of 18 September.] The less one sees of the result of the bombs the better. The big stores are carrying on gallantly in spite of their troubles. I bought a dress at D.H. Evans, there wasn’t a pane of glass in the shop, and the models were all nakedly exposed to the street, but the shop girls, wrapped up in big coats, were models of helpfulness, and I got just what I wanted. John Lewis’s great building was bombed and burned until it is only a blackened shell, but it bears the defiant notice “Reopening on October 5th”. The other big stores are running “Business as Usual” in such corners as remain.’
Virginia Woolf also observed the destruction of ‘that great city’, the love of which was, as she wrote to her friend the composer Ethel Smyth, ‘my only patriotism’: ‘to see London all blasted … raked my heart’. On the same day that Vere Hodgson returned to London, the Woolfs, Virginia and Leonard, came up from Sussex to spend
perhaps our strangest visit. When we got to Gower St. a barrier with Diversion on it. No sign of damage. But, coming to Doughty St. a crowd … Meck Sq. [Mecklenburg Square, where the Woolfs had their London home] roped off. Wardens there, not allowed in. The house about 30 yards from us struck at one this morning by a bomb. Completely ruined. Another bomb in the square unexploded. We walked round the back. Stood by Jane Harrison’s house [the classical scholar and anthropologist who died in 1928 had lived at number 11]. The house was still smouldering. That is a great pile of bricks. Underneath all the people who had gone down the shelter. Scraps of cloth hanging to the bare walls at the side still standing. A looking glass I think swinging. Like a tooth knocked out – a clean cut. Our house undamaged. No windows yet broken – perhaps the bomb has now broken them. We saw Sage Bernal [the scientist J.D. Bernal, who worked as Scientific Advisor to the Research and Experiments Department of the Ministry of Home Security during the war] with an arm band jumping on top of the bricks – who lived there? I suppose the casual young men and women I used to see, from my window; the flat dwellers who used to have flower pots and sit on the balcony. All now blown to bits – The garage man at the back – blear eyed & jerky told us he had been blown out of his bed by the explosion; made to take shelter in a church – a hard cold seat, he said, & a small boy lying in my arms. ‘I cheered when the all clear sounded. I’m aching all over’… we went on to Grays Inn. Left the car & saw Holborn. A vast gap at the top of Chancery Lane. Smoking still. Some great shops entirely destroyed: the hotel opposite like a shell. In a wine shop there were no windows left. People standing at the tables – I think being served. Heaps of blue green glass in the road at Chancery Lane. Men breaking off fragments left in the frames. Glass falling. Then to Lincolns Inn. To the N.S. [New Statesman] office: windows broken but house untouched. We went over to it. Deserted. Glass on stairs. Wet passages. Doors locked. So back to the car. A great block of traffic. The Cinema behind Mme Tussaud’s torn open: the stage visible. Some decorations swinging. All the R[egent’s] Park houses with broken windows, but undamaged. And then miles & miles of orderly ordinary streets – all Bayswater, and Sussex Sqre as usual. Streets empty. Faces set & eyes bleared … Then at Wimbledon a raid – people began running. We drove through almost empty streets as fast as possible. Horses taken out of shafts. Cars pulled up. Then the all clear.
‘One of the oddest things about our everyday life,’ mused Phyllis Warner on 19 September, ‘is its mixture of ruthless horror and every-day routine. I pick my way to work past the bomb craters and the shattered glass, and sit at my desk in a room with a large hole in the roof (a block of paving stone came through). Next to a house reduced to matchwood, housewives are giving prosaic orders to the baker and the milkman. Of course, ordinary life must go on, but the effect is fantastic. Nobody seems to mind the day raids, which do little damage. It is the nights which are like a continuous nightmare, from which there is no merciful awakening. Yet people won’t move away. I know that I’m a fool to go on sleeping in Central London which gets plastered every night, but I feel that if others can stand it, so can I.’
* Usually known as ‘Pug’, since, according to Churchill’s private secretary John (‘Jock’) Colville, he ‘looked like one, and when he was pleased one could almost imagine he was wagging his tail’.
* Most Ack-Ack guns had been deployed to defend factories and airfields during the Battle of Britain, so when the Germans suddenly switched their attention to London, the capital was highly vulnerable, its defence resting on an entirely inadequate total of 264 anti-aircraft guns.
* On 28 August 1939 the Ministry of Health had ordered that since at least 25,000 casualties a day were expected when the blitz started, hospital admissions should be restricted to emergency cases only, and those should be monitored carefully, since the patients might well have to be evacuated. On the day war broke out the Emergency Medical Services came into operation. Under this scheme the capital and its outlying districts were divided into ten sectors, with one or more of the London teaching hospitals at the head of each. St Thomas’s, for example, was the key hospital for Sector VIII, which included fifty-one voluntary hospitals and homes and miscellaneous other institutions scattered around south-west London and adjoining parts of Surrey and Hampshire, with the matron of St Thomas’s responsible for all the nursing staff in the sector.
What a domestic sort of war this is … it happens in the kitchen, on landings, beside washing-baskets; it comes to us without stirring a yard from our own doorsteps to meet it. Even its catastrophes are made terrible not by strangeness but by familiarity.
John Strachey, Post D (1941)
On the night of 12 September Whitehall was hit during a raid, and the Ministry of Transport was damaged by high-explosive bombs. Plans had already been made to move the Cabinet and the chiefs of staff to a citadel in the basement of the GPO’s research centre in Dollis Hill in north-west London (code-named ‘Paddock’) if Whitehall were to be bombed out, though other options had been considered, including various reinforced-concrete buildings close to Whitehall, such as a rotunda in Horseferry Road. On 20 September Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine, accompanied by Jock Colville, went to look over what might be their new London home. They inspected the flats and the ‘deep underground rooms safe from the biggest bomb, where the Cabinet and its satellites (e.g. me) would work and if necessary sleep’, wrote Colville. ‘They are impressive but rather forbidding; I suppose if the present intensive bombing continues we must get used to being troglodytes (“trogs” as the PM puts it). I begin to understand what the early Christians must have felt about living in the Catacombs.’
In fact the PM would prove to be only an occasional and somewhat peripatetic ‘trog’, as in the early days of the blitz he experimented to find what suited him best, somewhat to the alarm of his staff. One member of his private office, John Peck, wrote a spoof memo under the Churchillesque heading ‘ACTION THIS DAY’:
Pray let six new offices be fitted for my use, in Selfridge’s, Lambeth Palace, Stanmore, Tooting Bec, the Palladium and Mile End Road. I will inform you at 6 each evening at which offices I shall dine, work and sleep. Accommodation will be required for Mrs Churchill, two shorthand typists, three secretaries and Nelson [the resident black cat at No. 10, of which Churchill had grown fond]. There should be a shelter for all and a place for me to watch air-raids from the roof. This should be completed by Monday. There is to be no hammering during office hours, that is between 7am and 3am. WSC. 31.10.40.
In the event Churchill spent most of his working day at 10 Downing Street, occasionally repairing for the night to the underground Cabinet War Rooms, just off Whitehall, the nerve centre from which, in his words, he ‘directed the war’, or to London Underground’s offices housed in Down Street underground station
