The Day We Went to War (46 page)

A Bradford navvy was of the opinion that ‘Three quid a week’s too much for just playing cards and such-like for them buggers. They conscript t’lads, don’t they, for t’army? Well, I’d conscript old ’uns for ARP, and they’d get army pay. And if they say they’ve homes to keep and they’ve themselves to feed, I’d make them live in barracks.’ And a typist in Northumberland thought, ‘Most of the ARP workers seem to be having a cushy time. I wonder if they couldn’t have some work to do and be summoned at short notice if there’s an air raid.’

This attitude, a not uncommon one, led an exasperated fifty-year-old warden to tell Mass Observation, ‘I’ve a good mind to chuck it all up. If there had been an air raid we would all be public heroes. As it is, we’re called wasters and slackers.’

Florence Speed, whose brother Fred was a warden, was of the same opinion. ‘The Press are complaining that the blackout is
too
effective. Had real air raids followed the warnings since Sunday [3 September] – they might not be so keen to get London lightened.’

And once again, the inimitable Max Miller had a topical joke ready to hand, telling the audience at the Finsbury Park Empire, ‘I’m an ARP warden. Last night I had fun. I went out and saw a light in a lady’s room. I shouted up, I said, “Put that light out!” She said, “What?” I said, “Put that light out!” She said, “You come and put it out, you left it on!” You’ve got to be careful, haven’t you?’

One item of air-raid personal protection that everybody had was a gas mask. Most people assumed that the Germans would use, sooner rather than later, poison gas bombs in air raids on British towns and cities, and thirty-eight million gas masks, or respirators as they were officially designated, had been distributed at the height of the Sudeten Crisis the previous September. This measure had prompted a parody of the current hit tune by Joe Loss and his band, ‘Gonna Lock My Heart and Throw Away the Key’.

Since then, young children’s coloured ‘Mickey Mouse’ gas masks, designed ‘to make them less repellent to their wearers’, and gas helmets for babies and infants had also been issued. During the first days of the war, everybody, at least in London, seemed to be carrying gas masks in their cardboard boxes. On 6 September, Mass Observation did a spot check of passers-by on Westminster Bridge to see how many were carrying gas masks: 71 per cent of men and 76 per cent of women had their masks with them. But a similar survey in Bolton on the same day showed that only 14 per cent of men and 41 per cent of women were with masks. Many government and civic offices, commercial firms and other organisations refused admittance to their premises to those without gas masks. A paragraph in the press reported, ‘The Reading Room of the British Museum was never very easy to enter. Today not only must one have a reader’s ticket, but no person will be admitted unless he carries a gas-mask.’

The civic authorities of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames were particularly gas-conscious. The town’s mayor, Sir Edward Scarles, was photographed in the press wearing his mayoral robes, chain of office and a Civilian Duty gas mask. Presiding over Kingston Police Court, Sir Edward asked all those present to wear their gas masks for five minutes in order to get used to them. The press also reported, ‘At Kingston-upon-Thames people queue up daily at the entrance to the gas chamber, opened for the purpose of letting them test the efficiency of their respirators. It was stated that people arrived somewhat nervously but left full of confidence.’

When the sirens had sounded after Chamberlain’s broadcast, many, like the lady quoted in the
Topical Times
, thought that they were heralding a gas attack: ‘she had been informed that the best way to prevent gas poisoning was to fill your bath full of cold water, wrap yourself in a blanket, put on your gas mask, and jump into the bath. This she had done, and waited for the All Clear . . . it caused a good laugh. She said, “It was the first cold bath I ever had, and it took a war to make me do it.”’

‘I fell over some sandbags in town yesterday and dropped my handbag. I couldn’t see a thing.’ The HMV store on Oxford Street defiantly proclaims ‘business as usual’ despite its own protective sandbags.

A group of adults and children line up to test the efficiency of their gas masks. ‘Children took to their masks far more readily than anyone, and went on carrying them after their parents had given them up.’ Nicknames for the masks included ‘Dicky-bird’, ‘Canary’, ‘Nose-bag’ and even ‘’Itler’.

To prevent such future misunderstandings, the new Ministry of Home Security issued a little jingle to aid the public in identifying the types of alarm:

Wavering sound:
Go to ground:
Steady blast:
Raiders past:
If rattles you hear:
Gas you must fear:
But if handbells you hear:
Then all is clear.

This did not stop some Britons from taking their gas drill over-seriously. In exasperation, Mrs S. Smith of Stafford Road, Cannock wrote to
Picture Post
about her two daughters, ‘Often during the last fortnight, they have slept in their gas masks from 10pm till 8am. Will it harm them? Please print this . . . it might shame my girls into a little more sense.’

In its 30 September issue, the magazine replied with the warning, ‘Not getting usual air will harm them, Reader Smith. But more harm will be done to the gas masks. They should be kept carefully until really needed.’

But not everybody was careful with their masks. Within a few months over 20,000 had been left in London’s buses, trams and tube trains. Tens of thousands more had been handed in to police stations or lost-property offices throughout the country. As often as not they had little more in the way of identification than a pencilled ‘Mum’ or ‘Dad’ on the cardboard boxes.

Gradually, as autumn turned into winter, and the threat of air raids seemed to recede, more and more people began to leave their
masks at home. But not before, ‘a burning problem on the home front’, as
Picture Post
, tongue in cheek, described it, was solved. In a letter to
The Times
, Mrs Peggy Pollard of St Mawes in Cornwall came up with the answer to what bearded men should do about gas masks: ‘Four curling-pins may be bought and the beard tightly rolled up in these and tucked under the chin. The gas mask is then drawn over the face, beard and all, and is perfectly airtight. This discovery has been the means of preserving my husband’s magnificent beard, and I submit it to you in the hope that it may save others.’

If the blackout was the principal grievance among Britons in late 1939, then the rise in prices was not far behind. On 27 September, the same day that Warsaw surrendered, Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Simon introduced Britain’s first wartime budget. Income tax went up two shillings (10p) in the pound to 7s.6d (38p). Surtax and Estate Duty both went up sharply, at 60 per cent. An Excess Profits tax was imposed and duties raised on beer, spirits, wines, sugar and tobacco. Sir John, even at the best of times not the most popular of cabinet ministers, budgeted for £2,000,000,000, nearly three times more than £700,000,000 in his last peacetime budget five months before. The new taxes still left a gap of £938,000,000 between expenditure and revenue, which was to be met by borrowing.

Reaction to Sir John’s measures varied. Britain’s leading economist, John Maynard Keynes wrote in
The Times
, ‘What strikes me about this Budget is the utter futility of the old imposts to solve the problem, even when pushed to the limits of endurance.’ A leader writer in the same paper commented, ‘The House found nothing imaginative enough in the Budget to arouse its enthusiasm, or constructive enough to command its respect.’ While the
Daily Express
took a characteristically down-to-earth stance: ‘The Chancellor overdoes it. Sir John is going to work with a meat-axe. He would have done better to take a slice now and another one later.’

Ordinary citizens, by and large, took things philosophically.
‘Fancy, the income tax 7/6d in the £’, wrote Jessie Rex to her young relatives in the USA, ‘money will be scare now’. Gladys Cox of West Hampstead thought the Budget ‘a bitter pill, and it remains to be seen what its effect will be on the life (and soul) of the nation’. But Albert Hird of the
Daily Express
, thinking of the wasted years of the Depression, believed ‘that even the most bigoted Tory now would pray to heaven for the young men and women we might have had had they devoted a few millions of the country’s money to putting the people in the distressed areas to work instead of half starving them.’

Two days after the Budget, on 29 September, all over Britain, householders were completing National Register forms. The next day, an army of 65,000 enumerators under the direction of Sir Sylvanus Vivian, the Registrar General, were at work collecting the forms and issuing identity cards. All went very smoothly, though few of Sir Sylvanus’s volunteers could have been as fortunate as John Rider of Birmingham. During the course of his rounds to collect the forms and issue the cards, he received no less than one packet of twenty-four cigarettes and thirty loose ones, seven books, twelve cups of tea, one eating pear, five glasses of beer, one glass of ‘pop’ and two pounds of tomatoes.

Once collected, the forms served both as a register for national service and for food rationing. On 8 November, Jessie Rex wrote to her relations in America that she had just received her ration book that day. But it was not for another two months before the first foodstuffs were rationed in Britain. When, on 1 November, Minister of Food William Morrison had announced that food was to be rationed, it brought forth a storm of protest.
Picture Post
thought it ‘the most unpopular Government decision since the war began’. The
Daily Mail
’s comment was highly indignant and typical of press reaction: ‘Your butter is going to be rationed next month. It would be scarcely possible – even if Dr Goebbels were asked to help – to devise a more harmful piece of propaganda for Great
Britain. Our enemy’s butter ration has just been increased from 3ozs to just under 4ozs. Perhaps because Goering’s phrase, “guns or butter” has given butter a symbolical significance. But mighty Britain, Mistress of the Seas, heart of a great Empire, proud of her wealth and resources? Her citizens are shortly to get just 4ozs of butter a week. There is no good reason to excuse Mr Morrison, the Minister of Food, for this stupid decision.’

In more sober language,
The Economist
agreed: ‘The methods adopted by the Ministry of Food, first to oppose rationing, and secondly to find reasons for postponement, have run the whole gamut of plausibility and ingenuity and are now verging on the fantastic.’

But if the press, and in particular Lord Beaverbrook’s
Daily Express
, waxed indignant, the general public were not so hostile to the idea of rationing. A Liverpool housewife told Mass Observation, ‘I wish to goodness they would introduce rationing. At last I would be able to go into a shop and get what I was allowed. As it is I’ve got to beg for certain commodities and make up large orders before asking for what I want particularly – sugar, for instance – and then they turn around and say they haven’t any, and if you go in the next day and ask, they’re quite snooty, because you don’t buy anything else. This constant scrounging is getting on my nerves.’

Many believed that rationing would bring fair shares for all and stop profiteering. A Dorking cleaner thought that the ‘Price of food at the local grocer is scandalously high. And I’m sure he’s profiteering. He complains he’ll be ruined by the war. I hope he will.
I
shan’t register with a man who charges so high and has such poor supplies.’

Shopkeepers suspected of profiteering came in for a good deal of abuse, as one Mass Observer overheard: ‘Profiteers! Moneygrabbers! We know who reap the benefit in times like these. Blinking profiteers, that’s what you are! Sucking money from the poor!’ And he concluded his report on ‘Grocery in War’: ‘On one point grocer and customer are at accord. A hundred times a day the sentiment
is expressed on both sides of the counter, “
I’ll be glad when they start rationing.
It’ll put an end to all this.”’