The Secret History of the Blitz

Joshua Levine

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781471131028
• eBook ISBN: 9781471131035
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

‘Rigorously researched, yet reads like a novel you can’t put down’ LUCY WORSLEY

‘Joshua Levine is a fantastic and passionate individual. I highly recommend him for the breadth of knowledge he has’ STEVE McQUEEN

The Blitz is one of the most iconic and tumultuous periods in modern British history – and one of the most misunderstood.

From the first page, readers will discover a different story to the one they thought they knew – a tale of extreme lifestyles and unlikely friendships, savage horrors and joyful awakenings. Out of the shadows and the rubble, a modern Britain emerged: new industries were created and unprecedented opportunities arose for women. Yet, at the same time, criminals thrived, bringing uncertainty to the streets. As the nation reinvented itself, its people were pulled in every direction. This is what it was really like.

The Secret History of the Blitz measures the true pulse of a ‘blitzed nation’, revealing how this period of immense social and political change built the Britain we know today.

‘A first-class portrait . . . stuffed with memorable details’
&★&★&★&★&★ SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
 
‘A compelling reassessment of Britain’s darkest hour . . . Meticulously researched and written with great panache’
GILES MILTON

CHAPTER ONE

A Time of Extremes

No single artistic endeavour of the Blitz period – no film, no song, no radio programme – reveals more of the prevailing mood than a stage play called Thunder Rock. Phyllis Warner, a young middle-class Londoner, went to see it in the West End in March 1941, and described it in her diary as going ‘straight to the heart of the times’. It left her feeling ‘equipped for the ordeal that awaits’. She was not alone: ‘This play ought not to be missed,’ wrote George Orwell, reviewing it for Time and Tide magazine. And it became a huge hit – to the surprise of many who could remember the entertainment on offer during the First World War. A walk around the West End in search of a diverting evening in 1916 would have revealed musical revues such as Chu Chin Chow and melodramas like Edward Sheldon’s Romance, but not much in the way of serious theatre. These, though, were different times.

Thunder Rock is a claustrophobic tale of ghosts and politics set on a remote lighthouse on Lake Michigan – not an obvious recipe to inspire the British public. Its central character, disillusioned political journalist David Charleston, has renounced his former life, and retreated to the Thunder Rock lighthouse, where he is able to avoid human company for months on end. When visited by a former colleague, he explains that the problems thrown up by the modern world, with its currency of greed, expansion and destruction, are so insoluble that the only rational response is to run away. ‘I took this job,’ says Charleston, ‘to put myself out of circulation.’

But Charleston is not quite alone: he has created an imaginary world peopled by men and women who drowned during a storm on the lake ninety years earlier. These ‘ghosts’ are Charleston’s companions, his comfort, and the reason he eventually decides to re-enter the real world. They explain how, as they headed west across America in 1849, they were running away from the problems of their time – ignorance, social injustice, misogyny and disease. These problems might have seemed part of the order of nature in 1849 but, Charleston tells them, they would, in time, be tackled and overcome. Why, he asks, did they not stand up and fight when they had the chance? The ‘ghosts’ turn his own argument back on himself: why is he disengaging? Why is he failing to stand up and fight when he has the chance? Emboldened, he resolves to leave the lighthouse and rejoin the 1940 struggle. In a rousing finale, delivered to a former colleague, Streeter, he declares:

We’ve reason to believe that wars will cease one day, but only if we stop them ourselves. Get into it to get out, Street. We’ve got to create a new order out of the chaos of the old, and already its shape is becoming clear. A new order that will eradicate oppression, unemployment, starvation and wars as the old order eradicated plague and pestilences. And that is what we’ve to fight and work for, Street; not fighting for fighting’s sake, but to make a new world of the old. That’s our job, Street, and we can do it.

This is what a besieged Blitz audience wanted to hear. The fight against Hitler, the fight against oppression and chaos, the fight for a better future – these were really one fight, and it was winnable. Hitler was a symptom rather than a cause, and his passing would herald the dawn of the entire world. ‘Quite possibly our present evils, even including war, will disappear like leprosy and bubonic plague,’ wrote Orwell in his review. And it is interesting that this message of shining hope was brought to Britain by an American playwright, Robert Ardrey, just as the United States ambassador Joseph Kennedy – that ‘foul specimen of double-crosser and defeatist’ in the memorable words of Lord Vansittart – had done all he could to keep his country out of the war.

Thunder Rock had flopped in New York, closing after just a week. Ardrey wrote of his own play, ‘If the audience is cynical or satisfied or subjected to no sense of pressing danger, then the play does not exist. It is strictly a play for desperate people.’ It might not have existed for isolationist New Yorkers but it certainly did for blitzed Londoners. As well as for the British government – which paid for Thunder Rock’s transfer from a fringe theatre in Kensington to the West End. Michael Redgrave, the actor playing Charleston, met Treasury officials who told him that the government had bankrolled the play, but that its involvement must be kept secret. Such cloak-and-dagger state involvement might seem anti-democratic but the war years are usually excused: the ultimate survival of democracy allows for its brief suspension. And the fact is that the play did not, in truth, influence the people’s mood; it reflected it.

But it reflected only one element of the mood. As Tom Harrisson – anthropologist and co-founder of Mass-Observation, the extraordinary and controversial wartime barometer of public opinion – has written: ‘At no time in the Second World War generally, and in the Blitz particularly were British civilians united on anything, though they might be ready to appear so in public on certain issues.’

This book is a biography of the period, and as such it will try to look beyond the public faces to the real experiences behind events. It can certainly be difficult nowadays to express a contrary view on controversial events. It sometimes seems that we prefer ideas – as well as people – to be simplified into good or bad, right or wrong, black or white. A person, a dispute, a country, all are too often reduced to tabloid-friendly shorthand. Perhaps we are scared of thinking for ourselves. Perhaps we mistake nuance for weakness. And if this is how we contemplate the present, how much harder to make meaningful sense of the past, that foreign country where things are done differently? Here we often find ourselves guided by consensus; by received wisdoms that have been worn down by the years until they achieve the status of truth. So is it safe to pay heed to received wisdoms about the Blitz? A version of the consensus narrative, the sort one is used to hearing, might run something like this:

The Blitz began on 7 September 1940 with a huge raid on London, as the Luftwaffe changed its focus from trying to destroy the Royal Air Force’s fighter defences, to trying to crush civilian morale with a sustained aerial onslaught on the capital. From that day, London was attacked on fifty-seven consecutive nights. The East End was hit hardest – and responded to the danger and hardship with typical resolute humour – although other areas of London were also badly affected. Buckingham Palace, for example, suffered nine direct hits – allowing the King and Queen to ‘look the East End squarely in the face’. Thanks to grass-roots pressure on the authorities, London Underground stations were opened as deep shelters; inhabitants enjoyed the sense of community, and many were loath to leave at the end of the war. In November, Hitler ordered the Blitz to be widened to target the major ports and industrial cities, in an attempt to shatter the nation’s economy. This phase began with a horrifying attack on Coventry on 14 November. Attacks followed on Southampton, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield.

All the while, Winston Churchill’s carefully crafted words rallied the country, while some unprecedented social effects took hold. For the first time, British people of different classes and localities started talking to each other. Bombing ensured that people not only shared the same danger, but also sheltered together, fire-watched together, and served in the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) and Home Guard together. Evacuation meant that understanding replaced mistrust. Rationing and austerity measures meant that people wore the same clothes, ate the same food, bought the same furniture – and occasionally dabbled in the black market together. Women took jobs which had long been the preserve of men. Legislation was passed ensuring factory workers a guaranteed wage, a newly gained importance from which there would be no going back after the war. A surreptitious social revolution was taking place, paving the way for the Beveridge Report and the post-war welfare state.

On 10 May 1941 London suffered its worst raid. The Luftwaffe took advantage of a full moon and a low tide to start almost 2,500 fires. The House of Commons burnt to the ground, and nearly 1,500 people were killed. And this night, although nobody in Britain knew it at the time, marked the last night of the Blitz. Six weeks later, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his attack on the Soviet Union. He expected a quick victory, which would allow him to return his attention, once again, to Britain. That quick victory, of course, never came. Britain, standing alone with its colonies and dominions, had resisted Adolf Hitler. Before the entry into the war of the United States or the Soviet Union, the citizens of this country had kept the light of liberty shining. They had saved the world for democracy and freedom.

The conclusion of that narrative was invoked by Labour Party leader, Michael Foot, in April 1982, the day after the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands. In supporting military action, Foot proudly reminded the House of Commons of ‘the claim of our country to be a defender of people’s freedom throughout the world, particularly those who look to us for special protection’. Not only did Foot live through the events of 1940 and 1941, he was one of the authors of ‘Guilty Men’, a criticism, published in July 1940, of Britain’s unpreparedness for war. So we should be very careful before dismissing his words simply because they are familiar. They may contain substantial truth.

The consensus is often known today – perhaps harshly – as ‘the myth of the Blitz’, which was the title of a 1991 book by Angus Calder. Calder was keen to stress that his use of the word ‘myth’ did not imply that it was founded on lies, but rather that it presented a purified story, stripped of complexity and conflict, which invoked some truths and ignored others in its effort to appear historically destined. Far from striking the reader as gratuitous revisionism, Calder’s work is notable for his belief that the ‘myth’ is not a crude propagandist distortion. He accepts significant parts of it, and commends it, in his final chapter for promoting ‘a juster and friendlier society’. But it is difficult to disagree that, ultimately, the ‘myth’ does not – cannot – tell the whole story.

But care must be taken when digging deeper into such an emotive, politically charged period of history. The ‘myth’ has guardians fiercer than any dragon slain by Hercules. When it is suggested that people sometimes behaved badly during the Blitz, the guardians are liable to react with fury. An individual born long after 1940 will assert that nothing like that ever happened, while another will scoff that far worse things happen today – as though that has any bearing on the discussion. And, conversely, the suggestion that a ‘Blitz Spirit’ existed also has the power to infuriate. When writer Matt Wingett was putting together a theatre piece set in 1940, an artist friend asked him whether this would be another ‘bloody thing where we all pull together’. The friend, it seemed, had once met an old woman who told him of her miserable experiences during the Blitz. For the friend, there was now only one reality.

So how did the people of Britain behave during the Blitz? Did they sing ‘Roll out the Barrel’ in communal shelters, shaking their fists at ‘bloody Adolf’, before cheerfully dodging the debris next morning on their way to work? Or did they loot from bombed-out houses, fiddle their rations and curse foreigners, while hoping for a negotiated peace that would save their wretched lives?

Faces of ‘Blitz Spirit’. London firemen photographed in May 1941.

The answer, of course, is that they did both, and they did neither. Life was dangerous, hard, and lived in the shadow of invasion and death. It was also exciting and shot through with optimism. People pulled together and helped strangers; they broke rules and exploited neighbours. They bonded with, and stole from one another, they grew to understand, and to dislike each other. They tolerated without complaint and they complained without tolerance. They were scared and fearless, they coped and they cracked. They lost all hope, and they looked to the future. They behaved, in short, like a lot of human beings. Everything they did both confirms and refutes the ‘myth’ of the Blitz.

Over the course of this book, we will meet a widely ranging cast of characters. From the woman who experienced the Blitz as a time of ‘triumph and happiness’ to the man who described it as a time when he learned that ‘the world was a dark place’, to the opportunist who ‘used to pray for a fucking [air raid] warning, ’cos a lot of these shopkeepers used to run out and leave their shops . . .’

But while there was no single reaction nor a reliable formula to predict behaviour, it must always be borne in mind that large numbers of British people were faced with a period of brutal and intense terror that is almost unimaginable today. Even at the time, nobody could predict what months of intensive air raids would do to the morale of a nation. Our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were guinea pigs – and extraordinary things happened to them.

Albert Dance was a lance corporal in the Rifle Brigade who had been one of the last soldiers brought home from Dunkirk. A two-man yacht had spotted him lying asleep on a jetty near La Panne on 4 June. Seven months later, he married his sweetheart, Maisie, a factory worker, at the garrison church in Woolwich. And just a fortnight after that, he was called out of his army billet by an officer who poured him a whisky. ‘I’m sorry,’ said the officer, ‘but your wife has been very badly injured in a bombing raid.’

Maisie Dance was working at the Varley Magnet Company in Woolwich, making radio components. On the night of 28 January 1941 an air raid siren sounded, aeroplanes were spotted overhead, and the foreman sent workers into the shelter. Maisie was one of the last to enter, and as she did, a bomb exploded. She caught the blast. Albert was sent directly to Woolwich where he was escorted by Maisie’s father to St Nicholas’ Hospital. He remembers his initial reaction on seeing his wife: ‘She was a beautiful girl with lovely hair. Her hair was all matted with oil, her face was bashed, stones were embedded in her cheeks. She was crying with pain because her back was shattered and her arm was shattered. It was awful.’

Albert Dance – photographed later in the war as a staff sergeant in the Glider Pilot Regiment.

Albert spent the subsequent days at the hospital, and the nights at his mother’s house. He remembers the smell coming from underneath Maisie’s plaster casts; to distract her from it he started bringing in bunches of lavender. After a while, to his relief, her spirits seemed to lift. But throughout this time, the doctors were able to tell him very little. ‘They didn’t know what she’d be like when she came out,’ he says.

After a few weeks, Maisie was moved to a hospital in Darenth, and Albert returned to his unit. He had been gone just three days when a telegram arrived. Maisie had developed tetanus. Albert hurried back – to find his wife unable to recognise him. Her body was rigid and her face was locked. He fell to his knees and prayed to God to end her suffering. ‘I walked out to get a nurse and a doctor,’ he says, ‘and as I walked back in, she died.’

Albert Dance was interviewed by the Imperial War Museum in 1999, specifically about his experiences at Dunkirk and, later, in the Glider Pilot Regiment. This story of his wife’s death was not the main focus of the interview. It was incidental and nearly lost to the years, as have been countless other stories. And just as there were all sorts of different kinds of behaviour during the Blitz, so there were different reactions to the grief it caused. Joan Batt was living in Coventry in November 1940 when the city centre was all but destroyed. Years later, she said, ‘I still feel hatred for the Germans, they took everything off me.’ Ethel Clarke’s son was killed in an air raid, but she felt empathy with the Germans: ‘They didn’t ask for war. They lost their sons, we lost our sons.’ However understandable it is that a particular reaction be viewed as the only possible or rational one, however neatly it slots into the received wisdom, we must remain alert across a much wider spectrum.

And if it is human nature to fail to acknowledge the attitudes of others, it is equally human nature to become set in unquestioned ways of behaviour. All of us do it all of the time – and it can take a startling event to wake us up to other possibilities. The Blitz was such an event: it shocked people out of their rhythms. It encouraged unaccustomed ‘good’ behaviour and unaccustomed ‘bad’ behaviour – sometimes from the same individual. The Blitz was, above all, a time of extremes. Extremes of experience, extremes of behaviour, extremes of reaction. In all directions.

A very small thing happens in Patrick Hamilton’s beautiful wartime novel, The Slaves of Solitude. Miss Roach, a sensible young middle-class woman, is staying in a boarding house in a suburban town, beyond the reach of the bombs. While living this unfamiliar life, she enters a pub and has a drink. She is alone. There is no one else with her. And then she shares a drink with, and gets drunk with, a male stranger. As a poster girl for rebellion Miss Roach hardly stands with Emily Davison or Rosa Parks – but she is a rebel, all the same. She would not have contemplated such behaviour before the war. The Blitz was a time of intensity; people took risks, and they did new things – to greater and lesser degrees. They related to each other in wholly new ways. And their social, economic and political expectations grew as the world became a less ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Also by Joshua Levine
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Epigraph page
• 1 A Time of Extremes
• 2 Homeless and Helpless
• 3 Going Underground
• 4 Shelter Life
• 5 The Klondyke of the Midlands
• 6 Striking Oil in Sherwood Forest
• 7 The Germans Are Coming
• 8 The Enemy Within
• 9 Bloody Foreigners
• 10 The First Sexual Revolution
• 11 We’re All Criminals Now
• 12 Golden Age of Crime
• 13 It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times
• Acknowledgements
• Sources
• Bibliography
• Picture Credits
• Index
• List of Illustrations