Blitz Kids, page 45
A few were lucky. Alf Morris was among them:
The lady Air Raid Warden, Mrs Chumley, could see the plight I was in. She was a big woman, she laid across these people and her hand went down – wallop! – on my head. She grabbed my hair and pulled and pulled. I screamed. It didn’t free me. I was calling, ‘Help, Mum! Dad! Aunt Lill.’ I was calling for everybody. ‘Please, please, help me.’ So she laid across the bodies, put her hands under my arms and yelled, ‘Come out!’ and pulled me out. As I came out I felt my feet going across the faces of the dead and dying. She sat me down and put her finger to my face, ‘Go downstairs and you say nothing about what’s going on here! Nothing! Go on, downstairs!’ Honestly, I was bewildered. I was crying for my mother. I walked downstairs trying to compose myself.
His legs grazed and trembling, his small frame almost crushed, Alf made his way down the escalator.
As the scale of the disaster unfolded, the local ARP post was alerted and those on duty rushed to the tube station. With them was fifteen-year-old James Hunt. He was shocked to see the crushed bodies that were blocking the stairwell. Unable to show fear, he set to helping pull the dead and injured from the mass of tangled bodies. Being young and small he was unable to lift the older people and concentrated on the children. He noticed how the babies and children he carried had turned blue.
Among those who had survived the crush was Peter Perryment: ‘I don’t know how long I was there. After a while they started moving all the dead bodies behind me. I didn’t know they were dead. A policeman got hold of me from the stairs and took me across the road to the railway arches.’ As they crossed the road, Peter could see lines of corpses being laid out on the pavement. The corpses were piled on carts then taken to the mortuary at Whitechapel hospital. Once that was full, the bodies were taken to the nearby St John’s Church.
Arriving at the safety of the shelter, the policeman gave Peter a clear instruction: ‘He told me to wait in the air raid shelter there until the “all clear” goes. So I did. I stayed there till it was time to come out.’5 It was the same for so many. They were told not to talk about what they had seen and experienced and did as they were told. It was the start of a process that kept the story under wraps for many, many years. After the ‘all clear’ sounded, Reg Baker and a mate just went home, whilst his father went to the pub, as if nothing had happened. They realized something was wrong but didn’t hang around to find out. It was not until the next day that Baker’s mate discovered his own sister was among the casualties.
Among the survivors was Reg Baker’s sister. She had been out with her boyfriend when the alarm had sounded and had gone to the station to take cover. She had arrived at the entrance just as the people at the bottom had collapsed and the crush had started. She was one of the last to join the crush, having been pushed by the crowd on to the top of the pile of bodies, just one of many whose weight had helped crush those beneath them. As she lay there in the darkness she thought, ‘Ain’t it soft?’, unaware that she was lying atop the dead and dying.
At the bottom of the escalators Alf Morris was:
… crying my eyes out, I was looking for my mother. I pressed the bell and the door opened. He said, ‘What’s the matter, son?’ I was just crying, ‘I want my mum!’ I just wandered off and walked into an opening and got to my bunk and sat there. I was crying and shaking. I was too frightened to say a word. My legs were all grazed but I was more concerned about my mother and my aunt. I was crying but I wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened.
Ten minutes later his aunt arrived: ‘She’d also been told to stay quiet. Her stockings had been torn off and her black astrakhan coat and shoes had been left in the crush. We looked at one another and wondered where my mum was. We just held each other and kept crying.’ In the fullness of time, Alf realized how important it had been that those who escaped the crush had kept quiet that night. It was vital that further panic was prevented: one disaster was enough.
Although Alf Morris had experienced the horror of being crushed, he still had no idea of the scale of the disaster. The first sign that it was serious came when an air raid warden, a fireman and a policeman appeared from the tunnel, walked past the bunks and made their way up into the station. Everyone wondered why had they come that way? But then, the lights went down for the night and no one said anything else. Instead, they just tried to sleep, their minds full of dire thoughts about what might have happened. For Alf and his aunt, the morning couldn’t come quick enough.
Another of the witnesses was sixteen-year old Bernard Kops. He had not reached the tube station, instead having taken shelter in a doorway as soon as he heard the explosions of the new anti-aircraft guns. As a result, he had missed the disaster, only reaching the shelter once the dead were already being brought out. As he approached, people were talking about what had happened, with the rumour-mill suggesting hundreds were dead. All the teenager could think about was whether his mother and sister were among them.
As Bernard got nearer he could see crowds of rescue workers, policemen and air raid wardens. There were ambulances all around the entrance. Yet for all the evidence of the unfolding disaster, to Bernard it seemed the area was strangely silent. He waited for what seemed like hours as the bodies were brought out, all the time fearing he might spot family members. When he eventually got to see inside the entrance to the tube station, he was struck by the sight of clumps of hair that had been torn from the heads of the victims.6
So the night passed peacefully for those within the tube station. The next morning, when the lights went on as normal, people started to go upstairs ready to start another day. Alf Morris and his aunt left the shelter as soon as possible, with her walking barefoot up the stairs. No one made any announcements and there was nothing to suggest what had happened, except for an ominous pile of shoes near the top stairs. Lill stopped and searched for her shoes, put them on and continued the short walk home. Alf continued to keep tight lipped about what he had seen: ‘It was a different era. You didn’t ask questions, you said nothing. When you were a boy, you just shut it. We didn’t realize that people were missing.’
As they walked back to their home, they had no idea of what they were returning to. All they knew was that something terrible had happened and that the rest of the family had been somewhere behind them. Opening the front door, they were overwhelmed by a sense of relief: the whole family was waiting for them. His mother had heard the guns start firing and had abandoned any idea of reaching the station, instead taking shelter with the baby in the crypt of a Catholic church. His father, who had been last to leave the house, missed her at the church and continued to the shelter, arriving there in time to see that the police and the wardens had sealed off the station. When he asked what had happened, he was sent away. Like his son the next morning, he walked home imagining the worst. For the Morris family, the first sign that something had gone seriously wrong came when an expected visitor did not arrive that morning: ‘My mother looked after this girl, Vera Trotter. At eight o’clock she didn’t arrive. Mum normally took her to school when her mother went to work.’ As the day went on the sense of unease heightened.
Men and women went to work as normal, only to notice that familiar faces were missing. Schoolchildren entered classrooms where there were more empty desks than normal. Yet no one said a thing. Boys like Alf Morris and Peter Perryment, who had been pulled alive from the heaps of crushed bodies, did as they had been told the night before: they said nothing. As Alf recalled: ‘Everybody was mystified – people were missing from work or didn’t turn up at work. But we just got on with life.’
But the locals soon realized something was wrong. In Reg Baker’s class at Cranbrook School two brothers had been killed, part of a family that lost three generations in the disaster. At home he discovered both a neighbour and her grandchild had died. In one class, five children were found to be missing. Because many of the teachers came from outside the area, they had no idea there had even been an incident and started to ask the whereabouts of the missing children. Whilst the children continued to be silent in front of the teachers, by break time that morning they began to ask: ‘Where’s so and so?’
The failure of Iris Perryment and her seven-year old cousin Barbara to return home spurred the family into action. Whilst Peter went to school as normal, his eighteen-year-old brother Alfie, who was waiting to be called up into the Army, joined his mother and aunt and went round the local hospitals. But there was no sign of the girls. The mystery went unsolved until Peter’s father returned from work:
He said, ‘Where’s Iris and Barbara?’ We told him we didn’t know. So he went to Bethnal Green hospital. They told him that people had died at the tube and they had got some of the bodies in St John’s Church. So Dad went there and found my sister. He came home, and my aunt said, ‘Did you see Barbara?’ He said, ‘No,’ and told Alfie to go and look. He went there and saw a little black pair of shoes. He told them, ‘Turn that one over.’ And it was our cousin Barbara.7
It was the same situation in the Morris household: ‘When my dad got back from work he wanted to know where Vera had got to. We told him we didn’t know.’ Knowing that Vera’s father was away serving in the Army, he knew that something had to be done. It was only right that someone should try to discover if Vera and her mother were among the casualties. At first he toured the local hospitals, but could find neither of them. But as he continued his search, he began to realize the scale of the disaster. So he tried the mortuaries: ‘My father had pulled a nail from Vera’s shoe a fortnight previous, so he recognized her shoes. But her face was unrecognizable. It was the same for everyone. They only recognized them by their shoes and their clothes. Vera’s mother was beside her.’ When he got home, he walked up the passage and then sat on the step. What happened next shocked young Alf Morris. In an era when fathers showed little emotion, his father sat and cried his eyes out. Then he turned to his family and said: ‘I’ve found them, they’re both dead.’
That experience was shared throughout this close-knit community. In total 173 people had died, sixty of them children. Everyone seemed to know someone who had died. For two weeks there were daily funerals as families laid their loved ones to rest. Mothers were buried alongside children, some of whom had been crushed to death in the arms of the protective parent. All around the world, husbands and fathers serving in the armed forces received the notification that their loved ones had been killed. When Vera Trotter’s father was told his wife and daughter were both dead, he asked for compassionate leave, only to be refused on the grounds that he had no one left to go home to. It was a terrible end to a terrible incident. As Alf Morris later recalled, the tragedy had affected so many people in the area and had scarred so many lives: ‘It rocked the East End.’
Notes
1. This bombed block was the one Alf Morris had been living in.
2. Annie Amelia Baker v Mayor, Aldermen and Burgesses of Bethnal Green [1945] 1 All ER 135.
3. Annie Amelia Baker v Mayor, Aldermen and Burgesses of Bethnal Green [1945] 1 All ER 135.
4. Annie Amelia Baker v Mayor, Aldermen and Burgesses of Bethnal Green [1945] 1 All ER 135.
5. Peter Perryment met the policeman again fifty years later at an event to mark the anniversary.
6. The experience stayed with Bernard Kops for many years. In 1975 he wrote a television play, It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow, about the disaster.
7. When Peter Perryment’s mother died forty years later, they found the coat Iris had worn that night in her wardrobe.
CHAPTER 20
In Every Port …
‘The best part of going to sea was being able to get a few hours ashore and live it up … one did not get a great deal of sleep in places like New York.’
Christian Immelman, ship’s apprentice
‘It was just one dead town … There were no restaurants. There was no food on the shelves, nowhere to have a coffee. It was a bleak, miserable place.’
Murmansk, described by Leslie Forrest, fifteen-year-old Canadian galley boy1
Though still boys, the teenagers of the Merchant Navy and Royal Navy were exposed to a world few could have imagined before the war. Life at sea in wartime soon made the boys grow up. Whether at sea or in port, they started to act like men. Going to sea at sixteen made Raymond Hopkins a regular in the pub whenever he reached dry land: ‘I felt grown-up. No one asked me how old I was. I went on the booze a lot. It was our attitude. We thought we’ll live today because we might be dead tomorrow. It was the only way. At sea, you had to think that way. If you worried about it you’d get nowhere.’ His attitude reflected that of men who’d been at sea for many long years: ‘Why worry? It was one of those things. We just wanted to get to the destination and have a drink.’ In the words of Arthur Harvey, who went to sea aged fifteen: ‘We didn’t have a teenage life, like they have nowadays. We didn’t even see the world – we just saw the ports. But we were privileged.’
Reaching foreign ports, the boys marvelled at what they saw and experienced. There was something about arriving in port – whether overseas or on leave – that had them putting on their best uniforms or clothing before going ashore. For boys in the Royal Navy, there was something dandyish about their uniforms: unlike the Army or RAF whose uniforms were modern, sailors were dressed in clothing that had gone unchanged since the nineteenth century. Reg Osborn described dressing for shore leave:
our tailor-made tiddley, going-on-leave, number ones had wider bell bottoms, the front opening of the jacket cut much wider, and a ‘bow wave’ carefully introduced to the front of one’s cap … the carefully tied bow of the cap ribbon instead of being, regulation-wise, over the top of the left ear was positioned near to the HMS, or ship’s name, as possible.2
It was different for merchant sailors, who could wear what they wanted, so suits were pulled from lockers and pressed, shoes were shined and they were ready to ‘hit the town’. As they adapted to life at sea, the boys wanted to be like the men they sailed with. On Bernard Ashton’s first voyage his ship stopped to refuel at Las Palmas in Tenerife. Eight of the sailors, Bernard included, bought canaries in bamboo cages, paying for them in cigarettes. For the rest of the voyage, the birds all lived in the working alleyway and, as deck boy, Bernard had the job of cleaning out their cages and feeding and watering them. On a later trip, he even took home two monkeys.
As the Rochester Castle made its way around Africa, Bernard began to pick up tricks from the old hands on the crew: ‘I was quite green – but I learned as I went along.’ At some African ports the crew sold spare, worn-out ropes to the locals, making their deals over the rails of the ship. As the saying went, it was ‘money for old rope’. In other ports the locals were eager to buy empty jam tins or glass jars. He noticed how his fellow sailors drew all their rations, whether they needed them or not, saving them up to trade in port.
Reaching the Sudan, Bernard began to experience a world he had only previously seen in the books that had inspired him. As the ship was loaded with animal hooves to be taken back to England to make explosives, he watched the men working on the dockside. They were gangs of ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzies’, skinny, almost-skeletal men, their hair matted with mutton fat. To Bernard, these were men of legend, straight out of the books of his childhood, the warriors who had defeated General Gordon. At seventeen, the poverty in African ports made Edward Ford realize how lucky he had been to have been born British. Even working long hours on a crowded ship for pitiful pay in dangerous waters seemed better than a life of poverty. In Lagos, Edward was shocked to see the method used for loading peanuts. Two planks were positioned between the quay and the ship. Lines of men ran up one plank, poured their peanuts into the hold, then ran down the second plank. The work was relentless: the men were paid by the sackload and were desperate to earn as much as possible.
These exotic, yet shocking scenes, continued once the boys went ashore. Alan Shard recalled the scenes as he left his ship in Egypt:
Alexandria was a fascinating place full of crooks. Lots of pimps tugging at your arm at every turn. Every nationality practised the ancient trade. The street was named Sister Street. Those who weren’t pimps were trying to sell you something else. Stepping outside the dock gates in our whites we were besieged by urchins in the seven to nine age-bracket asking if you wanted a shoeshine in spite of the fact that they were already shining. Didn’t matter, they persisted … they received a kick up their backside. Often as not, this resulted in razor blades being produced and your arms being slashed before they melted into an alley.
The cadet recalled a visit to another Egyptian port:
three of us were inadvertently steered into a dubious dive just in time to witness a riveting demonstration performed by two young ladies. We skinned out smartly, with images of ‘Cancellation of Indentures’, but not before sighting the likes of what I had never heard of – nor seen since. There was also supposed to have been a performance with a donkey, but it was off that night, probably with a ‘headache’. Our innocence was still intact.
In Cairo Boy Bugler Robin Rowe noticed that, when the sailors weren’t looking, the shoeshine boys threw camel dung at their boots, thus ensuring they would need to be shined.
Brothels and bars where they could pick up girls were an obvious lure for the boys. After listening to the lewd tales of their fellow seamen, it didn’t take much to entice them ashore. As an increasingly confident young cabin boy, John Chinnery attempted to leave the ship with his crewmates as they made their way ashore to sample the delights of a foreign port. He thought he was a good-looking lad and had put on his best uniform, complete with white scarf, to go out to meet girls in the port. As he was leaving the ship, the Dutch captain called John back, telling him: ‘Not you, young man: books.’ The captain felt responsible for the young teenager and didn’t want him exposed to the dangers of disease or the attentions of violent pimps. So he was kept onboard to study seamanship whilst the rest of the crew enjoyed themselves ashore. In time, he discovered he didn’t need brothels and that, as a handsome and confident teenager, he could find all the female company he needed without paying. When he joined his crewmates in brothels he preferred to sit and chat with the madam whilst his mates availed themselves of the services on offer.
