Remembering the Bethnal Green tube disaster: The war-time tragedy Churchill hushed up

By “it” she means the worst civilian disaster of the Second World War, albeit one that was all but absent from the history books for many years.

On a rainy evening of March 3, 1943, 173 people were killed in a crush on the stairs at London’s Bethnal Green Underground station while sheltering from what they thought was a German bombing raid.

Of the victims 84 were women and 62 of them children, while 60 others needed hospital treatment.It was death and injury on a shocking scale and poignantly it was nothing to do with bombing but instead the result of a mass panic caused by the sound of an anti-aircraft gun.

Nor did the wider public know anything about it. Anxious to avoid dampening morale or for the scale of the catastrophe being used as propaganda by enemy forces Winston Churchill used the Official Secrets Act to order a media blackout.

Combined with the traditionally British stoicism of the age it meant the catastrophe was barely discussed, even among the survivors or grieving relatives. 

“You didn’t talk about it. It was as simple as that,” Babette, now a sprightly 86, recalls. It has taken decades for the voices of the survivors to be heard and for the victims to be commemorated and last Christmas relatives of the dead and their supporters gathered at Bethnal Green for the unveiling of a memorial in time for the 75th anniversary of the disaster.

A striking, inverted replica of the Underground station’s staircase carved with the names of the victims, it hangs near the entrance as a reminder of what happened.

Babette was there when it was unveiled and confides that she shed a tear. “It was very moving. Standing there took me back.”

Born and raised near Bethnal Green she recalls how when the air-raid siren sounded at 8.17pm that Wednesday night she gathered her clothes and blankets and along with her mother and older sister travelled to the bus stop to make the short journey to the Tube station.

Then half built – the platforms were finished but there was no track – people had been using it as a bomb shelter since the Blitz of 1940 and snakes of people descending the stairs via the station’s single entrance was a familiar routine. 

“Mum had rented two bunks down there. We had a Morrison shelter but none of us liked sleeping in it so if the siren warning went we would all troop off to get our blanket and pillow and head for the bus,” says Babette.

“On this occasion when we got outside we had just missed a bus and had to wait a few minutes for the next one. I have thought many times over the years that if we had got that first bus I wouldn’t be talking to you now as we would have arrived earlier and been caught in the middle of the crush.”

It was a dank, miserable night as the family made their way from the bus stop through the all-encompassing darkness of the blackout, with two more bus-loads following hot on their heels.

“All of a sudden floodlights came on and the rockets went off,” Babette recalls. “It wasn’t a sound anyone had heard before and it was frightening. That’s what caused the pushing.”

What the crowd didn’t know was that it was actually an anti-aircraft gun in nearby Victoria Park but the whistle of the discarded casings made the East Enders think they were under attack. 

Amid mounting panic wave after wave of people pushed forward on the Underground stairs to join the hundreds already gathered below. Yet unknown to them a woman carrying her baby had tripped, causing a pile-up.

“Then it was like a domino effect, everyone just falling on top of each other,” says Babette. Standing near the top of the stairs she and her sister were caught in the crush.

“I was holding my sister’s hand when someone fell on the back of me,” she recalls.

“Someone else was trying to drag her out and I can remember my sister saying, ‘Don’t pull me so hard I’ve got my little sister.’ Then finally an air raid warden got us out.”

She remembers the crying and screaming as well as the heat of the bodies. “It was horrible,” she shudders.

Also caught in the crush with his two brothers was Joseph Walker, now 83 but then just eight. “We all started to go down the steps and I got separated from my brothers,” he says.

‘‘The crowd was getting bigger and I got pushed down the stairs in a wave but luckily my head was clear so I could breathe. It was a long time before we were pulled out. So many were dead around me but someone saw my hand move and I was pulled out. My family were out searching for me.”

Joseph spent nine months in hospital recovering having suffered damage to his spleen, legs, neck and arms. Babette, meanwhile, emerged unscathed along with her sister although there was anguish when after being taken to an air-raid shelter to recover they realised their mother was not there.

“We were wondering where mum was but a little while later she came walking into the shelter. She had been taken into the church opposite. We just felt huge relief.”

Many were not so lucky. Ivy Brind lost her mother as well as her two-year-old nephew Barry, whom she was looking after for her sister-in-law. 

“She was holding Barry and saw the crowds at the entrance so she turned to go back home,” recalls her daughter Sandra Scotting. “Unfortunately the tide of people coming towards her just threw her back through the doorway and down the stairs. She lay on her back with Barry in her arms while people fell on top of them.”

Barry died along with Ivy’s mum yet for many years the incident was never discussed. “Mum never spoke about that night and nor did my sister,” says Babette.

In fact all were sworn to secrecy but the truth emerged once children went to school to find empty desks and employees realised their colleagues were missing.

“In many cases they have only been able to tell family and friends what happened to them fairly recently,” says Ivy’s daughter Sandra. “With people being killed at home and abroad in the war they just had to get on with life, yet for the Tube shelter survivors it has been with them for ever. It was a very traumatic event for mum.”

Their anguish was worsened by the discovery that the government also suppressed details about the lack of basic safety measures such as lighting and handrails, details that the council had previously reported to them.

It is one reason Sandra was one of a group of people who set up the Stairway To Heaven charity to establish a suitable memorial, believing that the plaque placed above the staircase entrance on the 50th anniversary of the tragedy was inadequate. That campaign finally came to fruition just before Christmas last year when the memorial was unveiled on a chilly December day.

The ribbon was cut by Joan Martin MBE who was the casualty doctor on duty at the nearby hospital on the night of the tragedy, treating the injured and dealing with many of the victims. She has since sadly passed away at the age of 103, never able to forget the trauma of that night.

“She carried it with her throughout her life stating that it was the worst night of her medical career,” Sandra reveals.

Like everyone else present at the unveiling ceremony to the new memorial Dr Martin took comfort from the fact that now at least those involved in the Bethnal Green Tube shelter disaster will never be forgotten.

For Babette it is a poignant legacy of a catastrophe that she feels could have been avoided: “It happened and it needn’t have happened. It is just very sad.”