Throughout the twentieth century, British civil defence programmes blended direct government action—the distribution of gas masks, say, or the construction of large public shelters—with calls to arms for the public to do their bit to keep themselves, and their families, friends, colleagues, and neighbours, safe.
Relying on the various tools of mass communication which came of age in this era, British civil defence authorities exhorted members of the public to prepare for attack. Not only did they give specific instructions—on what to do when the air raid siren sounded, for instance, or how to prepare for the chaos which would follow a nuclear attack—they also sought to foster the appropriate mentality among the populace. They wanted people to understand the severity of the threat faced, but without giving rise to panic or fatalism. They also wanted people to be ready to take drastic and transformative measures without threatening cornerstones of the British social order, such as traditional gender roles, the importance of the nuclear family (no pun intended), and the supposedly timeless values of stoicism and unobtrusive neighbourliness.
This essay will explore the ways in which the British state deployed propaganda—posters, leaflets, short films, and television and radio broadcasts—to mobilise the population for civil defence, in times of both war and (fragile) peace. It will consider these efforts across three main areas—how authorities sought to familiarise the public with the nature of the threat, explained how and where to take shelter in the course of an attack, and encouraged citizens to join the ranks of the various civil defence services.
NATURE OF THE THREAT
When the First World War broke out in August 1914, the British government had made very little effort to prepare for the potential of air raids on the British Isles. Nevertheless, the first took place only five months later, when German Zeppelin airships dropped bombs on the Norfolk towns of Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn, killing four civilians. As the war—and the raids—progressed, still no dedicated civil defence organisation was formed and most efforts were directed at shooting down the attacking aircraft rather than protecting people in the towns and cities below.
And yet, over time, a piecemeal approach to civil defence did emerge, with action taken by local councils and police forces, with some loose coordination applied by the Home Office. One of the earliest priorities was public information. Within months of those first air raids, a poster was produced which depicted silhouettes of friendly and hostile planes and airships so that civilians on the ground could easily identify any aircraft flying overhead. If an enemy aircraft was spotted, members of the public were instructed to “take shelter immediately in the nearest available house, preferably in the basement”, as well as being told not to “stand about in crowds [or] touch unexploded bombs”.
Interestingly though, the public were required not just to consider their own safety, but also to contribute to the wider defence of their locality. In rural districts, for example, they were asked to report any sightings, with details on time and direction, to “the nearest Naval, Military or Police Authorities”.[1] As such, the public were effectively mobilised as an essential part of broader government-led civil defence initiatives.
By the time of the Second World War, the danger of air raids had increased exponentially, both in terms of scale and likelihood. As early as 1932, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had warned that “the bomber will always get through”.[2] As another conflict drew nearer during the later 1930s, predictions of what it would look like involved images of cities laid to waste by huge fleets of enemy aircraft and civilian death tolls in the tens of thousands. This prompted major government policies, such as the evacuation of children and other vulnerable people from probable target areas to safer zones in the countryside, but it also necessitated an expansive public information campaign.
One thing that worried government planners and ordinary citizens alike was the threat of a chemical attack. Gas had been used extensively in the trenches of the First World War, and there was a widely-held expectation that it would be dropped from the air on civilian targets in the Second. Forty million gas masks were distributed in Britain before the war broke out, but these were unfamiliar, even distressing, devices to most civilians. As such, in July 1939, with war looming, the government issued a series of civil defence pamphlets to homes around the country, one of which was entitled Your Gas Mask: How to Keep It and How to Use It. This opened with a striking claim: “Take care of your gas mask and your gas mask will take care of you. It is possible that in war your life might depend on your gas mask and the condition in which it had been kept”.[3] This shows that while the Government may have taken the lead on civil defence matters, it sought to foster a certain degree of personal responsibility among citizens as well.
With the advent of the atomic age, effectively conveying the nature of the threat became even more important in civil defence communications. Hiroshima and Nagasaki offered only limited evidence of what a real nuclear attack would look like and those examples became increasingly irrelevant as technology advanced. By the time the hydrogen bomb was developed in the 1950s, it was clear that much work needed to be done to explain to the British public what to expect in the event that the Cold War turned hot.
In a leaflet produced in 1957, subtitled "What the Hydrogen Bomb Does", the effects of this new weapon were described in horrifying detail. The reader is told that the “bomb’s power is reckoned in millions of tons of high explosive”, that the fireball “instantly vaporizes anything it touches”, that the “blast surges outwards at the speed of sound, accompanied by a hurricane wind”, and, perhaps most menacingly, that deadly radiation “cannot be felt or smelled, tasted, heard or seen”. There was no attempt to pull any punches here.
Of course, fear alone was not a desirable public response in the eyes of the civil defence authorities. Even if, for most people in the target area or fallout zone, survival was unlikely, it was important that the public were given practical tasks supposedly to increase their safety, rather than run the risk of widespread panic or civil unrest. As a result, the leaflet encouraged civilians to establish a refuge room at home, construct a trench shelter in the garden, or even just take curtains down and whitewash the windows to reduce the risk of fire.[4] Set against the scale and severity of a hydrogen bomb attack, these suggestions seem almost laughably trivial, but they played into existing ideas of level-headedness and improvisation which had taken root in the British psyche during the Second World War, or even before.
SHELTERING
As the leaflet on the hydrogen bomb suggests, sheltering was an absolutely central pillar of British civil defence policy and therefore formed one of the most consistent elements of related public communication. During the First World War, shelter arrangements were, like so many other aspects of civil defence, distinctly haphazard. As detailed in the aircraft identification poster above, in the case of a raid, the public were simply directed to make for the nearest basement. Public shelters were few and far between, though approximately 300,000 Londoners did head to the relative safety of Underground stations in 1917 and 1918.[5]
With the intensified danger presented by the Second World War, many British citizens looked to their government to provide them with shelter. Substantial efforts were made to build large public shelters, but these were slow to emerge and ultimately insufficient. Moreover, the Government feared that large groups huddled together could result in awful death tolls from a single bomb, not to mention the dangers of crowd mentality. As a result, it encouraged people to shelter at home as much as possible. They produced and distributed Anderson shelters (a corrugated steel structure to be buried in gardens) and Morrison shelters (a type of reinforced table) and provided pamphlets with titles such as Your Home as an Air Raid Shelter and Shelter at Home.
The former reassured householders that, while “you may have seen pictures of shattered houses and have thought that a house is no place for you”, in reality “houses afford a great deal of protection against blast and splinters”.[6] The latter presented this as a matter of choice: “Not everyone wants to leave home for shelter. Some people can’t. Lots of people just prefer to remain in their own house anyway. This inclination is a natural one.”[7] Here, the Government’s desire to avoid crowds dovetailed neatly with the old adage that an “Englishman’s home is his castle”. Both pamphlets encouraged this spirit of resourceful individualism further, by providing instructions, alongside photographs and drawings, of how homeowners could make their house as safe as possible.
Nevertheless, sheltering at home was not an option for everyone. People who lived in flats, or whose residences were in major target areas (such as London’s East End), or who simply didn’t trust official assurances about the safety of staying at home, headed for public shelters in considerable numbers. In London, this often meant the Tube stations. Unsurprisingly, lots of people crammed into a confined space, night after night, rapidly gave rise to problems, especially in terms of hygiene and fractious interpersonal relationships. The installation of toilets and sanitary facilities, and the appointment of shelter wardens, went some way to addressing these issues, but public messaging also played a role. A Metropolitan Police report from 31 October 1940 (at the height of the Blitz) noted that “in order to maintain the high morale of the public and to secure their complete co-operation, and to offset any extremist activity, propaganda on behalf of the authorities concerned needs to be carefully prepared and discreetly and continuously applied”.[8]
Government aversion to large-scale public shelters only grew during the Cold War. The nature of the nuclear threat—wherein any attack would likely affect huge swathes of the UK, rather than just specific target areas—meant that shelter provision would need to be made for a majority, if not all, of the British population. There was neither the money nor the political will to make this happen. Furthermore, in an ideological struggle against communism, British authorities were keener than ever to emphasise action by private individuals, centred on their own homes, over any type of major publicly-funded government intervention.
To that end, during the 1960s, civil defence personnel were trained on a course called “Advising the Householder on Protection against Nuclear Attack”, which included sections with such troubling names as “What To Do If It Happens” and “Life Under Fall-Out Conditions”.[9] Then, in the 1970s, a wider campaign was developed to transmit this information directly from central government to the British people, by way of a pamphlet, radio broadcasts, and public information films. Known as Protect and Survive, this campaign was only supposed to be deployed if a nuclear attack seemed imminent but intense public pressure meant that the pamphlet was eventually published in 1980.
Its stark imagery and bold colour scheme has made Protect and Survive a lasting emblem of both civil defence propaganda and Britain’s Cold War more generally. The front cover featured an illustration of a conventional family (mother, father, two children) and bore the strapline "This booklet tells you how to make your home and your family as safe as possible under nuclear attack”. Just as with earlier examples, traditional values were reinforced through civil defence messaging. Inside, the booklet advised people to designate a fall-out room, construct an inner refuge from heavy furniture and bags of earth or sand, and stock it with essentials (from toilet paper and torches to toys and magazines).
It even featured a handy checklist which suggested, optimistically, that readers might want to tick off survival-critical tasks in the midst of a nuclear war. Stretching credulity even further, it also advised anyone caught out in the open when the bomb dropped to lie flat in a ditch and cover their head and hands with their jacket.[10] If all this advice seems rather futile in the face of a nuclear attack, that’s because its practical utility was only a secondary consideration. Of greater importance to the authorities behind it was the need to reassure the public that calmly and sensibly following instructions would help them survive. In this, though, it was not particularly successful—responses to Protect and Survive ranged from mockery and scorn to outright hostility. Some anti-war protestors felt that its implication that such an attack was survivable normalised nuclear warfare, and thus made it more likely to occur.[11]
RECRUITMENT
During the First World War, air raids were sufficiently infrequent and small in scale for existing fire, police, and rescue organisations to handle. There was no central civil defence service and policy was developed and implemented on a somewhat ad hoc basis. However, during the interwar years, as the threat of aerial bombing became much more serious, dedicated bodies were established, including the Air Raid Wardens’ Service in April 1937 and the Women’s Voluntary Service in May 1938. As another major conflict loomed, and then erupted, a top priority for the civil defence authorities—and especially for their propaganda arm—became recruiting adequate numbers of personnel to the new services.
Short films were a useful tool in this regard. Britain at Bay, produced by the Ministry of Information and shown in cinemas during the summer of 1940, shortly before the Blitz began, was one of the most potent. The voiceover, delivered by popular broadcaster, J. B. Priestley, began with the claim that “for nearly a thousand years these hills and fields and farmsteads of Britain have been free from foreign invasion”, before detailing the “ruthless aggression and conquest” of Nazi Germany’s “vast military machine [which] was created at the expense of all the decencies and amenities of civilised life”. It went on to assert that “Britain must become an impregnable citadel of free people”, citing not just the armed forces, but also the “many essential services, now calling for recruits. We need nurses, stretcher bearers, firemen, Civil Defence workers.” By linking these roles to “the future of the whole civilised world”, the film granted them a credibility and importance which had previously been lacking, especially when contrasted with soldiers, sailors and aircrew.[12]
During the Cold War, when the threat of attack was less immediate but the need for trained personnel, should it occur, just as high, recruitment efforts expanded significantly. From 30 September to 6 October 1956, the Government held a “Civil Defence Week” to encourage people to sign up for one of the many auxiliary services. One message that came through particularly strongly was a refutation of the futility of civil defence in the face of nuclear attack—an advert for the Rescue Section noted: “A lot of people think that in a nuclear war there would be no-one left to rescue. That just ISN’T TRUE. It’s NONSENSE.” There was even an entire leaflet produced entitled Civil Defence: Is It Any Use in the Nuclear Age? which tackled this question head on: “A lot of people think that, against a weapon as horrible as [the hydrogen bomb], Civil Defence would be useless – almost ridiculous. It is an understandable reaction. But it is entirely WRONG.”[13]
Another major campaign, Civil Defence is Common Sense, sought to sidestep this issue slightly, by showing that the skills and knowledge necessary “to help us survive the disaster of a nuclear war” could also be “put to very good use in peace-time disasters and emergencies”. The campaign also played into the British people’s self-image as neighbourly and kind—“in a crisis everyone would want to help as a matter of common humanity”. Yet the campaign also highlighted that these qualities alone wouldn’t be sufficient—“common humanity will not tell you how to rescue a man from a collapsed building, how to dress a wound or how to fight a fire”.[14]
Gender also played a role in recruitment to the civil defence services. Several propaganda materials made it explicitly clear that both men and women were needed but the roles offered to them differed. In one campaign for the Auxiliary Fire Service, the call was put out for “physically fit and self-reliant” men “who can handle equipment specially designed for fighting fires caused by a nuclear attack”, while women “must be alert, quick-witted and capable of sustained concentration”, so they could “work behind the scenes controlling and mobilising”.[15] Elsewhere, this distinction was made more bluntly—“This is a man’s job”, proclaimed one poster, advertising the Rescue Section.[16] Another merely said “There’s a job for women too!” with an accompanying leaflet that pointed out that women’s “talents are especially suitable for HQ Staff and the Welfare Section”.[17] In this way, traditional gender norms were utilised to aid in civil defence recruiting, and were in turn reinforced. Civil defence work may have offered many British women opportunities for independence and self-improvement, but the parts they could play were still carefully circumscribed.
To conclude, then, a study of public communication material can offer valuable insights into the ways in which civil defence policy and activities in Britain expanded, developed and changed at moments of great danger and uncertainty. Moreover, because the most effective propaganda always aligns itself with prevailing social and cultural attitudes among its target audience, this material also allows us to understand the British people across this period. From gender norms and family structures, to government-citizen relations and questions of "national character", these propaganda examples hold up a mirror to fascinating aspects of British society throughout the twentieth century.
[1] British Online Archives, Britain Under Threat: Civil Defence in the Era of Total War, 1914–1989, “AIR 1/498/15/316: Types of British and German Aircraft Posters”, available at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50285/air-149815316-types-of-british-and-german-aircraft-posters, image 3.
[2] Brett Holman, The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908–1941 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 57.
[3] British Online Archives, Britain Under Threat: Civil Defence in the Era of Total War, 1914–1989, “HO 186/115: Public Information Leaflet - Gas Masks”, available at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/49872/ho-186115-public-information-leaflet-gas-masks, images 29–30.
[4] British Online Archives, Britain Under Threat: Civil Defence in the Era of Total War, 1914–1989, “INF 13/281: Civil Defence Recruitment Posters”, available at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50287/inf-13281-civil-defence-recruitment-posters, image 21.
[5] Imperial War Museum (IWM), “The Air Raids that Shook Britain in the First World War”, available at https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-air-raids-that-shook-britain-in-the-first-world-war.
[6] British Online Archives, Britain Under Threat: Civil Defence in the Era of Total War, 1914–1989, “HO 205/155: Your Home as an Air Raid Shelter”, available at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50124/ho-205155-your-home-as-an-air-raid-shelter-leaflet, image 16.
[7] British Online Archives, Britain Under Threat: Civil Defence in the Era of Total War, 1914–1989, “HO 205/156: ‘Shelter at Home’”, available at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50125/ho-205156-shelter-at-home, image 72.
[8] British Online Archives, Britain Under Threat: Civil Defence in the Era of Total War, 1914–1989, “HO 207/503: Tube Shelter Committee - Police Report on Conditions and Behaviour of The Public”, available at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50195/ho-207503-tube-shelter-committee-police-report-on-conditions-and-behaviour-of-the-public, image 6.
[9] British Online Archives, Britain Under Threat: Civil Defence in the Era of Total War, 1914–1989, “HO 338/57: Home Office Manual of Civil Defence - Advice For The Householder on Protection Against Nuclear Attack”, available at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50297/73822-c10, images 29–51.
[10] British Online Archives, Britain Under Threat: Civil Defence in the Era of Total War, 1914–1989, “INF 12/1257: UK Local Radio Commercials Giving Advice To The Public on Protection Against Nuclear Attack”, available at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50370/73822-c90, images 112–142.
[11] Jonathan Hogg, British Nuclear Culture: Official and Unofficial Narratives in the Long 20th Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 135.
[12] IWM, "Britain at Bay", https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060006220.
[13] British Online Archives, Britain Under Threat: Civil Defence in the Era of Total War, 1914–1989, “INF 2/122: Civil Defence and Crime Prevention”, available at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50377/inf-2122-civil-defence-and-crime-prevention, images 42 and 75–86.
[14] British Online Archives, Britain Under Threat: Civil Defence in the Era of Total War, 1914–1989, “INF 13/115: Civil Defence Recruitment Posters and Pamphlets”, available at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50373/inf-13115-civil-defence-recruitment-posters-and-pamphlets, image 5.
[15] British Online Archives, Britain Under Threat: Civil Defence in the Era of Total War, 1914–1989, “INF 13/281: Civil Defence Recruitment Posters”, available at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50287/inf-13281-civil-defence-recruitment-posters, images 77–78.
[16] British Online Archives, Britain Under Threat: Civil Defence in the Era of Total War, 1914–1989, “INF 13/236: Civil Defence Recruitment Posters”, available at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50295/inf-13236-civil-defence-recruitment-posters, image 9.
[17] British Online Archives, Britain Under Threat: Civil Defence in the Era of Total War, 1914–1989, “INF 13/281: Civil Defence Recruitment Posters”, available at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50287/inf-13281-civil-defence-recruitment-posters, images 147–149.