LITMIR.BIZ

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There were a large number of Jewish people using the shelter that night: the dead of the Diaspora included a tragic number of husbands and wives or siblings who perished together – the Aurichs, Copersteins, Danzigers and Edelsteins, Hilda Muscovitch and her sister Golda Moscow. The Jewish dead were kept separate from the Gentile, most of whom were interred in a mass burial in nearby Abney Park Cemetery.

      So terrible was the incident (as locations where bombs had fallen were blandly called) that an observer from the Ministry of Information arrived the next morning to check on how the borough was coping. She reported that the council was ‘rising to the problem in a magnificent way and is acting with breadth of vision and initiative in coping with the endless and acute problems which are being thrown upon it’, though the Town Clerk warned her that people’s morale was very dependent on how soon homes could be ‘patched up’, satisfactory billets found or, in the case of older people, they could be evacuated away from the area – though this was proving ‘heart breaking’, as most of the elderly who desperately wanted to leave had nowhere to go. ‘The bill that is being run up for all these extra things [such as transport, food, overnight accommodation, storing the furniture of those bombed out, demolition and repair work] is tremendous, but none of the officials feel that at the moment anything matters except helping people as much as they can, but at the same time preventing their kindness being taken advantage of,’ she added in the reproving voice of bureaucracy.

      Just over a month after the start of the blitz, the Stoke Newington disaster acutely pinpointed several stark realities of the situation. How well equipped, resourced and prepared were local authorities for major ‘incidents’ that not only left many dead and injured, but also threatened to confront them with the overwhelming challenge of housing the homeless? How would it be possible to feed the hungry, repair buildings, demolish dangerous structures, get utility and transport systems functioning and ensure that war production was disrupted as little as possible? How would the various Civil Defence organisations – the ARP, the AFS, the rescue and demolition squads, the medical services, plus essential voluntary bodies such as the WVS (Women’s Voluntary Service) – cope? And how successful would those in authority – in central government as well as locally – be in tending to the social and emotional needs of the people, to their morale as well as their physical well-being?

      But the primary question that preoccupied most Londoners in the early days was: where would they be safe? And the answer seemed to be: nowhere. Anderson shelters were reasonably satisfactory if there was room for one, though they were often damp, cold, cramped and generally uncomfortable, while their metal surfaces magnified the crash and whistle of bombs, and fragments ricocheting off them clattered alarmingly. Moreover, sheltering in a tin ‘dog kennel’ in the garden could be a terrifyingly lonely experience, and many people preferred the ‘safety in numbers’ illusion and the camaraderie of communal shelters, where the raid outside could be partly drowned out by talking, singing and playing music. Yet brick-built surface shelters were increasingly distrusted, and shared all the drawbacks of cold, damp Anderson shelters, while adding some of their own when it came to sanitation, general comfort and cleanliness. And, as the Coronation Avenue disaster showed, reinforced basements, the government’s cost-saving preferred option, were not necessarily safe – indeed, as onlookers speculated, had the building’s residents stayed in their flats rather than going down to the basement to shelter, they might well not have been crushed, and would certainly have been unlikely to be killed by water, effluent and gas seeping into their lungs – an aspect of the tragedy that particularly horrified those who witnessed its aftermath.

      In London, and later in the rest of the country, people sheltered where they felt safest – even if this safety was often illusory. As the Ministry of Home Security found, the public showed ‘a strong tendency to be irrational in their choice of shelters’. In Shoreditch, residents hurried to the reinforced-concrete hall attached to St Augustine’s church, even though it had been refused designation as an official shelter since no part of it was underground. The vicar of Haggerston, whose church it was and who had had the hall built himself, felt that since there was not exactly a ‘superabundance’ of shelters in Shoreditch, he could not refuse entry to those who wished to shelter there. He displayed a large notice warning, ‘THIS IS NOT AN AIR-RAID SHELTER. They who use it as such do so at their own risk,’ but still his parishioners and more flocked in.

      Molly Fenlon lived in a block of flats near Tower Bridge in Bermondsey. On the first night of the blitz her father, who was a policeman, was on duty in the docks. Her mother, driven frantic by the falling bombs, decided to seek shelter. ‘A small party of us from the flats piled our bedding into an old pram and trailed off to 61 Arch, which is a series of arches under London Bridge railway station. It used, in years gone by, to be an ice well, and it felt as though all the ice had been left there, it was so cold. The walls were very damp too, but we were glad enough to go anywhere. Many homeless people, white and shaken, came in from Rotherhithe and the local district.’

      The next night Molly’s father was off-duty, so the whole family

      accordingly, about seven p.m., put its bedding on a pram and marched off. 61 Arch was full, and as it was cold, and damp as well, we decided to go along to the next Arch which is a through road converted into a shelter. That was full too. All the pavement down both sides was taken, so our little party slept in the gutter that night, except me. As there wasn’t even room for me in the gutter, I wriggled into the pram. It was a tight fit but I slept … Suddenly I woke up to find that a bit of the pram must have grown up and was sticking in my back. Looking at my watch I discovered that it was two a.m. All our party was asleep except Miss N…, she was reading a thriller! I found that I ached all over, so struggled out of the pram and spent the rest of the night walking up and down the Arch, smoking and thinking about my fiancé (as he was then) who was … in the R.A.F. I remember wondering, a trifle morbidly, if I should live to get married.

      We were an assorted lot there: as I walked up and down, I studied the … people as they slept. There was a tiny baby, a fortnight old, like a little rosebud in its pram, and an elderly man, bald headed, snoring fit to wake the Seven Sleepers, spread eagled on the ground with no blanket between him and the asphalt … Next morning I discovered that I had collected six flea bites on my person, and Miss N … was horrified to see a bug crawl across the collar of her raincoat as she was packing up.

      After that I struck: told mother that she could please herself but that I would rather be done to death by a German bomb, than bitten to death in an Air Raid shelter. She agreed about that.

      From then on the Fenlons slept at home throughout the raids – though they had to move flats when theirs was badly damaged by a twenty-eight-pound AA shell that crashed through the roof. When Molly married her airman fiancé on 17 November, it was in the vestry in the churchyard of St Olave and St John’s, since the church had been burnt out in a raid in October.

      On 14 October 1940, one of the large trench shelters in Kennington Park received a direct hit. ‘They are still digging,’ wrote Joan Veazey, wife of the vicar of the nearby St Mary’s church, in her diary, ‘and there are all sorts of rumours going around as to how many are trapped inside. We know that one of our church families always shelter there … So far we can get no news. There is nothing we can do but wait and pray for all those who are listening for the scratch of the rescue shovels.’

      The next day the Veazeys ‘heard that they have found the Potters who were in the park shelter. If what we are told is true, this family were sitting with their backs to the wall of the shelter, reading and knitting, when there was a sudden blue flash and the earth and concrete started to cave in … the blast turned the little daughter upside down and her legs were caught in the concrete of the roof … her mother took her whole weight on her shoulders until she was rescued … but as they took her out she died of shock and her injuries. Christopher [the vicar] will go to see the others who are badly burned in hospital … We do not know how many were killed … but the wardens say about 179 persons died in the shelter.’

      At Ramsgate on the Kent coast, caves provided natural shelters which the local council had started to improve access to as Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939, and which were completed by the outbreak of war. According to Picture Post, the three miles of tunnels that lay between fifty and ninety feet

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