Authors: Jessica Francis Kane
Laurie opened the inquiry the afternoon of Thursday, March 11, 1943.
“There is something I think it is probably my duty to mention,” he began. In the room with him were Ross, secretary to the inquiry, and a stenographer, Mrs. King, from the local school. “There will be matter given in evidence that is strictly confidential, and of course any improper use of that material would constitute an offense under the Defense of the Realm regulations.” Ross and Mrs. King nodded.
“Now let’s call and examine the first witness.”
As it was not a court, Laurie found it desirable to vary some of the usual procedures. There was no procession. The witnesses were kept across the hall in the small office of Mrs. Mallory, who typed requests for building repairs in the borough. In the days that followed, Mrs. Mallory fell into the habit of engaging all the witnesses in conversation. Ross often had to wait a few minutes while she jotted down a name or finished giving a piece of advice. A number of times he had to insist that Mrs. Mallory release a witness from a hug.
“Lord knows they need this more than anything else,” she said.
“You are feeling below the mark?” Laurie asked. He wanted to be kind at the beginning.
“I am very much below the mark, sir.”
“Is this owing to the shock of what happened?”
“Yes, sir. I worked up to the last before I went down to the first aid, and this is how it has left me.” The man was pale and shaking. “The doctor has ordered me to go to a place where it is very quiet.”
“Very wise. Let me just turn up your statement, and we will try to be brief. Now, your name is Henderson?”
“That is right.”
“And you are a constable at the Bethnal Green Police Station, H Division?”
“That is right.”
“What is your full name?”
“Martin, sir. Henderson.”
“Where were you when the alert sounded?”
“We were in a desperate position, sir. We thought we could not do anything outside until the pressure was removed inside, you see.”
“Now you’re getting ahead of me. Let us just take it by stages. Where were you when the alert sounded?”
“On patrol, sir.”
“What are your instructions in an alert?”
“To get to the shelter entrance.”
“Were you able to do that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“This particular night, March third?”
“Yes.”
“When you got to the entrance, what was happening?”
“I saw men working there as I have never seen men work before. They were crying because they were so desperate. We could not extricate the people.”
“So when you arrived, something had already gone wrong?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What did you do?”
“I was directed by my superior officer to get over the crowd and work from the bottom. We thought it would be simpler from the bottom.”
“You got over the people on the stairs, did you? How?”
“I swung from a girder. I accidentally kicked one or two people, but it couldn’t be helped. From the top it looked as if it would be much simpler to get at them from the bottom, but when you got to the bottom, it looked simpler from the top. It was actually much worse from the bottom.”
“They were filling the landing, I imagine?”
“No one was on the landing.”
“But they must have been pressed against that far wall?”
“No, sir. It was very dark, of course, but I can tell you no one was on the landing. That’s where I and several other people stood to try to get them out.”
“Have you ever known any trouble of this sort before at the shelter?”
“No, sir.”
“No panic or disorder at the entrance?”
“None whatsoever, sir.”
“You are the superintendent of H Division?”
“Yes.”
“And that includes the whole area affected by this tragedy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What is the area roughly served by the shelter—could you tell me that?”
“Mainly this end of Bethnal Green. I think most of the shelterers live in Bethnal Green.”
“What would it involve, the longest walk for a resident to get to the shelter in the area served? A quarter of a mile, half a mile, that sort of thing?”
“Ten minutes at the outside.”
“Ten minutes would cover it?”
“Assuming a person could walk half a mile in ten minutes.”
“You have been in charge of this division since before the war. Has there been any similar incident in the division?”
“No, sir.”
“Generally the population behaved well during the Blitz?”
“Extremely well.”
“And since?”
“Yes, very well.”
“There was a good deal of expectation, I suppose, that there would be a retaliation that night.”
“Yes, quite a deal.”
“Do you think the people were jumpy?”
“I would not say jumpy. They were expectant. We all were.”
“You had difficulty in getting the pile sorted, in getting the people away from the entrance?”
“It was nearly impossible to sort out which person was free to be removed. I am at a loss to account for it. I did not think it was possible for people to get so mixed up that it would be impossible to lift them off one by one.”
The work suited Laurie’s manner and physique. He had a penchant for seeming to understand even when he didn’t—this reassured his witnesses—and he was good at asking a lot of questions until he did. He held his hands in front of him, often touching his fingertips together in the shape of a vaulted ceiling. If he was at a loss for words, he sometimes rubbed his neck as if he had a sore muscle. The four prominent lines running in parallel across his forehead tended to knit themselves in consternation during the hardest interviews but always unraveled for a joke. From his clothes and background, he knew they expected academic pretension, and he hoped they were surprised when they got conversational warmth. He wanted them to know that he, like they, had not left the city at the start of the war. This was certainly a mark in his favor.
“When you arrived, were other officers and wardens already working there?”
“Two constables, I believe. I didn’t see any wardens.”
“That was at your end?”
“That was at my end.”
“That was the lower end, inside the shelter?”
“Yes.”
“You came by way of the emergency exit?”
“That is correct.”
“And you saw no wardens in tin hats?”
“No, sir. It was very dark, though.”
“And when you got to the bottom of the stairs, was there difficulty removing the people?”
“There was terrible difficulty in extricating the bodies.”
“Why was that? Why couldn’t you just take them away one
by one?”
“It is rather difficult to explain. The only way I can describe it . . .” The witness stopped a minute. “If we imagine my fingers as being about two hundred and fifty people, they were just like this.” He interlaced his fingers with a punch, then twisted and turned his wrists until it looked like he might be hurting himself.
“I see. They were all wedged up like that, were they?”
“It was impossible, sir.”
“And the pile shifted forward from the bottom step, onto the landing, I imagine?”
“No, sir. No one was on the landing.”
“You are an officer at Bethnal Green Station?”
“That’s right.”
“Had you or any of the other officers ever anticipated anything like this happening?”
“No, sir. We’ve had a little trouble, ordinary trouble, but nothing like this.”
“What is the sort of trouble you have had?”
“It is a very mixed crowd, sir, all nationalities here, so just the ordinary sorts of clashes. There are the blacks, the Yiddish people, Maltese, Chinese, every kind down there, and when you get a crowd of that description, you are bound to have a little disorder.”
“I see. Have you found much difference in the behavior of the different races?”
“Not particularly.”
“One is as easy to control as any other?”
“Most of the time, sir.”
“And yet a mixed crowd like that has clashes.”
“In my experience, sir.”
Laurie remained poised but friendly, engaging but not eager. He was taller than many of the East Enders, but because he was thin, they could tell themselves he lacked strength. This was far from true, but unimportant. During breaks, he walked the streets and studied the poor condition of the dwellings. He’d already taken note of the worn and mended clothing, the blue and gray best clothes the Bethnal Greeners wore to come before the inquiry. He didn’t expect to be invited in, and he wasn’t, but he knew that many families of multiple generations lived in no more than two or three rooms, sometimes with boarders. To Laurie, this proof of their already cramped lives made the crush even crueler.
“In your opinion, did the different races or nationalities or creeds or denominations we have here play any role in it?”
“No, sir.”
“No difference in behavior, then, that you’ve noticed?”
“Well, I do know that it is necessary for the Jew to wail. I didn’t know that before.”
“I see. How long have you lived in Bethnal Green?”
“My whole life, sir.
“Could you tell me more about the room?” Paul asked. The windows were open to the garden. They’d been talking for an hour, and Paul had been invited to stay for lunch. He hoped they might eat outside.
“Many attributed your success with the East Enders to the casual atmosphere you created.”
Dunne smiled.
“The table, for instance. A small one, arranged as if at a club.”
“I liked that table. So did the mayor, as I recall.”
Paul studied his notes. It was their second day of interviews, and he couldn’t tell if Dunne was being serious or not. Since Dunne had learned he was one of the orphans, their conversations had eased but not deepened. The old magistrate seemed amused by his questions, as if reminded of an old joke or a favorite childhood friend, and Paul felt a bit lost. He tried another direction.
“Let me ask you about the opening of the report. Stylistically, it was an unusual choice, and yet it gave the report a wide popular appeal.”
“When it was published.”
“Yes. Was that your hope, that it would have popular appeal? Were you trying to set a precedent for future government reports?”
Dunne tilted his head in thought. “Good questions. Let’s eat first, and I’ll try to think of answers.”
Paul followed him to the kitchen. A loaf of bread was set out, still in its plastic sleeve, next to plates, napkins, wineglasses—all mismatched from several ornate sets. Slices of cheddar and roast beef were displayed unceremoniously in their deli papers.
“A luncheon buffet,” Dunne said, gesturing to a chair. “I thought we’d fend for ourselves. What would you like to drink?”
There was no room on the small table for Paul’s notebook, so he slid it under his chair, surprised to find the floor sticky. Dunne poured two generous glasses of wine and offered him the bread.
“Help yourself.”
He brought over mayonnaise and mustard, an avocado, and a bag of carrots. Paul smiled and assembled his lunch a step behind Dunne in order to understand the rules. When Dunne used his fingers to peel a piece of roast beef, so did Paul. When Dunne used the same knife for the mayonnaise and the mustard, so did Paul. He would have liked a slice of avocado, but Dunne’s peeling of it made such a mash, Paul declined. Dunne had nearly finished his glass of wine before the sandwiches were complete.
“Bon appétit,” Dunne said, lifting his sandwich with one hand, pouring more wine with the other.
Paul took a bite, chewed, and swallowed. Never had he felt less hungry.
“Are you married?” Dunne asked.
Paul shook his head.
Dunne regarded him with affection. “Don’t wait too long. Oh, well, do whatever you want. I can see you’re trying to make something of yourself. Good for you. Now’s the time.”
Paul looked down at the mess of his sandwich. He wasn’t sure what Dunne was talking about, but he hoped to find a way back to the report. “It’s been almost thirty years since the accident,” he tried.
“You keep reminding me.”
Paul wiped his mouth. “You faced an impossible task—to make sense of a pointless tragedy—and in three weeks you interviewed eighty witnesses and wrote a full report yourself. That would be inconceivable today. Today it would take two weeks merely to decide on the members of the investigating commission.” He stopped, but Dunne’s pleased expression encouraged him. “Then there’s the writing itself. It’s artful and compassionate—the opening, especially, of course. The story I want to tell is how and why you told the story of the tragedy the way you did.”
“Death demands ceremony. An inquiry is just a kind of ceremony.”
Paul shook his head. “The inquiry, yes. Call it ceremony. But not your report. It was something else.”
“I wanted it to be. I did have this idea that the people should read it, needed to read it.” He took a small foil-wrapped cake out of the refrigerator.
“And with the almost novelistic opening you gave them, they did.” Paul reached for his tape recorder, thought it might be all right now, but Laurie shook his head.
“Another angle that interests me,” Paul continued, setting the tape recorder back down, “is that the first woman to fall was never identified.”
“Angle,” Laurie said, and Paul could tell he’d used the wrong word.
“Perspective. Maybe I just mean detail. It was widely known at the time that a woman was the first to fall. But she was never identified, right?”
Laurie was silent.
“Is there something we don’t know?”
Dunne fussed with the foil around the cake a moment, then gave up. “Yes.”
Paul stopped chewing.
Dunne picked up a knife and began sawing into the cake through the foil. “I’ve always thought of reports as the gospels of our time. The way they authorize a particular version of events.”
“That would make you the messenger,” Paul said.
“Oh, I didn’t mind that,” Dunne said. He served Paul a pile of cake crumbs. “The first woman to fall was a refugee.”
“What is the shelter’s rate of intake, normally? How long does it take to get, say, six thousand people down?”
“I should think fifteen to twenty minutes. Three to three and a half minutes a thousand. That is what I would estimate.”
“That is something over two per second passing a given point on the escalator?”
“Yes.”
“That is a good many, is it not?”
“They go through very quickly. The speed is quite good.”
“I see. Is it your opinion that nationalities, races, creeds, denominations, played any part in this at all?”
“Not in this, no.”
“Have you ever noticed, as a matter of interest, any difference in behavior between the different nationalities or races we have here?”
“I cannot say that I have. Of course, we have here at Bethnal Green a lot of the fellow we call the Cockney, the real good old Cockney, and I think that is why we have little panic here. But even the Jew, contrary to what we believed, stood up to it pretty well. They surprised me and everybody else who knows this part of London.”
“You were in the crowd outside the shelter the night of March third?”
“Yes.”
“What did you see when you arrived?”
“It was very dark. The crowd was moving along all right down the stairs, and suddenly the people in the front seemed to stop, and I felt an awful pressure from the back.”
“You couldn’t go forward and you couldn’t go back?”
“That’s right.”
“And you didn’t know why you couldn’t go forward. Did anybody seem to know?”
“No.”
“Could you see down the staircase at all?”
“Not really.”
“Did any of the people seem to be seeing down the staircase?”
“No.”
“What were the people doing?”
“How do you mean?”
“What were they doing, how were they behaving?”
“We were waiting. Some people were worried. We thought the bombs had started.”
“Why?”
“People yelled they’d started dropping them.”
“Who yelled that?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long do you think you were there?”
“I should think ten minutes.”
“But everybody is all right?”
“The baby came through. I lost my two oldest.”
“Where was your husband?”
“I was talking to him and trying to pull him out, right at the bottom of the stairs.”
“He was at the bottom?”
“Yes, right at the bottom. All he was saying was ‘Get Ivy out!’—she’s our baby—and luckily someone did pull her out for me.”
“But your husband, unfortunately—”
“No, he is in hospital.”
“Oh, that’s good. What is the matter?”
“He says he cannot feel his legs.”
“I expect the doctors will patch him up all right.”
“Of course, I lost my mother and two sisters.”
“I am interested in the first woman who is supposed to have fallen. You say you saw her?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you know her?”
“No.”
“Do you know what happened to her?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you see her afterward? Did she make it out of the heap?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“You live at Seventy-one Royston Street, Bethnal Green?”
“Yes.”
“Where were you when the alert sounded?”
“Indoors with my three little ones.”
“At home?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do?”
“I gathered up what I could and ran with the children to the shelter.”
“You ran, did you?”
“Yes.”
“How old are the children?”
“One is three and a half, the next one is six, and the other one is eleven.”
“Let me ask you right away, because the notes I have are not always accurate about this: the children are all right, are they?”
Laurie ate a cold Woolton pie that night with Armorel. He told her some of the stories he’d heard. “The victims looked alive until a warden touched them. Then they disintegrated.”
Armorel shook her head.
“The result, they say, of a new bomb that takes the breath out of people. Some took the bodies of their children home with them, convinced that the government, for unspecified reasons, wouldn’t allow them a proper burial.”
“Oh, Laurie.”
He told her that many of the witnesses mentioned a sound, something they heard that night that was different. They described it variously as a screaming blast, a crack, a rocket. What was clear in all cases was that it had made no sense to them. The East Enders knew the nightmare of aerial bombardment: the sirens, the drone of aircraft, the rumble of guns. They had nicknames for the searchlights and the barrage balloons, the pilots and the bombs. They claimed to be able to gauge by sound alone the location of a bomb, exploded or unexploded, incendiary, oil, or high explosive.
“Do you believe them?” Armorel asked.
“About this, I do.”
“Then I do, too. That night they must have heard something.”
“But when, exactly? That will be important. Anyway, I have a good lad helping. Ian Ross, a local constable. Quite capable, I think.”
Armorel put down her fork. “Isn’t it remarkable,” she said.
“What?”
“There is always such a supply of capable young men around you, and yet the city complains of a shortage.”
“If you’re worried about Andrew, remember you’re also proud. He’s going to be fine.”
Armorel shook her head again and picked up her spoon. “This is just soup with a crust. Do you think Lord Woolton eats it?”
Laurie smiled. Like most of their friends, they’d dismissed their servants for war work and now managed on their own. Woolton pie was supposed to count toward making your main dish a potato dish three times a week, according to the Ministry of Food’s Potato Plan. “I read the other day that crockery breakage is down ninety percent,” he offered.
“Yes, and indigestion is up a hundred,” replied Armorel.
Laurie took another bite of the tasteless soup. “The mayor’s an odd woman,” he went on, “but I don’t think she’ll be any trouble.”
“Did you choose this Ross, or was he assigned to you?” Armorel asked.
“I chose him. He seems intelligent.”
“Should we have him to dinner?”
“I don’t think that will be necessary.”
“I mean, would you like to have him to dinner?”
Laurie shook his head, his thoughts returning to the day’s testimony: “A few witnesses insisted on telling me the story of how they escaped being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Infuriating. Don’t they know a near miss is always safe enough?”