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A married man and a plumber by trade: Ernie was a happy-go-lucky adventurous type. His horizons had always stretched further than the streets of London – now battered from the blitz – where he made his living. Ernie was also something of the joker in the family pack and was the sort of person who was always willing to have a laugh.

In the brighter days before the war, the family often took weekend camping breaks at Hatfield, outside of London. Heather, Ernie's niece recalled that the adults used to frequent ‘The Green Man pub on Saturday night and [would] come home back across the field (very often in a wheelbarrow)’. They would then sit around a camp fire and sing ‘questionable songs’.

‘Ernie used to give me “flying angels” – me sitting on his shoulders with both of us holding our hands out together and dashing round the field,’ Heather recalled. ‘He was always considered the tearaway of the family and really very different from the others.’

Ernie was also extremely keen on motor bikes and the sport of scrambling, in which he won a number of prizes riding an Enfield 500. He met his wife, Billie, through motorbikes in 1938. ‘Ernie was a great motorcyclist’, she remembered, ‘and all the boys he knew used to collect in one of their gardens and tune up the bikes, and of course exchange views on everything.’

Billie would ride with the Battersea Boys Motorbike Club, which Ernie belonged to, as her ladies club was, she felt, a bit ‘stuffy’. They hit it off straight away, with Billie calling Ernie ‘Lew’ after his family surname. ‘When I first met him we were instantly attracted to one another and met as often as we could…he was a fun person and we were just two halves making up the whole being.'

The world at war

Once the war started, Ernie volunteered as a member of the ARP (Air Raid Precautions) rescue party at Wandsworth. For the first year – in what was known by many as the ‘Phoney War’, because of its relative inaction – the job would have entailed practising what we today would call disaster relief. ARP volunteers were taught the rudiments of first aid, made aware of the dangers of gas, water and electrical mains and taught how to deal with them.

In early September 1940, the training became a harsh reality with the beginning of the Blitz. In the months before, France had collapsed and Britain now found herself facing the might of the Axis powers alone. In preparation for a possible invasion, the Luftwaffe was charged with destroying Britain’s fighter defence through attrition and by bombing the southern airfields.

The ‘Battle of Britain’ was not, as often presented to the British public then and since, a simple turkey shoot where British Hurricanes and Spitfires shot down 10 enemy aircraft for every loss taken. While it is true that the RAF held a number of key advantages in the Battle, including the ability to keep their machines up in the air longer and the advantage of fighting over friendly territory, the destruction of friendly aircraft was still too high for British manufacturers to keep up with the loss of machines.

By September 1940, Fighter Command faced the threat of being defeated through attrition: it would take a miracle to turn the tide.

A ‘miracle’ did occur, although it was a lifeline that was to involve the suffering and deaths of thousands of civilians. A sudden change in German tactics occurred after RAF bombers managed to hit Berlin on a small-scale raid. Enraged that capital of the Third Reich had been targeted, and already seething that the British were refusing to come to peace terms, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to bomb Britain’s cities.

London, of course, topped the list of targets. The Luftwaffe frequently chose the areas of Wandsworth, Clapham, and Waterloo – with its vital railway lines running from London down to the southern ports and the West Country – for special attention. Although it should be noted that nothing like the tonnage of explosives fell here when compared with the East End. Nonetheless, the work of rescue parties in this part of London would have been fairly constant during particularly bad spells in the Blitz. It was also common practise for the civil defence authorities to send spare ARP rescue parties from one area of London that had escaped damaged to any area that had suffered particularly bad devastation. Thus Ernie may well have found himself working in areas outside his district.

One of the objectives of the bombing urban areas was not only to destroy the factories and industrial sites of an enemy nation, but to also destroy the homes of its work force. Often both objectives were achieved together due, quite simply, to the inaccuracy of bombing technology at this time. In 1940 there was no such thing as precision targeting, even in daylight. At night, flying through tracer, flak, while trying to avoid searchlight beams, most bombers would arrive over the target, ditch their ‘cargo’ and then head for home as quickly as possible.

Starting fires

The theory was simple: if enough bombers made it through the enemy defences and dropped a sufficiently heavy tonnage of bombs, then the target would be destroyed in the general conflagration. The aircraft following the lead wave would aim for the fires already started. They would drop their bombs into the nascent fires, hoping to stoke the flames further and cause the maximum damage possible.

But if the first wave’s bombs fell short of the target, a serious problem could occur. The following aircraft would release their munitions into infernos now springing up away from the target, the error becoming amplified with the passing of every wave dropping their bombs short. The term for this effect was called ‘creepback’. Creepback would often mean very little damage done to the primary objective.

To make their raids more efficient, both the Germans and the British would send their most able bomber units to lead the assault. In the lead aircraft was the master bomber who, it was hoped, would at least reduce the risk of creep back by hitting as close to the target as possible.  Later on, the British would seek to increase the efficiency of their bombing raids with the introduction of elite pathfinder squadrons, often flying the excellent Mosquito aircraft, which was rolled out in 1942. The pathfinders would drop coloured-coded flares to guide the waves of bombers to the target. The pathfinder’s job was exceedingly dangerous: they were the first into the area and they would often stay in the danger zone until the bomber stream had passed. They would relay information back to the approaching waves in order to make sure that their approach was correct and on target too.

Meanwhile, on the ground, meteorological conditions could cause serious problems for those combating the blaze. If enough fires took hold over a district, vortexes and spirals of flame could occur, sucking in oxygen from the surrounding areas. The oxygen would then feed the flames further. With the right atmospheric conditions, temperatures more likely to be found in the heart of a steel furnace could be reached. Lampposts would buckle, the leaden tiles of church roofs would melt – even the asphalt was seen to bubble and boil. Those who had fled into basements or bunkers would often be suffocated, if they had not already succumbed to the heat. Others were simply incinerated.

One of the worst bombing raids on London occurred just after the Luftwaffe had been ordered to target British cities, on 7 September 1940. In his work on the Thames, the historian Jonathan Schneer records how that on this day the waters became a river of fire as 350 bombers, with 600 fighters as cover, flew up the estuary during the day in tight formations from 14,000-20,000ft. The London docklands – the warehouse of England – was their target.

Dropping a mixture of regular explosive bombs (500kg and 1,000kg) and thousands of incendiaries and high-explosive splinter bombs, the fires started by the Luftwaffe were soon raging out of control. Around 1.5 million tonnes of softwood became kindling, the tea burned with a sickening smell, while rubber created voluminous clouds of toxic smoke. Vast stores of alcohol exploded sending out arcs of lethal flame. There were countless other goods that added to the misery of the emergency services. In the Woolwich arsenal, the firemen and ARP had to work among ammunition boxes and nitro-glycerine. Famously, one fire officer sent out a distress signal that ran: ‘Send all the bloody pumps you’ve got, the whole bloody world is on fire.’

Later that night, the Luftwaffe’s forces returned, their bombs adding new vigour to the blaze that was already raging. Schneer writes: ‘Flames leapt so high and long that they blistered the paint of fireboats three hundred yards away on the far shore of the river. They created hurricanes of wind that tossed burning embers across roads, over rooftops and trees, to set new fires wherever they landed.’

Danger UXB

Fortunately for London, such massed raids initiated in daylight (and more accurate because of this) soon became a thing of the past. Fighter Command, rejuvenated by the breathing space it had been given by the German focus on urban bombing, went on to win the Battle of Britain and forced the enemy to fly only nocturnal missions. The night time raids, however, continued with little interruption as Britain's nightfighters and other defensive measures, still in their relative infancy, struggled to cope.

Once the flames of a bombing attack had been doused and the utility mains secured, the rescue parties could begin their grim but vital job. One of the most dangerous aspects of working in the rubble and looking for survivors were unexploded bombs (UXB) that had failed to detonate. Deadlier still were the bombs with delayed action fuses designed to explode long after they had fallen, but just in time to kill the rescue parties and emergency service crews. Explosive teams were on hand to defuse any UXBs discovered, although this was time consuming. UXBs must have been severely frustrating to the rescue workers, who were well aware that every second counted in order to save lives.

A useful source on Wandworth during the war comes from the council records. Their oral history unit took down the recollections of Elsie Young, who had been an ARP warden based at Battersea town hall. Her job was to take down details from other ARP wardens reporting where the bombs had fallen and to where the emergency services should be directed. 'If the bombs dropped in places where a lot of people had been killed,' she recalled, 'they [would tell] us how many bodies had been picked up. How many limbs they had found – how many heads – horrible things like that.' With this in mind, it is worth pausing to reflect on the horrors that Ernie would have faced and the courage and determination he had to call on when he clambered through wreckage of homes, searching for survivors, but often finding human remains instead.

By the middle of 1941, the bulk of the German Luftwaffe had been diverted to the Eastern Front and the ‘Big Blitz’ was a thing of the past. German bombs had left large swaths of destruction and death. From the start of August 1940 to the end of May 1941 their bombs had been responsible for 43,000 civilians killed across the country.

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