Protect and Survive
Fall-out shelters made from soft furnishings and terrifyingly bland graphics: a wonderful visual history of the attack that never came
Nuclear War in the UK Taras Young Four Corners Irregulars 2019 Hb, 128 pp, £10, illus, ISBN 9781909829169
Many years ago, I was fortunate enough to enjoy a tour of RAF Scampton, then partially mothballed, an historic site that was once home to 617 Squadron (the famous ‘Dambusters’) and later to Britain’s V bombers, armed with Blue Steel missiles. As we faced the runway, my guide, the late Mervyn Hallam, a lifelong RAF man, mentioned that this was where the Vulcans had been on 15 minutes’ readiness “during World War III”; he quickly corrected this to “the Cold War”, but he’d already plunged us into a weird hauntological space where rural Lincolnshire had been at the centre of a devastating thermonuclear global conflict. For the thenbusy station and the Vulcan crews, the war had evidently been very real, even if hostilities were never announced.
Taras Young’s excellent little book takes us to a similar space, providing a rich visual history of preparedness for an attack that never came. While outlining the Government’s policies for dealing with a nuclear onslaught, the book is primarily concerned with the ways these were imagined in a series of printed materials issuing from the Central Office of Information and other official bodies. The notorious ‘Protect and Survive’ campaign of the 1980s is the bestremembered. Planned from the mid1970s as part of a coordinated campaign using film and radio materials produced by the COI, the infamous booklet was published after public pressure in 1980. Released outside of its intended context, as Young remarks, the booklet seemed at once “sinister and quite pathetic”, and it met with a withering reception from everyone from Raymond Briggs to The Young Ones and was parodied in Ben’s Bunker Book and EP
Thompson’s Protest and Survive.
The terrifyingly bland graphics are reproduced here alongside a wealth of less familiar material from the early 1950s to the mid1980s. There are survival guides produced by District and Parish Councils, promotional literature from bodies such as the Royal Observer Corps, and some truly bizarre commercial efforts such as Protect and Survive Monthly (“Will Your Pet Survive a Nuclear War?” and various ads for private nuclear bunkers.
It’s hard to look at this stuff without thinking of Richard Littler’s Scarfolk. It embodies precisely the same mixture of supposedly reassuring, but deeply sinister, official blandness and unthinkable terror: just look at the Ladybird Booklike mushroom cloud engulfing Hull shown below. Four Corners Irregulars have produced a handsome book with excellent reproductions of rarely seen material, while Young’s succinct account provides the necessary context. At £10, it’s a bargain. David Sutton
★★★★★