inspirational wartime leader, even though, in a flurry of works that had necessitated Churchill moving for a few nights to the Carlton Hotel in nearby Belgravia, a shelter had been built in the garden, and a dining room and sitting room set up in the basement, which Jock Colville thought resembled ‘third-class accommodation on a Channel steamer’. The question of where to keep Britain’s principal wartime asset led to a tussle that would continue between the obstinate Prime Minister and his staff and advisers throughout the early days of the blitz.
That Sunday, the second night of the blitz, bombs fell again on the docks, reigniting fires that were still smouldering, starting new ones, and stretching the line of fire and destruction along the banks of the Thames: soon twelve conflagrations were lighting up the sky, and testing the resources of the fire services to their limit once again. The two hundred German planes pounded the City too. Every railway line out of London to the south was put out of action, and factories and offices were destroyed, as were more homes. Four hundred and twelve Londoners were killed that night, and 747 seriously injured.
Gerry Knight, who had memorably thought ‘the whole bloody world’s on fire’ the previous night, was on duty again at Pageant’s Wharf fire station when the bombs started to drop. One fell on the station killing Knight and a colleague, Auxiliary Fireman Dick Martin. All that could be found to identify the forty-four-year-old Knight were his standard issue thigh-high fireman’s boots.
When the photographer Bert Hardy visited the East End two days later, ‘he said it was like the end of the world’, reported Alan Hutt. ‘Whole streets down and gone. East End soldiers deserting to rush home and frantically try to find their folks … A man and a woman sitting on a pile of wreckage staring listlessly in front of them without speech … Revolting stories of official red tape in dealing with refugees and bereaved survivors … climaxing in the hideous affair of the refugees bunged into one East End School on Saturday night to be all bombed to death on Sunday [sic].’
This ‘hideous affair’ made unbearably raw all the fears and many of the tensions of the blitz just a day after it started. A rest centre had been established at South Hallsville School in Agate Street, Canning Town, and it was there that six hundred men, women and children had been led on Saturday night after it had been decided to evacuate the local area. The refugees were in a state of acute shock. Most had lost their homes; for some, members of their family had been killed or wounded, or were missing; they had few if any possessions; their clothes were torn and dirty, their faces blackened by smoke and soot, often caked with blood, their feet burned and lacerated. They clung to each other, terrified, confused, some hysterical, others racked with uncontrollable anger, others traumatised and unable to speak. Rest centre staff, hopelessly unprepared for such a sudden influx, themselves shocked and anxious, bustled around offering cups of tea – that ubiquitous British panacea – trying to find blankets for the refugees, many of whom were only wearing thin nightclothes, offering reassurance as bombs crashed all around and shrapnel grazed the walls: ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be all right. We’ll get you away.’
That day Ritchie Calder had sought out the Reverend Paton, a popular East End priest known locally as ‘the Guv’nor’, whose dockland church had been bombed the previous night.
His pulpit still stood, but the roof and front wall had gone … I found ‘The Guv’nor’ at last, he was ashen grey with the anguish of the night. He had been out in the raids, helping his people throughout the night. His lips trembled and his eyes filled with tears when he spoke of his friends who were dead, injured or missing. But his main concern was for the living. He was dashing round the streets seeking out the survivors whose homes had been wrecked.
I went with him. We found many thousands sheltering in a school in the heart of the bombed area. I took a good look at the school. From the first glance it seemed to me ominous of disaster. In the passages and classrooms were mothers nursing their babies. There were blind, crippled and aged people … Whole families were sitting in queues perched on pitiful baggage waiting desperately for coaches to take them away from the terror of the bombs which had been raining down on them … these unfortunate people had been told to be ready for the coaches at three o’clock. Hours later the coaches had not arrived. ‘The Guvnor’ and I heard women, the mothers of young children, protesting with violence and with tears about the delay. Men were cursing the officials who only knew that coaches were expected. ‘Where are we going?’ ‘Can’t we walk there?’ ‘We’ll take a bus!’ ‘There’s a lorry we can borrow!’ The crowds clamoured for help, for information, for reassurance. But the officials knew no answer other than to offer a cup of tea.
One mother complained that her children had been forbidden to play in the playground … [the official showed me why]. In the playground behind the school was a crater. The school was, in fact, a bulging dangerous ruin. The bombs which had rendered these people homeless had also struck the building selected by the authorities as a ‘Rest Centre’… the school had already been bombed at the same time as ‘the Guv’nor’s’ church had been bombed. So had the parish church … So had other buildings and streets within a direct line with it. And then I knew that Sunday afternoon, that as sure as night would follow day, the bombers would come again with the darkness, and that the school would be bombed.
And so it was. ‘Filled with foreboding’, Calder ‘hastened back to central London. Three times I warned the Whitehall authorities during that evening that the people must be got away before more bombs dropped and certain disaster overtook them. Local folk back at the school were making equally frantic efforts to force the local authorities to act.’ But the displaced East Enders were still huddled in the ‘shelterless school’ at 8 p.m. on Monday when the alert sounded. At 3.45 on the morning of Tuesday, 10 September ‘the inevitable bomb’ scored a direct hit on South Hallsville School. Half the building was demolished, and hundreds of tons of masonry crashed down on its occupants. Rescue workers, frantically digging and scrabbling in the ruins, tried to free the injured, while a cordon was thrown around the area to keep people from seeing what was happening, and the censor warned the press that there were to be no reports or photographs of the tragedy, so injurious was it feared that it would be to the morale of the already disquieted city.
The rescue services dug for twelve days, trying to find survivors under the slabs of concrete and piles of bricks that filled the crater where the bomb had fallen, before they had to concede defeat. The dead – or parts of the dead – were carefully transported to an emergency morgue at a nearby swimming pool. Soon the rumours flew as fast as the fires had taken hold: hundreds were dead, and the authorities had ordered the site to be concreted over with bodies still entombed in the wreckage. Calder was incandescent with rage at the authorities, not only for failing to organise transport for the refugees, but also for failing to provide what he and others, including most vociferously the scientist and author of the book ARP, J.B.S. Haldane, had urged was essential for London: sufficient deep shelters to provide safety for all those in vulnerable areas. Calder went again to the scene. ‘I saw the gaping bomb crater, where stood a school used as a shelter centre, containing still uncounted bodies – families wiped out while they waited for transport which never came … I saw the rescue men descending perilously into it, with ropes around them, saw them pause, every now and then, in a hushed painful silence listening for the sound of the living, saw the tomb of whole families … I spoke to the men, fathers of families, who had been cursing on the Sunday. They were speechless and numbed by the horror of it.’
It has never been established why the coaches did not arrive: maybe the address they had been given was inadequate. The George, a well-known pub in the area from which coaches from all over London set off for Essex, had been designated as the rendezvous point – but there are more pubs than one in the capital called The George. Maybe the coaches had been misdirected to Camden Town, rather than Canning Town. Or maybe the drivers, caught in the raid and seeing the devastation in the East End, simply turned back. Certainly it was a grievous dereliction of duty on the part of the West Ham authorities to leave so many people unprotected in the eye of the raid. And whatever the reason, the result was fatal – 450 dead, Calder claimed in the bitter account that appeared the following year in his admonitory book The Lesson of London. West Ham Council announced the death toll as seventy-three, but locals still believe that nearer two hundred people perished in South Hallsville School