Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
Keep calm and carry on singing: why Britons fell in love with opera during World War Two
As the conflict with Nazi Germany raged on, British tram drivers tuned in to Tchaikovsky and waitresses revelled in Wagner. But why? Alexandra Wilson explores the surprising Second World War obsession with opera
Glasgow, 1942. The Carl Rosa Opera Company was in town to perform Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Tickets had been snapped up by local people – including many who didn’t really know what an opera was. The soprano Joan Hammond, who sang the title role that night, later recalled that there were always newcomers in the audience wherever the Carl Rosa performed, searching for something different to do – but also for some kind of transcendental escapism. Invariably, they cheered the singers to the rafters. Surprising though it may seem to us today, opera was hugely popular during the Second World War. This was part of a broader surge of interest among the British in the so-called high arts – a sudden and rather urgent desire to ‘become cultured’ and to enjoy the best that life had to offer – when every day might be your last. Guy Ramsey reported in the Daily Mail in 1943 that “every day in every way Britain’s musical and dramatic taste is becoming more and more ‘highbrow’”. Tram drivers were listening to Tchaikovsky, waitresses were revelling in Wagner, and operas were drawing large audiences at provincial theatres. This war, Ramsey wrote, was more personal than any before it, and felt closer to home. Serious times called for serious art, and popular variety shows no longer seemed in step with the national mood. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/2X2FXR2webready-9f2accf-e1767623285427.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph shows a man in a cap with round glasses and a cigarette in his mouth sitting on one of many stools outside a theatre. In front of him to the right, a billboard advertises the Sadler's Wells Opera" title="Stools for hire by people queueing for Sadler’s Wells Opera Company performances at the New Theatre, 1943. Tickets started at just 1/6 (about £4 today) (Image by Alamy)" /> Workers’ playtime Opera had already enjoyed reasonably wide popularity in Britain during the interwar years. In London, the enterprising impresario Lilian Baylis had set up companies at the Old Vic in the 1920s and Sadler’s Wells in the 1930s that were explicitly aimed at fostering a love of opera among local working-class communities. And over in the East End, people could regularly watch operas at the People’s Palace, a large entertainment complex on the Mile End Road. Touring opera companies regularly visited towns and cities around the country, and were eagerly anticipated by people of all social classes. Operatic music could also be widely heard in restaurants, hotel foyers and cinemas, and broadcasting and gramophone records had done a great deal to popularise and democratise the art form. But the opera boom of the early 1940s was in a different league. It would have been logical if opera had ground to a halt during the war, given the large resources conventionally needed to stage performances. To be sure, the most prominent venues did close: the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden was turned into one of the most popular wartime dance halls, and Glyndebourne in East Sussex became a home for evacuees from London. Read more | The War of the Operas: new money vs old in The Gilded Age Sadler’s Wells soldiered on during the early months of the war, staging matinees to get around the problem of blackouts, but soon enough the Blitz put paid to this, and the theatre became a refuge for the newly homeless. However, the company moved its operations to Burnley and toured extensively from there, putting on works including The Magic Flute, The Marriage of Figaro, Rigoletto and La bohème with a scaled-down cast, piano accompaniment, a simple painted backcloth and a sofa. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/La-Traviata-9c942fb-e1767623963300.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing two women sharing an afternoon tea on a tray, in a theatre auditorium" title="Audience members sip tea during the interval in a 1943 matinee performance of La Traviata at the New Theatre in London’s West End. The soaring appetite for opera among all classes fuelled a wartime renaissance in Britain (Image by Imperial War Museum)" /> The Times praised Sadler’s Wells for “Making converts to the art of music-drama” in places such as Oldham, Accrington and Stockport. Performances were so popular that theatres were desperate to book the company. The manager of the Hull New Theatre reported that his postbag was constantly full of letters from audience members “representing a cross-section of the community” who wanted to see the troupe. Periodically, when it was safe to do so – and even when it wasn’t – the company returned to London to perform in the West End. The soprano Elisabeth Parry recalled a performance at the Haymarket Theatre in 1944 when the show went on even while alarms rang and ‘Doodlebugs’ (V1 flying bombs) could be heard buzzing overhead. Audience members remained in their seats, and the singers and orchestra carried on as if nothing was happening. The success of the Sadler’s Wells tours showed that the British would happily embrace opera if only they were given the opportunity. Journalists expressed frustration that there had never been a move to set up a similar opera company in every major city around the country, because there was clearly plenty of demand. “No doubt there are as many busmen as there are butchers, bakers, baronets and bankers who enjoy a good opera when they can get it,” argued The Times. And the Times Literary Supplement proposed that, with a dozen more companies along the lines of Sadler’s Wells, “we should have a genuine art of opera in England as we already have a genuine public for it”. Sadler’s Wells worked in partnership with the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), which also arranged concerts in which professional musicians, including opera singers, performed in factories, air-raid shelters and hospitals. CEMA’s broad aim was to “carry music, drama and pictures to places which otherwise would be cut off from all contact with the masterpieces of happier days and times”. Operatic performances also featured in the Holidays at Home initiative organised by the Ministry of Labour, which turned open areas in cities into makeshift seaside resorts, and put on a wide range of entertainments. One such scheme in Liverpool, which included performances of opera, ran for 11 weeks in 1942 and attracted an audience of three quarters of a million. Arias on the airwaves Of course, there was also plenty of opera on the radio. In 1941, regular monthly broadcasts of studio operas resumed for the first time since the outbreak of war. The emphasis was primarily on well-known classics such as La Traviata and The Barber of Seville because, as the conductor Sir Adrian Boult said, “The evidence is general that the musical public turns to these sources for mental and spiritual recreation more eagerly than ever today.” BBC listener research from 1943 revealed that the numbers listening to variety shows were down by 20 per cent, whereas audiences for classical music and serious drama were on the rise. Read more | The biggest misconceptions about WW2 evacuees? This historian has the answers Victor Hely-Hutchinson, the BBC’s director of music from 1944, wrote that one of the few benefits of the war was the rise of an immense public enthusiasm for good music. “Go to an orchestral concert, or a fine operatic performance,” he said, “and you will find a corporate appreciation and desire for music of a kind, and on a scale, that has never been seen in Britain before.” Radio broadcasts allowed audiences to enjoy the highest standards of singing, which were not always evident in rough-and-ready touring productions. “Stayed at home tonight to listen to Faust – complete – on the wireless,” wrote one unnamed office worker in a diary submission for Mass Observation in 1942. “Feel very grateful to the BBC for giving us first-class opera; it is not often we get first-rate opera in Manchester, and there is nothing worse than good music badly executed.” Many people, men in particular, first encountered opera in the forces. Some took part in amateur operatic productions of works such as Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at military bases in Britain. Others stationed in the Middle East with Paiforce (the Persia and Iraq force) had the opportunity to hear operatic arias in concerts organised by the Entertainments National Service Association. Some of the most respected British opera singers of the day, such as Walter Widdop, Dennis Noble and Miriam Licette, toured that region. But by far the most significant boom in enthusiasm for opera among soldiers was seen in Italy. In 1944, the Daily Express reported that “one of the biggest surprises of our ‘invasion’ of Italy has been the way the men have become opera fans”. Some enterprising army captains reformed the mothballed opera company at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. Word soon spread that watching opera was a good way to spend an evening, and British troops took to queueing around the block to get tickets. The 1,600-seat theatre was always full to capacity, and two performances a day had to be scheduled to meet demand. A similar enterprise was also set up at the bomb-damaged and abandoned Teatro Massimo Bellini in Catania, Sicily and, as the Allies moved north, more companies were founded in major cities across the country. Naomi Jacob, who in 1948 wrote a book about opera aimed specifically at the soldiers who had come to love it in Italy, recalled that when the idea had first been mooted, there had been a lot of scepticism about whether British and American troops would be willing to listen to opera. But houses sold out in advance, and audience members often came back several times. Jacob reported that “no better audience ever existed… they were punctual, they gave rapt attention, and their appreciation was unstinted”. From September 1943 to the end of the war, countless British servicemen watched performances of opera in Italy. The composer and broadcaster Spike Hughes reported that “in every town the same thing happened: the British soldier took to grand opera as if it were in his blood”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1754686839webready-9635b10-e1767623396598.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a stage show. A large ensemble crowd stands at the back of the stage, while one man stands at the front, crouched down with his arm held backwards" title="A 1940s opera performance in Rome. Many British servicemen first experienced – and came to love – opera while stationed in Italy during the war (Image by Getty Images)" /> Exposure to Italian opera in Italy helped soldiers to become more discerning listeners. In Britain before the war, opera was performed in English translation everywhere except Covent Garden and Glyndebourne, two ‘luxurious’ venues that sat apart from the national norm. But here, suddenly, was an audience that had shown itself perfectly capable of appreciating opera in the original language. The Rome correspondent for the Sunday Express reported that “an ‘opera-conscious’ audience is being created for Britain after the war, but if any theatre magnate wants to cater for them he must offer something better than a third-rate touring company”. Optimism for opera Hopes were high, then, for what Britain’s operatic landscape might look like in the postwar period. Even the most sceptical commentators were coming round to opera: the Daily Express reported that “the most ridiculous art-form ever invented” was “proving more popular than anybody ever imagined”. Of course, many people who had encountered opera in pared-back productions during the war had no idea what it really could be. The public was, as The Liverpool Daily Post put it, “as ignorant of the real taste of opera as a wartime infant is of the taste of bananas”. But appetites had been whetted, and Britons emerged from the war wanting to see not only more opera but better opera. To a large extent, these expectations were met. The theatre director Tyrone Guthrie argued after the war that London was becoming the musical centre of the world, with opera at its heart. In the autumn of 1947, audiences in the capital had the opportunity to watch no fewer than 23 different operas performed by five companies. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1360190650webready-ae6a690-e1767623509642.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing five women dancing on a stage, in front of a large crowd of men in military uniform, who are all sitting on the floor" title="Servicemen watch a wartime rehearsal by the Entertainments National Service Association, which toured combat zones (Image by Getty Images)" /> A new company based at the Cambridge Theatre in Seven Dials performed Italian opera in Italian to groups of former servicemen and West End shopworkers. For a while, even glamorous Covent Garden presented a form of “opera for the people”, running regional auditions and recruiting talented opera-singing coalminers, secretaries and milkmen as soloists for a new company. Read more | "Hooray! The war is ended": 5 people's recollections of VE Day Some of these initiatives were only short-lived. Even so, there was very much a buzz in the air around opera after the war, with the Musicians’ Union declaring in 1947 that classical music had become “a necessary part of the life of the people”. The wider acceptance of opera as bona fide popular entertainment seemed to be summed up by the fact that when the San Carlo Opera Company from Naples visited just after the war, it performed not only at Covent Garden but also at Butlin’s holiday camps in Filey and Skegness. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/San-Carlo-Opera-Companywebready-ce0beda-e1767624438971.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a crowd of women, dressed in dresses and frilly white pinafores. One sits at a piano, surrounded by the others" title="Members of the San Carlo Opera Company of Naples perform at a Butlin’s holiday camp in the mid-1940s. Classical music was now, so the Musicians’ Union declared, “a necessary part of the life of the people” (Image by The Butlin’s Heritage Collection, History of Advertising Trust Archive (HAT))" /> Sadler’s Wells, meanwhile, made a triumphant return to its Islington home, where on 7 June 1945 it staged the premiere of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes – a rapturously received work that seemed to signal a hopeful new beginning for British operatic composition. New troupes formed to take touring opera around the country in the late 1940s. The 1940s also saw the foundation of Welsh National Opera – a group of talented amateurs at the outset but later a major player on the British operatic scene. Perhaps most importantly, thanks to the huge explosion of interest in the high arts that had taken place during the war, the nation was far more open-minded towards the possibility of funding it afterwards. Up to this point, public subsidy had only ever been a pipe dream. Now CEMA provided a model for the new Arts Council of Great Britain, which leaned heavily towards favouring opera. Thanks to subsidies, opera could be staged at Covent Garden year-round rather than just for a three-month summer season, and prices could be kept low. The Arts Council also undertook local measures to foster music-making and music appreciation, setting up clubs in workplaces and lending gramophone records. Meanwhile, opera featured prominently on the BBC’s new Third Programme. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/WNO-Chorus-in-Ebenezer-Chapel-1946-Idloes-Owen-front-6th-from-the-leftwebready-12658e1-e1767624255173.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white photograph of a large crowd of men and women, sitting in rows" title="Singers with the Welsh National Opera in the 1940s. The company made its debut with a double-bill of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci in 1946 (Image by Welsh National Opera)" /> “Fifteen years ago I should have felt obliged to defend opera as a form of art,” said the critic and academic Edward J Dent in a lecture delivered at Liverpool University in 1945, “but that is no longer necessary.” Opera continued to be enjoyed by large, socially mixed audiences through the 1950s, sixties and seventies, and was drawing record audiences in the eighties and nineties. But by those later decades, the media had begun to circulate a simplistic idea that opera was elitist, and by the turn of the millennium the idea was so entrenched that it was deterring newcomers to the genre. Opera was also becoming more expensive, declining on television and disappearing from the school curriculum. Today, opera still has something for everyone, but it has receded from the mainstream cultural conversation. Regrettably, it has become necessary, once again, to defend it as a form of art. Alexandra Wilson is a senior research fellow at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Her latest book is Someone Else’s Music: Opera and the British (Oxford University Press), published in September 2025 This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
"I felt very alone in a world gone horribly mad": the experiences of evacuees in WW2
It was a moment of possibilities, dislocation and dread. Dan Todman tells the story of the 1.5 million urban Britons evacuated to the countryside at the start of the Second World War
It’s October 1939, and an aristocratic couple are discussing how to manage the horde of ill-spoken, slovenly evacuees from the city who have been billeted in their house. Not to worry, the husband tells his wife: bringing the children into a more refined environment will soon civilise the youngsters. Instead, as the sketch plays out on the BBC Home Service, the couple’s lordly airs and graces disappear. It’s the evacuees – sent away from home at the behest of the authorities – who change their hosts, rather than the other way around. It’s a skit that fits with how the story of Second World War evacuation has often been constructed, both at the time and in the years since. Here is a narrative that emphasises a clash of cultures: the rural rich suddenly confronted by the urban poor – a moment replete with topsy-turvy possibilities. But the circumstances around the recording of the sketch itself reveal how evacuation was a much larger and more complex event than this straightforward narrative suggests. Read more | Persuading the people: British propaganda in the Second World War It was performed by a cast of variety performers who had also been evacuated, from London to Bristol. That move was part of the BBC’s own preparations to maintain a schedule of light entertainment to intersperse with the news bulletins and government announcements expected to dominate the airwaves over the first weeks of the war. Seen in this light, the first wave of evacuations was specifically a product of conditions in the autumn of 1939 – but it was also an event that came to have a deep significance in the British folk memory, emblematic of the longer and wider disruptions, separations and anxieties experienced by so many civilians. It was, too, part of a global phenomenon, as states and communities sought to move people out of harm’s way. Thinking about evacuation therefore helps us understand not only Britain’s war, but also a wider human experience – national and local differences notwithstanding – of the impact of mechanised conflict. Pre-emptive action In Britain, three types of evacuation were undertaken: official, organisational and private. Official schemes evacuated children, mothers with infants, pregnant women and disabled adults from cities to locations in the surrounding countryside – so-called ‘reception areas’. These were set in motion on 1 September, once war was imminent but before it had been declared. More of these evacuees came from London than any other single city but, with the exception of Northern Ireland (where evacuation didn’t start until 1940), this was a nationwide phenomenon. In total, more children were evacuated from other conurbations including Greater Manchester, Tyneside and Merseyside, than from the capital. Read more | Guernsey’s child evacuees Schemes were set up to relocate important parts of the state machinery that would run the war, too. The Air Ministry was later sent to Harrogate, the Admiralty to Bath and a new Ministry of Food was based in Colwyn Bay. At the same time, the BBC wasn’t the only organisation that evacuated its staff. Others, including banks, galleries and universities, moved part of or all their operations away from big cities. Meanwhile, many private citizens with the means to do so took it upon themselves to head to the homes of rural relatives or seaside resort hotels. In those first days of September 1939, as many as 3.5 million Britons may have been in transit by train, boat, coach or car. Being evacuated, as well as seeing evacuees depart, travel or arrive, were shared common experiences that lodged in the memories of those involved. As evacuee Donald Wharf recalled: “I will never forget standing, dazed and bemused, on the forecourt of Paddington Station… I also felt very alone in a world gone horribly mad. That was, of course, in spite of the fact that the station was virtually full, mostly with East End evacuees with labels and gas masks like me. But that was the way I felt at the time – maybe some others did too – while lots, who were similar in age to me, just put down their boxes and cried.” Anticipating attacks The rationale for these relocations was simple. There was a widespread expectation that any new conflict might start with a devastating air attack by enemy bombers. Such a raid would inflict all the horrors of the front-line trenches of the First World War – not just high explosives and slicing shards of metal but also choking and blinding gas – on civilian populations. The best way to protect vulnerable people and essential services was to move them out of danger. Such fears substantially overestimated the power of combatant air forces at the outset of the war, but it was the perception of risk that mattered. Had anything close to the worst-case predictions come to pass in Britain, the impact would have been so awful that it might have broken the country’s will to carry on. Local authorities were responsible for planning official schemes for evacuating children, some mothers and vulnerable adults. Teachers and members of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS), the civilian organisation set up under the auspices of the Home Office in 1938 to support civil defence and war work, then implemented these schemes. Local arrangements varied by area – how parents signed up their children to be evacuated, how much form-filling was involved, and how active local government officials were in communicating with families. As part of Britain’s official war history, Richard Titmuss was commissioned to study the effects of evacuation and bombing. In the resulting book, Problems of Social Policy (1950), he suggested that the varying quality of these local arrangements, and the confidence (or lack thereof) they inspired, influenced whether parents registered their children to participate in the scheme. Meanwhile, in the reception areas, WVS billeting officers arranged accommodation for evacuees. Householders with empty bedrooms could be compelled to take in evacuees, but in practice the overwhelming majority volunteered. In return, they were paid an allowance by the government. Most were not owners of stately homes or manor houses. Instead, it was typically lower-middle-class and working-class families who most often offered help. Their willingness to take in evacuees at short notice, creating considerable inconvenience, spoke to a moral acceptance of the obligation to help the needy in a time of national crisis. Unlike the wealthy, however, those of more modest means often lacked the space to separate themselves from evacuees whose manners, lifestyle and expectations were frequently very different from their own. Mass movement In some ways, the official scheme was an extraordinary success. In just a few days it moved around 1.5 million people from urban to reception areas without a single fatality. Had the expected aerial apocalypse arrived, this would have looked like an even greater achievement. Yet those journeys, and the travellers’ experiences on arrival at their destinations, did not feel so orderly to those involved. Most evacuees did not travel far, at least by modern standards. The majority went to rural areas relatively close to their home cities, though some were despatched much further afield. More than 250,000 were billeted in the Home Counties, 73,000 in East Anglia, and almost 57,000 in Wales. However, transport difficulties sometimes turned even journeys that were relatively short in miles into drawn-out tests of endurance. “I remember crying all the way to Wales,” evacuee Beryl Fermor (née Hedges) later wrote. In London, in particular, the pressure to quickly clear mainline stations saw evacuees packed onto trains as they arrived, breaking up school parties and disrupting organisation in reception areas. In some cases, it was weeks before billeting officers and teachers tracked down all their charges. Patriotically eager to bolster morale and reassure parents, journalists conjured up visions of the positive reception evacuees received. Reporting from “somewhere in Buckinghamshire”, the Daily Express painted a picture of women preparing spare rooms and putting “hot water bottles in the beds in which London children would sleep”. In practice, the situation was more varied and often chaotic. In some cases, billeting officers got the children they had been expecting and had already allocated to receiving households, and children were dropped off to their hosts in a process that was brusque but at least efficient. In others, unexpected parties of exhausted evacuees were left in draughty church halls while locals came to choose the ones they’d like. Even when things went well, there were inevitable confusions and complications that compounded the uncertainty and distress. Hostile hosts Some evacuees enjoyed warm welcomes from kind strangers who recognised the novelty and terror of the children’s situation. Having been instructed by his mother to look after his younger sister and “never let go of her hand”, one former evacuee remembered his eight-year-old self watching anxiously as all the other children in their party were found a billet. Every potential host found reasons not to take on two siblings. Finally, however, a married couple arrived who asked how they could help and, when the situation was explained, “without any hesitation they offered to take us both into their home”. Read more | Rationing, school closures and 'Blitz spirit': how did people cope in WW2? Conversely, some evacuees found themselves picked by those grudgingly looking for the least filthy or the most useful for household labour. “In retrospect,” Audrey Demers (née Jones) recalled, “we were treated in a similar fashion to cattle, as the villagers came and looked us over and selected or rejected.” Split up from friends and siblings, some children found themselves living with hosts who were abusive, neglectful or simply unwilling to tolerate for long this strange imposition on their home. Maintaining the dignity and welfare of evacuees in reception areas had been less of a concern in the planning than the need to get people out of the cities quickly. Even judged on these terms, however, the official scheme fell short. Take-up was highly variable. Only about half of London’s eligible schoolchildren were evacuated. In Newcastle, the figure was as high as 70 per cent. In Sheffield, only 15 per cent of those eligible took part. Some families could not organise themselves to meet the timetable of evacuation. Others were unwilling to trust their children to strangers. For many, warnings of the horrors of war only strengthened a protective desire to keep their families together. In the event, the UK did not come under sustained air attack until the summer of 1940 and the Blitz. As a result, adult evacuees soon left the reception areas and families brought their children home. The rate of return varied substantially. Many London children stayed away for the whole war. Conversely, in Clydebank, Scotland, from where more than half of the children had been evacuated in 1939, all but 5 per cent had returned by the end of 1940. They were still there in March 1941 when the Luftwaffe launched catastrophic raids that, according to official figures, left 528 people dead and 617 seriously injured. The initial experience of evacuation often brought differences to the fore. At the household level, the mixing of families in such close proximity inevitably exposed gaps in habits, routine and religion. Clashes of cultures released a flood of rumours in the reception areas – stories that revealed and reinforced class-based and regional prejudices about the urban poor. It was said that dirty children and slatternly mothers had arrived in inadequate and lice-infested clothing. They lazed around billets that were left increasingly filthy by their ill-mannered incontinence, it was claimed, and never contributed to household chores. In an angry Commons debate, Sir Henry Fildes, the Liberal National MP for Dumfriesshire, called evacuation “the dreadful scourge… placed upon the homes of Britain”. Head lice and bed-wetting In practice, the deplorable condition of some evacuees was usually the result of poverty, not preference. Two in five child evacuees from Liverpool and Sunderland, for example, had parents who depended either on out-of-work benefits or on very low incomes. Evacuation came early on a Friday, when wages were most stretched. Many families simply could not afford to kit out their children with new clothes or items on the packing lists supplied by schools. Problems with head lice and bed-wetting were not helped by long journeys on packed trains or by billeting at unfamiliar houses with forbidding hosts. “I can honestly say that we enjoyed being evacuees,” remembered one, almost 65 years later, adding that “we were well treated and obviously loved by our adopted parents.” For him, the experience made a lasting difference. His parents also moved out of London when they were bombed out of their home, and he never returned to the capital. Yet his words indicate that he knew others had not been so fortunate. And evacuees’ experiences did not have to be awful to be painful or to leave a lasting mark. “Home is not where one lives,” said one girl, evacuated from London’s East End to Oxford, “but where one has all the people one loves and knows.” Another evacuee, interviewed at the same time, recalled the differences between their home lives and the repressed respectability of their middle-class hosts, explaining: “I cannot do as I like in the house; I must also come in when I am told and sit down and eat my meals properly and not run out into the street with a slice of bread in my hand.” A third bemoaned the fact that “If we play ball in the streets, a window opens and an old lady puts her head out and starts telling us off.” Mothers' misery Those women who had joined their children on evacuation had a particularly miserable time. Accompanying teachers quickly sought to organise education for school-age children. In contrast, there had been no official preparation to support evacuated mothers. Their presence impinged on the private lives of host families in ways that embarrassed everybody. They had been separated not only from the family groups that formed their closest networks of support, but also from the world of urban leisure – particularly cinemas and dance halls – that offered some temporary respite from the travails of motherhood. Read more | The cruel cost of the Blitz: how did everyday Britons rebuild their lives? Devon’s Inspector of Education reported that the lack of space and privacy created “a very bad psychological disturbance for both mothers and children. They become difficult, the children cry and are irritable, and the nervous energy of the mother is sapped. Sometimes she punishes them for nothing at all and at others she is over-indulgent and sentimental.” Yet if women sought to go out, they often had to traipse the streets idly or risk further condemnation for moral lassitude. Given all this, it was little wonder that mothers returned home quicker and in larger proportions than any other evacuees. Those providing accommodation didn’t have it much easier. Having offered their homes in a crisis, they found themselves committed to sharing space with evacuees with whom they might have little in common, for the duration of a war that, the government made plain, would probably last for years. Even those for whom this proved a joyous experience found it demanding – not least because the value of the allowance they received from the government was rapidly eroded by the pace of early war inflation. A phenomenon so large inevitably involved a full range of human characteristics. There were good and bad hosts among those opening up their homes, just as there were good and bad evacuees. While acknowledging the worst and the best behaviour, we also need to recognise the stoic tolerance of the majority who just tried to get by. Second World War evacuations across Europe and Asia The UK was not the only country in which civilians were evacuated – or evacuated themselves Japanese aggression during the Sino-Japanese war (starting 1937) forced 60 million people to flee their homes in China. Evacuating industries, ministries and civilians to the west became a key part of the Chinese Nationalist government’s strategy to survive the war. When fighting broke out in Europe in September 1939, France and Germany both evacuated civilians from areas on each side of their shared border in anticipation of military operations – although, just as in the UK, the lull in action over the winter of 1939–40 encouraged some to return. The surging tide of Axis military victories in 1940–42 spurred enormous waves of mass flight. The 9 million Belgian and French refugees who took to their country’s roads and railways in May–June 1940 offered a frightening vision of social dissolution and encouraged other states to put more effort into controlling population movements. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, one of the most violent but impressive state-organised evacuations of the conflict saw the core of the Soviet war industry relocated from the path of Axis forces and rebuilt beyond the Urals. In Malaya (now part of Malaysia), Burma (Myanmar) and India. Meanwhile, the chaotic efforts to manage the flood of refugees from Japanese advances after 1941 further delegitimised British colonial rule. Allied success in reversing early Axis victories depended on massive aerial and ground campaigns that forced evacuation and refugee flight. Through an expanding programme that came to include mothers as well as children, Germany evacuated millions of its urban inhabitants from the threat of Allied bombing and the advance of the Red Army. In France, occupation authorities required non-essential civilians to leave fortified coastal towns. As the fighting fronts swept back through Europe and Asia, millions fled the demolishing force of the ground campaigns. Events at the end of the conflict, including the territorial settlements, ethnic cleansing and politically violent nation-building that underpinned the post-1945 order, displaced still more people. There were many differences between the experiences of those in flight – what forced them to move, who organised their departure, and whether they could ever return. But there were also commonalities – physical relocation, tensions with those receiving them, and a sense of powerlessness. The experience of evacuees in Britain was distinct, but it was far from unique – and indeed more common than the stories of combatants. Altogether, about 175 million people became refugees because of the conflict – far more than were mobilised into all of the militaries and munitions factories. This was an unprecedented scale of simultaneous popular displacement, involving about 8 per cent of everyone alive on the planet at the time. Clearing the coast There were further waves of evacuation – officially organised and otherwise – later in the war. Following the fall of France in June 1940, the new proximity of German air bases and the threat of invasion sparked schemes to evacuate coastal cities. And after the start of concentrated German night-time bombing raids on British cities in September 1940, fresh rounds of urban evacuations were organised, both pre-emptively before the raids and afterwards to relocate those who had been bombed out. Uptake rates on later schemes were lower than in 1939. Only in 1944 did evacuation on a similar scale occur. That summer, as London was ravaged by V1 flying bombs, more than a million people temporarily left the capital, including 307,000 children and mothers. This time the danger was immediate and real, but once again few people stayed away long. Most returned even before the government declared that it was safe to do so. Read more | The dangers of the Blitz spirit By that point, evacuation had already been the subject of numerous publications. Even as it was ongoing, the process was being narrated back to the British people by journalists, commentators and comedians. It was also analysed by social scientists and, inevitably, co-opted by politicians eager to establish their own version of what the war should mean. The public discussion that followed demonstrated the widespread appeal of the idea that the conflict ought to lead to societal change, but also the persistence of older ideas – notably the urban-rural divide and the alleged irresponsibility of the poor. The potency of both radical and conservative narratives was such that even today, when we think about what evacuation might have meant, they can colour our thinking. In truth, what evacuation meant to those who experienced it very much depended on their individual experiences. Dan Todman is professor of modern history at Queen Mary University of London. His books include Britain’s War: A New World, 1942–1947 (Allen Lane, 2020) This article was first published in the February 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
"War's greatest picture"? Inside the night St Paul's Cathedral survived the Blitz
On 29 December 1940, a night of havoc broke bricks and mortar and claimed more than 160 lives. But it also created a moment that was used to bolster British spirit for years to come…
The Blitz had halted briefly over Christmas 1940, but on the evening of Sunday 29 December the Luftwaffe resumed bombing an already hammered London. The whistling sounds of incendiaries were first heard at 6.15pm, and for the next three-and-a-half hours more than 100,000 such bombs fell. The attack was so ferocious that one American reporter telegraphed his office with the words: “The second Great Fire of London has begun.” While most people huddled in shelters or Tube stations, an act that had become all too familiar, firefighters and volunteers tirelessly tackled the 1,500 or so blazes across the city. Dozens of buildings were utterly destroyed – but not one crucial landmark. Why did Churchill want to save St Paul's Cathedral? St Paul’s Cathedral was surrounded by smouldering ruins, while flames licked the edges of the churchyard. But Prime Minister Winston Churchill, recognising its importance to British morale, sent a message saying St Paul’s must be saved at all costs. The cathedral’s volunteer firewatchers, the St Paul’s Watch, spent the evening putting out the fires from the 28 incendiary bombs that rained down on the building, using stirrup pumps, buckets and sand. One crashed through the dome and lodged in the support beams – causing molten lead to drip down – before it finally fell to the stone floor. Yet, incredibly, the cathedral sustained no irreparable damage. By dawn, the fires had been brought under control by the exhausted firefighters, the ‘heroes with grimy faces’. The night had left more than 160 dead and around 500 injured. War's greatest picture? A couple of days later, once the photo had been cleared by the censors, the Daily Mail's front page featured what it dubbed "war's greatest picture". St Paul's was still standing and almost emerging, defiant, from the black smoke. It was taken by Herbert Mason from the roof of the newspaper's office, around half a mile from the cathedral. "The shining cross, dome and towers stood out like a symbol in the inferno," Mason later said. Indeed the photo, known as ‘St Paul’s Survives’, came to represent British resolve – the ultimate icon of ‘Blitz spirit’. This article was first published in BBC History Revealed magazine
What was Christmas like in Britain during WW2?
As the bombs rained down on Britain, the season of goodwill still went on, albeit very differently. Emma Slattery Williams investigates what Christmas was like on the Home Front…
As the fighting raged across Europe, families on the home front still tried to bring a sense of normality to the festive season, although some traditions had to be adapted to account for the threat of bombing raids, goods shortages, and the reality of spending the holidays apart from loved ones. The Christmas of 1939 wasn’t much different to previous years in terms of celebrations, although for most people, the absence of family members marked the traditional get-together. But the Christmas of 1940 was a different story. After 57 consecutive nights of the bombing raids of the Blitz between September and November 1940, there was a small respite on Christmas and Boxing Day but, by 29 December, many families were rushing for the safety of air raid shelters once more. Rationing meant Christmas dinners looked, and tasted, very different, while the blackout put an end to festive lights on the streets. And as fuel rationing and travel restrictions began to bite, family celebrations were local affairs. Read more | WW2 timeline: 20 important dates and milestones you need to know What did people eat for Christmas in WW2? The familiar fare that would normally grace the dining table at Christmas was hard to come by. Some families saved up their rationing coupons so they could afford some extras, but, once rationing was in place, turkey was off the menu. ‘Mock’ food became popular, with foods such as vegetables and sausagemeat replacing turkey and other festive treats; in the week before Christmas in 1940, the tea ration was doubled and the sugar allowance increased to 12 ounces. Read more | The history of Christmas, plus 10 festive facts you might not know Homemade or renovated gifts were a necessity for most – toys, if they could be found, were expensive and many families were facing financial hardship. In 1941, the use of paper for anything other than to wrap food and for deliveries was prohibited, so old newspaper was used as substitute wrapping paper. How did people celebrate Christmas in WW2? Greetings cards were printed on small, flimsy pieces of paper, and were often reused in the following years. But cards were an important way of keeping in touch with those away fighting, or with evacuated children. Read more | 10 tips for surviving on the home front during the Second World War There was also the YMCA gift scheme, which allowed those serving overseas to choose gifts to send back to their families. American GIs stationed in Britain had the opportunity to spend the holiday season with a British family – in return they would often bring lavish gifts. For those who had lost their homes and belongings in bombing raids, Christmas was a particularly difficult time. Communities would help each other and canteens provided shelter and food for people in need. After food and gifts, families gathered around the wireless for the Christmas speech, to hear words of comfort and cheer from their monarch, George VI. Emma Slattery Williams is BBC History Revealed's staff writer This content first appeared in the Christmas 2020 issue of BBC History Revealed
Ahead of their new BBC One documentary on the subject, Lucy Worsley, Joshua Levine and Yasmine Permaul discuss how Londoners really reacted to the devastating bombing raids
Ahead of their new BBC One documentary, Blitz Spirit with Lucy Worsley, historian and broadcaster Lucy Worsley, historical consultant Joshua Levine and producer Yasmine Permaul interrogate the idea of “Blitz Spirit”. Introducing us to a raft of characters who lived through the bombings in London, they reveal how people really reacted to the devastating raids that threatened them and their loved ones. Read more: Lucy Worsley on Blitz Spirit: the courageous stories of six Londoners
Lucy Worsley on Blitz Spirit: the courageous stories of six Londoners
Lucy Worsley tells the stories of six people who endured the London Blitz, and finds that it was a time of courage and resilience, doubt and despair
Listen to this article: What does “Blitz Spirit” really mean? It’s a concept that’s frequently invoked in times of crisis: a curiously British commitment to keeping calm and carrying on. Eighty years on from the Blitz, though, it’s worth remembering that the eight months of intense bombing between September 1940 and May 1941 did not comprise just one single, homogeneous experience for the people living in London and the many other British cities affected. Those eight months were indeed a time of remarkable resilience, and of terrible suffering. Yet our clichéd images of the Blitz – jolly singalongs in the air raid shelters, milkmen continuing to deliver as usual to bombed-out houses – don’t tell the whole story. It seems timely, while we’re facing a national crisis of our own, to drill down deeper into the nature of the “Blitz Spirit” – and one way to do that is to look in detail at the personal recollections of Londoners who were there, living and dying beneath the bombs. The government issued propaganda declaring that “London Can Take it” – but would these ordinary people have agreed? The dangers of the Blitz spirit A closer look shows us that Londoners experienced a whole spectrum of doubt and despair as well as the courage and resilience about which we more often hear. And it’s hard to generalise: every person had their own unique experience of the Blitz, as the recollections of these six individuals reveal. NAME: Robert Barltrop AGE IN 1940: 17 JOB: Porter at Sainsbury's The day of 7 September 1940 had been a normal one for Robert, preparing chickens at the Sainsbury’s in east London where he worked. But that afternoon he took up his lookout post on the roof of the building to see the very first raid of the Blitz coming in from the east. The German planes “were flying across my line of vision”, he recalled. “I had a perfect view… they were heading straight for London, and it was going to be the docks that were going to get it… I began to hear thumps, and those were bombs falling, and clouds of smoke were rising up… until you couldn’t see anything but a huge bank of smoke, and still they were coming.” The cruel cost of the Blitz: how did everyday Britons rebuild their lives? Robert, however, was determined that life should go on; he rushed home that very evening – to go on a date. “It sounds daft but perhaps we both thought it was a bit romantic meeting in an air raid,” he wrote. “We could smell the smoke and hear the raid.” He wasn’t alone in thinking that some things were too important to give up, despite the Blitz. “You also had your own living life,” he recalled. “Particularly if you were young, you felt a very strong need to make some kind of social life for yourself. You knew you were going to be called up before long and if you didn’t see your friends and have a bit of a good time, then you were never going to.” Robert and his family survived a hit to their home, sheltering under their dining room table. But despite his insistence on living as normal a life as possible, the Blitz changed him. “Opportunities were taken away and intentions cancelled. Circles of friends were broken up and pursuits left behind: a great many of us were put on paths we had never envisaged.” Listen | Jonathan Boff explains how ordinary people coped with the privations of World War Two and considers what parallels can be drawn with the current Coronavirus crisis NAME: Ita Ekpenyon AGE IN 1940: 41 JOB: Student and air raid warden Ita was born in Nigeria, where he worked as a teacher before coming to London in 1928 to study law. When war broke out he was living at 146 Great Titchfield Street; he became an air raid warden, with Marylebone his local patch. Ita’s job was to make sure that people obeyed the blackout rules, to keep order in the shelters, and to help people to safety during raids. One of a small community of only 15,000 Londoners of African origin, Ita is among the most well-known of the black people who experienced the Blitz, largely because he wrote a memoir of his service. Some of the people on his patch considered it “lucky” to have a black warden. ”It amuses me,” he wrote, “that in the district where I work the people believe that because I am a man of colour, I am a lucky omen. I had heard of such child-like beliefs, but I am delighted that such beliefs exist.” But he also experienced the casual racism that was common in 1940s London. Once he had to intervene to prevent some foreigners from being ejected from a shelter, recalling that: “Some of the shelterers told the others to go back to their own countries.” Ita told them that he “would like to see a spirit of friendliness, cooperation and comradeship prevail at this very trying time in the history of the empire”. Calm and friendly, Ita noted that his very presence “seemed to cheer the people, for they felt the wardens were looking after them”. After the war he became a postman. He died in 1951. NAME: Frances Faviell AGE IN 1940: 34 JOB: Artist and nurse Well off, living in Chelsea, working as an artist: Frances seemed to have life sorted. But the Blitz turned her world completely upside down. She trained as a volunteer nurse, along with her housekeeper, and they took turns to pretend to be wounded. “It did seem ridiculous to have to lie flat on a piece of marked pavement pretending to be a casualty,” she recalled. But as Frances listened to wireless reports of the war’s progress, she began to feel a new seriousness. “I could listen in my beautiful room surrounded by comfort and with a good meal waiting downstairs,” she wrote, “but I could not eat.” As the Blitz continued, Frances became increasingly committed to her new vocation, taking on extraordinarily challenging duties – not least piecing together the broken bodies of the dead in preparation for burial. “It was a very difficult task,” she recalled. “There were so many pieces missing… the stench was the worst thing about it – that, and having to realise that these frightful pieces of flesh had once been living, breathing people. We went out to smoke cigarettes when we simply could not go on.” By the time of the penultimate big raid on London in April 1941, Frances was living with her second husband, Richard Parker, and was four months pregnant. Her house was hit, but she was able to crawl out of its smoking ruins – and her son, John Parker, is still alive today. NAME: Nina Masel AGE IN 1940: 18 JOB: Reporter for the Mass Observation project Nina was a working-class teenager living in Stepney in the East End of London, and a talented writer. She was working in her family’s local shop when she got a job recording her community’s attitudes to the Blitz for social research reports that were then used by the media and government. Nina was, perhaps more than most people, conscious of the gap between what the papers said about “Blitz Spirit” and the reality of the bombing in the East End. “Of course the press versions of life going on normally in the East End on Monday are grotesque,” she wrote. “There was no bread, no milk, no elec- tricity, no gas... The press version of people’s smiling jollity and fun are a gross exaggeration. On no previous investigation has so little humour, laugh- ter or whistling been recorded.” Nina is known particularly for her accounts of the enormous and notorious Tilbury air raid shelter in Stepney. “The first time I went in there, I had to come out,” she wrote. “I felt sick. You just couldn’t see anything, you could just smell the fug, the overwhelming stench... There were thousands and thousands of people lying head to toe... The place was a hell hole.” Nina’s report caught the eye of Winston Churchill, who insisted that conditions in the Tilbury Shelter be improved. But when the Ministry of Information twisted a Mass Observation report on the safety of shallow air raid shelters, which East Enders widely believed to be dangerous, Nina felt that she and the other researchers were being misrepre- sented, and she resigned. “I left soon afterwards,” she said, “in a blaze of indignation and fury.” NAME: Frank Hurd AGE IN 1940: 44 JOB: Fireman By September 1940, Islington-born Frank was more than ready for action, having prepared for months before the Blitz began. He and his colleagues in the Auxiliary Fire Service had “half-hoped for something to happen”, though they also “felt ashamed for letting the monotony get us down”. When the first bombs finally fell, though, Frank had more than enough excitement. On the first night of the Blitz he was called to Beckton Gas Works in east London, where he first experienced a bomb falling, describing “a weird whistling sound... then a vivid flash of flame, a column of earth and debris flying into the air, and the ground heaved”. How did WW2 affect schools in London? Night after night, Frank fought fires; his diary, now in the Imperial War Museum, tells a story of steady, unremitting, cheerful service. He never seemed to lose his nerve, nor his commitment to his work. “Perhaps I have made light of a serious situation,” he wrote, “but thank God we can laugh at this sort of thing.” If ever a Londoner kept calm and carried on, it was Frank. Tragically, though, on the night of 29 December 1940, during the so-called “Second Great Fire of London”, he was seriously injured fighting fires near Smithfield Market, and died in hospital the following day. NAME: Barbara Nixon AGE IN 1940: 33 JOB: Actor and air raid warden Until the war threw her career off course, Barbara had worked as an actor. In May 1940, though, she went to Finsbury Town Hall to sign up as one of the first female air raid wardens. A practical person and a socialist, Barbara joined up because, she explained, it seemed “the most active and obviously helpful Civil Defence occupation open to women... I wanted an active job; I particularly wanted to avoid the position of many women in the First World War – of urging other people to do work they wouldn’t think of doing themselves.” Barbara and her fellow wardens were given a tin hat and a whistle, but only a vague idea of their duties. The priority seemed to be to report where bombs had fallen, followed by providing reassurance to members of the public. “Our only asset,” she thought, “was our zeal to help.” On the late afternoon of 7 September, Barbara witnessed the first big raid on Lon- don – a devastating onslaught that set fire to the East End. Then, coming off duty, she went into Soho for dinner. Along with many others, Barbara hadn’t yet grasped that this first raid had been merely the overture: the intention of the initial attack had been to start fires to act as beacons, guiding in the many more bomb- ers that would follow that night. “That day, London had changed,” Barbara said, “like a drunk man suddenly sobering up when he receives tragic news.” The following morning’s newspapers were positive, declaring that London could “take it”, and that the damage had been surprisingly slight. But Barbara observed that, despite the censorship of the press, people suspected the truth: “The most common saying by men, as well as women, was that this wasn’t war, it was murder.” There was a sense of defeat. Once British artillery began to return fire, though, a more conventional glimpse of “Blitz Spirit” emerged in Barbara’s account. “On Wednesday they brought up the guns at last,” she wrote. “There had never been such an exhilarating uproar... it was a splendid and deafening cacophony. It was said that they fired 20,000 shells that night; it may have been extravagant, and not particularly effective, but it was worth it. It revived the spirit of the Londoners.” Lucy Worsley is a historian, broadcaster and author. Blitz Spirit with Lucy Worsley aired on BBC One in February 2021 and is available to watch on BBC iPlayer This article was first published in the February 2021 edition of BBC History Magazine
Jeremy Crang investigates reports on British morale made during the Second World War and considers what they can tell us about the ‘Blitz spirit’
Historian Jeremy Crang discusses his book The Spirit of the Blitz (co-edited with Paul Addison), which investigates reports on British morale made during the early months of the Second World War and considers what they can tell us about the so-called ‘Blitz spirit’. Jeremy Crang is the author of The Spirit of the Blitz (co-edited with Paul Addison) (OUP, 2020) Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones
During the night of 14/15 November 1940, several hundred German bombers inflicted devastation on the industrial city of Coventry. The 11-hour raid represented a radical departure in the air war that would mark (and mar) the way bomber fleets were used during the rest of the conflict. Here, historian Frederick Taylor explains what happened and why Coventry was targeted – and whether Churchill was forewarned of the attack…
Why was Coventry targeted? From early September 1940, Adolf Hitler had given priority to nightly attacks on London, hoping to force the British to make peace. By November, however, despite this relentless Blitz against eight million Londoners, Britain still held firm. Hitler decided to broaden Germany’s bombing effort with large-scale attacks on Britain’s industrial towns, especially those involved in aircraft production. Coventry counted as a jewel in the United Kingdom’s military-industrial crown. German intelligence was well-informed about the city’s industries and key infrastructure – exactly where in the city aero engines were manufactured; radar sets; military vehicles and navigation aids, and so on. Industry aside, however, there were further reasons for Berlin’s interest in the ‘Heart of England’. The Luftwaffe’s so-called ‘England Committee’, composed of Foreign Office officials and specialist academics, had advised the planners that the Midlands was a bastion of “conservative, stubborn-dour Englishness”. If such people’s morale might be broken, perhaps the country could, after all, be bombed into surrender. What was Operation Sealion, Hitler’s planned invasion of Britain? And why was it cancelled? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/2663043_10hitlergambnle_sml-2-127fd70.jpg" width="801" height="530" alt="Calculated risk: Adolf Hitler makes plans at his headquarters in Bruly-de-Peche, Ardennes, Belgium. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Calculated risk: Adolf Hitler makes plans at his headquarters in Bruly-de-Peche, Ardennes, Belgium. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> What happened? In fact, a succession of comparatively short – but in some cases lethally sharp – German raids against Coventry from late August onward had already killed 176 civilians. But the scale of the operation planned for mid-November – codenamed ‘Moonlight Sonata’ because of the expected full moon – foresaw a brutal step-change. The city’s population of about a quarter of a million people would suffer an aerial attack of unprecedented duration and concentration, its accuracy enhanced by a revolutionary new guidance system known as the X-Gerät (X-Apparatus). A pattern of radio ‘beams’, transmitted from stations along the French channel coast, met just before and over the target. Tracking devices aboard an elite group of pathfinder aircraft enabled them to follow the beams and recognise where they intersected, in the final instance precisely over the pre-planned aiming point. There they would drop bombs, creating fires and so guiding the mass of following bombers to the target. Every aspect was calculated to maximise destruction and inspire terror. The carnage began at around 7pm on 14 November in the city centre. Coventry’s gas and electricity supplies, telephone exchange, and its water and sewage networks were laid waste. Historic buildings came under attack, including the cathedral, plus large centrally located factories such as the Triumph Works, which was next to the cathedral. Your guide to the Blitz, plus 9 places affected by the bombings Later waves of bombers sowed further destruction on the centre, killing and injuring repair and rescue teams now working there. Other aircraft fanned out towards the suburbs, targeting more factories and adjacent residential developments. A Luftwaffe briefing recommended incendiary bombs for such areas, stating: “The effects on industry [in Coventry] would be especially amplified due to the fact that the work force, which lives in immediate proximity to the factories, would suffer along with them.” And so it proved. When dawn broke over the shattered, still-burning city, 568 of its inhabitants were dead. Local historians have recorded the names of almost all the casualties and where they perished. Entire families died together, often in rudimentary neighbourhood shelters. Hundreds more civilians were gravely injured. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/10/GettyImages-88790952-559db7e.jpg" width="1024" height="787" alt="When dawn broke over the shattered, still-burning city of Coventry, 568 of its inhabitants were dead. (Photo by Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="When dawn broke over the shattered, still-burning city of Coventry, 568 of its inhabitants were dead. (Photo by Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> What were the consequences? The Luftwaffe could celebrate and did so unashamedly. The word “Coventrated” (“conventriert” in German) was coined by Nazi propagandists to celebrate this new level of annihilation. However, while morale in Coventry and elsewhere in Britain wavered, it did not break. Abroad, the raid soon came to exemplify German barbarism. Wire reports, including shocking pictures of the ravaged cathedral (though less often of the wrecked factories) and of civilian corpses being lowered into mass graves, spread around the world, especially to the still-neutral USA. Certainly, American public opinion, hitherto still predominantly isolationist, had by the end of 1940 shifted sufficiently for President Roosevelt to gain congressional support for the supply of desperately needed aircraft and ships to Britain. America and WW2: when, how and why did the US get involved, and why they didn’t enter sooner? From a purely operational viewpoint, therefore, Coventry could be counted a German success, but the ensuing propaganda battle resulted in a crucial victory for Winston Churchill’s beleaguered government. Meanwhile, senior figures within the British Air Ministry such as Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Harris, a hard-nosed technocrat who had long chafed against restraints on the RAF’s bombing of civilian targets, could argue that Coventry freed Britain to strike back with equal ruthlessness. In February 1942, Harris took charge of RAF Bomber Command. It began systematically bombing German cities, with the Luftwaffe’s attack on Coventry as something of a blueprint – over time aided by improved navigation and bomb-aiming technology, and pursued with ever more apocalyptic efficiency. The three-year campaign saw the near-obliteration of Hamburg, Kassel, Berlin, and other German population centres – including, most notoriously, the historic city of Dresden in 1945. Did Churchill allow Coventry to be bombed? Post-war, many have been tempted into speculations remote from the reality of Coventry’s martyrdom. Was Churchill forewarned of the attack’s target by the Enigma codebreakers but did nothing for fear of betraying his source? Unlikely. Although he was probably informed late that afternoon, after the Luftwaffe’s guidance beam, with its intersection point over Coventry, was identified. Churchill: the ‘cry-baby’ war hero Could he nonetheless have somehow ‘saved’ the city? Countermeasures were, in fact, undertaken, including air attacks on the X-Gerät transmitters, whose locations were known to the British. Pre-planned retaliatory raids by Bomber Command against Berlin and other German cities were also under way even as the Luftwaffe sowed destruction on Coventry. Fighter Command was ordered into action. But the British night-fighters, most still lacking onboard radar, could not find the enemy bombers, and the local anti-aircraft artillery likewise proved ineffectual. So, given these weaknesses, should the government have attempted to evacuate Coventry at short notice? Hardly. Panic and chaos would likely have resulted. Better to order the city’s people to their shelters and hope. One thing seems clear, though, and of genuine historical significance: ‘Moonlight Sonata’ rebounded on Germany and the German people with a vengeance. Frederick Taylor is the author of a number of books on the Second World War, including the bombing of Coventry and Dresden. His latest work, 1939: A People’s History, was recently published in paperback by Picador. Coventry is recognised as a city of peace and reconciliation
Your guide to the Blitz, plus 9 places affected by the bombings
From September 1940 until May 1941, Britain was subjected to sustained enemy bombing campaign, now known as the Blitz. Find out how it began, what the Germans hoped to achieve and how it severe it was, plus we visit nine places affected by the attacks
From his vantage point in Normandy, Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring pointed his binoculars in the direction of the English coast. It was 7 September 1940, a fateful day in the history of the Second World War. Overhead close to 1,000 German bomber and fighter aircraft headed towards the English capital where they would shortly wreak devastation on the streets below. This was the first day of the sustained bombing campaign against Britain, popularly known as the Blitz, which Adolf Hitler hoped would soon bring a stubborn enemy to its knees. That day Göring had made a confident broadcast on German radio: “This is an historic hour, in which for the first time the German Luftwaffe has struck at the heart of the enemy”. The September raids were not in fact the first aerial attacks Britain had suffered in the war. There had been sporadic incidents of bombing since the previous October but these were small and infrequent, a far cry from the massed bombardment that Britain would face in late 1940 and early 1941. For Germany, the Blitz was in part a recognition that Hitler’s plan to invade Britain that summer was failing. After the fall of France in June 1940 Britain had been all that stood in the way of victory for Germany in the European war. However, because of the strength of the Royal Navy, an invasion of the British Isles would be a highly risky gamble and one that Hitler was not prepared to take without first achieving aerial superiority. The Second World War: a timeline Over the next few months the Luftwaffe clashed repeatedly with the RAF, hoping to win control of the skies. It was a close run thing but in the end it was the British fighters that emerged triumphant, inflicting heavy losses on their German counterparts. The legend of the Battle of Britain was born. With an invasion seemingly unlikely, Hitler switched his focus to the bombardment of British cities. This was to have the dual purpose of damaging Britain’s infrastructure and weakening civilian morale. Furthermore, on 25 August, British bombers had raided Berlin, and it is likely that the Blitz was also partly motivated by revenge. London received the brunt of the initial attacks, being bombed for 57 consecutive days at the start of the onslaught. Other cities did not escape, however, with ports and industrial centres also selected for destruction. The bombers came over in waves several hundred strong and because they flew by night it was very difficult for British defences to prevent them getting through. Listen | Jonathan Boff explains how ordinary people coped with the privations of World War II and considers what parallels can be drawn with the current Coronavirus crisis Preparations had been made for air raids including the distribution of Anderson air-raid shelters, evacuations of civilians to the countryside and the establishment of the Air Raid Precaution organisation, but nonetheless there was significant loss of life. Despite government efforts, many people were without effective shelters and so underground alternatives, notably tube stations, were commandeered for this purpose. In May 1941 the main phase of the Blitz ended. By this time British air defences, aided by developments in radar, had improved, meaning the Luftwaffe was suffering heavier losses during the raids. Perhaps more importantly Germany was about to embark on the invasion of the Soviet Union and needed to divert resources to the east. Operation Barbarossa: Hitler’s greatest mistake What is clear is that the Blitz did not achieve either of its objectives. British production was impaired but nothing like enough to knock the country out of the war. And while the population was undoubtedly shaken, civilian morale held up remarkably well in the face of the bombs. Air raids, albeit on a smaller scale, continued throughout the Second World War. Towards the end of the conflict the British people faced a new menace when the Germans began launching V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets at the country. These weapons arrived too late to shift the direction of the war but were still able to inflict a great deal of suffering. Around 60,000 British civilians were killed by German air raids in the war and countless buildings were damaged. But the legacy of the Blitz is not just limited to broken walls and bones. “It has become part of the mythology of the war,” says Dr Jeremy Crang of the University of Edinburgh. “The Blitz has come to represent the indomitable spirit of the British people against the odds and, along with the evacuation from Dunkirk and the battle of Britain, forms one of the planks of Britain’s ‘finest hour’. Words by Rob Attar. Historical advisor Dr Jeremy Crang, co-editor of The Burning Blue: a New History of the Battle of Britain (Pimlico, 2000) Your quick guide to the Blitz What was the Blitz? The Blitz was a sustained bombing campaign against Britain launched by the Germans towards the end of the Battle of Britain. What does Blitz mean? The word Blitz is an abbreviation of the word ‘Blitzkrieg’, meaning ‘lightning war’. When did the Blitz begin and end? The main phase of the Blitz began on 7 September 1940 and ended in May 1941, though Germany continued with sporadic bombings until 1945. A series of German raids in 1942 targeted historic cities and were nicknamed ‘Baedecker raids’ after the German guidebooks of that name. Was London the only city targeted during the Blitz? No, although London did endure 57 consecutive nights of bombings. Other cities targeted included Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Southampton and Swansea. How many people died in the Blitz? Between September 1940 and May 1941, 41,480 people were killed, says Richard Overy, of whom 16,755 were women and 5,184 were children. During the entire war, 60,595 British civilians were killed by enemy action in the UK, writes Daniel Todman, of whom 7,736 were children. How many German bombs were dropped on Britain? German bombers dropped 58,000 tonnes of bombs in 1940 and 1941. Nine places in Britain affected by the Blitz St Dunstan’s Church, London Where the first bombs fell Long before the Second World War began the British authorities were deeply concerned about the possibility of air raids in a future conflict. “The bomber will always get through,” former prime minister Stanley Baldwin had warned back in 1932. The Spanish Civil War had shown the potential for aerial destruction and, by the time Britain went to war with Germany, many feared a catastrophe. Two years earlier it had been estimated that 1.8 million might be killed or injured in a 60-day attack. The people of Britain would have to wait a year to find out whether their worst nightmares would materialise. On 7 September 1940 the Blitz got under way when two waves of German bombers dropped their loads over London, killing or wounding 2,000 people and igniting the largest fires the city had seen since 1666. The Great Fire of London: how the ferocious blaze of 1666 destroyed the capital Then, as on several future occasions, the docklands in London’s East End were the principal target. The district of Stepney took a savage mauling on that first day of the Blitz. Bernard Kops, who lived locally in 1940, later said: “That day stands out like a flaming wound in my memory. Imagine a ground floor flat crowded with hysterical women, crying babies and great crashes in the sky and the whole earth shaking”. During the Blitz many buildings in Stepney were reduced to rubble but the church of St Dunstan and All Saints survived with only its windows destroyed. The church is one of London’s oldest, dating back to at least the tenth century, although the main structure is chiefly late medieval. Today one of its stained glass windows recalls the Second World War, with an image of Jesus rising above the ruins of Stepney after the Blitz. Chislehurst Caves, Kent Where people hid from the bombers This ancient cave complex has been gradually dug out of the rock over the course of several thousand years. Up to the early 19th century Chislehurst was mined for chalk and after that it became a popular tourist attraction, which it still is nowadays. During the Second World War, however, the caves became very popular for an entirely different reason. Londoners living through the Blitz were in desperate need of shelter. Hundreds of thousands of households had been provided with Anderson shelters by the government but these offered limited protection and were only available to those with gardens. The indoor Morrison shelter was not distributed until March 1941. So as the skies filled with bombers night after night, huge numbers of civilians sought to find alternative places of safety. The Few: who exactly were the heroes of the Battle of Britain? In this spirit Chislehurst Caves became a giant impromptu air-raid shelter. So many Londoners took advantage of its caverns and passageways that special trains had to be put on to transport them all there. Some even took up residence, as an observer noted in November 1940. “We were told to go to the inner caves: but they had been filled by regular visitors – who had commandeered positions weeks before. Some had taken possession of cut out rooms, and curtains were fixed in front and behind… there were tables, cooking stoves, beds, chairs behind the curtains. Bombed out families live there permanently and the father goes to work and returns there and the mother goes out to shop and that is their home.” How dangerous was 'Blitz Spirit'? The stoicism of the British people in response to the Luftwaffe raids of 1940–41 is seen as heroic, but their defiance resulted in needless deaths, says Richard Overy. "The popular slogan that the bomb that killed you ‘had your name on it’ is not just a Blitz myth, but is recorded in wartime diaries and eyewitness accounts," he writes. "After a flurry of sheltering in the first weeks of the Blitz in September 1940, Londoners developed a growing insouciance..." The dangers of the Blitz spirit Bethnal Green Tube Station, London Where a tragedy of the Blitz occurred One obvious place to shelter from the Blitz was London’s underground network, deep below the city. Initially the government sought to prevent the stations being used for this purpose but the weight of popular pressure was such that the authorities were compelled to back down. As many as 177,000 people hid from the bombers in tube stations where they were sometimes supplied with beds and toilet facilities by the authorities. Like many other stations, Bethnal Green became a popular hideout. On 3 March 1943 it was the scene of a disaster. The worst stage of the Blitz was by then long finished but raids did still occur from time to time. That day air-raid warnings were heard and people hurried towards the station where they hoped to shelter. Exactly what happened next remains slightly unclear, however it seems that the firing of a new type of anti-aircraft gun caused panic and all at once a crowd of people surged forwards as they were descending the steps. In the resulting crush 173 people were killed and dozens more injured. Alf Morris, who was 12 at the time, later recalled the scene. “People were falling around me. I don’t know who they were, they were just falling. I went to move and couldn’t because they had trapped me. I couldn’t move at all. I was crying and screaming.” Afterwards the survivors were told not to speak about what had happened and it was only gradually that the full story emerged. There is now a plaque at the station commemorating the incident. How did Britons rebuild their lives after the Blitz? The German bombing of Britain from 1940–45 exacted a terrible price, in lives lost, infrastructure wrecked and nerves shattered. Daniel Todman reveals how Britons rebuilt their lives, and their cities, in the aftermath of the raids. "Psychiatrists reported that, although survivors of bad raids often showed signs of extreme shock, almost all of them recovered fairly quickly, without much more treatment than a kind word, a blanket and a cup of tea," he writes. "Those with more severe reactions to the horrors they witnessed, however, may have been discouraged from reporting by the media’s celebration of stiff-upper-lip endurance..." The cruel cost of the Blitz Coventry Cathedral, Coventry Where a city was wrecked Two months into the Blitz, the German bombers began to target Britain’s other industrial cities in earnest. This new phase was announced in horrifying fashion on 14 November when 449 bombers emptied their loads onto the city of Coventry. It was the most concentrated attack yet carried out over the British Isles and the effects were so severe that the German propaganda machine coined a new English word: ‘Coventrate’, which meant to destroy a city from the air. The raid cost 554 lives. The physical destruction was also great, including buildings with no military purpose such as hospitals. Coventry’s medieval cathedral sustained tremendous damage, as reported by Tom Harrisson, director of Mass Observation, at the time. “At each end the bare frames of the great windows still have a kind of beauty without their glass; but in between them is an incredible chaos of bricks, pillars, girders, memorial tablets”. In the aftermath of the war it was decided to let the ruins stand and construct a new cathedral close-by. The architect Basil Spence was commissioned to design the replacement structure, which was consecrated in 1962. Unlike so much of the postwar reconstruction, Spence’s cathedral is a majestic achievement, often held to be the architect’s greatest work. St Paul’s Cathedral, London Where a London icon survived In 1940 London was bombed 126 times. The last great raid of the year on 29 December was also one of the worst. Incendiary bombs were dropped around the square mile of the City causing an inferno that was dubbed the Second Great Fire of London. That night photographer Herbert Mason took a photograph of St Paul’s Cathedral’s distinctive dome emerging out of the smoke. This picture was shown on the Daily Mail front cover two days later and is probably now the defining image of the Blitz. Many of the buildings around St Paul’s were ruined during the war but Christopher Wren’s masterpiece (completed in 1710) avoided major damage, even though it was struck by 28 bombs. The cathedral’s survival owed much to a group of volunteers called St Paul’s Watch who took it upon themselves to douse incendiary bombs and prevent fires taking hold. Close to the cathedral is The National Firefighters Memorial. This bronze sculpture was created by artist John Mills in 1991 to recognise members of the United Kingdom Fire Service who risked their lives tackling the blazes of the Blitz. The names of 997 who died in the conflict are inscribed on the memorial. More recently the names of firefighters killed in peacetime have also been inscribed on the monument. Was the Blitz a 'golden era' for criminals? Joshua Levine reveals how the German bombing of British cities in the Second World War created new opportunities for lawlessness. "The range of offences committed during the Blitz, from breaches of regulations to cold-blooded murder, was wide," he writes. "And while some were committed by inveterate wrongdoers, many were carried out by ordinary people reacting to opportunity..." Criminals of the Blitz St Luke’s Church, Liverpool Where a church recalls Merseyside’s pain Britain’s ports enabled vital supplies to be brought into the country so it is little surprise that they were targeted in earnest by the Luftwaffe. Bristol, Portsmouth, Cardiff, Swansea, Plymouth and Southampton were all hit. Merseyside, then the country’s second most important port, endured a particularly torrid time, with almost 4,000 killed in the area between August 1940 and January 1942. The most intense period of bombing in Merseyside occurred from 1–7 May 1941. This ‘May Blitz’ saw 870 tonnes of high explosives dropped on the area, resulting in 1,741 people being killed. Among the Liverpool buildings damaged in these raids was St Luke’s Church, which was the recipient of an incendiary bomb on 5 May. The late-Georgian church’s ruins were left as they were after the war to act as a reminder of the trauma of the Blitz. It is now popularly known as ‘the bombed-out church’ and also contains a memorial to the Irish potato famine. Dalnottar Cemetery, Clydebank Where victims of Scotland’s Blitz lie Most of Scotland avoided serious damage in the Blitz. The main exceptions were Glasgow and the neighbouring Clydeside towns that served as hubs of industry and shipbuilding. In the spring of 1941 they were subjected to heavy raids by the Luftwaffe. One of the worst casualties was the small town of Clydebank, which was ravaged in successive nights of bombing on 13 and 14 March. Clydebank had been earmarked as a potential victim at the start of the war and most of its women and children had been evacuated in 1939. However when the expected attacks failed to materialise many of the evacuees returned to a town that they hoped had been spared. These illusions were shattered in dramatic fashion on the first night of the raids when 1,650 incendiaries were dropped along with 272 tonnes of high explosive bombs. By the end of the second night Clydebank had been devastated. It was reported that only seven of the town’s 12,000 houses escaped harm in the fierce bombardment. The number of dead was 528 and hundreds more were seriously injured. As it happened the industrial sections of the town were less badly damaged, meaning that the cost to British production was relatively limited. Belfast, Northern Ireland Where the Belfast Blitz is remembered Belfast was spared the bombers for the first few months of the Blitz, but with its valuable shipyards and factories it was never likely to escape entirely. Yet the local authorities seemed reticent to prepare for this eventuality, which meant that Belfast’s air-raid precautions left a lot to be desired. The Luftwaffe struck the city on three occasions in April and May 1941, wreaking havoc with high explosives, incendiary bombs and parachute mines. In total around 1,000 people were killed, most on the night of 15 April when the loss of life was significantly higher than after the attack on Coventry. “It was like an earthquake that night,” said resident Jimmy Penton. “The ground shook and the people squealed and yelled. They thought it was the end of the world." RAF Middle Wallop, Hampshire Where British fighters took on the bombers The British tried several tactics to stop the bombers getting through. Searchlights, anti-aircraft guns and night-fighter planes were all employed for this purpose, yet with limited success initially. Early in the Blitz it was taking an average of 30,000 shells to bring down a single Luftwaffe aeroplane. As time progressed, the use of radar and the introduction of the Bristol Beaufighter enabled the defenders to make life more difficult for the bombers. Spearheading the attack was John ‘Cat’s Eyes’ Cunningham of the RAF’s No. 604 Squadron. He accounted for several German aircraft, earning both the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Distinguished Service Order for his efforts in 1941. How the RAF won the war His morale-boosting achievements were trumpeted in the press where his remarkable ability to track down enemies at night was attributed to a diet of raw carrots. In reality, his secret was the Beaufighter’s airborne interception radar. RAF Middle Wallop was completed in 1940 and utilised as an RAF base for the remainder of the Second World War. This article has been curated from content first published in BBC History Magazine, BBC History Revealed and HistoryExtra between 2009 and 2017
We recently interviewed Jonathan Boff about the ‘Blitz spirit’ for the HistoryExtra podcast, in which he explored how ordinary people coped with the privations of World War II. Following the school closures across the UK and US, our content director David Musgrove asked what parallels could be found between wartime measures and the current school closures to prevent the spread of COVID-19…
David Musgrove: As schools close both in the UK and the US, there is a social dislocation that this imposes on the population, obviously a very live issue now. What parallels are there in either the First or Second World War and the public response to it? Jonathan Boff: Obviously there's a slight difference, in the sense that schools were not closed in either world war because of a fear of spreading disease, as they have been today. But actually, there are some really interesting parallels with the Second World War. As many people will know, for cities that were in danger of air attacks the first plan for children in the event of war was that they should be evacuated to the countryside. Large numbers of children were evacuated, and the schools were also evacuated. For example, large numbers of schools were evacuated from West Ham, I think, to Oxford. Listen | Jonathan Boff explains how ordinary people coped with the privations of World War II and considers what parallels can be drawn with the current Coronavirus crisis But a lot of the children did not go: their parents didn't want them to go, or they didn't want to go. So, you had a situation where the schools were in Oxford and the children were in many cases still in the East End, and that caused severe dislocation. Many fathers were out at work and many of their mothers were also out at work, but the schools weren't running. So the children were missing free milk and free meals, which were very important, particularly in poor areas. There were estimates that as many as a million children might have been effectively 'running wild' in London by the middle of September 1939. Increasingly as the war went on, and when the Blitz started [in September 1940], schools were being requisitioned for civil defence, and therefore were closing down. As many as two thirds of all the schools in London, about 60 per cent of those in Manchester, were closed down for that reason. Of course, many were bombed as well; something like 20 per cent of schools in London were damaged in the course of the war. In West Ham, for instance, where there was supposed to be 60 council schools, at the worst point there were only 16 of them open. Juvenile delinquency rates went through the roof – convictions for juvenile delinquency went up by a third between 1939 and 1941 – and generally, educational provision was badly disrupted. So, by January 1940, about a quarter of children in London were receiving full-time education; another quarter were having part-time education; and a quarter were being home-schooled, either in their own homes or perhaps in the homes of family members with sort-of wandering schoolmasters going around for an hour or so a day, marking homework and so on. And then probably about a quarter – something like 430,000 children – were getting no education at all. It was a serious problem. If you've ever seen the movie Hope and Glory [1987], there are some lovely scenes about what it was like to be a schoolboy in London during the Second World War. (I won't spoil the ending by telling you what happens in the last shot.) What was the cost of the Blitz? Bletchley Park: Britain's wartime intelligence factory By the end of the war (in some places), there were seven-year-olds at school who were unable to read and write as a result of the poor standard education they received. One of the consequences of that was the 1944 Education Act, the famous act which extended secondary education for free to every pupil in the country, up to the age of 15. It was planned to become 16, but that took longer. The historian Angus Calder has described it as the most signal measure of social reform that became law during the war itself; essentially, the most important gesture towards democracy in the 20th century. As a result of the crisis in education that occurred as a result of the war, everyone agreed that something needed to be done, and that bill, I think, was passed without division in the House of Commons. And so it was that major reforms were brought in after the war. Dr Jonathan Boff is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Birmingham. His books include Winning and Losing on the Western Front (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Haig’s Enemy: Crown Prince Rupprecht and the German Army on the Western Front (Oxford University Press, April 2018).