Jimmy Anderson sent these images to How to be a Retronaut after watching a documentary about the London Blitz of WWII. Over to Jimmy :
“During the Blitz fire-fighter Leonard Rosomer was mentally very scarred from having seen the fire-fighter who had relieved him being crushed to death by a collapsing wall in Shoe Lane, just off Fleet Street in the City of London.
Rosomer took up painting as therapy and became a very highly-regarded war artist. His picture of the scene in Shoe Lane, “The Collapsing Wall” is in the Imperial War Museum.
Shoe Lane is exactly where I work and the scene in question sits directly outside the entrance to the Goldman Sachs staff canteen.”
Post script: The fireman who died was yesterday given a permanent memorial on the site (below)
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Thanks to Jimmy Anderson. Thank you also to Andy Jarosz and 501 Places.
Next time I’m down that way I’ll walk Shoe Lane and remember Leonard and the firefighters. Thanks Jimmy.
Leonard Rosoman (not Rosomer) was already an artist before being drafted into the fire service, studying at the University of Durham in the 1930s.
Leonard Rosoman was already an accomplished artist before he joined the Auxiliary Fire Service. To correct Gary above, he was not ‘drafted’ into the Fire Service – he was a volunteer. He witnessed the wall collapsing onto two colleagues, having just been relieved from exactly that same spot. One of the two men depicted was the future travel writer and novelist, William Sansom who was a great friend of Rosoman’s. Sansom amazingly survived but Sidney Alfred Holder did not. Haunted by what he had seen, Rosoman painted the incident and revisited it several times, feeling that it was too raw an image. The original is now in the Imperial War Museum.
Thank you for the correction.