When the wall of cobblestones was judged sufficiently high, several iron window railings that the Ministry of Works had missed were cut apart, then placed as pikes atop the stones.
Woodley told me, “Largely because none of us had ever seen a panzer regiment in action, our new stone barricade looked impenetrable. We limped to our homes for dinner, exhausted, every muscle aching. I could not lift my arms to open my flat’s door or even to knock on it. They were utterly spent. I butted the door with my head until my wife let me in. I had a sizable blue bump on my forehead the next day.”
He may have taken offense when I grinned, because he added in the tones of a martyr, “So you can put in your book that David Woodley did not escape the war unscathed.”
George Portman was a veteran of the Somme, where he served with the Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment). The regiment was originally raised during Monmouth’s Rebellion in 1685 from the Tower of London’s existing garrison. Portman told me, “Our unit was known to be singularly difficult to remove from positions we had set to hold.”
Portman claimed to be an authority at receiving artillery shells. “The Fusiliers took our share in the Great War. Surviving it makes you an expert.”
When he joined the thousands of Londoner’s excavating a trench and tank trap in Hyde Park, he immediately saw their folly. “They were digging under trees.”
I admitted I did not know the danger of placing a trench under trees.
“Neither did they. So I whistled between my fingers and gathered a few of them around. They were using garden hoes and coal shovels, all these fine Mayfair and Belgravia ladies, some wearing evening gloves up to their elbows. They had mud streaked on their faces, and their hair was damp with sweat. One woman was wearing a string of pearls over a leather apron probably borrowed from her gardener. Quite a sight. Another woman dug while her chauffeur waited on Carriage Road, the door of her Rolls Royce open for her return.”
Portman and I were sipping ale at the One for All Pub in London. He went on, “I told them our unit had learned the harsh lesson at the Somme. A nearby squadron was in a foxhole in an orchard. They were under the low branches of an apple tree. I was posted along an embankment near a road and saw what happened and will never forget it. I heard the shell coming in and looked up. The shell stuck the tree, which acted as an airburst. The fragments shot straight down like a grenade, killing six soldiers in the hole.”
What did the Hyde Park diggers do? I asked.
“I give them credit. They shuddered at my description, but I didn’t hear one groan or see one mouth turn down. They just marched fifty yards away from the trees and began to dig a new trench parallel to the old one.”
I had never seen a television receiver before I came to London. Hugh Young, owner of Marylebone Radio and Electronics, assured me there were over twenty thousand of them in London before the war began. He lived in a flat above his shop.
He told me after the war, “Our barricade was assembled in great haste, in a frenzy, really. We were swept up in the urgency of it all, and our efforts were fanned by fear and defiance. People emptied their flats of furniture to pile it in the street.”
Desks, dressers, bookshelves, mattresses, and rolled-up rugs were thrown onto the heap. Hanging flower pots, commercial display racks, closet doors, an antique secretary. Young remembered a long and varied list.
“My neighbors were offering their all for the barricade, and I could do no less. One at a time, I carted out my television receivers and tossed them onto the mound. Twelve of them, their glass screens shattering as more furniture was thrown onto the pile.
“You lost your entire inventory?” I asked.
“You would have to have been on Marylebone Street to understand our fervor for that barricade.”
Philip Little was a bus driver who recalled for me his blockade. “We made the barricade with what we knew best, our double-deckers. Me and Arthur Johns and James Sullivan and Harold Bass parked them side by side on Bishopsgate. You couldn’t have squeezed a leaf between them.”
I asked if a panzer couldn’t easily have pushed one of the double deckers out of the way.
“That was our next thought. So we flattened all the tires.”
“That still doesn’t seem enough,” I commented.
“Then we filled the buses with rubble. Stones and bricks and beams. They sank to their axles.”
“Even that doesn’t sound like enough.”
“Well,” Little said, “then I bashed out the front window and sat in my driver’s chair with my old Lee Enfield, waiting for the bastards.”
Sidney Blasingale sold gas-proof dog kennels, manufactured by the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals. “They cost four pounds, and I hadn’t sold many. I threw two dozen of them on the barricade, glad to be rid of them.”
Douglas Harlow owned the Victoria Street Cinema. “I was losing money because of the fourteen fire-watchers I had to employ. The cinema’s wide, flat roof seemed to attract the incendiaries, and the fire-watchers had to sit up there every night. Then I made the mistake of showing Opened by Mistake, which had a bad-luck reputation because three cinemas showing it had been bombed. The long queues normally in front of my cinema disappeared. So I directed my fire-watchers to rip out the rows of seats and add them to the barricade.”
Martha Hudson rushed out of her flat to find a barricade being constructed of thirty-gallon drums carted from a nearby Thames dock. Her neighbors’ plan was to make a wall of them, then fill them with water for weight. Hudson urged that many of them be filled with petrol instead. An immediate rush ensued to siphon the tanks of automobiles and trucks. Where a siphoning hose was not available, gasoline tanks were pierced with a nail or a screwdriver, and the spilling gasoline was collected in jars. Most autos were low on fuel, but slowly, jar by jar, six of the barrels were filled. Gasoline-soaked rags were inserted into the bungholes. “You Americans are fond of barbecues,” she told me after the war. “My neighbors and I had one planned for the first Germans we saw.”
The Day of the Barricades produced several anomalies, to my mind, but perhaps not to an Englishman’s. London was awash in bomb rubble, yet many of the blockades were of automobiles and furniture and material ripped from standing buildings. Perhaps Londoners were saying, “We’ll give it our best,” and their best was items of value. Many of the barricades were made of what had until then remained intact.
Another peculiarity, possibly explained by their history as an island fortress, was that at the center of the concentric circles of barricades was not the seat of government, the Houses of Parliament, but the Tower. Some unspoken historic pulse, sensed by all, decreed that the ancient citadel would be London’s last stand. Fireman David Woodley said, “England would fall only when the invader had planted his wretched banner atop the White Tower.”
Winston Churchill later told General Clay that Second Dunkirk will be recorded as one of the celebrated marches of all time, maybe the most celebrated.
Clay, who by then should have known better, said, “Surely not as great as Alexander’s march to Thebes, 240 miles in thirteen days.”
The prime minister looked up from his tea. He wore an expression of tired indulgence. “As great, and as great as Hannibal’s winter march over the Alps in 218 B.C.”
“But not as great as Scipio Africanus’ masterly march from Utica up the Bagradas Valley.”
Churchill came back with, “As great, and as great as Harold’s march from York to Battle in 1066.”