The Blitz: The British Under Attack. Juliet Gardiner

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       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 СКАЧАТЬ