Having read your article about the unveiling of the memorial to the 173 victims of the Bethnal Green tube shelter disaster of 1943 (Opinion, 16 December), I would like to clarify some points. Having helped with an oral history project about the disaster, I read the correspondence between Bethnal Green Council and London Civil Defence Regional HQ; also the 81 witness statements taken during the government inquiry led by magistrate Mr Laurence Dunne. There are one or two living survivors of the disaster who insist that there was a “government cover-up”, because Regional HQ had refused requests from the town clerk to authorise improvements to the tube shelter entrance.
In fact, some improvements had been made. The irony is that more of them would have made no difference to the outcome, which was caused by other factors: there were no wardens on duty at the entrance, the concrete steps were uneven, the lighting was too dim and, although there were handrails on both sides, there was no central one. Mr Dunne wrote in his report: “Each authority failed to see that the matter was properly understood and considered by their technical officers”. He also wrote that the main cause of the accident had been “a lack of self-control at an unfortunate place and time”. The sound of the air-raid warning sent an unusually large number of people to the shelter on that evening, who were then somewhat panicked by the unfamiliar explosions of the newly installed anti-aircraft rocket guns. To this day no one knows why they were deployed that night, and not a single bomb fell within two miles of Bethnal Green. People were asked not to talk about the disaster, perhaps so as not to affect morale. But a government cover-up? It wasn’t as simple as that.
Joy Puritz
London
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