London Danger UXB
When the air raid sirens sounded on the evening of Saturday 9 September, 1940, East Enders were still getting used to enemy action. Though World War II was a year old, and around 800,000 children had been evacuated from Britain’s cities and ports, the bombs hadn’t fallen. That had all changed on the afternoon of 7 September, when 300 bombers bombarded the Port of London … the Blitz had begun in earnest.
Those around Columbia Road in Bethnal Green who didn’t have their own Anderson Shelter in the back garden had a readymade sanctuary in the basement of the moribund Columbia Road Market. The enormous Gothic building had been raised in 1869 by Angela Burdett-Coutts to supply affordable food to impoverished East Enders, but it never thrived. By World War II it had been closed for more than half a century, the market moving to the streets on and around Columbia Road.
The cellars formed one of the makeshift mass shelters, similar to the Tube platforms at Bethnal Green. And it should have been safe enough, but for a tragic fluke. A 50kg bomb jettisoned by a German plane dropped straight down an air shaft and into the shelter below. Columbia Road certainly wasn’t a target, but German planes would typically loop north-west from the docks, over Victoria Park and then Bethnal Green before heading home. As they did so, they would discharge any unused bombs.
58 people were lost, among them the four siblings of Ellen Ackred (nee Neport). Rene (15), Joyce (13), Samuel (5) and Derek (3), were killed outright. Ellen, who was 17, was at the cinema, and brother James also escaped the disaster.
The bitter irony was, of course, that had the children stayed at home in Baroness Road, they would have been fine. Ellen takes up the story. ‘My mother never recovered. We found her one day in the street - we always tried to keep an eye on her after that - and asked her where she was going.’ Searching her handbag, the family found a carving knife. The distraught Mrs Neport told them she was heading for Victoria Park, which as well as being the main anti-aircraft gun (Ack-Ack) emplacement had been converted into a POW camp for Italian and German captives. ‘They took my children, I’m going to take some of them,’ she said. The family quietly led her home.
It was just the start of the Blitz, which would hit London every night bar one until mid-November 1941. After that intensive bombardment, the second phase started, with heavy bombing through to February 1941. Now the Luftwaffe began to target other industrial centres, cities and ports. Prime targets were Liverpool, Birmingham, Plymouth, Bristol, Glasgow, Southampton, Coventry, Hull, Portsmouth, Manchester, Belfast, Sheffield, Newcastle, Nottingham and Cardiff. And still London was hit - one of the worst days was 29 December 1940, the so-called Second Great Fire of London, when St Paul’s survived, miraculously, amidst the devastatation. Phase 3 ran from February to May 1941, with civilians now firmly in the Luftwaffe’s sights. The last big attack on the capital, 10 May 1941, was also the worst, with 1436 killed and 1800 seriously injured. Buildings including the Houses of Parliament, St James’s Palace (though not Goering’s prize target of Buckingham Palace) and the British Museum were also hit.
On 7 September 430 had died with many more injured. The following day 412 died. By the end of the Blitz some two million houses (60 per cent of them in London) had been destroyed, 60,000 civilians killed and another 87,000 seriously injured. Most of them were in London, and a large proportion of those in the East End. Until midway through World War II, more women and children in Britain had been killed than British soldiers.
As the war went on, there were sporadic further attacks, including the Baedker Blitz of 1942 (which targeted historic cities including Bath, Canterbury in York in a morale-shredding exercise) and the Baby Blitz of 1944, which again targeted London (though with scant accuracy of success). The next airborne horror to be visited on the East End was that of the flying bomb, the V1 and V2 rockets first hitting London in 1944.
Many people then and since have wondered why Londoners were left so exposed. An Anderson Shelter was fine for resisting flying rubble, but corrugated steel was little protection against anything heavier. Morrison Shelters, designed for use indoors, were arguably a little better. The Catalan engineer, Ramon Perera had built hundreds of public shelters in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. Despite heavy bombing by Franco’s planes, casualties were minimal. Perera escaped to London just before World War II and offered his expertise to the British Government. The authorities demurred, opting for the Anderson Shelter and makeshift mass shelters instead. How many lives would have been saved had they taken Perera seriously? We’ll never know.
Columbia Market was finally demolished in 1958, and Ellen Ackred only returned to the site in the last few years, though she had never moved far away. ‘It still affected me … I couldn’t bear it,’ she admits. But of one thing she is sure: those 58 lives cruelly snatched in the early days of the Blitz should never be forgotten.