The London Blitz Murders

BEFORE…

On the brink of war, London was the largest and-in the opinion of many-greatest city in the world. Metropolitan London’s population was eight million and ever-growing, the population of Great Britain herself having risen some five million souls between the First War and the coming one… a third of whom lived or worked in London.

The Port of London commanded more tonnage than any other, generating a quarter of Britain’s imports; and better than half the world’s international trade passed through the claustrophobic, clogged financial district between the East End docks and the prosperous West End. Air travel was coming into its own as well, with London at the center of a network of airways making international travel fast and practical.

London, then as now, was the seat of government-legislative, executive and judiciary, with the House of Lords the Empire’s supreme court of appeal-as well as home to the royal capital… Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s and even the Tower of London down the Thames, where heads no longer rolled and the crown jewels were under watch by guards (and tourists).

Education was well-represented by eminent grammar schools (Alleyns, Battersea) and fine public schools (St. Paul’s, Westminster), while London University rivaled Cambridge and Oxford. There were museums-the British Museum and National Gallery were only the beginning of an impressive array-and theater that made New York’s Broadway look like the shabby vaudeville it was, plus comedies and musicals representing homegrown vaudeville as gloriously tasteless as anything the Yanks could muster.

Of course, a London resident had a higher cost of living than elsewhere in the kingdom; but the standard of living was also high, and even during the Depression-quelled by an economy spurred on by imminent war-unemployment had been low. The East End still had its share of poverty, however, and some considered a Bolshevik revolution inevitable.

A greater and even more imminent threat seemed to be London itself-its vulnerability, its dense population in a relatively small area, its attraction to an enemy desirous of delivering a “knock-out blow” to a target seemingly primed for an aerial attack.

And as we know, the bombs did drop… and the city did endure.

This is one small story in that greater drama, the account of one brave woman in that brave city, who like that city survived with dignity…

… and of a murderer who did not.