It's well known that in the Blitz, London's Underground stations were used by civilians as ad hoc air raid shelters. Indeed, photos of platforms crowded with huddled people taking cover from the bombs on the surface are iconic and practically the first thing you likely think of when the Blitz is mentioned. (I'm sure you don't need me to show you one, but here you go anyway.) In fact, only a minority of Londoners sheltered in the Tube: the peak was 177,000 shelterers on 27 September 1940, after three weeks of heavy bombing. That's a lot, but as Tom Harrisson pointed out it's no more than 5% of the population of London at the time.¹

Surprisingly, that number is also much less than the estimated peak use of the Tube as air raid shelters in the First World War. The best figure available for that seems to be 300,000, as given on 22 February 1918 by Lord George Hamilton, chairman of the Central London Railway (speaking about the whole UERL network):

The use of the Underground railways as air raid shelters has materially affected our operations in recent months. In the stations of the three Tube railways there have been as many as 300,000 people taking shelter at one time.²

The Official History gives the same number, presumably from the same source but tying it more specifically to the Harvest Moon raids at the end of September 1917:

When the first raid of the series had been made, on the 24th of September, a concourse of people, estimated at about 100,000, had rushed to take shelter in the underground railways. On each subsequent night, whether raids were made or not, the numbers grew to a maximum estimated total of 300,000.³

The reason why peak usage was so much higher in the First World War isn't clear. It's tempting to read it as an index of greater fear and anxiety, but it probably has more to do with the fact that there was next to no alternative in 1917, when the authorities were slow to open up public buildings for use as shelters, compared with 1940, after several years of public and private shelter construction, even if this was inadequate for the task of sheltering everyone. (In both wars, the people made the decision to use the Underground for shelter, against considerable initial official resistance.)

All this is by way of prelude. All those iconic photos of Tube stations being used as air raid shelters in the Second World War? They have no counterparts for the First World War. I've been on the lookout for them in all the years I've spent writing this book and have never come across any. I've just spent a few hours scouring my books, Imperial War Museum, London Transport Museum, London Museum, historic stock image collections, BNA/GNV, Google, etc, etc... there's nothing that I can find. Not a skerrick!

Why might this be? I can think of a few possibilities. One is technology: photography in poorly-lit conditions can be tricky without the right equipment and/or technical knowledge. Certainly there was progress in both cameras and film emulsions over the two intervening decades. However, there are certainly photos taken in the First World War under comparable conditions; to give a relevant example, Peter Cooksley's The Home Front (incidentally the best account of Tube shelters I know) has one of a large group of shelterers in Dover's Oil Mill Cave in 1916 which I can't find online, but is perfectly clear (albeit clearly posed and probably specially lit).⁴

Another possibility is license, official or social. Maybe the authorities didn't allow photographers to take photos of tube stations being used as shelters, since this may have been seen as a propaganda gift to the enemy. Or maybe those who tried were seen off by the shelterers themselves, who might not have felt like being recorded for posterity when they probably were not at their best. Again, perhaps, but I've seen no evidence for either possibility. It could also be a question of timing: perhaps the raids were too intermittent or too brief to allow for anyone to organise photographers to be sent down into the tubes to capture what was going on. The raids of the First World War, after all, were not nearly as intense or as sustained as those of the Second World War. (That, supposedly, 4 million people cumulatively used Underground stations for shelter in 1914–1918 compared with 63 million in 1939–1945 shows this too.)⁵

These last two possibilities can be disposed of, however, by the fact that several war artists were tasked with memorialising the tube shelter experience. I've found four of them (which also shows that my search skills are not totally deficient!):

• Walter Bayes, The Underworld: Taking cover in a Tube Station during a London air raid (1918). Elephant & Castle. Oil on canvas, held by the IWM (Art.IWM ART 935).
• Frank Lewis Emanuel, Raid Night in the Tube, January 1918 (1918). Pencil on paper, held by the IWM (Art.IWM ART 16297).
• Mark Gertler, Air Raid Night in the Tube (not completed). Commissioned by the War Artists Scheme but not finished.
• Archibald Standish Hartrick, Underground in Wartime (1916). Holborn. Ink on paper, held by the IWM (Art.IWM ART 18062).

The works by Bayes, Emanuel and Hartrick – shown above, in reverse order – are the only visual records we have of the First World War tube air raid shelters. Bayes' is easily the best known of these and the only one I've seen in person - it was prominently on display in the IWM when I was there last year, though I'm sure many people mistake it for a Blitz scene. The one by Emanuel looks like it's just a preliminary sketch; the similarity in title with Gertler's unfinished piece suggests that one was given the other's commission but was equally unable to fulfil it. Interesting that Hartrick's lithograph (I think) is dated to 1916, which was not close to the peak danger period. It perhaps shows the huddled, weary and probably quite fed up masses (plus one dog and one Boy Scout) the best of the three.

If you know of any others images of Great War tube shelters – especially, but not only, photos – please let me know!

Image source (other than IWM): Artsy.

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1. Tom Harrisson, Living Through The Blitz (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 111. [↩]
2. Railway News, 23 February 1918, 42. [↩]
3. H.A. Jones, The War in the Air: Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), 89-90. [↩]
4. Peter G. Cooksley, The Home Front: Civilian Life in World War One (Stroud: Tempus, 2006), 112. [↩]
5. Daily Telegraph (Launceston), 28 December 1918, 5; Transport for London, 'The Experience of Sheltering in the Tube during WWII'. [↩]