The Blitz: The British Under Attack

The motivation of Barbara Nixon, who was married to the distinguished Communist Cambridge economist Maurice Dobb, was much the same when in May 1940 she became a voluntary (part-time) warden. ‘I wanted an active job; I particularly wanted to avoid being in the position of many women in the First World War – of urging other people to do the work they wouldn’t think of doing themselves. At that time the ATS seemed to be mainly a matter of cooking and cleaning, for neither of which was I either competent or inclined; I found that the AFS entailed mainly switch-room work [for women], and First Aid Posts seemed to me to be too reminiscent of Job waiting patiently for troubles to be brought to him.’

The government had made its first appeal for ARP wardens in January 1937. In some places fully-worked-out Civil Defence schemes, including the recruitment of ARP wardens, were put in place within months; in others virtually nothing happened, either through inefficiency, a distaste for ‘warmongering’, or because there was no clarification about who would foot the bill. Herbert Morrison himself had been the spokesman for the Local Authorities Association in demanding that the government should pay 90 per cent, if not the whole cost, of these measures. On 1 January 1938 the ARP Act came into force, compelling local authorities to set up ARP schemes including recruiting wardens and expanding their fire services by forming and equipping the AFS. The Act committed the government to contribute between 60 and 75 per cent of the money to pay for these services.

But recruitment was sluggish: a radio appeal for a million men and women ARP volunteers in March 1938 largely fell on deaf ears. The Munich crisis in September changed everything: suddenly war seemed a threatening reality, and by the following March over a million people had volunteered. This still fell short of what was needed, and training in things such as gas detection and treatment, blackout regulation enforcement, first aid and various other air-raid practices was slow to be provided, as was equipment.

The wardens’ service attracted most volunteers, but during the phoney war there had been an alarming falling away of personnel (which was not helped by the government’s ban on recruitment) as disheartened citizens either transferred to the Local Defence Volunteers after it was set up in May 1940, or drifted away, wondering what their wartime role actually was, other than often being roundly abused and called a ‘little ‘itler’ when they tried to reinforce blackout regulations. The blitz would decisively show them.

The ARP was a locally embedded service: it was essential that wardens knew their area well, so that when there was a raid they knew how many people lived in a particular house, whether any had been evacuated or might be away, were infirm or had small children, whether there was an Anderson shelter in the garden, or if the occupants regularly used a public shelter. All this detailed knowledge of local residents and their habits would be invaluable in ascertaining where people were likely to be when a bomb fell, so that ambulance services could be directed efficiently and rescue parties shown where there might be survivors buried in the rubble.

Districts varied in the ratio of wardens they could muster, but in general in large towns and cities the norm was ten wardens’ posts to the square mile. The posts might be located in a shop, a hall or a basement, or even sometimes in a warden’s front room. There would be a Post Warden, and usually a deputy, and the area would be divided into sectors, each covering a few streets with around five hundred residents. There would be between three and six wardens for each sector, reporting to a Senior Warden. Some posts might have sub-posts too. In the country the posts would have to cover a much larger area, maybe encompassing several villages, and the wardens would have to assume more all-round responsibilities and competencies as the support services would take longer to arrive.

In Fulham, in south-west London, then a largely working-class district, some two hundred volunteers had enrolled by April 1939. The majority of them were middle-aged, and one in six was a woman: single women were more likely to join, since they generally had more time on their hands than married women with homes to run. In Fulham the volunteers came from a wide range of occupations, from the manual to the professional to the ‘artistic’, including a number of retired (mainly middle-class) men. This was not surprising, since the National Service handbook issued in January 1939 (that is, before the call for LDV – Home Guard – volunteers) had made it clear that ARP was the only job in Civil Defence open to older men. Some of the recruits were too old to fight, others had been turned down on medical grounds or were in reserved occupations, while others were waiting to be called up. When asked why they had enrolled, most replied in terms of ‘wanting to do my bit’, though some had come under pressure from employers and friends, and one twenty-six-year-old middle-class woman supposed that she ‘must have been drunk. It was New Year after all.’ Almost all would come to feel disillusionment with poor organisation, lack of relevant training, hanging around with nothing much to do and not having a ‘clue what to do in case of an emergency’.

Frederick Bodley and his wife Kath had enrolled as ARP wardens at Stoneleigh in Surrey within a fortnight of the outbreak of war in September 1939, and persuaded their neighbour Joan to do so too. Around 90 per cent of ARP wardens were part-timers who would come on duty at the end of a working day. The Bodleys’ first post had been in a private house, but it was soon moved to a smallish concrete building, which was ‘very comfortable for we have a radio, shove ha’penny board, playing cards and an electric kettle. The heating is supplied by two electric radiators.’ There was also a foot-wide bench that served as a bed, though this was soon ‘considerably widened and made very comfortable with the addition of a horse hair seat’, while layers of newspaper were spread over another couple of benches so that games of dominoes could be played.

The post to which Barbara Nixon was first attached was in the basement of an old house. It was equipped with a camp bed and chairs, tea-making facilities and a dartboard to help wardens while away the time between patrolling the streets and responding to an alert. She was issued with a tin hat, a whistle and a respirator, and taken on a tour of the seventeen public shelters in the area. Her fellow wardens were ‘railway workers, post-office sorters, lawyers, newspaper men, garage hands, to a few of no definable profession’. When in December 1940 she decided to become a full-time warden (after overcoming considerable Town Hall resistance to the appointment of married women), paid ‘the magnificent sum of £2 5s a week’, Nixon was transferred to a post in the north of Finsbury, where the raids had been heavier. ‘Nothing was left. The heart of the largest city in the world was a wilderness. Here and there desultory trails of smoke curled up; the pigeons had deserted it, no gulls circled over it, the only inhabitants were occasional scurrying rats … The silence was almost tangible – literally a dead silence in which there was no life. It was difficult to believe that this was London.’ Her companions were ‘the toughest set of wardens in the borough’. It was ‘unwise’ to ask what people had done before the war, because ‘owing to the fact that race tracks, boxing rings and similar chancy means of livelihood closed down at the outbreak of war, there was a considerable percentage of bookies’ touts and even more parasitic professions in the CD [Civil Defence] services, together with a collection of workers in light industry, “intellectuals”, opera singers, street traders, dog fanciers etc. In the early days the Control Rooms were crowded with chorus girls. There was also an ex-burglar, a trade unionist, and two men who hoped that joining the ARP would defer their call-up papers; the post warden was an ex-electrician.’ And all, except Nixon, ‘had been to the local school, though at different times, and they knew the family history of nearly everybody in the neighbourhood’; this urban community was as tight-knit as any Cotswold village.

From October 1939 until September 1940 the Bodleys received training in anti-gas procedures, learned how to use a stirrup pump to put out incendiary bombs, took part in ‘smoke drills’ in which they learned how to enter a burning building (on their stomachs, with their mouths as near the floor as possible), fire drill and putting out an incendiary bomb that was already blazing, and had mock exercises to teach them how to deal with an ‘incident’, complete with ‘bodies’ with labels attached detailing their imaginary injuries. They listened to a series of lectures on the correct way to load a stretcher, make a splint, bandage limbs, disinfect a gas mask and encourage the public to use theirs.

Nixon received some rudimentary instruction too, though it was on the job that her real training began. The Home Office recognised that ‘training can never be finished’, and she became aware of ‘the multitudinous things a warden needed to know, from the names of the residents in each house, and which shelter they used, hydrants, cul-de-sacs, danger points in the area, to the whereabouts of the old and the infirm who would need help in getting to the shelter, telephone numbers and the addresses of rest centres etc.’.

Full-time wardens had one day off a week, and part-time wardens were expected to turn up three nights a week; but in the blitz most put in many more nights. When the ‘yellow alert’ – bombers within twenty-two minutes’ flying time – was received in the wardens’ post, they would stop their game of cards or darts, or wake up from a snooze, don a tin hat and set off with a fellow warden to patrol their sector.

When the ‘red alert’ was received – indicating that planes were twelve minutes’ flying time away – the public sirens – the ‘Wailing Winnies’ (or Willies) or ‘Moaning Minnies’ – would sound, and people would start hurrying to the shelters, encouraged by the wardens who would be ‘ticking off the names of the residents in their area as they arrived, then back they went to hurry and chivvy the laggards and see that those who chose to stay in their houses were all right … They carried children, old people, bundles of blankets, and the odd personal possessions which some eccentrics insisted on taking with them to the shelters.’

The ARP wardens’ role was partly to look out for bombs falling, incendiaries alight or other incidents, acting as the ‘eyes and ears of the Control Centre in the field’ as the Ministry of Home Security’s account of the blitz put it, and partly to be ‘the chartered “good neighbour” of the blitz’, giving reassurance that there was someone out there in the dark streets, lit suddenly with blinding flashes of whiteish-green incandescent light as chandeliers of incendiaries fell, made violent by the drone of the bombers. (‘Where are you? Where are you?’ the novelist Graham Greene imagined them saying), the ‘sickly familiar swish of bombs’ falling with a thud, the crash of falling shrapnel and masonry, the deafening rat-tat-tat of the AA guns which ‘rose and fell in intensity’, each sounding subtly different. John Strachey called one near his Chelsea post the ‘tennis racket’ for the ‘staccato, yet plangent, wang, wang, wang; not unlike a sharp exchange of volleying at the net’ it made. For the journalist M.E.A. (‘Mea’) Allan, some of the AA guns on Hampstead Heath ‘just crashed, others sounded as if 50 people in the upstairs flat were playing tig around a billiard table, others as if 50 equally noisy children had collected tin trays and were banging them with hammers’.

Eight out of every ten heavy bombs dropped by German planes on Britain during the Second World War were high-explosive (HE) bombs – Sprengbombe-Cylindrisch (SC) general-purpose bombs – though tens of thousands of incendiary bombs fell during the blitz. The bombs were of various weights, ranging from 112 pounds (the bomb most generally dropped during the blitz, though by the beginning of 1941 heavier bombs were being used) to the 2,400-pound ‘Hermanns’ (named after the portly Göring, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe), the 4,000-pound ‘Satan’ (which could produce a crater large enough to accommodate two double-decker buses), and the largest bomb ever dropped on Britain, the 5,500-pound ‘Max’ (both names self-explanatory). The bomb’s thin metal casing was filled with amatol (TNT, ammonium nitrate and sometimes aluminium powder), and there was an electrical fuse in its side to detonate and ignite the explosive material, forming a ball of expanding, blazing gas while sharp shards of metal casing flew out with deadly penetrative power.

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