A GRIM SCENE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24630, 11 June 1941, Page 5

A GRIM SCENE

HOUSE OF COMMONS WILDERNESS OF DEBRIS HAVOC DONE BY OIL BOM (0.C.) LONDON, May 21. A waste of boulders and crumpled girders surrounded by " four tottering opsn walls, open to the clouds, ais bare of any ornament as if they had been skinned by a giant scraper," was one description of the House of Commons after it had been destroyed by an oil bomb during the Nazi raid on the night of May 10. ; ',';■." It was a grim scene that confronted the Prime Minister, Mr Winston Churchill, when he walked into the ruins of the Chamber on a sunny May day. The floor was piled with a wilderness of debris, and on the spot where only a .week before he had made the brilliant defence of his administration a gaunt drainpipe stood up grotesquely. "Mr Churchill Surveys Loss

Mr Churchill, who was accompanied by Mrs Churchill, Lord Beaverbrook, and Lord Reith, looked at the wreckage with a frowning brow, and made few comments. Mr Churchill was a young man of 26 when he first entered the House of Commons, and what were his thoughts, as* he stood surveying the wreck of the building which had witnessed his greatest triumphs and his most bitter disappointments, can only be imagined. Pillars, leather-backed benches, fine vaulted roof. Diplomatists' Gallery, Ladies' Gallery, the Distinguished Strangers' Gallery, soaring windows, and oaken walls were all piled in a mass of masonry 50 feet high which still smouldered in the sunlight. The remains of the great candelabra of clustered lights that hung from the ceiling lav among the rubble. It was all that remained of the chamber, in which the Commons have held their debates since 1852, when Barry completed that part of his new Palace of Westminster, Not since the fire of 1834, which destroyed the old place, has there been such a scene of ruin on this historic site. Famous Despatch Boxes

The celebrated despatch boxes, one on the Government side and one opposite for Opposition leaders (they bore the indentations of Gladstone's signetring) have vanished, and also the green benches, the Speaker's chair, and the table of the House. The Speaker's mace was saved.

Buried beneath the wreckage are also the shields with armorial bearings which were set up in front of the principal galleries to commemorate the 19 members of the House who lost their lives in the last war. The upper part of the west wall of the chamber has fallen down into the Star Chamber Court, which is littered with blocks of stone.

The great oak doors which were slammed bv ancient tradition in the face of Black Rod when he came to the Commons, have vanished. They are now somewhere among the boulders and the bricks where the Speaker's chair and the cross-benches are lying./ The House of Lords The debating chamber of the House of Lords was. not seriously damaged. A bomb made a small hole in the roof and a larger one in the floor, but apart from the windows having been blown out the interior appeared to have suffered little. The thrones occupied by the King and Queen at the State opening of Parliament and most of the Ved leather benches on each side of the chamber remain intact. In the Law Lords' Corridor, however, a mass of fallen masonry showed that worse damage had been done on the east side of the building.

The damage, to Westminster Hall, the oldest arid most famous,of the group of Parliament buildings, seems less than was at first feared. There are some gaps in the hammer-beam roof, but the greater part of it is unharmed, and survives in all its magnificence. Other Premises Secured

The loss of the Commons debating chamber and lobby will not cause the least dislocation of parliamentary business. Early last autumn the authorities foresaw the possibility of the House being bombed, and took over alternative accommodation. There, in a hall roughly the same size, the Commons chamber was reproduced, complete with tiers 1 of raised green benches, a long table for the clerks, and a canopied chair for the Speaker. So that M.P.'s should become accustomed to the emergency arrangements the House was transferred there in November for a few sittings. It was at the emergency home of Parliament that the King opened the new session in November. He read his speech in the temporary House 'of Lords, a room only a fraction of the size of the Lords' chamber in the Palace of Westminster.