Campaign to build memorial Columbia Market (pictured left, painted by the great and under-appreciated East End painter Albert Turpin) survived the terrible bombing that killed 51, but was felled by the planners. see below History Got a story to tell? If you have a tale about East End history, write to John Rennie or email him at johnrennie@gmail.com www.eastlondonhistory.com A tragic WWII ‘fluke’ sadly forgotten BY JOHN RENNIE SEPTEMBER 7, 1940. The first night of the Blitz. A night both long expected and yet a terrible surprise. Britain and Germany had been at war for a year, troops had been mobilised and children had been evacuated from London in anticipation of air raids. But the Phoney War of non-engagement on the continent had only been matched by quiet in the skies over London. All that was to change with the start of the Blitzkrieg, which was to last for 57 consecutive nights and then through until May the following year. More than one million London houses would be destroyed or damaged, and 32,000 Londoners killed or injured – 2,000 on that first night alone. Yet one of the greatest tragedies of that initial day goes largely forgotten – the bombing of Angela Burdett-Coutts’s Bethnal Green Columbia Market building, killing 45 East Enders who were using the market’s huge basement as a shelter. It’s an omission a new campaign aims to put right. The Columbia Market War Memorial Group (CMWMG) is spearheading a fund-raising campaign to have a plaque put in place for the 75th anniversary of the disaster, on September 7, 2015. Tom Betts was 12 years old on that warm September day. The Betts family were lucky enough to live in Columbia Buildings, the grand Gothic folly built 70 years before by Baroness Burdett-Coutts, and comprising both her never-successful covered market and shops, a church, swimming pool, baths, laundry and flats of a standard unusual in the East End. That Saturday morning, Tom and his brother went knocking on doors to take orders for coke from the local gasworks. Their ‘bit’ for the war effort – for which they earned 3d a sack – would pay for pie and eels each, a trip to the Saturday cinema and a Superman comic. Then in the afternoon, the air raid sirens had begun, but that wasn’t unusual. What was odd was the amount of anti-aircraft gunfire they could hear. Intrigued, Tom and his friends climbed the six floors to the top of Columbia Buildings to take a look. “There were hundreds of German airplanes, so low that the crosses on their wings were clear to see,” he remembered, 70 years later. “The bombs began slowly dropping from them, landing on the docks. It was bizarre, as I remember looking at the square below where children were still playing, completely oblivious to the destruction not too far away.” The sirens eventually silenced and Tom, his brother and mum went into Bethnal Green Road to do the week’s shopping, returning home to find the water off (the pressure was down due to the amount of water drawn to fight fires in the docks). Tom hurried out to get water from the standpipe in the street, a street lit up by the flames from the docks, and was warned by a neighbour that more bombers were on the way. He raced home and persuaded his mother to get to the shelter under the market. What happened next was one of those terrible flukes on which fates rest, the ‘chance in a million’ as newspaper reporter Peter Ritchie Calder memorably dubbed it. At the height of the raid, a 50kg bomb dropped straight through a glass ventilation shaft into the centre of the shelter, killing 51 people and showering survivors with splintered glass. Many were children, others members of a wedding party, their celebrations in full swing. Remarkably, the basement had been inspected and approved as a shelter by the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) agency. For Tom it was the beginning of ten terrible days being shunted from hospital to hospital, with no knowledge of what had become of his mother and brother. Eventually he was tracked down by his distraught father, who told him that his brother had survived but his mother had not. “I was devastated,” said Tom. “I still have feelings of guilt because I was the one who insisted we all went to the shelter.” Tom had been simply doing his best, of course. But was the government? Ritchie Calder, reporting for the Daily Herald, thought not. He pulled on his tin hat on the (Left) The ripping apart of the fabric of normal life can scarcely be imagined morning of September 8 and headed down to the East End – and was appalled by what he found. He would go on to report that children he had profiled the year before had been killed sheltering in a school. “I knew that school would be bombed,” wrote Calder. “Not a premonition, it was a calculable certainty.” He repeatedly warned Whitehall that East Enders must be got away from the bombs. He reported that the planning to deal with the newly homeless was chaotic – with the government refusing to accept responsibility and the local boroughs hopelessly bureaucratic and incompetent. For his pains, Ritchie Calder was accused of ‘giving comfort to the enemy’ but throughout the war he kept at it, highlighting the official ineptitude that was costing lives on the home front. But though he and the Herald relentlessly documented the incidents at the time, many are all but forgotten now. Trevor Wood and Geoff Twist are heading the CMWMG. I met the pair in the basement of the Guildhall Art Gallery in the City. An elegant building dating from 1999, its predecessor was itself destroyed during the Blitz. The pair talked with quiet enthusiasm and determination about their campaign to raise a ‘modest’ memorial. The plaque will cost not much more than a thousand pounds, and any money left over will go exclusively to local community organisations and charities. Trevor, born and brought up in Bethnal Green, knows all about the Blitz: his mother was one of the last to escape from the stairway at Bethnal Green station on the terrible night of March 3, 1943, when 173 died. Yet even he knew nothing about the Columbia Market disaster. “The story was reported in the Herald, and the king, the queen and Churchill came down and were photographed but, because of information blackouts, the location wasn’t identified,” says Trevor. The pair muse on the reasons for the loss of this particular tragedy. Timing? Location? The news blackout? Whatever the reasons, it’s an omission they aim to put right… with the help of the rest of us. There were hundreds of German planes, so low that the crosses on their wings were clear to see.” Tom Betts More information If you want to contribute or take part in the campaign, visit columbiamarketwarmemorial. wordpress.com For an interactive map of all the bombs that fell on September 7, 1940 see tinyurl.com/b56tvgb For more information about Ritchie Calder visit www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/ dispatches-from-the-blitz-why-peter-ritchie-calderwas a-true-war-hero-1989929.html For Tom Betts’s story visit www.bbc.co.uk/history /ww2peopleswar/stories/38/a8071238.shtml (Above) ‘Leave this to us’ poster – ironic as Ritchie Calder insisted that kids should have been out of London, but that the government was complacent (Below) Taking refuge in a makeshift air raid shelter on a Tube platform (Bottom) East End kids in a bombed out house 10 – 16 NOVEMBER 2014 N E W S F R O M T O WER HAMLETS COUNCIL AND YOUR COMMUNITY 13
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