A year ago, at the start of the war, the Government had feared all out bombing and the collapse of civilian morale. Today, some may have felt that those horrors had only been delayed by a year.

At this stage there was little that the RAF could do against night attacks, though the race was on to deliver Beaufighters and improve the radar they would carry. Anti aircraft gunners performed gallantly and had some success, but one reason that they kept firing was to demonstrate to the people being bombed that something was being done. Houses near AA sites were often damaged by the detritus from the guns rather than the activities of the Luftwaffe.

The Kentish Independent newspaper reported from Woolwich that there were “aged people and mothers with babies in arms, cripples and even a couple of blind men, still in clothes torn and dirtied when their homes collapsed around them. The shock of their experience and the loss of their homes seemed to have numbed their minds and reduced them to the depths of despair.”

Morale certainly did not collapse, but it might have come under more threat if Londoners had realised that they now faced the constant barrage of the Blitz until the spring of 1941.

As yesterday, there was not much activity until the approach of nighttime and then the bombers returned, with the fires from the previous night there to light many of them to their targets.