WWII Air Raid Shelter diorama
WWII Anderson Shelter diorama
Little nurses and soldiers partying underground
An air raid shelter in a school
Many people were saved by air raid shelters. Some died in them. On the night of October 14, 1940, sixty-nine years ago to the day as I write this, a bomb fell on Balham Station, hitting a water main. Sixty-five people (and perhaps more) died either from the blast or from drowning.
When the sirens sounded, though, Londoners preferred the familiarity and perceived extra safety of the Underground tunnels over their own homes. They'd used the Underground all their lives to move quickly around greater London and now they used it to shelter from the frightful attacks going on outside.
Eight deep-level stations were dug during the war - but until 1944, when five of them were opened to the public, they were used exclusively by the Government. They are:
- Belsize Park tube station
- Camden Town tube station
- Goodge Street tube station
- Chancery Lane tube station
- Stockwell tube station
- Clapham North tube station
- Clapham Common tube station
- Clapham South tube station
What was it like to hunker down in a crowded tunnel alongside tracks that still carried trains day and night? Vivienne T wrote: "My dad was a small boy during WW2 and he remembers it being quite cosy; the kettle was brought down to the shelter and the radio and the family would sit and talk and drink tea, play card games, and so on. On one occasion his dad put him on the roof of the shelter while they were all going in, because he was running around getting in the way, and then forgot about him. Dad said he had a marvellous time watching all the planes and the gunfire and the bombs dropping (he was about 6 or 7) and never felt scared at all. It wasn't until his gran went to pass him his mug of tea they all realised he wasn't there and went to retrieve him.
My mum, who was two years younger...was actually bombed out when their roof took a direct hit; she, her mum and her sisters were unharmed because they were in a cellar-type shelter. Anderson shelters would not survive a direct hit. About the same time, my grandfather's sisters were wiped out by a direct hit to their house; the family had got fed up of sleeping out in the shelter and had gone back in the house. A terrible time."
Though times were grim, a lighthearted story is told about the Bank of England. They built an underground shelter for their employees and the A.R.P. (Air Raid Precautions) team sent around a long health questionnaire to see if they could forestall any difficulties. One of the questions was: "Do you suffer from claustrophobia?" When 95% of the women answered yes, the team called in the chief of the women's division to ask if she had explained to the girls what claustrophobia meant. "Oh, yes," said she, "I told them it meant being afraid of confinement." Note: The joke only translates well if you know that the term 'confinement' means going through labor during a pregnancy.
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