What an amazing insight Foxcote, thanks for sharing it with us.
Obviously I didn't know your great aunt, Peggy, but I wonder whether she would have talked about it, even if specifically asked to. I say this because people in earlier generations than ours were, if not actively discouraged from talking about sad events they'd witnessed or experienced, accepted they'd happened and tried to put them behind them. This could, of course, go to what we'd call ludicrous extremes, where death of a family member, for instance, could lead to that person's existence almost being expunged from history.
I must admit that I almost added that to what I’d posted...
Yep. ‘Postal Warriors’ they must have called them back then...
I know my father was on the Dartford line train immediately behind the Ramsgate steam train that crashed into a Hayes line train at St John's, Lewisham, in thick fog in 1957. The Dartford electric, driven by a young driver, was able to stop just short of the wreckage. 50 people died in that crash. I remember that evening, aged 9 and waiting at home with my (never well) mother, wondering where my father, always home by 6.30 p.m. could possibly be: no immediate news of anything like that in those days, in fact I think it was only radio news at 9 or 10 p.m. that stated the bold facts that there'd been a fatal crash. I think it was midnight or later when my father's key was heard in the door, and the tears flowed, but not from my cool as a cucumber father who, in his usual understated way, said there'd been a few problems getting home, or words to that effect. He went off to work again a few hours later, and the accident was never, ever, mentioned again in my house, despite my father's interest in railways and steam engines in particular. Later on, years after his death, I found out why he'd always seemed to hate Italy and anything Italian, even though I'd thought he'd never been there. He'd actually been involved in the Battle of Montecassino in WW2 as a tank commander, I discovered. Family secrets!
They were called 'poison pen' letter writers, an incredible number of whom were women, often spinsters, and almost all would be anonymous.
Sobering stuff.
I know this is off topic but for some time after the KX disaster there were Met Police posters on the Underground asking for help to identify an unknown soul who had perished. Desperately sad stuff.
There’s a good article which has a significant section about this very subject on the London Reconnections site:
Astonishing. That generation never fall to amaze me.
I concur. It's worth remembering that many people involved that morning would have seen action during WW2 and so perhaps for them it wasn't so much of a shock.
Great article! Many thanks for passing on the link.
Different people react in different ways. I am not one to show emotion myself but that does not mean I am not feeling it inside. A neighbour of mine was in the 1988 Clapham crash, unhurt, and he seemed completely unfazed about it.
Not just those who were directly involved in WW2, either. The S.E. London house I was born in was opposite a group of prefabs, which replaced houses destroyed by rockets a few years previously. They were yards from a local Water Works, and the Woolwich Arsenal was only a very few miles away: when I was about four we moved a few hundred yards to a house that had its own small bomb shelter attached. My parents met when my father got sent (never heard why) to stay in the Royal Herbert Military Hospital during WW2, where my mother was a V.A.D. Air raids were daily events for weeks on end in London, and other cities of course, so people did get inured to them, just as those benighted souls in Syria and other war zones do now.
