by Pip Granger
In the late fifties, when rationing was finally over and a little colour started to come back in to Britannia’s grey and sunken cheeks, some people started to feel nostalgic for the days of togetherness and the much-vaunted ‘Spirit of the Blitz’. Personally, I could not see the appeal of queuing, singalongs in drab bomb shelters or rest centres, and dodging flying masonry on your way to the British Restaurant to eat off-ration. Thanks, but no thanks.
Like me, Ann Lee was a post-war baby, but her family’s experience of the Second World War was very different from that of my mother and father. They were living in the Peabody Estate in Wild Street, Covent Garden, when the Luftwaffe accounted for two of the estate’s thirteen blocks of flats. ‘Everyone always said the war was horrendous,’ Ann remembers, ‘but the community spirit there was built up by that, so that when I was born, in 1946, that was really strong. Obviously, as I got older, it changed slightly, but it was still very much a community.
‘When those blocks were bombed, my mum’s family lost their home. They were all safe down the shelter, but when they came out, everything was gone, the whole block. People just picked through the rubble to see if they could find any of their belongings. There was five or six children still living at home with my mum’s mum in K block, and they all went and stayed with different neighbours. They put them all up on settees, or an armchair with a chair and a blanket. The blocks were never rebuilt.’
There was a limit to what could be done by neighbours, particularly in the Peabody Estate, where people were already packed in tightly. Families who had been bombed out usually began by going in to rest centres, ad hoc facilities that were housed in public or institutional buildings; schools were a popular choice, but offices and defunct hospitals and workhouses did just as well, or as badly, depending on your viewpoint. Barbara Jones, who went to St Clement Danes school in Drury Lane, remembers that, ‘I went in one day in late 1943 and our cloakrooms were chock-a-block with mostly elderly women and small children. Hardly any men or younger women. We were directed not to leave our coats but to go up to the hall. There we were told that the Peabody Buildings had been bombed out in the night, and that our school was the rest centre for these people. They, and everything they still possessed, took up half the school, and we operated in the other half.’
Families who lost everything in the raids were re-equipped by voluntary organizations. Anne Payne tells us that her mother, who died in 1944 – of natural causes rather than enemy action – ‘worked for the British War Relief Society, which evolved from the Bundles to Britain scheme. Clothes, bedding and so on were sent from America to help families who had been bombed out. She worked at their depot helping to sort consignments and allocate them to those in need.’
Ultimately, the goal was to rehouse people, especially those in key occupations, in the local area. Sometimes this meant a considerable upgrade, as the local authorities tried to meet the need by commandeering the more or less luxurious apartments in Bloomsbury and Mayfair that had been left empty when their wealthy tenants or owners had elected to sit out the war somewhere a bit less bomby. Families from the cramped and narrow streets around Covent Garden market found themselves with addresses in Tavistock Square or Gower Street. Sonia Boulter recalls, ‘My parents were bombed out of Newport Dwellings twice – it might have been three times. My mum told me we were housed somewhere in Park Lane, but because they had been brought up [in Soho], they didn’t want to stay in Park Lane – more fool them!’
Long after the war was over, there were physical reminders in the shape of damaged people in the streets, and the damaged buildings – or rather the places where they had once stood. The words ‘bomb site’ entered everyday language. Right outside the kitchen window of my father’s flat in Old Compton Street was St Anne’s church tower, now without its church. By the time I got to know St Anne’s churchyard, the church had been gone a while and the rubble cleared away. What I saw from our window was the tower, on the left as I looked out, a few trees in the churchyard and, on the side next to Wardour Street, opposite the tower, black metal railings and a gate that was left open during the day.
I used to play on a path and a paved area just in front of the tower. Either side of it were table tombs that I would climb over and sit on. There was a shed opposite, tucked away a bit in the corner, for the gardeners’ tools. Gravestones lined the perimeter. On the Dean Street side of the tower was the bomb site, where the church had been. For a while, early in my memory, part of it was flattened for a car park, and there was a man there who had a bookstall laid out on a trestle table. He kept some stock underneath the stall, for ‘the more discerning gentleman’, who liked a bit of smut.
One of my interviewees, Leo Zanelli, was at home in Romilly Street in September 1940 when St Anne’s Church was bombed. ‘There were three distinct sounds,’ he remembers. ‘Whump, whump, whump, on the ground. We knew something had happened nearby. When we first came out in the morning, I looked up at the front of the church, and it looked all right, except the window looked a bit strange. As we crunched our way through all this broken glass towards it, I realized suddenly that I was looking through the window into the sky. The roof was gone.
‘For many years after, the kids would play in the church, in the rubble with all those mosaic tiles. Halfway up the tower there was a room with one wall off, with silver or pewter plates on the other, and a big oak chest, and of course, being kids, we opened the chest and it was full of papers, absolutely full. Some of them were old, the ink had gone brown.
‘I still have nightmares about this: we took armfuls of these things away, and we were trying to read them, then suddenly someone said, “If they catch you looting, they shoot you,” so everybody crapped themselves and threw them on the fire. I don’t know what happened to the plates and such.’
The unfortunate outcome of this adventure did not deter Leo and his friends from playing in the ruins. ‘Some time after we went up the tower, we found an opening in the ground. Somebody said, “Anyone got a torch, we’ve found this ladder going down.” Of course we immediately assumed there was treasure down there, and that it belonged to the King of Corsica, who’d got this gravestone in the church. Much later, I discovered that he was someone who’d done something for the Corsicans, and they couldn’t pay him so they gave him the title and an illuminated manuscript. He had died destitute, and people clubbed together to bury him.
‘Anyway, my house was closest, about fifty metres away, so I ran back, got a torch, and we went down the ladder. It was all cold, pitch black and cave-like. So we switch on the torch and there are coffins on shelves, just a foot or so away. You’ve never seen people move so quickly. In the blink of an eyelid everybody was standing up top again. How we all got up the ladder at the same time, I don’t know. We’d found the crypt, obviously.’
Leo and his mother generally took shelter during air raids in the Empire snooker hall across the road. The slate-bed billiard tables in the basement snooker hall – with no windows to be blown in – provided more protection than could be found in conventional Morrison shelters.
One of the abiding images of wartime London is of people sleeping on Underground tube stations, and although the stations in the West End did a roaring trade as shelters – Piccadilly slept up to four thousand people, for instance – few locals, it seemed, used them. Some used the newly built Lex Garage, others backyard Anderson shelters, or Morrison shelters set in the living room or under the stairs, while others used imaginative alternatives, like the Zanellis, or simply toughed it out. Because space was so scarce, safe shelters could not always be dug. Many schools had to improvise. ‘I remember,’ wrote Ray Constantine, ‘when I was at school, sitting in the sandbagged areas by the coat hangers and sinks during the air raids.’
Although the East End, the City and the docks took the brunt of the Luftwaffe’s attacks on London, the West End did not escape unscathed. Far from it. Sticks of bombs fell across Covent Garden and Soho, demolishing not only St Anne’s Church,
which copped it again in May 1941, but also part of Newport Dwellings and chunks of Old Compton Street.
A Civil Defence bomb incident photograph* shows the aftermath of the raid that brought down part of Newport Dwellings in the early hours of 17 April 1941, killing forty-eight people, including Sonia Boulter’s grandmother. Sonia pointed to the AFS man seen from the back in the foreground of this photo. ‘I often wonder if that was my dad. He wasn’t in the forces because he had TB, but he went in to the Auxiliary Fire Service and I wonder if that can be my dad.’
Many men who were for one reason or another excluded from active service joined the AFS, fire-watching through the long nights of the air raids, often from high, exposed places. Volunteer labour like this was at a premium in the Blitz. As Sonia Boulter’s schoolfriend, Maria Mechele, recalls, ‘I was born during the war and remember going to the air raid shelter in Berwick Street. My dad was in the heavy rescue, and used to go out and help dig the people out of bombed buildings.’
It must have been a desperate and harrowing job, digging through the rubble listening and looking for signs of life, but most of those who lived in London through the Blitz and the later doodlebug raids had nightmares to forget. The bombs left scars in people’s minds, as well as on the landscape. On Saturday, 8 March 1941, one of the biggest raids of the Blitz scored a direct hit on the Café de Paris nightclub, killing bandleader Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson and more than thirty others. All told, that night’s raids killed 159 people.
Newspaper reports concentrated on evoking the ‘spirit of the Blitz’. The Times of 10 March reported that ‘people living nearby made tea, and passers-by contributed handkerchiefs’, while soldiers, who gravitated to the West End on a Saturday night, helped the wounded by applying field dressings. ‘All agree,’ The Times account went on, ‘that there was the utmost coolness and much gallantry. “Don’t bother about me,” people with less serious wounds said over and over again. Rescue work began almost immediately. There were many wonderful escapes, and a fair number of people were able to walk out of the damaged building with no worse hurt than a bruised back or some cuts.’
One can hardly blame the newspapers for putting the best gloss on things, for emphasizing the positive, but things often looked different from ground level. An image from that day still haunts Leo Zanelli, who was ten years old at the time: ‘My mother’s brother, Uncle Peter, was an ambulance driver in the war. He was always coming to see us in Romilly Street after air raids to make sure we were all right. I remember once he came in, and he was in shock for ages. He’d gone in to the Café de Paris. The bomb had fallen straight through the skylight on to the dance floor. My uncle had picked up his best friend’s head. He used to stay awake at nights after that. Of course, he had to tell his friend’s father that his son had just died, but the bomb had taken his head off cleanly. Head in one corner, body in another.
‘He always remembered how, by the edge of the dance floor, there were a couple, still in their seats, and the man was offering the woman his cigarette case. You’d expect, a blast like that, people would be all over the place, and some were, but these two, although the concussion had killed them, they were just sitting there, natural.’
Leo carries other vivid nightmarish images from the war. ‘I was in the snooker hall,’ he remembers, ‘so I didn’t actually see it, but after a bomb, a soldier came down the street away from the scene covered in blood. When they took off his jacket to see what the damage was, there was a terrible scream, because his arm came off with it. The jacket was OK, not torn at all. Blast is a funny thing.’
The bombing was not all there was to fear. The blackout also claimed its victims. ‘Where the La Capannina restaurant is now,’ Leo remembers, ‘on the corner of Romilly Street, there used to be an oil shop, a general hardware shop, and in the morning they found a soldier impaled on the railings outside. It must have been a burglary: he just stepped off the roof in the blackout. I didn’t see it, but I heard people describe it to my mother; by the time I went out to have a look, they had covered it with a shelter. Apparently it was quite common for burglars to be killed by falling in the dark.’
Ray Constantine was another who experienced the horrors of war at first hand, even though he was a schoolboy at the time. His family had been bombed out. They were living in a rest centre: ‘I was walking down Lisson Grove to school one day, when a lorry about four hundred yards away erupted. For an instant I couldn’t breathe, then a deafening explosion knocked me over. Some time later, I got up and continued. There was a full arm in battledress on the pavement. I picked it up and placed it in the gutter. I was late getting to school, and said to the teacher, “Please, Miss, a bomb fell on me.” There had been no air raid, but nothing more was said.
‘I later worked out that the lorry must have been transporting a defused bomb that had somehow gone off. Then, recently, I watched a programme on UXBs. An old man was saying how bomb disposal used to disable the fuse with a large magnet, but that the Germans realized this and added a second, trembler device. He related how they had placed the magnet on a bomb in Marylebone, then loaded it in to a lorry to take it to Regent’s Park to be exploded. As his fiancée lived in Marylebone, he was excused the trip. The other five members of his team were all killed when the trembler blew it up in Lisson Grove.’
Ray also remembers that, ‘in autumn 1944, in broad daylight, I was riding a bus somewhere near Marble Arch/ Oxford Street, and a very little way ahead there was an explosion: a building covering almost a block shimmered, and just collapsed, leaving a cloud of dust, and blocking the road. There was no warning, as it was a V2.’
Of course, living through war scarred people physically as well. One thing I remember vividly from those early post-war years is just how many injured men there were selling things on the city’s streets: matches, razor blades, bootlaces, glass animals, hot chestnuts. There were those whose minds had fractured, and there were also the ‘walking wounded’. Many ended up as sandwich-board men or pearl divers (washer-uppers) in restaurants, or simply spent their days moving from a doorway to a park bench, from the bench to a bomb site, from bomb site to an alley behind a café that gave its leftovers away. There never seemed to be enough hostels, and dry, warm places to doss down for a night were at a premium.
Barbara Jones and her sister, Pat, were evacuated at the beginning of the war, but her parents stayed behind in their home just south of the Strand. Mr Jones volunteered for the Auxiliary Fire Service. ‘My dad,’ says Barbara, ‘prevented the Royal Society of Arts building from burning down by throwing incendiaries off the roof when the Little Theatre next door went up in flames – and received thanks, and a cheque, from the Society!’
Later in the war, Mr Jones was terribly injured in the bombing. ‘He was put with the dead at first,’ Barbara remembers. ‘When they finally got around to dealing with him, they had to put his skull back on in nine pieces. He was written up in the American version of the Lancet as the Man Who Wouldn’t Die. My mother was told he would never work again, that he might not see again, or grow hair again, all sorts of things he would never do again. If he had a bang on his head, he’d be dead.’
Barbara’s sister, Pat, takes up the story. ‘But he grew a shock of hair, he worked, he could see. When he was drunk, though, he would sometimes fall down and hit his head, and of course it would bleed like mad, and I’d be petrified.’
Another consequence of the war, and one that would make its presence felt, albeit in a different way, into the fifties, was how it liberated people sexually. As my mother – who had jostled to near the front of the queue when sexual liberality was being parcelled out – used to say that nothing loosened knicker elastic like the thought that you might die in the morning. For many, the last vestiges of Victorian repression decayed to dust in the face of all that transience. As Quentin Crisp wrote, in The Naked Civil Servant, ‘As soon as bombs started to fall, the city became like a paved double bed. Voices whispered suggestively to you as you walked along; hands r
eached out if you stood still, and in dimly lit trains people carried on as they once had behaved only in taxis.’
London in general had filled up with young people – many, but not all, in uniform – looking for some kind of escape from the alternating periods of boredom and terrifying danger that made up military life. The influx of American troops from 1943 on brought a whole new culture and even more sexual openness in to the mix, a development that sent Quentin Crisp in to raptures. GIs ‘flowed through the streets of London like cream on strawberries, like melted butter over green peas. Labelled “with love from Uncle Sam” and packaged in uniforms so tight that in them their owners could fight for nothing but their honour, these “bundles for Britain” leaned against the lamp-posts of Shaftesbury Avenue or lolled on the steps of thin-lipped statues of dead English statesmen . . . Above all, it was the liberality of their natures that was so marvellous. At the first gesture of acceptance from a stranger, words of love began to ooze from their lips, sexuality from their bodies and pound notes from their pockets like juice from a peeled peach.’
General licence and lawlessness followed this huge influx of people, all of whom were away from home and acutely aware that life could be brutally short and absolutely determined to have a good time while the going was good. After the war was over, the vice lords didn’t quietly pack up their working girls and spielers and go home, and their punters didn’t necessarily put their wallets away either. But there was a backlash. The fifties became particularly po-faced and judgmental, and would have killed all joy, had there not been strong resistance from those determined not to backslide in to what had been before.
For them, the thought of a cheerless copy of their parents’ lives, scarred by class snobbery, relentless poverty or ‘quiet desperation’ of one form or another, would not do. They wanted more, and they often found it by heading Up West. Soho was a magnet for the disaffected who having ‘seen Paris’ were determined not to land back ‘on the farm’, as the old song would have it.