Under Fire: The Blitz Diaries of a Volunteer Ambulance Driver

By Naomi Clifford

London in the summer of 1940...

June Spencer volunteers for the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service in Chelsea. Every night she writes up the day's events in her diary, whether it's driving in a hail of incendiaries, peeling potatoes for the crews, or loading broken and bleeding victims into her ambulance. She also records her hectic social life – dining at the Ritz, dancing at the Café de Paris and partying with the artists, writers and aristos in her set. But below the surface is turmoil and heartache: dear friends killed in action, relationships cracking under pressure and a growing dissatisfaction with her role in London. Using June's vivid first-hand accounts of life in the thick of the Blitz, Naomi Clifford paints a vivid picture of a young woman navigating the perils of home front life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Caret Press
• Release date: Jul 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781919623214

Book preview

under fire

the blitz diaries of a volunteer ambulance driver

Naomi Clifford

This book is dedicated to June’s descendants, and to everyone swept along by events beyond their control

Picture credits

Front cover: June Spencer at the ruins of Chelsea Old Church, April 1941; map reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © 1940.

Back cover: Portrait of June Spencer in her London Auxiliary Ambulance Service great coat, by Tom Dugdale, August 1941.

Ambulance crews in Chelsea, with kind permission of Kensington and Chelsea Libraries.

Lindsey House. Source: Historic England Archive.

Richard Stewart-Jones with James Lees-Milne, from James Lees-Milne Papers. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

‘Adelphi Casualty Station’ (1940), by Robert Fuller; ‘ARP warden on patrol in Chelsea, 1940’ by Sybil Gilliat-Smith, both with kind permission of Sim Fine Art.

Ernestine sketched by Jo Oakman. © IWM.

Photo of Alec MacTavish courtesy of Anne MacTavish.

Portrait of A.P. Herbert in 1928 © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans.

All other images © June Buchanan’s Estate.

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, heartfelt thanks to June Spencer’s family: Fenella Gatehouse, for lending me June’s diaries, and her partner Simon, for his enthusiasm and encouragement; Jamie Buchanan, for combing the manuscript for accuracy and for the loan of photographs in his collection; and Andy Buchanan, for his useful comments.

Few of those who knew June during the war years are still with us. However, some of their descendants are. Thanks are due to the family of Patience Clifford, as well as to the relations of June colleagues in the ambulance service: Pauline Nagle, Pamela Radford, Frank Enefer, Alexander MacTavish. Sybil Gilliat-Smith’s story was told with the invaluable assistance of Andrew Sim of Sim Art. Special thank-yous to Jane Cook for her encouraging sessions, which helped me find give a direction for the book and to Karen Robinson for her help and advice on publishing. The patience, calm and nuanced suggestions of my agent Hedda Archbold and the team at HLA Agency are evidenced in the finished book.

I finished writing the manuscript of the book during the time of Covid lockdowns, but before that had spent long periods in the National Archives, British Library, Westminster Archives, London Metropolitan Archives and Kensington & Chelsea Libraries, where I was assisted by the wonderful staff.

The biographical details of many of the inhabitants of Lindsey House and others of whom June wrote would not have been known but for the expert genealogical research of my brother Paul Klein. Speaking of family, I recall long hours in my little study, left in peace to decipher June’s scrawls, and from time to time let off dog walking duty—impossible without the consideration of Tim, Lily and Izzy Clifford, and of course Beeper the dog herself.

Finally, thanks to all the contributors who helped crowd-fund this project on Kickstarter. They all played a part in bringing June’s unique story into the light.

Abbreviations

About the text

In 1940 £1 was worth approximately £40 in 2021 values. A skilled tradesman might earn £8 for five days of his labour.

Extracts from June’s diaries have been corrected for spelling and punctuation. Where text is omitted I have used three-dot ellipses.

June Spencer (given name Elizabeth June Spencer) should not be confused with the radio actress June Spencer.

June Spencer

If you stand by the Thames at the southern end of Battersea Bridge and look across the water, you will see to the left the seven red-brick Brutalist towers of the World’s End estate. In comparison, the centuries-old dwellings of Chelsea surrounding them are like dolls’ houses, tiny and exquisite. Now trace the embankment rightwards. There, behind a collection of barges and small jetties, sitting back from the rest of the surrounding houses, is the top part of Lindsey House on Cheyne Walk. In 1940, in a room at No. 97 on the fourth floor, June Spencer sewed, drank tea, gossiped, made lifelong friends and wrote her diary.

June’s room became her refuge. After the stress and tedium of her ambulance-driving shifts, it represented safety and independence, even as bombs shivered the floors and blew out the windows. The building belonged to the charismatic antiquarian and merchant seaman Richard Stewart-Jones, who also owned nearby houses in the row, including No. 96, known by many as Whistler’s House because the artist had once lived there.

In Chelsea June observed some of the high dramas of the times. Think of her sunbathing in the back garden on 7 September 1940, the air sultry and motionless after days of high temperatures and full sun, looking up at a sky filled with hundreds of small black planes ‘not bigger than pinpricks’. It was the moment she and millions of other Londoners realised that the much-feared aerial assault on their city had begun.

Now cross to the other side of the bridge road and continue along by the river, past the new-builds, towards the corner of Battersea Park and look across the river once more. Above the trees you will see the solid brick tower of Chelsea Old Church. Imagine a dark night in April 1941. Echoing across the water you might hear the shouts of the demolition men as they topple walls, or of the heavy rescue teams as they appeal for silence so that they can listen for the cries of survivors, the penny whistles of the ARP wardens, the insistent whine of raiders still overhead; you might see the small dark figures of firemen, stretcher parties, first aiders, doctors, nurses and the ambulance crews lit by feeble headlights. Somewhere in the mix, is June, hurriedly returned from a night in the West End, holding up the skirt of her pink and black evening gown as she clambers over rubble. She is talking to her ambulance colleagues who tell her that the ambulance station has been wrecked and that the death toll at Chelsea Old Church includes five firewatchers.

While you stand by the river, conjure now another scene. This one takes place just over a year later. It is daytime. A bitter wind zips through tall leafless trees in Battersea Park. See June, buttoned into her thick navy Ambulance Service coat, cycling across the bridge, her eyes dark with anger. Her life has been turned upside-down, by the absence of bombs accompanied by the maddening possibility of more at any time. The days ahead promise only constant boredom and constant vigilance. She understands that to survive she must cut a new path in life.

You can carry out a similar exercise anywhere in London, half-seeing the unsung and the long-forgotten in their khaki or dark blue uniforms, their aprons or their cloth caps going about their chores and duties, your imagination positioning them amongst then-blasted hollows and gap-toothed streets. The temptation is to beatify those who lived through wars, who endured the front line or the home front, who were said to never complain and cheerfully carried on regardless. Their lives and experiences seem extraordinary to us now, but in truth they were no different to any other generation past or future: we all, as humans, must cope with the obstacles life throws in our path. If we assume that they were built of sterner stuff and were able to emerge unscathed from the war, at least mentally, we would be wrong. It’s just that they learned to manage in a certain way. And there is always a cost.

The writings of June Spencer, debutante, nightclubber, ambulance driver, dress designer, civil servant, Wren and climber-over-obstacles, bears witness to this.

June Spencer was born in 1916 into a comfortably-off upper middle-class family and grew up in a large house at Odsey Corner, a hamlet near the picturesque village of Ashwell in Hertfordshire, twelve miles from Cambridge. As a child she was sporty and adventurous, good at games rather than at lessons. She loved horse-riding, golf and tennis, which she played well into her eighties. When she was ten, her father, recognising her physical confidence, taught her to drive. She took to it instantly and was celebrated in her family for accurate and spirited reversing. Early on she also showed artistic talent. After she left school, having developed a love of sewing and craft, she trained at a dress-making school in Knightsbridge.

In most respects June’s life followed the standard trajectory for a young woman of her class: boarding school, jaunts in Paris, skiing trips to Austria and parties with the appropriate people in London. In May 1938 she was presented to the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace, her curtsey in front of the Royal couple being, in effect, an announcement of her availability for marriage to a suitably rich and well-connected man.

June may have been brought up amongst privilege, but this did not mean she was a stranger to hard work. She provided herself with a modest personal income by designing and making fashion belts which she sold to the London department stores Fortnum & Mason and Peter Jones. She also made clothes, for herself, family members, friends and servants. She had absorbed the idea that there were new possibilities for women and throughout her life she was resourceful, independent-minded and organised.

In 2016 June’s daughter Fenella Gatehouse first showed me the four chunky quarto-sized lined notebooks in which June wrote her diary from late 1939 to early 1943. Fenella knew that I liked to investigate the stories of ‘ordinary’, hitherto unknown women, and I was ready for a new project, so this seemed perfect. When I opened the first notebook, my impression was that reading the diaries through would not take long. June wrote in italic script; it all looked satisfyingly regular. There were only a few crossings-out and arrowed-in additions.

I could not have been more wrong. Although the handwriting looked neat, it was often illegible. June used a pencil; sometimes a soft, blunt one, in which case one letter would elide into the next, and at other times a hard, pointed one, turning her writing into a scrawl of pale spindly spiders. It was difficult to know which was worse. Fenella later told me that although June was left-handed she had been forced at school to use her right hand and that this might account for her deceptively neat-but-illegible script.

It did not help that her spelling was unreliable. Some words were easy to interpret — bicycle was always bycicle, were was always where — but when it came to the names of people, restaurants and places June would just make a stab at a phonetic version. Even so, I felt sure that I would, in time, learn June’s quirks, and to some extent that was what happened, although there are still a few words and names that remain, to me, indecipherable.

It was quickly clear that the only way to get to grips with the diaries was to transcribe them in their entirety. It would not be enough merely to over-read them and extract the most interesting passages. If I did that, I risked missing tiny nuggets of fact or juicy asides and would fail to take in the full scope of June’s world.

After I was able to make sense of most of the script, I had something to work with. June loved to write but she was not a writer in any professional sense. Her words, dashed down in a few minutes, flowed out of her. From the pages emerged the names of June’s myriad friends and acquaintances, many of them well known at the time although perhaps now primarily to the older generation: the actress Constance Cummings and her playwright husband Benn Levy, the maverick MP and writer A.P. Herbert, artists Tom Dugdale, Harry Morton Colvile (with whom June was romantically involved), Augustus John and Anthony Devas, as well as numerous politicians and luminaries, Kenneth Lindsay and Graham Spry among them, connected to Political and Economic Planning, the forerunner of the Policy Studies Institute, which aimed to plan Britain as a better place. It was a surprise, although not a big one, to discover that June was acquainted with Mary Wesley and was a visitor at Boskenna, the estate in Cornwall Wesley used as an inspiration for her novel The Camomile Lawn.

As I read June’s words I came to understand that they give an insight into how a young woman coped with the searing events of war, whether they occurred on her doorstep or across seas. June was not a typical Londoner, if such a thing could ever exist — after all, she came from a posh family and was a debutante — but her wartime experiences, and her responses to them, an ability to show coolness, stoicism and even cheerfulness in spite of the constant chance of harm or death and to hide deep-seated fear and anxiety, were common to millions.

Part of the trick to maintaining sang froid was to stay busy. Throughout June’s long life her calendar was chock-a-bloc and never more so than when she was in her early twenties and associating with a host of other young people, all of whom were leading lives as hectic as her own. During the Blitz, despite being kept awake by the Luftwaffe or dog-tired from night shifts, she had seemingly boundless reserves available for parties, drinks, balls, nightclubs, exhibitions, cinema and theatre trips, outings to the country, shopping expeditions, days at the races and meals out, not to mention hours crafting her belts and designing and sewing complex outfits for her friends.

Every few weeks she would head back to her family in Hertfordshire for respite from London, but even here there was always something to do: visiting her aunts and grandmother or helping out at the Red Cross canteen her mother ran, walking the dog, rat-catching or more sewing, making and painting. She was never one to sit contemplating her navel. Creativity provided an escape from the world around her and overcoming a design dilemma or a technical challenge in order to emerge with a stunning gown, coat or frock could lift her out of her immediate surroundings and give simple satisfaction in a job well done.

No wonder her handwriting was a mess — she was never at rest, always on the go. In any case, she was clearly not writing for posterity and probably did not care if no one else could read her words. June’s matter-of-fact style was not exceptional; few diarists offer evocative detail, even when recording events they know will go down in history. When she made her almost daily entries, listing out what she had done that day, June may have assumed that she would be the only person to read them and that as long as she could interpret her own scrawl it was fine. Indeed, it was fine and she was able to understand her own writing. In her eighties, she visited primary schools and talked to groups of children about her experiences in the Blitz, reading to them from the pages in those lined notebooks.

June wrote throughout her life. The volumes covering her teenage years and the start of the war on 3 September 1939 have been lost and there was a long break after 1943 when she joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service and met ‘Buck’ Buchanan, a dashingly handsome RAF pilot, but she resumed writing later and continued through the birth of her three children, her divorce and into old age.

Why did she write them? As I mentioned, they may have been partly for herself, an aide-memoire for use at some point in the future when she wished to recall exactly what she had done on a particular day. Certainly many entries were mundane, merely lists of places visited and people with whom she had lunched. This example is typical:

Monday 24 June 1940

Borrowed a bicycle. Had tea with Peter B. in the Kings Rd. Bicycled down to the West End. Supper with the Donnellys.

Given the perfunctory nature of much of the writing, why are June’s diaries as a whole so fascinating? The most obvious answer is that they add to the body of eyewitness accounts of the London Blitz — and surely we can never have enough of these. Also, the role of the London volunteer ambulance driver may be well known but the details of their work are not. There are few published diaries of those who served in the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service (LAAS). May Greenup’s memories of her experience at Station 39 in the West End of London, which were compiled in detail by her niece Angela Raby in The Forgotten Service, and Tracy Shaler’s Frenchy: I Wanted to Get Back at Hitler, which tells the story of Jewish refugee Jeannette Marx who served with the LAAS in the East End of London, are probably the best known. The novelist Rose Macaulay wrote candidly of her experiences driving for the LAAS in Camden, north London in which she described waiting for people to be excavated from dust and rubble before rushing them to hospital, but her most vivid accounts are themselves buried in the archives.¹

June’s diaries also paint pictures of worlds long disappeared: the wartime West End night scene; Chelsea’s villagey mix of artists, writers, aristos and those once called ‘common people’; the hive of activity at the extraordinary Lindsey House in Cheyne Walk; and the continued difficulties of life on the home front after the Blitz of 1940–41 ended.

The world is not short of memoirs of Chelsea during the war, of course. The teenage Joan Wyndham’s Love Lessons detailed her enthusiastic search for sexual experience while bombs dropped around her. Both Frances Faviell and Theodora Fitzgibbon moved in some of the same social circles as June and wrote memoirs. There are also the writings of the ruins inspector A.S.G. Butler and the diaries of June’s friend the architectural historian James Lees-Milne. More recently, Donald Wheal recalled his early life living in the Guinness Trust estate at World’s End at the western end of Chelsea and provided a welcome balance to the many accounts of the privileged.²

June’s diaries are decidedly not confessional. Although my thinking is that she probably saw herself as the primary reader, I also have a feeling that she might also have been writing with her mother, or someone like her, in mind, perhaps to prove her independence from the family or to reinforce her separation from the relative comfort of life in Hertfordshire. But she may have also feared that her mother would actually read them, which could explain why she gave no hint of sexual encounters — she wrote of romance but never of physical intimacy — and gave only fleeting indications of her emotional life. June said almost nothing about being dumped by her boyfriend Harry Colvile and when another love-sick admirer berated her for refusing his advances, she did not mention the insulting letter he sent her afterwards. Another explanation for June’s silence on personal matters may be that from childhood she was trained to be stoic. Not emoting was the norm for her class and time. She could not let the side down by making unnecessary fuss — to do so was selfish and harmful. Feelings, especially negative ones, were to be suppressed.

June’s reticence extended to the scenes she witnessed on duty with the auxiliary ambulance service. She was warned by her superior officers to self-censor, as expansiveness might break confidentiality or her diaries might fall into the wrong hands. Whether for these reasons or from a natural feeling of reserve, she did not describe in detail, as some did, the corpses and body parts, the trapped victims, the distressed and shocked survivors, and said little about the destruction of the beloved buildings of London. With some notable exceptions, the diary entries were clipped and peremptory, the effects of war kept at arm’s length.

The veneer June laid over her words hides much. On the surface her diaries paint unique vignettes of life in Britain, mainly London, in the Second World War — but they are more than this. At their heart June’s words tell us, sometimes through vanishingly small clues, that wartime optimism, self-sacrifice and bravery were only part of the story.

References

1. In 1939, aged 59, Emilie Rose Macaulay (1881–1959) signed up to serve with the LAAS as a part-time driver. She wrote about her work in letters to her sister Jean (Letters to a Sister) and in the magazine Time and Tide (5 Oct 1940). See Lara Feigel’s The Love-charm of Bombs.

2. See bibliography for details of these publications.

Goodbye to All That

Thursday 26 October 1939

Called by Eliza [the maid] at 7.30. Listened to the news at 8. Nothing fresh. Weather cold — the first frost. Painted in my room most of the morning. Dusted out the messy drawers. After lunch to Hitchin with Janet, had tea with Granny, who was very well. The Jonsons were there. Did an hour’s Red Cross at the Hospital, back to dinner. Daddy in town. Finished Paint & Prejudice by C.R.W. Nevinson and started Oil Paint & Grease Paint by Laura Knight.¹ George Turnbull rang up, also Mrs Edgcumbe.²

On the day June opened the new volume of her diary, newspaper front pages carried stories of Air Marshal Hermann Goering’s latest threats. ‘The moment has come when the war which Britain wanted must shower down on the British Isles themselves,’ he warned.³ This was generally interpreted to mean that the Nazis intended to bomb and gas civilians. June did not write in her diary about Goering or the war, except to say that she listened to the BBC news. Instead, she enumerated the things she had done that day. A simple list took only a few minutes to do and brought reassurance that life would go on as normal.

June’s earlier diaries have not survived so we cannot know her precise reaction to the outbreak of war. We could think of her at 11 in the morning of Sunday 3 September 1939, in that over-worn scenario, seated around the wireless, with her brother David and sister Janet and their parents Arthur and Helen,⁴ listening to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announce that ‘this country is at war with Germany’ but she was just as likely to have been up in London nursing a hangover after a good party or out tramping through the woods near her home at Odsey Corner with Steve, the family dog.

Like everyone else, she had known for months that war was approaching. This realisation came with Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March 1938 and the subsequent crisis over the seizure of the Sudetenland; Chamberlain’s desperate attempts to stave off war with the Munich Agreement did little to allay fears. In the summer of 1939, after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, June and her sister studied for the Red Cross first aid exam.Arthur volunteered as an air raid warden and Helen enrolled in the Women’s Voluntary Service, helping out at a mobile Red Cross canteen in Hitchin, their local market town. The family built an air raid shelter in the garden.

Local authorities had been drawing up civil defence plans since 1935 and the recruitment of stretcher-bearers, firefighters, demolition workers and ambulance drivers had begun. Thirty-eight million gas masks had been distributed in anticipation of attacks from the air. Everyone was familiar with the meaning of the acronym ARP – Air Raid Precautions – even if they could not at this stage imagine quite how important they were to be.

June and her family learned, from bulletins broadcast on the radio, the different permutations of the warning sounds made by air raid klaxon. On their trips to London they saw doorways filled with sandbags, trench shelters and street-level concrete boxes built in readiness for bombs, which most people assumed would start falling the instant war broke out.

On the day that the prime minister warned of the ‘days of stress and strain’ ahead and called on the nation to pull together, the blackout, the order to eliminate light on the ground and make the job of the German bombers more difficult, was already two days old. Even so, and despite this being the least unexpected war in history, it was a shock when the moment actually arrived.

The village of Ashwell has a chocolate-box appeal: the streets are pristine, the houses painted regularly and the lawns beautifully kept. There are Tudor half-timbered terraces and upright Georgian townhouses. There are thatched roofs. About fifteen hundred people live there now, a figure that has not changed much over the past two hundred years.

At the centre of the town’s small grid of streets is the fourteenth-century Church of St Mary, complete with a churchyard studded with ancient graves. There, on 12 July 1912, 41-year-old Arthur Spencer, his right eye sporting a rakish black patch (the result of a boyhood practical joke that had backfired), the son of a business-minded Hitchin engineer, and 23-year-old Helen Wright, the youngest of seven children of a solicitor