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During June and
July and August 1940 the bombs had been creeping closer to London. In
mid-August, on a sunny Thursday evening, there was a sharp attack on
Croydon, where sixty-two people were killed in less than half an hour, and
at last, on Saturday 7th September, a year after everyone had expected it,
came the turn of the capital itself. It was, one warden later remembered,
‘one of those beautiful early autumn days which feel like spring and can
make even London streets seem fresh and gay. There was hardly a wisp of
cloud in the pale blue sky.’ When the sirens sounded that afternoon they
marked, though no one then realised it, the start of the blitz. London was
to know barely a single peaceful night until the All Clear on the morning
of Sunday 11th May 1941 signalled the end of the last, and worst, major
raid of the war. During the same period, and after it, most of the
country’s major ports and industrial cities were to undergo even more
concentrated attacks, though their ordeal usually lasted for only two or
three nights at a time.
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Early on Sunday
morning, while all over the country the first Home Guards were going
wearily home after the great invasion scare, the people of East London
emerged from their shelters to find the streets thick with broken glass,
and, in thousands of cases, a smoking heap of rubble where their home had
stood. Thousands more discovered a shattered shell, with smashed windows,
doors sagging from their frames, tiles stripped from the roof and
everywhere soot, plaster and broken glass. Such experiences were to be the
lot of millions of families, in London and other cities, during the next
few months.
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But one of the
first results of the blitz was a widespread determination among those who
worked in London not to let ‘that man’ interfere with their daily
routine. On the Saturday night 410 people had been killed and 1,600
seriously injured and on Sunday 8th September the bombers came again,
in a raid which put out of action every railway line into London from the
south. Yet nearly everyone got to work somehow…. Temporary offices were
set up in cafes and shops and a popular subject for discussion was whether
it was worse sorting thousands of blast-scattered index cards back into
order, or having the job of shaking out the glass and dust from between
the pages of bombed files.
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Keeping
going
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That winter
absenteeism in most firms was actually less than normal, for one’s job
was something to cling to in an uncertain world. Post Offices were still
open, though often with candles stuck in bottles on the counter, and no
windows. In bombed streets postmen could be seen conscientiously
attempting to deliver the mail at one heap of ruins after another and
telegraph boys provided one of the strange new sights of the blitz,
carrying notices ‘Telegrams accepted’ and turning round to provide a
‘back’ against which the customer could write his message… The
spirit of 1940 is illustrated by the ‘Special Instructions’ on a
delivery note for a parcel of china and
glass
ordered by one customer in West London: ‘Ignore time-bomb, leave in hall
if out.’
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Before long
most large stores, and many other firms, were closing at 4 p.m., for
everyone’s life was becoming geared to the nightly siren. At first
nearly everyone sought shelter after dark, but by early November an
official census showed that only 40 per cent of the population slept in a
shelter, 9 per cent using a public shelter, 4 per cent the tubes, and 27
per cent a domestic shelter. The public outcry about conditions in the
largest public shelters, often without sanitation or even lighting, and
the appalling inadequacy of the over-loaded and ill-equipped rest centres
for the bombed-out led to immediate improvements, but cost Sir John
Anderson his job. He became, in Churchill’s phrase, ‘the Home Front
prime minister’, as Lord President of the Council. His successor as Home
Secretary, Herbert Morrison, the son of a Lambeth policeman, was a far
more accomplished Parliamentarian than Anderson and far better able to
understand what life under bombing really meant to the poor. He
transformed the rest-centres and shelters and restored confidence in the
government’s Civil Defence policy within a few weeks.
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Once the night
raids began, the public brushed aside the government ban on using the
Underground to shelter, simply buying a 1½d. ticket to gain admission to
the platforms and refusing to come up. By the 2?th September 177,000 men,
women and children were using the tubes every night, and though they were
at least dry and warm, at first even the ordinary station lavatories were
closed. ‘The result was’, one man who used Swiss Cottage station
remembers, ‘that every time anyone wanted "to spend a penny"
it was necessary to board a train and travel to the next stop Finchley
Road.’ Before long, however, temporary bucket lavatories were erected in
the stations and 22,000 bunks had been installed on the platforms, usually
in three tiers, the lowest one being usable as a seat during the evening.
But many people still had to sleep on the ground and anyone arriving on a
late train had to step over recumbent bodies to reach the exit. The L.C.C.
and welfare organisations were soon providing drinking water, lending
libraries and canteens and the tube became so popular that London
Transport issued an appeal urging every male shelterer ‘to be a man and
leave’ the available space ‘to women, children and the infirm’,
though it produced little response.
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Sheltering
– the Underground
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That winter
thousands of families, particularly in the East End, enjoyed the fullest
social life of their lives, with sing-songs, concert parties, informal
dances and even darts competitions between one shelter and the next. The
usual BBC ‘round the Empire’ feature was this year called Christmas
under Fire and described shelters in which paper chains hung from the bare
brick walls, wardens wore paper hats instead of steel helmets and the
faithful
W.V.S.
distributed mince-pies in place of cheese rolls.
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But most people
recall life in a public shelter with a shudder and especially the misery
of lying awake listening to other people’s snoring, which became a
serious national problem, never solved. If one could not lie down it was
almost impossible to sleep in any case. A Liverpool woman endured
‘sitting on a hard form in an unlighted, unheated street shelter. . .
with my baby on my knee...cramped, cold and terribly frightened’. She
told nursery stories to the children, but would stop suddenly and say,
‘Oh no, not that story’ when she reached the phrase, ‘I’ll huff
and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down’. One Ipswich Civil
Servant remembers a woman who talked and knitted all night. ‘We tried
not answering or just grunting but it was no use. She was very hurt one
night when one overwrought soul shouted, "Can’t you shut up, and
stop clicking those damn needles as well."’
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Public
shelters
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Domestic
shelters at least offered a little privacy, but many people rapidly found
that one could pay too high a price for safety. A Northolt woman remembers
that one night in a shelter, with her neighbours, two babies, a dog and a
candle, was enough for her. An Ipswich household decided, after sitting up
half the night in the cellar, to stay in bed, as ‘if we were going to be
blown up, we might as well be blown up in comfort’. A York woman would
not use her Anderson because, she believed, ‘there was more harm done by
waking children up out of their sleep and taking them out into the bitter
cold giving them a chill than there was from the bombs’. Many adults
felt the same.
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Anderson
shelters
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Yet it was
possible, having once decided to shelter, to make oneself reasonably
comfortable. A Highbury woman had a brick shelter in her garden, with
electric light, a ‘wicker chair, cushions, rugs, an oil stove in the
centre and, of course, food and tea. A gate in the fence to the next door
garden admitted neighbours who wanted to share with us’, she remembers,
and ‘at 11 p.m., if all were quiet we had tea from the kettle boiling on
the stove and usually biscuits, and then settled down and hoped for quiet
the rest of the night’….
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A government
leaflet offered advice on how to make oneself comfortable in the shelter.
‘A home-made heater can be made with two large
flower pots and a candle’, it suggested.
‘A Balaclava helmet, such as every soldier knows, will keep draughts off
your head. Before you leave the house turn off all gas taps… switch off
electricity at the main, leave buckets of water and earth on the front
doorstep, put your stirrup pump...where it can easily be seen, draw back
all your curtains and raise blinds...Dress yourself and your children
warmly.’ This routine now became familiar in millions of homes all over
the country. A Lanarkshire woman ‘would put out on a table a basket with
a bottle of water, bottle of milk, biscuits, warm clothing for the
children and ourselves... My husband of course carried his pocket book
with our money, etc. Each night, too, he filled the bath with water in
case of fire. We had a box of sand in the garden, so we could deal with
incendiary bombs.’ One Surrey woman put a large notice on the back door,
‘Don’t forget, Handbag, Identity Card, Gas Mask, Ration Book’. In
this family, as in many others, ‘We dressed rather than undressed to go
to bed.’
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The growing
reluctance of many people to go out of doors led the new Home Secretary to
look again at the need for an indoor shelter…
The result was the Morrison shelter, which resembled a large steel
table, six feet six inches long, four feet wide and two feet nine inches
high, with a steel mattress across the bottom and wire mesh at the sides.
During the day it could be used as a table and at night it could, with a
slight squeeze, accommodate two adults and two small children, lying down.
The first were delivered in March 1941 and by the end of the war about
1,100,000 were in use, including a few two-tier models for larger
families. Morrisons were supplied free to people earning up to £350 a
year and were on sale at about £7 to people earning more. Though not as
strong as the Anderson, the Morrison proved the most successful shelter of
the war, particularly during the ‘hit and run’ and flying-bomb raids
when a family had only a few seconds to get under cover. It was also a
good deal easier to erect than an Anderson, and while most people remember
their nights in the Anderson with horror, memories of the Morrison shelter
are usually good-humoured. A Colchester woman, remembers it provided a lot
of laughs’, like the night ‘a rather stout elderly lady was trying to
crawl out of it and became stuck half in, and half out; she looked like a
hippopotamus!’ A Sussex child played happily in the Morrison in the
kitchen at being a lion tamer in a cage, the family cat playing the part
of the lion. A Wimbledon woman also welcomed the cat into hers, and he
found it so comfortable that ‘his purr sounded like a flying bomb
sometimes’. A Teddington boy found the top ‘particularly good for
re-fighting sea and land battles with toy ships and soldiers’, and a
Staines girl, trained by her father on the top of the Morrison shelter,
went on to become table-tennis champion of West Middlesex…
Most people would echo the verdict of a woman who after using a
brick shelter in Brixton and an Anderson at New Cross, finally settled for
her own Morrison at Catford, and found it the best of them all.
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Morrison
shelters
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For those who
had no Morrison the most popular place was under the stairs, which often
survived even if the roof fell in, and the pantry was another popular
choice. The lonely pantry evenings of a Ryde woman, whose husband was
absent on Civil Defence duty, were cheered by the discovery of several
long-forgotten bottles of blackberry wine. This once relatively innocuous
brew had now turned into ‘a lovely, heart-warming, brandy-type drink. A
glass of that and let those damned Germans cornel’
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Other
places to shelter
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Strong,
old-fashioned tables also returned, like cellars, to popularity in 1940. A
government leaflet, Shelter at Home, pointed out that ‘people
have often been rescued from demolished houses because they had taken
shelter under an ordinary table... strong enough to bear the weight of the
falling bedroom floor’. I frequently worked beneath the solid oak tables
in the school library during ‘imminent danger periods’ and,
particularly before the arrival of the Morrison, families became
accomplished at squeezing beneath the dining table during interrupted
meals. Beds were also useful as shelters and in hospitals patients were
regularly settled on the floor beneath theirs. One Cambridgeshire family,
having brought the beds downstairs, then raised them on blocks to make it
easier to get underneath them suddenly.
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Some people had
to go out however heavy the raid. ‘Being the only doctor available for
the hospital’, a Morpeth, Northumberland, medical man remembers, 1 had
to leap out of bed every time the alarm went. I got so proficient that I
was up, dressed and in my car before the last diminuendo faded out. When
it got to dressing three times a night I went up at the first siren and
got into bed in one of the side wards.’ A Southampton doctor actually
welcomed night calls, since being out with a job to do was, he found,
better than lying quaking in bed. Not everyone was as courageous. A
Portsmouth woman remembers that, as she arrived with her mother at their
front door one night during a heavy
raid, ‘a short, wide, little figure burst up the
front path, pushed between Mother and me and demanded, "Quick, quick!
Where do you go? Which door? Where?" ‘ When her mother asked,
‘Haven’t you got the wrong house?’, she received the unexpected
answer, ‘I don’t care a b_____ whose house it is! Where’s the
bloody shelter?’
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Many people had
some private ritual which they persuaded themselves would keep them safe.
One North London woman warden ‘used to mutter "Oh my God!" as
a sort of talisman’ as she ran half a mile to her Post. She mentioned
this to ‘a friend who had a mile to go to her Report Centre and she
said, in all seriousness, "I say
The-Lord-is-my-Shepherd-I-shall-not-want,
the-Lord-is-my-Shepherd-I-shall-not-want"’…. Many people admit to praying, as they heard the bombers
passing over, ‘God don’t let them stop here!’. A vicar, who pointed
out to one of his parishioners, ‘It’s a bit rough on the other people
if your prayer is granted’, was put firmly in his place. ‘I can’t
help that,’ she told him, ‘they must say their prayers and push it off
further.’
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Old people on
the whole stood up surprisingly well to life in bombed cities. A
Sanderstead woman remembers the eighty-four-year-old neighbour, who had
tottered across the garden to share their shelter, saying perkily to her
husband, ‘Well, you never thought you would have me as a bed-mate!’ A
Haslemere woman remembers the seventy-seven-year old neighbour who
grumbled that because of the raids he could make few plans for the future.
A woman from Old Coulsdon, Surrey, was amused by her elderly aunt’s
precaution of always wearing her underclothes while bathing because she
feared ‘she might have to be rescued by someone before she finished’.
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Old
people
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Most children
were also remarkably unaffected by raids. One Scots-woman recalls that
after the heavy blitz on Clydebank ‘my son was thrilled to find bits of
shrapnel in the garden and went round picking them up’. A Worcester
Park, Surrey, woman found that when a stick of bombs fell on the nearby
park, shattering their windows, her children’s only reaction was to ask
if they could go and see if the swings were still all right. A woman
living near Croydon remembers ‘distinctly counting the explosions and
making a rhyme, "One two, button my shoe", of them to amuse
Margaret [her fifteen-month-old daughter] who was watching me intently and
would have been terror-stricken if I had shown the slightest sign of fear,
but my voice was quivering’…. Yet while her children were out of the
house no mother could feel secure…. One London woman recalls how a local
school was hit one dinnertime and it was ‘my painful duty to help by
picking up any article I saw unearthed as the men dug. I held aloft a
small pink purse. No words were needed. The mother of the child to whom it
belonged held out her hand, her face so anguished it was frightful to
behold. She took it and was led wordlessly away.’
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Children
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This dead child
was one of 60,595 civilians killed by enemy action in Great Britain during
the war. 86,182 were seriously injured and another 150,833 slightly
injured. London, during the four months from 7th September to the end of
1940, accounted for the largest single group of these casualties: 13,339
dead, 17,937 seriously injured. Before the war it had been expected that
each night’s bombing would produce 3,000 killed and 12,000 wounded. The
worst night’s toll in London, on 10th/ 11th May 1941, was in fact 1,436
killed and 1,792 injured but over the blitz as a whole the pre-war
estimate of fatal casualties per ton of bombs proved fourteen times too
high. The youngest person killed was a baby eleven hours old; the oldest,
a Chelsea Pensioner aged one hundred. 537 of the dead were never
identified….
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Casualties
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Although the
casualties were mercifully far fewer than expected, the damage to property
was far greater. From September 1940 to May 1941 in London alone 1,150,000
houses were damaged and at least one person in six made homeless for a day
or more, excluding those displaced by unexploded bombs. In Hull – a
perpetual target, its sufferings concealed at the time under the
description ‘a North East Coast town’ – only 6,000 out of 93,000
houses escaped some destruction; in Plymouth, nearly one house in four was
put out of action and many more made temporarily unusable. Over the
country as a whole, out of 13,000,000 houses in 1939, 200,000 were totally
destroyed, and about 3,750,000 damaged, many of them several times. What
bombs had left the looters often got. One A.F.S. man wrote bluntly:
‘Everybody loots... The A.R.P. Wardens, Demolition Men...the Police.’
A Liverpool school-girl, bombed out for the second time, found that her
roller skates had been stolen. A bombed-out Birmingham family, returning
for linen, cutlery and a few pieces of unbroken china, found most of it
had vanished. A Coventry woman resisted tears when bombed out until she
discovered that her small son’s toys had been looted. ‘I could hate
the Germans, but I did not want to hate my own countrymen’.
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Damage
to property
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Any heavy raid
meant for the housewives of the affected city a massive clearing-up
operation. A Plymouth woman remembers ‘returning to a mere shell of a
house.... No roof. No window panes. The door blasted open.... I’d have
given my kingdom for a cuppa, but there was no electricity and no gas. I
wasn’t to know then that we would be without gas for almost six
months.’ Electricity, however, was usually restored in a few hours and
piped water in three or four days. In the bombed cities millions of women
adjusted themselves to the living conditions of their grandmothers’ day,
fetching water by the bucketful from standpipes and army lorries, doing
their daily cooking over open fires, often made of wood from bombed
houses, and taking the Sunday joint to be cooked in the baker’s oven, if
any local bakery survived unbombed. After their first experience of living
without water, sensible housewives followed the official advice always to
keep filled bottles in the house. One Bristol woman remembers making tea
from the contents other hot water bottle. Another Bristol housewife still
feels proud of her ability, acquired in 1940, to wash and rinse her
husband’s shirt in a single quart. For many housewives the feel of those
after-the-raid mornings is instantly brought back by the taste of burned
food, for after an explosion soot from the chimney would settle
insidiously on food and crockery. Sanitation was an even greater problem.
People travelled long distances to find a usable
lavatory or used buckets and buried the contents
where they could; one conscientious East End doctor could be seen walking
a mile every day, carrying a trowel, in search of a really hygienic and
private spot.
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Aftermath
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Although it was
high explosive, through blast, splinters or falling masonry which caused
almost all the casualties in air raids, and interrupted public services,
it was fire which did most of the damage, but the government were
remarkably slow in taking effective measures either to prevent fire or to
fight it. In raid after raid pumps sent to help some burning city had to
stand idle as the connections would not fit the local hydrants, but it was
not until August 1941, on Herbert Morrison’s insistence, that the
existing 1,666 fire authorities in England and Wales were merged into the
National Fire Service. At the same time energetic steps were at last taken
to provide a proper emergency water supply, with six-inch steel mains
running along the gutters – they presented a new hazard in the blackout
– and ‘E.W.S’ – for ‘Emergency Water Supply’ – tanks
appearing everywhere, on open spaces, on the roadsides, and in the
basements of bombed buildings. Some resorts objected to static water
tanks, as they were commonly known, as ‘unsightly’, but the sun
sparkling on the surface often lent a new charm to the drab urban scene.
The tanks also provided mothers with a new worry, for children were for
ever floating home-made rafts of bomb-damaged timber on them, leading to
at least one death from drowning every month.
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Even more
important, immediately after the City had been devastated by fire on the
night of 29th December 1940, largely because whole office blocks had been
left locked and unattended, the government launched the Fire Guard scheme,
which made it compulsory in ‘prescribed’ areas, considered liable to
attack, to have someone on duty in every building at all times, ready to
extinguish any incendiaries that fell on it, or to summon help if the fire
grew out of control. Since not all firms had sufficient staff to protect
them properly, fire-watching, either in one’s own street or wherever
else one was directed to serve, was made compulsory in any place
considered to be at risk, which eventually included most urban areas.
Under the first scheme, in January 1941, men aged sixteen to sixty were
made liable to serve; in August 1942 the liability was extended to women
aged from twenty to forty-five, and in September 1943 to men up to
sixty-three. Men aged up to seventy and women from eighteen to sixty were
encouraged to add to the numbers available by volunteering and in practice
no one under eighteen was forced to serve. These measures produced in
theory an army of six million fire-watchers, which only began to be stood
down, area by area, from 13th September 1944; the last fire-watchers being
disbanded on 2nd May 1945.
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Fire
Guard scheme
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On business
premises the maximum anyone could be required to fire-watch was
forty-eight hours a month, usually served a whole night at a time. In
residential areas, people usually worked a rota, under which each person
on duty in a street did two hours on duty and then knocked up the next
watcher…. A then nineteen-year-old Somerset girl admits mildly, ‘I
never relished the two hours’ fire-watching when they fell from 2 a.m.
to 4 a.m.’ – she had to be up at 4.30 a.m. for the 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.
early shift at her war factory. It was not surprising that, as the years
wore on, people grew more and more reluctant to turn out at night.…
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The uniform of
the Fire Guard, the name which replaced the former ‘Street Fire Party’
in August 1941, was an armlet and a steel helmet, shaped, for some unknown
reason, like a high-crowned pudding basin, and without a chin strap, so it
readily fell off. To one Cambridge Fire Guard it recalled ‘a Victorian
sun-bonnet’; others made cruder comparisons. The Fire Guard’s weapon
was the stirrup pump, an admirably simple piece of equipment, consisting
of a small upright pump which went into a bucket, a metal bracket with a
foot rest or ‘stirrup’, and a long hose with a nozzle readily
converted from ‘jet’ to ‘spray’. By 1943 there was at least one in
every road, provided free or by a whip-round among
the neighbours, and signs reading ‘Stirrup Pump
Here’, Tire Guard Assembly Point’ or ‘Water’ could be seen on
gateposts everywhere. The new arrangements soon proved their value. In the
Baedeker raid on Canterbury when 6,000 incendiaries were dropped, the
fire-watchers saved the cathedral and in the Little Blitz on London in
1944 75 per cent of the fires started were put out without help from the
N.F.S. The truth was that, if
tackled at once, incendiary bombs – unless of the rare, explosive kind
– were not dangerous.
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Usually they
fell in a cluster, often from ‘Molotov breadbaskets’, which split open
in the air, scattering a hundred or more bombs over a single street.
Commander Firebrace described the noise of incendiaries hitting the ground
as ‘a curious plop-plopping sound’. Others compared them to leaves
drifting along a road, and to one Liverpool housewife they resembled
‘peas being dropped on a dish’. This noise was enough in most roads to
bring an eager crowd out of their houses ready to do battle with them. In
the West End women in evening dresses on their way to a dance were seen
contemptuously kicking spluttering bombs into the gutter. In Chelsea one
group of indignant elderly people and children complained to the wardens
because the residents of another road had moved in and put out ‘their’
bombs. The wife of an R.A.F. pilot remembers seeing little boys in Bristol
running about with dustbin lids "bagging incendiaries"’. Also
in Bristol one twelve-year-old girl modestly announced on arrival at a New
Year’s Eve party that she had put out nine fire bombs on the way…. In
Lambeth, when incendiaries fell opposite a pub, the landlord’s wife
carried out a bucket of ‘swipes’ – beer-spillings – mistaking them
for water, and plunged in her stirrup pump and doused the bomb in beer.
One man, covered in beer foam, inevitably joked, ‘What a glorious
death.’….
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Incendiaries
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