Post D:
Post D: Some experiences of an Air Raid Warden, by John Strachey (1941).John Scrachey was an Oxford educated journalist who wrote for the Spectator. Later he became a Labour MP and served, bizarrely, as the Parliamentary Private Secretary for Oswald Mosley between 1929 and 1931. Yet in 1931 he left the Labour party and joined the Communist Party. In 1940 he then left the Communists and joined the RAF. From here he was quickly transferred across to the Air Ministry where he became renowned as a radio commentator on the BBC. Later he once again became a Labour MP and spent time as the Under-Secretary of State for Air, Food Minister and Secretary State for War. He died in 1963. During his lifetime he published sixteen books.
posted by Benjamin Nakizo at 2:16 AM
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Choice quotes:
“Nazism combines a crassly mechanical-futurism with the fuss and fume of a tawdry, pseudo-Gothic misconception of the past”. (p16)
“Wages [for full time Wardens] £3 5s. a week for men, £2 for women”. (p17)
The benefits of having a uniformed organisation (p19)
“The main trouble of being a pure civilian during a prolonged air bombardment is that as such one’s only duty is to seek and maintain one’s own, and one’s companions’, safety. And this is inevitably demoralising. The instant that an individual is given even the simplest objective function, and becomes a member of an organised (and uniformed, notoriously important) group, the whole burden of deciding whether or not on any particular occasions to seek his or her own safety is automatically removed… Ford concluded that the enrolment of tens of thousands of men and women in the various Civil Defence Services would have been fully justified for psychological reasons alone, even if, as was by no means the case, their functions had been objectively useless.”
The benefits of woman serving in Civil Defence (p23)
“[Ford] had begun to notice that the sharing by women in the, in fact slight, but apparently considerable, dangers of Civil Defence work, was one of the most satisfying and valuable experiences which the sex had ever had the opportunity to undergo. Nearly all the women Civil Defence workers … undoubtedly derived the utmost reassurance from the discovery that they were just as capable of facing the Blitz as were men”.
Residents angry at the authorities (p29)
“The Government tells me to hate Hitler. And so I do, and no need of telling. But I don’t hate Hitler for this lot”, he swept his hand in a contemptuous gesture over the battered block… “This here is what Chamberlain has done. Shelters to get drowned in: nothing ready: nothing done for the people. If they think we’re going to hate Hitler for this, they’re wrong. They’ll find out their mistake someday, they will. Things won’t never be the same after this lot: nor they won’t. It’s time we has a say”.
A great chapter entitled “Digging for Mrs. Miller” which sees a rescue team dig for most of the day only to remove two bodies as another raid came in further away in the city. “So they took Mrs. Miller away, and the sounds of the new raid were her only requiem.” (p41)
On national pride:
“The heavy raids continued. Their scale, both in time and space, impressed Ford. As he walked the streets, he could fancy that he heard the laboured breath of London. Her incoherent vastness was stretched beneath the night and the raiders. Then, and then again, the hammer stroke of a heavy bomb plunged into the body of the city. London stirred, quivered, and caught her breath as if wounded. She was wounded, again and again. Yet she was so gigantic that her wounds became insignificant, were rendered trivial, were dwarfed, till they seemed no more than cuts or sores upon the hide of some great, slow animal. Ford, who had never had much feeling for London – she had seemed too shapeless and unending – loved her for being the home of a steady, stubborn people. She lay, not passive, but growling back at the tormenting bombers from her hundred guns. Yet she took what she had to take with magnanimity, a city once more worthy of history”.
His narrative, aside from being a vehicle for political commentary also has injections of humour. Of note is the ‘border incident’ between two the Wardens of two neighbouring sectors, each adamant that the unexploded bomb that had just been discovered was in their sector, not the other. The image of all these Wardens in their tin helmets crowding round a bomb crater arguing about which side of the line it had fallen is memorable. And very British.
After the larger chapter entitled ‘the big bomb’ a twenty-six hour dig resulted in the rescuer of a certain Miss Lee, who seemed to be more than fine after her ordeal. Yet days later they learnt she had died in hospital.
The British character (p115):
“Mrs. Wells was an obstinate woman. You may drop big bombs on her; you may kill her dearly loved husband before her eyes; you may bury herself and her daughter under her home; but you do not alter her”. (p115)
Bureaucracy became a problem when the Wardens requested that they be given spare timber to reinforce their own watch building. The Borough however believed that only steel supports could offer substantial protection and hence, with the demand on steel so great, they refused to provide timber. They feared that should they act and the Wardens be buried despite the timber supports they would be held responsible. So rather than take the risk they would rather deny the Wardens the half measure of protection offered by timber and do nothing.
Ford ponders the future for community organisation (p127):
“Ford came to wonder if this curious Corps did not perhaps contain the germ of a form of organisation which might be destined to play a permanent part in the life of the community. After all, if bodies of this kind had been evolved in order to deal with the effects of the Nazis’ efforts knock our cities down, might not somewhat similar bodies play a part in that vast rebuilding and replanning of our whole urban life which, by common consent, was envisaged as the central activity which would face us after the war?”
He talks of ‘music of the future’ when people sat back and envisaged how war time solidarity and organisation could be converted to peacetime needs. He talks of turning the Civil Defence force into a full time body of health and social workers, outside the private sphere. As he says, “If the queue at the Labour exchange, the U.A.B. interview and the re-imposition of the Means Test, seemed to the people of Britain to be the only prospect held out them by victory, then there would no victory”.
He expresses his sorrow that German lives were being taken in the same way by British bombers on a daily basis. Yet his anti-fascists credentials shine through. This was published in 1941 however, and to speak of sympathy with the enemy at this stage was surely highly unusual.
His final passage is a message to Hitler. He notes how Hitler may have deceived and broken the elites of Europe it was here, in London, that the common man held strong and simply by surviving acted to undermine Hitler’s cause.
“Make haste, or their quietness will echo around the world; their amusement will dissolve Empires; their ordinances will become a flag; their kindness a rock, and their courage an avalanche”.
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