How Britain Kept Calm and Carried On (3 page)

Altogether some 43,000 civilians died during the Blitz on Britain. Almost 140,000 more were injured, and more than a million homes were damaged or destroyed. Yet far from dampening the spirits
of British men, women and children, this danger and deprivation served only to strengthen their resolve. And it was laughter that seemed to be the national anaesthetic. It helped the British
through the bombing, not least because they could chuckle at themselves, which was just as well when one considers what outsiders sometimes thought of them.

According to Walter Graebner, London correspondent of the American news magazine
Time
, the besieged Londoner was a very special creature:

So Londoners just had to laugh at themselves. As one newspaper commented of Graebner’s description, it conjured up an astonishing picture of a race of inscrutable dwarfs, crouching
philosophically under a steady stream of water pouring from a busted ceiling, surrounded by dripping walls and moving only for an occasional walk in the world’s worst climate.

The paper ended: ‘Mr Graebner’s Londoner seems a cross between a happy alligator in a damp cave and an undersized tramp asleep in a tea-chest.’

That they were certainly not – but when it came to raising a laugh with a quip, there wasn’t a breed to beat them. When an old man filed into an air-raid shelter one night, carrying
under one arm a long-handled spade with which to deal with incendiary bombs, and under the other a harp – presumably for a little entertainment – one cockney said to her friend:
‘Blimey, there’s a bloke wot’s backed ’imself both ways.’

As far as Britain was concerned, life had to go on as normally as possible. Nowhere was this more apparent than at golf clubs where special rules had to be devised to deal with
the interruption caused by air raids.

In 1940, Richmond Golf Club in Surrey conceded: ‘In all competitions, during gunfire, or when bombs are falling, players may take cover without penalty for ceasing play.’

However, another rule said: ‘A player whose stroke is affected by simultaneous explosion of bomb or shell, or by machine-gun fire, may play the ball from the same place. Penalty: 1
stroke.’

A typical example of golfers’ sangfroid was shown by the following rules: ‘The position of known delayed-action bombs are marked by red flags at a reasonable – but not
guaranteed – safe distance.’ And: ‘A ball moved by enemy action may be placed as near as possible where it lay, or if lost or destroyed, a ball may be dropped not nearer the hole,
without penalty.’ Well, you couldn’t say fairer than that.

Indeed, British sport in general took the Second World War in its stride. In July 1944, at Lord’s, a cricket match between the army and the Royal Air Force was stopped when a doodlebug was
heard approaching the ground. The players lay on the turf, and spectators disappeared under the stands. But the rocket flew over the ground and landed in Regent’s Park. Middlesex and England
opening batsman Jack Robertson dusted himself down and celebrated the narrow escape by hitting the next ball for six. An outraged
Wisden
, the cricketer’s ‘Bible’, later
reported that this was ‘the first flying-bomb to menace Lord’s during the progress of a match’.

Watching football as the Battle of Britain raged overhead could be a tiresome diversion. The Home Office had ruled that play must be stopped whenever the air-raid alert sounded. Clubs attempted
to counter this with a system of ‘spotters’; even after the alert sounded, play would continue until the spotter on the roof of the stadium signalled the actual presence of enemy
aircraft.

It wasn’t just the bombs that caused problems, though. The blackout was as much a nuisance to sportsmen as it was to the general public. But they coped with it. Southampton FC’s
coach driver, returning from a game at Cardiff, became lost in the blackout, then he hit a brick wall, and finally the vehicle suffered a burst tyre. The players were forced to spend the night in
the coach, not arriving back in Southampton until lunchtime the following day. The players of Wycombe Wanderers had probably the worst experience. After a Great Western Combination game at Slough,
the Wycombe team had to walk the fifteen miles back to High Wycombe.

The blackout also caused problems for players training after work. Harold Atkinson of Tranmere Rovers recalled the dangers: ‘The part-time training was on a Tuesday and a Thursday and you
ran around the ground at your own risk. We used to sprint down the side of the pitch in the dark, and there were more injuries caused by training in the blackout than there were in proper
matches.’

Young and old, people coped. Writing to America in thanks for Bundles for Britain – a collection of clothing and other items sent from the USA for those bombed out of their homes in
Britain – an elderly Scottish woman said: ‘When the air-raid siren goes, I take down the Holy Bible and read the twenty-third Psalm, then I put up a wee prayer, take a wee dram of
whisky, get into bed and pull up the cover. Then I tell that Hitler to go to hell.’

Going the rounds in Hull – as we have already seen, the second most bombed city in England, with ninety-five per cent of its buildings damaged or destroyed – was this definition of
the perfect air-raid warden:

The war often brought out the best in people, especially during the Blitz. One North-East farmer, anxious not to abuse the system for claiming compensation for damage, registered his claim thus:
‘Repairing broken glass in piggery £3; replanting hedge £1; bomb crater fifteen feet deep by thirty feet across is well placed for making a new farm pond that will be entirely
acceptable to animals.’ The Blitz certainly produced some wonderful characters.

In December 1944, Chaplain K. Evans, RNVR, who had worked as a curate in London during the earlier war years, told the
West Australian
newspaper about the time he asked an elderly
member of his Bermondsey congregation how she managed to remain so calm at what was the height of the Blitz. She told him: ‘I comes in, I sits down and reads me book. I says me prayers. I
says: “To ’ell with ’itler,” and then I goes to sleep.’ Like that Scottish lady, that was her recipe for a restful night.

Relating another anecdote, Evans said that when a stick of bombs was dropped it was often possible to count them and estimate where the later ones would land. This happened once when he was
conducting a service. The congregation counted. The sixth bomb fell on one side of the church, the seventh landing on the other side in the road. But in relating the story to a friend afterwards,
one old lady said: ‘And when we got outside there was the creator right in the middle of the road!’ On occasions, incendiary bombs were referred to as ‘insanitary’
bombs.

On another occasion during a raid, the curate went with an ambulance to a public house that had received severe damage. Right in front, and in the middle of the road, a woman was sitting
laughing uproariously, an empty glass in her hand. The blast had sucked her out of the door, and when the curate asked her why she was laughing, she replied: ‘Blimey, that’s the first
time I’ve been out of the pub before closing time.’

Bombed-out shops and stores managed to carry on, with notices such as ‘More Open than Usual’ advertising that they were still trading, although when beer was in short supply, one
publican’s chalked notice told would-be customers simply: ‘Sold Out. Gone Out.’ Another sign, spotted on a bombed-out store, read: ‘This is nothing! You ought to see what
the RAF have done to our Berlin branch!’

And when passers-by saw an office manager and his secretary seated on the pavement outside what was left of their office, with a typewriter, cups of tea and a plate of biscuits on their shared
desk, they knew that they were keeping calm and carrying on.

In August 1940, Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Ray Sprigle was in England to report on the war and to see just how Britain was keeping calm and carrying on. That August, filing a
story from ‘the South-West Front’, Sprigle told of an experience he underwent when the air-raid siren sounded as he slept in his hotel.

Sprigle stumbled down to the air-raid shelter, to find that he was the first to arrive. It was, wrote Sprigle, a ‘de-luxe’ shelter with white-topped tables set out in an adjoining
room that also contained a piano.

One by one, the other guests came in, quite calmly, and sat around while the manager’s wife poured them tea as the raid went on overhead.

Eventually one guest, uninvited, began to play the piano, with one finger, knocking out probably the only tune he knew.

‘Wouldn’t it be grand if Jerry dropped a bomb on him?’ said another guest. That did not daunt the player, but then one lad in the corner decided to compete by doing impressions
of a cat and dog fight, and a hen laying an egg. Then everyone started singing, first ‘South of the Border’ and then ‘The Last Roundup’.

The hotel manager told Sprigle that he recently visited a friend. He arrived to find the friend picking through the wreckage of the family home. When the previous air raid had started, the man
had put his wife, two daughters and the family’s two pet dogs under the stairs, while he and his small son sheltered in the sitting room. A bomb had come straight down the chimney.

The man said that he had shaken his arms and legs and ‘as none fell off, I figured I was all right’, and then he extracted his wife, daughters and dogs from under the stairs that had
collapsed on top of them. Remarkably, none of the family was injured. As they emerged into the street, an old man was walking past. He stopped to survey the wreckage of a pub on the corner that had
also suffered a direct hit.

‘Hell of a thing,’ said the passer-by, ‘when an Englishman can’t get his dram or his beer because of that blighter in Berlin.’

‘All over England,’ wrote Sprigle, ‘people are taking these air raids in their stride . . .’

I was working in London, in Cannon Street, at the time of the doodlebugs – the flying bombs that came over, then cut out, and fell to earth. It was nerve-wracking. Once
that engine stopped, you just waited for the explosion.

One lunchtime, people were streaming out of their offices when we heard one coming over, so we just dived onto the pavement – which was muddy as it had been pouring with rain – and
then there was silence, followed by this almighty bang a couple of streets away. We all got up and started off again when over came another. Same thing – dive on the pavement, silence, big
explosion.

As I was getting up yet again, a little chap in front of me, wearing a cap, was also climbing to his feet. He looked at me and said: ‘Gettin’ kinda ’umdrum, ain’t
it?’

Etta Stern, Surbiton