I was ordained priest in London in 1939 when I was 23. A year later, on the first day of the London blitz, the planes arrived at 6 o’clock in the evening whilst it was still light. I was visiting a sick woman, she was in bed and her husband was also in the room. Suddenly there was an almighty row from aeroplanes and falling bombs. The man dived under the bed and I found myself holding the hands of both of them, the woman in the bed and the man under the bed. When the noise stopped I went outside into the street expecting to see devastation. Boys were playing football, one shouted out, “Hey, Mister, your church is on fire!”
The planes had dived through the canopy of barrage balloons and dropped a canister of incendiary bombs on top of the church. This was quite deliberate. It had a spire and being on a hill, was a prominent building about four miles from Rotherhithe. The plan was that when the bombers were over the fire the crew would press the release buttons and then the high-explosives would fall on the dock area. The Old Kent Road gas works was also set on fire. Every fire brigade in the district was sent there and the church was left to burn. The congregation managed to pick up all the incendiaries with shovels, except for one that lodged in the peak of the wooden roof of the high Victorian gothic building. There it smouldered happily for two hours with no way of getting near it. Finally it burst into flames and the whole of it caught fire. The fire brigade arrived a quarter of an hour later, just as the roof crashed in.
At 8 o’clock the proper air raid began. Fortunately an Air-raid Wardens post had just been completed in the church grounds, built to withstand light bombs with deep concrete foundations. Some hours later, when the raid ended, I went out to have a pee and nearly fell into a big hole bored at an angle underneath the shelter. We discovered later that the hole went 15’ deep into the back-filled earth where it failed to explode. It was still there at the end of the war.
Early the next morning we prepared for the 8 o’clock Communion service in Haberdasher Askes School across the road. I recall being reprimanded by the Vicar, Fr Bill Fenton, for being improperly dressed. Somehow my green Leeds BA hood had disappeared in the turmoil of the night. I have never worn one since. About three weeks later our temporary church at the school was bombed and blown to pieces so we moved back to the vestry, the one part of the church that had not been burned out.
Many people in the parish lost their lives. I remember one night when the Christmas Club was having its pay-out and the men were all in the pub. The basements of the terraced houses opposite had been shored and joined together to form a common shelter. The women and children were there. A bomb fell on the pub killing about sixteen of the men. In the shelter opposite, where I was, none of them know till the next morning who was dead, who was alive, who was in hospital.
One of the images I will never forget was when a lone bomber dropped a bomb on a house early in the morning. Rescuers knew there was a woman in it. The house was just a pile of rubble. They dug down. The woman had been in bed on one side of the room and a baby in a cot on the other side. In the instant between the bomb hitting the house and exploding she had thrown herself right across the room and spread-eagled herself across the cot in order to try and protect the baby, sadly to no avail.
On another occasion I was conducting a funeral. We were processing from the chapel to the grave when the sirens went and German planes came overhead. I kept on walking but had the feeling that nobody was following me. I turned round and found I was alone with the coffin, the pallbearers had all jumped into another open grave, I could just see their heads sticking out.
Amazingly people adapted to the situation. They were quite put-out on nights when there were no raids. They would be sitting in the shelter and they would say, “What’s going on, it’s eleven o’clock? I’m going to bed!”
With the church burned down and the children and many of the adults evacuated, it was decided the new curate was bad luck and I was told I was free to look for another job.
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