London’s response: government, Royals, propaganda and ‘Dig for Victory’
The Government in the Bunker
When the Blitz began in September 1940, the British government had already moved its operational nerve centre underground. Beneath the New Public Offices on Horse Guards Road, two minutes’ walk from Downing Street, a converted basement was reinforced with steel girders and a thick concrete ‘slab’ from June 1940 onwards. The Cabinet War Rooms housed the Cabinet meeting room, a Map Room manned around the clock by officers tracking convoys, fronts and air raids, communication centres for the Royal Navy, RAF and Army, and a transatlantic telephone room from which Winston Churchill spoke directly to President Roosevelt. The site was a closely-guarded secret throughout the war: even most ministers did not know it existed in advance. In all, 115 Cabinet meetings were held there, the last on 28 March 1945. The complex remained on twenty-four-hour standby until the lights were finally switched off on 16 August 1945.
The Cabinet War Rooms in Westminster were the secret reinforced underground HQ of the British war cabinet from August 1939 to August 1945. In all, 115 Cabinet meetings were held there between 1939 and March 1945, and the Map Room ran around the clock until VJ Day.
The Royal Family Stays Put
King George VI and Queen Elizabeth refused to leave London during the Blitz. Buckingham Palace was bombed nine times during the war; the most famous strike, on 13 September 1940, came within thirty metres of the Royal Family while they were in residence. The Queen’s remark afterwards — ‘I’m glad we have been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face’ — was widely reported and helped close the propaganda gap between the West End palace and the East End slums. The royal couple visited bomb sites across London, including the East End the day after Black Saturday and Coventry after the November 1940 raid. Princess Elizabeth (the future Elizabeth II) joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service as a driver and mechanic in 1945. The Royal Family’s visible presence is a key part of how the ‘Blitz spirit’ story was assembled at the time, and a pillar of the Edexcel historic environment requirement.
Propaganda and the Ministry of Information
The Ministry of Information, based at Senate House in Bloomsbury, ran the wartime propaganda campaign. Its Films Division commissioned the documentary London Can Take It! (1940), narrated by the American journalist Quentin Reynolds, which packaged a single night of the Blitz as a story of cheerful resilience and was widely shown in the United States to push American sympathy towards the British cause. Posters such as ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ (in fact never widely distributed at the time) and ‘Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory’ framed civilian feeling as part of the war effort. The Ministry also ran censorship through the Defence Regulations. Casualty figures from individual disasters (Hallsville, Balham, Bethnal Green) were withheld; weather reports were banned; troop movements were unmentionable. The aim was to control the wartime information environment without either lying outright or admitting how badly raids were going.
A common misconception is that the propaganda message of cheerful resilience captures how the Blitz actually felt. Mass Observation diaries from 1940–41, declassified after the war and now in the archive at the University of Sussex, record looting in bombed shops, panic on the worst nights, shelter trekking by middle-class families to outer suburbs and Epping Forest, and class resentment as East Enders watched West End hotels build private deep shelters. The historians Angus Calder (‘The Myth of the Blitz’, 1991) and Juliet Gardiner (‘The Blitz: The British Under Attack’, 2010) argue that the propaganda story was constructed at the time, not invented later, and that genuine resilience and serious strain coexisted. Top-band answers acknowledge both.
‘Dig for Victory’: Public Spaces as Allotments
When German U-boats began sinking Atlantic convoys in 1940, food imports collapsed. Britain imported around two-thirds of its food before the war; by 1942 rationing covered meat, butter, sugar, cheese, eggs and tea. The government’s answer was the Dig for Victory campaign, launched in October 1939. Civilians were encouraged to dig up their lawns for vegetables, keep chickens and rabbits, and convert public spaces into allotments. By 1943 there were around 1.4 million allotments across Britain producing roughly half of all the country’s vegetables and fruit.
London showed the campaign in its most visible form. The flower beds in front of the Imperial War Museum were dug for vegetables. The Tower of London moat, dry since 1843, was turned into vegetable beds worked by Tower wardens and volunteers, a striking image distributed worldwide as Ministry of Information propaganda. Sections of Victoria Park in the East End were turned over to allotments and to a Z-battery anti-aircraft rocket battery (the same battery whose test firing triggered the Bethnal Green disaster on 3 March 1943). Hyde Park grew potatoes; Kensington Gardens kept pigs.
The government’s decision not to close cinemas, dancehalls or theatres after the early shutdown in September 1939 was deliberate. Home Intelligence reports concluded that closing leisure for safety would do more damage to morale than the casualties from occasional bombing. The reopening of the Proms at the Albert Hall in 1941 (after the Queen’s Hall was bombed), the BBC’s use of the Lyceum dancehall for variety broadcasts and the Soho Windmill Theatre’s ‘We Never Closed’ advertising were all part of the same policy of wartime visibility. The 8 March 1941 direct hit on the Café de Paris in Coventry Street, which killed 34 including the bandleader Snakehips Johnson, did not change the policy.
War Reporting: From Censorship to Witness
Wartime reporting in Britain operated within a tighter frame than the Crimean War or the First World War. The BBC’s nightly news bulletins were vetted by Ministry of Information censors before broadcast. Newspaper editors received daily ‘guidance notes’ about what could and could not be reported. Yet within those limits, reporters such as Ed Murrow of CBS (broadcasting nightly to the United States from London with his ‘This is London’ opening) and the photographer Bert Hardy of Picture Post produced a different and more honest record of the Blitz than the Ministry of Information films. Censorship intensified the value of unofficial witness: the Mass Observation archive grew because diarists understood that what they were writing privately would not appear in newspapers. The result was a layered information environment in which propaganda, journalism and private observation all ran in parallel — and historians today have to read across all three.
London’s response to the Blitz combined institutional continuity (the Cabinet War Rooms, the Royal Family in Buckingham Palace), propaganda framing (the Ministry of Information’s ‘London Can Take It!’ and ‘Keep Calm’ posters) and visible self-reliance (Dig for Victory in Victoria Park, the Tower moat, Hyde Park).