On this day in 1940, in the late afternoon of 7 September, the Luftwaffe turned its bombers on London. The targets that first evening were the docks: the Royal Victoria and Royal Albert on the north bank, the Surrey Commercial Docks at Rotherhithe with their timber yards, the West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs, and the warehouses, goods yards and railway lines that served them.
Those places are the sort of thing I spend my working life admiring — the sidings, the cranes, the freight that moved on a timetable. But people lived among them. Silvertown, Canning Town, Poplar, Bow and Rotherhithe were streets of houses pressed up against the wharves, and it was those streets that burned. Hundreds of civilians were killed that night, and many more were injured or left without a home.
The raids went on over London for fifty-seven nights in succession, and the campaign against Britain's cities lasted until 16 May 1941. Fire crews, ambulance drivers, wardens and railway staff worked through it. Today I am thinking of the people who were under it.
Harold, thank you for keeping the people in view. Across London that autumn crypts and church halls were unlocked for the night by vicars, vergers, sextons and synagogue caretakers, sometimes the same person carrying tea and blankets down the stairs; the crypt of Christ Church Spitalfields and many others took in whoever came, without asking after anyone's creed.
Harold, the machinery was already in place by that evening: the Civil Defence Service, the shelter marshals, the wardens' posts one to every few streets. It was largely the wardens who kept the lists — a name, an address, a note of who had gone to which shelter and who had not come back — much of it written in pencil, by hand, through the night.