Читать книгу The Blitz: The British Under Attack - Juliet Gardiner, Juliet Gardiner - Страница 10

… 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.

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 with the fumes of oil stoves, oil lamps and various odours of cooking food … When the Corporation employees opened the doors in the morning, the stench and fumes came from within like a fog. It was a picture of Dante’s Inferno. Many of the people were nervous wrecks. People stayed in the tunnel by day, afraid to lose their places. There was hardly any room between the rough beds. Some performed their natural functions alongside their beds. It was unbelievable that people could be driven by fear to endure such conditions.’

Conditions were as bad, if not worse, in London’s most notorious shelter: the Tilbury in Stepney. For the Daily Herald journalist Ritchie Calder, it was ‘not only the most unhygienic place I have ever seen, it was … definitely unsafe … yet numbers as high, on some estimates, as 14,000 to 16,000 people crowded into it on those dreadful nights when hell was let loose on East London … People of every type and condition, every colour and creed found their way there … men from the Levant and Slavs from Eastern Europe; Jew, Gentile, Moslem and Hindu. When ships docked, seamen would come to royster [sic] for a few hours. Scotland Yard knew where to look for criminals bombed out of Hell’s Kitchen. Prostitutes paraded there. Hawkers peddled greasy, cold fried fish which cloyed the already foul atmosphere. Free fights had to be broken up by the police. Couples courted. Children slept. Soldiers, sailors and airmen spent part of their leave there.’

‘It was an enormous place,’ remembered Robert Baltrop. ‘I’ve seen figures like 6,000 sheltering in it every night. It wasn’t even properly underground, [much of it] was simply a surface building, and it was almost like a village; people sold things, ladies of the street carried on their business there … a whole nightlife went on in the Tilbury, all through the blitz.’

The Tilbury, situated off the Commercial Road, was part of Liverpool Street station goods yard, and was owned by two different bodies. On one side lay vaults and stores; on the other was an underground loading yard, partly below ground, and above it a massive warehouse supported on steel girders. The vaults had been taken over by Stepney Council as a shelter for 3,000 people, but the Home Secretary refused permission for it to requisition the warehouse and the loading bays – by far the larger part. However, the site had been an official shelter in the First World War, and ‘It was known to older people as “the place to go”.’ And that is what happened. When the desperate hour came, they crowded there from all parts of east London, often coming from miles away. The limited capacity of the official section was quickly filled, and thousands overflowed into the rest of the site. There was nothing the owners could do to prevent the torrent of humanity which took possession. The borough council disclaimed responsibility for those who took shelter in the ‘unauthorised’ areas, on the grounds that it had been refused powers and would be trespassing on private property. Even the police could not at first gain access, except when called in by the harassed policemen of the company concerned.

As long as Calder lived, he wrote, he would

never forget the stampede when the gates were flung open and the swarming multitude careered down the slope, tripping, tumbling, being trodden on, being crushed and fighting and scrambling for the choice of sleeping berths – in the valleys between the gigantic bales of newsprint. Expectant mothers and even children were crushed.

Sanitation barely existed. The only provision was for a handful of workmen usually employed there. The result was that the roadways were ankle deep in filth, which was trodden into blankets on which people were to sleep. Great stacks of London’s margarine were stored there. Hundreds of cartons were hopelessly fouled every night. It was over a fortnight before the margarine began to be moved out, by the intervention of the Ministry of Food. People slept among the filth. They slept in the dust between the rails and on the cobblestones of the roadway. They slept on the wooden bays amongst the food. It was appalling.

Hilde Marchant, who visited the Tilbury for the Daily Express, was equally appalled: by the sour smell of rancid margarine that pervaded the vaults, by the strong odour of horse in the loading bays, by the ‘confused mass of bodies strewn everywhere’, but above all when she came to ‘the canvas partitions at the end. These were the latrines, twelve chemical lavatories helped by a few buckets for the children. I went into the six latrines reserved for women. They were overflowing, and a woman worker was standing over the door, saying they could not be used any more that night.’

Euan Wallace, Regional Commissioner for the London Civil Defence Region, thought it was ‘no use spending a lot of money on things like water closets’, as the government lacked the power to requisition the part of the Tilbury owned by the railway company, and in any case, ‘It does seem … very doubtful whether it is worth putting new wine into such a very old bottle. It can never be anything but a very indifferent shelter and it presents peculiarly difficult health and sanitation problems.’ However, by mid-October ‘The Prime Minister has been hunting Morrison very hard on the Tilbury shelter question,’ reported Wallace, and though ‘the City was being unreasonably sticky on providing basements in commercial buildings’, accommodation was eventually found so that 4,000 shelterers could be moved from the railway-owned part of the shelter, and conditions improved for those who stayed.

Until then, though, it was largely due to individual unofficial initiatives that things got better. There had not been even a first aid post in the unofficial half of the Tilbury, but a local Jewish doctor volunteered his services and spent his evenings attending to the shelterers’ needs, then ‘slept the night at his self-appointed post. There were women there – genuine motherly souls with a passion for well-doing – who spent the whole twenty-four hours, for weeks on end, ministering to this vast unruly family. They were self-appointed shelter marshals, without authority and without resources. It was they who brought urns of fresh water into the unofficial shelter, rationing the water as sparingly as though they were the keepers of an oasis in the desert … Any minister or official or influential visitor who ventured into that shelter would be button-holed. With evangelical fervour, they would be told of the miseries these people had to endure, of what grand people they were if only they had a chance, and a whole catalogue of all the things that needed to be done.’

It was not only officials who beat a path to the Tilbury shelter: it soon became a tourist attraction for people from ‘up West’ to gawp at the hellish conditions their fellow Londoners were suffering a few miles away. Rachel Reckitt was in charge of the emergency Citizens Advice Bureau set up at Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel – a ‘university settlement’ where middle-class workers lived among the poor, hoping to share knowledge and culture, and alleviate the poverty of their neighbours – to offer advice and practical help to East Enders suffering during the blitz. In October 1940 she had a ‘night out with [the distinguished American lawyer] Mrs Goodhart [who] wanted to see the Tilbury shelter, so, as it was no good early in the evening [when no shelterers would have arrived] I offered to take her later. She said should we go and get some dinner at the Savoy, or have it at Toynbee? I believe she would have liked Toynbee, but saw I wouldn’t, so we had a drive round Wapping and Shadwell and the Isle of Dogs … it looked lovely in the fading light, especially the river. Wapping church and the school have gone … all but the Church tower … Then we had a good dinner at the Savoy, with Leslie Howard [who played Ashley Wilkes in the film Gone with the Wind, which had opened in London a few months previously, and who would be killed when the plane in which he was a passenger was shot down in June 1943] and Anthony Asquith [the film director ‘Puffin’ Asquith, son of the former Liberal Prime Minister] at the next table … Afterwards we went back to Stepney to the Tilbury shelter. Entry there is by pass only as they, naturally, dislike sightseers (especially those who come East after a good dinner to see how the poor live!). However, as I know the wardens, I was able to get Mrs Goodhart in. I especially wanted her to see it in case she goes to America; as she will be asked to lecture there [and] it would be very bad if she had to admit she’d never seen a shelter.’ The next month, Rachel Reckitt was taken on

a personally conducted tour of the famous Tilbury shelter, a great honour I gathered, as Lady Astor [MP for Plymouth Sutton] had been down a few nights ago and [the District Warden] refused to take her round. He said he was tired of West-Enders getting an evening’s entertainment sightseeing in East End shelters. I should hardly call it ‘amusement’ but I could sympathise with him as he is very busy. Anyway the people resent being exhibited to sightseers.

… They have reduced the numbers in Tilbury shelter from 12,000 to about 6,000 and made some improvements, though it is still very bad and many people sleep on the stones. It is a strange place, vast and very confusing as there are many parts to it. Most of it is under railway arches and there are trucks and sidings in it too. People have been known to park their baby’s pram in a truck, and found it gone to Birmingham or somewhere in the morning!

The District Warden is full of ideas and hopes the war will last long enough to get hot water laid on and proper feeding. It will have to last a long time at the present rate!

Ritchie Calder had greatly exaggerated the number of people taking refuge in the Tilbury shelter, as he had inflated the number killed in the bombing of South Hallsville School. He did so because, as a campaigning journalist, he had an urgent agenda. In his view the government was culpably negligent of the safety of its citizens – particularly its poorest citizens, who had not the resources to make their own arrangements. What Londoners (and indeed all those living in vulnerable areas) required were deep shelters. And these the government had consistently refused to provide.

The scientist Professor J.B.S. Haldane had paid three visits to Spain during the Civil War, which had made him something of an authority on defence against air raids – particularly since most British scientists were still using data from the First World War to frame their expectations of Second World War bombing. Haldane had spent weeks in Madrid and Barcelona (where there was ‘an extensive system of underground refuges … capable of accommodating altogether about 350,000 people’, according to the city’s mayor) gathering information and making statistical calculations, and what he discovered made him a passionate advocate of deep shelters. While he was not himself a member of the Communist Party – though he was a Marxist, and was the science correspondent for the CP newspaper, the Daily Worker – this was a campaign supported, indeed often led, by members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), who argued that it would be the working classes living in poorly-built accommodation, clustered around inevitable targets such as docks and factories, who would take the brunt of German aerial attacks. What some might call governmental incompetence in failing to make proper provision, the CPGB regarded as a conspiracy against the workers in a class war that made them in effect the ‘poor bloody infantry’ of the home front.

Haldane argued that gas was no longer the main danger – he was an expert on poison gas and had designed a gas mask during the First World War – but that the real threat came from high-explosive bombs. He believed that the government policy of dispersing the population into reinforced basements, surface and Anderson shelters, rather than constructing networks of mass underground shelters, was misguided, irresponsible and penny-pinching. In October 1938 he published a paper in the scientific journal Nature in which he demonstrated mathematically that there were no grounds for assuming that bombs dropped at random would cause fewer casualties if people were dispersed than if they were concentrated. Later that year his book, called simply ARP, was published by Victor Gollancz, founder of the Left Book Club. It advocated a two-year programme of excavating sixty feet under London to build 780 miles of seven-foot tunnels that could hold the 4.4 million population of the LCC area. These should be built of brick rather than concrete, since in Haldane’s view ‘The concrete industry is now in the grip of monopoly capitalism, and for this reason prices are likely to be higher relative to brick than would otherwise be the case.’ Following the book’s publication Haldane stumped the country speaking, usually on CP platforms, and writing articles for the Daily Worker demanding better protection for the British public against the blitz. He argued that some of Britain’s unemployed – of whom there were still 1,800,000 in the summer of 1939 – could be given work constructing the deep shelters he believed were required, a scheme he costed at an estimated £12 for each person who would be able to take refuge in them.

The Architect and Building News had voiced its readers’ concerns in October 1938, just after the Munich crisis, about ‘sandbagged basements … half finished trenches in the parks and squares … uncomfortable reminders of the ludicrous inadequacy of the eleventh-hour scramble of three weeks ago’, and demanded, ‘What is being done?’ That same month Finsbury Borough Council, in charge of one of the poorest boroughs in London, provided an ambitious answer. On 4 October Alderman Riley, Chairman of the Finsbury ARP Committee, recommended that the modernist émigré architect Berthold Lubetkin and his firm Tecton, which had designed Finsbury’s vanguard Health Centre, opened earlier that year, should be asked to come up with a solution to protecting ‘the whole of the population [of Finsbury] in the event of war’. Lubetkin and the civil engineer Ove Arup (who had proved so valuable in solving the construction problems of the Penguin Pool at London Zoo, designed by Tecton in 1934) worked out a ‘danger volume’ to measure scientifically the comparative protection afforded by different types of shelter, and came up with a plan for fifteen shelters (each housing between 7,600 and 12,700 people) deep underground, approached by spiral staircases that would permit everyone to be safely ensconced within the seven minutes it was reckoned would elapse between the alert sounding and the first bombs falling.

Although Arup greatly exaggerated the night-time population of the borough who would require shelter, it was an elegant solution to stowing the 58,000-odd residents of Finsbury plus essential services deep underground at the cost of ten guineas a head – a sort of Maginot Line of the air war. Finsbury Council organised an exhibition in the Town Hall to show how it would work, complete with chilling illustrations by Gordon Cullen (whose murals adorned the Health Centre) showing the frailty of other forms of protection, and on 15 February 1939 Lubetkin appeared on the infant medium of television to demonstrate the plan’s virtues. But the Home Secretary Sir John Anderson, to whom the plans had to be submitted, prevaricated, waiting for the recommendations of a group of experts including engineers and trade unionists; their White Paper, ‘Air Raid Shelters’, was finally published in April 1939. Winston Churchill, to whom Tecton had also sent a copy, was not ‘favourably impressed … it appears to be inspired by the wish to exaggerate the danger of air attack and to emphasise the futility of basement protection in the interest of some particular scheme in which you are associated. The wide circulation of such a book would not be helpful at the present juncture.’

On 18 April 1939 Tecton/Finsbury’s scheme was rejected on the grounds of impracticality – experience of building the London Underground indicated that it would take at least two years to build – of cost, shortage of materials, accessibility – it was reckoned that people would need to be within 150 yards of a shelter to get to it through congested streets in sufficient time – and of the fact that the plans were fundamentally opposed to the principle of dispersal. However, in the autumn of 1940 the government changed its mind, ostensibly for technical reasons, since German bombs were getting heavier. Herbert Morrison announced in an upbeat broadcast, ‘We Have Won the First Round’, that a limited number of deep shelters would be provided in the London region by tunnelling under the tube system at selected stations. But, he insisted, ‘It is quite certain that deep shelters cannot play more than a limited part in our plans … anything like a universal policy of deep shelters for the whole people or the greater part of it, is beyond the bounds of practical possibility.’ Morrison, who had been implacably anti-Communist as leader of the LCC, then launched an astonishing attack on Haldane (without naming him) and other deep-shelter campaigners for being ‘political schemers’ engaging in ‘defeatist agitation’. He accused them of seeking ‘to destroy our will to take risks in freedom’s cause’, and of ‘playing Hitler’s game’: ‘These people are not numerous, but they are mischievous; Hitler is no doubt delighted with their manoeuvres. He knows that if our people could be stampeded into putting a narrow personal safety before success, he would win.’

Plans for eight huge shelters, each holding 8,000 people and most constructed beneath existing tube stations, were approved in October 1940. But the first of three purpose-built deep shelters available to the public (others were used for telecommunications and similar facilities), in Stockwell in south London, was not opened until 10 July 1944 – more than three years after the end of the blitz. One hundred and thirty feet underground, it could accommodate 4,000 people and was equipped with canteens, lavatories and washing facilities, and even arrangements for laundry. By that time Haldane, who had usually taken shelter in a deep trench on Primrose Hill, near where he lived with his journalist wife Charlotte, and after that had been hit, in a shelter below London Zoo at the invitation of his friend Julian Huxley, the Secretary of the Zoological Society, had removed with his laboratory to Harpenden in Hertfordshire.

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.’

Grudging recognition may have been forthcoming, but since there was so little official enthusiasm for tube sheltering, improvements lagged. On 24 September it was announced that a million bunks would be fitted in London’s shelters, so that ‘whatever type of shelter is used, whether private or public, the aim is now that all the people of London shall have a definite space allocated in which they can sleep at night … when the [large basements, street and trench] shelters are fitted with bunks they will look something like American sleeping cars … Families would be allocated a specific space with [two- or three-tiered] bunks and sanitation … and encouraged to think of it as their own property and make it as comfortable as possible.’ However, ‘no bunks are to be fitted into the underground stations, although the use of the stations for night shelters has been recognised and they are now being used under police supervision’. There were reports that ‘police supervision’ included quizzing would-be tube shelterers and turning them away if they were considered to have other options – even if they were mothers with babies or small children in tow.

But on 4 October 1940, after a three-hour tour of underground stations, Admiral Evans announced that he intended to introduce a system of ticketing so that regular users could be allocated a space, which would obviate the need for hours of queuing – and also wipe out the thriving black market operated by ‘droppers’. These racketeers would ‘persuade’ a sympathetic tube worker to let them in ahead of the patient queue waiting until 4 p.m., on account of their supposed poor health, and would then ‘bag’ the best pitches by placing bits of bedding on them, and charge unfortunate shelterers the exorbitant sum of 2s.6d for them – at a time when the average wage was around £3 a week. Evans also promised that bunks would be provided, and that ‘the problem of sanitation has been solved in most cases’ – though this was disputable, since ‘sanitation’ usually meant a few overflowing chemical toilets, or people using the rail lines as a public convenience.

The first of the three-tier metal bunks were installed at Lambeth North station on 25 November 1940; by early March 1941, 7,600 had been erected in seventy-six stations. Most of them were allocated to regular shelterers, though 10 per cent were to be left free for those caught out in a raid. There were still, however, people who had to sit up all night, as they did in some public shelters. Latecomers had to cram in wherever they could – in corridors or the booking hall, or on escalators (switched off). The two platforms at Holland Park station would be almost full by 5 p.m.: by 7 p.m. the only space left was at the bottom of the emergency stairs. That same spring local councils were authorised to provide water-borne sanitation in place of the easily-knocked-over chemical toilets, and that reduced the stench a bit. At Old Street station, Shoreditch Council provided a laundry and disinfecting service for bedding free of charge to the ‘tubeites’. Washing facilities other than the occasional small handbasin were not provided: people either had to go home to spruce up before a day’s work, or use a nearby public bath (though many of those had been taken over by the Civil Defence services, often to be used as mortuaries). ‘We didn’t have bathrooms and facilities like that in our houses. We were used to going to the public baths, and when they were taken over, you just had to go home and if the water was still on, you’d just have a quick wash and off to work. But if the water was off, then you had to get it from a standpipe in a jug … It was very hard to wash your hair or anything like that. Personal hygiene rather went out of the window, but you just got used to it.’ In West Ham, Lever Bros equipped a van named ‘Lifebuoy Boys’, after one of its soaps, that toured the shelters offering people a chance to have a shower as they came out.

Local authorities, private caterers and voluntary organisations such as the WVS and the Salvation Army organised platform canteens in larger stations where shelterers could buy tea and buns, and sometimes hot soup, pies or sausage rolls, and cigarette-vending machines were installed in some stations. The LPTB equipped six tube trains to carry buns, cakes, biscuits, chocolate and urns of tea and cocoa around the network, served by staff wearing red armbands bearing the letters ‘TR’ (Tube Refreshments). Robert Boothby, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food, who had been ‘astonished’ by seeing ‘at least 700 people’ disgorging from one tube station at the end of the night to begin what could be a long trek home, commandeered coffee stalls and vans and had them positioned to sell tea, cocoa and soup to shelterers as they emerged blinking into the light of early morning.

‘It was better after that,’ concedes Irene Moseley. ‘The bunks weren’t comfortable by any means, but it was better than sleeping on the platform. Things became a bit more organised … a lady used to come round with biscuits and buns, and down one end of the platform were portable toilets. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was an improvement. And the best thing was that you were entitled to be there, and that made you feel a lot better … it gave you a sense of belonging really.’

A week after the start of the blitz, the King’s physician, Lord Horder, had been appointed to head a committee to look into shelter conditions both above and below ground. Father John Groser, the ‘turbulent priest’ of Stepney, was one of the members, as were the elegant Rose Henriques, wife of Basil Henriques, Warden of a Jewish settlement in the East End, and Alderman Charlie Key, MP for Bromley and Bow, who was soon to play a key role in the defence of London. The committee reported informally within four days and more formally at the end of September, though MPs complained that there was no full written record of its findings that they could consult. This, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, Florence Horsbrugh, intimated, was because it was highly undesirable that the enemy might find out what dreadful conditions Londoners were suffering as a result of its attacks.

Horder’s recommendations to reduce overcrowding, and various other measures, were largely followed – but slowly. They included providing a first aid post with a nurse in eighty-six shelters, the appointment of Shelter Marshals in the larger ones, prohibiting smoking in public shelters unless a separate section for smokers could be provided, the issue of masks to guard against infection, improved sanitation and lots of scrubbing with disinfectant, and using blowtorches on crevices to kill bugs – and regular inspections by Medical Officers of Health and their staffs to make sure all was as it should be. The greatest fear must have been of a diphtheria, measles or whooping cough epidemic, but fortunately this never happened; the main health hazards were impetigo, lice and scabies: most shelters were soon regularly sprayed with sodium hypochlorite or paraffin to try to deal with this, and any wooden bunks were replaced by metal ones, as wood was hospitable to lice. Hilde Marchant, in her unofficial role as ‘East End Commissioner’, was all for people being required to pass through a ‘Health Ministry hut’ at the entrance to every shelter, with disinfectant liberally used, and any unfit person being weeded out and sent to hospital, while bunks would be disinfected daily too, and bedding inspected and carted off to be fumigated if necessary.

Bedding was a touchy subject, since obviously it was likely to harbour bed bugs and worse. The Ministry of Home Security advised that it should be ‘aired daily so it keeps sweet and fresh’. The Swiss Cottager, a news-sheet produced by and for those who sheltered at that particular Bakerloo Line station, urged shelterers to ‘PLEASE stop the evil habit of shaking out blankets, mattresses etc., over the track each morning. The spreading of dust and germs over people, many of whom suffer from coughs and colds and “shelter throat” is little more than criminal. One of the gravest dangers we face is the spread of infection. Take your bedding home and do the shaking in your own back yard.’

While shelterers were being warned that ‘Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases’, and that they should always use a handkerchief, the chemist Sidney Chave, who had been drafted into the Emergency Public Health Laboratory Service, ‘set up primarily to protect the health of the civilian population under the stresses of war’ at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was trying to produce ‘a simple snuff which could be widely distributed to prevent the spread of diseases among the people who crowd into the underground … each night’. In December a mosquito prevention squad started work, since in the warm, damp atmosphere these were a constant irritation, and experiments started with disinfectant sprays incorporated into ventilation systems in case an epidemic did take hold.

Getting people to and from work was regarded as a wartime priority, and police patrolled the tube stations to ensure that no one took up residence before the official entry time of 4 p.m. There were two white lines painted on the platform: until 7.30 p.m. shelterers were obliged to stay behind the first one, eight feet back from the platform edge, so passengers could get on and off the trains. After that they could spread out to the second line, four feet from the edge of the platform, and also occupy corridors and stairways. Although most people were sympathetic to the plight of the tube troglodytes, some found it a ‘terrible hindrance … it is practically an impossibility to get anywhere quickly these days’.

Behind those white lines, a great deal went on between 4 p.m. and 11 p.m., when most adult shelterers retired for the night. Some entertainment was generated by the shelterers themselves: sedentary pleasures such as reading, writing letters, knitting, playing cards or board games, gossiping, playing the mouth organ or wind-up gramophone, having a communal singsong or dancing. Parties, quizzes and play readings were organised to pass the long air-raid hours. Bermondsey held a weekly discussion group at which the topics included travel, unemployment and ‘Should women have equal pay for equal work?’ The introduction of bunks was rather regretted by some, since it reduced the space available, but gramophones fitted with loudspeakers donated by the American Committee for Air Raid Relief to five of the largest shelters could make an evening spent in them seem more like a concert. Collections were taken for first aid equipment or towards a Christmas party, or presents for the children at Christmas.

Some shelters produced monthly news-sheets, including Holborn, Belsize Park, Goodge Street and the Oval, as well as the Swiss Cottager. There was also the Subway Companion, which was short-lived in its ambition to be distributed to all tube stations being used as shelters. ‘Greetings to our nightly companions, our temporary cave dwellers, our sleeping companions, somnambulists, snorers, chatterers and all who inhabit the Swiss Cottage Station from dusk to dawn,’ ran the Swiss Cottager’s first instalment. Each issue offered information and advice: ‘a Committee of Shelter Marshals has been formed. It hopes to act as a bridge between you and the London Passenger Transport Board, and also do what it can for each and every person using this station at night. If you have any suggestion or complaint – if you think something should be installed, provided or remedied, please let us know and we shall do our best to meet your wishes.’ ‘To guard against colds and infection … a face mask can be made with a few inches of surgical gauze, or even butter muslin. Sprinkle it with a little oil of eucalyptus and tie over the face with a strip of tape at bedtime. We understand the government intends to do something about face masks. Unfortunately, intentions are a poor medicine and instructions a useless preventive.’ Exhortations: ‘there is still far too much litter in the station at the “All Clear”. It is the prime duty of each and every one to leave the station in a clean and decent condition. Dustbins are provided in the station for refuse.’ ‘Do not bring camp beds into the station. Three camp beds occupy as much space as four blankets or a single mattress, so the available space is reduced by one fourth. YOU might be that fourth person turned away for lack of room.’ ‘Don’t expect home comforts or plenty of elbow room. Suffer a little inconvenience to make room for the next person.’ ‘Vibration due to heavy gunfire or other causes will be much less felt if you do not lie with your head against the wall.’ ‘Please do not contribute to any unauthorised collection. Members of the Committee may be recognised by their carrying a yellow armlet with the letter “C” in black.’ ‘It is your duty to report anyone spitting to a member of the Committee or a Warden.’ Jokes: ‘Our morning paper tells us that one person in every eight snores. This station seems full of eighth persons.’ (Government-issue earplugs were supplied at stations: proof against the noise of Ack-Ack guns, perhaps, but maybe not snorers.)

Aldwych station, on a branch of the Piccadilly Line, was closed at the end of September and converted into an underground shelter. It had been reckoned that it would be able to accommodate 7,500, but although this was over-optimistic, once the walls had been painted, the rails removed and the track covered over with sleepers, and two hundred bunks and lighting installed, some 2,000 people were able to shelter in the tunnel that ran from Aldwych to Holborn. The space was extended in the spring of 1941, taking over part of the tunnel where the Elgin Marbles and other treasures from the British Museum were being stored. Westminster Council donated 2,000 books from the borough’s libraries for the shelterers’ use, educational lectures were arranged to pass the time, the left-wing Unity Theatre put on the lighter sketches in its repertoire, and ENSA (the Entertainments National Service Association, or ‘Every Night Something Awful’, depending on your point of view) imported entertainers such as George Formby, as well as Shakespearean plays and a projector for films underground. A local vicar conducted a regular service at the Aldwych shelter, and a play centre was provided for small children at Elephant and Castle, with a qualified teacher to provide handicraft lessons. Such diversions spread to other shelters during that long winter underground (soon fifty-two stations had a library), and at the request of the Mayor of Bermondsey, one of the most-bombed boroughs in London, the LCC sent instructors to the shelters to teach drama, dressmaking, handicrafts and first aid, while children were provided with paper and paints, and produced ‘violent masterpieces in which Spitfires bring down Heinkels amid sheets of flame’.

But there was one thing that no one could provide: any guarantee of safety. On 7 October 1940 seven shelterers were killed and thirty-three injured at Trafalgar Square station when an explosion caused the concrete and steel casing over an escalator to collapse, bringing down an avalanche of wet earth. The next day nineteen were killed and fifty-two injured – most of them refugees from Belgium – at Bounds Green station in the northern suburbs, when a house next to the station was hit by a bomb and toppled over, causing a tunnel to collapse and bury the victims in masonry and debris.

On 14 October a heavy bomb fell on Balham High Road in south London just above a point where underground tunnels intersected. It caused a sixty-foot crater to open, and immediately a double-decker bus fell into it. Below ground a deluge of ballast and sludge, dislodged by the explosion, engulfed the platforms where six hundred people were sleeping, and gas from fractured pipes seeped in. Sixty-eight were killed, including the stationmaster, the ticket-office clerk and two porters. Many drowned as water and sewage from burst mains poured in, soon reaching a depth of three feet. The toll would have been even higher had not two LPTB staff wrenched open the floodgates. Seven million gallons of water and sewage had to be pumped out before salvage work could begin. For weeks afterwards those sheltering in nearby stations along the Northern Line were aware of a ‘ghost’ train that slipped quietly along the track around midnight clearing the debris of the Balham disaster, a tragic cargo that included shoes, bits of clothing, handbags, toys and other heart-stopping possessions.

At a minute to eight in the evening of 11 January 1941 a bomb fell on the booking hall of Bank station in the City, and a massive explosion tore through the station. It blew a massive two-hundred-foot crater in the road, which was so large that a bridge had to be built over it to get traffic flowing again. Many passers-by were killed, but in attending to them the rescue services did not realise at first that there was even greater carnage underground. The blast from the bomb ‘travelled through the various underground passages, and in particular forced its way with extreme violence down the escalator killing those sleeping at the foot of it at the time, and killing and injuring others sheltering on the platform opposite the entrances’, while some people were hurled into the path of an incoming train. A total of 111 people were killed at Bank, including fifty-three shelterers and four underground staff. An inquiry into the disaster opened on 10 February 1941. ‘It is difficult to convince people that even when they are 60 or 70 feet underground, they are not safe,’ remarked the chair. It had been alleged that inadequate sanitation was a key factor, as there were only a few chemical toilets in the station, and since these were soon overflowing, many declined to use them, and were queuing to use the conveniences in the booking hall when the bomb fell. The inquiry found that in fact no deaths and only a few minor injuries could be attributed to this. There was no first aid post on the platform, and there was no emergency lighting. There had been other recent ‘incidents’ in the area (notably on 29 December 1940), so roads were closed and access to the station was difficult, while fallen debris cut off access to the Central Line (both the Central and Northern Lines pass through Bank), meaning that it had taken doctors and stretcher parties more than an hour to reach it. While the injured waited for the medical services to arrive, a Hungarian refugee doctor, Dr Z.A. Leitner, who had himself been injured in the blast, gave more than forty morphia injections as he ministered to the injured single-handed in the gloom and choking dust. At the inquiry the hero doctor paid tribute to those he had helped. ‘I should like to make a remark. You English people cannot appreciate the discipline of your own people. I want to tell you, I have not found one hysterical, shouting patient. I think this very important, that you should not take such things as given – because it does not happen in other countries. If Hitler could have been there for five minutes with me, he would have finished the war. He would have realised that he has got to take every Englishman and twist him by the neck – otherwise he cannot win this war.’

^* In fact the much-feared ‘trogs’ would be found in the Ramsgate caves; with the approval of Herbert Morrison they were forcibly ejected.