The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The most difficult issue confronting local authorities was the recruitment of a sufficient number of local volunteers to man the civil defence and emergency services. A proportion of all jobs were full-time and in many cases well paid, attractive to a generation still experiencing relatively high unemployment. In Hampstead the post of principal assistant in the ARP department was advertised at £450 a year and drew 251 applications (a skilled worker earned perhaps £250). Less responsible posts still carried generous salaries of £250–£300 a year.¹⁶ It was harder to secure full-time and part-time volunteers. Although large numbers did come forward, inspired by the threat of a real war, most local civil defence forces were always short of their full establishment. When the bombing began in earnest in the late summer of 1940, many local authorities found themselves forced to accept help from voluntary organizations which had not been included in civil defence planning. In this case the British tradition of voluntarism cut both ways, encouraging men and women to come forward as wardens, nurses, firemen and rescue workers but at the same time alienating those who resented the transformation of volunteers into a disciplined and state-directed force. Nevertheless by the summer of 1940 out of a required establishment of 803,963 civil defence personnel nationwide, there were 626,149 in place, one-fifth of them employed full-time, the rest volunteers. A further 353,740 were part-timers on call in an emergency but not part of the enrolled service, including many workers who were recruited by factories and businesses to undertake air-raid duties in an emergency.¹⁷

These figures did not include two organizations central to the effective working of the emergency services later in the year: the fire brigades and the Women’s Voluntary Services. The regular fire services had always relied on extensive volunteer or part-time participation even in major urban areas. In 1937 there were approximately 5,000 full-time regular firemen who could not possibly cope with the requirements of heavy bombing raids on their own. The government ordered local authorities to set up an Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS) in 1938 to meet the possible threat of bombing, and by the outbreak of war the total fire service had swollen dramatically to 75,000 full-timers, around 85 per cent of them auxiliaries.¹⁸ By the end of 1940 there were altogether 85,821 full-time and 139,300 part-time firemen, of which the AFS made up 67,024 and 125,973 respectively.¹⁹ Relations between the two forces were notoriously poor, since many of the auxiliaries were from professional or clerical backgrounds while the regular firemen were overwhelmingly ex-servicemen or policemen. The author Henry Green, an early pre-war recruit, recalled the hostility in his wartime novel of life in the fire service, Caught: ‘there’s a prejudice against you lads,’ the station officer tells him, ‘you might as well know’.²⁰ The prejudice extended to women, who were introduced in significant numbers by the end of 1940, and to conscientious objectors who tried to join in 1940 when tribunals directed them to non-combatant jobs. In June 1940 the London Fire Brigade refused pacifist recruits on the grounds that they would be resented by the former soldiers among the regulars. The London Ambulance Service was also instructed to reject pacifist applicants and to weed out those with pacifist views among their ranks. The London County Council formally banned the employment of conscientious objectors on all civil defence duties the same month; a further 51 local authorities in England endorsed the same ban.²¹