The Blitz: The British Under Attack. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ