shaking. Dante had nothing on Hitler, believe me.
… At last, at 5 o/c, the All Clear went and we finally reached home to find some windows out and the ceiling down in Mummy’s room …
When I looked from my window I could see that one of the fires on Thames side was still burning and great clouds of black smoke were covering quite a large area.
‘Then quite suddenly it ceased,’ recalled Fireman Hurd, fighting a fire amidst the noise of screaming bombs and droning aircraft. ‘The silence was almost overpowering for a time. At about 5 o/c am the “All Clear” went. We had been subjected, without any real cover, to 8 hours of continual bombing! … Relief crews began to arrive (they came from Enfield) … we stayed there until 10 o/c on Sunday morning when our Sub Officer handed over to another officer. This officer and his ten pumps … had come from Brighton! Our crew proceeded home [then] and what a scene of desolation we passed through. Debris everywhere, confined to the East End though, but I was too tired to care much about what I saw then. We had been on our feet since 6.15 pm on Saturday until 10 am on Sunday, with only one snack in 21 hours.’
The All Clear ‘sounded a beautiful symphony’ in Bernard Kops’ ears:
everyone relaxed, the men arguing politics and the women talking about food, But the younger people wandered out to see the fires and I went with them along the Commercial Road. The closer I got the more black and red it became with flames shooting higher than the cranes along the dockside. Sparks were spitting everywhere and tongues of flames consumed the great warehouses along the black and orange waters of the Thames. Everything was chaos except the fire which was like a living monster with an insatiable appetite. And I was afraid of being devoured … so I left and wandered back towards Stepney Green where black smoke covered the sky.
Yet, with all this, there was a feeling of unreality. I couldn’t believe it, it was like a film being shown before our eyes, Men were rushing around selling newspapers, screaming about the amount of German planes that were brought down, and there had been a family wiped out where I had been standing …
That first night of the blitz, 436 people were killed and 1,600 seriously injured.* Among the dead were seven firemen. Thirteen men were killed when the corporation depot in Abbey Road, West Ham, which was being used as an ARP Cleansing and Ambulance station, received a direct hit. Cyril Demarne, who was nearby, hurried round to find a hand he recognised as that of his friend Wally Turley sticking out from under a huge slab of concrete. Turley, a fireman, had been attempting to put out a fire at the station when it collapsed, burying him, his fellow firefighters and other ARP workers stationed there. It was impossible to move the concrete to free the bodies until heavy lifting gear arrived, so Fireman Turley’s arm remained sticking out of the debris, a tragic signpost to one of the many instant burial grounds that night.
Soon after the first raid of the blitz had begun the previous afternoon, the manager of Robert Baltrop’s Sainsbury’s had decided to close the shop and send all his staff home. Baltrop set out to keep his date with a girl.
She turned up – it sounds daft but perhaps we all thought it was a bit romantic meeting in an air raid, all this was going on very close to us. We could smell the smoke and hear the bombs, but she had orders to take me home immediately if I turned up so we went to her home and they were all in the Anderson shelter in her back garden, her parents and the lady from upstairs, and we huddled in there, it was pretty awful all squashed in there together with the raid going on and her father talked in gloomy tones about H.G. Wells and how we should all have to live underground, and every time there was a thump her mother screamed … The man from upstairs came in straight from work, and he tumbled into the shelter breathless with these stories of roads blocked, streets in ruins, named places that I knew, and it was almost unbelievable to hear someone say, you know this place or that place, well, it’s been bombed.
Baltrop finally became ‘fed up’ with this talk and the confined space, and walked home. His father had been out, ‘picking up what news he could about the East End, because we knew it so well, we knew people and places, and he’s heard this place had been bombed and that place … and we sat and had a cup of tea and he talked grievingly about the East End and the people and how they must be suffering, and then we went to bed and the raid was still going on and we wondered, would we wake up in the morning? What would tomorrow be like? And when I did wake up it was a lovely, sunny Sunday morning, lovely except that I think that four hundred and fifty or more people had been killed in East London, and a huge number injured, terrible, terrible destruction, and the Germans were coming back again that night …’
* ‘Seriously injured’ described those who were admitted to and kept in hospital; a person receiving first aid treatment at the time, or subsequently presenting at an outpatients’ department or at their doctor’s surgery, was categorised as ‘slightly injured’. Of course many people sustained minor injuries for which they did not seek medical help, so they do not show up in the figures. Indeed, the Ministry of Home Security was concerned that reporting officers should be clear about what were ‘regarded as casualties, or to classify them in some way so that our published figures may represent the true gravity of the situation (i.e. not old ladies removed to hospital from near an incident “for their own comfort”)’.
2 ‘The Most Grim Test in its History …’
With our enormous metropolis here, the greatest target in the world, a kind of tremendous fat cow tied up to attract the beasts of prey.
Winston Churchill speaking in 1934 about the prospect of an aerial bombardment of London
Darling Kat, You little know what you say when you tell me to write for the papers. I am not, as you know, made of the stuff Londoners are made of. My instinct is to flee. I cannot report on scenes in shelters. There are hundreds of keen, nerveless people out all night pursuing fires and demolition … Still it is endurable and my greatest fear is being forced by Duff [her husband, the Minister of Information] to leave the city. It is so utterly unlike what I imagined the raids on London would be. I thought of a bigger, suddener attack, with the whole population blocking roads, Ministries evacuating to their pre-arranged dispersal stations, frightful dislocation, worse perhaps than this cold-blooded waiting for destruction. Most people don’t see it so. They have confidence in a defence being found. ‘This is only a phase of war. We’ll stick it out all right.’ There is not a street that does not show some assault. The curtains flap dismally out of Londonderry House and most of the big Piccadilly houses. I try to avoid the places where the cruellest gashes have been inflicted, but one has to take the way that cut-off streets, encumbered with bombs ticking to explode, allow.
Lady Diana Cooper writing from London to her friend ‘Kaetchen’ Kommer in New York on 23 September 1940
Around the time the ‘big blitz’ on London started in September 1940, the War Damage Survey of the Architects’ Department of the London County Council (LCC) started to record bomb damage to the capital. Using sheets of Ordnance Survey maps from 1916 that had been updated in 1940 to show boundary changes, new buildings etc., on a scale of 1:2,500 (25.34 inches to the mile), the architects marked incidents of bomb damage across the city’s 117 square miles, using different-coloured pencils to indicate degrees of severity. Black denoted those buildings that had been totally destroyed, purple those damaged beyond repair. Those that had sustained ‘serious damage, doubtful if repairable’ were coloured dark red, while properties ‘seriously damaged but repairable at cost’ were light red. Orange indicated ‘non-structural general blast damage’ and those in yellow had escaped all but minor damage – broken windows, or roof tiles dislodged, for example. The architects kept up their meticulous work until the end of the German V-weapon offensive on 27 March 1945 (V-weapon damage was indicated differently), and today their maps make sombre viewing.
The docks consist of little other than large slabs of black, with small infills of purple round