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‘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’
