Keeping the home fires from burning
During the darkest days of the Blitz, ARP wardens were the first line of defence on the home front. David Behrens tells their story.
WE REMEMBER them now, thanks perhaps to Bill Pertwee’s portrayal of warden Hodges in Dad’s Army, as busybodies out to nab any householder who left his light on during the blackout. But the air raid patrols of the Second World War were a vital link in the defence of the home front.
These pictures from the archive show a different side to the service whose members risked their lives nightly to protect property and people from the Luftwaffe.
The wardens were the front line of the civil defence service, and from the week war was declared they enforced the requirement to use heavy curtains or shutters to block the light from every home, office and factory, in order to make it harder for enemy bombers to find their targets. Their cries of “put that light out” and “cover that window” became part of the soundtrack to daily life.
Plans for the service had been put in place during the uneasy peace of the 1930s. Four years before the outbreak of hostilities, the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, had asked local authorities to make contingencies if the worst happened. Public air raid shelters were at the top of his list but the following spring, he created an air raid warden service and set about recruiting some 200,000 volunteers.
By the time the bombers came, there were 1.4m wardens, most of them part- timers with regular jobs during the day. Behind them stood firefighters, rescue and first aid parties, ambulance crews and medics.
Their standard kit for inspecting bombsites was a gas mask, overalls and a ceiling pike for testing the stability of overhead joists. They also carried wooden rattles – the sort popular with football supporters until the 1960s – to warn of gas attacks. And the big white W on their steel helmets left no- one in doubt as to their role.