The ‘Big Bomb’ in Shawfield Street- Friday 1st November 1940.

Contemporary images of Shawfield Street in 2022 by Tim Crook.

Shawfield is a rather unassuming street running south for about a quarter of a mile from around the middle of the King’s Road parallel to Radnor Walk to the East and Flood Street to the West where it is tapered to the South by Redesdale Street.

It was a classic late Victorian residential road of three and four storey terraced houses including a basement and attic room, usually for two or three servants- a cook, housemaid and housekeeper, and a garden behind.

During World War Two these were perfect locations for Anderson shelters- sheets of corrugated steel covered in earth.

So suitable for the modest middle classes holding down a profession, or honourable members of titled families living on private incomes and occupying themselves with respectable work.

In the alternative, it was a good landlord’s street where the four storeyed dwellings could be rented out for multiple occupancy- serving Chelsea’s community of students and artists and the lower middle class army of clerks and shop assistants who provided the services for the London Metropolis.

But what you would see now in the first decades of the twenty first century is a curious mixture of the Victorian and middle to late twentieth century architecture. It looks like a giant had cut the street almost in half and replaced the old with the new.

The real estate is super affluent multimillion pound town houses. High end and expensive cars take up the residential parking spaces. The scale of the building is the same. But the age is separated by several decades. The new builds have basement garages.

This is because on Friday 1st November 1940 one of the most powerful high explosive bombs hitherto dropped on Chelsea wiped out large swathes of the housing about half-way down on the side bordering with Flood Street and rendered uninhabitable much of the terraced housing opposite.

It left a massive crater which was so deep civil defence workers would say they had never seen one like it before.

Jo Oakman recorded in her Blitz diary that numbers 32 to 44 Shawfield Street were completely destroyed.

In fact many more of the houses had been wrecked and devastated by blast beyond all recognition and future habitation.

Location as it is now.

The bomb also impacted on Hoadley Cottages which were set off by a narrow passage behind Flood Street, the Hall of Remembrance in Flood Street, and Radnor Walk.

The human suffering experienced and heroism shown by those holding out while trapped in the wreckage and being rescued by ARP civil defence teams is heart-breaking to read and contemplate even 84 years later.

There are no memorials present, though the local church Christ Church does commendably commemorate the names of its parishioner victims killed during the Blitz and this includes the victims at Shawfield Street.

Historical and contemporary images of Christ Church in Chelsea. (Public domain postcards and photographs by Tim Crook 2022)

I implore you to remember the names and lives of the real people involved, and what they went through whenever you might be passing through or see the street sign from a taxi or bus travelling on the King’s Road.

I, for one, cannot walk down Shawfield Street without saying a prayer and blessing for those who died and those who did all they could to save them.

-o-

The Chelsea Blitz: Chelsea at war between 1939 and 1945 by Tim Crook is coming soon with publication by Kultura Press in 2026.

The book will contain in narrative form all of the postings on Chelsea Blitz history posted and in continuing development in Chelsea History and Studies. Publication is by popular demand from people and online readers wanting to have a book form of this remarkable story of the people’s history of Chelsea during these dramatic years.

It is expected to be the most comprehensive history of Chelsea during the Second World War years to date.

The online postings will remain on open access though with all rights reserved.

-o-

By the end of September 1939, 217 people were registered as living in Shawfield Street. It was mainly bedsit and private lodgings Chelsea. Most of those wealthy enough to have a place in the country had skedaddled and left their keys with letting agents.

Chelsea’s pre-war population of around 57,000 fell to 33,000.

But in 1940 Shawfield Street was jam-packed with people living and working in London because they had nowhere else to go or because in their own modest ways they were doing their bit for the Home Front.

At number 52 there resided 55 year old plate washer John Smith, chauffer mechanic Thomas Boyle, who was 35, and two women- 24 year old Margaret Franklin and 84 year old Harriet Hutchison both recorded under the heading of occupation as doing ‘unpaid domestic duties.’

In number 32, saleswoman Grace MacFarlane , 31, was living with Mrs Sybil Morandi, 39, and her 37 year old husband Leo who was a builder’s labourer, along with 29 year old domestic servant Eileen Ellwood.

This was a road of bricklayers, gardeners, post office telephonists and GPO engineers, housepainters, porters, cooks, clerks and electricians. Perhaps the most unusual trade belonged to 70 year old Arthur Bullworthy, a longstanding lodger at number 4, who was a billiard maker.

30 year old artist and designer Kenneth Eslick Floyd lived with his mother Mary at number 8 with four other people including retired master mariner John Perry now into his seventieth year. Kenneth Floyd would shortly enlist in the British Army and do his war service with the Royal Artillery.

At number 12 Lina Wallace (Hirschl), who was 41 years old and ‘of private means’, was a nurse in the ARP- just like the author painter Frances Faviell/Olivia Parker. Also residing in the same house were Police Matron Alice Coole, 53, and dress designer Alice Smith, who was 22 years old. They were being attended to by ‘Cook General’ Daisy Gilson.

The British photographer and surrealist painter Peter Rose Pulham lived with four others at number 16. Pulham (1910–1956) was an associate of Pablo Picasso and Max Ernst and close friend of Francis Bacon.

At this time he was the lover of Irish born writer, model and actress Theodora FitzGibbon née Rosling. Many of Peter Pulham‘s surrealist paintings were later destroyed when his studio was hit in the parachute mine bombings of Old Church Street in April 1941.

Two women in the street were listed as ‘War Reserve constables’ with the Metropolitan Police. They were Joan Keir Rabey and Kate Robinson at number 20.

Police Sergeant with the London and North Eastern Railway , Arthur Wood, lived at number 13 where 30 year old local cinema attendant Patricia Hunn (Ruff) was also residing. Patricia could have been working in any of the three cinemas in the King’s Road- The Classic (near Markham Square), The Gaumont (at the junction of Chelsea Manor Street north side), and The King’s (at the junction of Old Church Street), changing its name to The Ritz in 1943 and then the Essoldo in 1949.

Solicitor’s clerk Arthur Dunn, 26, lived with his parents Thomas and Mary at number 11 and was also working with Irene Haslewood in the Chelsea stretcher bearer squads operating out of Carlyle School buildings in Hortensia Road.

There was another Chelsea stretcher bearer living in Shawfield Street, Trevor Burrenstone, a 28 year old book salesman at number 27 with his wife Vera who was a waitress. Marion Macrae, 55, was the landlady of that household. She had two other tenants, stock-keeper for drapers Marie de Marnyhae, still working at 74 years of age, and another waitress- Joan Perrin who was 30.

19 year old Phil Sanders at number 1A was serving as an aircraftsman in RAF Coastal Command headquarters.

53 year old part-time butcher Arthur Spare at number 33 was working in Chelsea ARP civil defence.

Margaret Greentree, 32, was working as an orderly in one of the local hospitals when not looking after her incapacitated mother Nellie, now 59 years old, at number 47 Shawfield Street. Their neighbour Harold Weaver in number 45, was a clerk for Chelsea Borough Council only a few streets away at the Town Hall in the King’s Road.

Alfred Prowse, 51, a civil servant with the Ministry of Pensions, was living with his wife Florence, 52, and their 24 year old book-keeper and typist daughter Lorna at number 31 Shawfield Street.

Margaret Maddison, 46, at number 17 Shawfield Street, was working in war munitions as a ‘shell turner.’ She was lodging with 83 year old retired architect and surveyor Samuel Shepheard.

These are a few snapshots of the people of Shawfield Street in Chelsea during the early years of the Second World War. A fair amount of the population was transient. lodgers, servants, and tenants changed month by month, but some people had been there for most of their adult lives.

Street maps showing Shawfield Street in 1900, 1913, 1937, 1940 (from Luftwaffe intelligence files) and 1947

‘Hopelessness seems to reign supreme’

That final day of the week and marking the beginning of the third month of the Blitz had been very damp and wet through the early hours. ARP Warden Jo Oakman had been out on patrol on her bicycle while anti-aircraft guns opened up at planes high overhead.

The day remained drizzly and misty. Sometimes a strong wind blew in from the River Thames carrying with it heavier rain.

There’d been an all clear at 7.10 in the morning and Jo had just sat down for breakfast only for the sirens to wail again an hour and seven minutes later.

Breakfast had been spoiled. Mid-morning patrols on her bike again, and buying some fruit for one of her air raid casualties and leaving the gift at St Luke’s Hospital in Sydney Street.

By lunchtime more planes could be heard over Chelsea in great numbers and there was the dramatic sound of machine guns and straining aircraft engines as RAF Hurricane and Spitfire fighters engaged in a dogfight with German Luftwaffe bombers and their escorting Messerschmitt Bf 109s.

Jo had been distressed and frustrated when the afternoon was taken up with an investigation at Post Don in Glebe Place into the disappearance of the handbag and contents belonging to one of the victims of the bombing of the air raid shelter situated in the crypt of the Church of Holy Redeemer on 14th September.

Jo Oakman was appalled when one of her Warden colleagues was as good as being accused of stealing ‘that wretched handbag.’ She had learned that a reporter from the Daily Mirror had been at the Town Hall chasing a story about the alleged theft and Jo surmised this had been due to a tip-off from Mabel Lethbridge.

The heavy high explosive bomb which blew up in Shawfield Street was recorded at one minute past seven in the evening. Most people in Chelsea heard or felt it.

Sunset had been around 4.30 p.m. so it was dark when the bomb came down. The velocity of the blast generated huge clouds of brick dust and plaster which mingled and held in the drizzly mist of this miserable night.

The black-out rendered those struggling to understand what had happened additionally blind.

The Town Hall Control Centre recorded that at least six houses had been completely destroyed with casualties in Shawfield Street, and Hoadley Cottages in Flood Street. Another house had been battered in Radnor Walk.

Jo did not attend the Shawfield Street incident as she was directed to patrol her Cheyne district for the rest of the night and this was accompanied by a ‘terrific bombardment of AA guns.’

She visited the scene in Shawfield Street five days later on Tuesday 5th November at around 4.30 in the afternoon. She said the street ‘has the largest crater I have ever seen. The high explosive was supposed to be 4,000 lbs.’

The 4,000 lb bombs dropped by the German Luftwaffe were given the name ‘Satan’ and it could certainly be argued their impact was indeed satanic.

The bomb dropped on Shawfield Street at one minute past seven on the evening of Friday 1st November 1940 is believed to have been the first 1,700 kg (near 4,000 lb) Satan bomb dropped by the Luftwaffe on London in the Blitz of 1940.

It is therefore of additional historical importance. These dreadful bombs developed the notorious reputation of blasting out craters capable of holding two London double-decker buses.

Jo Oakman saw that the bomb had fallen between Radnor Walk and Shawfield Street and ‘created terrible havoc.’

She was told the incident had claimed around twenty people dead and sixty injured and wrote in her diary: ‘Hopelessness seems to reign supreme. From the rear- all the roofs in Radnor Walk seem damaged.’

‘The raw brutal smell of dissolved houses’

Air Raid Warden John Strachey put on his civil defence overalls when sirens and the cacophony of an air-raid ruined his dinner. He lived only a few roads away from Shawfield Street in St Leonard’s Terrace.

His ARP Warden’s observation post was at 46 Tedworth Square and the house he occupied was later pulled down and its site redeveloped.

It was five minutes to 7 p.m. on Friday 1st November. Outside he was immediately assailed by a man demanding ‘Warden! Come and see these dreadful lights. Don’t you think you ought to put them out at once.’ He had to explain: ‘I’m afraid I can’t put those lights out. You see, those are flares dropped from German aeroplanes.’

He could also hear a low flying bomber droning lower and lower and meeting the barrage of Chelsea’s anti-aircraft batteries. The man telling him off wore a trilby hat and Strachey started saying ‘Don’t you think it rather unwise to stand about without a tin hat just…’

It was at this point the world changed into slow motion surrealism as a threatening swish of a falling bomb prompted him to fall full length into the gutter. Thud sound but no explosion followed. Perhaps it was a delayed action high explosive bomb.

Mr Trilby Hat was still standing and lecturing on the best way to deal with the Germans. As John Strachey walked passed him there was another menacing swish followed by a loud bang.

As Mr Trilby Hat continued outlining his strategy for bombing Berlin, this area of Chelsea began to rain falling glass and cracking broken masonry.

Strachey now ran towards the source of something deeply disturbing in the vicinity of Shawfield Street. The outline of the houses looked unfamiliar.

ARP Wardens had specially adapted torches that could give near light without being seen from the air. A couple of cellars appeared to be smashed up.

Was that a crater? With other Wardens they strained their eyes, but the darkness was like ‘overlapping black rough woollen curtains.’

Something simply wasn’t there.

As he began to walk down Shawfield Street people staggered out of smashed houses and they began to realise what was missing.

Half way down there were no houses to be seen. Just the smell of powdered rubble from dissolved houses filling his nostrils. A raw, brutal and haunting smell of shattered homes and disintegrating humanity.

The peculiar and particular darkness hanging over Shawfield Street was not just due to a moonless night, but from the existence of a massive unsettled dust cloud.

The first emergency vehicle to arrive was the mobile medical unit of doctor, nurse and stretcher-bearers from St Stephen’s Hospital.

They’d gone into number 50. John Strachey followed them. Ground and first floor were largely intact apart from blown out window frames and piles of crushed plaster.

He got as far as the two top-floors which had been shattered into a crushed confusion of rubble, slates and roof timbers. The roof overhead had gone. The house had opened up to a night display of shell bursts and reflected gun flashes illuminated by ‘a searchlight waving its futility.’

The advance paramedic team of doctor, nurse and a two man stretcher party were administering to an injured man lying crumpled in a heap of plaster rubble. This was 29 year old electrician Thomas Henry Drummond.

But his breathing was laboured and violent. Doctor and nurse were trying to get a tube down his throat- in the modern era this is called intubating or an upper endoscopy.

One of the stretcher-bearers gestured to John that ‘There are two more in there.’

He was pointing to what had been a back room. The ARP Warden cautiously moved into the wrecked room using torch and metal hood. Roof timbers lay across it. There was something dark lying at his feet.

The beam of his torch revealed the figure of 28 year old waitress Kathleen Alice Elizabeth Ralph.

She lay partly in and out of a small mound of plaster and brick.

It looked like she had hurriedly put on outdoor clothes, blue zip trousers and two pullovers over her pyjamas perhaps to get ready to spend the night in a shelter when she heard the air raid sirens.

Sadly she had not moved quickly enough to safety.

One of her hands was curved behind her head and her legs bent so her body presented a gentle S shape.

The shock of finding her combined with the flashback memory of a skeleton of a prehistoric girl of the Mousterian Age from an abri he had seen a few years before in the Museum of Prehistory in the Dordogne.

He thought they both shared and presented a vision of elegance and beauty.

Was she dead? There was a severe head wound. He picked up her unresisting hand and felt for a pulse. He was sure he could feel one, just a very feeble beat. He went back into the other room and asked ‘Is there a doctor here?’

One of the stretcher party said ‘He’s a doctor, but he’s busy.’ Indeed he was. An oldish man, it could have been Dr Richard Castillo, or Dr Frederick Phillips, was still tending to Thomas Drummond, though none of the rescuers had any idea who their victims were at this time.

John Strachey said urgently: ‘I think the girl in here is alive. Will you come and see?’

The doctor completed what he had to do for Mr Drummond so that the stretcher team could take him to street level to be loaded onto a London County Council ambulance to the nearby St Luke’s Hospital.

He then followed John Strachey to see what he could do for Kathleen Ralph. He started with a hypodermic needle put into the grey and debris-encrusted flesh of her arm. He felt for the pulse, but could only say ‘Very improbable. Where’s the injury?’ Strachey said ‘Her head I think.’ The doctor replied ‘Her head?’ as though in astonishment.

He ran his fingers over her skull and under her blood and rubble matted hair and had nothing to say. Strachey asked hopefully ‘Shall I take her downstairs?’ The doctor must have looked at him with some pity and appreciation of the forlorn hope in his question.

He had to meet this with the cruel reality of all the disappointment Strachey would feel in the word ‘No.’

Kathleen Alice Elizabeth Ralph, the daughter of the late George Frederick Ralph, a petty officer in the Royal Navy, and her mother Catherine, and born on 27th October 1912 in Chatham Kent, had died.

Kathleen did not live at number 50 Shawfield Street. She had only been a visitor and like so many tragic victims of the Blitz experienced the cruel cliché of simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In all likelihood she had been a friend or acquaintance of Thomas Drummond.

She had to be left lying in the debris looking through the open roof at the night sky still angry with the lights and sounds of war until her body could be recovered at 10.30 the following morning.

She was formally identified by her sister and laid to rest at St Mary’s Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green on Saturday 9th November 1940.

‘A strange night this’

Irene Haslewood had just begun a card game with her stretcher bearer unit at the ARP Depot in Hortensia Road when the air raid sirens wailed at 6.45 p.m. on 1st November 1940.

So they tooled and dressed up with helmets on. The call-out came a few minutes after 7 p.m. and they were the first squad out with Irene driving them down the King’s Road knowing their destination was Shawfield Street.

Shouting over the sound of the accelerating Hillman car engine they were speculating about what kind of incident they were being sent to.

Although trained and equipped for acute air-raid rescue and salvage, they were being used as auxiliary ambulances and were often called out to pick up unconscious drunks tripping up and knocking themselves out in war debris or somebody having an epileptic fit on a road crossing.

What struck them was the pitch blackness in the chill damp drizzle greasing the windscreen and coming onto their faces from open side windows.

No fires from burst gas mains or incendiaries evading the attention of firewatchers to light up their way.

A Home Guard soldier stopped them at the junction of the King’s Road and Shawfield Street where they parked.

They had to literally grope their way down the road. At the half way point they could just make out the dim shape of a ruined house against the sky line. But wasn’t this a house damaged in a previous raid?

Before they could find an answer one of them stumbled and nearly fell into what they had not realised was at that time one of the biggest bomb craters in London. ‘The Big Bomb’ that made it had fallen on Shawfield Street only fifteen minutes before.

Now everything became clearer. Half of Shawfield Street and right into the backs of the houses in Flood Street had been razed to the ground. There did not appear to be a soul about- just a queer silence disturbed by the bass drone of German bombers overhead.

Irene’s stretcher team were ordered to search the houses for walking wounded. This was not easy because smashed upper floors had filled the staircases with heaps of rubble and debris.

Their first success of the night was getting a man out of the wreckage of his top floor home using a ladder. He clambered down safely still carrying his beloved canary in its cage.

All he could say after getting down was ‘There’s nothing left in that ****ing house’ and he drifted off into the darkness and direction of a local pub- most likely the Cooper’s Arms on the corner of Redesdale Road and Flood Street.

It was at this moment that the world and experience of Irene Haslewood and John Strachey would come together.

This is because it was Dai Davis and Bill Thatcher- two members of the Stretcher Bearer squad driven by her- who were at the top floors of number 50 Shawfield Street with the doctor and nurse attending to Thomas Drummond and Kathleen Ralph.

Irene was on the pavement as Strachey beckoned the doctor to see if he could do anything for Kathleen. And she was there when Davis and Thatcher had strapped Drummond to the stretcher for the descent down the perilous stairs littered with rubble and loose masonry.

The young man had a terrible compressed fracture of the skull. It may well have been the case that Strachey was there helping them by clearing away some of the debris and using his torch to highlight where whole steps of the staircase had been blown away.

Irene wrote ‘To bring a fully loaded stretcher down them was a work of art which they did very nicely.’

However, the ambulance had not yet arrived. Irene was furious and recorded in her diary that it was a disgraceful consequence of the Big Bomb incident straddling two different districts covered by separate posts of ARP Wardens.

Lack of coordination and communication meant Thomas Drummond had to be placed in the street on his stretcher and Irene ecalled: ‘To my dying day I feel I shall always hear those gurgling snores of the poor devil as his life ebbed away. We had always been told about compressed fractures causing snoring but luckily one’s imagination does not go very far when one is listening to a dreary lecture.’

But the horror and distress of this scene would get much, much worse.

Thomas Drummond’s grief-stricken mother Lucy arrived to find her son in this terrible condition.

She was a 69 year-old widow horrified to discover her only son and child groaning in the last throes of his existence.

She threw herself onto his body crying out in despair and with distracted grief. The whole squad implored her to desist as her howls filled the darkness.

She was unable to comprehend any of their well-meant reasoning.

Irene Haslewood would later write: ‘…finally the poor woman had to be dragged away by force. It was terrible – simply terrible. Mercifully the ambulance then arrived and the poor fellow was taken off to die in hospital.’

Thomas Drummond did in fact die at St Luke’s Hospital that very night. His mother Lucy was cared for and accommodated at the Cheyne Hospital in Cheyne Walk from where she would claim his body for burial.

He was laid to rest in Streatham Park Cemetery in Rowan Road on Tuesday 12th November 1940.

Lucy Drummond would pass away in Chelsea in 1949 at the age of 78, a widow and mother who had outlived her only son by eight years.

‘Chelsea’s biggest yet’

Frances Faviell had felt the tremendous thud of the ‘Big Bomb’ on November 1st 1940 at her home in Cheyne Place. Geographically she was only a few hundred yards from the impact. The ears of her dog Vicki pricked up and the dachshund looked startled perhaps in a way she had never previously shown.

Plaster came down from the ceiling. Plates and pictures fell from Frances Faviell’s studio walls.

She went out into the Royal Hospital Road to find out if she could discover and understand what had happened.

Everything seemed as it should be apart from a deep haze of what looked like November fog rising into the sky behind Cheyne Place.

Earlier that day she and her husband Richard had been entertained by their friend David Fyfe, a press officer working for the Ministry of Information, who lived in the very grand and historical house at number 1 Swan Walk.

David had invited them round to celebrate the fact that doctors had given him a clean bill of health for a life assurance policy and he was going to propose to his girlfriend Rosie. He was 43 years old and they had toasted his future good fortune that very evening.

When Frances went back into her flat, the phone rang and David Fyfe’s man servant desperately pleaded with her to come back quickly. He believed his master was dead.

It seems only three quarters of an hour had been the difference between the bonhomie of saying au revoir to a friend celebrating the prospect of long life, happiness and future marriage and now lying unconscious, grey-faced and on the edge of life and death.

When Frances and her husband got there, she thought there was a faint pulse. How ironic her experience almost mirrored that of ARP Warden John Strachey with the stricken Kathleen Ralph on the open top floors of 50 Shawfield Street.

Frances managed to get through to a doctor she knew who was on duty at St Luke’s. Advised to send David over to them by ambulance, Frances realised how difficult this would be in the middle of the chaos and confusion of ‘the Big Bomb’ incident.

Fortunately, she was able to organise her First Aid Post at the Victoria Hospital for Children in Tite Street to send for one of the Hortensia Road stretcher-bearer units.

As she wore the uniform of a Red Cross volunteer, the stretcher bearers, highly sceptical of whether Fyfe was indeed still alive, insisted she used her medical skills and status and give them the authority to convey him to accident and emergency at St Luke’s in Sydney Street.

Frances decided to follow them on foot in order to discover their friend’s fate while her husband Richard was required to report for fire-watching duties.

On the way there she encountered the Stygian madness of the devastation in and around Flood Street, Hoadley Cottages and what had been nearly half of Shawfield Street.

She found herself in the middle of what Jo Oakman had described as acute helplessness.

A half-dressed and confused woman with blood running down her arms talked of people trapped in the basements of their houses where they thought they would be safe.

Soon Frances could hear their plaintive cries.

ARP Wardens were there and quite rightly warned her not to scramble through the undulating piles of smashed and upended homes.

Civil defence now had specialist light and heavy rescue units who were expert in how to preserve life by burrowing and shifting debris so as not to precipitate further collapse and more injury and death to those trapped inside.

In the acrid stench of blasted homes and the swirling clouds of rain, brick and plaster dust all she could do was call out to those crying for help ‘It’s all right. They’re coming. They’ll get you out. Keep calm.’

When she got to St Luke’s her worst fears were realised. David Fyfe was dead.

Without a post mortem, it was impossible to know exactly why, but Dr Thompson surmised he had an underlying coronary condition which had been triggered by the shuddering percussion of the ‘Big Bomb’ sending a wave of death through the ground like a small earthquake.

For all the grandeur of his Chelsea existence David Allan Fyfe had a modest background having been born in Edinburgh where his late father William had been a butcher.

The 1901 census records David being brought up at Edinburgh’s 11 Wilfred Terrace by father William and mother Bella with a younger brother John.

His passing was announced in the Edinburgh Evening News on Wednesday 6th November.

He had made his way to British India to make his fortune as an assistant tea planter on the Peninsula and Oriental Steam Navigation Company’s liner ‘Malta’ from the Port of London on the 1st of May 1917.

He was then 21 years old and bound for Bombay.

He must have had hopes of marrying his girlfriend Rosie at Chelsea Old Church where he had been an usher at his friend from India, Vernon Harold Barlow’s marriage to Brenda Heyworth in April 1940.

David Fyfe died with personal wealth of £5,967 15s 10d which the Bank of England’s inflation calculator values at the time of writing (11th April 2024) at £276,556.91.

Hoadley Cottages

The Hoadley Cottages were nineteenth century dwellings tucked in between Flood and Shawfield Streets. Access was through a narrow entrance to Flood Street where The Post Office placed the address.

John Strachey had been sent there because they had been demolished by the Big Bomb blast and people were trapped.

Half a dozen or so rescuers were digging hard at what was now a ghastly mound of debris. Strong cries and groans were coming from it.

It was now raining steadily and he’d taken off his coat and gas mask so as to join the fast digging. No time for filling of wicker baskets. Fast throwing back of whole and half bricks was what was required.

Minutes and seconds mattered here.

He rather thought they must have looked like a line of ‘gigantic and insane rabbits, furiously digging their burrows’ into the ground.

In ten minutes they had made an appreciative impression and it was good that the cries and groans could still be heard and were getting louder and stronger.

One woman’s voice became distinguishable: ‘Oh, my God, we’re done for. I know we are. I know we are. Why don’t you come?’

In the darkness there was another man on the mound- neither rescue squad, nor warden, nor stretcher-bearer moving about uneasily and ducking to avoid the stream of flying bricks being thrown backwards through people’s legs.

This could have been the local Vicar of Christ Church- just around the corner- who was the Reverend H. Claude Harland at the time: ‘That’s quite all right, Mrs Hamilton. Now don’t become frightened. We’re getting to you very rapidly. There is no cause for alarm. All will be well.’

Strachey caught a glint of the Vicar’s dog-collar and well-meaning face in the light of one of the Warden’s torches as he continued his assurances to Mrs Hamilton who was ignoring him and of course could see nothing.

After half an hour of moaning and ecclesiastical ministrations, one of the rescue men had had enough.

‘Shut up! Shut up!’ It was said in a way that was neither brutal nor callous.

He had been sweating his guts out digging down to her and her groaning and his calling had got on his nerves.

Mrs Hamilton did shut up and so did the Vicar. The Reverend’s presence was of course fully appreciated. He was there giving comfort and consolation to his traumatised parishioners.

And whether he was in the company of believers or not, he was an encouragement to the civil defence workers.

It is also quite conceivable that the clergyman described by John Strachey may have been the Reverend Harland’s young curate, the Rev. E. M. Jenkins, as he is credited in the Parish magazine in November 1940 for carrying out ‘some useful rescue work’ that night.

When visiting a bombed building ‘His method of entry was to dive down the coal chute. In the basement he helped extricate a woman from the debris and pushed her up the chute to deliverance.’

And there is another possibility that the clergyman may have been the legendary Reverend Walter Gordon Arrowsmith, the vicar of St Luke’s, who became a hero blitz comforter and consoler at nearly every serious Blitz incident involving casualties in Chelsea during WW2. He was remembered for the help he provided at the Bramerton Street tragedy of September 9th 1940.

It seems likely all three clergymen could have been there fighting to save the lives of people they knew and whom they served as worshippers in a church also scarred and bombed by air raids.

Sketches of Shawfield Street’s local church Christ Church by Louis Thomson in 1938-9 depicting front, Chancel and Pulpit

Reverend Harland knew how to chronicle the Battle of Britain in this little Parish of Chelsea bound by the River Thames, King’s Road, Flood and Smith Streets:

‘There is something dramatic about this great city being hammered in this great moment of man’s destiny. It strikes the imagination of the world which sees a people willing to let its historic buildings be reduced to powder rather than surrender its freedom in defeat. When a big issue is at stake our people instinctively, and by the guidance of God Himself, unerringly make the right choice. Our mature political experience and the God-given power to choose between right and wrong unites the nation in resistance to a menace worse than the destruction of its ancient treasures.

Human destruction and suffering are more distressing than the loss of material possessions and yet this price is being paid also. People have laid down their lives through enemy action in this parish, in this borough, in this London. They should be honoured alongside the sacrifice of Navy, Army and Air Force, for as London stands firm in spite of casualties she is winning one of the major battles of the war. In place of her ancient memorials, which may be destroyed, she is building character and immortal fame in history. The worth of her people is greater than the worth of her monuments. It has eternal significance. What we are matters more in the long run than what we possess’

Back to the bomb site of Hoadley Cottages on Friday night 1st November 1940, and the rescue squad was engaging in an operation tried and tested before in terms of saving lives.

A shaft was being sunk from two opposite ends of the mound and their intention was that they would eventually find Mrs Hamilton in the middle, hopefully alive.

John Strachey and the rescue team were actually digging out the wreckage of number 3 Hoadley Cottages. Buried in there somewhere was 43 year old painter and decorator Thomas Wallace Hamilton, his wife Ethel, also 43, and their sixteen year old daughter Eileen.

The rain was now turning all the plaster and brick dust into a black sludge. The anti-aircraft guns would open up a cacophony of salvoes when an enemy bomber could be heard hovering directly overhead and the rescue men would all shout ‘Lights! Put that light out!’ and they were insisting on every torch to be turned off, even those carefully masked and used by the diggers.

They were determined that the Luftwaffe would not be dropping any more explosives or incendiaries on the rescue scene and contrary to the mythology, bombs did strike and fall on the same place twice. And those struggling for air and clinging onto life under the crushing weight of rubble would happily testify ‘Yes, you do bloody well hear the bomb that’s going to hit you.’

The rescue team would call for silence every ten minutes and call out to the buried people to give their positions. Over an hour there seemed to be three voices including that of Mrs Hamilton.

Eventually there would be only two women’s voices.

The Hamilton family had been saved by the miracle of something holding up an unshattered floor. It might have been one or two joists or even a displaced group of bricks.

Suddenly John Strachey and two of the rescue men uncovered a man’s leg striking out of the debris from the knee down. It gave out one convulsive kick or twitch and then hung still.

All they could do was carry on digging as the rest of the body was deeply buried. There was still some kind of audible voice belonging to it but it was getting fainter and weaker and eventually went silent.

Strachey was sent for jacks. It became evident that the Hamilton family’s survival depended on a very low cave no more than six to nine inches high under about ten feet of unbroken floor.

A jack began to crank open and the corner of the floor shifted upwards a few more inches, but in the slippery rain the jack kept giving in to the weight of the debris.

The frustration of the rescue team gave way to the exchange: ‘Can’t do nothing here. Let’s go’ followed by ‘Shut up, you bloody bastard, they’ll hear you.’

There was never any intention of giving up. They would find another point of attack. Mrs Hamilton started up her groaning and crying out again and this time it gave them more determination and hope.

This was combined with the black comedy of a Hospital nurse from the emergency mobile medical team fussing about her lost spectacles. For some reason she had taken them off- perhaps to find something to wipe the rain off. But a rescuer’s boot had most likely ground them into the rubble. She wandered off repeating ‘My spectacles, my spectacles’

The irony was not lost on everyone that they were all indeed wandering blind in the darkness of that night physically, spiritually and emotionally.

The jack was in action again and the floor was rising several inches. Strachey was sent to get a prop. He was only away for about 150 seonds. On his return Ethel and Eileen had either crawled or been pulled out. They were lying on stretchers and gulping at cups of tea from a thermos.

They talked to each other excitedly as the stretcher-bearers carried them through the narrow entrance into Flood Street and onto a waiting ambulance.

By this time Strachey and the rescuers were soaking wet. He found his coat and gas mask which were disgusting to handle because of the sticky grit covering everything.

He clambered over the debris towards Shawfield Street to find another rescue squad digging around the wreckage of an Anderson shelter. The tough corrugated steel sheets had been torn open. He likened it to a huge sardine tin opened up with a road-drill. It seemed the occupants had been flung in all directions and were somewhere in earth, brick, mortar and splinters of wood.

Strachey accidentally found himself stepping on a lifeless body. The rescue team struggled to push back three strips of heavy steel and retrieved the bodies of two men and a woman that had been entangled by the blast into one another. They now lay on a neat little row of stretchers.

They too were taken through the Flood Street entrance of Hoadley Cottages to be driven to the mortuary in Dovehouse Street.

The body of Thomas Hamilton was eventually released from the wreckage of his home at 1.15 a.m. on the Saturday morning. Unlike his wife and daughter he had not had enough cover from the undamaged floor and succumbed to the bomb blast and falling masonry injuries caused by the total destruction of his home.

He was, however, still dressed smartly in his dark grey suit and blue pullover as though ready to meet potential clients who wanted their house painted and carrying his National Registration and Identity Card which everyone in war-time Britain now had to have with them at all times, bearing his number AFBD/187/1.

John Strachey was conscious of acute fatigue in his knees and ankles and made for the blue lights station that all incident officers set up when they were dealing with a Blitz incident of this magnitude in the middle of the night.

This was when he came across the extreme lip of the Big Bomb’s thirty foot deep crater with vertical sides and presenting a deadly void he had never seen before. It was impossible to climb up or down its sides; particularly in the darkness.

He reached the incident officer at 23.33 hours. There was a jug of hot, sticky, sickly tea stew waiting for him and he was ordered off-duty to rest, clean up and return at 0400 hours.

As he made off he was struck again by the harsh, rank, raw smell of torn, wounded, dismembered houses and acrid overtone of high explosive combined with the stink of domestic coal gas seeping up from broken pipes.

This was the smell of violent death itself.

Biography of John Strachey by Hugh Thomas first published in UK and USA in 1973

‘Is anybody there?’

Irene Haslewood and her stretcher-bearer team were scrambling around the huge demolished area calling out ‘Is anybody there?’ over and over again.

They got no reply. They knew the occupants had had little time between the sirens and the Big blast to get to their Anderson shelters or basements. How many were unconscious? Had most of the occupants escaped unscathed or were walking wounded who had already made it to the rescue centres and FAP posts?

Chelsea had one of the best ARP Civil Defence organisations in the country. A bigger proportion of the population had volunteered than for any other Borough or council area.

That was why the Home Office chose Chelsea for the big public relations bombing home defence exercise in June 1939- just under four months before war was declared.

ARP Wardens had specific streets, roads and blocks of flats allocated to them with a duty to have an up-to-date record of anyone residing in every house, flat and lodging. They would often have the keys as well as always knowing the key-holders of empty residential and business buildings.

Despite the confusion of two Warden districts trying to work together with a massive bomb incident straddling their boundary, they were in fact doing an efficient and effective job of search, rescue and identification.

Irene was floundering about in sodden ruins in thick drizzle without torches because of the enemy bombers overhead and with the warning that it was very likely a large time delay bomb had been dropped within thirty yards of their big crater.

She had a quaint English way of understating her exasperation: ‘That did not add to the gaiety of nations at all.’

She was also getting used to a new stretcher-bearer recruit- 18 year old public schoolboy Graham Court- out on his first night duty and not making a particularly good job of it.

He was very short-sighted with half an inch thick glasses that were continually misting over in the rain and he had the greatest difficulty seeing anything in the total black-out conditions.

He refused to leave Irene’s side for one fleeting second and would take a step forward when she took one and turned round every time she turned round. This almost dancing double-act amused the other stretcher-bearers so much they began referring to him as her son.

They would have been wise to avoid calling her ‘mother’, as she may well have left them to find their own way back to the Depot with the long walk back up the King’s Road in rain-drenched clothes and gear.

After being ordered back to Hortensia Road, Irene reported their anger over the alleged failures of the ARP Wardens’ ‘criminal mismanagement’ of the incident.

There was a rumour that they could have been there to take wounded people buried in an Anderson Shelter- ‘This is the sort of thing that makes for bad feeling between the two services.’

‘I can sniff’em. Always know when they’re just corpses’

John Strachey could not get a wink of sleep between getting to his mother’s house in nearby St Leonard’s Terrace just after midnight and going back on duty in Shawfield Street at 4 a.m.

The adrenaline of those three hours between seven and midnight on the 1st of November had been enough to keep him awake for many days.

His first task was to take a group of men from the Gas Light and Coke Company to plug a huge leak in a basement of one of the wrecked houses where heavy rescue workers were digging for victims.

Strachey was rather impressed at how they set about their task as you would set hounds on a fresh scent. He managed to lead them into a basement half full of rubble with a ‘dickey ceiling’ and four or five rescue men at work. The stink of gas was very bad and the leak urgently needed fixing.

There was the risk of fire from sparks and of course the fumes could easily finish off anyone trapped in the debris as well as poison the rescuers.

Outside he was approached by a young man in A.R.P overalls who was looking for his mother in one of the demolished houses. She had always slept in the basement and he was certain she was there. Would they dig for her?

Well of course they would. It was the devastated stretch of houses in Shawfield Street between numbers 30 and 40.

Rather than sink a shaft vertically down, the Heavy Squad leader decided to access the basement through that of a neighbouring house and tunnel through a party wall. Strachey was invited to squeeze through on his hands and knees.

The four floored house had collapsed in on itself with masonry, timbers and furniture wedged all the way into the basement ‘like the after-effect of a glacier or avalanche.’

The young ARP man asking after his mother came back and when invited to climb through and look at the situation himself said he realised there was no hope that she was alive.

He had a fine grip of himself and said: ‘I drive one of the Council’s mortuary vans, so if you get her out let them know at the Town Hall and they’ll send me down.’

Chelsea rescue work during the Blitz of World War Two was so heroic and indefatigable because the rescuers knew they were digging out their own. That is why there were so many George Crosses, George Medals, OBEs and other awards made to recognise what they had done.

The squad leader eventually came out of the tunnel to say they had found the lady adjacent to a settee soaked in blood and most of her body was still fixed in the debris. One of the rescue men said to Strachey:

‘A course I could’ve told ’em she was dead before they started digging. I can sniff ’em. Always know when they’re just corpses. I just know when those that are underneath are alive and when they’re dead. I can sniff’em.’

At around 6.15 in the morning the ‘All Clear” sirens sounded. It was light by seven. Strachey now had a clear view of the damage done by only the one very large bomb- certainly of the largest size being dropped by the Germans at that time.

Its landing was directly upon several Anderson shelters built in the back gardens and yards. The crater was the deepest he had ever seen. For some distance from the rim everything had been levelled to the ground.

Beyond that shattered houses were still standing all with their doors and windows blown out.

Some of them had debris stacked up against them as high as their first-floor windows. It looked like some huge night tide or tsunami of broken ships, rocks and sea growths had been washed up their side.

Nine houses had been totally destroyed. Eighteen were so badly damaged they would have to be pulled down. It would be established in later days there were many more where only the basements were habitable.

The photographs at the top of this posting showing the spread of late 20th century architecture replacing the Victorian terraces is the mark today of the extent of this tragedy.

By Saturday morning, it was clear that the number of people injured and killed was much less than originally feared and the figure of those losing their lives was not as high at 20.

The people confirmed dead were a mixture of the young, old and middle-aged.

In addition to Thomas Drummand and Kathleen Ralph, both in their late twenties and from number 50, there was a newly married couple, 26 year old electrician Percy Illot and 30 year old typist Edna Illot who had been killed.

They had been living at number 38 Shawfield Street.

Percy’s body had been found at 1.15 a.m. on Saturday 2nd November. He was dressed for work or a night out in brown suit, blue shirt and tie, pullover and with a handkerchief still in his top pocket.

Edna had been wearing an elegant black and white checked coat which was quite the fashion for the time. She had been taken to St Luke’s Hospital on the Friday night, but died there shortly after arrival.

18 year old Beatrice Lanham from number 38 had also died after being rescued and taken to St Luke’s. She died there at 8.45 a.m. on the Saturday morning- just 45 minutes after John Strachey’s second shift had ended.

Her mother Lily, who was 42, was still missing and so was 47 year-old Miss Annie Ring.

65 year old Henry Baker and his 26 year old daughter Violet, who was an A.R.P. Control Centre worker from number 40 were also missing.

70 year old Mary Elizabeth Fitzgeorge from number 40 was found dead at 1 a.m. in the early hours of the Saturday morning.

The body of 65 year old Georgina Ward of number 36 was found fifteen minutes later.

66 year old widow Mercy Brown of 34 Shawfield Street was found deceased at 5.15 a.m. that morning.

45 year old Emily Wakeling from number 38 was found deceased at 7.15 a.m. also on the Saturday morning.

Rescuers were also looking for 57 year old Charlotte Violet Blanche Munro, who was known by her middle name Violet, from number 40 Shawfield Street, but they did have an idea where she was and her body would be found and dug out by 3.15 p.m. during the Saturday afternoon.

Violet was a typist working in the City of London and had only rented the two rooms at number 40 just three days before the bombing.

It was a cruel twist of fate that her new lodgings would be where she was killed within 72 hours of her moving in because she had previously lived with her sister at 11 Redburn Street which had been damaged in an earlier air raid.

Before that she had been living for 25 years at 62 Finborough Road, in Fulham.

Hers was the only funeral of Shawfield Street victims reported in local newspapers. Her employers and family attended leaving beautiful floral emblems placed at her graveside in Kensal Green Cemetery on 7th November 1940.

John Strachey and colleagues were given leave at 8 a.m. to return at 2 p.m. that day. This time he slept like a log.

The incredible courage of Miss Annie Ring

When he returned to the scene, the mood was gloomy. It was so sad picking up clothing, blankets, the odd shoe, and personal documents and putting them in a bedraggled heap in one of the abandoned houses.

And it was still raining. The heavy and light rescue squads didn’t have good enough Macintoshes or a change of overalls. Many of them were still in the same clothes they had on when first arriving in Shawfield Street just after 7 p.m. the previous night.

Most of the rescue squad now on duty were working in a cave they had dug out almost at the top of the mound of debris which had previously been the two houses taking the full force of the blast.

There was some tapping heard from below. ‘Silence!’ was demanded as one of them crawled inside and listened for any sound of life as the light rain pattered on the broken bricks and mortar.

He was sure he heard more tapping and he shouted down into the debris at the top of his voice “All right! Stick it! We’re coming! We’re coming!’

He was so loud those there were convinced he could have been heard at Chelsea’s home ground of Stamford Bridge- at least two miles away in Fulham.

John Strachey was determined to join this rescue operation and got permission from one of the ‘White Helmet’ chiefs of the ARP Warden districts.

Now the whole squad was in a furious pace of action grabbing the debris and flinging it aside. They knew they would have to move tons of it before they had any hope of finding anyone in that morass of destruction.

Strachey was filling baskets and passing them back along a chain of hands to be emptied. Every fifteen minutes or so there would be the order for silence in order to determine the continuation of the tapping, but eventually there would be a consensus among the rescue men to ‘Cut it out. Get on with it. You’re holding up the work. We haven’t much time.’

Everyone was not just thinking about getting to the person as quickly as they could, but to try and do so before dusk and thoughts of another night raid.

The very large, irregularly shaped mound of debris was being attacked from three different directions.

Soon they were amazed and delighted to hear that the tapping had changed into the sound of a human voice. There was somebody buried underneath all that and that somebody was definitely alive.

It was now half past three on Saturday afternoon.

‘Who are you?’ shouted one of the rescuers. ‘What name? What is your name?’

‘Thing!’ Did you say “Thing”?’

From the end of this tunnel he turned his face up to shout ”Thing, Bing, or Ring, or some such name.’

The ARP Wardens had been updating all their records and the running census of who was living, staying and visiting where and when, who was in a hospital, in a rest centre, who was dead, and who was missing.

The white helmeted Chief Warden cross-referenced, paused and said ‘There should have been a Miss Annie Ring.’

‘That’s right’ said the rescue man. ‘Ring. That’s what she’s trying to say.’

Now they knew for sure, they were burrowing like hungry and desperate moles to find a definite person, whose name they knew and they were determined to reach her.

It was now half-past four and the light was perceptibly weaker. This was going to be a race to get her out before full darkness and the fireworks of the Blitz began all over again.

They soon found an intact area of flooring- very similar to the cover for the Hamiltons at 3 Hoadley Cottages.

Miss Ring must be alive under a tiny lean-to. A team of tunnellers were digging away a shaft to get under this area of flooring.

There was no let up. By five a clammy dusk gained on the daylight.

At 6.20 p.m. the sirens went. ‘He’s back’ said one of the tunnellers. The anti-aircraft guns began first from distant batteries south of the river and then there was the sharp crack of local guns blasting away at the rising and falling drone of the bombers’ de-synchronised engines.

The rescue squads took no notice. But Miss Annie Ring could certainly hear it.

She began a wailing. It was hardly surprising that her shattered nerves had given way.

She produced an incoherent and terrified sound which occasionally crystallized into words: ‘It’s there again. They’ll get us all; they’ll get me.’

The rescue men shouted back: ‘No, they won’t. You’re all right. Stick it now. Stick it Miss. We’ll get to you in no time.’

‘Can’t you save me? Don’t be so slow. Why don’t you come?’ she wailed back.

‘Shan’t be ten minutes now’ they answered.

It was now half past six in the evening Saturday 2nd November. Fully dark and another air-raid with its symphony of terror in sound and ghastly light show of death in full performance above them.

In just over half an hour it would have been a full day since ‘The Big Bomb’ flattened and wrecked half of Shawfield Street and entombed 47 year old Annie Ring.

The Heavy Squad leader feared exhaustion and fear had taken their toll of two of his men who had burrowed a two to three yard tunnel and suggested they ‘knock it off a while’ to get some rest. ‘No way’ they insisted.

His entire team said they were going nowhere but to where they could dig out Miss Ring. He organised for a big tarpaulin to be erected like a rough tent over the mouth of the tunnel so the diggers could use their torches.

John Strachey and others with their steel ARP helmets formed a snake holding up the tarpaulin and passing back the filled baskets of excavated rubble and these came back after being emptied.

The exertion and speed of burrowing was relentless.

‘I can touch her hand now’ said one of the human moles. The corporal of the stretcher-bearer team replied: ‘Alright. Doctor says she can have this morphia tablet.’

This was passed down and Miss Ring was told: ‘Can you take this in your hand, Miss?’

‘She’s got it’ they heard.

The tarpaulin canopy created a little private torch-lit world of their own which sheltered them from the ‘rain-soaked, gun-thudding, bomber-droning world outside.’

They felt safer, but Miss Ring emotionally did not.

Her wailing became worse because all she could hear was the terror of the guns. The stretcher-bearer corporal explained: ‘The morphia always makes ’em worse to start with.’

It was now seven o’clock. ‘I can see her head now’ said the rescuer closest to her. Another said: ‘That ain’t her head. That’s her arse. She’s lying this way.’

A surreal, and in the circumstances, rather funny argument developed about her anatomy, which they all realised perhaps only Miss Ring could settle.

The arse-head conundrum also calmed her nerves. The wailing changed into the occasional sob.

John Strachey got a message solely directed at him: ‘Warden. Party here wants to see Miss Ring.’

He came out to find the tall, elderly and rather infirm-looking figure of a man in black coat and white wing collar.

‘I am Archibald Ring. Miss Ring’s father’ he said. ‘Is there any hope that my daughter is alive?’

Mr Ring was a 72 year-old carpenter though in his early years he had been a wine cellar clerk when following his father’s trade.

For fifty two years he had been a proud and much respected joiner and carpenter and had been admitted as a member of the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers trade union in 1925.

He and his wife Elizabeth had been longstanding residents of Chelsea having moved to the borough from Bermondsey.

Their daughters Annie and Mabel were both born in Chelsea and at the time of the 1901 census they were all living at 10 Bury Street, which is now called Bury Walk.

By 1921, the Rings were living at 83 Pelham Street, in South Kensington.

At that time Archibald was a carpenter for the high class building firm of Frederick Barr in Beauchamp Place, Annie was 27 years old and working as a domestic servant for the rich American Hulsizer family at their London residence in Cranley Gardens.

Annie’s youngest sister, 8 year old Phyllis and also born in Chelsea, was still at school.

By the start of the Second World War, mother Elizabeth had passed away, and Annie was now working as a gown machinist.

Father and daughter had been in lodgings in Brixton Hill, Lambeth. It seems Annie had simply been visiting a friend in Shawfield Street with her dog on that fateful night.

John Strachey said to Mr Ring: ‘But yes. Certainly she’s alive. We shall have her out very shortly now. Don’t be alarmed. I think I can arrange for you to speak to her now if you like.’ said Strachey.

Archibald Ring seemed overcome with emotion and speechless. He simply bowed his head and Strachey went back underneath the tarpaulin explaining ‘Miss Ring’s father is here. Can we let him come down to speak to her?’

They all agreed and a chorus of the rescue men could be heard saying ‘Stand back for Miss Ring’s father’ as John Strachey led him into the tent and half-pushed him into the mouth of the tunnel and about half-way down it.

The rescue man at the end said: ‘Here’s your father come to speak to you, Miss. Speak to ‘er, Dad.’

‘Is that you, Annie’ said Mr Ring in such a tiny voice it was impossible for her to hear him. Another chorus from the rescue men: ‘Speak up. Speak up, Dad, do. She can’t ‘ear you.’

And he did speak up but the emotion was so great the elderly gentleman’s voice broke. It was loud enough for Annie to reply ‘Is that you, Dad?’

Then they all handed the old boy out again. Had this held up the work needlessly for a couple of minutes? Not at all. This was good for everyone’s morale. A feeling of hope not dread was spreading.

The digging resumed furiously and Annie Ring’s voice articulated with much greater clarity. She was talking about her dog- ‘Right across my knees’ she said.

And the extraction was happening so quickly, John Strachey was amazed to see Miss Annie Ring facing him clear of debris from the waist up.

He could see a slight woman in her forties, her face and hair encrusted with greyish debris. Now she could see and talk to him and her rescuers, she was perfectly calm, and Strachey was so happy to see her there sitting ‘contentedly and innocently, like a dishevelled child sitting up in bed in its night nursery.’

She was proudly talking about her black Labrador retriever: ‘Scratched for me, he did. As soon as the first lot came down on me, I heard him scratching for me and barking. And then the second lot came down, much more heavy, and killed him, right across my legs.’

The Heavy Rescue man-mole closest to her said: ‘Saved your legs, lying soft on’em like that.’

Trying to move the body of her dog with the rubble next to her, hurt her legs: ‘Oh, my legs!’ she cried as her rescuer replied: ‘All right, Sister, all right. Bound to hurt a bit as we shift him off.’

A rope was now being used to free her. ‘I know I’ll never have the use of my legs again’ she said only for her rescuer to reassure her: ‘Oh yes, you will, Sister. In ten minutes (for it was always going to be ten minutes) when we gets you out, you’ll find the use of them legs coming back to you prompt. That poor beast’s body has saved them legs of yours.’

Annie Ring’s confidence and hope was now so strong she began chatting about her life in war-time London: ‘I’m a seamstress. Don’t use power machines in our shop. All treadle machines. Wouldn’t think big firm like them would have treadle machines, would you? Old-fashioned’ she went on.

The lead rescuer now had the rope fixed under her dog: ‘Now, Miss, we’re going to lift this dog off of your legs. May hurt a bit as the blood comes back into’em.’ And Annie Ring’s dog soon began to move on his order to ‘Now heave.’

It was gradually pulled back through the tunnel until it reached the last man in the line, John Strachey who now had charge of its heavy, soft, black body. He treated it with the same reverence accorded to the human victims of the Blitz.

Miss Ring carried on talking about her life and work, wondering if she’d be long away from her job and would somebody at the Hospital be kind enough to tell her firm what had happened. She didn’t want to inconvenience them.

Eventually Annie was helping to shift broken bricks and rubble herself from the area around her left leg which was beyond the reach of the diggers.

John Strachey, remembering how unpleasant it was to handle the jagged debris with one’s bare hands, took off his right glove and said: ‘Here’s a glove for her; pass it down.’ They took it, saying ‘Glove coming down.’ and Annie did put it on her right hand.

In about fifteen minutes Annie Ring was now fully excavated and uncovered.

The corporal of stretcher-bearers called out: ‘Ready for the doctor’ and as the trim, Macintosh coated figure of the doctor ducked his head under the tarpaulin, everyone heard ‘Doctor coming down; all out for the doctor’ as though a grand butler was announcing the arrival of the Duke of Chelsea at the Summer Ball.

He began to examine Annie’s legs. ‘They’re broken, Doctor, I know they’re broken’ she said. ‘No, no, I don’t think they are at all. Let’s just see, let’s just see’ he replied.

He asked for a splint and two triangular bandages which were passed down to him and bandaged her right leg to the splint. ‘That’s all we need to do here, Miss Ring’ he said. ‘Now you’re coming out’ and he wriggled himself back up through the tunnel.

John Strachey then witnessed a remarkable use of a new invention and improvisation in the London Blitz of 1940. It was impossible to get a traditional stretcher down through the narrow and irregular length of tunnel.

The stretcher-bearer corporal called to his men: ‘Fetch the Neil Robertson!’

Who indeed was Neil Robertson with the definite article?

In a little while they appeared with ‘a curious looking white object.’ The tarpaulin was rolled back and everyone worked with unscreened torches. No German planes could be heard overhead now.

The Neil Robertson was an enormous pair of stays stretched the full length of the body, made of white, tough canvas, reinforced with struts made either of a light metal or some pliant wood such as ash. This bent and rolled up into almost any shape.

Down this went through the sloping tunnel and gently and expertly it was slid under Miss Annie Ring. She was now able to considerably help herself by wriggling and rolling onto it.

There were straps which could fit across her body and firmly hold her in place and gradually they were able to pull her inch by inch through that confined, awkward and narrow space out into the open street and liberty.

Her confinement in that nightmare had lasted just over a day.

When the waiting LCC ambulance backed close up to the mound it was now nine o’clock.

John Strachey saw a calm and seemingly unshocked Miss Ring and when noticing that his glove was still on her right hand, he deftly bent down and slipped it off. She did not even notice.

At the time he thought this was the sensible thing to do as the glove could not possibly be of any further use to her.

But afterwards and in the years following when experiences such as this became the stuff of flashbacks, guilt and haunting memory, he could not help feeling he had been so mean in taking it back.

He had always particularly hated losing one glove of a pair as he not infrequently did:

‘So that even after twenty seven hours of the Shawfield Street incident the impulse to prevent that happening was still strong in him. Of all the things that happened in the course of this long incident this lending and recovery of his glove stuck most obstinately in his mind.’

Strachey saw Annie Ring driven off to St Luke’s in the ambulance. He went up to the doctor to enquire if in his opinion she had been badly injured.

‘Not at all, not at all. So far as I could ascertain, from the very superficial examination that was all that was possible down there, there is no grave physical injury. No limb is broken and there appears to be nothing else seriously the matter with her.’

These words gave John Strachey and all the Wardens and rescuers a feeling of so much elation and triumph. They had wrested Miss Annie Elizabeth Ring from the choas and evil of ‘the big bomb.’

Twenty-seven hours of stubborn digging, the use of the Neil Robertson stretcher, and bloody minded determination had brought them a victory.

This was their Dunkirk of the Blitz.

Annie Ring had been dug out from the depths of hell alive and well. Strachey went off duty and slept the deepest of sleeps.

‘I found a lovely black Persian cat’

Irene Haslewood was ordered back with her stretcher-bearer squad to Shawfield Street for salvage work on Sunday afternoon the 3rd November.

She had a cold and the weather was miserable with heavy rain turning all the dust on the bomb site into an ugly black-grey and slimy mud.

To compound everything they had to work in their ludicrously heavy and cumbersome anti-gas ‘suits’ as there was no guarantee that ordnance falling from the German bombers did not contain chemical warfare.

She explained: ‘The anti-gas kit is one of the comic issues of the war. It consists of trousers and a coat of voluminous proportions – built to fit a 17 stone hat. It is supposed to be waterproof but actually lets the rain through wherever it touches the body. We were just side splitting figures of fun.’

She refused to put on her tin hat with sheikh-like draperies and later regretted it when the wet mud dripped down her back.

In the afternoon daylight they had another view of the vast Shawfield Street crater. 70 feet deep in their opinion, and an estimation that the bomb penetrated 60 feet before exploding and turning the ground and houses upside down. At least sixteen houses had been smashed to pieces. She could see the demolition at the back of Flood Street.

She reflected on the appalling sameness of bomb ruins. Once a house had been demolished it became a heap of dust, rubble and shattered wooden beams.

Bombs and their destruction did not discriminate between the palaces and mansions of millionaires and the poor humble terraces of working class families. The salvage was the same. The damaged contents were rarely recognisable.

Because the blast had literally reversed the geology of the area, London clay and soil was now on top of the crushed housing originally built upon it.

65 year old Henry Mundy Baker’s body was recovered at 6.30 a.m. on the Sunday morning. The ‘coach body repairer and trimmer’ working for a garage in Pavilion Road Chelsea, had been living at number 40 Shawfield Street. They believed the body of his 26 year old daughter Violet, who had been working as a commercial clerk, was close to being found that day.

42 year old Lily Lanham of number 38 was still missing. Her 18 year-old daughter Beatrice had died at St Luke’s Hospital at 8.45 the previous morning. Beatrice had won a local junior scholarship from Christ Church elementary to go to secondary school and had been working as a clerk for wine merchants.

So by the time Irene Haslewood was helping Chelsea Borough Council dustmen shovel unsalvageable belongings into refuse lorries, only two women, Lily from number 38 and Violet from number 40 were the people now not accounted for.

Violet’s mother, Emily, and her two older brothers Alfred and Francis were standing by always hopeful and not surprisingly expecting the worst.

Lily’s husband Harry, a 47 year old collector of debts and salesman in the coal trade and well known in the Christ Church Parish, was also there with their 15 year old son George, both anxiously waiting for any news of what had happened to her.

By the Sunday afternoon a heavy rescue squad from the Fulham Borough district was taking its turn digging out the mound looking for her as well as Violet Baker.

And Irene Haslewood’s newly recruited and desperately short-sighted 18 year-old progeny Graham Court ‘in an excess of zeal went mountaineering’ over the big mound and brought down quantities of debris onto the heads of the Fulham rescuers. They were furiously indignant.

The stretcher bearers were paralysed with shame and matters were not helped by a long daylight air raid in progress above them with an ‘incessant drone of the Boche planes.’

Irene managed to calm feelings when she explained how very young and inexperienced he was. This was only his second day on duty.

But then Irene found a ‘lovely black Persian cat’ which had been terrified out of its senses. The ARP Warden said he believed it belonged to a house in Flood Street.

When she realised this meant walking only a few yards from a suspected unexploded time-bomb, she left the cat in Graham’s arms in search of its owners.

This made him the laughing stock of the rescue men who mocked him mercilessly.

She did find the house in Flood Street, but this was in semi-ruins and the occupiers long evacuated.

The bomb disposal team working on the delayed action bomb kept digging and digging down, but had been growing more and more sceptical that it had ever existed.

Royal Engineer soldiers were interrogating ARP Wardens who had been on duty on Friday night. ‘Are you sure you heard two swishes coming down?’

In the end, it would be fully established that all this horror and devastation was the work of just one big nasty bomb.

By the time Irene Haslewood had returned to Shawfield Street, Graham had given the cat to the Warden who had in turn put it into a house with no windows and the frightened beast had inevitably escaped.

Not a very successful day’s endeavours and no rescue cat for the Chelsea Cats’ Home.

During the last hour of their shift, there was a commotion after Violet Baker’s body had been found at around 4 p.m.

She had been extracted from the crater into a waiting mortuary van, still dressed smartly in red brick jumper, blue skirt and red slippers.

It seemed as though the bomb had caught her just as she had returned home from work and was about to have supper.

‘He kept saying to me, “I’m going now.” He knew they wouldn’t reach him in time.’

On the Sunday John Strachey was also on duty and after being harangued by the rather discontented RE Bomb Disposal Squad who were quite rightly sure they were searching for a phantom delayed action bomb, he decided to revisit the scene of Hoadley Cottages.

He came across Ethel Hamilton’s brother who was salvaging family belongings and had been given permission to do so by officials in the Town Hall close by.

Strachey asked: ‘Can you tell me how Mrs Hamilton and her daughter are doing?’

‘Very weell, very weell indeed’ the brother said. ‘I saw them last night in hospital. Eileen has not the use of her legs yet, but they say there’s no serious harm done to them. And Mrs Hamilton has no more than severe contusions, they say.’

‘What hospital are they in?’ Strachey asked.

‘St Luke’s in Sydney Street was the reply.

Back in Shawfield Street, the wardens’ lists now confirmed that it was only Mrs Lily Lanham who was missing.

The total casualty list, if it included her, was thirteen dead and six injured. [In fact the total number of fatalities would be fifteen when the deaths of two more people taken to hospital were taken into account.] Wasn’t this a miracle when they looked at the devastation all around them?

John Strachey thought of visiting the Hamiltons at St Luke’s and also Annie Ring if she was being treated there.

He decided to go there with fruit and flowers late afternoon on Wednesday 6th November.

Visiting victims in hospital had become something of a tradition for ARP Wardens and rescuers in Civil Defence during the Blitz. Friendships blossomed and people of all backgrounds bonded in those desperate moments when people found themselves together on the meeting ledge of life and death.

He was impressed with this London County Council hospital. It was run with less red tape and ‘prison-intimidation’ even though it was linked to the adjoining Chelsea Workhouse.

They let him into the women’s air-raid casualty ward even though it wasn’t visiting time. There was no fuss.

There were ten to a dozen women in separate beds all in a row. He had to ask for Ethel and Eileen Hamilton as he had scarcely taken in their faces in all that darkness and debris.

Ethel and Eileen were so pleased with John Strachey’s visit. They immediately tucked into the juicy Kent apples he’d brought in the fruit basket and they were so eager to talk about and share with him what had happened.

Ethel started with ‘We didn’t hear a thing, did we, dear?’

She continued ‘We were all three just sitting round the fire when the house began to fall in. Then it went black and we didn’t know nothing till we woke up under the debris. I could hear Eileen here calling, and father too. But we couldn’t say much because whenever we opened our mouths we choked with the dust. It was the dust more than the weight that killed Father.’

Mrs Hamilton’s eyes filled and she continued: ‘Of course we could feel that terrible weight on our legs, couldn’t we Eileen? But it was the dust that was choking us. The worst was that Father couldn’t have gone directly when the house fell. He kept saying to me, “I’m going now.” He knew they wouldn’t reach him in time.’

John Strachey remembered Mr Hamilton’s twitching leg. ‘Did you hear the rescue men working?’ he asked.

‘Of course we did! Weren’t they splendid?’ replied Mrs Hamilton gesturing to him with respect and admiration.

He filled them in on what was happening above them: ‘Did you know they were using their jacks to lift the floor off you? Before they got the jacks they were pretty well stumped, you know. Perhaps you heard one of them saying they might as well go home?’

Mrs Hamilton said: ‘Certainly we did. But, of course, we knew he didn’t mean it. Baffled he was. Baffled like? Were you there?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I was there.’

‘Eileen,’ Mrs Hamilton said, ‘do you hear that. He was there digging for us.’ The sixteen year old girl smiled and nodded in acknowledgement and thanks.

Had Chelsea Borough Council organised a place for them to stay when they came out of hospital? Mrs Hamilton explained: ‘Oh, we’ve had more than a dozen offers from friends to take us in. Don’t you worry about that.’

John Strachey then thought he should ask ‘I want to find a Miss Ring, who was also dug up. Is she in this hospital?’

Mrs Hamilton’s face suddenly changed. ‘Ah, Miss Ring- she died yesterday.’

This news struck John Strachey in the heart deeply. He was in a state of acute shock and disbelief.

‘No that can’t have happened!’ he cried, but all the other women in the Ward were listening and nodded their heads so sadly.

Ethel and Eileen Hamilton looked upon him with sympathy. ‘She was along in the end bed there. Went yesterday poor dear.’

‘But, but Why?’ he almost shouted as though he was challenging all the evils of the world and demanding an explanation from God. ‘Why did she die. She seemed all right. Surely she can’t have died.’

The ward sister came up sensing she had another casualty to attend to. As he sat in a bedside chair, she patted his hand and asked one of the nurses to get him a cup of tea with many sugars.

‘Why did Miss Ring die? We dug her up after twenty-seven hours. She was perfectly all right. She talked to us just as I’m talking to you. Now you say she’s died.’

The Sister explained ‘Shock partly, also multiple internal haemorrhages.’

Mrs Hamilton nodded: ‘It’s my belief it was mostly shock. She seemed all right when she first came in. Talked to us all. But at night when the guns began again. It turned her fair frantic. She was all right in the daytime. But she couldn’t stand the guns and the nights. Kept calling out and calling out, she did. And last night she went.’

[It is also possible to zoom in with close-ups of the aerial images showing the LCC funded St Luke’s General Hospital with an emergency casualty unit and ward during World War Two on the embedded links in this sentence. In fact there are still two buildings on the corner of Dovehouse and Britten Streets which were part of the original St Luke’s Hospital estate. These are what are now the Britten wing of the Royal Brompton Hospital and a small two storey building next to it in Britten Street with two chimney stacks.]

John Strachey would never forget or emotionally come to terms with what happened to Miss Annie Ring. For him her death was an indelible mark of the abject cruelty, injustice and inhumanity of World War Two.

What he didn’t realise at the time is that there were many deaths of Blitz victims seemingly largely unscathed after being buried and rescued in bombing incidents. Eventually Coroners, forensic pathologists and the medical profession would discover the cause.

Bomb blast and debris internally damaged muscles which would become infected with sepsis and without the right antibiotics at a time when treatment by sulphides and penicillin was at its early stages, apparently intact and unharmed Blitz victims would die without a mark on their bodies.

The Ward sister was right. Whatever the tribulations of Annie Ring’s post-traumatic stress continuing to trigger her despair during the continuing nightly air raids, it was the internal bruising of muscle tissue which would lead to her death and that of many others.

‘Have some guts, man!’

John Strachey’s ARP post was deeply depressed by the news. But they were kept busy with coordinating complex back-up services during the day for bombed out victims, moving and storing furniture and belongings, finding alternative accommodation, and reclaiming salved possessions.

John Strachey’s spirits were somewhat restored when hearing of Ethel and Eileen Hamilton’s visit to the Chelsea Registry Office across the King’s Road from the Town Hall to register her husband’s death.

“We’re all right; we’ll come out on top”, she chirped at the Registrar.

The Registrar no doubt intending sensitivity and sympathy replied ‘I hope so Madam.’

Mrs Hamilton roared in response: ‘Have some guts, man!’

These words John Strachey and all the Chelsea Wardens got to hear about with pride.

‘Have some guts, man!’ became their motto.

Those words were indeed Churchillian, but there was much, much more than that resonating through her pluck, chutzpah, and defiance.

In the words ‘Have some guts, man!’, Mrs Ethel Hamilton spoke for her generation. As John Strachey would write later:

‘Mrs Hamilton was an obstinate woman. You may drop big bombs on her; you may kill her dearly loved husband before her eyes; you may bury herself and her daughter under her home; but you do not alter her.’

He could have added she was and never would have been defeated in any sense of the word.

Chelsea’s ARP Wardens went in force and in uniform to Thomas Hamilton’s and Annie Ring’s joint funeral service at the incendiary singed and bomb battered Christ Church.

They were determined to show their respect and if the Reverend Claude Harland had invited them to exclaim Mrs Ethel Hamilton’s battle cry ‘Have some guts, man’ they would have done so with gusto.

Instead he read a passage from the Book of Common Prayer:

‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down, like a flower: he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay….Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto him the souls of our dear brother and sister here departed, we therefore commend their bodies to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’

But this was not the end of the big bomb incident in Shawfield Street.

Where was Mrs Lily Lanham? London’s Civil Defence forces were never prepared to give up the search for her.

The digging at what had been 38 Shawfield Street continued through the entire month of November and into the first week of December.

It was not until 5.30 p.m. on Saturday 7th December 1940 that she was found and she had been preserved in the London clay so well that her grieving husband Harry was able to say goodbye to her when she was still elegantly attired in black dress, green striped pullover, and pink blouse.

They had been only weeks away from celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary.

The heroic recovery of her body had been achieved by members of the Auxiliary Pioneer Corps called upon on Wednesday 6th November to help in rescue and recovery work for the first time. They had been persevering and relentlessly digging until they had found her deep beneath the very pit of the enormous crater.

Harry Frank Lanham would marry again in 1941 to Mary Goarty and have more children. After the war they moved to the new council development at Wiltshire Close. At the age of 68 he was still working, this time as a painter and decorator.

Unfortunately, in August 1961, the scaffolding he was working on in Moore Park Road Fulham collapsed in on him and he was killed.

A subsequent inquest revealed he had not been warned that the scaffolding had not been properly secured.

All the boards gave way underneath him and his co-worker only survived by clinging to a window ledge.

Artist Joseph McCulloch did paint the scene following the Shawfield Street bomb and this was displayed and reviewed in an exhibition of civil defence artists in the Cooling Galleries of New Bond Street in March 1942.

At the present time it is not known where this painting is or even if it has survived the 84 years since its creation.

John Strachey would write his evocative and moving experiences as an ARP Warden attending the Shawfield Street bomb in the best-selling book Post D Some Experiences of an Air-Raid Warden published by Gollancz only one year later in 1941.

Wartime censorship meant all the real names and locations were pseudonymous.

The research and writing for this posting is the first time the real people and narrative have been fact-checked and corroborated with public records.

Thus the extraordinary and inspirational pluck of Mrs Ethel Hamilton and the courage, endurance and tragedy of Miss Annie Ring can be publicly recognised and appreciated for the first time, along with all their rescuers.

The reality and truth of war on the Home Front in an area of Chelsea now associated with glamour, affluence and gentility can also be told and properly remembered.

Christ Church in Chelsea has created an elegant and dignified panel memorial to the people of their parish who died during the Second World War and this includes those killed while on active service in the armed forces and civilians killed as a result of enemy action.

Professional museum curator and St Luke’s churchwarden Louisa Price has very kindly photographed Christ Church’s memorial and the images are presented in the slideshow below. The names of the victims in Shawfield Street on 1st November 1940 and other bombing incidents in this parish during the Blitz are commemorated.

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An RAF photographic reconnaissance plane flew over Chelsea on 18th June 1941 and took this photograph of Chelsea showing the Barrage balloon over Burton’s Court, the Cheyne Place bomb-site of April 1941 evident in Royal Hospital Road, and the devastation caused by the ‘Big Bomb’ of 1st November 1940 in Shawfield Street.

For the purposes of academic criticism, review and analysis a part selection of the image shown below has Shawfield Street at the centre and reveals that the high explosive bomb has resulted in the demolition of nearly half of the street on both sides, all of Hoadley Cottages and a large portion of the housing facing Flood Street, now numbers 47 to 63 , and opposite the new blocks comprising the Chelsea Borough Council’s Chelsea Manor buildings estate which was completed in 1938 and formally opened in 1939.

Casualties Friday 1st November 1940

48 year old Annie Elizabeth Ring [died 5th November 1944 at St Luke’s Hospital] Daughter of Archibald Ring, of 109 Elm Park, Brixton Hill, and of the late Elizabeth Ring. Injured 1 November 1940, at Shawfield Street; died at St. Luke’s Hospital.

43 year old Thomas Wallace Hamilton Husband of Ethel Hamilton, of 475 Redcliffe Square. Died at 3 Hoadley Cottages.

66 year old Mercy Brown of 34 Shawfield Street. Widow of Thomas Brown. Died at 34 Shawfield Street.

65 year old Georgina Ward Wife of Edwin Ward, of 69 Manor Drive, Ewell, Surrey. Died at 36 Shawfield Street.

26 year old Percy Wilfred Valentine Ilott of 38 Shawfield Street. Son of the late Mr. and Mrs. F. Ilott; husband of Edna Phyllis Ilott. Died at 38 Shawfield Street.

30 year old Edna Phyllis Ilott of 38 Shawfield Street. Daughter of B. H. and E. Metcalfe, of 14 New Park Avenue, Palmer’s Green, Middlesex; wife of Percy Wilfred Valentine Ilott. Injured at 38 Shawfield Street; died same day at St. Luke’s Hospital.

42 year old Lily Lanham of 38 Shawfield Street. Wife of Harry Lanham. Died at 38 Shawfield Street.

18 year old Beatrice Lily Lanham of 38 Shawfield Street. Daughter of Harry Lanham, and of Lily Lanham. Injured 1 November 1940, at 38 Shawfield Street; died at St. Luke’s Hospital.

45 year old Emily Elizabeth Wakeling of 38 Shawfield Street. Daughter of the late Albert Edward and Emily Jane Wakeling, of 40 Christchurch Street. Died at 38 Shawfield Street.

65 year old Henry Mundy Baker of 40 Shawfield Street. Husband of Emily Beatrice Baker. Died at 40 Shawfield Street.

26 year old Violet Beatrice Baker A.R.P. Control Centre worker; of 40 Shawfield Street. Daughter of Emily Beatrice Baker, and of Henry Mundy Baker. Died at 40 Shawfield Street.

70 year old Mary Elizabeth Fitzgeorge of 40 Shawfield Street. Died at Shawfield Street.

57 year old Charlotte Violet Blanche Munro of 40 Shawfield Street. Daughter of the late James and Susanah Munro, of 62 Finborough Road, West Brompton. Died at 40 Shawfield Street.

29 year old Thomas Henry Drummond of 50 Shawfield Street. Son of Douglas and Lucy Drummond. Injured at 50 Shawfield Street; died same day at St. Luke’s Hospital.

28 year old Kathleen Alice Elizabeth Ralph Daughter of Mrs. Freed, of 79 Tothill House, Page Street, Westminster. Died at 50 Shawfield Street.

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Special thanks to Karen White and Chris Pain whose families lived in Chelsea during World War Two, and Malachy John McCauley, also brought up in Chelsea, who have very kindly encouraged and assisted my research. Special thanks to Marja Giejgo for editorial assistance. Research and archive facilities from Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council library services, The Imperial War Museum and National Archives at Kew.

Special thanks to Louisa Price for taking the photographs of the panelled memorial to WW2 military and civilian casualties present at Christ Church in Chelsea so it could be included in this posting.

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