No choice but to swallow my fear and do my duty
The redoubtable Dr Joan Martin dedicated her life to helping the poor and dispossessed – and never more so than on one fateful night in 1943, as a new book by Kate Thompson reveals
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 sailed through the air as ARP wardens tried desperately to pluck survivors from the pile of corpses.
These heart-rending scenes greeted rescuers called to the entrance of an east London Tube station one desperate, rain-swept night in March 1943.
The war was in its fourth year when Britain’s worst civilian disaster unfolded on the steps down to Bethnal Green underground, then operating as an air raid shelter.
East Enders, a stoic and resilient bunch, who had already survived eight months of nightly Blitz bombardment, were patiently queueing to get down to the shelter after the air raid siren sounded.
Unbeknown to them, the Government was 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.
Fearing a new and sinister weapon, people 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 a tangled mess of such complexity that it took three hours until the last casualty was pulled out. 173 people lost their lives, including 62 children. Whole families were wiped out.
AMONG the rescuers was Dr Joan Martin whose heroism in tending to the victims reveals a forgotten truth about women’s roles during the Second World War.
“It was a night of undiluted hell,” she recalled. “I had no choice but to swallow my fear and do my duty.”
As the country prepares to mark the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War this September Joan’s remarkable, untold story deserves a hearing.
Joan is one of many women whose lives are revealed in my new book, The Stepney Doorstep Society which takes a fresh look at the Second World War through the eyes of some of the East End’s most formidable matriarchs, the women the history books forgot. Born in November 1915, Joan 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 and a five-year-old Joan resolved that one day she would help people survive illness.
Joan was 20 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 heart-wrenching sights she witnessed, the disaster at Bethnal Green had the most profound effect on Joan, who was by then working as a junior casualty officer at Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children in 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 to deal with the flood of bodies.
“The mothers’ fingers were still curled from where they had been grasping their children when they died,” she said.
Ordered by her seniors never to breathe a word of what she witnessed, with the Official Secrets Act taking care of the rest, Joan kept her lonely secret for over 60 years.
“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.”
Whilst working in the East End, Joan tended to malnourished children with rickets, scabies and bug bites.
“The children would come in and, when given a drink of milk, would ask politely: ‘Where can I drink to?’” she said. “They were stunned to discover they could have the whole glass. It was those strong mothers who raised such polite children in the teeth of poverty who deserve the medals.”
Her eyes glittered with a fierce determination as she leant forward to share this with me: “In World War Two, it was women who saved the day.”
Two of the women in my book were visited last week by Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, at Jewish Care’s Brenner Centre at Stepney Community Centre. Life-long Labour supporter and antifascist Beatty Orwell, 102 and Marie Joseph, 97, both born and raised in Stepney, dazzled Camilla when they got up and danced with her.
“Meeting all you wonderful, inspirational people has been a real treat,” the Duchess of Cornwall said afterwards. Sprightly centre volunteer, Marie stunned the Duchess when she confided her age. As well as living through the Depression, she survived the Blitz in the East End, started work in a factory at the age of 14 and 83 years on is still working – she recently won an award for her volunteer work for Jewish Care.
The matriarch and mother of five says hard work and chicken soup is the secret to a long and happy life.
“You strive, you thrive,” she says. “I’ve worked hard all my life. My poor mum raised seven kids in two rooms. Not that I had any idea I was poor. During the Depression, everyone was in the same boat, you see.”
Sadly, Joan is no longer alive to see the publication of the book which celebrates her life. She died in January 2018, aged 102, four weeks after the unveiling of a Stairway to Heaven memorial to those lives lost at Bethnal Green underground.
AFTER the war Joan was given responsibility for the care of disabled children in Kensington and immunised them against diseases. Joan fought to improve the living standards of the poor.
Along the way, her dogged work has rightly earned Joan accolades and she was made an MBE in 1985.
Shortly before her death, Joan took food and clothing to the Grenfell Tower survivors, because impoverished North Kensington was her patch as a doctor for many years.
“People are so selfish these days, and only think of themselves,” she said after her visit. “We have lost the culture of volunteering. Those that lived through the war understand the need for self-sacrifice and pulling together. How is society organising itself to help weaker members?”
The wartime doctor also held strong views on modern women. “The problem with women today is that they labour under the illusion that they can have it all,” she told me, six months before her death. “I sacrificed a personal life to become a doctor. I never dreamt I could marry and have a career. It was one or the other.
“Somewhere along the line, you have to make a choice. I had a marriage to medicine and it made me who I am.”
● The Stepney Doorstep Society by Kate Thompson is out now, published by Michael Joseph.