The Blitz: The British Under Attack

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 underground made Ramsgate and Barcelona ‘the only towns in the world that have deep shelters’. There was natural ventilation, and electricity had been run from the town’s supply – and there was an emergency generating system if that should fail. Signposts were erected so shelterers would not get lost in the labyrinthine corridors. There was space for 60,000 people (twice the population of Ramsgate), none of whom would be more than five minutes away from one of the complex’s twenty-two entrances, and seating for 30,000. Dover strengthened the entrances to its caves too, and bored connecting tunnels and installed bunks, though ‘as there was no current of air, you can imagine what it was like when slept in night after night by those with no homes, and little facility for washing. Rather like a rabbit hutch.’ Or, as the Inspector General of Civil Defence, E.J. Hodsoll, described the scene in February 1941, ‘the equivalent of a gypsy squatters’ camp’.

An estimated 15,000 Londoners nightly colonised Chislehurst caves in Kent, which had been used as an ammunition dump in the First World War, with special trains being laid on to convey shelterers there each evening and return them to London in the morning. At first the caves were primitive, with bare earth floors and flickering candles or torches the only light, a single water tap and an oildrum filled with creosote for sanitation. But soon electric lighting was organised by two private individuals – one of whom had been renting the caves for the cultivation of mushrooms; donkeys carried away the ash bins that were used as lavatories; the local council provided bunks; and a Red Cross medical centre was opened, complete with emergency operating theatre and canteen. So safe were the Chislehurst caves considered that the children’s ward of a local hospital was moved there. At first shelterers were charged a halfpenny a night, but as the facilities grew more sophisticated – dances and singsongs were held, and a cinema screen erected; church services were held, with an improvised altar positioned under a ‘natural dome’, and the congregation joining in the appropriate hymn ‘Rock of Ages’ – this rose to sixpence, and a team of ‘captains’ was appointed to oversee things and keep order. By November the local council had taken over responsibility for the caves, but used a light touch for fear of stifling the ‘self-help’ initiative that had got them organised in the first place.

Existing tunnels below the streets of Luton in Bedfordshire were strengthened, as was the Ouseburn Culvert in Newcastle upon Tyne, while the Victoria Tunnel in the same city was also used as a shelter. In Runcorn, on Merseyside, where leakage from chlorine gas holders was considered a particular potential hazard in a raid, a network of underground tunnels was constructed. During raids on Plymouth, people trekked across the fields to take shelter inside a tunnel hewn in a quarry. It was cold and dark and water ran down the walls, but it was a haven, and every Sunday the local vicar conducted a service there. In Bristol, an old railway tunnel that had been used to take goods from the port into the city was taken over by ‘men, women and children huddled together sleeping on mattresses, planks or straw. Some had corrugated iron sheets or pieces of sacking and canvas placed overhead to catch the water that dripped from the rocky roof of the tunnel. The air was thick with the fumes of oil stoves, oil lamps and various odours of cooking food … When the Corporation employees opened the doors in the morning, the stench and fumes came from within like a fog. It was a picture of Dante’s Inferno. Many of the people were nervous wrecks. People stayed in the tunnel by day, afraid to lose their places. There was hardly any room between the rough beds. Some performed their natural functions alongside their beds. It was unbelievable that people could be driven by fear to endure such conditions.’

Conditions were as bad, if not worse, in London’s most notorious shelter: the Tilbury in Stepney. For the Daily Herald journalist Ritchie Calder, it was ‘not only the most unhygienic place I have ever seen, it was … definitely unsafe … yet numbers as high, on some estimates, as 14,000 to 16,000 people crowded into it on those dreadful nights when hell was let loose on East London … People of every type and condition, every colour and creed found their way there … men from the Levant and Slavs from Eastern Europe; Jew, Gentile, Moslem and Hindu. When ships docked, seamen would come to royster [sic] for a few hours. Scotland Yard knew where to look for criminals bombed out of Hell’s Kitchen. Prostitutes paraded there. Hawkers peddled greasy, cold fried fish which cloyed the already foul atmosphere. Free fights had to be broken up by the police. Couples courted. Children slept. Soldiers, sailors and airmen spent part of their leave there.’

‘It was an enormous place,’ remembered Robert Baltrop. ‘I’ve seen figures like 6,000 sheltering in it every night. It wasn’t even properly underground, [much of it] was simply a surface building, and it was almost like a village; people sold things, ladies of the street carried on their business there … a whole nightlife went on in the Tilbury, all through the blitz.’

The Tilbury, situated off the Commercial Road, was part of Liverpool Street station goods yard, and was owned by two different bodies. On one side lay vaults and stores; on the other was an underground loading yard, partly below ground, and above it a massive warehouse supported on steel girders. The vaults had been taken over by Stepney Council as a shelter for 3,000 people, but the Home Secretary refused permission for it to requisition the warehouse and the loading bays – by far the larger part. However, the site had been an official shelter in the First World War, and ‘It was known to older people as “the place to go”.’ And that is what happened. When the desperate hour came, they crowded there from all parts of east London, often coming from miles away. The limited capacity of the official section was quickly filled, and thousands overflowed into the rest of the site. There was nothing the owners could do to prevent the torrent of humanity which took possession. The borough council disclaimed responsibility for those who took shelter in the ‘unauthorised’ areas, on the grounds that it had been refused powers and would be trespassing on private property. Even the police could not at first gain access, except when called in by the harassed policemen of the company concerned.

As long as Calder lived, he wrote, he would

never forget the stampede when the gates were flung open and the swarming multitude careered down the slope, tripping, tumbling, being trodden on, being crushed and fighting and scrambling for the choice of sleeping berths – in the valleys between the gigantic bales of newsprint. Expectant mothers and even children were crushed.

Sanitation barely existed. The only provision was for a handful of workmen usually employed there. The result was that the roadways were ankle deep in filth, which was trodden into blankets on which people were to sleep. Great stacks of London’s margarine were stored there. Hundreds of cartons were hopelessly fouled every night. It was over a fortnight before the margarine began to be moved out, by the intervention of the Ministry of Food. People slept among the filth. They slept in the dust between the rails and on the cobblestones of the roadway. They slept on the wooden bays amongst the food. It was appalling.

Hilde Marchant, who visited the Tilbury for the Daily Express, was equally appalled: by the sour smell of rancid margarine that pervaded the vaults, by the strong odour of horse in the loading bays, by the ‘confused mass of bodies strewn everywhere’, but above all when she came to ‘the canvas partitions at the end. These were the latrines, twelve chemical lavatories helped by a few buckets for the children. I went into the six latrines reserved for women. They were overflowing, and a woman worker was standing over the door, saying they could not be used any more that night.’

Euan Wallace, Regional Commissioner for the London Civil Defence Region, thought it was ‘no use spending a lot of money on things like water closets’, as the government lacked the power to requisition the part of the Tilbury owned by the railway company, and in any case, ‘It does seem … very doubtful whether it is worth putting new wine into such a very old bottle. It can never be anything but a very indifferent shelter and it presents peculiarly difficult health and sanitation problems.’ However, by mid-October ‘The Prime Minister has been hunting Morrison very hard on the Tilbury shelter question,’ reported Wallace, and though ‘the City was being unreasonably sticky on providing basements in commercial buildings’, accommodation was eventually found so that 4,000 shelterers could be moved from the railway-owned part of the shelter, and conditions improved for those who stayed.

Until then, though, it was largely due to individual unofficial initiatives that things got better. There had not been even a first aid post in the unofficial half of the Tilbury, but a local Jewish doctor volunteered his services and spent his evenings attending to the shelterers’ needs, then ‘slept the night at his self-appointed post. There were women there – genuine motherly souls with a passion for well-doing – who spent the whole twenty-four hours, for weeks on end, ministering to this vast unruly family. They were self-appointed shelter marshals, without authority and without resources. It was they who brought urns of fresh water into the unofficial shelter, rationing the water as sparingly as though they were the keepers of an oasis in the desert … Any minister or official or influential visitor who ventured into that shelter would be button-holed. With evangelical fervour, they would be told of the miseries these people had to endure, of what grand people they were if only they had a chance, and a whole catalogue of all the things that needed to be done.’

It was not only officials who beat a path to the Tilbury shelter: it soon became a tourist attraction for people from ‘up West’ to gawp at the hellish conditions their fellow Londoners were suffering a few miles away. Rachel Reckitt was in charge of the emergency Citizens Advice Bureau set up at Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel – a ‘university settlement’ where middle-class workers lived among the poor, hoping to share knowledge and culture, and alleviate the poverty of their neighbours – to offer advice and practical help to East Enders suffering during the blitz. In October 1940 she had a ‘night out with [the distinguished American lawyer] Mrs Goodhart [who] wanted to see the Tilbury shelter, so, as it was no good early in the evening [when no shelterers would have arrived] I offered to take her later. She said should we go and get some dinner at the Savoy, or have it at Toynbee? I believe she would have liked Toynbee, but saw I wouldn’t, so we had a drive round Wapping and Shadwell and the Isle of Dogs … it looked lovely in the fading light, especially the river. Wapping church and the school have gone … all but the Church tower … Then we had a good dinner at the Savoy, with Leslie Howard [who played Ashley Wilkes in the film Gone with the Wind, which had opened in London a few months previously, and who would be killed when the plane in which he was a passenger was shot down in June 1943] and Anthony Asquith [the film director ‘Puffin’ Asquith, son of the former Liberal Prime Minister] at the next table … Afterwards we went back to Stepney to the Tilbury shelter. Entry there is by pass only as they, naturally, dislike sightseers (especially those who come East after a good dinner to see how the poor live!). However, as I know the wardens, I was able to get Mrs Goodhart in. I especially wanted her to see it in case she goes to America; as she will be asked to lecture there [and] it would be very bad if she had to admit she’d never seen a shelter.’ The next month, Rachel Reckitt was taken on

a personally conducted tour of the famous Tilbury shelter, a great honour I gathered, as Lady Astor [MP for Plymouth Sutton] had been down a few nights ago and [the District Warden] refused to take her round. He said he was tired of West-Enders getting an evening’s entertainment sightseeing in East End shelters. I should hardly call it ‘amusement’ but I could sympathise with him as he is very busy. Anyway the people resent being exhibited to sightseers.

… They have reduced the numbers in Tilbury shelter from 12,000 to about 6,000 and made some improvements, though it is still very bad and many people sleep on the stones. It is a strange place, vast and very confusing as there are many parts to it. Most of it is under railway arches and there are trucks and sidings in it too. People have been known to park their baby’s pram in a truck, and found it gone to Birmingham or somewhere in the morning!

The District Warden is full of ideas and hopes the war will last long enough to get hot water laid on and proper feeding. It will have to last a long time at the present rate!

Ritchie Calder had greatly exaggerated the number of people taking refuge in the Tilbury shelter, as he had inflated the number killed in the bombing of South Hallsville School. He did so because, as a campaigning journalist, he had an urgent agenda. In his view the government was culpably negligent of the safety of its citizens – particularly its poorest citizens, who had not the resources to make their own arrangements. What Londoners (and indeed all those living in vulnerable areas) required were deep shelters. And these the government had consistently refused to provide.

The scientist Professor J.B.S. Haldane had paid three visits to Spain during the Civil War, which had made him something of an authority on defence against air raids – particularly since most British scientists were still using data from the First World War to frame their expectations of Second World War bombing. Haldane had spent weeks in Madrid and Barcelona (where there was ‘an extensive system of underground refuges … capable of accommodating altogether about 350,000 people’, according to the city’s mayor) gathering information and making statistical calculations, and what he discovered made him a passionate advocate of deep shelters. While he was not himself a member of the Communist Party – though he was a Marxist, and was the science correspondent for the CP newspaper, the Daily Worker – this was a campaign supported, indeed often led, by members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), who argued that it would be the working classes living in poorly-built accommodation, clustered around inevitable targets such as docks and factories, who would take the brunt of German aerial attacks. What some might call governmental incompetence in failing to make proper provision, the CPGB regarded as a conspiracy against the workers in a class war that made them in effect the ‘poor bloody infantry’ of the home front.

Haldane argued that gas was no longer the main danger – he was an expert on poison gas and had designed a gas mask during the First World War – but that the real threat came from high-explosive bombs. He believed that the government policy of dispersing the population into reinforced basements, surface and Anderson shelters, rather than constructing networks of mass underground shelters, was misguided, irresponsible and penny-pinching. In October 1938 he published a paper in the scientific journal Nature in which he demonstrated mathematically that there were no grounds for assuming that bombs dropped at random would cause fewer casualties if people were dispersed than if they were concentrated. Later that year his book, called simply ARP, was published by Victor Gollancz, founder of the Left Book Club. It advocated a two-year programme of excavating sixty feet under London to build 780 miles of seven-foot tunnels that could hold the 4.4 million population of the LCC area. These should be built of brick rather than concrete, since in Haldane’s view ‘The concrete industry is now in the grip of monopoly capitalism, and for this reason prices are likely to be higher relative to brick than would otherwise be the case.’ Following the book’s publication Haldane stumped the country speaking, usually on CP platforms, and writing articles for the Daily Worker demanding better protection for the British public against the blitz. He argued that some of Britain’s unemployed – of whom there were still 1,800,000 in the summer of 1939 – could be given work constructing the deep shelters he believed were required, a scheme he costed at an estimated £12 for each person who would be able to take refuge in them.

The Architect and Building News had voiced its readers’ concerns in October 1938, just after the Munich crisis, about ‘sandbagged basements … half finished trenches in the parks and squares … uncomfortable reminders of the ludicrous inadequacy of the eleventh-hour scramble of three weeks ago’, and demanded, ‘What is being done?’ That same month Finsbury Borough Council, in charge of one of the poorest boroughs in London, provided an ambitious answer. On 4 October Alderman Riley, Chairman of the Finsbury ARP Committee, recommended that the modernist émigré architect Berthold Lubetkin and his firm Tecton, which had designed Finsbury’s vanguard Health Centre, opened earlier that year, should be asked to come up with a solution to protecting ‘the whole of the population [of Finsbury] in the event of war’. Lubetkin and the civil engineer Ove Arup (who had proved so valuable in solving the construction problems of the Penguin Pool at London Zoo, designed by Tecton in 1934) worked out a ‘danger volume’ to measure scientifically the comparative protection afforded by different types of shelter, and came up with a plan for fifteen shelters (each housing between 7,600 and 12,700 people) deep underground, approached by spiral staircases that would permit everyone to be safely ensconced within the seven minutes it was reckoned would elapse between the alert sounding and the first bombs falling.

Although Arup greatly exaggerated the night-time population of the borough who would require shelter, it was an elegant solution to stowing the 58,000-odd residents of Finsbury plus essential services deep underground at the cost of ten guineas a head – a sort of Maginot Line of the air war. Finsbury Council organised an exhibition in the Town Hall to show how it would work, complete with chilling illustrations by Gordon Cullen (whose murals adorned the Health Centre) showing the frailty of other forms of protection, and on 15 February 1939 Lubetkin appeared on the infant medium of television to demonstrate the plan’s virtues. But the Home Secretary Sir John Anderson, to whom the plans had to be submitted, prevaricated, waiting for the recommendations of a group of experts including engineers and trade unionists; their White Paper, ‘Air Raid Shelters’, was finally published in April 1939. Winston Churchill, to whom Tecton had also sent a copy, was not ‘favourably impressed … it appears to be inspired by the wish to exaggerate the danger of air attack and to emphasise the futility of basement protection in the interest of some particular scheme in which you are associated. The wide circulation of such a book would not be helpful at the present juncture.’

On 18 April 1939 Tecton/Finsbury’s scheme was rejected on the grounds of impracticality – experience of building the London Underground indicated that it would take at least two years to build – of cost, shortage of materials, accessibility – it was reckoned that people would need to be within 150 yards of a shelter to get to it through congested streets in sufficient time – and of the fact that the plans were fundamentally opposed to the principle of dispersal. However, in the autumn of 1940 the government changed its mind, ostensibly for technical reasons, since German bombs were getting heavier. Herbert Morrison announced in an upbeat broadcast, ‘We Have Won the First Round’, that a limited number of deep shelters would be provided in the London region by tunnelling under the tube system at selected stations. But, he insisted, ‘It is quite certain that deep shelters cannot play more than a limited part in our plans … anything like a universal policy of deep shelters for the whole people or the greater part of it, is beyond the bounds of practical possibility.’ Morrison, who had been implacably anti-Communist as leader of the LCC, then launched an astonishing attack on Haldane (without naming him) and other deep-shelter campaigners for being ‘political schemers’ engaging in ‘defeatist agitation’. He accused them of seeking ‘to destroy our will to take risks in freedom’s cause’, and of ‘playing Hitler’s game’: ‘These people are not numerous, but they are mischievous; Hitler is no doubt delighted with their manoeuvres. He knows that if our people could be stampeded into putting a narrow personal safety before success, he would win.’

Plans for eight huge shelters, each holding 8,000 people and most constructed beneath existing tube stations, were approved in October 1940. But the first of three purpose-built deep shelters available to the public (others were used for telecommunications and similar facilities), in Stockwell in south London, was not opened until 10 July 1944 – more than three years after the end of the blitz. One hundred and thirty feet underground, it could accommodate 4,000 people and was equipped with canteens, lavatories and washing facilities, and even arrangements for laundry. By that time Haldane, who had usually taken shelter in a deep trench on Primrose Hill, near where he lived with his journalist wife Charlotte, and after that had been hit, in a shelter below London Zoo at the invitation of his friend Julian Huxley, the Secretary of the Zoological Society, had removed with his laboratory to Harpenden in Hertfordshire.