Cockney kids catch a train for their new life during the Blitz
Reporter Hilde is in a class of her
own as Cockney kids flee the Blitz
LAST WEEK I told the story of Express journalist Hilde Marchant, who iconic editor Arthur Christiansen called: “The best reporter in Fleet Street” and her rise to fame. Her strength was in always writing about people and not about politics or events. She touched the hearts of readers and described herself as having a Cyclops eye in the middle of her head that observed of its own accord.
Night News Editor for 26 years, John Young wrote of her: “She could write like a saint and get down to the human basics of a story. The stuff she sent back from the war was brilliant.” But Hilde, praised by Winston Churchill for her human coverage of the Coventry bombings, would soon find herself on the slippery slope to despair on the Street of Broken Dreams.
AS THE night sky was lit with red flares; sweeping rays of searchlights and the flames of dying aircraft, and buildings blazed along the London skyline, Express reporter Hilde Marchant knocked back her Scotch, cracked jokes, laughed and swore with the British and American male hacks around her on the roof of the Savoy Hotel in the Strand.
It had become a sort of meeting place for reporters during the Second World War. Night after night they met there after filing their copy to the world’s Press, as foolhardy and dangerous as it was. Hilde would sometimes be waiting on the roof for her lover, managing editor Herbert Gunn, caught late at the office, to join her.
The outgoing and outspoken reporter couldn’t face waiting for him alone in the flat they rented together in Bloomsbury. She wanted to be in the thick of things with the boys.
The Savoy was a central location for many journalists during the Blitz in 1940, even housing the New York Times Bureau. Radio broadcasts were made there so that listeners could listen to the air-raid sirens and anti-aircraft guns.
Hilde’s affair with Gunn was no secret now, and Chistiansen was picking up bad feelings about it from some staff. Gunn had become her editorial guru, making sure she had the best assignments and ordering that her copy was treated with respect and not changed, just cut.
Bylines weren’t used much at the time, but Hilde always had them. Other hacks began to make jokes about the couple and jealousy and envy surfaced around the news desk.
But as the war began, Hilde was still a star in the editor’s eyes, so no one said anything. Her herograms always appeared in his glass bulletin box on the wall outside his office where others got bollockings.
One afternoon Christiansen asked her to cover the evacuation of London schoolchildren to the countryside, an event which had split the country.
Hilde chose to start at a block of family flats in a working-class corner of East London. She arrived there early the next day, watched and waited. “A frail cockney girl came out carrying a cardboard box with all her possessions and a gas mask instead of a satchel over her shoulder, knocking against her thin legs,” she said.
She was accompanied by her mother who told Hilde her eight-year-old child’s name was Florence Morecambe and the reporter followed them to school to witness distressing scenes as parents hugged their goodbyes.
“Tears flowed as the classes walked snake-like to the Tube and on to the Main Line trains taking them to a strange countryside they had only ever seen in books.”
Hilde went with them even to their billets in strange towns, getting the human stories of both the evacuees and their new families.
She saw the story through Florence’s eyes, even her mind, as the girl puzzled over news bill posters the teachers had partly covered up saying: ‘Warsaw bombed!’. “Everyone knew, even the children, that it would be London next,” she wrote.
Hilde’s stories were colourful and descriptive and tapped human emotions in the capital at the time. “Parts of London looked like Ypres or Arras yesterday,” she wrote “as people emerged from basements and holes to look into a choking dawn. One man shouted ‘get off you drunken fool!’ as he was pushed to the ground with his attacker on top of him. But as he forced the man off, he realised he was dead after being blown out of a building.”
Hilde went everywhere the danger was greatest throughout the war at home and abroad. Her colour pieces were greatly admired by Christiansen, Beaverbrook and the public. Even though she was born a German she was fiercely anti-Hitler and hugely patriotic. “She took her pen and her news flair into battle to defeat him,” said Express reporter Bernard Hall.
But things were to change. After the war a new breed of women journalists were born and old hands like Hilde didn’t get the sort of exciting colour stories they craved. Her ego cracked and she left the Express to join the Daily Mirror, finding the same thing there. For a while she found a home on the Picture Post writing colour pieces to the picture spreads. But it folded in 1957. And Hilde found herself a ‘has-been.’
Hilde: Health went downhill
Time passed before she suddenly emerged again … in the bars she had once loved in Fleet Street. The Old Bell, The Wig and Pen and El Vino. But she was a tragic figure. Broke and looking the worst for wear, she would lurk on the edge of Fleet Street executives she knew at the bar, and hope for drinks.
Those who remembered her felt sorry for her and would even drop her a fiver, but her presence became embarrassing. A lifetime of booze and endless cigarettes had taken their toll, and her skin was wrinkled and yellowing. Her hair grey and matted. Her clothes always the same.
She would say nothing about where she was living, or what she was doing, said Hall. “It was as if she wanted to remain anonymous to her past.” Hacks heard that she had married a journalist at some point, somewhere.
But as time went on, Hilde would be seen in Fleet Street standing at the bus stop outside PA, across the road from the Express for hours or sitting in the little garden of St Bride’s Church feeding the pigeons. Then she vanished into the mists of time.
On February 3, 1970, Hilde collapsed and died under a railway arch on cardboard boxes where she lay for hours before being found and pronounced dead in Charing Cross Hospital. She was about to be buried in a pauper’s grave until Fleet Street found out. Journalists at the Express raised the money for the funeral with enough left over to toast her in her favourite bars.
Farewell Hilde, gone but not entirely forgotten. Your written word lives on.
Reds see red over armchairs, pink walls
and China teacups at Savoy bomb shelter
DID YOU KNOW? That on September 14, 1940, the Fleet Street Press reported a rowdy march to protest against the lack of good air raid shelters for working-class Londoners during the Blitz.
Scores of protesters (with the help of some sympathetic waiters) occupied the luxury air raid shelter at the Savoy to highlight the stark differences in shelter for rich and poor.
It was led by Phil Piratin of the Communist Party from Stepney, East London, who told reporters: “Our little trench shelters in the park are a foot deep in water. The benches are half-a-dozen inches above the waterline. It’s hopeless to use them, and impossible to stay in them night after night. Now the street surface shelters are being put to the test but are blown away in the raids!”
Savoy staff tried in vain to stop the men, women and children rushing in but within minutes they were through the doors and heading downstairs where they found luxury cubicles for all decorated in pink, blue and green.
All the bedding, and even cutlery matched. There were comfy chairs and deck chairs all around. And all the linen, was the same uniform colour.
Several nurses were on duty. “Bleedin’ ‘ell,” said one mother, “we could live ‘ere!”
Despite the bombs, tea was served from China teapots at Savoy prices. The invaders were given cups at a special ‘wartime’ discount after heated discussion.
The shelter was widely publicised and resulted in improvements to shelters for working class Londoners within weeks
TOWN’S BIG FAREWELL TO A LOVELY
MAN WITH A WEIGHT ON HIS MIND
IN JUNE 1809, twenty men started digging at dawn to create a sloping approach to the graveyard for the biggest funeral the town had ever seen. Not in numbers of mourners, but in the size of the deceased.
A massive trench 7ft wide had been created for the grave and 112 sq. ft of wood used for the coffin, which had four giant, reinforced wheels.
It would roll down the slope and drop the casket into its resting place in the graveyard of St Martin’s Church, Stamford, Lincs. That was the plan. But history’s fattest man at the time, Daniel Lambert, wasn’t going to his grave that easily. As the funeral procession finally arrived at the graveyard, the wheeled coffin, 6 ft 4 in. long, 4 ft 4 in. wide and 2 ft 4 in. deep, sank into the mud and the 20 men who dug the slope, had to pull him into his grave with ropes, the Lincolnshire Echo reported.
A crowd had been growing all morning at the cemetery following the death of 53-stone Daniel in his ground-floor apartment at the local Waggon and Horses Inn just a few days earlier.
Because of his size, his body soon began decomposing and the funeral needed to be quick. Builders had to knock down part of the inn’s exterior wall and window to get his coffin out.
He measured 9ft 4in around the body and had a leg circumference of 3ft 1in. He was 5ft 11in tall. The clothes of the much-loved former sportsman, who boasted he never had a day’s illness in his life, were destined for museums.
The Leicester Mercury called Daniel “one of our city’s greatest icons.” He was born in Leicester on March 13, 1770. His father was the huntsman for the 4th Earl of Stamford and the keeper of Leicester Jail. His son grew up like any other child and loved to swim — he could carry two adult men on his back in the water.
He loved field sports too, particularly fond of otter hunting, fishing, shooting and horse racing. In his late teens he was always active and was considered an expert in the breeding of hunting dogs.
In 1788 Daniel joined his father as an assistant jail keeper at Leicester Prison and was much loved by other inmates, always trying to help them. He also assisted the other jail keepers with their problems and he would always listen. But he developed a problem.
He didn’t drink and didn’t eat much, hardly ever touching meat. But his weight was rocketing. He ran around parks, willing himself on, to try and get the pounds off until he collapsed with exhaustion. He wouldn’t eat for days. But his weight still crept up every month.
He was smiling and laughing with his friends but inside he was crying. By the time he reached 50 stone, his looks changed, and it was difficult to get a girl. Doctors were baffled and couldn’t do anything. He was perfectly fit, could walk eight miles … “and kick any leg into the air to a height of 7ft.”
A year or so later the jail closed and left him unemployable and a recluse as his weight still crept up. He stopped coming out of his home. But living cost money and he had little alternative but to put himself on show, and charge people to see him like a freak.
In 1806, with a heavy heart, he decided to rent an apartment in London’s Piccadilly and had a special carriage built to take him there. He moved in and placed an advert in The Times:
EXHIBITION.—Mr. DANIEL LAMBERT, of Leicester, the greatest Curiosity in the World, who, at the age of 36, weighs upwards of FIFTY STONE (14lb. to the stone). Mr. Lambert will see Company at his House, No.53, Piccadilly, opposite St. James’s Church, from 12 to 5 o’clock.—Admittance one shilling.
The public soon flocked to see him and were impressed by his intelligence and personality. Meeting him became highly fashionable.
But some mocked him. One male visitor demanded to know the cost of his coat, but Lambert did not answer. The man repeated the question, noting that, in his opinion, he had a right to demand any information, since he had contributed one shilling, which would pay for part of the material.
“Sir,” replied Lambert, “if I knew what part of my next coat your shilling would pay for, I assure you I would cut out that piece!”
Daniel’s business venture was successful, drawing around 400 paying visitors per day and his home was described as having the air of a fashionable resort, rather than that an exhibition. Gentlemen entering his rooms were obliged to remove their hats.
People would travel long distances to see him and on one occasion, a party of 14 travelled to London from Guernsey. As his fame spread, a life-sized waxwork of him was displayed in London and was later sold to an American museum. He soon became the target of newspaper cartoonists. But never mockingly. He was so popular that King George III popped in.
After some months on public display, Daniel grew tired of exhibiting himself, and in September that year, he returned, wealthy, to Leicester where he bred sporting dogs and regularly attended sporting events.
But he often made a series of short fundraising tours and his fame spread even more. He was on a tour when he collapsed and died at the Waggon & Horses in Stamford. No autopsy was performed. And cause of death was said to be degeneration of the heart.
Across England, many public houses and inns were renamed after Daniel particularly in Leicester and Stamford. The Daniel Lambert public house at 12 Ludgate Hill near St Paul’s Cathedral featured a large portrait of him in the lobby and his walking stick in a glass case.
TERRY MANNERS
20 October 2025
