大象传媒

The Blitz in the Elephant and Castle and my family鈥檚 removal to Feltham, Middlesex, after being bombed out

I was born in the Elephant and Castle, in South East London and I lived there happily until the age of twelve when the Second World War began. There were five of us in our family 鈥� Mum, Dad, my Grandma and my younger brother, Peter.
After a period of calm at the beginning of the war the Blitz started. As it gathered momentum so the raids grew in intensity and frequency. There were very few shelters available at that time. There was one surface shelter for the use of the tenants of St. George鈥檚 Buildings. It was built in our Square, the scene of so many happy hours spent with my friends. The next one to us was in Bedlam Park. This was a large underground shelter in front of the huge old building that had previously been a lunatic asylum called The Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem. This building is still in existence and is now the Imperial War Museum.
The shelter in our Square was built with two-foot thick walls and a concrete roof. It was just one long room, about twenty five foot long with a wooden bench down the length of both walls and an opening at each end protected by brick blast-walls. No doors, so that if there were a near miss the blast would go straight through the middle without crushing anyone at a closed-in end. You didn鈥檛 think about a direct hit鈥�
This shelter was big enough to hold about one quarter of the tenants of our flats; but as this was about all that still lived there it was fine.
Most of the underground shelters, like the one in Bedlam Park, were smelly and always damp, so hardly anyone was willing to use them. This was lucky as one night Bedlam鈥檚 shelter did get a direct hit and no one survived.
At first people tended to take no notice of the raids, or at least very little. They would go about their business or stand around in little groups near a shelter. But gradually, as the air raids increased in number and intensity, many started using the Underground railway stations as a shelter. My family sometimes used one after particularly heavy raids but it was noisy and smelly and crowded. There were babies crying and children running around, and coughing, and snoring, it was a wonder people slept at all. And yet, some people stayed down there all the time. Families would stay down there while the husband went off to work or while the wives would ventured out to get some food and cooked it on little Tommy Cookers. This was all strictly forbidden but nobody ever seemed to get caught at it. All the while the trains were still running, disgorging their passengers through the crowds on the platform, whilst the shelterers held on grimly to their little patch of safe ground.
There were two stations at the Elephant, the above-ground trains ran over a bridge across the Old Kent Road while the Underground station was actually in London Road, which ran parallel to St. George鈥檚 Road.
The tube station got a lot of publicity when all the papers and magazines ran articles and pictures taken down there. Pathe News showed these scenes. The film told of 鈥淏rave East-Enders Defying The Nazi Bombs鈥�, it was on all the cinemas in the country. 鈥淓ast Enders鈥s?鈥� The Elephant was in SOUTH EAST London! And we were proud of it!
The Blitz grew in intensity. Schools only opened an hour a day, if at all. We rarely managed to get there before the sirens sent us scurrying for shelter. No sauntering along nonchalantly as if nothing was amiss, we put our heads down and RAN.
The raids were almost continuous now, starting about six in the evenings and lasting until about six in the morning. Between raids we might get about an hour鈥檚 respite, then the bombing started again.
Dad had made us our own shelter by now. The old deal kitchen table just fitted in the passage running through the middle of our flat and it lived there for some months till the law of averages made it our turn. It sounds 鈥淗eath Robinson鈥� and makeshift, but that kitchen table, with us underneath it, probably saved our lives or saved us from serious injury when our turn finally came, as we all knew it would. All five of us managed to squeeze under that table, day and night. On a particularly good night we could get a whole night鈥檚 sleep.
My friend Johnnie Johnson and I had won scholarships to Wilson鈥檚 Grammar School. But this school had been one of the first to evacuate from London. We were left behind. Johnnie was evacuated by his parents. I don鈥檛 know where he was sent. My friend Betty Seale went away too, to relatives in Newmarket. I never saw either of them again.
Mum and Dad were adamant...No! Peter and I were not to be sent away. If anything happened to us it would happen to us all. Nobody would be left behind to mourn.
We were all back at West Square School again but only for an hour a day. If we managed to get to class there was just time to call the register, which was getting shorter day by day. When the teacher called a name in a hushed voice and there came no reply we would all look at the desk where that pupil had been sitting the day before. We knew we would probably never see them again. Before our family鈥檚 turn came that class had been decimated from about thirty children to no more than ten.

In the winter there was an almost permanent blackout. No street-lamps were lit and thick, black curtains shrouded the windows and doors of houses and shops in order to avoid any flicker of light reaching the German bombers overhead. Woe betide the shopkeeper or householder who allowed a chink of light to reach the outside. To go inside a shop you would open the outer door and wait till the outer door had closed before opening the inner door. The same applied to your own home.
Most nights you would hear the cry ring out 鈥淪hut that ??????
Door!鈥� as some unwary soul let slip a chink of light for some eagle-eyed Air Raid Precautions warden to see. Blackout curtains served a double purpose. Not only as blackout but also to prevent glass being blown into rooms. At first the few remaining workmen employed on our buildings diligently replaced blown out windows, only to be back again a few days later. Eventually they surrendered and filled the holes, where once was glass, with sheets of wood. We lived permanently in the half-light of weakly flickering gas lamps; there was no such thing as electricity in the Victorian buildings we lived in.
Every day when we went out we found the locality had changed its face again. At first people went out only when they needed to but gradually we got used to ducking into the nearest shelter when anything came a wee bit too close. Always you would be scrambling over rubble with glass crunching under-foot. Sometimes the rubble was still smoking. Firemen and A.R.P. wardens dug forlornly in the debris of a house that only last night had been a home for a family just like their own.
Blackout was something you learned to live with. To go out in the street was a work of art. We would either use the back door which led into the Square and the huge iron gate, which was seldom locked now as there was no caretaker to lock it any longer; or we would make our way down the passage in the dark, till we bumped into the table and then we crawled under it to reach the front door. To get out of our front door you had to pull the thin chain on the gas lamp in the passage to extinguish the lamp. Then you groped your way down the pitch-black passage till you bumped into the table, which now lived permanently wedged between the passage walls. You crawled under the table and out the other side. Then you groped your way along the passage till you got to the heavy cloth curtain that shrouded the wooden door. You reached behind it and opened the door; the door only opened halfway now. And then you squeezed out, trying not to trap the curtain in it in the process.
Returning was a reversal of the task: close the door behind you and stand blinking in the darkness; duck under the table, reach up to find the matches (they were never in the same place twice); pull the little chain to turn on the gas and light the fragile gas mantle trying not to touch it with the match, or it would disintegrate with a derisive 鈥減op鈥� and leave you standing in the dark.
The raids on London increased in intensity. We had thought things bad enough but we had not realized what was in store for London. One day the raiders were hitting the Docks and had been concentrating on them all day. Our flats were very close to the docks and the earth was literally shaking with the explosions but nothing seemed to be dropping round the Elephant, which was very unusual. So we took advantage of the lull and nearly all of the families that were still braving it out went up on the flat roof of our buildings to watch the flames and explosions.
It was the most incredible and terrible thing to see. The whole sky was awash with red from the burning buildings and faint figures could be seen. The firemen fighting that terrible inferno were up towering ladders vainly trying to contain the flames that were consuming building after building. Warehouses, office buildings, it seemed the whole of London was ablaze.
The raid went on all day and right into the night and even at the distance we were from it the whole of our road was filled with choking smoke.
The next day we heard that there was virtually nothing left of the Docks and not much of the City, its banks and its offices. St. Paul鈥檚 Cathedral had had a miraculous escape, but had been left surrounded by desolation.
Then one night in September, the twentieth, to be exact, all hell broke loose in St. George鈥檚 Road. The raid had been going on forever. The five of us had been under the table in our passageway all night when a different sound entered our ears. We were used to the whistle and crash of bombs and the rumble of falling masonry. Shouts and whistles blowing and the clang of fire bells, but this was a shrieking wail. Then there was the most terrific explosion we had ever heard. It seemed to go on forever, as though there were smaller explosions going on inside it. Our passage lit up with an intense white light then went black and filled up with smoke and dust. The doors that had protected us on either side blew in and rubble and dust started to creep in under our table. Mum and Grandma were screaming and clutching Peter while Dad and I were pushing grimly at the doors, trying to make an exit but to no avail and all the time the rubble and dust was creeping in and pushing at us from the outside.
First everything went strangely quiet and then we heard scrabbling noises from outside. Everybody carried whistles in their pockets in those days. The Rescue Team would blow them to let people who had been trapped know that they were searching for them. Dad and I blew our whistles to let the rescuers know where we were. We had got used to hearing the shouts and whistles of rescue teams at work in our streets, but this time they were coming for us!
It seemed forever but it was probably only about fifteen minutes before they reached us and dug us out. We were unceremoniously yanked out of our shelter. The next thing we knew Firemen, or maybe they were Wardens, were rushing us through the street to the back of our buildings, over glass and rubble piled high. The whole of our road seemed ablaze from end to end, shattered houses were now roaring infernos and people were digging frantically in mounds of rubble with countless smaller fires spurting from the roadway, from fractured gas pipes.
We were taken, dazed, to our shelter in the Square. Our Square was now a sea of broken glass and bricks. The public shelter we had despised was now a haven and we were greeted with a mug of scalding tea. We were the only family that had stayed in the Buildings and had not been in the shelter.
In the morning we were told that a bomber that had come down, probably with his bomb-load on board and had crashed on a small iron-works on the opposite side of the road. The explosion demolished everything that was still standing in our street. Our Buildings had been spared demolition but they were in a very sorry state. No windows or doors, concrete and brickwork smashed and pitted. But the flats were still standing. Across Elliotts Row, next to our Buildings, a block of flats that had been the twin of ours was now just a heap of smouldering bricks.
When the Wardens and Dad cleared enough for us to get into our flat I found that one of the capstones from our Building鈥檚 entrance pillars, a block about three feet square and eighteen inches high, was resting on top of my flattened bed. There were no ceilings above us now, only floor-joists. We never found Nigger, my dog.
Miraculously, of the five of us I was the only one hurt in any way. Mum found my arm black and blue with bruises where one of our doors had jumped on it. I cannot recollect much about that first day after we were bombed out. My most vivid memory is of us all sitting in an Underground carriage crowded with soldiers with rifles. One of them told us, callously, that they were on their way to Dover because the Germans had invaded us and landed there. We were sitting there with a few items, largely useless, which we had picked up on our way out of the flat and this was his idea of a joke on a family who had probably seen more of the war than he had.

Dad had a friend at work who had said if anything should happen and we should need to get away then he and his family would put us up at a place called Feltham, in Middlesex, his home. We were on our way there now.
This was only till we could get a place of our own somewhere. It was now September 21st 1940, two days before my birthday. I little realized how long I would stay in Feltham.
We boarded a train at Waterloo Station bound for this place 鈥楩eltham鈥�. It could have been the other end of the earth for all I knew and I gazed at all the greenery as we as we flashed by in the train. London was left behind.
Once we passed Barnes there was only the odd rows of houses and both Peter and I marvelled at the miles of grass and trees, Bedlam Park paled into insignificance when compared to open spaces like these.
Feltham was still a village at that time. It had some estates of brand new semi-detached houses with gardens both front and rear. And Mr. Hooper was waiting at the little station. We left the station, passed a few caravans and then crossed a huge field along a little track that ran round an immense lake that I learnt later was a disused gravel pit. There were many in Feltham. We stopped at a neat house with a green door, a garden in front and a huge back garden too.
We only stayed there three days. Feltham had a number of nearly new houses, all empty, as well as lots of picturesque old houses. It was easy to find a house we liked. We liked ALL of them and were quite spoilt for choice. We soon settled on 107 Hounslow Road, a big family house with a big garden and a field behind it. The field had horses in it! Dad arranged to get what furniture he could rescue down to us and we moved in.
At first we had scarcely any furniture but Dad鈥檚 Boss said he could borrow the horse and cart they used to deliver windows with and the driver volunteered to drive it down to our new home on a Sunday. Dad rode all twelve miles from the Elephant up beside the driver with what they could rescue and we had a semblance of a home again.

By Bill Cole of Feltham, Middlesex.

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