The Blitz: The British Under Attack

Trenches dug at the time of Munich were inspected and, if suitably sited, were redug if necessary to four feet deep, lined with concrete or steel and their entrances closed. But they had no sanitary arrangements, or even duckboard flooring, making them unsuitable for night-long occupation – though this often happened – were cold, and apt to become waterlogged. In any case, once the Munich crisis had passed, many local authorities had filled in their trenches and were reluctant to start digging again.

On 15 March 1939 German troops occupied Prague, in direct contravention of the Munich Agreement. Civil defence measures in Britain were immediately escalated. A new Civil Defence Bill conferred wide-ranging peacetime powers on local authorities that included the right to designate buildings as public shelters – shops, for example: Dickins & Jones in Regent Street had a much-sought-after basement shelter, as did D.H. Evans in Oxford Street – or clubs or institutes, against the wish of the owner if necessary, and to do whatever structural work was required, paying compensation if appropriate. Those people with incomes that entitled them to a government-issue Anderson shelter were supplied free of charge with materials to strengthen their ‘refuge room’ if they had no space for an external shelter, and the local authority would be reimbursed for the cost of doing the work. New buildings had to incorporate spaces for shelters, and employers with a workforce of fifty or more in a designated target area were obliged to provide shelter accommodation (and to organise ARP services) for their employees; they would receive government funding to help pay for this. Smaller firms in the same areas could apply for funding to safeguard their workforces.

Anderson shelters and reinforced basements were not going to provide protection for all those in vulnerable areas, so in May 1939 money was made available for materials for local authorities to build public outdoor shelters (though they had to foot the bill for the construction costs). For blocks of flats where there was no suitable shelter accommodation for all the residents, and where most were not eligible for free shelters, the landlord could be compelled to build one if petitioned to do so by more than 50 per cent of the tenants, and could recoup the cost by raising all the rents.

Despite these initiatives, by September 1939 shelter provision was lamentably behind schedule. There was a shortfall of about a million of the promised Anderson shelters (those delivered were optimistically pronounced to provide protection for 60,000 people), meaning that even in what were believed to be the most dangerous areas many people had no shelters, and none were offered for sale until the following month. These cost between £6.14s and £10.18s – easy terms available. However, the take-up was limited – by April 1940 fewer than a thousand had been bought, while the basement-strengthening programme had hardly started.

In some places the provision of public shelters was more advanced: about three-quarters of the trenches dug at the time of Munich had been reinforced, the City of London reported that its public-shelter-building programme was complete, and on the eve of war most cities exercised their power to requisition suitable sites. Notices proclaiming ‘Public Shelter’ appeared on various buildings – some more suitable than others. At the end of August 1939, in tardy recognition of this unsatisfactory provision, the government urged local authorities to provide purpose-built public shelters, above-ground ‘heavily protected’ brick and concrete constructions capable of holding up to fifty people.

Fortunately, the eight-month respite of the ‘phoney war’, which effectively lasted until May 1940, meant that shelter provision could continue in wartime. However, the materials needed for shelters were now urgently required for military purposes. Smaller Anderson shelters, only four feet five inches long, were now produced and pronounced suitable for four persons, while the original ‘standard’ Anderson was redesignated as large enough for six people, with an ‘extension’ tacked on to allow it to accommodate up to ten if necessary. Finally, in April 1940, the production of Anderson shelters was suspended altogether, but by the start of the blitz nearly two and a half million had been distributed, theoretically providing shelter for 12.5 million people. Many gardens, however, were littered with unerected Anderson shelters, now rusting and near to useless. Some enterprising boroughs such as Hackney in east London, under its redoubtable ARP Controller Dr Richard Tee, organised teams of council workmen or volunteers to help householders, and the Bristol Civil Defence Area had taken a similar initiative, but the government decided that sterner measures were needed to compel self-help. From May 1940, under the terms of Defence Regulation 23B, everyone who had been issued with an Anderson shelter had ten days in which to erect it and cover it in the requisite manner, or to report to their local authority that they had not done so. If they did not, and could not show that they were genuinely incapable of doing so, the steel sheets would be collected and issued to another household.

Meanwhile the government was pressing forward with the provision of public communal shelters, intended to accommodate twelve or so families from nearby properties, which it fully funded. After the Russian bombing of Finland in the winter of 1939–40 it was decided that railway stations would be likely targets, so shelters capable of sheltering the equivalent of ten minutes’ flow of passengers at peak travel times needed be provided at them. These were started at all London termini, but were far from completion when the blitz started.

By the start of the blitz, of the 27.5 million people living in ‘specified areas’ (that is, those urban and industrial centres considered particularly likely to be attacked, from which evacuation had been recommended), 17.5 million had been provided with some sort of shelter, domestic or public, at government expense. A few householders had provided themselves with shelters at their own expense, and an additional five million could use shelters at work. These figures were produced by the government when it came under attack – as it had since the mid-1930s – for the slow, patchy and often inadequate shelter provision. There was still an obvious shortfall, and those people not in a ‘specified area’ were left to their own devices, though issued with a booklet, Your Home as an Air Raid Shelter. Moreover, the shelter experience of many was very far from satisfactory.

People with rooms in their homes that they could make as bomb-proof as any domestic arrangement could be were, generally speaking, the most fortunate. BBC producer Anthony Weymouth and his family used the hall of their ground-floor flat in a mansion block in Harley Street in central London: the hall was the most sheltered part of their home, as it had rooms on either side, and its only window, which looked into an inner courtyard, had been fitted with an asbestos shutter. Citizens without such shutters were advised to leave their windows open, to reduce the risk of injury from shattered glass. The Weymouth family spent night after night in their hall, ‘lying in the dark on our mattresses for … hours listening to the drone of German bombers’. When he worked late at the BBC, Weymouth was obliged to sleep on one of the six hundred mattresses provided at Broadcasting House, ‘for the AA barrage besprinkles the street with pieces of shrapnel’.

Patrick Shea, a Northern Irish civil servant who had been put in charge of producing a top secret ‘War Book’, a manual for senior staff telling them of ‘the role and responsibilities assigned to each and every one of them in a great variety of preconceived situations’, was living in lodgings in Belfast. The household had a clearly defined ‘blitz drill’.

When the alert sounded the more active ones saw to it that the shutters were securely bolted, the bath, hand basins and sinks filled with water in case of fire, candles brought out lest the electricity supply should fail, fires extinguished. The assembly point for the whole household was the large ground-floor living room. Miss Mack, an elderly, socially superior person who normally kept herself to herself in her first floor bedsitter, would make one of her rare appearances amongst us. She would come downstairs draped in her fur coat and carrying her jewel case. Tenderly she would be manoeuvred into a recumbent position on a mattress under the large dining-room table; for the period of the alert she would lie there, her furs wrapped around her, her jewels clasped to her bosom. The Dublin couple, from whose mealtime conversation one deduced a background of tweedy opulence, would appear carrying two large suitcases colourfully decorated with the stick-on labels of famous shipping lines and faraway hotels. Having chosen their resting-place, they would inflate their two airbeds, settle down on them and with apparent indifference to the sound and fury outside, while away the time scrutinising the pages of out-of-date copies of the Illustrated London News and the Field.

Coffee would be made. Those not lying down or on a fire-watching tour of inspection of the top floor, sat or stood around the empty fireplace. In the tense atmosphere, with so diverse a company, conversation tended to be intermittent and trivial … From the darkness beneath the large mahogany table an observation about the brutality of the Germans or the splendid behaviour of the British Royal Family would remind us that Miss Mack was still there.

Phyllis Warner considered that ‘We are lucky in having our own shelter [in Mary Ward House in Queen’s Square, Holborn, in what would be among the worst-bombed boroughs in London] so that we can have mattresses and even a table or chair or two down there, but even so, with the bare girders and rough planks of its reinforcing, it resembles the worst kind of steerage.’

Those who were supplied with Anderson shelters did not, or could not, always dig them in properly, or failed to cover them with the requisite amount of sand and earth – which was what really gave protection – or to bank up a mound of earth at the entrance to act as a ‘baffle wall’. Even those Andersons that were correctly sited were less than ideal. Many filled with water when it rained, and they were cold and cramped, while the noise of bombs and falling shrapnel echoed alarmingly around their tinny walls if they were not properly insulated with soil. The problem, as with all government shelter initiatives, was due to a category error. Air raids had been expected to be sharp and above all short: no one seems to have anticipated that many would last all night. The alert would commonly sound at about 8 p.m., and the All Clear was often not heard until five or six the next morning. So shelters that might have been perfectly acceptable for the half-hour or so that daytime raids often entailed were profoundly unsuitable for an entire night – night after night. The family tensions that must have been engendered by such close and fearful proximity, exacerbated by boredom and exhaustion, are almost too dreadful to dwell on.

On 19 September 1940 Picture Post wrote that ‘long winter nights are ahead [but] with a little ingenuity you can make them tolerable by fitting your Anderson shelter with home-made bunks’. It showed how Mr Stuart Murray of Croydon had ‘turned his shelter into a family bedroom’ by nailing a double layer of chicken wire across a wooden frame to provide two upper and two lower bunks, transforming the tin shelter into ‘if not a bed of roses, a tolerable resting place’. Other families made several treks each evening before the alert went off, carrying eiderdowns, rugs, deckchairs, pillows and cushions from the house to the shelter. The effect of all this, of course, was to make things even more cramped.

‘This going up to the shelter is not as simple as it sounds,’ wrote Sidney Chave, a lab technician who lived in Upper Norwood, south London. ‘It entails five or six journeys up and down carting the necessary articles, and finally our precious bundle [the Chaves’ daughter Jillian, who was just over a year old at the start of the blitz]. As the journeys are made along a wet garden path, in complete darkness accompanied by sporadic bursts of gun fire and with the planes droning overhead, and as one’s arms are full up with cushions, blankets and the like – it is not such a jolly affair, this Shelter life!’

Then there were the cold and the dark. A few enterprising handymen ran electric cables to their back-garden shelters so that a bar electric fire could be used, but this could be hazardous. Oil or paraffin heaters were not recommended, since they could start a fire if knocked over, as could a paraffin lamp, and torches were not the answer to the dark, since within weeks of the outbreak of war, batteries had become all but unobtainable. A candle in a flowerpot was suggested, but that carried a fire risk too, and the flickering light was hardly adequate for reading or knitting.

Herbert Brush, a seventy-one-year-old retired Electricity Board inspector, lived in Forest Hill, south London. Clearly something of a handyman, he had managed to fit up some rudimentary bunks in the family Anderson shelter, rig up an electric light for reading, and kept ‘half a dozen books on various subjects on a small shelf I have put up’. But it still wasn’t entirely satisfactory. ‘As usual we spent 12 hours in the shelter last night,’ he wrote on 31 October 1940. ‘We have got used to hard lying now and go to sleep as easily there as in bed, though I must own up to stiffness in the morning, when I am able to double up on my bed for an hour or so. I can’t double up much on two 11 inch boards; that with cushions makes my bed less than 2 feet in width. I can’t lie with my face to the wall because if I double up at all my posterior overhangs the bed and that is not a comfortable position: the other way round my knees sometimes overhang but that is not such an uncomfortable position.’

The ever-resourceful Mr Brush continued to try to make sleeping in a tin hut in the garden as acceptable as possible. By December, when it had grown bitterly cold at night, the family lit a paraffin heater in the shelter for an hour or so before the alert was expected, took hot-water bottles in with them, hung a curtain over the entrance and ‘fitted shields to keep the draughts off the bunks on either side of the dug out. It is quite a comfortable place now,’ Mr Brush conceded, ‘when one gets used to the cramped space and the inability to turn over without falling out, for folks of my size.’

Eighteen-year-old Margaret Turpin’s family had a brick-built shelter in the garden of their East End home. ‘It was so small. My brother was nearly six foot, there was my father, myself, my sister, my mother and a baby, and somehow we were all supposed to be able to sleep in this shelter. But it was impossible. It was only about seven feet long and a few feet wide. We had to sit up all night because there just wasn’t room to lie down. I suppose my mother thought my father ought to be the one that lay down [because he had to go to work] and my father thought my mother ought to because she had a little baby. And my brother was tall and had to fit in somehow, and that was the reason that eventually we went to a public shelter, because there was no way we could have slept through a prolonged blitz.’

Others, less in the eye of the storm than East Enders, tried to find somewhere they considered safe in the house, rather than spend the night in an uncomfortable garden shelter. And invariably people would leave their Andersons as soon as the All Clear went, usually in the early hours of the morning, to snatch at least a couple of hours in bed before they had to get up to start the day.

No wonder that as the blitz went on, more and more people declined to use their Anderson shelters at all, even though they proved pretty effective. If correctly sited they were able to withstand the effects of a hundred-pound bomb falling six feet away, or a two-hundred-pound bomb falling twenty feet way, those inside usually suffering little more than shock. Nevertheless, by mid-October 1940, when the raids on London had eased off somewhat, more and more people opted to crouch under their staircase, which was considered to be the safest place in most houses, or drag a mattress under the dining-room table for the night, or even stay in bed and take their chances.

The Prime Minister was the first recipient of a government-issue and much more robust version of the dining-room-table shelter which went into production in January 1941. This was the Morrison shelter, a rectangular mesh steel cage six feet six inches long, four feet wide and about two feet nine inches high, bolted together with a steel ‘mattress’ and top, named after the then Home Secretary and Minister for Home Security, Herbert Morrison. It proved much more popular than the Anderson, though it was less effective, since it offered no protection from lateral blast. The Morrison was suitable for flats and houses without gardens, it was situated indoors (as in fact had been the original intention for Anderson shelters), it offered protection against falling masonry, could accommodate (snugly) two recumbent adults and two young children, was simple to put up and could be used as a table in the daytime. By this time the minimum income for eligibility for a free shelter had risen to £350 a year, but the distribution of Morrison shelters in London and other cities and large towns did not start until the end of March, just over a month before the ‘big blitz’ was effectively over.

In theory, local authorities could compel factories and commercial premises to make their shelters available to the general public outside working hours, but in practice this did not happen very often. Employers only had to plead that they did not wish to disrupt war production, which was accepted as paramount. Government departments were also urged to admit the public to their basements, but again this was often resisted on the grounds that the employees might need to sleep on the premises overnight during the blitz. Gradually throughout the winter months more basements were strengthened, but most people who had no suitable refuge at home had few options other than specially constructed public shelters. Again built in the belief that raids would be short and mostly in daytime, most offered no seating, lighting or sanitation, and no facilities even for boiling a kettle for a cup of tea.

Barbara Nixon was a thirty-two-year-old actress and graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge. When most of the theatres closed during the blitz, she volunteered as an ARP warden in Finsbury, north London, ‘which in those days stretched from near Liverpool Street due westwards to Smithfield, covered the area north of King’s Cross Road and back along Pentonville and City Roads to include Moorgate and Finsbury Square’. She wrote later: ‘During September 1940 the shelter conditions were appalling. In many boroughs there were only flimsy surface shelters, with no light, no seats, no lavatories and insufficient numbers even of these; or railway arches and basements that gave an impression of safety, but only had a few inches of brick overhead, or were rotten shells of buildings with thin roofs and floors.’ In Finsbury

we were well provided as regards numbers; there were almost sufficient for the night population, and they were reasonably safe … In my [ARP] Post area we had two capacious shelters under business firms which held three or four hundred, also fifteen small sub-surface concrete ones in which fifty people could sit upright on narrow wooden benches along the wall. But they were poorly ventilated, and only two out of the nine that came in my province could pretend to be dry. Some leaked through the roof and umbrellas had to be used; in others the mouth of the sump-hole near the door had been made higher than the floor, and on a rainy night it invariably overflowed to a depth of two inches at one end decreasing to a quarter of an inch at the other, and rheumaticky old ladies had to sit upright on their benches for six to twelve hours on end, with their feet propped up on a couple of bricks. Four or five times during the night we used to go round with saucepan and bucket baling out the stinking water; as soon as Number 9 was reached, Number 1 was full again. It was hard, wet and smelly work … There were chemical closets usually partially screened off by a canvas curtain. But even so, the supervision of the cleaning of these was not adequate. Sometimes they would be left untended for days on end and would overflow on to the floor … Then there was the question of lights. I have been told by wardens that, for the first two months [of the blitz], shelters in some boroughs had no lights at all. We had one hurricane lamp for about fifty people. How often in the small hours, if the raid had started early, there would be a wail of ‘Warden! Warden! The light’s gone out!’ and children would wake up and howl, women grow nervous and men swear. It was expecting altogether too much of people’s nerves to ask them to sit through a raid in the dark. The one paraffin light also provided the only heating that there was in those days. It was bitterly cold that winter, and naturally, therefore, the door was kept shut. Some of the bigger shelters had ventilation pipes, but the smaller ones that held fifty people only had the door. In some, the atmosphere of dank concrete, of stagnant air, of the inevitable smell of bodies, the stench of the chemical closets was indescribable … But if conditions in many of our shelters were bad, in some other districts they were incredible. They belonged more properly to the days of a hundred years ago than to the twentieth century.

Joan Veazey, newly married to the vicar of St Mary’s Church, Kennington, in south London, went with her husband Christopher to visit a number of local public shelters in September 1940. ‘It is amazing what discomfort people will put up with, some on old mattresses, others in deck chairs and some lying on cold concrete floors with a couple of blankets stretched round their tired limbs. In nearly all the shelters the atmosphere is so thick that you could cut it with a knife. And many of the places – actually – stink! I think that I would prefer to risk death in the open to asphyxiation. Mothers were breast feeding their babies, and young couples were making love in full view of anyone who passed down the stairs. In one very large shelter which was made to hold about 300 persons … only two buckets as latrines were available … and the result was that the whole floor was awash … the smell was so awful that we tied hankies around our mouths soaked in “Cologne”.’

Not only were such shelters cold, lacking in facilities, damp and malodorous, many were also dangerous. It seems almost beyond belief that a brick box standing out in the open, above ground, could be imagined to offer protection against serious attack. The best that could be said was that it was probably better to be in one of these than to be caught out in the street during an air raid, as you would at least be protected from shrapnel and flying debris. But public shelters had their own hazards. Government instructions for their construction had stipulated that the mortar to bind the bricks should be two parts lime to one part cement, but subsequent directives were more ambiguous, and local authorities bent on saving money, and cowboy builders bent on making money, started to substitute sand for cement – which anyway was in short supply due to the various demands for defence construction – in the mixture. A heavy blast near such an ill-constructed shelter could turn it into a gruesomely named ‘Morrison sandwich’ when the walls blew out and the heavy roof collapsed on the occupants, trapping and often killing them. In the London area it was found that at least 5,000 such potentially lethal public shelters had been built, while in Bristol 4,000 had to be demolished or radically strengthened for the same reason.

Margaret Turpin’s family had started to use a public shelter, along with a number of the families living near their East End home, since the one in the garden had proved unbearably cramped. ‘Of course you had to go there early, about seven in the evening, and then come home in the morning.’ One night the shelterers had been listening to the wireless when it went off, which ‘happened with almost every raid’:

The next thing I remember was coming to and trying to move my head, which I couldn’t, and as fast as you moved your head, you got a fountain of dust coming down, and it filled your nose and it filled your mouth, and I thought I’m going to die. I tried to shout, but the more I shouted and the more I moved, the more dust I brought down. I must have had lots of periods of unconsciousness, because I remember hearing people, and then a long time after, I remember seeing an ARP helmet, and it was way, way up, a long way away. And then suddenly it was quite near. I do remember the man saying to me, ‘We’ll soon have you out.’ He said, ‘All we’ve got to do is get your arm out.’ And I looked at this arm that was sticking out of the debris, and I said, ‘That’s not my arm,’ and he said, ‘Yes it is love, it’s got the same coat’… I don’t remember coming out of the shelter. I do remember being in the ambulance, and I think for me that was probably the worst part … I felt somebody’s blood was dripping on me from above, and I found that awful – mainly I think because I didn’t know whose blood it was, whether it was someone I knew and loved or not. And I tried to move my head, but of course it was a narrow space and I couldn’t get my head away from the blood. And I heard a long time afterwards that the man was already dead. But it couldn’t have been my father because he was taken out of the shelter and he didn’t die till two days later … He died, my mother died, my baby sister died, my younger sister died. I had two aunts and they died, and an uncle died … I knew almost immediately because when I came home from hospital – they sent you home and you were in an awful state really, and you had to find your own way home from hospital and I’d had … most of my clothes cut off to be X-rayed and I couldn’t use the arm that had been trapped. When I got to the house, there were milk bottles outside and I just knew then that nobody had come home to take them in …

The seven were all buried on the same day. My brother said that they put Union Jacks on the coffins. He didn’t know who did it … I didn’t go to the funerals … They sent me to Harefield [near Watford] of all places. It was quite a decent place to send me to. But unfortunately the people at Harefield could see the raids on London, and they used to come out to watch, to view it like a spectacle, and I couldn’t stand that.

4 Underground (#ulink_ef7f3344-7da1-51ef-9700-5ec89fe8fc42)

… 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.