The Blitz: The British Under Attack. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ to fit in somehow, and that was the reason that eventually we went to a public shelter, because there was no way we could have slept through a prolonged blitz.’

      Others, less in the eye of the storm than East Enders, tried to find somewhere they considered safe in the house, rather than spend the night in an uncomfortable garden shelter. And invariably people would leave their Andersons as soon as the All Clear went, usually in the early hours of the morning, to snatch at least a couple of hours in bed before they had to get up to start the day.

      No wonder that as the blitz went on, more and more people declined to use their Anderson shelters at all, even though they proved pretty effective. If correctly sited they were able to withstand the effects of a hundred-pound bomb falling six feet away, or a two-hundred-pound bomb falling twenty feet way, those inside usually suffering little more than shock. Nevertheless, by mid-October 1940, when the raids on London had eased off somewhat, more and more people opted to crouch under their staircase, which was considered to be the safest place in most houses, or drag a mattress under the dining-room table for the night, or even stay in bed and take their chances.

      The Prime Minister was the first recipient of a government-issue and much more robust version of the dining-room-table shelter which went into production in January 1941. This was the Morrison shelter, a rectangular mesh steel cage six feet six inches long, four feet wide and about two feet nine inches high, bolted together with a steel ‘mattress’ and top, named after the then Home Secretary and Minister for Home Security, Herbert Morrison. It proved much more popular than the Anderson, though it was less effective, since it offered no protection from lateral blast. The Morrison was suitable for flats and houses without gardens, it was situated indoors (as in fact had been the original intention for Anderson shelters), it offered protection against falling masonry, could accommodate (snugly) two recumbent adults and two young children, was simple to put up and could be used as a table in the daytime. By this time the minimum income for eligibility for a free shelter had risen to £350 a year, but the distribution of Morrison shelters in London and other cities and large towns did not start until the end of March, just over a month before the ‘big blitz’ was effectively over.

      In theory, local authorities could compel factories and commercial premises to make their shelters available to the general public outside working hours, but in practice this did not happen very often. Employers only had to plead that they did not wish to disrupt war production, which was accepted as paramount. Government departments were also urged to admit the public to their basements, but again this was often resisted on the grounds that the employees might need to sleep on the premises overnight during the blitz. Gradually throughout the winter months more basements were strengthened, but most people who had no suitable refuge at home had few options other than specially constructed public shelters. Again built in the belief that raids would be short and mostly in daytime, most offered no seating, lighting or sanitation, and no facilities even for boiling a kettle for a cup of tea.

      Barbara Nixon was a thirty-two-year-old actress and graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge. When most of the theatres closed during the blitz, she volunteered as an ARP warden in Finsbury, north London, ‘which in those days stretched from near Liverpool Street due westwards to Smithfield, covered the area north of King’s Cross Road and back along Pentonville and City Roads to include Moorgate and Finsbury Square’. She wrote later: ‘During September 1940 the shelter conditions were appalling. In many boroughs there were only flimsy surface shelters, with no light, no seats, no lavatories and insufficient numbers even of these; or railway arches and basements that gave an impression of safety, but only had a few inches of brick overhead, or were rotten shells of buildings with thin roofs and floors.’ In Finsbury

      we were well provided as regards numbers; there were almost sufficient for the night population, and they were reasonably safe … In my [ARP] Post area we had two capacious shelters under business firms which held three or four hundred, also fifteen small sub-surface concrete ones in which fifty people could sit upright on narrow wooden benches along the wall. But they were poorly ventilated, and only two out of the nine that came in my province could pretend to be dry. Some leaked through the roof and umbrellas had to be used; in others the mouth of the sump-hole near the door had been made higher than the floor, and on a rainy night it invariably overflowed to a depth of two inches at one end decreasing to a quarter of an inch at the other, and rheumaticky old ladies had to sit upright on their benches for six to twelve hours on end, with their feet propped up on a couple of bricks. Four or five times during the night we used to go round with saucepan and bucket baling out the stinking water; as soon as Number 9 was reached, Number 1 was full again. It was hard, wet and smelly work … There were chemical closets usually partially screened off by a canvas curtain. But even so, the supervision of the cleaning of these was not adequate. Sometimes they would be left untended for days on end and would overflow on to the floor … Then there was the question of lights. I have been told by wardens that, for the first two months [of the blitz], shelters in some boroughs had no lights at all. We had one hurricane lamp for about fifty people. How often in the small hours, if the raid had started early, there would be a wail of ‘Warden! Warden! The light’s gone out!’ and children would wake up and howl, women grow nervous and men swear. It was expecting altogether too much of people’s nerves to ask them to sit through a raid in the dark. The one paraffin light also provided the only heating that there was in those days. It was bitterly cold that winter, and naturally, therefore, the door was kept shut. Some of the bigger shelters had ventilation pipes, but the smaller ones that held fifty people only had the door. In some, the atmosphere of dank concrete, of stagnant air, of the inevitable smell of bodies, the stench of the chemical closets was indescribable … But if conditions in many of our shelters were bad, in some other districts they were incredible. They belonged more properly to the days of a hundred years ago than to the twentieth century.

      Joan Veazey, newly married to the vicar of St Mary’s Church, Kennington, in south London, went with her husband Christopher to visit a number of local public shelters in September 1940. ‘It is amazing what discomfort people will put up with, some on old mattresses, others in deck chairs and some lying on cold concrete floors with a couple of blankets stretched round their tired limbs. In nearly all the shelters the atmosphere is so thick that you could cut it with a knife. And many of the places – actually – stink! I think that I would prefer to risk death in the open to asphyxiation. Mothers were breast feeding their babies, and young couples were making love in full view of anyone who passed down the stairs. In one very large shelter which was made to hold about 300 persons … only two buckets as latrines were available … and the result was that the whole floor was awash … the smell was so awful that we tied hankies around our mouths soaked in “Cologne”.’

      Not only were such shelters cold, lacking in facilities, damp and malodorous, many were also dangerous. It seems almost beyond belief that a brick box standing out in the open, above ground, could be imagined to offer protection against serious attack. The best that could be said was that it was probably better to be in one of these than to be caught out in the street during an air raid, as you would at least be protected from shrapnel and flying debris. But public shelters had their own hazards. Government instructions for their construction had stipulated that the mortar to bind the bricks should be two parts lime to one part cement, but subsequent directives were more ambiguous, and local authorities bent on saving money, and cowboy builders bent on making money, started to substitute sand for cement – which anyway was in short supply due to the various demands for defence construction – in the mixture. A heavy blast near such an ill-constructed shelter could turn it into a gruesomely named ‘Morrison sandwich’ when the walls blew out and the heavy roof collapsed on the occupants, trapping and often killing them. In the London area it was found that at least 5,000 such potentially lethal public shelters had been built, while in Bristol 4,000 had to be demolished or radically strengthened for the same reason.

      Margaret Turpin’s family had started to use a public shelter, along with a number of the families living near their East End home, since the one in the garden had proved unbearably cramped. ‘Of course you had to go there early, about seven in the evening, and then come home in the morning.’ One СКАЧАТЬ