Hue and Cry and the 'Dead End Kids' of the London Blitz

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In my original article on children and bombsites in postwar British films, which really needs to be updated with my later discoveries, I noted how children's command of these spaces was celebrated in the 1947 Ealing comedy Hue and Cry, but later films came to see them as freighted with danger.

One reason for this positive early view, I now believe, is the role played by London urchins during the Blitz.

In an article on the History Press site, Ian Parson reveals that many of the children evacuated to places of safety in the countryside soon voted with their feet and came back to London. Just before the Blitz:

evacuees, or to give them their proper title, ‘unattended children’, were returning to Liverpool Street Station at a rate of two and a half thousand every week.

What happened next is remarkable:

The youngsters who only a few months before had been tucked away, in England’s green and pleasant and safe land, were as it turned out, brave way beyond their years, and they had a name. They were the ‘Dead End Kids’ and they were the brain child of 17 year old Patsie Duggan, son of a Poplar bin man. 

Soon a gang of scruffy urchins, including Patsie’s 13 year old sister Maureen, and recruits as young as ten, had equipped themselves with an assortment of tools, buckets of sand, rope and axes. Night after night, raid after raid, they were out there. Scouring the area for people in distress, hoping to perform the most daring rescue this time round. With no adults to supervise them, the game very quickly got seriously out of hand.

During the Blitz they were responsible for a series of life saving missions. On one really bad night, as reported in the London Fire Journal, an eye witness describes, ‘They rushed up the stairs, ready it seemed to eat fires!’ The same witness then described them as ‘emerging from the building, some of them with their tatty clothes smouldering.’

They became known as unofficial fire-fighters across the East End. But it was a dangerous game.

During the Blitz children accounted for one in ten deaths, and unfortunately, or perhaps inevitably, two of Patsie’s group were killed on duty. Ronnie Ayres and Bert Eden died together on a night when Patsie himself was also badly injured. They were putting out incendiary bombs when without warning three heavy bombs came down the other side of a wall to where they were furiously working away. They died instantly, killed by the falling wall.

This sounds too good to be true - a case of heroes being found at the darkest hour of the war - but there are other sources that tell the same story. One example is Frank Lewey, who had been mayor of Stepney during the Blitz, writing in John Bull magazine (23 October 1943):

We had some bombed-out children billeted at the "People's Palace." One night a cluster of incendiaries fell in the gardens and started to blaze up against some buildings. The resident caretaker, Mr. Crawley, who himself won a reputation as a fire fighter, told me, next morning, how those small boys "went over the wall like a pack of monkeys, and dowsed the bombs as if they were snuffing so many candles." They ought to have been in bed; but their action probably saved the "People's Palace." 

The Stepney Scouts deserve a word to themselves. Into one of our shelters a woman came crying, with five tiny children trailing crying after her. Her house had caught fire, and, in the rush to escape, she had left one of her babies behind. Two small Scouts, almost extinguished beneath steel helmets, instantly raced out through shrapnel and bomb-bursts, calmly entered the blazing house, and brought the little girl back. She looked very proud of her escort. And well she may have been! There were over 700 people in the shelter at the time.

No wonder Hue and Cry was a "notable box office attraction" at British cinemas in 1947.