The Blitz: The British Under Attack - Juliet Gardiner

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on end and would overflow on to the floor … Then there was the question of lights. I have been told by wardens that, for the first two months [of the blitz], shelters in some boroughs had no lights at all. We had one hurricane lamp for about fifty people. How often in the small hours, if the raid had started early, there would be a wail of ‘Warden! Warden! The light’s gone out!’ and children would wake up and howl, women grow nervous and men swear. It was expecting altogether too much of people’s nerves to ask them to sit through a raid in the dark. The one paraffin light also provided the only heating that there was in those days. It was bitterly cold that winter, and naturally, therefore, the door was kept shut. Some of the bigger shelters had ventilation pipes, but the smaller ones that held fifty people only had the door. In some, the atmosphere of dank concrete, of stagnant air, of the inevitable smell of bodies, the stench of the chemical closets was indescribable … But if conditions in many of our shelters were bad, in some other districts they were incredible. They belonged more properly to the days of a hundred years ago than to the twentieth century.

      Joan Veazey, newly married to the vicar of St Mary’s Church, Kennington, in south London, went with her husband Christopher to visit a number of local public shelters in September 1940. ‘It is amazing what discomfort people will put up with, some on old mattresses, others in deck chairs and some lying on cold concrete floors with a couple of blankets stretched round their tired limbs. In nearly all the shelters the atmosphere is so thick that you could cut it with a knife. And many of the places – actually – stink! I think that I would prefer to risk death in the open to asphyxiation. Mothers were breast feeding their babies, and young couples were making love in full view of anyone who passed down the stairs. In one very large shelter which was made to hold about 300 persons … only two buckets as latrines were available … and the result was that the whole floor was awash … the smell was so awful that we tied hankies around our mouths soaked in “Cologne”.’

      Not only were such shelters cold, lacking in facilities, damp and malodorous, many were also dangerous. It seems almost beyond belief that a brick box standing out in the open, above ground, could be imagined to offer protection against serious attack. The best that could be said was that it was probably better to be in one of these than to be caught out in the street during an air raid, as you would at least be protected from shrapnel and flying debris. But public shelters had their own hazards. Government instructions for their construction had stipulated that the mortar to bind the bricks should be two parts lime to one part cement, but subsequent directives were more ambiguous, and local authorities bent on saving money, and cowboy builders bent on making money, started to substitute sand for cement – which anyway was in short supply due to the various demands for defence construction – in the mixture. A heavy blast near such an ill-constructed shelter could turn it into a gruesomely named ‘Morrison sandwich’ when the walls blew out and the heavy roof collapsed on the occupants, trapping and often killing them. In the London area it was found that at least 5,000 such potentially lethal public shelters had been built, while in Bristol 4,000 had to be demolished or radically strengthened for the same reason.

      Margaret Turpin’s family had started to use a public shelter, along with a number of the families living near their East End home, since the one in the garden had proved unbearably cramped. ‘Of course you had to go there early, about seven in the evening, and then come home in the morning.’ One night the shelterers had been listening to the wireless when it went off, which ‘happened with almost every raid’:

      The next thing I remember was coming to and trying to move my head, which I couldn’t, and as fast as you moved your head, you got a fountain of dust coming down, and it filled your nose and it filled your mouth, and I thought I’m going to die. I tried to shout, but the more I shouted and the more I moved, the more dust I brought down. I must have had lots of periods of unconsciousness, because I remember hearing people, and then a long time after, I remember seeing an ARP helmet, and it was way, way up, a long way away. And then suddenly it was quite near. I do remember the man saying to me, ‘We’ll soon have you out.’ He said, ‘All we’ve got to do is get your arm out.’ And I looked at this arm that was sticking out of the debris, and I said, ‘That’s not my arm,’ and he said, ‘Yes it is love, it’s got the same coat’… I don’t remember coming out of the shelter. I do remember being in the ambulance, and I think for me that was probably the worst part … I felt somebody’s blood was dripping on me from above, and I found that awful – mainly I think because I didn’t know whose blood it was, whether it was someone I knew and loved or not. And I tried to move my head, but of course it was a narrow space and I couldn’t get my head away from the blood. And I heard a long time afterwards that the man was already dead. But it couldn’t have been my father because he was taken out of the shelter and he didn’t die till two days later … He died, my mother died, my baby sister died, my younger sister died. I had two aunts and they died, and an uncle died … I knew almost immediately because when I came home from hospital – they sent you home and you were in an awful state really, and you had to find your own way home from hospital and I’d had … most of my clothes cut off to be X-rayed and I couldn’t use the arm that had been trapped. When I got to the house, there were milk bottles outside and I just knew then that nobody had come home to take them in …

      The seven were all buried on the same day. My brother said that they put Union Jacks on the coffins. He didn’t know who did it … I didn’t go to the funerals … They sent me to Harefield [near Watford] of all places. It was quite a decent place to send me to. But unfortunately the people at Harefield could see the raids on London, and they used to come out to watch, to view it like a spectacle, and I couldn’t stand that.

       4 Underground

      … Those first fell raids on the East End

      Saw the Victorian order bend As scores from other districts came To help douse fires and worked the same With homeless folks to help them flit To underground that ‘wait-a-bit In Government, ruled out of bounds.’ But bombs and those sights and sounds Made common people take the law Into their own hands. The stress of war And most of their common sense Ignored the old ‘Sitting-on-the-fence’ They fled to the Tubes, the natural place Of safety. Whereupon ‘save-face’ Made it official. Issued passes, Being thus instructed by the masses Folk lived and slept in them in rows While bombing lasted: through the throes.

      From ‘In Civvy Street’, a long poem by P. Lambah, a medical student, about the home front in the Second World War

      When the alert sounded at about eight o’clock in the evening of Sunday, 13 October 1940, most of the residents of Coronation Avenue, an austere-looking nineteenth-century block of flats in Stoke Newington, north London, built by a philanthropic housing company, the Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Society, dutifully trooped down the narrow stone steps to shelter in the basement. There they were joined by a number of passers-by, since the basement had been designated as ‘Public Shelter no. 5’. The Daily Express journalist Hilde Marchant would call what followed ‘the greatest bombing tragedy of the whole of London’. A heavy bomb fell on the centre of the building, penetrated through five floors and detonated in the basement. The entire solid-looking structure collapsed. The floors above caved in, choking smoke and brick dust filled the air, and those who had not been killed by the weight of masonry falling on them found the exits blocked by rubble and debris. The water mains, gas mains and sewerage pipes had been ruptured by the explosion and effluent poured in, drowning and suffocating the shelterers. The rescue squads that rushed to the scene were unable to dislodge the heavy masonry that was trapping the victims.

      Screens were erected to keep the gruesome sights from the view of the public, as Civil Defence workers helped by soldiers drafted in from demolition work nearby laboured to rescue any survivors and retrieve the bodies. One member of the Finsbury Rescue Service had persuaded his reluctant wife to take their children to the Coronation Avenue shelter while he was on duty that night. ‘For days on end he watched the digging, although there was no hope at all. They tried to persuade him to go away but he only shook his head’ as rescuers excavated to find the bodies of his entire entombed family. The rubble was so compacted that it took over a week to extract all

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