In neither of my recent posts on the 1918 Bishopsgate Goods Yard disaster did I mention the 1943 Bethnal Green Tube disaster, despite it being an obvious comparison (as well as showing up as a related post). The death toll was tragically high both times: 14 at Bishopsgate, a staggering 173 at Bethnal Green (in fact Britain’s largest civilian loss of life during the Second World War). Both occurred in the East End, only about a mile apart. Both were instances of stampedes by panicked civilians which took place during German air raids. In neither cases was the panic was caused by a German bomb falling nearby, but rather by the unexpected sound of British rockets (warning maroons in 1918; anti-aircraft rockets in 1943). And both were widely blamed on Jews.

What is particularly interesting about this last point is that while nearly all of the Bishopsgate victims were Jewish (which, again, is not to ‘blame’ them or other Jewish people present for what happened to them), only a small minority (estimated at just five) of those who died at Bethnal Green Tube were. Indeed, the chairman of the official (and secret) report into the stampede, Laurence Dunne, called the idea of a ‘Jewish panic’ as a ‘canard’:

Not only is it without foundation, it is demonstrably false. The Jewish attendance at this shelter was, and is, so small as to constitute a hardly calculable percentage.¹

In a marked difference from 1918, the Home Secretary of the day, Herbert Morrison, reiterated to the House of Commons Dunne’s dismissal as ‘without foundation the rumours that the accident was caused by a Jewish panic’ (though he also let fascists and criminals off the hook). These rumours had been fanned by Lord Haw-Haw but did not originate with him: they had already spread as far as Bristol by the day after the disaster. Ministry of Information home intelligence reports that week similarly noted that the belief that ‘the trouble was occasioned by the Jews is reported from all parts of London, with the exception of Bethnal Green where there is full knowledge that any such statement is untrue’, given that the area near the tube was not Jewish (and on top of that was also the location of a BUF haunt).²

Why, then, did the rumour of a Jewish panic at Bethnal Green spread with such intensity in 1943? You can simply blame anti-Semitism, of course, but I think this must be an echo of Bishopsgate in 1918, a memory of a kind, if not a conscious resuscitation.³ Which is slightly ironic, in that the victims of Bethnal Green 1943 are now (fittingly) remembered through the Stairway to Heaven memorial shown above, whereas those of Bishopsgate 1918 are, apparently, almost not remembered at all.

Image source: diamond geezer on Flickr.

1. Quoted in Jerry White, The Battle of London 1939–45: Endurance, Heroism and Frailty Under Fire (London: The Bodley Head, 2021), 200.
2. Quoted in ibid., 200.
3. I haven’t seen it yet, but I suspect there is more on this in Jerry White, ‘Jews and bombs: the making of a metropolitan myth, 1916–1945’, in An East End Legacy: Essays in Memory of William J. Fishman, ed. Colin Holmes and Anne J. Kershen (London: Routledge, 2017).

Another reason for the disappearance from memory of the Bishopsgate Goods Yard disaster may be the disturbingly anti-Semitic content of the contemporary press accounts. These almost uniformly identified ‘aliens’ – generally understood to mean Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe – as the cause, as well as the victims, of the stampede, as is bluntly stated in the above Daily Chronicle headline. The first accounts to be published mentioned almost in passing that ‘the majority of the persons – in fact, practically all of those who were rushing for safety – were of alien nationality’.¹ However, the inquests into the deaths held soon afterwards provided the press with plenty of prejudice from coroners and police inspectors. For example, at an inquest held on 1 February 1918:

The coroner (Dr. Wynn Westcott) said that the panic was almost entirely due to foreigners or persons of foreign extraction. ‘It seems that we have not only to take care against air raids, but against Londoners killing each other.’²

Some accounts paraphrased Westcott as, in effect, describing the people at Bishopsgate as behaving in an animalistic, and in effect subhuman, way:

Commenting on the panic the coroner said it seemed to have been due almost entirely to foreigners, who had acted in a way unworthy of men, and more nearly approaching the ways of the lower animals.³

The testimony of a Metropolitan Police officer, Superintendent Mackay, was given wide prominence:

I am proud to say that we have not had the slightest trouble with English people, but we have very great trouble with the foreign element. We try to do everything possible to avoid disaster, but it seems that we cannot overcome these people unless we have a whole army of police permanently stationed at these shelters.⁴

You get the idea. My point is not that the people who stampeded at Bishopsgate were not ‘aliens’ or were ‘English’. Rather, it’s to point out what kind of thinking was enabled by this framing, and what was excluded.

To take the latter first, while the press accounts of the press reports did note that, as I described in my previous post, the public had gathered at Bishopsgate Goods Yard before the gates had been opened, thanks to premature warning of an impending raid, and then been panicked by hearing what they thought were nearby bombs or guns, thanks to an unfamiliar new alert signal, there was no blame attached to the authorities, or any suggestion that they should have done anything different.

To be fair, these were difficult issues, and there was no consensus: while some councils, for example, wanted maroon warnings discontinued, others were in favour of them being extended to all hours. But none of these issues were aired in the inquest accounts. Nor was there any understanding displayed at the inquests of the special difficulties an immigrant population, generally poor and perhaps with limited English literacy, might have in these circumstances. The area to the south of Bishopsgate Goods Yard was the heart of the Jewish East End, where refugees from pogroms and political persecution had flocked from the late 19th century. Second-generation immigrants would likely have a good grasp of English; the same could not be expected of their parents. In either case it’s questionable how closely they had been following the confusing changes in the policy regarding night-time use of maroons that I discussed in my previous post.

That wasn’t due to censorship; at least one London columnist ruminated on ‘the danger of assuming that uneducated people – or even educated people, for that matter – understand technical terms’:

Either the maroon warning must be abandoned, or people must be made to understand clearly that the first explosions they hear are in the nature of a warning.⁵

The matter was also raised in the House of Commons, where Sir George Cave, the Home Secretary, ‘expressed the opinion that the regrettable panic in East London was not a sufficient reason for abandoning this method of warning’, claiming that they had ‘saved lives by clearing the streets quickly’, and anyway, it would be confusing to change the system again since ‘people had learned to recognise the sound of the maroons’ (even though the people at Bishopsgate obviously hadn’t).⁶

As for what the emphasis on supposed Jewish cowardice enabled people to believe, the ‘Ladies’ Page’ of the Illustrated London News argued that it would disappoint ‘hideous German natures’ to know that ‘the sweet vision they evoke of all London rushing into dank cellars, and all our ordinary life abruptly stopped by our millionfold fears’ was false:

Far, far otherwise, O Hun! is the truth. The crowd that does rush for shelter is in microscopic proportion composed of the still absurdly large alien population in our Metropolis. English mothers very properly seek shelter and safety for their children; but the average, the common or garden Englishman and Englishwoman, displays a cool, calm courage that is really remarkable. Very keen regret is in many hearts the while, but panic terror – a complete stop in life’s business to hurry to shelter – not a bit of it.⁷

Here, to be German is to be cruel; to be Jewish is to be cowardly; but, fortunately, to be English is to be calm. Germans had been marked as ‘frightful’ since the beginning of the war; anti-Semitism obviously had a long history, but in this context London’s Jews had been castigated as cowards since the previous autumn, when they had been singled out for fleeing air raids down into the Tubes or out of London altogether. This was how you win the air war – one way, at least – by shoring up your emotional community through demonisation and scapegoating.

What, incidentally, did the government have to say about all this? Other than Cave’s comment mentioned above, not much. However, the War Cabinet did discuss the stampede at Bishopsgate Goods Yard, where:

The opinion was expressed that if this panic was mentioned in a press report, attention should be drawn to the fact that the stampede occurred among foreign-born inhabitants.⁸

I don’t know if this ‘opinion’ was communicated to the press in any way. I suspect that it didn’t need to be.

Image source: Daily Chronicle, 2 February 1918, 5.

1. Daily Chronicle (London), 30 January 1918, 1.
2. East London Advertiser, 9 February 1918, 3.
3. Daily Chronicle (London), 2 February 1918, 5. For a longer paraphrase, see Morning Advertiser (London), 2 February 1918, 2. I am admittedly glossing over the issue of the young Jewish or Russian men identified by police as pushing the crowd forward; there was a whole other thing going on here about their claimed reluctance to serve in the Army, complicated by the revolutionary situation in Russia.
4. Evening Standard (London), 1 February 1918, 8.
5. Evening Standard (London), 30 January 1918, 4; see also Evening Standard (London), 1 February 1918, 4.
6. Daily News (London), 2 February 1918, 4.
7. Illustrated London News, 9 February 1918, 194.
8. The National Archives, CAB 23/5/25, War Cabinet minutes, 29 January 1918.

One of the worst incidents of the German air raids on Britain in the First World War was a stampede at the Bishopsgate Goods Yard, Shoreditch, on 28 January 1918, in which fourteen people were killed. This has been almost entirely forgotten by the internet: while there are a number of detailed historical discussions available of the site, which is currently being redeveloped into a massive retail and housing complex, none appear to mention this sad incident in its history.¹ I’m not sure why the Bishopsgate stampede is so little-known. It may be that it has been overshadowed by the catastrophic bombing of Odhams Printing Works in Covent Garden the same night, in which 38 shelterers were killed by a Gotha’s bomb, London’s worst air raid incident of the war. (Though even that is hard to find anything about, short of opening a book.) The best account of Bishopsgate is by Ian Castle who also provides a list of the victims, who ranged in age from 58 to just six months.²

Bishopsgate Goods Yard, as can be seen from the above aerial photo, was a massive, covered structure, and a designated public air raid shelter. The East London Advertiser noted that:

It has been the custom of the proprietors, as soon as an official [air raid] warning has been given, to open the large gate, which leads into a very long arch where cover can be obtained by some 3,000 to 4,000 people and also to buildings which afford safe accommodation to an even greater number.³

Most of the site was destroyed in a massive fire in 1964, but you can get a sense from the surviving arches (which may well be the part used as a shelter) of what it would have been like in 1918. It certainly looks like a safe place to shelter from an air raid.

The proximate causes of the disaster were immediately apparent. Firstly, according to the Advertiser, ‘thousands of people began to arrive at this place before the authorities received the official intimation [of an air raid] and before, therefore, the gate had been opened’.³ There was necessarily a gap between the private alert from GHQ to the Metropolitan Police to TAKE AIR RAID ACTION (or TARA), which was the signal to mobilise the special constables to assemble at the larger shelters to keep the crowds in order, and the subsequent TAKE COVER public alert which was to be communicated to the public. The problem was that, inevitably, ‘knowledge that the special constables had been called out spread with […] wonderful rapidity’, and many people did not wait for official confirmation that a raid was indeed on the way before taking shelter; ‘and when they found that they could not go straight to the arch or the buildings they became very excited’.⁴

Secondly, the ‘discharge of the rockets increased the excitement’.³ These rockets were maroons, not weapons but explosive sound signals, which were used mainly as maritime distress signals. They had been used for air raid warnings in London since the summer of 1917, but only in daytime. After dark, when people were assumed to be resting or sleeping, they were held to be too loud and disturbing, and thus the public alert at night was policemen driving or cycling around with ‘TAKE COVER’ placards and sounding their bells, horns or whistles. However, during the raid on 18 December there had been too little time between TARA and TAKE COVER for safety, and so the decision had been taken to fire the maroons even though it was three hours after sunset. Over the course of less than a month there followed the announcement that maroons would be used during ‘the evening’ if there was not time for the usual warning method; a clarification that they ‘in all probability’ would be used up until 10pm, and ‘may or may not’ be used after that; and finally the announcement that they ‘will’ be used up until 11pm.⁵ (Not until March was it decided that they would be used at all hours, day or night.) On 28 January 1918, the maroons fired at about 8pm. Again according to the Advertiser, at Bishopsgate they ‘were mistaken by some for bombs and by others for our own guns, and which led to precipitate flight on the part of the populace’.³

Taken together, these reasons – the unofficial take cover warning, which led people to gather at shelter entrances before they were opened, and the official one, which to the uninitiated sounded like nearby bombs or anti-aircraft guns – might be held to be sufficient to explain the disaster at Bishopsgate Goods Yard.⁶ But I’ve carefully avoided mentioning the other, ‘real’ explanation offered by virtually all public accounts, official and unofficial.⁷ That explanation was race, as I’ll discuss in the following post.

Image source: Archivo Histórico de la UNAM.

1. E.g. Grace’s Guide, Subterranea Britannica.
2. Ian Castle, Gotha Terror: The Forgotten Blitz 1917–1918 (Philadelphia: Frontline, 2024), 191–193; 303. See also Jerry White, Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War (London: The Bodley Head, 2014), 249–250.
3. East London Advertiser, 2 February 1918, 4.
4. East London Advertiser, 2 February 1918, 4. (Added: actually, this article originally appeared in Daily Chronicle (London), 30 January 1918, 1.
5. Islington Daily Gazette, 24 December 1917, 1; Evening News (London), 4 January 1918, 2; Globe (London), 10 January 1918, 8.
6. Using an explosion as a signal that you should be worried about more explosions seems foolish at best, but while sirens were available, and indeed were already in use for raid warnings in places like Hull, they were rejected for London as requiring a source of steam for power, whereas maroons could be fired from anywhere. I don’t know whether electric sirens were considered.
7. Scare quotes definitely intended!

It’s the last day of AHA 2026, though the only things on the program for today are historical tours and as I decided (for reasons) to attend online this time, that means the conference is over for me. Though it felt rushed and a bit garbled, I think my talk on London’s air raid shelters in 1917-18 went well. The audience certainly seemed engaged and asked good questions (though in one case I later thought of a much better answer than the one I actually gave!).

Nevertheless, I found the process of putting the paper together unusually difficult this time around. One reason for this was that, as I anticipated when I submitted the abstract, I hadn’t yet got to grips with the content when it came time to think about what I was going to actually say. Another was that I’d been on Aviation Cultures Mk VIII support duties just a couple of weeks ago and found it difficult to switch back and forth (especially since it was in Canada and I wasn’t).

I think, however, that it was hard also because where I’m at with Home Fires Burning. As I said in my talk, this manuscript has been long in the gestation. In fact it’s just a few days short of five years since I gave my first talk coming out of this project. (A slightly later version of which I wrote up here). But, equally, I am approaching the end, having just started the penultimate chapter. So I feel like I should be able to say what’s it all about (a related, though slightly different, question to what’s it all for). And that question was definitely churning through my mind the night before my talk.

So, am I able to say what the book is all about? Well, although my talk was not about the thing as a whole, I think the conclusions, most of which I wrote about 15 minutes before going on camera, do cover a lot of it (lightly edited, and some links added, for sense and clarity):

• British pluck = stoicism, stiff upper lip, emotional restraint
  • In air raids, stay put, do not express emotions
  • = an emotional regime (Reddy)
  • Presented as innately British but actually learned by emulation of family/peers, and prescribed by press
    • Process of adaptation cf. Blitz spirit in WW2
• Most people displayed British pluck most of the time, but not all people all of the time
  • Sometimes large scale deviations from British pluck, alternately denied, minimised, excused, or displaced:
    • Bombardment panics: 1914, 1918
    • Raid refugees: 1915, 1917-18 [see image above]
    • Post-raid (anti-German) riots: 1915, 1917
    • Raid tourism: 1915-1918
    • Patrol movements: 1915, 1916, 1917-18
    • Reprisal demands: 1915-1918
    • [I forgot to include the actual topic of this talk! Air raid shelters: 1917-1918]
• Tube shelters were sites of safety for the working classes, but sites of spectacle for upper and middle classes, where they could feel disgust at working class/foreign bodies and habits and reinforce their own feelings of superiority
  • Tube shelters became a means of affirming both that to be British means having courage under fire, and that being ‘alien’ (Jewish) means lacking that courage
  • In an increasingly total war, non-British civilians were coming to be seen as liabilities, dangerous enemies within, endangering British civilians by their uncontrolled emotions and bodies

Does this make any sense? If not – you’ll just have to wait until the book is actually finished!

Recently, while editing the prewar chapter of Home Fires Burning, I made the decision to cut a few hundred words dealing with H.G. Wells’ ideas about aerial bombardment. And I feel good about it! Why is that?

I’m not a Wells scholar by any means, but in the past I have had to engage with several of his works, mainly in terms of their influence on ideas about a knock-out blow from the air, in which bombers would destroy cities at the outbreak of a war and cause a near-instant collapse of a nation’s will to fight: most importantly The World Set Free (1914), The Shape of Things to Come (1933), and, above all, The War in the Air (1908), which would have to be the best-known and most influential pre-1914 novel predicting aerial bombardment. Indeed, the title of my first book, The Next War in the Air, was partly a nod to The War in the Air. And you can see why:

As the airships sailed along they smashed up the city as a child will shatter its cities of brick and card. Below, they left ruins and blazing conflagrations and heaped and scattered dead; men, women, and children mixed together as though they had been no more than Moors, or Zulus, or Chinese. Lower New York was soon a furnace of crimson flames, from which there was no escape.¹

Even better – and if I’d known about it I certainly would have cited it in The Next War in the Air – is this passage from First and Last Things, a work of non-fiction Wells published the same year as The War in the Air, in which he imagined ‘great towns red with destruction while giant airships darken the sky’:

One thinks of congested ways swarming with desperate fighters, of torrents of fugitives and battles gone out of the control of their generals into unappeasable slaughter. There is a vision of interrupted communications, of wrecked food trains and sunken food ships, of vast masses of people thrown out of employment and darkly tumultuous in the streets, of famine and famine-driven rioters. What modern population will stand a famine? For the first time in the history of warfare the rear of the victor, the rear of the fighting line becomes insecure, assailable by flying machines and subject to unprecedented and unimaginable panics. No man can tell what savagery of desperation these new conditions may not release in the soul of man.²

Lovely stuff. And even closer to the knock-out blow idea that I was writing about.

But that right there is the problem: I’m no longer writing about the knock-out blow! That was the topic of my PhD thesis and my first book. Now I’m writing about air raid emotions (well, that’s as good a three-word summary as any), which is not the same thing. That doesn’t mean I won’t be revisiting the knock-out blow, or H.G. Wells; it does mean that I will have different reasons for doing so than I did before.³ It’s surprisingly hard to remember this, even after well over a decade later!

And it turns out that I just did not have good reasons for including The War in the Air or even First and Last Things in Home Fires Burning. Really, I had them in there because it was the prewar chapter and they represent prewar ideas about civilians being bombed from the air. And because I didn’t know what I wanted to say yet, and I needed to fill up space. But they don’t actually connect with the argument that I’ve been developing in Home Fires Burning, and that’s because I don’t think there actually was any widespread concern about civilians being bombed from air before 1914. It’s easy to assume otherwise, given what we know came later, but that’s ahistorical thinking. People live forwards, not backwards. Being spied on from the air – yes, that was definitely a worry. Dockyards being bombed from the air – sure. Government buildings and public infrastructure in cities – maybe. But not civilians as such. They didn’t feel that they were targets.

There’s very little evidence from phantom airship panics of 1909 and 1913, for example, of people being worried that the Zeppelins they believed they saw were going to come and bomb them. Instead, they were worried about how they might be used by Germany to overcome Britain’s naval superiority in a future war, through espionage, sabotage or bombardment. That’s interesting and, I think, important, which is why I’ve already said it.⁴ It’s definitely worth saying again in Home Fires Burning, but it would be perverse to spend several hundred words talking about Wells (yet again!) just to have to say that despite his fame, his vivid images of cities being destroyed by airships actually were not representative of how most people thought about bombing in 1908 (or 1914).

Sorry, H.G. It’s not you, but it’s not me either.

Image source: H. G. Wells, The War in the Air and Particularly How Mr Bert Smallways Fared While It Lasted (London: George Bell and Sons, 1908), facing 208.

1. H.G. Wells, The War in the Air and Particularly How Mr Bert Smallways Fared While It Lasted (London: George Bell and Sons, 1908), 207.
2. H.G. Wells, First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and a Rule of Life (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908), 224.
3. In fact, his thoughts on Blériot are still in the current draft.
4. Brett Holman, ‘The phantom airship panic of 1913: imagining aerial warfare in Britain before the Great War’, Journal of British Studies 55, no. 1 (2016): 99–119, at 113–118.

A few years ago I took part in a very enjoyable Tales from Rat City podcast episode, hosted by David Waldron and centred around the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane panic from the perspective of Ballarat in the Victorian goldfields region. That had actors reading out primary source quotations, which was a great way to highlight the oddness of what was going on for the people who were seeing these strange things flying about.

Now, David and Tales from Rat City are amping up the immersion and the weirdness with Panic From The Skies: A Call of Cthulhu Adventure! This sounds like something between a play, a re-enactment, and a role-playing game, all performed live for both in-person and online audiences. I used to play Call of Cthulhu back in high school, like, a lot, so this very definitely speaks to me!

Here’s the official description:

It’s being held on the evening of 22 May 2026 at the Ballaraat Mechanics Institute. Tickets are $5 if you’re there, $3 if you’re not. Sounds like a cheap way to have fun and learn about mystery aeroplanes at the same time!

Image source: Ballaraat Mechanics Institute.

I’m not obsessed with ‘England is no longer an island‘, you are!

OK, so maybe I am, a little, but mainly because ‘England is no longer an island’ (EINLAI) is one of those phrases that nearly every historian writing about early aviation in Britain cannot fail to quote, usually attributed to Lord Northcliffe, often in 1906 but sometimes 1909, either in the Daily Mail or as a verbal remark, but virtually always without a proper citation (‘As Lord Northcliffe famously said…’ with a footnote leading to a 1950s hagiography written off the top of the head of a journalist who got their first job from him).¹ So much so that I tend to get a bit smug when I see another instance of it pop up: here we go again! But, despite having spent quite a bit of time digging into the origins and early uses of EINLAI I can still learn something – which is another way of saying I can be wrong!

The instance here is in James Pugh’s excellent The Royal Flying Corps, the Western Front and the Control of the Air, 1914–1918. Writing about British press interest in aviation, he says:

This included Louis Blériot’s flight across the channel, which led the Daily Mail‘s proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, to declare that Britain was ‘no longer an island’.²

His given sources are:

• Daily Mail, 26 July 1909, 7.
• Daily Mail, 27 July 1909, no page number.
• Louise Owen, The Real Lord Northcliffe?: Some Personal Recollections of a Private Secretary, 1902-1922 (London, New York?: Cassell, 1922), 24.

Because James, unusually for this quote, gives some primary sources, I thought I’d look into them. I already knew about Owen’s memoir, which is the best evidence that Northcliffe ever uttered EINLAI, and in the context of Blériot’s flight, albeit over a decade after the fact. Page 7 of the 26 July 1909 issue of the Daily Mail appears to be general reportage of the flight, without any reference to EINLAI. But the 27 July issue has a number of close hits:

• H.G. Wells: ‘in spite of our fleet, this is no longer, from the military point of view, an inaccessible island’ (6).
• A Daily Express excerpt entitled ‘No Longer an Island’ (6).
• Frank Hedges-Butler: ‘It portends for the future that we are no longer an island nation and cannot depend upon the sea for protection’ (7).

And:

• An article German press reactions entitled ‘NO LONGER AN ISLAND’, which quotes the (Berlin) Lokal-Anziger as saying ‘England is no longer an island’ (7).

So there it is, the phrase itself. I was a little embarrassed to find it in the Daily Mail in 1909, because in my searches I hadn’t found that exact form in the Daily Mail until 1911. I still can’t find the 1909 use using a whole document text search for EINLAI, so it’s not just my poor search skills. Only when looking at the OCR text of the article does the reason become clear: it reads ‘England : longer an island’. So there’s my lesson: never trust a computer.

It’s interesting, though, that this first occurrence is credited to a German newspaper, because the earliest I have found of EINLAI in the context of aviation is in a German book by Rudolf Martin published in 1907. So that still seems to be the vector, rather than Northcliffe.

So, to sum up the history of EINLAI:

• first use: 1848.
• first use in the aviation context: 1907.
• first use in the Daily Mail: 1909 (above).
• first use by Northcliffe: 1909, maybe.

Come back in five years for more historical revisionism, probably!

Image source: Daily Mail, 26 July 1909, 7.

1. Don’t expect a citation for this.
2. James Pugh, The Royal Flying Corps, the Western Front and the Control of the Air, 1914-1918 (London: Routledge, 2017), 16.

My abstract for the Australian Historical Association’s 2026 conference, being held at Macquarie University from 29 June–3 July, has been accepted. My talk is entitled ‘The Underworld: Living and Dying in London’s Air Raid Shelters, 1917-1918’ and this is the abstract:

London’s first significant experience of air raid shelters came not in the Blitz of 1940–1941 but during the Gotha raids of 1917-1918. Largely in response to civilian occupation of Underground stations in September and October 1917, authorities quickly moved to identify and designate hundreds of buildings, both publicly and privately owned, as public air raid shelters: by May 1918 there was space in these shelters to shelter 1.4 million of the roughly 7.5 million inhabitants of greater London, a substantial proportion. But while the shelter experience was widespread, it was not universal, being mediated by class, gender, and ethnicity. In this paper, I will draw on official, press and personal sources, to assess what we can say about who used the air raid shelters in 1917-1918, why they used them and what their experience was like. I will also ask what lessons were learned, or not learned, in the interwar period by governments, organisations and individuals looking to prepare for the next war.

Since I’m just finishing the 1917 chapter of Home Fires Burning and about to start on the 1918 one, this was originally going to be a classic ‘talk about the thing I will have been writing about’ kind of paper. However, since I now think I actually need to next spend some time on fixing up the first few chapters, having decided some time ago to merge three of them into two to free up space but not actually doing that work at the time, the paper may turn into the equally-classic ‘talk about the thing I will be writing about next’. Come to the AHA to see which one it will be!

Image: Walter Bayes, The Underworld: Taking Cover in a Tube Station During a London Air Raid (detail), 1918 (Art.IWM ART 935).

The opening paragraph of the current draft of my next book, about one day over a century ago:

Shortly before midday on 13 June 1917, Upper North Street School in Poplar was hit by a single bomb dropped from a German aeroplane. It killed eighteen pupils, sixteen of whom were aged just five or six years old. More than a century later, the grief still radiates from contemporary accounts. Many of the dead children were disfigured beyond recognition and could only be identified by some distinctive item of clothing, such as ‘a button which the mother had sewed on the wristband the previous evening’. Newspapers told of ‘Pathetic scenes’ inside the coronial inquest into the deaths, with ‘many children giving way to childish grief at the thought of the sudden and awful fate of their school companions’, while one rescuer, a ‘fine burly’ sailor, was reported to have ‘wept quietly for a moment’, saying ‘these little children—it is too much’. But while anguish and despair were understandable responses, it was stoicism which was applauded, even – especially – when displayed by those who had lost the most:

The caretaker, who was still suffering from shock, says the first victim of the explosion he encountered was his own little son, whose body was mutilated almost beyond recognition. His wife was prostrated with grief, but the caretaker was bravely ‘carrying on.’ ‘School is ordered to start again tomorrow,’ he said. Then he went mechanically about the work in hand.

As Will Crooks, a Labour member of parliament (MP) and Poplar’s former mayor, observed admiringly of such restraint in the face of overwhelming loss, ‘I have never seen more truly British pluck than I have seen today’.

And from the Guardian, about one day less than a week ago:

The missile hit during the school’s morning session. In Iran, the school week runs from Saturday to Thursday, so when US and Israeli bombs began falling at around 10am on Saturday [28 February 2026], classes were under way. At a point between 10am and 10.45am, a missile directly hit Shajareh Tayyebeh school, in Minab, southern Iran, demolishing its concrete building and killing dozens of seven to 12-year-old girls.

Photographs and verified videos from the site, which the Guardian has not published due to their graphic nature, show children’s bodies lying partly buried under the debris. In one video, a very small child’s severed arm is pulled from the rubble. Colourful backpacks covered with blood and concrete dust sit among the ruins. One girl wears a green dress with gingham patches on her pockets and the collar, her form partly obscured by a black body bag. Screams can be heard in the background.

One distraught man stands in the ruins of the school, waving textbooks and worksheets as rescuers dig by hand through the debris. ‘These are the schoolbooks of the children who are under these ruins, under this rubble here,’ he shouts. ‘You can see the blood of these children on these books. These are civilians, who are not in the military. This was a school and they came to study.’

History has taught us nothing. But, as a historian, I have to keep hoping that it still can.

Image source: ‘The funeral of the child victims of the air raid – the scene at Poplar’, Sphere, 30 June 1917, 281.

Registrations are now open for Print the Legend, the next Aviation Cultures Spotlight event, which will be held online across 27 and 28 February 2026 (Australian Eastern Daylight Time; correct for your own timezone). This is a free event, but you do need to register beforehand.

Print the Legend promises to be both fun and insightful, taking its inspiration from the famous line in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’. In aviation history, that injunction has been taken to heart rather too frequently, whether at the time or later. That doesn’t mean the legends are wrong, necessarily, but they do need to be questioned rather than just accepted. And that is just what this Spotlight will do.

I’ll be presenting in the second session, on the evening of 27 February. I’m honoured to be speaking alongside Alessandro Pesaro, Ian Castle, and Dan Ellis, who will be talking about Pippo, von Buttlar, and scarecrow flares, respectively. I’ll be reprising and updating my ‘When was the Red Baron?’ and ‘The Red Knight rises’ posts, which I wrote a few years ago but otherwise never did much with.

Hope you can join us!

Image source: Leader (Melbourne), 7 August 1915, 7.