Episode 1 Blitz: The Bombs That Changed Britain

In September 1940,

death and destruction came to the streets of Britain

on a scale never seen before or since.

The noise was deafening.

Bang, bang, tremendous explosions, one after another.

They called it the Blitz.

The whole city was aglow.

In the space of little over eight months,

more than 450,000 bombs rained down on British soil.

But in the midst of the chaos and confusion,

meticulous records were kept.

This is a bomb map. Every single dot is where a bomb landed.

Using this untapped archive, we'll identify individual bombs...

That's the bomb that you're looking for.

Oh, it is, yes.

..with consequences which rippled out from the point of impact,

through the lives of people and beyond,

to help shape modern Britain.

Of all the houses that plane was flying over...

And one bomb.

Why did it hit us?

In this episode, a bomb falls on the East End of London

on the very first night of the Blitz.

Oh, my goodness me. At 05:55, at 8 Martindale Road.

HE UX.

This bomb changed lives.

It's just wiped out, hasn't it?

It's just wiped out.

But it also exposed a social care system in crisis.

There was just an utter lack of decency, of humanity,

on the part of the authorities.

What followed was a radical shift in attitudes towards the welfare

of us all.

Our plan is a service which will provide the best medical advice

and treatment to every man, woman and child in this country.

And it began with one bomb.

The Blitz begins.

A stone's throw from Martindale Road in Canning Town, East London,

12-year-old Norman Pirie saw the first bombers appear.

Brilliant blue sky.

I was playing in the street with two or three friends.

And we heard the noise of aircraft engines.

And we all looked up.

Hundreds of planes were coming down from the north,

which I thought was odd.

They must have swung round in a circle.

And they were almost coming down above the road.

And we stood there, open-mouthed.

As they got towards us...

..they started dropping the bombs.

The capital had experienced light bombing raids before, but now,

for the first time, the destructive force of the German Luftwaffe

was unleashed on a massive scale,

as wave after wave of bombers began to hammer the London docks

and surrounding streets.

It was a day that will go down in history as Black Saturday.

As Stan Harris, at the time an 11-year-old

Canning Town schoolboy, recalls.

It was like an air display.

Of course, then you heard the whistling and then the thundering

and you realised that this was all...

That this was real.

That carried on right through the afternoon, the evening,

all through the night, just continuous bombing.

All this area and most of the East End was just one ball of flame.

-NEWSREEL:

-The skies lit up for up to 1,000 feet with this great glow.

And it doesn't show any signs of diminishing.

So the flames are leaping even higher.

It's almost like the Day of Judgement.

As the pounding of the docks continued,

people sought shelter wherever they could.

I'd gone under the table and the next minute, bang.

The fireplace was blown out.

Doors came off, roof had gone.

Instead of looking up at the ceiling,

you were looking up at the stars.

During the raid that lasted for just over 12 hours,

more than 600 tonnes of bombs fell on the London docks.

At some point in that night of destruction, one bomb was released.

It plummeted to earth at around 1,000 feet per second,

heading towards a street in Canning Town.

30 seconds later, it found its mark...

..at number 8 Martindale Road.

Of all the bombs that fell that night,

this bomb would have consequences

long after the all clear had sounded.

Torn down and rebuilt after the war, Martindale Road was, in 1940,

a typical Canning Town street in the county borough of West Ham.

A terrace of two-up, two-downs.

Cramped accommodation for the neighbourhood's dock

and factory workers.

In Martindale Road, five years before the bombers came,

royal jubilee celebrations had been held.

In this working-class neighbourhood,

a close-knit community existed cheek by jowl

with poverty and deprivation.

Salt of the earth, salt of the earth.

Unlike today, where families have spread their wings,

they were always local, you know.

Within, in most cases, sort of within yards of one another still.

And remained so throughout their life.

The Royal Docks were the commercial heart of Canning Town.

Commodities and raw materials from the world over were unloaded here

for processing at the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery,

the Spillers grain mill, and half a dozen other major manufacturers.

But on Black Saturday these docks, warehouses and factories

would become the prime targets for German bombs.

And alongside them, in the target area,

were streets like Martindale Road.

Six doors down from 8 Martindale Road, at number 20,

lived Robert Belchamber, his wife, Mary-Ann, and their family.

Seen here in the hop fields of Kent.

For East End families like the Belchambers,

September usually meant hop and fruit picking,

and a few weeks of fresh air and freedom away from the smoke

and grime of Canning Town.

But on Black Saturday the Belchambers

were still in Martindale Road.

Sandra Belchamber is Robert and Mary-Ann's granddaughter.

She's been researching her family history for more than 25 years.

My grandfather Robert, when he came out of the Army,

he started to work in the docks.

And he was lucky enough, he got a union card,

and so he had regular work.

But, at some point, he had a disagreement,

an argument with somebody there

and, in frustration, he tore up his union card,

probably to throw it at someone, to make a point.

But then he became, then, one of the many

that used to have to stand outside the gates in the morning

and just get casual work.

But it meant also that the security of having a wage,

which wouldn't have been a lot, anyway,

but it would have been regular, was suddenly stopped.

Martindale Road knew all about hard times.

Poverty, the pawnbroker and the Public Assistance Board

were facts of everyday life.

They had, in those days, a system called relief office.

It was kind of like a social welfare thing.

Where, if you were very poor, you could go to them,

swallow your pride, and they would allow you a little money.

I mean, they made you, really...

It was almost like begging and pleading.

Little scraps from the table, kind of thing.

Now, my grandfather wouldn't have anything to do with this.

"I'm not going to take charity from these people."

But my grandmother went and she did it.

And if that wasn't enough, she'd go to the pawn shop on Monday morning,

pawn her wedding ring, pawn the clothes,

you know, pawn anything that she could,

to get enough money to feed the family for the week.

It was a hand-to-mouth existence, really.

Then the Blitz came to Martindale Road.

Sandra wants to find out what that meant for her grandparents.

If you lived in an area like that, then the bombs were dropping,

and you had family,

I mean, what decision do you make, where do you go?

And when you've got small babies and children, I mean,

it must have been terrible.

I don't really know how they coped.

"Bomb damage in West Ham during 1939 and 1945."

Sandra is examining official records to find out more about the bomb

that fell at 8 Martindale Road, just a few doors down

from her grandparents' at number 20.

Oh, my goodness me.

On the 8th of September, 1940, at 05:55,

five to six in the morning.

At 8 Martindale Road, HE UX,

which would have been a highly explosive, unexploded bomb.

The all clear sounds.

Just over an hour later, the unexploded bomb

at number 8 was reported.

It hadn't gone off,

but its discovery was the start of a chain reaction

that would change lives forever.

-NEWSREEL:

-Bombs, whether designed to go off on impact or not,

will normally penetrate to a considerable depth.

Therefore, all UXBs must be treated as potentially dangerous.

As many as one in ten bombs that fell during the Blitz

were classified as UXBs.

The bomb that fell at number 8 might have been fitted

with a time delay fuse or it could have been a dud.

But the official policy in the first weeks of the Blitz was the same,

immediate evacuation of all buildings within a 600-yard radius.

And so, early on the Sunday morning after the Black Saturday raid,

Martindale Road became the centre of a ring of chaos

that rippled out through the neighbouring streets,

as air raid wardens and police ordered residents to evacuate

their homes.

Everyone had to leave Martindale Road.

And that's the same time that my grandparents,

they were evacuated then, as well, because they lived

at 20 Martindale Road. They left everything and just moved out.

As the sun rises just 30 minutes after the reporting of the UXB

at number 8, it feels like all of Canning Town is on the move.

With the ruins of their homes still smouldering around them,

some families head south,

fleeing under the Thames by the Woolwich foot tunnel.

Hundreds more tramp the ten miles north to Epping Forest,

where they sheltered in improvised encampments.

But many stayed closer to home.

A few minutes' walk from Martindale Road, a rest centre,

a front-line refuge for evacuees, had been set up

at South Hallsville School, where today Hallsville Primary stands.

The Belchambers from 20 Martindale Road were among hundreds

told to go there.

At the school to help them was air raid warden Alfred Day.

Eva Coleman is his daughter.

He was a welder by trade.

He wanted to go into the Army but they wouldn't have him,

because of his job.

And he thought, he had to do something for the war effort,

so he joined the ARP, and he got sent here by the commanding officer

to say, go and help the people, check them in

when they're coming into the school and halfway through the evening

buses would come and take them off to the country.

Many years later,

Alfred Day wrote an account of what happened at the rest centre.

The theory of the rest centre system is quite simple,

people bombed out during a raid, especially during the night,

are housed temporary in a school or either such suitable building.

And as soon as possible,

transport will be arranged from outside the area

to move in and evacuate these people to a safer area.

The system should work but, like every other system,

it depends on everyone concerned doing the right thing

at the right time.

Among those driven to the rest centre that Sunday morning

by the UXB at number 8 were another Martindale Road family.

Albert Gunn, his wife Til and their children,

who lived in number 15.

Judy Gregory is Albert Gunn's niece.

I just think Albert was a character, he played in a band.

I actually imagine parties might be a bit of fun.

He'd worked for the sugar factory

and then, when you get to 21, they laid you off

because they then would have to pay you a man's wage.

And Albert said he would never work for anybody again,

so he actually didn't.

He did general labouring jobs,

he bought musical instruments that were broken

and repaired them and obviously sold them on.

He cut hair.

The children used to come to the house and call out,

"Albert, Mum's sick. Can you cut my hair and she'll pay you Friday?"

But when you look at the children's hair, he did a good job of it.

He could've been another Vidal Sassoon, we don't know, do we?

They had five children in total.

They had Joyce, who is their first-born child.

Then they had Albert, but he died when he was three.

Then they had Alice.

Then along came Stevie in '37 and then, in 1940, Annie was born.

We believe now it was on the 4th of September.

So on the 7th of September, Black Saturday,

she would have been three days old.

Just around the corner from Albert, in Crown Street,

lived Judy's father Henry Gunn and her mother Anne,

married just six months earlier.

Henry, who was away with the Army at the time,

was particularly close to his older brother Albert.

Dad loved him. Absolutely loved him.

But it was always, "My brother Albert."

He never just said, "Albert."

It's always, "My brother Albert."

Also at Crown Street, at number 23, was the matriarch of the Gunn clan,

Granny Gunn.

Granny Gunn married Thomas Gunn, who was in the Merchant Navy.

They had ten children, but only five ever lived at one time.

Granny Gunn said, "Grandfather was never there when she gave birth

"to a child and never there when she buried one."

With Thomas away at sea as usual, Granny Gunn

lived with her daughter Emmie.

Oh, Emmie was adored because you only had the boys there,

so they had this one girl who is the youngest member of the family,

they just doted on her, they idolised her.

She's always got a happy face, you know, it's a smiley face,

it's not a doom and gloom face.

With the Gunns and their neighbours waiting at the school

to be evacuated, all around them the devastating impact

of the first night of the Blitz was plain to see.

Destruction, death, terror, trauma, more than 400 fatalities in all.

Into the chaos of Canning Town that morning stepped Richie Calder,

a reporter for mass circulation left-wing newspaper

The Daily Herald.

For this campaigning journalist,

this was more than just another news story.

It was a cause.

As his grandson, journalist Simon Calder, explains.

What concerned Richie Calder was the fact that so little planning

had been done for the inevitable human toll that the war would take.

He had been very much involved with the Labour Party,

urging the government before the war and indeed during the,

kind of, first year before the Blitz started happening

that they had to make preparations for the welfare of the people

who would be badly hit by the inevitable bombardment.

Nobody was expecting the Blitz in quite such intensity,

but it was clear that there was going to be a human cost.

And so, all that Richie had to do was put on his tin hat

and hail a cab, and go to the heart of the story.

Early Sunday afternoon,

less than 12 hours after the unexploded bomb was discovered

at Martindale Road, Richie Calder arrived at South Hallsville School.

He described the scenes that confronted him in a book

published the following year called The Lesson Of London.

In the passages and classrooms,

whole families were sitting in queues perched

on their pitiful baggage waiting desperately for coaches

to take them away from the terror of the bombs.

I heard women, the mothers of young children,

protesting with violence and with tears about the delay.

Men were cursing the helpless local officials who knew only

that the coaches were expected.

The crowd clamoured for help for information, for reassurance,

but the harassed officials knew no answer,

other than the offer of a cup of tea.

The scene he encountered was of utter horror.

Very, very upset men and women who are trying to do their very best

for their families, their children were terrified.

All around them there was the evidence

of what the Luftwaffe could do and it became clear

that this was a place of great peril.

I knew on that Sunday afternoon that, as sure as night

would follow day, the bombers would come again with the darkness

and that school would be bombed.

It was not a premonition, it's a calculable certainty.

As evening fell, Calder hurried back to Central London

to raise the alarm.

Three times he contacted the authorities in Whitehall

warning them about the plight of the evacuees stranded at the school.

But no-one responded.

Back in Canning Town, the bombers have returned.

As Richie Calder knew they would.

-NEWSREEL:

-Morning went roughly a quarter of an hour ago

and the raiders flew straightaway over the city,

over Woolwich Way, the Thames Estuary, where they went last night,

where they've started another large fire.

You could smell... The smell of dust was everywhere.

Tobacco dust. They hit a lot of the warehouses and the ships and sugar,

molasses, I suppose, was spilt on the water and it was on fire,

catching fire and that was the smell.

And you could almost taste the dust in the air.

As the long night wore on and the bombs continue to fall,

more and more families sought refuge at the rest centre

where Eva Coleman's father, Alfred Day, and his colleagues

were struggling to cope.

The raiders kept up their relentless attack

and with each bomb that fell, a few more were added

to our swelling numbers.

By the time we crammed everybody into the shelters,

we were literally speaking, bursting at the seams.'

By the time the all clear finally sounded at 5:35am on Monday morning,

conditions in the school were becoming desperate.

A propaganda film made later on in the war shows rest centres

as they were supposed to be.

-NEWSREEL:

-They're welcomed and made comfortable,

but they can't stay too long as room must be found

for those made homeless by the next raid.

But after two nights of intensive bombing,

South Hallsville School was nothing like this.

Underequipped and unprotected to start with,

it had become overcrowded and squalid, as well as dangerous.

But still no rescue buses appeared to take people away

from the danger zone.

People kept coming, coming, coming, the electricity went,

the water went, there was nobody, no buses.

It's been 24 hours since Sandra's grandparents,

Robert and Mary-Ann Belchamber, left Martindale Road.

As conditions in the school worsened,

their anxiety reached breaking point.

They were told, because it was so full, that they would

have to be separated, they'd have to put the men and boys

in one corridor and the women and girls in another.

And my grandfather went back to Mary-Ann and said to her,

"Look, I don't like it. I think we should leave."

And so the three children and Robert and Mary-Ann left the school

and made their way out and decided that they would try

to get down to Kent, where they went every year to do the fruit picking.

Between the Belchambers and the safety of the huts in Kent

lay a city in flames and a transport system in chaos.

But just a few weeks before,

Robert had got lucky on the football pools

and had bought a second-hand car out of his winnings,

even though he couldn't drive.

But his son-in-law could, just about.

Although he had never driven a car before, only a motorbike,

he agreed to take them down.

So they got all in the car and drove down to Kent

through the Blackwall Tunnel, but everything was done in second gear,

because that's the only gear that he could use.

When they reached Blackwall Tunnel,

they were stopped by armed guards and they had to explain

why they were going, and after a lot of talking,

and a lot of persuasion, they were eventually allowed

to go through the tunnel, and they came down to Kent, in second gear!

Anne Gunn, Judy Gregory's mother,

had not joined her in-laws at the school.

With her husband Henry away with the Army,

she had gone back to her parents when the bombing started

and had then decided to leave Canning Town altogether.

But not before she'd said her goodbyes.

Mum said they moved them into a corridor by the headmaster's study

and Til was laying on the camp bed with the baby,

and the children were sat on a form alongside.

They were moved there because they were told it was safe.

In fact, I think Til said that to Mum, "We'll be safe here, Anne".

The air raid sirens sound their doleful warning once again.

Just over 36 hours since the unexploded bomb

was reported in Martindale Road, Canning Town was under attack

for a third consecutive night.

Judy Gregory has come to the record office for the Canning Town area to

meet local historian Paul Rusiewski and to find out what happened next.

These are group situation reports

from the ARP authorities

on the spot at the time that the German air raids were happening.

So this is an example here from West Ham.

So somebody's doing this, or this is happening 24 hours a day,

-someone is sitting?

-That's right, yes.

Writing these messages and having to dispatch them?

Oh, yes, yes. And they're being sent to the local headquarters

by ARP men on the spot where the bombs are falling.

These terse, fragmentary dispatches offer a minute-by-minute account

of incidents as they were called in from the front line of the Blitz.

Oh, this is us, my good...

Oh.

-WHISPERS:

-Pull yourself together.

At 4:09am, a report was received concerning South Hallsville School.

-You all right?

-Yeah.

It's, it's...

Major occurrence, 03:49, West Ham and South Hallsville School.

Badly damaged. 600 refugees accommodated here.

Stated to be in panic and casualties unknown.

Dreadful.

Absolutely dreadful.

Out in the playground,

I was just about to make a run for it when I heard something whistling

through the air. I threw myself down flat.

There was a terrific crunch and as I lifted my eye,

I saw one half of the school disappear

in a cloud of smoke and dust.

Verbal report from controller,

who states major occurrences at Hallsville School

resulted in about 200 casualties, mainly children.

Imperative that other refugees are evacuated without delay.

Arrangements for this going forward, otherwise situation still obscure.

We walked down and we could see the dust and the commotion

round the area of the school and there was broken beams

and bricks all over the place.

The rubble, if you could call it that,

looked about 20 feet high, to me, as a child.

You couldn't discern anything,

it was just a pile of bricks and dirt and dust.

And just saw this, these rescue people, policemen and wardens,

whatever they were,

we saw them bringing objects out and laying them on the ground

and covering them over with sacking.

We didn't know at the time they were bodies, or bits of bodies.

It was about 7am, daylight was beginning to break through.

Already a message had been sent to control, cancel the buses,

send us morgue vans and ambulances.

It was rumoured later that buses had been sent,

but they'd gone to Camden Town rather than Canning Town.

There was anger later on, people were saying,

"Well, why didn't the transport come in time?"

And the consensus, I think, was that they hadn't bothered.

The authorities don't care about us down here, the East End, you know,

they're not worth thinking about.

You just can't imagine...

-No.

-..what chaos...

-No.

-..was going on there.

-Because they didn't know how many people were in that school.

-No, no.

They didn't really know how to get them out.

It was an incident that nobody had any experience of dealing with.

Oh, no. And my understanding was that they were digging at the site,

getting bodies and bits of bodies out, for well over a week.

Really?

A small group of us were standing on the edge of the crater,

near to me with the counsellor in charge of shelters.

As we stood there surveying the scene, he lifted his head

to the sky, and with tears streaming down his face, he cried,

"My God, my God, this should never have happened!"

Casualties from the school were taken to a temporary mortuary

a few miles away at the Romford Road Baths.

A place Stan Harris would come to know well

when he joined the family firm of undertakers,

T Cribb & Sons in 1942, aged just 14.

It was strange, of course, and you had a ramp going down,

and you had all these trays lined up.

Maybe a family, maybe the odd one or two,

but sometimes three or four families,

depending on the raid, and how much damage and how many casualties.

As you picked them up, that's how they were brought out of the debris,

and invariably it was left to me, any young children and babies,

to prepare them and make them as presentable, if you possibly could.

Again, these stories that, in the end, they didn't bother

to get any more out.

They put quicklime down all over the place and there's still people

down there now, you know.

That's a point that's been raised many, many, many times,

and to be perfectly honest, I don't think anybody will ever know.

It's possible...

It's possible.

From the official death toll given at the time of 73,

44 of the victims from 17 different families came from Martindale Road.

Anne Gunn, Judy Gregory's mother,

discovered the Gunn family's fate when she returned to Canning Town

a few weeks later.

She decided to come home, because I think things had quietened down

a little bit then, and she asked a man sitting on his windowsill,

did he know where Mrs Gunn and the family were.

And he said, "Oh, they've gone, love."

She said, "Yes, I know they've gone, do you know where they've gone?"

Then he told her they'd all been killed.

And that was when Mum sent the telegram to get Dad home.

The incident in the family was always "the school",

never South Hallsville or Agate Street,

it was just "the school", and don't ask any questions.

We couldn't ask Dad any questions.

I look at these pictures...

Til, Joyce, Alice, Stephen, Annie,

Albert, Granny Gunn and Emmie.

A huge part of my family went,

and so our lives were very different after that, I think,

because these children wouldn't have been that much older than us.

What would our relationship have been with them?

It's just wiped out, isn't it?

It's just wiped out.

But this is one family.

If you multiply this across the whole of the country,

it's just awful, isn't it?

It's just, you can't sort of picture it, somehow.

And Martindale Road, in particular,

because although there were Albert and Til's family,

there were other families who lost five, six people in that street too.

All for the sake of a bomb that didn't explode, really.

Tuesday morning, 48 hours after the unexploded bomb was reported

in Martindale Road, reporter Ritchie Calder returned

to South Hallsville School to witness the aftermath

of a catastrophe he had seen coming.

The next morning I saw the crater,

I saw the rescue men descending perilously into it,

listening for the sounds of the living.

Saw the tombs of whole families.

I spoke to men, fathers of families, who had been cursing on the Sunday.

They were speechless and numbed by the horror of it all now.

With the disclosure of that tragedy,

which I insisted at the time, and still do insist, was the result of

official blundering, the storm broke.

Next day, the Daily Herald carried on its front page

Calder's angry account of the South Hallsville disaster.

But for Calder, the failures at the school were part

of a far greater failure by the authorities,

exposed in the first 72 hours of the Blitz.

An all-out aerial assault on Britain had long been expected.

Before war began, plans were laid to deal with this new form of warfare,

with elaborate systems to cope with poison gas,

mass hysteria and death on a catastrophic scale.

-NEWSREEL:

-This hand rattle means death.

Put on your gas mask.

But the authorities had prepared for the wrong war.

When the real bombs began to fall,

there was no poison gas or mass hysteria,

and casualties were in the thousands,

rather than the hundreds of thousands.

What the bombing did create was an acute social crisis

for bombed out families and families made homeless by evacuation,

struggling to put their lives back together again.

In the immediate aftermath of the South Hallsville tragedy,

Ritchie Calder went on the war path on their behalf.

Ritchie pieced together, from talking to survivors,

the story of the appalling odyssey they had to make,

calling in at various offices.

You had to find some kind of roof over your head,

you had to find some clothes, some food, a little bit of cash,

new ration cards, an identity card.

And Ritchie actually paced out that journey and he reckoned it

was 8.5 miles.

And when they reached journey's end,

it was like the bad old days all over again.

When they went to the official bodies, the Public Assistance Board,

in order to say, "I've lost everything,"

there was just an utter lack of decency, of humanity,

on the part of the authorities.

These people, who'd lost their homes, weren't seen as destitute

and desperately in need of support,

they were sometimes seen as scroungers.

In this moment of national emergency, Calder argued,

people were being let down by an antiquated system,

prejudiced against the poor and which failed to reflect

the new realities of the Blitz.

To understand how this could happen,

you have to understand the mindset of the bureaucrats

who designed the system in the first place.

This is Gideon Calder,

he's another of Ritchie Calder's grandsons

and an expert in the field of social policy.

In the National Archives, he's examining the file

of official correspondence dating from the summer of 1939,

a full year before the Blitz began.

Under discussion are rest centres like South Hallsville School and the

question of who pays to equip them.

The understanding was that there were two different types

of homeless person created by a likely, say, bomb attack.

The first sort of person would be somebody who was,

who remained in the place of their residence,

so they were called a "native" to that local authority.

The other kind of person would have shifted

from their home local authority to somebody else's,

and they would be called an "immigrant", or a "refugee".

So those classed as a native would be the responsibility

of their local authority, but those who'd been classed as an immigrant

would be the responsibility of central government.

But this classification created a bureaucratic stand-off

on issues great and small.

For example, there was a reluctance on all sides to pay for blankets

in rest centres, because, in the confusion of a raid,

how could anyone tell if they were being used by natives or immigrants?

This is a Mr Chatfield responding to Mr McGregor,

who we meet a lot in these documents.

I find it impossible, personally,

to stand out against the view that some provision of blankets

should be made.

Rough shelter is all very well,

and while mattresses and all other elaborations such as are suggested

in many quarters should no doubt be refused,

it would be a sure way to riot and revolution if scared,

exhausted and hungry people were not provided with some assistance

towards keeping them warm during the night.

In the corner there's a marginal note, it says,

The Treasury do not agree.

The story here isn't really just about blankets,

it's about the whole nature of the way in which these things

are being tackled. And if you are going to design a way

of equipping the nation, at local level, for the challenges

that were going to face it, this is almost exactly what you wouldn't do.

Think about how little we are aware of these lines on the map,

which are the boundaries between local authorities

and how little they would be in your head

were you in an emergency situation.

In human terms, it's a mess,

and it's a mess which we only really see that starkly

when the bombs are falling and people are plunged into crisis.

After the Black Saturday raid,

London was blitzed for 57 consecutive nights.

Calder followed in the wake of the destruction

as it spread from the Docklands to be heart of the City and beyond,

reporting on the plight of the homeless and destitute.

During his nightly forays,

he met people forced to take matters into their own hands,

improvising shelters and surviving as best they could.

What he kept seeing, as he was reporting,

was that hope actually lay with the everyday responses

of neighbourhoods, who tended to come up

with quite practical solutions.

You might think at some times that this is slightly romanticised.

The Blitz must've been straightforwardly rubbish

for many people. And I'm sure that they weren't all generous and kind

permanently through every moment of the situation.

But I think you have to believe him.

And what he mostly finds is people who repeatedly are doing

what they think is the best thing to do,

despite the fact nobody's ordered them to do it.

Calder didn't have far to look for examples of self-help.

When the authorities banned the use of the city's Underground stations

as shelters, Londoners ignored them,

forcing gates open or simply buying a ticket and refusing to budge.

Before long, the authorities quietly gave up

and made the Tube shelters official.

In Spitalfields, a working-class neighbourhood

just a few miles from Martindale Road,

Calder came across another example, Mickey Davis.

A local optician, who set up a committee to improve conditions

in the improvised bomb shelters that had sprung up in the area,

including one in the crypt of Christ Church, Spitalfields.

Gideon Calder has come to Christ Church

to meet Mickey Davis's nephew, Mike Brooke.

He was known as Mickey The Midget.

Which is not PC nowadays.

But back then,

he was something like four-and-a-half feet tall.

He was very short.

Mickey, as marshal of the Spitalfields shelter

across the road in the wool exchange,

also looked after this shelter.

So, I think, between the two shelters,

he would have been able to house 2,000-3,000 people.

These people look like they're having a tough time.

Well, although you were safe in the shelter,

it was not a healthy environment.

The impression that I get is that one of the main effects

that Mickey's work had was to transform shelters

from places which were pretty grim and with barely adequate sanitation

and with generally, you know, very poor sleeping arrangements

and so on into places which were at least humane

in terms of a place to spend the night.

He was one of life's natural organisers.

For example, he persuaded Marks & Spencer to give him money

to set up a canteen.

And from the canteen, he used the profits of that to buy milk

to give out free milk to the children who were in the area.

A very poor area, East End of London in Spitalfields.

And he got some sort of social service going.

But the thing that really caught Calder's eye in Mickey's shelter

was a medical post run by a volunteer doctor.

He managed, almost without knowing it, to instil ideas of hygiene,

of self-protection against disease,

of positive health against sickness,

and the idea almost unknown amongst the poor, that the doctor

is not just someone you go to when you are desperately sick.

That that voluntary medical post had all the hints of what we might do,

to create a health service instead of a sickness service.

My grandfather says in the Lesson Of London that Black Saturday

will become as significant in the history of Britain

as the fall of the Bastille in France.

What he means by that is that what we discover at those moments

is both the scale of what we face but we're also pointed towards

the necessity of certain solutions,

not just during the war, but also afterwards.

He repeatedly says what we're talking about here...

He's writing in 1941.

Repeatedly says what we're talking about here is not just a response

to the immediate kind of catastrophe of the Blitz.

It's a response to the rebuilding of the country, which will inevitably

have to take place after all this is over.

Calder's message, carried from the bombed-out streets of Canning Town

to the heart of the establishment, was the first draft

of a new national consensus that would emerge from the ruins

of Blitzed Britain.

Just over three weeks since the unexploded bomb fell

on Martindale Road, more than 5,000 Londoners had been killed

and around 7,000 seriously injured.

Around 120,000 houses had been destroyed or badly damaged.

And in London's rest centres,

25,000 homeless people were still stranded,

sometimes in desperate conditions, but with nowhere else to go.

Goaded by critics in the press like Calder and by political pressure

behind the scenes, on the 26th of September,

the government appointed a special commissioner

for the homeless in London.

His name was Henry Willink,

Conservative MP for Croydon North.

Isn't that so how you remember him?

Absolutely, and that photograph has always sat in my family's house

somewhere. So...

Juliette Hancock and Penny Linnett are Henry Willink's granddaughters.

It's incredibly familiar, isn't it?

It's very, very familiar.

-The pipe...

-Yeah.

-The glasses.

-The glasses, the thoughtfulness...

-Yeah.

-The paper!

By the time Juliette and Penny got to know him,

Henry Willink was Sir Henry

and had swapped politics

for the Mastership of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

But in the 1960s, he presented his grandchildren

with a privately printed memoir so that they'd know something

about his earlier life.

Oh!

It was a very privileged background he'd had.

But nonetheless, being a young officer at the age of 22

at the Somme, extraordinarily formative.

And the sense of duty that he had.

And I think, yeah, that probably all came together with what he was doing

in the Second World War.

The idea that he'd been responsible for men at the Front and it was

important for them to know that their families back at home

were being looked after.

I think he would have felt passionately that life

should be made as easy as possible for these people.

Not everyone was impressed.

In the pages of the Daily Herald,

Ritchie Calder greeted Henry Willink's appointment

with scepticism.

My grandfather wasn't convinced that he has the back-up, really,

to genuinely tackle the problems.

That he's a government placed man.

He's a Tory guy with no particular history

of dealing with these kinds of problems.

What happens over time, though, is that I think

he begrudgingly begins to recognise that, actually,

Willink is making a fist of it.

In that, actually, there's a real value in what's happening here.

In his memoir, Willink described how he set about the task.

It was after discussion with the London County Council's Rest Centre

Officer that, without any authority to do so,

I authorised the spending of £300,000 as quickly as possible

for the making of blast walls in 200 rest centres.

This seemed to me essential in order to reduce the risk of large numbers

of casualties arising from the explosion of one bomb.

All he had was influence and persuasion.

And I think the fact that he did what he did in the first 30 days,

let alone in the 12 months that followed,

was absolutely extraordinary.

Finding ways to do things, cutting through red tape.

On the 2nd of October, the Prime Minister sent for me.

I remember most clearly his a general directive,

which still seems to me admirable.

These unfortunate people must be treated

with kindness and generosity. But with firmness, when necessary.

Willink took Churchill at his word.

Outside East Ham Townhall in the borough neighbouring Canning Town,

he can be seen promoting one-stop information centres

designed to end the exhausting odysseys for bombed-out families

that Calder had documented.

He also cleared out the rest centres by speeding up billeting

of the homeless, recruiting a 30-strong team of social workers

to badger local authorities to do more for them.

The culmination of his work can be found

in a modest government pamphlet first produced in November, 1941

and entitled The Care Of The Homeless.

It marks the distance travelled since the bomb fell

on Martindale Road, a journey from an uneven, grudging, chaotic system

to a more humane system based on the concept of universal welfare.

I'm mesmerised because I've never seen this before.

No, I hadn't seen it before either.

And it's just the most extraordinary read.

The detail, isn't it?

Absolutely. They were actually, by this stage,

not only looking at good, practical administration,

but caring for people as human beings.

-Absolutely.

-And everyone being different.

So, it's got to that kind a small detail.

-Yeah.

-Covering literally everything from, you know,

what sort of food there needed to be in the centres.

How many blankets there needed to be.

In the giving of help on the multifarious problems

that beset the homeless, many agencies are involved.

And close planning is therefore required

to reduce as much as possible

what might be a harassing search for information and help.

So, he just pulled it all together, didn't he?

Pulling it all together.

The official bomb map for West Ham records the location

of more than 3,000 bombs that fell on the borough

between 1939 and 1945.

But the reverberations of the unexploded bomb

that fell on 8 Martindale Road were felt far beyond West Ham.

From the disaster itself, Hallsville School,

through the campaign in journalism of Ritchie Calder to the reforms of

Henry Willink.

-NEWSREEL:

-Mr Henry Willink, Minister of Health

for England and Wales,

talks about the government's National Health Scheme.

I've been asked to tell you just a little about this new plan

for better health.

Henry Willink went on to serve as Minister of Health

in Winston Churchill's wartime coalition government.

In 1944, he published a White Paper containing

this country's first proposals for a National Health Service,

a response to the Beveridge Report which had called for the creation

of a welfare state.

Our plan is a service which will provide the best medical advice

and treatment to everyone.

Every man, woman and child in this country.

Whatever your income, if you want to use the service,

there'll be no charge for treatment.

Sandra Belchamber's grandparents, Robert and Mary-Ann,

never returned to Martindale Road.

These Canning Town refugees made a new life for their family in Kent.

Today, golfers tee off where the hop pickers huts once stood.

Judy Gregory's mum and dad did return to Canning Town.

And Judy grew up in the same street where Uncle Albert

and his family once lived.

She didn't attend the school closest to her home.

But it was many years before she understood the reason why.

Today, Hallsville Primary is a beacon of excellence

in Canning Town.

Its children play on the site where South Hallsville School once stood.

There is no record of what happened to the unexploded bomb

at 8 Martindale Road.

But like hundreds of others, it was probably dug up,

taken to Hackney Marshes, and safely detonated there.

A bomb drops on a suburban street in Hull.

The three children were killed instantly.

The trauma that followed was captured

in a unique government survey.

He heard moaning and set about digging for his children.

He felt in a mental frenzy.

A survey used to help seal the fate of countless German civilians.

I find that horrifying.

I'm sorry, I don't know if I should say that.

But I find that horrifying.

How were the lives of Germans affected by air raids

when the Allies retaliated?

To explore this and more, go to bbc.co.uk/blitz

and follow the links to The Open University.