Walworth Under Fire (Part Four)

Walworth Under Fire

The memoirs of Rev. John Markham,

Rector of St Peter's Church, Walworth 1937-1944.

A cuddly toy the only comfort for a little boy during the blitz.

Part Four

Continued from Part Three

That first stage of the raids, lasting for 50 or 60 nights at a stretch, was not always fraught with excitement, because the enemy tried to wear people down by sending a few planes over at intervals all night, keeping us in the shelters for 12 hours at a time, with the occasional daylight raid adding to the strain. We might have a warning, but no bombs in our area, but it meant that we had to be awake, even though the bulk of the people in the area could snatch some sleep.

As a result, a number of the wardens began to go off sick, usually with a doctor’s certificate giving ‘nervous debility’ as the diagnosis. This could mean anything from plain ‘wind up’ to a cumulative strain, resulting from snatched meals, little sleep, and working under difficult conditions. Those who had to travel to work in the City or in factories experienced more hazards than we did, working, as I did, near home, with a wife in my case providing meals on demand. This situation was felt most keenly among the Fire fighting parties, especially when they were expected to do turns of duty on business premises. This duty became compulsory after a time, and was a very sore point with those who had volunteered from the early days of the war to be trained to fight fires in their own street. I had to address many meetings of these men, thirsting for the blood of the authorities. The latter were always campaigning for more fire guards in my area. They were particularly impressed by the strength of one of them, which could muster 40 volunteers. I did not disillusion them by revealing that most of them were youths, centred on a cafe, run by a gorilla-like ex-wrestler, whom I suspected of being a fence, and who used his fire-guards for other purposes besides the fighting of fires. The Town Hall provided them with steel helmets, and armbands identifying them as members of a Fire Party. During gunfire, they would patrol in pairs down the Walworth Road. If no one was about, they would heave a brick through a shop window, and dash round the next corner. Another pair would follow, and, if the coast was clear, empty the shop window, and disappear with their loot to the cafe. On several occasions, I chased them off if I saw this happening. I never reported anybody to the police, who during the air raids, except for the occasional War Reserve members of the force, were conspicuously absent from the scene. The policy was that the regular police reported to their Station, when the warning went, and only went out, when incidents called for their presence. My job, both as a parish priest and as a warden would have been impossible, if I had been known to tell tales to the police. I probably owed my immunity from attack to the fact that my attitude was known.

Looting did occur, of course. I tried to prevent it being done by the wardens. I remember refusing to enrol one man, who, early on in the raids, wanted to join our Post. He said ‘I am always first on the scene of any incident. I have a small van, and can be on the spot without delay.’ I made a few discreet inquiries, and found that he was a burglar, that his van was full of tools, and that he made a point of driving all over the borough, particularly to business premises, when they were hit, and diving straight into the ruins to find the safe! His only concern with us was that he wanted the cover of a warden's badge and identity card. These last were very much a part of life by then, and during raids, the War Reserve police were in the habit of stopping anybody on the streets and asking for their card. Besides my ordinary civilian identity card, I had a special one for my Post Warden’s rank, and later on another for my office of Incident Officer, and yet another for my post as Bomb Reconnaissance Officer. But more of this later.

One consequence of the looting was that we found ourselves responsible for the recovery of valuables in bombed buildings. We had to catalogue the possessions of casualties that we might find in the debris, and send them up to the Borough Treasurer's department, where they could be claimed by the owners or their relatives. I always rated this as important, once we had dealt with the safe delivery of casualties to the hospitals, because nothing helped their recovery more than the knowledge that their personal treasures were safe. The usual practice of those who took shelter was to put all their cash, Savings Certificates, items of personal jewellery, and personal papers, such as birth and marriage certificates, in their handbags, which they left under the chair on which they were sitting, or by their side, if they were in bed. As soon as it was daylight, I used to take two of my wardens, and tunnel through mountains of rubble to find these handbags. We dare not leave them even for a few hours, or they would be gone. Two incidents remain in my memory more than most, demonstrating the speed and organisation of the looters.

In one of the heaviest raids on London, April 16th/17th, 1941 at 3:30am, a large bomb hit a block of flats in my area at the corner of Saltwood Grove and Merrow Street, demolishing a three-storey building and partly destroying another. The blast also tore the windows and doors out of two hundred other flats in Saltwood Grove and Merrow Street, making the buildings unsafe, so that we had to evacuate all the inhabitants to Rest Centres. Two of my Fire Guards were killed, others injured as they were on watch in Saltwood Grove. Several people were buried in the debris of the flats. One of them was the elderly caretaker of our church school, Mr Marsh, and his wife. They were sheltering, as were others, under the substantial concrete stairs of his block of flats, where he was found, buried up to his chest in the debris, but comparatively unharmed. At the time of the explosion, he had his hands in the pockets of his rain coat. He could not move them, for they were pinned by the rubble. We got him out together with several others. Whilst this was happening, I was going through the census sheets, which the wardens so hated filling in day after day, showing where people sheltered by day and night, and their number. After much cross-checking, which took several hours, I decided that there were two possible casualties, unaccounted for in the rubble of one of the buildings. By this time it was a warm, sunny morning. One Rescue Party was standing by, in case of emergency: all the other services had left the site. We called, and listened by the heap of bricks and mortar. Then we heard what sounded like the faint mewing of a cat. I told the Rescue squad to dig, and very soon we found two girls, one dead under the remains of a kitchen table where she had sheltered, the other still alive, sitting in the remains of an armchair close by. She was the source of that faint sound, which was all she could make, when she regained consciousness six hours later. Her throat and lungs were choked with the white mortar dust which still remains in my memory as one of the most vivid sensations of all the bombing. It had an acrid, damp sort of smell. She was rushed to hospital, where she recovered quite quickly from a broken arm and severe bruising. I do not think that she knew how close we had been to leaving the site that April morning, before we heard that faint mewing sound.

Saltwood Grove looking towards Merrow Street 

many years before it was bombed. 

However, what I also remember about this incident is that it illustrated the problem of looting. Later that April morning, some of my wardens and I tunneled through the debris. Exhausting work at any time, but very much so after a particularly hectic night, with no sleep. I had made a brief visit home to find the Rectory completely isolated from outside visitors or traffic by a ring of unexploded bombs. We found the handbags and other possessions of the injured, and we also salvaged the contents of Mr Marsh’s flat, or what remained of it. He lived on the top floor. The front had collapsed leaving the kitchen and one other room intact. The staircase had gone. So we borrowed ladders belonging to one my wardens who was a window cleaner and climbed in through the back window of the flat. We then let down on ropes all the furniture and other fittings that we could find. I can picture to this day a tin bath, which we loaded with a complete dinner service, slowly and jerkily descending three floors on two ropes. At any moment I expected to see it tilt or turn over, but happily it did not. We stored all things salved from this flat in the ruins of the crypt, from where Mr and Mrs Marsh were able to recover them when they came out of hospital, and set up house together once more. That made a lot of difference. If we had waited another day, it would have been looted. It may seem that I was exaggerating the risk. But a few days later, a family from one of the blasted flats came to collect their furniture, and found that a piano had been taken from the upstairs flat, and two other relatives came to ask me whether they could enter their old mother's flat in Merrow Street, which had been blasted and made unsafe, and when I took them there, they found that all her trinkets, including her son's First World War medals, were gone. In fact, the very morning of the raid, the Borough Treasurer's men came down to empty the gas and electric meters in the blasted flats, only to find that everyone had been broken open and rifled. That was only six hours after the bomb exploded.

A rather more macabre side to this looting is illustrated by another precaution that I had to take, when we recovered dead bodies. As soon as we found them, I had to put them in an empty room, under the guard of two wardens, until the stretcher party could remove them to the mortuary. Otherwise, their clothing would be rifled, there in the midst of the darkness and dust, and falling bombs. I often said in those days that it was a good thing that I was not armed with a pistol or gun: I would probably have shot those whom I suspected of this kind of activity. It used to make me very angry.

A more comic side to this looting was shown that same night. I arrived at the scene of the explosion within a couple of minutes of hearing it. I quickly found the body of one of my Fire watchers, lying in the rubble. Then I found his wife, shouting and swearing her head off. ‘Some bleeder,’ she cried, ‘has nicked a couple of pounds of bacon I had in my meat safe.’  It transpired that the said meat safe was sitting on top of the rubble of the block, in which she had occupied the top flat.  I do not think that she knew then that her husband’s body lay a few yards away. Later on, the irony, the tragi-comedy of the affair remained with me. Shock can play funny tricks with people. Incidentally, I find that I still have the slips of scrap paper, listing the names and subscriptions of the several hundred people who gave money for the dependents of those fire guards, all local people from the damaged flats, giving sixpennies or a shilling or the occasional half crown, in spite of the fact that many of them were without homes at the time.

_____________________________

Part Five

Part One

Part Two
Part Three 

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.

Walworth Under Fire (Part Three)

Walworth Under Fire

The memoirs of Rev. John Markham,

Rector of St Peter's Church, Walworth 1937-1944.

Part Three

Continued from Part Two

Life went on fairly normally at the Rectory. We slept peacefully upstairs in our beds; our meals were regular and my diary of the period shows that church life carried on, with our usual daily services, clubs in the crypt, and Sunday School for the many children who had returned from evacuation. These children, for the most part, had to be re-evacuated before the air-raids in London began.

For us, the air raids started on a brilliant, sunny day, with distant rumbling of anti-aircraft guns, sited well outside the suburbs in those days. We watched the barrage balloons rising to their highest extent, like silver fish in the blue sea of the sky. Above them, appeared the misty trails of fighters chasing one another. These were soon followed by the straighter traces of bombers, the crash of bombs, falling well away from us, as we watched from the roof of the flats, just across the road from the Rectory. To us at that moment, it was a novel and exciting show, theatrical, unreal. We saw great gushes of flame appear in a long line in the direction of the docks, and on a hill, crowned with some buildings, in the direction of Lewisham. The air was filled with the hum of engines, but not a gun shot. We felt a bit defenceless. 

The sirens wailed again that evening, sending everyone hurrying into the shelters. The crypt filled up for the first time, and was soon sheltering twice the number for which it was designed, and from then on held anything between 600 and 900. This put a severe strain on air and the other resources. We of the wardens’ were busy, although I cannot now remember if we had to deal with any bombs that first night, but we soon had to do so during the nights that followed. The worst feature of those first raids was the continual drone of enemy aircraft, with not a sign of gunfire, accentuating the occasional crash of bombs, preceded by their eerie descending whistle and ‘whoosh.’ People were beginning to grumble at our apparent lack of defence. Those sheltering in the crypt were luckier than some in one respect: the young club members entertained them with music, and the canteen was a boon.

For my part, I brought down a bed for my wife and Susan into the scullery shelter, where Eileen read thrillers to take her mind off the raid. As the raids continued, beginning usually about 6 p.m. and often lasting until 6 a.m., we found it necessary to have our evening meal about 5 p.m. The tension made eating anything substantial at that hour uninviting, so that we settled for large mugs of Bournvita and powdered glucose, which kept me going on duty until breakfast. We did have some rations issued by the Town Hall. The Government authorised the payment of a small sum, 1/6 a night, I think, which the Borough of Southwark insisted on converting into rations of bread and cheese, Oxo cubes and a small amount of tea, for which we had to indent every day on behalf of the wardens who had signed on for a night’s duty. Very few of them felt like eating bread and cheese in the middle of the night, or drinking cups of salty Oxo, which gave then a thirst. As a result, we accumulated leaves of stale broad, lumps of mouse-trap cheese, and thousands of Oxo cubes. The tea was always quickly consumed. I remember that I was able to dispose of all this accumulation in two ways: the bread and cheese was used to feed my Deputy Post Warden’s hens, which he kept on a piece of church land just  across the street, while the Oxo cubes I exchanged for tea, which my Shelter Warden in the playground trench shelter [in Faraday Gardens] had collected over a period, and was pleased to swap me for 5000 Oxo cubes. The rations became stranger as time went on when we received bags of sweets and lettuce leaves. Eventually, the Town Hall was forced to pay the cash allowance. However, for most of the fire raids, my messenger Jenner was occupied for part of his duty in the task of delivering cans of hot tea and slices of bread and cheese to the various patrols, which I would not encourage to come to the Post themselves, except to report for duty and in the event of any emergency. The part-timers were able to snatch some sleep on occasions in the spells of off-patrol, either at home or in the Crypt, which was warm and provided a few armchairs and the canteen.

I hardly ever went down into the crypt shelter during raids, unless I was needed for some problem. When I did so, I had to tread delicately between the bodies of the shelterers, lying like sardines on a variety of beds, mattresses, blankets or old carpets, which they brought down with them. Some sat in deck-chairs, some lay on the narrow wooden benches, provided by the borough. The stench from overflowing Eisan closets and unwashed humanity was so great that we had to buy gallons of Pine Fluid, the odour of which I cannot abide to this day, 35 years later. The shelter wardens had a whip round among their flock to buy electric fans, which did stir the foetid air a trifle, giving an illusion of freshness. I suppose that you can get used to those sorts of conditions, if you stay in them for 12 hours night after night. At least one family of parents and young children stayed down there almost twenty four hours, rather than go home and risk losing their place. Plates were as precious to the regulars as seats in some theatres, so that queues formed outside hours before the sirens wailed, and I had to provide some wardens to regulate the flow of would-be shelterers, some of whom came from some distance, even by taxi. My wardens did a difficult job well, sorting out the regulars from the gate-crashers. They quickly got to know the locals, but they had to suffer a lot of abuse and even threats. I was reminded of their skill, when one of the shelterers developed Scarlet Fever. The Borough Health Officer promptly forbade us to allow more than the official number of 230 in the crypt the following night. I refused to put the burden of dealing with the 400 or so, who would have to be excluded, on the shoulders of my wardens, and told the authorities that the police would have to be responsible. That evening, two burly sergeants and six constables were sent to regulate the intake. By physical force during two hours, they were able to keep about 100 shelterers outside the churchyard gates, which they chained. Naturally, this crowd did not take this treatment lightly. The warning went: the police returned at once to the Carter Street Police Station; the crowd broke open the gates and piled pell-mell into the already crowded shelter, causing much more confusion than would have been present, if we had been allowed to fill the shelter methodically with the regular shelterers. 

I certainly kept out of shelters, whenever possible, relishing the fresh air of the nights. Likewise, I kept out of the Wardens’ Post for the same reason as much as was possible, preferring to keep an eye on the area by means of frequent visits to groups of wardens and fire-guards, who got to know me so well, that I never had any trouble. I marvel now, these thirty or so years later, at the freedom that I enjoyed during those long dark nights in the streets. I was never attacked, never threatened, not even sworn at, during those four years, although I had to chase would-be looters, discipline wardens, and was a ‘bloody parson’ possibly in the minds of many in the recent past. My predecessor had not been very popular, so that I might have inherited a reputation which called for the epithet ‘bloody’. I suppose that being seen about so much, and having to deal with the often tragic situations which came my way all too frequently during the raids, helped to alter their views of a parson. I did not think about this at the time; I merely did what suited me best, preferring to see and know what was going on for myself and enjoyed getting about. 

I had about 2000 people in Public shelters of some size in my area, and they weighed heavily on my mind, because none of the shelters was safe from a direct hit, and the recreation ground trench shelter was not even safe from a bomb falling in open ground between the trenches. For some unfathomable reason, these trench shelters, of which there were a number in open spaces, such as the London parks, were planned on a sort of ‘ladder’ outline. That is to say, there were two longer trenches, joined by four shorter ones at right angles to them, making a closed grid. Any bomb falling inside the grid, between the trenches, would create an earth shock-wave, sufficient to crush the trenches, the walls of which were made of thin pre-cast concrete slabs, strengthened after a time by a steel frame at intervals inside the shelter. I was thankful that this particular shelter in my area, did not have a direct hit, although one bomb fell outside the grid not more than twenty feet away.

Nevertheless, that trench shelter provided me with other problems, for it proved to be far from water-tight, so that in the heavier rain of that autumn and winter, when it was occupied night after night for 12 hours or more at a stretch, it filled up with water to a depth of anything up to a foot. I had to summon the Borough Engineer's department to come and pump it out. You can imagine what it was like for the shelterers, many of them very elderly, or with young babies, sitting in the wet with their feet on damp concrete, even after the pumping-out. I remember that I encouraged a deputation of shelterers from those trenches to storm the Town Hall under the able leadership of the shelter-warden’s wife, who shared the nightly task of caring for them with her husband. I salute them and many others who did similar thankless tasks during those long nights and then going off, to their daily work in many cases, or to care for their homes. In many cases, wardens and other Civil Defence workers returned to cold, dark houses, with no wife to give them a meal, because they had been evacuated. It was a cheerless business for them, whereas I had the support of my wife throughout, seeing that we had a cooked meal at least twice a day. This was not easy to do for a greater part of that first blitz, as the local gas main was fractured, and not repaired for two months, so that my wife had to cook on a small primus that we had bought the year before for a camping holiday on the Thames. Luckily, so many people had left the area that the local butcher had a plentiful supply of meat to enable him to be generous to those who remained. We were also fortunate that the gas supply was restored two days before Christmas. I particularly remember this happening because I was just about to light the altar candles in the church before the wedding of two young people of my congregation, Jack and Pat Wagstaff, when I noticed a strong smell of gas. I dashed outside the church in time to see a gang from the Gas Company digging up the road. The crypt had been bombed and the three inch main leading into the church had been broken. I tore down into the crypt and managed to turn off the main before the gathering congregation were overcome. A few moments later, I would have probably blown us all up with the taper I was about to light. This was only one of many escapes that I experienced in connection with broken gas and electricity mains.

This kind of event, however, provided an amusing relief from the grimmer side of our work in the parish. Before I describe the more serious incidents that I remember, it would be a good thing, perhaps, to explain the real nature of our work as air raid wardens. 

Southwark Town Hall, May 1943. The distribution of new ration books. 

The prime function of the air raid warden was the reporting of incidents to the Control Centre at Southwark Town Hall, from which the necessary services of Stretcher parties, ambulances, Light and Heavy Rescue teams, doctor and his Mobile Unit, Fire Services, and Police could be summoned as needed. In order that necessary services in the right numbers could be sent rapidly, it was essential that the wardens should send in accurate reports, with the probable number of casualties, the type of damage, whether the casualties were buried, the presence of fire or other hazards, and, above all, the exact location. His next duty was to see that the various services were directed to the exact scene, and told where the casualties were located, and where the various vehicles could be parked without blocking exit and entry to others that might arrive. 

For this to work effectively, it was vital that the wardens did not get involved themselves in rescue attempts too deeply or too quickly, or in such a way that their messages might be delayed. To bring about such self-control in a warden, when the people involved in an incident, very naturally, wanted him to help them, either to get free themselves, or to dig in the debris of a building for their relatives or friends, required a great deal of training. I was very glad, when the bombing started, that my wardens and I had spent many hours in the preceding months in exercises, designed to test their discipline. Nevertheless, exercises with simulated casualties were a very different kettle of fish from the real thing, when they could hear the cries of injured and frightened people, and were obliged to turn a deaf ear and get their messages correctly written on the special forms provided, without unnecessary delay. This training was to be put to the stiffest test in the biggest incident in our area, the bombing of the church and the crypt shelter underneath. More of that later.

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Part Four

Part One

Part Two

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.

Walworth Under Fire (Part Two)

Walworth Under Fire

The memoirs of Rev. John Markham,

Rector of St Peter's Church, Walworth 1937-1944.

Part Two

Continued from Part One

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. 

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Part Three

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.

Walworth Under Fire (Part One)

Walworth Under Fire

The memoirs of Rev. John Markham,

Rector of St Peter's Church, Walworth 1937-1944.

Part One

I suppose that it all started for us in the late summer of 1938, when my reading of the ‘Times’ and my two and half years’ studies, with the Consular Service in mind, made me aware of the impending war. I put up a large notice, about four feet square, on the notice board on the gates of the churchyard – ‘Peace or War?’ it read, and announced 24 hours of continuous prayer in my church, inviting my parishioners to do a stint in this endeavour to prepare for what I feared would come.

I was Rector of St Peter’s, Walworth, a classical-fronted church, designed by Sir John Soane, and built in the 1820s, when Walworth Common, as it was known then, had been recently populated with streets of small terraced houses and larger ones for those who could afford resident servants.  A middle-class estate for City workers in those days, by the time I had come as Rector, had become a densely-populated working-class district. 11,000 people in an area half a mile long and one quarter wide. We had more than our fair share of barrow-boys, living in small cottages, with stables attached, in Bronte Street, and serving the East Lane open-air market, a mini-Petticoat Lane. They kept their barrows of fruit and vegetables in their small yards, their fish in tanks under the beds. We had a colony of boxers, centred round Ted Broadribb, the ex-champion, and now a trainer. Don McCorquodale, and Freddie Mills were among those who were often about.

We also were reputed to have a very high proportion of the burglars and other gentlemen known to the police. The sergeant at Carter Street Police Station said to me on one occasion, ‘There are so many thieves in Walworth that they have to thieve off one another. If there is any crime in the Metropolitan area, they call us up first to find out where likely suspects are, and whether we have seen them at Walworth at the time of the crime.’

The Rector before me had all the carpets in the church stolen twice, because he had become rather unpopular with the criminal fraternity for his diatribes in his parish magazine against those who came to be married in church, but never bothered to come there at any other time. The church was very popular for weddings, as its Imposing classical-pillared front, and steps, made a good setting for the wedding photographs.

There was a fair amount of poverty there in those pre-war years. We often had columns of Unemployed Workers, carrying empty coffins, parading into the street leading up to the churchyard gates. This area was a miniature Hyde Park Corner for public orators of many different persuasions: Temperance, Jehovah's Witnesses, the Unemployed Workers’ Movement, and many more, using the Christian Evidence stand, designed rather like a bookie’s pulpit, which we kept in the entrance lobby of the church. This stand was erected just outside my front-door, at the entrance of the churchyard, so that, from my study window just above, I had a private and unimpeded view of the speakers, and a clearly audible example of their oratory.

They got their audiences from the milling crowds of shoppers, who thronged the Walworth Road, a hundred yards away, where touts for the various speakers could operate with some chance of gathering passers-by.  Ringed by this varied assortment of over-crowded and decaying houses, shops and a nearby main-line railway, the centre of the parish had a contrasting cluster of well-built flats, maisonettes and cottages, in tree-lined groves and streets, belonging to the Church Commissioners, the often-berated landlords of the Church of England. They were administered by a kindly band of ladies from an office in the estate, which had been built by the Commissioners in 1908. If I remember rightly, the Walworth Common estate was indeed common land, of which the Commissioners were ground landlord. They leased the land for a peppercorn rent on a 999 year lease, which fell due in 1908. The Commissioners then became owners of the property, which had been built in the course of time on their land. They immediately demolished most of the property, which by that time was very decayed and built flats, maisonettes and cottages, which enabled them to house people of all ages and family size. The result was that the centre of my parish was a kind of village, in which most of the tenants remained for family life, moving up from two-roomed flats to cottages and back to flats in their old age.

The village-like nature of this estate was enhanced by the proximity of the imposing church, in its park-like churchyard, and the nearby church school, founded at the same time as the church, [sic] and flanked on one side by a small recreation ground. This school was a very happy affair, small, but very well equipped, and staffed by a devoted band of teachers, who thought nothing of having four different sets of home-work for some of their pupils. It had such a good name in the area that there was always a waiting list for entry.

Such was the area over which I had been appointed Rector the year before. It was to be my home and my main preoccupation for the next five years, so much so that I very rarely went beyond its boundaries for very long. It became our world. I say ‘our world’, because my wife shared it with me, and for most of the time I had curates; first Bertram Calver, who left to be a chaplain in the R.A.F. and, towards the end, Leonard Trengove, a newly ordained Cornishman from Kelham. I had a dear old church-worker, Deaconess de Saumarez, who was evacuated in the war years. Above all, I had a very wonderful lot of people, the people of St Peter’s, Walworth, who were ‘The Church Under Fire’ in those war years. I write this very insufficient story for them – that they may have some record – perhaps a microcosm of what went on in countless little communities, which, amidst all the tales of great statesmen and gallant military exploits, can so easily be overlooked. I was privileged to share with them their ordeal by fire more closely than most by virtue of my calling. Here, then is their tale and mine.

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St Peter's Church and the Old Rectory in Liverpool Grove

As I said earlier, it really all began for us with my Church poster. My wife and I naturally talked about the imminent danger of war. I had read pamphlets about the Civil War in Spain, giving experience there in air-raids. I thought a good deal about the effect of such raids on my little domain, with its densely populated streets, and its proximity to the main railway line from the coast. Eileen, my wife, had trained as a gas-officer with the Red Cross, and knew a great deal more than I about that threat.

The time came when we both decided, as the Munich crisis developed, that we would go to Southwark Town Hall and find out what preparations for war and air-raids were being made for my parish. We were duly ushered into the presence of the young Deputy Town Clerk, who was the Air Raid Precautions Officer for the borough. We explained that we thought that war might break out in ten days’ time and asked him what he was doing about A.R.P. ‘Ah yes,’ he replied. ‘I will put you in touch with the air raid wardens in your area.’ A clerk was duly sent off to obtain the names, returning very shortly with a list, which consisted of a man and his wife, shopkeepers in the Walworth Road, just round the corner from my house, and two girl typists who lived with their parents in Trafalgar Street, which bordered the churchyard on one side. We were not reassured by this list, which seemed slightly inadequate for 11.000 souls. I asked about air-raid shelters; there were none. I asked about gas-masks; they were not assembled, the supplies of parts apparently only just being brought into the borough stores. I offered the basement of the Rectory as a wardens’ Post, and the crypt of the church, which we used as club-rooms and for Guide and Scout meetings, as a Public Shelter. Before we parted, I asked whether it would be in order to recruit wardens by an appeal that coming weekend in church. ‘Yes. That would be a great help.’ was the reply, and a clerk was sent for some enrolment forms for me to use in this recruiting drive. Back came the clerk to announce that they had run out of forms. So, I asked whether I could have some drawn up myself, and that was agreed.

This was the rather disquieting start to my association with Civil Defence, which was to occupy so much of my time and energy for the next five years. However, we were making a start, and not sitting on our backsides, grumbling, that is a temptation, that I have experienced like everyone else. We went home and contacted the wardens, whose name had been given. ‘Have you had any training?’  I asked. ‘Training?’ they said, ‘We haven't yet heard anything from the borough since we enrolled.’ So, we put our heads together. I drew up an enrolment form, which, i thought, asked for the relevant information from prospective A.R.P. workers, and the two girl typists, the Misses Medlar, had them duplicated at their office. We obtained about forty volunteers in church that Sunday. It was a start.

It was not long before they were called upon, for we were all summoned to a special emergency meeting in the Town Hall a short while after, and at the very height of the Munich Crisis. We were told that gas-masks were to be fitted to the whole population on a certain day, at the schools in the area, and we were to carry this out. We were briefly instructed how to do it, and allocated to our various schools. My wife and I found ourselves fitting hundreds of gas masks to a very varied crowd of Walworthians in one of the big London County Council schools, a gloomy, grimy, Victorian barn of a place, graced with the name of Michael Faraday. My chief memory is of a slightly panicky stream of people, and of one old lady who was most concerned with my efforts to pin the tapes of the gas mask round her hair, as it proved to be a wig, which was inclined to slip askew, or even leave her head, as i took the mask off. I had a moment of struggle with her, as she tried to hold on to her wig and I tried to remove the mask.

After they had been fitted, they were put into those anonymous-looking square cardboard boxes, which became part of the uniform of Londoners for the first months of the war, but gradually disappeared from public view, or only remained as receptacles for lunch sandwiches. We duly returned home with our cardboard boxes on this first rather awe-inspiring occasion, visions of vast gas clouds already threatening our horizon. I think that we very soon forgot them, except that we did buy a lot of sticky paper rolls for sealing windows and doors, together with cloth for the blackout of our windows. Only recently, I found a lot of the sticky paper strips in rolls, unused in our case.

The undeniable fears and apprehension of that day, which made me even more aware of the helplessness of the old and the young, and even more determined to see that they had as much protection as we could organise, was followed by the relief of Neville Chamberlain's bit of paper and ‘Peace in our time.’ However, I felt deep down that this was only a respite, which I must use to prepare. Not that I did very much in that winter of 1938-39, except attend a few meetings in the basement parish room of my Rectory, where the Wardens’ Post No.16 was to be provided. Our Area Officer was an ex-dustman of the Southwark Borough Council. He held about two meetings to get the area organised into two groups, to be managed by two Head Wardens, sharing the one Wardens’ Post. At one of these meetings, attended by about eight people, the question of appointing a Head Warden for one of the groups was raised. No one seemed keen to take the job, so the Area Officer asked me. I said that I wou1d be a Temporary, Acting Head Warden, but ‘Shouldn’t I have some training?’ ‘Haven’t you had any?’ I was asked. I was duly summoned a few weeks later in March 1939.

In the meantime, I tried to keep some of the keener volunteers together by holding meetings in the Post, at which I read some of the experiences of those who had taken part in the Spanish Civil War. The Wardens’ Post remained unequipped, as did the Church Crypt shelter.

My wife and I were very busy in the parish, and with the forthcoming birth of our eldest daughter, destined to be born in Apri1 1939. One of the affairs of the parish with which I was quite soon engaged was the preparing of the parents of our school children for mass evacuation in the event of war. The Head Master and I spent a good deal of time in persuading the parents to allow this evacuation. We were rewarded with a very high percentage of acceptances. Slowly and dimly, my parish was becoming aware of the threat of war. However, my impression now is that the possibility of war did not impinge very sharply on our lives in those Spring and Summer months of 1939. We were all too busy with pursuing our daily lives, free of the momentary panic of the Munich Crisis. My daughter, Susan, was born on 25^th April 1939, and I had my parish work – teaching several mornings in the school, club, many weddings, which entailed interviews at the rate of three a week, daily church services and getting to know my parish, which I had only taken over in 1937.

Everybody planned summer holidays. We had ours in August, when London parishes were least busy. But half-way through it, I had the strong feeling that war was very near, so we uprooted ourselves from Poole, where we had hired a house and a small yacht, and came back to Walworth. Very soon we were seeing the evacuation of the school, and the mothers and small babies. I think the latter presented the most pitiable sight –a column of women and very young children passing by my door on their way to the coaches to take them to the station, not knowing where they would finally arrive.

At least I did know where my wife and baby were going, as they went off on September 1^st to friends at Salisbury. My mother took over my house, a three-storeyed Victorian affair, with the Wardens’ Post in one of the basement rooms. My curate’s landlady disappeared, so that he came to occupy the top storey of the Rectory. Together, we tried to tackle the various problems which soon confronted us.

One was that neither the Wardens’ Post nor the crypt shelter had been provided with any sandbags for their windows, which were just above ground-level. So we organised a band of men, one of whom scrounged 400 orange boxes from a friendly greengrocer, and filled them with soil from the churchyard to give temporary protection. The crypt had been provided with wooden benches, and four Elsan closets, as there was no water or toilet facilities down there. A label went up outside ‘Shelter for 230.’ The recreation ground next to the school was in the process of having a shelter dug in its surface; a trench-type, lined with flimsy concrete slabs, four inches thick at the edges and less than an inch over most of their surface. The entrances were incomplete; builder’s ladder and tools were the only fittings visible. This was labelled ‘Shelter for 200.’ Apart from Anderson shelters in those houses with gardens, there seemed very little else for the crowds of Walworth Road shoppers in my area.

Looking at the faded pencil notes that I made at my wardens’ training class, I see that the pride of place in most of the lectures was given to the types of Poison Gas, and the precaution that we could take. High Explosive came a bad third in the course, with fire-bombs second. For the latter, we were provided with half a dozen stirrup pumps, rather like glorified garden syringes, which proved effective on the bombs, if you found then quick enough. I think that all our ideas about raids were dominated by Poison Gas in those first days.

On Saturday September 2^nd, in the midst of our preparations, a very smart young Army officer appeared, with fifty Royal Irish Riflemen in full battle kit, to announce that they had been allocated to the area as an Anti-paratroop force, and ‘Could they come to church the following morning?’ They apologised for the fact that they would have to bring their rifles into church with them. The war seemed distinctly nearer at that moment. I secretly wondered what the young Irish would make of our rather High Church Sung Eucharist at 11am.

Sunday was a bright late-summer day; we had our usual early service and then prepared for our Sung Eucharist. Most of the choir had been evacuated, leaving a few young ladies, one of whom had to be pressed into service at the last moment to play the organ for the first time in her life, as our regular organist had been evacuated with his firm. In due course, we started, with a congregation of a few old ladies and the fifty soldiers, clattering into their pews with their rifles and tin hats. I got into the pulpit for the sermon, started to preach on the Good Samaritan, when the air-raid warning sirens wailed. I looked at the congregation for a second or two, none of us daring to imagine what was about to happen. We had been indoctrinated with the idea that it would all start with massive bombing of London. I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen! I do not know what you will do; you can stay here, go down into the crypt shelter or home, but I must go to the wardens’ post without delay.’ With these words, I dashed into my vestry, tore off my vestments, and in my shirtsleeves, shot into the basement room of my house, to find a covey of fourteen lady telephonist volunteers, hurriedly, and in some panic being fitted with their gas masks by one or two of the men. I seized a tin hat and my wife’s Red Cross army-type respirator, and dashed off into the street to see what was happening at the half-finished shelter in the recreation ground. Already the streets were manned by War Reserve policemen in full gas clothing, consisting of oilskin coats and trousers, rubber boots, helmets and respirators, warning rattles in their hands. When I arrived at the recreation ground, I was confronted by a dense crowd of people from the East Lane street market, which had been at its usual Sunday morning height of activity. Prominent in the front of this crowd were several youths, who had outrun the rest, and, before I could do anything, they piled down the builders’ ladders into the half-finished shelter. I had visions of broken limbs and panic. Angrily, I tore down the Air Raid Shelter notice which the Borough Engineer had displayed. Within minutes, the ‘All Clear’ went, and I returned to the Post to sort things out, still in my shirt sleeves.

That memorable Sunday ended in a situation, which had an element of comedy in contrast to the rather tense morning. There was another Air Raid warning as darkness fell. The wardens by this time very much on their mettle, and encouraged by rather jittery householders, dealt fiercely with anybody who showed a light during that first black-out. Great excitement in the Walworth Road, as people living in one of the flats above a shop had fled away from London, leaving all their lights on and the windows without blinds. No one could get in from the street: I was summoned. How could we attract the attention of one who might be on the premises? My wardens wanted to break in, but I said, ‘Let’s try once more to attract their attention; I’ll get my air-pistol.’ With that I ran to the Rectory, got the pistol and fired a couple of slugs at the top window at the rear of the flat. There were no signs of life, so up swarmed one of my wardens (at such a speed, to the third floor, that I strongly suspected that he was a cat-burglar) and climbed into a window. I followed more slowly, and found myself looking into the window of the kitchen, and a sink full of unwashed dishes. So ended this brief adventure, only to be recalled by the local newspapers with large headlines ‘Rector fires at window.’ This was the beginning of many strange roles that I was to play during the next year or so. 

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Part Two

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.

the white lady of camberwell

The white lady of Camberwell

ALICE by Lorraine Atkinson

Alice could often be seen in and around the Camberwell and Walworth for many years. 

A is for Arments - Walworth A to Z

A is for Arments

2014 marked the centenary of the opening of Emily and Bill Arment’s very first Eel & Pie House at 386 Walworth Road, Camberwell Gate. The family business has supplied pie n’ mash and jellied eels to generation after generation of the people of Walworth. After several different premises its current location in Westmoreland Road is only a matter of thirty metres from where it all began. In a marvelous tribute to the proprietors, a block of flats on the new Aylesbury Estate has been named Arments Court.

Photo: Joel Virgo