Written by Daniel Pembrey to mark the 80th Anniversary of VE Day
Saturday, 7th September 1940 was a perfect day, more like Spring than early Autumn. At 4:43pm, sirens sounded and people on Oxford Street and Bond Street made for the shelters, again. John Lewis’s basement shelters housed several hundred workers. There’d been a few alerts over the past weeks, and a few actual bombs, but this sounded like another false alarm.
Flying up the Thames Estuary were formations of 965 enemy planes interspersed with anti-aircraft fire. This was real: it was happening. Hitler had picked this moment to demand submission from Londoners. The East End docks bore the brunt. As incendiary bombs fell, large parts were soon ablaze. Fires burned out of control in the brimming riverside wharves and warehouses supplying the capital’s shops, businesses and more.
Before long, fires could be seen 30 miles away, providing ideal beacons to guide the planes following in. At 8:10pm, the night raid began: 318 planes carrying high explosive bombs and landmines. These pushed further west into the heart of London and its symbolic centres of finance, government, entertainment and retail with tearing whistles, blinding flashes and concussive ground shakes. Again and again they came, and they kept coming.
Harry Gordon Selfridge’s world famous windows – displaying scores of autographs from celebrities who’d visited the store over its 31-year life – were blown to shards, reportedly reducing the 82-year-old American retail magnate to tears. These windows would be bricked up for the rest of the war. The store’s prized Art Deco lifts were equally damaged; they wouldn’t receive shoppers again before 1945.
A worse fate befell John Lewis’s elegant West House nearer Oxford Circus. On the night of Tuesday 17th September, an incendiary flammenbombe showered it with burning oil and petrol. Combined with strong winds and a separate high explosive blast, it devastated the structure dating to 1897. Three arriving firemen, promptly on the scene, were killed by a second high explosive bomb. In the basement sheltered 200, very frightened souls. A pungent, heady smell followed the burning oil running into street gutters.
“We were wakened about 12 by the first direct hit,” recounted Kay Austin, a John Lewis Partner helping manage the basement shelters that night. “I ran along to the Control-room. Water was pouring down behind our little switchboard and they were already trying to get an ambulance for the wounded firemen.” She tried to help a colleague evacuate some of the shelters but as she entered a Returns room where she had a dozen people sleeping, “the second bomb fell somewhere in front of me. I had one moment of sheer panic. I could have sworn the walls in front of me were going to collapse and the ceiling would then come down on us all… a curious feeling: it was not so much seen as felt – as though someone had put far too much into a cardboard hat-box, and you knew it must give way.” Thankfully, Austin lived to share her experience. First, she needed to help evacuate the shelters, “to Selfridges – a risky and difficult job.”
Daylight revealed shop window mannequins ejected onto Oxford Street, looking like corpses according to George Orwell (those sheltering in the basement suffered no injuries, clarified the Partnership’s secretary). War reporter Kingsley Martin likened it to the ruins of a Greek temple. Among the smouldering wreckage was a tin said to have contained staff tea money, the coins welded to the base by the heat, though archivists at John Lewis question whether it could have been; it seems more likely hot drinks were given to Partners for free. Regardless, this tin, now housed at John Lewis’s Heritage Centre in Berkshire, became totemic, symbolising a hardening resolve.
From the ashes rose an army exhibition in the summer of 1943, titled, The Equipment of a Division. Its purpose? To show the British public precisely what the soldiers of the fighting units needed, from shoelaces to tanks. All four acres of what had been selling space were given over to this aim. Where, before the war, greeters had received customers, an armed sentry now stood. The exhibition was phenomenally popular in the circumstances, drawing more than 650,000 visitors in its first five weeks.
Meanwhile, in place of peacetime fineries, Selfridges was selling blackout supplies. Striking images at the Imperial War Museum show the range on offer: white raincoats, pinafores and walking canes; luminous badges and lapel discs sold by the dozen; luminous armbands, too, and tape that could be added to edges of clothing, all intended to make wearers more visible to pedestrians and motorists on dark streets during the blackouts. By the start of 1942, an estimated one in five people had sustained some form of injury as a direct result of these blackouts. There were also blackout coats for dogs, luminous gas mask cases, luminous flowers for pinning on lapels and an ingenious blackout walking stick, the light in the tip of which could comfortably illuminate the ground before a walker just brightly enough because, after all, this was still Selfridges.
Into its basement came something else again: SIGSALY, a new technology from America. It was a blinking, humming terminal able to encrypt phone calls by digitising them, sometimes making users sound like Donald Duck. It allowed Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt to be in closer contact, for 12 minutes at a time at least. Enemy interceptors would only hear unintelligible noise. The terminals weighed 50 tonnes. The Pentagon received the first one, with an extension running to the White House. This one, in Selfridges’ sub-sub-basement, was reportedly 60 metres below ground, and required a team of US signallers to operate it. The system was checked over by pioneering codebreaker Alan Turing, who gave his blessing. Extensions ran to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, 10 Downing Street and a tiny space in the Cabinet War Rooms, disguised as Churchill’s personal lavatory.
Yet even the safety of this SIGSALY terminal in Selfridges, that far below ground, would be tested by what came next. The story concludes in Part Two, read here.
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