'Are the people really taking it?’

28th December 1940: An independent observer looks at the way people have adapted to life in the underground shelters in the Docklands area of London

Liverpool Street Underground Station Shelter: Close-up of sleeping people, their heads resting against the arched walls of the underground tunnel.

There was a lull in the bombing over the few days around Christmas, but people were taking no chances. Many minor improvements had been made to conditions in the shelters, bunk beds had been installed in many places, sanitary conditions improved, and there was now a distribution of food. People had grown used to a new routine surprisingly quickly. But a closer look revealed a division within society, a division between the patrician authorities and the working people. Britain was still a very class-ridden society.

Blitz Canteen: Women of the Women’s Voluntary Service run a Mobile Canteen in London. At 3:45am, Patience ‘Boo’ Brand drives the tea car and canteen from the WVS Canteen Service depot, whilst Rachel Bingham directs her by torchlight. They have together htiched the trailer onto the car and are on their way to supply refreshments to shelterers emerging for work after a night in the shelter.

Patience ‘Boo’ Brand and Rachel Bingham of the WVS distribute tea and buns to ladies sheltering in a trench shelter in a London park. The ladies have made the shelter more comfortable by bringing chairs, tables and lamps from home.

Margery Perham¹ describes a tour of some of the public shelters in London’s East End, when she assisted with the distribution of food over the Christmas week:

On again, to the great shelter under the arches beside the docks. The canteen is very late. There are about fifteen hundred shelterers here, and many have had no evening meal. They do not know why ‘they’ bring a canteen or who ‘they’ are or where ‘they’ come from. But ‘they’ are late and that is cause for annoyance.

There is a rush, and the table, set up with difficulty in the shelter to take the tea-urns and food, rocks dangerously. Hands tug at the canteen party, reach and clutch and wave their mugs in the dim light. Cockney voices shrill their orders. Appeals for restraint nd discipline are not understood. Even the grown men do not respond. Disraeli’s Two Nations are still two, and how is this one to learn courtesy, to feel a sense of solidity with the other from which ‘they’ of the canteen have come?

Shelterers knit and chat on their steel bunks in this North London air raid shelter.

The rush dies down. There is time to look round. The air reeks from the crowds and the unsavoury bundles of bedding, some of which - for there are not yet bunks to go round - still lie on the damp floor. Water drips from the arches and down the walls.