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
