In the venerable rock opera Tommy, there is a scene that takes place in wartime London where Ann-Margret crawls into a cage around her bed and cowers as the bombs fall.
Some frames to look at:
Frame 1 Cage in background at left. Frame 2 She’s opening it up to climb in. Frame 3 She’s cowering.
The cage seems to have a robust top and framework, and seems like it would be a nice place to be if a bomb went off a few houses away.
Did folks have these?
Were they makeshift, or were there commercial models available?
Not having any real knowledge of Blitz-era bomb defenses, it was always my assumption that the cage thing was yet another of Ken Russell’s attempts to work as many extraneous and gaudy props into the scenery as possible.
The Morrison was intended for urban multi-flat buildings, where there was no suitable basement for a shelter, or no other shelters within reasonable distance.
My mother’s family, living in a nice red sandstone tenement near Glasgow, Scotland, had an Anderson shelter in the back green; good thing, too, as their town was heavily bombed several times. She recalls that the family would decamp there on nights when a raid was expected (clear, with a full moon), rather than wait for the sirens.
I still get a kick when visiting the UK to look onto people’s back gardens and count how many Andersons are still there, doing duty as the garden shed.
I know a man who slept in a Morrison shelter in his family’s every night - when the raid warnings sounded, his parents would come downstairs and join him. Many people prefered these to outdoor shelters, because they weren’t cold or damp (Anderson shelters were almost permanently flooded, because their floor was a couple of feet into the ground).
My house still has it’s WWII Anderson air raid shelter in the garden (I keep tools etc in it). Some bombs did land nearby in the war (they were aiming for Clapham Junction).
One of my earliest memories was being hustled into the garden by my mother and clambering into our shelter when the air raid sirens went off. Even today when they test some of the alarm sirens - there is one that sounds like the air raid siren- the hair on my neck prickles.
Of course the Morrison Shelter could not withstand a direct hit . It would only protect you from falling rubble etc. My aunt moved into a council house in the 40’s . A previous family occupying it had all been killed when a direct hit landed on their shelter . The house meanwhile suffered some damage but was habitable in a very short time. Just the luck of the draw.
Boy, that’s too cool. It’s quite clear from the illustrations that Ann-Margret was climbing into her very own Morrison shelter.
Like Smapti, I always figured it was some kind of funky movie prop. I know better now.
Can’t imagine how spooky life must have been at the time. But folks just went on about their normal lives, putting in a full day at the office/factory, coming home, eating very slim rations, taking a nice warm bath in an inch of water, and sleeping in their Morrison shelter on cloudless nights. Can’t imagine it.
Since people have referenced both Anderson and Morrison Shelters – named after two successive Home Secretaries, Sir John Anderson and Herbert Morrison – here’s the Anderson Shelter.
Sorry I meant Anderson Shelter. Those people were in their shelter at the bottom of the garden. That got hit and they were killed . The house suffered only minor damage.
:smack:
My dad told me that he was never that scared by the blitz - you had plenty of warning and could either get into your own shelter or the big public ones. (it’s quite interesting to see the old “S” signs around London - there are a lot still there)
He lived in Enfield Chase - which is very close to the factory that made Enfield rifles and Enfield motorbikes etc - an obvious target. He had very vivid memories of seeing the East end on fire (Enfield is higher up).
What scared him (and every one else) were the V2s - as you had no warning at all and they weren’t that accurately targetted. In fact one landed near his house and the blast damaged his home (and killed his pet budgie). He never forgave the Germans for this and hated them until the day he died.
My grandfather told me a story regarding building his Anderson shelter in Harrow, north London. He and his father-in-law, who lived in the same house, received the roof, dug the trench, and then decided to put some nice woodwork inside the thing.
They laid down floorboards and put in a load of cupboards. The construction took them several days, during which time the cat disappeared. They assumed that the woodworking in the garden had scared her off, and she’d return when they finished.
But when they had finished, they stood back to admire their handiwork, and heard a plaintive “meow” coming from inside the shelter. They went in to look for the cat. Nothing. But the mewing continued. They realised with sinking hearts that they must have built their cat into the construction. So they pulled all the floorboards out, which took them hours, but no cat, and still the mewing continued. Meanwhile my grandmother came out to put some ration tins into the cupboards, opened the first one up, and out jumped the kitty.
More importantly, how many coupons did youhave to surrender to get the cat ration?
My mother says that one of the real low points of the war was when whalemeat was all they could get at the shop for a couple of weeks.
On the other hand, fish and chips were never on the ration, so that as long as some supplies of fish and spuds were available, you could get a feed. My grandmother always used to say “the Tallies (Italians) fed us through the war.” (The majority of fish ‘n’ chip shops were run by Italians pre-war. The men had all been interned as enemy aliens, but the women and children ran the shops).
Not all meat was rationed: rabbit, for instance, was not, and became a more frequent part of many people’s diet than had been the case before the war. According to my father, there was one butcher in town which always had a plentiful supply of rabbit all ready to cook, skinned and with the head and paws removed. While no-one was entirely sure where he got his meat from, they were sure it had nothing to do with the large number of cats he kept in the back yard behind the shop.
As I say – according to my father. Who subscribed to the “Who Shot Liberty Valance” school of reporting.
