London's Disasters E-Book

John Withington

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

From AD 61, when Queen Boudicca – outraged at her treatment at the hands of the Romans – marched on the city and burned it to the ground, London has been hit by wave upon wave of destruction. This fascinating and unique book tells the story of over 2000 years of disaster – fire, water, disease, pollution, accident, storm, riot, terrorism and enemy action. It chronicles well-known episodes like the Great Plague of 1665 and the Blitz, as well as lesser-known events such as whirlwinds and earthquakes. This new edition also includes the recent terrorist attack on 7 July 2005, as well as a new section on the crises which have plagued the financial City, including the near-collapse of Britain's banks during 2008 and 2009. London's Disasters ultimately celebrates the spirit of the people of London who have risen above it all and for whom London is still a great city in which to live and work.

Leseprobe

LONDON’S DISASTERS

FROM BOUDICCA TO THE BANKING CRISIS

JOHN WITHINGTON

For my father

First published in 2003

This edition first published in 2010

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2011

All rights reserved

© John Withington 2003, 2004, 2010, 2011

The right of John Withington, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7624 7

MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 7623 0

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

PART ONE – HOSTILE ACTION

1 War and Invasion

2 Rebellion and Riot

3 Air Raids

4 Terrorism

PART TWO – FIRES

5 Great Fires of London

6 Enter the Firemen

7 London’s Still Burning

PART THREE – ACCIDENTS

8 Crushes, Collapses and Fatal False Alarms

9 Explosions

10 Death by Water

11 Train Crashes

12 Air Crashes

PART FOUR – ACTS OF GOD

13 Plague

14 Cholera, Flu and Fog

15 Wild Weather

16 Earthquake, Famine and Flood

PART FIVE – ACTS OF MAMMON

17 Financial Disasters

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the library staffs of the Health and Safety Executive, the London Fire Brigade and the London Fire Brigade Museum for their help and their patience. Above all, I would like to thank my wife, Anne, for her constant support.

PART ONE

HOSTILE ACTION

ONE

WAR AND INVASION

London did not have to wait long for its first disaster. The city was founded by the Romans as Londinium around AD 50; a decade later, it lay in ruins – the only time in its history that a disaster has completely destroyed it.

The Roman city was built around Cornhill and Ludgate. By AD 60, it had spread over about 30 acres and become a busy trading centre. The houses had timber frames and thatched roofs and most were probably owned by Romans, well-to-do Gauls and other foreigners. The chain of events that began Londinium’s destruction started in modern-day Norfolk. There Prasutagus, King of the Iceni, had collaborated with the Romans and managed to construct a special relationship. His reward was to be allowed to remain semi-independent. Such arrangements, though, tended not to last beyond the death of the favoured individual.

In AD 61, the King died. He was survived by his widow Boudicca and two daughters. Prasutagus had hoped to safeguard their future by a will in which he left half of his considerable wealth to the Emperor Nero and half to his daughters. When he died, representatives of the procurator, the financial overlord of the province of Britain, appeared. They probably had instructions to seize the whole estate, but even if they did not, their arrogance and high-handedness provoked resistance.

The Romans responded brutally, flogging Boudicca and raping her daughters. It was not only the Iceni, though, whom they had alienated. The Iceni’s neighbours, the Trinovantes, whose territory lay in Essex and southern Suffolk, joined the Iceni. They bitterly resented having their lands and houses handed over to Roman war veterans, as well as the Romans’ efforts to make them worship the Emperor.

When the Britons went to war, the Roman Governor, Suetonius Paulinus, was campaigning far away in Anglesey with the XIVth Legion. In his absence, Boudicca’s host sacked and looted Colchester, massacring its Roman colonists, and destroyed part of a Roman legion that had tried to come to their rescue. When Suetonius heard the news, he raced down to London. His cavalry probably made it in three or four days, but the infantry was left far behind. With his depleted force, he decided that if he was to save the province, he had to abandon the city. So, in the words of the Roman historian Tacitus, ‘undeflected by the prayers and tears of those who begged for his help’, he led his soldiers off to the north, taking with him those Roman Londoners fit and willing to escape. The rest he abandoned to their fate. Some may have escaped into the territory of neighbouring tribes still friendly to Rome, but many were reluctant to leave, and the old and infirm could not.

When Boudicca’s army entered the city, the inhabitants were slaughtered. Tacitus complained the rebels did not want to take prisoners and make money from ransoms, they just wished to kill – cutting throats, hanging and crucifying ‘with a headlong fury’. They also burned down the city. The fearful intensity of the fire is clear from the way a heap of Roman coins found near the northern end of London Bridge have been partially melted together, and in the Museum of London, there are remains of coins and pottery burned as the city was destroyed. The ruins of Roman London also contain reddish fire debris 18 inches thick, another tangible reminder of the city’s first disaster.

Boudicca’s followers carried the destruction across the river to the settlement at Southwark, then they swung back north and meted out similar treatment to St Albans. Tacitus claims they killed 70,000 people in all. The figure is almost certainly a gross exaggeration, but the massacre was nonetheless a terrible one. The campaign, though, was to end in another massacre, this time of Boudicca’s host. It may have been 80,000 strong, but it was hampered by a long, unwieldy tail of women and children. Suetonius had probably gathered together a force of about 10,000, but its discipline and tactical sophistication enabled it to win a devastating victory. Tens of thousands of Britons were killed against just 400 Romans. Boudicca took poison rather than fall into the hands of her enemies.

Tradition has placed the fatal battle at a number of sites around London, like Stanmore Common to the north, or Honor Oak in the south. The favourite was Battle Bridge, near King’s Cross, with the body of Boudicca said to be buried at a site now occupied by one of the platforms of King’s Cross station, or under an ancient tumulus at Parliament Hill. No sign of the Queen was found, however, when the mound was excavated, and the view of historians nowadays is that the decisive battle probably took place in the Midlands.

Although Roman London was to encounter disaster from fire (see Chapter 5), in the two centuries after the defeat of Boudicca, it seems to have remained free from attack. Towards the end of the second century, however, work was begun on a major defensive wall and ditch on the landward side of the city, perhaps reflecting a fear that more turbulent times were on the way.

In 286, a Belgian named Marcus Carausius, hired by the Romans to fight barbarian pirates in the channel, declared himself Emperor of Britain. For ten years he and Allectus, who eventually deposed and murdered him, defied the Roman Empire. Then, in 296, Constantius Chlorus, who was the father of Constantine the Great and who would himself become Emperor, appeared to defeat and kill Allectus and win back Britain for Rome. Frankish mercenaries who had been hired by the rebel ‘emperor’, took refuge in London and began plundering the city. Fortunately for the citizens, some of Constantius’s ships sailed up the Thames. When the Franks saw them, they tried to escape, but, according to a contemporary account, the Romans ‘slew them in the streets’.

There was more trouble in 367 when the Saxons overran London. They were leaving loaded with plunder, driving prisoners in chains and cattle before them, when they were caught by the Roman general Theodosius, who had been despatched by the emperor. The Roman army routed the marauders and, when Theodosius entered the city, he was received with all the jubilation of a Roman triumph. Theodosius may also have strengthened London’s defences, and more work seems to have been done in the last decade of the fourth century too, but the barbarian tide could not be checked indefinitely, and besides, Rome was facing problems much nearer home, which meant it could no longer afford to protect outposts of the empire.

In the early years of the fifth century, the last Roman troops were withdrawn and, in 410, the Emperor Honorius warned Londinium it would have to look after itself. By this time, the citizens were probably hiring German mercenaries to protect them, perhaps giving them land to farm as payment, but they were not able to stop the comquest of England by Geramnic tribes. After the Romans left, Londinium and Southwark seem to have been largely abandoned, with the Anglo-Saxons initially settling outside the city walls, but, by the ninth century, they were moving back inside because of attacks from a new and fearsome enemy.

In 842, there was, according to some accounts, ‘great slaughter’ as the Vikings attacked London for the first time. In 851, they returned to kill once more, leaving the city a smouldering wreck. Then, in 871, London was occupied by the Danish Great Army, which probably stayed until 886 when Alfred the Great conquered the city. There followed a period of relative peace until 994 when the Norsemen, led by Svein Forkbeard, King of Denmark, and the future King of Norway, Olaf Tryggvason, invaded England with a fleet of ninety-four ships. They sailed up the Thames and set fire to London, but stubborn resistance from the defenders drove them off, and the city repulsed a further attack in 1009. In 1014, London submitted to Svein, but he died the same year and King Ethelred the Unready returned in alliance with another King Olaf of Norway. This one was known as Olaf the Fat during his lifetime, and after his death as a saint.

Seeing the Danes had massed their soldiers on the bridge between Southwark and London, Ethelred and Olaf tied ropes from their ships to the posts holding it up, and pulled it into the river, taking the soldiers with it. They then reconquered Southwark, and London capitulated. Two years later Ethelred died, and the kingdom fell to Svein Forkbeard’s son, Cnut, but London would face one more foreign invader before this tangled tale of dynastic rivalries reached its conclusion.

Cnut was succeeded in turn by his son, Harthacnut. Meanwhile, across the Channel, one of Ethelred’s sons, Edward, was living in exile with the Dukes of Normandy. Harthacnut invited him to return to England and on his death Edward became King, earning the nickname ‘the Confessor’ for his great piety. Edward’s Norman connections, though, led to more trouble. On his death, he left the throne to the English earl Harold Godwinson, but Duke William of Normandy, the future William the Conqueror, claimed that both Edward and Harold had promised it to him.

Determined to take England, William sailed across the Channel with his army. After defeating and killing Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, William spent a month subduing the south-east before turning his attentions to London. He began by burning down Southwark. In response, London’s defenders crossed the bridge to take on the invader. They got rather the worse of the encounter, but London had a formidable garrison and William was reluctant to face the possibility of a bloody battle, so he withdrew to the west, devastating the country in a circuit of destruction.

London was spared further damage when the Anglo-Saxon nobles submitted to the conquering Duke at Berkhamsted. His coronation, though, proved the most disastrous in London’s history. When William was crowned on Christmas Day 1066, the crowd outside Westminster Abbey shouted its acclamation of him as King. Hearing the noise, the Norman soldiers inside believed it heralded the start of a revolt so they ran out into the street, setting fire to houses and hacking down the supposed rebels. In view of the turbulence of the previous 200 years, perhaps the most surprising thing was that what now followed for London were more than 800 years of freedom from enemy attack.

TWO

REBELLION AND RIOT

London may have been free from foreign attack, but it would sometimes face death and destruction at the hands of Englishmen. By 1377, the country had been enmeshed in the Hundred Years’ War with France for forty years. Hostilities, as ever, proved expensive, so the government levied a poll tax, which had to be paid by even the poorest peasants. The countryside seethed with increasing anger, and in Kent in 1381 an ex-soldier named Wat Tyler emerged as leader. His right-hand man was a renegade egalitarian priest, John Ball, who asked the famous rhyming question: ‘When Adam delved, and Eve span / Who was then the gentleman?’ By June, Tyler had gathered a band of 10,000 Kentish peasants and decided to lead them to London. On the way, they plundered Rochester and Canterbury. At the same time, another group of like-minded men set out from Essex. The Kentish rebels went to Blackheath to await a meeting with the King, while the Essex men camped at Mile End.

On 13 June, King Richard II, then aged fourteen, set off from the Tower with his advisers in the royal barge, intending to meet Tyler. But when he saw the angry crowd of peasants, he turned back, so the rebels got to work on Southwark, burning down the Marshalsea Prison, freeing the inmates and plundering Lambeth Palace. The Mayor, William Walworth, was sufficiently alarmed to order that the drawbridge on London Bridge be raised and secured to stop the rebels crossing the river. Confined to the south bank, they wrecked the highly profitable Bankside brothels, most of which were owned by the Bishop of Winchester, though some belonged to Walworth.

Then Tyler threatened to burn down houses on London Bridge if the drawbridge was not lowered. The alderman in charge, apparently refusing help from armed volunteers among the citizenry, promptly lowered it, and the rebels streamed across. They were soon reinforced by Jack Straw’s men from Essex and others from Surrey, as well as large numbers of Londoners, from vagrants to master craftsmen, with whom the poll tax was also deeply unpopular. One chronicler even believed the revolts in Kent and Essex had been incited from London. Soon the rebels were running riot in the City. In the mayhem that followed the inmates in the Fleet Prison were released, and legal records were burned at the Temple.

A key target was the King’s uncle, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, seen as the power behind the throne. The rebels attacked his opulent Savoy Palace, killing some of his servants and throwing furnishings, clothes, jewels and plate into the Thames. Tyler had insisted there should be no looting, but some of the rebels clearly thought that drinking the Duke’s wine did not count, and a number were killed when they had had rather too much, and were trapped in the cellars as the Palace burned above them.

By now the rebels were becoming an increasingly threatening and disorderly mob. They killed tax collectors, and some carried on sticks the heads of foreigners they had murdered; the decapitated bodies of Flemish merchants were said to have been piled forty high. In Cheapside, the mob summarily executed lawyers. Then Newgate was emptied of prisoners. They also managed to gain control of the Tower, and seized their arch-enemy, Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor, the man widely seen as responsible for the government’s financial mismanagement. They also captured the King’s Treasurer, Robert Hales, Prior of the Hospital of St John, Clerkenwell, and executed them both on Tower Hill. For good measure, they burned down the priory too. The Archbishop’s cap was nailed to his skull and paraded through the streets, then displayed on London Bridge. There was a massacre in the City, and the mob burned down buildings at Westminster and along Holborn.

There followed King Richard’s finest hour. The rest of his reign might turn out a disaster, culminating in his being deposed and murdered, but now the fourteen-year-old monarch showed astonishing coolness and courage, not to mention duplicity and ruthlessness. While one band of rebels led by Jack Straw was attacking the Treasurer’s house at Highbury, Richard went with his courtiers to talk to another group at Mile End. He agreed to abolish their obligation to do feudal service and made a series of other concessions, as well as promising an amnesty to the insurgents. Charters guaranteeing these concessions were drawn up in Cheapside, and the Essex men began to disperse. The following day, Richard went to Smithfield, then a large open space west of the City wall, where Tyler’s men were gathered, to resume negotiations with them.

When they met, Tyler is supposed to have shaken Richard’s hand and said, ‘Brother, be of good cheer’, which was not how you were meant to speak to the King. William Walworth promptly stabbed him, and dragged him to the ground, while another of the King’s party finished him off. Richard then rode up to the wavering, confused rebels and offered himself as their leader. He took them to St John’s Fields, Clerkenwell, where the City militia had been raised. There the rebels were surrounded and persuaded to disperse without bloodshed. As the Kentish peasants were returning home, on London Bridge they would have seen the heads of Tyler and Straw, who had been executed, in the place where the Archbishop’s had been only a few hours earlier. Their exploits in London were followed by risings in four counties, but by the end of June, the revolt had been crushed and most of its local leaders killed. The concessions made by the King were quietly forgotten, though the poll tax was abolished.

Sixty-nine years later, the Hundred Years’ War was still being fought, but it was about to end in ignominy, with the loss of virtually all England’s possessions in France. The throne was occupied by the pious, well-meaning, but feeble-minded Henry VI, who founded Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge. By 1450, the government was bankrupt and once again it was the people of Kent whose patience snapped first. A man named Jack Cade led tens of thousands of them, including a number of gentry, to Blackheath, where they camped on 29 June 1450.

Ignoring an urgent appeal from the Lord Mayor to stay, the King fled north and left the city to defend itself. A hero of Agincourt, Sir John Fastolf, helped mount guards on the gates and along the wharves, and deploy projectile-throwing machines. He also sent his servant, John Payne, to Blackheath to find out what exactly it was the rebels wanted. They decided to behead him, and fetched an axe and block, but he managed to persuade them to let him go back and report their grievances instead. Their complaints about the selfishness and incompetence of the ‘kitchen’ cabinet surrounding the King would be calculated to appeal to many Londoners.

Payne delivered the message, and also told Fastolf about the size of Cade’s force, at which point his master retreated to the Tower. Cade’s men promptly took possession of Southwark on 1 July, making their headquarters at the White Hart Inn in Borough High Street. The next day, they cut the ropes of the drawbridge on London Bridge so that it could not be raised against them, and crossed the river. They caught Lord Saye and Sele, the Lord Treasurer of England, and decided to put him on trial. He refused to plead, so the rebels beheaded him in Cheapside and stuck his head on a spear. Then they tied his body to a horse’s tail and dragged it across the bridge to Southwark, where it was put on a gallows and quartered. His son-in-law, William Crowmer, the Sheriff of Kent, was also captured, and beheaded at Mile End; some twenty royal servants and a few other unpopular characters met a similar fate.

Cade had given a warning that any of his followers caught plundering would be executed, but with a force of 25,000 inside the City, there was soon looting of rich folk’s houses, assault, robbery and rape, and sympathy for the rebels began to evaporate. On 5 July, after they had retired to their Southwark headquarters for the night, another veteran of Henry V’s wars against the French got to work. Captain Matthew Gough took a group of men, killed Cade’s sentries, and occupied London Bridge. When the rebels heard the news, they rushed to the bridge and a fierce fight ensued, raging back and forth over its entire length. By now, a few of the inhabitants had fled, but most had stayed behind to try to protect their property. Some of them were now burned alive as Cade’s men set fire to their houses. Others were cut down in the street, and others still fell into the river and drowned. The battle raged for ten hours, and about two hundred were killed, including Gough himself. Then at eight in the morning, both sides agreed to a truce.

Many of the rebels were now inclined to head home with their booty, and the promise of a general pardon was enough to buy them off. Once Cade was out of town, though, the government offered a reward for him, dead or alive, and he was quickly run to ground in Sussex. Wounded, he was bundled into a cart, but died on the way back to London, where his naked corpse was mutilated and dragged on a hurdle over London Bridge to Newgate. His skull, in the time-honoured fashion, was displayed on the bridge, and, general pardon or not, dozens of rebels were rounded up and executed in Kent.

The most disastrous riot in London’s history would come more than 300 years later in response to a modest dilution of the laws discriminating against Roman Catholics. Lord George Gordon, a young MP on the make, spotted a way to advance his career. He became President of the Protestant Association, which got up a huge petition against the new law. On Friday 2 June 1780, he drew a crowd of 50,000 people to St George’s Fields in Lambeth and urged them to come with him to Parliament to present it. This was not a rabble; rather they were ‘the better sort of tradesmen’ – journeymen, apprentices, small employers. Indeed, a great deal of ‘respectable’ opinion was against the new law and the government of the City, the Court of Common Council, had asked for it to be repealed.

A hot sun was beating down, but Gordon told his supporters to dress in their ‘Sabbath day clothes’. The protesters marched three abreast and the main column was 4 miles long. At Westminster, they raised a great yell and invaded the parliamentary lobbies, carrying the petition into the chamber of the House of Commons. The mob terrorised Lords and MPs until the rumour got about that armed soldiers were on their way, at which point they dispersed. A body of Horse Guards did capture some of the protestors and took them off to Newgate, but that evening the mob gathered again, and people began to bar doors and windows, fearing the worst.

Obvious Catholic targets were soon under attack. The Bavarian Embassy was ransacked and the Sardinian Embassy burned to the ground. When the mob arrived at his chapel in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the Sardinian ambassador offered them 500 guineas not to damage a portrait of Christ, and 1,000 guineas to spare the organ. Both were destroyed as the building was burned down. On Saturday, the rioters took a day off, but on Sunday they descended on Moorfields and gutted a Catholic chapel, coming back the next day to wreck the schoolhouse and some priests’ houses nearby. The mob broke into groups and the violence spread. Some attacked Catholic buildings. Others turned on magistrates who had imprisoned rioters, and politicians who had supported pro-Catholic legislation. Irish districts were a particular target, because Irish immigrants were believed to be stealing jobs from Londoners. Sometimes, houses were attacked just to settle scores, and sometimes mistakes were made, as French Protestants, who had fled to England to escape persecution by Catholics, found themselves under attack. In Houndsditch, Jewish householders thought it prudent to put up notices saying ‘This house is true Protestant’.

All over the City houses flew blue ‘No Popery’ flags, and rioters roamed the streets with blue cockades in their hats. Up to now, the City authorities had shown little inclination to act, although some soldiers were stationed at vantage points, but on Tuesday, the crowd began to select more alarming targets. They returned to Westminster, where Parliament adjourned after hearing reports that the rioters were armed. They also attacked Bow Street police office, and then assembled in front of Newgate Prison, demanding that the gates be opened. They burned down the house of the keeper, then piled furniture against the prison gate and set fire to it. Other rioters scaled the walls and threw burning torches onto the roof. When constables came to try to help the keeper, the mob trapped them. By now, the rioters had broken through the roof and climbed down on ladders, while many prisoners feared they would be burned alive. Then the fire did its work and the gate began to give way. The crowd forced its way in and dragged out more than three hundred inmates, some of whom had been awaiting imminent execution. They also opened Clerkenwell Bridewell Prison.

The mob attacked the home of the Lord Chief Justice in Bloomsbury Square, burning his furniture, his paintings and his law library. Another judge’s house in Red Lion Square was also wrecked. By Wednesday, Gordon had completely lost control. Catholic shops, taverns and houses all over London were destroyed; the Fleet and King’s Bench Prisons were forced open, freeing about sixteen hundred debtors. The Clink was burned down, never to be rebuilt. A gin distillery owned by a Roman Catholic in Holborn was set on fire, taking with it twenty houses and several looters who got drunk and fell into the flames. The Bank of England was attacked. According to one story, the rioters were beaten back by clerks using bullets made from melted-down ink wells, but the authorities decided that in future they would take no chances. From then on, it was patrolled by a platoon of guards in ceremonial bearskins. There were also threats to the Mint, the Royal Arsenal and even royal palaces.

Now the City began to regret its earlier relaxed attitude. The militia and the Honourable Artillery Company were called out. Even the great radical John Wilkes took up arms against the mob. The government brought 10,000 troops into London. They were ordered to fire on the crowd and, by Thursday night, 285 rioters lay dead or dying. Order was finally restored, but, according to some estimates, more property was destroyed in London during the Gordon riots than in Paris during the week following the storming of the Bastille.

One week after the great procession to Parliament, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Lord George Gordon. He surrendered quietly, and was cleared of high treason. Many of his followers paid a heavier price: 25 were hanged in, others were shot in the streets. Estimates of the number killed or injured during the riots range up to 850. Gordon lived another thirteen years, finding time to be converted to Judaism, and to libel Marie Antoinette, an offence for which he was sent to the rebuilt Newgate Prison, where he died.

THREE

AIR RAIDS

In bright moonlight, just before midnight on 31 May 1915, more than eight centuries of immunity from enemy attack ended in London as the German Zeppelin LZ38 flew over the docks and the East End. A new kind of war had arrived, but for many Londoners the main surprise was how long it had taken to get there.

British aircraft had bombed Cologne railway station as early as September 1914 and, ever since the opening weeks of the First World War, the capital had been expecting attacks by the Zeppelins, gas-filled airships that cruised at more than 50 miles an hour at a height of between 10,000 and 15,000 feet. The government had taken the precaution of ordering a blackout. Street lamps had to be dimmed and domestic lights must not be visible through curtains. It was said that in the West End people bought thicker drapes, while in the East End, they turned down the gas lights, or lit the room with a single candle.

At first, the Germans were reluctant to sanction attacks on civilians, and as the raids that had been feared failed to materialise, vigilance in London began to relax. Then, in 1915, the Kaiser decided to authorise raids on ‘military’ targets in London such as the docks. On the night of that first raid, the blackout was ineffective. The Zeppelin commander easily identified Commercial Road, and headed for the docks. At 10,000 feet, he was beyond the range of anti-aircraft fire or night fighters. Fortunately, the 120 bombs he dropped were quite small: 90 were incendiaries, and the rest were little more than grenades. Although seven people were killed, relatively little damage was done. There was no panic, but London was already seething with anger after the sinking of the Lusitania earlier in the month. Physical attacks followed on foreign-owned shops and verbal attacks on the Admiralty, which at the time had the job of protecting London from bombardment.

Further raids followed, with the Zeppelins invariably coming at night. On 7 and 8 September, a total of thirty-two people were killed. The raid of 8 September did an estimated £½ million worth of damage and brought the City’s first bomb, which exploded in Fenchurch Street. A raid the following month killed seventy-one people at Woolwich.

The warning system was fairly primitive. Policemen would wear placards and blow whistles to sound the alert, while boy scouts on bicycles would blow bugles for the all-clear. Another way of raising the alarm was to set off loud fireworks called maroons, usually from police stations. The problem was that these were sometimes mistaken for the sound of falling bombs. During the winter of 1915/16, the government began to set up more searchlights and anti-aircraft batteries, but progress was not quick enough for many Londoners. On one occasion when the City was under attack, the only available gun had to be trundled all the way from Wormwood Scrubs. The issue of air defence dominated a parliamentary by-election at Mile End in January 1916, and the coalition government candidate came within 400 votes of defeat.

Altogether, there were ten airship raids on London in 1915 and 1916, but on 3 September 1916, the defenders had their first success against the enemy after an air chase across London and the Home Counties, when a wooden-framed Schutte-Lanz airship was shot down in flames at Cuffley in Hertfordshire, near enough for East Enders to see the fireball.

It was a sign that the tide was about to turn. Within a month, two more airships were shot down by aircraft after being picked out in the beams of searchlights. In the second incident, on 1 October, the Germans’ most successful London raider, Heinrich Mathy, was killed with his crew. The growing cost led the Germans to abandon Zeppelin raids on London, and the last came in October 1917, causing casualties in a number of areas including Camberwell and Hither Green, and hitting Swan & Edgar’s store in Piccadilly.

Before that final airship raid though, a more deadly foe had already made its first appearance in the skies over the capital. One lone aircraft had attacked the East End on 6 May 1916, then, six months later, another dropped half a dozen small bombs near Victoria station. It was in the following year, however, that the real raids began, conducted by the ‘England Squadron’ of Gotha biplane bombers based at two airfields in Belgian territory occupied by the Germans. Because the aeroplanes had a shorter range than the airships, more raids were concentrated on London.

At half past eleven on the morning of 13 June 1917, seventeen Gothas flew in tight formation over the Essex countryside. They dropped their first bombs on East Ham, then hit the front carriages of the Cambridge express at Liverpool Street station. One witness was the soldier and poet Siegfried Sassoon. He wrote: ‘an invisible enemy sent destruction spinning down from a fine weather sky; poor old men bought a railway ticket and were trundled away again dead on a barrow; wounded women lay about in the station groaning’. They attacked other streets around the station, and at Spitalfields, bomb fragments broke a window at Commercial Street School. As the news spread, parents ran to save their children. Some even scaled the school walls in the rush to get them out. In the afternoon, fewer than 250 out of 900 pupils turned up for lessons.

Only a few minutes later and less than 3 miles away, it was a 110-lb bomb, not stray pieces of shrapnel, that struck Upper North Street School at Poplar. It hit the infants’ class, killing fifteen children outright. Another three died later from their injuries, and twenty-seven more were maimed for life. Because it was a daylight raid, Londoners understandably assumed that the school must have been deliberately targeted, but it could just have been a tragic mistake. The school was only half a mile from quayside warehouses and railway sidings for the docks, which may have been the squadron’s real objectives.

Bombs also fell near the London Hospital in Whitechapel and around Aldgate. Casualties were wheeled into the hospital in ambulances, tradesmen’s vans and on hand-carts, or carried on stretchers and shutters. A bus that had been hit simply drove in with the casualties still on board. Altogether, more than 200 arrived in the space of one hour, and soon stretchers were blocking the corridors. Of the injured, 44 died, while 30 people were brought in dead.

Whether the civilian casualties were a mistake or not, the effect was devastating. That day, the Gothas killed 162 people and injured another 432 – nearly twice as many as in any other raid during the First World War. Not a single Gotha was shot down. Those who could afford it or who had friends or relatives outside London, began to get their children away from the capital, though there was no official evacuation.

Three weeks later, on 7 July, the Gothas were back. This time twenty-two of them hit Shoreditch, St Pancras and the City, destroying the Ironmongers’ Hall in Fenchurch Street, the only City livery hall to suffer this fate during the First World War. The writer V.S. Pritchett reported seeing walls stripped off houses, carts overturned and dead horses among the crowds, as 57 people were killed and 193 injured.

As the atmosphere in the capital grew more and more jumpy, there were false alarms too. Twelve days later, all seventy-nine fire stations in the London area, now linked by special emergency telephone lines, set off their ear-splitting maroons. Londoners leapt from their beds and ran for cover. Enemy aircraft had been sighted over the Essex coast, but they never made it to London. On 24 September though, the alarm was all too real. A 110-lb bomb dropped outside the Bedford Hotel in Southampton Row; it killed 13 people and injured 26.

In December, for the first time the Germans tried systematic fire-raising on a major scale; 6 aircraft dropped 276 incendiary bombs and started 52 fires. Fire crews had to race in from as far away as Wembley and Twickenham to help their London colleagues. They managed to contain casualties so that only two died and six were injured. Disturbingly for the fire-fighters, it was clear that the bombers sometimes returned to deliberately target them as they struggled to get the flames under control.

In the face of this new onslaught, the government shook up air defence, putting the whole operation under a single commander, who established a line of anti-aircraft guns 20 miles east of London and trained pilots to patrol in formation and coordinate their fire-power with that of the guns on the ground. Other changes were made on the home front too. Professional firemen who had been conscripted into the forces were brought back to London where their expertise was sorely needed. The improved defences forced the Germans to turn to night raids, and approach from different directions to avoid the guns. The capital was attacked for seven nights at the end of September and the beginning of October 1917, with districts like Paddington and Westminster now finding themselves in the front line.

Soon the Germans had a new weapon. Before the end of 1917, the Gothas were joined by a four-engined bomber, the Staaken R-39, the biggest aircraft used against London in either world war, capable of carrying huge 600-lb bombs. Some Londoners took refuge in nearby open countryside like Epping Forest. Others got out altogether. Brighton was a favourite bolt hole, and East End clothing companies began to complain about how many machinists they were losing, but most Londoners stayed in the city. They sought safety underground, often in designated public shelters in the basements of buildings where families would settle in with bedding and even pets. One was at the Odhams printing works at Long Acre in Covent Garden. Early on the morning of 29 January 1918, a Staaken scored a direct hit on the works with one of its 600-lb bombs. Thirty-eight people lost their lives. Another twenty-nine died in other parts of London during the raid.

Another refuge was the Tube where, by autumn 1917, there could sometimes be more than a quarter of a million people taking shelter. The government was at best ambivalent. There was a fear that once people had gone underground, it might be difficult to get them out again; a fear that would resurface during the Second World War. Lloyd George complained in his memoirs that there was growing panic in the East End, especially after the raid of 7 July 1917, and that at the slightest rumour of approaching aeroplanes, Tube tunnels would be packed with panic-stricken citizens, and that every night London’s commons were black with people, though other observers commented on the fortitude of the population. Certainly, there was some evidence of panic. A few hours before the bomb was dropped on Odhams, the firing of maroons was mistaken for the sound of falling bombs, and people stampeded for shelter at Bishopsgate goods depot and Mile End station. Fourteen were killed in the crush.