We took a little break from our London walks Blitz Blog yesterday to tell you a little about our Jack the Ripper Walking Tour of London’s East End.
Our previous blog on the Blitz told how the Firefighters were terrified that another wave of bombing was imminent but that that wave was cancelled.
In this blog we look at what happened in the streets of London as the Fire Fighters battled to control the flames that were raging all over the City of London.
Had the second strike come the firemen were in no doubt that it would have created a firestorm — the phenomenon that destroyed Hamburg and Dresden — and that the City would have ceased to exist.
As it was, by midnight fires along Moorgate were generating air temperatures of 1,000°C, the condition necessary for firestorm, but fortunately the areas affected were contained in extent and did not create sufficient indraughts of air.
By 11.00pm Guildhall had been abandoned, its roof collapsing in flames. Next morning the City Fire Watch would raise the Union Jack over its blackened walls; Winston Churchill would later make defiant radio broadcasts from its shell, and in 1945 General Eisenhower would broadcast the news of the German surrender from the ancient hall.
But this was all in the future. For now, the firefight continued on the ground.
Firebrace was continuing his tour of the fires. He described the situation in the Barbican:
The high wind which accompanies conflagrations is now stronger than ever, and the air is filled with a fierce driving rain of red-hot sparks and burning brands.
The clouds overhead are a rose-pink from the reflected glow of the fires, and fortunately it is light enough to pick our way eastward down Fore Street.
Here fires are blazing on both sides of the road; burnt-out and abandoned fire appliances lie smouldering in the roadway, their rubber tyres completely melted.
The rubble from the collapsed buildings lying three and four feet deep, makes progress difficult in the extreme. Scrambling and jumping, we use the bigger bits of fallen masonry as stepping stones, and eventually reach the outskirts of the stricken area.
Firebrace noted that the Barbican area had long been known to firemen as the ‘Danger Zone’. Its streets were very narrow and its old-fashioned buildings complied with few fire regulations. There were many warehouses, workshops and offices that represented a ‘torch waiting for a flame’.
By midnight there were six area conflagrations needing more than one hundred pumps each, twenty-eight requiring over thirty pumps, fifty at the twenty-pump mark, one hundred needing ten and 1,286 fires which ‘had to make do with one pump apiece’.
Two thousand fire pumps of the London Regional Brigades were at work, backed by 300 more from the surrounding regions. Before the war there were 1,850 fire pumps in the whole of Great Britain.
By 2.30am the firemen were tired and hungry. Publicans in the City were opening their pubs and giving them free beer. Fireman Rosefield and his mates were drinking outside a pub in ‘an alleyway near St Bride’s ‘ (either the Old Bell or the Punch Tavern).
At the same time Sub-Officer Wilmott and his crew were approached by an elderly lady with a carrier bag who asked ‘Would the firemen like a sandwich?’
Wilmott and his men agreed instantly and took their sandwiches to a nearby pub where he remembers that if they had accepted all the free pints offered they would have got ‘well and truly plastered’.
This generosity on the part of the publicans does not seem to have gone unrewarded: at 8.30 next morning Mr T R Tower crossed the river into the City at Blackfriars Bridge and was struck by the undamaged pubs on New Bridge Street — the Blackfriar, the Albion and the King Lud standing ‘like pearls among the ruins’ in the row of burnt-out buildings!
The firefighting continued throughout the night and Fire- brace reports that by 8am the ’situation was in hand’.
Many buildings continued to burn through the day but the Fire Service prided itself on extinguishing flames before the next nightfall so that they would not provide a beacon for the night raiders. This was achieved but ‘damping down’ operations continued for another three days.
In our next London walks Blitz Blog we will tell how on the morning after the City workers came in to work to find their city ablaze.
