The Secret History of the Blitz Page 6
Yet, despite this clear precedent, the government and the London Passenger Transport Board (as the LERC had become) made up their minds in the mid-1930s that, in the event of another war, the tube would be closed to the public, and used exclusively as a transport system for government traffic. This idea fell from favour as war approached – and the minutes of relevant meetings reveal great confusion as to what role the tube would eventually play.
In January 1939 Lord Ashfield, the chairman of LPTB, argued that the Underground should be closed altogether and not used for any purpose. Thomas Gardiner, the Home Office Secretary responsible for ARP, disagreed, saying that the tube ought to be used as normal – but could be adapted into a shelter for ‘refugees’ (as shelterers were known) if the network broke down as a result of bombing. Sir Philip Game, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, suggested having soldiers placed at his disposal to keep people out of the stations by force. The possibility was thus raised of British troops firing on women and children fleeing the bombs. Thankfully, Game admitted ‘serious misgivings’ about his own suggestion. The only common thread that can be drawn from the discussion is that the police, Home Office and transport authority did not want the tube being used as a shelter – unless it became absolutely necessary.
Several months later, the Minister of Transport, Euan Wallace, asserted that tube stations would be open to ticket holders only and not to refugees. Sir Philip Game questioned this policy. The police, after all, would be responsible for enforcing the rules. How, Game wondered, could they be expected to differentiate between travellers and refugees? If stations were kept open, he insisted, they would end up full of refugees, and there was nothing that the police – or anybody else – could do about it. Though hardly a solution to the problem, it was agreed that a broadcast should be prepared announcing that the tubes were essential to the war effort, and not available as air raid shelters.
In the end, the government’s approach to the problem was to avoid the problem. Its aim was to prevent the tubes being used as shelters. This was partly to avoid fostering a ‘shelter mentality’ among citizens, and partly because the functioning of the tube was essential to the functioning of London. But who was pointing out that the current shelter provision was inadequate, and that the tubes should be used to alleviate the problem? Who was proposing that the tube might work adequately as a shelter by night and a transport system by day? Who was suggesting that fear was a perfectly normal reaction to bombing, and that ‘refugees’ might remain fully-functioning members of society? Ignoring the example of the Great War, the authorities were simply hoping that the problem did not arise.
It did arise. On the evening of 8 September 1940, the day after the first heavy bombing of London, a huge group attempted to gain access to Liverpool Street Station. The station entrance was being guarded by police and LPTB staff. Bernard Kops, a fourteen year-old-boy who had been bombed out of his Stepney home the previous day, was in the throng with the rest of his family. With policemen barring the entrance, he thought he was going to be crushed to death. Screaming, he was swept along in the surge. The crowd was clearly not going to give way, and nor, it seemed, were the police. Suddenly, ‘a great yell went up and the gates were opened and my mother threw her hands together and clutched them towards the sky’. The people had won. The government, says Kops, had been made to acquiesce.
Three nights later, on 11 September, 2,000 people rushed down the stairs at Holborn Station before going to sleep on platforms and in corridors. Giddy with victory, the special correspondent of the Daily Worker (the Communist Party newspaper), wrote:
On previous nights when a few groups of people had attempted to use the station as a shelter, officials turned them away. Now in the face of the determination of thousands of people to secure real shelter from bombs, the London Passenger Transport Board officers seem to have given up the attempt to keep them out.
On 14 September Phil Piratin, a thirty-three-year-old designer of hats and the Communist councillor for Spitalfields East, carried out a publicity stunt to bring attention to the tube situation. Together with seventy-seven associates from Stepney, Piratin invaded the Savoy Hotel shelter and refused to leave until the All Clear had sounded. The police soon arrived, and Piratin tried to explain his position. He pointed to a woman from Stepney with four children whose husband was in the army. ‘What would you do,’ he asked the police inspector, ‘if your wife were put in the position of that woman over there?’ Piratin says that the inspector expressed sympathy – although he proceeded to take the name and address of every Stepney intruder. After a while, waiters began serving cups of tea – for which Piratin insisted on paying. The price was agreed at tuppence a cup, the amount charged by a Lyons Corner House. When the All Clear eventually sounded, the occupation ended. ‘Everyone left elated,’ says Piratin, ‘and there was publicity in the Sunday papers.’ One paper was rather sombre in its tone, however. The Daily Worker predicted that ‘One day the pent up fury of the workers will burst forth in all its majesty and might. And then woe betide the denizens of the Savoy.’
Before that day, however, there was a Blitz to struggle through, and by the night of 18 September, almost every functioning tube station was in use as an air raid shelter. At Hampstead, people were queuing outside the station at 2.30 in the afternoon. Across the network stations were filling up throughout the evening – and many were having to turn people away. Yet the following day, in the spirit of Canute, the government issued an urgent appeal to the public in the national newspapers. Under the heading ‘No Sheltering In The Tubes’, it urged people ‘to refrain from using tube stations as air raid shelters except in case of urgent necessity’. The problem was that the government had one definition of ‘urgent necessity’ – while a scared and lonely pensioner with no Anderson shelter or refuge room had another.
It may come as a surprise, while reading of a battle between the government and its people, to discover that the head of that government – Winston Churchill – was actually in favour of using the tubes as shelters. (This also seems inconsistent given that Churchill had recently expressed strong disapproval of the Finsbury Borough Council scheme – but Churchill had never been shy of reviewing a situation in the name of pragmatism.) More surprising is that Churchill was ignorant of the problem until 21 September. On that day, he asked Sir John Anderson to prepare him a précis of the issue. The Home Secretary’s note explained that the public had been sheltering in the tube since ‘the intensified air attack’ and that the authorities had found it impossible to keep them out. This could only be done with the use of military assistance – and public opinion would not allow this. ‘The decision regarding the use of the tubes for shelter purposes,’ explained Anderson, ‘was thus breached and we were faced with a fait accompli.’
The government had lost the Battle of the London Underground and it tacitly admitted the fact when the decision was taken to turn the Holborn to Aldwych branch of the Piccadilly Line into a public shelter. (This branch line had sheltered the War Cabinet during the First World War, and was currently being used to shelter the Elgin Marbles and other British Museum treasures.) On 25 September the government conceded public defeat with the issue of a declaration to the press which began: ‘The use of tube stations as shelters has now been officially recognised.’
A leader article in The Times on the same day drew attention to the Home Secretary’s admission that the provision of shelters across the country, and particularly in London, had been insufficient, and that ‘urgent and large-scale action’ was needed to remedy the problem. That action, argued The Times, should involve striking a balance between the policies of dispersal and deep sheltering: good use must now be made of all available deep shelters.
When assessing the performance of the government – and asking whether it did a good job for its people – we must first remind ourselves that the Blitz amounted to an unknown – and unknowable – prospect. Just as the government was having to guess at the size of the dea
th toll and the number of psychological casualties, so it was imagining the rise of lawless troglodyte communities in deep shelters under the ground. And while this prospect may sound far-fetched, bear in mind the excitement felt by Henry Moore as he sat, night after night, sketching people in their primeval state as though evolution had reversed itself. He could not have hoped to encounter this scene in any other place at any other time. Perhaps the government was not being entirely fanciful. And there existed, too, a fear of the antiauthoritarian and egalitarian spirit which was thought to be brewing underground. ‘Those under the ground instilled an element of fear in those who remained above it,’ writes Peter Ackroyd. ‘It is the fear of the depths.’
A more prosaic government concern related to the cost and construction of deep shelters. The Hailey Conference dismissed J. B. S. Haldane’s proposals on the grounds that they would take too long to build. But while the conference clearly lacked objectivity, its concerns may have been valid. In November 1940, after Herbert Morrison became Home Secretary, construction began on ten deep-level shelters in London, each attached to an Underground station. Just eight were completed, all behind schedule, at a cost of almost three times the original estimate. They were only opened to the public in 1944.2 The deep shelters proposed by Haldane and by Finsbury Borough Council might well have suffered the same fate.
The government also feared that large concentrations of people sheltering together would lead to instances of mass slaughter – and this was borne out by events. On 14 October 1940, for example, an armour piercing bomb forced its way through the earth above Balham Underground Station and exploded over a passage between the two platforms. Sixty-six people were killed. On 11 January 1941 a bomb fell on the booking hall of Bank Station. The force of the blast shot down the escalators and through the tunnels, killing fifty-one people. And on 3 May 1941 a bomb penetrated the basement shelter of Wilkinson’s Lemonade factory in North Shields. One hundred and seven people – more than half of those in the shelter – were killed. The people killed in these raids probably believed themselves safe. Colin Perry, an eighteen-year-old from Tooting, who witnessed the aftermath of the Balham bomb, wrote in his diary, ‘They had gone to the Tubes for safety, instead they found worse than bombs, they found the unknown, terror.’
Another government concern was that fear and panic would spread and breed in a crowd. An event which took place almost two years after the end of the Blitz suggests that this belief, too, had validity. On 3 March 1943, as a crowd of shelterers was entering Bethnal Green Station, the unfamiliar sound of a new type of anti-aircraft rocket in nearby Victoria Park caused a surge. It seems that a woman holding a child tripped at the bottom of the stairs leading from the street to the booking hall, and the surge quickly turned into a crush, in which 172 people were killed at the scene. Another person died later in hospital. One of the policemen called upon was James Morten, who recalls, ‘There were dead bodies piled up from the ground to the roof. It was simply a result of the panic by people coming in from behind.’
The surface damage caused by the Balham Underground bomb.
And beyond the government’s concerns, it seems that dispersal appealed to the majority of the population. Even when deep shelter was at hand, many preferred to remain closer to the home, either inside the house or in an Anderson shelter in the garden. Only about four per cent of the population of London actually used the tube for sheltering. Perhaps this reflected a British tradition of self-containment, of lives led alongside, but never interfering with, the neighbours. Or perhaps it simply offered a less disrupted existence. Either way, the Anderson shelter undoubtedly proved effective from a psychological point of view: millions of citizens spent nine months in its womb-like safety before emerging into the world in the early summer of 1941.3
During a September 1940 raid, Mrs Winifred Roderick gave birth to a son in her family shelter. The boy was named Peter John ANDERSON Roderick . . .
And it stood up very well to bomb damage – though not, of course, from a direct hit. The Anderson’s chief problem was a lack of basic comfort. It was small, cold and dark, and difficult for a family of four (or perhaps even six) to bear over long winter nights. As the Blitz wore on, many started to desert their Andersons for the relative comfort of the house. ‘A lot of the shelters got waterlogged,’ says Betty Brown, a factory worker from Chingford, ‘and we decided that we’d sleep inside.’ John Fowles, a schoolboy in Hackney, speaks for many when he says, ‘We had an Anderson shelter in the garden but we felt we stood as much chance in the house.’ The decision to stay indoors was taken by John’s father, whose Great War service afforded him total authority on such matters. This was a common theme across the country. Elsie Glendinning’s father had been a proud ‘Old Contemptible’ – one of the original British soldiers in France in August 1914. As Elsie and her mother sheltered inside their Anderson, Elsie’s father stood to attention beside it. ‘He wouldn’t go into the shelter,’ explains Elsie, ‘because he’d been in the First World War.’
Yet while the policy of dispersal was rational in theory, and both convenient and acceptable to many, what about those with no access to an Anderson or a refuge room? By dismissing the option of deep shelters and by initially refusing to make the tubes available, the government was consciously placing a sizeable section of the population at risk. While the months of relative inactivity of the ‘Phoney War’ allowed shelter provision to be accelerated (although it remained behind schedule) there was still many, across Britain, whose only protection was feeble brick shelters in the streets and parks. These are not fondly remembered. ‘Surface shelters,’ says Metropolitan policeman Walter Marshall, ‘were mostly used by ladies of easy virtue or by people needing to relieve themselves. You had to be careful what you trod in.’ Nor were they very safe. ‘The roofs of the shelters in Hull,’ says fireman John Cooper, ‘were not tied into the walls at the top so they weren’t effective against lateral blast. The walls would be blown in – or in some cases outwards and the whole roof would come down in one solid piece.’
One of the few defenders of the surface shelter was Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, who describes it, in his autobiography, as ‘the safest of the lot’. And so it is interesting to note that when the roofs of surface shelters caved in, the resulting mess was often known as a ‘Morrison Sandwich’ – the filling consisting of shelter occupants. Wartime investigations revealed that rogue builders and penny-pinching local authorities were frequently substituting sand for concrete in the shelters’ construction – so that, in London alone, at least 5,000 faulty shelters were erected. But there were still plenty of people spending the nights in these unhappy death traps. For six months, London secretary Alda Ravera slept in one, bedding down each evening, alongside her family, on a copy of the Evening Standard. It is hard to argue with Tom Hopkinson’s observation that the people of Britain were hardened to deprivation. And if anything could prove his point, it was the large-scale tendency of people in towns across Britain to avoid the bombing by the extreme measure of ‘trekking’.
The shelterers inside this Anderson were unhurt, despite widespread damage.
Trekking was the daily rush of people from the towns to the countryside in search of a place to shelter for the night. Trekkers were sometimes invited into people’s homes, but more often they ended up sleeping in barns and churches, under hedges, and in fields, before returning the next morning. The phenomenon took place in towns and cities that experienced heavy bombing, and it was viewed by the government as a sign of weakened morale. According to Richard Titmuss, the official historian of social policy, the government was so anxious that nothing should be done to encourage trekking that ‘no specific provision was to be made for the people taking part’. It was treated, in other words, as though it wasn’t happening. The press mentioned nothing, and no assistance was offered to the trekkers. Just as Londoners had reacted spontaneously to the bombing by occupying the tubes, people around the country were heading out of town – and the gover
nment was choosing to ignore them in the hope that they would go away.
Gwen Hughes was a young mother from Southampton. On the night of Saturday 30 November, she was buried alive by a bomb blast in one of the town’s shelters. It took several hours to dig her out, but her injuries were only minor. The following night her brother drove her out of Southampton to a recently built house six miles away. Gwen remembers:
Every evening my brother would drive around the town picking up strangers, and he’d drive them into the country. To escape the bombs. Mr and Mrs Hutchins’s wooden bungalow was made open to anyone. They were very good people. And people would shelter in this room, all sitting around the floor and lying wherever they could, just to be out of the danger of the town. The only time I agreed to go was on the Sunday – I couldn’t stand any more!
There are no figures for the numbers who would trek out of Southampton every evening, but a Mass-Observation estimate suggests that by 10 December, ‘twenty per cent or less of the normal resident population’ was sleeping in the old parts of the city.
After exceptionally heavy raids on Plymouth in the spring of 1941, around 30,000 people were trekking out of the city each day. On 24 April, after the city had been attacked over three consecutive nights, the figure may have reached 50,000. The following night, according to a Society of Friends report, a YMCA mobile canteen stopped near Yelverton on Dartmoor. The moor seemed deserted – but people soon began to appear ‘from among the ditches and heather’. A week later, the Luftwaffe bombed Merseyside for seven nights, and the town of Bootle suffered terribly. Up to 5,000 houses were destroyed, and every rest centre barring one was put out of action. An estimated half of the population trekked out of the town on 8 May, the last night of the bombing. These people were not cowards. They were ordinary citizens doing what they could to keep going in terrible circumstances. Clearly the authorities had not anticipated trekking, and so closed their eyes to it. It was rigid and unsympathetic leadership, demonstrating, in the words of Tom Harrisson, ‘an inability to understand the needs of ordinary people in extraordinary times’. Indeed, the fact that people were willing to walk for miles, sleep in ditches, and still arrive at work the next morning hardly demonstrates a lack of morale. It shows, on the contrary, supreme determination. Rather than trekking, perhaps it should be described as extreme commuting. And it confirms, once again, that Tom Hopkinson was correct to stress the underlying toughness of ordinary British men and women. What were a few nights on the moors to people who had lived their whole lives in hardship?