Creating the people’s war: Civil defence communities in Second World War Britain

Creating the people's war

Cultural History of Modern War

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https://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/history/research/centres/cultural-history-of-war//

Creating the people's war

Civil defence communities in Second World War Britain

Jessica Hammett

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Jessica Hammett 2022

The right of Jessica Hammett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 6241 0 hardback

First published 2022

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image:

Female ambulance drivers knit and listen to a wireless while they await a call out to air raid incidents on 2 March 1940. IWM HU 104542, Ministry of Information Second World War press agency print collection. Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.

Typeset

by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

For Robin Gladston

Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Community

2 The people's war

3 Veterans

4 Housewives

5 Adolescents

6 Lovers

7 Conscientious objectors

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

List of figures

1.1 ARP, Wembley, 2, 6 (September 1940). Courtesy of the British Librarypage

3.1 The Bromley Siren, 1, 2 (June 1940). Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum

6.1 Queen's Review, Willesden, 12 (August 1941). Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the help and support of many people. I am truly grateful for Hester Barron's encouragement and enthusiasm for the project. I also thank Caitríona Beaumont, James Greenhalgh, Claire Langhamer, Lucy Noakes, Linsey Robb and the anonymous reviewers who have generously read and commented on sections of the book. And many thanks to colleagues as I have moved between institutions, especially Laura King, Julia Laite and Josie McLellan. Henry Irving and Charlotte Tomlinson have been excellent collaborators and friends.

I have benefited from the assistance of many archivists while conducting research for this book. Stephen Walton at the Imperial War Museum, in particular, has been fantastic. Thank you to the British Library, Imperial War Museum and trustees of the Mass Observation archive for permission to reprint material. The Bishopsgate Institute is always a joy to visit, and archivists were extremely helpful at the Bristol Record Office, Churchill College Cambridge, Hackney Archives, The Keep, Library of the Society of Friends, LSE, Nuffield College Oxford, and the National Archives. The conversations I had with Irene Carter and Olive Whitcombe were always wonderful, and Alan Hartley was a font of knowledge. The project was made possible with an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant. Thanks also go to Emma Brennan and Meredith Carroll at Manchester University Press as well as the series editors. An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared in Social and Cultural History (2017), and research on civil defence magazines was published in the Journal of War and Culture Studies (2018).

The kindness of a wonderful group of academic friends kept me going through this process: thank you Anna Cant, Jesus Chairez-Garza, Peder Clark, Tom Crewe, Alex Elliott, Owen Emmerson, Laura Loyola-Hernández, Ben Mechen, Alexia Moncrieff, Sally Palmer, Daisy Payling, David Selway, Emily Sloan, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, and Natalie Thomlinson. Michele Robinson's characteristic generosity got me through the final stages. Thanks to Ismay Kitson, Dieuwertje Laker and Sara Tricoglus for being brilliant and giving me a sense of perspective.

Special mention goes to my family. I cannot express how grateful I am to my parents Sue and Paul, who have given me unfailing love and encouragement and unquestioning support. My grandparents Sarah, Jean and Ken are amazing and stirred my love of history. Luke and Dominic, my brothers, are incredible and inspirational, and my thanks also go to Beatrice Pellegatta, Margarita Méndez Sandoval and Ana Uribe Méndez. The book was finished during a pandemic and I am thankful that I was able to face both challenges with Waseem Yaqoob, who has been caring, understanding and fun. I am fortunate to have such a lovely extended family. My Uncle Robin died just as I was beginning this project and it would have given him immense pleasure to read this book: I dedicate it to him.

Introduction

In May 1940, at the tail end of the Phoney War and as Britain began to experience its first bombing raids of the conflict, an air raid warden wrote a message to his colleagues in the local civil defence magazine, The Siren of Halifax:

Many a patriotic Englishman having become, in his commendable zeal for service an Air Raid Warden, is being continually called upon to leave his so called castle and all that it holds dear to him, to do his appointed duty at his particular Wardens’ Post. Thus then does this place of rendezvous become his ‘home from home’ and when his ‘nights on’ come round, he with his colleagues must perforce do his duty by keeping watch and … ‘waiting for something to turn up’. These hours of waiting then, would probably be very tedious were it not that at most places where these illustrious guardians of the war burdened community gather, some form or other of recreation is available … Yet we read that where necessity has made its urgent call, wardens have acquitted themselves well, acting with bravery and efficiency … It is typical of our race that we can play hard as well as work hard, laugh both in gaiety and adversity … may sociability and the spirit of bonhomie remain to assist in making our duty our delight.

¹

This message was typical of those produced by civil defence personnel throughout the Second World War and highlights several themes which are central to this book.

These volunteers placed themselves at the top of the wartime hierarchy of service based on the behaviours and attitudes which had become central to understandings of active citizenship. Individuals and groups engaged with the rhetoric of the ‘people's war’ and used it to explain their particular value within the war effort, as well as to suggest that they exhibited national characteristics to a greater degree than other groups. Since the intensity of air raids fluctuated during the conflict and some areas never experienced bombing, the value of being prepared for action was positioned as being as important as behaviour under fire. And although the experience of war was vastly different across the country and at different times, we see remarkably similar messages produced throughout. These representations were developed within local social groups, through conversations at work and in writing for collaboratively produced local civil defence magazines such as The Siren. In this way, drawing on cultural understandings of civil duty and reshaping them to fit the particular circumstances of civil defence, personnel not only engaged with wartime mythology, they also helped create it; they wrote themselves into the ‘people's war’ and invested it with meaning.

Community, then, was central to the production of representations, but it was also a key feature of them; by the outbreak of war service to the community had become an important facet of good citizenship. Within civil defence, local groups of volunteers played a central role in developing a sense of community and an important method for achieving this was the recreational activities referred to in the extract above. Group cohesion was thought to be essential for the successful functioning of the services and would help personnel cope with both the fear and boredom experienced while on duty. But there were always fractures and boundaries, and communities could expand and contract along various lines. Despite this, civil defence was represented as an ideal society in miniature, and personnel believed that it was vital to take civil defence into peacetime to make the world a better place.

Civil defence

Civil defence – also known as Air Raid Precautions or ARP – was organised as a response to the expectation that the bombing of civilians would be a prominent feature of any future conflict. Planning for a potential next war began in 1924 when the ‘Committee of Imperial Defence Sub-Committee on Air Raid Precautions’ was established; however, it remained secret until 1935 and recruitment did not begin until the formation of an air raid warden service by the Home Office in March 1937. The Sub-Committee on ARP was chaired by John Anderson who later became Home Secretary and Minister for Home Security, and in this role oversaw the ARP Department when it was absorbed into the Home Office from November 1938. This position was taken over by Herbert Morrison in October 1940. The third key figure in civil defence planning and organisation was John Hodsoll, who was the secretary of the Sub-Committee on ARP from 1929 and then, in 1935, was made head of the ARP Department and Inspector General of civil defence, continuing in this position into the early Cold War period.

Although Britain had experienced air raids during the First World War, planning for civil defence had to begin virtually from scratch. During the earlier conflict the government had been heavily criticised for a total lack of preparation for the air raids which killed 1,413 and injured 4,820 in London and the South East.² Within some communities in London ‘air raid committees’ were informally organised, and these took on a range of duties:

to warn the residents and, so far as possible, ensure their taking cover under circumstances of personal convenience and public advantage … In some of the poorer districts, they even provide cocoa for the old and very young … guaranteeing that on occasion of any future air raids the upmost efforts will be locally forthcoming to ensure order, tranquillity and public safety.

³

After the First World War it was no longer conceivable that governments would be unprepared to protect their populations from aerial bombardment – since the technological possibilities of air warfare were widely known and the question of whether civilians would be deliberately targeted was not a subject for ethical debate as it had been during the First World War – and governments across Europe began planning civil defence measures from the early 1920s.

⁴

Susan Grayzel has shown that interwar planning in Britain was based as much on imagined possibilities for aerial warfare as it was on the experience of air raids during the First World War or later bombing campaigns in Spain and Ethiopia. Sustaining morale and minimising panic were deemed to be as important as protection from death and injury, and Grayzel argued that civil defence measures ‘make much more sense when regarded as being as much about morale (of both combatants and non-combatants) as about military necessity’.⁵ Measures were designed to allow civilians to continue with their daily life and work, and the Sub-Committee on ARP concluded in May 1924 that the ‘moral effect’ would be ‘out of all proportion to the material effect’.⁶ To this end they discussed a wide range of measures such as air raid warnings, the blackout, shelters, gas masks, post-raid services, repair and evacuation.⁷ As we will see in Chapter 1, civil defence work itself came to be seen as an important method for controlling emotions, allowing personnel to participate fully in the war effort and set a good example for others.

Despite early planning, preparations were slow to be put into practice. This was partly because a delicate balance needed to be struck between appearing to be well-prepared and causing alarm and panic by making war seem inevitable. There was also the risk that publicising plans too early would result in accusations of ‘war-mongering’ in view of the large anti-war movement of the 1920s and 1930s.⁸ A more significant difficulty, however, was leadership and finance. It had been decided that local authorities would be given responsibility for a large proportion of the costs and planning of civil defence in their locality, but they lacked both money and expertise (as well as enthusiasm in many cases) and they were, therefore, often slow to act. By late 1937 the government had agreed to fund between 60 and 75 per cent of the costs, but planning remained behind schedule in most areas and was deliberately obstructed by some Labour and pacifist councils who disagreed with many of the policies.⁹ The Munich Crisis of September 1938 was a wake-up call for many – the civil defence services were temporarily mobilised and saw a peak in recruitment, and serious efforts to improve organisation at a local and national level began – and the unexpected breathing space provided by another year of appeasement and then the Phoney War period was crucial for getting preparations up to speed.

Civil defence covered a vast field of war preparation on the home front (including shelters, post-raid services and evacuation), but this book focuses on the personnel of the civil defence services who were the backbone of the state's response to air raids. They were a diverse group. Around 30 per cent were women, they were drawn from all classes and backgrounds, and they represented a huge age range: the youngest member to appear in this book is an eleven-year-old schoolgirl, the eldest a First World War veteran in his nineties. Civil defence was built on two key principles which endured, although not without significant adjustments, throughout the war: it was understood to be primarily a volunteer service with a mass of unpaid part-time workers supporting a small nucleus of full-time paid staff who made up around 20 per cent of the services; and it was local, overseen by local authorities with personnel serving their own communities.¹⁰ While some of the civil defence services were built on existing organisations, others were new, and all had to adapt to changes in the tempo of war as well as the unexpected features of aerial bombardment. Civil defence complemented the work of two other significant wartime voluntary organisations: the home guard, who were part-time soldiers prepared for full-time mobilisation if invasion seemed imminent; and the women's voluntary service (WVS) who undertook a huge range of work, some of which overlapped with civil defence.

The experience of air warfare differed vastly across the country. The earliest air raids – during the Battle of Britain over the summer of 1940 – targeted ports and airfields and, by the end of the summer, industry. The attacks on civilians intensified with the beginning on 7 September of the Blitz which lasted until 11 May 1941. London was the primary target and over the autumn was bombed for fifty-six out of fifty-seven nights, but other cities such as Liverpool, Birmingham and Hull were also seriously affected. Even a single night of bombing could be devastating. The raid on Coventry on 14–15 November 1940 left 568 dead and 850 injured (of a population of 200,000) and almost a third of homes uninhabitable, while the Clydebank Blitz on 13–14 March 1941 left around 35,000 homeless out of a population of 50,000. While the Blitz generally targeted industrial cities, during the Baedeker raids of spring 1942 cities of cultural significance were bombed. During the Little Blitz, January to April 1944, the focus returned to London, ports and industrial cities. These were closely followed by the V-weapon attacks (the V-1 pilotless plane and V-2 rocket which were launched from France and the Netherlands) which hit London and the South East between June 1944 and March 1945. In between these periods of intense bombing there were intermittent raids. And although cities were hit hardest, during ‘tip and run’ raids bombs were dropped randomly on towns and villages along the flight path, while rural areas in the South East were badly affected by V-weapons.¹¹ In total, around sixty thousand civilians were killed by enemy bombs during the war, over forty thousand of them during the Blitz, and almost half in London. The experience of civil defence work, therefore, differed hugely but despite this, as we will see in Chapters 1 and 2, the representations of service produced by personnel were remarkably consistent across the country and for the duration of the war.

The most significant of the new services, in terms of size and visibility, were the air raid wardens who made up around one-third of the total strength of civil defence.¹² The ideal candidate was described in a 1937 government memorandum as ‘a responsible member of the public chosen to be leader and adviser of his neighbours in a small area, a street or group of streets, in which he is known and respected’, who would be responsible for ‘maintaining morale by setting an example of steadiness, shepherding the public to places of safety, and assisting with casualties and damage after the bombs had fallen … reporting the fall of bombs, the damage caused, and the presence of gas or fires’.¹³ This work was open to both men and women who had a good knowledge of their local area, and the lower age limit was thirty for men and eighteen for women. By the outbreak of war it was recommended that between three and six wardens should be on duty per shift and there should be up to ten posts per square mile. Each post was headed by a Post Warden; groups of posts serving between six and ten thousand residents were led by a Head or District Warden; and a Chief Warden co-ordinated the service across a town or borough.

¹⁴

The roles that wardens performed expanded during the Blitz in response to two serious and unforeseen problems: first, in order to provide better support to the rescue service when searching for trapped casualties, wardens kept a census of where people lived and sheltered; and, second, due to the widespread use of incendiary bombs they became responsible for using stirrup pumps to put out small fires as well as training firewatchers. Informal firewatch parties had been formed by groups of residents in a number of places during the Blitz to support the work of wardens, both spotting and extinguishing small fires. In January 1941 firewatching became a formal service (also referred to as the fire guard) with personnel affiliated either to their local warden post and generally working from their home, or to their place of work. By summer 1941 compulsion was introduced for some civilians as part of the National Service Act.

¹⁵

The decontamination service was the smallest and most limited in its role: to clean streets, buildings and vehicles after a gas attack and provide facilities for showering and washing contaminated clothing. Squads were made up of seven men and personnel were recruited from borough cleansing and county highway employees.¹⁶ During the interwar period gas attack had been accepted as an inevitable feature of future warfare, and if this had come to pass the decontamination service would have been vital. Yet contrary to all expectations, these men had nothing to do. As a result, and in response to serious manpower shortages elsewhere, in February 1941 they were offered training in rescue and first aid in order to provide support to other services; in May 1942 they were amalgamated with rescue and first aid parties.¹⁷ All three of these services had recruited on the same terms: fit men aged between twenty-five and fifty. (‘Manpower’ was the term used to describe the direction and allocation of labour by the state in support of the war effort, and I have retained this terminology throughout, though of course many women also gave service.)

By contrast, the work of the rescue and demolition service was significantly more challenging than had been predicted: men usually had to work in the dark; the damage to property was more serious than had been expected; and the time window for the successful rescue of casualties was generally very small due to broken gas and water pipes, collapsing rubble and fire.¹⁸ Rescue parties were staffed by skilled men from the building trade and local authority works parties, and their role was to free people trapped in rubble and carry out demolition where it was essential for this task. Parties were made up of eight to ten men, some of whom were trained in first aid and all were trained in anti-gas.¹⁹ After the Blitz the size of the service was reduced and the Civil Defence Rescue Service was formed in May 1942, which merged rescue, first aid parties and decontamination. On paper there were 125,000 men enrolled at the beginning of 1939, and by mid-1942 the newly amalgamated service had a strength of around 87,000.²⁰ Wardens were also given additional training in rescue and first aid at this stage to provide more effective support.

²¹

There were three casualty services: ambulance, first aid parties and first aid posts. Recruitment had been stalled for these services because it had been wrongly assumed that they could be staffed with members of existing voluntary organisations; as a result, in August 1939 they had reached only 56 per cent of requirements with 78,000 recruits still needed. The ambulance service was particularly pressed because it required vehicles which could be adapted to transport casualties as well as men and women who could drive them. First aid parties were staffed by men over twenty-five years old, who worked closely with the rescue service (and were later amalgamated). They were responsible for treating casualties on the spot and then deciding whether to send them home, to a first aid post or to hospital. First aid posts were staffed by a mixture of doctors, trained nurses and nursing auxiliaries, and shared with the ambulance service a minimum age of thirty for male personnel and eighteen for women.²² The work of the casualty services was easier in some respects than had been expected prewar because there were far fewer casualties than anticipated, but efficiency was hampered by the physical damage and blocked roads caused by bombing.

Report and control was the slowest service to develop because all other services had to be at an advanced stage in order to organise effectively, but recruitment was relatively straightforward as it was mainly comprised of local authority staff seconded from their regular roles. Telephonists tended to be women over the age of eighteen with some men over forty-five, and the local service was headed by a Controller (a local official) who co-ordinated between the medical officer of health, the borough surveyor and the heads of local civil defence services.²³ Warden posts communicated directly with the local control centre, who sent instructions to the other services. One of the biggest problems faced by civil defence during the war was maintaining communications during bombing as the telephone system was often partly or entirely broken down. In response the messenger service was expanded and reorganised so that by June 1941 messengers were posted at all operational centres, rest centres, information centres and mortuaries to carry messages by bicycle, by motorcycle or on foot when other lines of communication were down. Boys and girls aged fifteen could enrol and work outside when they reached sixteen, although girls required parental permission until they were eighteen.

²⁴

Finally, the fire service had to be greatly expanded and instructions for the formation of an auxiliary fire service to work alongside regular fire fighters were sent out to local authorities in February 1937. Although the wartime organisation was built on existing knowledge, experience and skill, there were significant differences in fire brigades across the country. In 1937 there was still no central supervision and no statutory obligation for local authorities to maintain a service and, consequently, there were huge differences in efficiency, staffing and equipment. From February 1937 local authorities were asked to reach common standards and recruit and train an auxiliary force, and nationally a recruitment target of 175,000 was set in March 1939. Men could be aged between twenty-five and fifty and had to pass a medical exam. Women were also employed but generally restricted to work in the control and watch room and as drivers.

²⁵

The reality of bombing exposed a number of serious difficulties particular to firefighting during air raids, which had been planned for in principle but underestimated in scale: fires were bigger, roads became blocked or congested with emergency vehicles, communication lines broke down, the blackout made working conditions more difficult and meant fires inside buildings could not be spotted at an early stage, fires were a target for further bombs and sometimes machine gunning, and water supplies were unreliable. Moreover, at the beginning of the Blitz the fire service was under strength in both officers and men.²⁶ In response to the problems of organisation, communication and efficiency, the fire service was nationalised in May 1941 (although only for the duration of the war) with training and equipment standardised.²⁷ This meant that local co-ordination improved and reinforcements of men and equipment could be brought in from other areas.

²⁸

It is difficult to determine with any accuracy the total number of people involved in civil defence or the individual services. Recruitment figures were calculated using self-reported returns from local authorities which were often incomplete and failed to account either for those who dropped out of the services or those who participated without enrolling. Despite limited central auditing, the official history of civil defence determined that the size of the service peaked in December 1943 with 1.85 million members, but the wartime Ministry of Information claimed that 1941 was the peak year with 1.93 million members, and the National ARP Committee suggested that there were up to 3.25 million engaged in 1942.²⁹ The vast majority of personnel volunteered part-time and, by day, many of these women and men worked in a reserved occupation. The regular fire service had reserved status, and for a period during the Blitz men aged between thirty and fifty could volunteer for the AFS instead of the military. Work was also available for housewives and those with caring responsibilities, men too young, old or unfit for military service, and conscientious objectors.

Civil defence harnessed a huge voluntary effort – and we should assume that many more helped out informally, especially in moments of acute need – but recruitment remained a concern throughout the war and there were serious problems of maldistribution between different localities and different services, with vulnerable urban areas often reporting the largest shortfalls.³⁰ There were a number of reasons for this. There was some resistance amongst civilians to volunteering until the threat seemed imminent.³¹ In the absence of air raids, there was significant public pressure to reduce spending on civil defence measures which were thought to be unnecessary. Moreover, criticism was directed at personnel who were seen by some as dodging more important, dangerous or arduous work – as we will see in Chapter 2 – and during the Phoney War many existing volunteers resigned due to ‘boredom, flavoured with unpopularity’.³² Yet the terms and conditions of civil defence actually compared unfavourably with many other forms of war work: as the ARP News explained in May 1940, ‘more remunerative employment under better conditions is available in civil life’ and the financial restrictions on local authorities meant there was no chance of improving wages to ‘attract a sufficient number of recruits of the right type’.³³ Pay rates were set at £3 weekly for men and £2 for women on the outbreak of war, and this had risen only to £4 0s 6d for men and £2 16s 6d for women by August 1944, with the exception of some rescue workers who were considered skilled workers and, therefore, paid higher trade rates. Benefits included free meals, uniform and equipment as well as compensation for death and injury, although provision of these differed across regions, between services, and for full- and part-time staff, and this was highly contentious throughout the war.

³⁴

Although underrecruiting was a concern throughout