had been objectively useless.
The motivation of Barbara Nixon, who was married to the distinguished Communist Cambridge economist Maurice Dobb, was much the same when in May 1940 she became a voluntary (part-time) warden. ‘I wanted an active job; I particularly wanted to avoid being in the position of many women in the First World War – of urging other people to do the work they wouldn’t think of doing themselves. At that time the ATS seemed to be mainly a matter of cooking and cleaning, for neither of which was I either competent or inclined; I found that the AFS entailed mainly switch-room work [for women], and First Aid Posts seemed to me to be too reminiscent of Job waiting patiently for troubles to be brought to him.’
The government had made its first appeal for ARP wardens in January 1937. In some places fully-worked-out Civil Defence schemes, including the recruitment of ARP wardens, were put in place within months; in others virtually nothing happened, either through inefficiency, a distaste for ‘warmongering’, or because there was no clarification about who would foot the bill. Herbert Morrison himself had been the spokesman for the Local Authorities Association in demanding that the government should pay 90 per cent, if not the whole cost, of these measures. On 1 January 1938 the ARP Act came into force, compelling local authorities to set up ARP schemes including recruiting wardens and expanding their fire services by forming and equipping the AFS. The Act committed the government to contribute between 60 and 75 per cent of the money to pay for these services.
But recruitment was sluggish: a radio appeal for a million men and women ARP volunteers in March 1938 largely fell on deaf ears. The Munich crisis in September changed everything: suddenly war seemed a threatening reality, and by the following March over a million people had volunteered. This still fell short of what was needed, and training in things such as gas detection and treatment, blackout regulation enforcement, first aid and various other air-raid practices was slow to be provided, as was equipment.
The wardens’ service attracted most volunteers, but during the phoney war there had been an alarming falling away of personnel (which was not helped by the government’s ban on recruitment) as disheartened citizens either transferred to the Local Defence Volunteers after it was set up in May 1940, or drifted away, wondering what their wartime role actually was, other than often being roundly abused and called a ‘little ‘itler’ when they tried to reinforce blackout regulations. The blitz would decisively show them.
The ARP was a locally embedded service: it was essential that wardens knew their area well, so that when there was a raid they knew how many people lived in a particular house, whether any had been evacuated or might be away, were infirm or had small children, whether there was an Anderson shelter in the garden, or if the occupants regularly used a public shelter. All this detailed knowledge of local residents and their habits would be invaluable in ascertaining where people were likely to be when a bomb fell, so that ambulance services could be directed efficiently and rescue parties shown where there might be survivors buried in the rubble.
Districts varied in the ratio of wardens they could muster, but in general in large towns and cities the norm was ten wardens’ posts to the square mile. The posts might be located in a shop, a hall or a basement, or even sometimes in a warden’s front room. There would be a Post Warden, and usually a deputy, and the area would be divided into sectors, each covering a few streets with around five hundred residents. There would be between three and six wardens for each sector, reporting to a Senior Warden. Some posts might have sub-posts too. In the country the posts would have to cover a much larger area, maybe encompassing several villages, and the wardens would have to assume more all-round responsibilities and competencies as the support services would take longer to arrive.
In Fulham, in south-west London, then a largely working-class district, some two hundred volunteers had enrolled by April 1939. The majority of them were middle-aged, and one in six was a woman: single women were more likely to join, since they generally had more time on their hands than married women with homes to run. In Fulham the volunteers came from a wide range of occupations, from the manual to the professional to the ‘artistic’, including a number of retired (mainly middle-class) men. This was not surprising, since the National Service handbook issued in January 1939 (that is, before the call for LDV – Home Guard – volunteers) had made it clear that ARP was the only job in Civil Defence open to older men. Some of the recruits were too old to fight, others had been turned down on medical grounds or were in reserved occupations, while others were waiting to be called up. When asked why they had enrolled, most replied in terms of ‘wanting to do my bit’, though some had come under pressure from employers and friends, and one twenty-six-year-old middle-class woman supposed that she ‘must have been drunk. It was New Year after all.’ Almost all would come to feel disillusionment with poor organisation, lack of relevant training, hanging around with nothing much to do and not having a ‘clue what to do in case of an emergency’.
Frederick Bodley and his wife Kath had enrolled as ARP wardens at Stoneleigh in Surrey within a fortnight of the outbreak of war in September 1939, and persuaded their neighbour Joan to do so too. Around 90 per cent of ARP wardens were part-timers who would come on duty at the end of a working day. The Bodleys’ first post had been in a private house, but it was soon moved to a smallish concrete building, which was ‘very comfortable for we have a radio, shove ha’penny board, playing cards and an electric kettle. The heating is supplied by two electric radiators.’ There was also a foot-wide bench that served as a bed, though this was soon ‘considerably widened and made very comfortable with the addition of a horse hair seat’, while layers of newspaper were spread over another couple of benches so that games of dominoes could be played.
The post to which Barbara Nixon was first attached was in the basement of an old house. It was equipped with a camp bed and chairs, tea-making facilities and a dartboard to help wardens while away the time between patrolling the streets and responding to an alert. She was issued with a tin hat, a whistle and a respirator, and taken on a tour of the seventeen public shelters in the area. Her fellow wardens were ‘railway workers, post-office sorters, lawyers, newspaper men, garage hands, to a few of no definable profession’. When in December 1940 she decided to become a full-time warden (after overcoming considerable Town Hall resistance to the appointment of married women), paid ‘the magnificent sum of £2 5s a week’, Nixon was transferred to a post in the north of Finsbury, where the raids had been heavier. ‘Nothing was left. The heart of the largest city in the world was a wilderness. Here and there desultory trails of smoke curled up; the pigeons had deserted it, no gulls circled over it, the only inhabitants were occasional scurrying rats … The silence was almost tangible – literally a dead silence in which there was no life. It was difficult to believe that this was London.’ Her companions were ‘the toughest set of wardens in the borough’. It was ‘unwise’ to ask what people had done before the war, because ‘owing to the fact that race tracks, boxing rings and similar chancy means of livelihood closed down at the outbreak of war, there was a considerable percentage of bookies’ touts and even more parasitic professions in the CD [Civil Defence] services, together with a collection of workers in light industry, “intellectuals”, opera singers, street traders, dog fanciers etc. In the early days the Control Rooms were crowded with chorus girls. There was also an ex-burglar, a trade unionist, and two men who hoped that joining the ARP would defer their call-up papers; the post warden was an ex-electrician.’ And all, except Nixon, ‘had been to the local school, though at different times, and they knew the family history of nearly everybody in the neighbourhood’; this urban community was as tight-knit as any Cotswold village.
From October 1939 until September 1940 the Bodleys received training in anti-gas procedures, learned how to use a stirrup pump to put out incendiary bombs, took part in ‘smoke drills’ in which they learned how to enter a burning building (on their stomachs, with their mouths as near the floor as possible), fire drill and putting out an incendiary bomb that was already blazing, and had mock exercises to teach them how to deal with an ‘incident’, complete with ‘bodies’ with labels attached detailing their imaginary injuries. They listened to a series of lectures on the correct way to load a stretcher, make a splint, bandage limbs, disinfect a gas mask and encourage the public to use theirs.
Nixon received some rudimentary instruction too, though it was on the job that her real training began. The Home Office recognised that ‘training can never be finished’, and she became aware of ‘the multitudinous things a warden needed to know, from the names of the residents in each house, and which shelter they used, hydrants, cul-de-sacs, danger points in the area, to the whereabouts of the old and the infirm who would need help in getting to the shelter, telephone numbers and the addresses of rest centres etc.’.
Full-time wardens had one day off a week, and part-time wardens were expected to turn up three nights a week; but in the blitz most put in many more nights. When the ‘yellow alert’ – bombers within twenty-two minutes’ flying time – was received in the wardens’ post, they would stop their game of cards or darts, or wake up from a snooze, don a tin hat and set off with a fellow warden to patrol their sector.
When the ‘red alert’ was received – indicating that planes were twelve minutes’ flying time away – the public sirens – the ‘Wailing Winnies’ (or Willies) or ‘Moaning Minnies’ – would sound, and people would start hurrying to the shelters, encouraged by the wardens who would be ‘ticking off the names of the residents in their area as they arrived, then back they went to hurry and chivvy the laggards and see that those who chose to stay in their houses were all right … They carried children, old people, bundles of blankets, and the odd personal possessions which some eccentrics insisted on taking with them to the shelters.’
The ARP wardens’ role was partly to look out for bombs falling, incendiaries alight or other incidents, acting as the ‘eyes and ears of the Control Centre in the field’ as the Ministry of Home Security’s account of the blitz put it, and partly to be ‘the chartered “good neighbour” of the blitz’, giving reassurance that there was someone out there in the dark streets, lit suddenly with blinding flashes of whiteish-green incandescent light as chandeliers of incendiaries fell, made violent by the drone of the bombers. (‘Where are you? Where are you?’ the novelist Graham Greene imagined them saying), the ‘sickly familiar swish of bombs’ falling with a thud, the crash of falling shrapnel and masonry, the deafening rat-tat-tat of the AA guns which ‘rose and fell in intensity’, each sounding subtly different. John Strachey called one near his Chelsea post the ‘tennis racket’ for the ‘staccato, yet plangent, wang, wang, wang; not unlike a sharp exchange of volleying at the net’ it made. For the journalist M.E.A. (‘Mea’) Allan, some of the AA guns on Hampstead Heath ‘just crashed, others sounded as if 50 people in the upstairs flat were playing tig around a billiard table, others as if 50 equally noisy children had collected tin trays and were banging them with hammers’.
Eight out of every ten heavy bombs dropped by German planes on Britain during the Second World War were high-explosive (HE) bombs – Sprengbombe-Cylindrisch (SC) general-purpose bombs – though tens of thousands of incendiary bombs fell during the blitz. The bombs were of various weights, ranging from 112 pounds (the bomb most generally dropped during the blitz, though by the beginning of 1941 heavier bombs were being used) to the 2,400-pound ‘Hermanns’ (named after the portly Göring, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe), the 4,000-pound ‘Satan’ (which could produce a crater large enough to accommodate two double-decker buses), and the largest bomb ever dropped on Britain, the 5,500-pound ‘Max’ (both names self-explanatory). The bomb’s thin metal casing was filled with amatol (TNT, ammonium nitrate and sometimes aluminium powder), and there was an electrical fuse in its side to detonate and ignite the explosive material, forming a ball of expanding, blazing gas while sharp shards of metal casing flew out with deadly penetrative power.
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