The Press: War Reporting, 1940

From Swansea, in Glamorganshire, to Southend at the mouth of the Thames, and all along the south coast of Britain, last week newsmen had passably good seats at the Battle of Britain. At Dover was the greatest concentration. Newsmen in tin hats and civilian clothes took their stand on Shakespeare Cliff, high above the English Channel, sat on camp stools and shooting sticks while British and German planes fought in the sky, amused themselves in slack intervals by giving names to Dover’s roly-poly barrage balloons: King Lear, Lord Castlerose, Göring (painted with medals), Puddin’ Pie.

In London while Nazi bombers laid eggs on the outskirts, carrot-topped, bespectacled little Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker (Hearst’s International News Service) danced with excitement on a roof in Fleet Street. But on Dover’s cliffs a bomb fell three yards away from Cameraman James Gemmell (British Paramount News), gouged a crater 20 feet deep, failed to explode. Frank Butler (I. N. S.) was hit by falling machine-gun cartridge cases, unharmed.

War was more comfortable for newsmen, who lived in comparative luxury at Dover’s Grand Hotel, than it had been in France. They could sleep most nights, rise at 6:30, bathe & shave in time for the day’s first air raids. One early-morning alarm caught a British photographer in his bath. Trailing a towel behind him. he ran to the roof, snapped his pictures.

In a sweets shop at the foot of Shakespeare Cliff newsmen bought cigarets and ice cream, between raids, from an old woman who thanked them cheerily, told them that Hitler’s war had saved her business. Army men, who got to Dover first, had all the girls, so newspapermen spent their evenings playing ping-pong in the hotel basement. Their favorite character was a bloated barrage balloon which they named Sefton Delmer. after a 252-lb. reporter for the London Daily Express. Shot down in flames one day last week, Delmer was their only casualty. Few hours later, Delmer II slowly ascended into the twilight above Dover.