I went today to the 71st anniversary memorial service for the victims of the Bethnal Green Tube shelter disaster, which I wrote about in my new book ‘Steaming to Victory: How Britain’s railways won the war’. It was the worst single disaster in Britain during WW2. (The picture here shows the Pearly Kings and Queens paying tribute today.)
What a truly touching occasion! Nearly 300 people, including some of the victims, now very elderly, shared memories at St John’s church in Bethnal Green. I was delighted to see Alf Morris, who survived aged 13, and is now 83. He described at length and very movingly his experiences for my book.
On the evening of March 3 1983, air raid sirens sounded over Bethnal Green and the people of East London made their way as usual to Bethnal Green tube station to take shelter. The station regularly provided beds for up to 10.000 people during an air raid.
On this particular evening, floods of people left nearby cinemas and pubs, and several buses emptied next to the Tube station. Suddenly in nearby Victoria Park the Royal Artillery started to fire a new rocket-based anti-aircraft weapon, which gave off a new and unexpected sound. Thinking it might be a bomb, people surged into the single narrow entrance to the station. Because of the blackout, it was lit with a single dim bulb.
Suddenly a woman with a baby stumbled and tripped. An elderly man fell over her. Others continued to tumble in the dark. Soon the crush was five or six bodies deep. People couldn’t move, crushed beneath those above them – and they quickly suffocated. Within sixty seconds 173 people were dead, 62 of them were children. But just as bad was the cover-up. There was a shameful media silence over the tragedy afterwards and relatives were ordered not to speak about it for fear of undermining the war effort. Now local people are trying raise the money for a permanent memorial that would help to correct this injustice for future generations.
Even today the story is absent from many accounts of the war in London. I was shocked about this when I came to write ‘Steaming to Victory’ and heard Alf Morris’s story. This is how his account starts in Chapter 10 of the book:
‘It was terrible, awful, horrible. I was pinned at the bottom of a staircase by a mass of dying people. And all these years later I still feel so sad about the ones who died.’ Alf Morris breaks down in tears as he recalls his experience as the youngest survivor of Britain’s worst civilian disaster of World War II. Seventy years on, aged 82, he is reliving the awful day when 173 people perished in a panic on a staircase as they tried to reach the safety of an air raid shelter at Bethnal Green Tube station in the East End of London. An air raid warden called Mrs Chumbley – I’ll never forget her name – grabbed me by the hair. I was hollering and hollering as it hurt. But she didm’t let go and eventually pulled me free by grabbing me from under my arms…
Steaming to Victory: How Britain’s railways won the war is published by Arrow Books on March 27 2014
