The Oxford student driven so crazed by terror of the Blitz he went on a gun rampage
Desperate Ida hit her husband with a chopper It was panic that killed people that night, not bombs
THE horror of the Blitz brought raw terror to Britain’s streets 75 years ago. Despite the popular image of plucky East Enders saying ‘We can take it!’, a new book suggests the reality was sometimes very different. Today, in our concluding extract, we tell how some people lost their nerve and were broken by the onslaught.
ON THE morning of May 17, 1941, Oxford student John Fulljames penned a note to a friend. ‘Thank you very much for your invitation and I’m sorry if you have ordered my dinner for nothing, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to come to see you at Oriel College tonight,’ he wrote. ‘Unforeseen and pressing engagements will detain me.’ A few hours later, Fulljames loaded a rifle, leaned out of an upstairs window overlooking University College’s venerable quadrangle and opened fire on fellow undergraduates walking below. Charles Moffat was shot in the neck and abdomen, killing him immediately. Two more students were badly wounded. Fulljames then handed himself in to the dean of the college. He was spared the death penalty by Stafford Assizes on the grounds of insanity and committed to Broadmoor, but released in 1945. He died in Cardiff in 2013 at the age of 90.
Fulljames had been a quiet young man with an excellent academic record, who had recently become moody and apathetic as the bombs rained down on Britain during the autumn of 1940 and the winter and spring of 1941. He was described by his closest friend as being ‘very worried about the war’.
In one respect, his story seems startlingly modern; we tend to think of campus shooting sprees as a contemporary American phenomenon.
But this case was very much of its time. Britain was in crisis, its Army on the run in France and its future uncertain following months of relentless bombardment. For many people, the appalling mental strain was too much to bear.
On the face of it, there was little in common between the Oxford student and an elderly couple living in London’s East End. But their extraordinary responses to national events reveal a great deal about Blitz-era Britain.
Ida and Joseph Rodway had enjoyed a long and happy marriage, but Joseph’s eyes and his mind had begun to fail, forcing his wife to give up her job as a machinist to care for him. On September 21, 1940, a bomb fell near the house where they rented rooms. They were physically unhurt, but had lost everything they possessed.
Ida was frantic. The couple were sleeping on a floor with friends and were about to lose the Labour Exchange benefits of 26 shillings a week to which they’d recently been entitled, leaving them with Joseph’s pension of ten shillings a week to live on — the equivalent of around £20 today.
She later told police she’d thought: ‘What on earth shall I do?’
The answer came to her on the morning of October 1, 1940. Instead of bringing her husband a morning cup of tea, she picked up a chopper and a carving knife. Joseph’s last words to her were ‘What are you doing this for?’ as she hit him with the chopper and then cut his throat with the knife, almost severing his head from his body.
Ida told her trial at the Old Bailey that she believed she had done the right thing — a view from which nothing would shake her. ‘We were bombed out of our home. I had nowhere to go and no one to help me. I was worried to death,’ she said.
When addressing the court, a medical officer made much of Ida’s unswerving belief that she’d acted correctly, suggesting this was strong evidence of her insanity. But given her husband’s mental and physical condition and their desperate prospects, who could say with certainty that she had not done the right thing in the circumstances? Ida died in Broadmoor in April 1946.
It is perhaps difficult to conceive how a domestic incident, however tragic, could cast much light on the era.
But a closer look reveals that Ida and Joseph Rodway, along with John Fulljames and his innocent target, were as much victims of the Blitz as anyone killed by an aerial mine.
The physical wartime destruction of Britain’s towns and cities is well known. But the devastating psychological damage caused to many of its citizens — sometimes lasting a lifetime — is harder to quantify and assess. It is likely, in fact, that the Blitz caused considerably more mental trauma to civilians than has commonly been acknowledged by history.
Clearly the Rodway and Fulljames cases are extreme examples. But Philip Vernon, professor of psychology at Glasgow University, described in October 1941 a national increase in symptoms of depression, lowering of confidence, increases in drinking and smoking and dissociative personality disorders, and a sharp rise in stress-related illness.
Eric Oddy, a policeman in London, recalled suffering from a number of such problems during the Blitz, including an outbreak of boils and the loosening of his teeth. ‘A lot of people had these things,’ he said.
Fellow policeman Les Waters had a four-year- old daughter. ‘The Blitz affected her so bad that her hair was falling out,’ he remembered.
‘I did feel sorry for her. What a place to live, a quarter of a mile from Woolwich Arsenal.’
Fear and shock were the engines driving the country. The novelist and scientist C. P. Snow was dismayed to find himself terrified by the bombing.
He later wrote: ‘When the bombs began to fall on London, I discovered that I was less brave than the average man. I was humiliated to find it so. I could just put some sort of face on it, but I dreaded the evening coming.
‘It was not always easy to accept one’s nature. Somehow one expected the elementary human qualities. It was unpleasant to find them lacking.’ Snow went on to describe how the apparent courage of those around him, including his landlady, made him feel even worse.
On March 3, 1943, panic and terror led to tragedy as a crowd of shelterers was entering Bethnal Green Tube station, spurred on by the unfamiliar sound of a new type of anti-aircraft rocket nearby.
A woman holding a child tripped at the bottom of the stairs leading from the street, and the surge quickly turned into a crush in which 172 people were killed. Another shelterer died later in hospital — all victims of the Blitz’s grip on their minds.
‘It was simply a result of the panic by people coming in from behind,’ recalled James Morten, a police officer at the scene. ‘There were dead bodies piled up from the ground to the roof.’
Viola Bawtree, a 57-year-old woman living in Sutton, Surrey, kept painfully honest diaries that paint a picture of fear and a struggle to retain religious faith. On August 27, 1940, she was undergoing ‘stark terror’ at the sound of the siren, some weeks before the Blitz even officially began.
‘My heart started a furious pounding and I seemed to hear sounds like distant bangs. I lay in abject terror,’ she recorded. Later, in an air raid shelter, she found herself unable to sleep. ‘Between three and four in the morning was the worst part,’ she wrote, ‘when my teeth chattered and I trembled violently.’
It is little wonder that for much of the Blitz, many spent their days in a state of physical and mental exhaustion.
‘For some period, people were walking around like zombies,’ says Roy
Bartlett, then a schoolboy in Ealing, West London.
An investigator for the wartime Mass Observation Project noted after visiting one of London’s busiest Underground station shelters that almost no ‘occupation’ or ‘amusements’ were taking place. Nobody reads a book and ‘the majority just sit doing nothing nothing, staring into space,’ he recorded.
For others, though, the raw, visceral human emotions they were experiencing could be channelled into more positive action.
Rosemary Black was a woman of independent means from a relatively safe area of North London. Caught in the middle of an air raid in the West End one night, she was ushered into Piccadilly Circus Tube station by a police officer.
Having read in newspaper reports that conditions in Tube shelters were ‘civilised’, Rosemary was appalled by what she saw. Every corridor and platform was crowded several deep.
The people seemed to her like ‘worms in a tin’. She was overwhelmed by the heat, the smell, the haggard faces, the crying of babies.
She stared at a woman lying with her head on the bare platform, her face an inch from a huge gob of spit.
Shaken by the experience, Black spent the following day in mental turmoil. ‘I sometimes feel I’d be happier if I were bombed out of house and home instead of always being one of the lucky ones’, she wrote.
Despite being neither injured nor homeless, she resolved to do something, and shortly afterwards became a tea and sandwich dispenser for the YMCA mobile canteen service. For her, simply being confronted by the uncomfortable reality of war was enough to invoke the Blitz spirit.
The artist and sculptor Henry Moore was similarly affected. Though forever associated in the public mind with his reclining figures, these legendary works of art would never have existed had it not been for a chance trip on the London Underground with his wife in September 1940.
Finding themselves caught in the middle of an air raid, they were ordered to stay below ground inside Hampstead Underground station. Moore later described how, irritated and trapped, he began to look around.
‘I could see what have since been called Henry Moore reclining figures,’ he said. ‘I just stood there, watching them — the lonely old men and women, the family groups.’
The next night Moore returned to the Tube station with notebooks in his pocket and began drawing. As the weeks went by, his routine barely changed. He was fascinated to observe the way the war had become etched on people’s faces; by their retreat from civilisation; by the chaos and disorder.
His works remain as a permanent memorial of the era. For many who survived, however, no reminder would be needed — memories of an intensely l i ved period would be indelibly branded on their psyches.
Professor Vernon, in his 1941 report of the psychological effects of the Blitz, described the fate of a young trainee teacher who underwent a personality change following the death of a friend in a bombing raid.
‘She has fulfilled none of her early promise as a teacher,’ wrote Vernon. Her energy and determination had been used up in internal conflict.
The flamboyant raconteur Quentin Crisp spoke of a young friend who suffered a nervous breakdown, spending nights staring at his front door ‘in case they should come in’. The man’s girlfriend eventually committed him to a mental hospital.
‘The war did not cause his madness, but it aggravated it by pressing on the soft wall of a hopelessly unrealistic personality,’ wrote Crisp.
Bernard Kregor, meanwhile, was a young messenger in Forest Gate, East London London. The bombing made him grow up very quickly.
‘I became absolutely a realist,’ he says. ‘The world was a dark place and life was a serious business.’ After the war, Kregor tried to make the best of every day. ‘I never ever take anything for granted,’ he said. ‘That’s how I was, and that’s how I am to this day.’
Bernard Kops, growing up in nearby Stepney, wrote with striking similarity of the Blitz as a time when he ‘stopped being a child and came face to face with the new reality of the world’.
But Kops’s experience was different from Kregor’s. Some people, he said, talk about the Blitz as a time of communal spirit — but that was not his experience. Rather than unity, he remembered only forced humour. It was, he wrote, ‘an era of utter terror, of fear and horror’.
Yet despite the prevalence of fear, the country never descended into the widespread panic or hysteria that the Government had dreaded.
Indeed, according to Professor Vernon’s research, British people demonstrated far greater mental resilience than psychologists could possibly have predicted.
So that though the toll on the minds of its civilians was undoubtedly greater than has been acknowledged by history, there were, nonetheless, fewer psychologicalpsycholog disorders, fewer hospital admi admissions and quicker acclimatisation to bombing than the authorities had preparedp for.
Vernon observ observed that people were gaining resilienc resilience from the company of others, and that war work was serving as ‘an e excellent palliative for potential nervo nervousness’ — an official endorsement, pe perhaps, that the famed ‘Spirit of the B Blitz’ was, indeed, a psychological reality.re
A report from the British Psychological Society in July 1941 on the provision of air raid shelters tended to confirm his view,v suggesting ‘the presence of c crowds and shelter officials reduce reduced anxiety’ and that ‘the provision o of communal shelters rather than in individual ones is, in general, the bes best policy’.
But beyond theset factors, there existed a sense o of relief that bombing was survivable. T This had been no foregone conclusion.conclusion In 1921 the Italian general Giulio Douhet had argued that armies would,wou in future, be superfluous as entire cities were turned to rubble by bombers.
In November 1932, Stanley Baldwin told Parliament: ‘I think it is well for the man in the street to realise there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed.’
Baldwin predicted that when the next war came, European civilisation would be wiped out. Harold Macmillan, writing in 1956, explained his generation thought of air warfare ‘rather as people think of nuclear war today’.
It was against this background that the people of Britain looked to the skies in 1940. And given their doomladen expectations, the Blitz Spirit might be seen as a huge sigh of communal relief.
Events had proved, possibly to everyone’s surprise, that whatever the enemy threw at them, the people of Britain could, in the words of Dorothy Fields’ and Jerome Kern’s 1936 song, pick themselves up, dust themselves off and start all over again.