The revised and enlarged second edition of this book will appear in October 2007 from the same publisher, Capital Transport Publishing. This new edition will include detailed surface location plans of each of the Deep Shelters, several new photos in colour and a few corrections.
In the meantime here are some updates that have come to light since the first edition was published.
Additional material has come to light on the Bethnal Green tragedy and unfortunately there is no room for this to go in the new edition. Particular thanks go to Robin Woolven for obtaining material under the Freedom of Information Act. Owners of the book may wish to print out this revision to tuck it in with their copy. The new and altered material is shown in italics.
It was not only at Liverpool Street that unopened Central Line tunnels were examined for use as shelters and other sections were also considered. The possibility was ruled out between Commercial Street and Bethnal Green owing to the risk of flooding if bombs hit large sewers in the neighbourhood but the unfinished station at Bethnal Green appeared suitable. The decision to use the station for a refuge in its incomplete state led to the worst civilian catastrophe of World War II, albeit little-known at the time thanks to a clamp-down on publicity.
The platforms of Bethnal Green station, 65ft below ground level, opened as a shelter on 11th September 1940 but closed the next day (or three days later, accounts vary) because London Transport believed there was a risk of flooding. This decision was overturned by the Minister for Home Security, Mr Herbert Morrison (later Lord Morrison of Lambeth), after he had balanced the relative dangers of flooding and bombing. During a tour of east London with Admiral Sir Edward Evans, Regional Commissioner for London on 5th October, Mr Morrison reopened the shelter. Its facilities were rudimentary, to say the least, simply because the station was incomplete. The platforms were complete and the walls properly tiled but other circulating areas were still uncovered bare concrete. Crucially, the sole entrance staircase had no handrail or roof and had a turn as it descended to the booking hall. For security reasons lighting was initially by hurricane lamps alone, whilst the only emergency exit routes were the long trek through the tube railway tunnels to Liverpool Street or Mile End stations.
The dangers of makeshift shelters were well known in official circles. The Hailey Conference, a group of experts across the professions and political parties whose report supported the government’s original policy of refusing to build deep shelters, suggested that steps were a potential danger when large crowds were entering a doorway (which was why any specially built shelter should have multiple entrances and descent should be made by spiral ramps). They warned too that the build-up at the entrances would leave many people waiting in a small area, aggravating any danger. If people converged on a shelter within a radius of 10 minutes’ walk, statistically 50 per cent of them would arrive in the last two minutes.
The government was under pressure to provide more shelter in the East End and even though statistically more than 85% of Londoners remained in their houses or their own shelters. Needs must when the devil drives, however, and any underground refuge was better than no shelter at all. Accordingly accommodation was provided for 4,000 people on the westbound platform and trackbed, on part of the eastbound platform and in the crossover tunnel. Barricades were erected to prevent the public reaching the eastbound running line (over which London Transport reserved the right to run engineers’ ballast trains).
The shelter area included part of the tunnel to the west of the station but not the shallow ‘sub-surface’ tunnel leading towards Bow Road. Several major sewers ran close to the station, posing a risk of flooding should a bomb penetrate them. To prevent the possibility of sewage flowing towards Liverpool Street, London Transport had by November 1940 erected bulkheads across the tunnels about a mile west of Bethnal Green station as well as sliding floodgates east of the station. In January 1941 these arrangements were revised to create a new shelter east of the station, using a portion of the platforms. Timber flooring was provided, along with an emergency exit leading up to Carlton Square. An unpleasant incident took place on 30th July 1942, when a large number of Stepney residents forced entry via this staircase, after which a sign was erected telling of grave personal danger to anyone rash enough trying to gain access by this means.
It was an omen of worse to come and the station’s infamy rests in the fact that it was the location of the worst single civilian death toll of World War II. The site is marked today by a Blue Plaque memorial, which states that on Wednesday 3rd March 1943 some 173 men, women and children died as they were descending the steps of the official station entrance to seek shelter.
On that night the air raid alert sounded at 8.17 pm and shortly afterwards, an off-duty policeman, PC Thomas Penn, noticed unusual congestion around the entrance to the station (at the corner of Cambridge Heath Road and Roman Road). He saw in the dim light of a single 25-watt bulb that the steps leading to the shelter were jammed with people who had become so tightly packed that they could not move. A genealogy website records that his first instinct was to assess the extent of the trouble and crawling over massed bodies to the foot of the 19 steps, where a woman had tripped, he observed with horror that the pressure of oncoming crowds had jammed over 200 people into the space of a small room. Having sent a message for help, PC Penn again crawled to the foot of the stairs and helped other rescue workers extricate the trapped people, continuing until the stairs were cleared. PC Penn was one of the several police officers who gave evidence at the inquest into the disaster.
An eyewitness account is quoted on the East End Life website. A Bethnal Green woman who was 19 at the time recalled that the station had only one entrance, which was also the exit.
I had gone to the station from our home in Cambridge Heath Road and was just starting down the station steps when the trouble began. The whoosh of a gun or rocket made people behind me surge forward. It happened several times and, as quite a few people were carrying bundles of clothes and bedding, I am not surprised that someone fell over in the gloom in front of us. Soon bodies began piling on top of one another and I was hopelessly trapped. I was upright but it was suffocatingly hot, and people all around were groaning and screaming.
Wardens called out: ‘Go back! Go back!’ to people at street level but it made no difference. Those on the outside were desperate to get in and didn’t seem to realise what was happening. My back was crushed and my hands trapped, and I called out that I couldn’t breathe. My tongue was hanging out and I panted like a dog.
It took them three hours to clear the steps and I lost track of time, then I was pulled back up to the street. My clothes were torn and my stockings shredded. I think I was very lucky to be near the surface. Later, my bad back, which I had injured in the accident, meant I could not work for a year and I was awarded £500 compensation. But the authorities made deductions and, in the end, I got only £375.
A survivor of the disaster, Alf Morris, is stated by the BBC website to have been one of the last people to be pulled out of the crush. He retains vivid memories of the scenes of panic. “It's indescribable what went on in them few minutes when most of the people died... the screaming, the hollering,” he recalled. A local resident, James Hunt, then 16 years old added, “When I arrived here there were all the bodies laid right the way down... I helped to get some of the youngsters up, I was only little myself, and I picked up mostly young children.” Prompt action ensured that all traces of the disaster were cleaned up within hours. Speaking on a BBC television programme in September 2003, local residents involved in the work said that police stopped buses passing nearby and conscripted able-bodied passengers into a task force for removing bodies.
There had been nearly 2,000 people in the shelter and when casualties were finally counted, it was found that 173 had died (not 178 as originally reported), including 64 children. In addition 92 were taken to hospital. News of the disaster took time to leak out, however. Initially the government withheld information about the tragedy in order to prevent word reaching the enemy but an announcement was made the following evening by the Ministry of Home Security describing a serious accident that had occurred near the entrance to a London tube shelter. The news was not widely reported until the Friday.
[Paragraph ‘Secret Enquiry’ has been moved to follow the next one]
At the time of the catastrophe no raid was in progress. People certainly saw a searchlight trained on the sky but the noise came from a salvo of anti-aircraft rockets launched in a test firing from a battery a mile away at the far north corner of Victoria Park. Known as a Z-Battery and designated 19Z, this used a relatively new technique of firing multiple rocket guns simultaneously and certainly created a terrifying sound, one that would certainly scare the living daylights of anyone unfamiliar with the uproar and startled even the few people in a nearby factory who had been forewarned.
Alec Allen, a ‘cocoa boy’ working as a dogsbody for the unit on the night of the disaster, claimed he was told of a test firing by the commander of the unit. “It was horrendous. The skies were lit up with these rockets. It sounded like the whole battery had been lit up simultaneously,” he recalled. Former soldiers from other Z-Battery units in London confirmed the singular noise of the weapon. “It was as if all hell had been let loose, belching out flame and noise as you've never heard it. Everyone else who heard it would be the same as me—petrified,” remembered one old soldier.
Security considerations meant the decision was taken not to inform the local population and when someone shouted, “They’ve started dropping them!” word spread rapidly that landmines were erupting and bombs hurtling downwards.
Clearly the interests of total security had to be balanced against the need to avoid public panic that could and did have fatal consequences, so subsequent allegations of official incompetence are debatable. Suggestions that the battery could have been tested away from populated areas ignore its specific function, to protect the locality of Bethnal Green.
Lessons were learnt, however, and local authority shelters were equipped with better handrails and lighting in staircases together with crush barriers and sliding gates at surface entrances. At Bethnal Green the entrance was altered immediately with two shelter marshals on duty over the full 24-hour period at top and bottom of the stairs. At other tube stations barriers were erected around entrances too.
If the catastrophe was a disaster waiting to happen, it is fortunate that it did not occur when the Bethnal Green shelter was more widely used. When opened it had bunk accommodation for 5,000 people with extra space for another 5,000 shelterers. It was popular with its residents, being well equipped to the extent of having its own underground public library. Former shelterer Reg Baker recalled the atmosphere: “You were so close to everyone in those tunnels that you got to know everybody—down in the bunk beds—they were only about four feet apart. We used to sleep in the tunnel on bunk beds either side that went right the way down. It was a full community... we had a canteen... we had a church—well, a vicar—and we had a library.” In fact the only major shortcomings of this refuge were the overpowering stench of industrial disinfectant used in the toilets and the single main entrance, supplemented by an emergency exit reached by tunnel half a mile away. When the Blitz was at its height, the shelter was often filled to capacity and became a second home to some. Numbers dwindled later on to a few hundred, possibly people with nowhere else to go.
Immediately after the disaster an inquiry was held in secret, concluding on 17th March. However, the results were not published until January 1945, near the end of the war. Questions were asked about the behaviour of certain officials and whether the accident could have been prevented. Suggestions were also made that fifth-columnists might have had something to do with the tragedy but these were discounted in the ‘Report of the Inquiry held by Mr Laurence Dunne into the Bethnal Green Tube Shelter Disaster’. This stated in section 38:
Before going on to deal with the rain and contributory causes of the disaster I should like at this point to deal with two specific allegations which have received some publicity, and which are without any foundation whatsoever. Each may be dismissed with a very few words:-
a. That this was a panic induced by Fascists or criminal persons for nefarious purposes. There were some deaths among men with criminal records. They and their relatives are as much entitled to sympathy as any of the other victims. This story had some local, and I hope limited, circulation. It is an absurdity.
b. That this was a Jewish panic. This canard had a much wider circulation and was, I understand, endorsed by the broadcast utterances of a renegade traitor from Germany. 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.
The notion of a Jewish panic later turned out to have been spread by local fascist activists, who had tried to spread dissent before the war. William Joyce (the second Lord Haw Haw) did indeed mention the disaster in his broadcast from Berlin the following Monday but never claimed it was a Jewish panic. Instead he mocked the official statement that there had been no panic, stating this kind of fairy tale could only be told to a child or an Englishman. Along with the reports on Radio Paris and Rome Radio he stated the cause as panic following enemy air raids.
That the official inquiry was fair and balanced has never been contested. But precisely why its proceedings have never been made public has exercised many minds, not least of Robin Woolven. Under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act of 2000 he successfully applied to read the witness statements, which he generously made available for this book. The vivid eyewitness statements make extremely uncomfortable reading, not just for the grisly details of conditions in the shelter after the accident but also the appalling light it focused on some sections of humanity.
Mrs B— had a 2½-year-old baby boy in her arms and was with her sister and her mother. “There were men crawling over our heads, yes some police officers were there. I was just bruised. There were torches flashing, they were not police officers because someone called out over our heads and the baby was free … I had my hand on the baby and said, ‘Will you please take the baby?’ and he said, ‘Every man for himself at a time like this’. That shows that he could not have been a policeman or anyone with any sense because he would have taken the baby from me.”
Equally disturbing, however, is the strong criticism of police handling of the disaster made immediately after Mr Dunne had completed his report. Herbert Morrison in particular felt the report “was not hard on police, if anything a bit gentle. Bethnal Green police were wrong in not tightening up after the [previous air] raid.” Affrighted by this, the government clearly had no wish for public morale to be undermined by criticism of the police. This may well have been the overriding reason for keeping this information secret so long.
Even those too young to have heard Germany’s propaganda broadcasts to Britain during World War Two will have heard sound bites of ‘Jairmany calling’ and the voice of Lord Haw-Haw. The title is generally applied to the controversial Nazi sympathiser William Joyce, who left Britain in 1939 to work for the Germans. After capture at the end of the war he was hanged for treason, despite being a U.S. citizen who had never legally held British nationality.
In fact the nickname, coined by Jonah Barrington of the Daily Express in 1939, before Joyce had taken to the airwaves, was hardly appropriate for him. There was nothing aristocratic about the hectoring tones of William Joyce and in fact he inherited the nickname from his two predecessors whose voices did indeed have a ‘haw haw’ inflection. The British renegade army veteran Norman Baillie-Stewart was one, whilst the other was Wolff Mittler, a German national who had enjoyed a public school education in Britain, acquiring a rather ‘plummy’ English diction. None of these characters should be confused with ‘Lord Hee-Haw’, the American F.W. Kaltenbach, who also broadcast for the Nazis.
Here is William Joyce’s commentary on the incident:
London Tube Shelter Panic: Morrison’s Fairy Tale.
As a result of panic during an air raid, 178 persons were killed and 60 injured in a London shelter. There were 600 people already in the shelter when a woman carrying a child stumbled on the stairs. In less than a minute hundreds of people were trampled upon. In his report about the accident the British Home Secretary [Morrison] added that there had been no panic and no bombs dropped in the vicinity of the shelter.That sort of fairy tale can only be told to a child or an Englishman. It is plain that as far as air raids are concerned, the nerves of Londoners seem to be on edge. If 178 people are trampled to death in hardly a minute, thousands must have tried to force their way down to this shelter. It was significant that on the same day, a relay broadcast by the Columbia Broadcasting Corporation [sic] in New York was suddenly interrupted with the New York studio announcing that the relay could not take place for technical reasons. It is plain that the British censor stepped in and prevented the U.S. commentator’s talk. (Note: The American commentator referred to was to have broadcast from London as part of the National Broadcasting Company’s regular hook-up at 00.15.)
Source: BBC Daily Digest, World Broadcasts no. 1,329 of 8th March 1943 in National Archive file HO199/114.
Several corrections and additions have been made to this chapter, shown in italics.
Just as the existence of the Post Office tube railway would surprise many otherwise well informed people, many folk will be equally surprised to learn that the same organisation built another, equally elaborate network of tunnels under London used for carrying telephone cables. The notion of a tube network for cables is not as radical as might seem, however, given that pneumatic tubes and telegraph cables had been driven underground since Victorian times and in view of the Post Office’s experience in tunnelling its one railway. Nevertheless, the extent of this system, now in the hands of British Telecom as a result of the separation of posts and telecommunications in 1981, is quite remarkable, comprising a network of mainly seven-feet diameter tubes covering a route length of around 12 miles.
Its origins go back more than a century, and the virtue of carrying telephone cables (and other public utilities) in subways or tunnels below ground was recognised as long ago as 1860. From this time onwards tunnels for shared services were constructed under all the major street improvements, including Kingsway, Aldwych and Charing Cross Road as well as the Victoria Embankment. Subsequently they were incorporated also in tube station booking hall developments (Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square and others), with the hope that an integrated system might one day be formed. Most of these subways are semicircular brick tunnels about 16 feet in diameter, running about three feet below the pavement. Rectangular openings are provided at frequent intervals for access to the pipes and cables. Currently, London has nine miles of joint use service tunnels carrying water, electricity, gas, telephone wires and now cable television (previously some also carried telegraph wires, hydraulic power conduits and pneumatic telegraph tubes).
The obvious advantage of subways was saving the need to dig up roads whenever alterations and new connections were needed. Another benefit soon realised was that faults and problems are less likely to occur thanks to the lack of disturbance. Shared use has its disadvantages too, as a disastrous explosion at Holborn proved in 1928, following a gas leak.
Subways provide some protection from aerial attack in conventional warfare, a fact recognised in one of the conclusions of the Air Raid Precautions Subcommittee of the Committee of Imperial Defence formed in 1924. As a result of its recommendations, the Post Office made plans for an emergency communications system making use of tunnels belonging to the tube railways, and these were put to good use during World War II.
The ‘Victory’ issue of the IPOEEJ explains how the tube railways were used extensively to give deep-level protection for a few miles for important defence and public trunk telephone cables. The scheme adopted entailed the linking up, by circumferential cables, of the radial cable routes of the tube railways at a number of selected interception centres located not far from the emergent points. In this way interruption by bomb damage to any of the radial cable routes could be restored readily by suitable re-routing of the circuits over the circumferential cables at the interception centres.
That was the theory anyway, although a typescript document (undated) in the BT Museum entitled The Work of the Engineering Department during the Present War concedes:
In one case this did not protect the cables and a bomb smashed in about 60 feet run of tunnel, cutting two important cables. The tunnel began to fill with water and sewage, and if temporary repairs were to be effected they had to be done very quickly. After great difficulties, the engineers managed to force two lengths of steel tube through the clay filling the tunnel and temporary cables were drawn through. It then became a race between the jointers making the connections between the old and new cables and the rising flood of water. The work had to be perfectly done if it was to be of use and the smallest pinhole would cause failure. The jointers won with seven feet of water in the tunnel and barely room to escape.
This incident occurred in the Northern Line tunnels at Eversholt Street, near Euston, on the night of 21st-22nd October 1940 and it was certainly exceptional. With the bomb passing through 47ft of solid ground, it was the deepest penetration by any enemy bomb in London. The same night both Euston and Mornington Crescent tube stations had to be evacuated between 10.30pm and 3am owing to flooding caused by the explosion.
The radial scheme was started in the late autumn of 1940 and completed during the following year, involved the laying of 250 miles of cable of which 116 miles were in public tube railway tunnels, another 20 miles in the Post Office Railway and a short but vital section in the 12 ft diameter pilot tunnel under the Thames at Dartford, constructed before the war in advance of the main road tunnel.
The radial cables were complemented by a ‘Ring Main’ cable around the periphery of London, begun in summer 1939. Under this scheme ten ‘Ring’ exchanges in outer London were extended to enable them to function as ‘tandem’ or intermediate exchanges handling trunk calls to and from London subscribers. In this way the operation could be decentralised if the main London trunk exchange (Faraday Building) was put out of operation. Private wires for the defence services were re-routed in this ring scheme as well.
Subsequently a large repeater station for trunk cable routes was built next to the North Circular Road, aimed at linking arterial trunk routes without the need to head to or radiate from the centre of London. Known first as the Hendon Ring Main exchange or Hendon Sub-Trunk Centre, then later as the Brent Building, this was opened for telegraph circuits in October 1944 and for telephony in February 1945. It was strategically important enough to escape the ban on new building construction and stood on the north side of the North Circular Road. Plans of the early 1950s allocated it a key role in the hardened national trunk telephone system (see Appendix 4) but it was later put to other uses and was demolished to make way for the Brent Cross shopping centre. Ron Flaxman, who maintained all Power equipment in Brent Building during the 1970s describes it as ‘a mysterious place and very utilitarian in construction, although extremely solid’. He remarks it was known officially as ‘Gladstone B’ and unofficially as ‘Bleak House’.
Many cable routes were installed to bypass London at greater distances. One carrier circuit, for instance, ran from Uxbridge to Colchester on open wire, following minor roads all the way. A more radical solution was adopted towards the end of 1943, when the possibility of heavy attacks on the London area was considered to justify additional measures to safeguard communications between London and other parts of the country. A second element of the Ring Main scheme was provided to interconnect repeater stations ringed about London at a radius of some 30-40 miles, using the latest design of multi-channel radio-telephone equipment. Using mobile equipment selected repeater stations on different cable routes radiating from London could be linked quickly so as to divert circuits to alternative routes.
Sites for the radio terminals were selected on high ground within a few miles of the repeater stations to obtain transmission paths of between 25 and 35 miles and the radio equipment used frequencies in the band 45-50MHz that had been allocated to the BBC’s Alexandra Palace television station, which had opened in 1936.
The decision to protect important Post Office telephone cables by laying them in London Transport tube tunnels was taken early on and a list dated 26th July 1939 shows the following works already completed:
These remaining works were stated to be ‘recently authorised and it will be some weeks before they are available’:
The precise purpose of (and routes taken by) Post Office telephone cables laid in London Transport tube tunnels is not well documented. Most information is thus circumstantial and in a few cases, speculative.
The plan reproduced in this chapter from Harbottle’s IPOEE paper illustrates the trunk cables radiating from central London and reaching the surface at Golders Green tunnel mouth and Belsize Park station (Northern Line north, for cable to Colindale ring main exchange), Manor House station (Piccadilly Line, for cable to Stamford Hill), Mile End station (unopened Central Line, for cable to Ilford), South Wimbledon (Northern Line south, for LIBerty exchange), and Shepherds Bush station (Central Line, for ring main exchange). These locations are clearly captioned, as are a number of locations and buildings in central London, which are also access points to the tubes.
The railway stations are Moorgate [for Wood Street exchange] and Elephant & Castle [possibly start of cable route to Deptford] on the Northern Line, St Paul’s [electricity control centre] on the Central Line, Waterloo [transfer point to Waterloo & City Line] and Trafalgar Square [transfer to Whitehall tunnels] on the Bakerloo Line, Brompton Road [anti-aircraft HQ] and Green Park [Devonshire House] on the Piccadilly Line and Paddington and Eastern District Office (P.O. Railway). Devonshire House, opposite the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly, is a massive mansion block situated on the block formed by Piccadilly, Berkeley Street, Mayfair Place and Stratton Street. Before and after the war it was best known as the headquarters of the Rootes Group of car manufacturers, but during World War II it housed a number of government departments and served as communications headquarters for MI8 and the Special Operations Executive (SOE). One other connection shown on the plan is Duke Street, the American communications centre in the Selfridges Annexe described in Chapter 6, where the SIGSALY scrambling apparatus was also housed (see Chapter 10). The cable connection is with the Post Office Railway tubes. No cables for the BBC are shown on the plan, although Broadcasting House itself is marked.
[Redrawn map]
This detailed map of the routes taken by telephone cables in London Transport and Post Office Railway tube tunnels is redrawn from fig. 16 of an IPOEE ‘read paper’ given in 1946 by R.H. Harbottle. To improve clarity, the PO’s own cable-only tunnels are not shown here.
Access to tube railway tunnels was not gained easily, however, and the Post Office realised it would achieve maximum flexibility only if it built its own tunnels, despite the significant capital cost. The process of building and extending these tunnels has a parallel with the development of London’s underground railways and readers familiar with this process will recall that the initial constructions were in fairly shallow ground, followed later by tubes at significantly deeper level. The Post Office cable tunnels developed along similar lines.
London’s first tunnel for the exclusive use of telephone cables was a short one in Wood Street (1925) but this was a one-off. The genesis of today's network lies in a small-bore (7 feet diameter) tunnel linking Holborn telephone exchange in the west with St Martins-le-Grand and the Citadel exchange (Faraday building). Started in 1941 and completed the following year, it is just over a mile in length and runs at a depth from 80 to 100ft below ground to be safe from bombing.
The need for conserving iron during the critical period of the war meant that the greater part of this tunnel was lined with reinforced concrete segments instead of the customary cast iron. The clay spoil excavated in the process was taken away and dumped in disused gravel pits west of London. To speed cabling operations, specially designed roller skates were used for the first time to bring the cables to the appropriate section of the tunnel. In total some 72 miles of cable was laid in this and other Post Office tunnels during the war (other tunnels included the Post Office Railway, which also provided a valuable protected route).
An equally vital cable tunnel was constructed beneath Whitehall to serve the ministries and service headquarters in this district. Since this tunnel system was bound up intimately with the Cabinet War Rooms, the Admiralty Citadel and the Rotundas, full details of the tunnels local to these buildings are given in the next chapter.
The Whitehall tunnels provided secure connections to government buildings locally, but the onward link to the national network was still vulnerable. This called for a fully protected cable route connecting government and armed services users in Whitehall with the Citadel main trunk exchange at Faraday Building, a mile and a half away in Queen Victoria Street. Constructing a new cable tunnel over this distance would have taxed the nation’s resources sorely under wartime conditions. Instead the linking cable was taken through tube train tunnels, the work being carried out in 1942. Starting at Trafalgar Square station (since renamed Charing Cross) the route followed the Bakerloo Line to Waterloo, where the cables were routed underneath floors to reach the Waterloo & City Line, along which they were taken to a point below Queen Victoria Street and then via Post Office tunnels into Faraday Building. Post Office telephone cables also ran northbound to Oxford Circus station, where a connection from the northbound Bakerloo Line platform led to the Post Office Railway directly underneath, which runs along Margaret Street.
To simplify interconnection between the Post Office telephone system and these railway tunnels, an underground transfer point was built at Trafalgar Square station (now Charing Cross). Work on this was put in early on and an entry in the Telephone Branch War Diary for September 1939 states: “Tube Cables. MDF at Trafalgar Square—building work completed, ironwork being erected” (the MDF or main distribution frame known as Trafalgar Square was actually located in the Whitehall tunnels, not at the station). A further entry for the same month from the Chief Regional Engineer’s War Diary elaborates:
The necessity for the installation of cables associated with certain vital requirements for defence services at sufficiently deep levels was realised long before the war, and many cables have been provided in London Passenger Transport Board tube tunnels. Subsequently, it was decided to construct a special tunnel at an approximate depth of 100 feet under Whitehall, from Trafalgar Square to King Charles Street, for the housing of cables for intercommunication between Government Departments concerned with national defence and for connecting cables between the various Whitehall offices and the trunk and toll interception cables in the London Passenger Transport Board tubes carrying defence circuits.
Access to the tunnel will be provided at Trafalgar Square [station] and Whitehall Exchange, cable access only will be provided at the Government building where the centralised private branch exchange [Federal] is to be installed, and at other important Government buildings. These cables will be taken through bore holes to laterals branching from the main tunnel. The distribution frames, audio and voice frequency equipment and power plant will eventually be provided in this tunnel. The work has not yet been commenced.
In the meantime, all existing and additional cables in the LPTB tube tunnels will be terminated on a small distribution frame which is now being installed at Trafalgar Square station. This is involving the provision of 12 cables, varying in size from 54/20 to 308/20 and three existing cables are being re-routed. The total cable mileage is about 107 miles.
The construction of a further tunnel in Aldersgate Street, which will be associated with the emergency arrangements at Headquarters and King Edward Buildings, started in the middle of the month. The consent of the authorities for this work was secured with the utmost celerity, and work commenced immediately afterwards.
Citadel telephone exchange, in Godliman Street just south of St Paul’s Cathedral, was constructed on citadel lines and was intimately connected with the deep level cable tunnels. This description, taken from the history of Standard Telephones and Cables Ltd, The Story of STC 1883-1958, says almost everything necessary.
The construction by the British Post Office of the fantastic building known as The Citadel, a huge concrete structure at the rear of Faraday Building in London, provided STC with another opportunity to help in safeguarding Britain’s communications. The Citadel was a keystone in the plan to safeguard the trunk and toll telephone services at the height of the blitz. It was not enough that the structure should be capable of withstanding every type of bomb; it had also to be able to withstand a siege. Into the building went 40,000 tons of concrete, 2,200 tons of reinforced steel, and onto it went a concrete roof seven feet six inches thick. It was completely self-contained, with its own continuous water supply, enough food for three months, and sleeping accommodation for off-duty personnel. Work was begun on the building in May 1941, and continued day and night until completion—STC’s transmission equipment was being installed on the lower floors while the concrete was still being poured into moulds above. To ensure a constant supply of concrete a large mixing plant was erected on a nearby bombed site and an overhead pipeline fed the mixed concrete direct to the scene of operations. When the ground floor was completed, giving protection to the workmen, work continued even during raid alerts.
The building contained an artesian well 600ft deep, yielding 2,000 gallons of water an hour, and the main entrance was protected against gas and possible frontal assault by heavy steel doors weighing four tons and locked from the inside. Three diesel engines, each of 388hp, supplied the energy to drive the large power plant used for the telephone equipment. This Rock of Gibraltar in the centre of London could still have been put out of action if the cables serving the building had not been made immune from enemy bombs. This was done by sinking a shaft eight feet in diameter and eighty feet deep to connect the Citadel with the elaborate system of deep level cables in the underground railways and the specially constructed Post Office tunnel which had been developed in the early years of the war.
The foundations of the building varied in thickness between five feet and ten feet. Below ground the outer walls were six feet six inches thick; above ground three feet three inches. The thickness of the floors dividing the three-storey building was one foot six inches, and the interior was sub-divided by walls two feet three inches thick to minimize the effect of possible damage by blast. The Citadel was bomb-proof, siege-proof and gas-proof, and during the heaviest bombing raids and flying bomb attacks the whole of the trunk services during the night were operated from there.
Marjory Chapman, a GPO telephonist during the war, has memories of Faraday.
They wanted telephonists up in London and I was picked to go there. When we first went up to Faraday Buildings they just had shells of concrete walls for the girls to stay in and the water was running down the walls. Well it was either that stay or go home through the air raids. I often went home because I preferred it. They had quite a hard time these girls, because if somebody didn't turn up there was always somebody to jump in immediately. There was no question of leaving anything unturned, you know. We had gas masks and we had fire watching as well. We had to do fire watching at home and fire watching up there, and there weren't enough of the men to go round so we used to do night duties as well. All you were concerned with was getting on with your job and seeing that everybody got what they wanted as best you could. Norman Wisdom was one of the telephonists with us at the time. He was a night telephonist and we used to sit on the switchboard and he used to tell us stories about what he'd done. He was very keen on horse riding. It wasn't all that busy at night, but you had to be there, you see.
Interesting routes were found for some cables. A case in point was ‘a special cable for defence purposes’ that was laid in December 1939 from the old St Paul’s station to C.T.O. (R), the reserve Central Telegraph Office that was located nearby in the basement of King Edward Building. According to the City Area war diary this cable ran through the long-abandoned ‘old parcels tube’ (see endnote) and was brought to the surface via the disused lift shaft.
The Post Office was not the only undertaking to provide fallback communication facilities. Cable & Wireless Ltd, responsible during World War II for the 355,000-mile Imperial radio and landline network that reached seventy countries, was acutely aware of the vulnerability of its central London terminals at its Central Telegraph Station in Moorgate (an establishment entirely separate from the Central Telegraph Office of the Post Office at St Paul’s). A reinforced bombproof and gas-proof duplicate station was built at the company’s head office at Electra House, on the Victoria Embankment, but even this would not safeguard communication if the cables leading to it were destroyed by enemy action.
Accordingly the directors toyed with the idea of providing fallback facilities further away at a safer location. They first considered a remote country house but eventually they selected ‘an unpretentious red brick villa’ at 12 Hamilton Road in the west London district of Ealing known to proud locals as ‘Queen of the Suburbs’. This was sandbagged but not made air-raid proof. Although its caretaker was armed with a revolver and a police constable kept watch outside, most local residents would have been unaware of the home’s new status. In the event, the Ealing station was brought into use only once, on 16th August 1940, when a bomb falling in Hammersmith severed the cable from Moorgate to the Atlantic cable terminal at Porthcurno (Cornwall).
Although this facility had been described in the two official histories of the company, it was not exactly common knowledge and in recent times became the subject of a fascinating rumour. Dismissed by many as an urban myth, the story was put into print by a contributor to an Internet newsgroup, Neil Conlon, who related how in the early 1970s a friend of his had purchased a large detached house in Hamilton Road, Ealing Broadway and set about re-decorating it. Conversion work on the basement proved extremely difficult, however, and it was only after considerable time and effort had been spent that a heavy metal door was revealed, with no visible means of gaining entry. Soon afterwards the owner was informed that his property had become the subject of a compulsory purchase order. The sum offered by officialdom was, apparently, very generous and the owner accepted.
‘The Mystery of the Door’ puzzled the correspondent for many years but was solved when he read Nigel West’s book GCHQ—The Secret Wireless War 1900-86, which revealed what lay hidden at 12 Hamilton Road had been a ‘standby cablehead and radio station’ for Cable & Wireless Ltd. The legend was not accurate in every detail, as it was not the basement (a small affair with only 5ft headroom) that housed the cable station. There are, however, extensive remains of old wiring in the rear room on the ground floor.
Valuable feedback received since this book was first published provides some useful clarification. Roger Morgan, who inspected the house, states the cellar was tiny and primitive, measuring 15 x 3 feet (lying just below the hall). It had a bare earth floor, bare joists, bare brickwork; in fact it looked as if it had never been used for anything. The back room on the ground floor showed a plethora of old telephone junction boxes on the window frames, but there was nothing striking, he adds.
Tony Clarke, whose grandfather, mother and aunt all worked for Cable & Wireless Ltd, living in North Ealing. He states:
During World War Two the girls would pass 12 Hamilton Road on the way to the station. My mother remembers commenting to my grandfather how odd it was that there was always a policeman outside, but though he knew what was going on there, he never commented. It was a time of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
One July night in 1944, a V1 crossed the river and hit the second floor of Electra House on the Embankment, with two staff members killed by rubble crashing into the underground shelter. By 04.10, four hundred night staff were back at work in the debris under generator power. This disturbance went unnoticed by overseas terminals, but the Moorgate office and landlines suffered violent disruption on several occasions in the Blitz, bringing 12 Hamilton Road into use.
With war looming, it had been planned to convert a remote country house into a standby cable and wireless station, linking London with Porthcurno and the Atlantic. In August 1939, an ordinary red-brick villa in Ealing was chosen as it was logical that the disruption would happen at the London end. Camouflage was discussed, but seemed too ridiculous, so the house was just sand-bagged and strengthened internally (though not made air-raid proof). When required, critical messages abroad were run after dusk between Moorgate and Ealing by two tin-hatted couriers driving a small car. This is another story in itself.
At the end of the war, with four brothers returning from war, my mother's family (Burke) moved to the vacant 12 Hamilton Road. It was known that the house had been owned by the company, but apart from an abundance of sand bags around the cellar and an odd layout in the scullery, there was nothing unusual. They don't remember any new plasterwork in the cellar, but it could have been a strengthened cupboard for the landline connections, sealed in before the war in case of invasion. However, my eldest uncle, Terence Burke, does remember finding the end of a 64-core cable sticking out of a flower bed in the back garden and some switchgear on tables in the scullery but apart from the sand bags, nothing of particular note in the cellar.
Interestingly, Cable & Wireless was not the only cable company to have its wartime standby facilities in Ealing. Research in the Public Record Office indicates that Western Union was also located somewhere in Ealing, whilst the Commercial Cable Company was based in Osterley, the French (PQ) Telegraph Company in Southall and the Great Northern Telegraph Company a little further away in Northwood (Middx.).
The first proposal for a tube line to carry the mail was put forward in 1855 by Rowland Hill, who suggested a line from the Post Office at St. Martins-le-Grand to Little Queen Street in Holborn. The initial proposal was for an ‘atmospheric railway’ designed by Thomas Rammell, who came up with a scheme by which a stationary steam engine would drive a large fan that could suck air out of an air-tight tube and draw the vehicle towards it or blow air to push them away. A smaller version of this system was later developed for message handling in large department stores and government offices.
Rammell devised plans for a number of lines in London to carry goods and mails, setting up the Pneumatic Despatch Company on 30th June 1859. In May 1861 an experimental 452yd line was laid in Battersea, which proved to be viable and led to a number of proposals that roused little support from the Post Office, although it agreed to make trials of the new system. The first 2ft gauge line ran a distance of 600 yards at Euston, beginning in 1863 and securing Post Office approval and success. It was followed by a longer, 3ft 8½in line from Euston through Holborn to the General Post Office at St. Martins-le-Grand, opening from Euston to Holborn in 1865 and to St. Martin’s-le-Grand on 1st December 1873.
However, because this new service shaved only four minutes off the time taken to carry the mail by road, the Post Office announced in 1874 it would not be using the new line, which was quickly abandoned and the Pneumatic Despatch Company dissolved. The terminus at the General Post Office became a coal and wood store, whilst other parts of the 5ft cast iron horseshoe-shape tunnel were put to other uses. In 1895 there was a proposal to reopen the tunnel with electric traction and a new company, the London Despatch Company was formed. Some work was done on upgrading the line and tunnels but the Post Office remained sceptical about its worth and work on the new project ceased in 1902 and the London Despatch Company was wound up in 1905. The Post Office finally bought the tunnel in 1921 to use for telephone cables, after which time it became known as ‘the old parcels tube’. Several sections of the tunnel have been lost over the years but about three quarters of it is still in use carrying cables. On 20th June 1928 an explosion in the tunnel under High Holborn was blamed on the ignition of coal gas, with one workman killed. During the subsequent excavations to repair half a mile of damaged road, four of the original mailbag cars were discovered (but not, unfortunately, preserved).
Cabinet War Room: the name ‘The Annexe’ sometimes used referred to the offices in the building above, not to the CWR itself.
A myth confounded: However, the extension of the Whitehall tunnel from the Air Ministry building to the Rotundas was available 24 hours a day as a pedestrian route for designated office staff, as implied by Churchill’s own description and Reekie’s book mentioned earlier. Notwithstanding the acute time and cost constraints of wartime lifts were provided in its access shafts at the New Public Offices (close to 10 Downing Street), at the Rotundas and elsewhere, unlike in most the post-war cable tunnels and the tunnel was built to a diameter of 8ft, a foot larger than cable-only tunnels such as Holborn-Faraday.
The DTN telegraph switching centre was constructed in a 16ft, not 12ft tunnel.
On page 119 the figure should read 300,000, not 300,00.
The fire at Goodge Street brought back very personal memories for one reader of the first edition of this book and he writes:
In early May 1956, as a National Serviceman sapper in the Royal Engineers I was in transit from Barton Stacey camp (Hants.) en route to a permanent posting on Malta G.C. via the holding point at Goodge Street, awaiting a military charter night to the Mediterranean island. Another lad I eventually found the way into the place, carrying our kitbags and equipment, and we were amazed to be ordered to take these and ourselves deep underground. Despite my enduring interest in both transport and geography, I had thus far never come across such a place.
Down endless stairs we struggled, and squeezed through a cramped, claustrophobic passageway within a poor1y-lit tunnel eventually to unload in a minute space, complete with underground-style bunk, where we were expected to await the call for the journey to the aerodrome for the flight to Malta. Usefully to fill time under Goodge Street., we were told to line a stretch of the tunnel walls with brown wrapping ‘kraft’ paper—to freshen them, perhaps ready for an officer’s inspection—they were very scuffed and grubby, no doubt through impact from soldiers’ equipment in the very restricted space. I recollect thinking fancy being down here, extremely hot and stuffy (no ventilation?) eleven years pretty well to the day after VE day.
I persuaded an NCO who seemed to be in charge that we’d done a good brown wallpapering job and as a reward, couldn’t we spend a few hours out of the hellhole?
He gave permission, and so we went by the tube and buses to my home in Hanwell for a clean up and a square meal, before returning for a second night underground. My parents were amazed to see me, thinking I had already flown to Malta.
The next morning, the expected call came to board the army transport for Blackbushe Aerodrome ready for the flight by Vickers Viking to Luqa, Malta. Some days later the news filtered through of the Goodge Street underground fire; what a relief no-one was killed, but I couldn’t help feeling whether our ordered new tunnel linings in brown wrapping paper may have helped spread it.
(Kingsway exchange) A serious headache for the Project Engineer, S.J. Little, was how to deliver to site the four large diesel generators for the exchange’s electricity supply. Studying the plans he reported to the Regional Engineer, Mr Pinney, that an additional tunnel would have to be driven. This was rejected on cost grounds and after further consideration Mr Little decided that if a new shaft was dug, the generators could be delivered by train to Chancery Lane station. This approach, whilst technically feasible, could only be done at night, otherwise it would have disrupted train operations considerably. In any case the LPTB had already established in March 1942, in a letter from their chief legal adviser to the Ministry of Home Security, that, “on the termination of hostilities, the right of access to the shelters through the Board’s properties now enjoyed by the Minister and his agents shall cease and access through their properties shall be solely at the discretion of the Board”. The war was now long over.
In the event London Transport relented for this occasion alone and the generators were hauled to Chancery Lane from ‘a railway yard in west London’ (probably Acton or Lillie Bridge depots) by battery locomotives. To avoid future problems of this kind a 9cwt goods lift was constructed in Furnival Street, allowing delivery of large items of apparatus by road, and it was by this route that all telephone exchange equipment arrived. Furnival Street was originally envisaged as the main entrance to the exchange complex but instead all installation personnel and Post Office staff used the original entrance to the tube station at 31/33 High Holborn.
Construction work was by no means plain sailing. Excavation caused serious subsidence around Chancery Lane, with cracks appearing in the fabric of the Prudential Assurance building. Initially the Post Office disputed the company’s claims but after the project engineer paid a discreet visit on the pretext of examining telephone block wiring in the building, he spotted some very plain cracks and the Prudential was paid £100,000 in settlement of its claim. Work was held up by the discovery in the Staple Inn shaft of a Roman coffin complete with skeleton. A tunnel being bored hit an underground watercourse and water poured into the workings; pumps were installed but water ingress has remained a constant problem.
Not surprisingly Kingsway exchange holds powerful memories for people who worked there. This is John Warrick’s slant on life underground.
My years down ‘'The Tunnel’ were quite different from anywhere else that I’ve ever worked. In the winter months if you didn’t come up at lunch-time you never saw the light of day, and before you came up you had to phone the ‘Jobsworth’ on the tiny door at the High Holborn entrance, just see what was happening with the weather. Life down there was a little like living in a submarine, I presume. It was completely self-contained and had an odour all of its own. Most exchanges have a combination smell of wax floor polish and PVC cable; this had an extra smell, the chlorine added to the plenum plant that washed the air before it was circulated. It always amazed me how they kept the seepage under control; there were very few damp spots considering the size and complexity of the place.
One problem they never really sorted out was the match-size snooker table we had in the recreation room. It had a definite downhill slope and the table tennis table legs had extensions on the down side legs. The canteen was pretty good considering it was quite small and catered for a number of people, around 80 at any given time. There was a full maintenance team based there: painters, plumbers, electricians, standby generators mechanics and mostly a good crowd of guys always trying to please. When the two passenger lifts were being serviced we had to use the goods lift at the other end of the exchange; the look on peoples’ faces was fascinating when all these men suddenly burst onto the street from behind what was normally closed doors. When I first arrived there the Senior Engineer took us on a tour and what struck me the most was the signpost that is situated in the main cable tunnel: 2 miles to Toilet, 8 miles to Hendon. I suppose if you’re a cable jointer and down there all day you need to know this kind of info.
Even gaining entry Kingsway was a secret ritual, as another staffer recalls.
The entrance to LTK was akin to the TV series The Man from Uncle. Access to the duplex Waygood-Otis lifts was gained by walking into the Alfred Marks employment bureau in High Holborn near to Chancery Lane underground station. You then passed to the back of the bureau through a set of double doors to a lobby, where a guard was on duty to inspect your Deep Level Pass and the lifts were waiting. From there you went about 120ft below the London Underground into the Kingsway Exchange. There were several other shafts into Kingsway, one of them being the goods lift at Furnival Street. All apparatus was taken down this shaft, and the Cornwallis Road Power section mechanical fitters hated this lift. The lift was prone to wearing out its ropes prematurely and those ropes were 2:1 roped, meaning that there was twice as much rope as on a normal lift so that it could carry a heavy load. The shaft being so deep also meant that a rope-changing job was a heavy laborious task and never looked forward to.
First page, Secrecy was absolute: the newspaper was the Daily Worker, not the Daily Express.
The similarity between these cable tunnels and the tubes of the London underground lies not only in the style of tunnelling but also in fascinating might-have-beens. Unfinished rail projects have their parallels among the cable tubes, notably a number of proposed routes that were all rejected in 1952. These included tunnels reaching south to Kennington, south-east to New Cross and an ambitious east-west link from Paddington and Bayswater to Bethnal Green, with spurs to Museum Tandem and Bishopsgate exchanges. The high level of the water table made the tunnel to New Cross problematic but shortage of funds was the chief reason for cancelling these schemes.
The heroic but never built Northern Line outreach of the London underground to Bushey Heath has its counterpart in the cable tube extension along the Edgware Road from Cunningham exchange out to Colindale that also never reached fruition. A reader of the first edition adds a footnote on this subject.
I remember in the early 1970s, before the Colindale switching centre was built, watching a bunch of navvies dig a shaft by hand, with a view to extending the cable tube from Maida Vale telephone exchange, only for it never to be used. The shaft at Colindale T.E was dug around 1970-1, fairly near to the edge of the Edgware Road on the old ROMAC site that the Post Office had bought previously. As far as I know the shaft was sunk to its full depth, but nothing more done with it until it was decided to build an SSC (Sector Switching Centre) on the site around 1972. I don't know what buildings it intended to link up with, but certainly Brent Building (Gladstone B) and Gladstone (Cricklewood) T.E. were both in a direct line from Maida Vale T.E. up the old Roman Road (Watling Street), now the A5. Colindale SSC was eventually built right over this shaft, so all that digging effort was wasted; the base of the shaft can still be seen inside the sub-basement. The Irish navvies who dug that shaft by hand had only a large bucket and crane to help them. It was dug at incredible speed, especially after several pints of Guinness in the pub opposite at lunch time!
The Broad Sanctuary citadel was built between 1950 and 1952 as a single-storey concrete underground blockhouse. Designed to survive atomic bomb attack, it now lies covered by the Queen Elizabeth II International Conference Centre, opened in 1986. It lies about three storeys below surface level with a massive roof slab approximately one storey thick on which now stands the basement car park for the conference centre.
The way into Stronghold was through the lower ground floor (not the basement) of the current extension building.
Deep Level Outlet: All available evidence indicates that this new cable scheme was never built. The mystery of the £5,000 referred to in the Treasury file was a budget to cover costs the BBC had already incurred with the Post Office, although quite what these costs were remains a mystery; the sum appears too much for aborted Post Office planning work. The relevant BBC files, the Deferred Facility Progress Minutes, discuss this scheme (known as Deferred Facility No 17: Deep Level Outlet) at considerable length, covering not only engineering issues but also the legal ambiguities. “It seems likely that the BBC will own the tunnel and be responsible for maintaining it… any cables run in railway tubes are subject to removal at the request of London Transport Executive—in other words, there is no security of tenure. This disadvantage could only be avoided by constructing a tunnel connecting the Stronghold directly with the existing deep level tubes owned by the Post Office, but the cost would be considerably in excess of that incurred by the present scheme.” The file concludes on 5th July 1956: “This scheme has been closed.”
The ‘nearly bombproof’ annexe of Selfridge’s department store, mentioned in chapters 6 and 10, served during World War II as a communications centre for the US army and navy, also housing the terminal equipment of SIGSALY. It comprised two storeys above ground and two below, located behind the store at the Duke Street end with a small service road running between them. It was connected at both levels below ground by short tunnels under the service road. The entire annexe was taken over by the US Forces on their arrival in the UK and housed their Base Transportation Office for London. It was at the north end of this sub-basement that the UK/US secure communications facility known as SIGSALY was located (and kept secret from all other staff in the building).
The annexe survives, although on 6th December 1944 a V2 rocket landed on the Red Lion public house (corner of Duke Street and Barrett Street), which blasted the annexe severely. Some very rapid work was needed to shore up the sub- basement walls and this work can still be seen today. Fortunately this incident did not effect SIGSALY, which occupied a fortified space within the sub-basement. This space is now completely empty. The annexe has been extended upwards and contains offices and a canteen.
Duke of York’s Steps: That the tunnel goes no further is indisputable; Duncan Campbell shows it as a dead end on the souvenir map of his Mole Tour and a former tunnel worker verifies his assertion amusingly as follows.
Whilst patrolling the Gerrard T.E. (telephone exchange) tunnel, we would go as far as Whitehall T.E. and The Duke of York Steps in The Mall. On one occasion we got to The Duke of York Steps, and there was a gang of cable jointers working. Normally this is a dead end and you have to backtrack to Whitehall or even Holborn, but these cable jointers had a tent erected over a manhole at the base of the steps in The Mall. As they were packing up for lunch when we arrived, they asked us if we wanted to go out that way too. As it was a nice day we accepted their offer and proceeded to climb up. When we emerged from the tent, there was an American tourist couple staring with their mouths open at about 20 engineers coming out of a tiny two-man tent, wondering how we all fitted into it!
ABBREVIATIONS AND GLOSSARY
COBRA = Cabinet Office Briefing Area
HORSA = Acronym for ‘Hutting Operation for Raising the School-
leaving Age’, an initiative of the 1944 Education Act.
BOMBING AND THE BLITZ
German V1 flying bombs began to hit London, beginning on London on 13th/14th June 1944, not 12th January as stated.
© Andrew Emmerson & Subterranea Britannica 2007.