Walworth Under Fire
The memoirs of Rev. John Markham,
The next few months have been called the ‘phoney war.’ Certainly
as far as we were concerned at Walworth, the urgency seeped away. There were no
air raid warnings. On the other hand, more and more young people were called up
to the service: uniforms became more evident, including some for us wardens,
who received blue boiler suits, with ‘A.R.P.’ in red on the breast pocket and
chromium-plated buttons. We also got a slightly superior form of gas-mask
carried in a canvas bag instead of the cardboard box. Equipment, such as rubber
boots, tin hats and six small axes appeared sporadically. At one time, the
crypt housed a dump of cardboard boxes, which proved to contain a large number
of left-foot boots, but no right ones. Sandbags replaced our orange-boxes as protection.
A start was made in issuing gas masks for children and unwieldy respirators for
babies, whose air-supply was maintained by the mother pumping a bellows. Our area
was slow in dealing with this issue, because of rivalry and squabbles between
the two Head Warden groups. This tension came to a head when the borough
decided to merge the two groups into one Post Area, under one Post Warden and a
Deputy. We became the last area in the borough to be still disorganised. Early
on, I had made it clear that I was not eligible as the new Post Warden, because
the church authorities expected the clergy to be free for their own particular
duties in the event of casualties. The impasse dragged on until February 1940.
In the end, the Chief Warden of the borough asked me if I would
take over the leadership of the area, as the wardens themselves seemed to be
unable to make up their minds about anyone. I said that I would only do so if
the wardens were unanimously in favour. We circularised them all, and they
replied, ‘Yes’ with one abstention. Thus I found myself head of a motley
collection of wardens, and an area which was very short of training and
readiness.
Before this happened, however, other things had been changing in
the parish. The schoolchildren began to drift back, in spite of the devoted
efforts of the Head Master and his staff, who thought nothing of writing up to
300 letters a week to the parents to keep them informed of their children. The
story of the evacuation of our church school (St Peter’s, Liverpool Grove) is worth a word or two. When we saw them off
just before the war, we had no idea where they were going, other than the fact
that they left from Waterloo Station.
We waited for several days for news of their arrival. Eventually,
a telegram came, telling us they had settled in Parkstone, near Poole.
Apparently their train from London had landed them at Wareham, where coaches
were waiting to take them to a variety of small Dorset villages. However, a
train-load of Southampton children, carefully destined by their borough for the
wealthy billets in Parkstone, were loaded onto the coaches meant for our
Walworthians. The final result was that our children from the poorer district
of South London were housed with the rich, while the Southampton children found
themselves scattered in the more primitive villages.
It was not long before the richer families of Parkstone tired of
their London children. Our Head Master, Mr Hardingham, and his staff worked
wonders in re-billeting them all with working-class families. The strange turn
of this story is that my church school landed in the very same parish, in which
a few days earlier my wife and I had been staying on our shortened holiday.
Our school was happily united for teaching purposes with another
South London school, All Saints, Surrey Square, our neighbours in Walworth.
Most of the staff of both schools settled down with the children: Mr Hardingham,
in fact, moved his home and family there. Everybody seemed happy and settled.
It was a great relief to me, as it meant that the majority of the youngsters
were off my hands, should bombing start. It seemed empty at church, with no
school services, which were always a joy – a church filled with singing boys
and girls. Our Sunday Schools were shut down, and only the elder young people
remained to use the Crypt coffee bar. Some of the older Scouts, denied their
usual den in the crypt because of the Shelter, used a bell-tent for a time in
the small garden in front of the Rectory.
The story of this school evacuation, however, ended less happily
than it began. The time came when the London County Council Education Department
decided that only one Head Master was needed for the two schools at Parkstone.
The Head Master of All Saints was the senior, due to retire within six months.
It would have seemed sensible to have brought him back to London, and left our
Head Master to look after our two schools. But no: Officialdom decided that our
head was the junior in service of the two, so that he must return. The net
result in the end was that the Head Master of All Saints took over for six
months, and then, because of his retirement, was replaced by a stranger. Within
a few weeks most of the children were back in London, and eventually had to be
re-evacuated to many different places for the rest of the war, their teachers
scattered likewise. Thus ended all our patient efforts to make the scheme work
well. I was particularly sorry for my Head, Mr Hardingham, who had to move
himself and his family back to London.
In the meantime, the Royal Air Force had requisitioned the school
building to house a Balloon Barrage crew, and the playground became the home of
a very large balloon and its winch. We soon got to know the crew very well, as
their telephone was often out of action, and we had one of their number in our
Wardens’ Post to take messages on our telephone. Incidentally, the County
received one shilling per man per day as rent for the school premises. After
some time, they tried to pressure me as Chairman of the School managers to get
rid of them. I steadily refused to do so, because I felt that these eight fit
men were the best insurance against fire that we could find, and they proved
this amply, when the bombs began to fall. They were not going to see a
comfortable billet go up in flames, if they could help it! In the final result,
our school survived when many round about were burnt.
In due course, the men of the Balloon crew were replaced by WAAFs,
and very charming ones too. I remember that we had them to tea, and they
entertained my family in their billets, which by that time consisted of some of
the flats nearby.
These barrage balloons, ugly, silver shapes, became a familiar
feature of our skies. They were designed to keep the Jerry planes at a certain
height, over 10,000 feet, making them an easier target for the anti-aircraft
guns. They also made the aiming of the bombs more difficult, which accounted for
the apparently indiscriminate pattern of the bombs when they did arrive. Flying
at such heights, the balloons were tethered by thousands of feet of wire, on
which were fixed bags of explosive to blow off the wing of any plane which
might get entangled with the wire. This made for complications for us on one
occasion at least. At night, the crew
were only able to see the wire by attaching a white cloth to it, about 50 feet
up. This could, and usually did, warn them if the wire was at an angle with the
ground indicative that the balloon was deflating after a hit from enemy
machine-guns or our own shrapnel. On one particular night, for some reason, the
balloon deflated without any of the crew noticing, so that they ended up with
about 2 miles of wire rope across the roof-tops of the borough. As they tried
to winch it in, chimney pots and stacks were pulled to pieces, and we were
called up from all sides.
_______________________
During those early months of the war, I found it equally hard to
reconcile myself to keeping the family away in the country. I could understand
the way parents thought about their children evacuees, and those husbands who
had seen their young wives and babies leave their homes for far-off country
retreats. I was fortunate in that I knew the home in which my wife and daughter
were staying – old friends of my mother’s. I was able to get down to Salisbury,
where they were, once a fortnight for a night at a time, travelling down in
blacked-out trains, crowded with soldiers. But I could see that my wife and the
baby were being affected by the worry of not knowing from day to day what was
happening in London. The fact that nothing did happen was no consolation during
the long nights. It was much easier for me, because I was busy with church and
the A.R.P.
So, one night down there, we spent hours discussing the problem,
and finally decided that if we were going to be killed, it was better to face
it together in the place which was our home, and among the people, who were my
other family.
I know now that I would not have been able to carry out my work in
Walworth during those years without the support of my wife. We had started the
whole association with the parish together; we had made that contact with the
A.R.P. and the Town hall together. We were, I believed, meant to finish it
together. A parish priest has a very special relationship with his parish. It
is not just a place of work – a job. I have found that each parish that I have
served has been part of me – indelibly imprinted on my being from then on, and
to which I can return years afterwards, as if I was returning home.
We settled down to the job in hand. One of the things I did was
dominated by the black-out. The church was exceptionally well-lit by two tiers
of very large windows the length of the building. They were impossible for us
to black out, which meant that we could not hold services late or early during
those winter months. We were accustomed to holding early communion services
every day of the week, some as early as 5:50am, often at 6:30am, to which
office cleaners, for instance, could come before work. Christmas was
approaching, and how could we hold a Midnight Christmas Eve service in the
unblacked-out church?
I found the answer in a scheme to make a chapel in the centre
section of the crypt, in a part not planned to be used for the shelter. We
transferred our Lady Chapel altar down there: did a bit of decorating, and
there we were able to have our Christmas Eve service, which had become very
much a part of Christmas for our people. We used it for many services through
the winter, until the Bishop of Kingston instructed me to put it back in the
church. By that time, summer days made it less necessary, although I was sorry
at the time. However, one good result of this affair was that, in order to have
the Reserved Sacrament handy at all times, without the danger of showing a
light in the church, I had been given a Tabernacle for the Sacrament, which was
then reserved on the altar in the crypt. Later on, this tabernacle was to be
handy for the Sacrament, when the church was bombed and the aumbry, which we
normally used, was no longer available. In this way, everything did work out
for the best in the long run. If I had not attempted the crypt chapel, I would
not have had the tabernacle, and we would have been in difficulty when the
church was bombed. But more of that later.
Besides Church matters, I was faced with the task of organizing
the A.R.P. Post Area, and the band of wardens. As I said before, their training
had been neglected. We embarked on an intensive series of exercises at all
hours, mostly in the evenings. We had to make sure that we knew what we were
doing, if bombs did fall – not just in theory, but in practice on the ground.
We had wardens lying about the pavements as casualties night after night,
whilst others practiced the reporting of these incidents with the other
services, such as Rescue and First Aid. We drilled ourselves so that, in the
time of crisis, it would be automatic that we should put our real job first –
the reporting to Control of the incidents.
At the time, the wardens used to grumble a great deal about this
training, which often necessitated long waits in the cold and dark, without
anything very tangible to keep their interest. The story runs that one acting
as a casualty, got fed up with a long wait, and went home, leaving a note
‘Casualty dead: gone home.’
Another chore which was unpopular, and which occupied a great deal
of their time, was a census of everybody in the area, indicating how many
people were likely to be in the house and where, by day and also by night. This
was to prove of vital importance later on, when we were faced with tunnelling into
piles of rubble and could so easily give up the task, if we did not know for
certain that Mr So and So, or his wife or his daughter, were supposed to be in
the building or that part of it which had been hit.
Street shelters were now going up everywhere. They were mainly
meant to be used by flat-dwellers, who had no Anderson shelters. They were
originally built very rapidly out of brick and lime mortar, their walls sitting
unkeyed on to the concrete of the roadway or pavement, and topped by a slab of
reinforced concrete about 9 inches thick, which was also unkeyed by any reinforcing
to the walls. Later on, these were known to us as ‘The Morrison Sandwich’
shelters, because in the actual blitz, too often the blast of a bomb would suck
the walls outward and the concrete top would sandwich the occupants to the
ground. Eventually, they had to be strengthened with reinforcing in the walls
and down into the concrete base.
In addition to these street shelters, two more public shelters in
our area were provided. One was a smallish underground shelter near the
Walworth Road shops, and the other was constructed out of the basements of
unfinished flats, which had only reached ground level. They were cellar-like
rooms, down rather narrow and steep stairs, with little ventilation and very
thin concrete roofs, intended as floors for the ground-floor flats. There was
no form of heating and they were damp; but they did eventually house some 500
shelterers, and were a constant problem.
The crypt under our church in those first months of 1940 remained
much as it had been at the start of the war. It might be as well to describe it
more fully. It ran most of the length of the church, was paved with flag-stones
and roofed with 15ft square blocks of york stone, about 6 inches think, which
formed the floor of the church above. They were supported on brick arches about
7ft high, which divided the crypt into three or four aisles. They were filled
in here and there with flimsy matchboard walls, which separated the various
clubs which were using the crypt. The heating for the church came from a very
large boiler, where pipes passed just below the ceiling of the crypt, providing
a reasonable amount of heat. The whole area was lit by electric light. The only
ventilation came from shallow windows high in the walls, which gave on to small
wells at the foot of the church walls. These windows were sandbagged, so that
no air or light could penetrate that way. In the middle of each side of the
crypt were two doorways, to which stone steps gave access from the churchyard.
This crypt was originally used for burials, which had been cleared from it many
years before to enable it to be used for parish organisations. There was no
running water down in the crypt, and the only toilet facilities were four Elsan
closets, provided by the Borough. It might seem that we were ill-advised to
offer this place as a shelter. But I knew that the people had used it during
the air raids in the First World War, and would have taken the law into their
own hands, if the authorities had not made it available. I consider that very little
was done in the first place to make the best of the facilities. When the time
came for it to be used, it was a constant anxiety to me.
In the first months of 1940, until the bombing started, it was used
for those parish organisations, which were still functioning. I was able to
recruit some of my congregation as shelter wardens to care for the people. One
of them was Mr A. Morgan, well over sixty years old, who, in the event, proved
indefatigable in looking after the shelterers.
In fact, I also recruited some stalwart shelter wardens for the
recreation ground shelter, a Mr and Mrs Jackson, who performed miracles of
energy and guts in serving their clients, although Mr Jackson had long hours of
hard work as a meat porter at Smithfield Market. In this shelter, again, there
was no water, except for one standpipe in the open playground above, necessitating
endless journeys up the steep stairs from below to get cans of water for the
thirsty children and their parents. Likewise, there were a few Elsan closets
behind sacking curtains in cubby holes off the narrow trench-like passages,
where the 9 inch deep wooden benches were so close to the opposite ones that
the knees of the shelterers almost touched. During the raids, the parents of small
babies had to bed them down on the concrete floor under their benches. Mrs
Jackson tore up sheeting to make nappies for the babies, when supplies ran out
during the 12 hours that some spent down there in the height of the bombing.
All that was undreamed of by us or the authorities in that spring and summer.
We were too occupied with the events across the Channel. The war was dramatically
hotting-up, as German forces conquered Norway and Denmark, then Holland,
Belgium and France. There were more and more casualties among the men from our
parish. Then came Dunkirk, involving the taking of many prisoners by the
Germans, and the death and wounding of many others. The list of those we remembered
in our prayers in church, both of the dead and wounded, and of those on Active
Service, rapidly increased.
Those who returned from Dunkirk had tales to tell. One I still
remember. The soldier, whose name I cannot now recall was a very ordinary sort
of working chap, a cheery South Londoner. He found himself marooned with
several companions on the Dunkirk beach, being bombed and machine-gunned from
the air, with no shelter, and many of the houses and hotels to the rear of them
on fire. Somewhere out at sea were the ships that were to take them off, but
the problem was to get to them. Our little man and his friends, like all
Londoners, were impatient to get on with the job, so they scouted through the
bombed houses, and found a tin bath, with a plug hole in the bottom, but no
plug. They launched this into the sea, and, armed with some lengths of wood,
jumped in and paddled out into the open sea. Luckily for them it was calm. They
managed to stuff the plug hole up, but water seeped in. Just as they were about
to founder, they were picked up, and brought home to safety. I could not help laughing
at the picture of these three characters in a tin bath.
Another of my lads from the parish got back. He was Albert Smith,
my Wolf Cub Master. After a short period of leave, he was drafted into the
Highland Light Infantry, full of tough Glaswegians. I did wonder at the time
what a life my young Londoner would have in such an outfit. He was eventually sent
out with them to North Africa and was killed in the desert.
In Walworth, we were getting used to rationing, started in the New
Year of 1940. This brought into being the usual black-market, in which some of
the barrow-boy community were heavily engaged. As Post Warden, I had to be rather
careful of what I might say in the endless chats we had together in the long
hours of waiting about in the Post. Once, I was injudicious enough to mention
that we liked prunes in my family. They were unobtainable. It was not long
before a wooden case of them appeared in the Post to be presented to my wife.
In July, 1940, the appeal came for aluminium to build planes.
Patriotically, my wife and I sacrificed all the pots and pans that we had
collected on the occasion of our not so distant wedding. For the war effort,
the iron railings round the churchyard, rather fine ones dating from 1824, were
removed, but not the heavy gates, which remained in solitary splendour, while rough
wooden palings filled the space on either side.
St Peter's Church in 1951 with railings removed
The war in the air, the Battle of Britain, began. We hastened our
organisation of the wardens. By this time, we had about 40 part-time air raid
wardens, and a few full-timers, who had to work 12 hour shifts. The latter were
not the pick of the volunteers, but men and women who were ineligible for the
armed forces, including one or two conscientious objectors. They found the long
hours of duty very often boring during this pre-blitz era. The wardens’ post in
our case was not very spacious, heated by a small gas fire, and no proper
ventilation. No daylight as the one window was covered with sandbags. The floor
was tiled. The furniture consisted of a few hard kitchen chairs and a deal
table. There were big cupboards built onto the walls, a narrow twisting stone
stair at one end, leading up into the Rectory hall, and a doorway the other end
leading into a passage, giving access to the rest of the Rectory basement, and
the two back doors, one leading to the street by way of a small courtyard, the
other giving access to a small backyard and the Rectory garden.
As for the Rectory itself, I had had the small scullery, next door
to the Wardens’ Post, shored up with heavy baulks of timber, with wire netting
over the ceiling. This was to be the shelter for my wife and daughter, who
slept in a bed there during the raids, whilst I had camp bed beside them, very
rarely used by me at night time, and only occasionally at all. Bertram Calver, my
curate, refused to go to shelter, and slept on the top floor of the house,
although he too was on duty in every raid. We ate in the large kitchen, next to
the improvised shelter.
Most of the wardens lived locally, and were able to get some sleep
at home. However, the Crypt also became their club and rest room, which many of
them used for sleeping, when they were not on patrol. We organised these
patrols rather carefully. I was anxious to keep the number of wardens in the
actual post down to a minimum, partly in order to avoid congestion of our
limited space, partly and principally to avoid large casualties in the event of
the Post being hit. One Wardens’ Post in the borough was hit, and many wardens
killed, as a result of a different policy, which entailed the gathering of the bulk
of the personnel in the post, until an incident occurred and they were
deployed. I therefore managed to find disused street shelters or rooms in the
empty houses in each sector of the area, and based a patrol of wardens in each
of these, with sufficient chairs and a table, Stirrup Pumps, etc., and only
allowed them to return to the Post if there was anything to report. At
intervals, either I or a deputy, and our messenger, Jenner, visited each patrol
during the raid to see how they were getting along. This policy also meant that
a close relationship between the patrols and the people living in their
respective sectors was built up.
Jenner, our messenger, was a lad of eighteen, and proved himself
to be brave and completely reliable. He and I had managed to acquire, old
bicycles, rather smaller than we would have normally chosen, mostly without
brakes and lights. During the height of the blitz we perfected a technique, of
falling off these bikes in full flight, whenever we heard an explosion, even
some distance off, and landing flat on the road. This was the fruit of my
reading the accounts of those who had been through the raids in the Spanish
Civil War, when it was proved that you could be fifty per cent surer of
escaping injury, if you lay flat, when a bomb exploded. Most of my wardens were
hard to teach in this respect, preferring to stand nonchalantly in groups,
saying, ‘That one was miles away.’ I did not mind their chaff, as I threw
myself down. I suppose that the same differences of outlook can be seen in the
varying attitudes to the wearing of safety belts in our cars. As I shall show
later on, I probably owe my life to the habit that I instilled into myself and Jenner.
Part of my duties as Post Warden was to encourage the formation of
Fireguard parties. In those pre-blitz days, there were plenty of volunteers to
fire-watch in their own streets. I also had to inspect the business premises in
my area to find out what Fire Precautions they had organised. One of these that
I recall more than the others was that which was occupied by the War Office
records of the First World War – a series of Wooden Huts on a site between two
small streets of houses. In these huts, there were tall wooden racks, separated
from one another by narrow aisles. The racks were at least twenty feet high and
were filled with bundles of papers, bound together with string. These papers
were the Service records of all the men who had fought in the First World War.
In the centre of this wilderness of wood and paper was a magnificent concrete
and steel shelter, with heavy steel doors. I asked the man in charge, what
firefighting equipment and personnel they possessed to deal with what seemed to
me to be a highly inflammable building. He replied ‘We have stirrup-pumps and
buckets in each of the corridors between the racks, and nine men on duty in the
event of a raid.’ I was not re-assured by his answer. For one thing, the very
substantial shelter, which must have cost thousands of pounds, would tempt the
fire-watchers to take shelter, rather than remain under the flimsy cover of the
wooden sheds. A fire could well start without them knowing. In point of fact,
when we had our first Fire Bomb raid, the whole building was ablaze before the
fire-fighters could do anything. We had to rescue them from their shelter,
which was surrounded by the burning building. A few weeks after the fire,
Ministry of Works men came and dismantled the shelter with pneumatic drills.
The morning after the fire, my parish was covered with half-burnt papers
bearing the names and army record of many old soldiers. Some of them made
interesting reading. As far as I know, these army records had no duplicates, so
that it seemed strange that this store had been left in my parish, and not
rehoused in a safer area. Incidentally, we had to rescue the families of all
those living in the small houses in the streets round this store, which
produced so much heat that the front doors of the houses were on fire.
When I did my Inspection all this was still to come. Even in those
last months, most people did not seem to be worrying much about air-raids. All
eyes were for the newspapers with their stories of the events across the
channel – the fall of France and Norway, and towards the end, the Battle of
Britain pilots, fighting their war over the southern counties.
_____________________________
The above content is from the private papers of Reverend John Gabriel Markham, held at the Imperial War Museum in London.
This 50 page memoir written in the 1970s and entitled 'The Church Under Fire', concerns Rev. Markham’s involvement with Civil Defence when he was Rector of St Peter’s Church, Walworth, SE17, prior to and during the Second World War, with descriptions of his work organising rudimentary Civil Defence for his parish at the time of the Munich Crisis, September 1938, preparing for the evacuation of local children and converting the crypt of his church for use as an air-raid shelter in early 1939, his appointment as ARP Post Warden in early 1940 and his responsibilities for training ARP wardens and Fireguard parties under his control, the evacuation of the church school, the effects of the Blitz, with references to conditions in public shelters and looting, his work as a Bomb Reconnaissance Officer, and final promotion to District Warden before moving to another parish outside London in 1944.
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