大象传媒

THE BLITZ
I returned from Chelmsford on August 23rd 1940, and on the 27th there was an air-raid. The sirens wailed their dismal up-and-down warning note at 9.20 p.m., and the welcome steady note of the All-Clear was not heard until 3 a.m. Those of us who lived through those times cannot, even 50+ years later, hear the Warning, in an old newsreel or film on television, without experiencing again that familiar sinking feeling in the stomach, nor can we hear the All Clear without experiencing that deep sense of peace and relief which it conveyed to us, as we emerged from our shelters and looked around at the dawn sky. Whoever designed those two sounds certainly knew his business. You may hear the sirens and the bombing on tracks 62 & 63 of my LP Album, Fifty Years of Broadcasting.
The siren itself consisted of an electric motor driving two circular fans, with vanes like water-wheels, about a foot or more in diameter, placed one at each end. This apparatus was mounted on a post of the size of a telegraph-pole, or on a metal housing fixed to the roof of a police-station, fire-station, or other such building. After the war they used the All-Clear note to summon part-time firemen to leave their regular employment and report to the Station for duty, and this continued for many years, until it was rendered unnecessary by the issuing to the men of personal radio-bleepers, and the sirens were not finally removed until much later. There was one still in place on a pole just by Collington Halt Station in Terminus Avenue for most of the time we lived there, 1967 - 85.
I suppose it would be difficult for those who never experienced a Wartime Blackout to imagine just what it was like for those who had to endure it for almost six years. Issuing from your own front door, after turning out your hall light, or leaving a cinema and negotiating the steps by the dim light of a few lamps under the canopy, you stepped out into complete darkness. Everyone carried a small hand-torch. Making your way along the street, you might occasionally switch it on to be sure of the kerb, or a street-name, or to shine it onto your own feet in a country lane so that an approaching driver could see you, but since batteries were, like most things, in short supply, you would do so only sparingly. The windows of the houses which you passed would be closely and thickly curtained, allowing no light to escape, and indeed many folk used fitted plywood inner shutters which had the advantage also of preventing injury if the glass should be blown in. In any case, all the electric lights in the houses were fitted with opaque shades which directed the light downwards onto the table-and-chair area and away from the windows. Air-Raid Wardens were always on patrol, and any inadvertent switching-on of a light in a room where the blackout had been forgotten would probably be immediately answered by a peremptory shout from the Warden or from any passing pedestrian - PUT THAT LIGHT OUT! The headlights of all public vehicles were masked by shuttered hoods which directed their light down onto the road. Private car-ownership was rare, and petrol for them was in short supply, and their headlights, often only one per vehicle, were also hooded. The laws requiring motor-vehicles to have two red rear-lamps of a certain minimum wattage did not come into force until about 1955, so in those days they had only one, of low power. Flashing direction-indicators were also unknown, as were interior lights switched on automatically by the opening of the door. Bicycles were very common, and I made a hood for my headlamp out of a cocoa-tin, cutting into the flat end the short sides and long bottom-edges of three or four narrow rectangles the width of the tin and bending the tin outwards to form shielded vents in the front. All traffic-lights were hooded in a similar way.
Inside buses, trams, trolleybuses and railway carriages, the lights were as dim as they could possibly be. For several days each month of course, in clear weather, we had the light of the moon, but this was not regarded as a blessing, because it brought the likelihood of intensified air-raids. Several of the popular songs of the day referred to the blackout. One began,

When they sound the last All-Clear, How happy my darling we'll be;
When they turn up the lights, And these dark gloomy nights,
Will be only a memory.

It occurred to me at the time that we should not know when we were hearing The last All-Clear.
Another began - When the Lights go on again, All over the World - and of course the powerful symbolism of the darkness of evil, the dark days of suffering, bereavement and hardship, and the light of freedom and truth, was universally felt.
There were many instances where a place formerly designated as a reception area became and evacuation area. It happened in Southgate, where Daphne's mother first received a family of French refugees but later saw her own children sent off into the country.
We heard of raids on Chelmsford from September 5th to the 9th, and for the next three months, until December 7th, there were warnings every night in London, as well as occasionally during daylight hours.
On October 10th my father noted that Grandma Davies, who was then approaching her 77th birthday, had made herself a very good bunk of wood and hessian and was sleeping on it in the cupboard under her stairs. Her only complaint was that the paper-boy would not push her newspaper right through her letterbox, so she was forced to rise early because of the cold draught blowing in.
I attended school every day during the term. At first during periods of Alert we went into the corridors, in order to escape the danger of flying glass should the windows be blown in, and we stood, or sat on the floor, working as best we might. Later, concrete shelters were built at the edges of the school field, and during the alerts we trooped out and sat in them, the teachers managing as best they might to continue some semblance of a lesson.
It soon became a routine to go home to tea and, soon after dusk when the sirens sounded, to go with my mother along to Number 6 and join the Cockerills in their garden-shelter. Three adults and five children could hardly be accommodated in so small a space with any comfort. We had to sit up all night, and my mother suffered swollen ankles. I remember vividly the shy sense of gratification and pleasure I had, as a lad of 16, when one night their baby daughter fell asleep in my arms.
We became accustomed to recognizing the sound of the bombers, because they had twin engines, which never emitted exactly the same note and therefore made an undulating drone. We also heard the sound of the anti-aircraft guns, and, of course, the whistle and explosion of the bombs.
There were barrage-balloons stationed in parks and other open spaces, to force the bombers to fly high enough to be caught in the searchlights and stay in range of the guns. There were guns in public parks, especially the larger ones such as Finsbury Park, and mobile guns were moved about the area as the target-areas for the night became clear. A colleague of my father's came up from his shelter during a lull, as we all did, to make a cup of tea, and found that a huge gun had been set up just outside his house. He rushed back to warn the others to be prepared for some almighty bangs, and returned to his kitchen to make extra tea for the gun-crew, but when he took it out for them he found that they had stolen away as silently as they had come.
The Cockerills used large white tea-cups with two handles, which I thought were well-designed for their purpose, safe to hold, and still useful even after one handle might be broken off.
The Critchleys at number eight were fatalists, and never slept in their shelter, so at week-ends when my father was at home we took to using their shelter. My father said once, We never thought that one day we would be sleeping in a hole in Critch's garden!
Folk on the South Coast were also accustomed to guns. When we moved to 63 Terminus Avenue in 1967 there were twenty very tall fir-trees at the foot of the garden, and we learned that they had been allowed to grow so large on the advice to the previous owner, from the Captain of the Gun which was stationed near the railway embankment close by, to afford at least a partial screen against the firing.
When an anti-aircraft shell exploded, its casing disintegrated into fragments of jagged steel, some as much as four or five inches long and perhaps half-an-inch in width and thickness, and of course the brass timing-rings and nose-cones also became projectiles. Moreover, every possible gun had to be pressed into service, and these included huge Naval guns, firing at very low elevations, which used very large shells. Every morning, folk would return to their houses to see whether any of this shrapnel had come through the roof. On October 18th I had to climb into our loft to position a bath under a shrapnel-hole to catch the rain until the tile could be replaced. The Council workmen were kept busy replacing the broken tiles, and from the top of a bus one could see the odd-coloured tiles on the roofs as one passed by.
We boys used to collect the shrapnel in the street as souvenirs, and a brass fragment was a special treasure. One day we found Jackie Cockerill riding his small tricycle about with a large magnet tied on a string behind, vainly hoping thus to collect any shrapnel which might escape his observation. I had a sweet-tin about 8"x5"x2" deep, full of shrapnel and fuse-rings, which made it very heavy. We also collected the thin strips of metallic tape thrown out by the bombers to confuse our radar. I donated my collection to the Bruce Castle Museum, where it may perhaps still remain, labelled with my name.
In the City, many of the stone buildings were pock-marked by great gashes made by bomb-fragments, and there is a bronze name-plate on a wall on the South side of Portugal Street, with a jagged hole in it, preserved there as a memento of those times.
It seems that the effect of an explosion is not entirely predictable, in that it may have a large effect at a distance and an unaccountably small effect close by, and irregularly so. A colleague of my father's, hearing the whine of a descending bomb, took shelter in a doorway and, after the explosion, emerged and continued his walk to the office, but on removing his overcoat he discovered inside it, against his chest, a great jagged piece of plate-glass. Many people carried about the piece of shrapnel or bomb-casing which had just missed them, almost as a talisman, to shew their friends. One joke told by a radio-comic related how he had encountered a much-bandaged friend who said, You know how people are all going about shewing their friends the piece of shrapnel which just missed them? Well, mine didn't.
I copy overleaf a letter my father received during this time. He had written to his colleague, asking him to find his anti-gas goggles and send them down to Kent for him. From it you may discern the kind of experience Londoners were enduring, and their stoicism and quiet sense of humour in the face of adversity, especially in his last sentence. Surrounded by bomb-craters and fires, red-hot buildings, boxes of butter exploding, windows out, no telephones working, electric light and power off, so no lifts in an 8-storey building - Difficult conditions indeed! A slight understatement!
I never heard that many bombers were shot down by the guns, though of course their firing was very good for our morale. There was some suggestion that the shrapnel was doing more damage to houses than to the bombers, so the guns were all withdrawn to the coast, but this gave the population the feeling that they were not being defended, and there was so sharp a decline in morale that they were brought back. Winston Churchill mentions this in one volume of his Second World War.
During all this time my father was spending his working-week at Valence. Westerham was near to Biggin Hill, the great R.A.F. fighter-station, in the thick of the Battle of Britain, with continuous aerial combat in progress, and bombs jettisoned by damaged aircraft or exploding in aircraft shot down. At one time there was a crashed aircraft in every field, and a map I have shewing the location of bombs in the Sevenoaks area is just black all over with symbols. He was also having trouble with the extraction of his remaining teeth, and broken or sleepless nights, being put in charge of first-aid at the house, attending lectures by doctors and planning the ordering and distribution of equipment, and taking his turn at fire-watching on the roof.
Fire-Watchers kept a watch for the falling of incendiary-bombs, which were about a foot long, plus the fin, about eight inches, and made almost entirely of solid magnesium. I dug one up on my Waltham Cross allotment in 1955, but could not succeed in lighting it, and eventually took it to the Police Station. These bombs typically punched a hole through the roof and came to rest in the loft, in which awkward location they had to be tackled by two men, one operating a stirrup-pump from a bucket of water whilst the other directed the jet. They had also a long-handled metal shovel to scoop up the burning bomb and remove it. Later the Germans added a small anti-personnel grenade to the nose of the bomb, designed to kill the fire-fighters, and this might break off on impact and be lying behind them, fused to detonate some minutes afterwards when they were busy trying to fight the fire. I have a stirrup-pump in the garage.
My father also had the daily and nightly concern for my mother and me under bombardment in London and hearing and seeing overhead the bombers on their way to bomb us, and finding rail and road transport in chaos on Friday nights and Monday mornings.
On Monday October 21st a bomb destroyed 30' of the main drain at Valence, on November 11th bombs fell in Courtman Road. The story of one of these bombs is told on Page 74 of my chapter entitled Neighbours.
From Friday December 27th to Sunday 29th there were severe raids on London from 6.30 to 11.30 p.m. which caused big fires in the City, and he arrived at London Bridge Station on the Monday to find it on fire. It happened often that the Fire Brigades had to stand idly by and watch buildings burn, as happened at Cannon Street Station, because mains had been damaged and they had no water available, so later, on sites where whole buildings had been destroyed, huge open water-tanks were constructed, labelled E.W.S. for Emergency Water Supply.
Prime Minister Churchill once said something to the effect that, in order to secure recognition for wartime resolution, fortitude, and endurance, it would be sufficient to say, I was a Londoner in 1940/41.

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