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Sex, fear and looting: survivors disclose untold stories of the Blitz

New history based on interviews gives unvarnished account of bombings and air battle

Maev Kennedy
Thursday October 5, 2006
The Guardian


The slackers, the looters, the promiscuous and the just plain terrified men and women of the Blitz are finally being heard, more than 60 years after the last bombs fell. The voices often edited out of the patriotic official version of Britain's finest hour resurface in a new history of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain, based on thousands of hours of recordings of survivors, held in the archives of the Imperial War Museum.

Joshua Levine, who spent almost a year listening to the memories of sailors and civilians, many now dead, said: "History is never black and white. Instead it's many shades of grey.
"There was heroism, but there are stories of real people behaving badly under stress, lots of sexual activity, fiddling rations, looting, getting through it all as well as they could.

"This was a crucial time in the whole social structure of the country. All the barriers were down, people were eating the same food, wearing the same clothes, sheltering together. Poor city children were evacuated to much richer families. All the old rules were broken and could never be put back together again. For good or ill the origins of modern Britain lie in this period."

Interviews

The Imperial War Museum has built up the archive over the last 30 years, sending staff out to record deeply personal interviews, often capturing insights from elderly and frail people which would otherwise have been lost for ever with them. "This is history within living memory - just," Mr Levine said. "This is the last chance to hear these voices at first hand." He was particularly struck by an appalling account of the direct hit on the Cafe de Paris, whose underground ballroom was thought to be safe, recorded by the late Ballard Berkeley, the actor later to become famous as the major in Fawlty Towers.

Berkeley, a special constable, arrived to find a scene from hell, the bandleader Snakehips Johnson decapitated, and elegantly dressed people still sitting at tables without a mark on them, but stone dead. What shocked him more was the ransacking of the corpses: looters mingled with the fire crews and police, and cut the fingers from the dead to get at their rings.

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