Night a mob of raging mothers tried to lynch a Nazi pilot
. . . just one of the hair-raising stories in a gripping new book on the heroines of the Blitz
SEvENTY-FIvE years ago, on a cloudless and ravishingly warm Saturday afternoon in early September 1940, the skies above the South of England suddenly darkened. People lazing in deckchairs in the drowsy heat, or mowing their lawns, looked upwards to an unfamiliar but terrifying sight. The Luftwaffe was heading towards London.
Some 348 German bombers escorted by 617 fighters would pound the capital that day from late afternoon until 6.30 pm. Two hours later, guided by the flames, a second group unleashed yet another firestorm, lasting all night and into the next day. The Blitz had begun.
Over the following eight months, more than 43,000 civilians were killed in truly terrible ways. Babies were swept from prams by the force of bomb blasts, mothers were killed running to safety and whole city centres were obliterated. British citizens saw their streets transformed from a home front to a battle front. Death rained from the skies and no part of society was exempt.
The Blitz was Hitler’s attempt to bring Britain to heel. He believed it would have such a devastating effect on civilian morale that the government would be forced to negotiate peace terms, but he underestimated the British character — and particularly that of women.
For of all the transformations that took place during this dark time in our island’s history, it was surely the nation’s women who underwent the most radical change. While researching my wartime novel, Secrets Of The Singer Girls, I got to know some of these extraordinary women, most now in their 90s, and listened rapt to their tales both of unimaginable hardship and newfound freedom.
‘We went from being mothers and wives to workers and fighters,’ recalls 96-year-old Dolly Simpson, from East London. ‘It’s we women who were the true heroes. It’s we who deserved the medals. We toiled while the bombs dropped around us, risking our lives, working and raising families in a war zone. My friend’s brother came home on leave during the Blitz. He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t wait to go back into the Army.’
Dolly was born in the 1920s, when women were regarded as the gentler sex. Before the Blitz, women’s lives were mapped out for them, constrained by their sex and class. They were supposed to be compliant, respectable and domesticated.
In one fell swoop, the Blitz destroyed all that. Kay Coupland, 93, from Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, was just 18 in 1940 and went from a job in dressmaking to working in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, the WAAF, on ambulance duty, ferrying bomb casualties to hospital.
‘One night was particularly bad for fires; even the fire hoses were burning,’ she recalls. ‘We were sent on a job to a hill in North London with sweeping views. It seemed as if the entire city was alight. Countless churches were ablaze — you could see their spires on fire.
‘ Suddenly, there was a terrific clap of thunder and lightning lit up the sky. Rain came down in buckets, drenching the fires. It felt like divine intervention. Now we’ll see what God can do,’ I said to my colleague, Joan.
‘Joan was right by my side; the next moment, she was on the floor. A piece of shrapnel had caught her in the neck. She died shortly afterwards.
‘The tragedy is she had only been married a few weeks when her husband, a pilot in the RAF, was shot down and killed during the Battle of Britain earlier that summer. Now she, too, was dead.’
LIKE Kay, many women found a stoicism and strength they never knew they possessed. Dot Smee, 88, from Witham in Essex, was barely a teenager when she volunteered to help in the war effort.
‘When I was 13, I fancied getting out of Bethnal Green in East London and so I applied to become a Land Girl, telling a small white lie about my age. I could almost taste the fresh air,’ she chuckles, ‘ except someone grassed me up and told them my real age.’
The Labour Exchange sent her instead to work as a machinist in Hackney, aged 14, just as the Blitz broke out. ‘When the bombs started to drop, we used to shelter under our work benches, unless it got really bad, and then we made our way to the shelters. If the guv’nor told us to keep working through a raid, we jolly well did as we were told! One shouldn’t laugh, but there were some, albeit unintentional, funny moments during the Blitz. Every night after work, I sheltered in a huge basement under a school near my home in Bethnal Green.
‘One evening coming home from work, myself and a friend got caught short when the sirens went off so we dived into the nearest brick street shelter, which was above ground. We were sitting there for a while when my mate nudged me.
‘“Here Dot,” she said, over the wailing siren. “This shelter’s about as much use as a chocolate teapot.” She pointed upwards and I was stunned to see the shelter had no roof.
‘We dashed to the school basement shelter, which was much safer. Well, it had a roof at least!
‘I remember sitting down in that shelter in Christmas 1940, singing Silent Night with some visiting curates as the bombs crashed down, while my friend and I tried to stifle our giggles. Humour was our best weapon for survival.’ ‘Weren’t you scared to work through the bombing raids?’ I asked. ‘You were only 14 after all?’ Dot shrugged. ‘ We had no choice. Besides, I was young and fearless.’
This sense of fearlessness relaxed the nation’s moral code. The number of illegitimate births in England and Wales jumped from 24,540 in 1939 to 35,164 in 1942. The incidence of venereal disease rose by 70 per cent over the same period as the age-old adage ‘keep your hand on your ha’penny’ was thrown to the wind.
‘In a time when living to see the dawn of a new day was far from a certainty, women were desperate to live for the moment,’ confides Henrietta Keeper, 88, from Stepney in the East End, who sewed uniforms for the troops.
‘In the factory, a lot of the women got up to mischief. One married woman used to smuggle notes into the pockets of the uniforms she was sewing. “If you’re in the mood, come to me and I’ll be in the nude”, with her address on the back. She got plenty of replies.
‘You should have seen the factory floor on a Friday evening. Women would wear their curlers anchored under turbans during the day and at clocking off time, the curlers would be torn out, fresh stockings, lipstick and rouge applied before they headed to the big dances up west in a cloud of Evening In Paris perfume.’
Mothers have a somewhat different recollection of these turbulent times.
The late Dorothea Medhurst from Kensington, West London, wrote down her memories of this ‘chilling’ time, and later her daughter Sue shared them with me.
‘I was 23 and a new wife and mother,’
wrote Dorothea. ‘Once I was pushing my baby along Oxford Street in her pram when the alarms sounded. That was a sound that made your blood run cold. I stopped and there was a man walking towards me.
‘I didn’t know him, but everyone showed concern for each other in those days. He looked at me with my pram and shouted, “Run and get your kiddies safe, I am right behind…” He didn’t finish the sentence because at that moment a bomb dropped and the blast sent terrible shockwaves right across where we were standing. I heard a bang, a whoosh and a whistling sound and instinctively ducked as the plate glass window was blown out of the shop opposite us. It missed me, went over the top of my pram and sliced the man horizontally in two.
‘For a second he remained upright, but as he fell the two halves of his body separated and then I couldn’t look any more. I ran all the way home in tears, oblivious to everything and promptly got told off by my mother for not going to a shelter.’ Contrary to popular belief, not all children were evacuated when the bombs started to fall.
‘My mother had us evacuated, but missed us so much she bought us home again,’ recalls Glad Westfallen, 79, from Colchester.
‘She raised seven children in Poplar by the East End docks, the worst hit area. I remember her once in the shelters reading us bedtime stories to try to drown out the thump of bombs. When the bombs got louder, her fingers would curl around the spine of the book, grip- ping it tighter until her fingers were blood red, but she kept on reading.’
And 86-year-old Pat Spicer, from Sonning in Berkshire, had a mother who’d do anything rather than be parted from her daughter.
‘My mother used to take me down to sleep underground at Bethnal Green Tube,’ she says. ‘I used to read Milly-Molly-Mandy stories and take free tap-dancing lessons. Us kids all used to hang out in packs, roaming up and down the tunnels. It was great exercise and our parents never worried about us. I remember watching a wonderful baritone singer in the theatre which had been erected over the tracks underground. He sang in Russian and I’d never heard anything like it. I was entranced and it sparked a lifelong love of music.
‘In the mornings, mothers would feed their kids what little food they had from their rations, then emerge blinking into the smoke- filled dawn, hoping to find their homes still standing for a quick wash before heading off to work in a factory. Business as usual.’ PERHAPS it was the perpetual sense of danger and the deprivation that bought one group of mothers’ tempers to boiling point. Gladys Edwards, from South London, is 83 now, but was an eightyear-old girl when she witnessed an extraordinary event two weeks after the outbreak of the Blitz.
‘A great shout went up from outside the flats where I was living in Westminster. A Luftwaffe pilot had been shot down in nearby Victoria and had baled out in his parachute, landing in Kennington.
‘That pilot was pursued by a huge crowd of angry women wielding shovels, brushes, sticks and whatever weapons they could grab. They were hellbent on his annihilation. One woman reached him and hit him with her coal shovel with an angry cry of “That’s for my boy at Dunkirk.”
‘He tried to run but his harness was too much for him. Suddenly, an Army lorry drew up and half a dozen soldiers with fixed bayonets jumped out and forced a way through the crowd. They rescued the airman and the last I saw of him was when, looking battered, he climbed into the back of the lorry.
‘You have to understand how much we hated them. The Germans started it, but we sure as hell finished it.’
After 267 days, on May 11, 1941, the Blitz ended. More than a million houses were destroyed and damaged in London.
Six months later, the National Service Act (No 2) was passed introducing conscription for women. All unmarried women and all childless widows between the ages of 20 and 30 could now be set to work for the wider good of the war effort.
‘I did all sorts of things,’ laughs Dolly Simpson. ‘I went from sewing Army uniforms to making tyres for trucks, to filling bombs and bullets with gunpowder. I even worked in a condom factory.’
Seventy-five years on, the Blitz still holds a unique place in the history of our country. Britain was the first country to successfully resist Adolf Hitler, after all.
But this year we must also celebrate the quiet heroism, spirit and courage of the nation’s women, whose stories are only just being told.
Kate thompson is author of secrets of the singer Girls, published by pan macmillan.