The Homicidal Crowd

It was on a British programme called Ghosts On The Underground that I first heard about the WWII tragedy at Bethnal Green Station. The programme’s format was to interview LU staff, who spun their ghoulish tales to camera, interspersed with dramatised vignettes and some great photography of the underground system. The Tube, having been built on countless gravesites and plague pits, and witness to many human disaters, is always ripe for tales of well known and not-so-well-known stations and their spooky happenings after hours.

One particular interview that has stuck with me was about Bethnal Green station. This is because it was my local station at the time I watched the programme. On 3 March 1943, amidst a period of WWII when more civilians were dying than soldiers, a mass panic ensued at Bethnal Green station which was doubling as a public bomb shelter. At 8.17 the air raid alert sounded and 1500 people fled into the station which already contained between five and six hundred people. At 8.27 a local anti-aircraft launcher fired rockets into the sky, which began a mass panic amongst people on the street. Those trying to get into the station believed the bottleneck at the entrance was caused by people being refused entry and so they began to push.  Moments later and people were being crushed to death, their screams masked by the sound of gunfire and rockets. 173 men, women and children were crushed to death, and a further 14 men, 33 women and 15 children were seriously injured. Ironically, no bombs had even fallen from the skies within 2 miles of the station. This was the psychology of an homicidal crowd: ‘every man for himself’.

In Ghosts On The Underground, a member of staff at Bethnal Green station recalls hearing screams of women and children coming from the platforms, but I think the event that created the alleged haunting is far more sinister: what can happen if you’re caught amongst a crowd of people all trying to save themselves.

Soon after the programme I went down to the station to see if I could find a commemoration. There is a relatively small  plaque over the south east entrance which you wouldn’t notice unless you were looking for it. In hindsight, this seems to mirror the attitude of the inquiry after the tragedy, which was hampered by having to remain almost secret, lest ‘the enemy’ find out and exploit panicking crowd psychology to their advantage.

Life Lessons From The Cutting Room Floor

Hal Ashby, one of the great but underrated Hollywood editors described the art and craft of editing as “…the perfect place to examine everything…everything is channeled down into that strip of film, from the writing to how it’s staged, to the director and the actors. And you have the chance to run it back and forth a lot of times, and ask questions of it – why do I like this? Why don’t I like this?”. Editing in Ashby’s broad definition, is the process of subjective scrutiny coupled with the potential to sculpt narrative arc, to forge a coherent path through a story; the editor acts as an unseen storyteller with the final elements of a film’s production at their fingertips. To put it more succinctly, Walter Murch, editor (and sound designer) for Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and Apocalypse Now once proclaimed that “editing could just as easily be called film construction”. Edits should be subtle or invisible: perfect links in stories without ever drawing attention to themselves. There are exceptions of course: Ray Lovejoy’s (or possibly Kubrick’s) famous jump-cut from prehistoric man’s first piece of technology to the grand technology of space travel in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Hugh A. Robertson’s stylish editing on Midnight Cowboy.

The point is, everything needs an edit. We edit our lives all the time. We edit what we say before we say it. Some people are better at that than others. A good edit is important. Online, where many things are perpetually in “beta”, where many things are apparently just a stream of consciousness; where newspaper clippings are riddled with typos, blogs have unchecked facts and photographs are emptied off a camera onto Flickr, is the art of reviewing, editing and crafting finished works under threat in an attempt to keep up with the pace?

I wonder because I’m prone to haste and impatience myself. Generally getting something finished is such a painful process – putting the “final touches” to something. But that’s probably why its the most important part of doing anything. Its the stage of creating something I should make more time for but never seem to. The perfect place to examine everything, the chance to run it back and forth and ask questions.

London Now I’m Not There

This has been inspired mainly by Thorsten’s post on the HPLL blog about his morning bus journey (on which I originally wrote this post as a comment), but it also ties in to some nostalgia from now being away from London for 7 months. Because amongst many things I miss of London, one non-person thing is, bizarrely, the Tube. I didn’t actually use it all that often in the last couple of years before I left but for some time, particularly when I lived over in Barnes, Hammersmith, I relied heavily on the Tube for getting to work in Old Street.

Despite being horrendously overpriced, I have quite an affection for the London Underground. I think because its so old: running on WWII technology and how it floods in heavy rain. Its so amazing that various parts of it were used as a huge bomb shelter in the wars. I’m forever impressed by the complicated yet grand, iconic status of the Tube map. I even love the strangely muted acrid stench underground, the mild claustrophobia, the dirt, the mice on the tracks, the sense of Victorian ghosts wandering silently about. I love that wild howl the trains make in the tunnels and the fact that some of them bounce about like old roller coasters. I can very easily remember the taste of the hot air rushing in through an open window in summer. There is no feeling quite like being alone on an underground platform late at night. But mostly I love the fact that being down underneath the Big Smoke reminds me of everything above it and all the experiences I have had there, and will again!’s