The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

In late December Herbert Morrison introduced to Cabinet a scheme for compulsory fire-watching. This was part of a broader drive to recruit more civil defence personnel, since the first months of bombing had exposed the gaps in its organization. The decision to introduce compulsion was presented as a form of civil conscription, with appeals to duty: ‘some of you lately, in more cities than one,’ Morrison announced in a New Year’s Eve broadcast, ‘have failed your country. This must never happen again.’¹⁶⁴ He wanted fire-watching parties to be set up in every street and business and empowered the local authorities to compel compliance if there were not enough volunteers. A further instrument for compulsion was introduced on 10 April 1941 with a new National Service Bill, which allowed compulsory recruitment of additional civil defence workers, classified key civil defence personnel as reserved occupation (free of the possibility of military conscription), and compelled local authorities to employ pacifists and conscientious objectors in civil defence and firefighting.¹⁶⁵ The move brought additional volunteers and fire-watchers; street fire parties were trained, equipped where possible with helmets, pumps, ladders and shovels, and linked more closely with the local firefighting authorities. Eventually as many as 6 million people registered for fire duty. Nevertheless, the increased level of compulsory mobilization reached those parts of the population generally less committed to the civic militarization that had gone on during the Phoney War, before the fighting started in April 1940. Some pacifists, content to undertake voluntary fire-watching, refused to be conscripted to do the same job; by April there were 24 cases going through the courts, followed in all but two by a brief prison sentence.¹⁶⁶ In Newcastle out of 57,444 registered for compulsory duty, 44,785 claimed exemption on grounds of ill-health, family commitments or vital war work. By 1943 the city had 57,000 people organized in fire-guard units but they were all volunteers.¹⁶⁷

The new programme of fire prevention almost certainly came too late to make a great difference to the effects of the Blitz. Morrison faced hostility from the trade unions over issues of compensation and conditions for the new fire-watching groups. The relation between the fire services and the new organization was also not clearly defined and the fires that engulfed London, Plymouth, Hull and Merseyside in the spring of 1941 showed the limits of reform. On 8 May the War Cabinet approved the creation of a National Fire Service and Morrison railroaded the agreement into law two weeks later. The NFS became operational in August 1941, organized in 11 regional divisions and a separate service for Scotland. Across the country there were a total of 143 local fire forces. The fire-watchers became the Fire Guard, with white metal helmets and better equipment, under the direction of Ellen Wilkinson. The police brigades and all the smaller forces were scrapped. The reform made possible a standard chain of command so that a single officer would be in charge of the fire services after a raid; it also allowed standardization of equipment and operational technique. A National Fire College was set up in a former hotel outside Brighton, and six volumes of a Manual of Firemanship were published.¹⁶⁸ By 1943 a comprehensive, well-equipped fire-prevention and firefighting system had been created, although difficulties were still experienced in coping with major conflagrations, as the later Baedeker raids demonstrated. How the new system would have stood up to bombing renewed on the scale of 1940–41 was never tested. The new service had to cope with only 10,000 fires, whereas the firemen in the Blitz had had to tackle 50,000.¹⁶⁹ The improvement in firefighting, like the efforts to cope with shelter, rescue and welfare, was one of the many stable doors locked long after the horses had bolted.

‘THE MENTAL STABILITY OF HULL’: MORALE IN THE BLITZ

In November 1941 the section of the Ministry of Home Security devoted to research on the effects of bombing began a survey under the direction of Solly Zuckerman on the psychological effects of air raids. A team of psychiatrists was sent to Hull to investigate the mental stability of its population in the aftermath of a series of shattering raids in the spring and summer of 1941. The object was to try to isolate factors that might explain how a city could be brought to the point of collapse. Hull was chosen because of the large numbers of trekkers who still left the city every night even though the major raids had stopped. The popular view in Whitehall was that the people of Hull exhibited less moral fibre than other city populations. Zuckerman’s team set out to test as scientifically as possible the extent to which bombing produced psychological collapse.¹⁷⁰