The Bank station disaster

On the evening of Saturday 11 January 1941, during a German raid on London, a heavy high-explosive bomb fell on the road junction in front of the Royal Exchange, opposite the Bank of England, in the very heart of the City of London. It pierced the roadway and exploded just beneath it, in the underground booking hall of Bank Underground station. The ceiling of the hall gave way and the road collapsed into the subways below. The blast travelled down the escalators to the platforms, where people were sheltering from the raid. According to the most commonly cited figures, 56 people were killed and 69 seriously injured. Where seven City streets met there was now a gaping hole measuring some 37 by 30 metres (120 by 100 feet), regarded as one of the largest bomb craters in London.

War chronologies give 57 killed and 69 injured under 11 January. Both figures appear in the sources: 56 dead is the number given by most histories of the London Underground, 57 by some tallies that also include a police officer among the victims, while the number of injured is sometimes given as about 70. Much higher figures, over a hundred, also occur in the literature, but they most probably arise from confusing the number of dead with the total number of casualties, killed and injured. The caption of a photograph in the collections of the London Museum places the explosion on the night of 10–11 January; the great majority of sources, however, link it to the evening of 11 January.

A station beneath a junction

Bank station opened in 1900 as the eastern terminus of the Central London Railway, today’s Central line. The builders had no room on the surface for a station building: the junction was surrounded by the Bank of England, the Royal Exchange and the Mansion House, the residence of the Lord Mayor of the City. The whole station was therefore placed underground. The booking hall was dug out just below the roadway, directly beneath the junction into which several streets run, among them Threadneedle Street, Cornhill, Lombard Street, King William Street, Princes Street and Poultry, and the subways around it also served pedestrians as safe crossings beneath the busy streets. In time the platforms of the line now known as the Northern line and of the short Waterloo & City line were linked by underground passages with the neighbouring Monument station, and the lifts were replaced by escalators.

This position made the hall particularly vulnerable to a hit. The Central line platforms lay deep, in tunnels bored through the London clay, but the hall, the escalator machine rooms and the subways were separated from the road only by the thickness of the ceiling. Like other deep stations, Bank served during the Blitz as a night shelter, used every evening by people living near the City and by those working late in the centre. Since the Balham station disaster in October 1940 Londoners had known that even the Underground gave no certainty of survival, but they still regarded it as one of the safest places in the city.

The evening of 11 January

The raid of 11 January was not among the largest of the Blitz. After the night of 29 December bad weather had restricted Luftwaffe operations for several days. As recently as December German bombers had been devastating one industrial centre after another, Sheffield and Manchester, but now the command was directing more and more of its strength against ports: on 2 January the bombers attacked Cardiff, and on the night of 10–11 January they wrecked the centre of Portsmouth, the Royal Navy’s main base. On the evening of 11 January the target was London again.

The bomb that fell in front of the Royal Exchange pierced the road surface and exploded in the escalator machine room just below the booking hall. The explosion destroyed the hall and the subways around it, and the roadway above them caved in along with rubble, paving slabs and earth. The people in the hall and the subways were killed beneath the debris or by the force of the blast. The shock wave, compressed in the narrow shafts and tunnels, travelled down the escalators to the platforms. According to some accounts it threw people standing near the edge onto the track in front of an incoming train.

Civil defence rescuers, firemen and Underground staff were still bringing out the dead and injured from beneath the rubble long after the all-clear. On the morning of 12 January the police constables Arthur Cross and Fred Tibbs, who throughout the war documented the destruction in the district for the City of London Police, photographed the crater in front of the Royal Exchange. Their pictures are among the best-known images of the damage in London.

The censors, as after the tragedy at Balham, restricted information about casualties in the Underground so as not to undermine confidence in the shelters, and the newspapers wrote mainly about the destruction in the City.

A bridge over the crater

The crater in front of the Royal Exchange paralysed one of London’s most important junctions and the principal meeting point of the City’s streets. The rubble was cleared by soldiers of the Pioneer Corps, the army’s labour formation, and then a detachment of the Royal Engineers threw a temporary steel bridge across the hole. According to the caption of a photograph in the London Museum’s collections, the crater was cleared and bridged within three weeks. Some studies call the structure a Bailey bridge; that type of bridge, however, was only coming into use in 1941, so the name may have been applied later.

The station itself was closed for about two months, until the damage had been repaired. A plaque in the station’s booking hall commemorates the victims today.

January 1941 in the Blitz

The Bank station disaster came in the weeks when London was still counting the cost of the Second Great Fire of London, the raid of the night of 29–30 December 1940. The City authorities and the press could draw up a full reckoning only after several days, once the last fires had been put out and the ruins had stopped smoking. The summary of 1 January 1941 showed that the Old Bailey, the Guildhall and – according to frequently cited figures – eight churches built by Christopher Wren after the fire of 1666 had been destroyed or badly damaged. Among other things, fire had consumed the roof of the great hall of the Guildhall, the medieval seat of the City’s government.

Among the buildings destroyed or badly damaged was also the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court, which stands a few hundred metres from St Paul’s Cathedral. The Old Bailey suffered very heavily in the Blitz, although the available studies do not always specify in which raids; rebuilding lasted until the early 1950s, and the restored Great Hall of the court reopened in 1952. Murals commemorating the Blitz were placed on its walls.

Two days after the disaster in the City, on 13 January, the Luftwaffe carried out a heavy night raid on Plymouth. The city in Devon, with its great dockyard and the naval base at Devonport, had been one of the most frequently bombed towns in southern England since the summer of 1940; alerts were sounded there every few days, and at the end of November more than a hundred German aircraft attacked the naval air station at Mount Batten and the fuel depots on the bay.

According to the local war chronicle, the raid of 13 January began on Monday 13 January at about 6.30 p.m. and lasted three hours. The chronicle records it under the night of 13–14 January, and some studies under 14 January, but it is the same attack. It was the city’s 256th air-raid alert since the beginning of the war. According to the chronicle, based on the journalist H. P. Twyford’s post-war book It Came to Our Door, 24 people were killed, 55 seriously and 62 slightly injured; other tallies give 26 dead. A direct hit on a shelter in Madeira Road, opposite Phoenix Wharf, accounted for many of these victims. Bombs damaged the city hospital at Freedom Fields, where a nine-year-old patient was killed, and wards of the Greenbank hospital. The gasworks at Coxside was badly hit, leaving the city with gas supply problems for some three weeks, and the municipal power station at Prince Rock stopped working (power was restored the next day from the National Grid). About 60 houses were destroyed and about 400 badly damaged. Two firemen, George Henry Wright and Cyril George Lidstone, who fought a blazing fuel tank in extremely dangerous conditions, were later awarded the George Medal.

It was one of the heaviest raids on Plymouth so far, but still relatively small compared with what was to come. The real Plymouth Blitz came in the spring of 1941. On the nights of 20–21 and 21–22 March, immediately after a visit by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, bombers destroyed the city centre and killed 336 people, and in April five more nights of raids devastated Devonport; more than 70 people died in a shelter in Portland Square. Altogether at least 1,174 civilians were killed and more than 4,400 injured in the raids on Plymouth during the war.

Place in the war

January 1941 was a month of transition in the Blitz. Winter, fog and rain limited the number of raids, and the Luftwaffe, as Cardiff, Portsmouth and Plymouth showed, was increasingly choosing ports and naval bases instead of the great inland cities. On 6 February 1941 Adolf Hitler sanctioned this shift with Directive No. 23, which gave first priority to the war against Britain’s seaborne imports. London was not spared, however: in the spring it still suffered heavy raids in March and April, and on the night of 10–11 May 1941 the bloodiest attack of the whole war, after which most of the German bombers departed for the East.

The Bank station disaster, alongside the tragedy at Balham, became the best-known example of the fact that even the Underground offered no protection against a bomb that struck a weak point: a shallow booking hall or a subway beneath the road. It did not change the behaviour of Londoners, who went down into the Underground until the end of the war, but it strengthened the authorities’ resolve to build new, very deep shelters beneath Underground lines, which were not brought into use until after the Blitz had ended. The worst tragedy in the London Underground during the war, however, turned out to be caused not by a bomb but by panic: in March 1943, 173 people were crushed to death on the stairs leading down to Bethnal Green station.

The destruction in the City also had a political dimension. A few days earlier, on 9 January, Harry Hopkins, the closest adviser of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had arrived in Britain, sent to judge whether the British would hold out. Winston Churchill devoted a great deal of time to him over the following weeks and took him on journeys around the country. Hopkins returned to Washington convinced that Britain would fight on and was worth supporting, which strengthened Roosevelt in the struggle over the Lend-Lease bill, introduced in Congress on 10 January and signed in March 1941. The Blitz, which was meant to break Britain’s will to resist, killed more than 40,000 civilians but did not force Britain to make peace, and the shattered junction in front of the Bank of England, bridged by the army after three weeks, became one of the images of a city that despite everything went on working.