Church of the Holy Redeemer and Upper Cheyne Row disaster- 14th September 1940.

It was Saturday 14th September 1940 and the eighty or so Chelsea people packed into the crypt of the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Redeemer in Cheyne Row must have thought they could really not be in a safer place when the air raid sirens sounded the arrival of German bombers.

It was still light. But they were effectively underground and protected by a large and well-built Victorian Church above them.

The crypt had been a public air raid shelter during the First World War with space for 200 people when London was first subjected to bombing from the Germans, first by Zeppelin airships and then by long-range double-winged Gotha bombers from May 1917.

On the 14th September 1940, Chelsea’s Air Raid Precautions Service was there shepherding the next generation of civilians needing shelter into the crypt. They had every reason to feel looked after.

And, additionally this was a place consecrated with the blessing of God.

But the evils of total war directed at civilian men, women and children were about to introduce a terrible reality about the Home Front.

When heavy high explosive bombs were dropped on London they came down with a force that easily penetrated concrete roof, earth covering, and tarmacadam.

As the later disasters at Balham, Sloane Square and Bank underground stations would prove, being underground was never any guarantee of safety.

The Luftwaffe ordnance shot into urban landscape and buildings like a bullet through a toy town model or dolls houses.

When they did not explode through time delay fuses, bomb disposal squads would have to risk their lives digging 40, 50 and 60 feet into the London gravel and clay to try to get to them before they detonated.

At 18.27 on this Saturday evening low flying German bombers dropped a series of four high explosive bombs in this area of Chelsea which were set for immediate blast on impact.

One fell in Oakley Street at the King’s Road end, another on a house in Upper Cheyne Row, another came through the large side window of the Holy Redeemer Church and directly through the church floor into the crypt. A fourth exploded in Lawrence Street at the junction of Justice Walk very close to Jo Oakman’s flat.

Jo Oakman recorded the order of the bomb blasts as Oakley Street, Upper Cheyne Row, the Holy Redeemer Church and then Lawrence Street. They were separated by seconds with one bomb wave masking another.

Those sheltering in the crypt might well have heard other explosions before experiencing the bomb blast in the crypt as a form of immediate boom and doom.

High Explosive bombs were also dropped along the King’s Road going east to west. The first at number 73, then another at Hooper’s Yard, and three more at 345 King’s Road, 394 King’s Road, and 401 King’s Road at the junction with Riley Street. Another high explosive was dropped on 48 Royal Avenue. The Luftwaffe were also dropping oil bombs and incendiaries.

The bombing of Upper Cheyne Row killed twenty five of Chelsea’s residents and injured many more.

What is not widely known is that another one of the stick of four bombs dropped by the German bomber had a similar trajectory to the Holy Redeemer crypt explosion in directly penetrating the house at number 5 Upper Cheyne Row all the way down to basement level.

There was a group of five people huddling among the sandbags lining the basement air raid shelter there.

Mabel Edith Price-Jones, a charismatic interior designer and poet, and her daughter Eileen always invited their immediate neighbours at number 75 Oakley Street, brothers Edward Moberley and Randolph Lea Grosvenor and their dedicated and much-loved housekeeper Elizabeth Sarah Parke to join them in their tiny shelter during air-raids.

The Luftwaffe bomb penetrated directly through the roof of number 5, through the floors and exploded as it landed right in the middle of what they wrongly thought had been their underground refuge and sanctuary.

Of course, not one of them survived.

The focus of this posting is on how the shock and horror of these bombings in this part of Chelsea directly affected four enormously talented and remarkable women: Jo Oakman; Mabel Lethbridge, Olivia Parker writing as Frances Faviell, and Mabel Edith Price-Jones writing as Peter Garell.

The posting also seeks to provide a biographical profile for each of the victims so that they are more than names on a memorial or casualty list.

They were loved ones, they were individuals, hard working, creative and special to their families. Each and every one of them were part of Chelsea’s unique community and deserve to be remembered.

Jo Oakman, Mabel Lethbridge and Olivia Parker were witnesses and wrote remarkable and unforgettable accounts. But Mabel Price-Jones was a victim- destroyed beyond recognition in the explosion which killed her. The same terrible fate befell her daughter Eileen.

Yet Mabel Price-Jones’s love and affection for Chelsea, for art and poetry have survived. It is fitting that all the charm she created for her book so appropriately called Chelsea Charm is fully celebrated more than eight decades after the brutality of war sought to destroy it.

Mabel collaborated in the creation of Chelsea Charm with the ink and pen artist and political activist Aimée Vivienne Vereker who did survive the Blitz and lived in nearby 8 Oakley Street until her death in 1981.

Upper Cheyne Row was also the address of two much celebrated and respected war correspondents. They were a stone’s throw from the Church of the Holy Redeemer.

The Australian Noel Monks (1905-60) joined the London Daily Express in the 1930s covering the Abyssinian war and then later the Spanish Civil War for The Daily Mail.

His fame soared with his powerful reportage of the bombing of Guernica by German aircraft.

He recalled: ‘“In the good ‘I’ tradition of the day I was the first correspondent to reach Guernica, and was immediately pressed into service by some Basque soldiers collecting charred bodies […] Some of the soldiers were sobbing like children. There were flames and smoke and grit, and the smell of burning human flesh was nauseating.’’’

He married the American journalist Mary Welsh in Chelsea in 1938 and the 1939 Register for late September of that year has them residing at 50 Upper Cheyne Row and Monks listed as ‘war correspondent’ and Welsh in her married name as ‘journalist, reporter.’

Noel and Mary were living at Upper Cheyne Row until moving into a flat nearer Central London two days after the Holy Redeemer Church tragedy.

Mary recalled making tea and providing sympathy to their cleaner Mrs Sarah Gordon who on 9th September survived the terrible bombing of the Cadogan House public shelter in Beaufort Street.

Noel specialised in flying with RAF bombers on missions to Germany and survived each operation to write books on RAF exploits which included Squadron’s Up and Taking Off.

Noel was on the Gestapo’s arrest list if there had been a successful invasion of Britain.

He covered most European fronts during World War II, and later reported on the Korean War and the Malayan insurgency. His personal account of covering wars is to be found in his book Eye Witness.

He would eschew the life of a war correspondent and become a Royal Correspondent thus swapping the reporting of battles and armies with Royal tours and receptions at Buckingham Palace. He passed away in a Turkish Bath in Epsom in 1960 at the age of 52 having suffered a heart attack.

Mary Welsh worked as a reporter in London’s Fleet Street in the late 1930s with the Daily Express. She had assignments in Paris in the years before the outbreak of the Second World War.

After the fall of France in 1940, she returned to London to continue her coverage of the War attending and reporting on the press conferences of Winston Churchill.

Mary left Noel for the Nobel Prize winning novelist Ernest Hemingway whom she met in London in 1944 and their affair continued when when both covered the Allied invasion of France.

Mary was a war correspondent in North West Europe for the US Time magazine.

She divorced Noel Monks in 1945 and would marry Hemingway after the War and live with him in Cuba until his death in 1961.

In 1976, she wrote her autobiography, How It Was.

Upper Cheyne Row and Cheyne Row’s connections with journalism during the Second World War continued when the editor of Picture Post,Tom Hopkinson, moved his family next door to Thomas Carlyle’s house at number 24 Cheyne Row.

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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 made public 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.

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Jo Oakman and Post Don

When you visit the scene, it is immediately apparent how everyone involved in this event lived, worked and served in their Home Defence duties so close to one another.

Residents sheltering from the Peabody Buildings in Lawrence Street and Key House in Glebe Place were yards away from the crypt shelter of the Holy Redeemer Church.

And so were the ARP Wardens operating out of their ground floor headquarters at Post Don in the Cook’s Ground School in Glebe Place.

It would not be an exaggeration to say everyone knew everyone else. Jo Oakman’s day had actually started at 5.35 a.m. with her reporting sirens, white, yellow and red alerts. The all clear had sounded at 12.15.

People were shopping in the King’s Road. By 3.50 p.m. there was a red alert and sirens and she spotted a crowd of planes flying Kensington way. Half an hour later anti-aircraft guns opened up.

It was a day of all clear sirens, then planes again and then all clear sirens again. At 12 minutes past five it was still light.

Another yellow alert and sirens by six twenty. By this time, she was helping people take shelter in the crypt of the Holy Redeemer church with the ARP Warden Bert Thorpe. This was his post and he quickly sent her off on her bike patrol down Glebe Place.

He saved her life. She missed being part of the carnage by just a minute or two. It was twenty seven minutes past six when disaster struck.

Jo’s journal entry for this incident is in language full of sorrow and agonising hurt. She lost a good friend in Bert Thorpe- one of the most popular and much loved full-time Wardens at Post Don.

She explained:

‘…hardly got away when HE (High Explosive bomb) sailed through church window through crypt floor to cellar where it exploded against some strutting among 80 odd people. I got knocked off the bike. A second bomb knocked me down again and the third sent a brick onto my tin hat. I went to Holy Redeemer and Browning [fellow ARP Warden at Post Don] and I set to work on stirrup pumps as the coke had caught alight.

Smoke from the coke was coming through the broken church window. The cries and groans were awful. God! help them all – A 20 stone woman blocked the doorway and we couldn’t get her up the stairs. Later we got her up with help from the police but she died. Some had got out via the back entrance and window.

Thorpe was under the arch – I rolled him over and saw his face – God – he had none and what he had was a mess. All his limbs were broken and lay at horrible angles. I recognised him by his hair, uniform and ring on his hand.

Did a bit of first aid and heaps of odd jobs – everybody was wonderful – accompanied and helped the dying. Other bombs fell in Oakley Street, Upper Cheyne Row (5 – 7 dead under wreckage). Lawrence Street (a man and woman were both severely injured in the basement of the house in Lawrence Street.). (re the bomb near Moore’s Gardens – it fell near the train bridge and caused some casualties in the street. Sept 14th -1940)

We took 12 dead and put them in the garden by the Kirk [Scottish name for a church] as it was getting dark. A man and woman wanted to go to hospital together so we got them on the same ambulance. The injured seemed endless. I thought the fire brigade would never come. (I think the Fire Brigade went to the wrong place.) Stirrup pumps seemed so little effective. There was a shortage of ambulances (the wounded were lying in Upper Cheyne Row in stretchers.)

First aid stuff at the Post and no iodine, only dry dressings and they were not big enough. Later in the night the dead were moved in cars.

I think my heart broke this night over the sights I have seen today – the Goulding family. Father and daughter, finding their lost son Gerald whom I put in an Anderson shelter down the road and dressed his foot. He was hysterical and wanted to get away and let his family know he was alive. One must have a heart somehow and somewhere – and mine I think broke. The love of that family for one another is a great thing and everlasting – it made me cry – I cannot forget it – we still worked at the Holy Redeemer.’

The diary offers no indication that Jo left the scene. She carried on working through the night, through the early hours of the morning and through the entirety of the next day:

‘Some of the dead (about 13) spent the night in the garden beside Holy Redeemer as we had no time to remove them owing to the coming of the next raid. They were moved early in the dawn. Some of them were in a shocking state of injuries and dirt. (Troublesome wounds were mostly in faces and legs). Harrods’ vans were used to remove the poor things. Some had precious little clothes left on them. The big room in Cook’s school was full of wounded – I saw most shocking sights in way of face injuries.’

Through the Sunday she carried on giving first aid, comfort and support to the survivors while intermittent sirens and anti-aircraft fire were punctuated by the sound of a violent dogfight overhead with two German planes and one RAF being brought down.

The heavy gunfire barrage continued into the Sunday night along with heavy rain, but now fewer bombs were being dropped.

At 10 p.m. she got home to Justice Walk but found her home smashed up by an oil bomb that had taken out the back of the house. She fetched some of her stuff and was put up by her fellow ARP Warden Browning.

Mabel Lethbridge and her terrifying day

Mabel Lethbridge (1900-1985) is another legendary figure in the history of Chelsea and as a writer of acute and traumatic experiences of the Home Front in the First and Second World Wars.

At the time of the Holy Redeemer Church and Upper Cheyne Row bombing she was trying to find ways of transforming her lettings and estate agency business into a boarding house operation in nearby Oakley Street for people needing to work in London during the Blitz.

She had direct experience of the horrors of war on the Home Front from the previous conflict and carried them with her physically.

When only 17 years old she miraculously survived being blown up manufacturing munitions. She lost a leg and lived with the psychological trauma and other physical injuries often requiring frequent operations for the rest of her life.

She had lied about her age in order to be able to provide her contribution to the Great War effort by making bombs in a factory in north London. She remains the youngest person to receive a British Empire Medal for this sacrifice.

The citation recognised her ‘services in connection with the War, in which great courage or self-sacrifice has been displayed,’ and ‘For courage and high example shown on the occasion of an accident in a filling factory, causing loss of one leg and severe injuries to the other.’

She would be denied a war invalidity pension because she had been under-age at the time of the explosion. She would often be nicknamed ‘Peggy’ on account of her disability.

She was interviewed by the BBC for the Great War television series, produced in 1964 and narrated by Sir Michael Redgrave, and the full archive of this recording has been made available by the BBC. She was also the subject of a ‘This Is Your Life’ programme in 1962.

In the 1930s the London publisher Geoffrey Bles recognised her story telling abilities and persuaded her to write her autobiography in three volumes which led to journalistic work writing features for national newspapers.

Bles published Fortune Grass in 1934, Against The Tide in 1936 and her experiences of the Second World War in Homeward Bound in 1967.

Homeward Bound includes a chapter of Mabel’s extraordinary and dramatic experience of Saturday 14th September 1940.

It is one of the most powerful and shocking personal accounts of the London Blitz, and I would argue, memorialises the lives of the victims in ways no other account has achieved.

Mabel had hired a butler and housekeeper, but the butler had recently been treated in a mental hospital and was clearly disturbed by the air-raids.

Late on Saturday afternoon she decided to go shopping even though her new butler was walking around her boarding house at 55 Oakley Street, clawing the air, laughing aloud in a horrible way, and clinging to her.

Mabel was dressed in a navyblue jersey and navyblue trousers with her tin hat slung over her shoulder and the butler’s wife said she looked like an ARP Warden- something which would later lead her to being accepted as working as one of the rescuers in the bombing incidents later in the day.

At five-thirty she had finished her shopping at the bottom of the King’s Road near Sloane Square with two great baskets crammed with provisions.

Postcard and Chelsea Borough Council guide images (from 1920s and 30s) of the shops Mabel Lethbridge would have been visiting Saturday afternoon 14th September 1940.

She was offered a place in the air raid shelter of a little draper’s shop when the warning siren sounded. But Mabel wanted to get home and she crossed the King’s Road to catch a bus back to the junction of Oakley Street.

She stood next to a young soldier at the stop by the Duke of York’s barracks. He was looking upwards and cupping his hands as though they were binoculars.

Mabel looked up as well and saw five German planes overhead. She kindly though urgently explained to him that if he ever wanted to live long enough to be promoted to sergeant they needed to run for their lives.

At that moment, a red double decker bus came tearing into the King’s Road from Sloane Square and barely stopped long enough for the soldier and Mabel to throw themselves into it.

This would have been a number 19, 22 or 11 bus though the chances of it ever reaching Parsons Green this late Saturday afternoon were rather minimal.

The driver put his foot down, and a panic-stricken conductor replied to Mabel’s observation that they seemed in rather a hurry: ‘What do you think this is? A ****** picnic and German planes overhead!’

As the bus picked up speed, the driver had decided now was not a good time to stop anywhere. Good decision as a stick of bombs fell in the direction of the King’s Road itself and one was so close to the double decker it blew in some of the bus windows. Passengers screamed.

Mabel was most impressed with the driver’s ability to turn the bus into a grand prix racing car and wanted to say thank you after it pulled up with screeching tyres just past the town hall at the famous Six Bells pub opposite the old Chelsea Workhouse burial ground.

This bus had fared a lot better than the number 88 which drove into a crater in Balham High Street one month later. It was travelling in the black out and met the aftermath of 1400 kg semi-armour piercing bomb dropped on Balham Underground Station.

‘Mrs Lethbridge, you’re bleeding’

But just as she made her way to the driver’s cab, a Red Cross nurse recognised her and said ‘Mrs Lethbridge, you’re bleeding.’

Mabel was indeed faint and dizzy as the bomb blast had impacted on her perforated ear-drum in one ear and the after effects of a radical mastoid operation in the other- both injuries arising from the munitions explosion in 1917.

One image of the Six Bells late 30s and early 40s, an advertisement illustration and one contemporary view as a restaurant in 2020s and two street views from 2024.

She said she wanted a drink as she was helped into what was her local with the landlord William Muir asking if that had just been a bomb outside while his wireless was purposely switched on so he could listen out for any war announcements and news.

Mr Muir informed the nurse that Mrs Lethbridge was one of his best customers and he poured her out a couple of large whiskies. As she reached out for one of the glasses, she noticed blood clotting on her hand and added: ‘You know Mr Muir, I need this drink, I need it rather badly.’

The nurse took Mabel to the toilets at the back of the Six Bells to establish the source of her injury. She had to strip right down even to her tin leg and they both realised that she had most probably been splashed by somebody else’s blood on the bus.

Back in the bar, Mabel put the second glass of whiskey to her lips when another bomb landed and detonated nearby.

Her teeth bit into the glass breaking it and cutting her gums. The blood now running down her face was certainly her own.

The nurse dabbed the blood from her chin and observed that she was clearly shaken.

Mabel realised it was time for her to get home.

William Muir asked his son to escort her. An ARP Warden from Fulham she knew quickly took over the task of accompanying her from the King’s Road.

Another high explosive bomb detonated at the junction of Oakley Street and the King’s Road blowing up a water main with water streaming into the basements of terraced houses.

Mabel recalled seeing huge wooden pavement blocks flying through the air as she realised they needed to make sure residents in the basements evacuated upstairs to avoid being trapped and drowning.

She found herself soaked neck high at the basement level of one of the houses and spotting a terrified mother and young child huddling at the back. She shouted for them to go upstairs and when she could not make herself heard, she wrapped her fist in cloth she had bought earlier from one of her baskets and punched in the window to get her message across.

Mother and child quickly fled upstairs in time. She described going from basement to basement with the Warden she was with to make sure residents could evacuate out of danger. Fortunately, steps were taken by the authorities to turn off the flood cascading out of the shattered water main. Oakley Street and the King’s Road were no longer flowing rivers.

The tall terraced Victorian Houses in Oakley Street close to the junction of the King’s Road in 2024 with the basements which flooded with water on 14th September 1940 and a late 1930s postcard view of Oakley Street towards Albert Bridge with the basement houses on the left. 2024 Images by Tim Crook.

Mabel and her ARP friend continued the long walk up Oakley Street to number 55 which was right at the end of the road close to the Albert Bridge crossing.

She was soaked, bedraggled and at one point had to take off her tin leg to empty out the water which had filled it up making it almost impossible to walk.

They were half way there close to a house that would be occupied some thirty five years later by the Jamaican Reggae song-writer Bob Marley in the 1970s.

Bombs in Upper Cheyne Row

Both threw themselves to the ground again when they heard and felt the deep sickening thuds of another sequence of falling bombs.

The one nearest to them destroyed two houses at the end of Upper Cheyne Row on the junction with Oakley Street.

Mabel and the Warden had been thrown by the force of the blast into the middle of Oakley Street. The Warden had to wipe dirt hurled into his face.

They were presented with the vista of the entire demolition of the whole of the first house in Upper Cheyne Row. This was number five. They were unaware that three women and two men sheltering in the basement had been blown to pieces.

The neighbouring house was cut in half.

A grand piano hung from the first floor. A chair tumbled from the jagged edge and smashed into the rubble strewn roadway.

They then heard a rising and unbearable cacophony of terrible screams and Mabel recalled that her blood ran cold and tore at her heart-strings.

The Warden was overcome with the symptoms of physical shock as well as crossing himself. ‘Come with me, you’ve got to come with me’ she shouted.

They were both holding each other up as they staggered and pulled each other up Upper Cheyne Row trying to locate the source of the screams. They spotted a woman’s hand sticking out of the rubble of numbers 5 to 7.

Mabel remembered it bore a glistening diamond ring and wedding ring. Two human hands would be recovered from the wreckage, but pathologists were unable to identify them with any victim.

Both Mabel and the Warden were utterly perplexed. There was no other apparent damage to buildings in Upper Cheyne Row.

Where were the screams coming from? They carried on to the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Redeemer on the corner with Cheyne Row, Lawrence Street and Glebe Place.

They were desperate to find the people screaming with the Warden crying out ‘Mother of God, guide me’ and Mabel practically praying ‘God, tell us where they are, help us to help them!’

‘It’s the church of the Holy Redeemer’

Then the Warden stood fast before the red brick building at the end of Upper Cheyne Row saying ‘It’s the church of the Holy Redeemer.’

All of the screaming was emanating from what on the outside was an untouched and wholly intact building. The Warden rushed into the entrance and emerged immediately shouting that it was the basement, the crypt.

Mabel walked back round the side of the church in Upper Cheyne Row and looked down at road level barred windows which are still there to this very day.

In the twilight of Saturday 14th September 1940 they were filled with the distorted faces of ‘trapped and doomed people.’ Mabel said they were unrecognisable as human beings.

It was as though scores of Munch scream paintings had been contorted and concertinaed in clouds of steam but instead of the high-pitched whistle of an old steam-engine, they were hearing a falsetto and soprano scream of human beings.

Mabel heard and felt small explosions from the crypt breaking open one of the two basement level windows and scalding her face.

She searched for a way to try and release the trapped people. An emergency exit sign led to a door but this was blocked by masonry.

Mabel used one of her shoes to smash the glass of the second barred road level window.

Mabel and rescuers then found a manhole which with great difficulty they were able to prise open and in doing so one of the rescuers (most probably an ARP Warden from nearby Post Don in Cook’s Ground school) was scolded in the face by the steam rushing out.

This may well have been Len Lansdell.

After he dropped down into the crypt he began passing survivors up onto the ground and shouted to Mabel: ‘I think the boiler has burst down here. Most of the crypt has collapsed, so we can only rescue people in sections; this entrance we have made only shows about half a dozen people. Get to a telephone, quick, get help. Tell them we need fireman, axes, heavy rescue tackle, anything…’

Mabel described the arrival of a doctor, most likely Dr Richard Castillo, who recruited her to do dressings and first aid. Everyone from nearby houses offered blankets, rugs, and pails of water.

The Holy Redeemer’s priest, the Reverend Father John Philip Valentin asked of Mabel ‘Will you call me to the ones you think are dying.’

It seems all three Holy Redeemer priests, Father Valentin, Father Anthony Thorold, and Father Fali of Tarapoe had rushed to the scene from their house at 37 Oakley Street (The reference to the presence of Father Fali is in Frances Faviell’s 1959 book Chelsea Concerto at page 114).

While the rescue services arrived, for some reason there were no ambulances, and this remained a problem all through the night and into the morning with private cars being used to take people to hospital and even Harrods vans being used the following day to take bodies to the mortuaries.

Mabel sponged faces, wiped away dirt and cement from shocked and shaking people, cleared eyes, dressed wounds, and gradually began recognising people she knew because during her time as a letting and estate agent during the 1930s she had found them homes and accommodation.

Mabel was taking messages and scribbling them on pieces of paper and passing them to others so mothers, children and husbands, wives, partners and friends could find out what had happened.

She had even taken the trouble to wash away puddles of blood collecting on the pavements.

Three ambulances did arrive though they were not designed for stretcher cases. The emergency doctors insisted they took away the worst casualties in any case. It didn’t matter they were sitting up.

Mabel saw the growing ranks of the dead being laid out on the driveway in front of the Carlyle laundry and covered over with blankets.

Our Most Holy Redeemer Sir Thomas More Church in the 2020s- a beautiful location for quiet and worship on the corner of Upper Cheyne Row and Cheyne Row, Chelsea. Images: Tim Crook.

Flashback to 1917

Mabel then had a triggering and shocking experience resonating from her losing one leg and almost the other in the munitions factory explosion in 1917.

A woman had been brought out onto the pavement with one leg blown off at the thigh and the other mutilated in shreds of muscle and sinew. As a doctor applied tourniquets, Mabel held and supported her head and shoulders and bunched up a thick blanket on her chest and stomach so she was unable to see what happened to her legs.

They both recognised each other. Mrs Julie Manners had been a client and kindly said: ‘Mabel Lethbridge has been here looking after me.’

As suitable ambulances were not arriving, the doctors decided she needed to be put into the back of a car and taken to hospital without delay. One of them injected her with morphine.

Mabel found her stick of lipstick in her pocket and wrote M on Mrs Manners’ forehead with the doctor adding T and the time.

The doctor and a friend carried her into the back seat of a private saloon car and just as she was about to go she asked Mabel if she could go back to her house in 9 Cheyne Row and turn off a pot of jam she was making which was still on the gas ring.

She had heard the air raid sirens, then the planes overhead and ran to the shelter forgetting to turn off the gas.

‘Don’t let it burn will you’ she said and Mabel replied ‘No, no I’ll see to it at once.’ These were last words these courageous women were to say to each other. Mrs Julie Manners died at the Royal Cancer Hospital in the Fulham Road three days later. Her other leg had had to be amputated.

A fine old man was brought up onto the pavement with no obvious sign of injury, but he was unconscious and dying. Mabel called over Father Valentin to read him his last rights and she held his wrist until she could no longer feel any pulse.

She held a mirror to his face and when there was no sign of clouding through breathing, they covered him and carried him over to the Carlyle Laundry forecourt.

Father Valentin even took the trouble of blessing Mabel despite the fact she was not a Roman Catholic.

Mabel then met an elderly lady and survivor of the crypt explosion who was resting in a doorway.

She was bleeding from small cuts and badly bruised.

She was German born ‘Miss Egerstorff’ who had been bombed out of her accommodation in the Bramerton Street raid on 9th September and had been living in an Anderson shelter because the prejudice against German people meant she could not find anywhere else to stay.

The old lady broke down in despair and Mabel arranged for her to stay at her boarding house in 55 Oakley Street until she could be found somewhere to live, hopefully with the help of Chelsea Borough Council.

Mabel provided refuge to others as well- including a young girl separated from her distraught mother who had to be taken to hospital. Her new boarding house became a first aid centre and she later had to throw out linen and carpets because of bloodstains left by the walking wounded.

She learned from the heavy rescue team digging down into the wreckage of 5 Upper Cheyne Row that the brothers Randolph Lea and Edward Moberley Grosvenor had left their home at 75 Oakley Street and gone with their housekeeper Elizabeth Parke to take shelter in the basement there and were most certainly dead.

She looked for her two shopping baskets which had been full of groceries, but found them empty with all the contents stolen.

Research suggests the homeless elderly lady described by Mabel may have been Evelyn Egerstorff who was born in 1876 and had a career in nursing, including for a time holding the post of superintendent of the Staffordshire Nursing Association.

She was not 79 in September 1940 as Mabel Lethbridge wrote, but 64. No other ‘Miss Egerstorff’ currently exists in the public records of pensionable age to match Mabel’s description.

In a newspaper report from the Bexhill Chronicle in August 1912 under the heading ‘Prevention Better Than Cure: The dangers of consumption explained’ it was reported she was in charge of a ‘Florence Nightingale caravan’ touring the country under the auspices of the Women’s Imperial Health Association of Great Britain. On this occasion it was visiting Battle and ‘Miss Egerstorff’ was described as ‘late county superintendent of the Queen’s nurses in Staffordshire’, and under her superintendence the work of expounding the ideals of the Association was being carried on by volunteers.

Over the days that followed Mabel became aware of more of the personal and family tragedies of the Saturday air raid’s victims. Two elderly sisters; one stayed a home, the other went to the shelter never to return. Mabel had arranged the letting of the nearby flat to them only the night before.

Views of Mabel Lethbridge’s World War Two boarding house at 55 Oakley Street, Chelsea in 2022. The adjoining number 56 has a plaque commemorating its famous resident Captain Robert Falcon Scott of the Antarctic exploration.

Muriel and Leslie Howell

Evelyn Egerstorff was one of the last people to be talking to the beautiful 29 year old fashion artist and designer Muriel Mary Howell. Only weeks before she had married City of London police officer Leslie Frank Howell. Leslie and Muriel were Mabel’s friends.

Mabel remembered them as a handsome young couple- Muriel ‘charming and pretty.’

They had moved into number 3 Key House at 39/40 Glebe Place– only a few yards walking distance from the Holy Redeemer church.

Evelyn Egerstorff said Muriel had been in high spirits laughing and talking right next to her in the shelter and handing round her honeymoon snapshots. Perhaps she was going out of her way to make everyone forget about the sounds of war outside.

Leslie had had tea with Muriel in the flat on late Saturday afternoon and kissed and hugged her goodbye for the last time as he left to go on night duty in the City.

When he came back in the morning he was perplexed to find that there was no black-out on the windows in the building. He was even more confused to find their flat empty.

He’d walked up Cheyne Row from the Embankment at 5.30 a.m. and hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. Back in Upper Cheyne Row he came across a policeman who told him about the previous evening’s air raid.

Leslie immediately realised something must have happened to Muriel, but the policeman had no list of injured or dead and where people had been taken to hospital. Had anyone been killed Leslie asked with his heart in his mouth.

The officer gestured to the entrance to Carlyle Laundry and explained that he was guarding fifteen victims whom he had referred to as ‘stiffs.’

They had been laid out in rows and covered in blankets. They’d remained there overnight because the continuing air raids meant it had not been possible to arrange for transport to move them to the local mortuaries.

They would be picked up later in the morning and somewhat incongruously the Harrods department store in Knightsbridge had kindly leant their delivery vans for the purpose.

Consequently, Leslie Howell had the dreadful opportunity and what turned out to be the terrible experience of examining each and every one of the bodies in his desperate search for his young wife.

When he found some of the faces unrecognisable he had to remember what Muriel had been wearing. She was the fourteenth body he had to look at in the dawn light of Sunday 15th September 1940.

Leslie had come around to see Mabel at 55 Oakley Street afterwards because he wanted to find out if she had been killed instantly and not suffered. Evelyn Egerstorff had been there when the high explosive bomb shot through into the crypt and exploded and she was able to reassure him that she would not have known what had happened to her.

Mabel was very aware of how much they had been in love with each other and she feared that he would never able to get over his grief. Leslie reported that Muriel’s handbag had not been found and there were little personal things in it of huge sentimental value. Would she be able to help him find it in the crypt?

They got permission from an ARP Warden at Post Don in Glebe Place and both searched among the pathetic debris of what had been the world of the living and now had the atmosphere of a Stygian mausoleum.

In amongst the rubble were wet and slippery objects. The smell was horrible and Mabel thought she was touching decaying fragments of flesh but kept her thoughts to herself.

There was a suitcase with knitting and thermos flask inside. An identity card inside a handbag disclosed the name of Minnie Keating of 9 Bramerton Street.

Mabel eventually found Muriel’s handbag, passed it to Leslie who sat on a block of broken masonry in semi-darkness looking at the photographs of their recent honeymoon and remembering the happiness and joy of their relationship so cruelly taken away from him.

They then went to Post Don handing over Minnie Keating’s bag and contents which were meticulously listed by a Warden and included three pounds in notes. He did the same for Muriel’s property which Leslie had to sign for before he could take it away with him across the road to what had been their home in Key House.

Mabel quite rightly observed that ‘A woman’s handbag is something essentially personal and I think it is one of the most tragic things to go through on behalf of a dead person.’

Mabel recalled how Muriel’s handbag reflected her tidy and glamorous personality. It included her Elizabeth Arden lipstick, a gay red and gold flat face-powder compact which in the 1930s and 40s was called a ‘flapjack’, the photographs of their honeymoon, her cheque-book and pristine marriage certificate- undoubtedly a proud and much beloved keepsake of an event that had meant so much to her.

Leslie’s distress at witnessing this rather cruel bureaucratic process of listing his wife’s belongings item by item with the scribbling of pencil on paper had been acute. Mabel noticed how white he had become and feared he might faint. She sent him over the road to his flat and took the bag to him afterwards.

In the days that followed Leslie obtained leave from the City of London Police on compassionate grounds and took one of the most dangerous war-time roles imaginable. He joined the Merchant Navy as a navigation officer where there was a minimum casualty rate of over 25 per cent.

In World War Two 27 per cent of merchant seamen died through enemy action. Wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill said of the Battle of the Atlantic: ‘The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.’

In Homeward Bound Mabel reported that Leslie had survived the war and they remained in touch through correspondence and his occasional visits to England.

The missing handbag

The kind-hearted and public spirited Mabel thought she should go round to 9 Bramerton Street and inform Minnie Keating that her handbag had been found in the crypt. But when knocking on the door she discovered that she had been buried the day before. Her grieving husband was not in but would be given the message.

Mabel would regret finding it because in the journey from Post Don in Glebe Place and Chelsea Town Hall it was lost along with the three pound notes inside. Minnie’s husband Tom would be outraged.

As with Muriel Howell’s handbag it contained items of huge sentimental value including a silver pencil and half the cash was the weekly shopping money for the gentleman Minnie was housekeeper to. Tom asked Mabel for help and suggested contacting the Daily Mirror to investigate and make an appeal for its whereabouts.

The Daily Mirror did indeed dispatch a reporter to Chelsea to look into the regulations surrounding the lost property of bombing victims. Minnie Keating’s handbag and its contents were never found.

The incident caused much bad feeling within Chelsea’s ARP community. Mabel insisted in Homeward Bound that ‘None of us doubted the complete honesty of the warden to whom I had handed it.’

Was there a class-related resentment of Mabel and her exhuberant and larger-than-life character? There might be some evidence of this when books that have been published about the Chelsea Blitz render her contributions to the Home Front in Chelsea and her own writing about it invisible.

Joan Wyndham’s Diaries of the War Years has an apparently whimsical description of her renting a room from Mabel at 55 Oakley Street at the end of July 1942: ‘We wandered through Chelsea eating cherries and looking for digs, and finally ended up in Oakley Street at a brothel owned by old Mabel Lethbridge, whose telegraphic address used to be ‘CHASTITY, LONDON’. I didn’t know if it was still a brothel, so I pretended to be Petya’s wife, and we booked a lovely room with a window looking on to the garden, a patchwork quilt, a wireless, and a copy of Kipling’s If over the bed. Dylan Thomas lives here too but I think he’s away at the moment.’

The Daily Mirror reporter investigating Minnie Keating’s missing handbag did not write anything about this issue. Instead, on 24th October 1940 the newspaper published a near full-page feature ‘Angels of the raid shelters: Pram canteen in Blitz’ reporting: ‘Every night, dodging bombs and shell splinters, Mrs Mabel Lethbridge, of Oakley Street, Chelsea, London, and her seventeen-year-old daughter Susan, have been the self-appointed waitresses to hundreds of Underground shelterers.’

The article was illustrated by a huge picture captioned: ‘Seventeen-year-old Susan Lethbridge in the top picture, and her mother, Mrs. Mabel Lethbridge, O.B.E. heroine of the last war (at back in the hat) pouring out tea and chocolate in one of the Chelsea air-raid shelters.’

Everything Mabel was doing was unofficial and voluntary. In her book, she said she was asked for the tea and refreshments by Chelsea’s ARP rescue squads because it was needed with the intensity of the bombing incidents through the winter of 1940.

When Mabel’s third volume of autobiography Homeward Bound was published in 1967 her publisher included the following blurb summarising her extraordinry life story:

‘Mabel Lethbridge first attracted attention in the thirties, when, in her first two volumes of autobiography ‘Fortune Grass’ and ‘Against the Tide’, she described the extraordinary events which made up her early life. In them she told how later, as a munitions worker in the first World War, she lost a leg in an explosion and was afterwards awarded the O.B.E. for bravery. She told of her days as a match seller in Seven Dials, of her disastrous marriage and the birth of her much beloved daughter.

Now, thirty years later, she continues the story. Her account of life in Chelsea as an estate agent during the thirties is amusing and light-hearted in grim contrast to the days and nights of the Second World War, also spent in Chelsea, when she became fire watcher, ambulance driver, tea provider and general comforter to those injured and made homeless by the Blitz. She appeared successfully on B.B.C. Television in 1962 in Eamonn Andrews’ “This is your Life” programme.

Here is a story packed with incident and anecdote: the baby she found abandoned on her doorstep; the agonising time spent in Stoke Mandeville Hospital when it seemed her remaining good leg must be amputated. This is not a book for the faint-hearted or squeamish. Miss Lethbridge has always been a fighter, and in these pages, she shows the same courage and humour in the face of overwhelming odds that was so widely acclaimed in her earlier volumes.’

The writer and poet Henry Savage wrote a bracing preface and paid tribute to a complicated and large-scale human character:

‘That, after an almost incredible life-and-death struggle for survival, Mabel Lethbridge surmounted this crucial test, is yet another proof of her indomitable spirit.

For indomitable she is. That is one of the words for her. Which is not to say that there are not others of a less eulogistic order. Frankly – for I do not write in anything but a desire to see this remarkable woman as in herself she really is – I say that there have been occasions, infrequent it is true, when my admiration, respect and affection, for Mabel Lethbridge have been forgotten for feelings of a wholly opposite nature. She can be terrifying; appalling, even: though that impression, it must be added, may be partly due to my faulty vision and certain conventional standards. Again, if, on one side of her dual nature she is a female Ancient Pistol, the world her oyster, on the other side she scatters its pearls with lavish, ungrudging hands. What does stand out clearly and unmistakably is that she is a woman who adds to life, makes it more liveable; in short, a woman to know.’

There is clearly what professional actors and directors in the drama world would call ‘a subtext’ to this passage. Mabel was ‘a character’ and it would seem having the privilege of knowing her would mean that the experience was likely to be a mixture of gratitude, just occasionally regret, though invariably always unforgettable.

Mabel’s autobiographical writings are being increasingly appreciated by academics and readers of ‘neglected literature’.

Frances Faviell’s skill at anatomy in honouring the dead

Frances Faviell, real name Olivia Parker, was neither a direct witness to the September 14th 1940 bombings nor part of the rescue operation. For her brilliant book Chelsea Concerto she interviewed Jo Oakman about what had happened. Jo said she had wished she had not turned over Bert Thorpe when she found his body in the wreckage because she would have preferred her memory of him to have been like he was in everyday life and when he kindly sent her on her way on bike patrol down Glebe Place and saved her life.

Frances was invited as a VAD nurse based at the large First Aid Post in the Victoria Children’s Hospital in Tite Street to help reconstruct the body parts of the victims in order for their families to have them ready for burial service.

She was selected because she was a significant and much respected portrait painter and had expert knowledge of human anatomy which she had studied at the Slade Art school in London. Such anatomy classes were in the core curriculum of Britain’s leading art colleges at the time.

Frances also knew ‘Bert’ Thorpe. It could be said everyone in Chelsea did. He was such a likeable, relatable and sympathetic character which was very much at the heart of his reputation as one of the country’s leading nurses. One can imagine how heart-broken his ARP colleagues were when his equipment was taken back to the Post Don Post in the Cook’s Ground school bright red and saturated with his blood.

The official shelter warden at the Holy Redeemer Church was in fact Martha Page, living in nearby Lawrence Street who worked for the church and she was also killed in the disaster. Bert simply wanted to be there to reassure the local residents whom he counted as friends.

Frances also visited one of the surviving victims at St Luke’s Hospital who told her the scene had been a massacre: ‘…in fact, she compared it to an engraving she had seen of the massacre of the women and children of Cawnpore in the Indian Mutiny [Indians call the uprising their first war of independence], with bodies, limbs, blood, and flesh mingled with little hats, coats, and shoes and all the small necessities which people took to the shelters with them. She said that people were literally blow to pieces and the mess was appalling.’

In fact there were no children victims in these bombing incidents in Upper Cheyne Row; largely because although there had been a phoney war of nearly a year, as soon as the 1940 Blitz began in London from 7th September families in Chelsea did their best to send their younger children to relatives out of the capital.

Also, the schools in Chelsea were still evacuated to country towns and the schoolchildren were being looked after in billets. Supervising teachers were usually with them.

Betty Compton was in charge of the First Aid Post in Tite Street and partnered Frances with a much younger VAD nurse called Sheila to do what they could with human remains collected from Upper Cheyne Row.

Frances did not hold back in writing about the reality and detail of the task. They were probably working in the mortuary adjacent to St Luke’s Hospital in Dovehouse Street. Her account from Chelsea Concerto was also republished as a chapter in the Faber Book of Reportage in 1987.

They were greeted by a mortician who informed them: ‘Proper jigsaw puzzle, ain’t it, miss?’ The carnage and smell was challenging and at some point, both women had to go outside and smoke a cigarette.

Frances’ adjectives to describe the task included the words ‘grim’, ‘ghastly’, ‘frightful’ and ‘revulsion.’ There were many difficulties including sad gaps in bodies reconstructed, too many legs and she observed that unless they ‘kept a firm grip on ourselves nausea was inevitable.’

Frances as a key writer of the Blitz of the Second World War then succeeded in turning something so macabre into reflective, philosophical and human writing: ‘The only way for me to stand it was to imagine that I was back in the anatomy class again – but there the legs and arms on which we studied muscles had been carefully preserved in spirit and were difficult to associate with the human body at all. I think that this task dispelled for me the idea that human life is valuable – it could be blown to pieces by blast – just as dust was blown by wind.’

Thanks from the King and Queen and Home Office investigation

On 19th September 1940 Jo Oakman reported in her diary that early in the morning she ‘Got kept at post to be introduced to Queen at 10.35.’ King George V and Queen Elizabeth made a special visit to Chelsea after the newspaper reports of the heroic rescue of Mildred Castillo trapped under the rubble of her home in Bramerton Street for five days.

A photograph of the Royal visit appeared in the News Chronicle and Jo pasted the cutting in her diary. Jo had attended the Bramerton Street and Upper Cheyne Row and Church of Holy Redeemer tragedies and rescue operations so there were very good reasons she:

‘Was introduced as a “gallant warden”, but also managed to introduce [Les] Landsell (Deputy P.W.) as the “fellow who did all the work”. Cheers – got a word in for him at last. He’s a grand fellow. He said “She’s good too!” to the Queen. (All the big bugs of Chelsea were present at the top of Bramerton St and Landsell was with us and then I did my stuff). H.M. The Queen thanked “him for doing all he had done for her people”. She was very sweet – and so genuine and natural. The Queen shook my hand and said something “about you gallant women”. It sure was a thrill – we’re all right and so is H.M The Queen.’

Later that day she was called to Chelsea Town Hall to meet two Home Office Intelligence officers investigating the bombing of the Holy Redeemer Church. They were probably trying to establish how the German bombs detonated after hitting the building and going through window and floor into the basement crypt.

They drove her to Post Don in Glebe Place to meet up with Len Landsell. They then went into the crypt of the church and ‘inspected every inch of the ground.’ Jo recalled:

‘The place (there was no crater on ground – bomb blew up against strutting) looks like a shambles inside – the victims must have been like rats in a trap – Heaven rest them all. All sorts of debris lay about – blankets; gas masks; chairs; broken bits of wood struts and broken ironwork lay all over the place. (Mr Nicholson; Mr Wharam, self, Mr Wilson and 2 experts were present at the interview at Chelsea Town Hall.) Was presented with a nice nose [Anti-Aircraft] shell by Chelsea Borough Council for my evidence.’

Jo also pasted into her diary the business card of ‘Owen T. Wilson Regional Technical Intelligence Officer from the Home Office, A.R.P. Dpt, Technical Branch.’

Remembering ‘Bert’ Thorpe

46 year old Albert George Thorpe, A.R.P. Warden of 31 Smith Street. Son of the late Joseph and Harriet Thorpe. Died at the Church of the Holy Redeemer, Cheyne Row. Bert Thorpe was cremated at Streatham Vale Cemetery on 25th September 1940.

There was only one obituary published in local weekly newspapers for the victims of the air raid victims in Upper Cheyne Row and the Holy Redeemer Church on 14th September 1940. This was in the Westminster and Pimlico News on 27th September 1940 for Bert Thorpe:

‘Killed At His Post: Chelsea Air Raid Warden’s End

The Chelsea A.R.P. organisation has lost one of its earliest members by the death on Saturday week of Mr. Albert George Thorpe, 31 Smith-street, Chelsea. He was killed at his post. Born in London, and trained in the North of England as an engineer, Mr. Thorpe joined the Royal Army Medical Corps at St. Mark’s Hospital early in the last war. He showed as keen an aptitude for nursing as he had for engineering.

Despite tempting offers to resume civil employment during the war, he preferred to remain in the Army, and he eventually saw service in France, Gallipoli, Egypt, India, Salonica, and various Red Sea and Aegean ports in H.M. hospital ship Egypt. He was nicknamed “The Admiral.” After demobilisation in 1919, he took up nursing as a profession and attended many notable people. In the course of his duties he visited Australia and America, his travels in the latter country taking him from San Francisco and Hollywood to New York.

His Love of Chelsea

On his retirement, he realised his ambition to settle in the Chelsea he had learned to love in his early days at St. Mark’s. He had latterly turned down a lucrative post as an instructor at Blackpool preferring to remain in Chelsea, where he was to have been married in the near future.

“Bert,” as he was known to many he came in contact with in the Chelsea A.R.P., was of modest demeanour, quietly efficient, and steadfastly cheerful under all circumstances. His last act was the means of saving life, for he had only just dispatched Miss Oakman, his assistant warden, on patrol when he was killed. He died, at the early age of 46, as he would have wished- in harness.

A memorial service was held at Christ Church, Chelsea, on Wednesday morning. The service was conducted by the vicar (Rev. H.C. Harland). Those present included Lieut-Colonel S. Boyle C.B.E., M.C., D.L., J.P. The interment was at Streatham Cemetery.’

The fire charred Army File of ‘Bert’ Thorpe

It seems Bert Thorpe was as much of a legend in the Royal Army Medical Corps as he was as an ARP Warden in Chelsea and the evidence can be found in his army file from the First World War.

It was not supposed to have survived and be available to historians because the government warehouse storing it and millions of others in Walworth was struck by incendiaries and high explosives during the 1940 blitz and largely destroyed.

There had been no back-up of photocopies and digital hard-disc folders. Such technology was not then available. The records of the lives of hundreds of thousands of British soldiers who had given and risked their lives between 1914 and 1919 handwritten in fountain pen and pencil on thin austerity paper went up in smoke.

But not all of them. Bert’s file had been rescued as he had tried to protect and rescue civilian lives in the Chelsea Blitz of 1940. The first two pages are charred into an almost oval shape as though the hand of God had grabbed his file from the inferno for the sake of posterity and then blown out the flames incinerating rapidly inwards from the outer edges. If only the same could have been done for Bert as a living person.

The British Army culture of communication and referencing at that time did not give itself to the contemporary fashion for exaggerated description and the use of words such as ‘brilliant’, ‘outstanding’, ‘a living saint’, ‘the best of the bestest’, ‘A triple star plus, plus’ and ‘number one.’

When on 18th March 1918 a Major in the R.A.M.C. on His Majesty’s Ship ‘Egypt’ said of Private Thorpe, A. army number 517069 that he was ‘a thoroughly competent and reliable mental attendant’ he was actually saying something loaded with an intense level of British Army sentiment and appreciation.

The flames had eaten up most of this page and had somehow stopped before leaving this handwritten commendation.

Army nurse Private A Thorpe specialised in the mental health of soldiers. Bert had a sympathy and understanding of how their minds could be broken and mutilated in war as much as their bodies.

During this terrible conflict, there were some generals in the British military authorities who were learning that these breakdowns were not a lack of moral fibre and cowardice in the face of the enemy, but the same as losing a limb or suffering from shrapnel and bullet wounds.

And because of all the prejudices of the time, being a mental attendant/nurse in the R.A.M.C. was about as popular as wanting to be a psychiatrist in a mental asylum after qualifying as a doctor after years of medical training.

H.M.H. Ship “Egypt” sailed the world of the Great War conflict picking up the casualties of this industrialised and total war and giving them all of the then advances in battlefield medical practice.

I would have thought Bert’s nickname of ‘The Admiral’ was a sobriquet based on its rhyming with the word ‘admiration’ as much as the fact he was on board a ship providing emergency mental health nursing in this most progressive field of medicine.

If you were a soldier shaking from head to toe with shell-shock and traumatised by sights and sounds that could never be forgotten, Bert was there to look after you on the hospital ship “Egypt” docking in at Salonica, Alexandria, Southampton, Malta, Cape Town or Bombay.

And getting the few ‘difficult’ sometimes noisy, gurning, gurgling, discordant and far from passive patients, off-shore far from the easily tucked up in bed or horizontally prostrate physically bandaged heroes in the onshore wards of army hospitals had its advantages.

In reality, most of the R.A.M.C.’s mental patients were quiet, sad, anxious, insomniacal, and living in a trance-like state of mental trauma.

Bert and his mental health R.A.M.C. colleagues were there to sail them away on a cruise of recovery, hopefully never to be seen again in their present condition.

Bert served for five years following his nurse training at the temporary war-time hospital of St Mark’s in the St Mark and St John teacher training college (known as MarJon) at the west end of the King’s Road past the World’s End.

Early 20th century images of the College of St Mark and St John in Chelsea which during World War One was used as a hospital and training college for R.A.M.C. nurses. This was Bert Thorpe’s introduction to Chelsea which would become his devoted home after demobilisation in 1920.

At one point, he needed treatment himself for tuberculosis caught from one of his patients. He recovered at Cape Town in South Africa. His army record shows hard work and devotion to duty.

His pay was always being increased because he was so good as ‘the mental attendant.’

He had no interest in aspiring for the dizzying heights of higher rank and an officer’s commission. Temporary Corporal might have been his grandest title though as we know the respect for him on the hospital ship “Egypt” was such that would refer to him affectionately by the highest Royal Naval rank of ‘The Admiral.’

He was determined to work so hard he would sometimes be found asleep on duty, usually at the end of his shift and receive minor military discipline in forfeiting one day’s pay.

I imagine Bert would have been brilliant at quiet talking therapy in the middle of the night. The medical notes for the handover were always complete and immaculate.

He was 21 years old with a scar on his right knee when he joined up in Chelsea on 26th May 1915 and 26 years old when he demobilized on 31st March 1920. He received the 1914-15 Star, British Victory and War medals.

Throughout his time in service his next of kin had been his brother Thomas James Thorpe who lived at 1 Oxford Villas, Portsmouth Road, Long Ditton.

At the time of the 1921 census Bert Thorpe was boarding in the home of greengrocer William Taylor at 79 Hook Road in Epsom. Bert was employed as a male nurse by the London County Council at Epsom’s Long Grove Asylum.

Over the next twenty years Bert continued his career in nursing and moved into the private sector where he was in huge demand.

In 1929, he was engaged to look after Ramon Reed from Battle in Sussex who had been struck down with paralysis from the waist down at the age of 16. For six years he was devotedly nursed by Bert who was by then living at 3 Paultons Square, Chelsea.

Bert made sure Ramon had an active life and lived it to the fullest of his potential.

They travelled the world. They toured Australia in a specially built ambulance. In 1935, they sailed to Hollywood on the liner DrechtDijk.

Then in 1936 they were both stricken with pleurisy. Ramon did not survive. He was only 25 years old.

Ramon was so grateful to Bert Thorpe that he left him a bequest of £6,500 as a remembrance of his kindness. The same amount was left to his governess, Louisa Toy.

The generosity and gift had national and regional newspaper coverage.

Ramon said he was leaving the money in his will to Bert ‘for his cheerful companionship and unremitting care and attention.’

The Daily Mirror reported 24th November 1936 ‘Young man leaves £6,500 to “cheerful” male nurse.’

Ramon’s father told the media: ‘I am so pleased that my son has remembered his nurse and governess, for they served him devotedly. My son was stricken with a terrible illness nearly nine years ago. Thorpe had been with him about six years. He needed a lot of nursing. Thorpe did everything for him. He hardly left his side for a single day. If he had not been so well nursed my son would not have lived so long.’

£6,500 in 1936 was worth £386,033.76 in today’s money according to the Bank of England inflation calculator (as of 30th September 2024).

Bert Thorpe decided to invest in property. He bought the freehold of two houses in Smith Street, Chelsea, furnished them with the finest of antique furniture, lived in one of them and rented out the rooms of the other.

His two passions in life were antiques and his cottage garden where he cultivated chrysanthemums. When the Second World War broke out rather than fleeing to the countryside for comfortable and safe living, he joined the London Ambulance Service.

His tenants included a laboratory assistant, German and French translator, retired merchant and a gentleman ‘of private means.’

On a sunny morning in July 1940 Bert was then 46 years old and wanted to do more so he walked into Post Don in Glebe Place and applied to be an ARP Warden. Leslie Matthews took his particulars. They became the best of friends and would go to auctions together with Bert bidding for antique furniture he loved.

Leslie noticed how Bert Thorpe was known to everyone, particularly the auctioneers and collectors. The two friends would patrol together as the Blitz blighted Chelsea in early September 1940 and they would inspect the crypt of the Church of the Holy Redeemer, chat with the occupants and developed what they called their ‘Cucumber Act’ which was making a joke with people sheltering during a noisy air raid and doing their best to look as cool as cucumbers.

They attended the disastrous air raid on the Cadogan House public shelter in Beaufort Street, and the bombing of Dr Richard Castillo’s home in Bramerton Street. He refused to leave his post even when told that his two houses in Smith Street had taken a direct hit.

He later turned up at the Warden’s post in Glebe Place with two suitcases containing what he had managed to salvage of his precious antiques most of which had been destroyed.

Leslie Matthews had been called up into the army just before Saturday evening 14th September 1940. A fellow Warden there, the journalist Harold Harbour, wrote this moving account of what happened to Bert on that fateful evening and the poignancy, sadness and tragedy of his death.

Post Don in Glebe Place phoned in the following reports to the Chelsea Control Room of the Town Hall:

‘18.35: Fire and trapped casualties Holy Redeemer Church.

18.39: Casualties. Many.

18.45: Two more rescue parties urgently required.

18.57: One more ambulance urgently required.

19.07: Another stretcher party wanted.

19.08: Three more ambulances and blankets wanted.

20.47: Bodies removed from Holy Redeemer are in grounds of church. Home Guard in charge.

Harold Harbour wrote:

‘Post D became a dressing-station. Its floors ran with blood. Someone came in with a battered helmet bearing the tell-tale letter “W” and some equipment blood-red.

“Looks bad for that chap,” said someone as they were dumped in a corner by the telephonist’s chair.

“Yes, it’s Thorpe. Terribly smashed up, he is. Must have caught the full force of it.”

“Heavens! And only last night he told us he’d got engaged to some girl he said had always been a good pal.”

Presently a girl’s voice on the ‘phone. “Could I speak to Mr Thorpe?”

The telephonist clumped her hand to the mouthpiece, and looked inquiringly at her District Warden. “It’s someone- a girl- asking for Thorpe.”

“Tell her,” said the District Warden, “tell her you’re sorry he’s not available.’

Harold Harbour remembered Leslie Matthews coming home on leave and visiting the crypt where his friend had met his death. His torch showed up the walls pitted by a thousand fragments of shrapnel, remnants of gas-masks and shreds of clothing.

Leslie so wanted something to remind him of Bert and luckily at home he came across the sale catalogue of an auction they had gone to in the Gloucester Road. He was comforted in spotting the entry ‘Lot 97: a figure of a man, an item, and an oddment’ and remembered his friend revelling in his passion for antiques. They had both laughed at the charm, mystery and absurdity of the listing.

Some of the Chelsea antiques dealers and shops ‘Bert’ Thorpe would have been seen in during late 1930s until his death in September 1940

Albert George Thorpe’s probate was £4,069 and 17 shillings. While he died wealthy, he also left a greater richness- the memory of a kind, cheerful and generous man.

Albert George Thorpe is commemorated at Christ Church in Chelsea which was his local place of worship as he lived in Smith Street and which held a memorial service for him in September 1940. His name is on the wooden panel remembering parishioners killed by enemy action in World War Two. (Exterior of Christ Church image Tim Crook 2022 and memorial panel image Louisa Price 2024)

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Saturday 14th September Civilian Casualties

When the Commonwealth War Graves Commission reports that a casualty ‘died at Carlyle Laundry, Cheyne Row’ what this actually means is that they had been in the air raid shelter in the crypt of the Holy Redeemer Church where they were killed or mortally wounded when the bomb cut through the church window and floor and exploded inside the crypt.

Their bodies were afterwards recovered and then laid out in the front of the premises of the Carlyle Laundry in Upper Cheyne Row which had been adjacent to the Catholic church and its garden. They had not been killed in any bombing of the laundry.

Margaret Helen Joyce Fisher, 44 years old, Chelsea A.R.P. (in 1939), was described in the Chelsea Borough Council records of identification as the daughter of a high court judge, of 88 Oakley Street.

Her CWGC entry says she died at Carlyle Laundry, Cheyne Row, but documents show she had been in the crypt shelter of the Church of the Holy Redeemer. She was buried at Streatham Park Cemetery on 23rd September 1940 with the grave number 15635, square 70.

There is some mystery about her estate for there were two probate declarations with different legatees and contrasting amounts: one in 1941 and another in 1947.

At the time of the 1939 Register in late September of that year she was living at number 46 Oakley Street, giving the phrase ‘private means’ under personal occupation which usually meant she had family wealth and security.

46 Oakley Street appeared to have a number of tenants including the painter/artist Joan S Gibson, Dorothy Robertson who worked as a shorthand-typist at the BBC, and Margaret Baldock who taught singing. Two other women living there were ‘independent’ and of ‘private means.’

The first and rather hasty probate declaration on 12th December 1940 gave £211 3s. 7d to Amy Mary Fisher, a widow who presumably was a relative. The second probate declaration on 27th September 1947 provided £2,112 4s. 4d. to another relative Mary Woodhouse Fisher, spinster and John Francis Harvey Templer solicitor.

Mary Woodhouse Fisher had been a government scientist and analytical chemist. When the Second World War broke out she was living in Wisteria Cottage, Quality Street in Reigate with her mother Emma and two sisters, Nancy a make-up artist and Dorothy an actress. All three sisters had volunteered for Home Defence duties. Mary was in the Women’s Voluntary Service, W.V.S., Nancy was in the auxiliary ambulance service, A.A.S., and Dorothy was in the auxiliary fire service A.F.S.

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Margaret Patricia Makin, 30 years old, a comptometer operator (key-driven mechanical calculator) of 2 Key House, Glebe Place. Daughter of Thomas J. and Nellie Makin, of 5 Brocco Bank, Sheffield. While the CWGC entry states she died at the Carlyle Laundry in Upper Cheyne Row, as with other victims, it is clear she had been in the crypt of the Holy Redeemer Church.

The Chelsea Borough Council records indicate she was buried in the Roman Catholic ground of the St Pancras Catholic Cemetery in East Finchley on 18th September 1940.

Margaret was born on 23rd March 1910 and baptised a Roman Catholic at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and St Patrick Church, Oldham in Lancashire. Her father Thomas was an accountant and the family moved around the Midlands, Lancashire and Yorkshire as he took posts in engineering factories and businesses.

Margaret had a short obituary published in the South Yorkshire Times & Express on 21st September 1940:

‘MAKIN.- The death of Miss Margaret Patricia Makin, elder daughter of Mr. and Mrs T.J. Makin, on Saturday, caused regret among a wide circle of friends. Mr. Makin, who is secretary to the Brightside Foundry Co., Ltd., Ecclesfield, is very popular with all the large works, and is also associated with many social activities. Miss Makin was fatally injured in an air attack on the London district.’

Margaret came down to London to work with her younger sister Joan Caren (born 1913) and at the start of the Second World War they were both employed as Chartered Accounts auditors, thus following in the footsteps of their father’s profession. They were living at 5 Callow Street in Chelsea before moving to Key House in Glebe Place.

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Martha Page, 55 years old, a Shelter Marshall; of 15 Lawrence Street. Widow of Charles William Page. Again, when the CWGC entry states she died at Carlyle Laundry, Upper Cheyne Row, she was undoubtedly a victim of the bomb explosion in the crypt of the Church of the Holy Redeemer.

She has been commemorated online at the Brompton Cemetery in West Brompton, Kensington and Chelsea and there are photographs which have been uploaded by her family including one with her husband in army uniform with the rank of sergeant and their son Jim.

Chelsea Borough Council records indicate she was buried at North Sheen cemetery on 19th September 1940 in grave number B.R.52.

The Page family were longstanding residents of Lawrence Street. Martha was the secretary and caretaker of the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Redeemer in Upper Cheyne Row and she was the official Shelter Marshall for the crypt of the church.

In the same way it was reported that ARP Warden Albert George Thorpe died at his post, the same could be said of Martha.

Martha Callanan was born on the 22nd September 1884 in the village of Frant which is three miles south of Royal Tunbridge Wells. The 1911 Census recorded 26 year old Martha living in 68 Wynnstay Gardens, Kensington and working as a general servant to Constance Bushe who was 67 years old from Castlehaven, County Cork.

Martha married Charles William Page in Chelsea in 1912. Charles was born on 7th June 1882 in Haverhill, Suffolk where his father Henry had been a silk weaver.

In the 1891 Census he was 8 years old, at school and living with his parents, one brother and four sisters at 23 Crowland Road, Haverhill. After leaving school it’s believed he headed for London looking for work which is where he met Martha.

Charles and Martha set up home at 15 Lawrence Street, Chelsea soon after their marriage. Their first son James was born 24th August 1913. More children followed: Hugh born in 1916 and Philip born in 1919.

When World War One broke out, the six feet tall Charles William Page enlisted with the 18th Battalion of the London Regiment (London Irish Rifles) on the 29th May 1915. He was rapidly promoted to Lance Corporal, Corporal and then to Sergeant.

He saw active service in France on the Western Front between August and October 1916.

His army record discloses that he was wounded in action on 15th September and on 2nd October 1916 during the extended Battle of the Somme. His Battalion was involved in the operations at High Wood and Eaucourt L’Abbaye.

Such were the severity of his wounds and injuries he was discharged from the army through invalidity on 20th March 1917 and he was awarded the Silver War Badge- a special decoration injured servicemen could wear on their civilian clothes so they would not be bothered by recruitment campaigns.

He was told the Badge ‘will be worn on the right breast or on the right lapel of the jacket.’ He was also granted a war pension.

He would be further awarded the British Victory and War medals for his service.

When back in civvy Street Charles was employed by Harrods Department Store, but his war injuries made it difficult for him to work.

At the beginning of World War Two the September 1939 Register recorded that he was an Army Pensioner with a life disability and unable to work.

He died at the age of 58 leaving Martha a widow only weeks before she was killed in the bombing of the crypt shelter on 14th September 1940.

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Minnie Jane Wilson, 44 years old, of Mulberry House, 15 The Vale. Minnie had been the parlourmaid employed by Admiral (then Captain) Cecil Harcourt at Mulberry House, The Vale, which is one of the more spectacular five story Victorian town houses in this part of Chelsea.

Even now you can identify the garret style accommodation that would have been reserved for the servants on the top floor and the huge basement for kitchen and other services at the bottom. This was still an upstairs and downstairs world in 1940.

Minnie had been born on 9th August 1896 in the Northamptonshire village of Faxton in the Parish of Lamport, and was the daughter of retired general farmworker Freeman Wilson.

72 year old Mr Wilson and her 68 year old mother Emma Wilson were living at 52 Parkfield Avenue, in Northampton when she was killed.

It can be assumed her parents were too poor to arrange for the transfer of her body and burial locally. Chelsea Borough Council took care of the undertaking services.

Again, when the CWGC record states she died at the Carlyle Laundry in Upper Cheyne Row, they mean she was killed by the high explosive bomb which penetrated the crypt of the Holy Redeemer Church.

She was interred in a common grave at plot AG, 46.6, 25.3 (also 190284C) in the Brompton Cemetery, West Brompton, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

Minnie Wilson had had a hard working life in service both as a domestic servant and her profile matches that of a woman soldier, ‘Minnie J Wilson’, who served in Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps during the First World War including deployment in the British forces on the Western Front in France in 1918.

To use the recruitment language of the time she would have been one of the girls ‘behind the man, behind the gun.’

Straight out of school at the age of 14 she began her domestic service career as a housemaid to farmer Robert Barker at Maidwell in Northampton.

She had the right age and profile to enlist in the Army Auxiliary Corps. Although the service record of Private Minnie J Wilson no longer exists, there is a medal card in her name with the rank of ‘Worker’ and soldier number 1023.

She would have seen service in France as she was awarded the Victory and British War medals, an honour quite rare for women during the Great War.

By the time of the 1921 Census Minnie had been demobilized from the Army and was now holding down servant positions in prestigious households in London.

At the age of 26 she was the parlourmaid to Harriet Mary Kate Rogers at number 85 St George’s Square, Belgravia. She was in a team of four domestic servants working for Mrs Rogers including a housemaid, lady’s maid and cook.

It would be reasonable to assume that Minnie’s army service had substantially enhanced her references and career prospects.

In the early 20th century Evangeline Holland wrote parlourmaids had ‘taken the place of menservants, it being thought that they are less expensive to keep, do more work, and ask lower wages.’ They worked from 6.30 a.m. to 10 p.m. First duties were to light the kitchen fire, sweep the hall, clean doorstep, brasses and boots left out for polishing. Last duties were washing up dinner and tidying the scullery and kitchen.

At the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939 she was now parlourmaid at Mulberry House, 15 The Vale in Chelsea and employed by Captain Cecil Halliday Jepson Harcourt of the Royal Navy who was in command in naval operations and at sea.

Mulberry House was a lively and busy household filled with relatives and friends of the Harcourts while the Captain was away fighting the war.

Cecil Harcourt had married the widow Daisy Evelyn Gould in 1920 who was more well known as the pianist Evelyn Suart. Evelyn’s daughters from her previous marriage, Diana and Griselda Gould, stayed at Mulberry House throughout the war.

Diana was a successful and well-known ballerina and actress who would marry the violinist Yehudi Menuhin in 1947. Griselda was working as an examiner in wartime postal censorship and would later marry the pianist Louis Kentner.

Cecil Harcourt had a dramatic career in the Royal Navy during the Second World War eventually becoming Second Sea Lord and knighted as Admiral Sir Cecil Harcourt in 1945. In August 1941 he was given command of the battleship Prince of Wales, three months later he transferred to the command of H.M.S. Duke of York until promoted to Rear Admiral in July 1942.

He commanded a cruiser squadron in the Mediterranean, took part in the North African landings and as Admiral Harcourt in August 1945 accepted the Japanese surrender in Hong Kong.

After his first wife died in 1950, he remarried in 1953 Stella Janet Waghorn and passed away at the age of 67 while on the way to St Stephen’s hospital from his home in Chelsea on 19th December 1959.

His probate was £25,115, 11s.10d. The Bank of England inflation calculator gives this as a value in August 2024 of £489,046.31.

There is no evidence that Minnie Jane Wilson had any effects or savings to report for probate. It is assumed whatever belongings of hers recovered from the crypt of the Holy Redeemer Church and her attic room at Mulberry House were sent on to her elderly and grieving parents in Northampton.

The Chelsea Borough Records state that she died from a head injury caused by falling masonry in the crypt shelter blast.

She passed away while she had been laid out on a stretcher in front of the Carlyle Laundry at 6.50 p.m. on the evening of Saturday 14th September and was formally identified by her employer Captain Cecil Harcourt who must have been in London on leave at the time of the bombing.

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Adolphus Birkenruth, was 84 years old, of 23 Cheyne Row, Chelsea. The CWGC file states that Adolphus, died at 23 Cheyne Row, but I think it more likely he had walked directly across the road to go into the crypt shelter of the Holy Redeemer Church when he heard the air raid sirens and was killed in the explosion there.

Adolphus was previously recorded in public records as ‘Adolph’ and it is possible he changed his forename to ‘Adolphus’ after the rise of Hitler and the new war with Germany. Birkenruth was a German-Jewish surname and the fact that Adolph’s father had been a diamond dealer and he had started out in his working life as a diamond polisher may be an indication of Jewish heritage.

In the late 1930s being called Adolph was about as popular as wearing the thin squared upper lip moustache made fashionable by Charlie Chaplin.

At the beginning of the war the British authorities had detained some refugees with the surname Birkenruth as ‘enemy aliens and internees.’ Many had been transported to the Isle of Man.

Adolph’s parents had become naturalised British Citizens and Adolph and his siblings consequently had British nationality.

Adolph was born in 1856 at Grahamstown, Sarah Baartman District Municipality, Eastern Cape, South Africa where it is likely his father was working in the diamond industry.

The very brief traces in the public records of Adolph Birkenruth suggest he had a most interesting life.

By the time of the 1921 census he was boarding in 13 Upper Phillimore Place, Kensington with the playwright Olive Greenaway who was known for writing successful one act farces and would read one of her plays live in the Savoy Hill studios of the BBC’s first London station 2LO on 27th April 1923.

Adolph was 64 years old and described as an artist.

The 1871 census had shown him in his large family at the age of 14 living in Howley Place, Paddington. His father Nathan and mother Rosa had been born in Hesse-Cassel and Frankfurt Prussia respectively. Adolph’s two sisters and one brother were recorded in the household.

Ten years later he was still living with his parents, this time in Kensington, and his occupation still listed as a diamond polisher.

Artist databases reveal the Birkentruth family moved back to Germany in the 1860s. There Birkenruth attended the University and further studied in Paris. In the 1880s he exhibited at the Royal Academy. He also worked as an illustrator for several magazines, including Black & White Weekly and the London News.

He became an active and professional artist. In 2014 the auctioneers Tennants sold a pastel by him listed as ‘Adolphus Birkenruth (1861-1940) Narcissus, signed and dated (19)06, 48.5cm by 34.5cm for £250. His correct year of birth was 1856.

This was a country house sale with lot number 1099. It seems he is also sometimes listed as Adolphe Birkenruth.

His 1886 painting of Luxembourg Gardens in Paris is certainly impressionistic. His ‘Portrait of a Woman’ also in 1886 is a further example of his work in oil portraiture. It seems he had an extensive range working in watercolour as in ‘Couple Talk’ and producing lavish illustrations for books. Mutual Art reports his work has sold up to $40,000 on occasion.

He was living at 23 Cheyne Row at the beginning of the Second World War at the end of September 1939 declaring that he was a retired artist and oil painter. He had a live-in housekeeper called Ann Davies.

Ann was replaced by housekeeper Mary Ellen Sherbourne in 1940 who would be killed in the shelter with her employer.

After his death, his solicitor needed to put a notice in the London Gazette asking for anyone with claims against his estate to come forward.

When probate was granted in 1941 it was to the value of £3,460 11s. 2d. (worth £146,777.67 in August 2024) and bequethed to Ian Reginald Benwell, a captain in His Majesty’s Army.

Chelsea Borough Council records indicate that he was identified by his National Registration identification card because the blast rendered his body unrecognisable. He was buried in Streatham Park Cemetery in Rowan Road in grave number 14938, square 12 on 24th September 1940.

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40 year-old Minnie Keating née Terry was the wife of Thomas George Keating, of 9 Bramerton Street.

She had been injured at the Church of the Holy Redeemer, Cheyne Row and died the same day at St. Stephen’s Hospital.

She was buried in Putney Vale Cemetery at plot 25, 1st in fourth row and her name is commemorated on a special stone monument stating: ‘This garden is dedicated to the memory of those who lost their lives in Chelsea through enemy action in the Second World War 1939-1945 and whose earthly remains were interred here.‘

Minnie Terry was born on 3rd October 1899. There were a few Minnie Terrys coming into the world in Britain at around this time. With close examination of the public records, it would seem Minnie was born into the household of her father John William Terry and her mother Emily in the Durham village of Brancepeth. Her mother was a Londoner from Marylebone.

There were two sisters Lily and Emily and a brother William with the family at the time of the 1901 census.

Twenty years later, Minnie was still living at 17 School House Brancepeth.

John William was a gardener employed to work the grounds of Viscount Boyne who owned Brancepeth Castle, used as a military hospital during the Great War and much of the village.

Minnie was now 21 years old and had been earning a living as house maid in domestic service.

Minnie’s mother Emily Jane Terry had passed away at the age of 33 in 1903 when Minnie was only 4 years old. Her father had remarried. His second wife Hannah had three children, Robert and Thomas, then 10 and 13 and a daughter Edith aged 7.

We fast forward to Chelsea in London in 1935, the year of King George V’s Silver Jubilee, which is where she married Thomas George Keating, who was Fulham born and a labourer gas worker for the Gas Light and Coke Company at the time of the 1921 Census.

He was living with his widowed mother Mary Ann Keating at 87 Sandilands Road, Fulham.

Mary was a cook by trade and this may have been how Minnie met her son because Minnie was now working as a cook and housekeper after moving to London.

When World War Two broke out Minnie and Thomas were living at 294 King’s Road, Chelsea just round the corner from 9 Bamerton Street where they moved to in 1940. By this time Thomas was working as a car part attendant and Minnie was still working as a cook in domestic service.

However, in the thirty years since the end of the Edwardian period, the British social world had changed dramatically. It was rare for domestic servants to be living in the households they were employed in. In the 1920s and 1930s British society had seen the most rapid and extended redistribution of wealth in history through taxation and new employment opportunities in manufacturing and commerce.

If wealthy middle-class house-holds in the cities and towns continued employing ‘servants’ they were more inclined to employ one housekeeper or a married couple who could combine cooking and cleaning domestic services with chauffeuring and gardening. They were more likely to be living in their own homes and ‘coming to work’. The language was changing and so were social attitudes.

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29 year-old Muriel Mary Howell. (née Muriel Mary Simpson) was a fashion artist and designer, and married to Leslie Frank Howell, a police officer with the City of London Police.

They were living at 3 Key House, Glebe Place. The CWGC says she died at Cheyne Row. She was killed in the shelter blast and died instantaneously.

Muriel and Leslie had married only weeks earlier.

Chelsea Borough Council records state that Muriel was buried in Isleworth Cemetery in grave number 58 B.U. on 20th September 1940.

The traumatic experience of Muriel’s husband coming home from City of London police duty at dawn on the following morning of the bombing and finding her body laid out in front of the Carlyle Laundry has already been covered in Mabel Lethbridge’s description of events.

I have tried to discover more about Muriel’s life and family. Muriel was born on the 19th December 1910 with her twin sister Drucie and they were baptised 30th April 1911 at St John the Divine Church Richmond.

Muriel’s father, Gordon Frederick Simpson, was a linotype operator in London’s weekly newspaper industry which was a vital engineering role making up the typeface and newspaper page design for printed newspapers.

At the time of the twins’ birth, they were living at 86A Swaby Road, Earlsfield. But tragedy was to hit the family hard when Gordon and his wife Drucie May lost Muriel’s twin Drucie Freda to illness in 1911. She was still in her infancy being less than one year old.

In 1913, the Simpsons had another child. Mrs Simpson gave birth to a son who was christened Bernard Gordon Robgen. Robgen was Mrs Simpson’s maiden name.

By the time of the 1921 Census, the family was living at 71 Talbot Road, Isleworth and Frederick was responsible for all the Linotype printing of the weekly papers published by Wandsworth Boro News Company Ltd.

The slideshow above shows the linotype-setting work of Muriel’s father Frederick for the edition of the Wandsworth Boro’ News for 7th August 1914- three days after the declaration of war on Germany. Like many newspapers of the time the front page is devoted to advertisements largely covering the costs of production. The editorial page subtitled ‘The European War’ has most of the page devoted to a large and grandly illustrated advertisement for Pitman’s schools.

In 1921, Muriel now 10 years old, was at school as well as her younger 8 year-old brother Bernard.

Muriel was still living at home with her parents in Talbot Road when the Second World War broke out in September 1939. She was 28 years old and a successful fashion artist and designer.

As we know she met City of London police officer Leslie Frank Howell during the phoney war of 1940, they fell in love, married and had a wonderful Honeymoon, taking lots of photographs and moving into their first home, the lovely flat in Chelsea at 3 Key House, Glebe Place.

It was the perfect location for Leslie since he only had to get a bus or walk to Sloane Square underground station to reach the City for his police duties. And Chelsea was the place to be for Muriel as a fashion artist and designer, even in war-time.

Mabel Lethbridge’s memoir reveals that Leslie would never be able to fully come to terms with the cruelty of losing his beautiful young wife so quickly after their marriage and setting up home together.

The Probate register issued in 1941, where all of Muriel’s estate and effects of £178 1s went to her husband Leslie Frank Howell, now a ‘navigating officer Merchant Service’, was self-explanatory.

The widower’s Merchant Marine service during the war, which mercifully he did survive, took him away from Britain. Mabel mentioned his later visits to the country were fleeting and occasional.

The grief for Muriel’s parents in losing their other twin daughter in these circumstances is unimaginable.

When exploring the public records, I was very pleased to learn their son and Muriel’s brother Bernard lived what I can only hope was not only a long, but happy and fulfilling life before passing away in Winchester in 2012 at the age of 99.

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38 year-old Eleanor Foxall was a driver in the London Ambulance Service and living at 4 Key House, in Glebe Place.

She was the daughter of Benjamin and Eleanor Foxall, of The Leys, Oaksway, Gayton, Heswall, Cheshire.

She was born in Toxteth Park, Liverpool on 27th May 1902. Her mother’s maiden name was Blackburn- rather appropriate for a lady from Lancashire. Benjamin Foxall was a shipsmith and chainmaker.

The family lived in West Kirby and Eleanor had a younger sister Stella born in 1909 who came down to London with her in the late 1930s. They were both renting 4 Key House in September 1939.

Eleanor had already volunteered to be a driver for the London Ambulance Service. Stella was listed as working as a masseuse.

The CWGC record says Eleanor died at Cheyne Row. She was obviously killed in the crypt shelter bombing of the Church of the Holy Redeemer. It is likely she went there with her neighbours Muriel Howell, and Margaret Makin and they were most probably sitting next to each other and were killed instantly and together.

They were in the same age bracket, young professional women, and it can be imagined how they walked down the steep front steps of Key House together turning left with Cook’s Ground School, later renamed Kingsley School on the other side, and made the short walk to the entrance of the Holy Redeemer Church on the corner of Cheyne Row and Upper Cheyne Row to join the orderly queue of local residents making their way down to the chairs and bunkers in the Victorian church’s basement.

It is also likely the housekeeper at number 23 Cheyne Row opposite, Mary Ellen Sherbourne, would have been helping her employer, 84 year-old Adolphus Birkenruth, across the road to take cover. They only had literally a few feet to reach what they hoped would be a place of security and safety.

It was still daylight, and the three women from Key House didn’t need torches, but they would have walked briskly with the background of wailing air raid sirens, the threatening deep monotonous hum with a drop in pitch every second or so from the German bombers above and ARP Wardens’ whistles and rattles as they sped about the nearby streets on bicycles calling for people to take cover.

Eleanor was dressed in her London Ambulance Service uniform. She could have been ready to go on duty and Chelsea certainly needed ambulance drivers that night.

Eleanor’s parents placed death notices in the Lancashire and Liverpool regional newspapers:

‘FOXALL- September 15, suddenly in London ELEANOR elder daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Foxall, formerly of West Kirby. Internment at Heswall Parish Church to-morrow (Tuesday) at 1.30 p.m. Inquiries: Tel. Holylake 176.’

Chelsea Borough Council records indicate that Eleanor was buried in the churchyard of St Peter’s Parish Church, Heswall on the Wirral in Cheshire on 24th September 1940.

Eleanor’s family clearly wanted her brought home and buried where she could be visited close by, left flowers and her memory honoured and cherished.

Three residents of Key House 39/40 Glebe Place, Eleanor Foxall, Muriel Howell, and Margaret Makin died in the bombing of the crypt shelter at the Church of the Holy Redeemer.

Pacha Randell was 72 years old, widowed and a retired police officer and London County Council caretaker living at number 14 Lawrence Street.

He was killed in the bombing of the crypt of the Church of the Holy Redeemer.

Pacha Randell was born in the village of Marsham, Norfolk on 3rd June 1868. His father James and mother Letitia were licensed victuallers running a tavern in the village High Street in 1881.

In 1881 Pacha was 12 years old and still at school. The census registered two other brothers, Ernest, 9, and Louis, 5. By 1891 he was a 22 year-old Police Constable with the Metropolitan Police based at St John’s Wood police station in New Street (Portland Town) Marylebone.

Pacha married Edith Russell in Hampstead in 1909.

In the 1911 census he was now a Metropolitan Police Constable assigned to the beats out of Hampstead Police station.

He was living in three room lodgings at 71 Sumatra Road, West Hampstead with his wife Edith, father-in-law, 69 year-old coachman George Russell, and his two children, son Freddy, aged 10, and 1 year-old daughter Ivy Letitia who was given her grandmother’s name.

By June 1921, Pacha had served his 30 years in the Metropolitan Police and retired to take up the role of caretaker in the London County Council Bridge Avenue Mansions in Hammersmith.

His wife Edith had passed away earlier that year at the age of 46, and he was now looking after his daughter Ivy then 11 years old and still at school.

At the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939 Pacha was living with his daughter Ivy at her home in 139 Clonmore Street, Southfields, Wandsworth.

She had married assistant foreman plumber Arthur Chase. In 1940 Pacha moved across the river to take lodgings in Chelsea at 14 Lawrence Street.

Chelsea Borough Council records indicate Pacha’s daughter Ivy identified her father and arranged for him to be buried in Wandsworth Cemetery in grave number 441 on 21st September 1940.

Chelsea Borough Council street map of 1937 showing bus routes and underground stations.

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Edward Constans was 65 years old and A.R.P. Warden living at number 53 Edith Grove, Chelsea. He was the husband of Mary Alicia Victoria (Cissie) Constans, also killed in the Holy Redeemer Church crypt bombing.

He was injured on the 14th September 1940 and taken to St. Stephen’s Hospital in the Fulham Road, Chelsea suffering from multiple bomb blast injuries.

To use a phrase in common use at that time, he fought for his life for two days, but eventually succumbed to the severity of his injuries and passed away at five minutes past seven on Monday 16th September 1940.

Edward was a commercial accountant by occupation and an A.R.P. Warden for Westminster Council’s ‘C’ Post at the Pimlico’s Victoria Methodist Church in Westmorland Terrace. We do not know why he was in this part of Chelsea with his wife at the time of the air raid. They could have been visiting friends and shopping in the King’s Road and walking through Chelsea on their way home.

The 1939 Register recorded that Edward was born on 14th April 1874 though his birth certificate was registered in the second quarter of 1875 in Chelsea under the name Jean Amans Edward Constans De Sanhes.

It is almost certain that Edward’s family was of French origin though his mother Charlotte was listed in public records as having been born in Yorkshire.

In 1901, he was living with his mother Charlotte and French born aunt Alexandra at 58 Stockwell Park Road, Lambeth. His occupation was ‘Secretary to a Public Company’- an expression encompassing the roles of registrar and accountant.

By 1911 he was living with his mother and aunt at 15 St George’s Road, Leyton and still working as an accountant. His mother Charlotte passed away in that year at the age of 56.

Edward married Mary Alicia Victoria Lyburn in 1918 under his birth name of Jean Amans Edward Constans De Sanhes. During the 1920s they lived in the Maida Vale area of Paddington and were on the electoral roll in 1929 at 13 Clarendon Gardens.

At the beginning of the Second World War in late September 1939 they were residing at 47 Sutherland Street in Belgravia. They moved to 53 Edith Grove in Chelsea the following year.

Chelsea Borough records indicate that Edward was buried in Putney Vale Cemetery in plot 25, row 4 and his name is commemorated on the special stone memorial commissioned by the council to remember their residents killed by enemy action during World War Two.

As indicated above Mary Alicia Victoria (known as ‘Cissie’) Constans was 70 years old and living with her husband Edward at 53 Edith Grove, Chelsea at the time of her death.

She was killed instantly in the blast from the bomb exploding in the crypt of the Church of the Holy Redeemer, Cheyne Row. She was born Mary Alicia Victoria Lyburn on 22nd April 1870.

Cissie’s remains are also buried with her husband at Putney Vale Cemetery and her name is commemorated on the special stone memorial to remember Chelsea’s victims of air raids during the Second World War.

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Alice Walkley, was 73 years old, a retired needle-worker and residing at 27 Cheyne Row when she was injured in bombing of the crypt of the Church of the Holy Redeemer.

The 1939 Register discloses that at the beginning of the Second World War the other tenants living at 27 Cheyne Row were hospital nurses Kathleen Connor and Ellen Pascoe.

Alice was taken to the Brompton Hospital for Consumption and Diseases of the Chest in the Fulham Road but died the same day from shock and multiple fractures.

She was buried at Putney Vale Cemetery in plot 25, row 4 on 24th September 1940 and her name is commemorated on the Chelsea Borough Council wall memorial for victims of the Blitz.

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52 year-old Mabel Edith Price-Jones An interior decorator of 5 Upper Cheyne Row. She was the wife of Edgar Price-Jones. She died in the basement of her house.

Mabel Edith Price-Jones was the author of the illustrated volume of poems titled ‘Chelsea Charm’ written under the nom-de-plume Peter Garrell. When researching this bombing incident, it upset me to learn that the bodies of both Mabel and her daughter Eileen were completely destroyed in the explosion which killed them.

When I discovered that Mabel had been responsible for the delight and dignity of all the poetry going into the Chelsea Charm publication of 1931, this made me all the more determined that the memory of her and her daughter is given much more prominence and commemoration. See the cover and first poem of her beautiful book below:

Mabel’s poetry celebrates with Wordsworthian emotion recollected in tranquillity so many of Chelsea’s iconic buildings and locations.

Her titles roam beautifully from the King’s Road, Physic Garden, Chelsea Old Church, Chelsea’s chimneys, Chelsea China, Carlyle’s House, Old Church Street, The Royal Hospital, Chelsea Reach, a Chelsea roof garden, and Cheyne Row.

It would seem that she wrote about her own house which would be destroyed in the bombing which killed her, her daughter and three friends sharing the basement shelter.

And she also left a charming and beautiful recollection of the Upper Cheyne Row and Cheyne Row that would witness all the horror of the London Blitz.

Mabel was born Mabel Edith Alcock in Liverpool on 20th February 1888. Her father Frederick was Chief Clerk in the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board. She was baptised in the Our Lady and St Nicholas Church, Liverpool on 5th June of that year.

Mabel’s grandmother on her father’s side Bertha had been German.

By the time of the 1911 census the family was living at 76 Shrewsbury Road, Birkenhead, were attended to by four servants and father Frederick was the general manager of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Mabel was 23 years old and still living at home with her older sister Gertrude and younger brother Gordon Leslie.

On 18th May 1915 she married Lieutenant Edgar Price-Jones of the Royal Engineers who saw active service during the Great War and received the 1914-15 Star, British and Victory Medals.

They were married at St Saviour’s Church, Oxton in Birkenhead by Mabel’s brother, The Reverend N.A. Alcock MA. Mabel’s father Frederick would pass away on 1st February 1916 in his 59th year.

After the First World War, Mabel, Edgar and their daughter moved to Chelsea where they lived in 6 Cheyne Row. Edgar was an engineer. Mabel was developing a career as an interior decorator.

By 1939 and the outbreak of World War Two, Mabel had moved to 5 Upper Cheyne Row. Edgar was in Birmingham living at 67 St Peter’s Road, Handsworth where he was the managing director of an engineering company and most likely involved in conversion of civilian engineering and manufacturing plants for the purpose of war munitions.

Within weeks of the death of his wife Mabel and daughter Eileen, he remarried to Winifred Bacon in Birmingham. He would pass away in Eastbourne at the age of 62 in 1949.

The Birmingham Mail reported in 1950 that Edgar Price-Jones ‘…a director of Metropolitan Gas Meters, Ltd, Nottingham and late managing director of Alldays and Onions Ltd left an estate of £11,430 valued by the Bank of England’s inflation calculator in August 2024 at £328,829.29.

Eileen Price-Jones, was 24 years old, and a secretary of 5 Upper Cheyne Row. She was the daughter of Edgar Price-Jones, and of Mabel Edith Price-Jones. She died at 5 Upper Cheyne Row with her mother and three neighbours.

Eileen was born 22nd November 1916 in the middle of the First World War. At the beginning of the Second World War it appeared she had evacuated to Torrington in Devon where she was staying in a guesthouse called Seckington House off the Torrington Road near Winkleigh.

Under the heading of ‘occupation’ she described herself as a secretary employed by M.O.C.N.R.

The rebuilt number 5 Upper Cheyne Row as it is in 2024. Image: Tim Crook.

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Dr. Randolph Lea Grosvenor, was 73 years old, and had the qualifications and awards of M.A., M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., King Albert’s Medal with Bar.

He was a retired Medical Practitioner of 75 Oakley Street and the son of the late Dr. George Fox Grosvenor and Eliza Frances Grosvenor.

He died at 5 Upper Cheyne Row with his brother Edward, carer Elizabeth Parke and two neighbours, Mabel and Eileen Price-Jones.

Randolph had been identified by his friend the Reverend Gordon Arrowsmith of St Luke’s Church who examined the documents and personal effects found among his remains in the wreckage of the house.

It is more than likely that the Reverend Arrowsmith would have been with the heavy rescue ARP team as they dug through the rubble looking for him.

The vicar would have been knocking on the door of number of 75 Oakley Street and confirmed with sadness and alarm along with the local ARP Wardens that nobody had seen Randolph, his brother Edward or Miss Parke since the air raid on the Saturday night.

He was buried at All Souls Cemetery in Kensal Green along with his younger brother on 24th September 1940. His grave number is 39750, row 5, square 64.

Randolph’s father, Dr George Fox Grosvenor ran a large and popular West End Practice. Randolph was the only one of his five sons who decided to follow him into the medical profession.

After Dr Grosvenor senior died in 1889, his widow Eliza Frances Grosvenor decided to move to Chelsea with Dr. Randolph Grosvenor. Her son began his practice at 75 Oakley Street which continued for around four decades.

Mrs Grosvenor died in 1928. Mother and son were closely involved in local charities and organisations. Eliza was described as a lady of considerable charm and a very lovable personality who initiated the friendship with Mabel Price-Jones when she moved with her husband Edgar to Chelsea in the 1920s.

Dr Grosvenor’s four brothers were Chetwynd and Oswald Grosvenor of the City of Mexico, Robert P. Grosvenor of the Canadian Pacific Railway in Calgary, and Edward Moberley Grosvenor of the Union Castle Company. Edward moved into 75 Oakley Street when he retired and because of his business acumen and experience became honorary treasurer of St Luke’s Church in Chelsea.

Edward Moberley Grosvenor, was 66 years old and retired shipping freight manager when he was killed with his brother on 14th September 1944. Edward was buried at All Souls Cemetery in Kensal Green on 24th September 1940 in the same grave as his brother 39750, row 5, square 64.

“Bomb Deaths Upset Two Wills”

The deaths of these two brothers would lead to a major legal precedent on probate about whose will is valid and takes precedence when two siblings die at the same time.

The tragedy meant there was only one surviving brother- Robert Pershall Grosvenor. Randolph and Edward’s wills intertwined legacies to each other, their brothers and relatives, to their housekeeper Elizabeth Sarah Parke and to their friend Mabel Price-Jones.

As the front page of the Manchester Evening News explained when reporting a Court of Appeal ruling in the litigation that followed: ‘Bomb Deaths Upset Two Wills’:

‘Contrary to many legal decisions that, where two persons died as the result of the same cause, the elder is presumed to have died first, the Master of the Rolls (Lord Greene) in the Court of Appeal in London, to-day, said that to speak of the infinite divisibility of time in connect with the bursting of a high explosive bomb was to ignore the realities of the case in the circumstances of the present day.’

The newspaper explained their cook-housekeeper Sarah Elizabeth Park received legacies under the wills of both. The court held that the brothers and their servant, as well as two others, Mrs Price-Jones and her daughter, died simultaneously, and that all dispositions made by the brothers’ wills, including legacies to Miss Parke, therefore failed.

But this case was much more complicated and was appealed to the then highest court in the country- The Judicial Committee of the House of Lords.

The probate and value of the estates of the two brothers were substantial.

Edward Moberley Grosvenor’s probate in 1941 was reported at £18,312 0s. 9d. The Bank of England inflation calculator gives this a value in August 2024 of £776,818.70.

Randolph Lea Grosvenor’s probate in 1941 was reported at £23,266 5s. 2d. The Bank of England inflation calculator gives this a value in August 2024 of £986,973.78.

No bombing incident anywhere in Great Britain generated such a unique issue of inheritance law which required a full run of the legal system and highly significant legal precedent which is studied by law students and quoted in active court cases to this very day.

The Law Reports recorded the result of the final ruling by the Law Lords on 20th June 1945 only a few weeks after VE Day and the end of the European War:

‘Five persons, two of whom had made wills benefiting some of the others, were killed by the explosion of a bomb bursting in a London dwelling-house in which they were and demolishing it so as to bury them in the ruins. There was no evidence to show whether any of the deceased had survived the others:-

‘Held (per Lord Macmillan, Lord Porter and Lord Simonds, (Viscount Simon Lord Chancellor and Lord Wright dissenting), that in the absence of such evidence they had died in circumstances rendering it uncertain which of them survived the other or others within the meaning of Section 184 of the Law of Property Act, 1925, and that accordingly in the administration of their estates by the executors of the respective wills the younger of the deceased should be deemed to have survived the elder.’

High Court and Appeal Court in the Royal Courts of Justice at the top of Fleet Street and the House of Lords chamber hosting rulings of the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords circa late 1930s and 1940s- the locations for the developing twists and turns of the bomb shelter inheritance case from 5 Upper Cheyne Row, Chelsea between 1940 and 1945.

The Law Lords reversed the Court of Appeal decision.

The House of Lords ruling set out the factual narrative. As far as I have been able to establish no other detailed account of a Blitz tragedy of this kind was present in any legal ruling reaching the highest court during the Second World War:

‘At about 6 p.m. on September 14, 1940, when the Battle of Britain was at its height, an air-raid warning sounded. At about 6.30 p.m., or a little after, a small house, No. 5, Upper Cheyne Row, Chelsea was struck by a German high-explosive bomb which penetrated to the basement, not exploding until it got inside the house.

In the basement, there had been constructed a small air-raid shelter, strengthened by sand-bags and other structures. The exact area of the shelter room was not in evidence. At the time of the explosion five persons were in the house: (1.) Mrs. Mabel Edith Price-Jones, aged fifty-two, the occupier of the house; (2.) her daughter Eileen; (3.) Elizabeth Sarah Parke, aged seventy, the housekeeper of the two male persons next mentioned, who resided in another house close by, but who used the shelter at No. 5. Upper Cheyne Row, because they had no shelter in their own house; (4.) Randolph Lea Grosvenor, aged seventy-three the first testator; and (5.) his brother, Edward Moberley Grosvenor, aged sixty-six, the second testator.

It was their regular or invariable practice whenever there was an air-raid alert to go down into the basement shelter. The house was completely shattered, being reduced to a heap of ruins, and all the five persons were killed and buried in the debris.

The bodies were subsequently dug out of the wreckage, three on one day and two on the next. They were all mutilated to a greater or less degree and in some cases, there was actual dismemberment. The faces were wholly unrecognizble. Two, however, could be identified as male and three as female. It was only possible to tell who the two males had been from articles found on them.’

The effect of the ruling was that the disbursements outlined in the will of Edward Moberley Grosvenor took precedence because it was decided that in law his elder brother Randolph had died first in these tragic circumstances.

On 17th December 1948, The Chelsea News and West London Press carried a report headlined: ‘Diary “find” in Second-hand shop: Memories of Edwardian Chelsea.’ Air ministry official Edward Hall had been rummaging around a second-hand dealer’s shop in the King’s Road and came across press cuttings about Dr. Phene combined with a 30-page diary. The paper reported that diligent research by Chelsea Library’s reference librarian Doris Eldridge established that the diarist was:

‘Mrs Eliza Frances Grosvenor, of Chelsea. She was related to and is believed to have been the mother of Dr. Randolph Grosvenor, of Oakley Street, who with his brother, Edward Moberley Grosvenor, was killed during an air-raid in 1940. The diarist’s name disappeared from the Chelsea register in 1928.

References to “Edith” in the diary are believed almost certainly to concern Mabel Edith Price-Jones of Upper Cheyne Row (killed in an air-raid shelter with the Grosvenors), who, under the pseudonym Peter Garell, wrote a book of poems called “Chelsea Charm.”‘

Mr Hall said: ‘”Actually, the diary is not possessed of much interest apart from a slight tang of the Edwardian period, such as the first motor-bus running down Oakley Street and the difficulties experienced by her sons with their own car; the trials and tribulations of servants: shopping (including the return of hair combings to Harrods) and the like. Over-printed notepaper, old cards and agenda papers were used to write the diary on. The actual MS will eventually find its way into the collection held by Wigan Public Libraies. Diaries are unique and precious and, scrappy as this particular speciman is, its risks of destruction are at any rate now discounted.”‘

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70 year-old Elizabeth Sarah Parke of 75 Oakley Street. Elizabeth Park was the quintessential domestic servant for the late 1930s and 1940s. As a cook and housekeeper she could do everything. When her employer’s budget allowed she could recruit and manage more staff.

Miss Parke was held in such high esteem that the wills of her employers, the brothers Dr Randolph Lea Grosvenor and Edward Moberley Grosvenor left her generous bequests. According to Mabel Lethbridge, it seems Miss Parke was also their chauffeur.

Elizabeth accompanied the brothers in the short walk from the garden of number 75 Oakley Street into the home of Mabel Price-Jones and her daughter Eileen at 5 Upper Cheyne Row and down into the sandbag lined basement shelter.

Mabel had been a life-long friend of the Grosvenors, including their mother Eliza, who had repeatedly referenced her in thirty pages of diary found in a secondhand book store in the King’s Road in 1948.

Miss Parke would have had ready an overnight picnic basket of provisions, including hot flasks of tea and coffee and blankets. We already know all five of them died together from the Luftwaffe high explosive bomb fall directly upon them.

They would never have imagined that their apparent simultaneous death would be the foundation and complicated source of a legal test case on probate which necessitated a ruling in the highest court in the land- The Judicial Committee of the House of Lords in 1945. When people leaving bequests to each other in their wills died in the same incident, what is the order of precedence for inheritance?

The issue came up in a recent High Court case, Scarle v Scarle in 2019, which quoted the 1945 ruling designated in the law reports as Hickman and Others v Peacey and Others in great detail.

Miss Elizabeth Sarah Parke was born on 16th July 1870 and brought up in Great Yarmouth where she was baptised. Her father John was a blacksmith. She was staying with her uncle and aunt, Charles and Hannah Park 1911 at 2 Blackfriars Road, Great Yarmouth in 1911. Charles was a fishmonger and Elizabeth at 40 was working as a domestic servant. Her younger sister Lydia, at 29 was a laundry worker.

Ten years later Elizabeth was the senior servant cook and housekeeper to the widowed 77 year-old Mrs Edith Caroline Methold and her granddaughter Irene at Langford Lodge Southwold in Suffolk.

Elizabeth was in charge of one parlourmaid, one ‘useful maid’, one house maid and a chauffeur.

At the beginning of the Second World War, Elizabeth was in charge of managing household duties at 75 Oakley Street and when the Register was taken at the end of September, she was described as ‘carer, housekeeper retired.’

The bombs on 5 Upper Cheyne Row and the Church of the Holy Redeemer rendered four women’s bodies ‘beyond recognition’ and these would appear to have included Elizabeth Parke, Mabel and Eileen Price-Jones and ‘Cissie’ Constans.

Their remains were interred in the special garden area of Putney Vale Cemetery commemorating civilians in the Metropolitan Borough of Chelsea killed as a result of enemy action between 1939 and 1945.

In Mabel Lethbridge’s memoir Homeward Bound she speculated, on the basis of what she heard from some of the air-raid rescue men, that there may have been an unknown woman who was killed and who has never been identified, but this is more than likely to have been Mabel Price-Jones, her daughter Eileen, or the Grosvenor brothers’ housekeeper Elizabeth Parke.

It is true that rescuers did find two human hands which they were unable to match to bodies described as ‘beyond recognition.’

However, it would seem, on the basis of the records I have examined, that the skill of the Council’s coroner’s teams ensured everyone was accounted for in these terrible circumstances.

The purpose of the ARP Wardens Home Defence infrastructure was that a very detailed record was kept of anyone and everyone staying in houses which would be updated every day and include contact details for key-holders.

Anyone leaving their flats, houses and business premises empty was expected to leave access keys with ARP services so they could deal with any damage through enemy action and put out fires started by falling incendiary bombs.

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Mary Alice Buchanan, 62 years old, of 15E Peabody Buildings, Lawrence Street. Daughter of George and Mary Reid, of Dublin, Irish Republic; widow of Robert Buchanan. Died at Upper Cheyne Row. Mary was buried along with her son at Putney Vale Cemetery on 24th September 1940 in plot 25, 4th row and her name is commemorated on the special stone memorial commissioned by Chelsea Borough Council to remember those who died from enemy air raids during World War Two.

Robert George Buchanan, 31 years old, welder of 15E Peabody Buildings, Lawrence Street. Son of Mary Alice, and of the late Robert Buchanan. Died at Upper Cheyne Row. Robert was buried in Putney Vale Cemetery on 24th September 1940 in trench number 25, row 5 and is commemorated on the Chelsea Borough Council stone memorial.

Julie Veronika Manners, 36 years old, the wife of Hubert John Victor Manners, of 9 Cheyne Row. She died at the Royal Cancer Hospital. Julie was buried in the family grave of the Catholic section of Acton Cemetery on 20th September 1940.

I suspect Mrs Julie Manners was actually born Julka Weronika Lewek on 24th August 1904 in Poland or what was then the Russian Empire. And the Polish Princess met, fell in love with and married her English gentleman, Hubert John Victor Manners, in the St Martin district of London in 1922.

She was 18 years old.

Julie, as she was known in Chelsea, was not really a Polish Princess but she could have been like one to Lieutenant Hubert J V Manners of the Royal Garrison Artillery who had just relinquished his commission in 1920 through ill-health caused by war wounds having served in the Great War on the Western Front since 1915.

And ‘Gentleman’ was how he was described in the 1921 census when at the age of 33, he was visiting 35 year-old Mrs Violet Lillian Warren and her 2 year-old son at the Manor House in the village of Willingdon, Sussex.

Hubert had been born in Kensington. His father John had been a barrister-at-law from the Isle of Wight and mother Annie from Ireland. For his Great War Service, Hubert received the 1914-15 Star and British War and Victory medals.

Hubert and Julie Manners had one son, Henry, born in Paddington shortly after their marriage in 1923. Henry would join the Royal Artillery and see service during the Second World War.

By the late 1930s Julie was running a property business based at 9 Cheyne Row, Chelsea and Hubert was running a mortgage and insurance business based at 22 King Edward Gardens in Ealing.

Julie Manners had been a regular client of Mabel Lethbridge whose Chelsea estate agency would find potential tenants for her high class boarding house in number 9 Cheyne Row on the corner with Lordship Place.

In late September 1939, they included steel manufacturer Roland Vesser, Targett Adams, a Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy, and Dulce Butterfield, a secretary in the Associated Ethyl Company.

Julie Manners fought like a lion (the meaning in English of her Polish name ‘Lewek’) to survive while being treated for her catastrophic injuries at the Royal Cancer Hospital.

Her other leg had to be amputated. But she could not defeat the shock and onset of infection and died three days after the bombing on Tuesday 17th September.

She was only 36 years old. Her family put a notice in the Kensington Post on 28th September 1940:

‘Manners.- On September 17. 1940. suddenly, Julie Veronica Manners, of 9 Cheyne-row, beloved wife of Hubert Manners and mother of Henry.’

When the tenants of 9 Cheyne Row heard that Mabel Lethbridge had been giving shelter for up to 17 of the air raid survivors, one of Mrs Manners’ tenants brought around the pan of jam she had left on the gas as she hurried to the shelter. Mr Tobin had been there to stop the bubbling jam burning and he transformed it into a large jar of home-made jam and combined it with a great parcel of groceries donated by all the tenants living in Mrs Manners’ house.

Julie Manners left probate of £251 11s 8d. Her husband Hubert died only six months later at the age of 53 in Mapledurham near Henley on 24th March 1941 leaving probate of £2,560 which the Bank of England inflation calculator estimates having a value in August 2024 of £108,598.51.

Mary Ellen Sherbourne, 60 years old, a housekeeper of 23 Cheyne Row. Again, the CWGC states that she died at the Carlyle Laundry, Cheyne Row, but she was in the shelter of the crypt of the Holy Redeemer Church when the bomb detonated among them.

Mary was housekeeper to 84 year-old Adolphus Birkenruth in number 23 Cheyne Row directly opposite the church and they would be both killed.

What seems so unutterably sad about Mary Sherbourne is that it is not possible to find any trail of relatives for her in the public records. For a woman who was born in 1880 and lived and worked in Britain for 60 years this is somewhat astonishing.

No family came forward to arrange burial, which was carried out by Chelsea Borough Council.

She was identified through the ‘inspection of effects and photograph taken of deceased after death.’ There is no gravestone in Brompton Cemetery to mark her passing and previous existence in the world.

It is possible she spent the whole of her working life in domestic service, unmarried and with no family to speak of apart from the people she worked for and with.

She was buried in the Brompton Cemetery in grave number 190298 on 24th September 1940 and is commemorated online.

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Dagobert Trebitsch fled the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Austria as a refugee and suffered the terrible misfortune of being killed by a Nazi bomb in an air raid on London- a city and a country which had given him sanctuary.

He was a leather exporter from Vienna and 77 years old when he died two days after his birthday on 25th September 1940.

He had been grieviously injured in the crypt of the Holy Redeemer Church and was being treated at Staines Emergency Hospital in Ashford, an advanced base hospital under the control of St George’s Hospital set up to take casualties from the Second World War.

The Emergency Medical Service (E.M.S.). provided beds and treatment to Dunkirk evacuation wounded and the increasing number of civilians being injured in the developing London Blitz in the autumn of 1940.

Sadly Dagobert succombed to the crush and burns he received on the 14th of September.

He and quite possibly his wife Julie [The public records do not disclose their exact relationship] were living at 28A Glebe Place just around the corner from the church.

Julie would pass away in Leicester in 1946. She had been born in Vienna on 25th November 1879 and would have been 67. The other person living with them and registered at the end of September 1939 was Sheila Weiss who was 70 years old. There is no other trace of her in the public records.

Dagobert and Julie Trebitsch were judged by a Home Office Tribunal to be exempt from detention as enemy refugees or aliens in November 1939.

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Percy Philip Hourahan living at 14 Lawrence Street was an immediate next-door neighbour of Holy Redeemer Church shelter warden Martha Page.

He received severe injuries in the bombing on 14th September 1940 and would die in Hill End Hospital in St Albans four years later on 10th October 1944 at the age of 48.

In the late September 1939 Register Percy is listed as having been born on 22nd July 1896 and was working as a ‘Cabinet Maker and Journeyman.’ His wife Ethel, born 31st October 1896 was there along with a John O’Brien, born 24th August 1878, and also a ‘Cabinet Maker and Journeyman’; no doubt one of Percy’s work colleagues.

Percy was part of a well-established and well-known Hourahan family in Chelsea. The local weekly paper covered the funerals of his mother Agnes Maria in 1929 and father Charles Robert in 1934. They had been living at number 70 Christchurch Street and their local church had been Christ Church.

Charles had been the ‘jobbing gardener’ for the Chelsea Hospital for Women in Arthur Street.

In June 1921, the 24 year old Percy Hourahan was living at 38 Christchurch Street and working as carpenter/joiner and bar fitter for ‘Buckley and Beach’ in nearby Shawfield Street.

He married Ethel Varney in 1926. They had two daughters both born in Chelsea- Mary in 1928, and Anne in 1931.

Percy had been a veteran of the First World War serving in the Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment and Royal Army Service Corps in France. He received the Victory and British War medals.

On the 5th October 1917 he had been treated for a gunshot wound to the neck.

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63 year old Joseph Edmund Norris was another casualty of the Holy Redeemer Church crypt bombing who died from the injuries he received while being treated in hospital a few weeks later.

It is not known why he was sheltering there as he lived wth his wife Agnes at 53 Rayleigh Road in West Kensington. It is possible he was visiting friends in Chelsea on that fateful Saturday.

He was described in the 1939 Register as a ‘P. Works Labourer.’

Joseph had been born in Wrotham, Kent on 2nd September 1877 and he was baptised at Plaxtol 28 days later.

In the 1921 Census he was 43 years old working as ‘a contractor pipe painter’ and with his wife Agnes he had two daughters and three sons living with them: Agnes 19, Herbert George 17, Sylvia 14, Ernest 12, and Alfred 8.

Agnes née Howell was working in a laundry. They had married in Brentford in 1901.

Joseph had had an honourable army career. He had enlisted in the Royal Artillery on 7th January 1897 at Hounslow and saw service in Gibraltar, Hong Kong and Singapore.

He was discharged in January 1909, but re-enlisted as a gunner into the Royal Garrison Artillery for service during the Great War in October 1914.

Joseph fought in France throughout First World War receiving the 1915 Star, British War and Victory medals.

After the 14th September 1940 bombing in Chelsea, Joseph was taken for treatment to the Teddington Memorial Hospital and died there just over four weeks later on 19th October 1940.

His wife Agnes passed away in 1947.

Some personal observations

Over the many years I have taken to research the events of Saturday 14th September 1940 in this part of Chelsea and the people involved, I have been profoundly moved by their lives and experiences.

This is, of course, true of all the incidents I have been writing about in the history of the Blitz in Chelsea during World War Two.

I am moved by all the many aspects of their humanity, their sense of community, public service, charity and courage.

These were the streets of my childhood and I had been privileged to have spoken to and knew a few of the people who had been in Chelsea at this time. I made a pledge to enhance and honour their memory.

When I return there now, and I am able to go into the Church of the Holy Redeemer in Upper Cheyne Row, I always take an opportunity to say prayers for them.

And those prayers continue when I catch sight of the ground level basement windows where Mabel Lethbridge and ARP rescuers saw the distraught faces and heard the agonising cries of from the survivors of the explosion in the crypt.

And I can’t help feeling the spirit of these remarkable people resonating to the very depths of my soul.

There’s ARP Warden Bert Thorpe and Shelter Marshall Martha Page helping the local residents take shelter in the Crypt; Bert sending the indefatigable Jo Oakman away on her famous bicycle down Glebe Place, the gaggle of the young women friends and neighbours Muriel Howell, Margaret Makin and Eleanor Foxall emerging from Key House to get to the shelter in time; housekeeper Mary Sherbourne helping her elderly employer the oil painter Adolphus Birkenruth across Cheyne Row to the church from number 23; the gathering of friends in the basement shelter at number 5 Upper Cheyne Row- two elderly brothers, their beloved housekeeper Elizabeth Parke and Mrs Price-Jones and her daughter, the incredible courage of Mabel Lethbridge and ARP Wardens tearing away at rubble and debris and desperately trying to save lives, the sang-froid and dignity of Mrs Julie Manners more concerned about the pot of jam she had left on her gas stove than the terrible injuries to her legs as the hero Chelsea GP Dr. Richard Castillo applied tourniquets and Mabel bunched up blankets on her chest so she could not see the extent of her wounds; and Jo Oakman coping with the shock and horror of finding her friend and fellow Warden Bert Thorpe’s dead body and then working through the night and all through the next day giving first aid and comfort to the survivors only to return to her flat in Justice Walk and find it uninhabitable through the bombing.

I say a prayer to all those good people left with the unimaginable grief of losing loved ones: City of London Police Constable Leslie Frank Howell who had to find his young wife under blankets covering the dead in front of the Carlyle Laundry in the dawn light of Sunday 15th September and retrieving the photographs of their recent honeymoon in her handbag lying in the wreckage of the crypt and 17 year old Henry Manners who lost his mother Julie in this bombing and then his father Hubert only six months later.

And then the three priests there to give consolation and comfort to the dead, dying and injured on a day among so many others during the Second World War challenging faith and summoning human courage in the words of 1 Corinthians 16:13: ‘Be on your guard, stand firm in the faith, be courageous, be strong.’

We should remember and pay tribute to the Chelsea generation of those days for they were truly courageous and strong.

This iconic Ministry of Information photograph of a fireguard on the roof of Senate House, Bloomsbury in early 1941 is symbolic of the plucky reality of what stood between the people of Chelsea and high explosive bombs, incendiaries, parachute landmines, oil bombs, and proto-intercontinental ballistic rockets and missiles with one ton payloads during the Second World War.

Brave and public-spirited women such as Jo Oakman, Mabel Lethibridge, Frances Faviell and so many others equipped with just a steel helmet, gas mask in cardboard box, bucket of water and kind of stirrup pump one would have found in garden centres.

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If you are relatives and descendants of any of the people mentioned and cited in this historical account and wish to correct any errors or add any further information, including portraits and photographs, please contact me by way of the comment section.

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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.

If you would like to protect the history and heritage of Chelsea do consider applying to be a member of The Chelsea Society which ‘was founded in 1927 to protect the interests of all who live and work here, and to preserve and enhance the unique character of Chelsea for the public benefit.‘

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Congratulations to The Chelsea Citizen, a dynamic new hyper-local newspaper launching in the spring 2025. Founder & Editor Rob McGibbon, Chelsea resident for 30 years and 40 years a respected and campaigning journalist. This is a significant and important development in the history of newspapers and journalism in Chelsea. Whole-hearted support from Chelsea History and Studies. Sign up for the Chelsea Citizen Newsletter.

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