Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Cautionary Conversation: The Blitz Spirit and the Blackout Ripper

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

In a crisis most people respond with decency and solidarity. The bombing of British cities in the Second World War did not cause society to crumble as was expected, but proved instead human resilience. That defiant "Blitz Spirit" is still a source of pride for Britons... but have inconvenient facts about that time been ignored? Alice Fiennes (co-host of the podcast Bad Women: The Blackout Ripper) explains that the chaos and disruption of the bombing allowed some people to commit awful crimes - and especially a trainee RAF pilot who embarked on a vicious killing spree under cover of darkness.    Find Bad Women: The Blackout Ripper wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Pushkin At the outbreak of the Second World War, one of the many fears the world had to contemplate was that civilians would be bombed. That was a new horror. Nobody knew what would happen if the bombers swarmed thick in the skies over the world's great cities. But the received wisdom was that the morale of the civilian population would shatter like the glass in their windows.

Civilization itself might break down. Winston Churchill believed this, so did Adolf Hitler, so did their generals. They were wrong. Every schoolchild in the UK knows the story of the blitz spirit of how as Hitler's Luftwaffe dropped bomb after bomb over London in late 1940, Londoners refused to be cowed. The glass did indeed shatter, but the British upper lip remained as stiff as ever. One pub put up a sign. Our windows are gone, but our spirits are excellent. Come in and try them. 80 years later, we still feel nostalgia for how people pulled together. We forget how surprising this stoic response was,

and the lesson was ignored. The Allies made the same mistake when contemplating their own bombing campaign of German cities. There was little sign that morale had been dented in London, or other English bomb hit cities such as Birmingham or Hull. Yet, Churchill's friend and advisor, Frederick Linderman, told him that morale was cracking, and that when German cities were thoroughly bombed, it would break the spirit of the German people. Predictably, it didn't.

Decades later, carpet bombing didn't break the spirit of the North Vietnamese, either. Our stubborn refusal to learn this lesson has had tragic consequences. We keep believing that when disaster strikes, what's needed isn't food and medical supplies, its law and order. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the response of the police, the media, and nearby areas was all shaped by the sad fact that they just couldn't believe that the citizens of New Orleans might pull together to look out for each other. Community volunteers were told to stand guard against looters rather than helping with evacuations or distributing food and water.

The Red Cross didn't enter the city for a month. They were afraid that it was just too dangerous. I highlighted these true stories in an earlier episode of cautionary tales called The Village of Heroes. I wanted to remind us that in a crisis most people respond with decency and solidarity, most people. I'm Tim Halford, There's another episode of cautionary tales coming any day now, but while you wait, this is another of our cautionary conversations, in which I speak to an expert about a tragic era of the past and about what we can learn from it. My guess this time is Alice Fines, who's a journalist, a criminologist, and a podcast maker.

Alice is the co-host and co-writer of the podcast, Bad Women, which is a feminist take on the ever-popular true crime genre. The new season of Bad Women, available as they say, wherever you get your podcasts, is about the experiences of women during the bombing of London and some of the awful crimes which were committed against them. And why these crimes should make us question our ideas about the so-called Blitz spirit. Alice Fides, welcome to Corscht Meetails.

Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure, although the show sometimes makes for for difficult listening, it is a true crime show. So what's the main thrust of the podcast? So at the heart of our show is this idea that states of war can pull focus and they can provide cover for all manner of really terrible deeds and really atrocious crimes. And in the case of the Second World War and the Blitz, there's also a literal cover of darkness, so Nazi bombers hoped to bomb Britain into submission. And as a defence against that, all the lights in British cities were dimmed. Street lights, lights in homes, illuminated signs.

This is almost absurd. We're turning the lights out and they won't find us, but actually it did work, right? Exactly. so the idea is that they can't find the places that would do most damage to bomb. But it also means that the streets at night are pitch black. And in London, even in London's nightlife district, all the lights have been extinguished, and that's where we find ourselves at the opening of bad women.

So there's a killer on the loose in London, and over one week in February 1942 he attacks two women and he kills four more. He strikes at night and the darkness helps him get away and disappear. But he also uses the new quite secluded spaces that have opened up on the home front as a result of war. At one point he murders a woman in a desolate air raid shelter and it's not just the spaces of war that help him get away with it. He is training to be a fighter pilot. Fighter pilots are incredibly glamorous at the time and really seen as heroes and so I think that because he goes around in this uniform the people of

his own side don't suspect him and he uses that to pick up women. He also affects the accent of an aristocrat, so he's not just fan the acceptance into an elite branch of the forces, but he's fan the acceptance into the highest echelons of society too. So at the beginning of our show, he picks up a woman called Greta Hayward, and he takes her out for a drink. It's really dark on the streets, and she notices that the route that he's taking her down is wrong, and she starts to feel uncomfortable, but he kind of coerces her into going with him.

And then she takes out a flashlight to illuminate their path. You don't want to use the torch. He grabs the light from her hand and plunges them back into darkness. Greta doesn't know, but she is certain of one thing. She doesn't want to venture into a secluded unlit bunga with this man. He grabs her and steers her into a doorway, pushing closely up against her and kissing her.

He raises her skirt. Greta protests and pushes his hands away. The airman reaches up as if to cradle her face for another kiss, but instead his hands knit around her throat. She tries to break free. Greta struggles to release the man's grip, but his fingers only tighten around her throat. She tries to break free. You won't. You won't. Greta struggles to release the man's grip, but his fingers only tighten around her neck, cutting off the flow of air to her lungs and blood to her brain.

You won't. You won't. Greta Hayward loses consciousness. Greta is not this killer's first victim, nor will she be the last. That's an audio from the first episode of the new series of bad women. We were hearing the voice there of Halle Rubenhold, who is your co-host. The first series of bad women was about Jack the Ripper, and I think more importantly about the women that he killed and their lives and the way we tend to overlook them. The curious thing about this new series is that, unlike Jack the Ripper, who is infamous,

the Blackout Ripper is largely forgotten. The women are forgotten, and you and Halle are trying to recreate their lives, recreate their stories, and remember what life was like for them. But we also seem to have forgotten the Blackout Ripper himself, this murderer. It is extraordinary that there's this act of collective forgetting. I think the fact that it was solved quickly has something to answer for there. The Blackout Ripper commits these crimes over a single week and he's caught pretty quickly, he's caught within that week. Sadly not quickly enough to stop him murdering

for women attacking too more. Whereas Jack the Ripper remains unsolved and into that void we can project all manner of fanciful theories, whereas the Blackout Ripper was solved and wrapped up. I think also it's unpalatable. It doesn't fit with our idea of Blitz spirit, it doesn't fit with the idea that the Blitz brought out the best in us, because in some cases people were opportunistic and people used the chaos of war to harm others. Do you reject the idea of the blitz spirit? Do you think that a whole thing is just a completely fake narrative or is it broadly true, but this is one of the tragic exceptions?

I think that the picture is complicated. There were instances of opportunism and people exploiting the chaos of war to their own ends, but I think that there is also a genuine show of stoic contempt for the enemy. There is this bravado and this desire to challenge the assumption that the British people could be cowed, that they could be bombed into submission. And we see that in the way that Chopper owners carry carry on as you'll hear in this next clip. One correspondent from a regional newspaper is in Piccadilly to report conditions back to his rural readership. It looked exactly like old times.

I saw the facade of a fine building seemingly untouched. Then you realized that you could see daylight through the windows from the outside and that the walls were all that was left. I saw an elegant establishment carrying on with tar pawlings slung across the open roof glass out everywhere. When storefronts and windows are blasted away, shopkeepers are keen to make a show of defiance. Business as usual. Reads the sign on one shattered shopped away.

In fact, more open than ever. A sign outside another bomb damaged shop admits, we never did like window dressing anyway. Not everyone can joke about the carnage. The writer George Orwell is crunching through West End Street slitted with stone fragments and glittering with broken glass. He comes across Sendabry from a bombed out department store. A pile of plaster dress models, very pink and realistic, looking so like a pile of corpses

that one could have mistaken them for that at a little distance. The scene is utterly shocking to him. But what astounds him most of all is that passes by seem utterly unfazed by the damage. To an astonishing extent, things have slipped back to normal, and everyone is quite happy in the daytime, never seeming to think about the coming night, like animals which are unable to foresee the future so long as they have a bit of food, and place in the sun. George Orwell, quite surprised at the resilience of the British public.

This is a cautionary conversation with me, Tim Haafard, and my guest, Alice Fines. We're talking about the new podcast, Bad Women, The Blackout Ripper. And we'll be back after this short break. Business notifications getting out of hand, buried under an avalanche of customer emails, texts, and social media messages? Keep your edge with Thrive Small Business software and never miss a message again. Thrive offers one solution to communicate, market, and run your business. But simply, small businesses run better on Thrive. Get Command Center for free today at thrive.ca.

That's THRYV.ca. Terms and conditions apply. Free plans have limited functionality. Hi, we're back. I'm talking to Alice Fines. One of the things I enjoyed about bad women was the way that you weave together these really quite upsetting stories of these attacks with a really vivid picture of what life was like in London for ordinary people

during the blitz. And there were a lot of surprises for me. There were a lot of things I didn't know. I was surprised, for example, by the fact that there was this quite vivid nightlife. In the first episode of Bad Women, you're describing this date that is clearly going a bit sour and it's very tense. As a listener, you're thinking, he's going to do something terrible. This is really bad. But while you're listening to that, and I was riveted, I'm also picking up this idea, what is this underground club, near Piccadilly Circus, and it's a bit of a dive, and there are sex workers wearing furs, and then they go somewhere else.

There's the salted almond, there's a club called the salted almond, and they have whiskey, and I knew nothing of this, and I was really surprised by the way that these bars and clubs were flourishing during the blitz. Absolutely, nightlife is a really important part of both the blitz spirit, I think, and also our series. Nightlife ceases briefly in 1940, public places empty out, but then people return in droves and it resumes kind of in full swing. And London is really this melting pot of different people. It's the staging ground for war. So you've got soldiers coming in from all over Britain, but also from Australia, France, Poland, from Canada, eventually also from the US, and young women

come to the city to meet these soldiers and have a good time. And you're absolutely right, the jazz clubs, the dive bars, are raucous. They're full of these young people who don't know what's going to happen. They are aware that they're here for a good time. They don't know if they're here for a long time. And this kind of hedonism in use. There are also other venues that stay open too. So there's the Windmill Theatre, which is this kind of celebrated variety venue. We're in Soho's Windmill Theatre.

This establishment has two claims to fame. One, the show here went on even at the height of the bombing, when many other theatres were dark. And two, it's the only place in town to see naked female flesh. It puts on a kind of glorified burlesque called Revoudaville. Time magazine's Walter Grapemer tells his American readers for an audience composed mostly of bald headed businessmen from the provinces. The Whitmill avoids the Prudish censorship laws by arguing that it shows

aren't pornography, but art. Like classical statues, the naked women on stage stand stock still. Any movement will break the spell and see the show close down for absentee. And this is a really interesting time, I think, to be a woman. You draw the contrast between what it was like to be a woman in the late Victorian era, all the repressions, the lack of rights when Jack the Ripper was active, and then little women now have the right to vote, they have a lot of rights they didn't have, but there

are still lots of inequalities, lots of injustices, and the war has just thrown everything up in the air all over again. Lots of opportunities for women and also lots of threats. Women in particular are entering spaces that they hadn't entered before and meeting people that they hadn't met before. That extends to things like conscription, women entering the forces. But also in this influx of people and the change in social milieu, there's a lot of short-term relationships, very high turnover of people, so the sexual politics of it are also really interesting. You know, as you say, everything just turns on its head for women.

Yes, and there's this phrase, good time girls and naughty girls, and so on. There's various euphemisms for, well, actually, I'm not sure exactly what they are, euphemisms for, and perhaps the ambiguity is deliberate. I think the ambiguity is telling. Good time girls are women who could be seen as working in the sex trade. They are kind of selling sex in quite a casual way. Some of them come to London for a good time.

They might end up trading sex for a meal or an item at a hotel. That is quite distinct from the more organized forms of selling sex. The women in fur that you mentioned in Piccadilly are usually more professional sex workers. Actually, I don't think they would even refer to themselves as sex workers.

That's what we would call them now. Yeah, and of course, it's easy to forget, but they would not have forgotten for a moment that there's a war on. And all of this sexual politics, the nude tabloes, the art, the windmill theatre, the Picadilly nightclubs and dive bars, all of this is happening during a blackout, it's pitch black outside. And there are bombers coming over and the Nazis are trying to kill people, they're dropping bombs on London the whole time. It's really extraordinary.

And dancing is in that context really popular. It's a huge morale booster. We see that even today in Cremenshuk, Ukraine we're seeing salsa classes continuing under-air raid and black out conditions illuminated by people's phone torches. And I can understand that. You know, when times are bleak and when times are dark, I think we cling to what makes the struggle to survive feel worth it. So people are going out dancing in droves in in London's nightlife district, the West End. And one place that's really popular is this illustrious club called the Cafe de Paris, which is by Leicester Square.

It's a subterranean joint. It's got this famous sweepings staircase. It previously was frequented by aristocrats, but now, quote-unquote, ordinary people are going there too. And they get some of the trendiest bands in. One night in spring 1941, there's a really famous all-black swing band playing it builds itself as Britain's only all-black swing band that is. Fronted by this very glamorous guy called Snake Hips Johnson, who's a dancer. And so Snake Hips is dancing in front of the crowd and conducting the band, and the air-raid sirens start to sound, and he tells them,

you can go to the shelters further below ground, but you'll miss the time of your life if you do. In the skies high above the club, the Cruelver German bomber lets go its deadly cargo. The bombs, especially designed to polish buildings, hurtle earthwords,

shrieking, and whistling as they pick up speed. Even the keynest of ears would have missed their sound. For snake hips and his orchestra have just launched into another number. A 110-pound bomb tears through the roof the cinema above the cafe debris. And it keeps going, slicing through floor up the floor

until it reaches the balcony right above the heads of Snake Hips Johnson. And as guitarist, Joe Denise. I can't describe the sound. It just was as old. And everything went black. I tried to stand up. I thought I was un-induced. The The next thing I know, I just fell down again. I looked down and saw a nasty mess where my leg had been. It was chaos, screams and shouts and dust and dirt.

Joe Denise is horrifically wounded. Snake hip's Johnson is killed outright. The oddities of bomb-las mean that musicians to their left and right are entirely unscathed, while others have been cut to ribbons. Some dancers haven't so much as a hair out of place, but are stone dead. Others still have been stripped of their clothes, but have survived. Around 34 staff and guests are dead. An off-duty nurse does her best to help the many wounded for a sight from the bomb zone's shrapnel,

flying glasses and shattered wine bottles of inflicted terrible injuries on the revenues. The woman is hailed as a hero for her efforts. However, there is a telling post script in an article printed in many newspapers. The young nurse had little to say about her work, but mentioned that while she was helping the injured, someone ransacked her handbag, taking from it objects of sentimental value, including a fountain pen. The selfless nurse has been robbed.

Corpse is too have been stripped of watches, wedding rings and jewelry. And I think that brings us to something quite interesting about the blitz spirit and how we tend to think of the blitz spirit. We tend to think that when civilization is interrupted, our baser instincts will emerge sort of Lord of the Fly's style, and something much more primitive will replace our culture. Which is not true. I mean, I've been pushing hard against this. This is not true. People do band together, people do do heroic things. It is extremely difficult to bomb a population

into submission, and the same is true after hurricanes, after earthquakes. Civilisation doesn't have this thin veneer that cracks people pull together. And yet... Totally. I mean, in disasters, we do see examples of behavior that we would consider to be really positive that show human beings in a great light. But I think, in the case of the blitz, we overemphasize those behaviors in our retelling of it. We've allowed those to whitewash the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is that conditions of war make life really, really hard for ordinary

people in really unfair ways. Something we see in the case of the Second World War and the Blitz and in our series, the Black Outripper is that ordinary people are drawn into these kind of illicit underground economies. Black markets, I think, are something we do associate with the Blitz, but we tend to think of the caricature of the Black market here. We don't tend to think of people like lone mothers being drawn into the orbit of thieves and gangsters. One example we look at in our series is a case of 12 launderresses who are charged with stealing military blankets to make coats to then sell on. They aren't humorous caricatures. They also aren't criminal masterminds.

They're ordinary women who have probably lost their breadwinners to the war. Their husbands have had to go off and fight. They still have to support their children in the context of rationing and they're making decisions with what's in front of them about how to survive. I mean, it's so sad. It's pathetic almost. The idea that you're stealing military blankets

and you're using it to make clothes and that's your living. And the other thing that I think we really don't tend to remember when we think about this time is that the government introduces legal machinery that actually means that it's much easier for ordinary people to be criminalized and then to suffer all the repercussions of criminalization. So one example of that is something called Regulation 33B, which is a response to the rise in rates of venereal disease among soldiers. Regulation 33B makes it compulsory for people to be examined and receive treatment, but

even though the spread of venereal disease takes two, it's primarily women who bear the brunt of this. And we look at the example of a young woman called Dorothy Waldry. She's also a lone mother trying to cope on her own, who is hauled up in court because she's not attended her mandatory medical examinations. Someone has labeled her as probably having given the

material disease and she's been required to go and see a doctor. She can't get the time off work to go and see this doctor as often as required. And so, as I said, she's hauled up in court and she's fine. After she's convicted, she can't get further work. Therefore, she can't pay the fine and she ends up in prison. And all of that in the name of protecting the British people. And this is a time that we now label the people of this time the greatest generation.

These are the people we look up to and we're supposed to emulate. Do you think that the idea of the greatest generation is simply a myth? I certainly think that we have a very simplistic picture of this greatest generation. So these are the people who were born in the first part of the 20th century and who persevered through economic depression and war to build a better world. That's this idea of the greatest generation, right?

And we consider them to be heroes. The problem is we're very attached to binaries of good and evil, I think. But the reality is that heroism is about conforming to a very specific set of traits which are rooted in cultural values that are given moment in time and in the context of war, that might be courage, but it might also be violence. Heroism doesn't automatically mean you embody kindness, empathy, care, any other traits that we might consider to be positive examples of of humanity. And I think in venerating this greatest generation and sort of idolizing them in this kind of blanket way without discrimination, we lose sight of the fact that some of the people serving alongside them report really terrible experiences. And something we look at in the series is women serving in the armed forces who experienced assault, sexual

assault, attempted rape, rape in their letters and diary entries from the time. Some of them describe men forcing themselves on them, men who make them feel very threatened. And you see it in the girls letters like Jean, who's just really wonderful. She goes away age 18, she's been in a provincial girls boarding school, she's sort of you know what she calls sort of Gentile Squire Arche. She grew up in Lancashire, she hardly knows about the birds and the bees and out she is and is wonderful letters home to her sister Pat. Well she's really frank about enjoying Dubonne in a bit of whiskey in her cupboard and she's doing pretty intense work, she's a code cipher and she's moved from Egypt to Italy. She's, you know, managing on her own.

But she gets utterly fed up, in fact, demoralized. When men, especially a liberated man, drunk men, constantly pestering her. How do you shake them off? I mean, here's an extract from one of her letters. I do wish that men didn't always assume that if they take you out, they can kiss you whenever they choose. Last night I went with a naval type to the club. He started getting gooey, and I had a hell of a time on the way home. But asked them now, and we do talk to a couple of veterans in the show. And they're very reluctant to say anything negative about the men.

They served alongside. They don't want to undermine our heroes. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's not very British to make a fuss, I guess. Absolutely not. And it's also true in civilian life. So another story we look at is this example of a woman called Doris Staples, whose address maker she lives in Henley. called Doris Staples, who's a dressmaker that she lives in Henley. And she is dating a American GI, private John Waters.

They go out for about six months. He's quite controlling, quite possessive, and he accuses her of seeing other men of sleeping with other men. Maybe she is, maybe she isn't, it kind of doesn't matter. She tries to leave him and he kills her. Doris turns her back on the soldier and steps into the shop, but jamming his foot in the door to stop her closing it on him, waters barges his way inside. What's interesting and what's really striking and sad is that the witnesses in the town of Henley who are called on after this death and who give evidence in court martial. Talk about how well liked

the killer Johnny Waters was, how popular he was in the town and how Doris, well, she was a bit promiscuous, she was rude to Johnny, so she probably kind of deserved it. And there's very much this sense that, even though he's a murderer, this man in uniform can do no wrong. I sent the case notes on this story to a criminologist, Professor Jane Munkton Smith. She's an expert in homicide, but also in controlling relationships and how they can end in murder. She said that she absolutely recognises behaviour and it might as well have been a case today. Him turning up at her work is absolutely typical of a controlling partner. What are you doing when I'm not there? I want to accept my authority on this relationship. I want to exert my authority on this relationship. I want you to know that you're being watched.

I need to know what you're doing. I need to let everyone else know that I own you. There's that kind of paranoid sexual jealousy. And humiliation, allegedly, is the thing that men are most afraid of. Women are most afraid of violence and being killed. Men are far more frightened of humiliation, so if you leave them, you're pushing that button. Alice finds, on core street tales, we like to try to learn the lessons of the mistakes of the past. With Ali Rubenhold, on the Bad Women podcast, you've been investigating the experience of these

women, the lives they led and in some cases, of course, their deaths at the hands of the blackout ripper. What are the lessons that you would like people to take away from the series? Beware of binaries. The picture is usually much more complicated than we'd like it to be. In the case of the blitz, we celebrate it as this triumph of humanity, and the reality is there are many more gray areas in there than we'd really care to admit.

And the other thing that's important is be aware of who gets to speak, who doesn't, and what the people we ignore might have to say, how might they challenge our assumptions and our predominant views in the case of bad women and the women we look at in this show, so many of them were ignored in their own time. And that made them vulnerable to violence. Alice Fines, thank you very much. Thank you. Alice Fines is the co-creator of Bad Women, the Blackout Ripper. Corsion retails will be back any day now and while you wait, you might consider listening to Bad Women, the Blackout Ripper, in all the usual podcast places. 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc

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