At first I could not see how we could live in it, but we managed to get some dark brown paint and covered the dirt over with this. What was left of our home was dumped in the house. It was all wet and filled with glass and rubble and took days to sort out. We had no floor covering or bedroom furniture so had to manage with hooks round the wall which the soldiers had left. . . . One day we decided to go up to Maple’s to see if they had a stair carpet. . . . They had just found some up in a store which they did not know was there. It had been there since before the war.
The outstanding memory most people whose homes were damaged by V-2s have of the immediate aftermath is the dirt – from plaster, pulverized brick, dust hidden in corners and crevices which had gone undetected in years of spring cleaning and, above all, soot, which was sometimes sucked out of a chimney by the vacuum which followed the first blast wave, with small black columns rising above the chimneys of all the houses in a road like so many exclamation marks. More commonly, however, the soot billowed out in clouds from every fireplace, as the wife of a licensee in south-west London recalls:
We got the carpet out in the front and were shaking the soot off with the help of our friends and one woman came past made up to the nines and thought it was just disgusting to shake the soot in the street where people had to walk. We were just in the mood for anything, so up went the carpet and the soot all over her.
With V-2 incidents occurring singly and over a wide area, all a borough’s resources could be concentrated on each one, and most were impressed by the speed with which initial help arrived. ‘They were marvellous’ is the verdict of a Sidcup woman of the ‘ARP and firemen’ who came to her aid and were soon ‘fixing all the doors and windows and putting back the ceilings’. A Romford woman feels an equally soft spot for the Boy Scouts: ‘They were so helpful with their trek cart. They piled on our salvaged bedding to take to the rest centre.’ Subsequently, the family were ‘given a blanket and a beautifully made quilt sent by the American Red Cross, some money and extra coupons. The money paid my fare to Leicester, where I stayed with my parents. Oh, the peace and quiet!’
Taking charge of what were officially known as domestic chattels from uninhabitable houses provided a useful occupation for those Civil Defence staff now underemployed, like the assistant fire-guard training officer for Ilford, who now became ‘liaison officer responsible for the handling of orders for removals’. The work tended to be given a low priority by those in charge on the spot – wrongly, in his view – and he became adept at doing his best for his clients, virtually hijacking a van which had ‘reported in error’ to him, to such effect that the driver ‘in the space of a few hours . . . dealt with five removals, which were taking several days to be handled under the existing arrangements’. Equally essential, but little publicized, work was done by the men from the public utility services. There was, it was realized, a real risk of fire when the current was restored to a block of vacated houses, for a cooker or heater might well have been ‘on’ when the power was cut off, and one man then working for the north-east area of the London Electricity Supply Company, covering the Dagenham area, found he had his hands full persuading people whose own houses had been undamaged ‘to switch off the house circuit at the mains’ when a whole road was being disconnected, and checking that everything was safe before the supply was restored. The effort involved was considerable. In a typical incident, in November 1944, of 400 properties damaged ‘over 90 had to have their . . . supply disconnected’.
Efficient though the post-incident services were, it could take months to convert ‘first-aid’ repairs into permanent ones, and even longer to restore a house to its normal condition. Grumbling about the slow speed of house repairs provided a means of protesting indirectly that the government had not stopped the rockets arriving and it was hard for people whose homes were at last being made good to see the men concerned suddenly removed, to carry out emergency repairs elsewhere. Lord Woolton had, at his press conference on 22 September, announced a drive to bring housing in London back to at least its condition when the first V-1 arrived in June, but he had reckoned without the rockets, and to those in charge it must have seemed at times that they were trying to bale out a boat in which as each leak was stopped half a dozen new ones sprang open.
Although his Ministry of Reconstruction was officially responsible for post-war housing policy, it was the larger but less glamorous Ministry of Works which directly supervised the building industry, and had the job of coping with V-2 damage. A military-style staff was set up by that ministry, with an intelligence section manned twenty-four hours a day to keep track of the changing situation, as new incidents were reported. A central planning group, the ‘Drake House Organization’, was set up in Drake House, Dolphin Square, and, for the capital, a London Repairs Executive, presided over from November 1944 by Duncan Sandys, promoted to Minister of Works from his previous rank of Parliamentary Secretary at Supply. Several other ministries were represented on these bodies, which, laying aside the leisurely traditions of peacetime, met for a period every day, including Sunday. A flow of updated instructions, known as ‘Serial Notes’, were sent to local authorities, and an equally unexcitingly titled newsletter, the London Repairs Bulletin, was issued to contractors, clerks of works and senior chargehands.
The speed with which a small army of workmen now descended on a street within hours of a rocket falling did much to restore public confidence in the government. In Ilford a large Welsh contingent, already busy on V-1 repairs, was at hand when the V-2s started, to such effect that a force of 1500 men, including those from local builders, might be at work, under the direction of the borough surveyor, within an hour of an explosion. The Ilford Guardian described, just before the end of the war, the high level of efficiency achieved:
When rockets fell at night arrangements were made for inspectors to visit and categorize the damage at dawn, and within an hour or two of daylight men were working on the spot. At the height of the attack . . . the men worked at night by the light of searchlights and electric lamps from the chimneys, on several occasions carrying on until 2 a.m. On at least one incident the men worked until 6 a.m. and then, after a wash and something to eat, returned again two hours later to put in a normal day’s work. . . . They had to contend with icy roofs and gales, in fact during high winds several of them were swept off the roofs they were attempting to cover with tarpaulins. The problem of materials became acute. . . . The Borough Engineer’s Dept had to scour Essex and London for various materials, sometimes having to send lorries far afield to get enough to keep the work going.
When the V-1 attacks began in June, about 21,000 men were already at work on war-damage repair work in the London Region; by December the total had multiplied sixfold, to 129,000, 96,000 of them employed by local authorities, direct or via contractors, and the rest provided by the Ministry of Works as a mobile reserve, or – in the case of 5000 – lent by the forces or the National Fire Service. Another 3000 civil-engineering workers were kept busy demolishing unsafe buildings. At first there was little movement of labour between boroughs, but eventually building workers on repair contracts found themselves liable to be moved to other districts and having to sleep in lodgings, hostels or even requisitioned schools or balls. Not all went willingly. ‘The grievances of the men’, the official history discreetly records, ‘were sometimes exploited for political ends,’ but ‘the inconveniences of regrouping were on the whole cheerfully endured by management and workers alike.’
The need to secure the maximum cooperation of the building trade meant a notable step forward in joint consultation between management and men. The official historian believed that ‘the local progress committees’ now set up, consisting of representatives nominated by the Building Employers’ Federation and the building trades unions, ‘played a notable part both in keeping up the pace of the repair work and in sustaining the morale of the public and the workers’.
In spite of general criticism of the bomb damage repair in
the press and elsewhere, the people of Greater London were on the whole greatly cheered by the energy and success with which large-scale first-aid repairs were carried out, and they were gratified to see their local representatives joining with those of both sides of the industry in the control of the work.
By January 1945 about 25,000 of the 130,000 building force were living in hostels and camps and many more were in other accommodation away from home. There existed, it was officially acknowledged, a need for ‘hot drinks on the site’ – i.e. the cherished tea-break – and for ‘lavatory, washing and drying facilities’, but even feeding an influx of carpenters, bricklayers and plumbers could provide a problem. Occasionally such men were given priority in local cafés during the dinner hour or taken by lorry to British Restaurants, the cheap publicly-run cafeterias opened earlier in the war, which were now sometimes kept open on Sundays for their benefit. Mobile canteens, operating on at least a hundred sites, also helped, and the Ministry of Labour thought the feeding arrangements satisfactory in 83 per cent of the places inspected. A fair index of morale was unjustifiable absenteeism, and at the end of November this was put at under 3 per cent, most of this occurring on Sundays.
Sensibly enough, men away from home sought what recreation they could, and one man then employed on repair work in West Ham remembers seeing an Irish gang one Sunday afternoon playing toss-halfpenny:
There was quite a large ring of men with pound notes at their feet. One man was tossing the halfpennies, I was standing watching, when suddenly a hot wind started screaming around us, lifting the money into a whirlpool. I threw myself down just as the houses around started falling. Then came the explosion. . . . On looking up, the first thing I saw was pound notes flying about and the Irishmen trying to catch them with no worry about falling debris.
To conserve scarce materials as well as labour, maximum (rather than, as was customary, minimum) standards of repair were laid down by the government, which ruled that, during first – and second-stage work, only essential rooms in daily use should be dealt with, and that walls and woodwork should only be painted to make them weatherproof, not for decoration. Non-standard doors and window frames which could not easily be repaired could be replaced by others, however ill fitting and unsightly: half the roof could be covered with slates below standard size, or with concrete tiles; and half the windows given opaque glass. To increase the total number of dwellings available, preference might be given to larger houses, to be occupied by several families, at the expense of smaller ones providing shelter for only one or two people.
The normal limit on repairs was a value of £500, sufficient before the war to buy a comfortable semidetached house in most places. It was realized that often it would take fewer man-hours to build a brand-new house than to reconstruct an existing one, but this solution, owing to shortage of materials, was not possible. House building had, for practical purposes, ceased in 1940 and in the whole of 1944—45 only 5500 permanent homes were built by local authorities and another 1800 by private firms, mainly for the police and armed forces. A few – a very few – ‘Portal’ houses had been built, and some (as mentioned earlier) had already been destroyed by a V-2, but by the end of the war only about 2000 were finished and occupied. The V-2s, in other words, did a great deal to create the housing shortage that was to be the dominant social problem of the immediate post-war years, and before the war finished their effects were visible all around in the oddly unfinished and usually shabby look of houses where the repairers had been at work and in the makeshift, temporary appearance of such property inside.
It was to be a long time before those bombed out were able to forget the experience and resume a normal life. These were the experiences of a South Norwood woman, a soldier’s wife, whose home, as described earlier, had been destroyed in late October 1944:33
The only clothes we had were those we stood in. . . . We were sent to various centres, such as the WVS, etc., but were finally fixed up handsomely at the American Red Cross, who gave us some really good clothes, also some toys for my son. . . . The remains of our home were carted off to a large empty house in Auckland Road and when the council eventually found us a requisitioned place at Addington, Surrey, we went to collect our stuff from this house. The sight was most pathetic. It looked completely useless, covered in dirt and dust, a piano half smashed, tables with legs missing, broken chairs. One of the clocks, however, still survived in working order, also a utility wireless set. . . . We obtained some compensation under the War Chattels scheme, plus a full quota of furniture and clothing vouchers, but this did not help a lot, as things could not be obtained. . . . In fact we did not obtain a bed to sleep on for about another twelve months, having to sleep either on the floor or on some camp beds provided by the council.
29
SPRING IN STEPNEY
My final report on this incident is that it was one of the most difficult ones that have had to be dealt with.
Civil Defence official on Hughes Mansions, Stepney, 27 March 1945
The V-2 attack had begun gradually. It ended suddenly, at the peak of its ferocity. The last week was, in terms of casualties, one of the worst of the whole campaign. As spring approached there seemed no good reason why the rockets should not continue to fall in undiminished, or even greater, numbers till the end of the war. At least, however, the weather had improved, as a strangely complacent Ministry of Information handout later recalled: ‘In March clear blue skies made it possible for people to see rockets bursting in the air.’
On 1 March 1945 Dr Jones, better aware than anyone of the country’s danger from the rockets, updated the analysis he had prepared in January of where the rockets were landing. The diagram he prepared showing the distribution of the first 420 rockets – about half of the total – confirmed his earlier impression of a ‘comet-like’ distribution stretching back to the east coast, with its foremost edge on the north bank of the Thames, and an apparent aiming-point at Wapping, one of the poorest parts of that distinctly poor borough, Stepney.
Stepney was in turn one of ten boroughs within Group 3 of the London Civil Defence Region, which, including V-2s still to come, came fourth in the table of rocket-affected areas, with 45. Where Stepney and its neighbours were exceptionally unfortunate, however, was in the number of ‘outstanding incidents’ which occurred there: 12 of the whole country’s total of 50. The group’s casualty figures, 602 dead and 1141 seriously injured, were the second largest. This was, of course, due to the relatively small area, 20½ square miles, the group covered, much of it, like Wapping itself, a place of large warehouses and mean streets of small terraced houses, heavily built up. Within the ten boroughs the rockets were very unevenly distributed, roughly in inverse relation to the wealth of those who lived or owned property there. Thus the famous ‘square mile’ of the City of London had no V-2s at all within its privileged precincts, though 146 people were seriously injured there by missiles falling outside its boundaries, and twenty landed near premises owned by the City Corporation in other parts of London, a reminder of how widespread the rocket nuisance was. Holborn had one V-2 incident, already described,34 Stoke Newington, Shoreditch and Bethnal Green each had two. Stoke Newington’s two incidents, in Green Lanes on 8 and 10 January 1945, apparently – if the Ministry of Home Security list is correct – caused no casualties. Shoreditch’s two rockets killed 18 people and injured 197, Bethnal Green’s 26 and 80 respectively, all but one of the fatal casualties, and more than half of the rest, occurring in Totty Street and the neighbouring Lesada Street, at 7.40 p.m. on the evening of 22 November. ‘I have never heard such a bang in my life’, wrote a woman, previously quoted, who helped to run a local evening institute, to her soldier husband from her home in Earls Court next day. ‘It was louder than the landmine that went off on top of us in the Dover Road, Blackheath, and . . . seemed to jar one’s whole body as if one had fallen downstairs.’ Its effect on the East-Enders, who had already endured so much, was traumatic, as her subsequent letter, on 28 November,
makes clear:
Three of our members, of the regular stalwart variety, have been killed, and dozens have lost their homes. . . . These wretched little houses collapse at the breath of a blast. We had about thirty kids in last night instead of the usual 120 and even these were quiet and dismal to the most astonishing degree. T. and his wife [the school caretakers] are very much the worse for wear, shivering with cold, tired, headachy and exhibiting all the characteristic symptoms of shock.
The New Year brought no respite to Bethnal Green. Early in February another V-2 landed in Parminter Street, in the centre of the borough, close to the town hall, as the same correspondent reported to her husband.
6 February 1945. You will be sorry to learn that poor Mrs X [who ran the institute canteen and lived nearby] was severely blasted by a rocket on Sunday evening [4 February]. You may remember that she had her home totally destroyed in 1940. This time it was merely windows, doors and badly damaged furniture. Mr T., who was visiting, had a bash on the head and glass cuts in his scalp, which are, I think, much more serious than he pretends. He seemed only half conscious yesterday.
Stepney’s first, but by no means its last, ‘outstanding incident’ occurred in Goulston Street, very close to the site of the famous Sunday morning ‘Petticoat Lane’ market in adjoining Middlesex Street. Fortunately this rocket landed on a weekday, at 2.20 in the afternoon of Friday, 10 November, but the results were bad enough: 19 dead and 97 other major casualties.35 A fireman stationed in Whitechapel was ‘in attendance’.
Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s Page 41