Queen Elizabeth wrote to Queen Mary on Friday, 13 September, ‘I hardly know how to tell you of the horrible attack on Buckingham Palace this morning. Bertie & I arrived there about ¼ to 11, and he and I went up to our poor windowless rooms to collect a few odds and ends.’ As the Queen was removing an eyelash from the eye of the King they heard a plane, which caused them to remark, ‘Ah, a German,’ as a bomb screamed down. ‘I saw a great column of smoke & earth thrown up into the air. And then we all ducked like lightning into the corridor. There was another tremendous explosion, and we & our 2 pages who were outside the door, remained for a moment or two in the corridor away from the staircase, in case of flying glass. It is curious how one’s instincts work at these moments of great danger, as quite without thinking, the urge was to get away from the windows. Everybody remained wonderfully calm, and we went down to the shelter … I was so pleased with the behaviour of our servants. They were really magnificent.’ Three of those servants, working below in the chapel, were badly injured, and one subsequently died of his injuries.
That same afternoon, the royal couple toured the East End. ‘The damage there is ghastly,’ the Queen told her mother-in-law. ‘I really felt as if I was walking in a dead city … All the houses evacuated and yet through the broken windows one saw all the poor little possessions, photographs, beds, just as they were left. At the end of the street is a school [South Hallsville School] that was hit and collapsed on top of the 500 people waiting to be evacuated – about 200 are still under the ruins [as was believed locally]. It does affect me seeing this terrible and senseless destruction – I think that I mind it much more than being bombed myself. The people are marvellous and so full of fight. One could not imagine that life could become so terrible. We must win in the end …. PS Dear old BP is still standing and that is the main thing.’
Harold Nicolson, now working in the Ministry of Information, had been concerned that it would not play well with East Enders if, while they were suffering so grievously, ‘the toffs up West’ got off lightly. ‘There is much bitterness. It is said that even the King and Queen were booed the other day when they visited the destroyed areas … Clem[ent Davies, Liberal MP and post-war party leader] says that if the Germans had had the sense not to bomb west of London Bridge there might have been a revolution in this country.’ Fortunately (in this context) the Germans displayed remarkably little such sense, and had ‘smashed about Bond Street and Park Lane and readjusted the balance’ (somewhat) on 9 September. Four days later ‘an aircraft was seen coming down the Mall … having dived through the clouds and dropped two bombs in the forecourt, 2 in the quadrangle, 1 in the Chapel & the other in the garden. There is no doubt that it was a direct attack on the Palace.’
The attack allowed the press to caption a photograph of the Queen meeting one East Ender: ‘Two women whose home has been bombed chat about the experience’. And the King told his mother that in his view, the couple’s visits to bombed areas ‘helped people who have lost their relations & homes & we have found a new bond with them as Buckingham Palace has been bombed as well as their homes, and nobody is immune’
If nobody was immune – which indeed few were – at least the royals could dress the part for their important role as morale-boosters, as their siren-suited Prime Minister fulfilled that of warrior-leader. George VI chose a series of uniforms, ‘wearing in turn the dress of each of the high ranks he bore, as Admiral of the Fleet, a Field Marshal, and Marshal of the Royal Air Force, [making] no further public appearances in mufti [after the outbreak of war] he gave visible notice that he considered himself as continually on duty as any man in the fighting services’, in the words of an admiring booklet published after the war.
The Queen had the right to wear a number of uniforms, including those of the WRNS, the WAAF and the St John Ambulance Brigade, and by 1945 her elder daughter Princess Elizabeth was entitled to wear the uniform of the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service – the women’s branch of the army). Presumably the Queen could also have considered agreeing to don the bottle-green-and-beetroot garb of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS). But instead the royal dressmaker, Norman Hartnell (who had made her a gown ‘especially for air raid nights’, and ‘a black velvet case for her gas mask’), turned his mind to the problem. He had considered that he ‘might perhaps have been useful to the War Office in camouflage, for I had many years of experience in the very antithesis of the art. It had been my special task to make figures stand out in sharp relief to the background, as has to be done in the case of Royalty.’ ‘What,’ he pondered, ‘might be appropriate wear for bombed sites and the devastated areas all over the country? How should [the Queen] appear before the distressed women and children whose own kingdom, their small homes, had been shattered and lay crumbled at their feet? In black? Black does not appear in the rainbow of hope. Conscious of tradition, the Queen made the wise decision in adhering to the gentle colours, and even though they became muted into what one might call dusty pink, dusty blue and dusty lilac, she never wore green [presumably for reasons of superstition] and she never wore black. She wished to convey the most comforting, encouraging and sympathetic note possible.’ Her hats, ‘made by Mr Aage Thaarup’, were always ‘innocent of veils’, so the populace could gaze on this sympathetic countenance without hindrance.
‘A sense of invasion,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary on 14 September, ‘that is lorries of soldiers & machines – like cranes walloping along to Newhaven. A raid is on … workmen on the hangar haystack – disguising a gun – said “Wish I was as sure of a thousand pounds as of winning the war.” ‘ 15 September 1940 was the day on which it was expected that German forces would invade Britain. ‘It may be this weekend,’ the Daily Herald had warned on the 12th, reporting that Hitler ‘has been accumulating shipping in the Channel ports, Hamburg and the Baltic, and obviously does not intend to let them rot. As the Prime Minister said last night, this invasion may never materialise: equally from present indications, it would seem that its attempt will not be long delayed. It may come anywhere in several heads from the coastline which is now in German hands. It is certain that everywhere it will meet with terrific opposition.’
There had already been an invasion scare on the night the blitz started. The previous week barges, motor launches and larger vessels had been photographed massing on the other side of the Channel, to such an extent that, according to the official history, ‘by the morning of the 7th there was much evidence from reconnaissance alone to suggest that an early landing might be expected’. In addition, German troops and dive bombers seemed to be moving into position ready for an attack, a rowing boat containing four Germans who confessed (or claimed) to be spies gathering intelligence for an invasion was captured off the English coast, and as the final clincher the moon and tides were in the right conjunction for such a crossing. The Chiefs of Staff were informed that an invasion might be imminent.
At 8.07 p.m. the signal ‘Operation Cromwell’ went out to all formations in London and the South-East for ‘immediate action’. Other commands were also told, but for information only. However, several zealous Home Guard commanders in various parts of Britain summoned their units by ringing church bells. These had been silenced after Dunkirk, and were only to be rung when it was clear that an invasion had started. In the febrile atmosphere of expectancy, heightened by notices flashed on cinema screens recalling soldiers to their barracks at once, rumours rapidly spread that the skies were already full of German parachutists, and flotillas of German motorboats were speeding towards English beaches. Members of the Home Guard hurried to their recruiting stations or carried out their jobs with rifles slung over their shoulders, householders paraded outside their homes with brooms, garden forks and spades, and the challenge ‘Who goes there?’ rang out throughout the land.
After this panic, General Sir Alan Brooke, Commander-in-Chief of Home Forces since July, tightened up procedures: in future no church bells were to be rung until he had personally counted a minimum of twenty-five German parachutists floating down onto British soil, and communicated that fact.
But the invasion did not come that night, nor any other. It was doubtful if the Germans could have mustered the 20,000 parachutists that the British government feared. The Kriegsmarine did not
