The Blitz: The British Under Attack

Grudging recognition may have been forthcoming, but since there was so little official enthusiasm for tube sheltering, improvements lagged. On 24 September it was announced that a million bunks would be fitted in London’s shelters, so that ‘whatever type of shelter is used, whether private or public, the aim is now that all the people of London shall have a definite space allocated in which they can sleep at night … when the [large basements, street and trench] shelters are fitted with bunks they will look something like American sleeping cars … Families would be allocated a specific space with [two- or three-tiered] bunks and sanitation … and encouraged to think of it as their own property and make it as comfortable as possible.’ However, ‘no bunks are to be fitted into the underground stations, although the use of the stations for night shelters has been recognised and they are now being used under police supervision’. There were reports that ‘police supervision’ included quizzing would-be tube shelterers and turning them away if they were considered to have other options – even if they were mothers with babies or small children in tow.

But on 4 October 1940, after a three-hour tour of underground stations, Admiral Evans announced that he intended to introduce a system of ticketing so that regular users could be allocated a space, which would obviate the need for hours of queuing – and also wipe out the thriving black market operated by ‘droppers’. These racketeers would ‘persuade’ a sympathetic tube worker to let them in ahead of the patient queue waiting until 4 p.m., on account of their supposed poor health, and would then ‘bag’ the best pitches by placing bits of bedding on them, and charge unfortunate shelterers the exorbitant sum of 2s.6d for them – at a time when the average wage was around £3 a week. Evans also promised that bunks would be provided, and that ‘the problem of sanitation has been solved in most cases’ – though this was disputable, since ‘sanitation’ usually meant a few overflowing chemical toilets, or people using the rail lines as a public convenience.

The first of the three-tier metal bunks were installed at Lambeth North station on 25 November 1940; by early March 1941, 7,600 had been erected in seventy-six stations. Most of them were allocated to regular shelterers, though 10 per cent were to be left free for those caught out in a raid. There were still, however, people who had to sit up all night, as they did in some public shelters. Latecomers had to cram in wherever they could – in corridors or the booking hall, or on escalators (switched off). The two platforms at Holland Park station would be almost full by 5 p.m.: by 7 p.m. the only space left was at the bottom of the emergency stairs. That same spring local councils were authorised to provide water-borne sanitation in place of the easily-knocked-over chemical toilets, and that reduced the stench a bit. At Old Street station, Shoreditch Council provided a laundry and disinfecting service for bedding free of charge to the ‘tubeites’. Washing facilities other than the occasional small handbasin were not provided: people either had to go home to spruce up before a day’s work, or use a nearby public bath (though many of those had been taken over by the Civil Defence services, often to be used as mortuaries). ‘We didn’t have bathrooms and facilities like that in our houses. We were used to going to the public baths, and when they were taken over, you just had to go home and if the water was still on, you’d just have a quick wash and off to work. But if the water was off, then you had to get it from a standpipe in a jug … It was very hard to wash your hair or anything like that. Personal hygiene rather went out of the window, but you just got used to it.’ In West Ham, Lever Bros equipped a van named ‘Lifebuoy Boys’, after one of its soaps, that toured the shelters offering people a chance to have a shower as they came out.

Local authorities, private caterers and voluntary organisations such as the WVS and the Salvation Army organised platform canteens in larger stations where shelterers could buy tea and buns, and sometimes hot soup, pies or sausage rolls, and cigarette-vending machines were installed in some stations. The LPTB equipped six tube trains to carry buns, cakes, biscuits, chocolate and urns of tea and cocoa around the network, served by staff wearing red armbands bearing the letters ‘TR’ (Tube Refreshments). Robert Boothby, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food, who had been ‘astonished’ by seeing ‘at least 700 people’ disgorging from one tube station at the end of the night to begin what could be a long trek home, commandeered coffee stalls and vans and had them positioned to sell tea, cocoa and soup to shelterers as they emerged blinking into the light of early morning.

‘It was better after that,’ concedes Irene Moseley. ‘The bunks weren’t comfortable by any means, but it was better than sleeping on the platform. Things became a bit more organised … a lady used to come round with biscuits and buns, and down one end of the platform were portable toilets. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was an improvement. And the best thing was that you were entitled to be there, and that made you feel a lot better … it gave you a sense of belonging really.’

A week after the start of the blitz, the King’s physician, Lord Horder, had been appointed to head a committee to look into shelter conditions both above and below ground. Father John Groser, the ‘turbulent priest’ of Stepney, was one of the members, as were the elegant Rose Henriques, wife of Basil Henriques, Warden of a Jewish settlement in the East End, and Alderman Charlie Key, MP for Bromley and Bow, who was soon to play a key role in the defence of London. The committee reported informally within four days and more formally at the end of September, though MPs complained that there was no full written record of its findings that they could consult. This, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, Florence Horsbrugh, intimated, was because it was highly undesirable that the enemy might find out what dreadful conditions Londoners were suffering as a result of its attacks.

Horder’s recommendations to reduce overcrowding, and various other measures, were largely followed – but slowly. They included providing a first aid post with a nurse in eighty-six shelters, the appointment of Shelter Marshals in the larger ones, prohibiting smoking in public shelters unless a separate section for smokers could be provided, the issue of masks to guard against infection, improved sanitation and lots of scrubbing with disinfectant, and using blowtorches on crevices to kill bugs – and regular inspections by Medical Officers of Health and their staffs to make sure all was as it should be. The greatest fear must have been of a diphtheria, measles or whooping cough epidemic, but fortunately this never happened; the main health hazards were impetigo, lice and scabies: most shelters were soon regularly sprayed with sodium hypochlorite or paraffin to try to deal with this, and any wooden bunks were replaced by metal ones, as wood was hospitable to lice. Hilde Marchant, in her unofficial role as ‘East End Commissioner’, was all for people being required to pass through a ‘Health Ministry hut’ at the entrance to every shelter, with disinfectant liberally used, and any unfit person being weeded out and sent to hospital, while bunks would be disinfected daily too, and bedding inspected and carted off to be fumigated if necessary.

Bedding was a touchy subject, since obviously it was likely to harbour bed bugs and worse. The Ministry of Home Security advised that it should be ‘aired daily so it keeps sweet and fresh’. The Swiss Cottager, a news-sheet produced by and for those who sheltered at that particular Bakerloo Line station, urged shelterers to ‘PLEASE stop the evil habit of shaking out blankets, mattresses etc., over the track each morning. The spreading of dust and germs over people, many of whom suffer from coughs and colds and “shelter throat” is little more than criminal. One of the gravest dangers we face is the spread of infection. Take your bedding home and do the shaking in your own back yard.’

While shelterers were being warned that ‘Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases’, and that they should always use a handkerchief, the chemist Sidney Chave, who had been drafted into the Emergency Public Health Laboratory Service, ‘set up primarily to protect the health of the civilian population under the stresses of war’ at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was trying to produce ‘a simple snuff which could be widely distributed to prevent the spread of diseases among the people who crowd into the underground … each night’. In December a mosquito prevention squad started work, since in the warm, damp atmosphere these were a constant irritation, and experiments started with disinfectant sprays incorporated into ventilation systems in case an epidemic did take hold.

Getting people to and from work was regarded as a wartime priority, and police patrolled the tube stations to ensure that no one took up residence before the official entry time of 4 p.m. There were two white lines painted on the platform: until 7.30 p.m. shelterers were obliged to stay behind the first one, eight feet back from the platform edge, so passengers could get on and off the trains. After that they could spread out to the second line, four feet from the edge of the platform, and also occupy corridors and stairways. Although most people were sympathetic to the plight of the tube troglodytes, some found it a ‘terrible hindrance … it is practically an impossibility to get anywhere quickly these days’.

Behind those white lines, a great deal went on between 4 p.m. and 11 p.m., when most adult shelterers retired for the night. Some entertainment was generated by the shelterers themselves: sedentary pleasures such as reading, writing letters, knitting, playing cards or board games, gossiping, playing the mouth organ or wind-up gramophone, having a communal singsong or dancing. Parties, quizzes and play readings were organised to pass the long air-raid hours. Bermondsey held a weekly discussion group at which the topics included travel, unemployment and ‘Should women have equal pay for equal work?’ The introduction of bunks was rather regretted by some, since it reduced the space available, but gramophones fitted with loudspeakers donated by the American Committee for Air Raid Relief to five of the largest shelters could make an evening spent in them seem more like a concert. Collections were taken for first aid equipment or towards a Christmas party, or presents for the children at Christmas.

Some shelters produced monthly news-sheets, including Holborn, Belsize Park, Goodge Street and the Oval, as well as the Swiss Cottager. There was also the Subway Companion, which was short-lived in its ambition to be distributed to all tube stations being used as shelters. ‘Greetings to our nightly companions, our temporary cave dwellers, our sleeping companions, somnambulists, snorers, chatterers and all who inhabit the Swiss Cottage Station from dusk to dawn,’ ran the Swiss Cottager’s first instalment. Each issue offered information and advice: ‘a Committee of Shelter Marshals has been formed. It hopes to act as a bridge between you and the London Passenger Transport Board, and also do what it can for each and every person using this station at night. If you have any suggestion or complaint – if you think something should be installed, provided or remedied, please let us know and we shall do our best to meet your wishes.’ ‘To guard against colds and infection … a face mask can be made with a few inches of surgical gauze, or even butter muslin. Sprinkle it with a little oil of eucalyptus and tie over the face with a strip of tape at bedtime. We understand the government intends to do something about face masks. Unfortunately, intentions are a poor medicine and instructions a useless preventive.’ Exhortations: ‘there is still far too much litter in the station at the “All Clear”. It is the prime duty of each and every one to leave the station in a clean and decent condition. Dustbins are provided in the station for refuse.’ ‘Do not bring camp beds into the station. Three camp beds occupy as much space as four blankets or a single mattress, so the available space is reduced by one fourth. YOU might be that fourth person turned away for lack of room.’ ‘Don’t expect home comforts or plenty of elbow room. Suffer a little inconvenience to make room for the next person.’ ‘Vibration due to heavy gunfire or other causes will be much less felt if you do not lie with your head against the wall.’ ‘Please do not contribute to any unauthorised collection. Members of the Committee may be recognised by their carrying a yellow armlet with the letter “C” in black.’ ‘It is your duty to report anyone spitting to a member of the Committee or a Warden.’ Jokes: ‘Our morning paper tells us that one person in every eight snores. This station seems full of eighth persons.’ (Government-issue earplugs were supplied at stations: proof against the noise of Ack-Ack guns, perhaps, but maybe not snorers.)

Aldwych station, on a branch of the Piccadilly Line, was closed at the end of September and converted into an underground shelter. It had been reckoned that it would be able to accommodate 7,500, but although this was over-optimistic, once the walls had been painted, the rails removed and the track covered over with sleepers, and two hundred bunks and lighting installed, some 2,000 people were able to shelter in the tunnel that ran from Aldwych to Holborn. The space was extended in the spring of 1941, taking over part of the tunnel where the Elgin Marbles and other treasures from the British Museum were being stored. Westminster Council donated 2,000 books from the borough’s libraries for the shelterers’ use, educational lectures were arranged to pass the time, the left-wing Unity Theatre put on the lighter sketches in its repertoire, and ENSA (the Entertainments National Service Association, or ‘Every Night Something Awful’, depending on your point of view) imported entertainers such as George Formby, as well as Shakespearean plays and a projector for films underground. A local vicar conducted a regular service at the Aldwych shelter, and a play centre was provided for small children at Elephant and Castle, with a qualified teacher to provide handicraft lessons. Such diversions spread to other shelters during that long winter underground (soon fifty-two stations had a library), and at the request of the Mayor of Bermondsey, one of the most-bombed boroughs in London, the LCC sent instructors to the shelters to teach drama, dressmaking, handicrafts and first aid, while children were provided with paper and paints, and produced ‘violent masterpieces in which Spitfires bring down Heinkels amid sheets of flame’.

But there was one thing that no one could provide: any guarantee of safety. On 7 October 1940 seven shelterers were killed and thirty-three injured at Trafalgar Square station when an explosion caused the concrete and steel casing over an escalator to collapse, bringing down an avalanche of wet earth. The next day nineteen were killed and fifty-two injured – most of them refugees from Belgium – at Bounds Green station in the northern suburbs, when a house next to the station was hit by a bomb and toppled over, causing a tunnel to collapse and bury the victims in masonry and debris.

On 14 October a heavy bomb fell on Balham High Road in south London just above a point where underground tunnels intersected. It caused a sixty-foot crater to open, and immediately a double-decker bus fell into it. Below ground a deluge of ballast and sludge, dislodged by the explosion, engulfed the platforms where six hundred people were sleeping, and gas from fractured pipes seeped in. Sixty-eight were killed, including the stationmaster, the ticket-office clerk and two porters. Many drowned as water and sewage from burst mains poured in, soon reaching a depth of three feet. The toll would have been even higher had not two LPTB staff wrenched open the floodgates. Seven million gallons of water and sewage had to be pumped out before salvage work could begin. For weeks afterwards those sheltering in nearby stations along the Northern Line were aware of a ‘ghost’ train that slipped quietly along the track around midnight clearing the debris of the Balham disaster, a tragic cargo that included shoes, bits of clothing, handbags, toys and other heart-stopping possessions.

At a minute to eight in the evening of 11 January 1941 a bomb fell on the booking hall of Bank station in the City, and a massive explosion tore through the station. It blew a massive two-hundred-foot crater in the road, which was so large that a bridge had to be built over it to get traffic flowing again. Many passers-by were killed, but in attending to them the rescue services did not realise at first that there was even greater carnage underground. The blast from the bomb ‘travelled through the various underground passages, and in particular forced its way with extreme violence down the escalator killing those sleeping at the foot of it at the time, and killing and injuring others sheltering on the platform opposite the entrances’, while some people were hurled into the path of an incoming train. A total of 111 people were killed at Bank, including fifty-three shelterers and four underground staff. An inquiry into the disaster opened on 10 February 1941. ‘It is difficult to convince people that even when they are 60 or 70 feet underground, they are not safe,’ remarked the chair. It had been alleged that inadequate sanitation was a key factor, as there were only a few chemical toilets in the station, and since these were soon overflowing, many declined to use them, and were queuing to use the conveniences in the booking hall when the bomb fell. The inquiry found that in fact no deaths and only a few minor injuries could be attributed to this. There was no first aid post on the platform, and there was no emergency lighting. There had been other recent ‘incidents’ in the area (notably on 29 December 1940), so roads were closed and access to the station was difficult, while fallen debris cut off access to the Central Line (both the Central and Northern Lines pass through Bank), meaning that it had taken doctors and stretcher parties more than an hour to reach it. While the injured waited for the medical services to arrive, a Hungarian refugee doctor, Dr Z.A. Leitner, who had himself been injured in the blast, gave more than forty morphia injections as he ministered to the injured single-handed in the gloom and choking dust. At the inquiry the hero doctor paid tribute to those he had helped. ‘I should like to make a remark. You English people cannot appreciate the discipline of your own people. I want to tell you, I have not found one hysterical, shouting patient. I think this very important, that you should not take such things as given – because it does not happen in other countries. If Hitler could have been there for five minutes with me, he would have finished the war. He would have realised that he has got to take every Englishman and twist him by the neck – otherwise he cannot win this war.’

* In fact the much-feared ‘trogs’ would be found in the Ramsgate caves; with the approval of Herbert Morrison they were forcibly ejected.

5 Front Line

The Warden. For some time before the blitz he was regarded by most of his charges with anything from cool indifference to active suspicion as a Nosey Parker.

But it’s ‘Saviour of ‘is country’

When the guns began to shoot.

Front Line 1940–1941: The Official Story of the CIVIL DEFENCE of Britain (1942)

I detect in myself a certain area of claustrophobia. I do not mind being blown up. What I dread is being buried under huge piles of masonry and hearing the water drip slowly, smelling gas creeping towards me and hearing the faint cries of colleagues condemned to a slow and ungainly death.

Harold Nicolson’s diary for 24 September 1940

‘There is no public record of the labours of the inter-departmental Committees, of the Boards of Inquiry, of the Treasury minute, of the final Cabinet minute, which settled upon the word “incident” as the designation of what takes place when a bomb falls on a street,’ wrote John Strachey. ‘Yet how important it was to select such a word … So when the time came, Whitehall had a word for it … “Incident” cannot be held to convey very graphically the consequences of a bomb. Just the contrary. The word is wonderfully colourless, dry and remote: it touches nothing which it does not minimise. And this, it may be supposed, was what recommended it conclusively to the authorities. It formed an important part of their policy of reassurance. For while anyone might be frightened of a bomb, who could be frightened of an incident?’

Strachey, the son of the owner and editor of the Spectator, was an old Etonian, highly intelligent and with a chequered political past. In February 1931 he and his fellow Labour MP Oswald Mosley had resigned from the Parliamentary Labour Party when Mosley’s expansionist plans to end unemployment were rejected, but by July, repelled by Mosley’s growing fascism, Strachey had left Mosley’s New Party. The following year his application to join the Communist Party of Great Britain was rejected, probably because he was regarded as an unreliable intellectual, but he called himself a Communist and wrote as one throughout the thirties. His extremely influential (and best-selling) book The Theory and Practice of Socialism, for Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club (of which he was one of the founders), was published in 1936. By April 1940, disillusioned by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Strachey broke with the CP, and on the eve of the blitz he signed up as an ARP warden, an experience he would lightly fictionalise in his book Post D, published while the blitz was still raging. It is a detached, controlled, probing account, infused with what W.H. Auden called ‘the surgeon’s view of pain’, and the New Statesman thought it so good that it ‘killed anything else in range’. In his ARP role Strachey attended many ‘incidents’. Ford, his alter ego in the novel, had got into ‘this ARP business’ by doing a few night-time watches at the suggestion of his formidable Chelsea landlady, herself an ARP warden.

At first he took part in watches and patrols on the next night and on subsequent nights. At first his equipment consisted in a borrowed tin hat – the one real necessity. But gradually other pieces of equipment came his way: a badge, an armlet; a borrowed torch. At a certain point in this development he was duly enrolled. Later it was suggested that he should become a fulltime paid warden (wages £3.5s a week for men, £2 for women). This involved being on duty every night but one a week, and being available for duty in the event of a raid (‘on call for sirens’) all day. At that period raiding was continuous every night, and there were usually three or more raids each day. Hence full-time wardens could not do anything else. As Ford had several other activities which he was loth [sic] to abandon, he decided to become an unpaid warden, on duty four nights out of five, but not on duty during the day. After enrolment he was duly provided with uniform and full equipment. In his borough, this consisted of a suit of overalls, a webbing belt carrying on it a message pad and a couple of bandages for first aid purposes; a torch hung round his neck by a strap; a steel helmet; a civilian duty gas mask.

He had taken this decision largely because

the main trouble of being a pure civilian during a prolonged air bombardment is that as such one’s only duty is to seek and to maintain one’s own and one’s companions’ safety. And this is inevitably demoralising. The instant that an individual is given even the simplest objective function, and becomes a member of an organised (and uniformed, this is notoriously important) group, the whole burden of deciding whether or not on any particular occasion to seek his or her safety is automatically removed. While one is functionless one is continually irritated by such questions as ‘Isn’t it really very silly to stay upstairs (or to go out) in this degree of Blitz?’ The instant the individual has become a warden, ambulance driver, member of the auxiliary fire service, rescue and demolition squads or stretcher bearer, this question is, nine times out of ten, settled for him or her … the enrolment of tens of thousands of men and women in the various Civil Defence Services would have been fully justified for psychological reasons alone, even if, as was by no means the case, their functions had been objectively useless.