The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
A real bunker mentality
Twenty-six years after the end of the Cold War, volunteers are working to protect a relic of the past that’s closer to home than people may think. Michael Alexander went underground to find out more
At the end of a quiet, modern cul-de-sac off Craigiebarn Road in the east end of Dundee, an unremarkable wooden gate leads to an unremarkable-looking low-rise building with a battered blue door.
To the right of the entrance is the only sign that something unusual can be found here: a large raised area of grass with some rusting metal vents protruding.
But the giveaway belies the scale of the former three-storey Royal Observer Corps (ROC) monitoring post buried 20 feet underground.
Until 26 years ago, the bunker would have been on the front line in the event of a nuclear attack on the UK, providing a place for 80 male and female ROC volunteers to measure nuclear blast waves and radioactive fallout.
Between 1956 and 1965, the UK Government ordered the construction of 1,563 monitoring posts at a distance of about 15 miles apart including at places like Cupar, St Andrews and Arbroath.
A total of 31 larger HQ and control centres – like the 28 Group HQ in Dundee – were also built.
As the Cold War came to an end with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the sites were all closed down when the ROC was stood down in 1991.
Many of the sites were subsequently demolished or fell into disrepair but some have been preserved by private individuals or trusts, including the restoration project team 28 Group Observed. It has spent more than a decade helping to restore the Dundee complex, which is the only remaining Royal Observer Corps sector bunker left in original condition in the UK.
The Courier was invited to join bunker manager Gavin Saxby – a systems engineer based in Edinburgh – and volunteer Steve West, from Forfar, on a tour of the remarkable complex, designed to be self-contained for months after a nuclear strike.
Unlocking the outside door and passing through the blast-proof door within, Gavin, 40, takes us down the main stairs, past the airlock and into the bunker, which comprises a maze of corridors and rooms on three levels.
He highlights the sewage ejector room, which is still in working order, the plant room, the switch gear for the fans and the ROC operations room, which has been kitted out with some of the original communications and moni- toring equipment that would have been in use during those Cold War years.
From there it’s on to the men’s and women’s dormitories, the first aid room and the radio room, which includes an old style Tele-talk and carrier receiver.
The tour ends in the sector operations room, which includes simulated maps of fallout from nuclear strikes on Scotland, as it might have been if the Soviets had ever attacked and the apocalypse of World War Three had commenced.
“We are standing in the sector operations room of the bunker, which is where the observers and some civilian scientists would have taken information gathered from all around Scotland and used it to plot the path of fallout as it moved across the country,” explains Gavin, who started working on the restoration of the bunker in 2004 after hearing about it when he joined Subterranea Britannica — a group committed to the study of man-made underground places.
“There were 25 bunkers of this size around the UK for each of the 25 groups and then those 25 groups were split into five sectors of the country. This bunker, which was built in the early 1960s, ran the whole of Scotland, which was called the Caledonian sector.
“It was originally to run the smaller ROC bunkers dotted all around the Dundee area. There were around 50 in the area at that time.
“The little three-roomed monitoring bunkers were designed to gather a couple of basic bits of information during a nuclear war. They would be able to tell the direction and the height of nuclear bomb bursts. They would have been able to tell the pressure that was caused by the bomb burst and they’d have read the levels of radiation post-strike.
“All of that information was gathered up, sent every five minutes back to the HQ bunker here in Dundee and, then, it was all plotted out on the screens so that the armed forces and the civilian government were able to work out which bits of the country needed to have air raid sirens sounded, which bits needed fallout sirens.
“After the event they would have been able to tell which areas were just too radioactive for people to go into.”
Throughout the Cold War, the Dundee bunker was opened up for exercises to simulate nuclear scenarios. If a point had arisen where war was inevitable, it would have permanently housed 80 or 100 ROC volunteers.
However, the most common phrase he hears from the public now is: “I had no idea that was there”.
Given the age of the building, maintenance is an ongoing issue. Two years ago, for example, a perished rubber washer on a water heater caused a horrendous flood.
However, he is delighted with the efforts of volunteers helping to restore the centre, including a number of former ROC volunteers.
And with the Arbroath Royal Observer Corps Monitoring Post Museum already in existence, he hopes one day the Dundee complex can be sympathetically opened up to the public with personalised tours.
28 Group Observed is always looking for volunteers and donations from tradesmen. See www.facebook. com/28group to find out more.
They would be able to tell the direction and height of nuclear bomb bursts