The Blitz: The British Under Attack. Juliet Gardiner

for all the residents, and where most were not eligible for free shelters, the landlord could be compelled to build one if petitioned to do so by more than 50 per cent of the tenants, and could recoup the cost by raising all the rents.

      Despite these initiatives, by September 1939 shelter provision was lamentably behind schedule. There was a shortfall of about a million of the promised Anderson shelters (those delivered were optimistically pronounced to provide protection for 60,000 people), meaning that even in what were believed to be the most dangerous areas many people had no shelters, and none were offered for sale until the following month. These cost between £6.14s and £10.18s – easy terms available. However, the take-up was limited – by April 1940 fewer than a thousand had been bought, while the basement-strengthening programme had hardly started.

      In some places the provision of public shelters was more advanced: about three-quarters of the trenches dug at the time of Munich had been reinforced, the City of London reported that its public-shelter-building programme was complete, and on the eve of war most cities exercised their power to requisition suitable sites. Notices proclaiming ‘Public Shelter’ appeared on various buildings – some more suitable than others. At the end of August 1939, in tardy recognition of this unsatisfactory provision, the government urged local authorities to provide purpose-built public shelters, above-ground ‘heavily protected’ brick and concrete constructions capable of holding up to fifty people.

      Fortunately, the eight-month respite of the ‘phoney war’, which effectively lasted until May 1940, meant that shelter provision could continue in wartime. However, the materials needed for shelters were now urgently required for military purposes. Smaller Anderson shelters, only four feet five inches long, were now produced and pronounced suitable for four persons, while the original ‘standard’ Anderson was redesignated as large enough for six people, with an ‘extension’ tacked on to allow it to accommodate up to ten if necessary. Finally, in April 1940, the production of Anderson shelters was suspended altogether, but by the start of the blitz nearly two and a half million had been distributed, theoretically providing shelter for 12.5 million people. Many gardens, however, were littered with unerected Anderson shelters, now rusting and near to useless. Some enterprising boroughs such as Hackney in east London, under its redoubtable ARP Controller Dr Richard Tee, organised teams of council workmen or volunteers to help householders, and the Bristol Civil Defence Area had taken a similar initiative, but the government decided that sterner measures were needed to compel self-help. From May 1940, under the terms of Defence Regulation 23B, everyone who had been issued with an Anderson shelter had ten days in which to erect it and cover it in the requisite manner, or to report to their local authority that they had not done so. If they did not, and could not show that they were genuinely incapable of doing so, the steel sheets would be collected and issued to another household.

      Meanwhile the government was pressing forward with the provision of public communal shelters, intended to accommodate twelve or so families from nearby properties, which it fully funded. After the Russian bombing of Finland in the winter of 1939–40 it was decided that railway stations would be likely targets, so shelters capable of sheltering the equivalent of ten minutes’ flow of passengers at peak travel times needed be provided at them. These were started at all London termini, but were far from completion when the blitz started.

      By the start of the blitz, of the 27.5 million people living in ‘specified areas’ (that is, those urban and industrial centres considered particularly likely to be attacked, from which evacuation had been recommended), 17.5 million had been provided with some sort of shelter, domestic or public, at government expense. A few householders had provided themselves with shelters at their own expense, and an additional five million could use shelters at work. These figures were produced by the government when it came under attack – as it had since the mid-1930s – for the slow, patchy and often inadequate shelter provision. There was still an obvious shortfall, and those people not in a ‘specified area’ were left to their own devices, though issued with a booklet, Your Home as an Air Raid Shelter. Moreover, the shelter experience of many was very far from satisfactory.

      People with rooms in their homes that they could make as bomb-proof as any domestic arrangement could be were, generally speaking, the most fortunate. BBC producer Anthony Weymouth and his family used the hall of their ground-floor flat in a mansion block in Harley Street in central London: the hall was the most sheltered part of their home, as it had rooms on either side, and its only window, which looked into an inner courtyard, had been fitted with an asbestos shutter. Citizens without such shutters were advised to leave their windows open, to reduce the risk of injury from shattered glass. The Weymouth family spent night after night in their hall, ‘lying in the dark on our mattresses for … hours listening to the drone of German bombers’. When he worked late at the BBC, Weymouth was obliged to sleep on one of the six hundred mattresses provided at Broadcasting House, ‘for the AA barrage besprinkles the street with pieces of shrapnel’.

      Patrick Shea, a Northern Irish civil servant who had been put in charge of producing a top secret ‘War Book’, a manual for senior staff telling them of ‘the role and responsibilities assigned to each and every one of them in a great variety of preconceived situations’, was living in lodgings in Belfast. The household had a clearly defined ‘blitz drill’.

      When the alert sounded the more active ones saw to it that the shutters were securely bolted, the bath, hand basins and sinks filled with water in case of fire, candles brought out lest the electricity supply should fail, fires extinguished. The assembly point for the whole household was the large ground-floor living room. Miss Mack, an elderly, socially superior person who normally kept herself to herself in her first floor bedsitter, would make one of her rare appearances amongst us. She would come downstairs draped in her fur coat and carrying her jewel case. Tenderly she would be manoeuvred into a recumbent position on a mattress under the large dining-room table; for the period of the alert she would lie there, her furs wrapped around her, her jewels clasped to her bosom. The Dublin couple, from whose mealtime conversation one deduced a background of tweedy opulence, would appear carrying two large suitcases colourfully decorated with the stick-on labels of famous shipping lines and faraway hotels. Having chosen their resting-place, they would inflate their two airbeds, settle down on them and with apparent indifference to the sound and fury outside, while away the time scrutinising the pages of out-of-date copies of the Illustrated London News and the Field.

      Coffee would be made. Those not lying down or on a fire-watching tour of inspection of the top floor, sat or stood around the empty fireplace. In the tense atmosphere, with so diverse a company, conversation tended to be intermittent and trivial … From the darkness beneath the large mahogany table an observation about the brutality of the Germans or the splendid behaviour of the British Royal Family would remind us that Miss Mack was still there.

      Phyllis Warner considered that ‘We are lucky in having our own shelter [in Mary Ward House in Queen’s Square, Holborn, in what would be among the worst-bombed boroughs in London] so that we can have mattresses and even a table or chair or two down there, but even so, with the bare girders and rough planks of its reinforcing, it resembles the worst kind of steerage.’

      Those who were supplied with Anderson shelters did not, or could not, always dig them in properly, or failed to cover them with the requisite amount of sand and earth – which was what really gave protection – or to bank up a mound of earth at the entrance to act as a ‘baffle wall’. Even those Andersons that were correctly sited were less than ideal. Many filled with water when it rained, and they were cold and cramped, while the noise of bombs and falling shrapnel echoed alarmingly around their tinny walls if they were not properly insulated with soil. The problem, as with all government shelter initiatives, was due to a category error. Air raids had been expected to be sharp and above all short: no one seems to have anticipated that many would last all night. The alert would commonly sound at about 8 p.m., and the All Clear was often not heard until five or six the next morning. So shelters that might have been perfectly acceptable for the half-hour or so that daytime raids often entailed were profoundly unsuitable for an entire night – night after night. The family tensions that must have been engendered by such close and fearful proximity, exacerbated by boredom and exhaustion, are almost too dreadful to dwell on.

      On 19 September 1940 Picture