The Blitz: The British Under Attack. Juliet Gardiner

– who spent the whole twenty-four hours, for weeks on end, ministering to this vast unruly family. They were self-appointed shelter marshals, without authority and without resources. It was they who brought urns of fresh water into the unofficial shelter, rationing the water as sparingly as though they were the keepers of an oasis in the desert … Any minister or official or influential visitor who ventured into that shelter would be button-holed. With evangelical fervour, they would be told of the miseries these people had to endure, of what grand people they were if only they had a chance, and a whole catalogue of all the things that needed to be done.’

      It was not only officials who beat a path to the Tilbury shelter: it soon became a tourist attraction for people from ‘up West’ to gawp at the hellish conditions their fellow Londoners were suffering a few miles away. Rachel Reckitt was in charge of the emergency Citizens Advice Bureau set up at Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel – a ‘university settlement’ where middle-class workers lived among the poor, hoping to share knowledge and culture, and alleviate the poverty of their neighbours – to offer advice and practical help to East Enders suffering during the blitz. In October 1940 she had a ‘night out with [the distinguished American lawyer] Mrs Goodhart [who] wanted to see the Tilbury shelter, so, as it was no good early in the evening [when no shelterers would have arrived] I offered to take her later. She said should we go and get some dinner at the Savoy, or have it at Toynbee? I believe she would have liked Toynbee, but saw I wouldn’t, so we had a drive round Wapping and Shadwell and the Isle of Dogs … it looked lovely in the fading light, especially the river. Wapping church and the school have gone … all but the Church tower … Then we had a good dinner at the Savoy, with Leslie Howard [who played Ashley Wilkes in the film Gone with the Wind, which had opened in London a few months previously, and who would be killed when the plane in which he was a passenger was shot down in June 1943] and Anthony Asquith [the film director ‘Puffin’ Asquith, son of the former Liberal Prime Minister] at the next table … Afterwards we went back to Stepney to the Tilbury shelter. Entry there is by pass only as they, naturally, dislike sightseers (especially those who come East after a good dinner to see how the poor live!). However, as I know the wardens, I was able to get Mrs Goodhart in. I especially wanted her to see it in case she goes to America; as she will be asked to lecture there [and] it would be very bad if she had to admit she’d never seen a shelter.’ The next month, Rachel Reckitt was taken on

      a personally conducted tour of the famous Tilbury shelter, a great honour I gathered, as Lady Astor [MP for Plymouth Sutton] had been down a few nights ago and [the District Warden] refused to take her round. He said he was tired of West-Enders getting an evening’s entertainment sightseeing in East End shelters. I should hardly call it ‘amusement’ but I could sympathise with him as he is very busy. Anyway the people resent being exhibited to sightseers.

      … They have reduced the numbers in Tilbury shelter from 12,000 to about 6,000 and made some improvements, though it is still very bad and many people sleep on the stones. It is a strange place, vast and very confusing as there are many parts to it. Most of it is under railway arches and there are trucks and sidings in it too. People have been known to park their baby’s pram in a truck, and found it gone to Birmingham or somewhere in the morning!

      The District Warden is full of ideas and hopes the war will last long enough to get hot water laid on and proper feeding. It will have to last a long time at the present rate!

      Ritchie Calder had greatly exaggerated the number of people taking refuge in the Tilbury shelter, as he had inflated the number killed in the bombing of South Hallsville School. He did so because, as a campaigning journalist, he had an urgent agenda. In his view the government was culpably negligent of the safety of its citizens – particularly its poorest citizens, who had not the resources to make their own arrangements. What Londoners (and indeed all those living in vulnerable areas) required were deep shelters. And these the government had consistently refused to provide.

      The scientist Professor J.B.S. Haldane had paid three visits to Spain during the Civil War, which had made him something of an authority on defence against air raids – particularly since most British scientists were still using data from the First World War to frame their expectations of Second World War bombing. Haldane had spent weeks in Madrid and Barcelona (where there was ‘an extensive system of underground refuges … capable of accommodating altogether about 350,000 people’, according to the city’s mayor) gathering information and making statistical calculations, and what he discovered made him a passionate advocate of deep shelters. While he was not himself a member of the Communist Party – though he was a Marxist, and was the science correspondent for the CP newspaper, the Daily Worker – this was a campaign supported, indeed often led, by members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), who argued that it would be the working classes living in poorly-built accommodation, clustered around inevitable targets such as docks and factories, who would take the brunt of German aerial attacks. What some might call governmental incompetence in failing to make proper provision, the CPGB regarded as a conspiracy against the workers in a class war that made them in effect the ‘poor bloody infantry’ of the home front.

      Haldane argued that gas was no longer the main danger – he was an expert on poison gas and had designed a gas mask during the First World War – but that the real threat came from high-explosive bombs. He believed that the government policy of dispersing the population into reinforced basements, surface and Anderson shelters, rather than constructing networks of mass underground shelters, was misguided, irresponsible and penny-pinching. In October 1938 he published a paper in the scientific journal Nature in which he demonstrated mathematically that there were no grounds for assuming that bombs dropped at random would cause fewer casualties if people were dispersed than if they were concentrated. Later that year his book, called simply ARP, was published by Victor Gollancz, founder of the Left Book Club. It advocated a two-year programme of excavating sixty feet under London to build 780 miles of seven-foot tunnels that could hold the 4.4 million population of the LCC area. These should be built of brick rather than concrete, since in Haldane’s view ‘The concrete industry is now in the grip of monopoly capitalism, and for this reason prices are likely to be higher relative to brick than would otherwise be the case.’ Following the book’s publication Haldane stumped the country speaking, usually on CP platforms, and writing articles for the Daily Worker demanding better protection for the British public against the blitz. He argued that some of Britain’s unemployed – of whom there were still 1,800,000 in the summer of 1939 – could be given work constructing the deep shelters he believed were required, a scheme he costed at an estimated £12 for each person who would be able to take refuge in them.

      The Architect and Building News had voiced its readers’ concerns in October 1938, just after the Munich crisis, about ‘sandbagged basements … half finished trenches in the parks and squares … uncomfortable reminders of the ludicrous inadequacy of the eleventh-hour scramble of three weeks ago’, and demanded, ‘What is being done?’ That same month Finsbury Borough Council, in charge of one of the poorest boroughs in London, provided an ambitious answer. On 4 October Alderman Riley, Chairman of the Finsbury ARP Committee, recommended that the modernist émigré architect Berthold Lubetkin and his firm Tecton, which had designed Finsbury’s vanguard Health Centre, opened earlier that year, should be asked to come up with a solution to protecting ‘the whole of the population [of Finsbury] in the event of war’. Lubetkin and the civil engineer Ove Arup (who had proved so valuable in solving the construction problems of the Penguin Pool at London Zoo, designed by Tecton in 1934) worked out a ‘danger volume’ to measure scientifically the comparative protection afforded by different types of shelter, and came up with a plan for fifteen shelters (each housing between 7,600 and 12,700 people) deep underground, approached by spiral staircases that would permit everyone to be safely ensconced within the seven minutes it was reckoned would elapse between the alert sounding and the first bombs falling.

      Although Arup greatly exaggerated the night-time population of the borough who would require shelter, it was an elegant solution to stowing the 58,000-odd residents of Finsbury plus essential services deep underground at the cost of ten guineas a head – a sort of Maginot Line of the air war. Finsbury Council organised an exhibition in the Town Hall to show how it would work, complete with chilling illustrations by Gordon Cullen (whose murals adorned the Health Centre)