Some wartime events in the East End stand out as being particularly terrible. One such occurred on 10 September 1940, when a school in Agate Street, Canning Town, that had been taken over as a centre for bombed-out families awaiting rehousing, received a direct hit. The tragedy was made worse by the fact that if the transport which had been promised to take them to temporary housing had arrived at the time arranged, the school would have been empty. Instead, all the occupants were killed. The official figure of seventy-three dead was questioned by local people, who believed that far more lost their lives.
Local people have also continued to question the official version of events that became known as the Bethnal Green tube disaster. Theories, some more shocking than others, have been put forward about the cause of what was the worst civilian incident of the Second World War, when, on the evening of 3 March 1943, the air-raid warning sounded just after eight o’clock and an estimated 1,000 people hurried towards the supposed safety of the underground. For some reason, panic ensued and the disaster happened. People close to the entrance stumbled and fell forward, crashing on to those already at the bottom of the stairs, and 173 people were killed, with another sixty-two seriously injured.
It was the sound of these new anti-aircraft guns in Victoria Park that started the rumour that enemy bombs were dropping and people took fright. They surged forward to get down the steps to safety.
Do you know, there were lots of stories around at the time about what really happened at Bethnal Green. The worst I heard – my dad told me this – was that some bastard was trying to dip people [pick their pockets] while they were preoccupied trying to get down to safety with their kids and that. Someone realized and the cry went up, and the struggle that started – as they tried to get hold of the bloke – caused someone to fall, and then, well, you know what happened next. Terrible, whatever the cause.
Dad was in the heavy rescue service and had to work on some pretty horrible incidents, including the one at Bethnal Green tube, where lots of people were crushed when someone tripped as they were going down some poorly lit steps and the guns went off close by… People were piling on top of each other in the rush to get to the shelter.
Like those in the rescue services who had to deal with the consequence of the tube disaster, supposedly ordinary young men and women showed themselves to be heroes and heroines. The simple fact was that there was work to be done, no matter how difficult, upsetting or demanding. It is sometimes hard to believe that so much responsibility was put on the shoulders of such young individuals.
The first woman is speaking about when she was a nurse of just nineteen years old, and the others were not much older.
We had to do one night duty in five at the hospital and had to prepare lists of casualties for the police to distribute. I was not so afraid when I was working.
I saw the destruction… whilst the bombing was taking place. I will always remember how people I had known all my life were coping with that destruction, and could still clear up and carry on with the cocksureness of the cockney. I was proud to be one of them.
Although we often came close to losing everything, we never expected it to be us who would take a hit. Everyone must have been constantly living under stress, but we… were protected by warmth and closeness and neighbourliness.
It was 1941. Our place had just had a blasting; all the windows were in. And we’d just been to the pictures and his brother came in, saying, ‘Here you are, here’s your papers. You’ve got to go in the army.’ So he said, ‘Shall we get married?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ Very romantic it was, we’d just been to see Love on the Dole! We got a special licence and had four days to prepare. As you know, we were rationed and couldn’t get a drink or anything. If you went to the pub you were allowed one tot per person, [but] we took bottles and managed to get them filled up. Goodness knows what went in it. A drop of everything. They all got blotto! Anyway, we got married and off he went to the army.
It could not have been easy for those young men and women who had to leave home and join the forces, but, in different ways, the war was as difficult for those left behind on the home front.
It was hardest to comfort those women whose men were ‘missing, presumed dead’. Half-news is always worse than certainty.
Some of my brothers would come home on leave and we’d have an air raid, and they’d say, ‘You’re putting up with far more than we are in the forces.’ Nobody dreamed it was going to last for six years. We had a lot of near misses. On one occasion, when they’d come home on leave, we were sitting down having something to eat. All of a sudden a buzz bomb came over. Me and my sister made a dive outside for the Anderson shelter. It dropped and the blast blew us both right into the shelter. When we came out, the men were all covered in soot. [My husband] had been blown right up against the street door. All the sausage and mash was covered in soot.
Having to find somewhere to stay if you had been bombed out was just one of the problems.
We’d heard there’d been a really bad raid in Poplar and I just wanted to get home to see if my family were all right, but they said at work [near the City] that I had to wait in the shelter till it was over. As soon as the all clear went, I was off. I don’t know how I got there, I don’t remember, but I know when I did I saw our place had had a direct hit. I nearly died on the spot, but a neighbour came over and said, ‘Don’t worry. They’re all right. They were out. They salvaged some of your stuff and they’ve gone looking for somewhere to stay. I said I’d tell you.’ I was so relieved. It wasn’t an unusual sight where we lived, close to the docks, seeing someone with their stuff on a barrow looking for somewhere empty after their place had copped it.
In June 1944 the East End was confronted with a new horror: the Vi, the first of which fell by a railway bridge in Grove Road, Bow, a matter of yards from my childhood home, killing six people and injuring and making homeless many more. They had a particular place in people’s wartime memories.
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When the characteristic whine of the doodlebug, the pilotless, flying bombs, stopped, you would count to ten and then know it was about to hurtle to the ground and explode, causing terrible damage.
We were in the shelter and heard a buzz bomb – doodlebugs, we called them – coming across the sky. Suddenly the engine cut out and we could tell it was going to fall close to us. There was a massive explosion and we found out afterwards it had fallen only two streets away.
We suffered damage as a result of the bombing, but escaped being driven right out until the buzz bombs [and then] we lived on the dance floor of the town hall for some time.
I was at [a relative’s house] when the sirens went off. She had cooked a tasty stew for our dinner. We heard the sirens, then ran out the back to go into the Anderson shelter. I was aware of a doodlebug – one of the pilotless German planes targeted on the docks – right above us in the sky. I gazed up, transfixed, and, as I looked up, my plate of hot stew and dumplings tipped down my front and on to the path. Annie, already at the shelter entrance, screamed at me and I ran, counting to ten as I heard the engine stop. I got inside the shelter with seconds to spare. The doodlebug dived into houses a few hundred yards along the road and exploded. Many people were killed and the houses flattened. There is now a park where those houses were. When the all clear sounded and we came out, we did not yet realize how close a call it had been. I was really upset at the loss of my stew. Like everyone else, I was really relieved that, once again, we had not been hit, but the loss of the stew really distressed me. Then, all the rest of the day and throughout the night, I watched the emergency teams digging for survivors. It felt like an invasion of privacy to see inside bedrooms, where the walls were ripped off. The mirrors still hung on walls, wallpaper flapped, fire-place and chimneys open to the sky, and, everywhere, scattered personal belongings.
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Listening to some stories, it might have seemed that the war was no more than a nuisance through which normal life had to be lived. But I had been
told so often by people that they had no stories to tell, that they were just ordinary, and then, after a few minutes of listening to what they had to say, it would become obvious that if there is such a thing as an ordinary person, I had yet to meet one. Whether it was the casual way in which they described an undeniably frightening time in their lives, or the humour and generosity with which they had somehow managed to retain their dignity, all the people who shared their memories were extraordinary in one way or another.
Where we had moved to, there were just surface shelters, they didn’t have room to put Anderson ones round there. In our little house we had gaslight and some of the houses further down only had oil lamps. We only had two up and two down and the scullery, and my brother and his wife and children came to us when their house was bombed. So we had a crowd. But I was seventeen then. We took that sort of thing in our stride, but we were scared. You couldn’t say you weren’t, but you deal with it at that age. We used to go down to the church, go underground. The barrage balloons were above on the ground and we were underneath. It was like going into a tunnel, all concrete. You slept along with anybody then. There were three tiers of bunks and you got in where you could. You didn’t know who you were sleeping with. We only stuck that for a while and then we thought, ‘Oh, well, we’ll go back to bed. Chance it.’ We used to go up the pub. You could hear the [anti-aircraft] guns from in there.
Sometimes schools were hit. Twice during the war I was sent to a different junior school because of bomb damage. Classes were doubled up, with teachers having to teach more than sixty children. We sat on the floor, on benches, in the hall, in shelters, we sat three to a desk. I don’t remember us being naughty. We realized times were difficult and accepted we had to get on with it.
Bombs were simply a fact of life and no one could do anything about them and we just did not worry about them. But there were far greater terrors. One day, I saw a rat suddenly whisk by me on the path and shoot down the shelter. I told my dad and he began a frenzy of banging with a stick and shaking the blankets in the shelter. He swept and poked, thumped and hollered, but no rat was revealed. Later, when we were in the shelter and I was thought to be asleep, the rat episode was discussed. My aunt told very graphically how, if a rat feels cornered, he would try to escape by jumping over your shoulder but was much more likely to go for your throat with his sharp teeth. She told stories of babies in prams having their faces gnawed off and of whole armies of rats marching down the street when their sewer home had been destroyed by the shells.
I was getting ready to go out, we were courting then, and he was coming round to collect me. I was standing doing my make-up, with my mirror propped against a sandbag, and the Battle of Britain was going on overhead. I said, ‘He’s a blooming long time getting round here.’ Well, of course, they’d got bombed down the docks and there were no buses.
One night we were in the shelter and there was a fairly heavy raid going on. The guns were firing and bombs were dropping. It was damp out on the road and Dad was wandering around outside, and we could hear the shrapnel falling and sizzling on the wet road when we heard Dad’s footsteps across the street. He stopped and then we heard him say loudly, ‘Sod it.’ He had been to pick up a piece of shrapnel and it was still hot and burnt him.
When there was a raid we would get up when the siren sounded and go down in the damp and the cold to the Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden. If the weather was really bitter, we would get into the Morrison shelter instead. This was a thick steel table. We would be put to bed under there and the mesh sides would be put up [around us]. We would often wake to find our parents were there squashed in with us too. Dad was knowledgeable about bombs, as I’m sure all adults at the time were. He could identify each whistle and crump as a shell, an incendiary, a hundred-pounder or whatever else it was. We [children] learned to do the same, but less expertly – we knew when they were close. The house shook and the china and windows rattled. It was often too noisy to sleep, so we played I-Spy and other games. I wasn’t very afraid. We often needed to go to the shelter in the daytime. At school we learned to crouch beneath our desks when the siren sounded. We ate our school dinners so often in the shelter that I thought ground rice was, in fact, ‘underground rice’ and that you only had it when you were underground.
When the bombing was at its worst, a lot of the women and children who had come back to London during the Phoney War were evacuated again. While it was the safe option, it could still prove disturbing enough for a child to want to plan his own return home and for adults to be willing to risk the bombs.
I started to save my pocket money to pay my fare. I hadn’t realized how homesick I was. I eventually saved sufficient to be able to write home and say I could pay my own fare, so it was arranged and Dad came down to collect me.
My mother hated being evacuated. She hated village life. There were no shops, no buses, no electricity and you had to walk everywhere. She missed her sisters and was glad to get back to London, even though the bombing was bad and we spent a lot of time in the air-raid shelters.
I was in the ARP and had to look after my elderly mother, who stayed in the East End. I didn’t want my children evacuated, but I was persuaded. I think I was as unhappy as the kids. I used to try and visit them, but I only had Sunday. One boy was evacuated to Wales, my daughter was near Uxbridge, and the one of nursery age was at Bury
St Edmunds. I’d go to Wales and my husband would go to another one. We used to go by train and it got too much. I couldn’t get them all together. The youngest was in Lord and Lady X’s house with all other little children. It was more like a children’s home. I used to take sweets and loads of things, but they were only allowed one and then they’d be put away. Very strict they were. I said to the welfare lady that I’d like my two youngest together, so they said the girl could go to Bury St Edmunds to keep an eye on the boy as she was four years older. That was the worst day’s work I ever done. I went there, this day, and I’d bought her a big doll like a baby. When I got into the grounds with the other mothers all the children were crying. What an alteration I saw in my daughter. Her hands were raw – where she’d been before they’d rubbed her hands for her when she had chilblains. They were all crying. And they’d cut off all her hair. And they were all hungry. I gave her this lovely big doll and I’d got sweets for her and everything. And she kept saying, ‘Give us the sweets, Mum, don’t give them to the lady and the man.’ But they wouldn’t have it. They said they had to be distributed.
Evacuation was a short-lived experience for different reasons for this little girl.
The war began when I was two and a half years old. When the opportunity came for evacuation, my dad’s sister, Annie, accompanied my mum and I to Devon. I was in the field one day when I heard a shout. It was my beloved dad coming over the stile. His shout echoed up the whole valley. He had walked miles from the station. It was a surprise to see him and what happened after is a blur. He had brought dreadful news. Annie’s husband, Arthur, had been killed in the docks, and he had come to tell her and to take her back for the funeral. So we all returned to London. Our evacuation had only lasted a few months. I don’t remember the journey back, but I do remember two policemen with tall helmets coming to tell us what had happened. It seems Arthur had had a load of timber dropped on him. The crane driver, who was too old to be called up, had suffered a stroke or a heart attack and had let the timber go. I remember Annie crying bitterly. So did my dad when the policemen left. Seeing my dad cry was terrifying.
Even so, she remembered her time in the countryside with great fondness.
We went almost immediately to Lincolnshire on an evacuation scheme. We were only there a few months, but it is a shiny, idyllic time in my memory. It’s a curious thing, I can recall the tough times in my life fairly easily, but when I reach a happy oasis like the time we spent in Lincolnshire, I am instantly overwhelmed by tears. At first we stayed with the village postwoman, who went on her bike delivering letters and much dre
aded telegrams from the War Office [around] the village. I remember her kindness… Her cottage was small and dark, without electricity or running water. I helped fill galvanized buckets from the well. But I wasn’t good at carrying them and always got wet socks. I suffered with chilblains, but most people did then.
The experiences of this boy, his brother and the unfortunate J. were rather different.
The evacuees weren’t liked and I suppose it was to a degree understandable, when we were just dumped on people, and when one considers the effect it must have had on their quiet village life, but if anything went wrong it was usually ‘those Londoners’ that were to blame. I’ve no doubt we did cause chaos at times with the things we got up to, but in the main we were too young to appreciate this. Some of the evacuees were poorly treated by the people who were looking after them. There wasn’t much we could do about it, because our parents were too far away. One of our billets was the vicarage. We had to live in the servants’ area and had our meals in the kitchen, except J., who had to eat in the dining room on a separate table in the corner because he was a ‘naughty’ boy. [His] family never sent him any clothes, so we were made to give him some of ours, and when Mum found out she went potty, because it was enough of a struggle clothing us two. I don’t know if J. had a mother, because she never came to see him, and his father only turned up once. Because we were kept separate [at the vicarage] we had some of our rations given to us individually each week. If we ran out there was no more. As J. had to have his meals in the dining room, because he was a bad boy, he wasn’t served by the maids in the same way as the family, but had his meals put on a plate in the kitchen and had to carry it in himself. Well, one day his plate got broken, either by him or one of the maids, and they wouldn’t give him another, so he carried in half a plate with the gravy dripping off it. If we broke anything we had to make an appointment and ‘confess’ our sin, and we were told to pay for a replacement or do some jobs to pay for it. Because J. couldn’t read very well, he had to go into the nanny’s room to have reading lessons, and while he was in there he saw she had a cupboard full of tins of fruit and things and packets of biscuits. We never saw those things on our plates.
My East End Page 28
