ST PAUL'S SURVIVES, 1940
silver gelatin print
24.3 x 28.2cm
unframed

Provenance
Private Collection, UK
By descent from the above to the present owner

Few photographs have come to embody the Blitz spirit so perfectly as Herbert Mason's view of St Paul's Survives, the cathedral’s majestic cupola rising from the smoke and fire. It is for many the most important photograph of the Second World War, embodying hope, perseverance, and the triumph of good over evil. It was taken on the night of 29th December 1940, from the roof of the Daily Mail building in Northcliffe House, where Mason was serving as a rooftop firewatcher.

London bore the sustained weight of the Luftwaffe's bombing campaign, suffering its onslaught from the skies on seventy one individual occasions, including a period of fifty seven consecutive nights of destruction. However the assault on the city that night proved to be the most ferocious raid of the entire Blitz. Over 100 tons of high explosive and 22,000 incendiaries were dropped. In just a few hours thousands of buildings and hundreds of years of urban history were obliterated.

"Into the dark shadowed spaces below us, while we watched, whole batches of incendiary bombs fell…We saw two dozen go off in two seconds…The greatest of all the fires was directly in front of us. Flames seemed to whip hundreds of feet into the air. Pinkish-white smoke ballooned upward in a great cloud, and out of this cloud there gradually took shape...the gigantic dome of St Paul’s Cathedral…It stood there in its enormous proportions – growing slowly clearer and clearer, the way objects take shape at dawn. It was like a picture of some miraculous figure that appears before peace-hungry soldiers on a battlefield." Ernie Pyle, American journalist