Juliet Gardiner - The Blitz - The British Under Attack

On 25 July another colour was introduced into the spectrum: a purple message would be sent to districts which, although they might be on the raiders’ flightpath, were not expected to be a target. On receipt of this, all outside lighting had to be extinguished, but factories were allowed to continue to work at night after the red message had sounded (since there would be no lights to attract raiders). It did have other effects, for example slowing down rail transport and reducing outside work.

Once the blitz started, the duration of the ‘alert’ and the ‘All Clear’ warnings was halved from two minutes to one.

In December 1937 the Air Raid Precautions Act had laid on local authorities the responsibility for ‘the protection of persons and property from injury and damage in the event of hostile attacks from the air’, and required them to submit ARP schemes for approval. There were few guidelines, though a small number of ‘model scenes’ were circulated. Part of the problem was that no one seemed entirely sure what would be needed, since there was little conclusive evidence of the effect that high-explosive bombs would have, and much more concentration was focused on the effects of poison gas than on what could be done to protect people from bomb splinters, for example. Local authorities received assurances that government funding of around 60 to 75 per cent of the cost (as much as 85 per cent in the case of poor boroughs) of ARP preparations – including shelters – would be forthcoming, providing their schemes were accepted.

In April 1938 Sir John Anderson, who was then Lord Privy Seal, had recognised that the shelter problem was ‘probably the most difficult of all the questions with which [local authorities] were confronted’. The government initially acted on two money-saving assumptions: the first was that most towns and cities would have ‘a large amount of accommodation which by adaptation and strengthening and by the use of sandbags could be made to give reasonable protection’; the second that all householders needed was advice from local officials, and that they would ‘generally do what they could to increase the natural protection of their homes’ – though in fact many of the houses in the most vulnerable target areas were poorly and cheaply constructed, and their ‘natural protection’ was all but nonexistent.

Nevertheless, the government’s policy for protection of the population during air raids was and would remain one of dispersal: it feared the consequences of hundreds of frightened people sheltering together in one place, and the effect on life and morale if such a shelter received a direct hit. This consideration was inextricably linked to the policy of evacuating ‘useless mouths’ – that is, women and children who could not materially contribute to the war effort – away from urban and industrial centres as soon as war broke out, and also led to the closing of cinemas on the outbreak of war (though most soon reopened), bans on large crowds at places of entertainment, football matches and other sporting events, and the implementation of a shelter policy.

Local authorities were required to undertake a survey of buildings in their area that could be strengthened to provide shelter accommodation, and to put in place plans to dig shelters in public open spaces. It was, however, considered inadvisable ‘to immobilise open spaces during peacetime by turning them into a trench system’, which might have been frighteningly reminiscent of the Western Front in the First World War, bearing the suggestion that the home front would indeed become the battlefront.

Meanwhile, householders were advised in a government-issue booklet, The Protection of Your Home Against Air Raids , to designate one room as a ‘refuge room’ against poison gas or bombs – ideally a basement or cellar, but if neither of these was available, ‘any room with solid walls is safer than being out in the open’. In the event of an air raid, the ‘head of the household’ should send all those under his (the male role was assumed) care with their respirators (gas masks) to the refuge room, and keep them there until he heard the ‘raiders passed’ (or ‘All Clear’, as it became known), and had satisfied himself that the danger had passed and the neighbourhood was free from gas.

The Munich crisis at the end of September 1938, when Neville Chamberlain desperately parleyed with Adolf Hitler in an attempt to find a solution to German demands for parts of Czechoslovakia, ratcheted up the need to find ways to enable Britain to ‘stand the test of imminent war’. On 24 September the Home Office issued directives to local authorities in heavily populated areas to construct deep trench shelters to accommodate 10 per cent of their residents – this work to be completed within an entirely unrealistic three days. The trenches were dug in public spaces such as parks, playing fields and recreation grounds, while householders who had sufficient space were encouraged to get digging in their gardens. A leaflet was circulated setting out how the trenches should be constructed, and owners of private land such as golf courses were approached for permission to slash into their greensward. By early October something like a million feet of trenches had been dug, but these were only ever intended to be used by people caught in a raid, not as somewhere to go to when the alert sounded – a misapprehension that was to endure throughout the blitz. The government constructed or adapted shelters for short-term use: a person’s proper place during a raid was considered to be in their home. But for many of the population, their homes offered little or no protection, and they sought refuge in public shelters – or anywhere that they believed was safer than their own usually shelter-less, basement and cellar-less homes.

Although the survey of buildings in London with a view to adapting them as shelters was more or less complete, no structural work at all had been started at the time of Munich, though sandbags started to be piled up around government buildings to protect them. By the time the crisis passed, some unsystematic work had been done in shoring up basements, but there was a general shortage of materials and a lack of precise technical information. Besides which, even if suitable buildings had been identified for shelter use, if they were privately owned the local authorities had no power to requisition them. In the majority of London boroughs, as in towns and cities throughout the country, there were still no public shelters by late September 1938.

But at the end of that year the government finally gave some substance to its policy of dispersal, announcing that ‘standard steel shelters’ – constructed of corrugated eight-hundredweight curved steel sheets, and soon to be universally known as Anderson shelters – were to be issued to two and a half million households in large towns in the most vulnerable areas. This number of shelters was reckoned to be capable of sheltering ten million people out of a potential vulnerable population of nearly twenty-seven million. The distribution started in February 1939, and anyone earning less than £250 a year could receive their shelter for free. When these had been distributed, it was intended to produce more for sale. Anderson shelters were six feet high, six feet long and four feet six inches wide, and had to be dug two feet into the ground and covered with earth or sand. Each could accommodate up to four or, at a squash, six persons, and they were fairly easy to erect. They were not bomb-proof, as the government pointed out, and would not save their occupants from a direct hit from an HE bomb, but if correctly positioned and well covered, they did offer protection against bomb fragments, blast and falling debris. But of course Anderson shelters were not suitable for everyone: you needed to have a garden.