It was terrifying at Bethnal Green... like a dam bursting in the pitch black
75 YEARS ON FROM AIR RAID SHELTER DISASTER
Walking tentatively down the damp staircase into Bethnal Green Tube station in London’s East End, 84-year-old Ray Lechmere grips the handrail tightly.
Each step is agonising because it was at this exact spot 75 years ago that his father and grandparents died.
They were among 173 people crushed to death on the night of March 3, 1943, as they sought shelter while the wartime air raid siren wailed. It was the single worst civilian loss of life in Britain during the Second World War.
“It was pitch black down there. You couldn’t see anything at all,” recalls Ray, who was nine at the time.
“I was with my sister and two of my older brothers. My mother and father and my grandparents were following behind. My parents had stopped to get them on the way to the station because they lived on the same street as us.
“When it happened, we were at the bottom of the stairway. It was terrifying, like a dam bursting. People were screaming. I knew my dad was looking after my grandparents behind us, but it was impossible to see anything.”
There was no central handrail to hold on to during the slippery descent underground in the darkness.
As a result, a woman near the front of the surge tripped and most of those behind fell on top of each other. People were tumbling so quickly that the entrance to the station was completely blocked. No one could move up or down.
What makes families bitter to this day is it could easily have been prevented. Only after the tragedy was a handrail put in, and the steps marked with white paint so they could be made out in the dark.
There weren’t even any bombs on that fateful night when the siren prompted everyone to dash to the air raid shelter.
Dabbing at tears he kept inside for decades, Ray describes what he saw underground. He says: “We were right in the corner, probably close to where the first people fell down in the crush, and they were just throwing children across.
“We stood there all night, at the bottom of the stairs, waiting. They had blocked off the staircase. There was no news, but I knew it was bad.”
One of the children lifted from the crush was six-month-old baby Margaret Ridgway. She was the youngest survivor of the Bethnal Green disaster.
Struggling to breathe in the crush, her mum Ellen, 28, held baby Margaret aloft for long enough to pass her on to a tall teenager nearby, thought to be Ray’s elder sister Maisie, 17.
A passing off-duty policeman, PC Thomas Penn, clambered over lifeless bodies to drag Margaret to safety through the narrow entrance to the street. In the minutes that followed, her mum died. Today, on either side of Margaret’s front room TV at her home in Chatham, Kent, are photos of the mum she never knew and PC Penn, the saviour who held her for a few vital seconds.
“For whatever reason, my mum decided to go to the Bethnal Green shelter that night instead of her usual one,” says Margaret, who is now 75 and whose surname is McKay.
She adds: “PC Penn heard the commotion and went in to see if he could help. He had to keep going in and out because it was impossible to breathe. I was told he went in and out at least three times.
“My mother was holding me up in the crush, as high as she could above her head. People have told me that PC Penn said to her, ‘If you are going to die, pass me your baby’. And that is what she did.”
Margaret and her mum had been living with another family in Bethnal
PC Penn said ‘If you are going to die, pass me your baby’. And that is what she did
MARGARET McKAY ON THE MOMENT HER MUM HANDED HER OVER IN CRUSH
Green because their own house had been damaged by Nazi bombs. When Ellen failed to return the next morning, her family went to look for her. They found tiny Margaret cradled in the arms of a nurse at a hospital. It was another three weeks before Ellen was identified at a morgue. Margaret lived at first with the makeshift foster family and then with her grandparents until her dad, Sapper George Ridgway, returned permanently from serving with the Royal Engineers in North Africa. “I was 20 before I knew what had happened to my mother,” Margaret continues. “My father remarried and I thought my stepmother was my real mother. My father had never wanted to talk about it. “I found out about my mother through the family that looked after They said she was very smart.” Ray and Margaret met for the first time a few years ago at a memorial service for the disaster victims.
As Ray points out the Bethnal Green railway arches where his family had sheltered during earlier German bomb raids, it is easy to see why everyone was so desperate to get into the station. Once the sirens sounded, the Tube was a sanctuary. A tiny blue bulb at the top of the tight bunker entrance was the only clue to its location. Bethnal Green station was requisitioned in 1940 at the start of the Blitz, and wasn’t used as an Underground stop until several years after the war. Youngsters would sleep in bunks along the platform. Some had hammocks stretched across the rails.
Speaking about the disaster, Ray, one of five kids, says: “The following morning we were allowed out first because we had been standing by the stairs all night.
“There were bodies lined up all along the pavement on one side of the road, covered over; you could just see the feet sticking out.”
He adds: “People were stood in front of them to block the view. I didn’t know whether any of them were my mum or dad. No one said anything.”
His older sister Maisie had the grim task of identifying the bodies of their dad, Thomas, and grandparents, Thomas and Florence.
Maisie eventually discovered their mum May still alive in hospital, but very badly bruised. “Her legs were swollen,” Ray, now of Upminster, East London, says. “I think lots of people must have trodden on her. We found out it was seven-deep in places. I missed being in that by a matter of seconds.
“Afterwards, nobody really cared. I was off school for a few weeks because of all the funerals. My mum wrote a note for my teacher when I went back to explain, and he just took one look, scrunched it up, and threw it away.
“I was expected just to get on with it. My mother and my sister had to go back to work on the machines at the factory.
“I also remember several of the children at my school were not there. They had died in the crush but no one spoke about it. I’ve felt bad about being one of the survivors most of my life.”
Behind the Tube station two months ago, a fitting memorial to the dead was finally completed. Running from bombs that never materialised that night, but victims of the war nevertheless.