Necropolis: London & it's Dead (35 page)

The epidemic spread fast. In Germany, over 400,000 civilians died in 1918, dealing a critical blow to their war effort. The first cases arrived in Britain in May 1918, appearing first in Glasgow. Over the following months, 228,000 people died: the highest mortality rate since the cholera outbreak of 1849. London, still recovering from the disruption of the war, could not deal with the epidemic. Ship after ship arrived at the docks, bringing more victims. Hospitals overflowed, although doctors could do little to save their patients. One of the most shocking aspects of the Spanish Flu was that, like its predecessors the Black Death and the Plague, it struck with terrifying speed. Victims could be fine at breakfast and dead by teatime.

In desperate attempts to contain the virus, streets were sprayed with disinfectant, and some people started wearing medical masks. Factories encouraged their workers to smoke, on the grounds that it prevented infection. Eventually, the disease ran its course, but not before it had killed 30–40 million worldwide: more people than the First World War.

Exhausted by war and pestilence, the English were losing their
faith. The certainties which had governed High Victorian mourning were gone. An entire generation had been swept away. Death was as random, and terrifying, as it had been in mediaeval London, but with none of the consolations of piety. It was no longer possible to believe that death was swallowed up in victory.

By the 1930s, elaborate funerals had fallen out of favour among the upper and middle classes. The Earl Marshall’s orders on the death of King George V in 1936 shortened the official mourning period from one year to nine months, and
Vogue
magazine directed its readers to steer clear of ostentatious mourning dress for the King, unless they were directly connected with the royal family.

In the East End, however, the full pomp and pageantry of funerals was still very much alive, as the funeral of Charlie Brown demonstrated.
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Charlie had been landlord of the most famous pub in the East End, the Railway Tavern, located on the corner of Garford Street in Limehouse, near the West India Dock. The pub was hugely popular with sailors and dockers, and Charlie Brown, ‘the uncrowned King of Limehouse’, was a larger-than-life character. According to East End historian Arthur Royall, Charlie was a flamboyant individual with a broken nose, a legacy from his boxing days. Always immaculately dressed, he was often seen out riding; unusually, for a pub landlord, he kept a stable of horses. Known for his charity work, and proud to be a Life Governor of the London Hospital, what really made Charlie famous was his passion for collecting. Displayed in his pub were Ming vases, carved ivory, mysterious medical monstrosities in glass jars, opium pipes and human skulls. Toffs and swells from Up West visited regularly to sample this slice of East End life.

When Charlie died at the age of seventy-two in 1932, his funeral was one of the most celebrated in the East End. The Church of St Peter, Garford Street, was standing room only. Mourners included the Mayor of Poplar and civic leaders. Outside, street vendors were
selling pictures. Long before the cortège was due to set off at half-past two, thousands had gathered near the Railway Tavern. The local paper reported that: ‘K Division supplied a large force of police, but their duties were light, as the crowds were orderly and respectful. All the neighbouring premises show signs of mourning in one way or another. Seldom is such a general manifestation of respect and regard shown.’ People lined the pavements along the route to Tower Hamlets Cemetery six deep, with huge crowds at West India Dock Road and Burdett Road. Three coaches filled with flowers followed the hearse, along with three mourning coaches and dozens of private cars. The cortège took twenty minutes to pass the Eastern Hotel. In the cemetery, the path to the grave was packed with people, and the police had difficulty making room for the cortège.

This tradition was upheld nearly fifty years later by the Krays, one of the East End’s most notorious gangster families. In October 2000, Reggie Kray’s elaborate send-off had all the hallmarks of a great Victorian funeral. Local shops closed as a mark of respect. Over 100,000 mourners lined the route along Bethnal Green Road, with heads bowed, as six black-plumed horses drew his hearse, decked with flowers reading
FREE AT LAST
. Well-wishers gathered outside St Matthew’s Church over two hours before the service, and the pavement was covered with wreaths. Afterwards, the cortège made its way to Chingford Mount Cemetery, where the coffin was placed in the family plot, alongside his twin, Ronnie, and their older brother, Charlie.

The good old-fashioned East End funeral appears to have survived the vicissitudes of time and fashion and become a national institution. At the end of 2005, a beloved matriarch in
EastEnders
specified just such a send-off, suggesting that, in some quarters at least, the Victorian funeral is alive and well.

If the First World War put civilian Londoners on the front line, it was nothing compared with the impact of World War Two. The first
bomb to fall on London during the Second World War was dropped by accident. On 25 August 1940, the German pilots were aiming for aircraft factories in south London, but hit the City by mistake. The bomb landed near St Alban’s Church in Wood Street, beside the Roman wall that had once formed part of London’s ancient fortifications, sadly, it provided no defence against death from the air.

Although Londoners had endured Zeppelin raids during the First World War, nothing had prepared them for the Blitz (from the German,
Blitzkrieg
–‘lightning war’)–an intense period of bombing which was to last for the next nine months. In July 1940, preparing to invade Britain, the Luftwaffe had bombed RAF airfields and radar stations. Then Hitler, forced to put his invasion plans on hold, and incensed by British raids on Berlin, resolved to destroy London.

‘If you could knock out London, you could knock out England,’ the historian Philip Ziegler once said. ‘You could almost knock out Western Europe.’
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Hitler believed destroying London would demoralize the population and force the British to surrender.

At 4 p.m. on 7 September 1940, 348 German bombers, escorted by 617 fighter planes, swarmed over London. Their mission was to hit hard and move on. They flew up the Thames, heading for the commercial and industrial districts of Docklands and the East End. The raid lasted until 6 p.m., and then, two hours later, guided by the burning buildings bombed on the first assault, a second group of raiders began another attack which lasted until 4.30 a.m. the following morning. Concentrated on the City and central London, the raid left 430 people dead. Woolwich Arsenal and the Docks were ablaze, with an intense smell of burning pepper, wheat and sugar coming from the warehouses, where cans of paint and barrels of rum exploded.

London was bombed day and night for the next fifty-seven days. In the worst single incident, 450 people were killed when a bomb destroyed a school being used as an air-raid shelter. The city blazed as it had not done since 1666. Churches, offices, entire rows of
houses were ravaged by scores of fires which made nighttime bright as day. The sounds of whining sirens, booming explosions, crackling flames and grinding aircraft engines filled the air as batches of incendiary bombs fell in pinpoints of dazzling white. By mid-October, over 250,000 people had been made homeless.

On 29 December 1940, another raid devastated the City but, unlike 1666, St Paul’s Cathedral escaped. ‘If there was one building in London that symbolized the determination of a Londoner to stand fast, I think it was St Paul’s,’ said Philip Ziegler. ‘The most dramatic of all the Blitz images is that wonderful picture of the dome of St Paul’s silhouetted against a wall of flames.’
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The scene was brilliantly described by the American war correspondent Ernie Pyle:

St Paul’s was surrounded by fire, but it came through. It stood there in its enormous proportions–growing slowly clearer and clearer, the way objects take shape at dawn; it was like a picture of some miraculous figure that appears before peace-hungry soldiers on a battlefield.

The streets below us were semi-illuminated from the glow. Immediately above the fires the sky was red and angry, and overhead, making a ceiling in the vast heavens, there was a cloud of smoke all in pink, and up in that pink shrouding there were tiny, brilliant specks of flashing light-aircraft shells bursting…the barrage balloons were standing out as clearly as if it were daytime, but now they were pink instead of silver. And now and then through a hole in that pink shroud there twinkled, incongruously a permanent, genuine star–the old-fashioned kind that has always been there.
¹⁸

Although St Paul’s survived, the following famous buildings were damaged: the House of Commons, Westminster Abbey, the Law Courts, the Guildhall, the British Museum, the Royal Mint and the Tower of London, as were fourteen Wren churches. Parts of
London were simply wiped out. ‘The East End and Docklands had been shattered. The great fire-bombs, in particular, had swept away whole streets, whole areas. All over London there were huge holes where formerly fine houses had stood.’
¹⁹
The writer Graham Greene recalled his shock at seeing a house in Woburn Square ‘neatly sliced in half’, where ‘a grand piano cocked one leg over the abyss’; an approaching bomber was ‘muttering like a witch in a child’s dream, “Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?”’ Greene’s Queen Anne house in Clapham was destroyed, and the signed first editions of his own books looted; he later had to buy them back from Sotheby’s.
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Returning to London in September 1940, Virginia Woolf found that a neighbour’s house in Bloomsbury had been struck by a bomb and was ‘still smouldering. That is a great pile of bricks. Underneath, all the people who had gone down to their shelter…the casual young men & women I used to see, from my window; the flat dwellers who used to have flower pots & sit on the balcony. All now blown to bits.’
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The following month, she returned to find that her own house in Mecklenburgh Square had been hit: ‘I cd just see a piece of my studio wall standing; otherwise rubble where I wrote so many books. Open air where we sat so many nights, gave so many parties.’
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A raid on the night of 8 March 1941 left 159 people dead. Among the victims were the revellers at the Café de Paris, a smart West End nightclub, which suffered a direct hit. Thirty-four people were killed. Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson and his entire West Indian dance band died. (Johnson was buried at St Pancras and Islington Cemetery.) Anthony Powell, in his sequence
A Dance to the Music of Time
, gave a vivid but unsentimental account of the tragedy. One character observes gruffly, of a dead socialite: ‘Poor Bijou. I’m afraid it was her last party.’

On 16 April 1941, a Foeke 685 fighter bomber raid killed over 1,000 people, caused over 2,000 fires and destroyed many historic buildings. The terminus of the Necropolis Railway at Westminster
Bridge Road was among them. Berthed in its siding, the train was bombed; a photograph shows a burned-out wreck, tossed aside like a discarded toy atop a heap of rubble and twisted metal. The station’s entrance, workshops, mortuary chapel and caretaker’s flat were flattened. All that remained were the platforms and waiting rooms.

At Kensal Green Cemetery, where mechanical excavators were on standby in the event of mass civilian casualties, bombs falling on the nearby railway lines and gasworks blasted graves open, showering the cemetery with human remains that were quickly reburied. The catacombs doubled as air-raid shelters, as did the crypts of many churches–sometimes with fatal consequences. Eighty-four people sheltering in St Peter’s, Walworth, died when it was bombed.

Although London had been a potential target since war broke out in 1939, with children evacuated to the country and gasmasks distributed, arrangements to protect civilians were woefully inadequate. The authorities banned people from using the Underground as a shelter, fearing they would never come out. But they had reckoned without the bloody-minded determination of the Cockney character. Faced with this new weapon of terror, Londoners took matters into their own hands. They bought halfpenny tickets, the cheapest available, and sat it out on the platforms until the raids were over. Closed lines were brought back into service. At Borough Station, a disused section of the former City and South London Railway’s tunnel was reopened as an air-raid shelter. The C&SLR was the world’s first electric underground railway and its deep-level tunnel provided accommodation for 8,000 people. A concrete floor was laid over the tracks, bunks installed and six entrances built for rapid access. It was subsequently resealed. Of course, not even Tube stations were immune to the Blitz. On 17 September 1940, seventeen people were killed when a bomb hit Marble Arch Underground Station. On 14 December of that year, Balham Station received a direct hit at street level, and sixty people, sheltering in the tunnel
below, drowned when the bomb destroyed a water main. Bank Underground Station took a direct hit on 11 January 1941, and 117 people were killed.

Despite Hitler’s plans to destroy national morale, Londoners developed a grim determination to carry on as normal, ‘in spite of all terror’.

‘The most noticeable point about Londoners’ response to the air raids was that it was not very dramatic,’ Philip Ziegler has said. ‘They did not surge out and shake their fists at the skies or strike dramatic poses and say, “We will go on fighting until the end!” nor did they panic and hide in corners and scream. They just phlegmatically went on.’
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At a popular level, this spirit manifested itself in lyrics such as Noel Coward’s ‘London Pride’, while even Virginia Woolf, with Modernist distrust of patriotic fervour, revealed an intense love of London in her diary, recalling the circular walk at the Tower with its garden of hollyhocks and the portrait of a little girl.