In November 1938,
Chamberlain placed Sir John Anderson
in charge of Air Raid Precautions (ARP).
He immediately commissioned the engineer, William
Patterson, to design a small and cheap shelter that could be erected
in people's gardens. Within a few months nearly one and a half million
of what became known as Anderson shelters were distributed
to people living in areas expected to be bombed by the Luftwaffe.
Made from six
curved sheets bolted together at the top, with steel plates at either
end, and measuring 6ft 6in by 4ft 6in (1.95m by 1.35m) the shelter
could accommodate six people. These shelters were half buried in the
ground with earth heaped on top. The entrance was protected by a steel
shield and an earthen blast wall.
Anderson shelters were
given free to poor people. Men who earned more than £5 a week
could buy one for £7. Soon after the outbreak of the Second
World War in September 1939, over 2 million families had shelters
in their garden. By the time of the Blitz
this had risen to two and a quarter million.
When the Luftwaffe
changed from daylight to night bombing raids, the government expected
people to sleep in their Anderson shelters. Each night the wailing
of the air raid sirens announced the approach
of the German bombers and ensured that most people had time to take
cover before the raid actually started.
Anderson shelters
were dark and damp and people were reluctant to use them at night.
In low-lying areas they tended to flood and sleeping was difficult
as they did not keep out the sound of the bombings. Another problem
was that the majority of people living in industrial areas did not
have gardens where they could erect their shelters.
A census held in November
1940 discovered that the majority of people in London
did not use specially created shelters. The survey revealed that of
those interviewed, 27 per cent used Anderson shelters, 9 per cent
slept in public shelters whereas 4 per cent used underground railway
stations (4 per cent). The rest of those interviewed were either on
duty at night or slept in their own homes.
In March 1941 the government
began issuing Morrison Shelters.
Named after the Home Secretary, Herbert
Morrison, the shelters were made of very heavy steel and
could be put in the living room and used as a table. One wire side
lifted up for people to crawl underneath and get inside. Morrison
shelters were fairly large and provided sleeping space for two or
three people.
Woman:
"Is it all right now, Henry?"
Man: "Yes, not even scratched."
Sidney
Strube, Daily
Express (November, 1940)
Home
Front
Home
Front Simulation
(1)
Muriel Simkin worked in a munitions factory
in Dagenham during the Second World War. She
was interviewed about her experiences for the book, Voices from
the Past: The Blitz (1987).
First of all we had an Anderson shelter in the garden. You were supposed
to go into your Anderson shelter every night. I used to take my knitting.
I used to knit all night. I was too frightened to go to sleep. You
got into the habit of not sleeping. I've never slept properly since.
It was just a bunk bed. I did not bother to get undressed. It was
cold and damp in the shelter. I was all on my own because my husband
was in the army.
You would go nights and
nights and nothing happened. On one occasion when my husband was on
leave, I think it was a weekend, we decided we would spend the night
in bed instead of in the shelter. I heard the noise and woke up and
I could see the sky. They had dropped a basket of incendiary bombs
and we had got the lot. Luckily not one went off. Next morning the
bombs were standing up in the garden as if they had grown in the night.
Rosie, my mum's sister,
had to go to hospital to have a baby. Her mother-in-law looked after
her three-year-old son. There was a bombing raid and Rosie's son and
mother-in-law rushed to Bethnal Green underground station. Going down
the stairs somebody fell. People panicked and Rosie's son was trampled
to death.
(2)
Evelyn Rose, who was a child
during the Second World War, was interviewed
about her experiences of the Blitz in 1987.
If you were out and a bombing raid took place you would make for the
nearest shelter. The tube stations were considered to be very safe.
I did not like using them myself. The stench was unbearable. The smell
was so bad I don’t know how people did not die from suffocation.
So many bodies and no fresh air coming in. People would go to the
tube stations long before it got dark because they wanted to make
sure that they reserved their space. There were a lot of arguments
amongst people over that.
We did not have an Anderson
shelter so we used to hide under the stairs. You felt the next bang
would be your lot and it was very frightening. My grandmother was
a very religious person and when she was with us during the bombing
raids she would gabble away saying her prayers. Strangely enough,
when I was with her, I always felt safe.
(3)
British government circular 'Air Raid Warnings' (1939)
When air raids are threatened, warning will be given in towns by sirens,
or hooters which will be sounded in some places by short blasts and
in others by a warbling note, changing every few seconds. The warnings
may be given by the police or air-raid wardens blowing short blasts
on whistles.
When you hear the warning
take cover at once. Remember that most of the injuries in an air raid
are caused not by direct hits by bombs but by flying fragments of
debris or by bits of shells. Stay under cover until you hear the sirens
sounding continuously for two minutes on the same note which is the
signal "Raiders Passed".
(4)
Kingsley
Martin was the editor of the New
Statesman during the Second
World War. He wrote about his experiences in his autobiography,
Editor, in 1968.
We had always slept in
our beds during the earlier raids and later we were never bothered
by the lethal danger of V-2s. If one dropped near you, you would never
know and so it wasn't worth bothering about, but buzz-bombs, with
a lateral blast, were a confounded nuisance because it was your own
fault if you, or your friends near you, were cut to bits by flying
splinters of glass. If you were sensible, you led the way to a shelter.
Night after night we would both go to bed, and then be woken by a
familiar noise in the sky. I preferred the nights I spent fire-watching.
The bomb would cut out and I would turn over in bed and mutter, when
I heard the bang, 'Oh, that's Mrs Smith and not us', but after two
or three times I would realize my folly, get up and find Dorothy,
also in two minds, sitting on her bed near a window. We would dress
and go down to a shelter, which we shared with Olga Katzin, and wait
for the morning.
In the day I would work
in the kneehole under my desk to avoid the danger of shattered glass
from the windows. I remember that children in one of the great hospitals
had their faces so penetrated by glass splinters that the doctors
questioned whether their lives would be worth saving. Glass, unlike
metal, will not respond to magnets and there was no alternative but
to cut away their faces.
(5)
Barbara
Castle, Fighting All The Way
(1993)
What we also lacked was an adequate shelter policy, and I had been
agitating together with our left-wing group on the Council for the
deep shelters which Professor J. B. S. Haldane had been advocating.
Haldane, a communist sympathizer and eminent scientist, had studied
at first hand the effects of air raids on the civilian population
during the Spanish Civil War and had reached conclusions on the best
way to protect them, which he had embodied in a book ARP published
in 1938. In it he argued that high explosive, not gas, would be the
main threat. He pointed out that modern high explosives often had
a delayed-action fuse and might penetrate several floors of a building
before bursting and that therefore basements could be the worst place
to shelter in. He stressed the deep psychological need of humans caught
in bombardment to go underground and urged the building of a network
of deep tunnels under London to meet this need and give real protection.
The government did not
want to know. In 1939 Sir John Anderson, dismissing deep shelters
as impractical, insisted that
blast and splinter-proof protection was all that was needed and promised
a vast extension of the steel shelters which took his name. These
consisted of enlarged holes in the ground covered by a vault of thin
steel. They had, of course, no lighting, no heating and no lavatories.
People had to survive a winter night's bombardment in them as best
they could. In fact, when the Blitz came, the people of London created
their own deep shelters: the London Underground. Night after night,
just before the sirens sounded, thousands trooped down in orderly
fashion into the nearest Underground station, taking their bedding
with them, flasks of hot tea, snacks, radios, packs of cards and magazines.
People soon got their regular places and set up little troglodyte
communities where they could relax. I joined them one night to see
what it was
like. It was not a way of life I wanted for myself but I could see
what an important safety-valve it was. Without it, London life could
not have carried on in the way it did.
(6)
Herbert
Morrison, An Autobiography
(1960)
There was also much argument about the advantages and defects of indoor
versus outdoor shelters. The outdoor Anderson shelter was very good
and provided almost complete safety except from a direct hit. However,
the fact that it would have to be sunk into the ground meant that
in many urban areas it could not be put up because of the lack of
any garden and in other districts the shelter was liable to flood
during the winter months.
The wide desire for an
indoor shelter which provided some degree of comfort and also assisted
people to get a night's rest in warmth and dryness did not take into
account the fact that there was some fire risk involved. I decided
that the risk was worth taking. Experience proved me justified. Next
the experts began to argue about the best design.
The experts - engineers
and scientists - would have argued for weeks. However, I told them
that I intended to lock them up in a room until they agreed, promising
to arrange to send food into them. I reported to Churchill that I
had taken this attitude and he was delighted, saying that he would
back me to the limit. The experts had their designs agreed upon and
completed within twenty-four hours. So was born what became known
as the Morrison table shelter.
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