How Britain braced for nuclear war in Dad’s Army style
One pub landlord planned to cycle around shouting ‘The Russians are coming!’
ATTACK WARNING RED!
by Julie McDowall
256pp, Bodley Head, £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£22, ebook £13.99
When my grandfather died, we discovered he’d built a nuclear shelter in the cellar of his house by tunnelling through the wall, into the foundations. There, he stored food, some weapons and, curiously, his vast collection of model trains.
Preparing for a very British Armageddon is the subject of this cracking book on civil defence during the Cold War, when the threat of extinction was real and, “by the 1980s, 70 per cent of young people… thought nuclear war was inevitable”. Julie McDowall pulls no punches describing the reality of that threat. From the horrors of Hiroshima – where the eyes of men caught in the blast had melted and “run down their cheeks” – to the radioactive fallout from tests that caused cancer and birth defects, it was clear that a third world war “would be one of unimaginable horror”. Unsurprisingly, many American experts predicted “panic” in the event of an attack on their people.
By contrast, if Britain were hit, experts worried about “apathy”. The experience of the Blitz had shown we were resilient; in the Atomic Age, we were apt to be resigned. Britain is a densely populated island, so there’d be no escaping a blast or its fallout, and the Government couldn’t afford to provide shelters. What civil defence we did procure had a Dad’s Army vibe.
In the event of a nuclear strike, for instance, the BBC would interrupt its broadcasts: “Here is an emergency announcement. An air attack is approaching this country. Go to shelter or take cover immediately.” The alert was issued to “250 police stations across Britain” via a bank of phones that “looked like a child’s toy: the four-minute warning, brought to you by Fisher-Price”. The message was passed on to the Royal Observer Corps, and sirens were triggered across the country, some cranked by hand (perhaps by “the local vicar, doctor or pub landlord”). In the early 1980s, the BBC interviewed a publican who had agreed to host a “warning point” at the Bull’s Head in the village of Monyash, Derbyshire, but had never been sent the actual siren. Were he given the signal, his plan was to jump on his bike and pedal through the streets shouting “The Russians are coming!”
The primary job of the ROC was to look out for the flash of a bomb and study the fallout. Volunteers were hidden in bunkers under the earth; during 48-hour exercises, they ate horrid rations, struggled with a chemical lavatory that “resembled a large plastic bin”, and shivered against the subterranean cold. Otherwise, a former volunteer tells McDowall, “There was a certain degree of autonomy with what you could do, as long as you didn’t turn it into a boudoir!” One gentleman somehow squeezed a comfy armchair down the entrance shaft.
“It was fun,” recalls another. “We had a radio that worked down there, books, magazines, card
games, and I remember an epic Monopoly game.” They knew, recalls a third, that this all had a touch of fantasy: “There would be nothing left after the expected bomb burst and radioactive decay, so we probably wouldn’t survive anyway.” And yet, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the ROC was abolished in 1991, volunteer Ann Smith says, “I was absolutely devastated. I felt my world had come to an end.”
There are worse ways to go. In February 1984, a policeman in Coventry accidentally triggered the siren at 6.30am, which “wailed for 30 horrible seconds”. The switchboard lit up with complaints, but most residents rolled over and went back to sleep. “It put the fear of God in me,” complained a local, “but as I couldn’t do anything about it, I just stayed in bed.”
Advice distributed at the start of the Cold War had implied that communities should pull together and households try to maintain as much normality as possible. Yet by the time of Protect and Survive, a booklet released by the Government in 1980, it was every family for itself. “At risk from fallout, exposure, hunger and lawlessness”, the recommendation was to hunker down and expect no help. But even Protect and Survive’s tips on how to build a shelter out of just a door, a mattress, sandbags and rope – you’d have to be built like Geoff
Capes to do it – was open to ridicule.
The flip side of the ROC was the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, many of whose members thought it was impossible to prepare for the Big One, and misleading or offensive to suggest you could. Labour councils handed out their own advice that was deliberately provocative (or realistic). The South Yorkshire Fire and Civil Defence Authority told residents that if a relative were to die, they should be placed in polythene, though “not too tightly sealed”, lest the gases escaping the corpse “rupture the bag”.
Some readers might feel that McDowall wears sympathy for the anti-nuclear position on her sleeve, but I was once a member of CND, too, and would be tempted to join again, given the state of international tensions. All war is Hell, but nuclear war is annihilation, eliminating the way of life one is supposedly fighting for. Prior to a conflagration, Britain’s prisons would have been emptied and converted “to house and shelter Government staff ”. The Home Office believed that psychopaths might prove useful in the new order, as they would experience “no psychological effects in the communities which suffer the severest losses”. In the land of the blinded, Hannibal Lecter would be king.