Remembering The Bethnal Green Disaster With Jessica Francis Kane

Last night, Annie Mole from the London Underground blog and I went to a talk at the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden on the circumstances surrounding the disaster in 1943 at the underground shelter which was soon afterwards to become Bethnal Green tube station - part of their current series of lectures and exhibitions entitled 'Under Attack'.

Reproduced from the Stairway To Heaven Memorial Trust Website

Introduced by David Bownes, the museum's curator, we heard about how instrumental the tube was in sheltering people from the poorest areas of London, particularly in the East End, throughout the Blitz. While initially the Government and London Underground tried to dissuade people from using the stations during air raids, eventually they capitulated and formally recognised many deep level tube stations as official shelters, kitting them out with bunk beds, standpipes and other facilities so that people could spend the night there in some comfort. Some stations even played host to concert parties who would perform on platforms erected over the rails to lift morale.  David accompanied his talk with some graphics, including some representations of the very evocative paintings of shelterers which Henry Moore created during this period, and also a rather cheery photograph of a refreshment train, which would stop at stations to dole out tea and biscuits.

Jessica Francis Kane, the American novelist, then took over the podium to tell us about her novel, 'The Report', which dramatises the events around the disaster which saw 173 people killed in a crush on the steps of the station when they dashed for shelter on hearing a new type of anti-aircraft rocket being tested by troops stationed just over in Victoria Park, obviously fearing that it was a bomb falling on the area. Jessica first heard about the disaster when she attended an event at the British Library where the report was reprinted by the Stationery Office, and finally decided to put pen to paper shortly after 9/11, feeling that she could draw some parallels between these two tragedies. In the novel, Jessica invents several colourful east end characters, with the only representation of a real person involved in the events of the time being Laurence Dunne, the magistrate who was tasked by Parliament with conducting an inquiry into the incident. Jessica divulged that although Dunne concluded the investigation and wrote his report in a matter of weeks it was only published after the end of the war - I suspect because if it had been released at the time it would have indicated to the Germans that the people of London weren't always the stoic, brave and cheerful people shown in the newsreels of the time.

After reading some passages from the novel, Jessica ended her talk and asked for questions. Remarkably, it turned that there were two survivors of the disaster sitting amongst us in the audience - Alf Morris, who was pulled from the crush by local air-raid warden Mrs Chumley, and another gentlemen who was hanging around with friends under the railway arches just down the street when the anti-aircraft gun went off. I should mention that Alf is the instigator of the Stairway to Heaven Memorial Trust, which is raising funds for a permanent memorial to be sited over the tube station entrance. The proposed design of an inverted staircase inset with the names of the victims makes a very powerful statement - you can donate to the fund online here.