The Blitz: The British Under Attack

On 19 September 1940 Picture Post wrote that ‘long winter nights are ahead [but] with a little ingenuity you can make them tolerable by fitting your Anderson shelter with home-made bunks’. It showed how Mr Stuart Murray of Croydon had ‘turned his shelter into a family bedroom’ by nailing a double layer of chicken wire across a wooden frame to provide two upper and two lower bunks, transforming the tin shelter into ‘if not a bed of roses, a tolerable resting place’. Other families made several treks each evening before the alert went off, carrying eiderdowns, rugs, deckchairs, pillows and cushions from the house to the shelter. The effect of all this, of course, was to make things even more cramped.

‘This going up to the shelter is not as simple as it sounds,’ wrote Sidney Chave, a lab technician who lived in Upper Norwood, south London. ‘It entails five or six journeys up and down carting the necessary articles, and finally our precious bundle [the Chaves’ daughter Jillian, who was just over a year old at the start of the blitz]. As the journeys are made along a wet garden path, in complete darkness accompanied by sporadic bursts of gun fire and with the planes droning overhead, and as one’s arms are full up with cushions, blankets and the like – it is not such a jolly affair, this Shelter life!’

Then there were the cold and the dark. A few enterprising handymen ran electric cables to their back-garden shelters so that a bar electric fire could be used, but this could be hazardous. Oil or paraffin heaters were not recommended, since they could start a fire if knocked over, as could a paraffin lamp, and torches were not the answer to the dark, since within weeks of the outbreak of war, batteries had become all but unobtainable. A candle in a flowerpot was suggested, but that carried a fire risk too, and the flickering light was hardly adequate for reading or knitting.

Herbert Brush, a seventy-one-year-old retired Electricity Board inspector, lived in Forest Hill, south London. Clearly something of a handyman, he had managed to fit up some rudimentary bunks in the family Anderson shelter, rig up an electric light for reading, and kept ‘half a dozen books on various subjects on a small shelf I have put up’. But it still wasn’t entirely satisfactory. ‘As usual we spent 12 hours in the shelter last night,’ he wrote on 31 October 1940. ‘We have got used to hard lying now and go to sleep as easily there as in bed, though I must own up to stiffness in the morning, when I am able to double up on my bed for an hour or so. I can’t double up much on two 11 inch boards; that with cushions makes my bed less than 2 feet in width. I can’t lie with my face to the wall because if I double up at all my posterior overhangs the bed and that is not a comfortable position: the other way round my knees sometimes overhang but that is not such an uncomfortable position.’

The ever-resourceful Mr Brush continued to try to make sleeping in a tin hut in the garden as acceptable as possible. By December, when it had grown bitterly cold at night, the family lit a paraffin heater in the shelter for an hour or so before the alert was expected, took hot-water bottles in with them, hung a curtain over the entrance and ‘fitted shields to keep the draughts off the bunks on either side of the dug out. It is quite a comfortable place now,’ Mr Brush conceded, ‘when one gets used to the cramped space and the inability to turn over without falling out, for folks of my size.’

Eighteen-year-old Margaret Turpin’s family had a brick-built shelter in the garden of their East End home. ‘It was so small. My brother was nearly six foot, there was my father, myself, my sister, my mother and a baby, and somehow we were all supposed to be able to sleep in this shelter. But it was impossible. It was only about seven feet long and a few feet wide. We had to sit up all night because there just wasn’t room to lie down. I suppose my mother thought my father ought to be the one that lay down [because he had to go to work] and my father thought my mother ought to because she had a little baby. And my brother was tall and had to fit in somehow, and that was the reason that eventually we went to a public shelter, because there was no way we could have slept through a prolonged blitz.’

Others, less in the eye of the storm than East Enders, tried to find somewhere they considered safe in the house, rather than spend the night in an uncomfortable garden shelter. And invariably people would leave their Andersons as soon as the All Clear went, usually in the early hours of the morning, to snatch at least a couple of hours in bed before they had to get up to start the day.

No wonder that as the blitz went on, more and more people declined to use their Anderson shelters at all, even though they proved pretty effective. If correctly sited they were able to withstand the effects of a hundred-pound bomb falling six feet away, or a two-hundred-pound bomb falling twenty feet way, those inside usually suffering little more than shock. Nevertheless, by mid-October 1940, when the raids on London had eased off somewhat, more and more people opted to crouch under their staircase, which was considered to be the safest place in most houses, or drag a mattress under the dining-room table for the night, or even stay in bed and take their chances.

The Prime Minister was the first recipient of a government-issue and much more robust version of the dining-room-table shelter which went into production in January 1941. This was the Morrison shelter, a rectangular mesh steel cage six feet six inches long, four feet wide and about two feet nine inches high, bolted together with a steel ‘mattress’ and top, named after the then Home Secretary and Minister for Home Security, Herbert Morrison. It proved much more popular than the Anderson, though it was less effective, since it offered no protection from lateral blast. The Morrison was suitable for flats and houses without gardens, it was situated indoors (as in fact had been the original intention for Anderson shelters), it offered protection against falling masonry, could accommodate (snugly) two recumbent adults and two young children, was simple to put up and could be used as a table in the daytime. By this time the minimum income for eligibility for a free shelter had risen to £350 a year, but the distribution of Morrison shelters in London and other cities and large towns did not start until the end of March, just over a month before the ‘big blitz’ was effectively over.

In theory, local authorities could compel factories and commercial premises to make their shelters available to the general public outside working hours, but in practice this did not happen very often. Employers only had to plead that they did not wish to disrupt war production, which was accepted as paramount. Government departments were also urged to admit the public to their basements, but again this was often resisted on the grounds that the employees might need to sleep on the premises overnight during the blitz. Gradually throughout the winter months more basements were strengthened, but most people who had no suitable refuge at home had few options other than specially constructed public shelters. Again built in the belief that raids would be short and mostly in daytime, most offered no seating, lighting or sanitation, and no facilities even for boiling a kettle for a cup of tea.

Barbara Nixon was a thirty-two-year-old actress and graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge. When most of the theatres closed during the blitz, she volunteered as an ARP warden in Finsbury, north London, ‘which in those days stretched from near Liverpool Street due westwards to Smithfield, covered the area north of King’s Cross Road and back along Pentonville and City Roads to include Moorgate and Finsbury Square’. She wrote later: ‘During September 1940 the shelter conditions were appalling. In many boroughs there were only flimsy surface shelters, with no light, no seats, no lavatories and insufficient numbers even of these; or railway arches and basements that gave an impression of safety, but only had a few inches of brick overhead, or were rotten shells of buildings with thin roofs and floors.’ In Finsbury

we were well provided as regards numbers; there were almost sufficient for the night population, and they were reasonably safe … In my [ARP] Post area we had two capacious shelters under business firms which held three or four hundred, also fifteen small sub-surface concrete ones in which fifty people could sit upright on narrow wooden benches along the wall. But they were poorly ventilated, and only two out of the nine that came in my province could pretend to be dry. Some leaked through the roof and umbrellas had to be used; in others the mouth of the sump-hole near the door had been made higher than the floor, and on a rainy night it invariably overflowed to a depth of two inches at one end decreasing to a quarter of an inch at the other, and rheumaticky old ladies had to sit upright on their benches for six to twelve hours on end, with their feet propped up on a couple of bricks. Four or five times during the night we used to go round with saucepan and bucket baling out the stinking water; as soon as Number 9 was reached, Number 1 was full again. It was hard, wet and smelly work … There were chemical closets usually partially screened off by a canvas curtain. But even so, the supervision of the cleaning of these was not adequate. Sometimes they would be left untended for days 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 the victims. The eventual death toll from that single incident was 154; twenty-six of the bodies could not be identified. 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.