The Secret History of the Blitz Page 5

  It is little wonder that for much of the Blitz, many people were in a state of near exhaustion. ‘For some period,’ says Ealing schoolboy Roy Bartlett, ‘people were walking around like zombies.’ And cellar life was providing Viola with a more basic form of existence than she had ever known: ‘This morning something started falling from my hair. I thought it was my comb, but it was a huge spider, all legs! I want to tell someone, but mustn’t.’

  After a while, Viola – like millions of others across the country – began to adjust. ‘Now that I’m more normal,’ she wrote, ‘I can think more of various advantages in all this.’ These included using time in the cellar to write and mend things, and finding fun in ‘trying to forestall Jerry’. She may have been clutching at straws, but the straws reflect a growing defiance.

  On 7 September, the day of the first heavy bombing of London, Viola reflected that there was no real safety except ‘to abide in His presence’. Until she could live a life of obedient faith, she would be afraid. That evening, as the sky above London glowed red, she called on God to frustrate the Germans. Later that night, she lay in despair thinking about all the people dying twelve miles away.

  After reading newspaper accounts of the effects of the bombing, she wrote: ‘I’m in danger of losing God . . . Oh, I can’t write for tears – I feel as though nothing matters any more, and prayer seems utterly futile . . . I’m cut off from Him now in a nightmare world.’

  By the following afternoon, she had found an explanation for His indifference: ‘I think that possibly God allowed such horrors so that men and women should realise to the full that this sort of thing must be abolished for all time.’

  Here is a vivid example of how an ordinary person was able to make sense of extraordinary events. The human spirit, it seems, is truly pragmatic and resourceful. But despite her deeply felt and intensely expressed emotions, Viola had not herself experienced any bombing.

  The first bomb fell on Sutton on 10 September, and two days later, after many more had fallen, Viola was able to congratulate her home town on having ‘saved London a lot of bombs’. A sense of pride in being bombed is common in Blitz diaries and memories, and in Viola’s case, it seems to have helped to displace fear. In some way, she was now ‘doing her bit’, no longer a voyeur but a full participant.

  Certainly, a change in her attitude became noticeable once the bombing had become routine. On 22 September she wrote that while the sound of the siren could still trigger nerves, ‘normally I think I can see it all more as an adventure’. Perhaps because danger can be easier to bear than the fear of danger, perhaps because normality breeds acceptance, Viola’s diary became a bolder affair as September wore on.

  Viola Bawtree and C. P. Snow were brave to record their fears – but they were certainly not alone in experiencing them. The consensus allows for the existence of fear – if only to acknowledge how successfully it was overcome. Yet fear was the dominant emotion of the Blitz. The Church Army acknowledged this in its shelter booklet, packed with prayers like – ‘Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.’ Fear made people try to seem fearless. As the sirens wail in Marghanita Laski’s To Bed with Grand Music, restaurant diners continue their conversations: ‘It was conventional to ignore the noise, to flout precautions, to die in the middle of a carefully prepared epigram.’

  Fear drove and shaped the country, and it tested the very idea of civilisation. It sent people underground against government advice, and kept them there, free of the sound of bombs and guns, oblivious to the stench and filth. And as people reacted viscerally, freeing themselves from the trappings of society, so they inspired others. The artist Henry Moore, for example, found himself excited and engaged by the primal sight of underground dwellers.

  Moore is associated in the public mind with his reclining figures – human forms reduced to their pre-cultural and pre-civilised origins. But these sculptures – as well as Moore’s exalted reputation – would never have existed had it not been for a chance trip on the London Underground in September 1940. Moore had recently turned down an offer from Sir Kenneth Clark, chairman of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, to become an official war artist. He had no interest in becoming involved in propaganda; he wanted to concentrate on his own work, specifically with moving his sculpture in an abstract direction. But one night, Moore and his wife found themselves stuck inside Hampstead Underground Station. A raid was taking place above ground and they were ordered to stay where they were. In an interview with journalist and author Leonard Mosley, Moore described how, irritated and trapped, he began to look around:

  I could see what have since been called Henry Moore reclining figures. I just stood there, watching them – the lonely old men and women, the family groups, the chatterers and the withdrawn. When they announced that the All Clear had sounded and we could go up to the surface, I went reluctantly.

  The next night Moore returned to the tube station with notebooks in his pocket, and he began drawing. As the weeks went by, his routine barely changed. He tucked himself into a corner of an exit, making himself as unobtrusive as possible, and he sketched people. He was fascinated by the distance of the people from the war – even as the war could be traced on their faces. And he was engrossed by their retreat from civilisation, by the elemental chaos and disorder. In a world of primal motivations, nothing remained but bare human essence.

  When the authorities started to organise life in the tubes, Moore lost interest in them. His attention turned to shelters where the chaos lived on, such as the notorious Tilbury Shelter in Stepney, a massive goods yard packed with Eastenders. He also spent rapt hours inside an unfinished railway tunnel at Stratford Broadway. This shelter was visited, and described, by Superintendent Reginald Smith of the Metropolitan Police ‘K’ Division:

  The first thing I heard was the great hollow hubbub, a sort of soughing and wailing, as if there were animals down there moaning and crying. And then, as we went, it hit me, this terrible stench. It was worse than dead bodies, hot and thick and so foetid that I gagged and then I was sick. Ahead of me, I could see faces peering towards me lit by candles and lanterns, and it was like a painting of hell.

  To Moore the tunnel was a unique prospect, to Smith it was Dante’s seventh circle. Once again we see the Blitz as a time of extremes – in all directions.

  If Henry Moore was inspired to action by the visceral, elemental world of the tube shelters, so was a Mass-Observation diarist who went by the name ‘Rosemary Black’. But where Moore was professionally excited by what he saw, Black was overcome by emotional horror. A woman of independent means from St John’s Wood in north London, her world was privileged and placid. She had understood from the newspapers that conditions in tube shelters were civilised – and she rarely doubted anything she read.

  The epiphany of ‘Rosemary Black’ began one wintery night in London’s West End. The blackout was in force, and she turned on her torch to look where she was going. The light caught the attention of a policeman who shouted, ‘Put that light out!’ She fumbled with the torch, failed to turn it off, and shoved it into her coat pocket. But the light continued to glow through the pocket. The policeman placed his hands on her shoulders, and pushed her down the stairs of Piccadilly Circus tube station. ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ he barked, his conversation apparently limited to Blitz clichés. Once down in the station, Black was appalled by what she saw. Every corridor and platform was crowded three deep. The people seemed to her like worms in a tin. She was overwhelmed by the heat, the smell, the haggard faces, the crying of babies. She stared at a woman lying with her head on the bare platform, her face an inch from a huge gob of spit.

  Shaken by the experience, Black spent the following day flipping between guilt and self-pity:

  God must surely have it in for me in my future life that I am granted all this underserved good fortune here and now . . . I sometimes feel I’d be happier if I were bombed out of house and home instead of always being ‘one of the luck
y ones’.

  Angry and helpless, she became resolved to do something. She went out and tried to find work as a war volunteer. After a series of rejections (as we have seen, it was not always easy to find such work) she was accepted as a tea and sandwich dispenser for the YMCA Mobile Canteen Service. Her journey is testament to the words of journalist Ritchie Calder in his 1941 book Carry On London. This book, written in the eye of the storm, reflected popular sentiment even as it tried to influence it. Calder writes:

  In this war we are all in it together . . . Yet, until this truth is driven home by the agony of experience, we are apt to cling to habits and ways of thought, living in the past, ignoring the present, and closing our minds to the implications of the future.

  ‘Rosemary Black’ underwent an ‘agony of experience’ despite being neither injured nor made homeless. She was confronted by an uncomfortable new reality with the result that her mind was opened. Her desire to help was a true manifestation of Blitz Spirit – and at the heart of the process was fear.

  But what of the government? Where did the guardian of the people sit in the chaos? We have seen in previous chapters that it could predict neither the extent, nor the effects of bombing. It is worth examining, in this period of shifting realities, how it attempted to protect its citizens, and whether it succeeded.

  In the years before the war, the government’s shelter policy focused on dispersal and household protection. Rather than bringing people together in large shelters where they might be killed en masse by a direct hit, fall prey to epidemics of fear and panic, or succumb to a ‘shelter mentality’ of inactivity which could prevent the country from functioning, it was felt that people should be spread out, either in their own houses, in garden shelters, or in small localised shelters. Life, in other words, should carry on as normally as possible.

  The importance of strengthening the home was heavily stressed: a Home Office booklet – The Protection of Your Home Against Air Raids – recommended that one room in the house be turned into a ‘refuge room’, preferably a basement or cellar, and stocked full of essentials such as books, playing cards, quiet games and a gramophone. Viola Bawtree’s cellar presumably qualified as a refuge room.

  A government-endorsed refuge room.

  J. B. S. Haldane – a distinguished biochemist and geneticist who had examined the problem of sheltering in Spain during the Civil War – took issue with the policy of dispersal. It was, he declared, worthless. It was true, he admitted, that large numbers would be killed if a large shelter was directly hit, but the chance of that happening was small. If people were sheltering separately, on the other hand, then ‘almost every bomb would find a human target of some kind’. The government’s desire for a dispersal policy, Haldane believed, resulted mainly from its unwillingness to pay for deep shelters. Not only that, but its emphasis on strengthening the home and building shelters in gardens shamefully ignored the needs of the slum- and tenement-dwelling working classes. In 1938 Haldane published a book called simply ARP, in which he set out his grand plan for miles of brick-lined tunnels sunk into the London clay with multiple entrances and a complex system of ventilation. The book received a mixed review in The Times – although the reviewer agreed that Haldane’s faith in the value of deep shelters was sound.

  In the same year that Haldane pounded the drum for deep shelters, Finsbury Borough Council in London commissioned an architectural firm (Tecton – which had been responsible for the elegant Penguin Pool at London Zoo) to come up with designs for a deep shelter capable of harbouring the entire population of the borough. Finsbury – the area south of Angel, east of Gray’s Inn Road, north of Smithfield and west of the Barbican – was a crowded working-class area with an ambitious left-wing council keen to improve living conditions, and to provide the sort of protection dismissed by the Home Office. Tecton’s designs, produced with the assistance of concrete engineer Ove Arup, consisted of fifteen circular tunnels capable of sheltering all 58,000 borough residents.

  In answer to Haldane’s criticisms and the Finsbury proposals, a government White Paper, ‘Air Raid Shelters’, was published in April 1939. It was the culmination of the Hailey Conference – a not-very-independent commission of experts which reported to Sir John Anderson, Lord Privy Seal and soon to become Home Secretary. In its conclusions, the White Paper unsurprisingly opposed the provision of deep shelters and defended the policy of dispersal. It endorsed the use of a corrugated steel garden shelter covered in earth (known as the Anderson Shelter – though named not for Sir John but for one of its designers, Dr David Anderson) as well as strengthened basements. The White Paper rejected Haldane’s proposals on the basis that even working as quickly as possible, it would take two years to build sixteen miles of tunnels – and these would provide shelter for only 160,000 people. And it concluded that Finsbury Borough Council’s deep shelters would not, in practice, allow sufficient time for the majority of citizens to reach safety. This could result in panic taking hold – particularly as people were likely to slow down, or even stop, once they had passed through the shelter entrance.

  Finsbury had an unusually progressive borough council. One of its developments was the provision of ‘violet ray treatment’ for daylight-starved ARP workers.

  So it was that the Finsbury proposals and the principle of deep sheltering were officially rejected. Throughout its discussions and consultations, the government had been careful to acknowledge its responsibility to protect the public. It had no desire to alienate its people. It was keen, however, to immerse them in a warm bath of self-congratulation, and to that end, a sense of British moral superiority was embedded in the debate. A sober, sensible British man, it was implied, would rather sit calmly at home with his wife and children than cower among strangers in a communal funk-hole. As the war began, therefore, the government was free to pursue its existing policy. The bombing, however, had not yet begun . . .

  By the time the White Paper was published, the government was hurrying along with its dispersal policy. In February 1939 two and a half million Anderson shelters had begun to be issued to households with gardens in vulnerable areas. Anybody earning less than £250 per year received a free shelter, or, if there was no outdoor space, the materials to strengthen a ‘refuge room’. There were many people, as Haldane had reflected, with neither outdoor space nor a ‘refuge room’. For these people and for those caught out during a raid, money was made available for the construction of communal street shelters with brick walls and concrete roofs.

  Yet even people in tiny houses without gardens sometimes had a personal shelter. Margaret Vear was a Liverpool factory worker: ‘We had back-to-back houses with a lane down the back,’ she recalls, ‘and they built shelters between the two walls so that when you walked down the lane you were walking through the shelters. You had a little gap, and then you walked through the next shelter.’

  Under the Civil Defence Act, 1939, meanwhile, employers became legally bound to provide shelter for their workers, and new powers were granted to local authorities to requisition buildings for use as shelters.1

  Despite these efforts, however, the government was facing criticism. In a House of Commons debate in April 1939, Herbert Morrison, who would become Home Secretary eighteen months later, expressed his deep concern about ‘the absence of a shelter policy on the part of the Government’. In the same debate Arthur Greenwood, also to become a member of Churchill’s War Cabinet, echoed Morrison, declaring that the people ‘are deserving of a good deal more adequate protection’. These criticisms came in the very month that the White Paper was issued. And the fact is that five months later, at the outbreak of war, shelter provision was severely behind schedule. Yet throughout this period, there was one obvious source of shelter that was repeatedly overlooked – the London Underground. And it was a source that had been tapped before.

  The First World War had seen aeroplanes turn from flimsy birdcages dropping feather darts on enemy soldiers into heavy bombers dropping thousand-pound bombs on enem
y cities. At first Zeppelin and Schütte-Lanz airships and then Gotha heavy bombers carried out attacks on Britain, killing over 1,400 citizens in the process. In June 1917, 162 Londoners died in a single Gotha raid. Anticipating events of twenty-three years on, the bombs fell mainly on the East End docks and the City of London. Liverpool Street Station received a direct hit as did Upper North Street School in Poplar where a bomb exploded in the infants’ classroom while the children were busy making paper chains.

  The world’s safest table tennis table.

  The British authorities feared that panic from these raids might weaken national resolve to the point where the country would be forced to sue for peace. This worry gave way to other concerns. In a House of Commons debate, Evelyn Cecil, member for Aston Manor, noted that while he was sure there was no element of panic among the people, ‘there is a very strong feeling of want of confidence in the general management’. Cecil was simply anticipating Herbert Morrison’s 1940 observation that the government lacked a coherent policy. And the people’s reaction to events in 1917 is revealed in a letter written by Bernard Rice, a Royal Flying Corps pilot at home on leave, in which he describes the beginning of a Gotha raid on London: ‘First came the bobbies, pedalling round on bikes with a “Take Cover” sign and continuous ringing bell attached. The streets cleared instantly. The tubes were thronged.’

  The people of London were taking shelter in the London Underground. And while Rice’s letter describes a daylight raid, people had begun congregating in the tubes overnight. In 1917 the London Electric Railway Company (having consulted Scotland Yard) began placing night staff in eighty-one tube stations to provide ‘shelter facilities’ to Londoners. LERC figures indicate that Hampstead Station – where Henry Moore would be inspired – held up to 3,000 shelterers, while Piccadilly Circus – where ‘Rosemary Black’ would have her dark epiphany – contained space for 5,000.