Tony Robinson reveals a little bit more about Blitz Street, explaining why a whole street was constructed for filming, and how the series left him breathless with excitement and yet filled with sorrow.
Channel 4: Blitz Street is an extraordinary undertaking. Explain what the series is all about.
Tony Robinson: I have no firsthand memory at all of a time when every night in our big cities for some years you would go out not knowing if you would be hit by a bomb or not. My memory of bombs in our country has been terrorist bombs, which might go off once every six months or whatever, and then we all make, quite justifiably, a great big song-and-dance about that. But the idea of this carnage that happened night after night is totally outside our experience. So what we wanted to do is recall what happened. Because in the same way that now we've lost the final firsthand memories of the First World War with the death of the last two British soldiers last year [2009], we're beginning to be in a situation where we're going to lose those firsthand memories of the Second World War. It seemed to me very important that we should get as much of that recorded as possible while we could, because it's such a central part of our history.
Channel 4: But it's much more than just personal testimonies, isn't it?
Tony Robinson: Yes, we also wanted to recapture what the feeling was like, what the bombs would have been like. I found out pretty quickly that nobody really knew, because there wasn't the kind of technology around in those days that we have now: the high-speed cameras, the ability of cameras to withstand the enormous pressures and shocks that a large bomb creates. So we found that we were able to do something that the MoD bods and the specialists really wanted to have done, which was to scrutinise that firepower really closely, in order to find out how it actually worked. And with that in mind, we built these two terraces of Second World War housing 25 miles outside Carlisle in the depths of the border country, in order to try and recreate the effects of the Blitz.
Channel 4: The terraces are built using the same materials and techniques as were used back then, is that right?
Tony Robinson: Absolutely. Because there would have been no point if it had been all breeze blocks - then you wouldn't have learned very much about how collapse occurred and where bombs would need to fall for certain kinds of collapse to occur, and the direction the shock waves went in and how they were deflected. All those kinds of things only make sense if you're using the original materials.
Channel 4: What were the scientists looking to discover?
Tony Robinson: I had assumed that when a bomb went off, it would be like all the fireworks that I've lit in my life: there would be a bang and everything would go up in the air, and that would be it. But in fact, when a bomb is detonated, it's a really complex chemical and physical process, which is doubly complicated by the fact that not only does the debris bounce off things, but the shockwaves themselves bounce off things. If you get a camera inside it, you see it's like a huge stew of explosion which somebody has just vigorously stirred. There's stuff going everywhere, huge amounts of stuff that ping pongs about everywhere.
Channel 4: It sounds like the investigation of the explosions really seized your interest.
Tony Robinson: Oh, absolutely. I became more and more drawn into it as the week went on and the explosions became more complex. But also that thing happened which I remembered from the early 1950s, and I remember my mum and dad talking about it, which is that however much like Armageddon these explosions are, happenstance means that there are things that don't get destroyed. There was a milk bottle, for example, that seemed to have an extraordinary tale. I'm not going to tell you what happens to that milk bottle, but it's worth seeing all four programmes just for the story of that milk bottle.
Channel 4: You look at various different bombs. Did the type of bombs used vary quite a bit during the Blitz?
Tony Robinson: Yes, very much so. You had German scientists experimenting both with ways of delivering this stuff and also with how it could be detonated. So first of all it was just a bomber flying over London, tipping out a whole load of explosives and hoping for the best. And then, for instance, you had the incendiaries, and their task was simply to create fire rather than explosions, so they were very different. Then you had incendiaries with delayed reaction, you had bombs with delayed reaction, and then, of course, you moved over to precursors of nuclear weapons. You had the rockets starting to come over, and that was an entirely new technology. Ironically, although the final ones, the V2s, had by far the biggest explosion, the V1s, which were smaller, were by and large more effective, because the technology worked better at that size.
Channel 4: How was it possible to test so many bombs on the terraces that were built?
Tony Robinson: Buildings are surprisingly robust. We were planting 500 kilos of TNT right next to the end of a building, and very large parts of it would remain standing. Since the pyramids, we have something like 3,000 years of building technology available to us, and stuff stands up. The reason why you were told to hide in the cupboard under the stairs, which always seemed incredibly naff to me, even as a five-year-old, the notion that that's what my parents had been doing a few years earlier, was because it works. It works because you're protected by the angle of the stairs, and the two outside angles of the wall. You can throw a hell of a lot of stuff at many parts of a house before it begins to go.
Channel 4: Where were you when the bombs were detonated?
Tony Robinson: We had to be some way off. We had to be several hundred yards away, in a bombproof cabin. Having said that, the damn thing shook like hell every time one of the larger explosions went off, and bits of debris hit it. The site director and I were the first people to drive back towards the site of the explosions afterwards, and to see the effect of each explosion was quite awe inspiring. The other thing that's really awe inspiring is that when you get a really big bomb, it goes bang, then you get the shockwave, and the shockwave will do some damage, then there is absolute silence, and you think 'That's it, it's over, it's finished'. Then there's a splat as the first bit of debris falls. Then another. Then three more. And then 50 more. And suddenly everything showers out of the sky. Because it's all been blown so high, it takes forever for it to come down, 20 seconds, something like that. We're all little boys at heart, and we like big bangs.
Channel 4: From what you mentioned earlier, it sounds like your parents lived through the Blitz.
Tony Robinson: My parents were East Enders, and although both of them were in the forces, every time they came back to see their mums and dads, the Blitz would be kicking off. So by and large they had second hand experience, although other members of my family had firsthand experience. I had a very small family, so I don't know of any deaths in the immediate family, but inevitably there would have been people who were injured and maimed if not killed who were relatives of mine, because my mum and dad lived in Hackney. That was close to the epicentre of where the bombing took place, because they were going for the docks, by and large. I very clearly remember Blitzed streets when I was growing up in the 1950s.
Channel 4: People talk about the Blitz spirit. Was that real, and do people talk about it in the programme?
Tony Robinson: Oh yes, they talk about it enormously, and indeed I can remember my grandparents would talk about it at length. It was something that everybody was very proud of, that they'd been through this thing, and everyone had pulled together. Of course there was looting, and of course everybody wanted to grab bits of debris and things lying around, and there were bombs specially designed to go off when people went back to get stuff. There was a lot of distress and some bad behaviour, but by and large all the people I spoke to felt almost a kind of nobility about what they'd undergone during that period.
Channel 4: The Blitz wasn't just a strategic thing, it was also an attempt to break the spirit of the British people, wasn't it?
Tony Robinson: Yes. The more you look into it the more you feel that it wasn't really a strategic thing at all. It almost started by accident: Hitler's air force accidentally dropped some bombs on a civilian area. Hitler was apparently furious because he hadn't given permission for it. Churchill retaliated, but it was an incredibly severe retaliation, and Hitler then responded in turn. It just kicked off, and once it had started, I think the Germans thought 'Aha, we're on to a really good thing, we can really break their spirit' in exactly the way that Bomber Harris and Bomber Command thought they could break the spirit of Berlin and Dresden. It's easy for us to point the finger at the Luftwaffe and say what terrible people they were for doing this, but we were doing exactly the same over there.
Channel 4: So why didn't it work? Why weren't spirits broken?
Tony Robinson: It didn't work for the same reason that I don't think it works anywhere. There is something about human beings, that in adversity they become more robust.
