Pre-war and Wartime Westminster

Pre-war and Wartime Westminster

We`ve been hearing so much about Germany and Japan recently whilst we commemorated 60 years since the end of World War Two, that I feel prompted to write a few words about London and in particular Westminster.

Westminster before the war was like a village. The inner sanctum of Westminster Abbey and the school was a very close-knit community. I was privileged to be born in a house in the Little Cloisters, the house in which Charles Kingsley had once lived, one of the more beautiful Queen Anne houses in London with a Grinling Gibbons ceiling. It looked out onto the beautiful Abbey garden one of the oldest cultivated gardens in the country where the monks once grew herbs for the Infirmary.

Life moved very slowly in those days. Every evening the lamp lighter came round on his bicycle and lighted the gas street lamps with a light and a long pole. This went on well into the 1960s. It was a time when visitors left visiting cards on silver trays, when even the Canons of the Abbey had domestic staff. There was very little traffic on the roads, though traffic lights began in 1933. I had a nanny (hard to believe in these days) and every afternoon I was dressed up and taking to the park where Nanny met up with all the other nannies, it was a very snobbish set-up. Nannies of titled families were entitled to certain seats. It was all part of the etiquette. Oh dear! It's too awful to think of now!

So I grew up under the towering edifice of the Abbey, with Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament just across the garden. There was, of course, a very different Westminster the other side of Horseferry Road - the large council flat blocks of Page Street housing about 8000 people. These people were to be the very stalwarts of wartime London, and real heroes.

Security was an unknown word. During the Coronation service in the Abbey in 1937 I actually sat in the Coronation coach waiting in Dean's Yard. Nanny had insisted on leaving the stand in which we were sitting to watch the procession to go home for a cup of tea, and I was allowed to climb up into the coach and explore it. I remember it well. Can you imagine that being allowed now?

Gradually the news became grave. Just before Munich people began to dig trenches in the London parks. Whitehall buildings were being sandbagged: rudimentary shelters were being organised and troops began to appear in the streets. A subaltern marched into Parliament Square leading a platoon with an anti-aircraft gun, which they put into position on Westminster Bridge. A London bobby walked across to protest. "Don't worry, old boy " said the young man, "there is no danger. She won't go off" that was about the state of our preparedness.

People lined up to take first aid courses. My father said the first lecture he attended was on how to treat snake bites - hardly one supposed the most likely form of casualty! The Home Guard was recruited and armed with pikes and the Coronation Chair was sent away. If Hitler came and demanded to be crowned, he should not sit in the chair of the English sovereigns.

War broke out, and there we were in the heart of Westminster. My father was Canon and sub-Dean of the Abbey and Rector of St John's, Smith Square. The domestic staff departed, those that could left for the country and Westminster was quiet. The iron railings were taken down from the parks to help with armaments; but daily life went on.

Then things heated up. I remember watching the Battle of Britain in September 1940, raging above the Houses of Parliament, in bewilderment. What a spectacle - the sky was ablaze with light, there were planes catapulting and the noise was amazing. But little did I know that our last air squadron had taken to the skies. Night after night the bombing went on with dreadful casualties.
Continued overleaf
Continued overleafThere was a large concrete shelter built into the Abbey Garden and every night the entire Abbey community took to the shelter. Each family had its own space on the floor.

After the Battle of Britain the Luftwaffe concentrated on intensive night bombing and this went on for six months. There were no air defences that counted. There were far too few shelters and Londoners took to the Underground stations. After a protest from my father to Brendan Bracken (Churchill`s PPS) at No. 10 that there was no proper protection for the citizens, a number of naval guns were mounted on lorries and sent out into the streets. They were not of the slightest use against bombers, but they made an enormous and most encouraging noise.

During this time services in the Abbey continued. The Abbey was miraculously undamaged, but in the last and worst of the raids on London, it was within an inch of destruction. On the night of May 10th, 1941 the whole of Westminster seemed on fire. The Germans tried first to bomb the water mains, so when the shower of incendiaries came there was no effective way of putting them out. All the houses in Little Cloisters caught fire and our own burnt to the ground with all our possessions inside. The Abbey was in great danger. The central tower was burning and if that fire spread nothing could save the whole Church from destruction. About 3 am my father phoned Downing Street and told them that only the Prime Minister's authority could save the Abbey. The duty officer at sent a brigade along and by morning the fire had been brought under control. St John's, Smith Square burn down on the same night. After May 10th, the night bombing ceased, and until the V2s arrived, daylight attacks became less frequent.

Much of Westminster survived, but the pre-war way of life was gone for good.

Rosemary Harris

I have drawn freely from my father, Bishop F.R.Barry`s autobiography "Period of my Life"

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