The Secret History of the Blitz Read online

  On the afternoon of 17 May, John Fulljames walked into a college friend’s room, picked up the Lee Enfield rifle propped up in a corner, and wandered back to his own room. He loaded a cartridge, steadied himself at the window, and opened fire on fellow students crossing the quad. Charles Moffat was shot in the abdomen. As he fell, groaning, another shot struck him in the neck, killing him. The second bullet also injured Dennis Melrose in the chest. A third shot missed, but a fourth struck Pierre de Kock in the calf. John Fulljames was not firing indiscriminately; his targets were all members of a particular college ‘set’. After the shooting, Fulljames walked up to the dean of the college. The dean asked him whether he knew from which room the shots had come. ‘I’m afraid they came from mine,’ said Fulljames. ‘Do you know who had the gun?’ ‘I’m afraid I did. What do you want me to do, sir?’

  A police photograph of the quad at University College, Oxford. Taken shortly after the shooting, a bloodstain is clearly visible.

  Fulljames had been approaching the end of his first year at Oxford. He was a quiet young man with an excellent school record, who had recently turned moody and apathetic. Nowadays he would probably be described as ‘disaffected’. Certainly, his behaviour had been erratic. While declaring himself to be a pacifist, he tried – and failed – to enlist in the Territorial Army. He told a college friend that he might ‘get a kick out of killing’, but when he went to see the Bette Davis film Dark Victory, he had to leave the cinema owing to his ‘horror of bloodshed’. He developed a dislike for a boisterous ‘set’ of college people – including Moffat, Melrose and de Kock – even though he had barely spoken to them. And he was described by his closest friend as being ‘very worried about the war’.

  At 9 a.m. on the morning of the shooting, Fulljames was seen searching a room for rifle ammunition. Later that morning, he wrote a casual note to a young man at another college:

  Thank you very much for your invitation and I’m sorry if you have ordered my dinner for nothing but I’m afraid I won’t be able to come to Oriel tonight. Probably unforeseen and pressing engagements will detain me in durance vile. Still, iron bars, etc . . . or is it ‘stone walls’?

  In durance vile is an archaic expression for a long prison term, while the final sentence refers to a line from Richard Lovelace’s 1642 poem ‘To Althea, From Prison’: ‘Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage’. In the hours before the shooting, Fulljames wrote to another friend:

  Michael, I want you to know, though I feel that you do, that during the second and the age that I have known you, life has opened out for me.

  Hidden in the adolescent love pangs are clues as to his state of mind:

  I want you to believe that what I do today, because I know what is going to happen, cannot separate us – I know that physically we shall be apart, but I shall always feel that somewhere, though you may not understand any more than I do, why I am going to do I have felt this coming all term [sic], and most of last. But I never really believed even when I saw ten cartridges at home, even until last night, and not until I woke this morning that I should ever do anything quite so utterly foolish.

  So while the act (or at least, some act) had been brewing for a while, it seems Fulljames only finally decided on it that morning. After the shooting, Fulljames sat in the porter’s lodge with the Master of the college, Sir William Beveridge, the economist whose 1942 report would inspire the creation of the welfare state. Beveridge asked Fulljames whether he had been ill. ‘No,’ he said.

  While on remand in Brixton Prison, Fulljames was examined by the senior medical officer who found him to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. ‘His antipathy,’ wrote the doctor, ‘seems to have generated in his own mind without any stimulating factors of any kind.’ But he went on to state that his schizophrenia was at an early stage of development. He was fit to stand trial for murder.

  The trial was held in early July. Counsel for Fulljames had to prove insanity. He submitted that when his client fired the four shots, he did not know that what he was doing was wrong. He presented the concept of schizophrenia to the jury by referring them to ‘the famous horror story’ involving Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. ‘The mind,’ he said, ‘disintegrated and the whole personality was withdrawn from reality into a world of fantasy.’ He called an eminent psychologist, Dr Henry Yellowlees, to give evidence that Fulljames was insane in law. In rebuttal, the prosecution called the senior medical officer from Brixton Prison, who restated his opinion that the schizophrenia was not advanced, and that Fulljames had known, when he fired, that what he was doing was wrong. The jury was presented with a straight choice. The young man’s life rested on its decision.

  The jury retired for just twenty-five minutes. It returned a verdict of guilty, but insane. Fulljames had escaped the hangman and was committed to Broadmoor. He smiled as he left the dock. In one respect, his story seems startlingly modern; we think of campus shooting sprees as a contemporary American phenomenon. But this spree was very much of its time. Britain was in crisis, its army on the run in France, its identity no longer certain. John Fulljames, a pacifist, horrified by the sight of blood, tried to join up – and failed. Even in its darkest hour, his country rejected him, and he went to an extreme to demonstrate his own existence. His defiance was the dark reflection of the optimism of Thunder Rock. And his survival was every bit as fortunate as the survival of his countrymen rescued from Dunkirk. A letter in his prison file, opened in 2014, reveals that, despite the jury’s verdict and the evidence of Dr Yellowlees, the medical authorities at Broadmoor did not believe him ever to have been insane, and were content to advise the Home Secretary to agree to his release in 1945, after just five years of detention. Fulljames, it seems, might very easily have been hanged for the murder of Charles Moffat.

  The case of Ida Rodway, meanwhile, exposes the truth about the early weeks of the London Blitz. On 14 November 1940 she was arraigned at the Old Bailey for the murder of her blind husband Joseph. She had attacked him with a chopper and a carving knife, almost severing his head from his body. It is perhaps difficult to conceive how a domestic incident, however tragic, could cast much light on the period – but a closer look reveals that both Ida and Joseph Rodway were just as much victims of the Blitz as anybody killed by an aerial mine.

  Ida and Joseph were married in April 1901. They had lived together for almost forty years. In that time, Joseph’s brother, Albert, had never known them to share a cross word. ‘They were always happy,’ he told the police. Joseph had worked as a carman, a horse-drawn delivery driver, but this was a dying trade, and he had been out of work for ten years. Ida had been working as a boot machinist, but when Joseph’s sight began to deteriorate, she started caring for him. When he lost his sight entirely, and his mind began to fail, he became entirely dependent on her. As a result, Ida’s attendance at work fell away, and she lost her job. They had now to survive, each week, on 10 shillings from Joseph’s pension and 26 shillings from the labour exchange, with the knowledge that the latter would soon be stopped.

  On 21 September 1940 the east London house, in which they rented rooms, was bombed. Ida and Joseph, in their garden shelter, were physically unhurt, but Joseph was admitted to Hackney Hospital in a state of distress, and Ida went to stay with friends. After three days, the hospital discharged Joseph, leaving the couple with nowhere to go, until Ida’s sister agreed to take them in. For the next week, they slept on the floor of her back room. Throughout this time, Joseph never understood where he was. Ida had trouble looking after him in a strange house, and he was becoming more confused. She had other anxieties, too: she would soon lose her labour money, leaving them with just ten shillings a week (about £20 today), and no idea what to do about the bombed house which still contained their furniture and possessions. She told her sister that she wished the bomb had killed them, and she started think about suicide – but decided that it would not be fair on her helpless husband. ‘I thought to myself,’ she later told police, ‘“Oh, what shal
l I do?”’

  Her answer to that question came on the morning of 1 October. Instead of bringing her husband a cup of tea in bed, as she had begun to do, she picked up a chopper and a carving knife. She went into the back room, and found Joseph sitting up in bed. She hit him first with the chopper – but it broke. ‘What are you doing this for?’ asked Joseph, startled. And then she cut his throat.

  A little later, Ida’s upstairs neighbour, Lily Beauchamp, met her walking down the street. Ida appeared dazed, and said, ‘Lil, I’ve murdered my husband. I want to find a policeman. Will you get one of the wardens?’ The astonished Mrs Beauchamp fetched a warden who accompanied them to the house. When the police arrived, Ida said, ‘He was my husband. I was worried about him. He was blind. We were bombed out of our home and I had nowhere to go and nobody to help me. I was worried to death. I don’t know what made me do it.’

  Ida was placed on remand in the hospital wing of Holloway Prison, where she spent her days sitting quietly, showing no emotion. She told the medical officer that she had done the right thing, as her husband was now out of his misery. On the morning of her Old Bailey trial, 13 November, the medical officer spoke to her once more. Ida told him that she intended to plead guilty to murder, as that would get everything settled. She said again that she had done the right thing, and seemed to the doctor to be entirely unconcerned about the result of the trial. On the basis of this interview, the doctor gave evidence to the court that Ida was insane and unfit to plead. The jury returned a formal verdict to that effect, and Ida Rodway, like John Fulljames before her, was committed to Broadmoor. Unlike Fulljames, she would never be released. She died in the asylum on 25 April 1946.

  When speaking to the court, the medical officer made much of the fact that Ida believed that she had done nothing wrong. This, to his thinking, was strong evidence of her insanity. But ‘nothing wrong’ to Ida Rodway meant that she had done the right thing in the circumstances. And given her husband’s mental and physical condition, given the huge difficulty Ida was having looking after him, and given their desperate future prospects, who could say with certainty that she had not? The insanity finding, of course, saved her from the hangman, but it is striking that in the surviving case papers, the only recognition of the practical difficulties faced by the Rodways can be found on Ida’s application for legal aid, made eight days after she had been charged with murder. The form reads: ‘The attack appears to have been the result of worry and agitation through war conditions.’ And ‘war conditions’ in east London, at the start of the Blitz, could be deeply distressing. As air raid warden Barbara Nixon noted, for many of the poor, the loss of a home was ‘a disaster comparable with the loss of life.’

  ‘Homeless’ by Clifford Hall. For many thousands of people – and certainly for Ida Rodway – being left homeless and helpless led to unthinkable misery.

  One of the surprising features of the Blitz, when it arrived, was the relatively small loss of life compared with the unexpectedly large amount of damage to buildings. Over 13,000 people were killed in September and October, and however much suffering this represented, it was a much smaller figure than had been feared. The number of Londoners made homeless by the middle of October, on the other hand, was around 250,000 – far greater than expected. The homeless might be left with nowhere to sleep, nowhere to eat, nowhere to wash, no money, no ration book, no clothes except those they were wearing, goods and furniture that needed salvaging, a damaged house that needed repairs, and no idea of what to do about any of these things. For the first few weeks of the Blitz, the authorities were taken by surprise. They could not control the situation. The result was described by social scientist Richard Titmuss, in his official history of wartime social policy, as a ‘crisis in London’. It was the central factor in Ida Rodway’s sense of helplessness and hopelessness. And she was not alone in her despair.

  When a family or an individual was bombed out, the first port of call was usually a rest centre. Often situated in an evacuated school, offering tea, bread, shelter, and sanitation, rest centres were intended merely as casualty clearing stations, to be emptied each day to make room for the next wave of homeless. But a daily turnover relied on housing being found each day, and though the bombs kept falling, the replacement housing did not arrive. In the first six weeks of the Blitz, only around 7,000 Londoners were rehoused, compared with the quarter of a million who were made homeless. The discrepancy is startling. Some people were staying with friends and family, some were living half-lives between shelters and bombed-out houses, some were living rough. By 26 September, there were 25,000 people in London rest centres, and the congestion was growing.

  Gioya Steinke worked in a rest centre. Once the ‘all clear’ had sounded, she became used to receiving wardens and firemen who arrived with people caked in thick bomb dust and debris. ‘It was very distressing,’ she says, ‘there was a lot of grief and crying.’ At first, Gioya spent much of the time in tears, but was told to learn to control herself. ‘You didn’t know who was a street market person and who was a person from the posh flats,’ she says, ‘they were all reduced down, and this, I think, had a lot to do with the wonderful camaraderie of the war.’ One wonders, though, how much camaraderie was felt at the time.

  When Lily Merriman’s house was destroyed, she and her mother and father were put on a bus and sent to a rest centre in a nearby school where they remained for a month. ‘We felt like refugees,’ she says. The centre had separate rooms for men and women, as well as a family room where Lily’s family slept on mattresses on the floor alongside strangers. As a result she refused to undress. And there were washing facilities, but no baths. ‘I used to feel dirty,’ she says. When the family was eventually rehoused, it was to a new area: ‘We didn’t see any of our old neighbours any more. We was shifted, and that was it.’

  But people were being shifted very slowly. Part of the problem was that the homeless did not know where to go for help. Often it was not clear where they should be going. There were too many assistance bodies, with badly defined responsibilities, and little co-ordination between them. The London County Council and a metropolitan borough, for example, might both try to billet different families in the same house. Richard Titmuss records how a damaged house resulted in visits to separate offices for cash advances, clothing, ration books, repairs, the salvage of furniture, the reconnection of utilities, and information about evacuation. And there was no guarantee of help in any of them. A sixteen-year-old girl, bombed out in November, needed to get hold of a few pounds for clothes. She spent an entire day visiting offices across Norbury and Croydon – and came away with nothing.

  To make matters worse, people desperate for relief were being received in the spirit of the poor law: hurdles were placed in their path as though they were paupers begging money for gin rather than victims of a national emergency. The most unsympathetic agency was proving to be the Assistance Board, the body responsible for dispensing financial aid, which usually erred, according to Richard Titmuss, ‘on the side of parsimony’.

  But perhaps we should not be surprised that this mentality persisted into the 1940s. This was a time, after all, when workhouses, those totems of Dickensian London, were still in existence. Doreen Kluczynska spent the Blitz working in the nursery section of Knaresborough Workhouse in Yorkshire. Some of her charges were abandoned children, while others were the illegitimate offspring of ‘shamed’ young women who had been forced into the workhouse. ‘The children didn’t have any sweet ration,’ says Doreen, ‘no toys, no books, and clothes that didn’t fit them.’ The clothing was not even their own; each morning they were dressed in clothes another child had worn the day before.

  One possible solution to the crisis in London was to move ‘useless mouths’ (as those not contributing to the war effort were known) out of the city.

  The result – Evacuation Plan VII – was introduced on 22 September. Under this scheme, the government would pay for homeless mothers and children to be evacuated away, but only f
rom a handful of east London boroughs; the plan was limited lest hordes of Cockney refugees were to apply and overwhelm the system. The government needn’t have worried: only about 2,600 mothers and children took up the offer in the last week of September. The scheme was then extended to cover the whole of London, and in October about 89,000 mothers and children were evacuated. But this figure was still lower than hoped, and the government responded with a propaganda campaign. One mother recalls the stern tones of ‘The Radio Doctor’, Charles Hill, as he ‘kept on about the selfish mothers who would not consider the offer of safety for their children’. The woman gave in to his bullying, and she and her daughter were evacuated to Devon.

  There were, in truth, plenty of reasons why homeless people did not leave London in the expected numbers. Many simply preferred familiar surroundings – however dismal the circumstances. Some were tied to jobs locally, others had been evacuated in 1939 and were not keen to repeat the experience. And there were those, like Maggie Edwards’ mother, who wanted to stay near their damaged houses. When Maggie’s house was bombed in November, the family went to stay with her grandmother nearby, but they visited their own house regularly ‘to light the fire and make sure everything was secure’. On one visit, Maggie’s mother noticed that the front door was slightly ajar. She went in, and found that the gas and electricity meters had been cracked open, and the money taken. On the floor nearby was a lead truncheon. ‘Obviously the burglar had intended using it if we’d caught him in the act,’ says Maggie, ‘and we had to reimburse the Gas and Electricity Boards ourselves.’

  Some people did leave London – before coming quickly back. Eileen Brome went to Bournemouth with her sister, stepdaughter, sister’s daughter, and friend’s daughter. All five of them shared a single room, which was testing enough, but then ‘we were called bomb-dodgers by the people of Bournemouth. They didn’t want us down there, they told us to go home again.’ Eventually, life became so unpleasant that Eileen and her group caught the train back to London. ‘We really thought bombs were better than people,’ she says. But things were to get even worse. A fortnight later, Eileen opened her jewellery box – to find that there were lots of pieces missing. ‘So I went to the police and they made enquiries, and it turned out the people we’d been staying with were known very well to the police. He was the biggest thief in Bournemouth!’