Johnson's Life of London

by Boris Johnson

  The terror must have been all the greater for the slow drumroll buildup. Tens of thousands of children were evacuated in 1939, only to come back to the city when the bombing failed to start—many of them East End kids only too happy to flee their strange middle-class families and their prissy habits. Theatres and cinemas had closed down and started up again. Then, on the evening of Saturday, 7 September 1940, the bombing started in earnest. Fighter command and the British chiefs of staff were caught napping as a force of 320 German bombers, accompanied by more than six hundred fighters, flew virtually unopposed towards key industrial and commercial targets. They bombed Woolwich Arsenal, Beckton gas works, West Ham power station, and they pounded the docks and slums of the East End.

  Soon the blaze was so great that it was like an orange false dawn, a convenient beacon to attract the next force of 250 German bombers that came over to continue the work. The historian Stephen Inwood records that by morning there were a thousand fires burning, three main railway stations closed, 430 Londoners dead and 1,600 injured. The docklands was full of speciality blazes from the goods whose import and export had helped to make London great.

  There were pepper fires whose fumes made firemen think they were breathing fire itself. There were barrels of rum exploding like bombs; paint that went up in sheets of white hot flame, asphyxiating black clouds from the rubber and a sweet sickly aroma from the burning tea. On it went through the autumn, intensifying in the spring. On 16 April 1941 the Junkers 88s came screaming through the night. They blew such a gash in the Admiralty Arch that Churchill claimed flippantly he now had a better view of Nelson’s column. There were countless vignettes of a horror-film quality: a much-loved local vicar, killed on the steps of his church as he invited people to take shelter; the bursting of the Fleet sewer and the release of smells that Londoners had not endured for two hundred years; a corpse a century old blown from its lead-lined casket, the head bouncing before people’s eyes.

  On 10 May 1941 the city was so pounded that by morning Londoners awoke (those that had managed to get to sleep) to find the Law Courts, the Tower of London and the Royal Mint had all been hit. The bridges were down, the stations were closed, 250,000 books had been burned in the British Museum, Westminster Hall had been set on fire and the House of Commons gutted. A bomb had also crashed through Big Ben, pocking and scarring the clock face. Even if the tempo died down for the next couple of years, the climax was horrendous.

  By 1944 new jet and rocket technology enabled Hitler to launch the V1s and V2s, causing such a stampede to leave the city that one wag reversed the aphorism of Dr. Johnson: only he who was tired of life chose to stay in London. By the end of the war the city had sustained catastrophic and in many cases irreparable damage. Eighteen city churches were ruined, including fourteen by Wren, and there were swathes of destruction around the City and the East End. Almost thirty thousand Londoners were killed and another fifty thousand badly injured, while 116,000 homes were destroyed and another 288,000 in need of major repair. About a million other buildings—half the entire housing stock—were in need of repair of some kind.

  The Blitz was not just physical in its destruction. There were psychological impacts. It would be nice to report that all Londoners behaved well in adversity, but it is pretty clear that there were some shameful exceptions. Looters prowled around the floors of shattered nightclubs, as the historian Philip Ziegler records, ripping open handbags and tearing rings off the dead and unconscious. Gangs of looters would send out spotters during the raids and try to get to the scene before the emergency services arrived. Though the crime of looting bombed premises was technically punishable by death, the magistrates began by being quite tenderhearted. But by 1941 the panic over looting was so great that sentences of five years’ penal servitude were common. Young culprits were caned.

  Scotland Yard set up a special anti-looting squad, and the police of 1941 had no compunctions about physically chastising the thieves. The writer Henry Green describes the condition of one man who had been collared by the cops, “with most of his clothes torn off, heels dragging, drooling blood at the mouth, out on his feet from the bashing he had been given.” There is perhaps no need to belabour the contrast in what is legally acceptable in the police handling of looters today.

  In spite of these punishments, the incidence of looting was actually higher in the “Little Blitz” of 1944, when the bombers returned. In West Hampstead the stock of a wireless shop disappeared within twenty minutes of a bomb falling. A resident of Agamemnon Road complained, “The looting that went on that night was something hawful. When the greengrocer’s wife found ’er ’andbag, every penny ’ad been taken out of it.” Under the stress of the Blitz some Londoners even succumbed to the virus of anti-Semitism—the very prejudice that raged uncontrolled in Nazi Germany—as though the bombs had opened the floorboards and exposed the spores of an ancient disease.

  Jews in wartime London were accused of hogging space in the air-raid shelters. The Home Office was so concerned by reports of anti-Semitism that it commissioned weekly studies of the flare-ups. Of course there was no evidence whatever that Jewish people were being selfish in the use of air-raid shelters, but even an author as fastidious as George Orwell noted of the queues, in language that may disappoint some of his fans, “What is bad about the Jews is that they are not only conspicuous, but go out of their way to make themselves so.”

  One of the most tragic incidents of the war took place on 3 March 1943, when people were filing to get into Bethnal Green Tube station. A salvo of rockets was fired in nearby Victoria Park, a woman stumbled at the top of the steps, and within seconds a panicked stampede had claimed the lives of 178 people who were either crushed to death or suffocated. Some said it was the work of fifth columnists or German agents, but more Londoners—though not in Bethnal Green, where they knew the truth—blamed the Jews. The cowardly Jews were so terrified that they stampeded: that was the story told throughout the city. According to a poll at the time, the proportion of those hostile to the Jews rose to 27 percent.

  It was odd, and unpleasant. And since we are looking at the morally discreditable aspects of British wartime performance, we might as well face another awful truth—that the ostensibly heroic British armed forces were sometimes accused of lacking the stomach for the fight; and their most notable accuser, in private if not in public, was Winston Churchill himself.

  On 16 January 1940—reinstalled at the Admiralty—he wrote a fierce memo to the First Sea Lord, Admiral Dudley Pound. “Our army is puny as far as the fighting front is concerned; our air force is hopelessly inferior to the Germans.” His words seemed to be borne out by events. Of all the military manoeuvres that the military were called upon to execute, the one at which they excelled was evacuation: the abject scuttle, the headlong flight.

  They evacuated Namsos in Norway in May 1940, in a humiliation that brought Churchill to power as Prime Minister. Nor did their performance palpably improve with his hand on the tiller. They were driven from France, and it is one of those miracles of self-deception that we still refer to Dunkirk as a triumph, when in fact this chaotic withdrawal was only made possible by the gross tactical error of the Germans, who halted their armour and allowed the British to get away. In May 1941 the British were conclusively bested in Crete, bullied off the island by the skill and daring of the German paratroopers in an episode bleakly and bitingly immortalised by Evelyn Waugh. But Norway, Dunkirk and Crete were nothing next to the disaster in Singapore.

  On 10 February Churchill cabled Field Marshal Wavell, the poetry enthusiast who was then Commander-in-Chief, India, and warned him of what was at stake. Look here, said Churchill, you ought to know how we see this thing here in London. There were more British forces in Singapore, he noted, than the Japanese had in the entire Malay peninsula. “The battle must be fought to the bitter end, at all costs. The 18th Division has a chance to make its name in history. Commanders and senior officers s
hould die with their troops. The honour of the British Empire and of the British army is at stake. I rely on you to show no mercy to weakness in any form. With the Russians fighting as they are, and the Americans so stubborn at Luzon, the whole reputation of our country and race is involved. . . .”

  Alas, the generals decided that on the whole there was no need to follow Churchill’s exhortations. Given the choice between death and dishonour, they plumped resoundingly for dishonour. On 15 February 1942 Singapore surrendered, and the event seemed to confirm a sneaking anxiety that had been growing in Churchill’s mind: that the British troops, man for man, did not have the same stuff of battle in them as the Germans or indeed the Japanese. He was worried, he wrote to his friend Violet Bonham Carter, “that our soldiers are not as good fighters as our fathers were. In 1915 our men fought on even when they had only one shell left and were under a fierce barrage. Now they cannot resist dive bombers. We have so many men in Singapore, so many men—they should have done better.”

  Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, took the same view as Churchill. He noted in his diary on 18 February 1942, “If the army cannot fight better than it is doing at present, we shall deserve to lose our empire.” It may seem a bit much for brandy-swilling politicians and absent generals to criticise our troops, but even the Japanese felt lucky to win at Singapore. In 1992 the victorious general Yamashita noted in his memoirs that his attack was a bluff. “I had thirty thousand men and was outnumbered more than three to one. I knew that if I had to fight for long in Singapore, I would be beaten.”

  If Churchill was embarrassed by the tapioca-like performance in Singapore, he was mortified by what happened next at Tobruk. He was actually sitting with Roosevelt, in the Oval Office, when the news came through that a garrison of thirty-five thousand had surrendered the Libyan town to a smaller force of Germans. “Defeat is one thing,” he mused later in his diary, “disgrace is another.” But if Churchill doubted the levels of spunk and pluck in the British soldier, others were beginning to have their doubts about Churchill and his leadership of the whole effort.

  The government started to lose bye-elections, and on 25 June a motion “of no confidence in the central direction of the war” was placed on the order paper of the Commons. When the debate was held, in July, MPs of all parties laid into Churchill, including Lord Winterton (an Irish peer, and therefore able to sit in the Commons), who said: “We are getting close to the intellectual and moral position of the German people . . . that the Fuhrer is always right . . . During the thirty-seven years that I have sat in this house, I have never seen such attempts to absolve the Prime Minister of ministerial responsibility.”

  Labour MP Aneurin Bevan said the problem was nothing to do with the fighting spirit of the average Tommy. It was the useless officer corps! The army was riddled with class prejudice. “Had Rommel been in the British army, he would still be a sergeant!”—a blistering crack that glided over Rommel’s graduation from an officer cadet school. Rommel was never a sergeant.

  In the end, of course, British troops redeemed themselves convincingly at El Alamein. General Montgomery duly assembled a two-to-one advantage in men and tanks, hit Jerry for six and stopped the German advance to Cairo. Churchill hailed the moment (not the end, not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning), and even in the 1970s I remember being taught—by good men who were themselves veterans of the Second World War—that this was a turning point.

  These days I am not so sure. The real turning points, surely, were the German failure at Moscow, the American entry and Stalingrad. Monty faced three German divisions at El Alamein; the Russians defeated thirteen German divisions at Stalingrad. We are talking about events on a different scale, and as the war went on it is clear that Churchill—and Britain—had diminished in relative importance.

  Even as the Allies were preparing for “Overlord” and the liberation of Europe, Churchill seemed to be strategically off the pace, continually suggesting peripheral feints and ruses, in the manner of Gallipoli, as if he were leery of a frontal attack. He was teased by Stalin about the prowess of the British navy, and it is a measure of the relative decline of British influence that when the Russians mistreated two British sailors—sentencing them to long periods of imprisonment in Siberia after a brawl in Murmansk—there was nothing that Churchill could do.

  Stalin and Roosevelt made jokes about shooting thousands of German officers, while Churchill seemed to be the gooseberry, fuming pompously on the sidelines. It was the Russians and the Americans who shook hands across the Elbe, and they must take most of the credit for the German defeat. Churchill was only as powerful as the country behind him, and Britain was simply exhausted, while London was on its knees.

  The industrial base of the city was smashed, with capacity reduced by about 40 percent; and as a manufacturing centre London never recovered to prewar levels. Office space only crawled back up to prewar volumes by 1954. Children’s education had been badly disrupted. Literacy declined. Bermondsey, Finsbury and Southwark lost 38 percent of their population. Poplar, Shoreditch and the City lost 45 percent, and Stepney lost a half. Buddleia and willow herb sprouted in the bomb sites. The Americans ruthlessly cancelled Lend-Lease as soon as the war was over, and Britain struggled to pay the interest on her debts.

  On 10 November 1942 Churchill had told the Lord Mayor’s Banquet: “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” And yet that was precisely what took place—largely at American behest—in the immediate postwar years. Churchill had spent much of his 1930s wilderness years campaigning against Gandhi and Indian independence. In one of his speeches, which has emphatically not stood the test of time, he had in 1931 denounced Gandhi as a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, and said it was “alarming and nauseating to see this fakir striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace to parley on equal terms with the representatives of the King-Emperor.” He had prophesied mass unemployment if India was given independence. When India was afflicted by a cruel famine during the war, and Churchill was asked permission to divert food supplies, he sent back a brutal reply. Things couldn’t be that bad, he said, if Gandhi was still alive.

  Churchill made a lot of good jokes in his career, but that was not among them, and by 1948 the joke was on him. India was given independence and there was not a thing he could do about it—because in 1945 he had been crushingly ejected from office.

  On 16 July 1945 Time magazine did an eve-of-poll colour piece in which its reporter followed the seventy-year-old premier to Walthamstow dog track. He arrived to cheers, with Clementine in tow; and then the booing began. “We want Attlee!” they cried. “In a free country like ours . . .” Churchill began to remonstrate, before—as Time put it—“Boos blitzed him out.”

  They booed him when he talked about housing and increased food production, and the general lèse-majesté continued the following day when a seventeen-year-old tossed a lit firecracker into his face. Churchill may have persuaded himself that the booers were a minority—just as they had been a minority when he toured the areas that had been bombed—but when the ballot boxes were finally opened, it was clear that they spoke for the country. The great war leader had lost by miles.

  A revisionist account of Churchill’s leadership might (and probably does) therefore go as follows: that his ceaseless 1930s warmongering was intended not so much for the good of the country but to put Churchill at the head of the nation’s affairs. Having got Britain into an avoidable war with Germany, he presided over one military debacle after another while London’s citizens, especially the poor, were mercilessly bombed. After six years of fighting, Britain found herself so weakened and impoverished that she had no choice but to run down the flag, relinquish the empire and accept a much diminished global role; and that after these vicissitudes it was hardly surprising that the great British public decided to kick Churchill out in one
of the biggest landslides of the twentieth century.

  I am sure there are other charges that are laid against him: that he was a racist and a sexist and a believer in eugenics, or that he cynically allowed Coventry to be bombed rather than betray Britain’s knowledge of German codes (a lie), or that he failed to do enough to stop the Holocaust (another lie), and so on and so forth. These are the kinds of accusations that tend to be made by revisionists—Charmley, Ponting, Irving, Buchanan and the like—and yet the interesting thing is how little difference they have made. We still love him—I love him; and we all know instinctively that the popguns of revisionism have left not a scratch in the supercolossal Mount Rushmore of his reputation.

  Like all members of the human race, the British are an instinctively hierarchical people. They tend to rank things and individuals and they like to argue about it. But in two important categories you will find agreement in just about every pub in the country: that Shakespeare is our number-one author, and Churchill is our number-one politician. There are about 430 British roads, avenues, streets and cul-de-sacs that bear his name. Madame Tussauds has made ten effigies of him.

  We may now have forgotten how much effort Churchill poured into his speeches, spending up to fourteen hours on their composition and practising his pauses and flourishes in front of the mirror. We do remember many of the things he said, not least because Churchill grasped that if you want to speak directly to the hearts of English people, then you should use short Anglo-Saxon words. “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” or “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” I make that three Latinate words to twenty-seven Anglo-Saxon. That’s why they stick. Or take this one: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing-grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” The only Latinate word is surrender, of course.