During the spring of 1939 a network of Regional Commissioners was established to compensate for the difficulties local authorities might experience, and although their executive responsibilities were defined rather inexactly, they represented an important link once war had broken out between the main ministries involved in civil defence or emergency work and the local ARP organizations. There were eventually twelve Civil Defence Regions covering the entire country, each with a major headquarters in a designated city and a large staff responsible for coordinating the welfare and emergency services. Because of its size and importance, London was awarded five commissioners.11 The whole structure was to be controlled by the British Home Secretary, who on the outbreak of war would also hold the newly created post of Minister of Home Security. The man eventually chosen for this dual role was Sir John Anderson, a much-respected career civil servant, austere, sharp-minded and principled, but remote from the teeming city populations now under his care. The Ministry was activated on 4 September 1939.12 The strength of the British wartime system rested on these clear ligaments linking local and central government and the fortunate absence of duplication of effort, but its success rested a great deal on the capacity of local civilian officials to respond to the strenuous demands of war, and this could by no means be taken for granted.
Local authorities built up their civil defence organization with no standard pattern and no common schedule. In those urban areas where there was strong political resistance from a wide spectrum of pacifist and anti-war groups to civil defence as an expression of militarism and war preparation, it proved possible to block the development of effective organization until close to the start of the war. Other authorities began preparation several years before it became a legal obligation. When the City Engineer in Hull wrote a circular letter to other urban authorities in early 1938 to find out what progress they had made with civil defence measures, he found schemes already in existence in Walsall, Doncaster, Coventry, Ealing, Stoke Newington, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and Birmingham, but no schemes at all in Sunderland, Bradford, York, Rotherham, Sheffield, Middlesborough and half a dozen other industrial cities. The most comprehensive schemes had been developed as early as 1935 in Coventry and Newcastle, covering every potential aspect of emergency work, training and public education; major schemes in Leeds and Manchester were ready by the autumn of 1936. Most cities had a scheme in place by the time of the Munich Agreement, in late September 1938.13
To cope with the new demands, local authorities appointed a full-time ARP controller, but much of the work was carried out by men, and occasionally women, who combined civil defence functions with their other duties. The key institution was the Control Room, which was usually set up in the local town hall in a bomb-safe basement, linked by telephone to other emergency centres or served by a troop of young messengers recruited from uniformed youth groups. By the outbreak of war, progress in constructing a functioning civil defence organization differed widely between areas, though the local records show that it was seldom ideal. In the London borough of Hampstead the ARP services were reported to be ready to function fully in an emergency by July 1939 and all gas masks had been issued to the population. The Control Room and first-Aid posts were fully manned round the clock from 31 August, but out of the planned 1,100 air-raid wardens only 220 were in place and from 45 cycle messengers, only three.14 In York, less menaced than London, progress was even slower. By October the city’s Emergency Committee had still not put up signs showing where warden posts and air-raid shelters could be found, a major domestic shelter programme had only just begun, gas masks had not yet been fully distributed for babies and children, and a full-time ARP officer had not yet been appointed. Out of 1,700 warden volunteers only 964 were effective and 500 had disappeared since the outbreak of war.15
The most difficult issue confronting local authorities was the recruitment of a sufficient number of local volunteers to man the civil defence and emergency services. A proportion of all jobs were full-time and in many cases well paid, attractive to a generation still experiencing relatively high unemployment. In Hampstead the post of principal assistant in the ARP department was advertised at £450 a year and drew 251 applications (a skilled worker earned perhaps £250). Less responsible posts still carried generous salaries of £250–£300 a year.16 It was harder to secure full-time and part-time volunteers. Although large numbers did come forward, inspired by the threat of a real war, most local civil defence forces were always short of their full establishment. When the bombing began in earnest in the late summer of 1940, many local authorities found themselves forced to accept help from voluntary organizations which had not been included in civil defence planning. In this case the British tradition of voluntarism cut both ways, encouraging men and women to come forward as wardens, nurses, firemen and rescue workers but at the same time alienating those who resented the transformation of volunteers into a disciplined and state-directed force. Nevertheless by the summer of 1940 out of a required establishment of 803,963 civil defence personnel nationwide, there were 626,149 in place, one-fifth of them employed full-time, the rest volunteers. A further 353,740 were part-timers on call in an emergency but not part of the enrolled service, including many workers who were recruited by factories and businesses to undertake air-raid duties in an emergency.17
These figures did not include two organizations central to the effective working of the emergency services later in the year: the fire brigades and the Women’s Voluntary Services. The regular fire services had always relied on extensive volunteer or part-time participation even in major urban areas. In 1937 there were approximately 5,000 full-time regular firemen who could not possibly cope with the requirements of heavy bombing raids on their own. The government ordered local authorities to set up an Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS) in 1938 to meet the possible threat of bombing, and by the outbreak of war the total fire service had swollen dramatically to 75,000 full-timers, around 85 per cent of them auxiliaries.18 By the end of 1940 there were altogether 85,821 full-time and 139,300 part-time firemen, of which the AFS made up 67,024 and 125,973 respectively.19 Relations between the two forces were notoriously poor, since many of the auxiliaries were from professional or clerical backgrounds while the regular firemen were overwhelmingly ex-servicemen or policemen. The author Henry Green, an early pre-war recruit, recalled the hostility in his wartime novel of life in the fire service, Caught: ‘there’s a prejudice against you lads,’ the station officer tells him, ‘you might as well know’.20 The prejudice extended to women, who were introduced in significant numbers by the end of 1940, and to conscientious objectors who tried to join in 1940 when tribunals directed them to non-combatant jobs. In June 1940 the London Fire Brigade refused pacifist recruits on the grounds that they would be resented by the former soldiers among the regulars. The London Ambulance Service was also instructed to reject pacifist applicants and to weed out those with pacifist views among their ranks. The London County Council formally banned the employment of conscientious objectors on all civil defence duties the same month; a further 51 local authorities in England endorsed the same ban.21
Like the Auxiliary Fire Service, the Women’s Voluntary Services for Air Raid Precautions (usually simply the Women’s Voluntary Services, WVS) was established in response to the growing international crisis in 1938 and the imminent prospect of war. Launched on 8 June 1938 by the Dowager Marchioness of Reading at the suggestion of Neville Chamberlain, the organization had over 32,000 volunteers by the end of the year from all over the country, and eventually almost 1 million members.22 Though the WVS was not strictly a public institution, the government provided funds and supported its activities. The initial object had been to recruit potential female air-raid personnel, but the organization quickly outgrew this purpose to provide a broad-based national welfare and relief service staffed and run entirely by volunteers. The distance from regular civil defence work was incorporated in a distinctive WVS uniform of green tweed suits and felt hats. There w
ere WVS Centres set up in most cities where women were recruited and trained. Lecture courses were organized on air-raid precautions, yet the women were not expected to administer first aid or extinguish incendiaries but to supply advice, set up and run Rest Centres, and to feed the homeless and disorientated victims of bomb attack. Demonstrations were organized of ‘street cooking’ to show how primitive barbeques set up in the aftermath of a raid could provide hundreds of wholesome meals.23 The WVS also ran local ‘Housewives’ Conferences’ to try to spread the circle of volunteers by showing films or theatrical sketches of housewives in action. In many areas women who were unwilling or unable to become full-time WVS volunteers set up neighbourhood networks. In Hull a League of Good Neighbours was organized early in 1940 to help the local air-raid wardens by providing emergency shelters, buckets of water on the doorstep, blankets and plenty of hot drinks. A bright yellow poster printed with the words ‘Good Neighbour’ was displayed in the windows of more than a thousand Hull homes.24
The effort to recruit women focused on areas popularly perceived to be women’s work – feeding, comforting, supplying household advice and goods. Yet from the outset it was clear that the civil defence services would not be able to recruit enough able-bodied men and would have to extend the service to women. This involved other judgements about the capability of women to fulfil civil defence roles. In York a recruitment drive to find women wardens specified that they should be ‘of a reliable and worthwhile type’ and should only be allowed to man posts on the outskirts of the town.25 In Hull, where around one-fifth of all wardens were women, the duties of female wardens were defined in gender terms: keeping information on all the women resident in the air-raid sector, help with expectant mothers and the disabled, duty at Rest Centres, demonstration of child and infant gas masks, and relief for male wardens at posts during the day, when raiding was unlikely to happen.26 In Newcastle the recruitment and appointment of air-raid shelter wardens was based on the ratio that three female wardens were equivalent to two males, seven women equivalent to five men; and so on. Women civil defence workers were paid 70 per cent of the men’s rate, and received less compensation for injuries.27 The recruitment of women was nevertheless essential. By June 1940 there were 151,000 employed full-time or part-time in ARP, and 158,000 in ambulance and first-aid work, over 72 per cent of the service.28 Wartime accounts of the Blitz are full of stories of female heroism and stoical resolve. In Post D, John Strachey, the socialist politician and temporary air-raid warden in Chelsea, records a woman warden who extinguished 11 incendiary bombs on her own as they scattered around Chelsea Hospital.29 The true heroes of Strachey’s account are the imperturbable women who run his air-raid post. A long survey of the Blitz compiled by the Air Ministry in the autumn of 1941 observed that women wardens in general reacted more sensibly to the grim reality of death and mutilation than men. They also took casualties. In the civil defence services 618 women were killed or seriously injured over the course of the war; 102 women from the WVS were killed during the Blitz.30
All of these different services had to be forged into a home-front fighting force with high levels of discipline and paramilitary practices and equipment. The militarization of civil defence was evidently helped by the fact that many of those who ran it or were recruited to its ranks had experience of military service in the Great War or had been career servicemen. One of the first wardens killed in Hull, in July 1940, was an ‘Old Contemptible’ from the British Army expeditionary force of August 1914, who had lived through the entire first war.31 Among the Regional Commissioners and their assistants there were eight generals, one admiral and nine other senior naval and army officers. In York the local ARP controller was a lieutenant general; an inspection of York civil defences in April 1940 was carried out by the national inspector of training and the regional training officer, the first an army captain, the second an admiral.32 Some authorities unsuccessfully petitioned the Ministry of Home Security in September 1939 to create a genuinely paramilitary force with officers and NCOs.33 At the least, the various civil defence services were keen to be in uniform as an indication of their status and a means of forging a distinct identity. ‘Uniform,’ ran a London Civil Defence Region circular, ‘has a value of its own … irrespective of the physique or personality of the wearer.’34 The government was slow to respond to the local pressure to create uniformed services, partly because of the cost, but once the bombing started the metal helmets and armlets originally made available were supplemented by ever more elaborate uniforms. For men this included blue overalls, military-style blouses and trousers, greatcoats, leather boots and berets; for women, greatcoats, serge jackets and skirts, stout shoes, felt hats, raincoats, fleece linings and peaked caps.35 The extravagant lists of equipment required by civil defence workers lacked only weapons. By the summer of 1940 civil defence personnel were permitted to join in local military parades to display their claim to be the fourth service.
The quasi-military character of the civil defence service extended to the training programmes first set up in the 1930s and the joint exercises civil defence personnel were required to take part in before the onset of the bombing. The training was undertaken both at a local level and in the main training centres set up by the Home Office before the war. During the war advanced courses were run from two Home Security schools, at Falfield in Gloucestershire and Easingwold in Yorkshire, supplemented by regional schools in each of the civil defence areas. Much of the early training concentrated on preparation for gas attack, which until 1940 was still regarded as the more serious threat. In most of the syllabi set up for ARP personnel, anti-gas lessons greatly outnumbered instruction on dealing with high-explosive and incendiary bombs. At Stoke Newington in north London eight out of nine ARP lectures for recruits covered gas (‘Nature and Property of Blister Gases’, ‘Protection of Eyes and Lungs’, ‘Gas Protection of Buildings’; and so on), while most of the training equipment consisted of imitation gas bombs, a smelling set of war gas specimens, and tins of mustard oil and lewisite oil to substitute for the real thing.36 In the summer of 1939 the Hull ARP organization ran regular training demonstrations of bombs and their effects in local parks; after detonating a miniature but very noisy high-explosive bomb, the training focused on gas bombs. Persistent gases (mustard gas and lewisite) were identified by smell; non-persistent gases were released in small quantities and the trainees warned to stand upwind while they observed its passage.37 The Home Office undertook to supply ‘Mobile Gas Chambers’ – vans converted for gas training – while some authorities set up intimidating ‘gas chambers’ where the public could test whether their gas masks were in working order.38
In the year or so before the onset of the Blitz civil defence personnel moved from training to practice. Regular exercises were held on every aspect from the blackout to evacuation. Since many of these exercises also depended on the cooperation of the population, they were a test of how disciplined the larger civilian body might be. This sometimes had mixed results. The evacuation practice held on 26 August 1939 to prepare schoolchildren and parents for the real thing met with a low turnout, for schools were still on vacation.39 Blackout practices began from the mid-1930s. Usually held in the middle of the night when most people were fast asleep, they seem generally to have been judged a success. A large blackout test in Leicester in January 1938 also involved mobilizing gas decontamination squads and firemen, although the effort to judge it from the air was inhibited by steady drizzle. A large-scale practice in the Manchester area in spring 1939 was given a higher degree of verisimilitude by the decision of Salford ARP to use fireworks and a controlled explosion to simulate a raid, followed by the demolition of an old property block to mimic bomb destruction.40 With the outbreak of war, combined exercises for all the emergency services (fire, ARP, first-aid, rescue and demolition) took place on a regular basis. In York there were eleven practices in November 1939 alone; in the London Region major exercises were held throughout the Phoney War, explained in detail
in operational orders that replicated military operations. Like military exercises, civil defence practice was run by umpires who awarded points to successful teams and observed deficiencies.41 Whether the practices really prepared the domestic front line for what was to come is difficult to judge. ‘We come here ready for at least death,’ complains Henry Green’s autobiographical hero, ‘and then we get into trouble for not doing under our beds.’ Green found the months of inactivity harder to bear than the real thing. ‘Now it’s on us,’ he continued, ‘not nearly as bad as we thought.’42
The period of almost a year between the outbreak of war and the onset of heavy city bombing exposed many problems in defending a large urban population against the anticipated horrors of air attack. Though the civil defence organization was largely in place by the end of the summer of 1940, and subject to regular rehearsals, the behaviour of the wider population, who were only compelled by law to comply with the blackout regulations but with no other aspect of ARP, was open to wide variation. The carrying of gas masks, almost universal at the onset of hostilities, declined rapidly. By March 1940 only 1 per cent of Londoners could be observed with them. Even after the onset of the Blitz, Factory Inspectors found many workers defying the instruction to carry their gas mask to work; the Ministry of Labour had to remind all firms to hold respirator practice at least once a week, preferably just before the dinner hour.43
Popular compliance with evacuation also declined sharply over the course of 1939–40 as homesick mothers and children returned to their families and homes. On 1 September 1939 a vast exodus of 1,473,500 people left the threatened cities to be rehoused in small town and rural areas – unaccompanied children, mothers with babies and pre-school infants, the disabled, the blind, and pregnant women.44 This official transfer was accompanied by voluntary evacuation by those (generally wealthier) whose presence in the cities was not required by the war effort. The foster households were paid 10s 6d per week for each child (8s 6d if there were two children); those aged 16 or over yielded 15s each, but many were set to work on farms and in other small businesses to pay for their keep. The bulk of evacuees chose to return home, around 900,000 by January 1940. A large number had not even evacuated in September 1939. In London, for example, only 34 per cent of eligible schoolchildren actually left the city in 1939, in Birmingham only 14 per cent. By May 1940 there were only 254,000 schoolchildren still evacuated in the whole country. Poor organization, an absence of effective welfare facilities and a failure to make adequate health inspections all combined to undermine the initial plan. So hostile were many city-dwellers to repeating the experience that a new government plan to register all children for evacuation when the bombing really began met with wide indifference; over 1 million parents refused to register when asked or failed to respond at all. The effort to get the most vulnerable members of the urban community into relatively safer reception areas collapsed.45
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 19