UNSHAKEN & UNSHAKEABLE
MASTER JOHN MITCHELL
Unshaken Unshakeable Master John Mitchell was Called to the Bar in 1972 and made a Bencher in 2012. He was appointed a District Judge in 1999 and a Circuit Judge in November 2006, sitting in both the County Court and the Family Court in London. He retired in 2017. Master Mitchell is Chairman of the Middle Temple Historical Society.
During the Great War the damage caused to the Inn’s estate was minimal. An anti-aircraft shell missed Gotha bombers and fell through the roof of the Queen’s Room without doing more than making a hole in the floor. Bomb damage was caused to the upper floors of 1 Hare Court and a second, unexploded, bomb was found in Hare Court itself. However, there was no complacency at the resumption of hostilities in 1939. Aircraft development and the experience of civilian bombing during the Spanish Civil War and of Warsaw ensured that preparations were swiftly made. The Middle
Temple organised air raid precautions and staff, residents and members volunteered to act as firefighters, wardens and first aiders. The Inn’s workmen developed an understanding of the roof structures, gas controls and water hydrants. Lectures were given on the use of stirrup pumps and the danger of gas. However, the training went untested during the year of the ‘phoney war’, which ended on Saturday 7 September 1940. There followed raids on 56 out of the next 57 nights, during which more than 18,300 tons of bombs fell on London. On the seventeenth night, the Temple
experienced the horror of modern aerial warfare for the first time. Harold Nicholson, a resident of 4 King’s Bench Walk, spent the night of Tuesday 24 September 1940 at his office in Whitehall. He heard the drumfire of anti-aircraft batteries and wrote in his diary that when they drop into silence, ‘one hears above them, irritating and undeterred, the dentist’s drill of the German aeroplanes, seemingly overhead, appearing always to circle round and round, always ready to drop three bombs and then…crump, crump, crump somewhere’. The next morning was cold, bright and cloudless but a pall of smoke and the smell of burning stained the air. As Nicholson reached the Temple he found water, soot and burnt paper everywhere. During the night six bombs had hit the Temple. A bomb had fallen through the roof of Inner Temple Hall, wrecking the interior. All the stained glass had been blown into Lamb Court where it lay smashed and twisted, Chambers in both Elm Court and Crown Office Row were flattened and two cornice stones from Elm Court, each weighing a ton and a half, had been blasted into Pump Court. A member of the Inn, writing under his pen-name of Cyril Hare, was to recall how ‘the mellow, placid Courts, ghost-haunted by the illustrious dead [had vanished] into ugly heaps of charred timbers and brick dust’. Further damage was caused on Tuesday 15 October 1940 when a parachute landmine fell in Elm Court but it was the force of the explosion rather than impact which caused widespread devastation. Fig Tree Court and Crown Office Row were all but destroyed and roofs and windows were shattered throughout the area from Lamb Building in the east, to Garden Court in the west, and from Brick Court in the north, to Plowden Buildings in the south. A huge piece of masonry was blown through the East Gable of Middle Temple Hall, smashing the gallery and badly damaging the Screen. The next day bewildered people wandered dismayed and angry over ground which was covered by a thick layer of what seemed like brown snow. On the Sunday 8 December 1940, the Hall was thankfully spared further significant damage when a second landmine exploded immediately to its west, creating a crater 18 feet
Trinity Call in the bombed out Hall in 1941
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