St Paul's Survives

The Blitz (shortened from German ) was the sustained strategic bombing of Great Britain and Northern Ireland by Nazi Germany between 7 September 1940 and 10 May 1941, during the Second World War. London, the United Kingdom's capital city, was bombed by the for 57 consecutive nights. More than one million London houses were destroyed or damaged, and more than 40,000 civilians were killed, half of them in London. When the picture was taken, almost every building immediately around St Paul's had burned down, with the cathedral surviving in a wasteland of destruction. Its survival was mainly due to the efforts of a special group of firewatchers who were urged by prime minister Winston Churchill to protect the cathedral. Twenty-nine incendiaries fell on and around the cathedral, with one burning through the lead dome and threatening to fall into the dome's wooden support beams. Members of the volunteer St Paul's Watch would have had to climb through the rafters to have any chance of putting it out, but the bomb fell outwards from the roof onto the Stone Gallery, where it was quickly extinguished. ==The picture==

'', which published this image in its January 1941 issue as proof that the German bombing campaign was working The picture was taken on 29/30 December 1940, the 114th night of the Blitz. The Daily Mail's chief photographer Herbert Mason was firewatching on top of the roof of his newspaper's building, Northcliffe House, in Tudor Street, off Fleet Street. Having been taken in the early hours of Monday morning, the photograph was cleared for publication by the censors to appear in the Daily Mail of Tuesday 31 December 1940. It became the main feature on the front page, with a caption reading "War's Greatest Picture". The image was cropped to omit many of the damaged buildings. The Mail also took the unusual step of publishing the photographer's account of how he took the picture: However, Mason's account should not necessarily be taken at face value. A detailed study by Brian Stater has shown that the final image was heavily retouched in the studio: "more of the picture has been changed than not". The original negative has been lost, and there are no surviving prints taken directly from it, but the copy printed in the Daily Mail is known to have been heavily cropped to remove some of the buildings surrounding it, and retouched with paint. The Imperial War Museum holds a larger copy of the print, showing the material that was cropped, but this itself is still heavily retouched. ==See also==