Ultimate capital punishment

The Battle of London 1939— 45: Endurance, Heroism and Frailty under Fire

In 1939, a fifth of the population of England and Wales lived in London, which made it a sitting target for Nazi bombers during the Second World War. And, after the zeppelin raids during the previous war, there was both a public fear and a private fascination with bombing — as H. G. Wells depicted presciently in The Shape of Things to Come.

In the days before the outbreak of war in September 1939, hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied children, mothers with babes-in-arms, the pregnant, the blind, the disabled were evacuated. Universities also moved their operations — SOAS to Cambridge, UCL to Aberystwyth, King’s to Bristol. Both the terror and the calmness of the times are captured in Jerry White’s exemplary social history of London during the war years.

Among the events he describes, are such poignant examples as that of a bomb hitting the sewage system beneath Coronation Mansions in Stoke Newington in October 1940 when 154, mostly Jewish, shelterers were drowned and when, in Catford, Sandhurst Road School was hit as pupils queued for lunch.

White bases his work on personal testimony, diaries and dedicated research — and depicts the seamier side of life as well as the resilience of resistance. All areas and communities suffered terribly, including the Jewish East End, whose destruction was doubtless a priority for Hitler. At the more personal, and squalid, level, within a few months of the outbreak of war, crime reached a seven-year high. Later, 1942 saw a “pilfering epidemic” and schmutter-stealing from Polikoff’s in Hackney was a regular occurrence. “Flash Izzy” Bernfield of Golders Green was sentenced to five years that year for his activities, while Harry Dobkin murdered his wife, Rachel, and was hanged at Wandsworth prison.

Jerry White records a direct hit on the Café de Paris night club in Leicester Square decimating “Snakehips” Johnson’s swing band of black musicians. White notes that “corpses were looted as first aiders fought to save the injured”.

And, though Black GIs were generally welcomed in the UK, there is a remarkable photograph in his book showing Black GIs officially segregated from their White counterparts at an Albert Hall concert.

In 1939, at meetings in Ridley Road and John Campbell Road in Hackney, the British Union of Fascists proclaimed: “It’s a Jew’s war!”

Oswald Mosley, shortly before his arrest and internment, told an audience that “we are fighting for the investments of Jewish financiers”. Mass Observation records indicated that antisemitism actually increased during the war. In May 1945, when unimaginable scenes of Buchenwald and Belsen were revealed to the British public in London cinemas, there was no mention that the victims were Jews.

In contrast, the locals of Little Houghton, near Northampton, generously offered to feed the hungry evacuees from a Hampstead Jewish day school.

The pupils, waiting for kosher food from London, adamantly refused to eat — much to the consternation of the perplexed villagers.

Just another vivid memory among others illuminating Jerry White’s tour de force.