Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit The True Story of London's Blitz About this episode Dan explores stories of London's Blitz, beyond the stiff-upper-lip stereotypes Dan discovers an unexpected world of crime, sexual revolution and desperation. He is joined by Joshua Levine, historical advisor on the new Steve McQueen movie, Blitz, to uncover the everyday lives of Britons under relentless bombing and the extraordinary resilience that shaped a generation.
Blitz will be available to stream on Apple TV from the 22nd of November 2024.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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2:32 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's history hit. Today, we're going to delve deeper into those dark days of the Second World War. We're going to hear about the experiences of Londoners on the ground during the Blitz. It's a very human story. It's one that's going to resonate not just with Londoners, but I think people from the other British cities that were bombed, and indeed, people from the many other countries that were subjected to horrific bombing campaigns during and after the Second World War.
3:07 Speaker 04 It's the afternoon of September 7, 1940, and firefighter Frank Hurd is pacing impatiently in front of Euston Road Fire Station.
3:18 Speaker 04 The Second World War has been underway for just over a year now, and Britain has been utterly transformed from a peacetime society into one mobilised for total war.
3:29 Speaker 04 Nowhere is this more evident than in the nation's capital. As he casts his eye down the heaving Euston Road, it seems to Frank that every single person is in uniform of one kind or another. Soldiers in khaki battle dress, man sandbagged AA batteries, the long barrels of their flat guns protruding ominously into the sky.
3:52 Speaker 04 An air raid warden in his sturdy cotton overalls casually patrols to and fro, calling out to the shop owners along his route and absently toying with a gas mask around his neck.
4:04 Speaker 04 Across the street, a volunteer ambulance driver in a red cross uniform leans against the hood of her ambulance, taking long drags on a cigarette. For his part, Frank is clad in the uniform of the Auxiliary Fire Service, a navy blue jacket with a steel helmet, rubber boots and waterproof leggings.
4:25 Speaker 04 He's pretty pleased with how sharp he looks, but the leather leggings have an annoying habit of squeaking when he walks. He steps cautiously back from the road as two trucks ferrying troops from King's Cross Station barrel past, horns honking frantically as they vie for space in London's crowded streets. It's not uncommon for people to be run over in the commotion of it all.
4:50 Speaker 04 Frank glances down at his wristwatch and sighs: 3:30pm. Another day of humdrum routine.
4:59 Speaker 04 Like millions of other young Brits, the 24-year-old North Londoner is full of patriotic fervour and keen to get into the action. After that mess at Dunkirk, anyone out of military uniform has become a bit of an outcast. He's tired of the judgmental looks he gets on the bus home that scream the unspoken question: "What's a young lad like you doing here? Shouldn't you be up there?" For two months, the British have watched with bated breath as the pilots of the RAF battle it out with the formidable Luftwaffe. The Germans want total air supremacy to pave the way for an invasion of Britain, but the RAF have refused to back down.
5:42 Speaker 04 Day after day, night after night, Spitfires and Hurricanes have taken to the skies to intercept swarms of German bombers on their way to hit airfields and factories. And they're not just Brits either. Veteran Poles and Czechs are up there giving the Germans hell, and people have come from across the Commonwealth to get some of the action. There are rumours that a few Americans have even volunteered. The fighting has been brutal and gruelling for the pilots, but for the most part, the war has yet to touch the lives of people like Frank in such an intimate way. But Frank's frustration is not going to last much longer.
6:25 Speaker 04 Not 30 minutes after he checked his watch, a massive aerial armada of German bombers appeared over London. Frank now finds himself crammed into the back of a converted lorry and barreling towards East London as sirens wail across the city.
6:42 Speaker 04 As they race past, he sees the first signs of the deadly air raid. Houses blown down to their foundations, the roads torn apart and fires licking across the entire horizon. He knows that things in the east must be bad if they've been ordered to ignore all of this. The lorry swerves to and fro to avoid craters and the rescue squads who are ready hard at work pulling people from the rubble. They're caked in thick dust and yell out as they heave enormous creaking timbers and slabs of concrete out of the way. Not even the rumble of the lorry and the blasts of distant explosions can hide the panic in their voices.
7:23 Speaker 04 Eventually, they arrive at Bechtin Gas Works, which has been totally engulfed in flames. Everyone is on high alert and tense. If this thing goes up, it'll make the German bombs look like firecrackers. The locals know that gas and fire do not play nicely, and everyone has moved as far away as they can. But for Frank and his team, this is the job. They hurriedly pull their equipment from the lorry and begin setting up a trailer pump, but as they do, a bomb smashes to earth beside them. A column of flame and dirt lifts Frank off his feet and throws him sideways.
8:07 Speaker 04 For a moment, he thinks he's dead. He can't hear, he can't see. It feels like he's been hit in the chest with a sledgehammer. It takes a while for him to gather himself, but he's relieved to discover, as he frantically runs his hands over his body, that he's unscathed and his team have all survived. As his fellow firefighters fetch water, Frank looks out in awe at the sight before him. The city seems to have been engulfed in flame, burning with a vivid orange glow. Not far away, he can see that the docks are on fire, the massive warehouses full of flammable alcohol and paint precariously scattered around the fire's edge.
8:54 Speaker 04 Beneath his feet, the ground shudders as bombs continue to rain down from the sky. The Germans are dropping thousands upon thousands of incendiary bombs, nasty little devices packed with thermite that create fires hot enough to melt steel. He watches in silence as a Royal Navy destroyer down by the river opens fire with her enormous anti-aircraft guns. Long streaks of flame curve up into the sky and explode amongst the mass of lumbering Heinkel bombers.
9:30 Speaker 04 Shrapnel literally rains down on him and bounces off his helmet with metallic thuds. He's not sure if it's from the flak shells, debris from the buildings, or pieces of German planes. The hours grind on as Frank and his team try to get a handle on the situation. He's struck by how quickly he's grown accustomed to the chaos. At first, he had thrown himself to the ground whenever he heard the whistle of a bomb, thinking that being blown up once was more than enough for one night. But he's already figured out how to tell from the sound alone when a bomb is going to land dangerously close. At 3:30 in the morning, a canteen van arrives, providing welcome relief in the form of tea and sandwiches.
10:16 Speaker 04 It's been over 12 hours since he's had anything to eat or drink. It seems a slightly ridiculous scene to Frank, like they're having a picnic at the gates of hell. But before he knows it, it's 5 a.m. and the all-clear has sounded. Frank has survived Black Saturday, the first raid of the Blitz, but 430 of his fellow Londoners have not been so lucky. Frank scolds himself for begrudging the monotony of life only the day before. The harsh reality of Hitler's war has come crashing down on him.
11:00 Dan Snow? The account you just heard is based on Frank Herd's diary, specifically entries he wrote in December 1940, a month after Black Saturday. It's a vivid, it's a heart-wrenching insight into the first large-scale air raid of the Blitz. From that point on, for 57 consecutive nights, London would be pounded by raid after raid as Hitler viciously tried to break British morale. There was no 24-hour period without at least one alert being sounded, and on most days, there were several. Tragically, Frank Herd himself would be killed in the line of duty, dying in hospital on the 29th or 30th of December.
11:43 Dan Snow? He was one of 327 London firefighters who were killed during the Blitz. It's a big story, so we're lucky to be joined by Josh Levine. He's a historian, author, and historical adviser for the upcoming Steve McQueen epic called Simply Blitz. Josh is the guy who's talked to you about this, and he's going to explain what it was really like to live in London during the Blitz: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
12:06 Speaker 05 T-minus 10.
12:07 Speaker 06 Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
12:09 Speaker 05 God save the king.
12:11 Speaker 06 No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.
12:18 Speaker 05 And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.
12:27 Dan Snow? Josh Levine, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
12:29 Speaker 05 Hi, Dan. It's very, very nice to be here again.
12:32 Dan Snow? Take me to the middle to the end of August 1940. Hitler's air assault on the RAF, on Britain's air force, is in full sway. Airfields are being pounded. There's daily gigantic swirling fights in the skies above southeast England. How is it going? Who is winning the Battle of Britain in the middle, in the third week of August?
12:56 Speaker 05 It's a really interesting one. I mean, everybody and nobody. On the face of it, the Germans clearly are putting the British, particularly Fighter Command's Number 11 group, under immense pressure. So they're really hammering the airfields. And these are the important...
13:12 Speaker 06 Airfields and they're doing a lot of damage. What they're trying to do basically is, well, they're trying to lure up the fighters to destroy them. They're trying to destroy fighters on the ground, which they're not so good at. But they're basically trying to destroy the infrastructure of fighter command. And you've got the Battle of Britain pilots who know, it's rare that you live through history and you know you're living through history. They know that the country's destiny is in their hands. And so you've got these enormous raids with an eye to invasion. I mean, invasion date has been set. And so Göring kind of takes the battle into his own hands. He launches these massive attacks. 13th of August is Eagle Day, Adlertag. I think it's about 1500 sorties are flown by the Germans. But all this time,
13:55 Speaker 06 lots more Germans are being shot down. And also, there's an interesting thing going on here. You've got the the German air intelligence chief, Michael Schmidt, who is kind of giving Hermann Göring, head of Luftwaffe, what he wants to hear. So they are absolutely damaging these airfields, these southern airfields, you know, really badly. But they're getting back online very quickly. They're not being put out of action. Where Schmidt was telling Göring, oh, they're out of action. You know, we're winning. We're on the verge of winning. And I suppose the question is, how close was Britain to being defeated, you know, at the end of August, beginning of September? And certainly the Germans thought they were
14:38 Speaker 06 right on the edge. And a lot of actually Battle of Britain pilots, you know, you see them interviewed, say that we were, we were days away. I think it's arguable that actually the British were holding out. I mean, another reason the Germans always thought that they were stronger was that the British had this amazing defensive setup that was based around radar, the Schenholm RDF radar was called, stations, which could see out 100 miles. They would report back to the operations rooms and it would all be mapped out. And so within three or four minutes, you could have aircraft actually up there and facing the enemy. The British didn't have to send up so many aircraft to face the Germans. So they could be more sparing. So when the Germans
15:22 Speaker 06 Saw that the British weren't necessarily always facing them with that many aircraft. Again, they felt that they were probably more powerful than they really were. So I suspect that the British fighter command wasn't as close to being defeated as is often thought at the end of August. There's no doubt, you know, under a hell of a lot of pressure. And there's no doubt that when Germany then changed its tactics, which they did on the seventh of September, that was a great, great relief to fighter command. But it doesn't necessarily mean that the game was up.
15:53 Dan Snow? So we got two punch drunk boxes at the end of August. They're inflicting casualties on each other. Why do the Germans change their approach at the beginning of September? Just take me through that process.
16:06 Speaker 06 Well, I think for one thing, the Germans did feel that they were pretty much on the verge of winning. I think another thing, a very important thing, is that British aircraft had dropped some bombs on Berlin and Göring had kind of stated his reputation, Berlin will not be attacked. I think he'd said, you know, if Berlin is attacked, you can call me Meyer, Meyer being a Jewish name. So you had that, that sort of challenge to pride and that kind of grew and you had a kind of tit for tat that came about and Germany felt really that kind of the gloves are off and they could then go for London. And actually, it made sense to go for London because if you think back, you know, what we said before,
16:50 Speaker 06 you've got the situation where Hitler wants to bring Britain to heel somehow, whether it's by invasion, whether it's by negotiation. And a great way to bring Britain to the negotiating table would be to attack London, which is so important in so many ways. You know, you've got the docks, which brings in most of the supplies. You've got the centre of government. If you can get the Houses of Parliament, if you can get 10 Downing Street, you know, that's a major coup. You've got this most heavily populated area. So you could ferment this kind of credible, it could lead to an uprising. You know, you could actually get so much pressure from the people to government to make peace, you could force the government's hand. So it did make sense in a way to change the attack. As it happened, it was not the
17:33 Speaker 06 right thing to do. But Göring and Hitler believed that it was the right thing to do. So from the seventh of September, you had, first of all, a daytime raid. So you had about 300 bombers dropping about 300 tonnes on London. And then the raid went on. Into the night, you've got to remember as well that bombing was kind of viewed in those days as nuclear weapons were viewed when we were growing up in the eighties. It was thought, and this had started after the First World War, it was thought that basically a bombing raid would destroy a country before, there was almost no need for armies anymore. You could send the bombers over and that was the end, you could finish it off. And I think it was 1932, you had the British Prime Minister actually saying the bomber
18:18 Speaker 06 will always get through. That was why, one reason certainly, why the British hadn't really bothered for a long time to build up a fighter force, because it wasn't considered necessary, because the bombers are going to get through anyway, so concentrate on building your own bomber force bigger than their bomber force. And in fact, in 1938, one organisation came up with figures genuinely believed in the first few weeks of the bombing campaign starting, one and a half million people would be killed. That was in 1938, that was the official prediction. So bombing was immensely, immensely feared, and so to start bombing London, this was in its way the nuclear option.
19:01 Speaker 06 It would surely bring Britain to the table.
19:04 Dan Snow? Let's start with London, for example, which experienced the brunt of the blitz initially. Away from the politics, away from the major strategic balance, what was it like?
19:14 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's astonishing really. I mean, it's very, very hard to, for us to imagine this. I mean, it became a way of life for people in, in London, this is just what happens. I mean, it started off, you know, you had early raids during the day, and then it was every night. It became this routine of, in London, night bombing. It came as a massive shock to people, I think. It's unimaginable that suddenly the war comes to you. It was a big leap from, you know, ordinary people going abroad to fight, to everybody, everybody being at war in their own homes. So this is a massive, massive shock.
19:54 Dan Snow? This is Dan Snow's History here, more after this.
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22:40 Dan Snow? And you mentioned your own homes. We've got the famous pictures and propaganda film reels of people digging out air raid shelters in their back garden. And how was the civilian population protected from these raids? Was there anything provided by the government at all?
22:54 Speaker 06 Actually, government was pretty good in some ways. So if you didn't have money, but you had a garden, you could have an Anderson shelter. Those are those famous corrugated iron shelters. You put earth on top and your family could sleep inside. And incredibly miserable, a candle and cold and wet in winter, dreadful. And we were all sleeping in bunks in there. So miserable from a comfort point of view, but actually, pretty safe. Obviously, a direct hit would destroy it. But even a near miss, it protected people better than is often thought. So those are made available. People paid for them if they had the money, if they didn't, they got them free. There were shelters placed in streets. These were
23:37 Speaker 06 pretty terrible, these surface shelters. So the Home Secretary at this point was Herbert Morrison. And these shelters were, a lot of them were very poorly constructed. And they had a tendency to just concertina shut on top of people. And when they did, what that was called was the Morrison sandwich. That's a kind of blitz style joke, dark humor of the time. What the government had not wanted, and I find this totally fascinating, they hadn't wanted large communal deep shelters. So there were reasons for this. Some weren't quite good. You know, if a bomb hit them, lots of people would be killed in one go. They were worried about fear being contagious. They worried about disease being contagious, being passed around people in these underground shelters. So before the war, they hadn't
24:21 Speaker 06 agreed to these being built. They hadn't given money for these to be built, because there were designs for them. And then when the war started, or when the bombing started, people did what they'd done in the last war. They went down into the tubes. And the government tried to keep them out. And again, for a good reason, that, you know, they wanted the tubes to keep running. But there are other reasons for not wanting people to go down, whether it was the tubes or whether it was deep shelters, specially built shelters, was they really did think, this was discussed in cabinet, they thought that there was a possibility that there'd be this sort of new race of antisocial troglodytes who would end up living underground and would
25:02 Speaker 06 become so comfortable in their useless lives that they would never come back up or contribute anything to society. They really thought there'd be a kind of a new race of British sort of mole people who would live underground and, I don't know, their eyes would heal up. I don't know, but they genuinely were worried about this. So you had this kind of, almost the battle of the underground, where people, remember, they'd done it in the last war, but the government absolutely didn't want them doing it in this war. So at first, you had a few people who would buy tickets and stay down, so it kind of started. But then people wanted to go down. At Liverpool Street Station at the start of the Blitz, you had people forcing their way down, past station staff and some police. And they actually
25:47 Speaker 06 forced their way onto the platform and refused to budge. Same thing happened a few days later at Hoban Station. It was a fait accompli, basically. People were insisting on doing it. And it's, again, disgusting government. What can we do about it? The head of Metropolitan Police said, well, do you want us to open fire? And of course, no, absolutely. The worst, can you imagine if they'd had police or soldiers firing at people trying to get into tubes? I mean, it would have been, that would have done the Germans' morale work for them. So, no, it was a fait accompli. People went down and they stayed down for the entire war. And the conditions were pretty horrific down there. But a lot of people loved it because rather than fear being contagious down there, courage was contagious. I mean, people felt so much more comfortable surrounded by others. And also, a lot of people were
26:32 Speaker 06 very lonely. And they had a community down there, which they possibly hadn't had for years. Mass Observation, the anthropological organisation, they went down there and they they watched people down there in these shelters. And it's just fascinating what they watched. I mean, a lot of people, we think of the Blitz as being this time of incredible drama and high tension. This is from a Mass Observation report. So the family would take their sandwiches down, and they'd have their sandwiches, and they would stare into space for several hours, without talking, without reading, without doing anything. Then they go to sleep. So for a lot of people, Blitz, in one way, was a time of great tension and drama, but it was also a time where absolutely nothing happened at all. There's never one story.
27:16 Speaker 06 And that's why history is fantastic, because we think, you know, oh, well, that's the story of that. It isn't, I assure you, whatever the subject. And the Blitz is not one thing. This wonderful idea we have of Blitz spirit, that, you know, everyone pulled together, everyone was shaking their fists at Hitler and the bombers and singing Viola Lynn songs together. So you've got that at one extreme. And at the other extreme, you've got people who say that this was all total nonsense. And in fact, the Blitz was a time of pure misery and crime and whatever. And of course, the truth is both. It all happened. It was a really complicated, interesting period.
27:56 Speaker 06 I spoke to this one fantastic woman, Joan Varley, and she told me the story about being on a bus in London, top of the bus, smoking on the top of the bus, sometime in the middle of the Blitz. And so she was quite young, she was seventeen, eighteen. She was smoking at the back. And on the top deck, it was evening, and there was just one man at the front, just the two of them up there. And they heard a stick of bombs coming down. And it was ahead. And the bus driver obviously heard it as well, because he veered off the route. And then the bombs landed, they went back onto the route. But while the bombs were coming down, the man got up, total stranger, got up, walked down the bus and held hands with her. And they stayed that way until the bombs exploded.
28:40 Speaker 06 Then he got up, without a word, went back and sat down, and they didn't exchange a word. And apart from that being perhaps the most English story you'll ever hear, it's also totally indicative of instinctive Blitz spirit. Because whatever the government did with Blitz spirit, took it and painted it for the Americans, or turned it into propaganda and propaganda films, whatever else. In essence, it was organic and it was real. And it makes sense, doesn't it? I mean, if you're suddenly, you have people who have never had anything in common, are suddenly sharing the danger, then of course they're going to be brought together. They're going to start chatting about my bomb, your bomb. But also they're doing stuff they've never done before.
29:24 Speaker 06 They're fire watching together. They're being evacuated into each other's homes. Working class kids into middle class homes. You've got them eating the same food with rationing, food changed enormously. You've got women working in factories. You've got, you've got all of these levelers. I mean, real levelers. Britain could not win this war. Britain could not survive without the people doing what they were doing. All the volunteering. You know, a story from a woman who was incredibly depressed because she couldn't find anything to volunteer for. Everyone was volunteering and there was nothing she could find. She was going around to all the organisations and she felt like a useless mouth. I mean, she, I can't do anything and she was desperate, I'll do anything.
30:06 Speaker 06 And again, volunteering together, people who wouldn't have had a word to say to each other before. And because they were, they were keeping the war going, so they were fighting. They were working in the factories. They were volunteering, they were wardens, they were auxiliary firemen, everything. Anything you can imagine. People were doing these things. The war couldn't be won or survived without them. So the relationship between people and government changed. Government had to take better care of them. So wages went up, protections. I mean, look who was running the Home Front. Churchill was running the war, but really didn't have much interest in the Home Front. It was the Labour members of the Cabinet who were running the Home Front. And so lots of proto socialist ideas. I mean, I never think that post-war government actually was socialist at all.
30:51 Speaker 06 But it was certainly a very different government to what had gone before. If you look at different government memos, you've got Halifax, who is as patrician as it gets, writing memoirs saying, I think we're going to have to have a different world after this is all over. He talks about, you know, having a fairer world. And if Halifax is saying that, then it's really, it's gone deep. So I think this is a very interesting period. It was giving people a stake in society. But also Blitz period, yes, I think it was organic, but it was also in no way the whole story. The period was so intense. It shifted people, sort of jerked them out of their ways of being to such a degree that they did things they never would have before, like women going into pubs on their own.
31:36 Speaker 06 It's a tiny thing, but it's quite a big thing, actually, to massive things. I mean, it was a sexual revolution. Reading a diary published, actually, a woman called Joan Wyndham, where she talks about the dangers everywhere, I'm going to sleep with Rupert. Could it be plainer? And then what's brilliant, she talks about it in some detail. And at the end of it, she says, if that's what all the fuss is about, I'd rather have a cigarette or go to the pictures. Rupert doesn't come out well. But I mean, the point being that it was changing everything, it was changing the way people lived. Your homosexuality, which of course was criminal, police were looking elsewhere. They weren't interested. And so this is why Quentin Crisp, the Englishman in New York, he described the Blitz as London turned into one great big paved double bed. You know, he has some incredible stories of the Blitz.
32:21 Speaker 06 He was actually, you know, he was on a charge of soliciting. And he said, for the first time ever, he was acquitted by a magistrate. But the time was changing. After the war, it was all tried to get it back in the bottle. Homosexuality was really slammed down on. But then the reaction to that was decriminalization. So I think it was a time where so much changed. Crime, crime went through the roof. There was lots of terrible looting, I mean, shocking looting. At the Café de Paris, this nightclub in Leicester Square, which was bombed in nineteen forty-one, one of the first people down the scene was a man called Ballard Barclay, who was a special constable, who was also an actor and was became the major in Forty Towers.
33:03 Speaker 06 And when he got there, people's fingers had been cut off to get their rings. So it's almost like the looters were an emergency service. They were down there like that. And ordinary people became criminals, you know, because they criminalized so many things overnight. Obviously in relation to food, what you could eat, what you could buy, in relation to lights, you know, turn that light out, all that. But also really odd things. There were colours you couldn't paint your car, you know, you couldn't have a car radio in case it was a spy's transmitter. Across the board, there were rules that suddenly came in, and there was strict liability. Didn't matter if you didn't know it was a law, you would get done. So, prim seventy-five-year-olds who spent their whole lives absolutely on the right side of the law, were suddenly done for offences to do with buying an
33:47 Speaker 06 unweighed chicken. And they had a record. So, messy, messy. And when I'm thinking of a period like this, embrace the mess. It's a total amazing mess, as of course is everybody's life.
34:02 Dan Snow? Take me through it, Knight. What's the Blitz feel like on the ground? The sirens go off, people take shelter, but there's many people who have jobs to do above the ground, right? Talk to me about some of the jobs people are doing trying to mitigate the bomb damage.
34:14 Speaker 06 So, to be a warden, for example, was an amazing job to be an area warden. The old Dad's Army cliche, turn that light out. I mean, that's true. I mean, they really did go around getting people to turn their lights out. But they had many, many other jobs as well. When a raid started, they would have to know, a warden would have to know everybody in the area, if someone needed help getting to a shelter, who lived in that house. Because if there was an incident, which is what they called a bomb, you'd have to know immediately how many people were meant to be in there. You had to know where water was, for example, the water mains or water tanks for the fire brigade coming. If there was a bomb, you had to guide the emergency services through what they were doing, where they were going. You had to be down in the shelters some of the time
34:58 Speaker 06 to sort of make sure the shelters were running smoothly. But I think the most interesting thing was, you were a kind of unofficial councillor. You became an expert on anything. Sometimes, they were seen as jobsworths and people who enjoyed, who really enjoyed having a little bit of power. But that was mainly before the blitz started. Once the blitz started, like the firemen as well, or clearly firemen before the blitz started were considered shirkers. You know, I've got a story, a man told me that he was refused service in a restaurant because why aren't you fighting? Why aren't you in the army? Changed overnight when the blitz started. Suddenly they were heroes. Dramatic romantic pictures on the front of picture posts. Tommy Trinder and James Mason films about them, you know, all, everything changed overnight.
35:43 Speaker 06 And the same with wardens. And so the warden, from having been a bit of a joke character, like Dad's army, they became these incredibly important local figures who people would go to see the warden to try and get advice from them about stuff. They became an expert on everything, even if they didn't know anything about what they were being asked about, because they became this sort of almost family figure, authority figure, somebody who was keeping you safe. And so if they could keep you safe on a day-to-day basis from the bombs, then they could keep you safe in any way. They could be there for you, they could advise you how to live your life. And so one ex-warden I spoke to said, yeah, people were coming to me all the time, asking me questions about things I had no idea about, but I had to kind of appear knowledgeable
36:28 Speaker 06 so people would remain calm, kind of thing. So you had wardens, and they had all kinds of wardens, whether they were men, they were women. There's quite a famous black air raid warden, a guy called Etek Penyon, who was a Nigerian man who was living in London. And he was, you know, a very important warden, one of the chief wardens in Malibu. And he had the most extraordinary experience. He found that he did actually have a lot of authority. And he was down in his shelter one day when there were another black family who were down there, and there was a white family who were trying to put a barrier between them and the black family. They were basically segregating inside his shelter.
37:09 Speaker 06 And he made this speech where he said, you don't do that in my shelter. If you want to put up a barrier, you go somewhere else. But, you know, the way he put it was in the terms of the day. He said, we are all members of the empire, we are proud to be members of the empire fighting for Britain, and we are all one people. And if you don't want to be in here, I'm always welling up, if you don't want to be in here. Then you can find somewhere else to shelter. And they did what he says, and they took the barrier down. So being a warden was an interesting job. There was a lot happening up above when the bombs were coming down, including crime. I found a brilliant story of a man who, his gang, had a gang of thieves, safe thieves,
37:52 Speaker 06 and they would go to work during a raid, wearing air raid warden costumes. They would stake out these safes and they were taking a safe out of a particular building by London Bridge when a bomb went off and knocked through them up in the air, through the safe up in the air. And they were running away when one of them, who was a cat burglar, whose name was Spider, saw a kid in the third floor window. And he was a cat burglar, so he shimmyed up, got hold of her, was bringing her down when a fire engine brought up with a policeman, sent the ladder up, brought them down. And the policeman said that, you know, can we take your name? We'd like to recommend you for an award. The safe was just over there. Spider wanted nothing to do with saying, no, no, I'm fine, thanks. So you've got the intensity of the time going from stealing a safe to saving a life like that.
38:37 Speaker 06 So that's the period. It's an amazing, amazing period.
38:43 Dan Snow? This is Dan Snow's History. There's more on this topic coming up.
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40:04 Dan Snow? There were obviously people who defused unexploded ordnance, unexploded bombs, incredibly brave people. Were there also people who stood on roofs to actually suppress the fire? In important buildings like Westminster Abbey, St Paul's Cathedral, or the government buildings, hospitals. When incendiaries landed, they would try and put them out with sand and water. How did that work?
40:23 Speaker 06 Yeah, I mean, St Paul's is a great example. I mean, St Paul's had its own team. And people said, "Oh, St Paul's survived, St Paul's wasn't hit." St Paul's was hit again and again. Twice, high explosives hit the building. Or, I think, once perhaps it was just alongside. But incendiaries were just hitting it left, right and centre. You know, one lodged in the roof and started to burn. So it had its own team. I think it was called the St Paul's Watch. Churchill actually said, "You know, whatever you do, don't let St Paul's burn." So there were people whose job was to absolutely do everything they could to keep St Paul's there. And there were fire watchers on roofs everywhere, whose job was to see that if a fire was starting, do what they could to put it out if they possibly could.
41:06 Speaker 06 One of the great crimes of the Blitz was a man who killed his wife and dumped her body as though she was a Blitz victim. He saw the opportunity, because he'd been a fire watcher. He saw a bomb land and thought, "Oh, it's a nice place to put her." Actually, it was a very terrible place to put her, because he put her under a large concrete slab, which no bomb would have done. But anyway, so, yes, absolutely. There were people whose job was to be up there. I mean, Churchill was up there as often as he could, because he was Churchill. So, you know, he couldn't wait to get up on a roof to see what was going on.
41:36 Dan Snow? And which cities were particularly devastated in the Blitz?
41:40 Speaker 06 I suppose in terms of its size, Coventry really. I mean, the whole centre of Coventry was completely ripped apart. And other cities were also, you know, really badly, badly hurt. I mean, I wouldn't say necessarily the entire city, but there were areas, you know, Clydebank, Liverpool, Manchester, Belfast. You know, these cities were really, really badly hammered. And it came as a big shock, I think, to people that this was even possible.
42:07 Dan Snow? What were some of the figures in terms of the deaths? And then, but also the dehoused, the homeless must be a gigantic number.
42:15 Speaker 06 Yeah, well, the deaths vary slightly, but forty-three and a half thousand people is a generally accepted figure for the number of deaths. And that's a very big figure. But when the bombing started in London, I mean, the amount of devastation to houses and the amount of people who were just suddenly left completely helpless. We're talking many, many people in London. And it was this kind of epidemic of homelessness and helplessness to the point that it started to be known as the crisis in London. And it was really shown up. I mean, a part of the problem was, or the main problem, was people who were left helpless were being treated as sort of Victorian Dickensian poor-law claimants. So there was nothing set up for them.
43:00 Speaker 06 So they had to go to about eight different places to get new clothes, to get a bit of money, to get whatever they needed. They'd have one night in a, in a sort of rest shelter, but then only one night, they'd have nowhere to go. And the houses weren't being repaired. I mean, the whole thing was an absolute nightmare. And it's really shown up by one case, amazing case I found. It was a murder, an Old Bailey murder, a woman called Ida Rodway, who was early seventies. Her husband was older, he was a car man, he was starting to become senile. They were living in Hackney and they were bombed out of their house. They were in the Anderson, their house was destroyed. And they didn't know what to do. Eventually, they went to Ida's sister, but they didn't have any money, they didn't have clothes, they didn't have anything at all.
43:43 Speaker 06 They didn't know where to go, they had no advice, completely helpless. And what made it worse was that Ida's husband was getting more and more senile, he didn't know where he was, he was sleeping on the floor in the sister's kitchen. And they'd had this incredible close marriage, and she, one morning, went out to get him his morning cup of tea, went to the kitchen, brought him back his tea. But alongside the teacup, she had a knife and she slit his throat and killed him. And she went outside and she found a policeman and said, I've just killed my husband. The court papers are in the National Archive. I mean, it's heartbreaking beyond belief. Murder was a mandatory sentence of execution.
44:23 Speaker 06 So you see the doctor, the old Bailey, bending over backwards to find her insane. Because that way she was sent to Broadmoor. Broadmoor had women in those days. And it's unbelievably painful, but also touching how he's trying to save her life. Because arguably, there's nothing insane at all about what she was doing. She said in her interview, it was kinder to do this. He had no life. I first thought I would kill myself, but I thought that was too unfair on him. So I just came in and I did that. And I'm not saying it was because of that case that London sorted itself out. Basically, a man called Henry Willink, who was later the Health Secretary, who was a Conservative Member of Parliament, was placed in charge of London and he reorganized it. This was also a time when citizens of vice bureaus came to the fore.
45:06 Speaker 06 But he organized it so there would now be one place where you could go for everything. Wasn't poor law stigma anymore. One place where you could go, you could get your money to tidy you over, get your clothes. You could have organized somewhere to stay. Repairs would happen almost immediately. So people who were going into the army were recalled and put on repair duty. He created a social system of social services where people could take their problems. They're all, incidentally, quite clearly precursor of the post-war government, the welfare state, but a precursor also of so much that we have now and sometimes take for granted. And again, this period, it's moving, it's fascinating. I don't think people really see it for what it was. It was very formative. Very, very formative.
45:49 Dan Snow? Well, thank you very much for coming on and telling us all about it. Joshua Levine.
45:55 Speaker 06 Thank you. Thank you for having me.
46:01 Dan Snow? So folks, there you have it. This is such an emotive story for me. I'm in London. I grew up surrounded by the effects of that bombing. I grew up with people who lived through it, including my dad, who told me stories about what it was like. It is such an extraordinary tale of how ordinary people were caught up in the great currents of history, how they responded to these traumatic circumstances. As everyone, I'm learning more about a period in which people were caught up in such sudden and extreme chaos. I wonder how I would have reacted, I wonder how my generation would have reacted to it all. And I dwell on the fact that we human beings have such a remarkable capacity to adapt, to change, to roll with it, but to cope, to absorb such suffering and horror and still get up in the morning.
46:45 Dan Snow? I think Joshua is right when he says this was a formative experience for Britain as a whole. It's rarely a day that goes by in British public life when people don't refer to the grit, the spirit and determination of the British during the Blitz. I was always taught, and I don't think it is a myth, I was always taught that the overwhelming impression of those caught up in the Blitz was that people came together. And by working together, by helping each other, by extending mutual aid, it just made it that little bit easier to survive, to get through and to rebuild. Be sure to check out the upcoming film Blitz. It welds together the might of 21st century CGI with some of the best acting you will see. That brings the story to life in a way that it hasn't been done before.
47:30 Dan Snow? And you should also check out Joshua's book, of course, The Secret History of the Blitz. And if you want to hear more about this period on the podcast, don't forget I recorded a two-parter on the Battle of Britain, which you should check out, that dropped back in August. Just type in The Battle of Britain Explained wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to like and subscribe so you get all of our latest episodes right there in your feed. See you later, folks.
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