At first when the manager of a famous London hotel approached tables of lunches with the news, everyone, from the Chief Whip, Capt. Margesson, to lowly correspondents, looked startled.,
What do you mean the police have ordered everyone out of the hotel during the procession?
That's the order, said the manager, spreading his hands in deprecating fashion. Actually the police said that everyone must go thirty yards from the street for the procession, but I'd advise three thousand yards.
In good order the guests paid their bills and left by the back door, not, as might be thought, in fear of what first seemed the Gestapo like activities of the British police, but in genuine respect for a procession which was to pass down a famous London thoroughfare on the stroke of three.


Peeping out behind a solid stone building a good 30 yards from the street, we watched the mysterious procession passing.
Slowly from unseen crowds equally well hidden behind buildings all along the street came cheers. Not from windows which had been left open and unoccupied, but muffled by yards of stone between them and the majestic sight.
There on a large Army lorry, escorted by outriders, sat the biggest bomb we had ever seen that close, and, sitting beside it, seeming to stroke it into a brief quiescence, sat the calm figure of an Army engineer. As it roared its way down the street towards, we hoped some eager marshes; the police shed their Gestapo .role and welcomed us back.



From the story by Helen Kirkpatrick, London Correspondent of the “Chicago Daily News,"
Printed in the “Daily Telegraph” Dec 1940