Wartime ‘ripple’ led to 600 east London deaths

Winston Churchill visits east London the morning after South Hallsville school tragedy at Canning Town. Picture: Metropolitan Archive

Painstaking research has revealed the disaster on today’s 80th anniversary of the South Hallsville School incident at Canning Town when men, women and children perished who were sheltering there for safety during the Blitz.

The story unfolds in a BBC documentary on the London Blitz 80 years ago about families who escaped the UBX, yet met their fate while seeking safety in the school.

A wartime journalist looking into the tragedy later met a people’s champion in Spitalfields five miles away, Mickey Davis, who was running a public air-raid shelter in Commercial Street that historians view as “the forerunner to the post-war welfare state”.

Gideon Calder interviewed for TV doccumentary about his uncle, wartime journalist Richard Calder. Picture: Mike Brooke

Eight decades on, a series of BBC2 documentary reports begins tonight with families having to be evacuated when the bomb lands on Martindale Road in East Ham the first night of the Blitz on September 7, 1940.

But it fails to go off, so the people are led “for safety” to Canning Town to wait at the school for buses to evacuate them to the safety of the countryside.

But the buses never turn up — the people are left stranded.

Gideon Calder at Spitalfields with his uncle Richard Calder’s wartime book, Carry on London. Picture: Mike Brooke

Fleet Street reporter Richard Calder meets the families put up in cramped conditions at the school and writes in the Daily Herald that “there’s going to be a disaster unless something is done”.

His tragic prophesy comes true the very next day when the school gets a direct hit during another German air-raid, killing everyone sheltering there.

“It puts Calder on the warpath as a campaigning social journalist,” BBC producer Tim Kirby said.

Mickey Davis known as ‘the midget with a big heart’ running wartime air-raid shelter at Spitalfields Market. Picture:Tower Hamlets Archive

“Calder comes across Mickey Davis’s public shelter in Spitalfields in his investigation and sees the outline of what we later come to call the welfare state.”

Calder has been looking into the South Hallsville tragedy when he meets the man known as “Mickey the Midget”, just 4ft tall, who runs the air-raid shelter like a welfare service years ahead of its time.

He includes a chapter on Mickey’s shelter under the Fruit Exchange in Spitalfields Market in his wartime book Carry On London.

Mickey Davis’s air-raid shelter under Fruit & Wool Exchange at Spitalfields Market during London Blitz. Picture: Tower Hamlets Archive

Researchers have since traced Calder’s grandson, university lecturer Gideon Calder, and Mickey Davis’s nephew, East London Advertiser journalist and former BBC news producer Mike Brooke, who were both interviewed for the documentary in 2017 at Spitalfields Church.

Gideon said after the filming: “My uncle looked at what people were doing in their everyday lives and community leaders like Mickey Davis trying to feed them and run the air-raid shelters.

“We still live largely in the world created on the back of the Second Worlds War—more caring, where something like the NHS is absolutely vital.”

East Ham trolleybus depot wrecked in September 1940 in same air-raid that hits South Hallsville School. Picture: Metropolitan Archive

Back then, east London is bearing the brunt of Goring’s Luftwaffe Blitz for five months, night-after-night.

The South Hallsville tragedy triggers a chain of events that leads to a government policy change into how to deal with mass homelessness caused by the air-raids.

People believed for years afterwards that the worst wartime civilian disaster had been at Bethnal Green in 1943 where 173 people died, the youngest a five-month-old baby, when a crowd surged down a tightly packed narrow staircase into an underground shelter and got crushed during a tragic false air-raid alert.

The flicks in the Blitz… Silver screen is showing Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman

The official casualty figure for South Hallsville at the time was 77—but it turned out decades later that closer to 600 people had died, nearly four times the number killed at Bethnal Green.