THE DAY THEY BOMBED BUCKINGHAM PALACE
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead. Story time. History time.
The King and Queen were at home when the bomb came screaming down.
Buckingham Palace.
Friday, September 13th, 1940.
Unlucky for some.
Very nearly spectacularly unlucky for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
It’s just after eleven in the morning.
London is a week into the Blitz.
And out of the clouds comes a German bomber.
Not a great formation of aircraft.
One raider.
It comes down the Mall, dives through the cloud and makes straight for Buckingham Palace.
And drops its bombs.
The King and Queen are inside.
And here’s the wonderfully human detail.
Just before all hell breaks loose, the Queen is trying to get something out of the King’s eye.
An eyelash.
Just think about that.
Not King George VI, Emperor of India, Defender of the Faith.
A husband with something in his eye.
A wife trying to fish it out.
And then they hear it.
The Queen described it afterwards.
That unmistakable whirr-whirr of a German aircraft.
Then the diving noise.
And then something no Londoner in 1940 wanted to hear.
The scream of a falling bomb.
The Queen said it happened so quickly that she and the King had time only to look rather foolishly at one another.
And then…
CRASH.
A bomb explodes in the quadrangle.
Earth and smoke shoot into the air.
They duck into the corridor.
Another tremendous explosion.
Windows go.
Masonry flies.
And the King and Queen head for the shelter.
There are moments when history is marble statues and state papers and great men making great decisions.
And there are moments when history is a woman trying to get an eyelash out of her husband’s eye when somebody drops a bomb on the house.
This is one of those moments.
And what a house.
Buckingham Palace.
Which gives us our word of the day.
Palace.
Lovely word.
And there’s a journey inside it.
A journey of about 1,200 miles.
Because palace takes us from London to Rome.
The word ultimately comes from the Latin Palatium.
The Palatine.
The Palatine Hill in Rome.
That was where emperors lived.
So closely did that particular hill become associated with imperial residence that the name of the place became the name of the thing.
Palatium.
Palace.
So every time we say Buckingham Palace, there’s a Roman hill hiding inside the name.
Rome.
London.
Buckingham Palace.
Word of the day.
Back to September 13th, 1940.
Because this wasn’t a bomb that happened to land somewhere vaguely near the Palace.
The King himself was in no doubt.
He wrote the next day that the aircraft had been seen flying along the Mall before dropping its bombs.
His conclusion was unequivocal.
It had been a direct attack on Buckingham Palace.
And it was quite a stick of bombs.
The King’s diary records six, though contemporary reports commonly speak of five.
Two landed in the inner quadrangle.
One hit the Palace Chapel.
Others came down in the forecourt, the garden and around the front of the Palace.
The Royal Chapel took a fearful hammering.
Windows were blown out.
A water main burst.
Glass, stone, dust and debris everywhere.
Several workers were injured.
And the Palace suddenly looked a lot less like the inviolable headquarters of monarchy and a lot more like thousands of other London buildings in September 1940.
Bomb damaged.
And that mattered.
Because by this point the East End had been taking it.
Really taking it.
The Blitz had begun in earnest on September 7th.
The docks were an obvious target.
So were the railways, factories, warehouses and power installations of East London.
But bombs don’t consult maps.
They don’t distinguish between a dock and the little terraced house beside it.
Between an industrial target and somebody’s bedroom.
Whole streets were smashed.
People were killed.
People were dug out.
Families lost everything.
And there had been suggestions that the Royal Family should get out.
Get the Queen and the two princesses away.
Send them to Canada perhaps.
No.
Queen Elizabeth’s answer has become famous.
The children wouldn’t go without her.
She wouldn’t leave the King.
And the King would never leave.
So they stayed.
And now the Luftwaffe had come to them.
There is, of course, a huge difference between being bombed in Buckingham Palace and being bombed out of a two-up, two-down in Stepney.
The King and Queen had shelter.
Staff.
Resources.
Other residences.
Nobody should pretend otherwise.
But symbolically, September 13th changed something.
The war had crossed the Palace railings.
It had come into the quadrangle.
It had blown the windows in.
And that brings us to one of the most famous lines of the Blitz.
Queen Elizabeth is said to have remarked:
“I am glad we have been bombed. It makes me feel we can look the East End in the face.”
It’s a remarkable line.
And sometimes it gets treated as though she were saying, jolly good, we’ve had a bomb, now we know exactly what everybody else is going through.
I don’t hear it that way.
I hear something subtler.
Almost an acknowledgement.
We haven’t suffered what they’ve suffered.
But at least now, when we go there, we don’t go completely untouched.
And here’s the thing.
They went there that very afternoon.
West Ham.
The East End.
Think about the timing.
That morning a German aircraft has bombed their home.
And a few hours later the King and Queen are walking through bombed-out East London.
The Queen wrote about it that same day.
She described what she saw as almost a dead city.
Empty houses.
Broken windows.
And through those windows, the ordinary possessions of ordinary people.
Beds.
Photographs.
The little things people leave behind when suddenly there isn’t time to pack a life into a suitcase.
That’s the detail that gets me.
The photographs.
Because a bomb can turn a house into rubble.
But the photograph on the mantelpiece tells you what the rubble was five minutes earlier.
A home.
And London in the Blitz was full of those terrible little domestic excavations.
Wallpaper open to the sky.
A bath hanging over nothing.
A staircase going nowhere.
A bed exposed to the street.
A child’s toy amongst broken bricks.
Private life suddenly made public.
And Buckingham Palace had had a taste of it.
Not for the first time, incidentally.
A delayed-action bomb had already landed in the Palace grounds on September 8th.
Another came down the following day and eventually exploded, damaging the Palace and destroying the swimming pool.
And September 13th wasn’t the end of it either.
Buckingham Palace was hit repeatedly during the war.
The Royal Family’s own official history says the Palace was bombed nine times.
Nine.
There’s another wonderful little King George VI moment from later in the war.
He was visiting bomb-damaged Hull.
A woman complained to him that all her windows had been blown out.
And the King replied:
“So are mine at Buckingham Palace.”
That’s good.
Dry.
Understated.
Very George VI.
And perhaps that’s why the bombing of the Palace mattered far beyond the physical damage.
The Germans had attacked the great symbol of British monarchy.
Presumably they hoped the effect would be demoralising.
It did rather the opposite.
Because there was the King.
Still there.
There was the Queen.
Still there.
Palace windows out.
Chapel smashed.
Carry on.
And there they were in the East End that afternoon.
There’s another irony here.
Buckingham Palace looks permanent.
Doesn’t it?
Stand outside those railings today and it seems immovable.
Victoria Memorial.
The great façade.
Balcony.
Guards.
Flags.
Gold.
Stone.
Ceremony.
The whole mighty apparatus.
As though it had always been there and always would be.
But cities aren’t like that.
Not even palaces are like that.
London is much more fragile than it looks.
And on September 13th, 1940, for a few seconds, the most famous house in Britain was just another London building under a falling bomb.
The King heard it.
The Queen heard it.
That rising scream.
They looked at each other.
And then the world exploded thirty yards away.
Which leaves us with that extraordinary image.
Not the balcony.
Not a coronation.
Not a state carriage.
Not guardsmen in scarlet.
A King with something in his eye.
His wife leaning towards him.
A German aircraft coming down the Mall.
And history about to come through the roof.
September 13th, 1940.
The day they bombed Buckingham Palace.
You’ve been listening to the London Walks podcast.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
Streets Ahead.
Story time.
History time.
And today, bomb disposal time.
Thanks for listening.
And come walking with us.
There’s always more London to discover.