The Blitz and Civilian Life

Fifty-seven nights

At about five in the afternoon on Saturday 7 September 1940, 348 German bombers came up the Thames and set the docks alight. The fires guided the second wave after dark. By morning about 430 Londoners were dead and 1,600 seriously injured, and the bombers came back the next night, and the next, for fifty-seven nights in a row. By the time the Blitz ended in May 1941 about 20,000 Londoners had been killed and 1.4 million made homeless, one in six of the population. Three years later the flying bombs and rockets began, and nobody heard those coming at all. The exam asks three things about this: what fell on the city and where, what it did to the lives of the people underneath, and what a historian can find out from the sources they left. This module covers all three.

Five words the examiners use

Each definition ends with a date or a number, because on this paper a feature without support is worth one mark, and a feature with support is worth two.

The attacks, in order

Put these six attacks on London in the order they happened.

• Black Saturday: the docks, Silvertown and the East End burn
• A bomb bursts a water main above Balham station and floods the platforms where hundreds are sheltering
• The Second Great Fire of London: the City burns around St Paul's
• The heaviest raid of the Blitz kills 1,436 people in a single night
• The first flying bomb falls on Grove Road, Bow
• A V2 destroys the Woolworths store on New Cross Road, killing 168 shoppers

Why the East End?

Stepney, Poplar, West Ham and Bermondsey took far more bombs, and far more deaths, than the rest of London in the autumn of 1940. Which explanation best accounts for it?

• The docks, the gasworks and the factories along the river were the targets, the Thames guided the bombers to them by moonlight, and the crowded terraces beside them had few gardens for Andersons and burned easily.
• The Luftwaffe was ordered to punish the East End for its communist sympathies.
• The West End was protected by a ring of anti-aircraft guns that the East End lacked.
• The rest of London had been evacuated and the East End had not.

Where people sheltered, and who got what

Shelter was the sharpest test of the claim that everyone was in it together. The comparison the examiners like is between what the government planned and what Londoners did.

Question 2(a): usefulness

A weekly report on morale in east London, written for this module in the style of the Home Intelligence reports the Ministry of Information compiled from October 1940. The enquiry is the effect of the Blitz on the morale of Londoners. Tap the TWO details a historian would find most useful, because a censored newspaper of the time would not have printed them.

• People in Stepney are very tired after three weeks without a full night of sleep, but the queues for the shelters are orderly.
• There is much bitterness that the West End has deep, well-run shelters while the East End has surface shelters and the Tilbury. The phrase a rich man's war is heard often.
• The visit of the King and Queen to the bombed streets of Stepney was well received.
• Looting of bombed shops is reported from several districts, and the police say that some of it is done by the rescue men themselves.
• The dance halls remain full on Saturday nights.

What fell on London

Select the THREE statements that correctly describe the nature of the attacks.

• The raids of 1940 to 1941 mixed high explosive with thousands of incendiaries, and the fires did more damage than the blast.
• After the first weeks the bombers came almost entirely by night, which made them harder to shoot down and harder for civilians to bear.
• The V1 gave a few seconds of warning when its engine cut out; the V2 fell faster than sound and gave none.
• Poison gas was dropped on the docks in the first week.
• The bombing was confined to military targets and the docks.
• The Luftwaffe bombed London by day throughout the war.

Morale: the picture and the files

The picture is the one the government wanted: Londoners cheerful in the rubble, the Windmill open, the King and Queen in the East End after Buckingham Palace itself was hit on 13 September 1940. The files tell a more complicated story, and the examiners want you to know both. On 15 September 1940 about seventy East Enders led by the Stepney communist Phil Piratin walked into the shelter of the Savoy Hotel and refused to leave, to show what the West End had that Stepney did not. On 10 September 1940 a bomb hit South Hallsville School in Canning Town, where hundreds of bombed-out families had waited three days for buses that never came; the official toll was 77, and local people always believed it was far higher. On 3 March 1943 a crowd surging into Bethnal Green tube station crushed 173 people to death on the stairs; the government kept the name of the station out of the papers and the inquiry report secret until 1946. None of this means morale broke. It did not: absenteeism stayed low and there was no demand for surrender. It means that censorship shaped what survived, which is why a historian needs the private reports, the borough records and the diaries as well as the newspapers, and why question 2(a) asks about provenance as well as content.

Four nights in the East End

Four Londoners, autumn 1940. At each step choose what actually happened, not what the posters said.

• A family of five in a third-floor Stepney flat. No garden, so no Anderson. The sirens go at eight. Where do they spend the night?
• An ARP warden in Poplar hears a bomb land two streets away. What is the first thing the job requires?
• A Ministry of Information official in March 1943 has the Bethnal Green photographs and the death toll on the desk. What does the Ministry do?
• A Home Intelligence officer writing the weekly report has heard talk of a rich man's war in the Stepney queues, and seen looting. What goes in the report?

From cause to consequence

Because the docks were the target and the _____ guided the bombers to them, the boroughs along the river suffered most. Because the government refused to open the Underground, Londoners opened it themselves, and by late September 1940 about _____ people a night were sleeping on the platforms. Because the papers were censored, the crush at _____ in March 1943 was reported without a name, and a historian has to turn to the _____ reports and the borough records to learn what Londoners really felt. And because the _____ gave no warning at all, the last winter of the war was in some ways the worst.

Where the Blitz killed

Between September 1940 and May 1941 about 43,000 British civilians were killed in the Blitz, around 20,000 of them in London. What percentage of the deaths were in London, to the nearest whole number?

Question 2(b): the follow-up

Question 2(b) gives you a detail from a source and asks how you would follow it up. The detail is the line in the morale report about looting by rescue men. Which follow-up would score all four marks?

• Question: how common was looting at bomb sites in east London in 1940? Source: the incident logs and court records of the borough of Stepney, because they record every reported theft with a date and a place, and they were not written for publication.
• Question: was there looting? Source: the Daily Express, because it reported the Blitz every day.
• I would look it up on the internet to find out more about the Blitz.
• Question: what did the King think of the East End? Source: the memoirs of a Cabinet minister.

Question 2(a), one source, marked

How useful is the morale report for an enquiry into the effect of the Blitz on the morale of Londoners? The report is useful for its content because it records feelings that no published source of 1940 would admit: bitterness about the gap between West End and East End shelters, the phrase a rich man's war, and looting, some of it by the rescue services. My own knowledge supports this: the Savoy protest of 15 September 1940 shows exactly that bitterness in action, and the Tilbury shelter, holding thousands without sanitation, is the kind of East End shelter the report is comparing with the hotels. The report is also useful for its provenance. It was written for ministers, it was secret, and its purpose was to tell the government the truth so that policy could be adjusted, so the writer had no reason to flatter. Its limits are also in its provenance: it is an official summary of overheard talk, gathered in a few days by observers who chose what to note, and it records what people said in queues rather than what they did, which is why it should be set beside the absenteeism figures before any judgement about morale is made. What earned the marks: content tied to the enquiry; own knowledge used to test the source rather than to decorate the answer; provenance used both ways, as a strength and as a limit; and a judgement about usefulness for this enquiry. Do the same for the second source and you have the eight marks.

Write the 8-mark answer

How useful are the morale report on the earlier card and a photograph of the King and Queen walking through bombed streets in Stepney, published in a national newspaper in September 1940, for an enquiry into the effect of the Blitz on the morale of Londoners? Explain your answer, using both sources and your knowledge of the historical context.

• For each source, say what its content tells you about morale, with a detail quoted or described
• For each source, say what its provenance (who made it, when, and why) adds to or limits its usefulness
• Use at least two pieces of your own knowledge to test what the sources say: Savoy, Tilbury, Bethnal Green, the Windmill, the Home Intelligence purpose
• Treat the photograph as evidence of what the government wanted seen as well as of what happened
• Finish with a judgement on how useful each is for THIS enquiry, not on which is better

Question 1: describe two features

Question 1 reads: Describe two features of the shelters used by Londoners during the Blitz. It is marked feature plus supporting detail, twice. Which answer scores all four marks?

• One feature was the Anderson shelter, steel sheets sunk into a garden; 1.5 million had been given out by September 1939, but they were no use to families in flats. Another was the Underground: by 27 September 1940 about 177,000 people a night were sleeping on the platforms, against the wishes of the government.
• Andersons. The tube.
• Shelters were very important in the Blitz because people were scared of the bombs and needed somewhere safe, so they went to lots of different shelters every night.
• Londoners used the Underground because the government had refused to open it, which shows that public pressure could change policy.