In the mid-1930s it was estimated that, each day, two and a half million people were on the move in London. That is why there was a large increase in private, as well as public, suburbia. It was the age of “Metroland,” which began life with the Cedars Estate in Rickmansworth and spread outwards to include Wembley Park and Ruislip, Edgware and Finchley, Epsom and Purley. The importance of transport in effecting this mass dispersal is emphasised by the fact that the very notion of Metroland was created by the Metropolitan Railway Company, and heavily endorsed by the London Underground. Their booklets and advertisements emphasised the resolutely non-urban aspects of what were effectively great housing estates.
“Metroland beckoned us out to lanes in beechy Bucks,” according to John Betjeman who had a tenacious if ambiguous affection for the suburban terrain—for “gabled gothic” and “new-planted pine,” for the “Pear and apple in Croydon gardens” and “the light suburban evening” where a vast and welcoming security is so much to be hoped for. In a poem entitled “Middlesex” Betjeman invoked another form of permanence—“Keep alive our lost Elysium—rural Middlesex again”—and the advertisers of the Metropolitan Railway and the Underground exploited this ache, or longing, for continuity and predictability. According to the brochures—displaying, once more according to Betjeman, “sepia views of leafy lanes in Pinner”—the new inhabitant of the suburbs will dwell beside “brambly wildernesses where nightingales sing.” One advertisement prepared by the London Underground showed three rows of grey and mournful terraces, with the words “Leave This and Move to Edgware.” A sylvan scene presents itself accompanied by a quotation from the seventeenth-century poet Abraham Cowley, who himself retired to Chertsey after the Restoration in 1660. In a single sentence he expresses the wish that “I might be Master of a small House and a Large Garden, with moderate conveniences joined to them.” Once more the new suburban vision, in accordance with the implicit antiquarianism of London itself, took refuge in an appeal to an ill-defined and ill-explained past.
The same form of cultural nostalgia was evident in the architectural style of the new suburbs, the dominant model being “mock Tudor” or what became known as “Stockbroker Tudor” or “Tudorbethan.” The desire was to combine the sense of continuity with the satisfaction of traditional workmanship and design. It was a way of conveying substantiality, and a measure of dignity, to these new Londoners who had exiled themselves from the central core of the city. The city can transform and regenerate itself in unanticipated ways. Thus the suburban Gardens, Drives, Parks, Ways and Rises are now as much a part of London as the old Rents and Lanes and Alleys.
London had created, and harboured, a new kind of life. Once more it happened unpredictably, with no concerted or centralised planning, and was directed by short-term commercial demands. So the suburbs became the home of shopping parades and imposing cinemas, of aesthetically pleasing Underground stations and ornate railway stations. It was the age of the Morris and the Ford. The factories which lined the new dual carriageways were now manufacturing the domestic items of this new civilisation—the washing machines and the refrigerators, the electric cookers and the wirelesses, the processed food and the vacuum cleaners, the electric fires and the leatherette furniture, the “reproduction” tables and the bathroom fittings.
In a novel entitled Invisible Cities (1975), the Italian writer Italo Calvino reflects upon the nature of the suburbs under the assumed names of the cities of Trude and Penthesilea. We may substitute Acton and Wembley Park. The narrator is told that he may travel wherever he chooses “but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end.” But this was always the definition of London, that it had no beginning and no ending. In that sense its suburbs simply partake of its endless nature. The gin palaces of the old city gave way to the glittering cinemas of the 1930s, the hostelries were replaced by “roadside inns” or mock-Tudor pubs located on significant crossroads, and the street-markets by shopping parades and department stores. The suburbs of the inter-war years significantly extended the life and reach of London, but essentially they elaborated upon it. In Calvino’s novel the narrator asks for the location of Penthesilea, and the inhabitants “make a broad gesture which may mean ‘Here’ or else ‘Farther on’ or ‘All around you’ or even ‘In the opposite direction.’” So for Calvino the visitor begins to ask “whether Penthesilea is only the outskirts of itself. The question that now begins to gnaw at your mind is more anguished: outside Penthesilea does an outside exist? Or, no matter how far you go from the city, will you only pass from one limbo to another, never managing to leave it?”
London is so ubiquitous that it can be located nowhere in particular. The extraordinary growth of its suburbs emphasised the fact that, since it has no defined or definite centre, its circumference is everywhere.
Blitz
A famous photograph of St. Paul’s cathedral; miraculously the church survived the depredations of the bombs of the Second World War, but it rose over a blasted and wasted city.
CHAPTER 76
War News
It began with attacks upon outer London. Croydon and Wimbledon were hit and, at the end of August, there was a stray raid upon the Cripplegate area. Then, at five p.m. on 7 September 1940, the German air force came in to attack London. Six hundred bombers, marshalled in great waves, dropped their explosive and high incendiary devices over east London. Beckton, West Ham, Woolwich, Millwall, Limehouse and Rotherhithe went up in flames. Gas stations, and power stations, were hit; yet the Docks were the principal target. “Telegraph poles began to smoke, then ignite from base to crown, although the nearest fire was many yards away. Then the wooden block road surface ignited in the searing heat.” The firemen had to race, through fire and perpetual explosion, to reach conflagrations which were almost “out of hand.” “The fire was so huge that we could do little more than make a feeble attempt to put it out. The whole of the warehouse was a raging inferno, against which there were silhouetted groups of pigmy firemen directing their futile jets on walls of flame.” These reports come from Courage High, a history of London fire-fighting by Sally Holloway. One volunteer was on the river itself where “half a mile of the Surrey shore was ablaze … burning barges were drifting everywhere … Inside the scene was like a lake in Hell.” In the crypt of a church in Bow “people were kneeling and crying and praying. It was a most terrible night.”
The German bombers came back the next night, and then the next. The Strand was bombed, St. Thomas’s Hospital was hit together with St. Paul’s Cathedral, the West End, Buckingham Palace, Lambeth Palace, Piccadilly, the House of Commons. Truly to Londoners it seemed to be a war on London. Between September and November almost 30,000 bombs were dropped upon the capital. In the first thirty days of the onslaught almost six thousand people were killed, and twice as many badly injured. On the night of the full moon, 15 October, “it seemed as if the end of the world had come.” Some compared London to a prehistoric animal, wounded and burned, which would disregard its assailants and keep moving massively onward; this was based on the intuition of London as representing some relentless and ancient force which could withstand any shock or injury. Yet other metaphors were in use—among them those of Jerusalem, Babylon and Pompeii—which lent a sense of precariousness and eventual doom to the city’s plight. When in the first days of the Blitz Londoners saw the ranks of German bombers advancing without being hindered by anti-aircraft fire, there was an instinctive fear that they were witnessing the imminent destruction of their city.
The earliest reactions were, according to the reports of Mass Observation and other interested parties, mixed and incongruous. Some citizens were hysterical, filled with overwhelming anxiety, and there were several cases of suicide; others were angry, and stubbornly determined to continue their ordinary lives even in the face of extraordinary dangers. Some tried to be jovial, while others became keenly interested spectators of the destruction
all around them, but for many the mood was one of spirited defiance. As one anthologist of London history, A.N. Wilson, has put it, the records of the time reveal “the perkiness, the jokes, the songs” even “in the immediate and garish presence of violent death.”
It is difficult fully to define that particular spirit, but it is of the utmost interest in attempting to describe the nature of London itself. In his definitive study, London at War, Philip Ziegler has suggested that “Londoners made a deliberate effort to seem nonchalant and unafraid,” but this self-control may have been a necessary and instinctive unwillingness to spread the contagion of panic. What if this city of eight million people were to regress into hysteria? It was precisely that fate which Bertrand Russell had predicted in a pamphlet, Which Way to Peace?, in which he anticipated that London would become “one vast bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for peace, the city will be a pandemonium.” It is possible that ordinary citizens, with instincts finer than those of their erstwhile “betters,” knew that this could not be allowed to happen. So the “calmness, the resigned resolution of the Londoner” was the quality which impressed those coming from outside. In all of its periodic crises, and riots, and fires, London has remained surprisingly stable; it has tipped, and tilted, before righting itself. This may in part be explained by the deep and heavy presence of trade and commerce within its fabric, the pursuit of which rides over any obstacle or calamity. One of Winston Churchill’s wartime phrases was “Business as usual,” and no slogan could be better adapted to the condition of London.
Yet there was another aspect of the calmness and determination of Londoners in the autumn and winter of 1940, springing from some deep sense that the city had suffered before and had somehow survived. Of course nothing could equal the fury and destruction of the Blitz, but the sheer persistence and continuity of London through time lent an intimate yet perhaps at the time unidentifiable reassurance. There was always the intimation of eventual renewal and reconstruction. The poet Stephen Spender, in north London in the aftermath of one raid, related: “I had the comforting sense of the sure dark immensity of London.” Here is another source of consolation; the city was too large, too complex, too momentous, to be destroyed. Then he recognised that “The grittiness, stench and obscurity of Kilburn suddenly seemed a spiritual force—the immense force of poverty which had produced the narrow, yet intense, visions of Cockneys living in other times.” This has the “spiritual force” of revelation, since Spender seems to have concluded that poverty and suffering had somehow produced a kind of invulnerability to even the worst onslaughts which the world can unleash. “We can take it” was one of the often recorded comments by those who had been bombed out of their homes, with the unspoken addition that “we have taken everything else.”
The attitude of self-sufficiency was often accompanied by an element of pride. “Every one absolutely determined,” one observer, Humphrey Jennings, wrote, “secretly delighted with the privilege of holding up Hitler.” There was, according to Ziegler, “a strange lightness of heart … Londoners felt themselves an elite.” They were proud of their own sufferings, in the same way that earlier generations of Londoners claimed an almost proprietorial interest in their noxious fogs, in the violence of their streets, in the sheer anonymity and magnitude of their city. In a sense Londoners believed themselves to be especially chosen for calamity. This may in turn help to explain the evident fact that “macabre exaggeration became a hallmark of many Londoners’ conversation,” particularly on the numbers of the dead and the wounded. The innate theatricality of London life affords one explanation; it has been said that there “was never any conflict in the city’s history to match the drama of the Second World War.” London firemen claimed that half their time was spent in dispersing crowds of interested spectators rather than fighting the conflagrations. If it were not for the sheer blank monotony of tiredness and suffering, suffused with the horror of the bombs, one might almost sense a gaiety or delight in destruction itself.
There are other images of these early months. One was of the blackout which plunged one of the most brilliantly illuminated cities of the world into all but total darkness. It became once more the city of dreadful night, and aroused in some inhabitants sensations of almost primitive fear as once familiar thoroughfares became lost in blackness. One of Evelyn Waugh’s characters notes that “Time might have gone back two thousand years to the time when London was a stockaded cluster of huts”; urban civilisation had been established upon light for so long that, in its absence, all customary certainties fell away. Of course there were some who took advantage of the darkness for their own purposes, but for many others the predominant sensation was one of alarm and insufficiency. The lure of shelter under the ground has already been discussed, together with the fear of administrators that London would breed a race of “troglodytes” who would never wish to come to the surface. The reality, however, was both more stark and more prosaic. Only 4 per cent of the city’s population ever used the London Underground for night shelter, largely on account of the overcrowded and often insanitary conditions which they would have found there. In implicit compliance to the tradition of London as a city of separate family dwellings, most citizens elected to stay in their own houses.
And what might they have seen when they emerged at daybreak? “The house about 30 yards from ours struck at one this morning by a bomb. Completely ruined. Another bomb in the square still unexploded … The house was still smouldering. There is a great pile of bricks … Scraps of cloth hanging to the bare walls at the side still standing. A looking glass I think swinging. Like a tooth knocked out—a clean cut.” Virginia Woolf’s description registers the sensation of almost physical shock, as if the city were indeed a living being which could suffer hurt. “A vast gap at the top of Chancery Lane. Smoking still. Some great shop entirely destroyed: the hotel opposite like a shell … And then miles & miles of orderly ordinary streets … Streets empty. Faces set & eyes bleared.” It might seem that nothing could obliterate these “miles & miles” of streets, that London could as it were “soak up” any punishment, yet its citizens were not so sturdy; fatigue, and weariness, and anxiety passed over them in waves. In the following month, October 1940, Woolf visited Tavistock and Mecklenburg Squares where she had lived. She passed a long line of people, with bags and blankets, queuing at eleven thirty that morning for a night’s shelter in Warren Street Underground Station. In Tavistock Square she found the remnants of her old house—“Basement all rubble. Only relics an old basket chair … Otherwise bricks & wood splinters … I cd just see a piece of my studio wall standing: otherwise rubble where I wrote so many books.” And then there was the dust, like the soft residue of obliterated experience. “All again litter, glass, black soft dust, plaster powder.”
It was remarked at the time that upon everything lay a fine coat of grey ash and cinders, prompting further comparison between London and Pompeii. The loss of personal history was another aspect of the city bombings; the wallpaper, and mirrors, and carpets were sometimes stripped bare and left hanging in the air of a ruin as if the private lives of Londoners had suddenly become public property. This encouraged a communal feeling and became one of the principal sources of the evident bravado and determination.
The Second World War also created a climate of care. It became a question of saving the children, for example, by a process of mass evacuation from the city to the country. In the months preceding the outbreak of hostilities on 3 September 1939, a policy of voluntary evacuation was drawn up to deal with the movement of approximately four million women and children, yet the curious magnetism of London then began to exert itself. Less than half the families wished, or decided, to leave. Those children about to be sent to reception areas in the country departed reluctantly. The children of Dagenham were despatched on boats and John O’Leary, author of Danger over Dagenham, has recorded “awful silence. The children did not sing.” One of a childhood contingent from St
epney, the writer Bernard Kops, recalled that “this was the place where we were born, where we grew up, where we played and sang, laughed and cried. And now all the grey faces as we passed were weeping. It was strangely quiet.” When they arrived in the country they seemed, and were, quite out of place. A minority were unwashed, lice-ridden and disruptive. Here the old image of the savage rises forcefully. Others “would not eat wholesome food but clamoured for fish and chips, sweets and biscuits” and “would not go to bed at reasonable hours.” They were the unnatural progeny of an unnatural city. And there “were children who refused new clothes and who fought and clung desperately to old and dirty things.” The image of the London child as somehow “dirty” and woeful is here reinforced. Then, within a few weeks, they began to return home. By the winter of 1939 approximately 150,000 mothers and children had come back; by the early months of the following year, half of the evacuees had made their way back to the city. “London was, for me, like a return from exile,” one is reported as saying in Ziegler’s history. “My pet cat met me at the gate, the neighbours welcomed me and the sun shone.” Here is a palpable sense of belonging, of being part of the city, which is the strongest sentiment among Londoners.
In the summer of 1940, when the German forces began to conquer Europe, another attempt was made to remove the children, those of the East End in particular. One hundred thousand children were evacuated but, two months later, 2,500 children were coming back each week. It represents the strangest, and perhaps most melancholy, instinct—the need to get back to the city, even if it becomes a city of fire and death. The curious fact, even during the air-raids themselves, was that the children proved “more resilient” than the adults. Like their predecessors over many eras, like the children depicted by Hogarth in the eighteenth century, they seemed to revel among all the suffering and privation, and in part reclaimed that state of semi-savagery which had been the mark of the street-Arabs of the previous century. One visitor to Stepney after a raid noted that the children were “wild-looking and grimy outwardly, but full of vitality and enthusiasm. One child said, ‘Mister, let me take you to see the last bomb round the corner.’”
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