The Blitz: The British Under Attack

Even though the government had been resistant to sanction deep shelters, it was a visceral human instinct to seek refuge underground when attacked from above, and that is what many of Britain’s urban population sought to do. As well as basements – Anthony Heap and his mother spent the blitz moving from basement to basement near where they lived in Bloomsbury, ending up most nights in the cavernous cellars of the Quaker Friends’ Meeting House in the Euston Road – the crypts of churches were popular. At St Peter’s church in Walworth in south London, the Reverend J.G. Markham found that his crypt, which had been designated as a public shelter for 230 people, usually housed at least double that number, with shelterers

lying like sardines on a variety of beds, mattresses, blankets or old carpets which they brought down with them. Some sat on deckchairs, some lay on the narrow wooden benches provided by the borough. The stench from the overflowing Elsan closets and unwashed humanity was so great that we had to buy gallons of Pine Fluid … the shelter wardens had a whip round among their flock to buy electric fans which did stir the foetid air a trifle, giving an illusion of freshness … You can get used to those sort of conditions if you stay in them 12 hours a night, night after night. At least one family stayed there almost 24 hours rather than go home and risk losing their place. Places were as precious, to the regulars, as seats in some theatres, so that queues formed outside hours before the sirens wailed, and I had to provide wardens to regulate the flow of would-be shelterers, some of whom came from some distance, even by taxi.

Lambeth Palace’s crypt could accommodate 250 people, and being so close to the Thames and across the road from the thrice-hit St Thomas’s Hospital, it was popular with the local community. But not with the Archbishop himself, his chaplain the Reverend Alan Don reported. During the September raids ‘sleep was, for most people, out of the question – and even CC [Cosmo Cantuar] descended into the basement for a while. He avoids the crypt – the people there frighten him more than the bombs!’

The Canadian photographer Bill Brandt, who had settled in Britain in 1932 and had established a reputation as a sensitive photo-journalist of English life and mores, was commissioned by the Ministry of Information to photograph London’s underground shelters. He spent the week of 4–12 November 1940 capturing the ‘drama and strangeness of shelter life’ until he caught influenza and had to abandon the project. The most compelling – and also the strangest – of the photographs he took are of people sheltering in the crypt of Christ Church, Spitalfields. Some show people sleeping in stone sarcophagi, while a bewildered-looking Sikh couple and their child huddle in a damp alcove. Ritchie Calder visited the same crypt, taken by the Shelter Marshal ‘Mickey the Midget’, in civilian life an optician, and he too was struck by the sarcophagi: ‘massive stone vaults. In them the bodies of the centuries-old dead had mouldered away. Now their heavy stone lids had been levered off. The bones and dust had been scooped out. The last resting-place of the dead had been claimed by the living.’ Others, unable to lever off the lids, lay stretched out on top of the tombs, while more lay in the aisles. There were ‘rows of old men and old women sitting bolt upright in paralytic discomfort on narrow benches. Some had “foot muffs” made out of swathes of old newspapers or were hugging hot-water bottles, their heads lolling in sleep. The vaults were bitterly cold. A draught full of menace blew through them – menace because it came from half-submerged windows, not blocked up, just blacked out.’

In the inner vaults, ‘stretched on the rough floor was a tall figure of an ex-Bengal Lancer, his magnificent shovel beard draped over a blanket, his head turbaned and looking, in sleep, like a breathing monument to an ancient Crusader … Life in this crypt, as in dozens of other crypts … in the early days of the “blitz” was worse than primitive. It made the conditions described by Dickens seem like a comedy of manners by Thackeray. The Fleet Prison and the Marshalsea were polite hostelries compared with conditions which existed when the “blitzkrieg” first hit London and drove most [sic] people underground.’

Not all underground people suffered the same discomforts and indignities. Brandt’s photographs show a couple coyly snuggling under an eiderdown in the basement of a department store – most West End stores had cleared out their basements to accommodate sleepers. The Savoy Hotel had a commodious basement, though this was often closed when water threatened to flood in if bombs fell on the Thames, which flowed past. On 14 September 1940 a Communist councillor (and later MP) for Stepney and ARP warden, Phil Piratin, who had been active in converting pre-war East End tenants’ associations into Shelter Committees to keep up the battle for deep shelters, and to press for better facilities in public surface and tube shelters, led a party of seventy of the borough’s residents to the Savoy to demand access to its shelter. ‘We decided what was good enough for the Savoy Hotel parasites was reasonably good enough for Stepney workers and their families. We had an idea that the hotel management would not see eye to eye with this, so we organised an “invasion” without their consent. In fact there was no effort to stop us, but it was only a matter of seconds before we were downstairs, and the women and children came streaming in afterwards. While the management and their lackeys were filled with consternation, the visitors from the East End looked round in amazement. “Shelters?” they said. “Why, we’d love to live in such places.” ‘

The recently built Dorchester was considered all but bomb-proof with its reinforced concrete structure, but it turned its basement first into Turkish baths and then its basement gymnasium into an air-raid shelter, a ‘funk hole’ in which the beauteous Lady Diana, wife of Duff Cooper, who had resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty at the time of the Munich crisis, felt ‘quite secure’ as she lay ‘hugger mugger with all that was most distinguished in London society’. ‘No one snores. If Papa makes a sound I’m up in a flash to rearrange his position. Perhaps Lady Halifax is doing the same to his Lordship [the Foreign Secretary] … They each have a flashlight to find their slippers with, and I see their monstrous forms projected caricaturishly on the ceiling, magic lantern style. Lord Halifax is unmistakable. We never actually meet,’ she wrote to her son, John Julius Norwich, evacuated to safety in Canada.

Should a person wish to dance and dine at the Hungaria restaurant in Lower Regent Street, they could book a shelter place in the cellar for the night as well as a table. If the raid lasted all night, breakfast would be served in the morning.

However, the most obvious place in London to shelter underground was the one the government refused to sanction. Although tube stations had been used as shelters during air raids in the First World War, this was forbidden at the start of the Second. The reasons were several: the first was the necessity of keeping people and goods moving during the blitz, of ferrying the injured or homeless away and of bringing essential supplies to the stricken areas. Another was the restricted access to many tube stations: the deep, narrow stairways and escalators would be hazardous if a panicking mass of people converged on them (a fear that was to be realised not during the blitz but in the Bethnal Green tube disaster in March 1943, when 173 people were killed in such a crush). Fear of flooding if the Thames was bombed was another real concern: before the war twenty-five heavy, electrically operated gates were installed at stations on either side of the river at Waterloo, Charing Cross and London Bridge which could be closed within a minute of the order being received from the control room at Leicester Square. And a fourth concern was the fear of a ‘shelter mentality’ when thousands of people would crowd underground and, feeling safe in their troglodyte existence, would refuse to re-emerge, with disastrous consequences for war production.*

However, on the first night of the blitz East Enders defied official policy and appropriated their own deep shelters by buying a penny-halfpenny ticket for a short journey on the tube, and refusing to come up again, camping in their thousands on the cold stone platforms with no sanitation or refreshment until morning. It was a fait accompli which, predictably, the Daily Worker celebrated as a people’s victory when on 13 September 1940 2,000 people swarmed down the stairs at Holborn station as they had done on previous nights, and ‘The LPTB [London Passenger Transport Board] officers seem to have given up on any attempt to keep them out.’ Some stayed in stations near to where they lived, others travelled ‘up West’ until they found less crowded platforms. All felt safer down the tubes, particularly since the sounds of air raids raging overhead were all but blotted out, but in the early days all were uncomfortable, often cold and frequently hungry.

Since so many children were evacuated at this time, some London schools were closed, including ten-year-old Irene Moseley’s in the East End. ‘So during the day I was sent off with my suitcase to get in the queue for a place on the platform [at Old Street station]. We had to disguise ourselves as travellers, not shelterers, so any bedding that we took down had to be in suitcases … I used to make a place on the platform for the rest of the family so that when they’d finished work they’d come down and a place was already secured. Otherwise, there would be arguments and quarrels with people who used to push your suitcase or your bedding out of the way, because it was every man for himself down there.’

Whole families arrived bringing blankets, rugs and pillows, bread and cheese or sandwiches and a bottle of tea – or beer – and milk for babies to drink, sweets, and sometimes, hazardously, a small spirit stove to brew up on, though official advice was to keep drinks warm by wrapping the container in layers of newspaper, or constructing a ‘hay box’. Some brought playing cards to pass the time, a ‘book’ (magazine), even a wireless or a wind-up gramophone, and invariably a small box or bag containing their savings, insurance policies, saving cards, ration books and identity cards – their paper wartime lives. Deep underground they were packed like sardines, with no air circulating, nowhere to get food or drink, or wash, and with the only lavatories – if there were any – in the booking hall. Fierce territorial disputes raged over places to sleep, and when every inch of platform space was occupied, latecomers arranged themselves in the corridors and on the escalators, or even in the booking hall, which offered little protection, particularly as many had glass roofs, or large skylights that would have sent shards of glass crashing onto the recumbent forms below in the event of a nearby attack.

A local reporter went to see conditions at Elephant and Castle tube station at the end of September 1940, and what he described sounds as grim as the notorious Tilbury shelter:

From the platforms to the entrance the whole station was one incumbent mass of humanity … it took me a quarter of an hour to get from the station entrance to the platform. Even in the darkened booking hall I stumbled across huddled bodies, bodies which were no safer from bombs than if they had lain in the gutters of the silent streets outside. Going down the stairs I saw mothers feeding infants at the breast. Little girls and boys lay across their parents’ bodies because there was no room on the winding stairs. Hundreds of men and women were partially undressed, while small boys and girls slumbered in the foetid atmosphere absolutely naked. Electric lights blazed, but most of this mass of sleeping humanity slept as though they were between silken sheets. On the platform when a train came in, it had to be stopped in the tunnel while police and porters went along pushing in the feet and arms which overhung the line. The sleepers hardly stirred as the train rumbled slowly in. On the train I sat opposite a pilot on leave. ‘It’s the same all the way along,’ was all he said.

The Reverend Christopher Veazey and his wife Joan visited the same Elephant and Castle tube station, where some of their parishioners were settling down for the night. ‘I had not realised just how many people were sheltering there,’ wrote Joan Veazey after their visit on 17 September 1940. ‘They were lying closely packed like sardines all along the draughty corridors and on the old platforms, so that people who wanted to get on the trains had to step over mattresses and sleeping bodies. There was a picnic feeling about the whole set-up, families were eating chips and some had some fish … others were singing loudly. Tiny babies were tucked up in battered suitcases, and small children were toddling around making friends with everyone. We tried to chat with some of the folk, but there were too many to be able to help very much. The noise was terrific … both of trains running to a standstill and of people shouting above the noise.’

Families would usually stay in the tube until the All Clear went (not that they could hear it), and they were usually cleared out by station staff at around six in the morning, to allow cleaners in to prepare for the day’s activity. ‘It was frightening … because you never knew what to expect, whether you had a home or not to go to. Sometimes the fires were still raging, the fire engines were there, you were picking your way across rubble and lots of water in the streets from the hoses, and all the time you were wondering “have I still got a home?”,’ remembers Irene Moseley. ‘When you did get home, there was probably no gas or water. So I was almost reluctant to leave the Tube, it was a home to me … there were a lot of other children down there and we’d play hide and seek along the platform and up the escalators. It was a haven, you felt safe down there.’

Barbara Betts (later Castle, the Labour Cabinet Minister), who was trying to scratch a living as a journalist – writing mainly for Picture Post, which rarely paid, and trade papers such as the Tobacconist, which paid, but not much – and was also an ARP warden in St Pancras, joined one of these ‘troglodyte communities one night to see what it was like. It was not a way of life I wanted for myself but I could see what an important safety valve it was. Without it, London life could not have carried on the way that it did.’

Since the blitz, the picture of a mass of humanity sleeping in the tube, as portrayed by Henry Moore in his chalk drawings of underground shelters, has become one of its most iconic images, along with the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral wreathed in smoke during the raid on the City on 29 December 1940. Some accounts seem to suggest that the entire East End was nightly crammed into the underground. In reality a ‘shelter census’ of London’s central area at the height of the blitz showed that there were 177,000 people sheltering there – that is, around 4 per cent of London’s population, which compares with 9 per cent in public shelters and 27 per cent in Anderson shelters. One hundred and seventy-seven thousand is still a large number of people, but despite this large-scale colonisation, the government retained an equivocal attitude towards the tube being used for shelter.

In mid-September 1940 the Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, accompanied by the Minister for Aircraft Production and newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook, and Lord Ashfield, chairman of the LPTB (who had previously expressed a preference for closing down the entire underground system) had visited Holborn tube station. They had talked to shelterers, many of whom from the East End were literally living down there, having been bombed out of their homes in the first raids. It was by now obvious that it was simply not possible to enforce a ban on the tube being used as shelters unless the authorities were prepared to risk a collapse of home-front morale and very ugly confrontations, with the police reinforced by the military barring station entrances and keeping angry and fearful people in the streets during a raid. The government grudgingly changed its policy, though it insisted that the underground was primarily for transport, and that shelterers must not interfere with that. But gradually some order and regulation – and some facilities – were introduced.

At the beginning of October 1940 Herbert Morrison replaced Sir John Anderson as Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security. The Home Secretary, the senior Secretary of State, was essentially responsible for law and order, whereas Home Security, a ministry canvassed at the time of Munich as a wartime essential and attached to the Home Office when war broke out, was in charge of all civil defence against air attack. This included responsibility for air-raid wardens, the firefighting services, first aid, decontamination and rescue squads, as well as facilities such as civil defence equipment and shelters, and arrangements concerned with blackout and air-raid warnings. Moreover, the Minister had to coordinate all those ministries that would be affected by air raids and their aftermath: Transport, Food and Health, among others. And soon Morrison would also be Chairman of what a Labour Party pamphlet described as ‘the Blitz Team’, the official title of which was the Civil Defence Committee of the War Cabinet, taking on an absolutely pivotal role in the prosecution of the war on the home front and the well-being of the people in acutely testing and hazardous times.

He was well placed to do so. The son of a Lambeth policeman, Morrison had left school at fourteen, and had been active first in the ILP (Independent Labour Party) and then the Labour Party. He had been a conscientious objector in the First World War, and in 1920 became Mayor of Hackney in east London, at thirty-two the youngest in London. Two years later he was elected to the London County Council (LCC), and in 1923 as Labour MP for South Hackney. Appointed Minister for Transport in the second Labour government from 1929 to 1931, he also led the LCC from 1934 until 1940, though he effectively abandoned this role when he was appointed Minister of Supply in May 1940. Morrison had a deep commitment to and knowledge of his native city – and undoubtedly more of a common touch than the rather grand and austere Anderson – and his time as an MP in Hackney had coincided with the borough’s notably energetic ARP activities. Before the war he had been a member of the ARP (Policy) Committee, and he would have seen the papers relating to the problems of future air raids.

Ritchie Calder was ecstatic at the appointment. In an open letter published in the Daily Herald he wrote:

Dear Herbert Morrison, When I heard you had been appointed Home Secretary I went home and slept soundly … I have seen men and women, these tough London workers of whom you and I are proud, whose homes have gone but whose courage is unbroken by the Nazi bombers, goaded by neglect and seething with resentment and furious reproach. THEY LOOK TO YOU … Much of the breakdown which has occurred in the last month could have been foreseen and avoided; or having arisen could have been mastered by anyone who understood the human problem of the Londoners and the complications of local government … you have a task as great as your abilities. Go to it Herbert …

Improving the shelters was only part of Morrison’s task: there were many other pressing administrative problems that needed urgent attention, but he made shelters a priority, though some changes were already in hand, with local authorities empowered to provide bunks, sanitation, drinking water and first aid, and to enrol voluntary shelter marshals, while a paid ARP warden would be assigned to each occupied tube station.

In the afternoon of 3 October 1940 the new Minister went to Buckingham Palace to kiss hands with the King and receive his seals of office. That done, Morrison set off to inspect shelters in south London, starting at Southwark tube station, where a raid was in progress and Ack-Ack guns were firing constantly as he and the inevitable retinue of journalists toured the non-facilities and spoke to shelterers. The next day it was the East End, where, accompanied by Admiral Sir Edward Evans in full dress uniform and wearing his medals and white gloves (Evans had been second in command to Captain Scott on his Antarctic expedition in 1910, but was always known as ‘Evans of the Broke’, after the ship he had commanded in the First World War), one of the two Regional Commissioners for London, he headed straight for the notorious Tilbury shelter. After a quick tour of that wartime Hades, Morrison ordered structural improvements that would cost £5,000. ‘What does money matter?’ he exclaimed. ‘There are thousands of lives involved! Get it done at once!’ He had called in on the unfinished Bethnal Green tube station on the way, and on hearing that ‘at least 4,000 slept there nightly’, declared it an official ‘deep shelter’ sixty feet below the street.

Morrison immediately appointed the diminutive Labour MP ‘Red’ Ellen Wilkinson – so named for her ginger hair and her radical politics, which included leading hunger marchers from her shipbuilding constituency, Jarrow, to London in 1936, and who may have been Morrison’s mistress at one time – as one of his three Parliamentary Secretaries, and gave her direct responsibility for shelters. The appointment of this ‘dumpy, energetic little woman’ as Morrison’s ‘liaison between the shelters and his Whitehall desk’ pleased another critical journalist, Hilde Marchant of the Daily Express, who was now described as one of the newspaper’s two ‘Commissioners for the East End’. ‘I met [Wilkinson] several times in the shelters and Whitehall and liked her. She is direct and decisive, a busy vigorous woman who has impressed the men she works with, and she has got her practical hands firmly on the subject.’ Harold Nicolson, currently ensconced at the Ministry of Information, would also become a fan of Wilkinson’s ‘realism’. ‘She said to me: “You deal with ideas and one can never see how an idea works out. I deal in water closets and one can always see whether it works or not.” I do so like the little spitfire. I should so like to see [her and Florence Horsbrugh at the Ministry of Health] made Cabinet Ministers.’ Wilkinson turned out not only to have ‘nerves of fire and steel’ as she toured shelters all over Britain during the first months of the blitz, but a personal empathy with the shelterers: she had been bombed out of her flat in Guilford Street, not far from King’s Cross, in October 1940.

Every day a straggling queue could be seen outside most underground stations from mid-morning, with people clutching their cushions, blankets and other night-time necessities, waiting for the gates to open for them at 4 p.m. The government, concerned that this could have a serious impact on war production as well as the regular life of the capital, was anxious that the concession, as it saw it, to use the tube as shelters should be regarded as that, and not as a right. The underground should not be depicted as a destination of choice, and the Home Office issued memos to newspaper editors requesting them to be circumspect in their coverage of people sheltering there. Articles such as one in the Sunday Dispatch on 22 September, which reported that ‘by 6pm there seemed no vacant space from St Paul’s to Notting Hill, from Hampstead to Leicester Square … types varied much from the trousered, lipsticked Kensington girls to the cockneys of Camden Town; but all were alike in their uncomplaining, patient cheerfulness’, could only fuel the overwhelming desire for platform space that the government feared. Representing the underground as a sanctuary only for those unable to deal with the raids in any other way might limit the numbers. The Ministries of Transport and Home Security issued a joint appeal to ‘the good sense of the public and particularly to able-bodied men to refrain from using tube stations as air raid shelters, except in cases of urgent necessity’ – though presumably an air raid was an urgent necessity. The notion of it being ‘unmanly’ to use the tube was reiterated by notices on the platforms urging: ‘Trains must run and get people to their work and homes. Space at the Tube stations is limited. Women and children and the infirm need it most. Leave it to them!’ The Daily Express reported that on the night of 28–29 September 1940 twenty unattached young men were directed by police and station staff at South Kensington to find somewhere else to shelter. But men – some of whom might have been troops on leave – needed safety and sleep too. ‘I am 29 and though I am not in the army yet I am just as much in the frontline as any soldier in this country,’ complained a twenty-nine-year-old working man. ‘It really is unreasonable to abuse chaps who are waiting to be called up.’