The Blitz: The British Under Attack

3 Sheltering

What a domestic sort of war this is … it happens in the kitchen, on landings, beside washing-baskets; it comes to us without stirring a yard from our own doorsteps to meet it. Even its catastrophes are made terrible not by strangeness but by familiarity.

John Strachey, Post D (1941)

On the night of 12 September Whitehall was hit during a raid, and the Ministry of Transport was damaged by high-explosive bombs. Plans had already been made to move the Cabinet and the chiefs of staff to a citadel in the basement of the GPO’s research centre in Dollis Hill in north-west London (code-named ‘Paddock’) if Whitehall were to be bombed out, though other options had been considered, including various reinforced-concrete buildings close to Whitehall, such as a rotunda in Horseferry Road. On 20 September Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine, accompanied by Jock Colville, went to look over what might be their new London home. They inspected the flats and the ‘deep underground rooms safe from the biggest bomb, where the Cabinet and its satellites (e.g. me) would work and if necessary sleep’, wrote Colville. ‘They are impressive but rather forbidding; I suppose if the present intensive bombing continues we must get used to being troglodytes (“trogs” as the PM puts it). I begin to understand what the early Christians must have felt about living in the Catacombs.’

In fact the PM would prove to be only an occasional and somewhat peripatetic ‘trog’, as in the early days of the blitz he experimented to find what suited him best, somewhat to the alarm of his staff. One member of his private office, John Peck, wrote a spoof memo under the Churchillesque heading ‘ACTION THIS DAY’:

Pray let six new offices be fitted for my use, in Selfridge’s, Lambeth Palace, Stanmore, Tooting Bec, the Palladium and Mile End Road. I will inform you at 6 each evening at which offices I shall dine, work and sleep. Accommodation will be required for Mrs Churchill, two shorthand typists, three secretaries and Nelson [the resident black cat at No. 10, of which Churchill had grown fond]. There should be a shelter for all and a place for me to watch air-raids from the roof. This should be completed by Monday. There is to be no hammering during office hours, that is between 7am and 3am. WSC. 31.10.40.

In the event Churchill spent most of his working day at 10 Downing Street, occasionally repairing for the night to the underground Cabinet War Rooms, just off Whitehall, the nerve centre from which, in his words, he ‘directed the war’, or to London Underground’s offices housed in Down Street underground station in Mayfair, on the Piccadilly Line between Dover Street (now Green Park) and Hyde Park Corner stations, which had been closed in 1932 and adapted as offices for the Railway Executive Committee. This was considered to be safe, and boasted a large dining room where the food was reputed to be excellent, though it could be noisy as underground trains rattled past.

In December 1940 the Churchills moved into a ground-floor flat in the No. 10 annexe above the Cabinet War Rooms. It was hardly bomb-proof, but it was more robust than No. 10 itself, and was at least fitted with heavy steel shutters that could be closed during an air raid. Apart from Winston’s occasional excursions underground, it was in this ex-typing pool that the couple largely saw out the war.

The question of how best to protect the public during air raids was one that had exercised government and civil servants for some time. It had long been estimated that each ton of high-explosives dropped on a congested area would cause as many as fifty casualties, and the RAF had reckoned that on average seven hundred tons of bombs would be dropped daily, although in the first few days in an effort to achieve a ‘knock-out blow’ the figure was more likely to be nearer 950 tons; or perhaps the Germans would decide on a week-long attrition that would deliver as much as 3,500 tons on London in the first twenty-four hours. An indication of the effects of intense air raids was brought sickeningly home to many British people as they sat in their cinema seats watching newsreels of the bombing of Barcelona and Bilbao during the Spanish Civil War.

A vital matter was to give the public warning of an impending air raid. The country had been divided into 111 warning districts (based on telephone areas rather than local authority boundaries), and messages about approaching enemy aircraft were originated by RAF Fighter Command, which, using direct telephone lines, cascaded the warning to control centres. These would then transmit the message in strict order of priority to those on the warning list: government offices, military establishments, the police, Civil Defence HQs, fire brigades and large industrial concerns in particular areas.

Each stage of alert was distinguished by a different colour code-name. A yellow message was the ‘Preliminary Caution’, meaning that enemy planes were estimated to be about twenty-two minutes’ flying time away. This message was confidential, and the public would not have been aware of its receipt since those receiving it were instructed ‘to take the necessary precautions in as unobtrusive way as possible’. A red message, the ‘Action Warning’, was relayed when the planes were twelve minutes’ flying time away. This was the signal for the police to activate the air-raid sirens in their district, which emitted a low, moaning sound that rose to a querulous wail (a ‘wailing banshee’, in Churchill’s phrase), alerting the public to the fact that a raid was imminent and that they should seek shelter. Fighter Command finally sent the green message, ‘All Clear’, indicating ‘Raiders Passed’; for this the sirens sounded a steady two-minute note.

In July 1940 the government shifted the balance from safety first to production first, as the war effort was being disrupted by workers unnecessarily spending unproductive hours in shelters, particularly during daytime raids, when an alert might last for three or four hours. The Home Secretary and Minister for Home Security Sir John Anderson announced that ‘Workers engaged in war production should be encouraged … to continue at work after a public air-raid warning until it is clear that an enemy attack is actually imminent in their neighbourhood.’ This was to be made practicable by the recruitment of roof spotters, who would alert the workers when enemy planes were sufficiently close for them to need to take shelter.

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.

Trenches dug at the time of Munich were inspected and, if suitably sited, were redug if necessary to four feet deep, lined with concrete or steel and their entrances closed. But they had no sanitary arrangements, or even duckboard flooring, making them unsuitable for night-long occupation – though this often happened – were cold, and apt to become waterlogged. In any case, once the Munich crisis had passed, many local authorities had filled in their trenches and were reluctant to start digging again.

On 15 March 1939 German troops occupied Prague, in direct contravention of the Munich Agreement. Civil defence measures in Britain were immediately escalated. A new Civil Defence Bill conferred wide-ranging peacetime powers on local authorities that included the right to designate buildings as public shelters – shops, for example: Dickins & Jones in Regent Street had a much-sought-after basement shelter, as did D.H. Evans in Oxford Street – or clubs or institutes, against the wish of the owner if necessary, and to do whatever structural work was required, paying compensation if appropriate. Those people with incomes that entitled them to a government-issue Anderson shelter were supplied free of charge with materials to strengthen their ‘refuge room’ if they had no space for an external shelter, and the local authority would be reimbursed for the cost of doing the work. New buildings had to incorporate spaces for shelters, and employers with a workforce of fifty or more in a designated target area were obliged to provide shelter accommodation (and to organise ARP services) for their employees; they would receive government funding to help pay for this. Smaller firms in the same areas could apply for funding to safeguard their workforces.

Anderson shelters and reinforced basements were not going to provide protection for all those in vulnerable areas, so in May 1939 money was made available for materials for local authorities to build public outdoor shelters (though they had to foot the bill for the construction costs). For blocks of flats where there was no suitable shelter accommodation for all the residents, and where most were not eligible for free shelters, the landlord could be compelled to build one if petitioned to do so by more than 50 per cent of the tenants, and could recoup the cost by raising all the rents.

Despite these initiatives, by September 1939 shelter provision was lamentably behind schedule. There was a shortfall of about a million of the promised Anderson shelters (those delivered were optimistically pronounced to provide protection for 60,000 people), meaning that even in what were believed to be the most dangerous areas many people had no shelters, and none were offered for sale until the following month. These cost between £6.14s and £10.18s – easy terms available. However, the take-up was limited – by April 1940 fewer than a thousand had been bought, while the basement-strengthening programme had hardly started.

In some places the provision of public shelters was more advanced: about three-quarters of the trenches dug at the time of Munich had been reinforced, the City of London reported that its public-shelter-building programme was complete, and on the eve of war most cities exercised their power to requisition suitable sites. Notices proclaiming ‘Public Shelter’ appeared on various buildings – some more suitable than others. At the end of August 1939, in tardy recognition of this unsatisfactory provision, the government urged local authorities to provide purpose-built public shelters, above-ground ‘heavily protected’ brick and concrete constructions capable of holding up to fifty people.

Fortunately, the eight-month respite of the ‘phoney war’, which effectively lasted until May 1940, meant that shelter provision could continue in wartime. However, the materials needed for shelters were now urgently required for military purposes. Smaller Anderson shelters, only four feet five inches long, were now produced and pronounced suitable for four persons, while the original ‘standard’ Anderson was redesignated as large enough for six people, with an ‘extension’ tacked on to allow it to accommodate up to ten if necessary. Finally, in April 1940, the production of Anderson shelters was suspended altogether, but by the start of the blitz nearly two and a half million had been distributed, theoretically providing shelter for 12.5 million people. Many gardens, however, were littered with unerected Anderson shelters, now rusting and near to useless. Some enterprising boroughs such as Hackney in east London, under its redoubtable ARP Controller Dr Richard Tee, organised teams of council workmen or volunteers to help householders, and the Bristol Civil Defence Area had taken a similar initiative, but the government decided that sterner measures were needed to compel self-help. From May 1940, under the terms of Defence Regulation 23B, everyone who had been issued with an Anderson shelter had ten days in which to erect it and cover it in the requisite manner, or to report to their local authority that they had not done so. If they did not, and could not show that they were genuinely incapable of doing so, the steel sheets would be collected and issued to another household.

Meanwhile the government was pressing forward with the provision of public communal shelters, intended to accommodate twelve or so families from nearby properties, which it fully funded. After the Russian bombing of Finland in the winter of 1939–40 it was decided that railway stations would be likely targets, so shelters capable of sheltering the equivalent of ten minutes’ flow of passengers at peak travel times needed be provided at them. These were started at all London termini, but were far from completion when the blitz started.

By the start of the blitz, of the 27.5 million people living in ‘specified areas’ (that is, those urban and industrial centres considered particularly likely to be attacked, from which evacuation had been recommended), 17.5 million had been provided with some sort of shelter, domestic or public, at government expense. A few householders had provided themselves with shelters at their own expense, and an additional five million could use shelters at work. These figures were produced by the government when it came under attack – as it had since the mid-1930s – for the slow, patchy and often inadequate shelter provision. There was still an obvious shortfall, and those people not in a ‘specified area’ were left to their own devices, though issued with a booklet, Your Home as an Air Raid Shelter. Moreover, the shelter experience of many was very far from satisfactory.

People with rooms in their homes that they could make as bomb-proof as any domestic arrangement could be were, generally speaking, the most fortunate. BBC producer Anthony Weymouth and his family used the hall of their ground-floor flat in a mansion block in Harley Street in central London: the hall was the most sheltered part of their home, as it had rooms on either side, and its only window, which looked into an inner courtyard, had been fitted with an asbestos shutter. Citizens without such shutters were advised to leave their windows open, to reduce the risk of injury from shattered glass. The Weymouth family spent night after night in their hall, ‘lying in the dark on our mattresses for … hours listening to the drone of German bombers’. When he worked late at the BBC, Weymouth was obliged to sleep on one of the six hundred mattresses provided at Broadcasting House, ‘for the AA barrage besprinkles the street with pieces of shrapnel’.

Patrick Shea, a Northern Irish civil servant who had been put in charge of producing a top secret ‘War Book’, a manual for senior staff telling them of ‘the role and responsibilities assigned to each and every one of them in a great variety of preconceived situations’, was living in lodgings in Belfast. The household had a clearly defined ‘blitz drill’.

When the alert sounded the more active ones saw to it that the shutters were securely bolted, the bath, hand basins and sinks filled with water in case of fire, candles brought out lest the electricity supply should fail, fires extinguished. The assembly point for the whole household was the large ground-floor living room. Miss Mack, an elderly, socially superior person who normally kept herself to herself in her first floor bedsitter, would make one of her rare appearances amongst us. She would come downstairs draped in her fur coat and carrying her jewel case. Tenderly she would be manoeuvred into a recumbent position on a mattress under the large dining-room table; for the period of the alert she would lie there, her furs wrapped around her, her jewels clasped to her bosom. The Dublin couple, from whose mealtime conversation one deduced a background of tweedy opulence, would appear carrying two large suitcases colourfully decorated with the stick-on labels of famous shipping lines and faraway hotels. Having chosen their resting-place, they would inflate their two airbeds, settle down on them and with apparent indifference to the sound and fury outside, while away the time scrutinising the pages of out-of-date copies of the Illustrated London News and the Field.

Coffee would be made. Those not lying down or on a fire-watching tour of inspection of the top floor, sat or stood around the empty fireplace. In the tense atmosphere, with so diverse a company, conversation tended to be intermittent and trivial … From the darkness beneath the large mahogany table an observation about the brutality of the Germans or the splendid behaviour of the British Royal Family would remind us that Miss Mack was still there.

Phyllis Warner considered that ‘We are lucky in having our own shelter [in Mary Ward House in Queen’s Square, Holborn, in what would be among the worst-bombed boroughs in London] so that we can have mattresses and even a table or chair or two down there, but even so, with the bare girders and rough planks of its reinforcing, it resembles the worst kind of steerage.’

Those who were supplied with Anderson shelters did not, or could not, always dig them in properly, or failed to cover them with the requisite amount of sand and earth – which was what really gave protection – or to bank up a mound of earth at the entrance to act as a ‘baffle wall’. Even those Andersons that were correctly sited were less than ideal. Many filled with water when it rained, and they were cold and cramped, while the noise of bombs and falling shrapnel echoed alarmingly around their tinny walls if they were not properly insulated with soil. The problem, as with all government shelter initiatives, was due to a category error. Air raids had been expected to be sharp and above all short: no one seems to have anticipated that many would last all night. The alert would commonly sound at about 8 p.m., and the All Clear was often not heard until five or six the next morning. So shelters that might have been perfectly acceptable for the half-hour or so that daytime raids often entailed were profoundly unsuitable for an entire night – night after night. The family tensions that must have been engendered by such close and fearful proximity, exacerbated by boredom and exhaustion, are almost too dreadful to dwell on.