Eyewitness Reports of the Destruction of St Bride's
At the time of the destruction of St Bride's, three members of today's congregation who witnessed the devastation in December 1940, must have had doubts as to whether the church would ever rise again here in Fleet Street. But the rest of the story, to quote an age-old saying, is history.
Here, Brian Braithwaite, a Guild of St Bride member for ten years, John Colley (invested in 1979) and regular worshipper Hugo Dunn-Meynell, relate moving accounts of what it was like to be there, in the heart of the British newspaper industry, with its 'cathedral' church in ruins.
Brian Braithwaite writes:-
I had joined Mercers' School in Holborn in 1938 at the age of 11. When war broke out, the whole school was evacuated to Horsham, where it stayed during the remainder of the war. But my brother and I jumped at the opportunity to come back to London in December 1939 when the school decided to reopen for boys who wished to return to the capital. (In good time for the ensuing Blitz: that irony was capped in our case by the bizarre fact that we had been billeted on a German family!)
My father ran the advertising for J W Benson, the jewellers and watchmakers in Ludgate Hill. When we heard the dreadful news of the catastrophic bombing of the City of London on the night of December 29th, 1940, the family went up from our Chiswick home to check the Ludgate Hill shop and offices. Needless to say that there were no shop or offices - nor much of Ludgate Hill for that matter. The aftermath of that dreadful night was truly harrowing to witness in the cold light of day.
I have such a clear picture in my mind of the smoke, debris and utter destruction of the area. I remember that we walked up to Smithfield market and found ourselves treading on legs of lamb, packets of butter and other foodstuffs. Amongst the extensive damage, we saw the tragedy of St Bride's and the miraculous salvation of St Paul's.
From the age of 13, I have never forgotten the desolation of that morning in the street where I was to spend so much of my life in my subsequent career.
The school, of course, stayed in Holborn during the bombing, with many lessons taking place in the air raid shelter in the basement. During one particularly heavy blitz period, we had compulsory school work at home by correspondence course!
We boys enjoyed the Monday evening swimming sessions at St Bride's Institute Baths, having wended our way through so many ruins and bomb sites.
John Colley writes:-
The nightly bombing to which London was being subjected for those last four months of 1940 made little apparent difference to the way Fleet Street went about its business. The business of producing tomorrow's newspapers was so all-consuming there was little time to think about what was going on above; and that was true not only of those working in the great buildings housing the Nationals, but also in the basements of the scores of London offices of the big Provincial papers. That isn't to say there weren't moments of sheer terror when the ominous whistle of a bomb you knew was going to land close by could be heard, but once the immediate danger was over you just got on with the job that had to be done. It was such a familiar situation that one became hardened to it.
Outside, Fleet Street appeared to be its usual nightly hive of activity and got on with its job as much as circumstances would allow. News vans still dashed off to the London termini, couriers brought Govt hand-outs from the Ministry of Information, messengers from picture and news agencies dodged the shrapnel and bombs as they darted from office to office, even the odd tramp made his nightly call to cadge a cuppa. With most of the newspapers gathered together in an area all around Fleet Street the agencies - PA, Reuters, Ex Tel and the rest - sent the majority of their news through cables strung across the Street to tape machines in subscribing offices, all liable to disruption by bomb and blast - which brought more messengers delivering a hand service.
Night life in the Street at that time centred around the all-night cafes - and there were many of them, all doing good business serving sustaining tea and snacks. Pubs, of course, had to keep to licensing hours, but Fleet Street's two Black and White all-night milk bars did a roaring trade serving hot soup and a great variety of milk shakes!
Occasionally a fire-fighting party of three dodged from building to building, one carrying a bucket of water, one a stirrup pump and the third a hose on their way to put out an incendiary fire. Air Raid Precaution wardens made their nightly calls and public service vehicles on their way to or from 'an incident' were up and down the Street throughout the night. All in all there was hardly a quiet moment, either on the ground or up above!
Philip Gibbs in his book "The Street of Adventure" - a must for every young aspiring journalist before the war - summed up how Fleet Street was when he wrote it and how it was still during the Blitz... "taut with nervous energy". And it was that energy that carried us through those dark days.
Hugo Dunn-Meynell writes:-
On Eating and Survival
In addition to dropping high explosives, nearly every night of 1942-43 the Luftwaffe released cascades of incendiary bombs. I, just out of school, became one of the nocturnal Fire Bomb Fighters, colloquially called Fire-Watchers, our function being to inform the authorities if our own building had been hit, and to cope as best we could until the professionals arrived. Strictly speaking, we were conscripts, unlike the specially trained, more regimented Air Raid Wardens.
I already knew the City quite well, as my father had his feather merchant business in Fann Street - now part of the Barbican - until a land mine shattered the warehouse, temporarily covering a wide area with a mixture of goose-down and ostrich plumage.
Equipped with a torch, buckets of sand and water, a stirrup pump, and a small spade, I was to liaise with the leader of our tiny team stationed near St Bride's, while doing my best to cope with the incandescent pests. As I had previously dealt with quite a few of the species close to my home on the other side of the river, I did not find the prospect particularly daunting, especially since I was to receive remuneration of 3/6d per night - seventeen-and-a-half pence, no less!
My colleagues and I were a monastic bunch, since the routinely chauvinistic authorities had ruled that fire-watching was exclusively men's work. Our chief was Richard, an archetypal pinstriped managing clerk, a childhood polio case who every day struggled to London from his sea front home near a heavily mined beach, where the preparations for invaders were in frantic construction. Dick never told us much about these - "Careless Talk Costs Lives", the posters said - but occasionally loosed dark hints of some "pretty big stuff", then looked guilty for a while. There was Jimmy, invalided from the army after nasty injuries at Dunkirk and promptly "bombed out" in the hospital where they put him together again ("like Humpty Dumpty," he said cheerfully), amazing a succession of glamorous girlfriends with his patchwork of scars and stitches; Paddy, a 1914-18 sergeant-major, now proud parent of a 40-year-old of similar rank; and Fred, our janitor, a semi-disabled First-War veteran with a tedious flow of expletives. His language both shocked and bored me; how could the sole adjective in his vocabulary be used to describe everything from watery stout and Hermann Goering to Vera Lynn and (most respectfully) our "**** King and Queen, God Bless 'em"? His redeeming feature, however, was a hot line to one of the few surviving fish-and-chip shops in the City. Edgar, a WWI "Tommy", was First Reserve, though as a Home Guard Commanding Officer, he was technically exempt from fire-watching.
So there we were: Jimmy with one eye, Dick and Fred lame, Paddy ancient, Edgar seldom present, and me so wet behind the ears that, by common consent, I was appointed procurer of victuals.
Gradually, I developed special relationships with a number of traders in and around Smithfield and Billingsgate. They kept me informed about expected sausages or fish cakes, while there was a certain snack bar which would occasionally produce such "under-the-counter" delicacies as tinned soups and fresh pasties.
With enlightened self-interest, we welcomed visitors; they never arrived empty-handed, the guardians of neighbouring buildings sharing the spoils of their own forages in exchange for part of ours. One night, Paddy appeared with his son, who had access to Rainbow Corner, the American GI canteen in Shaftsbury Avenue. They brought some peculiar stuffed buns called "hamburgers". Dick, pining for decent cheese more than we did for steak, told us (so often that we could have screamed) how twelve months after the fall of France, a client had taken him to Simpson's, where heavy tippers could still cajole a wedge of Camembert out of the maître d'hôtel. Jimmy's mother worked wonders at Passover. Paddy and the missus occasionally struck lucky at a jellied eel stall in the Old Kent Road.
From Edgar, we heard about the very discreet court martial of a heavily aristocratic Home Guard private whose crime of stealing ammunition had been offset by his remarkable skill at picking off tasty rabbits, of which we obtained our share of the evidence. A school friend of mine, who had already managed to get into uniform, called one night clutching an unlabelled bottle of real navy grog; I'm not surprised that he eventually became an Admiral. Jimmy's much-decorated kid brother, holder of the RAF's record for the most sorties over Berlin, once turned up with huge can of peaches, but couldn't participate in the ensuing feast because of his terror during air raids. Occasionally, Fred and Edgar would reminisce about the Flanders trenches: I recall their discussing the relative merits of two mademoiselles from Somewhere-or-other, Fifine and Marie-Thérèse, barmaids whose various services each had patronised decades earlier. "I liked Fifine best," said Fred. "She worked wiv yer, if y'know wot I mean ..."
Let's face it, our conversation was mainly about food, but I hardly need say that black-market comestibles did not feature. Some luxuries could be bought quite easily, we knew, but it would never have occurred to us to tap into the system; just not cricket. I was to be amazed, during my post-war forays into liberated France, to learn that frequenting the marché noir had there been regarded as a demonstration of patriotism.
Parishioners of St Bride's will have noticed a nearby café named Jones Dairy. The former scattering of these in the City was a great haven for fire-watchers, if only because the Minister of Food, persuaded that we needed hearty breakfasts, made it possible for us to be fed bacon with - believe it or not - an egg each, plenty of toast, and excellent coffee (bang went the 3/6d). Thus fortified, we footed it back to the office, noting with sadness the destruction of neighbouring premises like St Bride's.
Came the day when I took the King's Shilling and said good-bye to my motley of fellow anti-incendiaries. I occasionally go to the City these days, usually to visit St Phoenix's - as I now think of that lovely Wren church - or to attend livery banquets. But as I pass along Fleet Street, my mind always turns to our Jerome K. Jeromesque camaraderie of sixty-plus years ago. I am, of course, the only survivor, but like to think of the others enjoying the paradise they deserved - of Dick making up for the lost Camembert years, and Paddy and son sharing celestial Big Macs. I'm sure Jimmy was quickly forgiven the ham sandwiches eaten on a Dunkirk beach, though Edgar's titled miscreant may have had some explaining to do about the rabbits. As for Fred, I've no doubt that he was reunited with the industrious Fifine.