Resilience and Increased Solidarity
When the war began, London had a population of about nine million people, jammed into 750 square miles. British prewar planners assumed that a sustained bombing campaign of 60 days would kill about 600,000 Londoners, and injure another 1,200,000. As things turned out, the Germans did target London with a sustained bombing campaign that lasted for nearly two months. Fortunately, the actual resultant casualties, while bad enough, were nowhere near the apocalyptic figures predicted.
British authorities, with their upper-class prejudices, feared that London’s working-class neighborhoods, such as the East End, would become unstable under a bombing campaign. Nonetheless, in a reflection of their priorities, the East End and other poor parts of the city ended up with the fewest bomb shelters per capita. Between that, the low quality of working-class housing that made it extra vulnerable to bomb damage, and the fact that the area, with its docks, shipping facilities, and other industries, was extra attractive to German bombers, East Enders got the worst of it.
Within the first six weeks of the Blitz, thousands were killed and wounded in working-class neighborhoods, at significantly higher rates than those suffered in the rest of London, and about a quarter-million of the city’s poorest citizens had been bombed out of their homes. Making matters worse, the authorities initially tried to keep civilians from using the London Tube – the city’s underground metro system – as shelter during the bombing. They were forced to quickly relent, and soon, about 150,000 people could be found sheltering in the Tube on any given night.
Self-organized communities developed underground, amounting to mini-governments created by the sheltering denizens. Among other things, they divvied up the limited space into sleeping areas, smoking areas, and play zones for children, and organized committees to settle disputes and lobby the authorities for improvements. That was worrisome to some officials, and Home Intelligence expressed concern that “people sleeping in shelters are more and more tending to form committees among themselves, often communist in character, to look after their own interests“.
On the other hand, the way the working class folk efficiently organized themselves underground, while toughing it out aboveground, changed the upper and middle classes’ poor perceptions of poor people. Before the war, the working class was routinely depicted negatively in print and media, with a snobbish historian’s dismissal of poor mothers as “slatternly malodorous tatterdemalions trailing children to match” being par for the course. Working-class conduct during the Blitz changed that, as writers and photographers and artists began depicting the slum dwellers as wielders of quiet dignity in the face of adversity. There was significant condescension in that, to be sure, but it was nonetheless a significant improvement over what had gone on before, and it did much to promote intra-class solidarity for the remainder of the war.