The Blitz: The British Under Attack. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ