9/11
Isn’t it funny how you remember where you were when you heard specific news events that had an impact? I remember exactly
where I was and what I was doing when hearing of events such as the deaths of Otis Redding, Elvis Presley and John Lennon. It was the same with 9/11.
On 11th September 2001 I was working at County Hall on the South Bank in London, together with another engineer, Bob Thomson. I don’t remember what we were doing specifically, but it would have been software program related on their fire detection system.
County Hall was originally opened in 1922 as the intended seat for London government. An impressive building, it
comprised nearly 1000 rooms and over 5.2 miles of corridor. It was incomplete at this time, and was later extended to its present size. It remained unused until final occupation in 1958. It is infamous as the seat of Ken Livingstone as head of the Greater London Council, and Margaret Thatcher’s eventual solution to eradicate him from power was to abolish the GLC in 1986.
Now turned into mostly a leisure complex, the site facilities engineer informed us a plane had gone into one of the World Trade towers in New York. We showed disbelief, but he insisted it was true, so we headed for a Security room where we knew there was a TV. Sure enough, we watched in awe as the second plane hit the second tower at 14.03. I texted my daughters to stop what
they were doing and get to a TV, as we sat spellbound as we watched live events unfolding as they happened.
Time moved on, and we finished up what we were doing, and had a second job arranged over the river, so set off on foot over Westminster Bridge. We had heard that Routers in Docklands had sent most staff home (if you want to take out the UK financial markets, you only need to take out this building), as had many other organisations. Westminster Bridge was deserted, and most noticeably there were no planes, the Thames being the normal flight path in to Heathrow.
In the current situation we anticipated we might be denied access, but in the event we waltzed straight into Portcullis House with our contractor’s passes. Straight through the tunnel that connects this to the Houses of Parliament, we needed to book in at the Security control room. That was the first time I heard the name ‘al-Qaeda’, as the likely perpetrators of the airline hijacks, the police here obviously having their finger on the pulse of government.
Unrestricted, we headed back to Portcullis House, and through a maze of corridors that eventually led to the main Control Room for all the Government buildings in Westminster, hidden away in an adjacent building. This is one of those double steel door affairs where you get past the camera, then gain an escort through the first door, then this closing before the second opens. You enter into a room about 7m by 10m, full of control consoles and with one complete wall of video screens. Staffed by around eight police officers together with two fire officers, you are under the close supervision of one of these at all times.
We set about our work on the Portcullis fire graphics system. Talk was of the days events, and that Tony Blair had convened COBRA, the Civil Contingencies Committee, in Downing Street, which is a rare event that only occurs during a major crisis. One of the video screens was tuned into a television channel news feed, displaying the day’s events. It was at this point that a news bulletin flashed up, with Tony Blair announcing to the Country that COBRA had been convened, and that the UK governments security forces were (and I remember the exact words) ‘at a heightened state of security and readiness’.
It was at this exact moment that one of the coppers shouted out ‘anyone want any toast’; whilst a young policewomen asked another how many sugars they wanted in their tea. We looked around and one of the fire officers was asleep, three coppers were reading the paper, with the remainder watching the news, mostly sat back in their chairs with their feet on the desk. Not one of them was actually working, and these were the people protecting the Government in a time of crisis. We just looked at each other and burst out laughing!
Ironically, the next day we had a job to do in an office building for an American company in Guildford. We turned up for an arranged appointment and were refused entry on the grounds that ‘they had increased their security and were not letting any visitors enter their building’.
where I was and what I was doing when hearing of events such as the deaths of Otis Redding, Elvis Presley and John Lennon. It was the same with 9/11.
On 11th September 2001 I was working at County Hall on the South Bank in London, together with another engineer, Bob Thomson. I don’t remember what we were doing specifically, but it would have been software program related on their fire detection system.
County Hall was originally opened in 1922 as the intended seat for London government. An impressive building, it
comprised nearly 1000 rooms and over 5.2 miles of corridor. It was incomplete at this time, and was later extended to its present size. It remained unused until final occupation in 1958. It is infamous as the seat of Ken Livingstone as head of the Greater London Council, and Margaret Thatcher’s eventual solution to eradicate him from power was to abolish the GLC in 1986.
Now turned into mostly a leisure complex, the site facilities engineer informed us a plane had gone into one of the World Trade towers in New York. We showed disbelief, but he insisted it was true, so we headed for a Security room where we knew there was a TV. Sure enough, we watched in awe as the second plane hit the second tower at 14.03. I texted my daughters to stop what
they were doing and get to a TV, as we sat spellbound as we watched live events unfolding as they happened.
Time moved on, and we finished up what we were doing, and had a second job arranged over the river, so set off on foot over Westminster Bridge. We had heard that Routers in Docklands had sent most staff home (if you want to take out the UK financial markets, you only need to take out this building), as had many other organisations. Westminster Bridge was deserted, and most noticeably there were no planes, the Thames being the normal flight path in to Heathrow.
In the current situation we anticipated we might be denied access, but in the event we waltzed straight into Portcullis House with our contractor’s passes. Straight through the tunnel that connects this to the Houses of Parliament, we needed to book in at the Security control room. That was the first time I heard the name ‘al-Qaeda’, as the likely perpetrators of the airline hijacks, the police here obviously having their finger on the pulse of government.
Unrestricted, we headed back to Portcullis House, and through a maze of corridors that eventually led to the main Control Room for all the Government buildings in Westminster, hidden away in an adjacent building. This is one of those double steel door affairs where you get past the camera, then gain an escort through the first door, then this closing before the second opens. You enter into a room about 7m by 10m, full of control consoles and with one complete wall of video screens. Staffed by around eight police officers together with two fire officers, you are under the close supervision of one of these at all times.
We set about our work on the Portcullis fire graphics system. Talk was of the days events, and that Tony Blair had convened COBRA, the Civil Contingencies Committee, in Downing Street, which is a rare event that only occurs during a major crisis. One of the video screens was tuned into a television channel news feed, displaying the day’s events. It was at this point that a news bulletin flashed up, with Tony Blair announcing to the Country that COBRA had been convened, and that the UK governments security forces were (and I remember the exact words) ‘at a heightened state of security and readiness’.
It was at this exact moment that one of the coppers shouted out ‘anyone want any toast’; whilst a young policewomen asked another how many sugars they wanted in their tea. We looked around and one of the fire officers was asleep, three coppers were reading the paper, with the remainder watching the news, mostly sat back in their chairs with their feet on the desk. Not one of them was actually working, and these were the people protecting the Government in a time of crisis. We just looked at each other and burst out laughing!
Ironically, the next day we had a job to do in an office building for an American company in Guildford. We turned up for an arranged appointment and were refused entry on the grounds that ‘they had increased their security and were not letting any visitors enter their building’.
Pork Chop
Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2001, at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty To Animals mobile clinic just outside ground zero in New York.
Erick Robertson, of Oakhurst, California, holds the head of Porkchop, a one-year-old
search and rescue dog, as he receives intravenous treatment for dehydration.
Robertson and Porkchop have been working at the World Trade Centre attack site since Sunday.
Erick Robertson, of Oakhurst, California, holds the head of Porkchop, a one-year-old
search and rescue dog, as he receives intravenous treatment for dehydration.
Robertson and Porkchop have been working at the World Trade Centre attack site since Sunday.
London Bombings
The Blitz
On the 7th September, 1940 the German airforce changed its strategy and began to concentrate on bombing London.
On the first day of the Blitz killed 430 citizens and 1,600 were severely injured. The German bombers returned the next day and a further 412 died.
Between September 1940 and May 1941, the Luftwaffe made 127 large-scale night raids. Of these, 71 were targeted on London.
During the Blitz some two million houses (60 per cent of these in London) were destroyed and 60,000 civilians were killed and 87,000 were seriously injured. Of those killed, the majority lived in London. Until half-way through the Second World War, more women and children in Britain had been killed than soldiers.
Arthur Harris, Bomber Command (1947)
I well remember the worst nights of the Blitz. I watched the old city in flames from the roof of the Air Ministry, with St. Paul's
standing out in the midst of an ocean of fire-an incredible sight. One could hear the German bombers arriving in a stream and the swish of the incendiaries falling into the fire below.
In his diary Joseph Goebbels recorded how Adolf Hitler had decided to increase the terror bombing attacks on Britain (25th April, 1942)
He said he would repeat these raids night after night until the English were sick and tired of terror attacks. He shares my opinion absolutely that cultural centres, health resorts and civilian resorts must be attacked now. There is no other way of bringing the
English to their senses. They belong to a class of human beings with whom you can only talk after you have first knocked out their
teeth.
Joan Miller, One Girl's War (1970)
We who lived in London through the Blitz were constantly observing pathetic and heroic sights, and constantly experiencing some fresh excess of outrage; even the violently altered appearance of the city was a shock to the system. It was disorientating to find a well-known area transformed into a nightmare territory of shattered buildings, horrifying craters and acres of rubble. Places to which you had attached importance were suddenly no longer there. Eight Wren churches were destroyed in a single night. Everyone had stories of their own lucky escapes or those of friends. Many, of course, weren't lucky at all. Shelterers in the Underground were among the earliest casualties: Trafalgar Square, Bounds Green, Praed Street and Balham Stations all suffered direct hits before the end of 1940. A night-club in Leicester Square, the Cafe de Paris, a haunt of mine, was bombed in the spring of 1941 and turned, in seconds, from a place of gaiety to a shambles. Like Hatchetts restaurant, it was believed to be safe because it was underground.
Through it all, of course, things kept going. A milkman picking his steps across a newly ruined road, a postman collecting mail
from a letter box mysteriously left intact in the middle of a wasteland - these, among other potent images, symbolized the Londoners' particular refusal to be intimidated. I know of no one who lost heart, gave way to nerves, or experienced despair. Those who suffered most, it seemed at times, gained from somewhere the hardihood to endure it. My ex-colleague John Dickson Carr, whose house was twice demolished around him, was able to joke about these experiences
On the 7th September, 1940 the German airforce changed its strategy and began to concentrate on bombing London.
On the first day of the Blitz killed 430 citizens and 1,600 were severely injured. The German bombers returned the next day and a further 412 died.
Between September 1940 and May 1941, the Luftwaffe made 127 large-scale night raids. Of these, 71 were targeted on London.
During the Blitz some two million houses (60 per cent of these in London) were destroyed and 60,000 civilians were killed and 87,000 were seriously injured. Of those killed, the majority lived in London. Until half-way through the Second World War, more women and children in Britain had been killed than soldiers.
Arthur Harris, Bomber Command (1947)
I well remember the worst nights of the Blitz. I watched the old city in flames from the roof of the Air Ministry, with St. Paul's
standing out in the midst of an ocean of fire-an incredible sight. One could hear the German bombers arriving in a stream and the swish of the incendiaries falling into the fire below.
In his diary Joseph Goebbels recorded how Adolf Hitler had decided to increase the terror bombing attacks on Britain (25th April, 1942)
He said he would repeat these raids night after night until the English were sick and tired of terror attacks. He shares my opinion absolutely that cultural centres, health resorts and civilian resorts must be attacked now. There is no other way of bringing the
English to their senses. They belong to a class of human beings with whom you can only talk after you have first knocked out their
teeth.
Joan Miller, One Girl's War (1970)
We who lived in London through the Blitz were constantly observing pathetic and heroic sights, and constantly experiencing some fresh excess of outrage; even the violently altered appearance of the city was a shock to the system. It was disorientating to find a well-known area transformed into a nightmare territory of shattered buildings, horrifying craters and acres of rubble. Places to which you had attached importance were suddenly no longer there. Eight Wren churches were destroyed in a single night. Everyone had stories of their own lucky escapes or those of friends. Many, of course, weren't lucky at all. Shelterers in the Underground were among the earliest casualties: Trafalgar Square, Bounds Green, Praed Street and Balham Stations all suffered direct hits before the end of 1940. A night-club in Leicester Square, the Cafe de Paris, a haunt of mine, was bombed in the spring of 1941 and turned, in seconds, from a place of gaiety to a shambles. Like Hatchetts restaurant, it was believed to be safe because it was underground.
Through it all, of course, things kept going. A milkman picking his steps across a newly ruined road, a postman collecting mail
from a letter box mysteriously left intact in the middle of a wasteland - these, among other potent images, symbolized the Londoners' particular refusal to be intimidated. I know of no one who lost heart, gave way to nerves, or experienced despair. Those who suffered most, it seemed at times, gained from somewhere the hardihood to endure it. My ex-colleague John Dickson Carr, whose house was twice demolished around him, was able to joke about these experiences
How would Churchill have answered the Islamist threat?
NEVER IN THE field of human conflict was one man so widely quoted by so many. John F. Kennedy once observed that Winston Churchill “mobilised the English language and sent it into battle”. Today, facing a new enemy, that powerful army of oratory
is marching off to war again.
Churchill is embedded in Tony Blair’s rhetoric, and behind every reference to the “Blitz spirit”.
A brooding, bulldog bust of Churchill is prominently displayed in the Oval Office by George W. Bush, while Eliot Cohen’s stirring account of Churchill’s wartime leadership is required reading in the White House.
For the Right, Churchill is the hero who stood up to tyranny when others looked away, the personification of the Anglo-American alliance: Osama bin Laden is linked, often simplistically, to Hitler, and those who fail to sign up enthusiastically for the War on Terror are therefore labeled appeasers.
The tug-of-war over his reputation would have come as no surprise to Churchill. He knew that it was the historian’s privilege to shape the future, as well as to record the past, and once remarked that he would ensure his place in history, because he intended to write it; historians, politicians and pundits are still writing it, and never more urgently than at times of national insecurity.
Churchill had an uncanny ability to frame emotional tumult, personal sacrifice and human conflict in a unique form of political poetry that was instantly timeless.
His words from February 1934 seem grimly appropriate: “I have lived through a period when one looked forward, as we do now, with anxiety and uncertainty to what would happen in the future . . . Suddenly something did happen: tremendous, swift, overpowering, irresistible.”
It is reasonable to ask what Churchill, a man so acutely aware of his own historical legacy, might have made of the worst terrorist attack on British soil. He would, I think, have snorted at the facile comparisons between the deaths caused by the attacks of 7/7 and the pounding, nightly horror of the Blitz. But he would surely have commended the “business as usual” attitude of most Londoners, and the outpouring of resistance on the internet, with its spontaneous black humour.
From a broader perspective, he might well have backed the invasion of Afghanistan and the toppling of the Taleban, an identifiable regime with a putrid ideology posing an imminent danger to British subjects.
I am less convinced that he would have supported the war in Iraq. At the time of the Mesopotamia campaign in 1917,
Churchill had seen the British Army march on Baghdad to take control of the oilfields and topple a brutal regime, only to become embroiled in a bloody quagmire. Churchill also knew that the “highest moral value” attaches to striking the second blow, to responding to provocation: he would not, I believe, have started a pre-emptive war. (Saddam was another avid Churchill fan: “We will fight them on the streets, from the rooftops, house to house . . . ” he told George Galloway, shortly before running away to hide in a hole in the ground.)
For such a determined personality, Churchill could be maddeningly inconsistent. Yet on the issue of Islamic fundamentalism, his views were pungent, precise and astonishingly prescient. In The River War, his account of the reconquest of the Sudan that ended in the battle of Omdurman in 1898, Churchill anticipated many of the themes that preoccupy us today: the nature of terrorism,
Islamic fanaticism and the clash of civilisations between the Islamic world and the West.
“Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytising faith,” he wrote after going into battle himself against the Dervishes, the followers of the Mahdi, the self-proclaimed prophet of Islam who had launched a mass rebellion to drive the infidels out of Egypt. Churchill
writes as an enthusiastic imperialist, comparing the “fanatical frenzy” of the Mahdi’s followers to rabid dogs. But his analysis is more nuanced than the language suggests. He understood that extremism flourished amid the “fearful fatalistic apathy” in the Muslim world — precisely the apathy that Britain’s Muslim communities must now urgently combat. Rather than condemn the Dervishes as mere lunatics (as many of his contemporaries did), he sought to understand their suicidal bravery through the “mighty stimulus of fanaticism”.
In a passage that presages his staunch resistance to Nazism 40 years later, he wrote: “I hope that if evil days should come upon our own country, and the last army which a collapsing Empire could interpose between London and the invader were dissolving in rout and ruin, that there would be some . . . who would not care to accustom themselves to a new order of things and tamely survive the
disaster.”
For in the end, Churchill saw the Sudan campaign as a conflict between barbarity and civilisation. Of the battle of Omdurman he wrote: “Civilisation — elsewhere sympathetic, merciful, tolerant, ready to discuss or argue, eager to avoid violence, to submit to law, to effect compromise — here advanced with an expression of inexorable sternness.”
That, undoubtedly, would have been Churchill’s response to the suicide bombings in London: these are not disasters to be “tamely survived” but an immoral assault on civilised values, to be fought with “inexorable sternness”.
is marching off to war again.
Churchill is embedded in Tony Blair’s rhetoric, and behind every reference to the “Blitz spirit”.
A brooding, bulldog bust of Churchill is prominently displayed in the Oval Office by George W. Bush, while Eliot Cohen’s stirring account of Churchill’s wartime leadership is required reading in the White House.
For the Right, Churchill is the hero who stood up to tyranny when others looked away, the personification of the Anglo-American alliance: Osama bin Laden is linked, often simplistically, to Hitler, and those who fail to sign up enthusiastically for the War on Terror are therefore labeled appeasers.
The tug-of-war over his reputation would have come as no surprise to Churchill. He knew that it was the historian’s privilege to shape the future, as well as to record the past, and once remarked that he would ensure his place in history, because he intended to write it; historians, politicians and pundits are still writing it, and never more urgently than at times of national insecurity.
Churchill had an uncanny ability to frame emotional tumult, personal sacrifice and human conflict in a unique form of political poetry that was instantly timeless.
His words from February 1934 seem grimly appropriate: “I have lived through a period when one looked forward, as we do now, with anxiety and uncertainty to what would happen in the future . . . Suddenly something did happen: tremendous, swift, overpowering, irresistible.”
It is reasonable to ask what Churchill, a man so acutely aware of his own historical legacy, might have made of the worst terrorist attack on British soil. He would, I think, have snorted at the facile comparisons between the deaths caused by the attacks of 7/7 and the pounding, nightly horror of the Blitz. But he would surely have commended the “business as usual” attitude of most Londoners, and the outpouring of resistance on the internet, with its spontaneous black humour.
From a broader perspective, he might well have backed the invasion of Afghanistan and the toppling of the Taleban, an identifiable regime with a putrid ideology posing an imminent danger to British subjects.
I am less convinced that he would have supported the war in Iraq. At the time of the Mesopotamia campaign in 1917,
Churchill had seen the British Army march on Baghdad to take control of the oilfields and topple a brutal regime, only to become embroiled in a bloody quagmire. Churchill also knew that the “highest moral value” attaches to striking the second blow, to responding to provocation: he would not, I believe, have started a pre-emptive war. (Saddam was another avid Churchill fan: “We will fight them on the streets, from the rooftops, house to house . . . ” he told George Galloway, shortly before running away to hide in a hole in the ground.)
For such a determined personality, Churchill could be maddeningly inconsistent. Yet on the issue of Islamic fundamentalism, his views were pungent, precise and astonishingly prescient. In The River War, his account of the reconquest of the Sudan that ended in the battle of Omdurman in 1898, Churchill anticipated many of the themes that preoccupy us today: the nature of terrorism,
Islamic fanaticism and the clash of civilisations between the Islamic world and the West.
“Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytising faith,” he wrote after going into battle himself against the Dervishes, the followers of the Mahdi, the self-proclaimed prophet of Islam who had launched a mass rebellion to drive the infidels out of Egypt. Churchill
writes as an enthusiastic imperialist, comparing the “fanatical frenzy” of the Mahdi’s followers to rabid dogs. But his analysis is more nuanced than the language suggests. He understood that extremism flourished amid the “fearful fatalistic apathy” in the Muslim world — precisely the apathy that Britain’s Muslim communities must now urgently combat. Rather than condemn the Dervishes as mere lunatics (as many of his contemporaries did), he sought to understand their suicidal bravery through the “mighty stimulus of fanaticism”.
In a passage that presages his staunch resistance to Nazism 40 years later, he wrote: “I hope that if evil days should come upon our own country, and the last army which a collapsing Empire could interpose between London and the invader were dissolving in rout and ruin, that there would be some . . . who would not care to accustom themselves to a new order of things and tamely survive the
disaster.”
For in the end, Churchill saw the Sudan campaign as a conflict between barbarity and civilisation. Of the battle of Omdurman he wrote: “Civilisation — elsewhere sympathetic, merciful, tolerant, ready to discuss or argue, eager to avoid violence, to submit to law, to effect compromise — here advanced with an expression of inexorable sternness.”
That, undoubtedly, would have been Churchill’s response to the suicide bombings in London: these are not disasters to be “tamely survived” but an immoral assault on civilised values, to be fought with “inexorable sternness”.