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In September 1935, the then British prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, published a circular entitled 'Air Raid Precautions', inviting local authorities to make plans to protect their people in event of a war.
Some towns responded by arranging the building of public air raid shelters.
These shelters were built of brick with roofs of reinforced concrete. Some local authorities however ignored the circular
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| Building a Public Shelter |
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and in April 1937 the government decided to create an Air Raid Wardens' Service and during the next year recruited around 200,000 volunteers.
In August 1938 Adolf Hitler began making speeches that suggested he was going to send the German Army into Czechoslovakia. The British government now began to fear a war with Nazi Germany would happen and Neville Chamberlain ordered that Air Raid Precautions (ARP) volunteers to be mobilized. Cellars and basements were requisitioned for air raid shelters and trenches were dug in the parks of large towns.
In March 1940 the urgency for community shelters got underway, the government supplying the materials, and the driving force behind the scheme.
Private builders were employed to carry out the work under the supervision of Government surveyors.
The shelters consisted of 14-in brick walls and one-foot thick reinforced concrete roofs, similarly to, but much larger than, the private shelters in backyards and gardens being introduced slightly later.
The communal shelters were usually intended to accommodate about fifty people from families in the surrounding estates. The shelters were divided into various sections by interior walls with openings connecting the different sections. The Sections, or rooms were normally furnished with six bunks. |
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Public Air Raid Shelter with room for about 50 people |
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The construction work went on rapidly, as Councils tried to accommodate as many of the population in their area as possible, until the resources of concrete and bricks began to run out due to the excessive demand placed on them so suddenly.
Due to the incompetence of the Government's construction specification, however, an ambiguous instruction was misinterpreted, and resulted in a sand and lime mix being used in the construction, without the benefit of cement. |
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| These dark shelters quickly became squalid, unsanitary and dangerous. They were cold, damp, and dark. Ventilation was poor and the stench not helped by the fact that the chemical toilets provided in them tended to overflow. |
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When the bombs began to fall, many of these inadequate shelters simply crumbled, and people sheltering in them died. Also at around the same time rumours of accidents started to circulate, such as on one occasion people being drowned due to a burst main filling up the shelter with water.
It was then that these shelters began to become highly unpopular, and shortly afterwards householders were being encouraged to build or have built private shelters on their properties, or within their houses (such as the Anderson or Morrison shelter), with materials being supplied by the government............. |
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