When the Clocks stopped at
Printing House Square

The sirens sounded around Printing House Square, the home of The Times, at 8.22 pm on the evening of Tuesday, September 24, 1940. The paper’s Air Raid Precautions (A.R.P.) officers in the Control Room were later to testify that as the evening wore on a sense of foreboding came over the room. The raid seemed to be particularly heavy in the Blackfriars area of London that night.

Printing of the paper was in full swing by the early hours of the morning with over 300 staff were on the premises and over 80,000 copies of The Times already printed when the danger signal was again given just after 1.50am. A spotter at No. 1 post on the roof of the main building was on the telephone to the Control Room warning them about a plane flying particularly close by when he heard the whistle of a bomb. He had barely shouted to his two companions to duck when the bomb struck the front of the building at ground level at 1.52 am in the morning of Wednesday, September 25. The blast ripped the clock from its location between the second and third floors and it fell into the crater below.

Once the initial effects of the blast had subsided, they descended in the dark picking their way through the debris on the floors below. As they arrived on the ground floor they were met by a rescue party setting off to look for them with the words “We never expected to see you again.”

In fact the bomb never penetrated the wall of the front office but exploded on contact. While the explosion caused widespread damage there was no fire and no serious casualties. The A.R.P. and the firemen conducted a thorough inspection of the buildings and, having satisfied themselves that everything was safe, reported to the proprietor, Major John Astor. 18 minutes after the bomb struck he gave the order to resume running the presses. Production continued and the edition was not lost.

That The Times was able to continue its proud tradition of never having lost an issue was down to two principal factors: luck and planning. The luck was that the bomb did not penetrate the building before exploding which reduced the damage. The planning was that well before the outbreak of war, the paper’s management had placed all the vital production departments below ground level in basements that had been strengthened to take the weight of the machinery. In July 1938 they had also instituted a most efficient Air Raid Precaution system and every member of staff who was not on active service or in the Home Guard held some A.R.P. position.

Frank Patrick Bishop, assistant manager of The Times, wrote about the event in The Times House Journal and wrote about the relief that the edition as saved, but also the difficult task of creating the next day’s paper amongst the bomb damage:
“To-day’s paper is all right; now we must think of to-morrow’s. First, in the growing light, we make a full tour of inspection. There are books and papers scattered about in the road; we peer at them with torches. Letters signed by this or that member of the staff, circular, telephone directories, pages from a book about the Spanish war; nothing that really matters, at least let’s hope not!

But what about to-night’s paper? How is the News Room going to function? How is the Classified Department going to extract from this appalling mess the advertisements booked to occupy the front and back pages? And where are we going to put all the day staff? The editorial, managerial, advertisement, accounts departments have all disappeared. So have the I.D. [Intelligence Department] and the library. The main telephone switchboard is out of action. And the rooms that can be made available are without windows and even without desks and chairs.”

News of the direct hit on The Times did not become public knowledge for another 18 days due to wartime censorship and because the edition was not lost. The event was finally reported in the columns of the paper on October 12. The report included a letter from the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, the original of which is held in the archive of The Times.

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