Iris Bryant

Iris Bryant would have been 89 today. 

I try to imagine what it would be like to still have her with me. These days, it’s not unheard of for a woman to live to that age, and to be sound in mind, if not always in body.  She’d have loved to have seen her grandchildren grow up and she’d have been desperately proud of both of them. She’d have been proud of me too. She was one of the first people I allowed to read one of my unpublished books and I was very nervous about it. Mum was a voracious reader who haunted the public library and was on first name terms with all the staff there. She was also honest. She handed me back the manuscript of A Respectable Woman with a casual air, as if it didn’t mean much to her.

“If I’d got that from the library, I’d be looking for more books by that author,” she said, in matter of fact tones. “Better get writing some more.”

It was one of the best tributes I ever had as a writer.

Mum was born in 1931 in an old weavers’ cottage in Bessy Street in Bethnal Green, East London. Her parents, Herbert and Hilda Taylor had seven children, although the youngest, Joyce, survived only a few days after birth. My Mum used to tell us that she could remember them using a dressing table drawer as a crib for the baby. The family later moved to a small terraced house in Hartley Street, close by.

My Uncle Herbie was the eldest, followed by Hilda, Violet, Jimmy, Mum and then Ronnie. The family was poor, in a way that it’s hard for us to imagine now, but fiercely respectable. There were iron-clad rules about cleanliness and tidiness and if you wore white socks they had to BE white. My Nan washed down her front steps every morning until she no longer had her own front step, net curtains were bleached  and windows were cleaned even when there wasn’t much to eat. I never knew my grandfather, but I’m told he ruled the family with a rod of iron, and for all the humorous stories told about him, I’ve always suspected that all of them felt a sense of freedom along with their sadness when he died in 1946 when my Mum was just fifteen.

Wartime came, bringing the Blitz to the East End and the family separated. Herbie went into the army, Hilda joined the ambulance service and the youngest four were evacuated to Norfolk. It wasn’t a good experience, and as an adult, my Mum spoke very little of her time there. We never knew why they were brought home, right back into the middle of the bombing, but it was clearly bad. For a time they remained at home. Vi was old enough to leave school and start work, and the youngest three attended the local school, dodging air raid wardens on their way home and collecting shrapnel from bomb sites. They were still in London in June 1943 when the tragedy of the Bethnal Green Tube Disaster took the life of one of their cousins and they could remember the falling of the first V1 flying bombs. 

Mum, Jimmy and Ronnie with Mr Wiggins

At some point, probably in 1944, they were evacuated again to a farm near Tamworth. This second experience was very different to the first. Mr and Mrs Wiggins were an older, childless couple, who probably chose the Taylors because the two boys could help on the farm, but they were very kind, if old-fashioned, and took good care of the children, inviting my Nan to visit and sending farm produce home to her when they could. My Mum was very attached to them and remained in touch after the war. I can remember the excitement of visits to the Wiggins farm as a small child.

The letter urging my grandparents to let Mum take up her scholarship

After the war it was back to London and a short time back at school before Mum left at 14. She was already something of a rebel, and rejected well-paid jobs in local factories to travel up to the West End to work in an office. Her father was furious, believing that it was her duty to contribute as much as she could to the family budget, but Mum was determined. She was clearly bright, although it was many years later while sorting out some old family papers, that she discovered that she had been offered a scholarship to carry on with her education at the local girls grammar school. The headmistress of her school wrote a very eloquent letter begging her parents to let her go, and assuring them that the scholarship covered all expenses, even the uniform. Mum had never known about this, and I think it was a shock even after all those years, with both her parents dead, to find out that they’d refused it on her behalf without even telling her about it.

Mum did well at work, taking every opportunity she could to learn new skills. War ended in Europe and then Japan and Mum accompanied her elder sisters to the celebrations proudly wearing home made blouses sewn from parachute silk. Hilda and Vi married and soon afterwards, Hilda emigrated to Australia with her new husband.

Mum in her Land Army uniform

Life changed in 1946 when my grandfather, who had been ill for many years with chest problems, probably an industrial illness, contracted pneumonia and died. My grandmother was ill in hospital with the same thing, and with elder sisters married and moved on, Mum was on her own with the two younger boys until her eldest brother arrived, rushed home on compassionate leave from the army. With her father gone, there were suddenly new freedoms for my Mum and she made the most of them. At the age of seventeen, she surprised everybody by announcing that she had signed up to join the Women’s Land Army.

Mum had very happy memories of her Land Army days near Cambridge and we loved her stories when we were children. The women’s land army finally received a veterans’ badge and acknowledgement for their service in 2007. I can’t tell you what Mum said about that, but she was actually very proud of it. I still have the badge she wore at the time. Mum’s stories made even the worst tasks sound like a laugh and talked fondly of dances at the local American and Canadian air bases. She had several boyfriends during those years, light-hearted romances with a Canadian pilot and an Irishman from an army base, called Paddy, but then towards the end of her time there, she met Kurt, a former German POW who had chosen to remain in the area after the war, working on a farm. Kurt was different, it was serious, and for a time I think she genuinely thought she might marry him, but the prospect of him possibly wanting to move back to Germany one day made her hesitate.

She was still undecided when she left the Land Army, and went up to Cambridge at weekends to visit Kurt, hitching lifts on Army lorries to save the train fare in a way that would terrify us today. Perhaps she would have taken the risk eventually, but in 1950, working as a telephonist in a City office, she was asked to be bridesmaid at a close friend’s wedding. The best man was the best friend of the groom, a young builder’s apprentice by the name of George Bryant and my Mum had been dodging him for months, knowing that Violet and Bobby were trying to set up a date. She later found out he had been doing the same thing, as he was still recovering from a broken romance. They couldn’t avoid the wedding though, they met, and my mother’s life suddenly became a lot more complicated.

It took several months for her to decide. Unusually, she was completely honest with both Kurt and my Dad, and she continued to go up to Cambridge at some weekends. Others were spent getting to know my Dad. They were both broke, so dates often consisted of long walks along the Embankment. Dad was from South London, not far from the Elephant and Castle, and wasn’t seen as a very good prospect by my Mum’s family. He was very quiet, very shy and came from the wrong side of the river, with no education. Her brothers, all as confident and full of it as she was, used to tease him unmercifully. Dad put up with it, got used to it, and won my Nan over very quickly by offering to decorate her house in his spare time. He was very good at it, ignored Jimmy and Ronnie’s tormenting and quietly waited.

At some point, he must have decided that it was decision making time. I’ve never known how that was worked out, but Mum went up to Cambridge to talk to Kurt and promised my Dad that she’d give him a definite answer on the Sunday evening when she got back. The ensuing story is a family legend, with something farcical about it which could never happen in these days of mobile phones and messaging. Mum’s train was delayed and she missed their rendezvous which led Dad to think she’d decided to marry Kurt. He went home, miserable, but then decided he still wanted to speak to her so went back out and got the underground to her house. She, meanwhile, got the underground to his house, only to find he wasn’t there. In their mutual upset, it took two more cross London train journeys before they finally managed to meet up. They were married in 1952 on Christmas Day.

Mum’s last job was as Matron’s secretary at an Old Folks Home.

Theirs was a traditional life. They lived in rented flats and houses all their lives, worked hard, saved their money and raised two daughters. Both worked their way to better jobs, my Dad spending a lot of his working life working for the Post Office and then British Telecom, my Mum doing a variety of office jobs, then staying home with the children until I went to secondary school when she took a job in a bank. There was nothing remarkable about Mum’s life, and yet in her own way, she remained quietly different.

Mum was fiercely independent to the end of her days. Although her education was severely cut short, both by the war and by her parents poverty and limited viewpoint, she was self-taught. Like my Dad, she was a reader, good at arithmetic and passionate about history. My childhood never took me on foreign holidays but I grew to know the winding back streets of London in a way that few of my schoolmates did. We walked for miles every weekend, fed pigeons in Trafalgar Square, went to every royal event, saw the Changing of the Guard regularly and got locked in the park after the firework display for the Royal Wedding, my sister and I having to hoist Mum and Auntie Vi over the fence to get out.

Never too old to crawl into a Thomas the Tank Engine tent…

She supported me through school days, very hands off unless I asked for help with a problem, but willing to step in if necessary. She valued independence and would probably seem almost neglectful in these days of helicopter parenting, but she was always there, rock solid, if I needed her. She supported me through university, through working life, through marriage and children. She adored her grandchildren and was very hands on, a favourite playmate, even though my choice of late motherhood meant that she was not as active as she would have liked.

 

In later life, she had a variety of health problems and wasn’t always patient about it when they got in the way of real life. She and my Dad enjoyed retirement, took up sequence dancing, got more adventurous about holidays and finally got a dog. We talked sometimes about them moving to the island after we came to live here. Dad seriously considered it, he loved the countryside and being by the sea. My Mum loved them too and visited three or four times a year, but she refused to consider a move. Mum was a Londoner, and a city girl. As with her ventures into rural life as a girl, she enjoyed the outdoors, but her roots were in London, in the East End, and along the banks of the Thames where she’d done her courting and fallen in love.

When they finally moved to the island it was too late. Dad had cancer and died only a couple of months after he got here and Mum, by then, was already showing signs of dementia. She’d smoked all her life, long after Dad gave up, calmly asserting that it was her one vice and she knew the risks. We gave up arguing about it, we knew how stubborn she could be. Vascular dementia was the legacy of that vice, a series of small strokes over the years, which gradually took her away, until she no longer knew who I was.

Even in the home, with declining faculties, she was something of a legend. She found a friend who clearly reminded her of my Dad, and they managed to make themselves the centre of the day room, passing acerbic comments on whatever was going on around them. She was funny to the end, reminding me heartbreakingly of the mother I adored with the occasional sharp comment. She outlived my Dad by six years and was buried beside him on a quiet hillside in Braddan, a long way from her home town. Mum wouldn’t have given a damn about that, it was the living she was interested in.

At her funeral, the weather was appalling, and my sister and I were wholly unsuitably dressed for it, tottering over to the graveside in heeled shoes and our smart funeral outfits. The wind howled, the rain came down, and our flimsy umbrellas were instantly wrecked. The vicar, clearly Manx, was well-prepared with a big solid umbrella, and there was something slightly smug about him as he stood reciting the final words of the funeral as the coffin was lowered into the grave. There was a sudden huge gust of wind which caught his umbrella just the wrong way, and took him off his feet, knocking his glasses off and nearly sending him into the muddy open grave. 

Mum and her girls, an early holiday. I’m the little one…

Suddenly she was there with me, laughing. I looked at my sister and I knew she was hearing it too. We stood there on that rain lashed hillside, holding each other up laughing, as we’d once had to hold Mum up, hiding behind the car at a family funeral when her much-loathed posh hat blew straight off her head and into a puddle before she even made it into the church. We cried laughing that day, despite our grief, and we did it again at Mum’s funeral, knowing that she’d never really leave us.

 

 

Happy Birthday to Iris Bryant, nee Taylor, an East End girl to the end of her days. I’ll go up in a bit and put daffodils on the grave, they were your favourite flower and both your grand daughter and I love them just as much. You’re laughing somewhere at me doing that, telling me not to be daft, to take the flowers home and enjoy them myself. I’ll get some for me as well. I always do on this day.

You were a remarkable woman in an unremarkable life, and I will never stop missing you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Bethnal Green Tube Disaster – a little piece of family history

The Bethnal Green Tube Disaster happened on 3rd March 1943.  173 people died; men, women and children while trying to hurry down the steep steps to the station which was being used as an air raid shelter.  Growing up in East London with a mother who lived through the Blitz as a child, I can’t remember ever not knowing about this tragedy.  The story was told through my family and with grisly curiosity I can remember being quite young and asking about it time and time again as my mother insisted on holding my hand going down those steps on our way to the underground.  So it was something as a shock to me to discover as an adult how many people in Britain have never heard of it at all.

The story, for me, follows on from my previous post about my childhood in London.  There were endless stories of wartime Britain from my parents, grandparents and aunts and uncles.  I’ve often wondered about the accuracy of some of them given how memories change over time.  My mother is gone now as are all her brothers and sisters so I can’t ask for more detail and I wish I’d done it while I could.  But the story of the tragedy in March 1943 was very real.

The winter of 1940-41 was a nightmare for Londoners, with the bombing pounding their city.  On one occasion, London was hit for 57 nights in a row.  In December firebombs hit the city.  Air raid sirens were a constant background to daily life although there were many false alarms, but a lot of Londoners used to go into the shelters for the night just in case.  Many had Anderson or Morrison shelters in their back gardens but they were cramped with no light, little air and no toilet other than a chamber pot.  A lot of people preferred to use the Underground.

Bethnal Green was a new station as the Central Line had been extended from Liverpool Street in 1936, but work had been interrupted by the outbreak of War.  With the track not yet laid, there was plenty of room with up to 5000 bunks.  There was a sense of community with singing, laughter, tea urns and even a library and with bombs falling around them it must have given many a sense of security to be with their neighbours and friends.

Bombing was not as bad as it had been in previous years but on 3rd March 1943 it was expected to get worse as the RAF had  bombed Berlin quite heavily two nights earlier and people were expecting reprisals. With the sound of the Siren and the closure of the cinema, 3 buses had just stopped nearby and their passengers dashed for the shelter. A woman carrying a baby tripped and fell as she went down the steps to the platform. A man tripped over her and a domino effect started. At the top of the stairs came shouted warning of bombs falling and when a new and loud sound was heard people thought it was a new kind of bomb although it was actually a  new anti-aircraft rocket battery being tested in Victoria Park near by.

People panicked and pushed into the shelter unaware of the horror unfolding below them in the dark. The way was blocked but still people poured down. There were no handrails in the middle, no white edgings on the steps and no police on duty. It was dark and the steps were slippery from the rain. Around 300 people were wedged into the stairway – an area measuring approximately 15 x 11 feet. By the time they were pulled out, 27 men, 84 women and 62 children were crushed to death while 60 survivors needed hospital treatment.  In a horrible irony there was no air raid or bombs dropped that night in the East End.

There was a government enquiry although it’s findings were not published until the end of the war to avoid propaganda for the enemy and damage to British morale.  The entrance was poorly lit, with no central handrail and apparently the local council had asked permission to alter the entrance and put in a central handrail, but had been refused the funds by the Government of the day.  After the tragedy new handrails were installed on the steps down to the station. Each step was marked with white paint.

The official statement by the Ministry of Home Security states:

“According to accounts so far received, shortly after the air-raid Alert sounded, substantial numbers of people were making their way as usual towards the shelter entrance. There were nearly 2000 in the shelter, including several hundred who had arrived after the Alert, when a middle-aged woman, burdened with a bundle and a baby, tripped near the foot of a flight of 19 steps which leads down from the street. This flight of steps terminates on a landing. Her fall tripped an elderly man behind her and he fell similarly. Their bodies again tripped up those behind them, and within a few seconds a large number were lying on the lower steps and the landing, completely blocking the stairway. Those coming in from the street could not see what had taken place and continued to press down the steps, so that within a minute there were about 300 people crushed together and lying on top of one another covering the landing and the lower steps.
“By the time it was possible to extricate the bodies it was found that a total at present estimated at 178 had died and that a further 60 were in need of hospital treatment. Statements from a large number of eye-witnesses and members of the police and Civil Defence services make it clear that there was no sign of panic before the accident on the stairs. No bombs fell anywhere in this district during the evening. Preliminary reports received by the Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security indicate that police, wardens, soldiers, W.V.S. and civilians worked hard and well to rescue the victims. Mr. Morrison has instituted the fullest inquiries to establish in greater detail what took place and to see whether any structural or administrative weaknesses have been brought to light”

The injured were taken to hospital in Whitechapel and the dead were taken to the mortuary there on carts and buses.  When it became overcrowded the bodies were stored in St John’s Church opposite the tube station.  Many of the victims were later buried in Tower Hamlets Cemetery, which was cleared by members of the Drapers Company with help from the Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery in time for the 60th anniversary. Others are buried in Manor Park Cemetery and a few elsewhere.

Because of the government’s desire to keep the tragedy quiet while war was still going on, those involved were told to keep quiet and not say what had happened.  A report was filed by Eric Linden with the Daily Mail, who witnessed it but it never ran. 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.  Everybody in the East End knew the truth but in the days without the internet and social media it did not filter out to the country as a whole.  The press were silenced. There was no counselling in those days and PTSD wasn’t recognised.  People were told to just get on with their life.

There is a list of the dead on the memorial website, and one of them was a twelve year old boy called James William Taylor.  Jimmy was my mother’s first cousin, living within a few minutes of her and in the close knit community of the East End he attended Bonner Street School with her and her brothers and was a close part of her extended family.  My mother and her brothers heard about the disaster from some other children on their way to school and were told that the bodies were being taken out and laid out on the pavement waiting to be transferred.  With the grisly curiosity of wartime children they took a detour to see them.  Only later did they find out that one of the hastily covered bodies laid out beside the road was their cousin Jimmy.

Thinking about this tragedy in light of the recent horrible events in London has made me realise how much times have changed.  It is inconceivable to us that families, including children like my mother, were allowed – in fact expected – to cope with the reality of a tragedy like this without help or counselling or even without financial support.  Women who lost their breadwinner in the tragedy faced hard times with their children.

Surprisingly my mother used to tell me that she remembered surprisingly little sense of outrage or anger at the government either for the disaster or the cover up.  Perhaps that was because she was a child but also it was wartime and everybody had been taught that ‘careless talk costs lives’.  There were no internet groups on Facebook to stir up anger and resentment and animosity, there was just the local community which offered comfort and support and practical help to those in need.  What blame there was landed upon the local council since they were not allowed to publish their requests for funding to improve the entrance, given the number of people using it.  But in wartime London, protests were fairly muted.  People had other things on their minds and it was not until after the war that the full truth gradually emerged and public anger grew including a number of court cases.

For many years the only memorial was a small plaque on the stairway, the one which used to spark my curiosity as a child but in 2007 local residents, including many who had lost family in the tragedy and one or two survivors, formed a charity for a proper memorial to the worst civilian disaster of the Second World War.  Their web page is well worth a look, as it tells the story in far more detail including very moving accounts of survivors.

The memorial, called A Stairway to Heaven is finally being unveiled on Sunday 17 December 2017.  More than 70 years after the tragedy, those 173 people, including my first cousin once removed, are being remembered.  Most of those who survived the disaster are gone now, but those who remain have never forgotten.

My mother didn’t spend all her childhood in London, she had two spells of evacuation, but she had vivid memories of the time she was there and she was a good storyteller.  I’m going to write them down and perhaps get my sister and cousins to dredge up their memories of their parents’ stories.  It’s very easy to think there is plenty of time.  I wish I’d asked both my parents a lot more and written it down so that I could remember it more clearly.

As a history graduate and historical novelist, perhaps it should be my job to record the family history as well so that all our children can benefit from it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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