Elbert Royden debated leaving London, but a wager kept him on his street in Mayfair and at his shovel and wheelbarrow. The morning after the first Luftwaffe bombs fell on London, early in the war, Royden and his neighbors gathered in his parlor and vowed they would never surrender their street to German explosives and that they would cart off every stone and pile of mortar and sweep up each speck of dust that might land on their street for the duration of the war. They bet themselves a bottle of Highland malt whiskey.
Many weeks Royden and his friends worked every evening until midnight, back-breaking labor with crowbars, shovels, wheelbarrows, and brushes. When I asked Royden why he did not desert the city, he replied in the tone I had become accustomed to, “Who would have continued our work on our street?”
I report here that at the end of the war, Royden’s avenue had lost three townhouses on one corner and four in the middle of the block. Other than those gaps, the street was in pristine condition. No mounds of rubble, no dust. Planters were in bloom, cobblestones were brushed, and windows were clean.
Royden concluded, “The Glenlivet made the entire effort worthwhile.”
By his own figuring, David Woodley lifted over four hundred thousand buckets of water during the war. “At the end of a night of it, my arms would hang down my sides like limp rags. I would not be able to lift a fork the next morning, could hardly shave myself.”
Woodley was a member of the London Fire Brigade. He was once a sailor, as were most brigade fire-fighters. He had trained endlessly on their new pumper. “It was a thing of beauty, a Dodge, made in America, ruby red, with brass nozzles and chrome plating on the mountings. We treated it like a royal lady.”
In May 1941, Woodley’s fire station in Chelsea was hit by a Luftwaffe bomb that demolished the pumper. “Could not be salvaged. We pitched the scrap metal to the Ministry of Works. There was no replacement to be had, not with the RAF needing Spitfires. So we fought the fires with buckets.”
Night after night, Woodley organized bucket lines among brigade members and pressed civilians. “I truly think we were more symbolic than anything else. Not much a bucket brigade can do against an entire city block on fire.”
If he was powerless against the blazes, why didn’t he flee London? I asked after the war.
He replied with the assurance of a man with a mission fulfilled, “We had nothing else, so we fought the bombers with symbols. It was an important fight, and I stayed for it.”
My personal lesson on British perseverance came from Rose Hadley. She was a Cockney, born within the sound of the Bow Bells, who proudly listed her trade as “washer woman.” Once a week Corporal Elliot dropped off General Clay’s and my laundry at her Cheapside shop. During our trip to London on the day before the invasion, Elliot drove by her shop to pick up the last batch of laundry. He returned to my office to say that Mrs. Hadley’s small business had been destroyed by fire and that she was nowhere to be found. He had seen her washing machine crushed under fallen rubble. We had grown fond of Mrs. Hadley.
Just when I thought Elliot might become teary, I heard this thunderous voice call out, “’Allo, darlin’s.”
Elliot spun to see Mrs. Hadley stepping into the office, dragging a child’s wagon filled with neatly folded uniform shirts and trousers.
The corporal cried out, “Mrs. Hadley! You’re OK!”
He rushed to her and clasped her in his arms.
She giggled and squirmed out of the embrace. “Ah, go on with you. It’s nothing your mother wouldn’t do.” (As with the Germans I interviewed, I’m translating. Her actual words were “Awr, gerwom wiv yer. Nuffink yer muvver weren’t do.”)
She had salvaged an old washing board, used a door as an ironing board, heated her irons over a fire in a pit dug in the debris, and was making deliveries in a borrowed wagon. She bade Elliot good-bye with “You Yanks like your shirts clean, I know that much.”
For me, Mrs. Hadley best represented London spirit in its time of crisis. Small courage was shown in quiet ways, thousands upon thousands of times each day.
We know now that a primary goal of the German High Command was to generate terror in the city and to start a massive, destabilizing exodus of frightened citizens that would leave London empty. It never came to pass. As General Clay seemed on the verge of losing his battle, Londoners had already begun winning theirs.
As far as I can determine, only one arrow was fired during the invasion. Roger Leeds, the elderly president of the Worthing Archery Club, let it fly, and as a result, he and the rest of Geoffrey Hurst’s guerrillas were added to the timeless scroll of English heroes. Today, ask any schoolboy in England to name his idols, and he’ll likely reply, “Geoffrey Hurst and Roger Leeds, and maybe Robin Hood.” Indeed, Fleet Street likened Hurst’s soldiers to Robin Hood’s band of merry men.
“I laughed at Leeds and his bow all those weeks of training,” Captain Hurst told me after the war. By then he was Sir Geoffrey. “The old bugger didn’t tell me he was the European archery champion three years running in the 1920s.”
By S-Day, Captain Hurst’s guerrilla cell had matured and was served by two signalmen, a clerk, and a storeman. They were supplied with a light ration of high explosives, ammunition, and booby traps. They had also been provided a base.
“Other strike forces—that’s what we were called by General Stedman, and I credited him with a sense of humor—had underground dugouts that had been excavated, roofed, and furnished with bunks and ventilation by the Royal Engineers. Ours was less opulent. It was an enlarged badgers’ sett in an abandoned chalkpit. I suppose badgers had lived there for fifty years. We walled off half their burrow and lived next to them. I’ve had worse neighbors.”
In their burrow, the guerrillas waited as the Germans rolled by overhead. “It was dark as pitch in there, and that old fool Roger Leeds kept poking me with his longbow. Panzers above, and one of my men was carrying a bow and arrows. I wanted to bawl.”
Hurst became a convert that night. The bow was made of yew and was six feet long. It could send a goose-feathered arrow three hundred yards with accuracy. “But Roger was less than thirty yards from his target.”
His target was a Wermacht sentry patrolling a home north of Worthing. The sentry’s squadron had collapsed in their bedrolls after the long channel crossing and the day of battle on English soil. The German guard was walking a random circuit around the grounds, his rifle hanging limply in his hand.
Hurst told me, “Just as he passed a poplar tree in front of the house, Roger’s arrow hit him, right through the neck, with such force that it pinned him to the tree. The German didn’t make a sound, just hung there limply and died. His rifle dropped to the grass.”
Gallant Robin Hood may not have behaved quite as Captain Hurst then did. His service knife between his teeth, Hurst crawled across the grass to the house’s front door. He carefully pushed it open. There were no lights inside. He heard the muffled breathing and turning and whimpering of exhausted men at sleep. The Wehrmacht infantrymen were scattered about the main room, two on davenports, the remainder on a Persian carpet.
Hurst moved silently to the first German. He gently put his hand over the sleeping soldier’s mouth and slit his throat. The man jerked and tightened, but made no more commotion than did his sleeping neighbors. After a moment, the guerrilla captain inched further along the carpet, passing by the next German, to the third enemy soldier. His knife worked again, its steel blade a soft glimmer in the darkness.
Hurst spent the next ten minutes dispensing death and granting life in an alternating pattern. His work done, he dragged himself through the front door, knowing Roger Leeds was covering him from behind a tree. The guerrillas escaped, the only casualty being Hurst’s stained clothing.