Portrait of a civilian

Colin Perry

Colin Perry was just 18 years old when war broke out in September 1939. He lived in the London suburb of Tooting and worked as a clerk in the City of London. He kept a journal of his thoughts and experiences from June 1940, just after the fall of France, until November 1940. These few months were crucial for Britain, and therefore for the whole remaining effort to thwart Nazi Germany’s goals. Britain stood alone during this period and endured the constant threat of invasion and aerial bombardment. Colin Perry’s account of life during these dark months is fascinating, as it reflects the hopes and fears of a young man who cannot help seeing the war as much as an adventure as something to be feared.

Once the news of France’s capitulation was known, young Colin Perry’s account was full of contradictory ideas and thoughts. He said ‘condemn him to hell who is responsible for bringing Britain to the verge of existence – Britain whom we love and whom our ancestors placed into the leadership of the world.’ Colin considered, from a viewpoint of considerable personal disappointment, that ‘Red tape is our course. Maybe I’m embittered at having passed the Medical A1, just because I do not possess a school certificate I cannot get into the flying part of the RAF.’ He was also a young man with considerable imagination. While listing all the young women to whom he had been attracted in the past, he noted that one, a German girl with whom he had spent ‘a day and a half’ in London in 1938, was ‘charming and extraordinarily attractive but I suspect her of 5th column work’!

On 17 July, Colin reported the following dramatic developments:

Tonight in our proud Island prepare ourselves for the word that the invader has commenced his attack. The air raid wardens have passed information round that the Military at Tolworth will tonight throw up a smoke-screen, which will spread and envelop the whole metropolis, blot out vital objectives and generally throw invading hordes into confusion.

His dramatic smokescreen did not materialize and instead he paid a visit to the cinema, where he saw the propaganda film, Britain at Bay. The impact of this on Colin was dramatic. He claimed it ‘made me want to join the army tomorrow’ – doubtless the intention of the production.

Colin, for all his focus on the war and the preparations for the imminent invasion, betrays the preoccupations of teenagers the world over in his writing. Interspersed with his comments about joining up are many about girls, particularly one whom he saw on a regular basis, but whom he had not as yet summoned up the courage to ask out. Colin, who could imagine himself fighting the enemy, could not similarly conceive of this girl taking him seriously.

On 19 July the RAF, hard pressed at this point in the Battle of Britain, contacted Colin to inform him, in a ‘circular,’ that they would be postponing any application of his for aircrew for at least a month. Colin’s response to this was that ‘I do want to get in the Services before the winter, as I shall then save myself the price of a new overcoat, hat etc.’ While visiting a friend’s flat near Chancery Lane, Colin thought that the many barrage balloons rising above the city looked very much like so many ‘soft, flabby, silvery floating elephants.’

On 30 July, Colin experienced his first raid when a solitary German aircraft dropped bombs on Esher, killing and wounding five people. The searchlights in the vicinity of Colin’s house were used only briefly, in the hope of persuading the pilot that he was in fact over a rural area rather than the fringes of London itself.

As July became August, Colin became increasingly convinced that the long-predicted German invasion was likely to come sooner rather than later. On 9 August he was writing that ‘the invasion did not come yesterday. Now people think Hitler will try today or tomorrow, both dates of which are favourable to his star. I maintain he will strike on 22nd of this month.’ Interestingly, Colin at times considered the unthinkable: what life might be like under a German occupation. He was particularly concerned with the fate of Neville Chamberlain and speculated that ‘in the event of British defeat – God forbid – he would be produced like Laval and old Pétain. I cannot understand just why Churchill does not kick him out.’

While Churchill and many Britons were doing their utmost to convince President Roosevelt of the necessity of joining with Britain to resist German aggression, 18-year-old Colin had his own thoughts about the USA. He believed that the developments in the war to date had now obliged the USA to ‘realise how dependent they were upon us’:

America would not help us at all by entering into this war. They are in greater danger from the Nazis than ourselves if only they but realised it. Riddled with fifth column, a bastard race, with a conflict of opinion they must maintain a two-ocean navy, which they can’t.

Colin’s thoughts and feelings reflect the mindset of a comparatively immature youth, but the war predictably impinged on his life in a way that he had not thought possible. On 21 August, a friend of his family, Mrs Block, called to say that her neighbor had been killed in an air raid: ‘a bomb fell directly on her Anderson shelter. Her road had been machine-gunned.’ Needless to say, this reawakened Colin’s wishes to fight again and he drifted off into thoughts of joining the RAF:

There is nothing I would like better in this world than to be a fully-fledged fighter pilot awaiting a gigantic air offensive, lounging on the rough grass talking with Pete and Steve … by the side of our aircraft as we awaited the signal to scramble.

While Colin’s youthful bravado kept his and his friends’ spirits up through this episode and many other minor raids, involving sparse formations of German aircraft, as the days passed through the summer the bombing intensified and Colin’s mood darkened slightly. On 28 August he wrote: ‘I cannot say how tired I am. I have never known how much sleep means. Since the early hours of Friday morning the Nazi bombers have been over continuously, in consequence we have had warning after warning.’

Colin’s description of this event is particularly interesting, as it sheds light on the opinions of ordinary people on the ground towards the bombing. Colin thought that ‘nuisance bombers,’ as their title suggests, were more of a problem than the large-scale raids. The ‘nuisance’ aircraft came over singly or in pairs and their aim was simply to prompt air-raid sirens and precautions on the ground. Colin said, ‘It is obvious that these raiders are sent only to shake our morale. It is these that are responsible for keeping all Londoners awake and in their shelters for hours every night.’ The net result was that many people, responding directly to this German tactic, chose to demonstrate their defiance and their need for sleep, by ‘taking the risk of staying in bed when they [the bombers] come over.’

Colin, true to his ideas, ‘mostly stay[ed] in bed … it was impossible during the early hours of Tuesday to do so, however, as every ten minutes or so for 6 hours the German raiders passed right over our flat.’ Colin’s thoughts on all of this were simple: ‘I may be tired and somewhat depressed, but by God all this only makes us the more determined to smash blasted Hitler once and for all. The whole of Britain is now more determined than ever.’

This determination, which many have subsequently termed the spirit of the Blitz, was to be severely tested in the coming weeks as the German raids intensified. On Monday 9 September, Colin’s tone changed considerably. Gone was the jaunty defiance and cockiness, and in its place was a genuine sense of shock:

London, my London, is wounded, bloody. The sirens sounded last night at 7.59 and straightway [sic] ’planes were diving and booming overhead. I saw a whole ring of anti-aircraft fire mark out Clapham Common high in the sky … Becton gasworks has been hit … we stayed in the shelter for a while, but I kept rushing around with my binoculars. At one period the firing was so intense I dare not risk the 18 yards’ run to the shelter and stood against a concrete wall, flat. The ‘all-clear’ sounded at 5.30 am.

But worse was to come. Colin, of course, had to make his way to work that day, exhausted and strained from the excitement and lack of sleep of the previous night. After taking the underground as far as Bank, he ventured out as far as Princes Street and was greeted by a scene of utter devastation along ‘a Princess Street hitherto unknown to me.’

Cars packed the road, people rushed here and there, calm and collected, fire services, ambulances. Refugees from the East End, cars and bikes, luggage and babies all poured from [the] Aldate direction … a high explosive bomb had fallen clean in the middle of Threadneedle Street, just missing the Bank’s main entrance and somehow missing the old Royal Exchange. Here in the heart of the City … next door to my office, always considered by me as untouchable, had descended the cold and bloody stab of Hitler. In the office the windows were cracked and smashed … dust and earth covered my chair and then I beheld the 3rd floor. No windows, debris, dirt. I was staggered as I beheld the spectacle. I took myself to the roof with my binoculars and saw the most appalling sights. All over the heart of the City fires were burning, hoses playing … I cannot describe my feelings, they were all too dumbfounded and I was incredulous.

Colin’s diary takes an abrupt turn at this juncture. He writes:

I knew then that my diary is not ‘exciting’ reading of happening to be envied, it does not really show the spirit of glamour which I take from these raids, but it simply shows the callousness, the futility of war. It depicts bloody people, smashed bodies, tragedy, the breaking up of homes and families. But above all, high above this appalling crime the Nazis perpetrate, there is something shining, radiating warmth above all these dead and useless bodies, it is the spirit, the will to endure, which prevails.

Colin Perry joined the merchant navy in the autumn of 1940 and on 17 November joined HMT Strathallan as the ship’s writer. He survived the war and published his diary in 1971.