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Wednesday 14 March 2012
Hardly exciting: build your own air raid shelter (re-visited)
Sorry Tom, but this view of the second world world war as somehow being an exciting time has caught my interest. My previous post on this theme looked at the construction of a cage to protect ones bed, creating a terrifying impression of sleeping in a zoo or nightmarish prison. Reading government produced information leaflets on this must have brought the fact of war literally home to the people of this country, perhaps for the first time. The pamphlet I have on building an air raid shelter at home pulls no punches. In order to demonstrate the success of these 'bed cages' the good people at the Ministry of Home Security blew up a typical family house to test their design to the full. I am not convinced that these images would have done anything to calm the anxieties of the people. The pamphlet claims that despite the entire house collapsing on the 'bed cage', it was possible 'to get out unaided'. I might be suffering from 21st century cynicism, but it seems hardly credible. I have included the page from the information pamphlet for you to decide:
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This “Shelter at Home” (1941) booklet bomb test is based on National Archives reference HO 197/24, Morrison shelters in recent air raids:
ReplyDelete“Morrison Shelters in Recent Air Raids
“A report of Ministry of Home Security experts on 39 cases of bombing incidents in different parts of Britain covering all those for which full particulars are available in which Morrison shelters were involved shows how well they have stood up to severe tests of heavy bombing.
“All the incidents were serious. Many of the incidents involved direct hits on the houses concerned, a risk against which it was never claimed these shelters would afford protection. In all of them the houses in which shelters were placed were within the radius of damage by bombs; in 24 there was complete demolition of the house on the shelter.
“A hundred and nineteen people were sheltering in these Morrisons and only four were killed. So that 115 out of 119 people were saved. Of these only 7 were seriously injured and 14 slightly injured while 94 escaped uninjured. The majority were able to leave their shelters unaided.”
I have also uploaded a: YouTube video of the post war scaled model demonstration by its inventor Sir John Fleetwood Baker of the Ministry of Home Security.
“A shelter should be designed to absorb some part of the applied energy in its own partial collapse; complete resistance was far too costly ... The Morrison table shelter was ... designed to withstand the debris load of a house by its own partial collapse, whilst still giving adequate protection to the occupants.”
- <a href=" http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue/displaycataloguedetails.asp?CATID=2043087&CATLN=6&accessmethod=5”>George R. Stanbury (the key Home Office “Protect and Survive” author, who tested shelters at the 1950s British nuclear tests), “Scientist in Civil Defence: Part 1”, UK Home Office’s Scientific Advisory Branch journal <i>Fission Fragments</i> (issue 17, June 1971), National Archives reference HO 229/17</a>.
The same idea exists in car bumpers and “crumple zones” which absorb impact energy.
Herbert Morrison, An Autobiography (1960):
“The outdoor Anderson 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.”
Norman Longmate, How we Lived Then - A history of everyday life during the Second World War (1971):
“At first nearly everyone sought shelter after dark, but by early November [1940] an official census showed that only 40 per cent of the population slept in a shelter, 9 per cent using a public shelter, 4 per cent the tubes, and 27 per cent a domestic shelter. The public outcry about conditions in the largest public shelters, often without sanitation or even lighting, and the appalling inadequacy of the over-loaded and ill-equipped rest centres for the bombed-out led to immediate improvements, but cost Sir John Anderson his job. ... His successor as Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, the son of a Lambeth policeman, was a far more accomplished Parliamentarian than Anderson and far better able to understand what life under bombing really meant to the poor. ... The growing reluctance of many people to go out of doors led the new Home Secretary to look again at the need for an indoor shelter ... The first were delivered in March 1941 and by the end of the war about 1,100,000 were in use, including a few two-tier models for larger families. Morrisons were supplied free to people earning up to £350 a year and were on sale at about £7 to people earning more.”
By the way, the Morrison table shelter was included in the 1982 UK Government manual, "Domestic Nuclear Shelters - Technical Guidance". (WWII shelters survived secret British nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s at Monte Bello. It would have been cheaper to reissue to households against Saddam’s (alleged) WMD, than the cost of the Iraq War! It was well proved in actual experience of enemy bombing.)
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