The Blitz: The British Under Attack

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.* 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 …’

* ‘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 …’

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,* 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.