When my grandfather died, we discovered he’d built a nuclear shelter in the cellar of his house by tunnelling through the wall, into the foundations. There, he stored food, some weapons and, curiously, his vast collection of model trains.
Preparing for a very British Armageddon is the subject of this cracking book on civil defence during the Cold War, when the threat of extinction was real and, “by the 1980s, 70 per cent of young people… thought nuclear war was inevitable”. Julie McDowall pulls no punches describing the reality of that threat. From the horrors of Hiroshima – where the eyes of men caught in the blast had melted and “run down their cheeks” – to the radioactive fallout from tests that caused cancer and birth defects, it was clear that a third world war “would be one of unimaginable horror”. Unsurprisingly, many American experts predicted “panic” in the event of an attack on their people.
By contrast, if Britain were hit, experts worried about “apathy”. The experience of the Blitz had shown we were resilient; in the Atomic Age, we were apt to be resigned. Britain is a densely populated island, so there’d be no escaping a blast or its fallout, and the Government couldn’t afford to provide shelters. What civil defence we did procure had a Dad’s Army vibe.
In the event of a nuclear strike, for instance, the BBC would interrupt its broadcasts: “Here is an emergency announcement. An air attack is approaching this country. Go to shelter or take cover immediately.” The alert was issued to “250 police stations across Britain” via a bank of phones that “looked like a child’s toy: the four-minute warning, brought to you by Fisher-Price”. The message was passed on to the Royal Observer Corps, and sirens were triggered across the country, some cranked by hand (perhaps by “the local vicar, doctor or pub landlord”). In the early 1980s, the BBC interviewed a publican who had agreed to host a “warning point” at the Bull’s Head in the village of Monyash, Derbyshire, but had never been sent the actual siren. Were he given the signal, his plan was to jump on his bike and pedal through the streets shouting “The Russians are coming!”
