Hitler hanged and burned: VE Day in South London 1945

The end of war in Europe was celebrated with several days of relieved VE (Victory in Europe) celebrations across Britain in May 1945. In South London as in many other areas this includes bonfires, parties and singing in the streets. On the Old Kent Road there were 'groups of people singing round pianos on the pavements'; on Rye Lane, Peckham sailors rode on the top of double decker buses; hundreds gathered at One Tree Hill.

During the events 'scores of effigies of Hitler were burned' while it was reported that in Artichoke Place, Camberwell 'another Hitler dummy is swinging from a gas lamp with a noose around his neck' (South London Observer, 11 May 1945)

 

WW2 Peace Shop in Blackheath: 'War will cease when men refuse to fight'

During the Second World War, as in the First World War, there were pacifists who refused to serve in the armed forces because of their political and/or religious opposition to war. Many of these war resisters suffered time in prison, while others recognised as conscientious objectors were officially excused on the basis that they agreed to undertake non-military duties.

The main journal of the peace movement, then and now, was Peace News which was founded in 1936. Its entire run has now been digitised on Internet Archive and it is a fascinating treasure trove of historical material. I have already found some South London nuggets and no doubt you can find plenty more.

Here's one interesting story... the Blackheath Peace Shop, which ran at 14 Royal Parade from late 1938 until mid 1940. It was seemingly set up by local branches of a number of pacifist groups including the Peace Pledge Union, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship and the Society of Friends (Quakers).

Peace News, 5 April 1940

In the early days of the Second World War it was opening daily between 10 am and noon, and 3 pm and 5 pm, with Sunday afternoon tea parties followed by open air meetings on Whitfield's Mount on Blackheath.

Peace News, 22 September 1939

The shop did though face hostility, with a window being smashed in May 1940 at this 'centre of pacifist activity in the neighbourhood':

Peace News, 3 May 1940

:
The shop also featured in a court case in which six officials of the Peace Pledge Union were prosecuted in relation to a poster reading 'War will cease when men refuse to fight. What are you going to do about it?' The poster was said to have been on display in various locations including on a board outside 1a Eddystone Road in Brockley (the HQ of the Forest Hill branch of the PPU) and outside the Peace Shop in Blackheath. The location near to the Heath where 'service men resorted' was cited as evidence for the serious charge that the poster was intended to incite 'disaffection' in the armed forces.

The trial ended with the defendants being ' bound over' after the Peace Pledge Union agreed to withdraw the poster. A verbatim account of the 'Poster Case' trial was published as a pamphlet by the PPU later that year. One of those summonsed to court was Ronald Smith, of Courtrai Road SE23, described as the 'group leader' of the PPU's Forest Hill branch.

Peace News, 7 June 1940

Shortly afterwards it was reported in the Lewisham Borough News that 'Blackheath's little Peace Shop' had closed down after having its window broken again.

The PPU remained active in Blackheath however, with its local branch meeting at the home of its secretaries Alan and Winifred Eden-Green  of 2 Talbot Place SE3. As well as supporting 'distressed COs' they set up a Pacifist Service Unit to provide welfare help in the local community.  Alan Eden-Green (1916-1997) was  a conscientious objector during the Second World War who 'performed voluntary work for Woolwich Council in the blitz, driving mobile canteens and putting up Anderson shelters for the elderly' (obituary in Independent, 12 December 1997).  Winifred Eden-Green worked as assistant to author and prominent pacifist Vera Brittain through the war years and on to 1962. The Eden-Greens later edited a collection of Brittain's war time letters  in which they recalled that 'two attempts were made to set the Blackheath Peace Shop on fire' and that an Army Major had threatened to shoot them both (Testament of a Peace Lover: Letters from Vera Brittain, Virago, 1988).

Peace News, 15 November 1940

The former Peace Shop at 14 Royal Parade has most recently been home to Yield Gallery.

see also: Dick Sheppard peace centre in Peckham 1939

Light Perpetual - remembering the New Cross V2 disaster

An eye catching, if slightly storm frayed billboard advert in New Cross Road announces the paperback publication of Francis Spufford's novel 'Light Perpetual'. Spufford has been teaching creative writing at Goldsmiths since 2008 and the novel is directly inspired by events in New Cross Road. As he explains in the book, 'for the last twelve years, I've been walking to work at Goldsmiths College past a plaque commemorating the 1944 V2 attack on the New Cross Road branch of Woolworths. Of the 168 people who died, fifteen were aged eleven or under. The novel is partly written in memory of those South London children, and their lost chance to experience the rest of the twentieth century'.

The premise of the novel is to imagine what might have been given some very slight alteration in circumstances - supposing a technical fault has caused the missile to fail during its journey, as many did, or it landed relatively harmlessly in a park rather than a crowded shop on a Saturday?

'That's time for you. It breaks things up. It scatters them. It cannot be run backwards, to summon the dust to rise, any more than you can stir milk back out of tea. Once sundered, forever sundered. Once

scattered, forever scattered. It's irreversible. But what has gone is not just the children's present existence [....]  It's all the futures they won't get, too. All the would-be's, might-be's, could-be's of the decades to come. How can that loss be measured, how can that loss be known, except by laying this

absence, now and onwards, against some other version of the reel of time, where might-be and could-be and would-be still may still be'.

And so Spufford imagines how the lives of some of the children who died might have played out in the decades to come, what they missed out on and what the world missed out by their absence. I really enjoyed the novel but admit to being puzzled why he set a story that is so clearly tied to a real New Cross event in the fictional south east London borough of Bexford. But as he recently explained, 'I wanted to find a way of remembering the event that was faithful but not literal, so had to invent a London borough and drop a V2 of my own on to it, not to trample on anybody’s real grief'.

Memorials

There are actually two memorial plaques at the site (where the Iceland store now stands)- the first put up by Deptford History Group in 1994...

...and the second sponsored by Lewisham Council unveiled in 2009, as reported here.

As I roved out on Deptford Broadway

The events are also referenced in a song from 2012 included on the compilation 'Deptford Day: Songs About SE8'. 'As I roved out on Deptford Broadway'  by Neil Gordon-Orr imagines somebody looking back on their youth in the pubs and cinemas of New Cross and Deptford and missing his friends lost in the Second World War, including in the V2 attack.

As I roved out on Deptford Broadway

As I roved out one summer Sunday

To take the air on Deptford Broadway

Fell in with Jo and Sam and Susie

Says I who'll share my wages with me?

We had a quick dram in the Dover

In the Royal Albert we sipped some porter

Sam left with Jo and Susie after

She caught the tram and I fell over

I saw Susie the next Friday

In the Odeon kissed through a movie

Next week we danced in the New Cross Palais

Next year in St Pauls we were married

Now I sit here in the Granby

And all those years have gone behind me

So have a drink and sit beside me

My old friends' stools are all long empty

Sam never came back from the army

Jo crossed the seas when she got married

And Susie died right here in New Cross

When the rocket blew up Woolworths

Now I go walking every Sunday

I dodge the cars on Deptford Broadway

I think of Sam and Jo and Susie

And all the other ghosts beside me

The sunlight perpetual reflects off the gold letters on the billboard

'Come, other future. Come, mercy not manifest in time; come

knowledge not obtainable in time. Come, other chances. Come,

unsounded deep. Come, undivided light. Come dust' (Frances Spufford)

 

All Swell at Camberwell - Women in trousers at the town hall shock (1941)

'All Swell' - 'an unofficial bulletin published monthly by the Camberwell Branch of Nalgo for the special benefit of members serving with the Forces... Edited by David Leggatt, Food Office, Wilson's Grammar School, Peckham Road'. The motto of the old Camberwell Council  - now incorporated into Southwark Council - was ‘All’s well’, so the Union was playing on this. NALGO, the National Association of Local Government Officers, became part of Unison.

Anyway the big news in November 1941 was that the ‘the town hall saw for the first time women members of staff wearing trousers’.  This was something the author approved of: 'trousers are more hard wearing than stockings and more economical at the present time; by their use, women save both coupons and money. It follows then that fewer stockings mean more tanks for Russia'

 [original document is in Southwark Archives]

Dora Project: Nazi terror in Germany & SE London

Last weekend coming up for the Dora Project at Peckham Platform (in Peckham Square by the library). A very interesting exhibition  that 'combines art, WW2 London and early rocket engineering' it has been put together by artist Françoise Dupré in collaboration with Rebecca Snow. Essentially it documents and displays the links between the Nazi V2 programme - which entailed slave labour in a concentration camp and the death of thousands in rocket attacks - and later US and Russian space exploration. In particular, after the second world war Nazi rocket engineers played a key role in the Apollo programme:

 

'DORA PROJECT connects two sites of terror: London and Mittelbau-Dora Nazi Concentration Camp in Central Germany. V2 rockets were assembled by slave labourers in an underground factory in Mittelbau-Dora where more than 20,000 inmates died. Between September 1944 and March 1945, V2 attacks on London killed around 2500 Londoners and destroyed homes and families'.

Mapping the connections between slave labour and rocket attacks



Wernher von Braun, architect of both the V2 rocket and the Apollo programme



 

Commemorating SE London victims - a list of V2 attacks in Lewisham
 

As this exhibition combines my local history interests and my previous time in the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, it couldn't have been more me. Dora Project closes on 15 May



1939 Evacuation - 2,000 children leave New Cross Gate in two hours

I'm sure many of us returning to work after the Christmas holidays are not looking forward to getting back on trains and buses. Spare a thought though for some previous travellers... On 1 September 1939, at the start of the Second World War, the mass evacuation of children from London and other cities started. As these reports show, 2,000 children left New Cross Gate station alone in less than two hours. Two still existing New Cross schools are mentioned specifically - Childeric and Waller Elementary (now Edmund Waller Primary School):

'Greatest Evacuation Has Begun - 3,000,000 persons on the move - Exodus of Bible Dwarfed - Cheerful Youngsters at London Stations

Britain today began the giant four day task of evacuating 3,000,000 children, mothers, blind and maimed. From the big cities of the land there began an exodus on a scale without precedent in human history... Nearly half of the three million are from Greater London...

Before dawn nearly 200 children assembled at Myrdle street School, East London. Among them was nine years-old Freda Skrzypce, who arrived with her parents from Danzig on Sunday. She has a companion in Ruth Rosenzweig, aged nine, a Jewish girl. The dexterity with which children were shepherded through arriving masses of morning workers at Waterloo Station was a perfect piece of organisation. At Myrdle school, which is in a poor part of East London, children were told to be at the premises at 5:30 am, but before the gates were opened at five, some were already waiting outside... As one little girl was leaving here mother, she asked pathetically, 'I wonder if I'll ever see you again mummy - here or anywhere else?'.

.. In less than two hours nearly 2,000 children had left New Cross Gate Station on the Southern Railway. 'The discipline of the children was astonishing' a reporter was told 'and I had not one case of a difficult child. The children behaved as though they had been prepared for this for months. I wish all our passengers were as easy to manage'.  'A triumph of co-operation' was how a London County Council official described the evacuation. Children, teachers and railway employees worked in perfect harmony.

A cripple girl of eight, who has had eleven operations, was evacuated from St Thomas Hospital. Clutching a dolly, she pointed proudly to the foot of her bed saying 'My gas mask is there'.

(Express and Echo - Exeter, Friday 1 September 1939)

'Nearly 800 children left New Cross Gate Southern Railway Station at 8:50 am. Mothers and fathers gathered in a goods yard and waved good-bye with handkerchiefs and newspapers as trains moved out. None of the children knew their destination. 'I hope it is going to be the seaside' said one boy. 'I have brought by bathing costume along with me'

(Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette - Friday 01 September 1939)

'Activity at New Cross Gate Station, one of the big London entraining centres in the scheme, began soon after 8 a.m., with the arrival of tiny tots from Childeric Road Infants’ School. Hand-in-hand, with the requisite belongings, including gas-masks slung over their shoulders, they followed the instructions of their teachers. These children were quite cheerful — it was apparently a great adventure. Scores of mothers, despite appeals to go no further than the schools at which the children assembled, went to the station, but were not allowed on the embarkation platforms.

The first trainload to leave was practically all infants —and 95 per cent, delighted infants. Glorious weather and a train ride into the country— perhaps to the sea. It was great. Many took precious toys with them. Two little girls left together, each hugging teddy bears. There were dolls in plenty, and the tinier the children the happier they were. Two mothers changed their minds outside the station. They had walked at the side of the procession from one of the schools, but at the last moment, as their children were approaching the barrier, they caught them up in their arms and took them home again...

A master at Waller Road Elementary Junior School, who saw pupils off to-day, gave very remarkable figures of a timing test they had had at the school for putting on gas-masks. He said that from the moment the order was given every mask was on in 31 seconds, and one infant of four years had put it on in 15 seconds. A cheery Cockney going in the direction of New Cross Gate Station with a vegetable barrow hoisted a couple of youngsters on to his potatoes and pushed them to the station. The cheerful co-operation of London workers in travelling early did much to lessen delay and congestion. About 20 children arrived in a furniture van—singing!'

(Bristol Evening Post - Friday 01 September 1939)

David Lodge on bullet holes in Brockley

The novelist David Lodge (born 1935) grew up in Brockley, living at 81 Millmark Grove from 1936 to 1959. He went to St Mary Magdelen Roman Catholic primary school in Brockley, and walking home from school during the Second World War he had a narrow escape:

'One afternoon we were a few hundred yards from the railway bridge that traversed Brockley Road just before Brockley Cross when a German aeroplane flew over our heads firing its machine guns, perhaps at a train on the line, though its main target was said later to be an anti-aircraft battery on Telegraph Hill... Some of the bullets hit the white-tiled walls under the bridge and left pockmarks which were still discernible the last time I looked, about fifty years later'.

I checked myself last week, and yes the bullet holes are still there more than 70 years after the end of the war.

Brickley Central

David Lodge's 2008 novel 'Deaf Sentence' is the tale of a recently retired academic at a north of England university coping with going deaf and his elderly father's dementia. Said father still lives in the house where the narrator grew up, situated in an area named 'Brickley', a 'drab segment of  south-east London' with 'its streets of squat identical terraced cottages on the flat bits, and larger terraced houses and tall detached and semi-detached villas on the hilly bits'.

The father lives in 'Lime Avenue', a setting clearly based on Lodge's childhood home in Millmark Grove:  'squeezed in on rising ground between a main road and the railway, and it leads nowhere except to the main road at each end. The houses on the railway side have back gardens which abut on to an unusually high and wide embankment' whereas on the other side of the street the gardens are 'raised up artificially on landfill contained by a high concrete wall' backing on to the main road.

'Brickley' also features in his novel The Picturegoers set in a local cinema, while his time at the St Mary Magadelen parish youth club - St Ignatius Social Club - inspired an episode in his novel Therapy.

Lodge's portrait of Brockley/Brickley is less than flattering, but as he notes in his recent autobiograpy:  'When I was growing up there after the Second World War Brockley was a declining, unfashionable suburb, though I did not perceive it as such. After I ceased to live there in 1959, as Goldsmiths College in New Cross grew in size and status it began to attract more sophisticated residents - teachers, artists, actors - and lately it has become almost trendy'.

(Source for all above, except Deaf Sentence quotes, 'Quite A Good Time to be Born: A Memoir: 1935-1975' by David Lodge, Random House, 2015).

An Underground Bunker at Goldsmiths in New Cross

During the Second World War, Goldsmiths College was evacuated to Nottingham. The buildings in New Cross were taken over for Civil Defence. There was a barrage balloon, and an Air Raid Precautions (ARP) Control Centre, with First Aid and Casualty Clearing Station. The swimming pool in the college was set aside as a potential mortuary. In the event an incendiary bomb attack in 1940 destroyed the swimming pool, which I believe was never reinstated, and  badly damaged much of the main building.

However, in the Upper Field, where the Stuart Hall Building now stands as well as tennis courts, an underground ARP Control Centre was built but never used. According to Dorothy Dymond's 'The Forge: a history of Goldsmiths' College 1905-1955' (London, Methuen, 1955):  'The Borough Council in conjunction with the Ministry of Health also carried out extensive excavations under the Upper Field for the purpose of a large ARP Control Centre. This elaborate underground structure suffered some damage from a bomb and was never actually brought into use. At the end of the war, after various possibilities of College utilization had been considered and rejected, the whole structure was buried, out of sight and out of mind'. Wonder if there's anything left of it?

From 'The Forge' (1955)

Goldsmiths Library after 1940 incendiary bomb attack

Divided by Race, United in War and Peace

On Friday 19th September (7:30 pm) there's a screening of ‘Divided by Race, United in War and Peace’ at St Catherine’s Church, Pepys Road, Telegraph Hill, SE14 5TY. Tickets are £5 / £3 (including snacks) and can be booked at www.thc.ticketsource.co.uk

'Divided by Race, United in War and Peace is a warm and life-affirming film, directed by Marc Wadsworth.   The film examines race relations in Britain during and after the Second World War and is a timely reminder of the contribution by overseas troops to the war effort.   Telegraph Hill Ward Community Weekend runs from Sept 19-21 and the film will be screened at St Catherine’s Church, Pepys Road, SE14 5TY as part of the weekend of events. At the core of Divided by Race, United in War and Peace are the testimonies of 13 surviving veterans, West Indian and African young men and women who volunteered to join the war effort and soon afterwards returned to live in Britain.   They risked their lives to serve under the British flag in times of war, then faced a second battle – their right to remain under that flag, as British citizens.   Until now their stories have not been properly heard'.

History Corner: WW2 Stretchers as Railings

Mereton Mansions in Brookmill Road, Deptford was formerly Carrington House, a homeless hostel. The railings outside have an interesting history too - they are made from metal stretchers used by ARP (Air Raid Protection) during the Second World War.

Similar examples of this recycling can be found elsewhere in London. I spotted these on the East Dulwich Estate:

See also The Great Wen on World War 2 Railings - he mentions that there are similar railings in Harleyford Street SE11. There is an interesting discussion on flickr too with pictures from elsewhere, and some detail that confirms this is not just an urban myth. In fact here's a photo of one of the stretchers in action:

from Wartime Memories by Ruth Durrant - note the stretchers
(this picture was taken on one of the River Emergency Service boats in the Second World War,
which operated from Cherry Gardens Pier in Bermondsey)

History Corner: Lord Haw Haw

I've mentioned before that William Joyce, who as 'Lord Haw Haw' was the voice of the Nazis' English language radio broadcasts during the Second World War, had once been involved in the Conservative Party in Dulwich. I've been reading more about him in 'The Meaning of Treason' by Rebecca West (1965), who attended Joyce's treason trial at the Old Bailey.

Joyce  was born in New York in 1906 to a pro-British Irish family, and moved to London in 1921 after spending most of his childhood in Galway.  West's book combines details of Joyce's life with the most incredible condescension to South London. Indeed she even implies that Joyce's South London period partly shaped his destiny as a place breeding frustrated ambition in those to whom traditional routes to power are blocked:

'He came to London before his family; and his destiny sent him down to South London, and there was significance in that. South London is not the London where England can be conquered. It is not London at all, even calling itself by a vague and elided location. 'Where do you live?' 'South the river'. The people on the other bank never speak of their landscape as "north of the river". They may go down east, or up west, but they move within London, where the Houses of Parliament are, and the Abbey, and Buckingham Palace'.

Joyce's first London home was in Longbeach Road SW11, 'in one of those streets which cover the hills round Clapham Common like a shabby striped grey counterpane'. While here Joyce began studies at Battersea Polytechnic. When his parents came to London afterwards he moved into the family home at 7 Allison Grove SE21, 'a house as delightfully situated as any in London. Allison Grove is a short road of small houses which has been hacked out from the corner of the gardens of a white Regency villa in the greenest part of Dulwich'. Ironically the house was destroyed by a German bomb early in the war: 'Nothing remained of it except a hole in the ground beside the remains of a neighbour's basement'.

Joyce was active in the Conservative Party's youth wing, the Imperial Youth League and later the Tory Party proper. He was also involved with the British Fascists from 1923 to 1925, who provided security for Conservative Party public events - Joyce prided himself on being a street-fighter and claimed to have helped the notoriously brutal Black and Tans in Ireland in their efforts to suppress Irish nationalists. It was in this physical capacity that Joyce sustained his striking scarred face during a fight while defending the platform at a 1924 Tory election meeting at Lambeth Baths in Battersea. In 1927 he married and  moved to Chelsea where he remained a Conservative Party activist until 1932 when he joined Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. He subsequently became its Deputy Leader and Director of Propaganda.

Crystal Palace

In 1933 he was back in South London, living in in Crystal Palace in 'a home which, though cheap and unfashionable, possessed its picturesque distinction. He was staying in a flat in a road clinging to the top of an escarpment in the strangest spot in the strangeness of South London. It was far south of the river, where the tameness of town overspreads hills which, though insignificant in height, are wild in contour; and if it covers them with the tame shapes of houses it has to stack them in wild steepness. But above this suburban precipice the buildings themselves were wild with the wildness sometimes found in Victorian architecture. Outside the windows of his flat in Farquhar Road, two towers ran up into the sky and between them the torso of the Crystal Palace was at one and the same time a greenhouse and a Broad Church cathedral... A little way up the road was the Crystal Palace railway station, the most fantastic in London, so allusive, particularly in its cast-iron ornamental  work, to uplifting Victorian festivity that it wold not be surprising to find its platforms thronged by a choir singing an oratorio by Parry or Stainer.. It was from this flat, on 4 July 1933, that William Joyce addressed the application for a passport which cost him his life'. It was as a holder of a British passport that Joyce was later convicted of treason. His lawyer argued in his trial that he was technically a US citizen and therefore could not be guilty of treason to the British state, but Joyce had spent years arguing that he was British with the passport application the clinching evidence.

Joyce in Germany with his wife Margaret

Joyce split with Mosley in 1937 and founded the British National Socialist League, even more rabidly anti-semitic than the BUF. He moved to Germany just before the outbreak of war in 1939, and worked for the Nazi propaganda effort all the way through to their defeat in 1945. After being captured and brought back to England, Joyce was detained in Brixton prison, Wormwood Scrubs and finally Wandsworth, 'a shabby old prison, black as a coal tip, set among the trodden commons and the discoloured villas, the railway viaducts and the long streets of little houses, which lie "south of the river". The last days of his life in London were to be spent only a mile or two from the house in Longbeach Road where it had begun'. He was hanged for treason in January 1946.

Incidentally Joyce's daughter Heather Piercey ended up teaching in Deptford, trying to atone for his anti-semitism by promoting links between Christians and Jews (see this 2005 interview).

(See also Nickel in the Machine - The Execution of Lord Haw Haw at Wandsworth Prison in 1946, from where I sourced the photos).

Freedom for Tooting

Some friends of mine have recently moved from New Cross to Tooting, so as a parting gift Transpontine will take a rare roam into the western lands of South London to offer up some nuggets of cultural history from Tooting and Balham.

Tooting Popular Front


In the late 1970s comedy TV series Citizen Smith, the Tooting Popular Front was a fictitious South London revolutionary group with slogans including 'Freedom for Tooting' and 'Power to the People'.

In real life, Balham was arguably the birthplace of British Trotksyism. In the early 1930s, a group of South West London socialists were expelled from the Communist Party for their opposition to Stalin's policies. Their ranks included Hugo Dewar from Tooting CP, Reg Groves and Harry Wicks and they constituted themselves as the Balham Group of the International Left Opposition operating from 79 Bedford Rd, SW4; Groves later wrote a biography of the 'red priest' Conrad Noel, and indeed some of the Balham Group had been close to Noel's Anglo-Catholic socialist 'Catholic Crusade'.

Punk and stuff

Charlie Harper of punk band UK Subs was a hairdresser on Tooting Broadway when the band started out in 1977. Guitarist Nicky Garratt recalls: 'We based ourselves out of Charlie’s hairdressing salon... where we stored our battered Marshall P.A. system in the back room along with drums, amps, baskets of towels and a huge supply of hair care products. The Salon, became both meeting place and hang out over the next year mostly because it was one of the few places where Charlie could be found with any degree of certainty'. In Julien Temple's film Punk Can Take It (1979), based around the band's music, there a scene with Charlie Harper in the hairdressers.

Other musical connections include:

- Marc Bolan (T-Rex) went to Hillcroft School in Beechcroft Road, Tooting (now known as Ernest Bevin College) - as a teenager he lived in Sun Cottages, Summerstown;
- Captain Sensible of The Damned was born in Balham;
- Kirsty McColl started out in a band called The Tooting Frooties;
- Kitchens of Distinction did a song 'On Tooting Broadway Station':

Angela Carter

Writer Angela Carter grew up in Balham - her favourite building was the Granada Cinema in Tooting, where she went as a child with her father, as recalled in a 1992 BBC documentary: 'This cinema, with its mix of the real and false - real marble hugger-mugger with plaster, so you have to tap everything to see if it sounds hollow or solid - this apotheosis of the fake. There was a functioning cyclorama, in my day, clouds, stars, a sun, a moon, drifting across a painted sky. I held my breath in the gallery of mirrors - anything might materialise in those velvety depths, monsters, beauties, my own grown self. I would have been seven or eight. This was the first great public building that ever impinged on me - and even though it was then jam-packed with queues, the marble steps polished by uniformed ushers, all the same, from outside it was just a concrete bunker. So there was always the element of surprise. It was, like the unconscious itself - like cinema itself - public and private at the same time... I fell in love with cinema although I scarcely remember the movies I watched with my father, only the space in which we sat to watch them, where we sat with all those wonderful people waiting in the dark'.

World War Two

In October 1940 at least 66 people died while sheltering at Balham tube station during a German air raid. The tunnel was flooded after a bomb fractured water mains. The incident features in Ian McEwan's novel Atonement, and in the film version of the book.

Sharley McLean: from refugee nurse at Lewisham Hospital to LGBT activist

Born Lotte Reyersbach in Germany, Sharley McLean (1923-2013) fled the Nazis and ended up in London. Her parents both died in the Holocaust (her father was a socialist, her mother was Jewish). After hearing a libertarian speaker in Hyde Park she got involved in the London anarchist scene, selling the papers Freedom and War Commentary at Speakers Corner, though she was ambivalent about their pacifism during the Second World War: 'I really saw the Nazi machinery as an evil and so I did not want to participate in anything that would detract from that'.

During the war she worked as a nurse at Lewisham hospital, as she later recalled: 'My first involvement in unions was when I was nursing at Lewisham hospital. I learned from a friend that nurses at Friern Barnet got five nights off a fortnight and we were getting only four. I heard that there was a trade union in the hospital, basically for porters and cleaners and another nurse and I got in touch. We were probably among the first nurses to join a union. You had porters who wheeled trolleys for the corpses; you had porters who looked after the rubbish. Everybody insisted on the differential and I thought that was crazy. However, we did get five nights off a fortnight.

I hated the war; we were in the frontline, all the casualties we saw. When Sandringham School was bombed, there was a tremendous anti-German feeling when those kids were brought into the hospital. It was heartbreaking: a war against children. You just worked; there was a dedication and even people with little nursing experience were called upon, to set up drips. It was all done by hand and we had a big fish kettle to sterilize things. Things were primitive compared to now and the sepsis rate was higher, and there were no wonder drugs. I was also on duty when the hospital was hit. A bomb fell on the dispensary which caused tremendous fire. As nurses we were told where there were so-called safe points and one of my friends on E Block had taken shelter at one of those points and that collapsed and she was killed outright. We were badly burned in the D Block I was in but we managed to evacuate all the patients, and people who hadn’t walked for months and months suddenly found they were able to walk down these ghastly fire escapes. At the end of the war Ruth [another refugee] and I went down Lewisham High Street and we sang every German folk song we could remember'.

Sharley (pictured above in 1941) carried on working in the NHS until she retired, and later became involved with HIV/AIDS support at the Terrence Higgins Trust as well as being a lesbian activist working for the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. Indeed her first encounters with other lesbians were while working at Lewisham in the Second World War.

'When Lewisham Hospital was bombed, we all shared rooms and even beds because the rooms were so small. We were together; we cuddled each other without giving it a second thought. I think we were naive sexually. One staff nurse would say there were two ward sisters who were 'homosexual ladies'. They used to tell people they weren't married because their boyfriends were killed in the First World War. I remember we used to look at them with curiosity. Ridiculous when you think how naive one was.

I can remember one woman in particular I had a tremendous crush on. She was a cancer patient. I was very fond of her and I was told off for being too emotionally involved when she died. Also one of the orderlies used to say to me, 'Oh, you are one of us' and I thought she meant that I was as English as she was and I felt flattered that I had been accepted'.

Source: Inventing Ourselves: Lesbian Life Stories (Routledge, 1989). The air raid on Lewisham Hospital took place in July 1944, killing at least three people. The bombed school she refers to was actually called Sandhurst Road School in Catford - 38 children were killed there in January 1943.

Update March 2022:

Sharley MacLean was given recognition in the 'Out and About' exhibition of material from the Bishopsgate Institute LGBTQ+ Archive at the Barbican Centre in Feb/March 2022. Included was a banner from 'Hyde Park Gays and Sapphics' with a sign saying that this was a group founded by Sharley in 1982 and which for more than 20 years gave speeches on gay rights at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park.

Tanners Hill Bomb Shelter Sign

This fading image on Tanners Hill, Deptford, is a double ghost sign. The 'S' on a white background points to a Second World War bomb shelter further down the hill.

Over the top of it you can make out more recent graffiti 'Proletariat' - the letter 'Prole' in white paint and the rest of the word bleached out on the brick work as if it at attempt was made to clean it off at some point.

A similar sign remained on Jerningham Road, SE14, until the wall was demolished recently. There'a also one in Ladywell.

Anybody know where the Tanners Hill bomb shelter was, or even recall what the graffiti said?

Restless - World War Two Deptford

Restless (2006) by William Boyd is a great read, a tale of wartime espionage and its reverberations many years later. Much of the action takes place in the USA and Oxford, but at one point in 1942 the main character has cause to visit Deptford for reasons I won't divulge for fear of spoiling the plot:

'The next morning on the wireless she heard the news of the raids on Rotherhithe and Deptford - whole streets flattened, an entire housing estate evacuated, blocks of flats burned out and destroyed... She read of a charitable-trust estate in Deptford - three blocks almost totally destroyed, a direct hit on one, Carlisle House - 87 people feared dead... Eva caught a bus to Deptford the next day and went in search of Carlisle House. She found the usual fuming moonscape of dereliction: hills of brick rubble, teetering cliffs of walls and exposed rooms, gas mains still burning through the tumbled masonry with a pale wobbly light'

I believe that Carlisle House is fictional, though of course there were many real life scenes like this in Deptford during the war. At the BBC WW2 People's War archive, Daisy Purkiss recalls life in Deptford at that time:

'If we were caught in the street during a raid... we ran for the nearest shelter. We always ran for cover if we were outside. In Deptford High Street there was a bomb shelter under a big shop- Burton’s, a clothing shop. Everyone out in the High Street when the sirens went off ran for that, and stayed down there until the “all clear” sounded. Most of the raids were at night, and in the morning on the way to work we could see what the bombs had done . The did a lot of damage - knocked down buildings, shops and everything, but Burton’s was never knocked down. There were some American troops in the area and they used to help with clearing up the bomb damage. By the time the war ended most streets around Deptford and Lewisham had buildings missing where the bombs had landed'.

Ladywell Shelter

This 'Shelter for 700' sign is on the road bridge on Ladywell Road, opposite Ladywell station. It's mentioned in a few places online where it is described as a World War 2 bomb shelter sign. But is it? These were usually painted on a white background with a big 'S' for Shelter (see New Cross example here).

I wondered whether it might be more recent, e.g. a homeless shelter from Crisis at Christmas or similar. Does anybody know for sure? And where was the shelter? Presumably somewhere towards Lewisham High Street.

War Lore - a tale of Barnes Wallis

Although many people have marked another remembrance day, it is clear that as far as the World Wars of the Twentieth century are concerned 'remembrance' in the sense of living memories of people who died in those wars is fading fast. There's hardly anybody left who remembers the First World War, and those who remember the Second are disappearing fast. Most of those who do remember have childhood memories, so what people recall is often a mixture of lived experience and the stories they heard later about what happened. Of course these stories are sometimes interesting in themselves even when they are not necessarily true.

I heard some interesting New Cross war folklore this week, when a senior citizen told me his war stories. He could still recall his windows being blown in as a three year old in Loughborough Junction. But then he told me about the engineer and weapons designer Barnes Wallis- that he lived in New Cross (true - his father Charles was a doctor and there's a plaque at 241 New Cross Road; he later lived at 23 Pepys Road); and then that Wallis had tested out his a prototype of his famous bouncing bomb in an underground area at New Cross bus station (then the tram station), specially filled with water for the occasion. I've never heard this and I don't think it's true - the tests were actually carried out near Herne Bay in Kent. Has anybody heard this tale or a variation of it before? Wallis's childhood home in New Cross Road was more or less opposite the tram station, maybe that explains how the story came about.