by A. N. Wilson
The French philosopher Simone Weil, who had spent the earlier part of the war with her parents in New York, had returned to Europe and worked for the Free French. She yearned for martyrdom and, denied the chance to return to France, she wasted away, tubercular, chain-smoking, anorexic, dying at a sanatorium at Ashford, Kent, in August 1943, aged thirty-four. She was only one of millions in London during the war, but there is an aptness about this stubborn and completely sui generis figure of genius gravitating towards the unconquerable London. She lodged in Notting Hill at 31 Portland Road (not, in those days, the fashionable street it has since become), with a schoolteacher’s widow, a Mrs. Francis, who had two children. She went everywhere on foot, noting the “utterly special atmosphere of the pubs in the working-class districts. I tenderly love this city with its wounds. What strikes me most about these people, in their present situation, is a good humour that is neither spontaneous nor artificial but that comes from a feeling of fraternal and tender comradeship in a common ordeal.” 2
The sufferings inflicted upon civilian populations by aerial bombardment were one of the grisly novelties of the Second World War. When placed alongside the casualties inflicted by Allied bombardment on Hamburg and Berlin, or by the Americans on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the actual figures of those slain by German bombs in London were, by the horrific standards of that conflict, comparatively small. Tens of thousands died. Of 147,000 serious or fatal casualties caused by bombardment in Britain, 80,000 were in London (29,890 killed and 50,000 badly injured), and 1.5 million homes were destroyed. But London was still recognizable at the end of it, scarred, ruinous, but recognizable. By the end of the Battle of Berlin in 1945, 70 percent of the city would have been completely flattened. Sir Arthur Harris of Bomber Command had ordered an astounding 14,562 sorties over the German capital. As well as killing tens of thousands of Germans, these raids killed many Russian prisoners of war, working in Berlin as slaves and denied the refuge of the air-raid shelters.
It has been said that bombing cities forces the inhabitants, almost against their will, into a spirit of bravery and defiance. Yet Alexandra Richie, whose thousand-page Faust’s Metropolis must be the best history of a city written in modern times, states, “Despite . . . preparations Berliners never developed the spirit which characterized London during the Blitz, not least because of the increasing presence of the Gestapo, and the bossy air-raid wardens, who bullied people with endless new regulations.” 3
In perhaps the most brilliant piece of fiction to come out of wartime London, The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen, it is noted that “In that September [1940] transparency people became transparent, only to be located by the just darker flicker of their hearts. Strangers saying “Good night, good luck” to each other at street corners, as the sky first balanced then faded with evening, each hoped not to die that night, still more not to die unknown.”4
The number of Londoners evacuated from the capital was 700,000—mostly the poor, mostly children. It would seem as if the overall exodus from the capital by the outbreak of war was 1.2 million, or 13 percent of the population. By Christmas 1939, half the evacuees who had left the capital had returned. It is difficult to be certain of figures. Some evacuees settled down to their very different lives, being billeted on families in the country. The poorest of them, verminous, undisciplined, and ill clad, unacquainted with such niceties as lavatory paper or soap, and psychologically disturbed into bed-wetting, were not always welcome to their more genteel hosts.5
For the Londoners themselves, the tedium of country life palled. (“They call this spring, Mum, and they have one down here every year.”) Many homesick families would prefer to be united in a half-ruined house in London than to be separated from their loved ones. When their homes were bombed they were herded into inadequate refuges, often set up by the local vicar, in church halls, schools, and the like. Those lucky enough had Anderson shelters or Morrison shelters built in their gardens. Far more went down into the Underground stations. By late September 1940, 177,000 people were sleeping in the Underground system. It was more than a shelter against bombs. It was a place where, quite literally, Londoners clung together, a return to the shared beds of childhood or even to the mysterious darkness of the womb itself. In Henry Moore’s unforgettable drawings of these figures curled in their makeshift bedding all, even the old, have something of the air of sleeping children.
The atmosphere in London was tense, but there was great pride about carrying on in defiance of the bombs. “Business as usual” was the motto. The great thing was not to fuss, but there was also not merely intensity but intense excitement. Sexual feeling was high. In the absolute darkness of the blackout, Anything Went. Strangers made love. The historian A. L. Rowse had his only sexual experience in ninety years of life during the blackout, coming home to his club and bumping into a man who said he was a policeman.6 The knowledge that you might be killed any night was balanced with the heady knowledge next morning that you were still alive. A young woman whose house had been bombed wrote,
I’ve been bombed. . . . I lay there feeling indescribably happy and triumphant. “I’ve been bombed!” I kept on saying to myself, over and over again—trying the phrase on, like a new dress to see how it fitted. . . . It seems a terrible thing to say, when many people were killed and injured last night; but never in my whole life have I ever experienced such pure and flawless happiness.
At the center of this extraordinary and overcharged atmosphere sat the Prime Minister, a figure who throughout his political career had always seemed too colorful, too interesting, too bombastic to fit into the dull grays of the political spectrum and whose career stretched from the Dardanelles to the Siege of Sidney Street to a long period of exile making speeches denouncing Gandhi from the back benches of the House of Commons and writing articles for the Daily Mail defending Edward VIII or the British empire. Then had come his moment, and Britain’s.
“War’s a brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art,” as Byron reminds us,7 and when the prissy, dithering figure of Neville Chamberlain took to his sickbed, Britain took Churchill to their hearts. To visit the cabinet War Rooms beneath King Charles Street is to be reminded, as no book can remind us, of the extraordinary atmosphere of those times and the extraordinary quality of the man who directed operations down there. He did not often sleep there, and he had small regard for his personal safety, enjoying sitting on the roof at George Street to get a better view of the air raids. But he was sometimes obliged to sleep underground; and there may still be seen his modest bedroom and the range of weaponry, including a Tommy gun, with which he proposed to defend himself had invasion occurred and his bunker been penetrated by Nazis.
His daily routine became legendary and exhausted all who worked with him—cabinet ministers, chiefs of staff, long-suffering secretaries. He woke about 8:30 A.M., lit a cigar with his bedside candle, and, wearing his green and gold silk dressing gown decorated with dragon motifs, he would hold court, read all the newspapers, dictate letters, and plan the day. By mid-morning, he was ready to soak in the bathtub while holding military discussions with General Alan Brooke (later Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke) or General Sir Hastings Ismay, who in 1944 threatened resignation because of Churchill’s irascibility. Lunch and dinner were always accompanied by champagne. He had an afternoon nap, but would then work on until three or four A.M. When he had finished dictating a speech at three one morning to a bleary-eyed secretary, he remarked, “Don’t bother with a fair copy of that tonight. . . . I shan’t want it till eight o’clock.”
Churchill was the last true leader Britain ever had—after that, perhaps, Britain did not want or need a leader. Leaders, as opposed to mere political functionaries, inspire whole nations, make them feel and act and function in particular ways. The doggedness, the refusal to give up, the good humor, even the booziness of Londoners at this extraordinary time were reflected in their wartime Prime Minister, whose BBC broadcasts, though an embarrassment to the very sophisticated, held the capital,
the nation, and indeed the world in thrall with their bombastic mingling of Macaulay and Gibbon, their iron resolve, and the transparent decency of their philosophy. It was inspired of Margaret Thatcher, when Prime Minister, to open the Cabinet War Rooms and make them into a museum—the map room, with its pins and bits of wool indicating the positions of great armies, the cramped corridors, the rows of telephones, the absolute lack of grandiosity or side, the neatness. It is a place where, you feel, a group of extraordinarily talented and, in the last resort, modest people gathered together to finish a dreadful but vital task, and accomplished it with consummate skill. Whether or not it was Britain’s finest hour, it was certainly London’s.
12
POSTWAR
The film studios at Ealing Green, West London, were founded in 1931 by Basil Dean, and had helped to establish the cinema careers of George Formby and Gracie Fields. Dean quarreled with his fellow directors and was replaced in 1938 with Michael Balcon, who was in charge of production throughout the war. With backing by Rank and MGM they produced some goodish war films— London, For Those in Peril—but it was for the postwar comedies that Ealing Studios became famous, indeed immortal.
Already, by 1954, they were foundering, and they finally closed production in 1957. The films of their glory days, like the 1945–50 Labour government of Clement Attlee, or like the Festival of Britain in 1951, possess an extraordinary quality of their own, depicting an England, and especially a London, which, having come through the war victorious, even triumphant, was at the same time completely vulnerable. Watching these larky black-and-white comedies today, we see an England that was self-mocking, indeed self-parodying. Kind Hearts and Coronets is a fantasy in which a man of suburban origins in south London manages, by a series of somehow perfectly harmless-seeming serial murders, to become a duke. (All the aristocratic murder victims are played by Alec Guinness.) In The Lady Killers and The Lavender Hill Mob, even London’s criminal gangs are homely, cheery almost.
The comedy that really began the series and determined the tone of all the rest was the 1949 Passport to Pimlico. Now one can watch it for its black-and-white shots of bombed-out streets and a skyline unhaunted by modernist architecture, roads comparatively uncluttered by traffic, tarmac free of road signs or yellow no-parking lines. The eruption of an unexploded bomb in a small quarter of Pimlico, the district hard by Westminster, reveals hidden treasure, discovered by the local grocer (Stanley Holloway). Thanks to the scholarly evidence of Professor Hatton-Jones (Margaret Rutherford) presented at an inquest, it is discovered that Pimlico, or this small corner of it, belongs, by some ancient charter of Edward IV, to Burgundy, and is therefore technically autonomous. The local bank manager, publican, fishmonger, and friendly policeman join with the grocer to proclaim their independent republic, in which the austerities of the war years and of Attlee’s Socialist Britain are done away with in the name of the liberties of old England. There is a liberating scene in which they all tear up their ration books in the pub and toss them in the air like confetti.
At first put out by the rebellion, the Attlee government decides to take them at their word, isolate them with barbed wire, and cut off food and water supplies. The rest of London sympathizes with “plucky little Burgundy.” “Don’t you know there’s a siege on?” asks one of the characters. A parodic Berlin airlift occurs when Londoners bring them food and supplies; and there is a twist ending, when the treasure and gold-rich Pimlico returns to the British fold by lending the bankrupted Socialist Treasury of Stafford Cripps their gold supplies in exchange for various local amenities. The shell hole is filled with clean water for the children to bathe in and becomes the Pimlico Lido. The combination of independent-minded contempt for government bureaucracy with the desire for the social amenities offered by central government foreshadows the “Butskellism” or consensus politics of the 1950s.
If the Ealing comedies produce in the viewer the sense of looking into a vanished age, so, too, does a perusal of the guides and catalogues for the Festival of Britain, 1951. There is such insularity and such optimism.
Britain had held out against the Nazi and Japanese world dominators, held out long enough for the Americans to finish the job by achieving world domination themselves. Both processes—the holding out, and watching America collect the prize—had been isolating in a more than psychological sense. (By the end of the Second World War no banana had been seen in the British Isles for six years.)
In the bleak postwar London depicted by Passport to Pimlico, in which much of the city was still scarred by bomb sites and in which rationing continued, the Festival of Britain was conceived as a tonic to the nation. It was planned for 1951, the hundredth anniversary of the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in the middle of Hyde Park, an event had heralded Britain’s commercial and political preeminence in the world. The symbol of the festival was a helmeted Britannia of art deco simplicity arising from a star and a sun. The colors of the geometrical borders were red, white, and blue.
The principal London site for the festival exhibition was in the bomb-torn stretch of land between Waterloo Bridge and County Hall. The guiding spirit behind the festival had been Herbert Morrison. The young Hugh Casson was in charge of the design of the site, which used many LCC-employed architects, many artists and designers. The only permanent building on the site was the Royal Festival Hall, a joint effort by a group of LCC architects including, among others, Robert Matthew, Leslie Martin, and Peter Moro. Attending concerts there in the twenty-first century, one feels as if one is stepping into a northern European Socialist world, benign but dull—as it were Trondheim, or Reykjavik. The imperialistic fantasies of Aston Webb, which had produced County Hall, the Admiralty Arch, and the refurbished Buckingham Palace in the Edwardian era only half a century before, had been replaced by a much smaller vision of England as a modest, decent little place, with a pipe-smoking Prime Minister, Mr. Attlee, whose appearance was that of a bank manager or the headmaster of a minor private school.
Whereas the Great Exhibition of 1851, with its Arab, Indian, and other exotic displays, had emphasized the worldwide interests of British commerce and influence, the Festival of Britain tended to celebrate the virtues of Britain. Great emphasis was placed upon town planning and on the housing that would go up to replace the bombed-out old slums.
One of the most eagerly visited parts of the exhibition was a show flat furnished by the London Co-operative Society in close cooperation with the Council of Industrial Design. The modern furniture was easy to clean and affordable. There was an emphasis on living areas being multipurpose—a kitchen-dining-living space being larger, lighter, airier than anything experienced in the little terraces and tenements that most prewar Londoners had known.
Visitors could see plans for the model Lansbury Estate in the East End, and also for such social experiments as the building of Harlow New Town, Essex. A dull but clean paradise opened up for people. Compared with the visitors to the Millennium Dome half a century later, however—that was the brainchild of, among others, Herbert Morrison’s grandson Peter Mandelson—the Festival of Britain was a cornucopia of intellectual and visual stimulus. The exhibitions of scientific and engineering achievements, of natural history, of architecture and geology, all presupposed a level of intellectual curiosity, and of information, which was entirely lacking in the various “Zones” of the Mandelson Dome.
This might have been an insular exhibition in some ways, but the visitors were offered, within that limit, an encyclopedic range of useful and interesting information: every species of British bird was either stuffed or constructed out of paper by R. Talbot Kelly. (His eerily accurate paper bird sculptures were indistinguishable from his taxidermy.) The section devoted to the sea told the viewer everything from different species of whales, to shipbuilding, to modern methods of hydrographic survey. A vast exhibition of books at the Victoria and Albert Museum celebrated the literary and bibliopegic skills of the prewar years, before paper shortages put a stop to decent boo
k production. (There were no books visible in the Mandelson Dome.)
By the time the exhibition opened, Attlee’s Labour administration had been voted out of office and Winston Churchill was once again Prime Minister, to remain so until his retirement, unwillingly reached, in April 1955. He was succeeded by the irascible, sickly, and, as we know now, narcotic-ridden Sir Anthony Eden as Prime Minister.
The Labour Party was voted out of office partly because the electorate was fed up with austerity, but partly because it had won the argument. (Rather in the same way that the electorate dared to vote for Blair’s Labour Party in 1997, because it had adopted Thatcherite monetary policies, the electorate of 1951 trusted Churchill once more because he was going to continue the welfare state, the housing program, and the broadly Socialist agenda set out by Attlee, Cripps, and Morrison.)
The determination to rebuild the ravaged capital continued. When the model Lansbury Estate was exhibited in the Festival of Britain, emphasis was placed upon the importance of “neighborhood.” Though the designs of the flats were to be “modern,” they should be made to seem familiar by being built from London stock bricks, like the old houses destroyed in the war, and with Welsh slate on the roofs. Schools, markets, pubs, and even churches should be incorporated in the design—the Ricardo Street Primary School, off East India Dock Road, being an example of gentle and not obtrusively or brutally modernistic neighborhood architecture.