Louder than bombs
How the Blitz was felt for generations in one family
Towards the end of her 94 years, like many who had lived through the Blitz, my granny talked mostly of bombs. One bomb, especially. In February 1944, the corner of the south London house where she lived with her young family was taken off as a Luftwaffe bomber jettisoned its load on its return home. All survived, but this moment became a kind of boundary within her life. Now, there was “before the bombing” and “after the bombing”. Late in life, those days pulled Mabel back in. They were, in her head, where she spent most of her time.
Of course, her experience was widely shared. By then, bombs and their wreckage had long been a matter of routine, in London as in Hamburg. They were dropped from a distance in a way – new to warfare then, now normal – which meant pilots could feel separate from the human impacts of their mission. Yet once landed, those impacts would echo for decades, through the lives of those bereaved and injured.
A new BBC series beginning this week examines the specific effect of four single bombs dropped in a single street in a single place – London, Hull, Clydebank and Bristol. Each an anonymous lump of metal packed with explosives, dispatched with no particular individuals in mind, which became tied into the unique fabric of viscerally personal human stories that had wider consequences for the Second World War and left a legacy we still live with today.
Part of Mabel’s story was that she was married to a Blitz reporter – Peter Ritchie Calder of the Daily Herald. My grandfather covered the wreckage as the city blazed, writing nightly amid the sirens, at one stage describing his typewriter “treading flakes of soot into the paper” as he wrote.
Our reliance on social media and smartphone updates makes it all the more striking that then, amid the “second great fire of London”, the public’s picture of events was painted almost “live” by a limited number of jobbing journalists, drawn here and there across the city by each new major incident. Even in the age of the typewriter, events were written almost as soon as they were lived – and in the rawest, readiest form, by news reporters. Even more than for most, bomb stories became written into the Calders’ lives.
Ritchie Calder visited an East End school in 1940, used as a rest centre for those made suddenly homeless by the air raids. Its playground was now a bomb crater. There was every sign that, with the pattern in which the bombs were landing nightly, the school building itself would follow. There were frantic local calls to clear the shelter, and get the people elsewhere. Three times that same evening, Calder tried to get Whitehall to take urgent action. The following night, a bomb hit the school and 450 people were killed.
Public rage followed, with clamour for an organised response. For what the bombs and their reporting were uncovering was a failure of concerted planning. In preparing for war, local and central government had made strong provisions for accommodating the high level of predicted corpses. As it unfolded, they seemed flummoxed by the need to find space for displaced living people. They had not counted on the vast numbers of homeless refugees resulting from sustained bombing. There were 250,000 people displaced in the first six weeks of the Blitz, from September 1940. This figure would rise to 1.4million by June 1941, in London alone. One in every six Londoners.
While the bombs were indiscriminate, homelessness was more likely to hit some than others. The German campaign was not evenly spread across London boroughs, and focused especially on crowded, working class areas – in particular, because of the docks, the East End. While the better-off were no better protected against instant homelessness, they were more likely to have the means to find their own solutions. Yet the air raids made clear that people could be placed in poverty through no fault of their own – and that clothing and rough shelter might be urgently required by those who had presumed themselves to be exempt. Calder describes a soldier finding his parents in a school rest-centre, after two weeks’ hunting. “When I came through Dunkirk, I didn’t think Mum and Dad would have to go through Dunkirk, too.”
Amid all this, Calder became a partisan, through and alongside his detailed Daily Herald reporting. He railed against the failures of antiquated local bureaucracy. London’s local authorities were a mishmash at the time, with different services – gas, electricity, telephone, water – operating uncoordinated and with different footprints. Meanwhile, Whitehall’s initial line had been to deny responsibility for the welfare of survivors, leaving this to the mishmash of the boroughs – a “jigsaw of parochialism”, as Calder put it. Pettiness and buck-passing were rife. Local officials had been arguing about who would pay for the equipment of rest centres with basics such as blankets. In the end, the Treasury agreed to.
Stories of avoidable tragedies with disorganised aftermaths – interviews with people taking matters in their own hands, rather than waiting for a concerted response – had been crucial in their shoving power. Many of these came from Calder’s journalism.
Such changes had momentous implications. “The loom of war,” wrote Calder in his 1941 book
Start Planning Britain Now, “was weaving an entirely new pattern of British life”. People were shuffled around, displaced, evacuated, thrown together in air-raid shelters and given common cause by the circumstances of adversity. The war exposed social problems more hidden in peacetime. Enduring, more coordinated responses were created in the heat of emergency. Systems grew out of necessity, to fill gaps in service provision or just to establish it. Clunking bureaucracies were exposed for their lack of grip and realism by the bottom-up organisation of shelters and healthcare by people living at the hard edge of the Blitz.
The story of the establishment of the modern welfare state is often attached to the plans of particular men: prominently William Beveridge and Clement Attlee. Yet it was not made possible solely by models or pieces of clever design or the motivations of single actors. It needed buy-in and support. Enough of the public needed to see its point. Attlee and Beveridge were veterans of the “settlement” movement: colonies of educated people locating themselves in poor areas of large cities, seeking to understand the nature of poverty and work with the poor to address their circumstances. Theirs were isolated stories and “niche interests”. The mess of the war, and responses to it, made those interests mainstream.
Like other Blitz stories, these keep reverberating. The UK is not currently enduring air raids but we are a dislocated society, unequal and often ill at ease with itself, split along deep lines, from attitudes to Brexit to access to the housing market. One sadness of those wartime lessons, for Ritchie Calder, was precisely that it took such extremity – “the agony of experience” – to press home a longer-standing need to come up with rational and coordinated responses to social problems, for the better-off to appreciate their shared predicament with the less advantaged, and to face up to the challenges of the time.
Mabel’s generation felt the impacts of history in ways those in other times are lucky not to. Hers was one bomb among thousands. Just a little story, in the grand scheme of things, like each of Ritchie’s filed reports. Yet looked at another way, like everyone’s, their stories are about things far bigger than themselves.