London: The Biography

It began with attacks upon outer London. Croydon and Wimbledon were hit and, at the end of August, there was a stray raid upon the Cripplegate area. Then, at five p.m. on 7 September 1940, the German air force came in to attack London. Six hundred bombers, marshalled in great waves, dropped their explosive and high incendiary devices over east London. Beckton, West Ham, Woolwich, Millwall, Limehouse and Rotherhithe went up in flames. Gas stations, and power stations, were hit; yet the Docks were the principal target. “Telegraph poles began to smoke, then ignite from base to crown, although the nearest fire was many yards away. Then the wooden block road surface ignited in the searing heat.” The firemen had to race, through fire and perpetual explosion, to reach conflagrations which were almost “out of hand.” “The fire was so huge that we could do little more than make a feeble attempt to put it out. The whole of the warehouse was a raging inferno, against which there were silhouetted groups of pigmy firemen directing their futile jets on walls of flame.” These reports come from Courage High, a history of London fire-fighting by Sally Holloway. One volunteer was on the river itself where “half a mile of the Surrey shore was ablaze … burning barges were drifting everywhere … Inside the scene was like a lake in Hell.” In the crypt of a church in Bow “people were kneeling and crying and praying. It was a most terrible night.”

The German bombers came back the next night, and then the next. The Strand was bombed, St. Thomas’s Hospital was hit together with St. Paul’s Cathedral, the West End, Buckingham Palace, Lambeth Palace, Piccadilly, the House of Commons. Truly to Londoners it seemed to be a war on London. Between September and November almost 30,000 bombs were dropped upon the capital. In the first thirty days of the onslaught almost six thousand people were killed, and twice as many badly injured. On the night of the full moon, 15 October, “it seemed as if the end of the world had come.” Some compared London to a prehistoric animal, wounded and burned, which would disregard its assailants and keep moving massively onward; this was based on the intuition of London as representing some relentless and ancient force which could withstand any shock or injury. Yet other metaphors were in use-among them those of Jerusalem, Babylon and Pompeii-which lent a sense of precariousness and eventual doom to the city’s plight. When in the first days of the Blitz Londoners saw the ranks of German bombers advancing without being hindered by anti-aircraft fire, there was an instinctive fear that they were witnessing the imminent destruction of their city.

The earliest reactions were, according to the reports of Mass Observation and other interested parties, mixed and incongruous. Some citizens were hysterical, filled with overwhelming anxiety, and there were several cases of suicide; others were angry, and stubbornly determined to continue their ordinary lives even in the face of extraordinary dangers. Some tried to be jovial, while others became keenly interested spectators of the destruction all around them, but for many the mood was one of spirited defiance. As one anthologist of London history, A.N. Wilson, has put it, the records of the time reveal “the perkiness, the jokes, the songs” even “in the immediate and garish presence of violent death.”

It is difficult fully to define that particular spirit, but it is of the utmost interest in attempting to describe the nature of London itself. In his definitive study, London at War, Philip Ziegler has suggested that “Londoners made a deliberate effort to seem nonchalant and unafraid,” but this self-control may have been a necessary and instinctive unwillingness to spread the contagion of panic. What if this city of eight million people were to regress into hysteria? It was precisely that fate which Bertrand Russell had predicted in a pamphlet, Which Way to Peace?, in which he anticipated that London would become “one vast bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for peace, the city will be a pandemonium.” It is possible that ordinary citizens, with instincts finer than those of their erstwhile “betters,” knew that this could not be allowed to happen. So the “calmness, the resigned resolution of the Londoner” was the quality which impressed those coming from outside. In all of its periodic crises, and riots, and fires, London has remained surprisingly stable; it has tipped, and tilted, before righting itself. This may in part be explained by the deep and heavy presence of trade and commerce within its fabric, the pursuit of which rides over any obstacle or calamity. One of Winston Churchill’s wartime phrases was “Business as usual,” and no slogan could be better adapted to the condition of London.