Greeny News

London Blitz: 7 September 1940 was the first day of the German bombardment of London that lasted 76 consecutive nights
• Datablog: See how the first day's attacks looked. Full list
• The first day: hour by hour. An interactive map

It was late in the afternoon of an early September Saturday 70 years ago when the German bombers came, flying low, in formation, up the Thames, their engines roaring as they headed for London to start eight months of bombing the capital.

"It was the most amazing, impressive, riveting sight," wrote Colin Perry, a lad cycling that afternoon on Chipstead Hill, Surrey, in a memoir years later. "Directly above me were literally hundreds of planes … the sky was full of them. Bombers hemmed in with fighters, like bees around their queen, like destroyers round the battleship, so came Jerry."

Mavis Fabling, now 80, remembers that afternoon of 7 September 1940 just as clearly. She said: "I can still remember it very vividly. We lived in Abbey Wood, three miles from Woolwich Arsenal. My mother was baking in the kitchen, I was playing outside and my father was digging in the garden. Suddenly he rushed inside. He'd seen the planes overhead. 'Quick, quick, quick, get into the air raid shelter.' We ran down into the shelter in our garden.

"There were awfully frightening sounds, of bombs dropping and then there was one ghastly, thunderous sound. It was a direct hit on our neighbour's shelter. They were all killed, the whole family, except the father who was out. My mother had taken his wife shopping the day before to buy clothes at the Co-op. I can remember looking out of the window at the coffins being brought out and my mother very distressed.

\\ "Then my father got a car from his work and took us down to the old man 'house in Kent, and I remember looking out the window and saw the sky glowing red behind."

The records of the London fire brigade for that day, now kept in the metropolitan archives office in Clerkenwell, tell the story of the first major raid of the blitz in meticulous and sober detail. Neatly typed official green slips record each incident and a separate bound volume lists all the fires attended.

There had been scattered, small-scale raids for weeks, but this was the first concerted attack, ordered two days before by Hitler in retaliation for an RAF raid on Berlin a fortnight earlier.

Day fire started fairly quietly, but by evening the evidence, minute by minute, the incidents coming thick and fast. First in the East End, and then on the docks, the two sides of the river, and then the city - more sporadically - West End.

Trivial fires â€" 6ft by 4ft patch of grass burned in the garden of 207 Waller Road, SE14 at 6.40pm â€" are listed alongside the major: 24-48 Dee Street, Poplar E14, explosive bomb; Culloden Street School; 50-68 and 41 to 71 Aberfeldy Street; and 2-36 and 1-37 Ettrick Street â€" a whole neighbourhood flattened.

The communities beside the docks got it worst: Silvertown on the north side was cut off for hours, its roads and terraces ablaze, Deptford too. At 6.07pm Childeric Road off New Cross Road was hit: 21 to 61 and 10-40 inclusive, 37 private houses severely damaged. At nearby Ruddigore Road, 13 private houses were damaged by explosion and fractured gas main. At Childeric Road today, the west side of the road still stands: a neat Victorian terrace of all the odd numbers. But the other side of the road is now a park.

Stacey Simkins, then 16 and an office boy enrolled as a fire brigade messenger â€" sometimes allowed to hold the hose when other firemen were busy â€" was off duty that night, at home with his family in East Ham. "When the bombers came over that night, most of us stood outside in the road, watching the fires down on the docks. It sounds ridiculous to say it now, doesn't it? We didn't think about the bombs, it was just that old cockney thing: 'Woss goin' on?' "

Fire is almost overflowing. At the beginning of the war, London, only 120 red fire engines and 2,000 motorized pumps. That night, with 'accounts just to say "put out handpumps" or "is not extinguished by strangers with sand."

"Tea makes a blaze that's sweet, sickly and intense. It struck one man as a quaint reversal of the fixed order of things to be pouring cold water on to hot tea leaves. A grain warehouse … brings forth banks of black flies, rats in hundreds and the residue of burnt wheat, a sticky mess that pulls your boots off."

By 6.30pm there were nine fires out of control in the docks. Timber stacks on Surrey docks were so fiercely alight that a fireboat had its paint scorched off in seconds. A rum warehouse went up, its contents spilling into the water and setting the Thames ablaze "like a Christmas pudding". There was a 1,000-metre wall of flame below Tower Bridge.

At 8.30pm, a second wave of bombers arrived, using the fires to guide them up the river. By 3am the next day, the exhausted firemen were gaining control. At 5am the all-clear was sounded.

The first night's raid left 430 killed, including seven firefighters, 60 boats sunk and the docks destroyed. Beckett quotes a fireman: "A man who returned from leave the following day found colleagues in shock, convinced they would not live for more than another week. Men who were old enough to have fought in the first world war said the western front offered nothing worse than they had seen."

The next night, the bombers came again, killing another 400. On 9 September 200 bombers came by day, 170 by night and their bombs killed 370. They came for 57 consecutive nights between mid-September and mid-November and then regularly for another six months until May 1941. Two years later, there would be doodlebugs and V2 rockets.

"Somehow, we just carried on," said Mavis Fabling. "I think it was worse for our parents than for us. I got used to doing my homework in the shelter. The teachers still expected you to learn your Shakespeare sonnet for the morning."