Women won the day in strong mothers who rais in the teeth of poverty de
Their faces were purple, their limbs crushed and tangled. Desperate cries and muffled groans pierced the gloom. The bodies were piled up six deep on the narrow staircase.
Shoes went flying as Air Raid Precaution wardens tried desperately to pluck survivors from the pile of corpses.
These heart-rending scenes greeted rescuers at the entrance of an East London Tube station one desperate, rain-swept night in March 1943.
Among them was Dr Joan Martin, whose heroism reveals a forgotten truth about women’s roles during the Second World War.
“It was a night of undiluted hell,” she said. “I had no choice but to swallow my fear and do my duty.”
Though to the medic, the impoverished but proud mothers of the East End were the real heroes at that time.
The war was in its fourth year when the disaster unfolded on the steps down to Bethnal Green Underground, then used as an air raid shelter.
East Enders, a stoic and resilient bunch who had already survived eight months of nightly Blitz bombardment, were patiently queuing to get into the shelter after the air raid siren sounded.
Unbeknown to them, the government were testing an anti-aircraft rocket from a battery in nearby Victoria Park.
The scream of the rocket was like no noise they’d heard before.
Civilians hurried to safety down the slippery, poorly lit stairway. A woman carrying a baby tripped and, before she could get up, others fell over her, causing a deadly human domino effect.
Within 30 seconds the stairway was converted from a corridor to a charnel house. Horrifyingly, dead and alive were pressed together in such a tangled mess that it took three hours until the last casualty was pulled out.
Some 173 people lost their lives, including 62 children. Whole families were wiped out.
It was a testing moment in Dr Joan’s career – a remarkable, untold story which we are sharing in the 80th anniversary year of the outbreak of the Second World War.
Born in November 1915, she was determined to become a doctor after her best friend died of polio. “It’s so unfair,” she complained to her father on learning only men could be medics.
“Well, what are you going to do about it?” he challenged. His words hit home. Five-year-old Joan resolved that, one day, she would help people survive illness.
Joan was 20 in 1936 when she won a place at the Royal Free Hospital, the only London medical school at that time to take women. She began her clinical training just as war broke out.
Despite a fear of fire, she worked through the Blitz tending to victims “with their guts hanging out”, moonlighting with the London Ambulance Service by night to earn extra money.
But of all the horrifying sights she witnessed, it was the disaster at Bethnal Green which had the most profound effect on Joan.
She was by then working as a junior casualty officer at Queen Elizabeth Dr Joan died aged 102 in 2018 CARING Dr Joan Martin at work Hospital for Children on Hackney Road. Joan laid out the dead and tended to the survivors all night, continuing even when her superior fled from the ward, too horrified by the flood of bodies.
“The mothers’ fingers were still curled from where they had been grasping their children when they died,” Joan said. Ordered by bosses never to breathe a word of what she saw, with the Official Secrets Act taking care of the rest, she kept her lonely secret for over 60 years.
After that dark night, the wartime doctor found her faith in God tested, but her resolve to carry on and help those suffering in the East End strengthened. “Back then, people had pride in poverty,” she told me. “The mothers suffered such deprivation, often going hungry so that their children could eat.
“They would push prams piled high with washing down to the washhouse.
“They were poor but never dirty. To be clean was a mark of pride.” While working in the East End, Dr Joan ten to malnourished children with rick scabies and bug bites.
“The children would come in a when given a drink of milk, would politely, ‘Where can I drink to?’” she s
“They were stunned to discover t could have the whole glass. It was th strong mothers who raised such po children in the teeth of poverty w deserve the medals.” And her eyes tered with a fierce determination as