Tuesday 3rd December 1940. 10 a.m.
Detective Chief Inspector Edgar Walter Septimus Saxe-Coburg, accompanied by his detective sergeant, Ted Lampson, walked along the currently disused railway track of the Aldwych Underground station, deeper into the tunnel. Just three months before, this branch of the Piccadilly line to Holborn had been an active part of the London Underground system, but the Blitz in September changed all that.
The Blitz had begun in early September, the intensive bombing by the Luftwaffe of London and Britain’s other major cities, but primarily London. Before that there’d been daytime bombing raids by the Luftwaffe, but the small Spitfires and Hurricanes from the airfields in Kent and Essex had kept most of them at bay during the period from mid-July until early September that became known as the Battle of Britain. The death toll had been high during the Battle of Britain, especially among the young fighter pilots who’d been sent up day after day to confront the giant German bombers and engage in aerial battles with their German fighter Messerschmitt escorts, but the death toll for the Germans had been even higher. Finally, the Germans had to admit that the RAF had defeated the Luftwaffe in these daytime attacks, so the Germans had switched to night-time attacks, when the small fighter planes could not defend the city.
The docks in the East End had been among the first to suffer, the whole area ablaze, and then more and more of London had become a target. On 10th September, Buckingham Palace itself had been hit by a German bomb, proving that no one and nowhere was safe. The block of flats in Hampstead where Coburg and his wife, Rosa, had lived had been completely demolished during a raid. Fortunately for the couple, they had been out when it happened, but everyone else in the block who’d sought safety in an Anderson shelter in the grounds had been killed.
C
