[Vwoolf] Another anniversary coming up

[Stuart N. Clarke]

VW Diary, Tuesday 10 Sept 1940

“Left the car & saw Holborn. A vast gap at the top of Chancery Lane. Smoking still. Some great shop entirely destroyed: the hotel opposite like a shell. In a wine shop there were no windows left. People standing at the tables--I think drink being served. Heaps of blue green glass in the road at Chancery Lane. Men breaking off fragments left in the frames. Glass falling. Then into Lincolns Inn. To the N.S. office [at 10 Great Turnstile]: windows broken, but house untouched.* We went over it. Deserted. Wet passages. Glass on stairs. Doors locked. So back to the car. A great block of traffic. The Cinema behind Mme Tussaud's torn open: the stage visible; some decoration swinging. All the R[egent's]. Park houses with broken windows, but undamaged. And then miles & miles of orderly ordinary streets--all Bayswater, & Sussex Sqre as usual. Streets empty. Faces set & eyes bleared. In Chancery Lane I saw a man with a barrow of music books. My typists office [in Chancery Lane] destroyed.”

*”Jolly’s [caterers] by Great Turnstile destroyed ... and where Chancery Lane joins High Holborn, a bomb blew up the corner buildings, splattering Stone Buildings in Lincoln’s Inn with fragments, killing fifty people in a public shelter and breaking a water main.  The water cascaded down into the Chancery Lane Safe Deposit.  The records of the Spanish Republican Government had already been moved to a safer place; Banister Fletcher’s original architectural drawings and a thousand water-sodden family secrets were retrieved.”
TRENCH, Richard, "London Before the Blitz" (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), p. 81


Stuart
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