A world without hope

The air raid sirens started sounding in the East End just after 8pm on Wednesday, 3 March 1943. Bethnal Green Tube station was a designated bomb shelter and within minutes 2,000 people had taken refuge inside it, while hundreds more were hurrying to join them.

A woman with a baby in her arms tripped as she rushed down the ill-lit steps and, when a few people stopped to help her, the crowds behind thought they were being deliberately held back. Terrified of being left unprotected when the bombs began to fall, they shoved and heaved till they got things moving again.

There were no bombs in Bethnal Green that night; but when the next day dawned, there were dozens of squashed bodies at the bottom of the station stairwell. The mother whose stumble had started it all was still alive, but her child was not.

In total, 84 women died, along with 62 children and 27 men, and many others were badly injured. But those were not the only casualties: the stampede at Bethnal Green also dealt some serious wounds to British national pride.

The image of working-class Londoners as cheery unflappable heroes was in tatters. The government faced down calls for a public inquiry, saying that evidence of panic among ordinary Britons would give aid and encouragement to the enemy.

Meanwhile, rumours about the disaster flew around the country and patriotic citizens became convinced that it was the work of outside forces: one blamed it on "foreign-born Jews", another put it down to communists and another cited the feckless young, anxious to use the shelters for immoral purposes.

The police inquiry was inconclusive and, according to the new book by prize-winning historian Joanna Bourke, the real culprit was nothing other than "debilitating fear".

Bourke is a specialist on Britain in the two world wars, and in 1999 she made a splash with An Intimate History of Killing, pointing out that true military glory is not a matter of laying down your life for the nation but of slaughtering people from other countries. She has now turned her sharp historical eye on what might be called the passive voice of warfare: not the action of killing but the emotion of fear.

Her most fascinating pages are devoted to the world of military medicine, where health has a curious habit of swapping places with illness. On the one hand, she discovers scary Army doctors who regarded normal fears as pathological reactions; on the other, terrifying "war psychologists" who believed that patients who were crippled with neurosis in peacetime might flourish in times of war. She then expands her brief to include a vast miscellany of non-military fears.

She ranges from the fear of being buried alive to "school phobia", taking in cancer, rape, BSE and paedophilia along the way. The accumulation of anecdotes is impressive and, in her opinion, it establishes an important general truth: that fear has grown steadily more " nebulous" over the past 100 years, and hence more pervasive and debilitating than ever.