The Blitz: The British Under Attack

The next day, since the water supply had failed, all the remaining patients – except one who had been brought in as an emergency appendicitis case that morning – were evacuated to sector hospitals in the country,* with medical students carrying the stretchers to waiting ambulances. St Thomas’s was hit again on 13 September and again on the 15th, when two surgeons and a nurse were killed and four were seriously injured, including one in charge of the first aid post who subsequently died. The outpatients ward, the dispensary and the hospital chapel were badly damaged, and the electricity supply was cut off, so doctors and nurses had to tend the patients by candlelight or using the few battery-powered nightlights available. The hospital was hit three more times during the blitz. It was, in the words of its historian, ‘for most of the war little more than a heap of ruins; yet it never closed entirely. When things were bad life was carried on in the basement … when things were better … a semblance of normal life and work miraculously took over in hastily cleared out rooms and wards.’

An air-raid shelter had been established in the basement of Buckingham Palace by appropriating one of the housekeeper’s rooms. The ceilings were reinforced with steel girders, the high window protected by steel shutters. The furniture came from all over the palace, while the decoration consisted of valuable Dutch landscapes, many featuring canal bridges and ruminant cows. An axe and an emergency escape ladder lay ready alongside a bottle of smelling salts. Members of the royal household sheltered in an adjacent room with a piano – but the King vetoed its use for rousing singsongs.

‘My darling Mama,’ Queen Elizabeth wrote to Queen Mary on Friday, 13 September, ‘I hardly know how to tell you of the horrible attack on Buckingham Palace this morning. Bertie & I arrived there about ¼ to 11, and he and I went up to our poor windowless rooms to collect a few odds and ends.’ As the Queen was removing an eyelash from the eye of the King they heard a plane, which caused them to remark, ‘Ah, a German,’ as a bomb screamed down. ‘I saw a great column of smoke & earth thrown up into the air. And then we all ducked like lightning into the corridor. There was another tremendous explosion, and we & our 2 pages who were outside the door, remained for a moment or two in the corridor away from the staircase, in case of flying glass. It is curious how one’s instincts work at these moments of great danger, as quite without thinking, the urge was to get away from the windows. Everybody remained wonderfully calm, and we went down to the shelter … I was so pleased with the behaviour of our servants. They were really magnificent.’ Three of those servants, working below in the chapel, were badly injured, and one subsequently died of his injuries.

That same afternoon, the royal couple toured the East End. ‘The damage there is ghastly,’ the Queen told her mother-in-law. ‘I really felt as if I was walking in a dead city … All the houses evacuated and yet through the broken windows one saw all the poor little possessions, photographs, beds, just as they were left. At the end of the street is a school [South Hallsville School] that was hit and collapsed on top of the 500 people waiting to be evacuated – about 200 are still under the ruins [as was believed locally]. It does affect me seeing this terrible and senseless destruction – I think that I mind it much more than being bombed myself. The people are marvellous and so full of fight. One could not imagine that life could become so terrible. We must win in the end …. PS Dear old BP is still standing and that is the main thing.’

Harold Nicolson, now working in the Ministry of Information, had been concerned that it would not play well with East Enders if, while they were suffering so grievously, ‘the toffs up West’ got off lightly. ‘There is much bitterness. It is said that even the King and Queen were booed the other day when they visited the destroyed areas … Clem[ent Davies, Liberal MP and post-war party leader] says that if the Germans had had the sense not to bomb west of London Bridge there might have been a revolution in this country.’ Fortunately (in this context) the Germans displayed remarkably little such sense, and had ‘smashed about Bond Street and Park Lane and readjusted the balance’ (somewhat) on 9 September. Four days later ‘an aircraft was seen coming down the Mall … having dived through the clouds and dropped two bombs in the forecourt, 2 in the quadrangle, 1 in the Chapel & the other in the garden. There is no doubt that it was a direct attack on the Palace.’

The attack allowed the press to caption a photograph of the Queen meeting one East Ender: ‘Two women whose home has been bombed chat about the experience’. And the King told his mother that in his view, the couple’s visits to bombed areas ‘helped people who have lost their relations & homes & we have found a new bond with them as Buckingham Palace has been bombed as well as their homes, and nobody is immune’

If nobody was immune – which indeed few were – at least the royals could dress the part for their important role as morale-boosters, as their siren-suited Prime Minister fulfilled that of warrior-leader. George VI chose a series of uniforms, ‘wearing in turn the dress of each of the high ranks he bore, as Admiral of the Fleet, a Field Marshal, and Marshal of the Royal Air Force, [making] no further public appearances in mufti [after the outbreak of war] he gave visible notice that he considered himself as continually on duty as any man in the fighting services’, in the words of an admiring booklet published after the war.

The Queen had the right to wear a number of uniforms, including those of the WRNS, the WAAF and the St John Ambulance Brigade, and by 1945 her elder daughter Princess Elizabeth was entitled to wear the uniform of the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service – the women’s branch of the army). Presumably the Queen could also have considered agreeing to don the bottle-green-and-beetroot garb of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS). But instead the royal dressmaker, Norman Hartnell (who had made her a gown ‘especially for air raid nights’, and ‘a black velvet case for her gas mask’), turned his mind to the problem. He had considered that he ‘might perhaps have been useful to the War Office in camouflage, for I had many years of experience in the very antithesis of the art. It had been my special task to make figures stand out in sharp relief to the background, as has to be done in the case of Royalty.’ ‘What,’ he pondered, ‘might be appropriate wear for bombed sites and the devastated areas all over the country? How should [the Queen] appear before the distressed women and children whose own kingdom, their small homes, had been shattered and lay crumbled at their feet? In black? Black does not appear in the rainbow of hope. Conscious of tradition, the Queen made the wise decision in adhering to the gentle colours, and even though they became muted into what one might call dusty pink, dusty blue and dusty lilac, she never wore green [presumably for reasons of superstition] and she never wore black. She wished to convey the most comforting, encouraging and sympathetic note possible.’ Her hats, ‘made by Mr Aage Thaarup’, were always ‘innocent of veils’, so the populace could gaze on this sympathetic countenance without hindrance.

‘A sense of invasion,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary on 14 September, ‘that is lorries of soldiers & machines – like cranes walloping along to Newhaven. A raid is on … workmen on the hangar haystack – disguising a gun – said “Wish I was as sure of a thousand pounds as of winning the war.” ‘ 15 September 1940 was the day on which it was expected that German forces would invade Britain. ‘It may be this weekend,’ the Daily Herald had warned on the 12th, reporting that Hitler ‘has been accumulating shipping in the Channel ports, Hamburg and the Baltic, and obviously does not intend to let them rot. As the Prime Minister said last night, this invasion may never materialise: equally from present indications, it would seem that its attempt will not be long delayed. It may come anywhere in several heads from the coastline which is now in German hands. It is certain that everywhere it will meet with terrific opposition.’

There had already been an invasion scare on the night the blitz started. The previous week barges, motor launches and larger vessels had been photographed massing on the other side of the Channel, to such an extent that, according to the official history, ‘by the morning of the 7th there was much evidence from reconnaissance alone to suggest that an early landing might be expected’. In addition, German troops and dive bombers seemed to be moving into position ready for an attack, a rowing boat containing four Germans who confessed (or claimed) to be spies gathering intelligence for an invasion was captured off the English coast, and as the final clincher the moon and tides were in the right conjunction for such a crossing. The Chiefs of Staff were informed that an invasion might be imminent.

At 8.07 p.m. the signal ‘Operation Cromwell’ went out to all formations in London and the South-East for ‘immediate action’. Other commands were also told, but for information only. However, several zealous Home Guard commanders in various parts of Britain summoned their units by ringing church bells. These had been silenced after Dunkirk, and were only to be rung when it was clear that an invasion had started. In the febrile atmosphere of expectancy, heightened by notices flashed on cinema screens recalling soldiers to their barracks at once, rumours rapidly spread that the skies were already full of German parachutists, and flotillas of German motorboats were speeding towards English beaches. Members of the Home Guard hurried to their recruiting stations or carried out their jobs with rifles slung over their shoulders, householders paraded outside their homes with brooms, garden forks and spades, and the challenge ‘Who goes there?’ rang out throughout the land.

After this panic, General Sir Alan Brooke, Commander-in-Chief of Home Forces since July, tightened up procedures: in future no church bells were to be rung until he had personally counted a minimum of twenty-five German parachutists floating down onto British soil, and communicated that fact.

But the invasion did not come that night, nor any other. It was doubtful if the Germans could have mustered the 20,000 parachutists that the British government feared. The Kriegsmarine did not have any special landing craft at the time, and its commander, Admiral Erich Raeder, did not consider that a seaborne invasion was remotely feasible, while General Alfred Jodl, deputy to Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OBW), the high command of the German armed forces, advised Hitler that invasion should only be contemplated when Britain was paralysed and ‘practically incapable of fighting in the air’. On 12 October Hitler postponed ‘Operation Sealion’, the planned invasion of Britain, and in January 1941 effectively cancelled it. But at the time, of course, no one in Britain could be sure that this was the case, and that the blitz was not the final ‘softening up’ prior to an invasion. A state of alertness was maintained, and would be reactivated on occasions both as a defence and to encourage the war effort.

London was not alone in those dark days of September and October 1940 in experiencing death, injury and destruction from the air. There were spasmodic raids on the Home Counties, Liverpool had been attacked sixty times by the end of the year, and German bombs had also fallen on the Midlands, Scotland, Wales, the south coast ports Southampton and Portsmouth, the West Country and the North-East. But the capital took the brunt of the Luftwaffe attack, with 27,500 high-explosive bombs and countless incendiaries and parachute mines dropped between 7 September and 13 November.

In those two months London became a city pockmarked with ruins and rubble, its streets assaulted, private spaces ripped open to public gaze, landmarks that had stood for centuries instantly made jagged and fragile, the aftermath of the previous night’s onslaught evident in the pall of smoke and dust that hung over the capital, the smell of burning that lingered in the autumn air, roads closed, the snaking coils of fire hoses, the weary, soot-blackened faces of the firemen, the ARP wardens, the heavy rescue squads, the numbing sense of exhaustion. Vere Hodgson, a Birminghamborn woman living and working as a social worker in west London, had come back to the capital ‘to face the blitz’, as she put it on 10 September 1940. ‘This was the night the anti-aircraft barrage took on a formidable tone, and gave Londoners some satisfaction. They had more to listen to than bombs falling one by one. I shall never forget the next fortnight as long as I live … sleepless, terrified nights, and days when you could fall off your chair with weariness, and yet somehow held on … the tense look on the faces of the inhabitants of Notting Hill Gate – for of course I ventured nowhere else!’

With newspapers forbidden to mention the precise locations of bomb damage, Londoners discovered the topography of destruction for themselves. Anthony Heap, a local government official living with his mother not far from King’s Cross station,

heard of all sorts of places near us which were supposed to have been bombed but on walking round this afternoon, observed that it was the usual pack of false rumours. With one exception Harrington Square where we used to live … I could see that two houses on the north side of the square had been completely demolished and a bomb had dropped in the roadway and blown a bus up against them. The bus was still there standing lengthways against the ruins. Furthermore the roofs had been blown off two houses on the corner of Lidlington Place and thirteen houses in Eversholt Street … Most of the square’s inhabitants had been down the shelter and escaped injury but one or two people had been killed and they were still trying to get out someone buried in the basement.

The volume of gas in our stove very slight today. Presumably some of the borough’s supply is being transferred to other districts where the mains have been hit.

I heard that Tussaud’s cinema caught a packet last night. So as soon as the All Clear went at 6.25 [on 9 September] I dashed along to see. And by gosh it had too. Only the front of it in Marylebone Road and the proscenium was left standing. The rest was completely demolished as were some buildings behind it as well … not a single window in any building in the vicinity remained intact. Huge crowds thronged along the Marylebone Road to see the ruins. It was one of the sights of London today.

10th Spent entire afternoon going round sightseeing in the raid devastated areas … Holborn was easily the worst of the lot. Most of the centre between it and Chancery Lane and Red Lion Square was laid waste …

‘Only two theatres kept open last night – the Coliseum and the Criterion. The West End and local cinemas kept open but hardly did any business,’ reported Heap, who by 16 September had got a job in Finsbury Council’s Borough Treasurer’s Office, and reported that ‘Every time anyone in the office goes out wage paying or rent collecting they come back having witnessed some fresh scene of devastation.’ Over the next few weeks he chronicled the damage to central London: St Paul’s Cathedral, where

broken masonry was still piled up in front of the altar and sun streamed in through a hole in the roof; Temple Bar, St Clement Danes Church, the statue of Richard 1 (‘only the sword bent on this’) outside the House of Lords … the whole area around Cambridge Circus on the south side is in a terrible state now. Practically every street is blocked with debris which the Army Pioneer Corps have now been detailed to clear away. Next week 5,000 of them start work on this all over London … Bomb almost demolished 145 Piccadilly the house in which the King and Queen used to live when they were Duke and Duchess of York … London Palladium burnt inside nothing visible outside. St James Church, Piccadilly partly demolished. The Fifty Shillings tailor opposite burned down … The Carlton Club in Pall Mall stopped a direct hit. Also Carlton House Terrace … opposite the former German Embassy … Bomb in Blackfriars Bridge Road hit five trams held up by traffic lights during the rush hour. Many casualties … Looked at bombed out theatres Brewer Street, Saville Theatre, Drury Lane theatre only just missed a bomb, alleged Queen’s Theatre bombed.

But on 10 November Heap was able to report that just a week after London’s first raid-free night since 7 September, ‘no raids at all today – till evening. Some people inclined to link this with [Neville] Chamberlain’s death’ – since ‘the now-derided champion of peace died today [in fact the previous day] a broken and disappointed man’. Though in Heap’s view, ‘Whatever the bellicose little upstarts in power today may think of him, history cannot but judge him as a fine statesman and a great gentleman.’

Lambeth Palace, which was perilously close to the river, had received a direct hit on 20 September. Alan Don recorded:

Bomb entered roof just above large drawing room window – drawing room, parlour, little drawing room are wrecked and bedrooms above are a mass of ruins, the pantry etc. a mass of rubble. Four airmen sleeping under a table in the knife room next to the coal hole were only saved by the fact that they had a table over their heads, the contents of the drawing room fell on top of them, but they crawled out unhurt … the people in the basement passage were covered with dust and got a severe shaking but were uninjured … the crypt was full of people, some 200 of them: had the bomb landed on the other side of Cranmer’s Tower they would have received the full force of the explosion. That no one was injured is a miracle. The force of the blast was terrific – the furniture, panelling etc. is reduced to matchwood, the shutters were lying in fragments on the lawn, some of the pieces landed beyond the terrace, the wall of the house is bulging dangerously and great blocks of masonry fell onto the grass … a gaping hole in the roof yawns above the landing … the whole place is covered in white dust and much of the glass is broken.

The Archbishop of Canterbury was not in residence that night, but when Canterbury Cathedral was bombed for the second time in October, Don began to wonder, ‘Are the Germans deliberately trying to kill the Primate? They have had shots at the King and the Prime Minister and they doubtless have no love for CC [Cosmo Cantuar].’

By mid-October ‘the Bishop of London reported that between 20–25 of his churches have been put out of action entirely while another 250 have been more or less damaged. St James Piccadilly is a serious loss … There is scarcely an historic building in London that remains entirely unscathed and yet we are told that three years of such bombing would be needed to destroy a quarter of London!’ wrote Don.

The sight of their ravaged city would imprint itself forever on Londoners who lived through that intense time. On 26 September Phyllis Warner went shopping in Oxford Street: ‘I almost wish I hadn’t, the sight of that fearful destruction makes me feel so much worse tonight. [It had been severely bombed in the early hours of 18 September.] The less one sees of the result of the bombs the better. The big stores are carrying on gallantly in spite of their troubles. I bought a dress at D.H. Evans, there wasn’t a pane of glass in the shop, and the models were all nakedly exposed to the street, but the shop girls, wrapped up in big coats, were models of helpfulness, and I got just what I wanted. John Lewis’s great building was bombed and burned until it is only a blackened shell, but it bears the defiant notice “Reopening on October 5th”. The other big stores are running “Business as Usual” in such corners as remain.’

Virginia Woolf also observed the destruction of ‘that great city’, the love of which was, as she wrote to her friend the composer Ethel Smyth, ‘my only patriotism’: ‘to see London all blasted … raked my heart’. On the same day that Vere Hodgson returned to London, the Woolfs, Virginia and Leonard, came up from Sussex to spend

perhaps our strangest visit. When we got to Gower St. a barrier with Diversion on it. No sign of damage. But, coming to Doughty St. a crowd … Meck Sq. [Mecklenburg Square, where the Woolfs had their London home] roped off. Wardens there, not allowed in. The house about 30 yards from us struck at one this morning by a bomb. Completely ruined. Another bomb in the square unexploded. We walked round the back. Stood by Jane Harrison’s house [the classical scholar and anthropologist who died in 1928 had lived at number 11]. The house was still smouldering. That is a great pile of bricks. Underneath all the people who had gone down the shelter. Scraps of cloth hanging to the bare walls at the side still standing. A looking glass I think swinging. Like a tooth knocked out – a clean cut. Our house undamaged. No windows yet broken – perhaps the bomb has now broken them. We saw Sage Bernal [the scientist J.D. Bernal, who worked as Scientific Advisor to the Research and Experiments Department of the Ministry of Home Security during the war] with an arm band jumping on top of the bricks – who lived there? I suppose the casual young men and women I used to see, from my window; the flat dwellers who used to have flower pots and sit on the balcony. All now blown to bits – The garage man at the back – blear eyed & jerky told us he had been blown out of his bed by the explosion; made to take shelter in a church – a hard cold seat, he said, & a small boy lying in my arms. ‘I cheered when the all clear sounded. I’m aching all over’… we went on to Grays Inn. Left the car & saw Holborn. A vast gap at the top of Chancery Lane. Smoking still. Some great shops entirely destroyed: the hotel opposite like a shell. In a wine shop there were no windows left. People standing at the tables – I think being served. Heaps of blue green glass in the road at Chancery Lane. Men breaking off fragments left in the frames. Glass falling. Then to Lincolns Inn. To the N.S. [New Statesman] office: windows broken but house untouched. We went over to it. Deserted. Glass on stairs. Wet passages. Doors locked. So back to the car. A great block of traffic. The Cinema behind Mme Tussaud’s torn open: the stage visible. Some decorations swinging. All the R[egent’s] Park houses with broken windows, but undamaged. And then miles & miles of orderly ordinary streets – all Bayswater, and Sussex Sqre as usual. Streets empty. Faces set & eyes bleared … Then at Wimbledon a raid – people began running. We drove through almost empty streets as fast as possible. Horses taken out of shafts. Cars pulled up. Then the all clear.

‘One of the oddest things about our everyday life,’ mused Phyllis Warner on 19 September, ‘is its mixture of ruthless horror and every-day routine. I pick my way to work past the bomb craters and the shattered glass, and sit at my desk in a room with a large hole in the roof (a block of paving stone came through). Next to a house reduced to matchwood, housewives are giving prosaic orders to the baker and the milkman. Of course, ordinary life must go on, but the effect is fantastic. Nobody seems to mind the day raids, which do little damage. It is the nights which are like a continuous nightmare, from which there is no merciful awakening. Yet people won’t move away. I know that I’m a fool to go on sleeping in Central London which gets plastered every night, but I feel that if others can stand it, so can I.’

* Usually known as ‘Pug’, since, according to Churchill’s private secretary John (‘Jock’) Colville, he ‘looked like one, and when he was pleased one could almost imagine he was wagging his tail’.

* Most Ack-Ack guns had been deployed to defend factories and airfields during the Battle of Britain, so when the Germans suddenly switched their attention to London, the capital was highly vulnerable, its defence resting on an entirely inadequate total of 264 anti-aircraft guns.

* On 28 August 1939 the Ministry of Health had ordered that since at least 25,000 casualties a day were expected when the blitz started, hospital admissions should be restricted to emergency cases only, and those should be monitored carefully, since the patients might well have to be evacuated. On the day war broke out the Emergency Medical Services came into operation. Under this scheme the capital and its outlying districts were divided into ten sectors, with one or more of the London teaching hospitals at the head of each. St Thomas’s, for example, was the key hospital for Sector VIII, which included fifty-one voluntary hospitals and homes and miscellaneous other institutions scattered around south-west London and adjoining parts of Surrey and Hampshire, with the matron of St Thomas’s responsible for all the nursing staff in the sector.