Walworth Under Fire
The memoirs of Rev. John Markham,
Continued from Part Five
I had fear, and thank God I did, for it made me take whatever
precautions I could, without neglecting the work that I had to do. I had so
many narrow shaves, which added to my surprise, at the end of it all, that I
was alive. Several of these were the result of the job that I took on after the
first blitz, when the Bomb Disposal Units were unable to cope with all the
calls to investigate possible unexploded missiles. It was decided to train two
Police Inspectors and one Air Raid Warden out of each Police Division in the
Metropolitan area. I was chosen to be trained in this way, and went for a
special course at London Regional Headquarters in the Kensington Museums. On my
particular course, there were about a dozen Police Inspectors, many of them
young bloods with Hendon Police College training, who boasted that, naturally
the police always came out top in the examination at the end of the course. The
only other warden, and myself were the butts of their chaff.
I had not taken an examination of any sort for 10 years, but secretly
I determined that I would do my best to beat the police. Therefore, I studied
hard, and really learnt the mass of facts about every type of missile, German
and English, with which we had to be familiar, and which we had to memorise.
Impossible to refer to books for the various characteristics and dimensions in
the darkness. It was a nice boost to my morale, both as a warden and a parson,
that I did come top in the final examination.
Before that happened, the course involved some ground exercises in
bombed buildings, in the dark mostly. We had to creep about those sites,
observed by unseen Royal Engineer officers, and discover various planted bombs
or other missiles and report about them, without theoretically blowing
ourselves up. On some occasions a voice would call out of the shadows, as one
of us crowded above the missile, saying, ‘Thank you, Mr So and So. You have
just blown, yourself up.’ That would be the end of that exercise. We inspected
sites, which illustrated the kind of damage that various types of bombs might
cause.
As a result of this training, I was involved in a number of
incidents connected with unexploded bombs, and many more that were suspected,
but turned out to be due to something else. One I remember, reported to us by
an old lady as having made a hole in her back garden, proved to be a hole dug
by her cat.
Others were incidents, which were generally accepted as ‘having
gone off’, but which, after careful investigation by myself and the Bomb
Disposal Squad, proved to be large unexploded bombs with delayed action fuses.
I found the work fascinating, and being comparatively young, took over nearly
always from the other Bomb Reconnaissance Officer in my area, who was an older
Police Inspector, looking forward to his retirement, and not anxious to risk
his neck, unless it was absolutely necessary. I suppose it was my reading of
detective stories, and boyhood ambitions to be a second Sherlock Holmes, that
spurred me on, for the investigations that I undertook involved the following
up of tiny clues and some inspired guesswork. Two cases only, I will record.
The first concerned a bomb which was supposed to have gone off in
the middle of one of the small side streets in my Post Area on the night of
April 16-17, 1941. It had been a heavy raid, and I did not know about this
particular bomb until, the day after. I was puzzled by what I saw. There was a deep
crater in the road, where the bomb was supposed to have burst. It had fractured
the electricity, gas and water mains. And yet, the pavements nearby were little
disturbed, the small houses some 15 feet away on either side had a few broken
windows, but no structural damage. One of the people living in the houses said
to me ‘Oh. Yes. It went off all right. We heard it and here is a piece of the
bomb.’ What he offered me, I recognized to be a piece of what was called ‘the
kopf ring’, a triangular sectioned ring of steel, which encircled the heavier
bombs to retard their penetration in the ground, and allow them to explode
nearer the surface. I accordingly got into touch with the Borough Engineer’s
department, who said that they had inspected the incident, as their mains were
broken, and definitely decided that the bomb had exploded, and were sending
their gangs down to repair the mains. I was not at all satisfied with their
verdict, but work began on the mains: I had other things to do. From time to
time I visited the site to see how they were getting on. They mended the
electric and gas mains and finally a crew was sent to dig deeper to repair the sewer.
This time, I watched them. I said to the ganger, ‘Watch out for fragments of
the bomb, because I do not think it has gone off.’ They laughed, and carried
on. Suddenly, they turned up a large piece of alloy, coloured blue, which was
in fact, the tail fin of a big bomb. They were out of that trench like greased
lightning. I telephoned the Borough Engineer, and down came the Bomb Disposal
Squad. It was not long before they exposed the rear end of a bomb, weighing a
ton. In the meantime, we had evacuated the people from the adjacent houses, and
the street was cordoned off. Most of the
people had been living happily in houses close to the bomb for the past weeks. They watched a trifle apprehensively, as the
Bomb Disposal Squad dealt with the fuses, the most delicate and dangerous part
of the operation. Officially, the drill was that one of the squad unscrews the
fuse in the crater, while another stands above, in case he needs help.
Everybody else should retire behind the barriers, sealing off the area. The
Bomb Squad Captain and I dutifully did as we were supposed to do, and watched proceedings
from a safe distance, but, as usual, several of the squad lounged round the
crater. A certain nonchalance is perhaps excusable after dealing with the
hundreds of bombs, with which, by this time in the war, most of them had become
familiar. However, the captain, one of the most experienced, agreed with me
that we should not take unnecessary risks. Unfortunately, quite a number of men
were killed unnecessarily, because they ignored the safety drills.
The fuses made safe, the squad brought up a mobile crane, and
hoisted the bomb out of the hole in the road, like some offending tooth. A
great gasp ‘Ooo, look at that.’ went up from the watching crowds behind the
rope barriers. For ‘Hermann’, named after the portly Goering by the bomb
loaders in his Air Force, was as large and fat as a pillar box, and that
without his tail, which had broken off in pieces on impact. If he had exploded,
there would not have been much of the street left, and a crater 20 feet deep
and 30 feet across would have opened up. I saw the result of such explosions in
a square of old Victorian, four storey houses, in Surrey Square, in the next
area to ours, when I went along to see how some colleagues of mine, the Vicar
and curate of All Saints’, Surrey Square, were faring after a heavy raid. I
found that the whole square was filled with craters, large enough to take a
bus, and every one of the houses, reduced to piles of rubble. I was therefore
thankful that our ‘Hermann’ was now safely on the Bomb Disposal Unit’s lorry.
The second incident involving an unexploded bomb also illustrated
the same fact that confused so many of us in the early days. This is the
unexpectedly violent damage caused by the entry of a bomb, dropped from a great
height even if it does not explode on contact. Like I have just described, many
cases occurred because our knowledge of the behaviour of bombs on impact was
insufficient. There were thousands of missiles lying in the ruins of London,
written off when they fell as small, exploded bombs or anti-aircraft shells.
One of these unexploded missiles was the unwitting cause of a
gigantic operation to re-examine every reported incident since the beginning of
the blitz involving, in the case of our borough alone, over 4000 occurrences.
As a consequence I was launched on a very intensive detective search, which I
found fascinating.
The incident that sparked off this search happened when there was
no raid in progress, one Sunday evening, when I was sitting in our dining room
in the Rectory with Eileen. It was a sunny day: we had had no raids lately.
People were enjoying the Sunday break, many of them thronging to the Trocadero
cinema, which was still intact, near the Elephant and Castle, a mile or so from
us.
Suddenly, there was an almighty crump. The ground shook. I leapt
up and craned my head out of the window, in time to see a great column of smoke
and debris ascend into the air somewhere in the direction of the Elephant and
Castle. I think this must have been late 1942, when I was a District Warden and
an Incident Officer, covering the southern half of the borough, as far as the
Elephant & Castle. I therefore rang up the Control to see what had happened.
They said that a large explosion had occurred near the Trocadero, but knew
nothing more. I got on my bike, and cycled up to see what I could do. By this
time, services of every kind were converging on the scene, without being called
out, in particular the Fire Service from the big station near the Elephant
& Castle. When I arrived, they were swarming all over an enormous pile of
rubble, about thirty feet high, which was all that remained of a block of flats.
There was naturally a lot of confusion, but eventually the casualties were
identified and dealt with. Miraculously, only a few were in the flats at the
time: there was only a handful in the street, passing by, when the explosion
covered them with flying rubble, and, in one case blew one of them up in the
air and tossed him on top of the houses on the other side of the street. He was
found, injured but alive. It was miraculous, because, had the bomb gone off a
little later, the people in the cinema would have been coming out, and
thronging the street.
After it was all over, investigations by the Royal Engineers
revealed that the explosion was that of a ‘G’ type mine, weighing about a ton.
This kind of mine was not a parachute mine, but had fins like a bomb. It had
been designed to be dropped into shallow waters, and lie at the bottom. It had
very sensitive fuses, detonated in various ways. This particular one had been
dropped two years before, had hit a block of flats, severely damaging them as
it went through the building and buried itself in the foundations. It was
written off at the time as an exploded bomb, and the block was demolished and
the site cleared. People were able to live in the next-door flats for two years
without any suspicion that they were literally sitting on a time-bomb.
When it did explode on that Sunday evening, it did far more than
shake the surrounding area. It caused a major revolution in the ideas that the experts
had held with regard to German fuses. These were armed before they left the
planes by means of an electrical charge. The fuses were detonated by this
charge, when the bombs hit, or when a delayed action mechanism triggered the
charge. It had always been thought that the electrically charged fuses would be
harmless after approximately three months, by which time the electrical power
would, they assumed, have evaporated. As a result of this theory, many
unexploded bombs in awkward situations, which had lain there for more than
three months, were on a very low priority for removal.
After this ‘G’ type mine had gone off, having lain there for over two
years, the whole theory had to be abandoned.
Hence the re-appraisal of all the incidents recorded since the start of the blitz, and the thorough
investigation of the sites of any which might be doubtful. The one that I particularly
remember in this affair was one that had been
reported at the time of its arrival as an exploded anti-aircraft shell.
It had fallen, so it was reported, on a small house in a row of semi-detached
dwellings, badly damaging the top back bedroom, and the kitchen below. I went
along to see it, and was lucky to find that it had not been cleared up, and the
house was empty. The next door houses, however, had been occupied throughout
the previous two years. I was immediately suspicious, when I found the
rain-pipes on the wall of the damaged back rooms were untouched, and still
hanging tightly to the wall. Furthermore, the garden wall, separating the house
from the next door back yard, and constructed of old bricks and mortar, four inches
thick, was intact, although it was separated from the room in which the shell
was supposed to have gone off by a mere two feet. I looked over the wall into
the yard next door, watched from their back door by the people who lived there
a few feet away. I noticed that the stone slabs of the yard were raised a few
inches in a sort of hillock.
‘That bomb definitely went off, guv’nor,’ the man next door said
to me, ‘I've got a piece of the bomb to prove it.’ ‘Can I have a look at it?’ I
asked. He went indoors and appeared with a metal ring of dull green steel. I
thought to myself, ‘This looks very like the carrying ring of a German bomb, so
we are probably not dealing with the supposed anti-aircraft shell.’ To make
sure, before I alarmed anybody, I rang up the Bomb Disposal Captain, and
described the shape and size of the ring. ‘That definitely sounds like the
carrying ring of a 500lb bomb. I'll come down straightaway.’ It was not long
before he and some of his squad came to the house, saw what I had seen, and
decided on the evacuation of that street and several others nearby. They dug
down in the yard of the occupied house, where I had seen that suspicious hump,
and found the fins of the bomb, they followed further clues and eventually ran
the bomb to earth four feet under the kitchen floor of the man who had given me
the ring. The bomb had apparently come down through the house, which suffered
the damage, entered the ground and jinked sideways under the garden wall and
the back yard to its final resting place. It proved to have a delayed action fuse,
which failed to function because the bomb was damaged in its penetration of the
building and its foundations. It was lucky for the family living above it, for
they later told me that they had danced ‘Knees up, Mother Brown’ at many
parties on their kitchen floor, a mere four feet from the unsuspected
death-trap.
I sympathised with them, for I too had been within a few feet of a
very dangerous, unexploded mine, without knowing it was there at the time. We
had a heavy raid. We were luckily not badly damaged in our area. So after the ‘All
Clear’, when it was first light, I wandered across the border of my Post Area
to see how my neighbours, the Reverend Thompson and his wife had fared.
As I crossed the boundary, I noticed that the streets were
completely deserted. Not a living soul in sight. When I arrived at my friends’ Vicarage,
I discovered that a bomb had fallen between it and the adjacent church,
damaging both pretty severely. I wandered round the ruins, to make sure that
nobody was about, and then returned through the eerily silent streets to my own
Rectory. There I found Father Thompson and his wife, plus Father Curwen and his
dog, from All Saints’, Surrey Square, on our doorstep, asking whether they
could take refuge with us, because they could not get near their house from which
they had been evacuated by the police. A parachute mine, they explained, was
hanging just over their garden wall, waiting to be defused by the Royal Navy,
who were the experts to deal with it. I was rather shattered to discover that I
had walked in their garden a few minutes before, within a few feet of the
unseen mine. The drill, you must understand, that had been drummed into me, was
that even pedestrians must be kept away from an unexploded mine for a distance
of 400 yards. They have a very sensitive trembler trigger mechanism, designed
to be set off by vibrations from passing ships. They were consequently very
tricky objects for the Navy Mine Disposal Unit.
Father Curwen, the Vicar of All Saints’, Surrey Square, and his
curate, not to mention his dog, had a prolonged ordeal during the raids. As I
have already mentioned, Surrey Square had received more than its fair share of
heavy bombs. I think that this was due to the fact that one of the largest
railway marshalling yards, the Bricklayers’ Arms, lay just across the Old Kent
Road from Surrey Square. Time after time, salvoes of heavy bombs, probably destined
for the Bricklayers’ Arms, fell short, demolishing first the church, and then
the Vicarage, both of which were in the centre of the square, together with the
Church Hall. When the Vicarage was hit, Father Curwen was shaving in the
bathroom upstairs, his curate on his way out by the back door to the church.
When the bomb hit the front of the Vicarage, Father Curwen opened the bathroom
door, to find nothing except the ruins of the front rooms. The curate was blown
by the blast out of the backdoor. Neither of them was hurt, and the dog
survived. They then took refuge in the Hall, which doubled up as their Vicarage
and a temporary church. Finally, another raid damaged the hall, so that they
had to retreat to live with the Thompsons at St Stephens, from which they were
chased once more by the unexploded mine.
One of my nicest memories was preaching at a later date at a High
Mass celebrated by Father Curwen and his brother clergy, with a full choir, in
the roofless, bare ruins of All Saints’ church. Miraculously, the organ, on the
North side of the roofless chancel, had survived and was played for the service.
In connection with the bombing of his parish, I remember the
strange noise that the large bombs made as they travelled over my area. At the
time, I was busy with an incident in my own area, where a bomb had fallen In
Boyson Road, blowing up the water and electric mains, and causing the collapse
of an adjacent newsagents. As we struggled to get through the debris to the
people whom I knew were buried, those heavy bombs sent us flat on our faces in
the road with their awe-inspiring, rumbling, rushing, somewhat reminiscent of
an express train, a sort of wobbling roar. They seemed to be so near, that we
were surprised when nothing happened, and then got on with the job in hand. It
was pitch dark: I was very worried because I stumbled on the end of a severed
electric main, rearing like some serpent about five feet into the air from the
crater. There was water running from the main everywhere, flooding the cellar
of the public house apposite, and causing a marvellous firework display of
shorting electricity in a junction box in the pavement, where the cover had
been smashed. Men were dashing about, shouting, in the dark. I was afraid that
someone would touch the electric cable and be killed. I noticed that someone
had sent for the Fire Service to pump out the pub cellar, before the beer was
spoilt.
The newsagent’s shop, with its living quarters in two storeys
above, was just a heap of rubble which had fallen so neatly into the cellar,
that the debris scarcely formed a pile higher than a man at pavement level. I
knew the people who lived there. One was a young man, an ardent member of the
Pacifist movement, the other his sister. They had taken over the shop recently.
He had been to see me, and was due to serve in my church for one of my early
morning services next day.
The Rescue squad, my wardens and I worked all that night to find
them. We tunneled down through tightly packed debris, which included thousands
of cigarettes, the allocation for that month having been delivered that morning.
Eventually, we found first the sister, dead, and then the brother, still warm,
probably suffocated by the dust. We felt defeated.
These tunneling jobs were strange affairs, so chancy in their
outcome. One night, I was summoned to a small house, which had been demolished
by a bomb. We managed to crawl under the collapsed bedroom floor, held up
precariously on one side by the tottering wall. There, by the light of our
torches, we found a man, still sitting in a kitchen chair at a table, his head
and body bowed down to the table top by the weight of the flooring, which had
crushed him, injuring his head. He was grey with mortar dust, but conscious. We
got the rescue party, who sawed off the legs of the chair, and so released him
to be whisked off to hospital. In the meantime, we found his daughter lying
dead in the debris a few feet away. To look at the scene in the light of the
following morning, it was difficult to imagine that anyone could have survived
under the pile of rubble and wood, which was all that remained of the house.
While we were looking, a young man appeared, who wanted to dig through the
debris into the place where his front room had been. ‘My old mum,’ he
explained, ‘is terribly anxious about her valuables which she kept in a tin box
under her bed in the downstairs front room. She always shelters in the trench
shelter in the play-ground, and has nowhere to go. It will help a lot if I can
get hold of that tin box.’ I replied that we could not let him dig in the
ruins, but I and one of my wardens would do it for him. So there we were
digging downwards through the pile, so that it would not be unduly disturbed
and bury us. It turned out that the top room of the house formed a flat, in
which a young married couple had taken great pride in furnishing the front room
with the latest fashion in shiny furniture, including a piano, marble surround
to the fire-place, patterned rugs, etc. - the sort of articles that the big
hire purchase stores in the Walworth Road displayed in their windows before the
blitz blew them out. We dug through the lot, hauling the piano from the debris,
piece by piece. I can still see the iron frame, cart-wheeling down the heap of
rubble, its strings twanging protestingly, as it crashed to rest. We cut a hole
through the pile carpet, so that one of my wardens could squeeze under the old
lady’s bed below, and find the tin box which contained her few treasures. It
was, hot, dirty work, after a long noisy night, but always felt that these little
salvage efforts were worthwhile. It is hard to realise that it was these small
things that made such a difference to the morale of so many people. I suppose
the secret of it lies in the fact that we showed that someone cared about the
loss of their homes. It was important that there should be some visible link
with that home, as they took refuge in the bare, amorphous surroundings of the
schools, which acted as Rest Centres for the bombed out.
We tried to do something also for those who eventually found
alternative lodging, when their time in the Rest Centres came to an end. One
case I remember particularly, because out of the tragedy of one home, another
family was given a new start. I was given the complete contents of one of the
flats, formerly occupied by an old retired shoe maker and his wife. The Council
had arranged for the old couple to be evacuated. Old people, with no families
to look after them were being encouraged to take advantage of this scheme.
Unfortunately, this particular old couple, in their eighties, probably married
for 60 years, were evacuated to different hospitals or old peoples’ homes
somewhere in the north, in different towns, so that they did not see one another.
They quickly pined and deteriorated. They both died. Their flat in my parish
was left intact by the bombing. Their only relative, an elderly man living out
of London, offered me the contents of the flat. My wardens helped me to move
them to the crypt, which was empty after the bombing. We borrowed a cart and
horse from one of the barrow boys, and within a few weeks were able to supply
another bombed out family with all the necessaries for setting up home –
complete sets of crockery, bed linen and furniture. The only article I did not give
them was the old shoemaker’s set of tools, which I used from time to time for
many years after.
Such are some of the vivid pictures that come to the surface of
one’s mind after all these years. But life during those first months of the
bombing was not all death and destruction. It is true that many days in the
blitz of 1940 were dominated by the warnings, and the bombs. We ate and slept
when we could, but warden duty took a lot of the time. I remember being so fed
up with the understandable grumbling of the full-time wardens at the long hours
of duty, and the disturbed off duty periods, that I worked out the hours of
duty that I did for that particular week, and it shocked me when it came to 118
– and I was officially a part-time, unpaid voluntary Post Warden. The unpaid
voluntary wardens, in fact, did more than their fair share of duty. On top of
it, they had to get to work to earn their living. I had my parish duties. We
tried to keep the daily services going, although they were often impossible, if
incidents occurred, which kept me on duty in daylight hours. I tried to get
some sleep after breakfast. I can remember falling asleep, with my fork full of
a rasher of fried bacon, half way to my mouth. We rarely got a bath. Yet family
life, church life, went on. We printed the Church Magazine ourselves on one of
those old, flat, hand-rolled, duplicators. Eileen did the rolling of the 200 or
so copies, a page at a time. She cooked, she looked after Susan, and fed myself
and the curate. She shopped, sometimes cycling up as far as the Army and Navy
Stores in Victoria Street for the groceries. Susan sometimes went to stay with
her grandparents in Tulse Hill. Otherwise, we very rarely left the area during
the weeks of the first blitz. We slept and ate in the basement of the Rectory
most of the time.
Then the raids became less frequent. We returned to sleep
upstairs. If there was a raid, the Post was alerted by two telephoned signals –
Yellow warning (raiders in the offing) and Purple (raid imminent). When they
had been received, one of the wardens would clump up two flights of stairs to
our bedroom and shine a torch on us in bed, with the words ‘Yellow (or Purple)
warning, sir.’ I would dress and hurry down. Eileen would take shelter with the
child in the basement.
And then we actually had a holiday. In the summer of 1941, when
the last big raids on London ended with that of May 10th, we were offered a
fortnight’s holiday by the diocese, offered by the Vicar of All Saints’ Church,
Southbourne, to a clergyman’s family in the bombed areas. We had a marvellous
time there.
Parish life revived. I had confirmation candidates to prepare:
many weddings, and some baptisms. I signed thousands of forms for my
parishioners, mostly for the special milk and orange juice allocation for
people with young children. Calver, my curate, and I dismantled the organ in
the church, stacking the pipes which seemed to be usable, hundreds of them, down
in the crypt, where I got Mr Maunder, the organ builder to come and label them,
with a view to the rebuilding after the war.
St Peter's Church in 1954
I did more training for the Civil Defence, and we received brand
new uniforms to replace the rather tattered overalls. They consisted of blue battle
dress, with, yellow badges, and a blue mackintosh, and police type boots. Finally,
I found myself promoted to District Warden, responsible for the oversight of
several Post Areas. One of my deputies became Post Warden, and I had to find a
new office. I managed to get hold of an empty shop at the corner of our street
and the Walworth Road, a mere 50 yards from the Rectory. The Town Hall told me
to buy the furniture that was needed, so Eileen and I explored the second-hand
office equipment dealers in Holborn. We ended up with a couple of desks, a
table and some chairs, plus a filing cabinet which looked very smart in the spacious
front showroom of the shop. The large spare space of linoleum became a
demonstration area for lectures and exercises, for I could draw plans of
streets on the lino in chalk. There was a large cellar under the shop. We
arranged a telephone plug, so that, during the raids, we could take the office
telephone down there. Edith Rush, one of our choir members, who now played the
piano for our church services, volunteered to be our telephonist at nights. We
also organised a trailer pump crew, trained by the Fire Brigade to manhandle
one of the smaller pumps, really intended to be drawn by a car. This crew
became very keen, dragging their pump for half a mile to fires. They made our
cellar their headquarters. Eventually, Edith Rush married one of the crew.
My office staff consisted of Mrs Baker, the wife of Councillor
Baker, who had been a Post Warden of one of the Posts in the district, and now
became my Deputy. They were a marvellous couple, always willing and cheerful.
Mr Baker, one of the Southwark Borough Labour Party councillors, proved
invaluable to me in dealing with the large meetings of Fire Guards, thirsting
for the blood of the authorities over the question of compulsory fire watching
on business premises. I would give a reasoned exposition of the matter, which
did not cut any ice at all with the angry men. Baker would then get up and
address them for half an hour or so, saying a great deal, of which I could not
make any connected or logical sense whatsoever. Time after time, I watched the
eyes and faces of his listeners. I saw them glaze over, as if they were being
slowly anaesthetised. When he stopped, there would be an outburst of clapping,
and they voted for our proposals. I consciously used this power of oratory for
my own ends but was inwardly chilled by a demonstration of the kind of
spell-binding that Hitler had exercised in Germany.
_____________________________
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.
