Remembering 'Black Saturday' - the Blitz on London's docks

© Simon Poulter 2016

With my impending return to London I've commenced the trepidatious process of finding somewhere to live. This, obviously, is no easy task given the capital's spiralling rents and insane house prices, and that anything actually worth inhabiting ends up in the hands of offshore owners before the cement has even dried. However, I plough on regardless, and am looking vogueishly east, rather than returning to the south-western Surrey suburbs I grew up in.

In particular, I'm being drawn to the areas around what used to be London's docks, once the gateway to a third of Britain's imports and the site of London's origins as both the capital and a point of trade established by the Romans. In the 1980s, after the docks had been supplanted by facilities elsewhere capable of handling gargantuan new container ships, the-then Tory government began the process of transforming the area into what became known as Docklands, and the forest of gleaming glass and steel spires it is today.

Even now, 30 years on, looking across the water from Greenwich to Canary Wharf and the Royal Docks, the skyline still seems to serve testament to Thatcherism and the loadsamoney 'yuppyisation' of '80s London. What you don't see so obviously is the social patchwork it created - expensive towers rising from some of London's poorest boroughs, City workers living in lofty, pricey eyries above one of the most culturally and socially diverse populations in the country.

© Simon Poulter 2016

Michael Heseltine, Margaret Thatcher's Environment Secretary, set up the London Docklands Development Commission as an enterprise zone for the redevelopment that would follow. However, it was The Long Good Friday - John Mackenzie’s superb British gangster film, starring Bob Hoskins as ambitious crime boss Harold Shand, which presciently anticipated the birth of Docklands.

With filming starting shortly before the Tory landslide in May 1979, Shand was the most Thatcherite of criminals - running his 'manor' in and around Wapping, Limehouse, Shadwell and the Isle of Dogs, and making a landmark deal with the New York Mafia to invest in the regeneration of the East End. He even invisioned the area hosting an Olympic Games. "What I'm looking for is someone who can contribute to what England has given to the world: culture, sophistication, genius. A little bit more than an 'ot dog, know what I mean?" he tells friends aboard his yacht moored in St. Katherine's Dock.

The other Sunday I took a walk around the Royal Victoria Docks, strolling from the ExCel exhibition centre on one side, past a row of hotels and apartment buildings, underneath the northern terminal of the Emirates Airline (the Boris Johnson-sanctioned attempt at a cable car commute between the Greenwich Peninsular and the docks), past a credible-looking urban beach shining in the late summer sunshine, and onto the southern side which has retained the towering dock cranes.

Like that of my Sunday stroll, the afternoon of Saturday, 7 September, 1940 was similarly warm, with the docks basking in late summer sunshine. That was until the sky turned black with the sight of almost 350 Luftwaffe bombers escorted by more than 600 fighters, unleashing an onslaught that would herald the start of the Blitz - the systematic bombing of the British capital with the intention of demoralising its people.

It was a technique that Hitler had used on the continent, notoriously in Rotterdam the previous May, bringing about the swift surrender of the Dutch for fear of the Germans repeating the exercise on Utrecht and other cities. This time, London's docks, in particular, were singled out as the main target for the German bombers, with Hitler hoping to paralyse London's life and trade by bombing the wharves, warehouses, factories and power stations in the East End and around the Thames Estuary.

That day, 76 years ago tomorrow, became known as 'Black Saturday'. It began shortly after 5pm as the first wave of bombers dropped incendiary bombs, disturbing life in one of London's most vibrant districts. "My sister had gone to Stratford to see an Arthur Askey film," recalled Frank Thorpe, a young boy at the time. "I went with my brother to watch West Ham versus Tottenham. At half-time West Ham were leading 4-1, when the planes came over. They looked so menacing. We rushed home as fast as we could. A stick of bombs dropped not 100 yards away."

Guided by the flames casued by the first wave, a second came along two hours later, with more and more bombers appearing over London as Saturday gave way to Sunday. Across the capital's east and south-east - in Brockley and Catford, Bermondsey, Camberwell and Peckham, Stepney, Mile End, Poplar, Plumstead and Woolwich, civil defence records list entire houses, bakeries and butcher's shops, sugar warehouses and timber yeards, printers and churches, all ablaze. Some properties had been levelled completely, while others partially, with roofs missing and windows blown out. The entire eastern end of London was lit by the bright orange glow of flame.

Len Jones, another schoolboy on September 7, remembers the first German planes arriving overhead: "It was very exciting, because the first formations were coming over without any bombs dropping, but very, very majestic, terrific, and I had no thought that they were actually bombers. Then from that point on I was well aware, because bombs began to fall, and shrapnel was going along King Street, dancing off the cobbles."

As the bombing intensified, and German incediaries gave way to high-explosives, the experience became very different. "The whole of this atmosphere was turbulating so hard that, after an explosion of a nearby bomb, you could actually feel your eyeballs being sucked out. I was holding my eyes to try and stop them going. And the suction was so vast, it ripped my shirt away and ripped my trousers. Then I couldn't get my breath, the smoke was like acid and everything round me was black and yellow. And these bombers just kept on and on, the whole street was rising and falling."

Len's house was destroyed that day. And he saw death for the first time: "Two bodies, two heads sticking up. I recognised one head in particular: it was a Chinese man, Mr Say, he had one eye closed, and then I realised that he was dead."

Between 7 September and between September 1940 and May 1941 some 20,000 Londoners died in the Blitz. London wouldn't be alone, of course, with Coventry, Plymouth and Liverpool also coming under attack in the weeks that followed, but London's docks came in for the heaviest bombardments - with some 25,000 bombs falling on Docklands throughout the Blitz, including the 57 consecutive nights of bombing after the 7th, making it the most heavily bombed civilian target in Britain during the war. But, as Nazi Germany would find to its cost, Hitler's bombing wouldn't break the British spirit.

Despite the daily attrition, London continued to function, Londoners continued to be Londoners. The docks continued to be of strategic importance to the war effort, even harbouring naval ships and submarines. The docks also played a part in D-Day, with the East India Dock being used to pre-assemble the Mulberry harbours before they were towed to Normandy on 6 June, 1944, with landing ships bound for the beaches being loaded in the docks as well.

76 years on, there is little to link the modern Docklands with Black Saturday or indeed the war. Like much of London, the skyline has been transformed by modernity, and ground level transformed by the multiculturalism of a city which is now home to more than 250 nationalities.

The cranes around the docks sit idle, looking somewhat like the giant mechanical 'walkers' from The Empire Strikes Back. Once they were functional, but today they sit alongside the modern housing, like iron statues, strange pieces of modern art, towering like guardians over the wakeboarders, canoeists and cayakers, and the City workers who call this place home.

© Simon Poulter 2016