Underground, Overground (30 page)

Pick was dismissed from the Ministry of Information, and he died of a brain haemorrhage in 1941. In
London: The Unique City
(1934) Steen Eller Rasmussen wrote: ‘The moment you enter the London Underground you feel, though you may not be able to explain exactly how you feel it, that you are moving in an environment of order, of culture.' You feel the same today, and it is the true memorial of Frank Pick.

In the Second World War the London Underground ‘did its bit' and entered wartime mythology by providing sheltering space for Londoners, but these shelterers were an embarrassment to the authorities. The habit of taking shelter in the Underground had developed in the First World War, when the stations were made available from the time of the first Zeppelin raids on London in May 1915. There was far less bombing of London in the First World War than in the Second, and yet a higher peak of sheltering was achieved. As Stephen Halliday writes in
Underground to Everywhere
, ‘A final sequence of raids in February 1918 prompted as many as 300,000 people to seek shelter in the Tubes on a single night – almost twice the number recorded in the much worse conditions of the Blitz twenty-two years later.'

There had been jingoistic criticism of the shelterers of the First World War – cowardice was alleged – whereas it would be nearer the mark to say that those of the next war were the objects of patrician distaste. They were like the guest at a party
who won't leave. Also, they'd invited themselves. At the start of the war the authorities feared that, once people went down into the Tubes, they might not come out. And it was more important to keep the trains running than to provide shelter for the masses. Tube stations packed with snoring Londoners? Here was the very opposite of ‘passenger flow', and so signs were put up outside the stations, announcing that they were not to be used as shelters. The Communist Party campaigned against the ban and so struck a chord. After all, for the previous thirty years Londoners been taught by Frank Pick to think of the Tubes as a civilised place of refuge – a home from home, ‘Where it is Warm and Bright', as a poster of 1924 had put it.

When the Blitz began, in September 1940, the pressure mounted, and on the evening of 19 September there was a new kind of evening rush hour, with people besieging the stations and threatening to storm them. So the public were admitted to (as it would turn out) every one of the deep-level Tube stations. But men were encouraged to think it was beneath them to shelter in the Tubes. They were urged to ‘Be a man and leave it to them' – meaning women, children and the infirm. To the patrician mind there was really no need for anyone to shelter in the Tubes. People ought to have their Anderson shelters in their gardens – named after the very politician, Sir John Anderson, who as Lord Privy Seal had originally determined that Underground stations were not to be used as shelters. But the shelterers usually didn't have gardens. Or they could use the indoor Morrison shelters, reinforced table-like arrangements named after our dapper friend Herbert Morrison. The Morrison shelter never caught on, perhaps because it would only come into play if the user's house were collapsing about his ears – a depressing scenario to have to envisage. But notwithstanding their snubbing of his shelter, Morrison, as Home Secretary in Churchill's government, became a champion of the troglodytes.

They were given some of the comforts of home – three-tier bunk beds, for example – and they were supplied with food and drink by catering trains: Tube Refreshment Specials. When I say ‘food and drink', I mean food and tea, which was served in giant, two-gallon teapots or, as revealed by a photograph in
London Transport at War
(1978) by Charles Graves, a watering can. People also bought their own comestibles: bottles of ginger pop, jam rolls, meat pies. Graves writes:

One old woman proudly announced that she had brought enough cheese and tea-cakes for a fortnight, and indeed it was noted that she did not leave the East End railway platform which she had chosen for fourteen days, except to get a ten-minutes breath of fresh air when there was no air-raid in progress.

The Tube stations offered warmth, camaraderie. You didn't pay for light or heat; there were, in fact, few overheads, except the one that really mattered. There were two peaks of sheltering: the first, and highest, was during the Blitz; the second during the rain of V1 and V2 rockets in 1944. A count taken one night early in the Blitz found 177,000 Londoners sheltering in the Tubes. It is said that about 4 per cent of Londoners took to the Tube at some point during the Blitz.

You could book your space in advance by acquiring a ticket (no charge was made, of course) that allocated you a space on a platform. The trains continued to run – as the slogan had it, ‘London Transport Carried On' – and the late and early ones, which disturbed the sleepers, were much resented.

Let us ride the last train of the evening, as it rumbles past those crowded platforms. The windows of the trains were covered with mesh, to collect broken glass should a blast occur. But people would tear away this stuff, even though – or perhaps
because – they were counselled against doing so by ‘Billy Brown of London Town', a small bowler-hatted prig depicted on public information posters, and a successor to that earlier, un-named paragon, ‘The Man Who Always Took His Place In The Queue' etc. And the subterranean platforms
were
lit (sometimes too brightly for the sleepers, so they would tie bits of cloth around the shades); therefore we ought to see
something
.

Wartime sheltering in Underground stations was at first permitted only with the greatest reluctance. It was feared that once the working classes went underground, they'd never come up again. Yet, for years beforehand, Londoners had been encouraged to think of the Underground as a place of cosiness and security, ‘Where it is always warm and bright'.

We might, for instance, see shelterers sleeping on deckchairs on the platforms. We might see one shelterer not sleeping but scratching him- or herself, because the humid Underground (‘It's warmer down below', remember) harboured a type of flea,
culex molestus
, which must have thought that all its Christmases had come at once when the shelterers moved in. We might see a shelterer spitting, and one of the paid wardens (there was one at every station, working alongside volunteers) reproving him. We might see card schools or chess games in progress, because most of the shelterers knew each other … or we might see somebody sitting up in one of the three-tier bunks and reading one of the journals specially produced by and for the shelterers. We might see Henry Moore – although he wasn't famous then – drawing the shelterers, creating the
Shelter Sketchbooks
that
made
him famous. He said the holes through which the trains disappeared reminded him of the holes in his sculptures. There might be a piano on the platform, and a singalong taking place. Then again, members of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and Arts might be playing gramophone records of classical music, seeking to better their captive audience, but apparently their efforts were not always appreciated. (I am reminded of a late night conversation I had with a ticket gate attendant at Charing Cross. Classical music was being played on the tannoy. I asked him why, and he said, ‘It's because people don't like it. So they leave the station quicker.')

The cut-and-cover lines were no good for sheltering – not deep enough, as proved in November 1940, when the newly
rebuilt station at Sloane Square was directly hit. Seventy-nine people were killed on a departing train. But the Tube shelterers faced other hazards besides bombs. At Balham on the night of 14 October 1940 a bomb blew open a water main and sewer, killing sixty-eight shelterers. At Bank on 11 January 1941 fifty-six died when a bomb penetrated the upper layer of the station. The worst was at Bethnal Green, in the new station built on that westerly extension of the Central, and not yet open as a Tube station, but open as a shelter.

At 8.27 p.m. on 3 March 1943 a new, deafening and unfamiliar sort of anti-aircraft gun began to be fired at nearby Victoria Park just as three buses disgorged their passengers at a stop near the entrance to the shelter. According to Sandra Scotting, honorary secretary of the Stairway to Heaven Memorial Trust, ‘We'd bombed Berlin two nights earlier, so people were expecting reprisals. They thought the guns they heard were bombs. So it was … “Into the shelter, quick.” There should have been a warden on duty; there should have been a policeman.' And there should have been a handrail running down the middle of the nineteen stairs that led to the first level of the Tube station. There is such a handrail at Bethnal Green now – as there generally is on Tube station staircases because of what happened next.

A young woman carrying a baby tripped at the bottom of the stairs. Three hundred people fell on top of her, becoming trapped between the bottom of the stairs and the roof of the station corridor into which the stairs descended. If you look at that 11 foot by 15 foot aperture today, it looks completely innocuous. ‘But it became blocked with a wall of people,' says Sandra, ‘all intertwined.' One hundred and seventy-three people died, including sixty-two children, and ninety were injured. It was worse than Hillsborough, worse than Aberfan. There is a small brass plaque inside the station. It reads, ‘From Great Things to Greater … Site of the worst civilian disaster of the Second World War. 173
men, women and children lost their lives descending these steps to Bethnal Green Air Raid Shelter.'

Sandra's grandmother, her mother (then a young girl), and her cousin were in that wall of people. Her grandmother and her cousin died in it. In later years her mother would say, ‘They died at Bethnal Green,' without supplying further details; she'd then change the subject. ‘The memory – they just buried it,' says Sandra. ‘The authorities had told them not to talk about it.' An inquiry was held soon after, but its conclusion (fiercely rejected in Bethnal Green) – namely that there had been a mass panic – was suppressed until after the war in the name of morale. In common with many residents of Bethnal Green, Sandra's mother never used the station after it opened
as a station
in 1949. And there are still people in Bethnal Green who boycott the station.

Enough money has been raised – partly from collections at Bethnal Green Tube – for the first stages of a monument that will eventually comprise an inverted duplication of the original staircase. It will be built in a small public garden next to the fatal entrance. London Underground has given every assistance.

It was Herbert Morrison's decision to open the station as a shelter. In November 1940 he announced on the radio that a new system of tunnels would be built under the Underground, and the implication was that these would be made available to the public. These fabled deep-level shelters were finished in 1942. Each took the form of twin concrete tunnels. There are eight of them. One is under the Chancery Lane, the others are under Northern Line stations at Clapham South, Clapham Common, Clapham North, Stockwell, Goodge Street, Camden Town and Belsize Park. They found a variety of uses during the war. The one at Goodge Street – signified today by its sinister, utilitarian surface building, ruining what would otherwise have been an elegant crescent off Chenies Street – was General Eisenhower's base in 1942, and from there the D-Day landings were planned.

The public were admitted to some of the deep shelters during the raids of 1944, but they are basically eight white elephants, mainly used today for storage of things such as architectural drawings, which have to be kept for a long time. London Underground has ‘given up its option' on the shelters.

Another subterranean command centre was at Down Street, the under-used Piccadilly Line station in Mayfair that closed in 1932, having been caught in a pincer movement between a new westerly entrance for Dover Street station (which would be renamed Green Park), and a new easterly one for Hyde Park Corner. It is said that in 1938 Frank Pick led a candle-lit tour through the corridors of Down Street for officials of the Railway Executive, which controlled the railways in the Second World War. ‘It's just what we're looking for,' they told Pick, ‘we'll take it.'

A bombproof steel cap was placed over the top of the station, which was adapted to accommodate not only the Railway Executive: Winston Churchill would also put up there in 1940, when the cabinet's underground lair off Whitehall was being strengthened. He later recorded that he ate some very good dinners in Down Street, and others have speculated that the smell of his roast fowls, his cigar smoke and brandy vapours may have drifted along the tunnels, affecting the dreams of the shelterers uneasily replete on meat pies and jam rolls at, say, Hyde Park Corner.

I was given a tour of Down Street a few years ago. You could still see the remains of the flock wallpaper that had made the executive feel at home. My guide, an Underground employee called Geoff, pointed out the remains of what he thought was a breeze-block runnel or channel. ‘It's just wide enough to have accommodated a tea trolley,' he said. Some members of the Executive lived in Down Street around the clock, and you could see where their bunks had been fixed to the walls. The ones who did come and go would venture down to the platforms, most of which were – and are – bricked off from the eyes of any spies
that might have been riding the Piccadilly Line. But there was an access point to the tracks, from where a red lantern could be dangled, bringing any approaching trains to a stop. Departing members of the Executive would then board the train via the driver's door. At the end of the tour Geoff led us to this alcove, and we watched the faces of the passengers on the trains going by – stared directly at them – but none seemed to see us. It was like being a ghost, unable to communicate with the world of the living. But then we did make contact. Geoff hung out his own red light; a train stopped, and we departed by that privileged means. (You can never really hate the Underground after that sort of experience.)