The cultural memory of London in the Second World War hasn’t really changed since the 1940s. It’s all about the Blitz spirit, a people united in the face of adversity — grumbling a little, perhaps (this is Britain, after all), but stoic, resilient and mutually supportive. The pictures are of heroic firefighters, families sheltering from bombs in Tube stations, whistling milkmen picking their way through debris, and the indomitable city symbolised by the dome of St Paul’s rising through the smoke.
Those images were deliberately chosen, of course. This was a war of national survival. And in a world that was adjusting to the mass media, propaganda was key. Photographs, newsreels and reporting were expected to contribute to morale. The story they told was essential then, and proved useful to later politicians; Tony Blair was quick to evoke the Blitz in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001. And in the public mind that story has proved remarkably durable, partly because it was true.
But it wasn’t the whole truth and for decades there have been historians and writers trying to adjust the picture. Among them is Amy Helen Bell, whose earlier book London Was Ours used private diaries and letters to show how it felt to live through the bombing, and who returns to the period in Under Cover of Darkness, this time through the prism of murder, her other academic interest, with a handful of homicides.
The London she depicts was a hostile environment, fractured by misery and fear, as the wearying months rolled into years. The shelters were less cheerful than the photographs suggest, being prey to casual violence and opportunistic thieves. Outside, the blackout-darkened streets harbored a multitude of sins, their bombed buildings providing cover for prostitutes, black marketeers, looters, gangsters and even serial killers. The crime rate was rising, as were the murder figures, exacerbated by the presence of so many young men from the British, Canadian and American forces. Families and communities were broken up by the bombing and social norms were fraying — with divorce, abortion and illegitimate children.
The anxiety was too much for some. Bell recounts the tragic tale of Lily Wright, so depressed by the prospect of a German invasion that she killed her nine-year-old daughter. Even bleaker is the story of Margarete Brann and her daughter Irene, Jewish refugees from Germany who lost all sense of hope and agreed a suicide pact. Irene survived and — as the law insisted at the time — was sentenced to death for the murder of her mother. (She was pardoned and served only a few months in jail.)
The London the author depicts was a hostile environment, fractured by misery and fear.
It wasn’t all gloom, of course; there were pubs, clubs, dance-halls and late-night caffs doing good business. We’re also reminded of what a diverse city London was then, from the “vibrant Jewish East End” to Soho with “its vibrant immigrant community”; there was even a “vibrant queer subculture”. As that verbal tick might indicate, there’s an element of academic fashion here with much talk of those “who defied the social norms” and “challenged wartime standards of masculinity”.
Happily, that note doesn’t dominate, and to counteract it there are some fascinating glimpses of the varied views within the judicial system. When a homosexual man was killed by a couple of Canadian soldiers he picked up in a Soho bar, the judge accepted their story that they had been provoked by his sexual advances; they were offered a manslaughter plea-bargain to avoid a full murder trial. The police, though, were furious and wrote to complain: even if the victim had been “a sodomite”, there was no evidence to support the men’s account and this was an abuse of justice.
Judges weren’t necessarily in tune with juries either. Summing up in the case of an ex-soldier who had killed his unfaithful wife, the judge left no doubt this was murder: her adultery was no justification for his crime. Nonetheless, the jurors returned a verdict of manslaughter and the judge distanced himself: “I want to make it perfectly clear that it was their view, not mine.” This is not a monolithic set of moral values and social attitudes.
It wasn’t all gloom, of course; there were pubs, clubs, dance-halls and late-night caffs doing good business.
The book opens and closes with one of Britain’s best-known murderers, John Christie, of 10 Rillington Place; the first victim of his ten-year killing career came in 1943 with Ruth Fuerst, an Austrian Jew working in a munitions factory. But the other cases are far less familiar, chosen for being essentially ordinary. As so often they tend to be tales of slightly shabby and pathetic lives that would have been forgotten had they not ended in violence. Nor are the killings, for the most part, mysteries in a way that fans of Agatha Christie would recognise, and the investigations are dogged rather than spectacular, except for the occasional intervention by a psychic or a display of forensic photography.
Yet it’s the unheroic normality of the accounts that makes this a compelling read. Even with the increased crime rate, the peak was just 66 murders in London in 1945 (it’s been double that in recent years), and it’s what the cases have in common with the wider society that linger. These people — killers and victims alike — could be almost any of the faces in those photographs of the shelters, and the mundane, fragmented details re-animate a lost world of Lyons Corner Houses and Post Office savings books, where a woman spent the evening by “going to her mother’s to listen to the wireless”. It’s the grubbiness that comes through: the smell of families — told to use no more than five inches of bathwater a week between them — crammed into shelters where a bucket served for a toilet.
Consequently, Under Cover of Darkness isn’t really about the murders at all, but about life during wartime and, paradoxically, it reinforces the picture of a resilient city, clinging on amid the rubble and rationing. It’s a fine book, but it won’t change the popular image of the Blitz.
Alwyn Turner is a London-based writer
