Clapham Common Deep Shelter, The Drum and the Balham Station Bombing

The Brothers Hartnall's recent show at the Hammersmith Apollo meant a night in the smoke courtesy of Airbnb in W6. This allowed a lovely wander south of the river around Clapham Common and then a perambulation south to Balham Station on the day after the night before. We're going to have to backtrack here however and begin at the end of my days walk at Balham Underground Station which sits astride Balham High Road and was built in 1926 as part of the extension of the City and South London Railway to a design by Charles Holden, Frank Pick's architect of choice who had previously worked on war cemeteries in France and who brought his simple, modernist style to London Transport infrastructure. Like many of the stations on the Tube network Balham was used by the civilian population as a bomb shelter during World War II. This was initially discouraged by the government who believed that the population would remain in the Tube network after the bombing had ended. At the start of the Blitz however on 8th September 1940 a crowd broke through the locked gates at Liverpool St Station and the day afterwards the Minister for Home Security rescinded the policy and the population sought protection in the relentless bombing thereafter. On the Booking Hall at Balham are two plaques noting the events of 14-15 October 1940, when a 1,400 kg fell on the road above the north end of the platform, leaving a crater into which a double-decker bus crashed providing an iconic image of the Blitz. The tunnel partially collapsed and was filed with earth and water from fractured water and sewage pipes. Sixty-six were killed in an event that was hushed up by the authorities for fear of dissuading the civilian population from seeking shelter in the tube network. The event was used in Ian McEwan's novel Atonement, although the incorrect date is used in both the book and its film adaptation. These issues arelso noted further along the network by a very swish black and white Clapham Society plaque on the corner of Clapham High Street and Clapham Park Road which marks the entrance to Clapham Deep Shelter which was built in late 1942 after the government set up the London Passenger Transport Board who in turn came up with the idea of five deep shelters south of the river at at Clapham South, Clapham Common, Clapham North, Stockwell and Oval – and five to the north. These, it was intended would exist under the existing train tunnels but be connected to the existing Tube stations.The shelters were intended to have twin parallel tunnels 5 metres in diameter and 365 meters long divided into two decks that would accommodate 8000 people. By the time these were finished however the Blitz was all but over and the tunnels were repurposed, first as accommodation for American troops and after the invasion of Europe as a government installation and so was fitted out as offices and an extensive system of teleprinters, telephones and other telecommunications equipment were installed. After the war the Clapham Common shelter was used as an archive for government records until its decommissioning in 1952. This however was not the end of the line so to speak. In 2012 the site was re-employed as a hydroponic farm where produce can be growth for local use without racking up food miles. The Clapham South shelter situated on Balham Hill was used differently firstly as temporary accommodation for some of Britain's first postwar Caribbean immigrants who arrived on the ship MV Empire Windrush in 1948 as well as hotel accommodation for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and for visitors to the Queen’s coronation in 1953.

The memorialisation problem

It's an interesting one isn't it? Someone - lets call him ooohhhh Cecil Rhodes, puts up a statue to himself with the intent of being remembered in a particular way. As an advancer of civilisation, a visionary, a doer, an all-round good egg. He establishes a scholarship at a prestigious university like Oxford to "promote unity between English speaking nations and instil a sense of civic-minded leadership and moral fortitude in future leaders irrespective of their chosen career paths." His ultimate goal was ""the furtherance of the British Empire, for the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire." The scholarship was taken by (among others) Bill Clinton, Tony Abbott, Bob Hawke and Malcolm Turnbull of Australia,John Turner of Canada, Dom Mintoff of Malta, Norman Manley of Jamaica and Wasim Sajjad of Pakistan. From the beginning the scholarship was contentious: both women and black Africans were excluded from the programme. Black Africans were admitted to the programme after pressure from former scholarship recipients in 1971, women only in 1977, 75 years after the scholarship was established. In 2015 Ntokozo Qwabe, a Rhodes scholar himself called for (among other things) the removal of a statue of Rhodes from Oriel College, Oxford. Rhodes' memory then may not we what he originally envisioned but he IS remembered. This post, however is not about Cecil Rhodes but about John Passmore Edwards. You know? John Passmore Edwards? No? This is man who was described in an obituary in the Times of 24 April 1911 as doing "more good in his time than almost any other of his contemporaries" and rated as "Amongst the late Victorian philanthropists, whose motives [were] beyond reproach [and whose] benefactions expressed deeply held and intelligent convictions about conditions of progress in his society".. A man instrumental in the construction over the space 14 years of hospitals, drinking fountains, libraries,schools, convalescent homes and art galleries. He also contributed to the WEA (Worker's Educational Association) furthering the opportunities available to those lower down the social scale. His home in leafy Hampstead is marked by an English Heritage plaque in 1988. Three of his works in London are also marked: a drinking fountain south of the river in front of Christ Church graveyard on Blackfriars Road and two libraries one in East London on the corner of Gladstone Place and Roman Road, the other recently spotted by Shepherds Bush green erected by the Hammersmith and Fulham Historic Buildings Group. The building on which is it affixed is now the Bush Theatre. The building was designed by Maurice Adams who Edwards used for several of his projects. Edwards' His largesse is even more apparent in the West Country where he established libraries in Newton Abbot in Devon and Bodmin, Camborne, Falmouth, Launceston, Liskeard, Penzance, Redruth, St Ives and Truro in Cornwall. His roots were Cornish, he was born between Redruth and Truro in 1823, the son of a carpentee. He was educated in the village school and became a journalist, later moving to London to take advantage of the nineteenth-century boom in journal publication. He became involved in many social causes: the reform of the Corn Laws, the abolition of capital punishment, the suppression of the opium trade and the abolition of flogging in the services and opposed military action in the Crimea and in South Africa publishing polemical leaflets such as'Intellectual Tollbars' (1854) protesting taxes on paper and newspapers and also 'The War: a Blunder and a Crime' (1855). After several false starts in publishing he eventually bought the Echo newspaper in 1876 which espoused social causes and a liberal philosophy (eventually selling part of his interest to Andrew Carnegie) and became Liberal MP for Salisbury in 1880. He quickly became disenchanted with political life however, doing his utmost to better the world in an extra-parliamentary capacity. It is perhaps sad that his name is not as well known as Rhodes'.