The poor level of popular collaboration with ARP was also evident in the uneven spread of air-raid shelters across the country. The number of shelter spaces in public and domestic shelters by March 1940 was estimated at just under half of the 27.6 million people in the major cities and ports. Of this total, 39 per cent were domestic shelters of three main types: brick surface shelters, reinforced basements (with steel or wooden supports) and so-called ‘Anderson shelters’, curved metal sheets to be dug into back gardens and covered with up to a half-metre of soil, named after the engineer David Anderson who designed them.46 None of these was remotely bombproof. Neither were most of the public shelters, which consisted of basements in public buildings, public trenches (some with proper covering and reinforced sides, some not), and a number of larger, purpose-built shelters. The government remained committed throughout 1940 to the argument that it was better to have the population dispersed in small, mainly domestic shelters than gathered together in large public bunkers, where there were greater health risks and problems of public order. Public shelters supplied spaces for around 10 per cent of the vulnerable population, domestic shelters almost 40 per cent.47 This took no account of the large number of people who believed in 1940 that they had no secure access to an air-raid shelter or those who chose not to shelter at all. One opinion poll taken in July 1940 showed that 45 per cent of respondents had no domestic shelter and relied on the much smaller proportion of public shelters; a second showed that two-thirds of respondents blamed the government for not building more underground facilities.48 Research undertaken later in the war by the government scientist Solly Zuckerman revealed that of those without a domestic shelter (45 per cent of households with children, 58 per cent of those without) only 9 and 17 per cent respectively claimed to have resorted to public shelters. Among families that did not evacuate, the survey found that just over half claimed to have no shelter during air raids.49 Here lay the origins of the high level of Blitz casualties.
There were also wide differences dictated by topography and social geography in the nature and number of shelters built before the Blitz. In urban areas with unsuitable geological conditions or low-lying poorly drained ground, there were few cellars or basements and councils had to resort to large numbers of brick-built surface shelters, whose evident vulnerability made them unpopular with shelterers. In Hull the local council ordered almost 15,000 of them to be built because many working-class houses lacked gardens for Anderson shelters; even for those that did there was the constant menace of flooding. In Gateshead, across the River Tyne from Newcastle, surveys in 1939 showed that out of 31,000 households inspected, 24,000 were unsuitable for Anderson or basement shelters ‘because of the restricted nature of the backyards’, and surface shelters had to be built for 60,000 people.50 In the London borough of West Ham the low-lying ground made it difficult to install any domestic shelters, either Anderson, surface or trench, while the absence of gardens in most working-class housing ruled out outside shelter. A wartime analysis of West Ham’s Blitz observed that garden shelters were also disliked because they cut families off from the community around them; communal shelters came to be preferred for social as well as practical reasons.51 There were also numerous cases of people rejecting the offer of shelters, or refusing to allow basements or cellars to be used. In Hull the same street-by-street survey of shelter options found a mixed response from those canvassed. In one street with 26 properties, 5 householders asked for a shelter, 9 refused, 3 had no available space, 2 were shops and 7 elicited no reply. Even when the canvass of the whole city was complete, 1,279 households cancelled their initial request.52 When York civil defence services got the same response, the ARP committee insisted that people should be compelled to make a statement explaining why they had refused a shelter. Those who cancelled a request were to be denied any shelter in the future. Almost 10 per cent of Anderson shelters delivered were rejected on delivery.53
The problems of supplying shelters in the most vulnerable city-centre areas, with cramped streets, small backyards, narrow pavements and a working population immediately distrustful of the officials who canvassed them, highlighted the complex relationship between state and people occasioned by the menace of bombing. What should have been a straightforward consensus on providing effective shelter and emergency care became an area for political negotiation and public persuasion. Neither state nor community had any experience to go on, and although they shared an interest in protection from bombing, it was hard to enforce regulations or to participate willingly in the absence of any bombs. This partly explains why the shelters that were provided were so poorly resourced. Many were badly constructed because of shortages of material, particularly cement, and the reliance on local contractors, whose construction work varied widely in quality and cost. Little thought seems to have been given to what should be inside the shelters; almost all lacked bunks, and most had no toilet facilities, heating or effective light. The cost of even this degree of shelter was enormous. Local records show that civil defence expenditure increased dramatically between 1939 and 1940. In Hull expenditure was £18,200 in 1938–9 but £69,400 in 1939–40. In Newcastle the cost in 1938–9 was £18,600 but in 1939–40 was £244,000 and in 1940–41, £450,800.54 The impact on the local economy was immediate and local councils found themselves competing for scarce resources and waiting months or more for the supply of civil defence equipment. What might be defined as a ‘civil defence economy’ was forced to compete with the pressing demands for military supplies. By the autumn of 1940 the Ministry of Home Security was asking for one-third of all cement production for shelters, but was allocated just 12 per cent. Churchill, who wanted priority for shelters to meet his promise that people might ‘sleep as safe as possible’, was told that priority had to be given to war production and the defence ministries, whose requirements were needed to protect the country from invasion.55
The relationship between state and people was also severely tested over the issues of air-raid alarms and the blackout. The alarm system was operated by the Royal Air Force, which reserved the right to use its advance intelligence of approaching aircraft, secured by radar and the Observer Corps, to decide when an alarm should be sounded. The system at the start of the war was a complex one. The country was divided into 111 warning districts and only those where the attacking aircraft seemed to be heading would be given first a restricted alert that aircraft were approaching (yellow), then a full alarm which triggered the sirens (red), followed by a ‘raiders passed’ message (green) and a final ‘cancel caution’ (white), when the state of alarm was ended.56 This system raised many difficulties. German attacks were often small-scale and scattered, which made it difficult to decide when and where to sound the alarm. The policy was generally to avoid sounding an alarm for a small number of aircraft, but this meant that bombing might occur with no siren at all, which provoked public resentment. In July 1940 the manager of the National Oil Refinery at Llandarcy in South Wales complained that his plant had been bombed three times without receiving even a yellow warning. In Liverpool in August bombs dropped on Merseyside after the all-clear, leaving workers reluctant to leave the shelters on ‘green’. ‘The general opinion,’ wrote Liverpool’s chief constable, ‘is that the warning system is not to be relied on.’57 The issuing of indiscriminate red alerts, on the other hand, stopped all work by day or by night and sharply reduced war production. Since the red alerts often produced no raid on most of the area where they were issued, people began to ignore them. In July 1940 the system was modified. The ‘red’ became an ‘alert’, when bombers were active but not yet a direct threat, while the alarm came only minutes before an attack. Workers were expected to continue working during an alert and to retreat to shelter only when roof-spotters reported approaching aircraft or could hear nearby gunfire. The reduction in alarms was welcome, though it still meant that bombs might fall without warning, while workers took to the role of roof-spotter with mixed enthusiasm.58
The blackout was in ge
neral a more successful measure, though it imposed on the whole of Britain an exceptional experience for almost six years of war. Detailed regulations for street lighting and vehicle lighting, instructions to paint white lines on kerbs and other obstacles, stringent scrutiny of blacked-out windows, all succeeded in creating an effectively darkened but navigable environment. In cities, air-raid wardens patrolled from day one of the war to report any chink of light, and because it was an offence, unlike other civil defence regulations, persistent offenders were fined.59 This even extended to government departments where it was regularly reported that they failed to show a good example to the community. Officials tried to claim Crown immunity but the police insisted on charging someone for each offence. A senior officer was appointed in each government building, answerable in court for any negligence; it was agreed that any subsequent fine would be paid for by the government employer.60 The blackout was in many ways the most obtrusive of civil defence measures for it had to be observed daily and completely. ‘The lack of ventilation was stifling in hot weather,’ wrote the Warwickshire housewife, Clara Milburn, in her wartime diary, ‘but it is wonderful how one can conform to an order when it is absolutely necessary.’61 Enforcement of the blackout nevertheless provoked tensions with the wardens. Civil defence personnel had no right of arrest, except for those who were also enrolled as special constables or auxiliary policemen. Arguments over the blackout or shelter provision seem to have been widespread. ‘At present,’ noted a Ministry of Health official in autumn 1940, ‘anyone can assault an ARP warden.’ His or her only remedy was to take out a private lawsuit.62
The tensions were at their highest through the long months of waiting for the bombing to start. On the one hand, some of the public thought that civil defence personnel were shirkers, men who ought to be in the armed forces (an irony given the hostility to employing conscientious objectors). The Ministry of Information was so concerned with the popular attitude to civil defence workers that in June, Under-Secretary of State Harold Nicolson recommended a concerted propaganda drive to restore confidence in ARP and ‘implicit obedience to the wardens’.63 On the other hand, civil defence personnel became restless and disillusioned by almost a year of inactivity. In Hampstead it was reported that volunteer enthusiasm was on the wane by November 1939, exacerbated by long hours of unpaid work and poorly furnished ARP posts. Wardens were resigning at the rate of eight a day.64 The Regional Commissioner for the Northern Region later admitted to an audience that the monotony of standing-by for months had been ‘the first enemy to be fought’.65 When the first bombs dropped in late June and some civil defence services found themselves in action, the Ministry of Home Security announced to the nation that the fourth arm of the services alongside the army, navy and air force had finally gone into action. ‘You’ve had a long period of waiting,’ ran the broadcast. ‘Sometimes your purpose has been misunderstood.’66 The preparation to meet the bombing war was nevertheless mixed: limited evacuation, disliked by many; a poor level of shelter provision with almost no amenities in place; an alarm system which invited distrust; emergency services untested in the crucible of home-front war.
RESCUE AND SHELTER
When the bombing began in earnest from August 1940 its effects were not uniform. Across the country the experience of bombing varied according to the strategy pursued by the enemy. Most of the population experienced alarms and disturbed sleep, but more than half were never bombed, and many of those towns and cities on which bombs fell were the victims just once or twice of stray or jettisoned bombloads. In rural areas bombing was a very occasional interruption. In North Devon, for example, a handful of bombs fell on villages which were on the flightpath to South Wales, and a bomb on Barnstaple, the largest town, left a crater in a road. Villagers watched the burning port of Plymouth in the far distance or went as bomb tourists to inspect the damage in local towns. The only three wartime fatalities in the region were the result of crashed RAF aircraft.67
It was the ports and cities on the German Air Force priority lists which suffered repeated and heavy bombing. Even small coastal towns were not immune if they were on the German routes. Ramsgate on the Kent coast, ‘that defenceless watering place’ Churchill called it, had 62 raids between 1940 and 1944; many of the attacks were made by only one or two aircraft and on some occasions the handful of bombs fell into the sea or on the local golf course. The one major and deliberate raid was on 24 August 1940. Over the course of the war 76 townspeople were killed.68 The port of Hull by contrast was deliberately targeted 84 times, 20 modest raids in 1940, 10 heavy raids in 1941, and then hit-and-run raids until March 1945, all at the cost of 1,104 dead.69 Plymouth, hit 59 times between July 1940 and April 1944 and subject to 602 air-raid alerts, claimed to be proportionately the ‘worst blitzed city’, with 1,172 dead. The total number of damaged housing units exceeded the city’s entire pre-war total because repaired houses were hit again, sometimes two or three times.70 The impact on major conurbations also differed widely. In the northern region there were 118 raids in 1940, 131 in 1941, but thereafter only 49 small raids. In Newcastle these resulted in 141 deaths and in Sunderland 273, yet in Gateshead, across the river from Newcastle, there were only five fatalities and in Durham and in Darlington, both at the heart of the nearby coalfield region, there was not one.71 The overall pattern of bombing in Britain presented a patchy and uneven picture both geographically and chronologically.
The priority throughout the period popularly known as the Blitz (a term mistakenly derived from the German Blitzkrieg, or lightning war) was to limit casualties either by temporary or permanent evacuation of the bombed area or through shelter and rescue. The effort to ensure that vulnerable women and children were evacuated was renewed as bombing began, but there remained extensive resistance to the transfer. A study of ten London boroughs found that among the most heavily bombed quarters of central London the percentage of households affected by evacuation ranged from 20 per cent in West Ham to 11 per cent in Islington. The proportion in suburban Barnes was only 8 per cent.72 From the whole London area, now the object of sustained daily bombing, only 20,500 children were moved in September, and in December only 760. By September 1941 there were just 60,000 unaccompanied evacuee children from a population of over 7 million. In December 1940 the Minister of Health, Malcolm MacDonald, concluded in a report for the government civil defence executive committee that there was no need to compel children to leave the capital: ‘the general picture is that London children are healthy and are even less affected by bombing than adults’.73 By the spring of 1941, from the whole country, there were 1.368 million evacuated children, babies and mothers, teachers, disabled and blind, a lower figure than in 1939; some had remained in the reception areas since 1939, others joined in what was called a ‘trickle evacuation’ over the winter months, many from cities outside London. The number of unofficial or unassisted evacuees has been difficult to estimate but may well have been greater than the number who left under official aegis. By 1941 the population of Greater London had fallen by one-fifth. Many private evacuees could be found among better-off households which could bear the cost of moving to the country or a long sojourn in a hotel. In September Home Intelligence reported that it was impossible to get a hotel room anywhere within 70 miles of London.74
Temporary evacuation after a raid was a common and rational response to the impact of heavy bomb attack, but it was frowned on by the authorities. ‘Trekking’, as it came to be called, was regarded as a social menace and a threat to wartime productivity. Those who either would not or could not evacuate formally were encouraged to stay put. ‘It is undesirable,’ ran a Ministry of Home Security report from March 1941, ‘that considerable numbers of people … should become a night vagrant population.’75 Yet from the start of the Blitz urban populations voted with their feet. Workers from the dock areas of London after the first major attacks tried to reach safer areas at night. Home Intelligence warned of ‘nerves cracking from constant ordeals’. A large part of t
he population of Plymouth and Southampton slept in the country or in tents after the first raids; even by the spring some 10,000 people, led by the local mayor, trekked out of Southampton every night, in Plymouth around 6,000–7,000. After the heavy raiding of Liverpool, 50,000 dockworkers were bussed in and out of the city. In Clydebank after the raids in spring 1941, thousands trekked to the railway tunnel at Greenock while 2,000 slept in the open on local hillsides. A total of nearly 40,000 people eventually left the stricken city.76 These evacuations were in many cases brief and improvised, affected by the pattern of raiding, but they did raise difficult issues of temporary accommodation and feeding, and the government reluctantly had to concede the establishment of ‘cushion areas’ around the worst-affected cities, where temporary billets could be found and Rest Centres and canteens provided.
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