Bethnal Green Underground Station
Bethnal Green is a London Underground station in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets . It is in the Travelcard tariff zone 2, at the intersection of Cambridge Heath Road and Roman Road. In 2014, 16.08 million passengers used this station served by the Central Line .
The station opened on December 4, 1946. Before that, it had been used as an air raid shelter during the Second World War . On March 3, 1943, 173 people were trampled to death in a mass panic while trying to seek refuge in the station.
The Bethnal Green disaster
Construction work on the eastern extension of the Central Line began in the mid-1930s. At the beginning of the Second World War, most of the tunnels were completed. While individual sections served as underground factories, the Bethnal Green station was used as an air raid shelter , initially unofficially, then with official approval.
By 1943 the number of people seeking protection had fallen sharply; it only rose when retaliatory strikes for British air strikes were feared. This was the case on March 3, 1943. The British press reported on an air raid on Berlin on March 1st. At 8:17 p.m. the warning sirens sounded and many people calmly descended the stairs to the underground counter hall. A new type of anti-aircraft missile of the Unrotated Projector type was fired in nearby Victoria Park at 20:27 . The gun was still a secret and the unexpected, unusual explosion caused a panic. A woman, who was probably carrying a toddler, stumbled on the narrow staircase and started a chain reaction that involved 300 other people. 172 were trampled to death within seconds, and one person died a little later in hospital from the injuries. 69 of the victims were children.
The accident was reported, but the censors ensured that the exact location of the accident remained unknown for the time being. There was an investigation into the circumstances of the accident, but Justice Secretary Herbert Stanley Morrison made only a brief statement about it in Parliament. A local advocacy group accused the government of trivializing the disaster, and two families of victims sued the district administration for damages.
Finally, Morrison published the investigation report. He came to the conclusion that the disaster was caused by poor lighting, lack of barriers (which the district administration could not have afforded) and lack of supervision by the Metropolitan Police . The main culprit, however, was allegedly the irrational behavior of the crowd, and allegedly there would have been deaths even if precautionary measures had been taken. Morrison wanted to keep the report under lock and key because he feared that it would not be believed.
Web links
- Jessica Lack: The hush-hush catastrophe , The Guardian, February 15, 2003 (article on the 1943 disaster)
- Photo of the air raid shelter (September 1940)
- Photo of the platform with train (January 1947)
- Photo of the counter hall (May 1949)
Individual evidence
- ↑ COUNTS - 2014 - annual entries & exits. (PDF, 44 kB) (No longer available online.) Transport for London, 2015, archived from the original on February 21, 2016 ; accessed on December 29, 2017 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
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Coordinates: 51 ° 31 '38 " N , 0 ° 3' 19.7" W.