Blitz ordeal fell on poor
HISTORY, as one of the lads in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys complains, is just one blooming thing after another. I don’t mind history like that, myself, at least not as much as I mind the onething-causing-another kind.
As you might have guessed from the title, BLITZ: THE BOMBS THAT CHANGED BRITAIN (BBC2) is on a mission to prove that the Luftwaffe’s attack strategy in 1940 shaped the way we live today. My main gripe, having seen the first episode, is that such tinsel strings of cause and effect get in the way of first-hand, nuts and bolts history.
There was plenty of that to hand, as the story began on the first night of the Blitz: Saturday, September 7, 1940, at 4.43pm. German bombers hove into sight over Canning Town, East London and 12-year-old Norman Perry watched them as he played out in the street.
Seventy seven years on, he recalled the brilliant blue sky, the way the planes seemed to be coming from the north. Stan Harris, 11 at the time, said it looked almost like an air display, until the bombs began to fall and he realised it was for real. Over the next 12 hours, some 600 tonnes of bombs fell in the area around London’s docks.
One such bomb fell on the house at number eight Martindale Road, but did not explode and when the firestorm had died down the next day, the inhabitants of the area were told to evacuate their houses.
Over the next seven days, this pattern would be repeated many times. Bombs rained on the densely populated manufacturing and shipping centres of East London, around one in ten were primed to blow up later or were just duds.
As a precaution, residents in the hard-up, close-knit neighbourhoods around the unexploded bombs were made to leave. This, in the early days of the Blitz, was as far as government planning had gone and the consequences were quickly felt. Desperate families were holed up in rest centres, often community halls or schools, which rapidly became overcrowded and dangerous.
The school near Martindale Road lost its electricity and water supply as the infrastructure of the city itself was consumed in the firestorm. A bomb then fell on it, taking scores of lives, mostly those of children and injuring hundreds.
The sorrow was still there and still raw, in the diary entries of those who’d been there, in the stories they’d passed on to their descendants.
The poorest were hit hardest, as Daily Herald journalist Ritchie Calder was quick to point out and while the authorities bickered over who should house and feed the homeless, ordinary people tried to sort things out for themselves. It was down to sheer public resistance, for example, that London Underground platforms were used as shelters.
Eventually, the anger was heard, and Henry Willink, Tory MP for Croydon, headed up a committee to help those rendered homeless by the Blitz.
He was later involved in the first plans for a welfare state, meaning, I think, in the dodgy logic of last night’s programme, that we have the Luftwaffe and the Tories to thank for the NHS.
I could do without that kind of duffers’ overview, especially as so many direct, moving accounts of the East End’s Blitz took us right there, amid the fires, the smells and the panic. Did we need a historical gimmick to make us care? Pray God that’s never the case.