The Balham station disaster

On the evening of Monday 14 October 1940, a few minutes after eight o’clock, a heavy German bomb fell on the carriageway of Balham High Road in south London, directly above the northern end of the platforms of Balham Underground station on the Northern Line. It burrowed some 10 metres (32 feet) into the ground and exploded just above the cross-passage linking the two platforms. Several hundred people had taken shelter from the raid below. The roof of the tunnel partly collapsed, and from fractured water mains and sewers water mixed with earth, gravel and sewage poured in. On the surface, in the blackout, a double-decker bus drove into the crater. According to the register of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission 66 people were killed; other tallies give between 64 and 68. It was one of the worst single tragedies of the Blitz in October 1940, the month in which the Luftwaffe switched to night raids and London was bombed almost every night.

Popular chronologies record several brief items for October: on 2 October, that the bombing of London went on throughout the month; on 13 October, that British civilians were still being killed by German bombs although the attacks had “greatly diminished”; on 14 October, the Balham disaster with 66 victims; and on 21 October, that Liverpool had been bombed “for the two hundredth time”. Together they form a single picture: a night campaign that no longer resembled the daylight air battles of August and September, but which killed almost as many people. Two of these items need qualifying.

From day to night

After the defeat of the daylight raids on 15 September the Luftwaffe gradually withdrew its large bomber formations from the skies over England by day. At the turn of September and October its daytime operations were increasingly confined to sweeps by fighters and fighter-bombers – Messerschmitt Bf 109s and Bf 110s carrying bombs – which crossed Kent and London at high altitude, dropped their loads and turned for home. They did little damage, but they forced Fighter Command to scramble squadrons constantly. According to the date generally accepted in the literature, from 7 October night bombing officially became the main method of waging the campaign. By day bombers now appeared only sporadically, and darkness took their place.

It is presumably to this change that the remark found under 13 October, that the attacks had “greatly diminished”, refers. It was true if one looked at the daytime air fighting and the number of aircraft visible over England by day. It was not true if one counted bombs and victims. According to British figures cited in the literature, in October 1940 the Luftwaffe dropped some 8,200 tonnes of bombs on Britain, only about a tenth of them by day, and more than 5,400 tonnes by night on London alone. According to British civil defence statistics, more than 6,300 civilians were killed across the country in October, not much fewer than in September (almost 7,000). In those two months together more than 13,000 civilians died, most of them Londoners. What had diminished, then, was the visibility of the raids and the Luftwaffe’s losses, not their lethality.

The night gave the German crews almost complete impunity. British night defences were very weak at the time. There were few night fighters with airborne radar, mostly obsolete Blenheims, and their early radar sets were unreliable; the new Beaufighters were only just entering service. The anti-aircraft guns fired “blind”, in a barrage that did more to raise Londoners’ spirits than to bring down aircraft. According to figures cited in the literature, on the night of 14–15 October London’s anti-aircraft artillery fired more than 8,300 shells and shot down two bombers. The German aircraft – chiefly Heinkel He 111s, Dornier Do 17s and Junkers Ju 88s – found their target without difficulty, because London was vast and the Thames clearly visible in the moonlight. In poorer weather they used the Knickebein (PL) radio guidance system, which the British were just learning to jam.

The night of 14–15 October

The night on which Balham was bombed was one of the heaviest of this phase of the Blitz. According to the most frequently cited figures, some 380 bombers of Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle’s Luftflotte 3 came over London, making it the strongest night attack on the capital up to that time. The moon was almost full. Bombs fell in many districts, from the centre to the suburbs in the south and north. Railway lines and stations were damaged, and several hundred fires broke out. According to British tallies, about 200 people were killed in London that night and about 2,000 injured. The next night, 15–16 October, the bombers returned with an even heavier load: they dropped some 380 tonnes of high explosive, started almost 900 fires and cut five main railway lines into the capital.

A bomb above the tunnel

Balham station, opened in 1926 on the extension of the line to Morden and designed by Charles Holden, was one of the so-called deep-level Tube stations, whose platforms lie in tunnels bored through the London clay. Such stations were regarded as the safest shelters in the city, and since September the authorities, at first reluctantly, had allowed people to spend the night in them. On the evening of 14 October there were, according to various accounts, between about 500 and 600 people on the platforms and in the passages at Balham: whole families with blankets, food and flasks, who had come before dusk to sit out the night.

At about 8.02 p.m. a high-explosive bomb of some 1,400 kilograms fell on Balham High Road. It was of the semi-armour-piercing type – designed, that is, to penetrate deep before exploding. It drove into the road, passed through the layers of earth and exploded at a depth of about 10 metres, just above the cross-passage between the platforms at the northern end of the station. The blast did not reach the people on the platforms directly, but it brought down part of the vault of the northbound tunnel and ruptured the water mains and sewers running beneath the street. Water, mud, sand and gravel burst into the tunnel. The lights went out. The collapse and the engulfing mud cut some of the people off from the exits, and the water also flowed through the passages into the southbound tunnel. According to reports, the mass of earth and water spread for several hundred metres along the tunnels, almost to the neighbouring station of Clapham South in Clapham.

Some of those sheltering managed to escape by the stairs and passages at the southern end of the station, helped by Underground staff. Many, however, drowned or were buried in the northbound tunnel before anyone could reach them. Recovering the bodies from the mud and rubble took many days.

A bus in the crater

On the surface the explosion tore a huge crater in the road. A few minutes later a number 88 double-decker bus drove into it in the blacked-out street; according to most accounts it was already running without passengers or returning to the depot. The driver did not see the hole in the darkness, and the bus slid nose-first into the crater. According to the available accounts, no one on the bus was killed. The photograph of the red bus wedged in the crater above the wrecked station later went round the world and became one of the best-known images of the Blitz. In Britain itself the press reported very little about the Balham tragedy: the censors did not want Londoners to stop regarding the Underground as a safe refuge.

The victims

The number of dead is uncertain, as is typical of many Blitz disasters. The register of civilian war dead kept by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission lists 66 people killed at the station. Other sources speak of 64 shelterers and four Underground staff, 68 dead in all. More than 70 were injured. The most frequently given figure of 66 therefore corresponds to the Commission’s register, but it is not the only one in the literature. This uncertainty has even affected the commemoration: a plaque unveiled in the station’s booking hall in 2000 gave 64 victims; in 2010 it was replaced by a new one without a death toll, and in 2016 London Underground unveiled a memorial stone on the site.

The section of the Northern Line between Tooting Bec and Clapham Common was closed for almost three months. The station and the line reopened on 12 January 1941.

The Balham tragedy later found its way into literature and film: it is mentioned in Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement and in its 2007 film adaptation, and in 2024 Steve McQueen showed the flooding of an Underground station shelter in his film Blitz, inspired by the Balham disaster.

Other shelter tragedies

Balham was not the only shelter to fail in those days. On 12 October a bomb hit Trafalgar Square station on the Bakerloo line, beneath Trafalgar Square, and killed seven people who were spending the night there. On the night of 13–14 October a single German aircraft dropped a bomb on houses right next to Bounds Green station in north London. The collapsing buildings crushed the end of the platform tunnel in which people were sleeping. According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission register, 16 people were killed on the spot, among them three Belgian refugees, and a seventeenth died in hospital the next day; about twenty were injured. That same night in Stoke Newington a bomb hit a shelter beneath a block of flats in Coronation Avenue. According to most studies, about 160 people died there, making it one of the bloodiest disasters of the entire Blitz, although it attracted less attention than Balham.

These events showed that even a deep shelter did not guarantee survival. The Underground was not, in any case, Londoners’ main refuge. In mid-September about 150,000 people were sleeping in it, and later fewer, while most of the population spent their nights in corrugated-iron Anderson shelters dug into their gardens, in cellars, in public surface shelters or simply in their own beds. The authorities, who before the war had rejected the idea of sheltering in the Underground for fear of fostering a “shelter mentality” and paralysing transport, had to give way to the facts. On 3 October, in the government reshuffle, Herbert Morrison, a London Labour politician, succeeded John Anderson at the Ministry of Home Security. In October the government decided to build new deep shelters beneath Underground lines for some 80,000 people. They were ready, however, only when the heaviest raids were already over. In the autumn the stations began to be fitted with bunks; tickets for sleeping places were issued, toilets were organised and meals were brought in by special trains.

Liverpool and other cities

Although London remained the main target, the night raids also fell on other cities. In the last ten days of October the Luftwaffe dropped some 450 tonnes of bombs on Birmingham and Coventry, and attacked factories in Manchester, Glasgow and Kingston upon Hull. Liverpool, the largest port on the west coast, through which most supplies from North America passed, had been bombed since August. The first major raid on the city, by about 160 bombers, came on the night of 28–29 August, and the following nights brought more. In October, according to British figures, some 180 tonnes of bombs fell on Liverpool and the surrounding Merseyside area.

The mention found under 21 October that Liverpool had been bombed “for the two hundredth time” needs explaining. Local chronicles record in the last ten days of October, usually under 21 or 23 October, “the two hundredth raid on Merseyside”. According to histories of the bombing of Liverpool, however, there were about 50 raids on the city between the end of August and the end of October, many of them minor, involving a handful of aircraft. Two hundred bombing raids in so short a time would therefore have been impossible. The figure most probably refers to air-raid alerts: the sirens sounded over Merseyside every time German aircraft approached, including when they flew on elsewhere or circled without dropping bombs. For the inhabitants, who went down to the shelters night after night, it was an equally exhausting tally. Liverpool’s worst days were yet to come.

Churchill and the night defences

The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who since September had regularly visited the bombed districts, spoke in the House of Commons on 8 October about the scale of destruction with a certain defiance: at the current rate, he calculated, it would take the Germans about ten years to destroy half of London’s houses. This was meant to raise spirits, but it did not alter the fact that the night belonged to the Luftwaffe. On 17 October a conference on the state of night defence was held at the Air Ministry, at which the Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command, Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, was sharply criticised. He was accused of being slow to introduce night fighters and new methods of combat. Dowding, the victor of the daylight battle, was removed from his command in November. The problem was solved only in 1941, by Beaufighters with better radar, ground-controlled interception radar and ever more effective jamming of the German radio beams.

Place in the war

October 1940 was a month of transition. The Battle of Britain in its daylight form was drawing to a close, and on 12 October the German command postponed the invasion until the spring of 1941, which in practice meant that the night bombing was no longer preparing a landing but was meant to weaken Britain in its own right. The raids on London, carried out almost without a break for 57 nights from 7 September, continued until the beginning of November, and in mid-November the Luftwaffe changed its plan and struck at industrial centres and ports: on 14 November it destroyed Coventry, and then bombed Birmingham, Bristol, Southampton and Liverpool, where on the night of 28–29 November a bomb hit the shelter in Durning Road and killed 166 people. London was still to suffer the great fire of 29 December, the disaster at Bank station on 11 January 1941 and the last and heaviest raid, on the night of 10–11 May 1941. Liverpool and Merseyside lost some 4,000 dead over the whole Blitz, more than anywhere apart from London.

The Balham disaster became a symbol of this night war against cities: the enemy could not be seen, a shelter could turn into a trap, and death was decided by chance – in this case, a bomb that struck the one spot where it could break through into a crowded tunnel. Despite such tragedies, Londoners neither abandoned the Underground nor broke psychologically, as the authorities had feared before the war. By May 1941 the Blitz had killed more than 40,000 British civilians, but it did not force Britain to make peace.