Aviva companies in WW2 — working through the Blitz in London
The sixth in a series of blogs written to mark the anniversary of VE day by sharing stories of Aviva companies on the home front.
The biggest impact on those still manning the various company offices in London was that of the Blitz. Although many Aviva group companies evacuated most staff for the duration of the war, they still retained skeleton staff in their buildings for the convenience of their London customers. Some companies, like Commercial Union, Northern Assurance, and Ocean Accident maintained their head offices in London throughout the war.
Fears of the danger of air attack surfaced as early as 1938 when the London branch engineering manager at General Accident informed Francis Norie-Miller that a number of his female staff would not come in to work in the event of war, due to the threat of air raids. DIB of Union Assurance, also writing in 1938, lamented that: ‘there is something fantastic and repulsive in the thought that it should be necessary, in this year of grace, to equip a building in the heart of a civilised city with protection from attack by supposedly equally civilised people’.
Reminiscences from staff recall the daily interruption of bombs, the regular clearing of debris from bombing raids, and the problems of moving around the city. According to DIB, writing again in the Commercial Union staff magazine of Autumn 1940: ‘the question of travelling is a problem peculiar to London, with its great distances, and it has at times been a problem indeed. So far as Cornhill is concerned the record is probably held by a gentleman who arrived one day at 2.30pm and departed at 3pm’.
Doris Page, who worked at Northern Assurance during the War later recalled: ‘I got to know a great deal more of the City during this time. Depending on how far the buses could take you, the rest of your journey you had to walk, stepping over hose pipes and rubble, and diverted around areas if not passable, to get to your place of work’.
Another Northern Assurance typist, Dorothy Haines, described her journey into work after the fire bomb raid on London on the 29–30 December 1940:
‘On the Monday following the raid of Friday night the tube was blocked and we were turned out at Old Street tube station and had to walk to Moorgate. Mary’s office ‘Cable & Wireless’ near Moorgate tube station had been completely ‘gutted’ and as staff arrived they were ordered to report for duty at a building on Victoria Embankment — so she continued her walk […] Bunny and I continued our journey scrambling over debris and fire fighting equipment as the square mile of the City was still smouldering. We became very dirty from smoke and fumes and eventually reached the Northern Assurance, No 1 Moorgate, building intact and unscathed.’
Vivienne Hall also worked as a typist at Northern Assurance and kept a diary throughout the war period which is now held at the Imperial War Museum. In it she wrote that it became quite normal to take between two and four hours to get to work. She described picking her way through the debris caused by night-time bombing raids and her amazement at the work done to quickly clear roads and pavements which initially seemed impassable.
A R Tingey of the Yorkshire Insurance London City staff recalled a day in his life as a member of the skeleton staff there in early 1940: ‘Just before 9am I diligently pick my way across dozens of criss-crossing firemen’s hoses, and unlock the front door (except, of course, on the occasions when it has already been conveniently blown open) I then sweep up the glass and plaster from the main office and make arrangements for the front window to be boarded over — this having been blown out (or, rather, in) during the night’.
Tim Cheal of North British & Mercantile also remained, as one of the skeleton staff at the 61 Threadneedle Street branch. He later wrote: ‘After a severe bombing, kiosks appeared in the city where patient transport officials gave advice upon ‘how to get home’ from here’ — I remember on one occasion approaching one of the officials and enquiring about transport to Tonbridge. The official looked at me and said ‘you’ve had it chum’. That night I slept on a stretcher in the basement at head office’.
Mr Cheal was far from being the only staff member to sleep at the office, indeed early in the war plans were made at Commercial Union for staff to work in shifts if transport became too difficult with one group working from Monday to Wednesday and another from Wednesday to Friday: ‘Meals will be provided in the first basement, work will be done in the second, and sleep will be wooed in the third. Thus travelling in the black-out, with all its delays, dangers and discomforts, will be reduced to a minimum.’ You can just see the corner of a camp bed in the photograph below which was taken at the company’s Birchin Lane offices which housed subsidiaries Edinburgh Life and West of Scotland.
Members of staff like those at Provident Mutual’s, largely abandoned, office at 25/31 Moorgate were on fire watching rotas which included working all night. FEK later recalled that out of the first 91 nights of the Blitz there were only four during which there was no air raid. The basement at these offices had been turned into a large public shelter which the staff were also responsible for supervising; according to FEK: ‘Many stories could be told of pick-pockets, drunks, a death, and what missed being a birth by half-an-hour […] On Saturday nights we used to have a sing-song […] on Sunday a film show was put on’.
Several members of General Accident staff became virtually permanent residents in the basement shelter at their offices at Aldwych in the first few years of the war. This was due to either being bombed out at home or finding the journey in and out of work too difficult. One of these men, WJ Robinson, later wrote in the staff magazine:
‘One memorable night… something appeared to strike the building with a terrific crash. The sound of tumbling masonry was heard. We rushed to the safety doors quite anticipating that the whole of the building had collapsed, but our luck was in. A series of three near misses had plastered us with chunks of roadway, destroying a good many windows. Outside was havoc with two burnt out buses and adjacent buildings wrecked.’
He may well have been describing the scene photographed below. One of the columns of the General Accident building can just been seen on the far right of the image.
One of Robinson’s fellow shelter residents, David Temple, was not so lucky, as Robinson recorded: ‘David Temple’s decision to sleep one night at the YMCA coincided with an extremely severe raid during which he received fatal injuries. His passing was a great shock to all of us.’
Members of General Accident’s staff were not the only ones to get bad news of colleagues they had seen only the day before. Vivienne Hall recorded in her diary her feelings about arriving at work in November 1939 to hear the news that one of her male colleagues at Northern Assurance had been knocked down and killed in the blackout just outside the office the night before.
Tim Cheal of North British & Mercantile later wrote about the death of his colleague Reg Lawrence: ‘One morning I arrived at the office prepared for the usual cheery greetings and braced for any of the customary leg pulls, but heard that Lawrence, who had often arrived very early, had not turned up. I later learned with deep regret that he had been killed in an air-raid the night before.’
Reg, who worked in the Home Fire Department died in an air raid at Barking Park AA gun site while in the act of entertaining the gunners there. He was killed by a piece of shrapnel which came through the roof of the hut where his concert party were performing.
Naturally, many of the London offices were damaged. By the time the image below was published in The Policy in April 1941, the London headquarters of National Mutual Life Assurance of Australasia at №5 Cheapside had been bombed out. Fortunately, the company’s staff and records had already moved out of the city and were safely installed at 16 The Grange, Wimbledon.
On 19 October that year an incendiary bomb penetrated to the second floor of the Railway Passengers office at 64 Cornhill causing severe damage to the upper floors from fire and water. Most of the staff had fortunately already been evacuated to Newland Park with those of North British and Mercantile. Those who had stayed to run the office were forced to relocate to 61 Threadneedle Street. Also on the move in October 1940 were the London staff of the Scottish Insurance Corporation. The Post Magazine reported that they had left their damaged offices in Cannon Street for 14 Cornhill which had been kindly loaned to them by Scottish Equitable Life.
Another example of rival insurance offices helping each other out during this period came in May 1941 when Scottish Union and National’s office at Walbrook was destroyed in a night raid. The Scottish Union staff were taken in by North British and Mercantile at 61 Threadneedle Street which also took in staff from its own Mincing Lane branch that had been destroyed by fire in the same raid. The Threadneedle Street head office also became a refuge for staff from the company’s Stratford branch in East London which had been reduced to heap of rubble on 19 April 1941.
Also by April of 1941 the windows in the headquarters of London and Scottish Assurance Corporation on Arthur Street had been blown out, as you can see in the photograph below. Most of the staff had been evacuated to the Dower House, Cheam and those who remained in London simply cleared up the glass and carried on as usual.
From the look of this photograph, the staff at Road Transport and General’s branch around the corner in King William Street were less fortunate. You can just see the company’s mangled sign on the left-hand side above the scene of destruction looking down towards London Bridge.
As happened with North British and Mercantile, the head office of United Kingdom Provident at 196 Strand became a shelter for staff from its branches around London. Many of the head office departments were evacuated to Newberries, Radlett, at the start of the war and London branch staff moved in to take their place. The company’s branch at 37 Victoria Street was destroyed and a direct hit closed down Bloomsbury branch but, other than an incident involving fire bombs, 196 Strand remained unscathed.
The building’s luck ran out on the night of 28 July 1944 and staff arrived the following morning to find ‘our beautiful office a wreck’.
This series of photographs, from a booklet about the event, shows the scene that confronted them.
It was fortunate that the building was hit at night so that although the team of fire watchers and the caretaker were in the office there was only one, fairly minor, injury reported.
According to the booklet: ‘staff worked as never before, the women in particular were magnificent and by Monday morning they were partially installed in new home at 33 Gracechurch street.’
Another company facing a big clean-up operation in July 1944 was Northern Assurance. Writing in her diary Vivienne Hall recorded hearing the ‘danger overhead’ warning as she walked up Princes Street on the way to work. She had reached the building at 1 Moorgate and was waiting for the lift when the building opposite was hit. She described the deafening roar and the thud of the huge 8-foot windows crashing in, complete with their frames, while she crouched under a counter and waited for the ceilings to come down.
The photograph below shows the scene that greeted her when the dust cleared.
It seems amazing that this had become a fairly run of the mill event for our staff in this period. Afterwards Vivienne went to her first aid station to deal with staff suffering from cuts and shock. Then she and her colleagues cleared the glass and broken wood as best they could and got on with their day. Later entries in her diary indicate that the windows were not replaced as she describes the cold of that winter with only cardboard and mica blocking up the windows. Apparently, the staff continued working wearing their overcoats and with shawls draped over them.
Other group offices in London to be damaged over the war years included Hamilton House, the head office of Employers Liability Assurance, which was damaged by air raids four times, and Norwich Union’s London Marine premises at 50–51 Lime Street which were totally destroyed in 1941. Sun Life’s Leadenhall and Lime Street branches were also both destroyed and the company’s Westminster branch was hit by a flying bomb.
General Accident’s Aldwych office was also damaged, by a high explosive bomb, as described by W J Robinson: ‘The building, in the centre of a much bombed district seemed to bear a charmed existence until once morning the office clocks stopped at 3:06am, when a high explosive bomb penetrated the roof and exploded on the third floor […] Structurally the office withstood the shock amazingly well and although the shelter (by now open to the public) was crowded to capacity, no casualties were sustained. The shelter is now officially closed to all excepting fire watchers off duty and occasional members of the staff’.
