National Fire Service people and Heavy and Light Civil Defence rescue squads search for survivors of a V2 rocket bomb on London during the autumn of 1944. Image: War Illustrated.

A V2 rocket bomb which descended from the sky on the Woolworths and Co-op stores in the New Cross Road Saturday lunch-time 25th November 1944 became the most devastating Home Front disaster caused by the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile.

New Cross experienced mass destruction of buildings and human life.

This catastrophic event happened a stone’s throw from Deptford Town Hall, now an important building used for teaching by Goldsmiths, University of London.

The people’s history dimension of this event is more bound up with the history of Goldsmiths than has hitherto been fully realised.

Goldsmiths now owns the site of the former St James’s Church, which has been converted into gallery and teaching spaces and is part of the memorial and human geography of what happened in the Second World War.

It has not been fully appreciated that people died in the buildings now used as teaching spaces by Goldsmiths such as 286 and 288 New Cross Road. These buildings along with the neighbouring Deptford Town Hall were badly damaged in the blast.

All windows and doors at the front had been blown in. 288 New Cross Road was being used as a ration book issuing office and was busy on the day. Post office sorting was being done behind and people working there were seriously injured.

The other buildings on the corner of New Cross Road and St James’s- numbers 280 to 284 New Cross Road- were completely destroyed and everyone in them either killed or injured.  The prefabricated single storey buildings erected in their place in the late 1940s have continued to be used as Goldsmiths teaching rooms.

The V2 tragedy is an important historical Goldsmiths event and I believe we have a duty to recognise, respect and give commemoration to the people who died on our campus, as well as all the survivors and rescuers.

Goldsmiths is unique in being the site of impact for each of the Nazi vengeance weapons launched against Britain in 1944- the V1 rocket killing two members of the RAF barrage balloon unit on what is now the College Green on Monday 26th June 1944 and the V2 rocket killing 168 people on Saturday 25th November 1944.

As far as I have been able to establish no other university location in the UK has had the misfortune to have been hit by both V1 and V2 rockets in the World War Two conflict and with so many fatal casualties.

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Image courtesy of  the Woolworths Museum.

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This significant historical image above shows the rescue and salvage operation on the Woolworths site in the New Cross Road 26th November 1944- less than 24 hours after the V2 rocket struck.

A heavy crane, National Fire Service, ARP heavy and light rescue units are all present. The Woolworths store has been pancaked. Half of the Royal Arsenal Co-operative store is demolished. Neighbouring houses in Goodwood Road have been destroyed and wrecked.

There is so much destruction people can now see the Childeric School in the distance where generations of Goldsmiths’ College students did their teaching practice. The photograph’s perspective is from the corner of St James’s and New Cross Road where buildings with people working in them, including Clamp & Son auctioneers have been completely destroyed.

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The founder of the League of Coloured Peoples, Dr Harold Moody, would have taken part in the rescue and saving lives operation. He was in the network of emergency medics drawn from local GP surgeries and hospitals. The historian Stephen Bourne in Under Fire: Black Britain in Wartime 1939-45 published by the History Press in 2020 wrote:

‘On Saturday, 25 Novmber 1944, Dr Harold Moody left his surgery in Queen’s Road, Peckham, to attend the aftermath of a V-2 rocket incident in New Cross Road. This was in the very heart of working-class Deptford in south-east London. It wasn’t far from where 168 people were killed and more than 120 were seriously injured, mainly mothers and their children who were among the Christmas shopping crowds’ (Bourne, 190, 2020).

Stephen Bourne explained: ‘Dr Moody attended as part of a team called in from the surrounding area. They struggled night and day amidst the chaos and carnage to bring comfort to the survivors’ (ibid).

Bronze bust of Harold Moody by Ronald Moody, National Portrait Gallery, London. By 14GTR – Own work CC BY-SA 4.0

121 people had been seriously injured and needed treatment among the rubble.

The wreckage area covered a wide expanse of the junction between  St James’s, New Cross and Goodwood Roads.  Woolworths had been obliterated along with half of the neighbouring Co-op store.

The office buildings on the corner of St James’s Road and New Cross Roads were also destroyed and the prefabricated 1940s style single story blocks which replaced them and now used by Goldsmiths are evidence of devastation wrought on this side of the explosion.

There is also strong evidence that there was another Black doctor practicing in the area and giving his medical services to the victims of the V2 strike.

In the 1994 publication Rations and Rubble: Remembering Woolworths The New Cross V2 Disaster Saturday 25th November 1944 there is an account by Patricia Blay who was 14 years old and working in the post office of the Co-operative Store next door to Woolworths.

She survived the blast and recalled: ‘We lived in Childeric Road and my mum came looking for me. She came round the front and they were laying the people out in the street that were dead. She went searching for me like mad but couldn’t find [me]. The doctor on the corner came out and sent to the army where my dad was and got him sent home on leave. That was Dr Chundun, the first black doctor that we’d ever seen […]  he was very nice’ (Steele, 1994, 24).

Dr Walter Chundun would have performed a very active role in emergency medical assistance to the victims of the disaster. He was a serving Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps having been first commissioned as a lieutenant in April 1940 with promotion the following year. Dr Chundun practiced at 12 Clifton Rise (east side) New Cross and 102 Foxbury Road Brockley up until 1981. He demobilised from the British Army in 1946 with the rank of honorary captain in the RAMC.

Dr Chundun was born in what was then Dutch Guiana (now Suriname) on 16th November 1906 and travelled from British Guiana (now Guyuna) to study medicine in Scotland where he qualified in 1937  as a licensed doctor of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and the Royal Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow.

Both the Scotsman and Edinburgh Evening News papers described these as ‘Triple qualification successes’ in their editions of 28th October 1937.

One of the hero doctors attending the victims of the Woolworths V2 disaster- Dr Walter Chundun features in this group photograph of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, summer 1935. He is standing fourth from left second row from the front. He was then a 29 year-old medical student before qualifying in 1937. Archive photograph by very kind permission of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

Dr Chundun married Sheila A Deakin in Marylebone in 1965 and took British citizenship in 1967. He would have been a witness to the ‘Battle of Lewisham’ on Saturday 13th August 1977 when hundreds of far-right National Front activists tried to march from New Cross to Lewisham but were challenged by thousands of counter-demonstrators.

Violent clashes between the two groups and police took place on Clifton Rise and a plaque was erected on the corner with New Cross Road in 2017 to mark the 40th anniversary of the event.  Dr Chundun passed away in Greenwich in 1994 where he had been a director of the Shooters Hill Residents Association with the address of 63 Shooters Hill Road.

Heroism was also in abundance throughout the Second World War on the part of founder member of the League of Coloured Peoples and decorated Trinidad born Great War veteran George Arthur Roberts.

George Arthur Roberts BEM MSM (1891-1970) Great War veteran, Leading Fireman WW2 and educator. Image: By Figures CC BY-SA 4.0

Between 1939 and 1945 he was a leading fireman at New Cross fire station and attended four bombing attacks and fires at Goldsmiths which devastated the building and left the swimming pool turned mortuary a roofless and blackened shell in May 1945.

Crews and appliances from his New Cross station would have been the first on the scene of the Woolworths disaster on Saturday 25th November 1944. Stephen Bourne wrote: ‘It is likely that George A. Roberts, the Trinidad-born fireman based as nearby New Cross Fire Station, would have attended the scene also (Bourne, 190, 2020).

George would be awarded an MBE recognising his pioneering discussion and education groups in the fire service.

Much has been written about an event which tore the heart out of the local community; largely because so many women and children died. Norman Longmate in his book Hitler’s Rockets: The Story of the V2s devotes pages 207 to 212 to a detailed description and analysis along with eye-witness accounts.

After WW2 Deptford Borough Council set about rebuilding on the site of the Woolworths tragedy and by 1960 the building now standing was fully constructed enabling Woolworths to return to the New Cross Road and with the provision of two storey maisonettes for council tenants above. Image: Goldsmiths History Project

In 1994 there was a major project on the part of Deptford History Group and local organisations to fully commemorate what had happened fifty years before. An exhibition in the New Cross Library, public meetings, the unveiling of the Lewisham Borough Council plaque, and publication of the 55 page book Rations and Rubble: Remembering Woolworths The New Cross V2 Disaster Saturday 25th November 1944, edited by Jess Steele provided an outstanding commemoration to those who died and tribute to those who took part in the rescue operation.

Lewisham Council Local History and Archives Centre has provided a list of the details of those who died and could be identified. At present it does not include all of the 168 cited in the street memorials said to have been killed. This ongoing online memorial project seeks to identify them all and to provide more information about the lives of those killed.

The historian of Woolworths, Paul Seaton, has also researched and developed online an outstanding Woolworths museum including an evocative memorial page to the victims of the V2 attack on the store in the News Cross Road. 

There were thirty staff and one hundred customers in Woolworths when the rocket struck at 12.26 p.m. As Paul wrote: ‘They were simply shopping for saucepans and gifts or drinking Bovril and other hot drinks at the Tea Bar on a busy Saturday before Christmas.’

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