It happened to me: I survived the Bethnal Green Tube disaster

Seventy-nine-year-old Londoner Alf Morris was just 13 when he survived the Bethnal Green Tube disaster on 3 March 1943, in which 173 people, including 41 children, lost their lives while trying to escape from German bombs.

Alf and his wife Vera Rose, 73, live in Hornchurch, Essex, and are supporting the Stairway to Heaven Memorial Fund to try to raise money for a memorial to the tragic events.

Alf Morris: Still haunted by the cries of the babies crushed to death in the Bethnal Green Tube disaster in 1943

It was when the sound from the wireless suddenly went dead that we first knew an air-raid was imminent.

This particular evening in 1943, my parents, my aunt Lilian and a family friend, Harry, who was staying with us because he'd lost his home in a previous raid, were all sitting around the radio listening for the latest news.

My father jumped up suddenly, telling Lilian to take me straight to Bethnal Green Tube air-raid shelter, while he and my mother got my baby sister ready to follow after us with Harry.

Four years into the war, we were all quite used to this routine. But it didn't make the prospect of going down into the shelters again any less frightening.

As I trotted alongside my aunt down Old Ford Road, towards Bethnal Green station, she glanced nervously at me as the whining sound of the airraid siren began. 'Come on, Alf,' she said, 'we'd better run!'

Just as we reached the junction of Victoria Park Square, a radar-controlled searchlight swept across Bethnal Green Gardens, illuminating the sky above. We knew it would not be long before the anti-aircraft guns started firing.

We couldn't risk being caught in the street or we might be killed by falling shrapnel.

We ran to the entrance of the Tube station. A 25 watt bulb hung across the doorway, giving just enough light for us to see down the first staircase.

There were already crowds of people ahead of us, women telling small children to tread carefully as they made their way down in the dark, babies crying in their mothers' arms.

Halfway down the staircase we were deafened by the sound of an explosion. We all thought it must be a bomb. Only later did we discover that it was our side's anti-aircraft rockets.

Then someone at the top of the stairs shouted to warn us that two buses packed with people had just arrived. Panicked by the sound of the rockets, the passengers were rushing into the Tube entrance.

Suddenly everything turned into chaos. Jostled by those nearest me, I got separated from my aunt and found myself on the third stair from the bottom, pinned up against the wall. People were falling to the ground in front of me.

Thinking I was about to be crushed to death, I started to cry, screaming out for my mother.



During the Second World War dozens of London Underground stations were used as air raid shelters

As the crowd surged forwards, I saw women with babies still in their arms falling to the floor as others piled on top of them. It was a terrible sight. The sound of their cries lives with me still.

I found myself being wedged tighter and tighter against the wall. Then, over the heads of the crowd, I recognised a lady air-warden I knew, a strongly built woman called Mrs Cholmondeley.

I tried to clamber towards her. Leaning out across the heads of the people nearest to her, she grabbed my hair and tried to pull me upwards.

Now in even worse pain, I cried even harder. She then picked me up like a sack of coal and lifted me up out of the crowd and down to the safety of another landing.

She then looked at me very sternly, put a finger to her lips and said: 'Go downstairs to the shelter. Say nothing about any of this!'

I was terrified by what I'd been through, and by the warden's fierce command. I staggered on down the escalators.



After pressing a bell on the steel flood door, I was let on to the platform, where those who had gone down before the buses arrived were oblivious to the tragedy above them.

Making my way to a three-tier bunk, I was enormously relieved to see my aunt running towards me. She looked distraught - her shoes were missing and her coat and stockings were torn. I could tell from the way she hugged me that she'd thought I was dead.



I told her what the warden had said and she replied that it was probably best not to frighten people.

There were 2,000 people sheltering in Bethnal Green station that night. The next morning at 6.30 my aunt and I left the shelter.

Upstairs, I expected to see mountains of corpses but there were only piles of shoes, and the steps were wet where someone must have washed them after removing the bodies.

It was only then that people started to notice some of their friends and relatives were missing.

At home I was overjoyed to find my own family alive. My father described how he'd tried to follow us the previous night, how he'd had to leave my mother and baby sister in a shelter while he went with Harry to search for us at Bethnal Green.

Prevented from entering the station by the emergency services, he'd spent the entire night thinking we were dead.

But someone else close to us was still missing: a young mother called Lily Trotter who used to bring her seven-year-old daughter, Vera, to be looked after by my mother while Lily worked.

My father found them among piles of corpses at a mortuary and cried like a baby at the sight.

A total of 173 people died that night, 41 of them children. The aftermath of the tragedy was almost as bad as the horror of the night itself.

There were up to 15 funerals a day in Bethnal Green every day for the next two weeks. Five children from my class were among them. In some cases whole families had been wiped out.

Yet there was very little in the newspapers the next day - a blanket ban on reporting was imposed to preserve public morale. Only those, like me, who witnessed the events at Bethnal Green station know, and will never forget, what really happened that night.