The Secret History of the Blitz Page 4
In the end, the real solution to the crisis did not lie in relocation, but in reorganisation. On 26 September, Henry Willink, MP for Croydon, was appointed Special Commissioner for the Homeless. Three days later, he gave a press conference at which he acknowledged the extent of the problems. He promised that the ‘pillar to post’ chasing after different officials ‘which too often has been demanded of the homeless’ would end at once. In future there would, he said, be one place for the homeless to go for all the primary necessities. He intended to clear the rest centres, as they were meant for only for emergency use. And he intended to sweep away the poor law mentality. From now on, he promised, ‘London Region will do its utmost for those who have suffered in the front line.’ Willink had been a battery commander on the Somme; he understood the concept of a front line.
Henry Willink: the Conservative Member of Parliament who kick-started the welfare state.
In a matter of days, Willink set out clear and practical principles. He placed his greatest emphasis on providing new homes. This would be the responsibility of the local authorities, working seven days a week with extra staff. They would continually re-survey all of the available housing stock, personally escort people to their new billets, and resolve any disputes. They would take responsibility for requisitioning houses, and for supplying and salvaging furniture. Meanwhile the London County Council would be responsible for providing the immediate necessities of life. The LCC and the local authorities would liaise closely with each other, and members of Willink’s staff would monitor the whole of London to ensure that his improvements were properly carried through. And in a forward-thinking move, a permanent staff of social workers – known as ‘welfare inspectors’ – would be employed to deal with individual cases of distress.
Willink also dealt with the lack of information reaching the public, and the widely dispersed government agencies. He established Information Centres across the capital, and placed housing and welfare advisers in every rest centre. Assistance Board officials were sent into rest centres to make payments on the spot, while mobile units equipped as fully functioning offices went on the road, dispensing money in recently bombed areas. And most important of all, Administrative Centres were established in which the relevant agencies were finally gathered together under a single roof.
This was all too late to help Ida Rodway, but the ‘crisis in London’ was tackled effectively. Measures were also taken to improve the rate and quality of housing repairs. In December the military call-up of workers engaged on repairs was suspended, and a repair service was created of men specially released from the army. This was particularly important: people wanted to return to their own homes, and unlikely as it often seemed in the aftermath of a raid, most houses were repairable. Indeed by January 1941, eighty per cent of the houses damaged in London had already been repaired.
If Henry Willink was the man with the administrative skill to resolve the crisis, his example came from the Citizens Advice Bureaux (CAB). Described by the Manchester Guardian as a ‘clearinghouse for information’, the CAB was formed in 1938, but it came into its own during the Blitz, as its staff of keen volunteers helped to fill the governmental void before Willink’s improvements could take hold. The CAB motto, tellingly, was ‘We’re all in it together’.
As the organisation grew in size and standing, bureaux started opening in shelters, rest centres, and in private homes and offices across the country. Advisers were trained in post-raid welfare, so that they could inform the public where to apply for housing, clothes, emergency money, repair work – the information that the government should have been providing. In 1940 and 1941, this was the information that most people wanted, but surviving records reveal a wide range of applicants with a huge variety of problems.
Advisers were surprised by the numbers of people who needed help filling in forms. Illiteracy was a serious problem in Britain. A soldier came in to a bureau asking for help for his mother. Neither of them could fill in her evacuation form, or her compensation form for furniture lost in a raid. The woman’s husband and daughter had been killed in the raid, and she had nowhere to go. She was referred to a rest centre in Southwark, but the soldier was asked to bring his mother to the office so that she could be dealt with personally. In cases like this, pastoral care was as important as advice.
Elizabeth Atkin, the daughter of a House of Lords judge and one of the first CAB workers, understood the importance of listening. One evening, she was locking up the bureau in the Charing Cross Road. She wanted to get home before the bombing started. At that moment a man knocked on the door, and said, ‘I won’t keep you a moment. I just want your advice.’ Elizabeth let him in. He told her that he’d been offered a job in the north of England but that his wife didn’t want to leave London. ‘I think it’s a better job, but, of course, I don’t want to upset her.’ The man embarked on an hour-long monologue, while Elizabeth offered only the occasional yes or no. Eventually he left. The next morning, a letter came through the door. It read, ‘Thank you very much for your advice. I’ve taken it.’
Advisers had to become familiar with a wide range of charities offering different forms of assistance. One woman, having lost ‘everything’ in a raid, including £12 in cash and her spectacles, was referred to the Lord Mayor’s Fund for new spectacles, to the Personal Service League for clothes, to the Soldiers’, Sailors’ and Airmen’s Family Association for billeting expenses, and to the Women’s Holiday Fund. She was also offered an escort to her billet: assistance sometimes took more active forms.
Some queries required a detailed knowledge of law. An ARP man had been admitted to hospital after a raid, just as his army call-up papers were arriving. The ARP authorities could not pay his wages as he was technically now a soldier. And he had been refused compensation for his injuries despite their being caused by enemy action. The CAB took these matters up on his behalf. Other queries were of a personal nature. A woman whose husband was in the army abroad showed up in a panic; her husband had written her a letter saying that he had ‘heard things about her’. It is not clear (and not recorded) how the CAB could help. Another bureau was located near a camp of Dutch soldiers who had been evacuated from Dunkirk. A surprisingly short time later, one of the Dutch sergeants was being held responsible for a dozen local babies. According to an adviser, the Dutch authorities were very good about maintenance. ‘But it took a bit of sorting out . . .’
Elizabeth Atkin’s work extended well beyond office duties. Illustrating the debt owed by the government to the organisation, Elizabeth was to visit bombed houses to decide whether repairs should be carried out at the government’s expense or at the householder’s. The answer depended on who was living there. She remembers visiting a nice young man in a house in south London with shattered windows. ‘Is there a child or old person in the house?’ she asked. The answer was no. ‘I’m terribly sorry. I can’t help you. You’ll have to do it yourself.’
The CAB was only one of many voluntary organisations – and individuals – to come to the fore during the period. Bernard Nicholls was a social worker (and a conscientious objector) who tried to ease the plight of London’s down-and-outs. He helped to transform the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields into a dedicated shelter, removing the centuries-old coffins – one of which was Nell Gwyn’s – and reinterring them in the country. He and his colleagues replaced them with the long-term homeless.
‘At the time,’ Bernard says, ‘many shelters were experiencing problems with homeless people who usually slept in the parks.’ Many of these were verminous, many were alcoholics, and they were finding it difficult to find shelter. ‘We took people from the “submerged” thousands of Westminster’s population who had lived mostly out of sight of the generality of the population.’
One of these people was a drinker of neat methylated spirits whom Bernard succeeded in rehabilitating. A short while later, having been reunited with his family, the young man showed up again at the crypt, reeling and barely able to stand. Bernard w
as furious. ‘I took one look at him and said, “It’s perfectly obvious that I haven’t communicated with you. Let’s see if this will,” and I slapped him hard in the jaw. He went straight down. Then I realised the awfulness of what I’d just done.’
Bernard and his colleagues helped far more vulnerable people than they slapped, however, including one man so infested with lice, after months living in St James’s Park, that the skin on his back was a ‘wet pus-y mass’. After the war, a Social Care Unit was formed at St Martin’s to provide support for the homeless, and that work continues today, very much a legacy of the Blitz.
The Women’s Voluntary Service was a jill-of-all-trades which took on a staggering variety of functions during the Blitz. It was founded in 1938 by Stella Isaacs, Marchioness of Reading, described by friend Isobel Catto as ‘a remarkable person, who cut through any type of red tape, and got things done’. The organisation’s non-rank structure allowed members to share out roles according to individual strengths. This made it adaptable enough to staff rest centres, care for the homeless, set up mobile canteens, drive ambulances, man observation posts, carry out ARP duties, assist with evacuations, remove iron railings from buildings, collect a mass of rosehips (a source of Vitamin C), and far more besides.
Isobel Catto, a young woman from a well-to-do family, was given an administrative job at WVS Headquarters in Tothill Street, near Westminster. ‘We were the powerhouse sending out news and instructions to the local centres,’ she says. Women applied to join at these local centres, and word of mouth quickly increased the size of the organisation. ‘We really wanted to get as much time as people had to give.’
When the Blitz started, Isobel became involved in one of the WVS’s most important roles. ‘We were getting clothes for people who were bombed.’ Some of these clothes were donated, but Isobel’s job was to negotiate with clothing companies to buy coats, skirts and jerseys at wholesale prices. She would then distribute them to the local centres according to need. In December 1940 Isobel placed a large order with the Houndsditch Warehouse, a well-known East End department store. ‘I had not arranged to get it collected. It was Christmas, and I thought that it could wait.’
The night of 29 December 1940 saw the largest attack on London yet. Ten Heinkel 111s laid a carpet of 10,000 incendiary bombs, followed by more than a hundred other aircraft dropping high-explosive bombs and parachute mines. In the resulting conflagration 9,000 firemen battled to prevent the entire City of London from burning to the ground. Had it not been for fog on the Channel coast preventing follow-up raids, it might well have done so. Isobel Catto could see the flames from her home in Surrey, and her thoughts were focused on her clothes in the Houndsditch Warehouse. What would become of them?
The next morning I went off to London. It was all guarded with the police. You weren’t supposed to go through, but I was in uniform, and I said I had these things in the Warehouse, and I didn’t know if any could be saved. I’d managed to get hold of three lorries, and we were in these, and they let us through. When we got to the Warehouse, it hadn’t received a direct hit, but half the side of the building was down. But the clothes were still hanging on their rails, some of them soaked with water, but they would dry out. So we got a lot of people to help, and we shoved them off the rails and threw them into the lorries, and we saved most of them. I realised that once you’ve received the order, you must get them out and get them distributed! Don’t leave them all in one place! We were fortunate!
Having learned her lesson, Isobel moved on to the organisation of troop canteens, a role in which she found herself pitched against formidable local women – ‘Lady Bountifuls’ in her phrase – who had set up their own canteens and were fiercely resisting interference from the WVS.
A mobile canteen paid for by the people of the Bahamas.
It is clear that the country benefited from a tidal wave of volunteerism; large numbers of people gave up time and energy in a common effort to boost the country’s ability to defend and organise itself. Which is not to say that everyone’s experience was positive; having already failed in her efforts to join the CAB, Vera Reid, a well-educated young woman from London, received a note from the Minister of Labour and National Service, in May 1940, telling her that her services were not wanted. ‘Strange that in times like these,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘the individual is so often thrown back on his own resources.’ Nevertheless, the growth of volunteer spirit undoubtedly brought people together. It could hardly have any other effect.
It is worth noting that the work of Henry Willink – in making agencies more accessible, in promoting social workers, in protecting the vulnerable from exploitation and neglect – represents the early stirrings of the welfare state. Yet it is testament to these extreme times that far from being a socialist agitator or leftist thinker, Henry Willink was a Conservative Member of Parliament. In this age of transition from Victorian to modern, in which workhouses overlapped with social workers, and where problem-solving was more important than ideology or allegiance, a truly imaginative and progressive voice could come from almost any direction.
And what of John Fulljames, the young man who carried out a modern-style campus shooting spree? In 1945, only five years after the shooting, a prison reformer named Alexander Peterson, with connections to University College, attempted to find Fulljames a job. He approached Archibald Balfour, the head of a large trading company in South America, asking whether a position could be found for him as an English teacher in Peru. He described Fulljames to Balfour as ‘a young fellow of 24, of excellent physique, good appearance, manners and a very useful brain’. Balfour replied that having considered the matter carefully, he could not ‘take the responsibility of finding the man a place as a boy’s teacher . . . Supposing there were again to be some mental lapse and something awful were to occur?’ Much better, thought Balfour, to find him ‘a job in a mining or trading company in some remote place’. The exchange could be taken from a Somerset Maugham story. In the end, the young man whose fortunate survival mirrored that of his country lived to an impressive age. John Fulljames died in Cardiff in February 2013.
CHAPTER THREE
Going Underground
If you share any DNA with the author, you will be wondering, at regular intervals, how you would have coped with the privations and problems of the period. But as your mind drifts off, bear in mind the words of Tom Hopkinson, wartime editor of Picture Post magazine. ‘Ordinary people,’ he wrote, ‘were used to deprivation and lived every day with anxiety; so that side of the distress was not so much new as additional.’ London Can Take It – just as it always has. Even so, the new conditions were capable – as we have seen – of pushing many beyond their limits. And the Blitz was not simply another period of economic hardship. It was far stranger and darker than that – which was why the poor law mentality had to be set aside – and it tested people of all ages and classes in unimagined ways.
Novelist and scientist C. P. Snow was the son of a shoe factory clerk whose drive and energy had propelled him to the High Table at Christ’s College, Cambridge. Snow found to his horror that he was terrified by bombing. He later wrote:
When the bombs began to fall on London, I discovered that I was less brave than the average man. I was humiliated to find it so. I could just put some sort of face on it, but I dreaded the evening coming, could not sleep, was glad of an excuse to spend a night out of town. It was not always easy to accept one’s nature. Somehow one expected the elementary human qualities. It was unpleasant to find them lacking.
Snow went on to describe how the apparent courage of those around him, including his landlady, made him feel worse. His admission is valuable as a reminder that we are never safe from ambush by our own sensibilities.
Viola Bawtree, a fifty-seven-year-old woman living in Sutton, shared her cellar shelter with various neighbours and members of her family. Her painfully honest diary entries paint a picture of base fear, and a struggle to retain religious faith. On 27 August 1940 she was
undergoing ‘stark terror’ at the sound of the siren. She had to decide whether to stay in bed or go downstairs to the shelter where others were lying in deckchairs. She opted to stay in bed: ‘Suddenly the searchlights started again and my heart started a furious pounding and I seemed to hear little sounds like distant bangs. I lay in abject terror.’
Viola went downstairs to the cellar, and took her place in a deckchair. ‘Oh how welcome, for I feel I must be with someone,’ she wrote. It is a sentence that might have come from Mrs Miniver, and it shows why ‘Blitz Spirit’ can never simply be dismissed as a myth: the scared and lonely were drawn into each other’s company. Viola’s nephew, Kenneth, and her neighbour, Ivan, were at the dark end of the cellar, where she joined them. In the diary she described her situation as ‘comic’ – but she was in no mood to appreciate the humour. As the others slept, Viola lay awake. ‘Between 3 and 4 was the worst part,’ she wrote, ‘when my teeth chattered and I trembled violently.’ After the All Clear sounded, she went up to bed, but sleep still would not come, and when the searchlights shone again, she crept back down to the cellar. She returned to her bed at dawn and finally grabbed an hour’s sleep.