Today is the 65th anniversary of the Bethnal Green Tube disaster:
On that day [in 1943], hurrying for shelter from an air raid, 173 people were killed on this staircase without a single bomb falling. In all, 62 children, 84 women and 27 men died with a terrible simplicity: at the enquiry, the magistrate said that “the stairway was, in my opinion, converted from a corridor to a charnel house in from ten to 15 seconds. Death was, in all cases examined, due to suffocation and the vast majority showed signs of intense compression”.
Newspaper reports of the time explain it, baldly. At 8.17pm, the alert sounded and, in the next ten minutes, over 1,500 people went safely down the stairway (the shelter, an unfinished Tube station, held 9,000 people, with bunks for 5,000).
At 8.27pm, a salvo of anti-aircraft rockets a new type, unfamiliar to the public caused a panic surge. At the same time, a woman carrying a baby tripped near the bottom of the 19 steps, starting off a domino effect. People lay, unable to move, their plight invisible to the pressing crowd above because of the blackout. “There was built,” said the official Home Office statement, “an immovable and interlaced mass of bodies five, six or more deep.”
It took until 11.45pm to clear the scene, even in the middle of a war. The disaster was the Hillsborough of its time. The home secretary, Herbert Morrison, urged stoicism. “Shocking as this blow is, it falls upon a people tested and hardened by the experiences of the blitz and as well able to bear loss bravely as any people in the world.”
Full details of the disaster was hushed up until after the war, despite journalists attempting to bribe kids with £5 to tell their stories. Stairs into the station were cleaned of blood overnight and nothing was said even to those who were already sheltering in the station. Survivor, Alf Morris:
We all walked home and then people didn’t arrive. There was a little girl who my mother looked after. She didn’t turn up, so I went to school without her.
When I got to school, there were children missing. In one case, there was seven went to the Tube and only one came up, the whole family was gone.
