• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Wartime Cover Up? The Bethnal Green Tragedy (1943)

A

Atch_

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
Mar 4, 2003
Messages
185
Text added for clarity--Yith

The night of the disaster​

There were 10 air raids upon London during the night of March 3 1943.

When the alert sounded at 8.17 pm, hundreds of people left their homes to run to the Bethnal Green Tube Station shelter where 500 people were already sheltering.

Local cinemas emptied and three buses stopped to let passengers into the shelter. In just ten minutes, 1500 people entered the shelter.

At 8.27 p.m. one of the new anti-aircraft rocket batteries at nearby Victoria Park fired its salvo of 60 rockets, making a deafening roar.

The sheer volume of people crowding to get in the shelter was overwhelming.

Inside the tube station

Sheer panic - crowds pressed forward on the Tube station's wet and slippery stairs
The crowd at the shelter entrance, who were waiting to get in, panicked and surged forward.

There was only one narrow entrance to Bethnal Green Tube and there were no crush barriers.

The main staircase was dimly lit by a 25 watt bulb.


It had been raining and the station's steps were wet, making for a treacherous descent.

Inside, a woman near the bottom of the first staircase fell. A man tripped over her, others slipped, and within 15 seconds the stairs were blocked with hundreds of fallen people.

The pressure of the crowd trying to push into the shelter prevented rescuers from helping.

A total of 173 people suffocated to death in the ensuing panic.

________________________________________________​

Hmm. Missile testing or something very other?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I didn't see all the programme but would they have tested a missle in such a built up area, they must have known the consequences and the possible effect on public morale???
 
Indeed - but bring forth the other explainations.
 
Link here

It's probably a UL but i was always told that the woman who slipped first survived the tragedy (highly unlikely!!!).
 
A fairly comprehensive story here , as for the woman who slipped, it seem she survived but her child didn't.
 
Could be this I guess.....At 8.27pm the touch-paper was lit. A frightening roar went out as a nearby anti-aircraft battery fired its salvo of 60 rockets.
Cant be sure, I didn't see the program.
 
The program about the Bethnal Green Missile Tube Scare Tragedy. 170-people crushed to death trying to get into Bethnal Green Tube bomb shelter during the war. Apparently they were spooked by some crazy rocket/missile firing incident.
 
Wikipedia has since been updated to add the 'secret history' element.

News of the disaster was withheld for 36 hours and reporting of what had happened was censored, giving rise to allegations of a cover-up, although it was in line with existing wartime reporting restrictions. Among the reports which never ran was one filed by Eric Linden of the Daily Mail, who witnessed the disaster. The story which was reported instead was that there had been a direct hit by a German bomb. The results of the official investigation were not released until 1946.

At the end of the war, the Minister of Home Security, Herbert Morrison, quoted from a secret report to the effect that there had been a panic, caused by the discharge of anti-aircraft rockets, fired from nearby Victoria Park. But other authorities who looked into what had happened disagreed; the Shoreditch Coroner, Mr W R H Heddy, said that there was "nothing to suggest any stampede or panic or anything of the kind"; Mr Justice Singleton, summarising his decision in Baker v Bethnal Green Corporation, an action for damages by a bereaved widow, said "there was nothing in the way of rushing or surging" on the staircase; the Master of the Rolls, Lord Greene, reviewing the lower court's judgement said "it was perfectly well known .. that there had been no panic". Lord Greene also rebuked the Ministry for getting the case to be held in secret.

The Baker lawsuit was followed by other claims, resulting in a total payout of nearly £60,000, the last of which was made in the early 1950s. The secret official report, by a Metropolitan magistrate, Laurence Rivers Dunne, acknowledged that Bethnal Green Council had warned London Civil Defence, in 1941, that the staircase needed a crush barrier to slow down the crowds, but was told that would be a waste of money.

Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethnal_Green_tube_station#Wartime_disaster_1943

Bethnal_Green_stn_memorial_plaque.JPG
 
81rzXHGylRL._SL1500_.jpg

Actress Millie Bobby Brown has written (ghostwritten) a novel called The Nineteen Steps about the Bethnal Green Tragedy.

The first page opens (Yith: features) with the clunker: “It was hot — the kind of heat that makes you long for the weather to cool down.” This is followed by about 150 pages of walk-on characters ominously pointing out just how dodgy the steps down to Bethnal Green station are. “While the entrance is adequate for normal usage,” some random engineer tells the Mayor, “I think it’s very likely unsafe if there are crowds of people all trying to enter at once.” It’s a bit like setting a novel on the Titanic and having guests randomly come out with, “oh, I sure do hope we won’t see any icebergs on our journey.”​

Extracted from this review:
https://i-d.vice.com/en/article/ak3npe/millie-bobby-brown-nineteen-steps-review

Preview Here:
https://www.amazon.com/Nineteen-Ste...&asin=0063335778&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1

Best parody of the first line:

Screenshot 2023-09-23 at 1.02.29 PM.png
 
First I heard of this was in the TV series All Our Yesterdays, which explained how the disaster was covered up for reasons of national morale.
 
Precisely.
There was a cover-up, but for obvious reasons.
It was a morale 'thing'. Also, they didn't want to put people off going to the tube for shelter. It was hard enough to persuade the public to 'underground' life in the first place.
 
Stormkhan said:
Precisely.
There was a cover-up, but for obvious reasons.
It was a morale 'thing'. Also, they didn't want to put people off going to the tube for shelter. It was hard enough to persuade the public to 'underground' life in the first place.
Click to expand...
Exactly.

We will never be able to count how many lives were saved by people seeking shelter in the Underground during the Blitz, That has to be set against the 173 people sadly lost in this incident - the sadness greater because as I understand it this was the result of a false alarm. But to report it would, without doubt, have put people off seeking shelter - humans are not good at judging relative risk.

Note that it was released to the public pretty much as soon as the danger was over.
 
That appears to be the case, unfortunately. There had been a big RAF raid on Berlin two nights before. In the past, these raids were often followed by retaliatory raids by Germany; there was one such retaliatory raid on York in 1942, which killed several people in the street where I now live. So people were nervous.

There was a new rocket battery (a Z Battery, see above) in Victoria Park, less than a mile from Bethnal Green Station; this was fired at about the same time as the disaster occurred, so almost certainly contributed to the panic, and was probably the trigger.

Z Batteries weren't very useful weapons at that time - they could have worked well in the Blitz of 1940, when formations of hundreds of bombers were coming over, but that wasn't the Luftwaffe strategy in 1943. Usually the German planes came over as small packs or lone raiders, capable of causing panic but very difficult to hit with ground-based rockets. So the rocket batteries were introduced too late to be very effective.
http://www.hjbrownhistorian.co.uk/The Anti Aircraft Z Batteries of World War 2.html
 
Stormkhan said:
Classic case of an author learning about a 'real' incident then building a fiction novel on it.
Adds just enough reality to spark interest, then leaving the reader to enjoy/not enjoy the rest.
Click to expand...
Apparently (I know the ghost author) MBB had relatives who were involved in the tragedy. It was learning about these relatives and their lives that made her decide to 'write' this book (or rather give my friend lots of notes. She did actually have quite an active part in the writing of the book, just not, you know, the actual writing bit).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top