30th December, 1940 : Morning : City of London
This was where the Speeds’ New Union Street factory was, and Fred came looking for it today. He wasn’t allowed through: it was in the heart of the most perilous zone, where walls could come crashing down at any time. . . . . . It would be days yet before the Speeds would get a permit to explore this wilderness. And when they were finally allowed in to explore, “So complete is the destruction that you have to stand still to take bearings.” When they got to the factory, there was nothing left.
“the air raid shelter which had been in the centre of the basement had withstood the fire, but in all that mess around and on top of it, I could not distinguish one single object, not even a button. Amazing when you think of the heaviness of Ethel’s mahogany showcase and the mahogany counter which ran all along one wall. They had disappeared as completely as a matchstick.”
Fred did find the safe, though, and some firemen offered to force it open with axe and crowbar. The charred ledgers fell to dust as they were lifted out and all the paper money was gone too, leaving just twenty-five shillings in coins – and so discoloured that it was difficult to tell half-crowns from pennies. Ethel gave a pound of it to the fireman, “which left her five shillings salved from her entire business, but opening the safe had been no light task.”
“The whole of the City is full of smoke and paper, etc. is still falling this morning,” Peter Maynard wrote to his parents from Britannic House in Finsbury Circus on the morning of 30th December. “The streets are full of businessmen with nothing to do. Imagine coming to one’s office in the morning and finding it a gutted skeleton or still burning. Hundreds of people have done that this morning. All our telephones are out of action. Hardly any work being done this morning. The whole of Moorgate is closed . . . I have tried to see if Ernest’s office is OK, I doubt it. I will have another try at lunch.”
Bill White went out with Life photographer Bill Vandivert to explore the streets . . . . . . “by the dull winter daylight it was a shambles, almost deserted except for the occasional firemen playing hoses on heaps of rubbish. But once we ran into half a dozen neatly dressed businessmen in well-brushed bowler hats, the directors of a famous London bank. They had trudged through the rubble to peer, over a shattered wall, at a safe which contained the company’s records. It had crashed through to the basement and now lay on its side – a steel island in a pool of charcoal-stained water.”
“Presently we happened upon a couple of elderly men, partners in some business which had been completely destroyed. They were asking their way, because some of the streets they couldn’t recognise. When they discovered we were American reporters, they began talking as people often do when they realise they may be quoted. “We will carry on”, one of them said, “no doubt about it, in spite of things like this. Our spirit isn’t broken. After all, what else is there to do? Carry on! That’s what we should do!” They said these things half to themselves, half to us, because they knew we were reporters. We turned off at a side street and left them climbing over rubbish toward their little business, which both we and they knew they would not find.”
Hitchcock, Williams & Co was, like so many other burnt out businesses, already busy arranging new premises while it waited to see what could be salvaged from the old ones. And, of course, accommodation for the live-in staff. All across the Square Mile, by tomorrow, the ropes that blocked off the devastation would be festooned with notes about where postmen and visitors could now find the firms that they were seeking. Business As Slightly Unusual.
Over by the Tower, the merchants of “Wine Land” were as attached to their own few bibulous streets, clustered around Falstaff’s Eastcheap, as any stubborn East Ender. And now they took in neighbours just as readily. The next edition of Wine & Spirit Trade Record (whose own offices had received “relatively slight damage – broken windows, doors inside the rooms blown off hinge, and so forth”) carried a list of some sixty businesses that had been burnt or blasted out. A few gave new addresses outside London but most had relocated just a little further down the same street or round the corner in the next one, moving from St Dunstan’s Hill to Water lane, or Water Lane to Great Tower Street, or Great Tower Street to Mark Lane, or Mark Lane to St Mary-at-Hill, and thus back full circle, almost, to St Dunstan’s again.
There was a faintly fruity, Dickensian aroma to the messages from these wine merchants, whose premises Dickens himself must have passed on his walking jaunts around the City :
Messrs Dent, Urwick and Yeatman regret to announce that their offices which they have occupied at 34, Great Tower Street for well over a hundred years were demolished by enemy action on the night of 29th December. For the time being, therefore, through kindness of friends in the Trade, they have established a temporary address at 40, Eastcheap EC, where all communications should be addressed. In consequence of the raid all records, and a considerable amount of duty-paid stock have been lost. Messrs Dent, Urwick and Yeatman would be very grateful if any friends would send them any transactions or accounts outstanding in order to help them over this difficult time.
Elsewhere, Messrs Farrow and Jackson Ltd, in a similar fix, assured readers that : “If suppliers will forward statements of any accounts outstanding, together with copies of relative invoices, these statements will be promptly met”.
It was business as usual too, though, for some equally Dickensian trades, as the same issue of Wine & Spirit Trade Record revealed. Like its predecessor in 1666, this fire had destroyed Halls of the ancient City Livery Companies, including that of the Bakers Company in Harp Lane. But as an official had – perhaps unwisely – informed a Daily mail reporter, its cellars, containing priceless wine stocks of two other Livery companies as well as its own, remained happily intact. “The cellar”, he added, “was beneath the hall, the floor of which was still smouldering after the fire.” On consideration, the Bakers Company, decided that it was wisest to let the wine cool before attempting to remove it and ordered that the cellar door should be sealed in the meantime. “This was to have been done the next day”, the Record recorded, “but before it could be effected the beadle reported that the bulk of the wines had gone.”
Blitz : M.J. Gaskin : Faber & Faber
2005 ISBN 978-0-571-21795-3 / 0-571-21795-8