Stairway to Heaven

This memorial is above the stairs leading down to Bethnal Green underground station.

At the beginning of WW II the station had been constructed but the tracks not laid for this extension to the Central Line. The line is now the longest, forty-six miles, but when it opened in 1900 it only ran from Shepherd’s Bush to Bank. Anyway, it proved ideal in the war for use as an air raid shelter with room for 7,000 people.

There was only one narrow entrance to the station and it had not been completed. Three times Bethnal Green councillors wrote to the government asking for funding to make the entrance safer but were refused. At the beginning of March 1943 the RAF bombed Berlin and Londoners feared retaliatory raids. On the evening of 3rd March air raid sirens went off and there was an orderly move down the narrow stairs to the underground platforms. Three buses arriving at the same time swelled the numbers trying to get into the station. Then, most unfortunately, a new anti-aircraft battery in nearby Victoria Park started firing. The crowds outside the station thought they were being bombed and the orderly move into the station turned into a stampede.

173 people died that evening, 62 of them children, and another 90 were injured. Some 300 people were trapped in the stairwell, unable to move and being suffocated by people falling on top of them. It was a tragedy that the government was anxious to conceal in wartime. Until this year the only memorial was the plaque I photographed, above.

Finally there is a fitting tribute outside the station and I went to a ceremony to open it yesterday morning. The Stairway to Heaven Memorial was designed by local architect, Harry Paticas. The base is Portland stone and the inverted staircase, modelled on the one down to the station in 1943, is made of teak with the names of the 173 victims carved into it. At the ceremony were the local MP, the Mayor of Bethnal Green, the Mayor of London and Dr Joan Martin MBE, aged 102. She had been on duty that terrible night in March when the casualties arrived at the local children’s hospital where she was a junior doctor.

There was a good crowd on a cold and damp Sunday morning. The blessing was delayed as Sadiq Khan arrived ten minutes late and turned his back on me. I suppose he still bears a grudge about my support for Zac. I noticed uniformed representatives of the police, fire brigade and Red Cross as well as some Pearlies and plenty of Press and TV crews.