Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz: Protecting the Population of Bombed Cities 9781441159953, 9781474217231, 9781441143587

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Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz

History of Crime, Deviance and Punishment Series Editor: Anne-Marie Kilday, Professor of Criminal History, Oxford Brookes University, UK Editorial Board: Neil Davie, University of Lyon II, France Johannes Dillinger, University of Maine, Germany Wilbur Miller, State University of New York, USA Marianna Muravyeva, University of Helsinki, Finland David Nash, Oxford Brookes University, UK Judith Rowbotham, Nottingham Trent University, UK Academic interest in the history of crime and punishment has never been greater and the History of Crime, Deviance and Punishment series provides a home for the wealth of new research being produced. Individual volumes within the series cover topics related to the history of crime and punishment, from the later medieval to modern period and in both Europe and North America, and seek to demonstrate the importance of this subject in furthering understanding of the way in which various societies and cultures operate. When taken together, the works in the series will show the evolution of the nature of illegality and attitudes towards its perpetration over time and will offer their readers a rounded and coherent history of crime and punishment through the centuries. The series’ broad chronological and geographical coverage encourages comparative historical analysis of crime history between countries and cultures. Published: Policing the Factory, Barry Godfrey and David J. Cox Crime and Poverty in 19th-Century England, Adrian Ager Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London, Richard Ward Rehabilitation and Probation in England and Wales, 1900–1950, Raymond Gard The Policing of Belfast 1870–1914, Mark Radford Forthcoming: Deviance, Disorder and Music in Modern Britain and America, Cliff Williamson (2016) The Forefathers of Terrorism, Johannes Dillinger (2016) Private Policing in Modern America, Wilbur Miller (2016) Feminist Campaigns Against Child Sexual Abuse, Daniel J. R. Grey (2016)

Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz Protecting the Population of Bombed Cities Peter Adey, David J. Cox and Barry Godfrey

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2017 © Peter Adey, David J. Cox and Barry Godfrey, 2016 Peter Adey, David J. Cox and Barry Godfrey have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as authors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: ePub:

978-1-4411-5995-3 978-1-3500-4852-2 978-1-4411-4358-7 978-1-4411-4842-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Adey, Peter. Crime, regulation and control during the Blitz : protecting the population of bombed cities / Peter Adey, David J. Cox and Barry Godfrey. pages cm Summary: “An interdisciplinary study on crime and security in blitzed British cities”– Provided by publisher. ISBN 978-1-4411-5995-3 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4411-4358-7 (ePDF) – ISBN 978-1-4411-4842-1 (ePub) 1. World War, 1939-1945–Social aspects–England. 2. Bombing, Aerial–Social aspects–England– History–20th century. 3. London (England)–History–Bombardment, 1940-1941–Social aspects. 4. Liverpool (England)–History, Military–20th century. 5. Coventry (England)–History, Military–20th century. 6. War and crime–England–History–20th century. 7. Crime prevention–England–History– 20th century. 8. Law enforcement–England–History–20th century. 9. Internal security–England– History–20th century. I. Cox, David J. II. Godfrey, Barry S. III. Title. D744.7.G7A34 2016 940.53’1–dc23 2015034258 Series: History of Crime, Deviance and Punishment Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations 1

2

3

Introduction Peripatetic perspectives Protecting the population: approaching morale, criminality and mobilities (Western) Approaches to the Liverpool Blitz Methodology The structure of the book

viii x xi 1 4 13 17 21 22

Anticipating the Blitz Liverpool as target Strikes Interdependencies Going underground Adapting a new machinery Problems, plans and performance Evacuation Near futures Theatricality and performance Conclusion

27

Nervous System Nerve centre Scale and abstraction Contingencies A moral geography Conclusion

55

27 31 33 38 40 42 44 48 51 53

57 63 65 69 78

vi

4

5

6

7

8

9

Contents

Crime During Wartime Wartime crime on Merseyside Policing the Defence of the Realm Looting, blackout and automobility Conclusion

79 81 89 91 99

Grey and Black Markets How the legal market operated How illegal markets operate Cracking down on the docks The everyday grey and black markets on Merseyside Conclusion

103

Liverpool’s Cure for Wartime Juvenile Delinquency Was there a rising tide of delinquency? Bombsites and shelters: juvenile crime on Merseyside The cure for juvenile delinquency? The Liverpool experiment in youth reform Conclusion

123

Controlling Mobility in the City Traffic Evacuation, billeting and trekking Political creatures The missing Rescue Damage and displacement Conclusion

143

Monitoring, Measuring and Maintaining Morale The problem of morale Targeting Morale and productivity Mass atmospherics A moral(e) geography Morale and mobility Conclusion

169

The Legacy of the Blitz The immediate legacy

189

104 107 114 118 121

124 129 133 136 141

144 147 151 155 156 163 165

170 171 173 177 179 184 187

189

Contents

Liverpool could take it Post-war reconstruction – physical and mental Looking to the future – a ‘new Jerusalem’? Post-war consensus on criminal justice? The modern Merseyside Blitz and the making of a myth Notes Bibliography Index

vii 192 194 195 198 199 202 224 232

List of Illustrations Figure 1.1 A panorama of the Liverpool Blitz. 2 Figure 1.2 An air raid warden surveys the damage to the corner of Lord 8 and Castle Street during the Blitz. Figure 1.3 J. Hamilton Hay’s rendering of the electric car terminus. 11 Figure 1.4 An anti-aircraft battalion prepares in Liverpool. 12 Figure 2.1 The Dockers’ umbrella. 30 Figure 2.2 The overhead railway is hit. 30 Figure 2.3 The extensiveness of the Liverpool’s Dock Estate (marked in 36 black). Figure 3.1 An outline of Liverpool’s air raid districts, and the districts 58 overlaid onto the city map. Figure 3.2 The chartroom at Liverpool’s main control. 60 Figures 3.3 and 3.4 Birkenhead’s main control room. 61 Figure 3.5 The new pathways of communications for Birkenhead’s main 62 control. Figure 4.1 Prosecutions in Liverpool (Assize, Quarter Sessions and 84 Magistrates’ courts), 1939–45. Figure 4.2 Prosecutions for offences against the person, Liverpool and 84 England and Wales, 1938–45. Figure 4.3 Prosecutions for property offences with violence, Liverpool 85 and England and Wales, 1938–45. Figure 4.4 Prosecutions for property offences without violence, Liverpool and England and Wales, 1938–45 (English and Wales figures 86 have been divided by 10). Figure 4.5 Traffic accidents and fatalities, 1926–2006. 91 Figure 4.6 Birkenhead: alcohol-related offences (from court registers). 96 Figure 4.7 Birkenhead: property offences (from court registers). 97 Figure 4.8 Birkenhead: defence regulations (from court registers). 97 Figure 4.9 Prosecutions for drunkenness in Liverpool and England and 101 Wales, 1938–44. Figure 5.1 The grey market. 113 Figure 5.2 Black market circuits. 114

List of Illustrations

Figure 5.3 Bootle’s Dock Estate. Figure 5.4 The gatehouse at Wapping Dock today. Figure 6.1 Indictable offences committed by juveniles, England and Wales, 1938–45. Figure 6.2 Indictable offences committed by juveniles, England and Wales, 1938–45. Figure 6.3 Incidence of crime, by age, England and Wales, 1938–45: males (per 100k population of that age). Figure 6.4 Incidence of crime, by age, England and Wales, 1938–45: females (per 100k population of that age). Figure 6.5 Male daily average, borstal population, 1914–45 (figures from annually published Reports by Directors of the Prisons). Figure 6.6 Juvenile offending in Birkenhead and Liverpool, 1930–45. Figure 6.7 Prosecutions under the Education Act, England and Wales, 1938–45. Figure 7.1 Birkenhead evacuees de-train at Oswestry station in September 1939. Figure 7.2 Some of the remains of Bootle’s bombed architecture in Tom Fairclough’s Collateral.

ix 116 117 125 125 126 126 129 130 135 149 167

Acknowledgements This book was made possible by the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust standard project grant, and a Philip Leverhulme Prize to enable some of the completion of the book. We were awarded the grant Mobility, Regulation and Control in a Time of Terror: The Liverpool Blitz (2008), whilst the authors worked together at the Research Institute for Law, Politics and Justice at Keele University. The grant culminated in a workshop, The Hidden Blitz in 2010, held at Keele. We acknowledge the support of our respective departments, Geography and Criminology at Keele, and as the book was written over a long period of time, we thank colleagues at our new academic homes in Royal Holloway University of London, Liverpool University and University of Wolverhampton. The help and assistance of many archives and archivists were invaluable to our research. These include the Liverpool Records Office, Birkenhead Records Office and Wirral County Archives; Chester Archives; the Mass Observation Archives and the National Archives at Kew. Tom Fairclough, the Merseyside Police Archives, the National Library of Wales and the Wirral County Archives, all provided considerable help in tracing imagery and providing reproduction rights. Finally, we would like to thank Jo Turner who gave considerable archival and research support.

List of Abbreviations ACTO

Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders

ADCC

Air Defence Cadets Corps

ARP

Air Raid Precautions

ARW

Air Raid Wardens

BA

Birkenhead Archives

CUP

Cambridge University Press

DAB

Delayed Action Bomb

EUP

Edinburgh University Press

HC

House of Commons

HE

High Explosive

HL

House of Lords

HMRI

Housing Market Renewal Initiative

HMSO

Her Majesty’s Stationary Office

HUP

Harvard University Press

IWM

Imperial War Museum

LRO

Liverpool Record Office

LUP

Liverpool University Press

MO

Mass Observation

MUP

Manchester University Press

OUP

Oxford University Press

PAC

Public Assistance Centre

xii

List of Abbreviations

PUP

Princeton University Press

TNA

The National Archives

UCL

University College London

ULP

University of London Press

UXB

Unexploded Bomb

WVS

Women’s Voluntary Service

YUP

Yale University Press

1

Introduction

The city awoke to a new day. Everywhere streets were blocked with tumbled masonry, carpeted with millions of shining splinters of broken glass and braided with miles of snaking rubber fire hoses. In many districts especially the business and shopping areas, there was complete devastation. Overturned trams, dangling wires, twisted tramlines and uprooted lamp standards littered the main thoroughfare whilst rubble was spilled across them at frequent intervals and brick dust lay thick over miles of side streets. The air was sharp and acrid, it stung the eyes and nose. Over everything there hung a pall of smoke and dust, and a black blizzard of burnt paper from stricken shops and offices. (Search Project 1979) Accounts such as these help us imagine war from the air felt on the ground. Except this is not London, or Coventry, as you might expect from more popular or dominant accounts of the Blitz; this is an account of Liverpool. The Luftwaffe ‘May Blitz’ attacks on Liverpool, and at other times during the war on Merseyside, were able to reform what Angus Calder would call ‘the whole geography of a familiar area’. The Blitz made the big ‘open spaces’ of a stark lunar landscape, celebrated by writers contemporary to the time in awe of the magnitude of the destruction (Calder 1992: 200). The Blitz endured by the city and its residents was a deadly kind of urban renewal, demolishing the tightly packed dwellings that lined the docks and devastating Birkenhead’s Borough Road, and Primrose Road in Bootle. In all, 90,000 houses in Liverpool and beyond were destroyed or damaged: estimates suggest some 80 per cent of Bootle’s housing stock suffered the same fate. In Birkenhead, over 24,000 dwellings suffered damage. Overall, almost 4,000 people were killed across Merseyside in the highest level of concentrated bombing outside of London.

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Figure 1.1 A panorama of the Liverpool Blitz. Source: ‘Bomb Damage in Liverpool’, Wikipedia commons., https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Liverpool_Blitz_D_5984.jpg.

The main attacks on Merseyside came in two phases. First in 1940, the Luftwaffe conducted what Juliet Gardiner has called their ‘provincial tour’. Merseyside, Gardiner explains, ‘including Liverpool, Bootle, Wallassey and Birkenhead – was Hitler’s “number one target” outside the capital and had suffered sixty raids’ (Gardiner 2011: 201); this was compared to London’s 126 by the same moment in time. Later on, the ‘May Blitz’ saw a massive concentration of bombing between 1 and 7 May 1941 – much of it focused on the industries and services located on either side of the Mersey. For Gardiner once more, this was ‘Britain’s lifeline, with ocean liners bringing food and war materiel across the Atlantic’ (Gardiner 2011: 201). The scale of the bombing created enormous levels of mobility. Aside from the relocation of people made homeless and the children sent away to other parts of the country for their own protection, there were many other residents from the hardest-hit areas moved out each afternoon, or ‘trekked’ to safer areas away from the falling bombs. One eyewitness letter described the scenes one evening: At night, lorry after lorry goes down our road (the only one open at all), with men, women and children, with blankets and pillows, etc. They are taking them up into Huyton Woods to sleep – but they are laughing and cheering the whole time – wonderful people. In the evening you see queues and queues of men, women and children waiting to be taken away. One lorry comes up, they get in, in perfect order, no pushing; as each one gets in they give their name and a special permit card to an officer and then get driven away. The orderliness and the quiet way it’s done is wonderful, but very sad when you watch them. (Spiegel 1983)

Introduction

3

Let us note that the geographical damage told through these atmospheric descriptions was also social, political, cultural and economic. The Blitz on Liverpool and Merseyside harmed a complex web of industrial and labour relations, commodity flows and supplies that were even internationally extensive (specifically under the lend-lease agreement with the United States, which came into being on 11 March 1941 and resulted in over $30 billion of aid being shipped to Britain between March 1941 and September 1945). The Blitz affected other more intimate relations in the social makeup of households, especially during the phases of evacuation, and it set into motion an alternative rhythm to the city. Alternative pathways and illicit circuits of displacement were formed, of trading, theft, criminality and delinquency, all amid the dust, debris and waste of crumbling buildings, burning warehouses and houses smashed to smithereens. Little pockets of opportunity for crime and deviance were created. The ‘Myth of the Blitz’ (Calder 1992), which perpetuated the view that the British stoically bore the bombing or peacefully removed themselves to safety in the shelters in an orderly manner (or to nearby countryside as the quote on trekking intimates), is now extremely contested (see Ponting 1990; Hylton 2001; Heartfield 2012), just as darker moments on the domestic front found in the internment and marginalization of foreign ‘aliens’ have also been brought to light (Kushner and Cesarani 1992). As with London, Coventry, Hull, Newcastle and other heavily bombed cities, the Liverpool Blitz was not calm, orderly or jovial; rather it was fraught with tension, terror and danger. It is important that we do subdue the magnitude of the violence, even if we should be careful not to overemphasize, as Peter Stansky cautions, the more ‘distressing aspects of the Blitz’ (2007: 183). Alongside the damage to the housing stock and critical infrastructure, Liverpool’s Register of Burials reveals not only the death toll but also brief descriptions of the manner in which the populace were killed by the May bombings.1 On 3 May, residents in Bentham Drive were killed by falling masonry. Most were killed or injured by splinters, shrapnel and collapsing building materials set into motion by a bomb explosion or weakened by fire, those in Coltart Road and Hunslet Road by a bomb explosion. There were many deaths categorized by the causes: bomb explosions and masonry; brain injuries from a fractured skull, presumably from shrapnel or splinters, together with multiple wounds and burns. Blast, shock and falling debris accounted for many other deaths. Rather than celebrate or decry the explicit violence in this detail as exemplifying any notion of good or bad morale, or a

4

Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz

failed or resolute Blitz spirit, our interests are in the historical reconstruction of what happened – in explicit detail – to the measures designed and adapted to govern and police the Blitz.

Peripatetic perspectives Such a focus on the measures of governance and policing contrasts with many existing reports of Liverpool and Merseyside life through the Blitz, which have tended to fall on the perspective of everyday life, witnessed by a lone urban walker making his or her way through the scene. Accounts of Liverpool’s Blitz are often recovered through this peripatetic view from below. The journey is usually a solemn one, mourning the pain or hardships of the war and family life straining to cope with the rhythms of bombardment and the pressures of rationing and other wartime regulations. Somehow the drudgery of these walks is mixed with the crackle and spectacle of the violent attacks. Contemplation converges with sensory overload at the extreme noises, temperatures and flashes of light: Poor Liverpool, she was a very sorry sight; the devastation was immense and we had quite a time finding our way to the Liver Building. […] Before long all Hell broke loose. They were coming over in droves and the noise of the bombs was thunderous. Some people made a hasty retreat to the hotel (Adelphi) cellar. [which] was packed and only dimly lit. We managed to find a spot amongst the crowd and sat down. Few spoke, the noise was deafening even down there. […] The all-clear went at about 4 o’clock and we crawled up to our rooms numb with exhaustion.2

Of course, this pedestrian view of the city is not just the product of artistic style or the imaginative recovery of memory but real itinerancy, the consequences of emergency regulations and the result of severe infrastructural breakdown, which would mean the only option to traverse the city was by walking. The Blitz regularly caused the rupture of local transport networks: a tram or bus service halted by a burst gas mains, debris blocking the streets, a highexplosive found on the line and so on. Many were forced out of their houses, factories, shops and offices, either escaping a raid or returning from one, once the all-clear was given. Others found profit, motive or the means to exploit these conditions in a parallel itinerancy of petty crime, theft, looting and gang violence amid the Blitz. While these accounts are very much

Introduction

5

situated within the streets of Liverpool and Merseyside (even as they were demolished), they should not serve to separate us from wider issues that penetrate the brute facts of the bombing of a city. Indeed, if we can extrapolate from the flaneur – the celebrated figure of the stroller expressing the great forces and tensions underplay within the modernity of nineteenth-century imperial Paris (Harvey 2003) – then another kind of walker (Benjamin 1999) might allow us to begin to elucidate the Liverpool Blitz and the governing and policing of populations during wartime. The popular novelist of Liverpool life Helen Forrester chooses to focus much of her account of the Blitz during her early twenties on her pedestrianism. Forrester was not native to Liverpool; she was born in Hoylake, but moved to Liverpool just before her teens due to her father’s bankruptcy. Her autobiographical work Lime Street at Two, reminding us of the romantic coordination of many couples meeting under the famous clock at Liverpool’s Lime Street station, settles on a repetitive five-mile walk to work along Byrom Street, Scotland Road and Stanley Road (Forrester 1985). The geography of her trek was almost a ladder up the spine between the docks and the rest of the city on her way to Bootle. This was a walk littered by fallen debris, undertaken because she hadn’t the money or the railways were out of action. Forced by her mother to relinquish whatever meagre earnings she achieved, Forrester’s mobility is also a product of the relations of family structure and the difficult maternal and gender ties that were bearing the brunt of wartime shortages (Holdsworth 2013).3 The circulation and redistribution of her labour to an oil-refining plant later in the war would see this journey become much shorter, before lengthening again as her mother sought safer accommodation on the Wirral. This move would force the young Helen’s dependence on other transport infrastructures such as the Mersey Railway or the ferry in order to cross over the river into the city. That so many of Forrester’s walks were undertaken through a mist of tears or gloom owes something to the inseparability of Liverpool life from the war in the Atlantic. Of course, the Mersey had been realized by so many writers to set the pace and cadence of Liverpool well before 1939. In the first months of conflict, Forrester’s employment was as a social worker, offering pensions advice to the families and wives of merchant seamen and sailors lost at sea. It was there that she learnt of her fiancé Harry’s death. Helen had to deal with his mother, Mrs Evans, who was seeking advice on how to collect his pension but was unaware of her son’s and Helen’s relationship. Helen at once realizes the death of her fiancé, and the irony that religious

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Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz

differences had forced Harry (brought up as Roman Catholic) from his family home and to keep his engagement with Helen, a Protestant, in secret, only for his mother to collect a pension upon his death. Tragic as this story is, it helps us realize how entangled the pathways of convoys in the Atlantic, being picked off by packs of German U-boats, really was with life ashore in Liverpool, and the various industries and communities connected with that life. If the air-war was to shatter any sense of ‘separateness between the two fronts’ (Grayzel 2012: 3) of war and home, the case and context of Liverpool and Merseyside shows how these demarcations were even more complicated. Bryce Evans (2013) has discussed at length how the IRA’s campaign on Liverpool before the declaration of war with Germany had resulted in a tear gas explosion in the Paramount and Trocadero cinemas on 3 May. The attacks on cinemas and other important urban infrastructures such as bridges, railway stations and electricity pylons were intent on killing as well as causing disruption. Like the threat of aerial war, they were popularly viewed as a desecration of public space as political violence was waged on civilians. Evans even shows how a Liverpool newspaper described the attacks as ‘lightning outrages’, in anticipation of the war terminology of blitzkrieg as lightning war. As we will see below, other forces of violence and corruption would split and fray the social and material fabric that shielded the population from war. During the morning light on her walk, Forrester and other workers would pick through a procession of pedestrians ‘winding through shattered or blocked streets’ (Forrester 1985: 221). In the dark, other objects became hazards. It could be a stop-start journey, with the darkness lit by flares dropped by the German bombers. The trail of pedestrians, made up of rescue squads, walking causalities, tradesmen, ‘like telephone men and electricians’, medical personnel, interwove a line of vehicles: ‘motor traffic crawled along with heavily shaded lights; ambulances and fire engines rang their bells. Lorry drivers, tram and bus drivers normally kept going until a raid was overhead’ (Forrester 1985: 221). Forrester’s walk becomes almost a horizontal cross-section of the different layers of Liverpool’s Blitz. As Susan Grayzel has noted, the air raid ‘potentially brought all civilians into the war zone and thus made their ability to survive vital to the war effort’ (2012: 3). And so the mobilization of the civil population meant Forrester’s walk would have to navigate a strata of civil defence personnel, police and volunteers mixing with the city’s normal services, all enrolled to keep the city moving. Walking along the roads through these stratifications and seams of effort was

Introduction

7

to be exposed to danger, to the many efforts made to impose order and regulate life during wartime and to the lives and practices that sought to evade those measures of control. At different moments, a raid would pass right overhead, leaving Helen with little shelter to hide in. In one moment, she explains, ‘I went down on my knees in the road and then flattened myself against the kerb, face tucked into the tiny corner of protection that it offered’ (Forrester 1985: 253). In other moments, forced to adopt a different route, Forrester finds herself cat-called by the rowdy sailors and dockers congregating at the city’s bars and hostelry with the influx of work, ignorant of or insulated from the turmoil going on around them. For Forrester, and others experiencing the extreme violence of the Blitz, the events become too much to take in. The bombing of the city becomes an overwhelming sensorium of spectacle, sights, smells and sensations difficult to contain. We should note that these were not completely original experiences of the city if we are to realize the context to Liverpool and Merseyside’s Blitz experience. A backdrop of writing, some of which is contemporary, has seen pre-war Liverpool celebrated with the sublime excesses of speed and commerce not dissimilar from the bewilderment of war, even that experienced at the front. Take a fictional character from Anthony Quinn’s noir-ish Liverpool Blitz novel Rescue Man, Tom Baines, who remembers from his childhood not a walk but a canter as he rode mounted from Princes Park to Princes Avenue and on towards the city: His accelerating heartbeat soothed by the complacent steadiness of the horses’ gait. As the streets called him on, the unwanted height and rhythm of the saddle lent an exhilaration he had never known from the inside of a tram. A Shawlie selling flowers outside the Philharmonic Hotel; grubby kids playing hopscotch barefoot on the pavement; the crowd thickening as he passed St Luke’s Church and then steered into the narrow funnel of Bold Street, […] past the stern pillared façade of the Lyceum, the horse’s flanks sweating now, the rider too, close packed alongside the quick flurry of wheels on cobbles, the busy criss-crossing of leisured ladies and boatered gents and boys singing the newspaper headlines. At the corner of Church Street and Whitechapel he paused to watch a commotion – a costermonger’s barrow had overturned, its load blocking the way – and then with a mere touch of the stirrup they were heading up Lord Street, chocked with trams, past the Victoria Monument overlooking St Georges’ Crescent and down, down again, towards the majestic plateau of the pier head. […] the boy gazed out beyond the liners to the river and the ocean pathways vectoring north. (Quinn 2012: 8–9)

8

Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz

Figure 1.2 An air raid warden surveys the damage to the corner of Lord and Castle Street during the Blitz. Source: Reproduced with kind permission of the Merseyside Police Archives.

Of course, it was precisely this landscape that was subjected to the falling shells, but Quinn’s appreciation of the city’s motion illustrates that there were earlier and similar interpretations outside of the experience of war. This can be no

Introduction

9

better exemplified than in other portrayals of Liverpool, notably Walter Dixon Scott’s impressionistic account of the city, writing at almost the same moment as Quinn’s fictional character. Written as companion to Liverpool artist J. Hamilton Hay’s watercolours, Dixon Scott (1907) conjures up the docks as a sublime, inhuman landscape: Neither of the land nor of the sea, but possessing almost in excess both the stability of the one and the constant flux of the other – too immense, too filled with the vastness of the outer, to carry any sense of human handicraft – this strange territory of the Docks seems, indeed, to form a kind of fifth element, a place charged with daemonic issues and daemonic silences, where men move like puzzled slaves, fretting under orders they cannot understand, fumbling with great forces that have long passed out of their control. […] That, certainly, is the first impression – an impression that has nothing whatever to do with the romance of commerce or the ingenuity of man, or anything of that kind, but that is simply the effect of the unhuman spaciousness of it all, the strangely quiet, strangely patient presence of great ships, the vast leaning shadows, the smooth imprisoned waters, the slow white movements of a seabird gravely dipping and curving, dipping and curving, between the shadow and the sun, the sudden emergency in the midst of this solemnity of some great fever of monstrous echoing activity. Afterwards of course, as the senses grow accustomed to the new order of things, to the frightened spaciousness and the bursts of tangled effort, there ensues another attitude. (Dixon Scott 1907: 27)

Dixon Scott, born in Liverpool in 1881, began writing for the Liverpool Courier and Country Life before becoming a regular contributor to the Guardian and the Bookman. Dixon Scott would die at Gallipoli during the First World War, being much admired, and a collection of his writing would be published posthumously in Men of Letters (Dixon Scott 1916). His work is a good example of the attentiveness of modern visitors to all that was sensuous of Liverpool, to allow an account of the city to speak through the tingled senses. A review in The Spectator would not necessarily find Dixon Scott’s style particularly favourable; ‘we do not admire this mode of putting the matter’, they wrote, finding the book ‘somewhat fatiguing’ and lapsing into ‘something that a hostile observer might call silliness’.4 They did, however, find meaning in his recognition of the role of water in the life of the city, perhaps above anywhere else. The river’s complicity in Liverpool, like Forrester’s account of the merchant seamen, is Dixon’s ‘chief orderer and distributor’ of life on shore, shaping the people’s actions and their senses.

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Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz

While the focus of this book is not predominantly literary at all, what we are trying to emphasize here is an expressiveness to other accounts that are shared in and out of wartime, especially with regard to Liverpool, where focus is given to the experience of being there. Dixon Scott’s Liverpool is articulated as a ‘torment of labour’, ‘efficiency and tirelessness’, summoning a ‘bigness of her interests’ ( Dixon Scott 1907 : 30). The tension in play in Dixon Scott is that Liverpool’s scale departs his awareness and the sensation is overwhelming. It is the system, the scale of the docks, and especially their traffic which are too big for him to comprehend. His is a state of modern bewilderment in which the ‘system of the labyrinth begins to emerge’ (Dixon Scott 1907: 30). The sublime violence, the ‘superhumanity of drama’ (Dixon Scott 1907: 33) of Liverpool’s modernity, could be said to repeat itself in the Blitz, voiced by many others picking their routes through the city.5 Dixon Scott notices ships sit poised in the docks; humans scuttling about are weighed against the ‘gigantic measure’ they find themselves serving (Dixon Scott 1907: 33). The ships could almost be the dirigibles hoisted in barrages above the city, waiting to interrupt Luftwaffe bombers. Such images would figure in the concerned mind of the Liverpool Blitz bystander, confused by the magnitude of the possible destruction. One such daydreamer sees a balloon winched skywards and imagines the panic should it be set alight to become a ‘flaming mass of balloon which might engulf the winch itself together with the operator’. The other threat was also the tethering cable, almost a mile long, which could fall across the city damaging buildings and blocking roads. For others it is as if all the senses are being attacked at once. As the barrage moved overhead there would be showers of lethal shell splinters falling like rain and striking sparks on the road surface. Sometimes a whirring sound as a particularly big piece such as a nose cap could be heard. The raid could have comparative lulls but the night overall consisted of one long crashing noise, whistles of falling bombs and brilliant light, and in areas where bombs had fallen there would be a covering of grey dust over everything from pulverised plaster and mortar and bricks. (Tomlinson 1996: 20)

Was Dixon Scott anticipating exactly these kinds of apprehensions when describing Liverpool at night, in a ‘vortex of light that boils beneath the great cliffs of St. Georges Hall, so terrible in their nocturnal shapelessness’ (Dixon Scott 1907: 91)?

Introduction

11

Figure 1.3 J. Hamilton Hay’s rendering of the electric car terminus. Source: Dixon Scott (1907).

Banality While we recognize the experiences of such a Blitz spectacle, our attention is drawn instead to the banalities of not only Blitz life but also to the issues the authorities sought to govern that our walkers seem to tread upon. The bombing certainly meant dramatic and catastrophic spectacle, but it came to matter in more mundane ways as it interrupted the life of the Liverpool and Merseyside public. The terrific explosion of a street’s gas mains would soon be felt by low gas pressure for cooking the following day, or none at all. The electricity would falter. Water provision was uncertain as the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, lakes and swimming pools and lastly the river Mersey came under threat. The canal would be later breached by a bomb as previously separate systems seemed to get muddled up during the Blitz; a steel barge came through the breach in the canal to end up in the railway yards. Against all this destruction and disintegration by now familiar to the inhabitants of the city grew up another landscape: that of protection. There were

12

Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz

balloon barrages; street bunkers; and fifty-two 5,000-gallon steel water tanks, and over a hundred smaller canvas ones, put in place to provide supply where the water mains had been hit or failed. Parts of the city became strange as they were drawn into the war. St George’s Hall, the city’s famous Assize Courts and grand Victorian edifice set proudly opposite Lime Street Station, became a massive shelter for 800 people in the basement. The crypt was divided into wings and sections; screened-off chemical closet pails for relieving oneself were provided in recesses. On the floor, a mass of humanity stretched out over cardboard boxes used as groundsheets, blankets and sheets to cover them. On gangways sat elderly men and women. People tended to see where they slept as their ‘own pitch’, and returned to it nightly.6 Against the backdrop of Liverpool’s great ‘movement economy’, against the recorded senses of the sublime we have been discussing, from the size and scale of its various industries and its great connections, the speed and acceleration of the place of tarnished tram tracks, entangled overhead wires, enrobed by the smoke from ships and railway engines and factories, against this vibrancy, we can compare the new protective measures that seem to suggest something more stolid, despite their temporary and urgent construction. Liverpool and the towns on Merseyside were protected by a brutal solidity of things and regulations, ‘the sandbagged buildings, the warden’s posts, the square, ugly surface shelters in the side streets – the balloons, searchlight sites and AA guns’ (Hughes 1993: 2). This was a new landscape of laws, regulations, conduct and defensive materials, and it was there to stay, at least for a while.

Figure 1.4 An anti-aircraft battalion prepares in Liverpool. Source: ‘Liverpool’s Anti-Aircraft Defences’, The Liverpolitan, October 1938, p. 15, LRO.

Introduction

13

Protecting the population: approaching morale, criminality and mobilities Behind all of this bewilderment at sandbagged buildings and anti-aircraft guns and underneath the spectacle expressed by writers and spectators resorting to their immediate visceral responses, or other imaginative tropes and metaphors, were other kinds of labyrinthine ‘systems’: whole apparatuses of networks or backups of civil defence workers, air raid wardens, police and military personnel, rescue workers, first-aid workers, firemen and fire-watchers. Behind that were plans, so many plans that sought to create procedures and protocols of what to do when the siren wailed, what to do when the telephone lines went down, where to seek help from, how to report a bomb or bomb damage, where to send and house children when war was declared and how to evacuate them again a year later when many had returned to their homes during the ‘phoney war’. Both in front of those measures, in terms of how they were enforced, policed or provided by harder physical infrastructure, and behind them, in terms of a raft of legislation and Defence Regulations which shifted almost by the day, was a different reality to many of the Blitz narratives we have heard. Such a focus on the bureaucratic, the banal, the life of governing and policing the Blitz is the focus of this book. The story of the Blitz on Liverpool and Merseyside complicates existing accounts of the bombing war by exploring the Liverpool Blitz through a number of scales to reveal how efforts to protect the population actually played out in the governing of everyday life. We mean this in the sense that our story is not a simple examination in the tradition of revisionist histories that get behind the apparent ‘myth of the Blitz’ or the official or well-worn accounts. Certainly, our study explores how a state possessing far more extensive powers sought to control and govern the population’s behaviour. Our account is also of how the various measures to protect and secure were conceived, designed and implemented in particular contexts and, quite simply, did not always work. This requires some care, as Ziegler (2002: 163) has pointed to the unfortunate tendency to root ‘out every instance of greed, panic, cowardice, snobbishness, prejudice, and to deduce from them that the authorities were callous and inefficient, the people shiftless and uncertain’. Our aim is not to seek allegiance to one overarching analysis of the Blitz on Merseyside and Liverpool over any other, but to explore the ways in which the emergency and police apparatus was designed, contested, resisted, fought and subverted. While we will point to moments of failure or fragmentation

14

Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz

in these efforts to govern, it is less about deliberately identifying failure than moving away from an analysis of the Blitz over-determined by unmitigated celebration. Indeed, within the very gaps and fissures of protection were the effectively criminalized proportions of the population who were placed closer to the edges of poverty and starvation by the new regulations. Otherwise they found themselves cracks, ways around and opportunities. The enterprising, the criminal and the downright desperate all invented tactics to exploit those new rules. There were the movements and fluidities of the population’s behaviour, their travel habits and the flux of materials traded, moved and supplied within the city that seemed to escape control as much as they could be channelled and directed. And there were the population’s feelings, the excessive sentiments of a population awaiting the start of the Blitz and being collectively punished by the bombs as well as the punitive measures designed to protect them. Protection was often an irritant upon the face of everyday life and expressed in a rash of traffic restrictions, blackout restrictions, rationing, trading rules, controls over rumour, gossip, low morale and so on. This book is, thus, an examination of the ability to wield substantive new as well as existing powers in order to govern and control behaviour. It examines how those powers failed, how they were felt, experienced and crucially resisted or how they came with inadvertent and unanticipated consequences. It is worth saying that this book is unlikely to fizz or crackle with grand theoretical developments. Our project is more modest because our intent is primarily empirical – to understand and say what happened. And yet, our investigations, and the stories we present here, could also be seen as the waves, peaks and troughs coaxed, shaped and directed by undercurrents of critical thought. It is not that we require the Liverpool Blitz to be brought to life by these notions, quite the reverse. An outcome of this work is how it helps us refine the ways we might think about governance in wartime, to ask just what exactly happened to behaviour, criminal and otherwise, in Britain’s provincial cities? How were citizens really responsibilized during this time? How did the emergency apparatus succeed or fail? What happened to the geography of the city shaped by the bombs and navigated by emergency workers and the general populace? And in what ways was all this viewed and experienced from those inside Liverpool and Merseyside, as well as those looking in at it from a distance? In other words, debates in contemporary social science and the humanities inform this project, but for the most part they will remain a little more unsaid than explicit. For now, we can draw three closely related sets of interdisciplinary concerns that work in the background of this study.

Introduction

15

Morale A key conceptual category informing this work is the notion of morale. While we will explore this in more detail later, it is suggestive that the forms of governing which were devised and deployed during the Blitz sought to understand, capture and, to a certain extent, manipulate the collective sentiments of an entire population. While morale has featured in an enormous number of studies to examine the various doctrines of air power conceived and devised during the socalled Bombing War (see, for example, Biddle 2009; Overy 2013), we follow a far smaller number of inquiries which examine morale from more or less below, as well as above (Hewitt 1983; Mackay 2002; Torrie 2010; Süss 2013). We mean this not so much in the terms of whoever was dropping the bombs, but the different scales of interests in maintaining and managing morale for the purposes of securing the population from the bombs, as well as themselves.

Criminality People continued to commit everyday offences when the war started, but the wartime conditions introduced new opportunities for theft, burglary, looting and other property crimes. A new raft of criminal offences (or the reintroduction of criminal offences introduced in the First World War) brought thousands of people before the courts who had never been in trouble before. The blackout created unheard-of for a generation possibilities of committing undetected acquisitive or sexual crime, while the imposition of stringent Defence Regulations brought many previously blameless individuals into the purview of the judicial system. Juvenile delinquency was seen as a particular problem within Merseyside, and as we will discuss, it was the focus of several academic studies at the time. The physical and mental geographies of Liverpool that are referred to throughout this book also played a part in providing numerous settings for petty and occasionally serious offences; the docks in particular offered potential rich-pickings for nefarious behaviour. We therefore investigate how both local and national authorities understood these perceived problems and their efforts to react to them.

Mobilities Contemporary developments in the social sciences encourage us to think about the ways in which the static primitives of sociological and geographical thought

16

Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz

that we take for granted, like community, or the social, are in fact far from still (Urry 2000; Sheller and Urry 2006; Cresswell 2010). Rather than looking at migration patterns, transport networks, habits and routines of bustling about the city as expressions of other structural forces, like economics – mere by-products of something more interesting – this body of work asks what if those mobilities were interesting in their own right? What if we were to take those mobilities seriously on their own terms and make sense of how those mobilities were conceived, worried about, planned and experienced? What kinds of mobile lives were made in the nexus of sea, land, trade, industrial and migration networks that were targeted during the Blitz on Liverpool and Merseyside? How was all that moving about changed and altered by the threat from bombing? How was it governed? How did it worry those trying to protect the population? How was it enrolled into systems of defence and preparations for the Blitz? Thus, while the pages of the book are not smattered with theories of mobility, they have shaped the tone and texture of the book’s investigation. What these three foci add up to is an attention within the book to a series of efforts to govern, because, for whatever reason, a problem existed which demanded that governance. Problems create spaces for intervention into which various modes of governmental, regional and local powers, regulations and practices were deployed. Liverpool and Merseyside, as we will discuss in the following chapter, were eminently problematic and these problems intersect our interests. The potential of a panicky population, for example, concerned the national interwar committees on preparing for air-war and suggested collective disapathy and riotous mobilities, as well as a potential vacuum for disorder and criminality (Mackay 2002). How was this problem of mobility, criminality and collective feeling to be governed in Liverpool and Merseyside? In this equation of concern, however, was a context. Our interest is not only in how this context made a difference but also in the context of Liverpool and Merseyside that was already problematic for a whole variety of issues that relate to the pre-war failures of social policy in the area: industrial decline and unemployment, urban poverty, family separation, labour agitation, Irish Republicanism, religious sectarianism, tensions of migration, childhood delinquency and gang violence, among many others (Belchem 1992, 2007; Macilwee 2011). The scale of unemployment on Merseyside during the period is shown in Table 1.1, compiled by the Ministry of Labour in answer to a question in the Commons concerning ‘the numbers registered as unemployed at 15th January, 1940, in Hull, Liverpool, Newcastle, Cardiff, and Fleetwood, respectively, and the corresponding numbers at the first convenient date after 3rd September, 1939’:

Introduction

17

Table 1.1 Number of unemployed in Hull, Liverpool, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Cardiff and Fleetwood, as at 15 January 1940 and 11 September 1939 (HC Deb 12 March 1940 vol. 358 c1020W) Area

15 January 1940

11 September 1939

Hull

15,205

12,637

Liverpool (including Bootle)

64,150

63,462

Newcastle-Upon-Tyne

15,446

13,719

Cardiff (including Penarth)

9,538

9,879

Fleetwood

2,247

1,704

This book finds that it cannot abstract the Liverpool Blitz from this context, nor would it want to. Instead, we explore the entanglements of the Blitz, and the measures of policing and protection, within a distinctive local situation of existing problems, as well as the local political frames through which the protections and policing of the Liverpool Blitz were conducted.

(Western) Approaches to the Liverpool Blitz It is helpful to pause for a moment to consider how we might think about the problem of trying to govern and police the Liverpool and Merseyside Blitz. We turn to Western Approaches Command, and, in particular, the 1944 feature film of the same name, Western Approaches, directed by Pat Jackson. We want to suggest that the logistical issues of the film’s production, and of course the representation of Western Approaches Command during the course of the film, help us to conceptualize the central problem facing governance and policing explored in this book. The movie’s production, as well as what it depicts, provides us with some insight into how Liverpool and a wide variety of agencies sought to govern and to provide protection during the Blitz. The film has, we might say, ‘performative force’ (Gregory 2011), while illustrating the intimate relationship between Merseyside and the long trains of convoys at threat in the Atlantic by the Germans’ U-boat blockade. The perception of Liverpool’s centrality to the war effort came down to not only its importance as a port and how that lent primacy to the interests of the Luftwaffe, who saw the city as a secondary target only to London, but also as the centre of Western Approaches Command (known as ‘Western Approaches’).

18

Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz

Established in Derby House, now Liverpool’s Second World War museum, the navy set up the combined operations command for the rectangular area of sea through which the Atlantic convoys were redirected to arrive in Britain. The convoy routes were steered away from the English Channel to pass instead over the top of Ireland, and thus the command moved from its previous position in Plymouth to Liverpool in early 1941. Derby House became the naval nerve centre partly because of the strength of the building, which was reinforced, but also because of its proximity to the General Post Office (GPO) trunk network, then a major backbone of the telephone system (Kent 2004). In case the lines were disrupted, Derby House was equipped with radio, and a standby headquarters at Knowsley House was located several miles outside the city. Knowsley formed part of a contingency plan should the Liverpool building suffer irreparable damage or require evacuation. The film Western Approaches was intended as the navy’s answer to Target for Tonight, Bomber Command’s 1941 blockbuster which used real Royal Air Force (hereafter RAF) personnel instead of actors. Comparable to our use here, we take some inspiration from Derek Gregory (2011), who explores the visualizations of Target, and the technical processes and exercises portrayed by it. Target, funded by the Crown Film Unit and produced by Henry Watt, shows the process of the Allied bombing of a target in Germany. As Gregory (2011) notes, the early part of the film meticulously follows the sequential processes of the identification and planning of a target through aerial photos, maps and eventual instructions – a smooth and normal process Graham Greene compares to that of the work of a factory. Western Approaches was Derby House’s commander-in-chief Admiral Sir Percy Noble’s response to Target. The Crown Film Unit, director Pat Jackson and the famous cinematographer Jack Cardiff were commissioned in 1942 to make the film based on an early treatment by Owen Rutter (Aldgate and Richards 1994). The film would be made in Technicolor, and designs were made to ambitiously shoot the entire film in live-action utilizing genuine mariners, rather than relying on actors, studio-set models or simulations of the sea footage. Jackson had worked with Target’s Harry Watt on other productions and had learnt from his dramatic approach to documentary subjects, including the banal processes of Post Office savings in the film The Saving of Bill Blewitt. Jackson would follow Watt’s lead by employing, for example, in The Builders (1942), real bricklayers to perform the role of actors. In Western Approaches, the film’s narrative locates Liverpool and other actors and organizations somewhere near a series of communication and decision centres. The result is a fascinating

Introduction

19

portrayal of geographical scales, details and abstractions through particular circuits of communication and authority. While making the film, the production team soon learn of the importance of these networks as they begin to negotiate access to naval resources early in preproduction. Meeting Percy Noble at his apartment on the top floor of Derby House for cocktails, 18.30 sharp, Jackson remembers his first encounter with the commander-in-chief in his memoir (Jackson 1999: 95): Noble: Jackson: Noble: Jackson: Noble:

‘So, how can I help?’ ‘I must get to sea for a bit, Sir.’ ‘You’ve come to the right place for that. When do you want to go?’ ‘The sooner the better, Sir.’ ‘You a good sailor? Not that it matters a damn. Nelson was as sick as a dog for the first three or four days. What do you fancy? Atlantic convoy? Freetown? Capetown? You name it and we’ll have you aboard in no time.’

Jackson was soon led by Noble down into the building’s bowels to witness what Noble referred to as the newspaper men and women’s favoured title for the room, the ‘nerve centre’ or Operations Room. As Jackson (1999: 95–6) narrates: We left Sir Percy’s apartments at the top of Derby House. The sentry outside the door ram-rodded to attention, as did others standing at each turn in the corridor leading to the lift. I felt that I was walking in the shadow of the Lord. Down, down, down to the deepest basement. More ram-rodding sentries until we found ourselves in the main Operations Room. A deathly hush as in an empty cathedral. The hiss of compressed air as a pneumatic communication tube dropped its despatch cartridge into its wire basket. The Duty Officer, a commander accompanied by a commodore, left the enormous chart of the Atlantic as they saw the C. in C. enter and walked towards him. A Wren on a ladder, for the chart covered a vast wall space, was in the process of pinning a symbol, quite small, in mid-ocean. The Admiral’s eyes went to it at once. We walked towards the chart. He looked up at the little symbol and I saw now that it was a cross outlined in red. Very quietly he asked: ‘When did that happen’, Wynne? ‘Just had news of it, Sir.’ ‘Hmm…nothing nearer than about 500 miles…Let’s hope they managed to get the boats away.’ ‘Let’s hope so, Sir, with all aboard.’ ‘Amen to that’, Sir Percy said, hardly above a whisper, and turning to me remarked: ‘There’s your first view of the Battle, Jackson.’

20

Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz

Here we see Jackson and the naval officers, deep in the bunkered building, taking another view of the battle. Of course, the war was to be found on Liverpool’s streets too, but the view within Derby House was a view into the war in the Atlantic, seeing positions hundreds of miles away. Indeed, in Jackson’s first treatment of the script, following Owen Rutter’s screenplay, they both saw the film opening onto the lifeboat and many seamen bailing water, before focusing on the name S.S. Jason. As a wave sloshes against the boat’s moniker, the scene dissolves into the symbol bearing the name JASON then being pinned to the massive wall-chart in the Operations Room at Western Approaches in Liverpool, before moving swiftly back to the Jason. In fact, these dissolves and transpositions fill the film, jumping geographies to the deck of the Jason, Liverpool, New York and the convoy that leaves it. When we hop back to Liverpool, the plight of the ships is dealt with by arrows and coordinates, symbols being moved to position ‘Y’, identified U-boats that might cause a ‘little trouble’. This can be juxtaposed with the quiet view from a lurking U-boat, where we see the merchant seamen through the German’s eyes, literally through the view of a periscope, and the wireless signals they pick up from the Jason. This is ‘Reality’, Jackson (1999: 111) writes, ‘but from opposite poles’. While Rutter wanted to show in this movie that the ‘life of the sea goes on’ (Aldgate and Richards 1994: 48), moving back from the sea to the normality of the control room, in both of these perspectival shifts from the close to abstract, we get to the heart of the issues of governing the Liverpool Blitz: how to control from a distance, from petty misdemeanours to the widespread conflagration of the urban centres? The challenge for Liverpool and Merseyside, in many respects, could be conceived to be far easier than the distant ships being picked off in the Atlantic. And yet, it was a question which concerned not quite as distant government departments, which held fixed ideas of Merseyside, and a machinery of welfare, policing, social policy, criminal justice and a whole raft of air raid regulations. Yet the film, like this book, was also concerned with presenting a realism of experience not seen on cinema screens before. It sought to show the war through perspectives outside of mythologized and stereotyped representations of the efficiency, and apparent calmness, of wartime control. Derby House remains quite an abstract location throughout the film, for it is the action on the sea which is given precedence. Hugely demanding conditions plagued the film’s production, losing days of footage to the rolling motion of the sea which upset the cinematographer Cardiff throughout. Sunlight and glare bleached the image during good weather, and the lack of light when it was overcast meant

Introduction

21

much of the footage was unusable. The boat was hardly up to the challenge of the conditions either. In other words, this was a view on war from outside of the centre, even if the centre was necessary to produce the film. Much of the filming took place at Holyhead, and later in a studio in 1942–43. Many of the actors, however, notably the perfect Bob Banner who was to play the ship’s captain, were recruited in Liverpool, seconded from the Merchant Navy. And, like the brittle industrial relations which were to threaten the war effort and Liverpool’s place at the centre of it, the production was occasionally marred by labour disputes and deserting actors anxious to get back to their ordinary jobs. The various boats used during filming – which presented numerous problems for the film crew given the roughness of the seas – relied upon Jackson’s scavenging from Alfred Holt and Company for the lifeboat and, once again, the navy for the trawlers that would pull it. Technicolor supplied the film, first experimenting in their single-colour film stock called Monopack, before settling on the standard, if sensitive, three-film-strip stock.7 Shortages of Technicolor’s film stock would mean delays in beginning the shoot as the last remaining film in Britain was being used by the unit and waiting for shipments from the United States before their 2,000 feet would run out. In this sense, the disruption to the film’s production apes the fragility of the material pathways and logistics route which made Liverpool a crucial but vulnerable chain in the war effort. Moreover, it highlights the attention of Liverpool’s authorities to the vital urban networks that would be threatened during aerial attack on the city.

Methodology Our approach to this is primarily archival, and we make full use of the materials, writings, records, reports, images, sketches, interviews and articles held within the historical record, consulted in collections from the Liverpool Records Office, Birkenhead Records Office, other local collections in Chester and Crewe, as well as national collections such as the National Archives, the Mass Observation Archive and the Imperial War Museum. Contemporaneous local and regional newspapers also provided us with a rich vein of opinion. We do, wherever possible, try to refer to the perceptions and experiences of those who were there, and match, triangulate and compare the positions and perspectives of the materials we gathered. Take an interview with Liverpool’s Assistant Chief Fire Officer Owens, where he was asked if he could remember what the centre of the town looked like during the May Blitz (Spiegel 1983). The representations of

22

Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz

Liverpool make a distorted lens through which memories are refracted and, in some instances, resisted. Owens asks us to imagine a road full of debris – debris will feature a lot in this book – that abundant by-product of the Blitz which would choke up the streets, as well as in a finer form, people’s lungs. For Owens, the photographic representations of the Blitz are flawed when one considers that they capture a moment quite outside the chaos of destruction: When I say debris, I think a lot of photographs that you see of the Blitz don’t do justice to the way things were. Because those photographs in the main were taken a few weeks afterwards. There had been an attack then the City Engineer’s people or the army would go in and clear the left debris and essential roads. A lot of side roads would be left with debris still there. If you were working in an area that had been under severe attacked it was almost impossible to drive a vehicle through it. The debris was all over the road. Buildings were down. Buildings were on fire. Dale Street and Water Street especially. (Interview with Chief Fire Officer Owens, in Speigel 1983)

Reflecting on Owens’ complaint allows us to consider the importance of the contextualization of each piece of the Liverpool and Merseyside Blitz we encountered. We have attempted to interrogate each piece of historical evidence – from the court clerk’s handwritten record of a blackout offender’s sentence to the daily bombing reports of the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) wardens – from a point of view. The readers of each individual piece of archival ‘debris’ would have viewed it from different standpoints (the newspaper trial report of a boy ‘scrumping’ apples might say different things to the authorities, the juvenile delinquency agencies, the boy and his parents, for example). We have tried to reconstruct the personal and experiential elements of each piece of archival evidence, as well as their bureaucratic rationale. Although the evidence we have of the bombings, the crimes and the debris of destruction dates from over seventy years ago, we hope to capture how novel, frightening and dramatic the residents of Liverpool and Merseyside found war on the Home Front to be.

The structure of the book The book is structured as follows. First we examine how the Blitz on Liverpool and Merseyside was anticipated, and exactly how those anticipations would come to inform and shape the various protective and policing measures. In Chapter 2, we suggest that we must look further back beyond the nearness of war

Introduction

23

to make sense of this question. The measures designed to protect Liverpool, and who and what should be protected, would owe a lot to the inter-war conception of Liverpool as a vulnerable target in the context of future aerial conflict. Liverpool, it was assumed, would show special propensity for social disorder and breakdown. We explore how the emerging emergency governance plans and procedures would draw on an existing set of municipal responsibilities, as well as a legislative apparatus designed to fend off industrial disputes. In Chapter 3, we explore how the governance of Liverpool and Merseyside was structured and designed as a ‘nervous system’ of coordination and communication. By opening out this architecture of protection and response, the chapter examines a network of local police officers and air raid wardens, volunteers and municipal authorities, interacting with a regional network that would feed upwards to the national authorities. This structure would manage the depth and detail of the Blitz and its consequences for the population. We show that such a structure made its own problems as the imposition of national policies was rarely received with open arms locally. The chapter sheds particular insight into this problem by focusing on the firewatchers’ dispute and the politics of gender and place it articulated. In Chapter 4, we turn our attention directly towards crime and its execution, monitoring, policing and prosecution during the Blitz on Liverpool and Merseyside. In light of the previous discussion, the chapter suggests that the police were particularly overwhelmed during this period, borne down by their responsibilities for other duties specific to the Blitz, from attending bomb sites to marshalling the enormous traffic problems caused by damaged roads and fallen debris; the policing of industrial disputes, so feared before the war, and the extensive new laws requiring enforcement under emergency legislation, which covered such things as diverse as blackout regulations to restrictions over the selling and distribution of goods. We show that a waning trust in government, both national and local, and the new skein of regulations drew many people into criminality for simply performing perfectly routine or ordinary activities. Similarly, the police did not greatly change their preponderance for policing and monitoring the working-class communities of Liverpool and Merseyside. Chapter 5 turns attention towards black market activities. Even though our account does not show patterns that are dissimilar to other cities during the time, given the onus of Liverpool and Merseyside as a distributional hub for transatlantic goods, and the location for other important industries and services from oil refining to soap production, the regulation and policing of the black market struggled to contain the flows and leaks of high and low value

24

Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz

materials, as well as the everyday trade in goods rationed by government, such as fuel or food. The docks and railway industries provided amazing opportunities for low-intensity pilfering brought home for one’s family towards far more extensive criminal networks, just as a far older culture of work had already normalized some of these practices. We suggest that black and grey market activities were sometimes closely related. It is easy to overlook how the Blitz affected everyone a bit differently. What’s more, it is easy to assume that the practices of governance and policing with which we are concerned were deployed evenly across the population. Of course, Liverpool was well known for housing a trouble population, among others, of delinquent children. In Chapter 6, we show how a culturally rooted notion of the child took particular hold, almost reaching a state of hysteria at the blight of children running riot in the bomb- and shrapnel-riddled streets. The chapter explores the popular representation of these gangs of delinquents, accused of thievery, looting, vandalism and poor citizenship in the spaces of the Blitz. We also examine efforts aimed at reforming Merseyside’s youth by directly enrolling them in the assistance and simulation of air raid precautions and civil defence workers. Chapter 7 continues the book’s interest in the mobilities of the Blitz, especially those that appeared to evade the authorities and also those that came to constitute the attempts to govern through the chaos of the Blitz. The chapter focuses on three key issues: first, the problem of traffic and how the police should govern and marshal it. Traffic is interesting because it was often used as a yardstick of the damage a city had endured and its levels of disruption. Second, the massive process to evacuate vulnerable populations from Merseyside is examined in some depth, especially the pathologizing of the Merseyside urban populous, and their children. Finally, we continue onto the work of the rescue workers, especially Birkenhead’s rescue corps, who moved, cleared and searched through debris. The corps illustrates some of the frictions that built up as different organizations rubbed against one another, forced to work together in the emergency conditions. Police, air raid wardens and ambulance and rescue workers often clashed. The final main chapter of the book explores a far more slippery, mobile and intangible thing: morale. It has been well documented how morale was identified as a ‘target’ for the Allied bombing campaigns on Germany (Biddle 2009). What’s more, morale was determined as a problem for government worrying over the effects of the German raids on the will of the population to carry on (Mackay 2002). Liverpool and Merseyside were at the centre of these

Introduction

25

concerns. The region and particularly the town of Bootle were even used by the government as indicators of some of the worst rumours of discontent during the war. At the same time, the analysis of good and bad morale set up some interesting collisions between different government departments. Some of these antagonisms took place over Liverpool. In this chapter, we explore how morale was understood, measured, represented and sought to be controlled, often with a lot of difficulty. The chapter explores how the concerns over morale slipped between different organizations, from the highest levels of government to the air raid warden and local policeman seeking to crack down on the spread of rumour. Finally, the book concludes with an assessment of the legacy of the Blitz in a national and local context. In many respects, we show that the legacies were anticipated and set in motion in advance of and during the Blitz itself. We have seen how the Blitz exposed some important problems relating to the structures of government that would administer Liverpool and Merseyside, especially with regard to the housing problem. The immediate aftermath of the bombings would see new plans proposed for the city, which parroted some of those suggested by Liverpool’s incredibly equipped planners, architects and social scientists well before the war. And just as the prospects of reconstruction following the war promised a new utopia of welfare to alleviate the evils of social deprivation, some of the strategies of urban renewal on Merseyside were characterized to be almost as violent as the Blitz itself.

2

Anticipating the Blitz

The country is steadily organizing itself for the coming of a possible war. None can know what it will be like, or can forecast, beyond a general feeling that it is bound to be very uncomfortable. The prevailing mood is much more one of annoyance than fear.1 Before Liverpool was caught up in the anxiousness of anticipating an aerial war and the vulnerability of urban populations, before the government and the city’s leaders and indeed other military, strategic and populist commentators began to think of the city as a target, Liverpool’s pre-war image, particularly the waterfront, was as a place to see. It is important that we begin here, in the way Liverpool began to be seen by itself and others, which would come to shape the manner in which the city was to be imagined as a potentially vulnerable target should aerial bombardments begin. What we are trying to evoke is the sense that if one can see, and indeed, be seen – especially as prodigious and important – then that logic could just as easily be turned back into the cross hairs of a target.

Liverpool as target Liverpool was a place to see and a place to see from. Let us return to the writing of Walter Dixon Scott (1907: 41), who encounters the docks, once more, as a place to witness the remarkable romance of a liner entering the docks from the river: It is a smear in the sky, it is a neatly pencilled apparition, it is a towering event in the River, it is a vast door barring out the west, all in the briefest space of time: from start to climax the event leaps up through a swift crescendo of incident and the little figures trooping an instant later over the high gangways that are really bridges from New York to London have a fine aura of adventure. To see all this

28

Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz accomplished in some evening of amber and emerald, with the lights unfolding like pale flowers on the far drawn violet shores, is to get another vision of the world’s possibilities of beauty and romance.

Dixon Scott’s romantic vision does something to the vision of Liverpool, his view eclipsing to all intense purposes the grime and decline of the shipping industry and its attendant labours, and to see the gangways as ‘bridges’ to other places. Of course, bridges go both ways. In other words, Dixon Scott (1907: 39) renders Liverpool’s dockside area as a place to see; ‘half of Liverpool uses it as a matter of business’, he suggests, with ‘the other half as a matter of health and pleasure, and it presents all day long the appearance of a democratic promenade’. Outside of the industry and labour, then, Dixon Scott sees the docks as a place to flaneur, to stroll, to watch. He describes it (Dixon Scott 1907: 39) as the ‘finest of Liverpool’s parks, furnished with its sheet of water, provided with its cafes, its bookstalls, its seats’. It is populated at lunchtimes and by suburban dwellers seeking a time in the city. They could be looking out at the industry and beauty as if ‘a familiar picture on the walls of their living-room’. ‘The actual people of Liverpool are here at last to be seen in vital conjunction with the weapon they employ.’ The sense of Liverpool’s river-dock borders being bound up in certain kinds of peripatetic spectatorship, leisure and visual culture Scott gives us, can be found in the other ways that the docks could be consumed, including the ingenious modes of transport Liverpudlians could use to navigate the port. The city’s Light Overground Railway (LOR) was opened in 1893 by the leader of the opposition, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, running the whole length of the docks on a steel and iron viaduct. As with other major municipal infrastructure developments in the city, the opening of the railway was done with pomp and circumstance. The opening ceremony was performed at the railway’s generating station at Bramley-Moore Dock, followed by a ride on the railway. It would carry 200,000 workers a week. Dockers, seamen and local inhabitants affectionately knew the system as the ‘Dockers’ umbrella’. But as the first electric elevated railway in the world, it also created a visual opportunity. Some of that potential was fulfilled in film. Between 21 June and 21 October 1897, Jean Alexandre Louis Promio, a cinematographer working for the Lumière Bros., filmed extensively in Liverpool, including several scenes from within a train on the Overhead Railway. The film survived as a ‘panoramic montage’, bereft of the sequential order it was actually filmed in by chopping up the linear narrative of the

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landscape into contiguous or ‘noncontinuous’ parts (Ziegler 2002: 163). What the film recognizes is a ‘horizontal landmark’, bringing the docks to the attention of the public and particularly tourists. The docks could be made more intimate with the city, overcoming ‘the visual separation produced by tall barring walls between the dock landscape and the inner city’ (Koeck and Roberts 2010: 71).2 In accordance with Promio’s spectatorship the LOR became much more than a means to move goods and labourers, but for the general public; the scheme was inspired by and compared to New York’s elevated railways. It was marvelled as a solution to the snarling up of both dock and passenger traffic on both the existing lower lines and adjacent road traffic; ‘it was clear that some other means must be provided for the expeditious transit of the public’.3 In 1932, the company offered first- and third-class tickets for round trips to tourist passengers, which proved to be heavily popular and enabled an enjoyment of the view from the horizontal landmark. Liverpool began marketing itself through the visualities afforded by the railway. Also known as the ‘ovee’, before the war it carried six-and-a half million passengers in its first year, later peaking at nineteen million passengers, but thereafter generally declining in numbers due to competition from the electric tramways.4 Advertisements for Liverpool emphasized the dock artery as a tourist attraction, the only way to see the city. ‘Visitors to Liverpool should not fail to take a trip on the railway that affords a panoramic view for 6½ miles of the finest docks and shipping in the world’ one advertisement proclaimed.5 The discussion and engineering plans for the railway make any of the municipal ambitions, and indeed its destiny to serve a public, much more explicit. George Lyster, the Chief Engineer of the Mersey Docks and Harbour board, had visited New York to study their scheme. The vast numbers New York’s system commuted were bandied about. A reporter from Manchester would also regard the railway rather begrudgingly as not ugly. No doubt this is mainly due to its surroundings. Viewed from the street, it has nearly always a background of tall warehouses. It is inside the dock wall, and seldom comes between you and the sky. It is to be said that the structure is as handsome a thing could very well be.6

Between the start of the bombings on Liverpool in September 1940 and just before the May bombings in 1941, only some sections of the railway were workable (Hughes 1993: 1).

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Figure 2.1 The Dockers’ umbrella. Source: Circa 1940’s, Flickr photo kindly provided by Ron Stewart, www.flickr.com/photos/54996985@ N00/3827211735/in/photolist-6QcsHe.

Figure 2.2 The overhead railway is hit. Source: Reproduced with kind permission of the Merseyside Police, Merseyside Police Photo Archive.

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In other representations of the city on film, other landmarks would find more ephemeral yet widespread circulation, such as in the Mersey Queensway Tunnel, which linked the city to Birkenhead and a Wirral line. King George V opened the tunnel during a ceremony in 1934 to an audience of some 200,000 people. As Les Roberts (2012: 109) writes, ‘there are probably few examples which pay such a celebratory tribute to the proud civic identity evoked by this landscape’. Roberts (2012: 109) locates the tunnel within a wider Liverpool narrative of modernity and engineering prowess, ‘connotative of a wider sense of place and belonging, one that speaks of nationhood and Empire’. In accordance with the tunnel’s celebrity, Liverpool’s landmarks, events and ceremonies were professionally turned into films. Mitchell and Kenyon, pioneers of commercial motion pictures, would visit, filming at Holy Corner shop fronts and also one of the first motor cars on film, together with the Cunard liner SS Saxonia in 1901. The opening of the Tunnel was screened only days after the event in the packed St George’s Hall. These infrastructural projects of tunnel building, grand stations such as Lime Street, the business areas around the docks and its landmarks such as the Royal Liver Building, as well as other businesses and monuments, not to mention the Catholic and Anglican cathedrals, along with their representation through the cinematic forms of newsreels, amateur and professional photography, collided together to focus ‘“love of place” (topophilia), imperialism, and nationalism’ (Hallam 2012: 45). Many of the largest shipping companies in the world still had their head offices in Liverpool, as did numerous insurance companies. And yet, through all of this, despite the security of Liverpool’s celebrated imperial and municipal industry and for all of Dixon Scott’s ‘efficiency’, for all the panoramic views, promenades, newsreels and amateur videos, and confidence, Liverpool was highly exposed as a target (see below). The Overhead Railway, as we will learn later, while offering great views, was highly visible, sticking out like a nerve as a vertical promontory to the docks. The ‘handlebar’ to the city; the docks and the railway were strategically visible to the Luftwaffe’s bombers. Thus, as Sara Wasson suggests (2010) of London’s docks preceding the London Blitz, the swagger of imperial commerce and the promenade-ship which made Liverpool’s activity so visible also made the city particularly vulnerable.

Strikes News of Liverpool, good and bad, did not just spread due to civic accomplishment but also frequently due to volatile social and industrial relations and organized

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political movements. In the summer of 1911, industrial tensions festered between the railway companies, the Railway Workers Union and the Board of Trade, primarily over discontent with a conciliatory scheme signed in 1907, which attempted to avert strikes over pay and conditions disputes with conciliation panels and arbitrators. Riots had been sparked in Liverpool; a report published in the New York Times of 16 August 1911 claimed that the summer heat was doing nothing for tempers in the fray. While the dispute had actually spread from Southampton, a mass rally was held on 13 August in Liverpool at St George’s plateau with an estimated 80,000 in attendance, and over 250,000 workers on strike throughout the city. Then on 15 August rioters attacked a convoy of prison vans carrying some ninety prisoners who had been arrested from the riots. Two men were killed. The New York Times’ bylines variously read ‘A Reign of Terror’, ‘Famine Feared’ and ‘Martial Law declared’. For about an hour the rioters faced police batons, and in the evening baton charges along Scotland Road. Of course, the import for US readers was the wider effect on food and cargo, and ocean liner traffic: Both in Liverpool and Manchester supplies are running short, and deep apprehension is felt that both cities will be isolated. ‘We are practically within three days of starvation’, said a leading Manchester flour merchant, and in the Liverpool district the millers gave notice that the city in a few days will be absolutely without bread.7

Dramatic pictures of mounted policeman escorting food through Liverpool’s streets added to the idea that Liverpool and the country’s supply networks were highly vulnerable to industrial action.8 The docks and the roads and communities behind it such as Scotland Road become most notorious hotbeds of poverty and public dissent. This idea of Liverpool would only be compounded in the inter-war period, notably in the police strike of 1919, when over half of Liverpool’s police force, and three-quarters of Bootle’s, failed to report for duty, while the strike rate in other towns and cities was a fiasco. The 907 striking Liverpool constables left mass disorder in Scotland Road, Byrom Street and Great Homer Street. Interestingly, the violence was not in collusion with the strike but an opportunity given by the police vacuum. The brutality shown in 1911, and the apparent divisions between the police and the working class, made things worse. By the end of the strike over 3,000 soldiers were occupying the city. The general strike of 1926 also saw almost 100,000 workers on strike in the city.9

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Interdependencies The idea that Liverpool could be a target for attack from the air was not new. It had in fact multiplied, being amplified in the press, conjured by military intellectuals, and invented in novels in popular culture. It was, of course, set in a wider British and European military context which has, now, been very well documented. The notion of air-supremacy, together with Guilo Douet’s air power doctrine and the belief that ‘the bomber will always get through’ (a phrase first used by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to Parliament on 10 November 1932), acclimatized inter-war Britain to the position that its urban centres would be terribly vulnerable to bombing. Events during the First World War had also shaped these anticipations. On 31 January 1916, nine German airships would take off from Friedrichshafen and Lowenthal; their destination was reportedly Liverpool. Because the city was positioned across the northern and westerly stretches of UK territory, the ability to reach it would demonstrate German air superiority. At 20.30 one of the pilots looked down and seeing only darkness assumed he was over the Irish Sea. Turning south the airships saw a large town and to the south, separated by further darkness, a smaller-size settlement. They apparently assumed they were between Liverpool and Birkenhead, but there is considerable uncertainty as to the veracity of this version of events. Whatever the truth, the Zeppelins and their crews were actually over the West Midlands, north-west of Birmingham, and went on to bomb Tipton, Bradley, Walsall and Wednesbury, killing several dozen individuals and terrorizing many more. Numerous other Zeppelin raids occurred throughout the country during the early years of the war, until advances in ballistic technology made the dirigibles easier to shoot down (Sutherland and Canwell 2006). Despite Liverpool never actually being hit by a falling Zeppelin bomb, German reports believed that it had, or deliberately used, artistic license to make grander claims of the evening of destruction for its domestic audience. One such story was published in August 1916 emphasizing the wholesale immobility of the city’s famous movement economy of ships, cargo and capital. The reported damage zeroed in on these symbols. An estimated £2,000,000 worth of big liners were apparently destroyed, along with their cargo of food and munitions. The story was of widespread destruction, reporting that the ‘great railway station in Lime-street has had to be closed

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to traffic’ (North German Gazette, August 1916). This was due to the ‘mountain of debris caused by the collapse of the roofs and supports which cover up the rails’. Economics and trade had also been halted with the ‘Corn exchange, in the very heart of the business district’ having to suspend all its transactions ‘every part of the building has been rendered unsafe’.10 The account was one of urban structural and fiscal immobility, the disintegration of the imagery imagining blocks of rubble and masonry blocking train and tramlines, craters making their trajectories impossible. Sutherland and Canwell (2006: 9) estimate the cost of damage caused by the raids rather more conservatively at c. £54,000. So, if this is not quite in the vein of the pre-war ghostly, spectral scareships of more Fortean genre (Clarke 1999), ominously hovering on the edge of anxious imaginations, reports of the Zeppelin raids built on the broad fear of Liverpool’s vulnerabilities to not only aerial attack but also different forms of disruption. If the First World War lent emphasis to the importance of Liverpool as a gateway and distribution node to Britain’s food, industry and commodity supplies, it also demonstrated some of the human terrors of aerial bombardment that went along with the choreographies of cargo and trains. The anxieties of destruction Liverpool got caught up in began to fester in a geographical imagination which convulsed the political and municipal veins of local identity upon which the city’s famous buildings and industry were etched; an apparently emotional public easy to terror and susceptible to political messages; and more critically, the systems of distribution networks, port and docks, railway and roads which tied up the image of Liverpool we have been trying hard to render with the fortunes of Britain in conflict. The idea of Liverpool as a crucial pivot or node took hold. We can take as an example the writings of the naval architect E.F. Spanner assessing the possibilities of air power for the future of naval security (Spanner 1927). In his analysis of a new view of the sea and the air, he saw their trajectories coming together as air power could threaten the points at which sea traffic was brought onto land. For Spanner, and it is important not to assume his view was one without its detractors, the aeroplane meant the obsolescence of the surface vessel. A warship would become useless in its ability to protect a country’s docks – ‘a grave weakness which the Navy is powerless to safeguard from attack’, he would argue (Spanner 1927: 215). Spanner presented a view of Britain’s seaports operating entirely at the whim of a foreign power, which could easily shut them down at speed given their

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geographical proximity. The threat was merely an equation of distance and speed; ‘not one of the seaports in Great Britain lies more than 500 miles from the boundaries of certain important Continental Powers’ (Spanner 1927: 215). At 120 mph, he asserted, bombers would be over Britain’s cities within four hours. This was the ‘NEW THREAT’, ‘which cannot be prevented by the British Navy’ (Spanner 1927: 215). In Spanner’s thesis, enemy air forces would head straight for the jugular, or in his terms, the ‘throats of the country’. Brett Holman (2014: 44) argues that this emphasis upon ‘interdependency’ coloured much of the thinking of interwar airpower theorists, concerned that the ‘complexity of modern civilization’, was ‘its major vulnerability’. Nations were likened to ‘a human body’, ‘the ability of aircraft to leap over the battlefront’ and ‘strike directly at the nation itself; to strike a blow, so to say, at its very vitals; paralysing its nerve centres, and robbing it of its power of internal action’. Spanner amplifies these concerns by posturing: Were the ‘throats’ of our great seaports choked, this country of ours would be, to all intents and purposes, ‘blocked’ as effectively as if no merchant vessels were able to reach our shored. By attacking those ‘threats’ enemy air squadrons could do more towards starving this country than could any great concourse of surface warships attacking our trade routes. (Spanner 1927: 229)

Liddell Hart suggested that ‘A modern state is such a complex and interdependent fabric that it offers a target highly sensitive to a sudden and overwhelming blow from the air’ (Liddell Hart 1925: 47), demanding his readership to think through the possible implications of a simple railway strike, ‘Fleet Street wrecked’ or the possibility of slum districts ‘maddened into the impulse to break loose and maraud’. For Spanner, all this was possible in Liverpool, emphasizing the modern marvel of the docks, in its size, acreage, extent, its ‘ceaseless movement’, their speed, mechanical lock gates and so on, cranes, warehouses, railway lines, wharves and jetties, elevator plants and grain silos, meat warehouse, repair shops, graving docks. These were modern wonders yet vulnerable ‘at many points’, a ‘trivial fraction of equipment absolutely essential for discharging and loading our ships’ (Spanner 1927: 222). Spanner’s approach was one of anticipation, because such a catastrophe was difficult to appreciate, yet it would be impossible to camouflage as clear a landmark as the Mersey or the Thames, for it would prove ‘As easy to spot the entrances of the great dock systems as to spot the neck of a bottle’ (Spanner 1927: 230).

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Figure 2.3 The extensiveness of the Liverpool’s Dock Estate (marked in black). Source: Adapted from Royal Holloway, Geography Map Collection

The interdependencies and vital points that Liverpool seemed to embody would be combined in several inter-war publications, most notably in William Le Queux’s imaginative novel Terror of the Air, which explored a series of aerial poison gas attacks upon London, New York and the most terrible concentration in Liverpool (Le Queux 1920). Le Queux’s is a strange book, but not the first time had he anticipated a German threat in Liverpool to his writings.11 At first the raid is pure spectacle. Black smoke balls begin to condense and creep up the river. The river’s banks of leisure and industry became another site of visuality and spectatorship: how to see the dangerous cloud from the best vantage point? If the novel seems redolent of the government’s tendency to render the population as gawking spectators, liable to gather in dangerous congregations, then it was undoubtedly a weather vane. For as the cloud began to unfurl and spread rapidly and laterally, creeping inexorably, Le Queux writes: Suddenly, and completely, the nerves of the waiting crowds went to pieces. In the twinkling of an eye, amongst, stark and unreasoning panic swept

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among the packed banks and there was a swift rush to get away from a menace which was felt to be all the more terrible because it was completely incomprehensible.

The Dockers went too. Only the ‘hardier’ remained, leaving the once-thronged banks quite deserted (Le Quex 1920: 71). The cloud soon descends and causes further havoc. The novel paints a picture of the busy river all but dead, viewed from the perspective of Birkenhead. Crewmen, visible on the river’s vessels, are seen collapsed, ships drifted guideless colliding with one another. A Birkenhead ferryboat had crashed into the landing stage, bodies strewn about the deck, while many other boats lay still or destroyed. The railways were also still, the trains, having emerged from the tunnel carrying unconscious passengers, stopped by their emergency breaks. One of the book’s protagonists, Violet, comes up with a plan to blow away the poisonous gas, which had come to settle in the streets, with the propellers of aircraft. Violet’s plane was anchored in place, the engine turned on. And voilà, the gas disappeared. With the eager rush for volunteers, those lying unconscious on the ground began to wake up and a tremendous cheer resounded. The story is certainly one of providential action; the causalities are not so great because of timely response and a committed police, repair and volunteer forces. Cooperation between the different authorities of Liverpool and Birkenhead helps to mitigate the loss of life. The story functions as a warning. Even though many lives were immediately saved, the greater effect is on the disruption to the city’s port industry. Local towns soon began to run short of food, and the surplus stores in the city were soon depleted. The novel reflects the perception of the fragility of the population’s will, finding the canny dock workers and organized labour the most unreliable of workers. The dockers refuse to don gas masks and begin their work ‘fetching out food’; some are helped and coerced by soldiers. Later on in the story, the emergency passes and normality returns, but as the city attempts to recover, the dock workers cynically go on strike for higher pay, before yielding to the demands of the populace. The gas contaminates any food left out; refrigeration plants without power ensure that perishables go off. England, the book narrates, ‘had for some time been existing on the smallest possible margin of supplies. One third of the food she ate passed through the port’ (Le Queux 1920). It is here where we see the possibility of the most severe breakdown, the paralysis spreading well beyond Merseyside to the rest of the country. Le Queux paints an image of ‘famishing hordes’ pouring forth. Should the port remain under the cover of the gas,

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Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz no limits could be set to the results of their desperation. In all probability, as most careful observers believed, a wave of anarchy would sweep over the country in which all ordered government would be submerged […] Truly the raider had struck at our most sensitive point. (Le Queux 1920)

Even if Le Queux’s imaginations seem far-fetched, they align with an inter-war imagination of aerial attack, which found a considerable footing in Liverpool. Even well before Le Queux’s novel, in 1913, two of Liverpool’s brewers, W. E. and C. A. Cain, had offered to support the launch of a volunteer Flying Corps for Liverpool, in response to a plea from the Lord Mayor and a group of ‘ship owners and businessmen’, anxious to contribute to Britain’s aerial defence.12 A meeting on 7 May 1913 saw these interests come together at the Town Hall, attended by Major Sykes of the Royal Flying Corps, brandishing a letter from Colonel Seely, the secretary of state for war who would try to encourage the Liverpool leaders to support a nationwide scheme.13

Going underground This imagination of a new intimacy between the city, Germany and Northern Europe was represented in an article entitled ‘Why Air Raid precautions are vital’ in February 1937.14 Illustrated with a map of concentric circles emanating out from Germany, Emden was pinpointed in the map as being a German air force base (although it was actually a naval and U-boat base, later bombed in the war), the report traded on this inaccuracy. Like a ‘sword of Damocles’, a ‘peril’ hanging over their heads, ‘high-powered, fully laden bombers in less than an hour-and-a-half ’ could cover the distance between Liverpool and Emden.15 Those who would deny the preparation efforts for this danger ‘might just as sensibly when on a voyage, throw away their life-belts because the sea was calm and the sky blue’. Peter Stapleton Shaw, MP for Liverpool Wavertree, nodding to the kind of infrastructural, interdependent fear we have been discussing, corresponded with David Maxwell Fyfe, MP for Liverpool West Derby, about a solution. He painted a picture of what the first three months of the war would look like: Every effort will be made by invading aircraft to level an important port to the ground, and special attention will be paid to docks, storehouses and lines of communication leading from the port in question. […] If the city has been levelled to the ground and all its railway and thoroughfares blocked by debris it will be very difficult to accomplish this.16

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Shaw’s solution was, like other imaginations of war fought from the air, to go underground, in the form of a tunnel through Everton Hill, a proposal which had been consistently knocked back; a spat developed in the Commons between the minister of transport and two Liverpool MPs who claimed the department had given a public promise to offer a grant covering 100 per cent of the cost.17 ‘Supposing you could by means of a tunnel’, Shaw suggested, ‘which might be either the Mersey or the Everton Tunnel – get these goods into the open country, then I maintain that the devastating effect of an air raid would be very greatly diminished’.18 Indeed, in Shaw’s plan both resources and the worker population would be mobilized by the tunnel: ‘I feel certain that a system of communicating trenches to the main Everton tunnel, or in fact to the outskirts of the city, would not only preserve the morale of the workers but would ensure that they could do their work much more efficiently, due to the absence of panic etc.’19 Schemes like this were not pie in the sky. The Everton Tunnel proposal certainly went through the motions, and was taken seriously by the ministry, even if it proved too costly. Mr Kirby, MP for Liverpool Everton, asked the Lord Privy Seal: whether, having in mind the great importance of the city of Liverpool in time of war and the necessity to protect its population engaged on work of national importance, he will, when considering air-raid precautions in the city consult the Minister of Health, the Minister of Transport, and the Liverpool City Council as to the desirability of reviving the Everton tunnel scheme.20

Kirby’s question would stir a series of discussions in the commons on public shelters, with further questions asked by Logan. John Anderson was advised that the scheme would be prohibitively expensive.21 The scheme is perhaps more useful for us because it scratches at the surface of the plans put in place for Liverpool to shelter the public, which even in November 1938 were receiving a lot of discussion. Liverpool’s ‘innovations’ in this regard, spanned from the tunnel scheme to creating temporary steel and concrete canopies which would effectively form roofs spanning narrow streets, and turning Liverpool’s labyrinth residential and dock dwellings to their advantage. Liverpool’s city building surveyor Mr Clangan met with the Home Office to share drawings and discuss the general scheme in February 1939. The Home Office went some distance to the ‘sympathetic consideration’ of the development of this scheme, suggesting at the value ‘even if it is not a great success, to have this matter pursued further in Liverpool because of its great possibilities for other areas where it is needed’.22 Following the meeting Clangan sent the Home

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Office a memo including detailed plans. Liverpool’s members for parliament, Surveyor and Town Clerk would make numerous requests to the Home Office to speed their consideration of the plan.23

Adapting a new machinery In a wider context of inter-war industrial agitation, Britain’s and Merseyside’s experiences of industrial unrest began to shape the defence measures which would be developed in the advent of potential air war. Terence O’Brien, the official historian of UK civil defence, explains how the lessons established in the 1920 strike would take shape in the Emergency Powers Act: The political issues of this strike are of less importance to this narrative than the machinery set up and the relationships established between the Government and the public under such unusual conditions. […] The A.R.P. Committee gave close attention to the lessons afforded by the Strike. They decided it had effectively demonstrated the need for a civil general staff, and that ways of adapting the machinery recently in use to A.R.P. purposes should be examined. (O’Brien 1955: 29)

This also included understanding the value of an efficient telephone network, the ability to broadcast news to the public and resources in motor transport. What was thus gathered was effectively an understanding of peacetime and wartime conditions as a continuum, so that the functions undertaken during war were closely involved within peacetime emergencies, even if they were of a different order. What’s more, the responsibilities between both peacetime and wartime emergencies were related: To attempt suddenly to divorce the purely war-time responsibilities of many Departments from peace-time ones would lead to much duplication and confusion. The mantra of ARP was the emphasis on decentralization as the guiding principle, there was clearly need for effective central machinery for the double purpose of coordinating policy and consultation over plans. (O’Brien 1955: 34)

This onus on the local through central coordination of policy and consultation saw many cities and towns like Liverpool, Bootle, Wallasey and Birkenhead encouraged to develop their own arrangements for a potential air attack. As early as 1935 in Liverpool plans took form in the shape of a conference held in the Town Hall with representatives from Liverpool, Bootle, Southport,

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St Helens, Warrington, Birkenhead, Wallasey and the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board. The conference received Wing Commander Hodsoll, in charge of ARP at the Home Office, in order to discuss the plans of Merseyside following a Home Office circular on 9 July which placed Air Raid Precautions responsibilities in the hands of local municipalities. The emphasis of the meeting was how Liverpool would meet the emergency with organization, and the focus was on adaptation ‘to consider how organisations in their areas could be adapted to meet various emergencies in time of emergency’.24 It was suggested that sanitary services might be used to decontaminate the streets, and highways deal with repairs to roads. A Scheme for Liverpool under its Air Raid Precautions (Special) Committee was circulated on 18 October 1935.25 This consisted of an eight-page document, breaking the precautions down into four main constituent parts: 1. Executive control 2. Education of the public in self-protective measures 3. Measures to be taken by the corporation for the protection of the public and dealing with casualties 4. Maintenance or augmentation of various services. The Harbour Board and Docks would emphasize a similar scheme of adaptation (the Port Emergency Committee, created in 1936, which assumed sweeping powers to control operation in docks during time of war), using its existing personnel and resources to meet the special conditions, envisaged more as an amplification or exaggeration of ‘normal’ emergencies: The normal organisation on the dock estate, which is prepared to function in emergencies at the present time, has been used as the basis and the men whose normal duty it is to undertake the work of repairing buildings and roadways which may be damaged will, following air attacks, be responsible for the decontamination of roadways, etc., on which gas may have been dropped, for the clearance of debris and for assisting in fighting fires.26

A wider set of national legislation would also reach Liverpool. On the evening of 3 August 1939, five men from Liverpool, three from Birmingham and one from Manchester were driven to the landing stage in Liverpool awaiting the steam-packet Munster to take them to Dublin. Two of the men, with obvious sympathies to Irish Republicanism, left the waiting police van to join the steamer and shouted ‘Up the Republic’ as they boarded. The men were nine of sixteen deported from Liverpool in just twenty-four hours under the Prevention of Violence (Temporary Provisions) Act, 1939. IRA violence had ramped up

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in Liverpool perhaps more than anywhere else (which resulted in tear-gas explosions together with the detonation of an explosive at an electricity pylon) before and during the first year of the war in what Evans (2013) describes as a ‘noirish atmosphere’ as the intensity of the bombing rose to eight attacks in four days of late August 1939. The example helps us to juxtapose the different forms of emergency legislation to affect Liverpool and Merseyside. The act enabled special powers of expulsion, prohibition, arrest and detention, designed to deal with the exceptional circumstances of terrorist violence in the midst of building geopolitical tensions. As the Home Secretary Samuel Hoare explained to the House of Commons during a discussion of the Bill of July that year, these measures were doubly urgent both on the ground of order and security and on the ground of even graver risk if a war emergency came upon us. They are drastic, but drastic action is necessary. They are novel, but we are living in altogether abnormal times. The Government are convinced that in the interests of the State the Bill must be passed without delay.27

Thus alongside the wartime emergency powers, various forms of mobility were produced by other emergency legislation which effectively took members of the population – identified as terrorists – out of the protections of law, by expelling them from Liverpool’s landing stages (and, of course, this legislation would subsequently become a permanent feature of Northern Ireland’s legal landscape). What is also striking are the timings of these expulsions and the speed at which the legislation was passed. As Laura Donohue (2000: 415) explains, ‘It too was intended as an interim statute’; ‘[it] is a temporary Measure to meet a passing emergency’ argued the home secretary to the House in his July speech.

Problems, plans and performance One of the most common calls to action was to develop plans for what to do; as Mackay (1999: 138) states, ‘the driving impulse behind the government’s prewar programme for Civil Defence and Air-Raid Precautions had been fear of the consequences for public order or failing to have it ready for the eventuality of war’. As late as 24 March 1939, the Guardian reported that there was still a 44 per cent deficiency in enrolment in Liverpool’s various Civil Defence units. However, this compared favourably to the deficiency of 57 per cent in Manchester. The projected scale of Civil Defence was indeed vast; the Guardian of 5 April 1939

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stated that the government put the total nationwide cost of Civil Defence plans at a one-off cost of £45 million together with a recurring cost £120,000 per year for the next forty years. With regard to Liverpool, the Guardian of 5 February 1940 reported that the city treasurer estimated the cost of Civil Defence to be £2,785,251, of which the city would be expected to fund £667,485 by means of loans (with the government to pay the remainder). The general ideas of what air war would look like shaped the emergency plans which Liverpool and local towns developed. On 18 May 1939, the Guardian described a large-scale blackout experiment on Merseyside rather unclearly as ‘quite satisfactory’. However, inspector general of Air Raid Precautions from the Ministry Wing Commander Hodsoll more fulsomely described warning signals tested in Liverpool as the best that he had ever heard. He was appointed as such in 1938. In 1940, the newspaper was somewhat more impressed with the first full-scale test of War Room of Region 10 (Northwest). It reported on 1 April 1940 that ‘so impressively thorough is the organisation, so completely cut-anddried the method, that every contingency is provided for and any calamity can be smoothly handled by four men and half-a-dozen girls in a small room’ (note the patronizing term ‘girls’ rather than ‘women’). Given the onus on lethal gas in those threats, as spelled out precisely in Liverpool by Le Queux, and in many other public commentaries and warnings well before the outbreak of war, the local authorities were developing several schemes to move patients away for medical treatment, to decontaminate the affected areas and to secure the medical facilities necessary. By 1936, Birkenhead was already developing a medical services scheme with methods for clearing the causalities away to hospitals, evacuating cases from the hospitals and providing cooperative arrangements with outlying hospital facilities. Mobility was key for the first-aid parties, ambulance transport and potentially contaminated clothing. At one of two sites, Birkenhead Institution Laundry and the Infectious Diseases Hospital laundry, gas contamination could be dealt with. Four casualty-clearing hospitals were chosen and a system was considered which was required to sort and separate out the various flows of patients and their clothing that it would need to process. This meant that ‘male and female, wounded and unwounded, and contaminated and uncontaminated were to be kept entirely separate’. The Chief Medical Officer of Birkenhead, Mr Mathieson, was very proud of his scheme and relished Home Office praise. He would claim that the Home Office architect Mr Williamson, ‘when reviewing the Birkenhead scheme a week ago, stated that it was as complete an emergency scheme as he had seen in any part of the country’.28 The scheme revealed a broader imagination at work. Merseyside

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Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz

not only was a nexus of mobility but also aimed to carefully sort, segregate and seal off its spaces of protection. In Birkenhead, the Byrne Avenue Baths, a redbrick decorative public swimming baths, needed sixteen airlocks built and each entrance to be covered with anti-gas cloth. Any entrance or empty space would be sealed off and wide passages to prevent spaces where gas could linger needed to be narrowed. Windows had to be boarded up and sealed with cellophane or adhesive tape. In the main swimming pool, piping would be altered to create a system of showers at four-foot intervals to form contamination sprays. While gas presented an external threat, what to do with a vulnerable population of children and the elderly presented another. Birkenhead’s Education Committee anticipated two main periods to actual hostility: First, a ‘preliminary period of grave national anxiety during which events will indicate grave issues’.29 This was imagined as a time of precautionary activity, with schools in normal session. And then second, ‘a period of grave national emergency […] extremely short in duration and will not allow more than last minute preparations’.30 Several sorts of futures were being imagined for Merseyside’s children, and it was for this eventuality that a whole plethora of activity was diverted. While we will deal with many plans throughout this book, in the next section we focus on one of the most talked-about and controversial plans: evacuation. Later, we will explore how the actuality of that planning came into contact with several of the other problems associated with Liverpool as a ‘problem area’, the idea of the ‘child’ and the ‘family’, especially mothers, will be brought into view.

Evacuation If we continue over on the other side of the Mersey with the Birkenhead schemes, estimates were calculated on the potential numbers that would need evacuating in March 1939. Around 13,829 children were requiring evacuation, over half the total in the borough, and 827 teachers and volunteer helpers volunteered to go. The number of mothers and children desiring evacuation was 8,835 and the number of ‘expectant mothers, blind, cripples’ desiring evacuation was 433, leaving a total of 9,268 of the second classification.31 General practitioners had been encouraged to inform expectant mothers who desired evacuation to send their names and addresses to the Medical Officer’s Department in Hamilton Square, where a continuous register was being kept.32 A week after the medical officer’s plea, his deputy F. G. Foster updated the Air Raid Precautions Committee with the particulars that would be fed into the committee’s estimates detailed

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above. The number of expectant mothers was based on an estimate with an interesting calculation. Foster knew that there had been 2,500 registered births the previous year. Thus in the next six months there would be on average 1,250 ‘confinements’. Of those 1,250 there would be 850 who are pregnant three months or over. However, he determined that not all of those mothers would require local authority assistance in evacuating. Sixty per cent of expectant mothers were believed to attend antenatal classes; of the remaining half, it was thought that 20 per cent of them could be assumed to be in ‘comfortable circumstances’ and for that reason do not attend clinics and ‘would no doubt make their own arrangements for evacuation’. The other half of that 40 per cent, however, were assumed not to attend clinic either through indifference or other reasons; that other half would need assistance. Thus the total number requiring evacuation would be 680.33 The actual transportation of these evacuees would be organized in the following way. The scheme was devised or organized primarily at the county level, although the Home Office had proposed an earlier scheme that they communicated with Birkenhead council. They initially estimated forty-five trains would be needed from Birkenhead Park railhead, some sixteen from Rock Ferry and forty-eight trains from Woodside.34 The county effort was led by the clerk Geoffrey Scrimgeour of Cheshire County Council, who was organizing a parallel scheme for Manchester and Salford. The county would communicate with the railway company who would devise the timetable for transports. Scrimgeour had to alter the original scheme given conflicting information from the Ministry of Health and the Home Office, who had identified some of the billeting areas as regions of danger. He was also ‘anxious that, as far as possible, refugees shall not be concentrated at one or two railheads, but they may be uniformly distributed over the whole area’.35 Birkenhead’s town council would communicate these instructions to the Public Assistance Committee (hereafter referred to as PAC). The PAC wrote back to the Birkenhead Emergency Committee with the hope that the message would be passed back to the train companies. Their scheme would need adjusting to Scrimgeour’s acknowledgement of the Home Office’s warning, which took Hoylake, West Kirby and Neston areas ‘only as a last resort’. It is assumed that the Home Office had changed its mind, given their earlier report had included those areas in its initial estimates in September. They suggested that instead Alsager, Hale, Nantwich and Bucklow could take the 12,500 people destined for those areas, thus requiring a wider coordination in southern Cheshire.36 However, should the scheme actually involve evacuation by rail to Neston, Hale and Alsager, areas in close proximity to Birkenhead, the PAC

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considered it ‘absurd’ as those towns could be reached within a couple of hours’ walk or thirty minutes’ cycle ride. They suggested that the numbers could be cut by 50 per cent, allowing for the transport of aged persons, children and so on. Scrimgeour’s 1938 scheme was a highly detailed logistical operation ensuring that the trains, assembly areas and billets were all in accordance with the ability to move and host the evacuees. The plan went like this. Each evacuee entrained, referred to as a ‘refugee’ in much of Scrimgeour’s workings, would be given a ticket with the name of the station together with a serial number.37 On arrival at the station, reception officers, identified by a white armband on the left arm, would take charge of the evacuees and lead them from the station to the pre-arranged rendezvous or assembly point. The process was one of stopping, checking, distributing, moving and stopping again, before the evacuee arrived at their final destination. The senior reception officer should also make arrangements to check the tickets in order to tally with the given numbers, and assemble those who could not produce a ticket into a separate group. On arrival at the rendezvous assembly point, the evacuees would be given another ticket with the name of the district or rural parish to which they would be taken. The officers would have given care to ensure that members of the same family would be sent to the same district or parish. At the rendezvous point it was suggested that they should be given a hot drink, perhaps soup or tea, before being taken to their billet, without delay. Record-keeping was important; the billeting officer was charged with completing a form in triplicate to be held respectively by the householder, the ‘refugee’ and the third retained. Reception officers were given detailed instructions to perform, too. An officer was instructed to ‘take up position at convenient intervals along the platform (two or three coaches to each officer) so as to take charge of the refugees as they detrain’.38 The officers were treated as marshals, or umpires, intended to convey a complicated process of moving, registering and herding the evacuees smoothly and easily: You will as soon as the train slows down call out the name of the station and ensure that all persons alight hold an evacuation ticket for that railhead […] You will then marshal the Refugees of your party, and escort them to the rendezvous which will previously have been indicated to you, giving such assistance as required.39

Under point five: ‘You should, as far as possible, see that all those marshalled under your escort, surrender the evacuation ticket as they leave the platform, to the persons appointed by the Senior Reception officer to collect those tickets’.

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A senior reception officer’s tasks would have been quite onerous; they had to be satisfied that the rendezvous areas were appropriate for sanitation, and whether medical help could be obtained if needed. Once the evacuees were assembled and the required road transport had loaded them, the senior officer would need to telephone the Chief Billeting Officer to indicate their time of departure. Finally they would need to pass back the received numbers and tickets to the Chief Reception Officer, the same Clerk of the County Council, Scrimgeour. The estimates and schedules were finely detailed. During the eventual evacuation which sent many more evacuees to Wales, the Newtown and Llanidloes Rural District Council illustrate this well in their summary of detraining and debussing arrangements. They requested even finer degrees of granularity about the children they were soon to receive. Their joint evacuation officers wrote to the Birkenhead Town Clerk to request details of the proposed groupings of schoolchildren.40 The evacuating children needed to be accompanied, and the reception officer staff were helped by women from the Women’s Voluntary Service for Civil Defence, based in Atherton Street, Birkenhead (WVS). Finding the right volunteer, however, was not easy. In discussion with the Town Clerk, a representative of the WVS suggested that they had two types of volunteer: ‘the working class mother, anxious to go with her own children and willing to help with other peoples, and the leisured woman with no ties, frequently a retired school mistress, who is willing to give her whole time to the service of the children’.41 In Birkenhead, a volunteer was found to begun interviewing over 130 applicants, helped by two assistants. They were given certain criteria to look for and questions to ask. The type of person sought should have been determined by their possession of ‘initiative and common sense and an interest in children’; some of this could be established from looks, ‘the volunteer’s personal appearance and demeanour – e.g. tidiness: good general impression’. Suggested questions began with ‘Are you married or single?’.42 On declaration of war the evacuation plans came into force. The mayor of Birkenhead would write: They left, under conditions without parallel in our history, for destinations quite unknown to most of them, unhappy at the thought of separation from their homes and families and uncertain as to what the change would mean to them.

The mayor would declare that these fears at uncertainty had been ‘dispelled by the kindly welcome with which they were received by the Householders and by the arrangements made by the Reception Officials and Voluntary Helpers

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to enable them to settle down quickly’.43 In Chapter 7, we will explore how plans such as these did not go entirely smoothly.

Near futures Plans, plans and more plans. Planning activities for air raids occurred before, but also during and in the midst of the war, not only in advance of it. In January 1941, the regional commissioner sent around a circular anticipating the possibility of much harder raids. His circular followed others and earlier ones that referred to the speed of repairs and heavy damage clearances dated 28 November 1940, and later in early December wider sets of problems around communications, communal feeding, issues to speedily restore the ‘normal life of the community’ and morale at a high level.44 In November, Birmingham and Coventry had come under some of the heaviest bombing that had been seen during the war. Birkenhead responded by considering contingency plans for various forms of breakdown in the town’s provision of services, should it receive this new wave of heavy bombing. Householders were advised to play a bigger role in things, to ‘cleanse’ their streets during the period of disorganization, to pick up litter, fragments of brick and glass, tiles and roof slates. Materials could be stacked, and the streets and paths swept. Communal feeding was a possibility not only for those requiring rehousing but also for those whose ability to cook had been affected by damaged gas, electricity or water services. The water department was tasked with making domestic supplies available through standpipes and water carts, for which a number of vehicles were provisioned. Services were provided by the public assistance centres, which included seven rest centres, food stocks dispersed under heavy attack potentially by several spare ambulances, a hearse and a horse-drawn cart. In Birkenhead’s and the other borough’s response to this new phase in the war was a concerted effort of Merseyside’s chief food officers to meet and discuss what effect these new anticipations of war would have upon their work. They met on 18 December 1940 in Liverpool to discuss not simply ‘emergency purposes but EXTREME EMERGENCY PURPOSES’.45 The group discussed the scenario of what if Liverpool and Birkenhead’s food warehouses were destroyed at the same time? The Town Clerk of Bootle detailed their capacity to accommodate 15,000 people in eight centres some way away from the centre of the town situated up the coast in Formby and Southport,

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towns which had the character of tourist resorts, being accessible to the railways. This strategy of moving those bombed out of their homes as far away from the area as possible was in the main due to the experiences shown the previous month in Coventry, where ‘bombed persons housed within easy reach of their homes were a menace’. Billeting those made homeless to nearby accommodation was considered a hindrance as the populace would keep trying to get back to their houses for their belongings. In Coventry, the group considered, ‘the authorities had no option but to throw an armed military Cordon round the City and prevent all outsiders from gaining access to the city’. Forms of criminality were imagined in light of the Coventry case where some examples of persons outside of the bombed area ‘were coming in and actually endeavouring to buy or steal bombed persons’ rations’.46 Food executive officers could be instructed to ask for ID cards so that residents would be able to prove their residency. They agreed that as well as attempting to move their new refugees as far away as possible, they would require some demarcation between Liverpool and Birkenhead. Local mutual cooperation pacts would be brought into operation, relying upon assistance from other neighbouring local towns. Even so, the Mersey’s separation of Liverpool and the towns of Bootle from Birkenhead, Wallasey and Bebington on the Wirral side caused concern. Potentially fragile transport links tied the areas together, all the more concerning given that most of the food stocks lay on Liverpool’s side of the river. What if the Mersey tunnel were blocked and ferries were halted, as envisaged in Le Queux’s novel? What if the Queensferry crossing that bridged the River Dee between North Wales, Chester and the Wirral should be disrupted; where would Birkenhead and its neighbours be? Assurances were made that North Wales had ample supplies that could be drawn upon, and vans were being requisitioned to improve the fast distribution of food. Liverpool’s liaison officer, Mr Maxwell, was identified as the coordinating officer should these large-scale attacks occur. By August 1941, the local food executive officers for the area were developing plans to set up ad-hoc shopping centres to provide alternative arrangements for distributing food and other goods, requiring both regional and local networks of supply. With the support of the Chief Constable, street shopping centres were planned consisting of ‘vehicles stocked with essential foodstuffs’, vans made stationary as if a temporary market.47 On 20 May, a group of local grocers, bakers, butchers and dairymen met at Argyle Street to discuss the arrangements for putting such a scheme into action: this included the Birkenhead and District Co-op, representatives of the Birkenhead Grocer’s Association, milk traders,

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greengrocers, fishmongers, chemists as well as the police, water department and gas department.48 The local authority was to keep a list and assess the resources available to it in both workforced and materials. The engineers department listed between fifty and eighty tonnes of cement for repair work, a good supply of timber for temporary tracks and supporting excavation work, together with its war reserve of sewer bricks, pipes, concrete tubes and road material. It had 100 traffic diversion boards and a ‘good supply’ of barricading. The supplies also included four heavy rollers, three compressors, three concrete mixers, one power rammer, one power pump and three hand diaphragm pumps. Three tips for the removal of waste and rubble were in place in Woodchurch Road, Bidston Moss and Storeton. The chief engineer’s team numbered some 100 men; he requested that this should be raised to 500, and they should be equipped with greater numbers of picks and shovels. He also suggested, given the complexity of the bustle of activities from the web of services which would arrive on the scene of a raid, that a ‘clearing house’ should be put in place to avoid these different services getting in one another’s way and disrupting the repair or recovery work. The head of the Air Raid Rescue Corps at Birkenhead, Robert Owen Lloyd, suggested that mutual aid would need to be harnessed, drawing on help to support his gangs of workers if not from Liverpool but neighbouring authorities, even the military. The transport department would report that moving in 500 troops at a few minutes’ notice was perfectly possible from available vehicles that could be easily diverted. Indeed, Lloyd proposed radical efforts would be needed to deal with a ‘colossal’ raid on the scale of Coventry. This included taking up those listed on the unemployed register; increasing demolition parties and considering the use of explosives to remove the need for hand labour; commandeering vehicles especially for tipping; and thus preparing new dump sites for steel work, lead, copper and other valuable materials. The cleansing department had the promise of fifty-eight tipping vehicles and 125 flat-deck lorries. Contingency arrangements were reported from the corporation’s gas department. Given the potential disruption of transport in and out of the town, the department carried a stockpile of seven to eight weeks’ worth of coal. Duplicate supplies of electricity were available from their own generating plant and the electricity department’s mains. Arranging with Wallasey and Liverpool a system to interchange their mains supplies and equipment, should it be needed for repair work, had assuaged the vulnerability of the various gasholders that dotted the town. The link with Wallasey was in the form of ten-inch highpressure mains, and a twelve-inch low-pressure backup. This would form part

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of a wider national scheme organized by the National Gas Council, while local stocks of cast iron mains, spare electrical motors and the like were being pursued. Assistance from other local boroughs was also considered for water provision, although many more men would be needed for repairs, as would pipe layers and joiners and unskilled labourers for excavation. The engineer to the Cheshire Water Board would advise that the mains water supply to Liverpool, Birkenhead, Hoylake, Chester and Neston were ‘inter-connected at what we have considered the best points’, presumably to indicate some resiliency within the localized grid that water could be piped in from elsewhere. Electricity arrangements saw the organization of shift operations and staff on standby. As we can see plans proliferated Merseyside’s emergency concerns. This ethos continued well into the war and accelerated in the multiplication of innumerable and overlapping emergency plans. Unfortunately, we can also identify this tendency in the advisories from the Home Office which created their own problems, as many defence regulations would be repealed or fail to be enforced.

Theatricality and performance For local historian Christine McNamara, Liverpool’s designs resembled the hidden staging of a play, the emergency work churning away behind the scenes while the public remain blissfully unaware of the effort occurring within the administrations and bureaucracies that keep public services running. McNamara (2000) writes: The story behind the outstanding efficiency displayed during the Blitz by the civil defence services of Merseyside is rather like the sort of story that lies behind the staging of a successful play. There is so much hard work undreamed of by the general public who see, and are intended to see, only the result.

And yet, we find that this metaphor serves a slightly different purpose. It does not alert us to the apparent invisibility of the emergency machinations, but rather the ways in which they were consistently and routinely staged in plain sight, so as to perhaps mollify but certainly mobilize Merseyside’s public. They were anything but hidden, fulfilling a wider logic of performance that theatre historian Tracy C. Davis (2002: 25) has suggested characterized Britain’s later Cold War programme of preparedness to nuclear attack: ‘civil defense as practiced by the USA, Canada, and the UK was literally just that: practiced, and done so with conscious reference to theatre and performance modes’.

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Perhaps some of this sentiment is best expressed in an air raid display conducted at Speke, south of the city on the Mersey Estuary at the airport run by Captain H.J. Andrews, a celebrity airman within the local press, and manager of the airport since its opening in 1933. The Liverpolitan reported on the ‘mock airraid’ and the measures of defence and response to a bombing raid on a fabricated house.49 The reporter used the event to question just how serious Liverpool’s preparations were, or at least the government’s support of them, finding the word ‘mock’ to be ‘quite suitable’. The raid was found to be quite unrealistic, the response botched as once an apparent gas bomb had been dropped, the Air Raid Wardens who were poised to give a gas warning, armed only with hand rattles, were not heard. Although it was conceded that the display was of great interest to the 30,000 spectators, and Alderman J.G. Paris used his position from the main control tower to broadcast an appeal for volunteers, the BBC failed to lower the microphone, and the crowd unfortunately heard the Alderman ‘enquire from the Lord Mayor how his speech had ‘gone?’’ In August, the Air Raid Precautions Exhibition was opened at Radiant House on Bold Street, which included an enrolment bureau for women volunteers to join the Women’s Air Raid Precaution’s section. During the exhibition films of actual bombardments from Spain were shown daily at 11.00, 13.00 and 15.00 hours.50 The press would delight in reporting on drills, practice and dramatic performances of the defence apparatus. These included the newly refurbished searchlight depot on Mather Road which reopened in March 1938 with a drill hall: A lofty dark room, divided from the ballroom by a large roller screen, will presently be equipped with miniature searchlights which, for practice purposes, can be trained on model aeroplanes which will be electrically driven along wires across the roof. In this room there will also be electrically operated buzzers which will travel across the roof to enable the sound locator detachments to detect the position of an unseen target.51

By 1939, with some of the press’s cynicism waning, Liverpool’s Emergency Committee, settled under the coordinating stewardship of City Clerk W.H. Baines, spoke of these practices. Perhaps the fascination with drilling and exercising owed to the fact that that was all the print media really had to go on at that stage in the preparations for war. In early June it was a demonstration of a pump drill given in Essex Street at the Divisional Auxiliary Fire service in their new headquarters (see Ewen 2006), a warehouse in Simpson Street, near the Wapping Dock Overhead Railway station. The drill concluded the opening

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ceremony which was presided over by J.R. Hobhouse, as the man ‘dressed in regulation rubber boots, oilskins and tin helmets, worked the division’s two pumps which threw feathery jets of water up the well of the warehouse as far as the second floor in a realistic display of fire-fighting’. Hobhouse used the moment to emphasize Liverpool’s place in the war: ‘We must be prepared’, he said, ‘to tackle anything that happens here and to see that the goods come into the country all of the time.’52

Conclusion In this chapter, we have explored the wider imagination of the Blitz in Liverpool and Merseyside life, and, of course, Liverpool and Merseyside in wider speculations of aerial war. As we have sought to show, anticipation was a constant means through which the fallout of the bombing was governed. Plans, procedures and other narratives, moreover, occurred during the war, not just in advance of it. Throughout the Blitz plans, exercises, drills and simulations were a regular occurrence that never really shook off the attentions of a press dryly commenting on the public demonstrations. On 17 July 1941, Liverpool conducted a gas test at London Road and had given the public little warning as to where the test would take place, except before the ‘actual onslaught of fumes there was so large an assemblage of police troops, and wardens, all with gas masks at the ready and many carrying rattles and bells, that this was sufficient warning in itself ’.53 While the realism of the drill might not have been anything close to the reality, it had very real effects on unsuspecting Liverpool residents. At a tobacconist’s an assistant and customer fell into a ‘ridiculous fit of weeping’; a hairdresser ‘dropped his scissors and reached for his mask, but the subject in the chair, with half his head trimmed, had no such protection, could not leave, and had to cry it out’. Ironically, this was the most gas Liverpool would have to endure during the entire war.

3

Nervous System

As we saw in the previous chapter, physiologic metaphors were used to make sense of the impeding aerial war and how cities like Liverpool would deal with it. The idea of the country as a body took particular hold. This was a physique, with more than a skeleton of bone, but flesh woven together by a system of nerve endings and pathways into different parts of the body. Liverpool was one such nerve centre: a vital network through which the bomber would cripple the country by trapping the key nervous points or, in Spanner’s terms, ‘throats’ – choke points. To counteract this threat, by harnessing other networks of coordination and control, the authorities could manage and steel Britain’s response. In Liverpool this was no less true as a way to plan and comprehend the adapted and newly forming wartime organizations, and paths of responsibility and communication between them. In this chapter, we present something of a counterstory to many narratives of the Blitz. Even within Liverpool we hear how the air raid warden was one of the key nodes of a hub- and spoke-network of preparation (see below). This was a figure that sought to hold the community together by his example. As heroic and particularly emotionally controlled individuals, these figures would regulate and perform the maintenance of the morale of the household or neighbourhood. But the raft of preparations under Civil Defence, Air Raid Precautions and other Defence Regulations was also the task of the city leaders and other civic personnel – public servants from the local authority.1 It is in this context where the logic of the heroic individual acting within the apparatus of urban protection is blurred. Instead it is the bureaucrats who try to portray themselves as unlikely heroes – citizen-civic leaders – ready to forge on, wielding the network of preparedness together by leadership and coordination in order to do battle with the evils of bureaucracy. As with the wardens, however, these figures also gained an antagonistic status.

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Before the bombing of Merseyside began, as we discussed at some length in the previous chapter, Liverpool’s arrangements for preparedness meant encouraging inter-authority working. Developing their own procedures and training suitable for the geographic, administration and organizational context, however, was a battle of bureaucracy. ‘It has been said’, wrote one report, that: ‘The hour produces the man’. That was true in Liverpool, for no sooner was it apparent that the danger of enemy air raids was no longer remote in time, than the leader of the City council, Alderman A.E. Shennan JP, took upon his shoulders the responsibility for cutting the Governmental ‘red tape’ which had hitherto hampered the actions of our ARP Committee.2

Held back by non-decisions and the hesitations of central government, it was the timely and decisive civil servant who could best battle the bureaucracy and release the ties that bind the hands of local organization and response. This was a test for good citizenship. The heroes of Blitz-preparedness were those who would not shrink from cutting red tape, acting speedily and making good decisions. Emphasis would be placed on the assembly of Liverpool’s protection network, the speed of the machine to come together. Reports focused on the complexity of the logistics operations in delivering services to the citizens of Liverpool or distributing objects for the war effort. Logistical forms of mobility and coordination seemed to promise the speed and assembly of a more general protection effort in the face of an emergency. Take the way gas masks were discussed in one article: The government had millions of these in store at Aintree for the inhabitants of the north-west region, which covers a wide area. First of all, it became necessary to transport from the stores at Aintree the 800,000 masks which our citizens required. This task was performed by the Corporation’s own vehicles, and they were conveyed to the Lister Drive Power Station. It is natural to assume that these masks, which were in three sizes, were all ready to be handed out. Nothing of the kind. The parts of which each individual mask is constructed had to be assembled, and the organisations of that task fell upon our Civic rulers. […] Speed in assembly was vital, and machinery had to be constructed to enable the assembly of the masks to be accomplished in the shortest possible time.3

Protection was about more than simply putting gas masks or Anderson shelters together; it was also achieved through the right sort of speed and energy.

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In this chapter, we examine much more clearly these emergency networks and nerve centres, establish how they functioned, what routes, pathways, individuals and technologies they were constituted by and what appeared to be threatening them by fracture or disruption. At the centre of this apparatus, of course, are not cold abstractions or simple lines of communication, the point or the play being that the networks of Liverpool’s emergency apparatus were nerve-like. The hierarchical organizational structures, the systems of coordination and response and the enrolment of the populace into these systems were particularly felt meaningful, and they routinely struck at the nerves of identity and citizenship. Recognizing how these structures would be so loaded, Herbert Morrison explained during debates in Parliament that this was a system which would depend upon a particular ‘democratic public spirit and one of friendly co-operation between the State and the local authorities’.4

Nerve centre For Liverpool’s nerve centres to meet the threat of aerial war, they would need some compartmentalization. Not counting the other towns on either sides of the Mersey, Liverpool was divided into ten districts. These districts were drawn on the original police divisions of the city. Each of those areas had a ‘division subcontrol centre’ (see Figure 3.1 below). These were located as follows:

A Division Divisional Sub-control Centre

Hatton Garden

B Division Divisional Sub-control Centre

Students’ Union, Bedford Street

C Division Divisional Sub-control Centre

Mill Street Mission

D Division Divisional Sub-control Centre

Rose Place

E1 Division Divisional Sub-control Centre

St John’s School, North Dingle

E2 Division Divisional Sub-control Centre

Walton Hospital

F1 Division Divisional Sub-control Centre

Beechley, Harthill Road

F2 Division Divisional Sub-control Centre

Wellington Street, Garston

G1 Division Divisional Sub-control Centre

Old Swan Technical School

G2 Division Divisional Sub-control Centre

Seaman’s Orphanage, Newsham Park.5

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Figure 3.1 An outline of Liverpool’s air raid districts, and the districts overlaid onto the city map. Source: A redrawing of Liverpool’s air raid districts, adapted from, The Liverpolitan, October 1938, p. 15, LRO.

Each of these divisions had their own sub-control centre which would feed into the main control (see Figure 3.2 for Liverpool’s main control), which was situated originally at Belmont Road Hospital, then Holt High School and finally, before the raids started, at the Police Training School in Mather Avenue. They had their own operations officer, and a representative of each of the civil defence services. As nerve centres, they had to interpret geographically how the areas were being effected by any event. They used

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Figure 3.2 The chartroom at Liverpool’s main control. Source: Liverpolitan, January 1940, photo owned by author.

large maps on the walls to record incidents, using different coloured pins for each division. They would know where personnel were in order to send them to the nearest emergency, identifying parties at work or at standby. Incident reports from police and wardens would be phoned in to these centres, in order for services to be ordered out to the right locations. The

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city’s emergency committee led by the ARP controller Baines was the political voice of this apparatus. Birkenhead would institute a similar apparatus (see Figures 3.3.–3.4) and undergo some refining of the process and the control room itself in late 1942.6 The main control room was separated from a reporting room, where messages would come ‘IN’ and go ‘OUT’ (see Figure 3.5). Reports would be taken on carbon copy paper as a Damage Report Form into the main control room. The room featured a long desk of different departments, including the police or the town surveyor, behind them fire and transport and records, and in front of them a plotter and the main controller. Records detail an intricate series of processes of the movement of information to be initially plotted geographically by the plotter, and then relayed by the officer in charge to different departments, and captured in appropriate forms and tables for communication or record keeping. The effect of this process was to give each event and report of a raid or damage the designation of an ‘occurrence’, with an occurrence number and a geographical location in order for a raid to be distributed to different responsible departments, and so that no mistake could be made over whether the damage was new or old. These control rooms, which featured in numerous write-ups in the local press, were detailed as a marvel of modern organization and used as a metaphor for the wider emergency organization. The Liverpool ARP controller was group officer for mutual aid within the South West Lancashire Group comprising of: Liverpool, Bootle, Southport, St Helens, Warrington, Birkenhead, Wallasey and the intervening rural areas. This placed Liverpool at the head of group control, acting as the coordinator of mutual aid and assistance should it be needed, and to be in charge of sending onward transmissions to the regional headquarters in Manchester. Manchester’s regional centrality was not always the case. In February 1939, the North-Western Area headquarters of Air Raid Precautions were located in Liverpool. This function was later moved from the Liver Building to Arkwright House, Manchester, then holding a more central position within the regional administration. North Wales, which had previously come under the region, was now administered from Cardiff, moving Liverpool’s natural junction as nucleus of the region. The architecture of this structure and its resourcing of both people and equipment were not entirely up to the city, but were led by Home Office circulars which occasionally, and sometimes very often, either contradicted previous instructions or interfered with the political machinations of Liverpool’s existing municipal structure and personalities. Perhaps an example

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Figures 3.3 and 3.4 Birkenhead’s main control room. Source: Photos of main control centre, B/167/6, Birkenhead Archives. Reproduced with permission of the Wirral Archives Service.

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Figure 3.5 The new pathways of communications for Birkenhead’s main control. Source: Adapted from ‘Country Borough of Birkenhead – Civil Defence Report and Control Centres: Staff notes – 2nd Revision, December 1942’, 30 January 1943, BA. Reproduced with permission of the Wirral Archives Service.

can be seen in a specific discussion between Liverpool’s Town Clerk and the Home Office. The city had structured its initial Warden Organization in 1937 according to 1 post per 500 of the population. This meant, given the size of the city being just short of 900,000 people, 1,800 posts were required and on the basis of thirty part-time wardens per sector. This did not map all that precisely onto Liverpool, which found it difficult to secure the premises for wardens’ posts. Instead they obtained 744 posts for 748 sectors which required an organization of 22,440 part-time wardens.7 Except the new instructions in 1939 authorized Liverpool only for 10,250 wardens plus 25 per cent, making a total of 12,812, based on the geographic ratio of ten posts per square mile. The committee was very anxious about the potential ‘hard feeling’ caused by the need to cut almost 10,000 wardens, quite ‘likely to upset the whole of the Wardens’ Organization’. The regional officer reported that it might lead to ‘a good deal of disruption’ and the resignation of senior officers.8 He recommended a reduction of 7,000 instead. The city was able to compromise with the Home Office and agree a reduced number of posts and personnel. Resourcing the warden system was not plainsailing either. In September of 1939, a warden, George James, wrote to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool, sending copies to John Anderson, the minister for home defence. He detailed problems in the lack of equipment, how wardens were

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having to make up the cost of telephone calls themselves as well as postage fares, their own lighting supplies, cable, disinfectant – they had not even a rattle for the warning of gas. He suggested that this was resulting in the threat of his fellow sixteen wardens of his sector to resign ‘on bloc’ [sic].9

Scale and abstraction The structures and committees of Liverpool’s and Merseyside’s nerve centres parsed different geographical scales, and the information that went up and down these scales was modified according to need. This meant that the nervous system effectively functioned by moving information to different levels and scales of authority and jurisdiction, while that information moved between different concentrations of detail to abstraction, from the full colour gritty reality of the damage ‘on the ground’ as it were to a more distanced form of brevity. In this sense, the Blitz in Liverpool and Merseyside did not and could not just stay in Liverpool. Its effects would be more wide-reaching, just as Liverpool would require help and support from outside. We can follow some of these hierarchies through the chains of situation reporting of given raids on the city. Immediate situation reports were received at the Home Office from the regional commissioner who had received notices from Liverpool as the group controller. The Home Office could expect to receive several updates during one night. On 29 November 1940, at 2.00 hours it was reported: H.E. on following points. Instruction centre, Durning Rd. Some persons trapped, gas mains burst and overhead wires down. 2.00 ASHFIELD, WAVERTREE (0145hrs) Number of houses demolished and church damaged, at Scarsbrick Rd. off Walton Hall Avenue 0202.hrs. Casualties not yet known. Grundy Street and Northbrook Street. Fire Started (0115hrs). Suspected 8 persons trapped. Riversdale Road, of Aigburth Rd. Between Riversdale Road and railway. Railway Bridge damaged. Some debris on main line. Causalities unknown.10

A major situation report would usually follow this. On this occasion it was on 30 November by the deputy regional commissioner. This was a particularly busy night of raids, with the report mentioning that over 1,000 homes had been made uninhabitable and 3,000 people had been catered for in the emergency rest centres. What is also striking is that the early report on Durning Road does

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little to indicate the tragic loss of life of that evening. The full report suggested that the casualties of the night would not have been anyway near so large had a high explosive not hit a junior instructional centre on Durning Road, Edge Hill, which at the time was being used as a public shelter. Nearly 115 bodies had been found by the time of the report, but many more would eventually be in what proved to be the highest loss of life in a single incident in Merseyside.11 Various sources give a minimum of 166 deaths, but the exact count remains unknown. Reports focused on damage to buildings, unexploded bombs and casualties, as well as damage and disruption to Liverpool’s transport connections, especially its railways. For instance on 22 December: 22/12/40 UXB at Wapping siding, Edge Hill. L/M.S. Railway Goods siding blocked […] 15:00/22/12/40 3 D.A.B’s on East Side of L.M.S. Railway Maghull. Both lines blocked damage not excessive […] UXB at 07:20/21/12 on Bankfield Goods Station L.M.S. Railway Line blocked. Busy Goods Depot […] 21/12/40 UXB at Sandhills Lane. L.M.S. Railway Station. Traffic suspended. Busy Line.12

Earlier in the report, fifty casualties were said to have died in Liverpool, while in Birkenhead other infrastructural and supply problems were caused by the bombing. The railway line was closed to shipping as was the flour mill in Wallasey. A UXB had fallen in Dock Road, Wallasey, closing both the railway line and the road opposite the Birkenhead Grain Warehouse. Production was stopped at the Paul Bros.-owned Homepride Flour Mill. The dock or ‘float’ was home to what had been one of the most important milling centres in the world, split between Birkenhead and Wallasey and a ‘key point’ according to the report. The escalating chains of reporting that this intelligence would follow can be determined when Herbert Morrison presented figures to the War Cabinet which detailed that over 200 people had been killed in Liverpool and the Merseyside region on the night of Saturday 21 December 1940 alone: ‘In the Liverpool Docks a number of berths had been hit. Nine vessels had been sunk, set on fire or damaged. Some 4,000 persons had been admitted to rest centers in the Merseyside district.’13 On 3 March 1941, the heavy attacks on Merseyside necessitated further regional reporting. In Wallasey, the Chief Constable had estimated fifty people were dead and 150 seriously injured, and the gas was out and would be restored in three days. Water was only available in part of the borough.14 In Birkenhead, rescue work was said to have been underway, with

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the estimate of those killed being around sixty. Four rest centres were knocked out while a further eight were functioning and two more were expected to be opening. ‘Morale of the Blitzed people is said to be excellent. Rescue work will necessitate employment of 400 men. Can supply 100 locally.’15 Actually Birkenhead and Wallasey suffered the majority of the raids and the following regional report noted that outside assistance was being sought. The report for Liverpool was far more detailed. At 3 King Street, the top floor offices of a shipping company were suspected of having received a parachute mine, the inhabitants were evacuated and the nearby telephone exchange was closed, affecting bank, central and trunk lines. Warehouses holding cotton were smouldering, as were furs. On Old Hall Street, fire caused serious damage to a water mains and the street was blocked. Overhead electric cables and coal gas mains were also damaged. The following more detailed report of Birkenhead revealed the far greater extent of damage to essential services including the docks, three hospitals, hotels and a police station. Eight additional rescue parties were sent in by the commissioner and military assistance was requested. Of great concern was the production of gas which was ‘escaping faster than it is being produced’, but organizing infrastructure regionally had its advantages. The commissioner reported that as ‘many gas repair gangs as possible’ were being sent to resume supply, and enable ‘BIRKENHEAD to supply WALLASEY’. One thousand homes had been made temporarily uninhabitable. In Wallasey, electricity supply was cut off completely and gas production had ceased, hence the need to use Birkenhead’s gasholder. Indeed, the coal that was supplying Wallasey to use for gas was stopped by the attacks for two days, although because of contingency arrangements the town had three weeks’ supply. The Birkenhead telephone lines were not in order either. Liverpool was discussed during a meeting of the War Cabinet on 12 May 1941. Alongside Belfast, both cities had lost almost 30,000 tonnes of shipping combined from recent air raids.16

Contingencies In the form of preparing for almost every occurrence with plans and backup plans as we saw in the last chapter, these levels and lines of coordination and control had their own contingencies. Many were vulnerable and potentially frail, really quite brittle systems that could be broken. To combat this threat, backup nervous systems were designed and put into practice should they be needed.

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These shadow networks would go beyond Merseyside too, for the government was considering plans to intervene directly should wholesale destruction occur. Birkenhead, for instance, circulated a secret scheme intended to be applied should the main reporting lines and control centre break down, perhaps from a communication line being cut. If that were to happen then the centre would not be accessible by telephone. Or if it were to undergo a direct hit from a falling bomb, classified 1–3 in terms of severity, then the centre itself could be destroyed.17 For major telephone communications failure, the scheme considered sending staff to a reserve centre – designated as the Williamson Art Gallery on Slatey Road (a red-brick neo-Georgian building) – using the entrance on Mather Road. Otherwise messengers could be used. As one would expect, the gallery would later come to display various exhibits associated with the war. Perhaps its most famous installation in this regard was Graham Sutherland’s Devastation, 1941: An East End Street, which showed in Birkenhead in January 1948, as it toured the country.18 If the most severe form of disruption were to occur in Birkenhead, then operations would be transferred to the reserve centre. The Chief Warden would be informed and cars sent out to collect reserve staff from their homes. This contingency was as much of an issue of labour power as it was of infrastructure. The Chief Warden would need to assess working rotas in order to call up offduty officers, or those nearby. The chains of reporting would also have to be shifted to the backup nerve centre. Once a ‘skeleton staff ’ was assembled and a leader representative determined, the Chief Warden would give the order for reports and communications to be sent in. The regional civil defence structure would then be informed of this change, as would the other local services feeding into the effort for air raid precautions. While there would be little warning of the scheme being put into place, the intensity of the raids would give some indication of the likelihood of the reserve centre being needed. As usual, arrangements of this kind also dealt with the banal. Details for keeping the regular cleaning of the reserve control room would be left with the gallery’s librarian. Plotting lines, tallies, message forms, pencils and scrap paper could be found in the small cupboard in the messenger’s room. On 29 and 30 September 1940, Slatey Road and those nearby came under bombardment. A large-calibre high explosive dropped 15 feet from the front elevations. While this caused serious damage to the police station and several houses, the art gallery was reported to have received no damage other than flying debris which caused some minor damage to the roof.19

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Liverpool also played a wider national role in the movement of messages, in that it was for a time the HQ of the Censor’s Office. A diary entry from a worker in the headquarters of the office based in Littlewood’s building in the centre of Liverpool suggests that this was a poorly kept secret: ‘Everyone in Liverpool seemed to know what we were doing – the bus conductors would sing out “All aboard for the blue pencil” – the current euphemism for censorship – on the buses going to Littlewoods.’20 Liverpool, as would other cities, even developed a ‘cyclist citizen’ scheme initially proposed as a squad of cyclist messengers who would maintain communications should others fail.21 Cyclists were envisaged as a way to maintain communications between ‘essential centres in the city’. In reality, they were used much more widely, but they were first understood as a way to patch up the dislocated or disconnected networks so fragile to bombardment. The Guardian of 19 June 1940 reported that Liverpool CTC (Cyclist Touring Club) were used for message delivery by ARP personnel. As with the common values of mobility and other moral codes of citizenship associated with bicycle cultures (Aldred 2010), their qualities were emphasized by the authorities seeking competent cyclists ‘and their skill and the mobility of their machines’. A circular was forwarded by Percy Brazendale, president of the Liverpool District Association and chairman of the Council of the CTC calling for ‘citizen cyclists’ to answer the call. Volunteers were to be valued for their ability to negotiate city traffic, ride at night, read maps, touring, track racing and road trials. Given the onus of cycling clubs on citizenship, the deployment of these messengers marks a re-adaption of leisure mobility skills to the war effort.22 The teams had their own headquarters in the Angel Hotel on Dale Street. Their headquarters – really a club room – were being run by the Cyclists Touring Club and the National Cyclists Union. Apparently well-known cyclists were among the volunteers. Coordinating all this activity at a variety of different scales put existing jurisdictional arrangements and departmental authority to the test, especially in terms of what they could and could not do. Following Liverpool’s May Blitz, a Home Office circular (as subsequent debates in the House of Commons discussed) extended the role of the local authority in relation to civil defence and more through a new Defence Regulation 54b to extend the original Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, 1939. The nerve system reached into the fabric of local services and local government not only for air raid precautions but also ‘for the welfare and maintenance of the population’ that was tied inextricably to the ‘repair and restoration of the public services’. The detail of the circular and changes to

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Defence Regulations came with extracts of parliamentary debates of 24 July and 7 August.23 Herbert Morrison discussed how the present emergency exceeded existing civil defence arrangements; ‘the welfare of the civil population during and after an air raid is bound up with the restoration of the life of the community and depends upon a large number of services’. Five to six departments involved first aid, road and rail transport, gas, clearance and so on. The amendments realized that those functions ‘could not be dealt with in isolation from the work now carried out by those departments under normal conditions’.24 The new Defence Regulation extended those existing powers, requiring a local authority to perform such functions as may be thought necessary in the interests of public safety, the defence of the realm, the maintenance of public order, or the efficient prosecution of the war, or for maintaining supplies or services essential to the life of the community.

The shift in the regulation gave national government more power to direct local authorities to intervene on ‘exceptional situations which may from time-to-time arise in the present emergency conditions’.25 This placed considerable onus on reaching back up the scales and organizational networks, root and branch, should it be needed. The circular indicates the limits of plans: it is not possible to meet the needs of every situation resulting from a raid by prearranged plans conforming to any one pattern. Where however the resources of a local authority are inadequate to grapple with a situation created by a heavy attack, immediate guidance and help must be given by the organs of Central Government.

The regional commissioner should step in in those moments. As with the local emergency committees who were meeting daily and regularly following attacks, the Home Office recommended a conference the regional commissioner would chair following an attack at a fixed hour early in the day and as often as necessary thereafter, so as ‘to enable the damage done to be appreciated in perspective and to initiate and coordinate vigorous remedial action’. The representatives of government departments would work under the regional commissioner’s leadership and consist of the following organizations and their representatives from both local and national levels: 1. Local authority concerned. 2. Scheme making and public assistance authority other than 1 and other authorities effected. 3. Public utility undertakings. 4. Police. 5. Port director and naval director (if a port). 6. Army.

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7. Emergency services. 8. Assistance board. 9. Food. 10. Ministry of Health. 11. Ministry of Information. 12. Ministry of Labour. 13. Ministry of Pensions. 14. Petroleum Department 15. General Post Office. 16. Board of Trade. 17. Regional transport commissioner and railway companies. 18. Ministry of Works. 19. Women’s Auxiliary Service. Liverpool’s evolving nerve system was therefore a combination of many centres and nodes, each with overlapping responsibilities; some of which were entirely local, made up of local people, holding a local remit; some of which were envoys of government departments based in Liverpool because of immediate local need. By 1942, the evident heightening of emergency during the war necessitated the Department of Emergency Works being set up at Lambeth Bridge House, London, and detailed in ARP circulars and memos from the regional commissioner.26 Thirty emergency work officers were sent out to the most important towns and centres. Liverpool’s was based centrally at 81 Dale Street and the role of Mr E.H. Garner was to help facilitate enlarged ministry materials dumps in the city, provide technical advice and to assist in the provision of labour, materials and central and regional support, were it to become necessary. The works officer would also decide on the provision and citing of infrastructure such as the use of steel booths that would provide temporary shelter and accommodation for shops should a town or city undergo enough damage that trade could not continue, or shop premises were no longer habitable. Some 700 had been produced and Southport stocked twenty which could be called on.27

A moral geography The overlapping nerve centres and systems we have described caused considerable friction and tensions in Merseyside, especially with central government. Perhaps one of the most fraught examples can be found in a debacle over women firewatchers in business premises by the compulsion of a Home Office order, the amendment of the Fire Prevention (Business Premises) Order, 1941, by the Fire Prevention (Business Premises) Order, 1942. Fire-watchers were a crucial link in the chain of spotting the erupting conflagrations from incendiaries, or unexploded bombs posing potential risk to business and residential premises. Anger ignited over the special concern for the moral and physical safety of women, primarily if they were ordered to work as fire-watchers in the dock estate. Liverpool’s Emergency Committee had planned to go ahead with the

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order, but by 2 September the committee recommended to the city council to oppose it. At the same time the committee followed resolutions recommending an inquiry concerning the many men who were believed to be shirking their duties by leaving the city at night.28 At the heart of the issue was the perception that women would be compelled to fire-watch at night in dock areas. The committee reinforced their stand that there would be ‘no likelihood of women being brought into the city to watch in warehouses, or in the industrial areas’. Labour Alderman Luke Hogan was one of the most vocal opponents. Speaking to a crowd, he stated: It is not a question of their courage; that doesn’t arise. We know they have shown the courage of any Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale, or any other heroines of the past. The question is whether any decent man is going to allow a woman to do a job of that character. (Hear, Hear). […] It was not merely a question of women dealing with bombs … although it takes a man to stand up against things now. But you are going to send your wives and sisters down to the centre of the city to meet all sorts of strange company, I am not prepared to stand for it and I don’t think the Council, the city of the country is (Hear, Hear).29

Some of the responses to the debates by member of the public, as Sonya O’Rose has explained (O’Rose 2003), were found to echo the Alderman’s view but in a different way, finding the order not only unfair to women but also emasculating. The order was perceived as a denigration of masculine work, argues O’Rose: ‘Such a proposal is to me – and probably to others of my sex a very serious reflection on my manhood’; for another it was a sacrifice of ‘the last shred of our manhood’, so complained several letters to newspaper editors (O’Rose 2003: 111). Through this debate crystallized a moral geography of the city around which the war and its measures of protection were made sense of. This was a highly gendered and localized sense of belonging. As O’Rose (2003: 113) argued, the debate ‘provoked the ire of those who were concerned to maintain the masculinity of certain duties of citizenship’. Of course, the Emergency Committee’s point of view was not unilateral. Some newspapers felt aggrieved at the impression their resistance would give of Liverpool: It is felt that the present situation gives a totally incorrect picture of the city of Liverpool and its people, and it is asked whether Liverpool is going to approve the action of its authorities in giving to the world the false impression that a big percentage of the male population leave the city each night, that women are unwilling to shoulder the same burden as the women of other British cities, and

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that there are dangers lurking in the city’s streets which makes it unsuitable for women to be out at night.30

The politics of the spat were complicated. On 23 September 1942, a memo intended for the meeting of the Emergency Committee was circulated to the press outlining Alderman Hogan’s position once more. As before the Alderman was at pains to highlight that they did not want to cast doubt on the ‘pluck’ of the city’s women; they were to be admired for their ‘courage’.31 Rather the articulation of the problem was partly about the centralization of Air Raid Precautions in the Home Office and their determination of policies affecting Liverpool. Without consultation either from Parliament or the city, Hogan felt the orders to be an imposition of overly extended powers. He did not mince words. On Morrison, Hogan lambasted, ‘he apparently holds the view that those unknown gentleman know more of the conditions of this city than the elected representatives and the business community’.32 On Wilkinson, Morrison’s Joint-Parliamentary Secretary, she had only worsened the position by her apparent ‘provocative and half-true statements’.33 Hogan remarked witheringly that Wilkinson ‘seems to have appointed herself a sort of Petulengro regarding women’s thoughts and feelings on this matter’.34 The gendering of fire-watching was highly spatialized, reflecting a widespread suspicion of national governance through a politics of place so that many asked: ‘why should the Home Office decide what is best for Liverpool?’ Moreover, the debate reflected what we saw earlier were quite particular ideas about womanhood and the spaces of the city, defining the proper places for women to be, and by implication, where they should not go: A glance at one of our Liverpool maps showing the vulnerable areas and knowledge of the localities supply the reasons. There are some seven miles of dock adjoining which run numerous narrow streets, built in which are warehouse and factories. These warehouses and factories are not modern: many of them are considerably more than a hundred years old. There is not adequate provision in these buildings for air-raid shelter. In many cases they are lofty buildings with as many as eight floors it would require experienced men to know how to deal with explosive incendiary bombs inside.35

Hogan presents the docks’ geography as plain to see, self-evident to anyone with just a little local knowledge. The risks would unnecessarily and disproportionately threaten women who were unfamiliar with the buildings, or barely hardy enough to weather their conditions; ‘women will not be able to stand up to the responsibilities, and the paper scheme from Whitehall will, like

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confetti, become a complete nuisance and, we are satisfied, will interfere with the efficient tackling of the fire menace’.36 The conditions of the buildings the ‘mandarins’ had apparently ignored, sitting so far away in Whitehall. The lower floors of the warehouses were likely to be flooded, and ‘infested at night time by literally thousands of rats and mice which, quite obviously, will materially affect, even when there are no night raids, the rest or sleep of the women would-be fire fighters’.37 Even more egregious to Liverpool’s leader was that the city of London seemed to be exempt from the order. Why was London a special instance and not Liverpool? The scheme was thought to do ‘more to lower the morale of the citizens here than anything the Luftwaffe can ever devise’.38 The danger was not just about poor physical conditions but the perception of other dangers, building on a wider understanding of docks and the port in history. The dock areas were regularly visited by a perceived insalubrious, mobile population who inhabited the liminal spaces of the port. Once more he emphasized both local knowledge and the moral character or quality of the dock areas and their inhabitants: The moral dangers involved in compulsory women fire-watching in down town areas […] is not a namby-pamby feeling here but it is a fear based on our knowledge. This is no reflection upon the moral standards of our women Liverpool, however, is a port in which there is a constant move of population. There are many strangers within our gates, and whilst none of our women have the slightest objection to watching and fighting with their own menfolk in their own residential areas, there is the strongest opposition to their being compelled to leave their homes, and during the blackout period, to make their way and report for duty at night-time down in the city of the city.39

Given the many instances of theft and other petty and organized crimes we will explore later, it is not surprising that the docks were seen as such an unsavoury place to fire-watch.40 Commenting that ‘throughout the centuries the manhood of Britain has always been influenced by a sense of chivalry and respect towards women’, the Alderman remarked that now, on the basis of equal risk, ‘these things are to be swept away’.41 On this thought, it is worth pausing to remember a wider imagination of the docks at work in the debate and at the time. Sara Wasson (2010: 43) describes London’s docks as a ‘liminal terrain, where exotic and domestic meet and mingle’. The arguments waging in Liverpool articulated a similar dichotomy of domestic female meeting exotic, dangerous and public other. In many respects then, the issue was obvious to the local committee. Consider also Wasson’s narrative of

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British writers making sense of the destruction of the East End; London's docks, once a confluence and expression of British Imperial power now a symbol of ‘an imperial nexus disintegrated and heroic effort dwarfed’ (2010: 45).42 Alain Corbin, narrator of the liminal places of ports and the seaside in cultural history, would also describe the port in terms that are akin to Liverpool’s treatment. The port is an ambivalent place, both disturbing and comforting. As a space open to the wealth and the threats of the world, it evoked both shelter and refuge, and vulnerability. It combined images of invasion and escapism. (Corbin 1994: 193)

It is worth mentioning that Liverpool’s dockers were not consistently marginalized as individuals of suspicion. They were not always cast as slackers or apathetic malingerers. It is true that the dock workers had threatened industrial action, or at least indicated the possibility of disruption, resenting the poor working conditions in a disagreement over the provision of hot meals. An appeal was made to the port director in February of 1941 to overcome rationing difficulties and to ‘meet the dockers’ needs for meals’.43 Licensing regulations had restricted the opening of pubs and clubs in the vicinity of the docks, making it ‘almost impossible for a docker to obtain a hot meal at any licensed house in the vicinity of his work’.44 Mr Logan, putting the question to Parliament, suggested that the government should urge local authorities to supply canteens along the lines of the docks to fulfil this need. Should they not do it, then the conditions of workers were directly affecting the productivity of the port: ‘May I put it to the Minister that this is a matter of the utmost urgency and that the whole system of Liverpool on the dockside will break down unless this arrangement is made?’45 In this integral role, the dockers were also celebrated as essential workers showing the utmost good morale and cheeky cheerfulness. Accusations at the lowering of Liverpool’s dock workers’ efficiency in the Guardian agitated a response in the form of a letter from one ‘Jugular Vein’. Writing from Liverpool, he suggested that from his experience the majority of the men are an intelligent, hardworking section of the community, who, possibly because of the casual nature of their employment, have come to be regarded as something of a Cinderella in industry, with few to pay them a tribute of respect for the important services which they render.46

In the same month, Herbert Morrison’s visit to Liverpool and Birkenhead Docks pronounced the dockers’ spirit to be remarkably sound. Asking how long an elderly docker known as ‘granddad’ had worked in the docks, there was a ‘roar of laughter and a voice crying “Don’t ask him! He tied up Noah’s Ark!”’.47 Morrison

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tried to express some of what he found, and his hopes to the pressmen; ‘Turn the stuff around and get it away. […] These are the sorts of times when the ambition of all of us should be not only to do a day’s work but a day and a half ’s work in a day.’48 In early May, a team of dockers, described in local reports to be wearing handkerchiefs over their faces to protect them from the sparks and smoke whirling about them, saved a burning dock warehouse from collapsing and ruining the beef supplies it held therein. The beef, a consignment from South America, was saved. The dockers were presented as hidden heroes, people who would never be recognized, happy to go on quietly about their business. The population believed to be quite unaware of ‘how near their pressed beef was to being braised a little before it reached the tables’.49 After having saved the cargo, the dockers informed the shipping companies and road haulage firms, Jarvis Robinson and Harland and Wolff, of the damage and the potential impact on their logistical operations. In their valour the dockers were proved as ‘men of action in an emergency, willing to do a tough job in the interests of the people’. They also appeared cheerful, particularly to celebrity. In February, the US Republican and internationalist Wendell Wilkie visited Liverpool during his ‘lightning tour’ of Liverpool and Manchester.50 Touring the docks before being picked up by Lord Derby at Gladstone Dock to take him to Manchester, Wilkie was pressed in at all sides, before pressing hands of a crowd of cheering dockers.51 Later in July, the New Zealand premier’s visit to the docks saw Prime Minister Fraser’s referral to ‘the boys’, demonstrative of their heartening and contagious spirit.52 Fraser marvelled that some dockers had even shown impatience at the disruption caused by some photographers attempting to capture his visit; ‘they started to make a row about it. They did not want to stop work’.53 Back to the Home Office’s fire-watching proposals, and the scheme asked other questions of Liverpool, particularly the morality of those who appeared to be leaving the city each night. Again, through the lens of gender, the government appeared to be allowing ‘hundreds of men who earn their living in Liverpool’, to be able to have ‘made their homes’ in North Wales, Cheshire and the upper and coastal parts of Lancashire, complained Mr Shennan, while Liverpool women would be asked to go into those areas to protect them: Every evening we see them streaming to the stations to pack the ‘funk’ trains and get out of the city before dark. The practice has become a byword in Liverpool, but the Emergency Committee are going to stop it […] we shall fix a date to reregister the men who we believe to be dodging their national duty.54

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Shennan also picked up on a comment by Ellen Wilkinson, MP and joint parliamentary secretary to the minister of home security, and future minister for education, who had implied that the managers of businesses might not be fire-watching themselves, instead leaving it to their employees. She had gone further to suggest that anyone who knew any instances of this shirking of responsibility should communicate with the ministry, tying good citizenship – as it came to be used in other parts of the war effort against rumours and gossip, for example – to monitoring one another’s behaviour. Shennan countered: ‘We don’t want to be turned into a nation of informers. That is one of the causes of this war (hear hear)’. The Emergency Committee formed a delegation, headed by the mayor and other members of the council, heading to London to meet with Liverpool’s MPs and explain their position. The entourage carried a map with them, illustrative of three main points: (1) that an area on the map should be designated as excluded from the arrangements of the order, (2) those males not forced by the order should be forced to do fire-watching in the area shown and (3) to provide facilities amenable to women would be impossible. They also traded verbal blows with the minister. ‘The attitude of the minister’ ‘has been one of stubborn muddle’, it was suggested to the Press afterwards, while Hogan proclaimed the government’s unwillingness to back down as the latest form of authoritarianism: Your Chamber must be concerned in regard to the persistent attempts to deprive the local authorities of their powers, which may turn out to be more important than the actual issue of fire-watching. I write as a socialist, although most of us are Socialists in one way or another just now, but I view with great alarm the advent of any Government, Labour or otherwise, where men like the present Minister of Home Security are given their head and allowed to ride roughshod over any interests which stand in their way. […] A taste of the sweets of office apparently is calculated to create ‘Tin-pot Hitlers’. In many respects under the guide of emergency &c., there is little to distinguish between the methods employed by our own dictators and of those abroad.55

The Liverpool leaders also took particular offence that Morrison should have visited Liverpool accompanied by the North West Regional Commissioner, Hartley Shawcross, to inspect Liverpool’s fire services, all without the accompaniment of Liverpool’s Emergency Committee or other civic leaders.56 The Guardian reported the slight. As several telephone calls were made to the minister’s office to alert him that Liverpool’s delegation were in London, ready to discuss the issue, Morrison was in Liverpool.57 It is possible that the Emergency Committee actually crossed Morrison’s path on their way down.

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By 29 September, with the debate still waging, the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce confirmed the minutes of the General Trade Committee and, in supporting the Emergency Committee’s stance, attempted to turn the debates over gender to their advantage. Dan Tobey – chairman of the Emergency Committee of the council – had also visited the members of parliament for Liverpool in London to present their case. Tobey referred to the Home Office slights upon members of the Emergency Committee being characterized as ‘old women in trousers’ and that the defence from Liverpool Chamber of Commerce had been to save their own wives from fire-watching.58 Tobey articulated the Home Office’s deliberate invocation that both a class and gender war was being ignited by Liverpool’s leaders; ‘the Government department mentioned that they intended to see that the rich should fire-watch, and not only the poor’. He thought they should agree ‘that this is not quite the thing to say’.59 Morrison would continue with the line that Liverpool were making a mountain out of molehill, arguing that the order would not affect Liverpool in the way it was being imagined: ‘Women can be compelled to fire-watch only at their place of business or in their home area. There are no women working on the docks.’60 The heat of the debate reached furnace temperatures in early October when Ellen Wilkinson came to Liverpool and addressed an audience at Picton Hall, the amphitheatre under the now Public Records Office, to a reported audience of 1,800 within and a larger crowd waiting outside (5,000 tickets had been applied for). Her visit, captured vividly by several local newspapers, portrays something of the tumult over the issue. She gave her address in something of a chaotic atmosphere, fielding many objections and interruptions from the audience. The Guardian described that she was ‘heckled’.61 Wilkinson made the point that too few men were doing fire-watching, bringing applause before a woman interjected ‘Bring the conchies out and we will do it’, to which Wilkinson replied, ‘The Government recognises no conscientious objection to fire-watching.’ The paper reported ‘loud dissent’, the Echo reported an ‘Oh’ and derision from the crowd, before a man shouted ‘What about Morrison? He is hiding behind a woman. Let him come up.’62 Later in the speech, Wilkinson again lay the problem at apparent trekkers, ‘We don’t see why a typist and shop girl should watch the shop and office if the boss goes to North Wales’ (applause). ‘I have been told of the “Funk Express”’, she remarked amidst laughter. ‘It is not special to Liverpool. Don’t blame a man if he goes out on the “Funk Express” on six nights if he does fire-watching on the seventh’. A woman, ‘But is their journey really necessary?’ (loud laughter). By the end of the talk, Wilkinson began to indicate a softened position, admitting that

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‘this warehouse area, is I gather, a special problem’. Another woman spoke, ‘I live in that area, and fire-watch there’; Miss Wilkinson, ‘You are a brave woman’.63 Counsellor Braddock made the point that ‘working class women were prepared to do anything required of them, but not fire-watching in those areas where people made any amount of money and disappeared at five o’clock at night’. The implication that dockers were not bearing the brunt of their responsibilities was only compounded by reports in Birkenhead that several dockers had not been attending their duties, usually distributed into a routine of two hours on, two off.64 One was not seen after 18.30 when his shift was meant to begin, and was awoken by a constable at his home. Two others from Wallasey were also seen by the court. Having fallen drunk during a meal, one was found in the cookhouse with facial injuries, which were believed to be from tripping over in his intoxicated condition. Another was found drunk in a cookhouse when he should have been on watch. Wilkinson left the meeting and reported to the Echo that she had ‘enjoyed it’, only for Hogan to criticize Wilkinson’s view on the principle of the ‘equality of sacrifice’. ‘Why should it in the main be the poor people who work in this poor property in the down-town warehouses who shall have to face the terrors of a real “Blitz”. Whilst other women who work up-town or don’t work at all are to be precluded from sharing in these grievous dangers?’65 Given all the slinging of mud in either direction, the wider press coverage reinforced the earlier concerns one journalist had voiced over the potential consequences to Liverpool’s image. Liverpool was being highlighted once again as a problem. During the spat News Review conjured the image of ‘firewatch funks’, scuttling off ‘as fast as the afternoon suburban trains can carry them to hotels and homes at Southport and Wirral. Liverpool citizens say that these were the men who, after big blitzes, picked a dainty way with their umbrella points through the debris each morning.’66 In fact, as the Guardian reported in November 1942, many men were not actively shirking their duties; rather they lived in dormitory settlements away from the city centre or docks and had been outside the previous zone of compulsion. The Guardian commented that as a result of the new regulations, ‘a good many men will be brought in and they will be drawn upon before women are asked to serve at their workplace’.67 Morrison was reported as responding, ‘Don’t get me wrong. I like Liverpool. But if Liverpool wants a scrap it can have one – with Ellen.’ Wilkinson was reported to have said in the same article, ‘Soldier’s wives don’t mind being fireguards’, but she added, ‘the objection comes not from them, but from certain young painted-nail ladies who have married officers and think their life’s work is

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done’.68 The immediate response of the emergency committee was that a closed door had been left a little open.69

Conclusion As we have seen, the Liverpool Blitz was governed through networks of coordination and control. The networks allowed the circulation of instructions, and information, so that the Blitz, and the emergencies it would ignite, could be known at various scales of authority, from the local divisional air raid post to the regional commissioner and the Ministry for Home Security. This apparatus enabled emergencies as they caught on to be managed and distributed to different authorities and organizations according to varying degrees of abstraction. Being a nerve centre also carried weight, and we have seen how much of the experiences and descriptions of these networks of reporting and control gathered a certain amount of responsibility, but also prestige. We also see tensions caused by the parsing of abstractions, or the unfamiliarity of different actors at different ends and different scales of these networks. The debate over women fire-watchers reflected as much the inability of a government ministry to successfully govern the workings of a municipality as it did their inability to recognize the material conditions of life in the docks, and the gendered and misogynous codings of that life. Dropping an infrastructure like this on a proud city like Liverpool and other local municipalities was never going to go smoothly. The idiosyncrasies of Liverpool and Merseyside, as with many other cities, for various other forms of wartime regulations and the wider security and emergency apparatus, meant that the speed and urgency with which the plans and protocols were being imposed struggled to work all that well. Mixed with a politics of place, the imposition of some schemes saw the nerve centres resisted, re-negotiating the centralized intent. For we could consider the network of threads of connection between places as effectively lines of sight, enabling bureaucracies to see and intervene on wartime problems. These lines of sight performed normatively, almost producing latitudes of action within which the organizations and individuals could act and what they would be judged against. In the following chapter we begin to focus on how these networks of governance followed a parallel netwidening as the legislation and apparatus of wartime and emergency enveloped a vast range of the populace and their practices by policing.

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Those […] brought up in the immediate post-war tradition of cheerful defiance are liable to be most impressed by the discovery that some behaved badly (in the worst cases looting the property of those bombed out of their homes). (Anon. 1946: 152) At the same time as the ‘Blitz Week’ in early May 1941 there were a number of worrying accounts of serious offending in the city. The Liverpool Echo recorded details of an ‘Attack By Looters’ after the enemy bombers had done their work. The newspaper reported the case heard by Liverpool Magistrates’ Court on 5 May 1941: In the early hours of the morning, while firemen were playing their hoses on a fire at the back of a public house, Det. Con. Pennington heard a noise in the front of the premises and saw the accused and the other men helping themselves to bottles of beer and other property from the shelves. The detective told them to stop, and the accused and the other men immediately attacked him. The accused hit the detective and bit his finger, which had to be stitched in hospital.

Other reports in the Echo that week condemned the breaking and entering of warehouses during bombing raids, the widespread thefts from the docks, the looting of bombed-out premises by youths, the storage of stolen property in many of the air raid shelters around Liverpool and a ‘looting gang’ that ‘helped’ to get servicemen home on leave blind drunk so they could then strip them of their property.1 The readers of the Echo and the national papers would have already been alarmed a couple of months earlier by the report of the bombing of the popular dance venue Café de Paris in Piccadilly. Thirty-five party-goers were killed in a bombing run, and while The Times (for example) tried to remain upbeat in their report of the carnage, the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror reported that the fingers of the dead were cut off by looters in order to rip off their gold and

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diamond rings. Some of the wounded had their wallets and jewellery removed while they wandered around in a dazed state searching for medical assistance.2 These reports mingled with others reporting the looting of bombed-out houses. On 9 November 1940, the first people prosecuted for looting, ten of whom were members of the London Auxiliary Fire Service, were tried at the Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey). Indeed, in the first two months of the London Blitz almost 400 people were prosecuted for looting in the capital. The Lord Mayor of London suggested that notices should be posted throughout the city, making it clear that the maximum punishment could be death by hanging.3 Capital punishment was, of course, also reserved for murderers, but the number of murders in England and Wales increased by a fifth during the war (from 115 in 1940 to 141 in 1945). Prosecutions for wounding and grievous bodily harm – an assault where injury was caused or a weapon was used – nearly doubled. While it is possible that the chaotic social and moral conditions engendered by wartime conditions could have caused some people to abandon their inhibitions to commit acts they otherwise would never have done, there were also situational conditions which assisted the commission of criminal acts. It was, after all, dark due to the imposition of the blackout, the streets were full of strangers and there were less serving police officers – three factors which enabled serious violent crime to take place. On the morning of Sunday 9 February 1942, the dead body of a teacher was discovered in an air raid shelter in Marylebone, London. She had been strangled, and her handbag was missing. The murder was probably initially put down as a robbery which had gone wrong. The next day another woman was found strangled (and her throat had been cut) in her flat in Soho. The most devastating detail was that she had been sexually assaulted and her body had been mutilated by a tin opener which had been left at her side. Although not discovered until three days later, it transpired that, on 11 February, another prostitute had been murdered and mutilated. The police were by now convinced that the same man was responsible for these gruesome murders. Clearly on a spree, 12 February saw another body discovered, with the same modus operandi. Two days later, an attack on a woman was disturbed, and the assailant fled. However, he had left behind his RAF-issue gas mask at the scene. The gas mask container was marked ‘525987’ and the owner was Gordon Frederick Cummins. Before he was arrested, Cummins had attacked another woman, but the police now had their man, and sufficient evidence to gain a conviction. In a period of six days in February 1942, in the midst of a darkened, blitzed city, Gordon Cummins, the

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‘Blackout Ripper’, had carried out a series of murderous attacks in London’s air raid shelters. He was tried at the Old Bailey. The trial lasted only one day and the jury took half an hour to bring in a verdict. Judge Asquith accordingly sentenced him to be hanged. Ironically, his demise at Wandsworth Prison took place while an air raid was going on, and some of his potential victims were scurrying for shelters outside the prison walls.

Wartime crime on Merseyside Crimes committed in London may have received more press attention than those in the provinces, but Liverpool also had its share of serious crime. Samuel Morgan had been twice convicted as a youth (of larceny), and an aggravated assault on a woman in 1931 before joining the Irish Guards, serving in Palestine and Egypt. He stood in the dock of Liverpool Assizes on 17 January 1941 in his Guards uniform ten years after his last conviction, facing a charge of murder. His victim, Mary Hagan, was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl who had been sent out by her father for cigarettes at the local shops in Waterloo, Liverpool. When she was found at midnight on 2 November 1940 in a Home Guard blockhouse, her strangled and unclothed body showed signs of sexual assault. Morgan, home on leave to visit his parents at Berkley Drive, Seaforth, was arrested and admitted to the police that he had been talking to Mary outside the blockhouse that night, but was adamant that he was not guilty of her murder. After a six-day trial the jury brought in a guilty verdict, and on 17 February 1941 he was sentenced to hang. He appealed on the grounds that he did not have any bruises, cuts or other signs of struggle; and also that the judge had misdirected the jury. It was true that the presiding judge could have told the jury that a charge of manslaughter rather than murder would be appropriate if Mary had died while Morgan had been indecently assaulting her, rather than raping her. The appeal was dismissed and a date for his execution at Walton Prison was fixed as 9 April 1941. In a last attempt to plead for leniency his mother, Alice, wrote to Buckingham Palace (original syntax and spellings preserved): I am pleading so hard to you on behalf of my Son who has to Die on this Wednesday April 9th. I beg of you, can something be done for my Son’s Reprieve. Or has he got to Die such a Death, and an Innocent Man … I can only say he Dies a British Hero […] Beloved King and Queen of our most Beloved Country, I Beg, Plead, and Crave of you, to help my Son who is Innocent. His Bereaved and Broken Hearted Mother and Father.

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The Home Office recorded that the letter had reached the Palace the same day as the execution took place, noting, ‘It is a pathetic plea and at this date it would be better not to reply.’4 Aside from parents and relatives few would have shed tears for Cummings or Morgan, and at a time when many members of the armed forces were dying in the service of their country, and civilians were being killed in their thousands in German bombing raids, it is unlikely that one judicial execution would be considered unwarranted. Indeed, newspapers clamoured for more offenders to be hanged, especially with regard to the crime of looting from bomb-damaged property, the Daily Mirror decrying the ‘fact’ that ‘fines and imprisonment have done nothing to stop the ghouls who rob even bodies lying in the ruins of little homes. Looting is in fact on the increase. […] The country demands that this crime be stamped out […] hang a looter and stop this filthy crime’.5 In the courts, however, the sentences handed down were not so categorical or draconian. The man who looted roofing slates during the worst week for bombing on Merseyside, the first week of May 1941, received only a probation order, not imprisonment. Two other looters brought before Birkenhead’s magistrates in 1941 did go to prison, but only for six months, not the lengthy terms demanded by the newspapers, and certainly not the death sentence that the law allowed.6 In some senses the sorts of offences reported or reprinted in the Liverpool Echo have characterized modern views on wartime crime. Drawing on contemporary publicized warnings about the dangers of looters taking advantage of the chaos caused by heavy bombing raids, it has been easy to fall into a cosy view of the ‘criminal classes’ putting down their safe-breaking tools to join the effort against the Nazis. Those few ‘wrong-uns’ that skulked in the ruins of bombed-out homes taking the property of victims were surely an aberration, and one that the authorities dealt with severely. Or maybe not so severely, given the sentences handed down to the Birkenhead looters. This chapter will test this hypothesis, and also ask whether crime rose or fell during the war. Did patriotism and the ‘Blitz Spirit’ together engender a new lawabiding attitude among the civilian population; or did the lack of police officers on the darkened streets encourage criminality? Did people fall foul of the raft of new wartime regulations, and if they did, who were the people that were brought before the courts, and what happened to them? What was the public attitude to those who ignored blackout regulations? How did crime and justice operate in these extraordinary times? The questions are numerous and the historiography on wartime crime that can help us to answer them is unfortunately quite small. Existing literature

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on crime during wartime has tended to focus on earlier periods and question whether the courts preferred to let defendants join the armed forces rather than face imprisonment – see, for example, debates between Sharpe (1984), Hay (1982), Beattie (1974, 1977, 1986) and King (2000, 2002). The twentieth century is not so well served with research studies; however, there have been three major studies of crime during the Second World War – see a summary in Alker and Godfrey (2015). Edward Smithies’ Crime in Wartime, published in 1982, was the first to challenge the view that offending subsided in wartime Britain. Using a variety of archival and documentary sources he showed that there were many notorious crimes recorded between 1939 and 1945. Donald Thomas (2003) took a similar approach in concentrating, in the main, on the development of organized and serious crime. He discussed ‘spivs’ and the black market that sustained them, although he explored how defence regulations also created criminality. Lastly, Emsley (2013) has recently approached a new side of wartime offending – crimes committed by servicemen. His study has reminded us that offending followed men wherever they went – abroad, demobilized and at home on leave. Together these volumes have added to our knowledge of crime during wartime conditions. They, together with other more specific research into particular crimes, paint a picture of crime being ordinary, endemic and ingrained into wartime society – see, for example, Cox’s (2011) research into bigamy, which shows that bigamy rates rocketed during both world wars and their respective immediate aftermaths. Crime was not viewed as unpatriotic, unusual or extraordinary in wartime Britain, and certainly not in wartime Liverpool, as many influential commentators noted. Addressing the topic of ‘Public Dishonesty in Wartime’, Dr Albert David, the Bishop of Liverpool stated: We have been confronted by an outbreak of self-seeking, carried far beyond the limits of ordinary honesty […] pilfering and shoplifting, in wanton and senseless damage […] there is abundant evidence of dishonest work […] there can be no doubt that what I have described is a great and growing evil. (Thomas 2003: 17)

Was the bishop right to fear the rising tide of crime in Liverpool (and Merseyside)? Let us start with some of the most basic questions that are always asked about crime – how much was there; were crime rates going up or down; what sort of crimes were committed, and by whom? The published judicial statistics for England and Wales for 1938–45 show an increase until 1941, a slight decrease in 1942, a substantial further decrease in 1943, a substantial rise in 1944 and a large increase in 1945. A complex set of trends then, but overall there was an increase of 69 per cent since 1938. As Emsley (2013) and Allport (2009) both

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16000 14000 12000

Against person

10000 8000

Property with violence

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2000 0 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945

Figure 4.1 Prosecutions in Liverpool (Assize, Quarter Sessions and Magistrates’ courts), 1939–45.

note, the post-war period then saw the rise in reported crime continue to increase significantly after the war. Turning to the figures for Liverpool, the increase in offending was mainly in offences against property rather than offences against the person (Figure 4.1). Similar to all cities in England and Wales, property offences (either with or without violence) were vastly more numerous than crimes of violence. As Figure 4.2 shows, the number of assaults and more serious violence in England and Wales was rising while rates of violence in Liverpool were stable. Contemporaries might have surmised that the blackout conditions created dark streets where strangers could attack unsuspecting victims. In fact, as is the case today, these figures were mainly made up of disputes between people who were known to each other (family members and neighbours in the main). It is notable, however, that Liverpool bucked the national upwards trends in violent crime.

14000 12000 10000 8000

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Figure 4.2 Prosecutions for offences against the person, Liverpool and England and Wales, 1938–45.

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120000 100000 80000 60000

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Figure 4.3 Prosecutions for property offences with violence, Liverpool and England and Wales, 1938–45.

Liverpool again experienced a divergent trend with regard to property offences with violence (robberies, burglaries, demanding money with menaces and so on) (see Figure 4.3). Although broadly aligned with similar trends to the national picture, the rise in prosecutions as the war came to an end was slight when compared to the national figures. As Emsley (2013) noted, contemporaries worried that returning soldiers would have the skills to carry out large-scale robberies, safecracking and ‘bank jobs’. The popular film League of Gentlemen (1960) illustrated these fears when it portrayed the activities of a group of demobilized servicemen (led by Lieutenant-Colonel Norman Hyde, played by Jack Hawkins – a real-life colonel during the war) who used their army skills to rob a bank (and almost get away with it). It may have been the case that some demobilized servicemen used their skills in this way, but the reality was probably far less romantic than the movie version. In any case, the rise in prosecutions was evident before the war ended (the upturn started in 1943) and most of the robberies were what we would now term ‘muggings’ rather than sophisticated bank robberies. Given the scale and vulnerability of goods flowing through the Liverpool and Birkenhead docks at this time, and the number of warehouses that were broken open through bomb damage, there were numerous opportunities for theft in Liverpool and Birkenhead. Liverpool generally followed national patterns, although, again, the Liverpool figures do not show the same level of upward lift after 1943 as the rest of England and Wales (Figure 4.4). As already noted, the blackout created darkness, and bombed-out houses provided ready opportunities for theft and looting.

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40000 35000 30000 25000 20000

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Figure 4.4 Prosecutions for property offences without violence, Liverpool and England and Wales, 1938–45 (English and Wales figures have been divided by 10).

The population was constantly mobile and shifting, as noticed by Liverpool’s Emergency Committee during their characterization of the docks amidst the fire-watching debate. Men returned from the front on leave, sailors poured into the port, trekkers were traipsing off to the countryside and an anonymous mass of people swept in and out of Birkenhead and Liverpool every day. Not surprisingly, some took advantage of these conditions to commit crimes. The railways and the docks in Liverpool were targeted by thieves. Nationally, the value of goods stolen from the railways in 1943 was approximately one million pounds; by 1944 it had virtually doubled to nearly two million; the docks in Liverpool, London, Bristol and elsewhere reported huge losses due to pilfering, warehouse-breaking, the taking of customary perks by workers and wholesale robberies. Five refrigerated ships docked in Liverpool were relieved of five thousand pounds worth of beef and lamb. The lorry driver paid off warehouse staff so that he could load twenty more carcasses onto his vehicle than the fifty the Ministry of Food had ordered. The twenty carcasses were then diverted into the hands of black-marketeers (Hodson 1944: 146). Indeed, much of the stolen property found itself on the black market (as discussed in Chapter 5). So, there were many reasons why wartime crime rates should be higher than peacetime rates. However, there are equally good reasons why the rates of crime should plummet. Men are overwhelmingly responsible for crime, and thousands had left Merseyside to join the war. The police force were very busy dealing with bomb sites and traffic problems caused by road closures to be patrolling regularly (as we discuss below), which could all hinder the detection and reporting of crime; so it could equally well be argued that crime rates should be falling in this period.

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Criminal statistics cannot be taken as a true record of real levels of crime, because they were influenced by so many factors. As the 1946 Watch Committee Review of the 1939–40 period stated, ‘There can be no doubt that there has been a substantial increase in crime since the years before the war. It is difficult, however, to get any reliable index as to the extent of the increase.’7 Indeed, nevertheless, many at the time relied on them as the best possible indices of crime taking place during the war. Emsley (2013) has reported that national crime statistics fell during the First World War but rose during the Second World War, and so simple links between low crime and the absence of men should be treated with caution – the creation of new laws (e.g. stealing, looting, hoarding food and rations coupons and so on), the willingness of the criminal justice system or victims to proceed with cases and so on, all make axiomatic links difficult to establish. The figures above show trends, but without reliable population data it would be impossible to compare the per capita rates of crime in Liverpool, and nationally. During the war, the shifts in population numbers also make accurate analysis impossible. Another problem is that the number of police is a determinant in the number of prosecutions. Many police officers had joined up, despite constabulary duties being a reserved occupation. No doubt this was because many saw armed service as their patriotic duty, or it conformed with dominant ideas about masculinity, or simply because it offered more comradeship and excitement. Whatever the reason, Liverpool’s police force was depleted. Police officers may not ‘manufacture’ crime, but their availability offers more potential for crimes being detected and reported.8 The following section suggests that in addition to police numbers falling during the war, the officers who remained had their time taken up by many duties other than crime detection. From as early as 1936, members of Liverpool Police Force had attended classes to prepare them for air raids, including those held at the Falfield AntiGas School in Gloucestershire. In 1939, some police officers were trained in protection against high explosive and incendiaries, and they then qualified as instructors for Local Air Raid Precaution (so that they could train the air raid wardens). Over 200 policemen (185 regulars and seventeen specials) were eventually trained as instructors for LARP. Anticipating the ‘complicated conditions’ that bombing might bring about, the police were also trained to coordinate activity at bomb sites. Looking back in 1946, the Watch Committee concluded that the training they had provided was inadequate, and had left volunteer air raid wardens incapable of coping with the terrible realities that a sustained period of bombing

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brought. The volunteer ARWs would have been completely at sea without the help of police officers on the ground. ‘The purely police problems resulting from the air raids were many.’9 Police officers on the spot were expected to rescue and dig out survivors (although this was contested by the rescue squads); help to put out fires; ensure that the wounded were cared for, and the dead properly disposed of; identify unexploded ordnance (there were 235 unexploded bombs disposed of by Liverpool’s bomb disposal officers during the war); and control and direct traffic. Although they had no authority to do so, and we will later discuss (Chapter 7) why the Ministry for Home Security believed that they had not nearly gone far enough, the police closed roads, denied access to various parts of city to motorists and effectively sealed off various parts of town, whenever they saw fit.10 Controlling traffic and the considerable number of other activities they were required to carry out at bomb sites drew police away from their other duties. The busiest nights for the police were 3 and 4 May, when they dealt with over 600 incidents. The police were also, it should be remembered, dealing with illegal gambling and drunkenness in the air raid shelters, as well as an active IRA bombing campaign which was especially problematic in the first few years of the war.11 There was also the policing of industrial disputes, as discussed in Chapter 2 above, so feared in the inter-war anticipation of a war on the city. For example, in 1943, 12,000 bus drivers and conductors joined the city’s dock workers to go on strike, and policing the protests and marches involved large numbers of police officers.12 The police were therefore spread much more thinly than they had been before the war, and their ability to control crime was reduced. Operationally, in addition to general patrols, the police had particular priorities towards which they devoted their limited resources. Liverpool had been declared ‘No.1 Port’ when the war started, and received the bulk of transAtlantic trade, as well as mobilized US servicemen. The Watch Committee had feared that ‘coloured’ American troops would be resented if they formed relationships with ‘white’ women. Miscegenation fears around the indigenous Chinese population resurfaced (there had been a virulent moral panic on this theme in the 1930s – see Chamberlain 2012). In 1946, the Watch Committee were able to conclude that their fears had been largely unfounded. Nevertheless they had formed a ‘mobile force’ which could respond rapidly to any riots and disturbances. They had a more realistic approach to illicit drinking, prostitution and general licentiousness that a large transient male population created in the port cities. Generally despondent of their chances of making any real impact

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on prostitution (aside from juvenile prostitution where they felt they were more effective) the police were nevertheless pleased that Defence Regulations gave them the power to inspect houses of ill-repute. A considerable amount of police time was spent in regulating the worst of them: ‘some of the premises closed were filthy places operated by aliens attracted to the port by the hope of fleecing seamen’.13 There was also a constant concern that girls were being seduced by visiting servicemen and merchant sailors.14 However, it was in detecting and prosecuting the range of behaviour that fell under the other clauses of the Defence Regulations that police officers spent much of their time.

Policing the Defence of the Realm The commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Air Vice-Marshal Sir Philip Woolcott Game, believed that more laws simply meant more crimes. This was in retrospect (his views were published in Tribune on 28 April 1944) after the volume of Defence Regulations cases had become more than apparent. He might also have added that policing more laws meant considerably more work for his officers. The net-widening created by emergency legislation brought in many people who would not otherwise have troubled the courts (along with a number of people who were well known to the police and the magistrates). The original Defence of the Realm Act was enacted in 1914 in order to prepare the civilian population for war, or at least to curtail behavior by civilians which would undermine military efficiency. It contained the following clauses: (1) His Majesty in Council has power during the continuance of the present war to issue regulations for securing the public safety and the defence of the realm, and as to the powers and duties for that purpose of the Admiralty and Army Council and of the members of His Majesty’s forces and other persons acting in his behalf; and may by such regulations authorise the trial by courts-martial, or in the case of minor offences by courts of summary jurisdiction, and punishment of persons committing offences against the regulations and in particular against any of the provisions of such regulations designed: (a) to prevent persons communicating with the enemy or obtaining information for that purpose or any purpose calculated to jeopardise the success of the operations of any of His Majesty’s forces or the forces of his allies or to assist the enemy; or

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(b) to secure the safety of His Majesty’s forces and ships and the safety of any means of communication and of railways, ports, and harbours; or (c) to prevent the spread of false reports or reports likely to cause disaffection to His Majesty or to interfere with the success of His Majesty’s forces by land or sea or to prejudice His Majesty’s relations with foreign powers; or (d) to secure the navigation of vessels in accordance with directions given by or under the authority of the Admiralty; or (e) otherwise to prevent assistance being given to the enemy or the successful prosecution of the war being endangered.[…] (2) It shall be lawful for the Admiralty or Army Council: (a) to require that there shall be placed at their disposal the whole or any part of the output of any factory or workshop in which arms, ammunition, or warlike stores and equipment, or any articles required for the production thereof, are manufactured; (b) to take possession of, and use for the purpose of, His Majesty’s naval or military service any such factory or workshop or any plant thereof. The 1914 Act formed the basis of the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1939, which restated most of the 1914 clauses. The provisions of the 1939 Act additionally brought in the death penalty for looting, while the Treachery Act 1940 made assisting the enemy a capital offence (Archbold 1943: 1524–5). The most used provisions, however, were those concerned with reducing the chance of enemy bombers identifying targets by the lights that shone up from the ground. Before the war, the air ministry recognized that night-time bombing raids were likely, and that navigation from Germany to British cities and accurate targeting of military and manufacturing sites would be more difficult if lights on the ground could be extinguished. Defence Regulation No. 24 mandated that every night from sunset to sunrise all interior lights inside any building must be obscured and lights outside all buildings must be extinguished, subject to certain exceptions in the case of external lighting where it is essential for the conduct of work of vital national importance. All windows and doors were to be covered at night. Blackout curtains and shutters were used to cover windows, while paint was used to cover reflective surfaces. The government ensured that the necessary materials were available. Streetlights were switched off, or dimmed; and traffic lights and vehicle headlights were fitted with covers with slits in them to deflect the headlight beams towards the ground. These regulations also applied to bicycles, which, of course, were much more numerous than motor vehicles at the time.

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91

Looting, blackout and automobility Although the blackout undoubtedly limited the ability of German bombers to navigate their way around the country, and therefore the measures were critical to protecting the civilian population, the blackout restrictions also greatly increased the dangers of night driving and this caused many fatalities as a consequence (see Figure 4.5). The king’s surgeon, writing in the British Medical Journal in 1939, complained that by ‘frightening the nation into blackout regulations, the Luftwaffe was able to kill 600 British citizens a month without ever taking to the air’.15 The number of deaths on the roads peaked in 1940 at 9,169. That year, one person died for every 200 vehicles on the road, approximately a hundred times higher than today’s figures. The king’s surgeon would have got on well with the Chief Constable of Birkenhead, whose views on reckless motorists were scathing: Motorists juggle with their headlights, and insist on driving at ordinary speeds. Pedestrians overlook, or ignore, the fact that they do not have the same liberty of movement as in normal times. So the holocaust goes on, the killed and injured on the roads exceeding the killed and wounded in the War. There is no analogy between the two casualty lists – one is truly the ‘roll of honour’, the other the result of sheers indifference or criminal carelessness.16

10 Accidents per 100 registered vehicles 8 Fatalities per 1,000 registered vehicles 6

4

2

0 1926

1936

1946

1956

1966

1976

1986

1996

2006

Figure 4.5 Traffic accidents and fatalities, 1926–2006. Source: http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/olympicbritain/transport/look-out-in-theblackout/

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National judicial statistics were not published during the war for reasons of economy. In 1946, the government published the figures for 1939–45, although the document lacked a considerable amount of the detail usually contained in the annually published statistics they normally published. They decided not to include statistics on breaches of the Defence Regulations since some of the offences were similar to those covered by normal laws; that is, looting was a form of theft but with potentially much harsher penalties, and they also realized that there had been so many prosecutions under Defence Regulations that it would make comparison with pre- and post-war statistics impossible. Accordingly, they produced a separate appendix which recorded the extent of prosecutions under Defence Regulations. The statistical compilers were right to be worried about the distorting effects of including the Defence Regulation statistics within the general crime statistics. The numbers involved are staggering, as Table 4.1 shows.

Table 4.1 Prosecutions under Defence Regulations, England and Wales, 1940–45. Defence Regulation (prosecutions) Misleading acts Interference with H. M. Forces

1940–45 1,930 38

Sabotage

361

Photography

509

Pigeons

581

Postal packets

795

Protected places and areas

4,616

Bylaws: certain places and areas

7,419

Trespassing and loitering Defence areas Entering and leaving United Kingdom Control of motor vehicles Control of fuel for motor vehicles Change of name

3,607 10,515 2,683 68,219 815 3,747

Amendment of Aliens Restrictions Act, 1914

153

Billeting

619

Control of public shelters Control of lights and sounds

449 928,397

Civil defence duties

3,138

Fire prevention, business premises

7,893

Crime During Wartime

93

Defence Regulation (prosecutions)

1940–45

Interference with water pipes for fighting fires

435

Persons to continue in employment in police and CP duties

2,001

Looting

4,478

Publication of disturbing reports

131

Desertion from ships

8,110

General control of industry

113,799

Control of employment

34,662

Strikes and lockouts

2,036

Trespassing on allotments

2,989

Control of cultivation

885

Traffic on highways, canals etc.

9,940

Collection of articles of military value

803

Speed limit in built up areas in blackout

30,211

Home Guard

6,172

Other defence (general)

12,755

Defence (finance)

1

Total

1,275,889

The blackout (lighting) regulations, and the control of speeding cars in the darkened streets, made up a large proportion of prosecutions. Together they constituted nearly one million prosecutions over the course of the war. It has been estimated (Calder 1992: 337) that one in every fifty people was prosecuted under Defence Regulations during the war (although a number of repeat offenders would skew these statistics). As might be expected and Table 4.2 shows, prosecutions were most numerous during the period when Britain experienced the heaviest bombing raids, and in the build-up to the start of the war when fear of bombing was probably at its height. Table 4.2 Magistrates’ courts (selected Defence Regulation prosecutions) 1939–45. 1939 Blackout lighting offences

1940

1941

1942

1943

1944

1945

59,758 302,443 210,934 154,080 109,757 73,831 17,594

Looting

0

646

2,508

415

255

561

93

Speeding in built-up area in blackout

0

5,935

6,654

6,845

3,825

3,443

3,509

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There were a number of serious offences which the higher courts reserved unto themselves. A few hundred people were prosecuted at the Assizes and Quarter Sessions for: assisting the enemy (eleven cases), interfering with Her Majesty’s Forces (eleven cases), avoiding National Service by self-maiming (seven cases) and so on (the total of all cases dealt with in these courts in the whole of the war was 254). Other offences, such as spreading disinformation, spreading disaffection and breaches of the ‘control of industry’ or other employment regulations, could be dealt with by either the higher or the magistrates’ courts. Serious cases of looting (which, it should be remembered could end in a capital sentence) were sometimes dealt with at the Assizes and Quarter Sessions (552 over the course of the war), but magistrates dealt with the vast majority of looting cases. Nationally, only half of the convicted looters were sent to prison, and hardly anyone else actually served time for breaching Defence Regulations (less than 3 per cent) (see Table 4.3). In Birkenhead, one person was imprisoned for a month for looting a bombedout warehouse, and two people were imprisoned for six months, for looting bombed-out houses. All were dealt with in the magistrates’ courts. Indeed, the surviving court registers for Birkenhead Magistrates’ Court as shown in Table 4.4 reveal an interesting picture of how Defence Regulations bolstered the number of prosecutions through the local courts. Table 4.3 Penalties for breaches of Defence Regulations, 1939–45. Disposals (% within offence line) Gaoled

Fined

Looting

1,412 (53)

1,265 (47)

Blackout

332 (.03)

898,330 (99.9)

1,815 (1.7)

101,729 (98.3)

8,577 (4)

202,817 (96)

Black market Other

Table 4.4 Prosecutions in Birkenhead under Defence Regulations, 1939–42. Offence Lighting restrictions Motor vehicle infringements Defence Regulations (general) Aliens Movement Restrictions

No.

%

1,584

72

269

12

75

3

42

2

Other

218

10

Total

2,190

99

Crime During Wartime

95

The Birkenhead and Liverpool court registers also reveal how the local population experienced the new raft of regulatory offences that were regulated by the police and air raid wardens; and a great many people were subject to blackout-related prosecutions. During the worst year of the bombing raids, Birkenhead alone recorded over 100 prosecutions every month. As the Chief Constable lamented: ‘The Black Out has imposed very heavy work indeed, and it is regrettable that very many residents do not appear to appreciate the importance of the black out, nor the time taken by the police in carrying out their work.’17 Indeed, total blackout was impossible to fulfil with regard to the docks; without a degree of light the dockers could not function – pre-war blackout exercises had ‘caused a 50% reduction in the speed of handling goods, which was only partially alleviated by the issue of handlamps to dockers’ (Prouty 1947: 5). There were also numerous fatalities attributed to the blackout. Mr David Logan (the MP for Liverpool Scotland so vocal in the previous chapter) asked the home secretary about accidents attributed to the blackout in Liverpool Docks on 7 May 1940 and received the following reply: Since the beginning of the war inquests have been held on 18 seamen drowned in the port of Liverpool. Of these, 15 were believed to have been drowned during the hours of darkness. Special arrangements are made for the lighting of the docks where work is in progress at night, and steps have been taken by the Department to secure that full advantage is taken of those arrangements. Suitably restricted lights at the gangways of ships are also permitted, and guard chains are provided at dangerous parts of the docks, in accordance with the regulations made under the Factory Acts.18

Of course, the docks under the management of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board had begun preparations for reduced lighting in advance of the war, following a memo circulated by the Home Office.19 These saw the Docks as a special case in which standards for Restricted Dock Lighting could be introduced so as to permit some but highly restricted lighting. In preparation, the board began purchasing and adapting dimmed bulbs, shades so as to ensure light could not escape upwards, reflectors and the painting of quay edges by using lime wash or white paint. Broken white lines were considered better than solid ones. Police officers were resisted when trying to enforce regulations, as were the air raid wardens (who were often physically resisted or assaulted): A voluntary Air Raid Warden saw a light shining from a bedroom window. When he shouted up to the householder, Mr Gornall, he used abusive language to refuse the request. The light was still shining when the constable called by the

96

Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz ARW arrived. After a heated argument, Constable Price told him that he would enter the house to extinguish the light. There was a fierce struggle and the officer was struck a violent blow in his face. Gornall’s wife then joined in, and the fight was watched over by a large crowd that had assembled in the street.20

Cases reported in the local newspapers described the frustration that the police and the local magistrates felt when dealing with recalcitrant citizens who seemed determined to risk the lives of their fellow residents: a smartly dressed woman was fined £2 at Liverpool Police Court on 19 August 1940. When a police officer and a hotel porter had asked her to put out her lights during the blackout, she had replied ‘go away you cuss, and don’t disturb a lady in her room, you miserable creatures’.21 She joined thirty other offenders before an unsympathetic court, and all of them were convicted and fined. In the same court five days later, Magistrate Denis Mooney stated that he was appalled by the number of shops that had lights exposed, and that he was determined to stamp the practice out. He dealt with twenty lighting breaches that day, imposing fines of up to £2. He was, however, threatening to send future offenders into custody for one month each.22 Figures 4.6–4.8 suggest that disposals imposed in local magistrates courts were affected by wartime conditions. There were no prosecutions for violence during the May 1941 bombing offensive (assaults were usually taken to court by individual victims rather than police officers, and people probably had more on their mind than taking minor disputes/assaults to court). Penalties for alcoholrelated offences were slightly higher immediately before and during the bombing period (Figure 4.6) with no custodial sentences being imposed on drunks in 1941 after May. 100 90 80 70 60

1d.–20s. fine or 1–31 days gaol

50 40

Over 20s. fine or over 31 days gaol

30 20 10 0 Pre-Blitz

During Blitz

After Blitz

Figure 4.6 Birkenhead: alcohol-related offences (from court registers).

Crime During Wartime

97

100 90 80 70

1d.–20s. fine or 1–31 days gaol

60 50 40

Over 20s. fine or over 31 days gaol

30

Supervision

20 10 0 Pre-Blitz

During Blitz

After Blitz

Figure 4.7 Birkenhead: property offences (from court registers).

100 90 80 70 60

1d.–20s. or 1–31 days gaol

50 Over 20s. fine or over 31 days gaol

40 30 20 10 0 Pre-Blitz

During Blitz

After Blitz

Figure 4.8 Birkenhead: defence regulations (from court registers).

The penalties imposed on property offenders (these figures do not include looting offences, but may still contain cases of theft during blackouts) were much higher during the bombing period. The figures are actually quite stark. Penalties imposed for breaching Defence Regulations tell a similar tale. During the Blitz they were much higher than before the bombing had started or after it had ended. This is fairly convincing evidence that magistrates were reactive to wartime conditions, and that they had a quite extreme reaction during the bombing period to offences which appeared either to undermine the war effort

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(facilitating accurate bombing and so on) or involved defendants who appeared to be preying on civilians during extraordinary circumstances. Magistrates (and judges in the higher courts) seemed determined to try and stamp out wartime offending, and challenges to lawful authority, with stiff sentences. A typical response from the judiciary can be seen in Justice Stable’s remarks with regard to a blackout thief who appeared before him at Liverpool Assizes. For stealing a gold watch and 2s. 4d., Edward Sidney Jones was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude. Justice Stable told him, ‘Woe betide the man who comes before me for breaking into a dwelling-house or committing any crime of violence during a period of black-out.’23 It is also quite clear that the police tried as hard as they could to contain situations where disputes arose before they could get out of hand. For example, a young constable from Cheshire struggled with a situation which could easily have spiralled into something much more serious, as he recorded in his wartime diary; he wrote that on Thursday 17 October 1940, I reported John Hayter, Manager of the Blossoms Hotel, for permitting three lights to show from the hotel overlooking St John’s Street during the blackout period. On this occasion a hostile crowd had assembled and I found it necessary to restrain a soldier who asked my permission to shoot at the electric bulbs with his rifle.24

Angry crowds often gathered around lit premises during blackout and sometimes hurled bricks at the lights. 25 Police and air raid wardens sometimes then found themselves protecting, as well as prosecuting, the property owner. This was the case whether the crowd thought the property owner was deliberately or just negligently leaving lights shining out. People were, of course, petrified by the thought of bombers swooping down on their houses, and the majority seemed to be genuinely convinced that the blackout regulations were necessary to protect them. No doubt the majority of police and ARP wardens held the same view. However, when the threat of bombing was subsiding, public confidence in the need for and impartial application of Defence Regulations also subsided. ‘The sooner the Gestapo gets here the better!’ shouted Harold Allibone after being convicted in Liverpool Magistrates’ Court for running an illegal gambling racket in the docks.26 Today such comments sound more than a little naïve, but they evidence the feeling that the authorities were overstretching themselves. It is highly unlikely that the Gestapo would have dealt with Allibone more leniently than did the Liverpool Bench, but the six months’ imprisonment he received would still have caused grumbling among many dock workers who would have thought it excessive.

Crime During Wartime

99

Conclusion How can we explain the level of resistance? The blackout was supposed to keep the civilian population safe, and both Birkenhead and Liverpool had experienced very heavy bombing raids which had killed thousands of people in the city. Why would residents risk their and others’ lives for the sake of pulling closed some curtains? In part, it was because the regulations came to be seen as less necessary and more onerous as the war went on, especially after the threat of invasion and heavy bombing had receded. To take one example; the Ministry of Fuel temporarily displaced the art in the Walker Art Gallery during the war. In 1944, a number of the typists and clerks who staffed the desks inside were convicted of large-scale trafficking of clothing coupons and sentenced in Liverpool Magistrates’ Court. The convicted (and disgraced) administrative staff were fined, although they could well have expected to suffer heavy prison sentences.27 The leniency of the fine imposed by the stipendiary magistrate is perhaps slightly surprising given the impact that such crimes had in reducing public confidence in government offices. The people of Liverpool, of course, already had a healthy suspicion of many government officials and operations by that time. The confidence in the government and public belief in the forces of wartime authority that sustained morale at the beginning of the war had sadly eroded away by 1944. Winston Churchill (1985: 560–1) himself had warned about the demoralizing effect of overzealous policing of minor infractions of blackout regulations. In his letter to Neville Chamberlain in 1939 he had cited the case of a man who could be prosecuted for smoking a cigarette ‘too brightly’. His prediction seemed to be proved ever more correct as the war continued. The answer also partly lies in the history of policing of working-class communities – see Macilwee (2011) and Godfrey (2014). The Liverpool and Birkenhead court registers record the place where offences took place, including the addresses where every blackout regulation was infringed. What becomes evident in studying these records is that the police continued a well-worn tradition of patrolling, surveilling and controlling the traditional workingclass areas of Liverpool, and that is where the offences were detected. Certainly, the commercial and manufacturing districts were also patrolled, since these premises continued to be problematic for the police. Shops and factories had particular problems. It was difficult to effectively black out the huge expanses of glass roofing that many Merseyside factories had, and the paint they used to

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cover the glass was not really effective. The shops and also hotels relied on bright environments to operate and they very often found themselves before the courts. The fines that were levied upon them were paid from profits, and few shop and hotel owners faced gaol for their laxness in regulating their lights. The concentration of blackout and other Defence Regulation prosecutions fell not on the areas subject to the bombing raids, however, but on the workingclass districts of Merseyside. Of course, it is a moot point as to whether the predomination of visible light in those working-class areas of Liverpool indicated to German pilots and navigators that the place that lay below them was indeed the city of Liverpool. If that were the case, then the authorities would be justified in imposing that level of surveillance on those areas. That argument loses some force, however, when the prosecutions for blackout offences continued long after the bombers had left. For example, one man was prosecuted in Birkenhead for lighting a cigarette (which could never have been seen by an enemy bomber in any case). This offence took place in 1945, long after any danger from the Luftwaffe had passed over.28 It would be a mistake to see wartime policing as ‘policing in the usual way’ because the war did bring unique social conditions which affected both the personnel involved in policing as well as the style of policing. Nevertheless in some respects the policing of wartime Merseyside continued a deep tradition in watching over and regulating working-class areas. The 1930s policing that Brogden (1991) described is similar to the style described by many other commentators for earlier periods. Indeed, the tradition of over-policing the poor can be traced back as far as the eighteenth century with ease, an oftreported police axiom being that ‘you guard St. James [one of the most affluent areas of London] by watching St. Giles [one of the most notorious areas]’.29 Turning back to the first weeks of May 1941, in addition to the nine blackout offences, the two servicemen who were AWOL, and the man convicted of obstructing the fire brigade in their duty, the vast number of the fifty prosecutions heard in court was characteristically ‘normal’, consisting of traffic violations, drunkenness and petty crimes which would be considered part of the normal round of magistrates’ court business before the war. Four people were convicted of not paying their poor law rates; and the motorist who was stopped for having faulty brakes in Prentice Road West was fined twenty shillings.30 The trends of ‘normal’ crime (offending which was not connected to the opportunities presented by the blackout or the bombed-out premises, or created by people falling foul of Defence Regulations) followed national trends by and large. The prosecutions for drunkenness in Liverpool, for example, follow the same trend as the rest of the country (see Figure 4.9). As the war continued,

Crime During Wartime

101

6 5 4 Liverpool (1k)

3

England and Wales (10k)

2 1 0

1938

1939

1940

1941

1942

1943

1944

1945

Figure 4.9 Prosecutions for drunkenness in Liverpool and England and Wales, 1938–44. Source: Figures taken from Liverpool Watch Committee Reports and Judicial Statistics for England and Wales, 1938–1945 (LRO).

alcohol became more difficult to obtain, and fewer men were around to drink to excess; therefore rates fell until the war was concluded. Just as with many other places experiencing extraordinary political or social conditions, ‘normal’ acquisitive crime, traffic violations and public order offences simply continued in Liverpool and Birkenhead. The war did not stop offending, although it did reduce the number of men around to participate in offending. Defence Regulations created offences which were designed to control the behaviour of the civilian population, and since the civilian population were sometimes incapable or unwilling to comply, the number of regulatory offences in the magistrates courts grew hugely. Some offences which have come to typify our views of wartime crime – such as blackout offences – ran into their thousands in Merseyside (and every metropolitan area in England and Wales), while others, such as looting, remained a small percentage of crime in the country. Donald Thomas (2003: 392) believes that: The world of the ration racketeers died with the restrictions they had exploited. Criminals who had perfected the skill of hi-jacking a lorryload of butter or warehouse-breaking in search of nylon stockings, were free to return to more ambitious pursuits. Those civilians who had merely ventured over the border of criminality, in order to keep their larders stocked or their cars running, became in the 1950s the respectable citizens of a ‘home-owning democracy’.

The evidence from Birkenhead and Liverpool experience partially but not completely validates that viewpoint. It is clear that the authority of the police and ARP wardens was much more contested and less consensual than modern portrayals prefer to remember or portray. It is also clear that, although much

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of the discontent and resistance came from the section of society that felt the full force of regulatory power during the war – the working-class districts of Birkenhead and Liverpool – all sections of society came to resent Defence Regulations as the war progressed (and they seemed less necessary and therefore more intrusive), and when they were applied to them. It is also the case that, as the metropolitan police commissioner had noted, new laws manufactured people who broke them. Seasoned criminal hands turned their attention to the opportunities that war conditions offered – bombed-out buildings, a busy, distracted and undermanned police force, and the dark – and by doing so they were simply continuing in the practices they had already developed before the war. Others broke the law through need, ignorance, because they thought the law was silly or because they did not think it applied to them. The vast majority of these types of ‘non-criminal criminals’ infringed blackout regulations or indulged in the informal economies that circulated in wartime Britain – the black market.

5

Grey and Black Markets

Welsh composer Ivor Novello was one of the most popular British entertainers of the first half of the twentieth century.1 He was also one of the most famous people to be prosecuted for the illegal use of rationed goods in the Second World War. In 1944 he was arrested for having stolen petrol coupons in his possession, and sentenced to two months in gaol. Although he spent just four weeks’ confinement in Wormwood Scrubs before being released on license, the prison experience had a considerable impact both on Novello’s health and his celebrity status.2 Although his reputation subsequently recovered, the arrest and sentence had a salutary effect on Novello, and on the public as a whole (as perhaps it had been designed to). Novello’s fall from grace came when the end of the war was in sight, but when valuable resources such as petrol were still in short supply. Nearer the start of the war, the first food rationing case in Birkenhead (on 21 September 1940) saw widow Ellen Timmis, of 9 Manor Hill, prosecuted for receiving a packet of bacon from Éire. In return for the meat, she had reimbursed her daughter with a one-guinea postal order. It turned out that she had already previously received a box of apples and other farmyard produce from her daughter’s farm, something that went against her in court. Ellen made no real attempt to defend her actions since she believed that the rationing laws did not apply to goods sent in from abroad. The magistrates fined her £2, which was a considerable sum for a widow living in wartime conditions to find. Ellen Timmis was a very different person from the three smooth-haired, slick, Brylcreemed men described by land girl Shirley Joseph: They were not gentlemen and they looked like they never smiled […] They spoke in a sort of harsh whisper. ‘Here, we’ve come all the way from Birkenhead and haven’t done no business’. ‘One thing, petrol’s no object’. ‘Did you fix that deal for a thousand tyres?’ At the mention of tyres I pricked up my ears. I knew my father had badly wanted some new tyres for a long time.

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Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz

‘What, can you get tyres?’ I asked impulsively. For a moment there was silence. I think they had forgotten my existence. ‘Tyres? As many as you want – at the right price’, one answered, laughing without smiling’. (Quoted in Calder 1992: 408)

All of these characters (the celebrity, the widow and the ‘spivs’) formed part of a now notorious system of underground theft and trade in rationed goods during the wartime period (and until the early 1950s when rationing eventually ended).3 This chapter will explore why and how the grey and the black markets eventuated, how they operated and within what social and distributive circuits and what steps the authorities took to try and eradicate or at least control a trade considered to be extremely damaging to the British war effort. Lastly, it will explore whether anything, except maybe the scale, and the potential impact on the ability to prosecute the war, distinguished the black market from routine behaviour that was fairly normal before the war, and which continued long after the war had ended.

How the legal market operated Even if Ivor Novello thought that the rules did not apply to celebrities such as himself, he would have been aware that the use of petrol was severely rationed. Because of its importance to military mobility, petrol was the first commodity to be rationed in September 1939. In the same year, the Ministry of Food announced the new regulations designed to keep Britain adequately provisioned.4 New offences included the disposal of food while it was still edible; failing to preserve food thereby allowing it to rot; and producing too much food so that some of it was wasted (dogs could be fed, but not too much). Although the Liverpool Echo reported that the new regulations would be interpreted leniently and administered with a light touch, the newspaper also warned that the penalties extended to up to two years’ imprisonment. Everyone expected that there would be few prosecutions, and the minister for food, Robert Boothby, assured the country that there would be ‘no Boothby snoopers’ ensuring compliance with the laws. Baron Boothby was in office until 1941, when he resigned for not declaring an interest when asking a question in Parliament (after the war he became a friend of the Kray twins, and a noted ‘man about town’ in London).

Grey and Black Markets

105

From 8 January 1940, sugar, bacon and butter were all rationed, and dairy products (cheese, milk, eggs), meat and lard and other sundries (tea, jam, biscuits, cereal, canned and dried fruit) all followed as the German blockade began to bite. Fresh vegetables and fruit were not rationed but, nevertheless, there were extreme shortages, hence the exhortations to ‘Dig for Victory’ and the governmental appeal for gardeners to turn their lawns into vegetable patches, and their prize flowers to be put aside to allow for the growing of potatoes. Food shortages were apparent by 1942, despite the entry of the USA into the conflict; the German U-boat campaigns extorted a high price on merchant shipping. Getting hold of lemons or a banana was almost unheard of. Oranges were usually reserved for children and pregnant women (who had to prove to the greengrocer that they were pregnant). Apples were, of course, grown in the UK (by gardeners but also by commercial growers in Kent and the south of England) and so were available but usually subject to locally imposed restrictions; one apple per customer, for example. Of course, the unrationed goods, such as apples, were still very expensive to buy. Although citizens were encouraged to make the fruit that they had grown themselves, or berries they had collected from the hedgerows, go further by turning it into jam and preserves, this was often criticized for the amount of (rationed) sugar this used.5 Bread was never rationed during the war, but a National Loaf made from wholemeal flour replaced white bread, though it was never very popular (Calder 1992: 276–7).6 As the war progressed rationing was extended to clothing, which was rationed on a points system from June 1941. People were entitled to one new outfit per year in the first years of operation, but later the coupon exchange rate was recalibrated and at the end of the war coats could only be obtained with nearly a whole year’s ration coupons. So, for the majority of the period of the war, all adults were entitled to buy 4oz. bacon and ham; 1s. 2d. worth of meat; 3oz. of tea; 4oz. preserves or 4oz. of sugar; a pint of milk per week; a packet of dried eggs every fortnight; and four fresh eggs every three months. Each month a small amount of biscuits, sweets and chocolate could be bought. The regulations around food therefore provided more than a minimum level of sustenance, but still left people wanting more. Britain was never in the same position as the occupied countries (or the Channel Islands in particular where shoe leather was boiled to make it soft and edible), but there was still a consumer market created by rationing (Cruickshank 1975: 141–52). If more food could be obtained from somewhere, there would always be a ready market to consume it. Rationing was not the only governmental response to shortages. In June 1942, the Combined Food Board (which was an international body tasked with

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maintaining food supplies across the United Nations) began to coordinate the flow of supplies from North America to Britain in order to relieve the shortages; and in order to try and keep the price of food down, government subsidies were introduced (to the tune of £145m in 1942–43) and the price of particular foodstuffs was fixed at an affordable price. Nevertheless, the main plank of governmental policy concerned the restriction and rationing of foodstuffs at home and in commercial enterprises. Restaurants had initially been exempt from rationing, but this was resented, as people with more money could supplement their food rations by eating out frequently. The Ministry of Food in May 1942 issued new restrictions on restaurants. Meals were limited to three courses; only one component dish could contain fish or game or poultry (but not more than one of these). Fish itself was not rationed, although it was not plentiful because of the difficulties of trawlermen going out to sea. No meals could be served between 11.00 pm (or midnight in London) and dawn (5.00 am) without a special licence. The maximum price of a meal was five shillings, with extra charges allowed for cabaret shows and luxury hotels. All in all nearly 900 inspectors were employed to make sure that the statutory orders of the Ministry of Food were obeyed by customers, retailers and wholesalers.7 Food inspectors arranged for local helpers to tour the shops trying to buy goods without handing over coupons, or to determine whether traders were supplying customers who were not registered with the shop. If it became clear in court that the shop owners had been enticed, cajoled or bullied into supplying goods, the magistrates were vocal in condemning the un-British aspects of the agents provocateurs who had trapped their victims. Nevertheless, it was difficult in court for retailers and restaurateurs to argue against professional witnesses such as food inspectors: ‘The man sent in by the food inspectors looked hungry and the shopkeeper felt sorry for him. Liverpool Magistrates fined him £2-00 for his “kindness.”’8 At the start of the war, particularly, the undercover spies were highly thought of in government.9 As the war continued, the undercover enforcement officers were brought under more control. They were forbidden from trying to entice goods from shop owners by way of sympathy – saying that they had been bombed-out, or had lost their family, and so on. They were especially warned about trying to obtain goods from young shop assistants (and, of course, there were a good many of these). It is not clear whether the undercover officers were entitled to keep the goods they had wheedled out of the shopkeepers after the trial, but the suspicion that they were better-fed than the majority of the population would have ensured that they were unpopular figures in the locale, and not just with shop owners.

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Taking together the background context of shortages in key resources (petrol, clothing and food) and the specific conditions imposed by rationing and pricefixing, ‘the whole notion of rationing – controlling what had previously been freely available – would suggest an area ripe for behaviour that was illicit, though not seen as criminal in the community. The black market was the inevitable consequence of regulation’ (Gardiner 2004: 155). Indeed, it was a combination of regulation and the policing of regulation which provided the boundaries for the scale and operation of the black market. This can clearly be seen in the changing rationing regimes for petrol. For example, the trade in petrol vouchers, which had been steady but low level, increased after 1941, when further restrictions were imposed, and private motorists had their fuel allowances reduced. The problem for police was not just that there was a trade in stolen or forged coupons but that they needed to decide which motorists they should stop – each investigation required specialist equipment and tried the patience of police and motorists alike. When all private petrol allowances were stopped in 1942, it became easier. Any private car was likely to be running on stolen fuel or ‘red petrol’. Therefore it was the rationing system combined with the authorities’ ability to police it that was key in driving trends in black market crimes. The controls over the free market, which were designed by wartime government to provide a fair and equitable distribution of resources, seemed to have spawned an illicit illegal market which operated in tandem with the world of rationing. Without a customer base no market can survive, so who were the people who were willing to risk public humiliation (like Novello), court fines (for the widow Ellen Timmis) and imprisonment (for the smooth-haired petrol thieves)? How did customers enter this marketplace, and with what intention; and how was the market supplied?

How illegal markets operate The fixed price for rabbits was 9d. per pound. So the rabbits sold for 11d. per pound by Mr Bishop on his St John’s Market stall in Liverpool were too expensive.10 So concluded the magistrate who fined Bishop £5. The market-stall holder countered, reasonably, that he made no profit at all at that fixed price and therefore his goods would have to be sold at a higher price. This neatly encapsulated the dilemma. The regulations controlling the effective rationing of food cut across market conditions. In order for traders to maintain a profit, they

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needed to sell ‘under the counter’ for a higher price, and people seeking their goods would be happy to pay that price. This system reduced the amount of food available under rationing, and raised demand for black market goods. This was a ‘Catch 22’ situation for the Ministry of Food to wrestle with; but not only the ministry, of course, for it was the courts that dealt with those who took their wares under the counter, and who got caught (for many simply got away with it).11 Before it reached the shop-counters, the goods had to be trafficked from their legitimate place of storage or travel into the hands of distributors. The docks and the railways presented multiple opportunities for largescale theft and robbery. Millions of pounds worth of goods were moved through the Merseyside docks and railway sidings. Goods were left relatively unprotected, and the necessity of keeping these vulnerable areas in near-darkness due to enemy action meant that they drew the attentions of organized criminals operating in the north-west of England (but who had connections to wider distribution networks throughout the country). Pilfering from the docks or the railways was said to be endemic (with Brunswick Dock being a particular black-spot for railway thefts), and a significant proportion of the goods that were ‘liberated’ from the stores were not for personal use.12 They ended up in a wholesale import–export business controlled by organized networks. Of course, Brunswick Dock’s Goods Station, adjacent to other docks Harrington and Herculaneum, saw a huge amount of traffic to Burtonwood, the United States Air Force base. Supplies and aircraft would be directed through Liverpool’s docks to be reassembled at Burtonwood as the maintenance and supply base for the United States in Europe. The vicinity of Brunswick was, thus, a critical facility for valuable cargo and ripe for criminal pickings. Some workers who had been loyal employees for many years were happy to participate in a lucrative arrangement where shadowy men took delivery of various kinds of goods in return for an extra ‘bob’ or two to add to the weekly wage. For example, four men convicted of pilfering 80,000 cigarettes (worth £7,500) intended for delivery to American troops stationed in Britain were sentenced to three years’ penal servitude at Liverpool Assizes.13 Thefts from railways increased by ninefold in one year.14 Indeed, pretty much anything disappeared from the docks. Sacks of peanuts, rice and sugar were stolen.15 Military materials were taken; foodstuffs were taken; coal and fuel was taken; clothing and textile goods were taken. Bottles of wine and spirits were taken from bomb-damaged dock warehouses by a fire-watcher and two auxiliary firemen.16 It appeared that nothing was safe.

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The illegal trade in petrol had also attracted the attentions of organized crime, because the profits were so large. A petrol ‘speak easy’ scheme linked together a Liverpool city councillor and the director of a shipping company in a conspiracy to evade the provisions of the Motor Fuel Rationing Order.17 On 1 July 1942, the basic civilian petrol ration had been abolished. Vehicle fuel was only available to ‘official’ users, such as the emergency services, bus companies and farmers, and also, of course, the armed forces – what one correspondent to the Guardian referred to as ‘cars carrying letters of magic’.18 Fuel supplied to approved users was regulated, dyed red and identifiable with simple equipment. The use and supply of fuel for non-essential purposes was an offence, and the Liverpool operation was found to have supplied over 12,000 gallons of unregulated fuel (one single man was supplied with nearly a thousand gallons which would quickly find itself redistributed on the black market. The men pleaded not guilty at Liverpool Assizes to ‘joy-riding’ with coupon-free petrol). 19 The market for the stolen petrol and the forged or stolen petrol coupons was extensive. Nearly 200 summonses were issued regarding the fraudulent use of petrol in one just one sitting in 1941.20 While petrol and other goods remained in short supply, there was a large market for all kinds of illegal goods, and a lucrative trade which delivered a great deal of money into the hands of a few large-scale criminal operations in the north-west. The criminal enterprises that planned and carried out wholesale robberies of dock warehouses and distributed petrol throughout the country also controlled a shadowy network of backroom staff who could also manufacture false identities, and forged documents, which could facilitate entry to restricted areas, or cover up the identity of known ‘black marketeers’. Professional forgers had a field day, not just with manufacturing ‘dodgy’ petrol coupons but also documents of leave for soldiers going AWOL, and travel passes which allowed free travel around the country. False identification papers were at a premium, and came with attendant risks. Forging a petrol coupon meant a considerable spell in gaol; forging a military document could potentially end in the gallows. However, again, the wartime conditions created a lucrative market which could lead to big financial rewards for those prepared to run the risks. For example, the government agreed to pay compensation for people who had been bombed out of their homes. Full compensation would be paid at the conclusion of hostilities, but people were entitled to claim an advance of up to £500 with an additional £70 available for furniture and clothes. So many people were losing their homes during 1940 that officials of the local National Assistance Office did not have enough time to check people’s claims, and a number of false claims were

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advanced. Those who genuinely had been bombed out were also sometimes caught up in criminality. Because compensation payments took a long while to come through (the bureaucracy was struggling to cope), loan sharks took advantage of people desperate to scrape together funds for food and shelter, and to replace belongings destroyed by the bombs (Gardiner 2010). Ration books were stolen by burglars, stolen by postmen, lost, destroyed in bombing raids and so on. Not surprisingly there was some slippage between those honestly and carelessly lost, and those which were sold on and replaced by the authorities. This provided a nice bit of extra income, and it seems that there were about 800,000 careless people who lost their ration books during the war (Gardiner 2004: 506). By 1944 a ration book could be bought for as little as £1 in London (Gardiner 2004: 507). The evacuation of children from Merseyside (as discussed in more detail in Chapter 7) to safer areas in temporary billets provided another route for dishonesty. The householder received 10s. 6d. from the government for the first child they rehomed, and another 8s. for other billeted children. Unfortunately, some people continued to claim their allowances after the child had returned home, or filled in stolen or forged forms, or simply claimed for children that did not exist. The defendant in one particularly unsavory case in 1940 did not bother with forged documents, but simply obtained the real thing. Mr Strawson read a newspaper obituary about the death of a whole family in a bombing raid, and rushed to identify the bodies at the Liverpool mortuary. He took possession of the jewellery and personal belongings found at the scene, and, citing the need to obtain the £45 funeral costs, he claimed the £250 life insurance that was rightfully his as sole heir. Except that he was not the heir, or even related to the deceased. The police had shown sympathy to Mr Strawson when he asked for the insurance documentation at the local police station; he had wept openly at the custody sergeant’s desk, after all. They were less sympathetic to the 53-yearold labourer from Ryder Street, Liverpool, when his deception became known, and he was sent for trial.21 Public opinion, during the war and subsequently, has differentiated between the black market activities of despicable characters like Mr Strawson; organized gangsters that carried out the wholesale robbery of dock warehouses and ships; ‘spivs’ that sold on stolen property and rationed goods; and the ‘ordinary’ people who managed to obtain a few extra pounds of meat or a couple of eggs from the friendly local shopkeeper who would ‘keep a bit back’ for customers that they had served for years, and with whom they had friendly relations. Oral histories

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of the period recall not just the mechanisms involved but also the social context of how markets operated (together with their integral biases). For example, Angie Irvine of Worcestershire contributed the following memories to the BBC People’s War website: We were luckier than many during the war, ironically because of my husband injuring himself beforehand. An injury caused at work ruled him unsuitable for war service, allowing him to stay at home and work bringing in a wage, while I could stay at home with our baby. This allowed us to survive financially a lot better than many people we knew, allowing us a few extras on top of rations. I had to take my baby to the Lowesmoor clinic every week to be weighed and collect rations of cod liver oil and concentrated orange juice (for rickets) plus tins of national dried milk. This was the easy part, however, as the rest of our rations came from the city centre and required a lot of patience and queuing. We had to queue regularly for over an hour to pick up our rations of meat and fish. Cod would arrive at the fishmongers in the Shambles in a box and was cut up into chunks and was charged at 1/- for 1lb. Nothing was filleted but the heads and tails were cut off for those that had a cat. Of course, when it was all gone you accepted it. It was the same for meat rations as well. The butcher, again in the Shambles, would often put cuts of meat under the counter for his favourite customers. Meat was a real luxury at this time so we ate mainly spam, sausages (though who wanted to guess what was in them) and scrag ends at home. What I hated most was only having 2 oz. of cheese a week, but we managed, there was no choice. 22 Every weekend the family would take a country bus out to my Aunts farm near Ledbury in Herefordshire and would usually come back with some extras, including bacon, eggs and vegetables. This was a real bonus. I was also lucky when it came to clothing rations. Because I was so small I could fit into junior sizes. This would save me at least 12 coupons a year.23

Where as Angela and her family were able to draw upon local and familial resources to get ‘a little bit extra’, others were not able to muster these resources: The obvious teachers’ favourites at school, who in my view were no different from the rest of us, had parents who managed shops. As far as I know, my mother was never offered anything from ‘under the counter’ because she wasn’t able to give anything in return […] Very occasionally ‘luxury’ goods came in from overseas. It saddens me now to think of all those merchant seamen who risked their lives to bring in anything that wasn’t an absolute necessity. Their ships were at constant risk of being sunk by German submarines […] When there was a shipment of bananas, word got round and all the women queued up for them. My mother was very eager for me to try them, as I never had, but it was a strange taste to a palate unused to them, and I didn’t like them. My

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classmates all reported the same […] Luxury goods always seemed to be readily available on the Black Market, i.e. illegally and at a high price. From time to time my mother was offered them by neighbours who ‘new somebody who knew somebody else’. The offer was never explicit – because that would have risked being caught at breaking the law. Rather it was hinted at through saying things like, ‘Of course Mrs. Clarke, if you are ever really short, I know someone who can probably do something to help’. She never followed any of the offers up. She would never have considered anything illegal, and anyway, money was too short. Black market goods were always excessively expensive.24

As the above extracts show, the grey market of ‘under-the-counter’ goods was sustained by local connections – farmers and chicken-keepers, or orchardowners, who could keep a regular supply of goods coming into local shopkeepers. The countryside was, of course, a little world of its own with an interconnected supply network that relied on known acquaintances, local farmers and shop owners ‘keeping mum’ about their illicit trade. The urban centres also had their supply chains. Manufacturers sold goods from the back door when they had overproduced on orders, especially in the textile industry; and, again, it was the docks and the railways that provided the opportunity for employees to take goods home for their families, or to sell on or exchange for other goods across the industrial cities (Roodhouse 2013: 22–3). Leeds was the ‘Racket Town’ exposed in the Daily Mail in 1944; but the ‘L-Triangle of Leeds, London, and Liverpool’ were considered the main centres of the black market.25 Many would place Liverpool ahead of Leeds in that line-up, because of the opportunities the dock and railway transport systems provided for wholesale theft. John Kenny, fifty-eight, dock labourer, of 27 Vine Street, Birkenhead, was stopped at 8.40 pm as he was leaving the docks and found to be in possession of chocolate and cigarettes which he initially claimed he found between the timbers of a ship. He later pleaded guilty in court. In the same session, David Owen Hughes, a fifty-year-old dock labourer, was searched by a detective at the dock gates and was found to have two bottles of whisky that he ‘found’ in the cargo netting. Hughes, who had no previous convictions, was fined £5. Yet another man, William Dickinson, a 37-year-old man from 30 James Street, Wallasey, who started work as a watchman at the docks on Monday, was found to have two tins of milk on him when leaving work on Tuesday; he was convicted in court on Wednesday and fined £5.26 The numerous personal connections between Merseysiders and their relatives in Ireland provided another source for supplying the city’s residents with fresh food. Food parcels from Éire often literally dropped onto Liverpool doorsteps.

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Customer exchanging 1 lb of bacon for sugar from the Neighbour Neighbour makes jam with the sugar for a Relative Relative eats some jam, sells the rest to a Shopkeeper Shopkeeper sells jam under the counter to a …

Figure 5.1 The grey market

As long as there was no payment involved, the authorities did little, but any hint of a commercial relationship, however small, was stamped upon. Mrs Pearce of 24 Violet Street, Liverpool, was prosecuted by the Ministry of Food for receiving 2 lb of sugar and ½ lb of butter from her Irish relatives. Her mistake was to send a postal order to County Cork covering the costs of the goods, resulting in a £3 fine and £1 court costs.27 Gardiner suggests that the smaller infringements committed by ordinary folk (buying a little something extra under the counter) were connected to the larger ‘proper’ black market and wholesale theft (Gardiner 2004:506). Of course, that is true, in so far that larger robberies filtered goods down to be distributed to people who knew little or nothing of the original crime, but there has been little research conducted on how these black market circuits interacted. Figure 5.1 shows the typical supply chain for the grey market – with the shopkeeper being the starting point for a complicated interweaving of sales, exchanges and gifts, which all combined to provide a benefit to local members of a close-knit community. However, the grey market was never completely separate from the black market since they touched at various points, or at least they could do. So, using the example above (in Figure 5.1), it is possible that the bacon supplied to the shopkeeper came from a crate cracked open by a dockworker, and sold to the shopkeeper for a small profit – or exchanged for some other rationed goods; or, alternatively, it could have been supplied by a gang working for an organized network of criminals. Figure 5.2 shows how both systems supported each other. As Emsley (2013) has reminded us, the black market operated not just within Great Britain but wherever the British forces operated.28 Indeed, the scale of their nefarious activities abroad probably dwarfed illegal operations back at home. Of course, at points, the two illicit trades were connected, with soldiers returning

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Organized crime Manufacturer Warehouse breaker Shopkeeper Looter

Organized distributor

Relative living abroad

Dock/railway pilferer

Individual receiver

Soldiers on Leave/AWOL

Neighbours/friends/relatives

Figure 5.2 Black market circuits

on leave to Liverpool and Birkenhead during the war, and demobilized after the conflict had ended, all bringing home ‘souvenirs’ (including radio equipment, guns, ammunition, looted property, and so on) that held considerable value.29 The distribution networks that passed around pilfered goods from the docks and the railways were perfectly adequate to also distribute the goods brought home by soldiers and sailors.

Cracking down on the docks There was, and still is, disagreement about the scale and importance of the black market. The economist W.E. Parker did have a stab at gauging the size of the trade, estimating that the turnover of the black market would be at least £52 million.30 Roodhouse (2013) summarized the debates between those who believed that the trade was widespread, demoralizing and a danger to the war effort and those who believed that the market was overstated, and did not

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seriously diminish the country’s ability to fight the war. Qualitative judgements, anecdotes, newspaper stories and oral accounts of the scale of the black market predominate. Statistics are largely absent, although some conviction data were recorded. In 1944, for example, there were 25,667 convictions for food rationing offences, and 17,256 the following year.31 However, there was and always is a huge amount of illegal activity which goes undetected or unprosecuted. With marginal criminality such as the activities that comprised the grey economy, the dark figure of crime is likely to be even larger. Contemporaries could not quantify the size of the illegal markets then and neither can historians and criminologists today. The newspaper reports of crime were selective – with large or dramatic black market crimes being reported more than petty rationing breaches. However, the comments from the bench which did appear in the newspapers often reported remarks made by magistrates which suggest that sentencers believed that black market activities were strongly centred on the docks districts, and that only strong sentences could deter further offending. Newspaper reports indicate that magistrates were getting tough with dock thefts by 1941. Already statements about stamping out vile practices had been made by presiding magistrates, and two men were each sentenced to a month’s imprisonment with hard labour for stealing cigarettes. The two men had been employed in the docks for seventeen and twenty years, respectively, had no previous convictions and pleaded poverty. Nevertheless the sentencing magistrate wanted to stress that pilfering would no longer be tolerated.32 Custodial sentences began to be handed down with increasing frequency. On 30 November 1940, the Liverpool Echo reported that a local coal merchant had been forced out of business because of the constant pilfering by his own employees. The five prosecuted men had carried on for over six months, eventually causing over £200 worth of losses to James Sanders’ business in Smith Street Kirkdale. The magistrates declared that this was a serious case, and sentenced the defendants accordingly: Henry Lewis, age 35, carter, Scarsbrick Crescent, Walton, Liverpool, 3 months’ gaol. John Henry Turner, age 26, motor driver, Newark Street, Kirkdale, 2 months’ gaol. Alexander Scott, age 40, labourer, Tyne Street, Birkenhead, 1 month gaol. William John Dykes, age 33, motor-driver, Smith Street, Kirkdale, 1 month gaol. Edward Ballans, age 20, Reading Street, Kirkdale, 1 month gaol.

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Figure 5.3 Bootle’s Dock Estate. Source: OS six-inch Cheshire.NE, 1928. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland.

Dockworker Frederick Ord of Benedict Street, Bootle, did not fare any better before the magistrates (see Bootle’s Docks above in Figure 5.3). He was found leaving his place of work with a leg of lamb tied to each leg, and some kidneys in his socks. The humorous element of the case were cut short by a magistrate who reminded those in court that this was the meat ration for a week for six people. A fellow worker was also convicted of taking home from the docks twenty kidneys ‘for his dinner’ and sentenced to six weeks’ hard labour in gaol. In the same session, George Johnston, thirty-two, dock labourer, received three months’ gaol for receiving lamb worth eighteen shillings.33 The get-tough policy did not seem very effective. In 1941, one Magistrate lamented that ‘it makes one wonder whether anything would ever be safe from dock thieves [...] apparently the only way to protect an article is to put it under four padlocks and mount three to four policemen to guard it’.34

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Liverpool was becoming notorious for dock theft. The docks had always had an advantage over other industries in that they were walled-in, workers had to pass through a gatehouse where searches could be conducted by watchmen (see Figure 5.4). During the war the internal security system could also draw upon uniformed police services (as had happened with textile manufacturers in the previous century – see Godfrey and Cox 2013). Patrol cars were stationed by the dock gate-houses, and uniformed officers assisted with the

Figure 5.4 The gatehouse at Wapping Dock today. Source: By John Bradley (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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searching and subsequent arrest of dock-pilferers. However, the walls around docks and rail yards still seemed to be permeable, with hundreds of workers seemingly able to smuggle through goods taken from containers and from ships. Aside from smuggling goods through on their person, some engaged with more imaginative schemes. For example, a gang of men loaded 25,000 cigarettes onto an army truck in 1941. It was not unusual for military vehicles to go into and pass out of the docks and the driver was not stopped. However, when the thefts were discovered, the homes of the truck driver and his helpful dock colleagues were all searched and thousands of packets of cigarettes were discovered.35 The scale of the black market trade (the pilfering from the docks and railways especially) would probably have fluctuated over time, as the demands of consumers and rationing regulations changed. Particular items would have commanded higher prices at different points, depending on the severity of the shortages. The organized crime element of the black market would have tailored their activities accordingly. However, the majority of goods taken from the manufactories, warehouses, ships, containers, parcels and luggage would still have been ‘walked out’ of the docks by employees, delivery drivers and other dockworkers who continued to take home goods on a weekly if not a daily basis. The amount of employee theft dwarfed the robberies carried out by black market ‘spivs’ and their ilk.

The everyday grey and black markets on Merseyside On 4 December 1940, the Liverpool Echo reported that the dockworkers in Liverpool and Birkenhead had established a collection scheme whereby a hat was passed around for funds to pay the fines of men convicted of stealing from the ships. The chairman of the court condemned the vicious practice, but what drew this extraordinary collective response to protect and compensate thieves who were undermining the war effort? Were the Liverpool and Birkenhead dockers a group of people at odds with the ‘Blitz spirit’; reckless or disreputable individuals who did not care whether their actions endangered, impoverished or cheated their neighbours and countrymen? Or, instead, were they defending practices that went on regardless of the war because they were deeply ingrained in the working lives of men and women in Merseyside and elsewhere, and had long been so? Some historians lean towards the former view, seeing wartime crime as a visceral reaction to chaos, need and the breakdown of ordinary rules which

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govern civil behaviour. Gardiner made the following remarks about looters but it is probably more suitable as a description of a view about who was swept up into the black market: Many looters were petty criminals in peacetime who found that the Blitz provided them with unprecedented opportunities as previously inaccessible premises suddenly spilt forth bounty. Others were simply opportunistic, in the right place at the right time […] Previously honest citizens impetuously yielded to temptation in these times of stress and chaos. (Gardiner 2010: 329)

Mackay (2002: 128) formed a similar view, stressing that ‘The black market […] made pitfalls for the unwary’. So too did Harrison (1990: 151), who saw a more organic approach to wartime crime emerging: A biological – an animal – response to events, a search for survival without any formal planning, let alone higher leadership or guidance. People, families or individuals, just decided for themselves, according to temperament and opportunity and chance.

War was exceptional, therefore, wartime crime was exceptional, was it not? There are a number of factors which mitigate against this view, however. The scale of the grey and black markets suggests that practices were widespread; and historical evidence suggests that the traditional entitlements that were established across all workplaces in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were simply too strong to be set aside for the wartime period. Roodhouse (2013: 253) states that ‘black markets were everywhere and nowhere in austerity Britain’, but the reasons why they flourished, though never reached the same proportions that they did in other war-involved countries, and the reasons why some people participated in the black market and why some did not, have been under-researched. Roodhouse (2013) studied the operation of the wartime black market, but his focus is really the commission and control of crimes in abnormal times. His enquiries into why some people participated in criminal activities while similar people in similar conditions did not have moved forward our understanding of the operation of both the grey and black markets in the Second World War. Crossing the participatory edge into criminality has long been debated by criminologists. Could the particular (possibly short-lived) social and economic conditions created by the war alter behaviour sufficiently to cause law-abiding citizens to risk arrest? Did rational-thinkers weigh up the benefits and pitfalls of ‘unethical consumerism’ (as Roodhouse (2013) terms it); or did a prevailing social climate of respectable fiddling create a permissive culture that

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enabled a new moral code to emerge during wartime? Economists have debated how attempts to equalize the distribution of goods could be possible if people chose not to act in an unethical manner (Bronfenbrenner 1947a: 107–20; 1947b: 934–6; Nordin and Moore 1947: 933–4). Roodhouse (2013) has recently added to this debate, but in a more nuanced way, downplaying the rationality of the consumer of black market goods. Nevertheless, despite the internal negotiations carried out in the minds of those considering entering the grey or black market, huge numbers of people did enter the market. The illegal markets were sustained not by a few dockers in Liverpool, but by the many thousands of housewives queuing up at the corner shop for a few extra ounces of illicit cheese; by the children sent down to the local farm to collect a few eggs in exchange for some errands run; by the businessman willing to purchase some dodgy petrol coupons so he can visit friends and relatives who were sick; by the many thousands of informal friendships and associations that held communities together. ‘Largescale black market operations involving big sums of money and large quantities of controlled goods were few and far between, but petty transactions involving large numbers of people and little or no money were commonplace’ (Roodhouse 2013: 48). The black market robberies and large-scale thefts primed a market, and caused a great deal of outrage among the magistrates, business-owners and newspaper editors of Liverpool and Birkenhead, but major crimes were dwarfed by the daily activities of Merseysiders getting a little bit extra, whenever they could. The other opportunity for supplementing the family rations did involve the dockers and railway-workers, but not in large-scale break-ins. The taking home of legs of lamb and anything else that could come to hand, and which could be carried home through the dock gates, to be used or sold on, was indeed rife. It had long been the case. In the eighteenth-century dockyards, the workers were entitled to take home waste pieces of wood which were unusable in manufacture, but which would keep a home fire burning. It was not unusual to find dock carpenters sawing up perfectly good pieces of wood in order to make these ‘chips’ (Emsley 2013: 143–73). As with almost every industry, dock workers saw the waste material they took home as part of their wage. Textile workers took home waste cloth to make clothes, waste wool to stuff mattresses and pillows; milkmen took milk; industrial workers took home pieces of metal; and so on. As the nineteenth century continued, these customary practices were criminalized and workplaces became subject to increasing surveillance (see Godfrey and Cox 2013). Workers in the twentieth century saw their perceived customary entitlement

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(as compensation for poor conditions, lower wages than they would have liked, oppressive management structures and other real and/or imagined reasons) extend to finished goods. The docks had particularly strong local occupational cultures which robustly defended such customary practices (hence the collection hat for dockers found guilty of theft during the Second World War). They were keen to preserve their right to take home goods from containers that had broken (or had been broken) open. Neither the increased police presence at the dock gates nor the introduction of military policemen overseeing the unpacking of containers within ships would be allowed to interfere with this customary right and pilfering, or the taking of goods as perquisites, continued long after the end of the war (see Kerr 1958; Smithies 1984: 35–45; Ayers 1990: 286; Roodhouse 2013: 56–7 for further details). Indeed, it was only the advent of container shipping that finally curtailed the practice (Emsley 2013). This trade in dock and rail-yard goods sustained the dockers’ families and friends, and also stocked the suppliers of the grey market. The workers themselves, of course, also stocked the courts, for they took considerable risks in carrying out their ‘customary entitlement’ under the noses of police officers stationed at the rail and dockyard gates. Those who ended up in the courts were those at the lower end of the social spectrum, not the higher end of organized crime. ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser and Arthur Harding were two well-known and established offenders who took advantage of wartime conditions to increase the scope of their offending. However, the black market was open not only to the established criminal fraternity but also to the casual offender, and those who would never have included themselves in the same bracket as Arthur Harding in any respect. As we saw in the previous chapter, wartime conditions increased the opportunities for property crime (a good proportion of which stocked the grey and black economies), and also created a raft of new offences which people could fall foul of; but the war did not seem to profoundly alter people’s perceptions of the law, of right and wrong.

Conclusion Chapter 4 showed that the police gaze fell most clearly and directly on Birkenhead and Liverpool’s working-class residents, just as it always had. The poorer ends of both places were highly regulated, and watched over by ARP wardens and police officers enforcing blackout regulations. With regard to the black market, it was the working class who again contributed most to the docks

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of the local police courts. In this case, it was because the docks and railway yards were the source of both dramatic large-scale robberies, but also the everyday thefts (or exercising of customary practices) which supplied the illegal markets that swirled around Merseyside. These circuits connected relatives in Ireland and Liverpool with shopkeepers and dockers in Birkenhead, petrol suppliers in Merseyside with London spivs and so on. However, the bedrock of the trade were the normal employees who took a little bit extra home from their place of work; and the normal families who were happy to take home some goods that fell off a dockyard lorry, or came from under the counter of a local shopkeeper. The hardest nuts to crack for law enforcement (even during extraordinary periods of war) were the everyday embedded practices of the ordinary person who ‘carried on regardless’.

6

Liverpool’s Cure for Wartime Juvenile Delinquency

In his popular book The Young Lag, which was published just after the war, Sir Leo Page gloomily concluded that: during the six years of struggle new and grave problems of delinquency arose. This is a common phenomenon of modern war and it would have been a matter for astonishment if the extraordinary conditions which obtained in the great cities had not led to demoralisation of character and conduct. Fathers of families were taken by the military services; mothers left their homes to occupy themselves in war-time industry; families were dispersed by evacuation; abnormal demand for labour enabled unskilled youths to earn fantastic wages; schools and boys’ clubs were closed or destroyed. (Page 1950: 22)

Page linked together the increased availability of contraception, immorality, theft, rudeness and promiscuity in a seamless narrative which sought to explain the rise in youth delinquency. The roots of delinquency for Page, however, remained the disruption to social and moral norms brought about by the war. This was familiar territory. Pearson (1983: 240) noted that many of the same factors were blamed for delinquency in the 1920s: ‘with a relentless predictability the juvenile “crime wave” was regularly associated with weakened family ties and the war-work of mothers […] youthful affluence which resulted from buoyant wartime employment conditions’. Heightened fears about delinquency remained after the First World War when the demoralizing effect of American gangster movies was also identified as an additional factor in the interwar period (cited in Marwick 1991: 158). Research produced by education researchers such as Sir Cyril Burt and a raft of others on both sides of the Atlantic discussed how and in what ways some youths were subject to various kinds of delinquency. Psychological explanations in the 1930s vied with sociological theories to

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explain why the period of adolescence was particularly associated with disorder, delinquency and defiance to authority (in Chapter 7, we explore the apparent role of problem families and problem mothers in the production of delinquency). In other words, anxieties about wayward youth were not in any way novel by the time the Second World War started. The emergency conditions and the general anxiety about the war would give a new lift to moral panics about youth delinquency, as this chapter will show, in the special conditions of the Blitz and the new landscape of bombed-out buildings and air raid shelters. Curiously, Burt would draw on an existing Liverpool study by F.J. Marquis (Lord Woolton) which suggested that delinquency tended to be highest in areas most remote from open spaces or facilities like recreation grounds, parks or playing fields.1 The ‘open spaces’ of the Blitz mentioned right at the start of this book were clearly not of the right kind (Mannheim 1998). Local studies of delinquency, including the Cambridge Evacuation Survey, would comment not on such ‘open spaces’ but the unfavourable character of the big city. From this perspective, Bootle’s proximity to Liverpool tainted it with an urban insalubrity, while the towns surrounding Cambridge would not suffer the same fate.2 This chapter will also examine whether there was any reason to panic, because the authorities took several measures in Merseyside and elsewhere to combat the apparent tide of rising youth lawlessness. As with the rest of the civil defence and Air Raid Precautions apparatus, the way to tackle delinquency appeared to be organizational and moral, appealing to certain ideas of childhood and citizenship. But first, let us investigate whether there was actually a rising tide of youth crime.

Was there a rising tide of delinquency? The published annual judicial statistics show a fairly steady growth in offences of a sexual nature and violence in England and Wales until the end of the war, when the number of sexual offences rose significantly. There was a discernable ‘bulge’ in the larceny statistics in England and Wales during the first years of the war. The numbers were also quite significant. In both 1941 and 1942, the annual numbers of thefts committed by juveniles nearly topped 45,000. The more serious offence of breaking and entering only ever reached 15,000 at its height in 1945, but had risen steadily throughout the war period (see Figures 6.1 and 6.2):

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1400 1200 1000 800

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Figure 6.1 Indictable offences committed by juveniles, England and Wales, 1938–45.

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Breaking and entering Larceny

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Figure 6.2 Indictable offences committed by juveniles, England and Wales, 1938–45.

The extent of juvenile crime was obviously a cause for concern, as this debate from the House of Lords indicates: Undoubtedly the main offences amongst boys consist of stealing and breakingin and entering. A bicycle is left standing against a wall; the chance is easy, the risk seems small, and the bicycle is taken away. Perhaps a shop offers peculiar temptations – particularly the type of shop with open counters. Gas meters and automatic machines are broken into. Careless elders leave loose sums of money lying about. An untenanted furnished house may offer the prospect of easy plunder. All too often these youngsters, led by an adventurous lad, go about in gangs deliberately bent on wrong-doing. I think I am right in saying that over 50 per cent. of crimes committed by boys are done in groups of three or more. The boys who succumb most frequently to these temptations are chiefly in the twelve to fourteen age-groups. On an average, the thirteens are the worst. Think of it, my Lords, thirteen the peak age for juvenile crime!3

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The Board of Education also noted a rise in delinquency among children aged between 11 and 13 (Marwick 1991). The people of Merseyside must have had similar concerns when presented with lurid headlines. On 21 February 1940, the Birkenhead News reported that a twelve-year-old had stabbed another boy with a kitchen knife after arguing with him. Criminologists today report that the peak age of offending for males is fifteen, and fourteen for females. Although there are a variety of reasons why peaks happen for children in this age bracket, the most relevant is that it is around school-leaving age. During the Second World War, the school-leaving age was set at fourteen, and therefore it is entirely consistent with modern theory that the peak age of offending for boys (as shown in Figure 6.3) was between thirteen and sixteen. For girls, the peak age of offending became evident slightly later than it did for boys (see Figure 6.4). This might indicate that girls were under greater 2500 2000 1500 1000 500 0 8 to 9 10 to 12 to 14 to 11 13 15

16

17 to 21 to 25 to 30 to 40 to 50 to 20 24 29 39 49 59

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Figure 6.3 Incidence of crime, by age, England and Wales, 1938–45: males (per 100k population of that age). 250 200 150 100 50 0 8 to 9 10 to 11

12 to 14 to 13 15

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Figure 6.4 Incidence of crime, by age, England and Wales, 1938–45: females (per 100k population of that age).

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levels of parental surveillance during the war, as the novelist Forrester attested at the start of this book, but is more likely to indicate that there were more opportunities for teenage girls to obtain employment, and they therefore had less financial need to commit acquisitive crime, and simply had less time on their hands to get into trouble. For those young people who did have some time on their hands, the war seemed to present many opportunities for making mischief. The frequent threat of raids seemed to create the conditions for juvenile burglaries while the occupants were out or families had escaped to shelters.4 John Arrowsmith, an errand boy of Gill Street, was sent to Borstal for three years after pleading guilty to breaking into empty dwellings, stealing and looting property, when their owners had moved out of the city.5 Juvenile delinquents were blamed for the high rate of crimes in crowded tube shelters. As soon as the chosen victims had gone to sleep the thief would quietly carry off their bags. Teenage pickpockets were also kept busy in public air raid shelters. Others concentrated on burgling the houses of those who had gone to public shelters. One fifteen-year-old was told by a magistrate that it was a crime almost as serious, if not as serious, as looting.6 By February 1941, the government announced that all the country’s remand homes were full. Soon afterwards, two boys of fourteen and fifteen escaped from Wallington Remand Home and broke into the Home Guard store at Upper Norwood. Luckily they were arrested before they could do too much damage with their tommy-gun and 400 rounds of ammunition. Raids on Home Guard armaments stores became a common problem during the war. In February 1943, seven teenage boys stole 2,000 rounds of sten-gun ammunition. The following month, three seventeenyear-olds held up the cashier at the Ambassador cinema in Hayes with three loaded sten-guns that had been stolen from the local Home Guard store. After they were arrested they admitted that they had taken part in forty-three other raids in London (Mortimer 2011). Looting, of course, was commonplace (see Chapter 4), and juveniles were frequently involved.7 In total, juvenile crime accounted for 48 per cent of all arrests in the nine months between September 1940 and May 1941 and there were 4,584 cases of looting. In October 1940, four boys presided over at Liverpool Juvenile Court were labelled a disgrace, ‘not only to your parents, but to your country’.8 The boys, who had broken into a shop and stole £30, 1,200 cigarettes, six cigarette lighters and a wedding ring, took advantage of the shopkeeper leaving to go to a shelter after hearing gunfire in the air that night. In the same sitting, three twelve-year-olds were each ordered six strokes of the birch, having stolen £10 from a Chinese widow whose house was damaged in the bombing.

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With examples of boys breaking into factories and smashing machines and stories of boy gangsters armed with razor blades threatening shop staff, Liverpool’s atmosphere of juvenile lawlessness was said to ‘strike at the root of our national war production’.9 This was the statement of Mr W. Culshaw, prosecuting at Liverpool’s Children’s Court during August 1940, accusing two boys aged fifteen and sixteen of damaging a stamping machine by cutting a spring just because they fancied a rest. Culshaw declared the act to be ‘nothing more or less than sabotage’. Indeed, the situation was perceived so bad that discussion in the press suggested that juveniles should not be allowed to take up positions of employment in factories carrying out war work. Razor blades, knives and even bottles characterized the weapons of some of the most violent of crimes. Eighteen-year-old George Henry Rodaway was charged with attempted murder after entering a bar and bludgeoning the barmaid who was on fire-watching duty with a bottle and then a copper tankard. The barmaid was taken to hospital with a lacerated wound to the head, cuts to both hands and a wound on the left wrist.10 Even the communication tendrils of Merseyside’s precious emergency infrastructure were threatened by these forms of misbehaviour. A fourteen-yearold boy was fined ten shillings and ordered to pay 4s. in costs at the Birkenhead Juvenile court on 18 April 1941. The ARP post at Hurrell Road, Birkenhead, was damaged when the boy threw an axe that cut the telephone wire which passed over the top of the door to the post. The police determined that the boy had aimed the axe at the bowling green beyond the post, but his aim was not true and the axe hit the post and cut the wire. Fortunately no urgent calls were made that day. The presiding magistrate warned that ‘hundreds might have died as a result of the boy’s stupid and highly dangerous act’.11 In addition to the crime statistics, and the stories that were prominent in the local and national press, one last indication that juvenile delinquency was a real concern for the authorities during the war was the figures detailing the juvenile penal estate. After releasing all of the boys who had served more than six months, and setting free all young prisoners in areas that were likely to receive heavy bombing, the Borstal commissioners anticipated that the incoming numbers of inmates would remain low for the duration of the war. In fact, they rose from 1,173 in 1940 to 1,521 in 1941; by the end of the war there were 2,166 Borstal lads (Rose: 31–2). As can be seen in Figure 6.5, the Borstal population fell when the release scheme was enacted, but new committals soon built up the population once again. This was a huge and unanticipated increase. Nor did the punishment inflicted in Borstals and other institutions seemed to be working to reform the new inmates. In 1940, two boys were sent to trial for escaping from their Approved School,

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2500 2000 1500 1000 500 0 1914 1916 1918 1920 1922 1924 1926 1928 1930 1932 1934 1936 1938 1940 1942 1944

Figure 6.5 Male daily average, borstal population, 1914–45 (figures from annually published Reports by Directors of the Prisons).

and setting fire to a haystack in order to attract German bombers who they hoped would bomb the school to the ground,12 hardly signs that the institutions were reforming their inmates. At the national level at least, juvenile offending was growing, and the juvenile justice system was struggling to cope with the increase in juvenile offending. What was the situation on Merseyside?

Bombsites and shelters: juvenile crime on Merseyside The Chief Constable’s Reports show that juveniles committed between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of crime in Liverpool in the wartime period.13 The Chief Constable also stated that he was convinced of three things: juvenile delinquency was increasing; offences committed by juveniles were increasing in seriousness; and recidivism among juveniles was increasing.14 During the war, the Merseyside Juvenile Courts were busy. In just one month (August 1940), Birkenhead magistrates dealt with fifty-seven cases involving young people. The vast majority involved acquisitive crime (thirty-one larcenies and receiving stolen goods; twenty-three breaking and entering offences). Most were petty thefts, nine boys were prosecuted for scrumping apples, for example, but four boys aged twelve and thirteen were convicted of stealing coats valued at £23 from a shop at 107 Grange Road, and were all sent to Approved Schools as a punishment. Liverpool was even busier. The Juvenile Court there heard seventy cases in one morning, with one boy having a further seventy offences taken into consideration. In another case, William Monroe and his brother Thomas were alleged to have committed 112 offences of breaking and entering.15 Overall, the news from the courts was not very encouraging (Figure 6.6).

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2500 2000 1500

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Figure 6.6 Juvenile offending in Birkenhead and Liverpool, 1930–45. Source: The drop in Birkenhead statistics in 1944 and 1945 might be because the Chief Constable authorized 395 and 471 cases to be dealt with outside of formal prosecution, and therefore they never reached the courts (or statistical compilation).

Juvenile delinquency seemed to be ingrained to wartime conditions, and found its way into the culture of society. These concerns made their way into popular post-war British feature films such as Brighton Rock (1947), which depicts violence and youth crime. Hue and Cry (1947) portrayed a juvenile gang at work in the ruins of London (see Godfrey and Lawrence 2014). Juvenile offending appeared to be everywhere. ‘In May 1941, problems of looting and “wanton destruction” had reached such “alarming proportions” that some people were too afraid to take shelter in an attack, for fear of being robbed of their remaining possessions’ (Jones 2006: 162–63).16 Local councils attempted to prohibit bad behaviour in the shelters. This included drunkenness, wilfully disturbing others, improper use of lavatories, spitting, littering, giving or receiving money for reserving places, taking loaded forearms into shelters, bill-posting, meddling with shelter lighting, smoking, begging, playing musical instruments, collecting debts, selling goods, taking offensive or dangerous items into the shelter (prams, cooking implements, birds and animals) and, lastly, interfering with the notices prohibiting all these things (Jones 2006: 163). It was the behaviour of young people in the shelters that caused the greatest concern, however. If it wasn’t the vandalism, it was the licentiousness. The disgust of a Liverpool policewoman came across vividly in her MO diary entry for 6 October 1940: The condition of this shelter tonight was most revolting. It was packed, largely with very young girls, generally accompanied by foreign or British seamen, many under the influence of drink. Five drunked [sic] Norwegians tried to force their

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way past me into a plainly labelled ‘Women’s Lavatory’. Inside the lavatory girls were sitting on the top of the dividing partitions and making vulgar suggestions to the seamen. (Jones 2006: 159)

Children and young people were a portion of the population perceived to be susceptible and of easy ‘influence’ from others in the darkened and hidden spaces of the Blitz (Gardiner 2005). A fourteen-year-old girl found paralytic and drunk in a shelter with an eighteen-year-old friend was said to have ‘got into conversation in a shelter with two sailors’. Offered a bottle, ‘she did not remember any more’.17 The prosecution of juvenile crime performed curious gender relations. Take the case of Victor Willetts, aged eighteen, and a girl of fifteen, who was reported accompanying Victor during various robberies, and notable cases of theft following convincing people to take him to their home, having pretended to have become made homeless by a bomb.18 It is the girl who is seen as curiously complicit in Victor’s behaviour. As early as 28 March 1940, the Guardian raised similar concerns about underage girls hanging around army barracks. The same article also detailed Lord Mayor Sydney Jones’ support for women’s police patrols – at the annual meeting of Liverpool Women Police Patrols he praised them for their ‘sympathetic personal treatment’. Other diarists from Liverpool echoed the complaint that drunken rowdy behaviour was making respectable people fear seeking safety in the shelters, and the newspapers and other publications continued the theme. Justice of the Peace made the following comments on unruly and disreputable behaviour (not necessarily always committed by juveniles) within shelters: It is peculiarly ill-behaviour to make uncomfortable the people, usually including women and children, who seek refuge in public air-raid shelters. It is bad enough to be harried by the enemy, but that frightened folk should have thrust on them the silly talk and alcoholic breath of their half or wholly drunken fellows is intolerable. Let these lie down in the gutter, their natural habitat. Minor degrees of misbehaviour are smoking, sometimes strong pipes or cigars, peeping out and drawing back with apprehensive looks, taking advantage of inescapable proximity to practise small indecencies. We ourselves see no fun in the would-be dancer who thrusts his attentions on frightened girls, and we go all the way with the Member of Parliament who wants these actions severely punished, and agree with him that a defence regulation on the subject would be very proper.19

Further problems with young men not giving precedence to women and children or the elderly are detailed in the following issue of the journal.20 As a response to such concerns, Defence Regulation 23AB was shortly afterwards introduced;

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this included the allocation of specific places for individuals and the right to eject people by force.21 Shelters were understood as unobservable spaces hidden from the glare of authority. Shelter hooliganism and damage was rife.22 The theft of the sorts of materials intended to shore up public shelters was also common. For example, some children stole sandbags, which were later found on their parents’ homes’ shelter roofs. In another instance some ninety-eight sandbags were stolen, and then emptied and scattered over the road.23 In another a gang of eight boys were prosecuted for removing or demolishing some 2,000 bags (over 600 were found at their homes). Even the very bricks and mortar were stolen from shelters, and the theft of materials from building sites in-progress was commonplace.24 On 16 October 1940, a shelter was damaged by several boys smashing up the seating and exits. The magistrates sitting at Birkenhead Juvenile Court described them as turning the shelter into ‘a shambles’.25 Three days later, under the banner headline, ‘Beastly Hooliganism Is Going to Be Stopped’ the Birkenhead News reported the case of two boys who had been part of a noisy gang in an air raid shelter. Teenagers Harold and Douglas Boothroyd of Peel Street, Tranmere, were accused of disorderly behaviour and jostling girls (a charge of assault was pressed against Harold). Neither boys had been in trouble before, but they had caught the courts in determined mood. The chairman stated that ‘we are taking a very serious view of this case. Here is the country at war and people are compelled to go to shelters for safety; and you have nothing better to do but go there kicking up a row’.26 He fined Douglas £2, and sent Harold to prison for one month. When reading the details of cases listed above, and reading contemporary newspaper reports, we have to be careful not to fall too easily into the mind-set of the authorities. Magistrates and local councillors were naturally concerned that morality and the war effort were being undermined by reckless and criminal teenage behaviour. However, many of the children caught up in the panic about youth delinquency would have seen their actions in a completely different light. Emerging from a shelter after a night’s bombing, boys and girls would have scrabbled over debris to explore and sift the rubble for things of interest to play with or collect. This would have included things with some monetary value – tins of food, or children’s toys from bombed-out houses, for example – and also pieces of wood, bits of metal, spent shells or shrapnel (the latter two items often being particularly highly prized by young boys) and all the other residue from the previous night’s bombing raids which could be used for entertainment. The ruins or partial destruction of factories and warehouses offered a venue for exploration and for playing games, and also for smashing windows, kicking in

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doors and causing other forms of damage. What was essentially ‘playing’ would then have been seen as criminal damage, and, of course, the taking of property from bombed-out houses could be interpreted as looting. Not that the children would have joined in with that interpretation: ‘Sons of the Empire relived past wars and practised for the next’ […] boys who acted aggressively often had their behaviour praised by friends, parents and schoolteachers, since it demonstrated their preparations for adult life, where masculine toughness in wartime and peacetime (within limits) was a quality to be admired. (Godfrey 2004: 30)

Here was the war for which they had practiced! Here now was the opportunity for teenagers to test their skills and courage in diving across dangerous landscapes, teetering bombed-out houses that might collapse at any moment; scampering across a warehouse roof to catch sight of German bombers; carrying out daring acts to capture some foodstuffs from a damaged shop; and so on. Britain would need brave heroes to defeat the Germans, why not these boys who would join up if the war lasted for just a few years longer (as many thought it might)? Why wouldn’t teenage and pre-teenage boys prepare themselves in this way? For police officers and ARP wardens, however, and also for ordinary members of the public witnessing such acts, the marauding gangs of pre-teenage bomb-site scavengers were very visible evidence of rising juvenile delinquency. It was also a call to action for policy makers, and attempts were made to control the children through the criminal courts, but also through all sorts of other diversionary schemes. As has been shown, in the nation’s juvenile courts indictable offences rose dramatically, as did repeat offending. The threat was ever present but also emergent; it would get worse unless stopped. Delinquency was a social problem which would ‘grow up’ to become an even broader social nuisance were it not nipped in the bud. The authorities in Liverpool and Birkenhead were determined that would not happen.

The cure for juvenile delinquency? The threat of childhood delinquency, sexual promiscuity, fear of untrained youthful energy and exuberance and the suspicion of urban pollution and racial degeneracy took particular hold in urban centres such as Liverpool. Research from medical institutions such as the Tavistock clinic would emphasize that separation from parents (through evacuation, and wartime service) and the

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uncertainty brought to the children’s school or home environment by wartime conditions could be expressed in delinquent behaviour. In 1944, J. H. Bagot published the results of his research into the punitive detention of juvenile offenders at the Liverpool Remand Home (Bagot 1944). He found that the amount of juvenile delinquency in Liverpool had indeed risen sharply after the outbreak of war; indictable offences heard at Liverpool Juvenile Court stood at 1,633 in 1939, rising to 2,168 in 1940, 2,249 in 1941 (this figure included 128 cases of looting which was not indictable) and reducing slightly to 2006 in 1942 (Bagot 1944: table 1, p. 9). There was, however, a far smaller percentage rise in juvenile offending in Liverpool than that experienced during the First World War. Bagot found that there had been a greater proportionate increase in breaking and entering cases compared to larceny, and that there was a greater increase among young persons than children. Punitive detention had been used widely in Liverpool since its introduction under Section 54 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933. Some 564 juveniles were detained in Liverpool Remand Home between 1940 and 1942 – this was over 50 per cent of the total for the entire country during the same period. In his study, Bagot investigated the family background (including incidence of ‘broken homes’) of juveniles sentenced to punitive detention in the Liverpool Remand Home, together with their employment opportunities, and both mental and physical health. The findings were perhaps largely unsurprising. Almost all offenders had received an elementary school education, almost quarter of them (24.9 per cent) were malnourished (a much higher figure than for children and young persons in general), almost two-thirds of young persons were unemployed at the time of their offence and less than 4 per cent were members of a youth organization.27 Bagot’s findings (Bagot 1944: 76) suggested that while Liverpool’s experiment with punitive detention of juveniles was ‘not markedly successful for any large distinctive group of delinquents’, its effects on first-time offenders and young persons appeared slightly more positive. His conclusion made the following recommendations: that more notice be taken with regard to the individuality of circumstances of each juvenile offender; that cases for punitive detention be more carefully chosen; and finally, that more research on the subject was required. Others agreed that the conflict and the special ‘war conditions’ were the root cause of delinquency. ‘The war has produced many solvable problems but this Liverpool’s “Dead end” kids, must not be allowed to flourish and grow as it has since school attendance, parental control, and welfare work among juveniles has been interfered with by war-time conditions’28 Indeed, the importance of

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school attendance as a backbone of moral education was constantly referred to in contemporary policy documents. The Beveridge Committee suggested a ‘comprehensive policy of social progress’ in 1942 to address what Beveridge considered the ‘five giants’ of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.29 ‘Ignorance’ was to be addressed by a new Education Act (7 and 8 Geo 6 c. 31, passed in 1944 by the Churchill-led wartime coalition). The act made attendance compulsory until the age of fifteen for all children, helping to provide a further level of support for adolescent children during and, of course, after the war. It is not as if Liverpool’s children were thought to be uneducated or being left to fend for themselves, however. On 5 March 1941, Liverpool’s councillors met to discuss the status of Liverpool’s schools. There were a total of 109,749 children in elementary school and 7,456 in secondary education. Of that number, 88,485 and 7,250 still remained in the city. By 1941, evacuation of children had begun at a ‘trickle’. Just 7,740 children had been evacuated in total. The councillors reported that there were ‘no children receiving no education’30 However, nationally there was a great struggle to get children into school. The disruption to the school system, the lack of parental oversight and the excitement of playing truant among the bombsites picking up bits of shrapnel, or whatever else they found, all enticed children to stay away from school (see Figure 6.7). If Liverpool had managed to shepherd all of its children into school, they would have been doing very well, and would have bucked the national trend. However, the Chief Constable’s Reports indicate that Liverpool and Birkenhead also had their share of Education Act offences. The Chief Constables seemed to confirm a general feeling among the populace, city leaders and journalists that

20000 18000 16000 14000 12000 10000 8000 6000 4000 2000 0 1938

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Figure 6.7 Prosecutions under the Education Act, England and Wales, 1938–45.

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truancy was rife. One magistrate spoke at length of boys who had not attended school for many weeks, ‘running about the city like savages’.31 There were many cases of ‘joy-riding’. In one instance a gang of youths stole a car and drove it into the Wirral. They soon broke into a shop and stole a number of goods. The gang went on to steal an ARP ambulance which they drove back to Birkenhead with their goods before abandoning the vehicle. Even if those boys had wanted to be educated in Liverpool’s schools, the city’s educational facilities would not have been able to accommodate all of them. Despite the evacuation of some children to reception areas, the schools were placed under increasing pressures by the demands of the war and civil defence to plan for all contingencies. In particular, the emergency committee worried about putting provisional arrangements in place for housing corporation departments should their existing accommodation be damaged. Although the case was made to the city engineer and surveyor that such arrangements would deplete the use of teaching space for children, he saw ‘no alternative’ but to bring the matter to the committee, suggesting the possible allocation.32 The Town Clerk’s department would move eighty staff to Morrison School in Greenbank Road. The city engineers and building surveyors would move 200 employees to Northway School, Holt School and Cunningway Road School. The largest department, the city treasurer’s, would potentially move 671 staff to Priory Road Council School, Gilmour School or Highfield. A conference with the inspectors of schools and the education committee was proposed while plans were drawn up to install telephones, wiring and small stores at each school, should they be needed. Every attempt was made to keep the schools open and functioning as normal, but it was inevitable that many children ended up staying away from school, and consequently having the time and space to take up other pursuits.

The Liverpool experiment in youth reform We have mentioned J.R. Hobhouse before. He would become a regional commissioner overseeing civil defence for the north-west region based in Manchester and Liverpool. Aiming to divert children’s spare time for more useful purposes,33 Hobhouse set up the country’s first Junior Civil Defence Cadet Corps in Liverpool with a grant for £500 from the Ministry for Home Security. ‘You can rely on people in this district standing up to fast bowling the same way as the Londoners have done’, Hobhouse would write.34 He had recruited over 1,800 cadets by 1940 and before the government supported the scheme. Recruiting

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adverts brought the idea within the realms of national service and full-time employment: ‘you may have felt that there were jobs for the older people but none for you. This has been so but is so no longer, for now the other Forces of the country are organised, the way in which YOU can serve has become clear’.35 The recruits, between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, were trained in firefighting and anti-gas measures, first aid and the effects of high explosives. They were taught the topography of their ARP division and the geography of Liverpool, and at specialist schools on Sunday would be taught in bomb extinction, firefighting, first aid, roof spotting, as various press articles reported.36 Many were sent to help with communications as messengers. Recruiting stations were set up at over twenty-one schools including Garston, Toxteth and St James opposite the Anglican cathedral. They were also given drill and physical exercise in line with the principles espoused by the Board of Education. Hobhouse would later apply for further grants for fitness equipment for his recruits, and even rubber-soled shoes for the poorer recruits. Civil Defence, like the ADCC and other youth organizations, believed in a body culture that could mould the subject-citizen into the right physically reactive and moral shape, drawing on wider Edwardian, masculine and imperialist notions of citizenship and embodiment (Springhall 1977; Rosenthal 1986; Matless 2005). The press were proud to announce a 400-strong squad nucleus of the pre-entry training squadrons of the Air Defence Cadets when the scheme was launched; and on the celebration of their official status, about 1,000 of the recruits paraded on 2 February outside St George’s Hall in front of the Lord Mayor the commissioner for the north-west region Sir Harry Haig, before marching to a café for tea.37 Marches and, as mentioned above, physical drill were central to the development of this somewhat manly ideal. The scheme was mentioned in the Justice of the Peace, which emphasized the centrality of a disciplined body; ‘it has been explained that they cannot stand up to the strain of existing conditions unless they are fit in body; hence physical training is an integral part of their general training’.38 Even for these upstanding young people, there was a fear that cadets could be unwittingly tainted by the wrong kind of adult. Leaders of the scheme, when posting the boys to their occupations, were ‘most anxious to avoid having the boys distributed in ones and twos at the posts of the various Services, as hanging about with adults of varying character is apt to be demoralising, (too much smoking and playing cards)’.39 In order to preserve their ‘spirit’ they would need to be kept together. Overnight with one-seventh of the service on duty, the recruits could sleep in the company headquarters in the charge of one adult.40 The spirit

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of the cadet force could then be used to ‘infect’ others with their enthusiasm and interest, having a marked effect on the ‘morale of the streets in which they live’. One important role was to be cheerful: It will help you to be cheerful whatever happens, for you know that you will have done all that is possible to equip yourself as a citizen. Remember that older people have many worries in war time and they need all the help they can get. You can help them by being cheerful. Many of you have a father or an elder brother away in the Forces or at sea; you must take his place. Remember that a smiling face is a nail in Hitler’s coffin.41

The ARP controller W.H. Baines, on behalf of Liverpool’s Civil Defence Emergency Committee, would later write to the Home Office requesting an official title and some recognition for the role of these recruits as an official part of the civil defence organisation of the city. Other voluntary organizations, too, were thought to play a role in preventing delinquency, and in showing boys how they could grow into useful and respectable young men. Of the 653 juveniles convicted in Birkenhead in 1943, the statisticians made a note that 204 did not belong to any club or youth organisation. The Chief Constable believed that magistrates should have the power to direct children into these voluntary bodies since the parents were disinterested in their children’s welfare and moral upbringing.42 Indeed, parents were blamed for their children’s offending and some punishments were directed specifically at parents. One letter to the Liverpool Echo leaves no doubt in the mind of the reader that, while there are many cases of juvenile delinquency, ‘every one of them can be laid at the feet of the parents’.43 Parental apathy, unemployment and the lure of the cinema were identified as the various problems at fault. In May, a woman was prosecuted at Liverpool police courts for two months because she had left her children unattended during an air raid, and was thus ‘wilfully neglecting’ them. An interim order was granted for twenty-eight days to remove the children to a home.44 On 5 March, it was reported that the Chief Constable of Chester had predicted, and was seeing, large increase in juvenile crime, almost three times the average for the previous five years.45 Thomas C. Griffiths particularly criticized parents ‘for their indifference and points out that fact that names and schools cannot be published in the Press tends to make them more indifferent’.46 This was conceived as a potential problem for neighbouring counties. The Chief Constable would also point out that evacuee children made up a large proportion of these offences, especially in drunkenness, and a remand might be a solution.47 In April, just a month before

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the May raids, two nine-year-old boys were brought before Liverpool Juvenile Court charged with breaking and entering and the theft of money and clothing. The chairman of the court, Councilman Cleary, sent the boys for twenty-eight days’ remand, and reprimanded the boys’ parents ‘for bringing the children home from the reception centres, and for failing to send them to school’.48 In another report on the deterioration of conditions in the city’s shelters, the lack of light and comfort was blamed on children who were vandalizing the shelters. This was ‘an indictment of Liverpool parents, their apathy and their lack of control over wilfully destructive youths and children’.49 As we will see later in relation to evacuation, the idea of the ‘problem family’ gained common parlance in the press, as well as the pages of public health journals, drawing on eugenicist ideas of urban biological and social degeneracy, as we have already seen in the analysis of Cyril Burt, and magisterial surveys of Liverpool and Merseyside by David Caradog Jones and fellow colleague of Liverpool’s Department of Social Science A.M. Carr-Saunders (Macnicol 1987).50 Common to such conceptions of an urban underclass (Welshman 2013) or a ‘submerged tenth’ was a focus on the mother, who gained special scorn during this time as feckless, irresponsible, immoral and unreliable, when commentators and reformers could have been focusing upon the social and economic conditions within which Liverpool’s children were brought up (Starkey 2006). Indeed, Liverpool’s Deputy Minister of Health C.O. Stallybrass would publish his findings on ‘problem families’ following the war, which would be held up by eugenicist-inspired reformers as a key example (Caradog Jones 1934).51 In the Eugenics Review, the psychiatrist and eugenicist C.P. Blacker highlighted Stallybrass’s definition of problem families as ‘Families presenting an abnormal amount of subnormal behaviour over prolonged periods with a marked tendency to backsliding’ (Blacker 1946: 118). This demonization of the problem mother would also continue being exposed by wartime conditions (Starkey 2002). More on Stallybrass later, but, for now, it is clear that before, during and after the Blitz Liverpool and Merseyside were considered by local government, public health officials and the social science elite as a particular problem space. An interesting case reported in the Liverpool Echo saw discussion of the case of John James Dowler, 17, a labourer of Queensland Street, Liverpool, who pleaded guilty at Manchester Assizes to ‘two charges of breaking and entering, with larceny, a charge of looting, and a charge of larceny committed whilst on bail’. The defence counsels pleaded for leniency on the basis ‘that all the offences were committed when parental control was lacking owing to enemy action on accused’s own home’.52

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The Chief Constable of Liverpool saw little role for voluntary bodies but wanted the school system to separate out unruly boys and girls and educate them in special schools where they could be taught discipline and morals. The Chief Constable was not alone in demanding that the state step in to help discipline and control wayward children. The conscription of fathers (with some never returning from their military service) together with the drafting of mothers into war-work (labouring in the munitions factories and so on) was thought to have created a deficit of care and supervision over children, and if parents were no longer able to watch over the activities of their children, then the state would be forced to lend a hand. Sometimes that helping hand was heavier than a liberal state would think appropriate for peacetime conditions, but the war necessitated a more disciplinary approach according to some. In July 1940, the posing of a question in the House of Commons as to a potential curfew for Liverpool’s children gives us another view into the concerns bubbling away in the city.53 David Logan, MP for the constituency for Liverpool Scotland – centred around Scotland Road or ‘Scottie Road’, an area of workingclass and immigrant families living in tenement flats following earlier slum demolition – asked the question to the parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Home Security, William Mabane. Logan appealed to the provision of a curfew for children under the defence regulations. Mabane responded that ‘My right hon. Friend does not think there are any sufficient grounds for making a general order of the character suggested. There is a number of local curfews in Defence Areas, but these are not confined to children.’54 Logan responded that his request represented considerable concern and discussion in the city, but would it not be considered? Viscountess Astor would also chime in, ‘Will my hon. Friend consider carefully the tremendously good effect which a curfew would have on children, and will he bear in mind that the problem of children is much more important now than it was before the war began?’ Both Logan and Astor then (Logan a staunch supporter of emergency powers delegated to the government in the extension of the Emergency Powers Act of 1939) express a view especially pertinent to Liverpool.55 The children were a ‘problem’, and greater regulation was required in order to adequately police them. A month later in the local press, a letter would express precisely this attitude, suggesting that the ‘present system of mollycoddle is no better remedy for precocious lawlessness than is a pill for an earthquake […] it is suggested that the magisterial bench should call for an expert report on the position, with a view to the abandonment of weak theory’.56 Of course, those who couldn’t learn their moral lessons from parents, schoolteachers and youth leaders would have

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to be treated differently. Chief Constable Winstanley wondered whether penal reform had gone too far. Although, quite rightly in his opinion, children were no longer executed or transported to Australia, surely the magistrates should have the power to impose unpleasant experiences on child offenders? The crudity of his argument is strange for a usually thoughtful man, and perhaps reflects the scale of anxiety about wartime juvenile delinquency.57 No doubt he also anticipated that, just as in the period after the First World War, there would be a further escalation in juvenile offending. He was right to have these fears.

Conclusion The unreliability of published criminal statistics (see Chapter 4) is just as evident in juvenile figures as it is in adult statistics. They are only an indication of trends in prosecutions rather than an accurate reflection of real offending levels. Nevertheless, the broad trends in juvenile offending are so strong that they convincingly suggest a rise in juvenile delinquency during the war. The reasons for this seem evident, the schools were closed, the streets were strewn with rubble, the bombed-out warehouses and shops offered easy pickings. On top of that, there was a willingness to interpret youthful activities (collecting bombing souvenirs from the rubble) as criminal acts of theft and looting. Larking around became disorder, experimentation with alcohol became drunkenness and so on. The expected juvenile crime wave had arrived. The newspapers were then willing to report youth ‘outrages’ (criminal damage of bomb shelters) since it seemed to represent something more than simple youthful petty crime. The boys and girls that appeared in the dock should have been preparing for wartime service, and supporting their older siblings and their parents in the war effort. Not only were they committing crimes; they were undermining morale and damaging the war effort. No wonder there was considerable debate in the newspapers, local councils and Parliament as to what could be done to stop the lurch into moral decline. Given the wartime circumstances, it would have been very odd indeed if there had not been a focus on youth delinquency, or a very public debate about its scale and meaning. Within those public debates, the impetus to blame and punish was a strong strand. Those impulses had been evident for a very long time, of course. Absent and disinterested parents, for example, bore the brunt of criticism from Chief Constables and policy makers from before the First World War, and that theme continued long after the Second World War had ended. Just as evident was the

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reform strand. The nineteenth-century urge to reform and rehabilitate delinquent youth (through reformatories, youth clubs, special schools and so on) continued to run alongside more punitive language. The incoherence and inconsistencies of these twin approaches can be seen in legislative innovation. For example, the 1948 Children Act empowered local authorities to take children into care but the Criminal Justice Act passed in the same year set up attendance centres and detention centres to retrain young offenders with strict regimes of military-style drill and hard labour. The Birkenhead and Liverpool Juvenile Court Registers reveal similar dichotomies. Children there convicted of the same offence, in the same district, in the same week, could either be fined, offered probation or packed off to Borstal. Liverpool was unusual in one major respect, however. The scale and approach to diverting youths away from crime and into useful social engagement was significant. The remarkable contribution of key individuals, such as Hobhouse, supported by local authorities and trade unions, created organizations such as the Cadet force, which channelled youths into better routes to adulthood. Those children who were left to their own devices because their parents were engaged in war-work, or whose parents were just disinterested, now had a group of peers to associate with, and something which used up their time, making sure that they had fewer opportunities to get into trouble. It is not the case that every child joined the cadets, or that it eradicated juvenile delinquency. Clearly the statistics show that it did not. However, it did probably reduce juvenile offending, and it also created the start of a focus on youth culture which then continued into the post-war period.58

7

Controlling Mobility in the City

On 9 May 1941, a report from the regional commissioner stated that the number of homeless in the city was estimated in the region of 20,000 people. The city had lost eleven out of its twelve rest centres, and resources were ‘completely exhausted’.1 The local authorities were attempting to evacuate 12,000 homeless that night out of the city, using various vans and other vehicles. The urge it seemed was to escape; this desire was expressed, as the commissioner suggested: [I]n an almost universal determination to get out tonight at any cost and every vehicle leaving the town is crammed with women and children who have little hope of finding shelter […] the unofficial evacuation cannot be catered for and it looks tonight as though it would be on a big scale.2

Throughout this book we have focused on various forms of mobility that have been licensed, encouraged, regulated or governed in various ways. As illustrated above, the authorities had struggled to keep a handle on the unruly mobilities. In London, Elizabeth Bowen had tried to render something of the scene of cordons and people leaning against the ropes admiring the damage and diverted traffic, ‘the unstopping phantasmagoric streaming of lorries, buses, vans, drays, taxis past modest windows and quiet doorways’ (Bowen 1948: 91). In this chapter, we explore more explicitly the mobilities central to the effort to protect the population of Liverpool and Merseyside, and explore how the authorities sought to govern the ‘organic power’ of the city, ‘a source from which heavy motion boiled, surged and, not to be damned up, forced itself new channels’ (Bowen 1948: 91). We focus on three kinds. First, we explore how the everyday traffic of the city and the surrounding area was dealt with, and examine the difficulties of keeping the population moving, and therefore Liverpool’s economic contribution, all while protecting and repairing the city following enemy air raids. Given the impetus of protection is often to hold still, to hunker down, we explore some of the tensions in these policies. Second, we explore the actual manifestation of the

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government’s evacuation policy as it played out in Liverpool and Merseyside, focusing more intently on the experience of Liverpool’s and Birkenhead’s evacuation by those tasked with managing the complex process, receiving the evacuees and the evacuees themselves. Third, against the everyday and periodic rhythms of traffic and evacuation, we examine the urgent, emergency mobilities of those tasked with searching and finding those trapped, killed or lost in the bombing raids. These were the emergency and rescue workers rushing to the scene, tasked with tunnelling through collapsing buildings in desperate search of bodies, and concerned with assessing, propping up and making repairs, amidst a confusing array of other emergency workers. Just as London had been clogged up by mountains of waste and debris, caused by the destruction of the city and the confusion of overlapping responsibilities and authorities in the early years of the war, Liverpool would face similar problems.3 The city was certainly fractured by the bombs, but in the aftermath it congealed into new forms difficult to penetrate, navigate around or remove elsewhere.

Traffic If morale was the barometer or thermometer used to assess the impact of the Blitz on the population’s health, then the way in which traffic was managed and regulated was another. Indeed, just as the Home Office’s envoy John Hodsall would be particularly cynical of MO’s morale surveys (see the next chapter), he was equally scathing of the ability of Liverpool to manage its own traffic, as he discussed during a visit to Merseyside and Lancashire during the May Blitz. During a visit in early May 1941, Hodsall, who was then head of inspectorate for Air Raid Precautions within the Ministry of Home Security, first arrived in Manchester at 8.00 am on Sunday 4 May, before meeting on Monday 5 May in Liverpool. Hodsall saw the deputy regional commissioner and attended the Emergency Committee.4 In keeping with the Blitz’s reduction to a visual spectacle suitable for tourist appreciation, Hodsall found Liverpool’s streets akin to a scene of a bank holiday. He was highly critical. The control of the city’s traffic was decidedly non-existent and he found the streets ‘packed with people either sightseeing or whose offices had been damaged’.5 He added that there was ‘no attempt to keep people out of the centre of the city and little attempt to keep them away from incidents on which work was still going on, particularly fire’.6 We will return to the roads for it is there where Hodsall found most of his vexation, but he found it necessary to remark that many of the main railway

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stations had been put out of use, while the city’s communications had been severely disrupted. The concern of his report was the resumption of movement as quickly as possible. While the coordination of emergency response in the city could continue because of radio wireless communications between the city and regional headquarters, much of the telephone system had been knocked out. The disruption this caused to businesses and other activities, Hodsall concluded, might well have been averted, whereas instead a ‘feeling of helplessness appears to descend on everyone. I believe that this problem wants tackling on a much broader plane altogether.’7 For Hodsall, aping twenty-first-century technophobes, the networked character of modern life had made Liverpudlians vulnerable to any sort of disruption to these communications, ‘once the telephone is gone people are apparently quite helpless until it is restored’.8 Hodsall’s attitude expresses some of the logic of the Home Office’s attitude to Air Raid Precautions and Civilian Defence. That is, if preparations and response could be good enough, then the impact of the Blitz would be greatly minimized. Hodsall’s main bugbear was Liverpool’s streets and roads; the ‘important arteries’ were found to be blocked or congested and the approach roads to the docks he discovered to be in ‘an appalling state’.9 Much of this owed to what he determined was an ‘almost complete absence of control’.10 It seemed that little amount of planning or forethought had come from the police, charged with the management of Liverpool’s roads during the raids. Any amount of planning could have anticipated the large disruption caused by the Monday morning rush that followed the raids on the Sunday night. That this had not happened was ‘doubly inexcusable’, and was compounded by the fact that on the journey over with the commissioner from Manchester by road, they did not see ‘one single policeman’ until they had reached the main entrance to the Mersey Tunnel, ‘where there was one traffic policemen and that was all. The result can be well imagined’.11 If we can read anything from the Home Office’s disdain of Liverpool’s traffic management during the raids in early May 1941, it is how the inability to manage or coordinate these traffic mobilities would easily become compounded into other problems. The impact of the disruption could spread into other systems and subsystems of the Merseyside movement economy. The electricity power outages following the Sunday raid had left a number of trams immobilized in the streets. Where they would normally be towed back to their depots during such an occasion, the Monday rush, combined with the rescue workers and the sightseeing general public, had left almost every single street congested with cars parked on either side of the road. This meant it was quite impossible to tow

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the trams because of the narrowed width. The streets were also crowded with people who had found their offices and workplaces uninhabitable. Many were clearly there to take in the atmosphere of destruction. Reports found that the police were doing very little to keep people away, resorting to pieces of string as a means to cordon off dangerous locations. Large numbers of people had congregated near the Town Hall, which should have been cordoned off, but it was the place where names of causalities had been posted and a crowd had formed very quickly. Had the police controlled the numbers of cars coming into the city, and where they had decided to park, the situation could have been prevented. During the meeting of the Emergency Committee, these views had been put forward to the Chief Constable, who Hodsall considered was chiefly unaware of the problem, before he was ‘sent out’ to attempt to deal with the unruly parking and to institute more effective traffic control. Two further issues that Hodsall recorded warrant discussion. First, the blockages of mobility in the city centre were threatening to halt the movements of goods in and out of the docks. While the traffic control was maintained by the police, the communication with other areas of the docks north of Liverpool was controlled by a different local authority: Bootle. Thus the ways in which Liverpool and its nearby towns were divided into different local authorities created complexities which could compound the bombings, Bootle being ‘linked up to Liverpool in such a way as to cause very great difficulty’.12 Second, the Chief Constable did not seem to be fully aware of the powers he held to control the traffic problem. He asked the regional commissioner for extra authority to close of the areas of the city he needed to, but the commissioner pointed out that it was unnecessary for his intervention as these powers were already held by the Emergency Committee. While the city struggled to manage its traffic circulation problems during the Blitz, they made more concrete plans in relation to the city’s fixed infrastructure, even if the same tensions existed. The city authorities worried endlessly about the use of tunnels for protection from the air raids, as had been seen in London. The infrastructures for moving people under the city and the Mersey could also be used for shelter. Debates waged between Liverpool’s and Birkenhead’s leaders, the Tunnel Committee and the regional commissioner. In late December 1940, when St George’s Hall was set alight, the 400 people held in the basement of the shelter were taken to the Rendell Street entrance of the Mersey Tunnel. The Emergency Committee were very nervous about setting a precedent for using the tunnel entrances should it disrupt traffic and the port. The movement of

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military personnel and the transport of equipment under the Mersey could also be halted by this dual use.13 As the intensity of the raids reached its peak in Birkenhead in March, the town followed up their discussion with the Tunnels Committee and the regional commissioner.14 Birkenhead made their representations on the basis that because residents were unable to use the tunnel for shelter, they were choosing instead to leave the town. This mobility was threatening production in shipbuilding, the docks and other essential establishments, creating a great ‘exodus’ each evening. ‘[A]dequate shelter during periods of the “alert” will do much to reassure the workmen’, the Town Clerk insisted, and would relieve some of the pressure from what they considered the inappropriate use of the entrance of the Hamilton Square station of the Mersey Railway.15 In Liverpool at the Water Street entrance of James Street Station of the Mersey Railway, the Liverpool Emergency Committee worried that at least 2,000 people were regularly sleeping in the tunnels at night.16 Sanitation facilities were needed and installed. Chemical toilets would be added and cleaned each day, and shelter wardens were appointed. Perhaps one of the most interesting developments was a more speculative scheme to protect the streets, roads and wide-open areas of Merseyside from the danger of enemy aircraft landing. Merseyside’s fields and roadways, especially across the river on the Birkenhead side, were considered possible landing strips or primitive runways for troop-carrying aircraft intent on invasion or potential subterfuge. The scheme, which examined sites allowing clear 250- and 350-yard runs, was represented by a map of roads and sites adjoining Woodchurch Road and Downham Road. Potential fields were also surveyed and camouflage schemes were considered. Curiously, eight of these fields were owned by the Leverhulme Investment Trust near Landican Village.17 Anti-landing obstructions were built from concrete blocks on junctions and roads, coordinated by the Liverpool Fortress Command at Derby House and Local Defence Volunteers (LDV). The map marked permanent blocks in green, and those that could be made movable in red. Those on private property were marked blue.

Evacuation, billeting and trekking Despite the best-laid plans that were made in preparation before the war, the evacuation of Liverpool and Merseyside turned out rather differently. The authorities struggled to administer and organize a mobile population who

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wanted to move and settle according to their own wants and desires and fears. Evacuees seemed to respond to the rhythms of the Blitz much more directly than to the local authorities. For a start, the first evacuations initially planned in 1938, and carried out on the declaration of war, did not turn out as people expected. Dispelling many of the myths of sending smiling children to the countryside for magical adventures in sprawling country houses, evacuation research has shown how the process became responsible for some of the largest social changes in British history (see commentaries such as Welshman 1998, 1999). The first waves of evacuations, moreover, were entirely short-lived. Primarily because the bombing took so long to arrive, the immediate evacuation in September 1939 very quickly saw large numbers returning. Sometimes this owed to the conditions the evacuees found themselves occupying, living far away from home in strange and not always friendly or comfortable surroundings. One mother would write to the head teacher of a local school. The letter passed on to Birkenhead’s Town Clerk revealed the conditions her four children were asked to endure at a house in Llwyn Road, Oswestry, Shropshire. Her girls were asked to sleep in the same room (or bed) as an adult, the house already overcrowded with two adult male lodgers, a husband, wife and child. She complained that the homeowners allowed the children out in the rain without shoes or socks; she had the feeling that ‘they are not welcome’ and was making plans to bring the two girls home.18 The regional commissioner’s offices had asked for an update from Birkenhead as to the numbers of returning evacuees. Writing in late September 1939, the Town Clerk estimated these to be around 300 schoolchildren per week, ‘for the most part with their mothers’.19 Spread over the reception areas allocated to the town, he estimated about 10 per cent of the evacuating children had already returned.20 But the problem was they could only estimate these numbers. Few householders would give prior notification of an evacuee’s departure. Indeed, the actual numbers who had been evacuated were really much lower than had been expected. Birkenhead’s scheme functioned on a smaller scale, almost 40 per cent of the planned numbers leaving, with the majority going to Wales. Communication between the two local authorities show some of the uncertainty over the actual numbers. In preparing a report to the Ministry of Health, Oswestry council asked Birkenhead to confirm the total numbers who should have arrived in the area and had since returned.21 Table 7.1, which gives the estimated rates of returning evacuated children as of 8 February 1940, shows that Merseyside was not exceptional with regard to this problem.

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Table 7.1 Estimates for numbers of unaccompanied evacuated children returned to place of evacuation as of 8 February 1940. Evacuation area Number of children evacuated Returned to evacuation area Birkenhead 9,350 4,600 Birmingham 25,241 11,000 Bootle 7,123 3,500 Liverpool 60,795 23,000 Leeds 18,935 8,500 London 241,500 79,500 Manchester 66,300 41,000 Newcastle Upon Tyne 28,300 14,000 Sheffield 5,338 3,500 Source: Excerpted from HC Deb 08 February 1940 vol 357 cc415-6W.

The plans were apparently perfect. The trains were organized precisely; the first intended to leave Birkenhead Woodside station at 17.20 on the first and second days, arriving in Oswestry at 18.35. On the third day, two trains left, one at 11.20 and the other at 15.05; the same was planned for the fourth.22 As the trains alighted they were met by waiting arm-banded officers, incidentally poised in front of the travel by rail tourist adverts for the area that promised a ‘September holiday’.

Figure 7.1 Birkenhead evacuees de-train at Oswestry station in September 1939. Source: ‘School children arriving in Newtown and Oswestry’, 9 September 1939, Geoff Charles Collection, National Library of Wales, Aberystywth, gcc00937, Courtesy of the National Library of Wales.

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The planners estimated that roughly 75–80 per cent of the mothers arrived with children. Just under half the number of unaccompanied children were believed to have returned home.23 What would go with and follow the evacuated was clothing, especially from Liverpool’s Public Assistance Committee, but the systems of distribution did not always function well and the reception towns in North Wales were suspicious, as the children soon began returning home once they had received this aid. Householders were especially resentful of the children arriving so poorly prepared. The circuits of evacuation and clothing provision could, it seemed, be a sign of Liverpudlian dependency on Welsh generosity. In Rhos, Denbighshire, an impression was formed that some parents sent their children in their shabbiest clothes, ‘waited until they were provided with new ones, and then came to collect them’ (Wallis 1989: 126). Town clerks tried to summarize parents’ complaints of the Liverpool and Merseyside evacuation. These owed to the ‘quietness of the countryside’, ‘the distances from school or from shopping centres’, with an accompanying ‘general feeling of loneliness and being cut off from their friends’.24 Mothers would despair at the ‘the prospect of winter days’ and ‘separation from husbands’.25 Other complaints were directed against the householders or ‘billet holders’, who were believed to be deliberately trying to get rid of the official evacuees in favour of their friends or relatives, and even private evacuees who would pay more than the government rate. Interestingly, low-wage earners ineligible for public assistance relief faced particular difficulties in keeping a home back in Liverpool, while sending sufficient money to provide for their wives and children in the reception area to where they were evacuated. Other issues arose, according to Birkenhead’s Town Clerk, because of the relative proximity of the evacuated children to where they had left. Parents would tend to visit their evacuated children sporadically at weekends, which, the clerk believed, ‘undoubtedly upset many school children who would otherwise very likely settle down and not ask to be brought back’.26 A paragraph was drafted for the local press pleading with parents to avoid visiting their children except on urgent grounds, explaining ‘that grave and unnecessary inconvenience is being caused to the householders who, burdened with the care of children during the week, are at least entitled to some relief at weekends’.27 The complexity borne by the movement and return of children, their mothers and accompanying teachers provoked further planning deliberations for the local education committees. In both Liverpool and Birkenhead, the directors of education were at pains to make clear that parents should not encourage return evacuation on the assumption that schools would be reopening.28

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Political creatures Akin to other instances when mobilities are given moral meanings, even pathologized, and considering that the evacuee children were aligned with broader imaginings of the urban youth, it is perhaps not surprising that Liverpool’s exodus of children was associated with the contagion of germs and diseases. While debates have waged between the official histories such as Titmuss’ (1950) appraisal of evacuation’s ideological consensus, and revisionist histories have countered this view, both Titmuss and others (Macnicol 1986; Welshman 1998) have illustrated Liverpool’s complicity with a range of problems. These have included: childhood delinquency, intransigent class divides and the consequences of a polluting urban poor. A large number of Welsh local authorities who received evacuees from Liverpool spoke of ‘children in rags’, found in a condition which ‘baffles description’, and of clothing which was so dirty and verminous that it had to be destroyed (Wallis 1989). Liverpool became known, in the early months of the war, as ‘the plimsoll city’ (Titmuss 1950: 114).29 Sonya O’Rose (2003) refers to the conflation of the evacuee children with the conditions and class of the urban family made precarious and sometimes homeless by the war. She draws testimony from a social worker in Liverpool who reported of the ‘poor ignorant shiftless folk in Liverpool rest centres, who polluted Church halls in two or three nights and whose children were learning to be city savages’ (O’Rose 2003: 59). In Liverpool and further afield, the mobilities of evacuation became not only a testing ground and a site of visibility for social policy and welfare, but they built upon entrenched and reforming views discussed in the previous chapter on the mother, the household and the child’s place within that unit of domestic space. As has been well documented elsewhere, the Women’s Group of Public Welfare in its Our Towns report, and its ‘hygiene sub-committee’, became particularly noteworthy, popularizing the failures of existing social policy. Right at their centre was Liverpool as a special kind of problem.30 Liverpool’s assistant medical officer mentioned before, Clare Oswald Stallybrass, pinned the realizations of stark urban poverty – through the evacuation experience – on the disintegration of the family and its domestic centripetal force, the mother.31 The Ministry of Education’s visit to Liverpool reinforced these notions. The party visited on 30 and 31 October 1941, with the senior medical officer, his assistant and the director of education. The report was scathing if understanding, recognizing that the bombardment of Liverpool had been extraordinarily rough. The report

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focused on the high incidence of scabies, particularly at the remand homes where it was found that 100 out of 120 inmates were infested, and around 30 per cent of every child was believed verminous. The report would add weight to the already tipped scales of opinion that Liverpool’s woes were an essentially unsolvable problem. This was summarized in the most pernicious terms possible: There is no question that Liverpool is a dirty town. It is not an easy matter to deal with especially since the adult members of the family remain as reservoirs of infection. Also, in Liverpool, there is a certain type of person – living mainly in the worst areas of the town – whose mode of life is so low that all conceivable educative measures will inevitably fail to bring about an improvement in their management of themselves and their children.32

Unforgivably, the author of the report concluded that ‘in such cases the only hope of social progress is the undertaker’. But this was later in the Blitz and after the first waves of evacuation had returned. In late September 1939, Dr David Fraser, medical officer of health for the district, examined the evacuation of children from Birkenhead to Buckley, Cheshire. He reported that a great number of cases of ‘infectious sores, infested heads and scabies’ were presented, and like other mobile-threatening tides of infection, the doctor admitted that the ‘magnitude of the problem of what to do with these infected children had not presented itself to me beforehand as being possible. I can frankly say that at the moment I was overwhelmed.’33 The situation was perceived to be so bad that they opened a special hospital in a disused house to treat the evacuees. At the doctor’s time of writing, seven cases of impetigo, six of scabies, one of scarlet fever, one case of diphtheria, two cases of septic sore throat and one case of bronchitis and asthma were found and treated. The doctor’s comments about a case of scarlet fever which had come from a house in Birkenhead, where only a day before a sufferer had been removed to an isolation hospital, reveal a broader epidemiological imagination at work merging with a moral one. Liverpool’s dwellings, like their children and parents, were pathologized, understood as reservoirs not only of disease to be spread by the evacuations but also the moral conditions and behaviours necessary to culture those germs and diseases. If Merseyside’s morally ambiguous natural history of destruction created the ideal conditions for the spread of vermin and disease, so too would the close, sweaty and anxious mobile spaces of the evacuation itself. As Gillian Wallis notes, ‘the travelling conditions were such as to promote the spread on infection’ (1989). Scabies would be difficult to detect on transportation. Verminous

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diseases and bacteria were understood to be able to thrive in the ‘hot atmosphere which doubtless prevailed in many railway carriages filled with children […] and lice too, particularly head lice’; according to Wallis, these ‘were likely to have occupied many new scalps during the course of the journey’ (1989: 122). There is plenty to suggest that these cases were exaggerated, reinforcing religious, sectarian and nationalistic tensions, especially in North Wales. Liverpool’s director of education, Charles Francis Mott, found in an official report that the proportion of verminous children in three Liverpool schools in poor areas to be just 18 per cent.34 It is certainly possible that the perceptions outweighed the medical evidence, even if Liverpool would end up agreeing to pay 3s. 6d. for every child that was immunized on being sent to Ruthin, North Wales. The pathologization of evacuee mobilities from Liverpool and Merseyside, in other words, became tied to, and confused with, a wider set of social and political differences. Liverpool’s Archbishop Richard Downey (1928–53) complained that ‘Liverpool children have been sent to the non-Catholic part of the kingdom where facilities for the practice of their religion are practically non-existent’ (quoted in Field 2011: 20). Welsh district councils requested that no more Roman Catholic children be sent to their areas in evacuation. As the Catholic practices and rituals of the evacuees jarred, so would the nationalistic sentiments and identity politics stirred by sending the evacuees into Wales. In February 1939, the government’s plans provoked a famous statement from the Welsh Nationalist Party. Saunders Lewis accused the government of ‘militaristic totalitarianism’.35 Within the same article reproduced in the Catholic Herald, the reporter hinted at the wider paths of historical mobilities the evacuees were tracing on the railways. It was precisely the same routes which had opened up the north and west Welsh coast to English tourism, and thereby the influx of ideas and practices which would threaten local identity. However, this threat may have been overemphasized by some concerned individuals. In a Commons debate on Civil Defence and Evacuation in November 1939, Colonel Ralph Glyn, Conservative MP for Abingdon, stated: Wonderful self-sacrifice has been shown by Church workers of all sorts. There were particularly bad instances of a lack of imagination. I am thinking mainly of the evacuation of the Roman Catholic population from a part of Liverpool into an area of the country where there was a condition of Protestantism which was perfectly incredible, and where the people really seemed to believe that Papists were persons whose end was already assured. Hon. Members can imagine the strain that was put on such an area when Roman Catholics came from Liverpool and elsewhere and were billeted in the very homes of people who had been

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brought up to believe that a black Papist was the last person in the world. In spite of that extraordinary situation, owing to the tact and consideration very largely of the nuns and the friars the strain has been broken down. I do not mean to say for a moment that those districts of the country which are addicted to extreme Protestantism have been converted to Roman Catholicism – far from it – but the people realise that there is some good in other people, even though they belong to a different creed. That was a remarkable achievement.36

Evacuation even threatened commerce. The article reported that the tourist resorts of North Wales were flummoxed by the government’s promise of 8s. 6d. per head, per week for every evacuee a boarding housekeeper could take, where they would be used to almost 16s. per day during the holiday season. This would be ‘ruinous’ to the industry.37 Running in the opposite direction to the concerns of the spread of vermin or Catholicism from Liverpool to the reception areas, the evacuation would also expose Liverpool’s and Merseyside’s children to suspicion and downright hostility. One notable complaint referred to a father paying a visit to his wife who had been evacuated with their children. The mother had been separated from one of the daughters who was taken with a friend to another dwelling. On paying a visit to his wife, he soon heard ‘that there was a strong rumour in the village, amongst the Birkenhead evacuees, that my girl was sleeping in the same bed at Mrs Connah’s with a child, according to information, that was suspected of suffering from a certain complaint’.38 He would make further enquires to discover that the child had recently returned from Thingwall Sanatorium, ‘having been in for observation as a suspected Tuberculosis victim’. Prejudice was not, however, a one-way process; a diary kept by an employee of the Censor’s Office includes the following entry: Many Londoners were billeted on local people and an aunt of mine had about 3 people billeted on her. Some of the Londoners were very snotty about Liverpool and were consequently not particularly popular. Those of us who knew London were somewhat amused at their patronising line – a friend said they were all the sweepings of Earls Court which was a little hard on Earls Court.39

The subheading for this section is ‘political creatures’. This is not a rhetorical flourish but it is taken from Roger Titmuss’ famous phrase that the ‘louse is not a political creature; it cannot distinguish between the salt of the earth and the scum of the earth’ (Titmuss 1950: 136). What Titmuss was trying to argue was that the existence of vermin and poor living conditions that the evacuees showed signs of, or found themselves sent to, could not be tied down to ‘personal

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virtue or political principle’, as many commentators believed (Titmuss 1950: 136). Despite this interpretation the evacuation articulated and reinforced the idea that Liverpool and Merseyside were problems, with a problem population living in problematic circumstances. The mobility of Liverpool’s children and the vulnerable could mobilize the problem.

The missing In one memoir, a part-time auxiliary fireman from Heywood, Lancashire, A.E. Curran, describes volunteering from his crew to send a relief team to Liverpool during the May Blitz. They were sent to Bootle. On their arrival in the city Curran remembered: As we entered Liverpool the sky was red from the reflection from the fires. Entering Liverpool was like going into a cave due to the volume of smoke over head, but still a cave lit internally by a mass of red flames.40

The protection of the city, as we have seen, required marshalling the movement of traffic around the spaces made deadly by the bombings and collapsing buildings, or sending people away to safety in the reception areas. All this mobility, however, was made possible by an enormous amount of movement of labour and personnel. These were the emergency, fire and rescue workers, deployed from inside and outside the local area. They were made up of volunteers, and forced to carve new and dangerous routes into damaged areas, fire-stricken factories and collapsing homes in search of the dead or survivors. The visible irony of the rain of bombs on the city was not only that the very systems designed to shuttle people across the city and the local towns were subject to some of the most intense bombing but also that they became some of the most dangerous places. An especially heavy raid in Birkenhead on 21 December, though reported on Boxing Day 1940, had a particularly damaging effect on the town’s transport infrastructure.41 The railway embankment was hit, causing damage to the running of the railway. It was concentrated at the Laird Street Car Sheds, detonating on the heavy concrete floor over the shelter provided for the employees. Corporation buses were destroyed and eight corporation employees were killed. During the March raids, the depot would undergo a large blast, causing damage to the tram shed and repair shop and to rolling stock. Beaufort Square flats were heavily damaged, a bomb completely destroying several apartments, and those that were damaged led to the temporary

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evacuations of their inhabitants. Avon Street, Portland Street and Upton Road all received a battering. Occupied with flammable fuels waiting to be ignited, or heavy iron and cargo to be released to tear flesh and crush bone, emergency workers had to contend with these conditions, to navigate them to reach stricken civilians or to repair essential services, frequently picking through rubble and body parts, which they would need to collect. Fire workers and wardens had to contain the many fires set alight by incendiary bombs. Curran tells of one of the most terrifying raids his fire unit had to contend with finding an entire railway track ablaze; the railway bridge had been completely demolished by a bomb. The railway sleepers under their feet had caught fire and their uniform of oilskin coats was melting and their rubber boots beginning to blister. Fortunately, their colleagues were able to find another water supply and spay an escape route through the inferno. Curran himself was somewhat typical of the mobility of volunteers within the different services. After being married in June, Curran was called up for full service and allocated to a temporary fire station on Scotland Road. He would be eventually transferred to fireboats in order to carry fire pumps around the port to deal with any fires that might threaten the boats and ships waiting at the port. He would again transfer to a fireboat, a converted Norwegian fishing trawler and retrofitted with four Leyland fire pumps, intended to cover the particularly vulnerable petrol tankers that would sit in the river after discharging their cargo. Ventilating the vessels gave a high risk of explosion. Reported in the Liverpool Echo, Curran’s group were known as the ‘water rats’.42

Rescue Of special interest are the volunteers tasked with wading through the rubble and debris to protect both the buildings and the lives that could be found within them. Many of these teams were organized through the city’s engineers department, and in Birkenhead’s case the master builders department, which performed a variety of activities during and in the aftermath of raids. The Birkenhead Air Raid Rescue Corps reported to the Town Clerk, their assessment of bomb damage on residential and commercial properties, as well as their vital rescue and clear-up work. Their gangs would pull survivors and bodies from the wreckage and rubble of attacks, destroy buildings which were a danger and assess the repairs required to ensure dwellings could be habitable again. On many occasions this would entail the temporary evacuation of homes until repair works had been undertaken.

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Being sure everyone had been taken to safety required some knowledge of the inhabitants, who was there, who had left for the day or trekked outside of the town for the evening. After midnight on 4 September 1940, 74 Rock Lane, in the area of Rock Ferry, to the south of Birkenhead, received a direct hit. The rescue parties removed several causalities, but they were still working the following day to locate a missing man believed to be buried in the debris. The Corps reported to the Emergency Committee that ‘We are making further inquires to check up, in case it is found that the missing man is not actually in the premises.’43 The Corps suggested that ‘the number of persons sleeping in each flat or house should be exhibited on the outside wall or should be known to the neighbours on either side’, adding, ‘It is most difficult to be satisfied that everybody has been rescued from damaged property as there is so much hysteria among the affected people.’44 In other words, knowing exactly where the populace were was a difficult task, especially given the confusion. The rescue parties’ search for bodies was a gruelling and unpleasant task. On the night of 9 August, four bombs fell in the Prenton area, and the house of a Mr E. Bunney received a direct hit, detonating on the roof, destroying the chimney, severing part of the roof and collapsing the ceilings. The owners of the house escaped relatively unscathed, but the maid sleeping above them was killed. Death had been instantaneous ‘decapitation taking place’.45 First-aiders had worked then to prepare the casualty to be taken from the house, allowing the rescue part to withdraw. Almost on top of each other, rescue corps, wardens and first-aiders would all struggle for space as the scenes of bomb damage became a curious logistical problem of different responders struggling to get their work done.46 In this case, the rescue party would return the following day to make a further search for the ‘parts of the causality which had then been reported, to the writer, as missing’.47 A rescue party was sent to further salvage the property, clear the debris and locate the parts of the body which were missing. The head of the poor maid was eventually found and reported to the Birkenhead control room for removal to the mortuary. Some would break down at the horror of bodies blown apart, only to be collected and taken to mortuaries (Hentea 2014). Other writers in the wider Blitz on Britain’s cities could revel creatively in the ‘abnormality’ of times (Mellor 2011; Feigel 2013).48 These actions demonstrate the complex exercise of movement and coordination of the different workers. A house would need to be searched, its surviving residents rehoused and accommodated with food and shelter. Materials would need taking away; debris would need to be cleared; parts of the house made safe by demolishing; materials brought in to repair; bodies searched

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for and taken to the mortuary – all this required further coordination. The head of the Rescue Corps even made the point that a large number of police were ‘sight-seeing throughout the house over a considerable period’, disrupting the activities of the rescue workers and first-aid teams.49 He made the point that ‘on occasions such as this the absolute minimum number of persons should be allowed in the building’.50 He suggested a police constable could be posted at the entrance to a damaged property in order to restrict access. Where the dead were taken was another problem of mobility but also storage. Many mortuaries were quickly overcome by the volumes of the dead transported to temporary mortuaries, and in many cases, stored in completely inappropriate ways. In Birkenhead, during the worst raids to effect the town during March 1941, just a few months before the conflagration on Liverpool, several complaints were made regarding the delivery, movement and storage of bodies carried out by the mortuary arrangements. A Mr Cook, whose mother and father had been killed on 12 March, raised a serious complaint with the mortuary at Woodchurch Road. After coming up from London, Mr Cook and his brother were made to wait for five and a half hours to identify the bodies. The mortuary clerk, a Mr Maddocks, appeared completely overwhelmed. Mr Cook found that he had to help the clerk just to fill out the necessary forms. The form should have then gone to the Town Hall, where Mr Cook was waiting the following day to register the death, except there was a big delay in getting the form over. Then, when Mr Cook presented at 3 Conway Street, it was found that the form had been incorrectly completed. The complainant ended his letter to the Town Clerk explaining that he was an officer of the City of London Corporation, ‘and if London had made a hash of things like I have seen here it would be God help the people’.51 The Chief Air Raid Warden, Mr Ryalls, who would present these findings to the Town Clerk, was given supplementary evidence of the problems at Woodchurch Road. A divisional air raid warden discovered that the simple fact of where the mortuary key could be found was bungled. In early March, the warden reported, one evening after a series of heavy raids, that on attending the mortuary with several bodies, the dairy did not have the key and the mortuary was found open but unmanned.52 The volunteer Maddocks did not respond well to these charges, writing a staunch and venomous letter to the Town Clerk, characterizing the warden Ryalls as ‘sitting at his desk making complaints about men doing their voluntary duty’.53 Maddocks’ defence hinged on two issues that had obviously irked him: first, he considered the air raid warden’s complaint unnecessary ‘interference’. The second issue was that the Blitz conditions had proved impossible for him to conduct his duties, and that he was doing his best.

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He believed Ryalls was oblivious to these conditions. His handwritten letter to the clerk describes the chaos of the night of the 12th.54 Both windows and door had been blown out by a nearby explosion, the power was down, his books and papers were torn and thrown about the office, while he had a number bodies he could attend to only under torchlight and between running for shelter between raids. In Liverpool and Merseyside, the emergency rescue squads and gangs came to express a policy. The teams, adorned with decontamination suits, were supervised by a buildings inspector who made judgements as to a building’s safety, whether it should undergo demolishing if the damage was too grave, and what kinds of repairs, urgent or not, were needed. Those surveys, taken with the help of the buildings inspector, would form reports sent by Robert Owen Lloyd, chairman of the Air Raid Rescue Corps (Lloyd was awarded an MBE the following year), to the Town Clerk.55 As with other towns and cities, rescue work could be hampered by the interests of the public and surplus personnel crowding the site. Part of this was by design. A report to the emergency committee contemplated the Germans’ use of timed delay bombs that would explode some two or three hours afterwards. ‘It would appear the technique of the enemy’, suggested Lloyd, at the present time, is to include one delayed action bomb in the string, no doubt with the idea of interfering seriously with rescue work, and it may well be on incidents in the future that unless precautions are taken we shall have a very severe number of casualties unless such incidents are cleared of the general public and the minimum of ARP personnel are left working on the incident.56

In the clamour of the sight-seeing public to witness the events, and the sequence (hopefully) of ARP wardens, first-aiders, messengers, rescue workers, police and firemen, frictions could not be avoided. We can spend time excavating several disputes because they had a tendency to congeal in accusations of petty bureaucratic busybodying in the competition between emergency workers to outdo one another, and in accusations of a more serious nature, including incompetence and criminal behaviour. Angus Calder imagines a typical example of petty conflict as the police arrives at a bomb scene: There would be an unedifying argument between the officer of the law and the senior warden over who had the right to control the incident. The policeman would say that the ultimate responsibility was his; while the effective leader of the operation might be the chief man of the rescue team (Still less unedifying

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demarcation disputes would occur when bombs fell on boundaries between post areas or boroughs. (Calder 1992: 200)

An interesting example can be found in a case where it was believed that a member of the public was the potential cause of an unstable house to collapse on its inhabitants, killing four of them. An account of a policeman, Special Sergeant Howard, who was also skilled as a carpenter, illustrates some of the antagonism at play between the Merseyside rescue squads and the police. Arriving sometime before the rescue squads turned up at the scene, Howard had made good progress in attempting to dig out a gas meter which was evidently leaking gas into the immediate vicinity. On the arrival of the rescue squad, its chairman R. O. Lloyd (mentioned above) rebuked Howard, suggesting, ‘in a very sarcastic manner’, that someone should relieve Howard of his work.57 The special constables he was working with were also berated by another member of the arriving rescue squad. As Howard began to be overcome by the effects of the escaping gas he had been exposed to for too long, he received another dressing down, ‘Get to Hell out of this, you have no right here’, before adding: ‘Are there any-more so and so specials in there?’58 Howard’s commanding officer, writing in a letter of complaint to the Deputy Chief Constable of Birkenhead, illustrates the uneasy relationship between the different services working together: I am satisfied that all possible Police assistance is always given with the various Services. These efforts have been successful up to the present, and every endeavour will be made by the Police to keep matters so, but the incident reported above is not likely to foster good feeling, especially when such a manner of address is used towards a man who cannot, for reasons of discipline, retaliate as a person not attached to the Police force might consider appropriate. 59

At the heart of this case, however, is a tendency for the rescue squads to distrust anybody who would stumble onto their territory. Lloyd would accuse the police of interference mentioned above; he also believed that they were complicit in allowing large numbers of the public to interfere with the rescue work. In a letter to the Town Clerk, Lloyd draws on the failure of the police to control the public crowd at the Clive Road incident. By letting adventurous civilians near the site, and notably one particular volunteer, Lloyd argued that they were partly to blame for the collapse of the building.60 Lloyd reported that ‘This volunteer with good intentions moved some part of the debris which caused the collapse of the party wall and so entombed the four people’.61 Lloyd went on: ‘all services should be warned not to interfere with rescue work in damaged buildings, only

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under the instructions of the Rescue Party leaders’. While Lloyd regarded the help of others as valuable, he believed that they did not possess the necessary skill and foresight to anticipate further collapse of damaged buildings. The rescue work of the four people in question, instead of possibly taking twenty minutes to half-an-hour took something over three hours with the consequential disastrous result.62

Lloyd’s complaint goes to the heart of the difficulties in controlling the circulation of the populace around precariously damaged buildings. In the same letter, Lloyd reports from Argyle Street that within half an hour of the ‘all-clear’ signal, a large number of civilians would be seen on sight-seeing expeditions. The police, Lloyd argues, ‘were totally incapable of dealing with the large numbers of people wandering about the various streets, and it may be that this is the time when the removal of personal effects from damaged buildings, takes place by unauthorised people’. The internal investigation by the Birkenhead police inspector, in collected statements from several officers and special constables present, refuted many of Mr Lloyd’s concerns in the most adamant way, finding his accusations ‘to be extravagant exaggerations with only the flimsiest of foundations’.63 The report found that the officers present had used physical barricades to cordon off the dangerous properties, allowing no one inside other than ARP personnel. No member of the public was believed near. The investigation found Lloyd’s final suggestion of looting too much to bear: ‘This is libel equally on the police and the people of the town. No looting immediately following a raid has been reported to the police of this […] and the only known case was detected by the police and the culprit eventually sent to penal servitude’, the investigating officer retaliated.64 Of course, the antagonism of emergency workers was not limited to rescue workers and the police. As with the fire-watchers, drunkenness was a serious problem found in some emergency workers which flared up other organizational tensions. One incident records the civil defence medical officer and doctor on duty on 1 November 1941 as being drunk. A report from the staff trainer on duty as acting controller that night in the emergency control room accounts for Mackay’s (the doctor in question) movements as he entered the premises. First he appeared to antagonize other medical representatives before explaining that he intended to remain in Birkenhead only a short while, before he slighted the staff officer in front of his colleagues, calling him ‘a wet’.65 The staff officer brought him into the corridor where he told him he would need to ‘withdraw

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the remark’ or assure the officer that it was made in jest. Mackay accused the officer of ‘exceeding’ his duty and ‘was excited’. He was asked to leave, and, it was considered, brought considerable disruption to the control room staff during the air raid. In some cases, the authorities could show lenience. Dr Morley Mathieson dealt with the case as Mackay’s senior officer and believed the man’s drunkenness owed to a sinus problem which he had treated with whiskey. But more evidence was to emerge of that evening. Mackay had been approached before he even entered the control room by the police constable, after a quick conversation the constable ‘was satisfied that he had had drink and not wishing to enter an argument I walked away’.66 And even earlier on in the evening, at around 21.40 Mackay had a confrontation with Chief Inspector Jones during an incident at Livingstone Street, where Birkenhead Corn Mills had been demolished by a high explosive bomb; nobody was believed to still be in the building. Jones appears to have been beckoned over by Mackay and told that he had been given complete ‘bunk’, and that he thought wardens and police should be able to work together.67 The Chief Inspector rebuked Mackay for lighting up a cigarette before moving on to another incident. The tale does not end there. Given the efficiency of police reporting, we can turn to an incident just minutes before Chief Inspector Jones’ encounter when Mackay first entered the scene of the damage to the Corn Mills. It was at 21.35 when Constable Stacey arrived on the scene with Constable Rimmer to find two firewatchers had already extricated themselves from the quite demolished Corn Mills. A few minutes after they arrived, Mackay turned up in the passenger seat of a motorcar. Stacey noticed that his speech was slurred, and he smelt of ‘intoxicating liquor’.68 Mackay had difficulty lighting a cigarette and he was quickly told to extinguish because Stacey had noticed an aircraft overhead. Mackay asked Stacey three times whether there were any people left in the building, but didn’t seem to understand Stacey’s answer to the negative. When Stacey explained to Mackay that he was then going to erect barricades on either end of the street and that he would take responsibility for any driver who collided with the debris, Mackay appears to have gone over to a group of bystanders and told them: ‘We have not had any trouble in Birkenhead yet, not like we had in London […] It is nothing to what you’ll get tonight’.69 Antagonisms were possible between all classes of emergency worker. Of course, it was accepted among many that the working conditions of the rescue squads were terrible, all the more galling thought their chairman given they were predominantly volunteers and received no pay. The sharp Blitzes of September 1940 saw the teams in Birkenhead working steadily in torrid conditions. On

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the night of 17 September, Rocky Bank Road and Hawthorne Road were some of the worst hit. Number 27 was struck with a high explosive bomb at the rear of the house, demolishing the back elevation walls, trapping four people in the basement; only two of them could be saved. Number 39 took a direct hit with what the surveyor presumed to be a bomb of 200–300 lb. The bomb dropped through the roof, causing the front elevation of numbers 39 and 37 to be effectively pushed outwards from the inside. Some of the rooms were saved from immediate destruction by the demolition gangs who demolished several overhanging walls; that made the building safe. However, the houses would never be useable again. More terribly, a Mrs Clark was rescued from the bedroom of a house; a child believed to be about five years of age was beyond medical aid.70 The cluster of bombs falling on Greenbank Road damaged electric cables, water and gas main pipes. On South Road, a 21-foot water main and gas main was fractured. Given the tortuous work, Lloyd wrote to the Emergency Committee regarding the question of the payment of the part-time volunteers. Following up a letter to the Borough Treasurer he expressed concern, believing that it was ‘affecting the real spirit of the part-time volunteers […] I would say that there is no comparison with the Rescue Party duties’ with the wardens, Auxiliary Fire Service and ARP; ‘I do consider that the Rescue Parties work under some terrible conditions and therefore should receive some special consideration.’71 His concerns were underlined by the fact that he reported he was taking a holiday ‘owing to long stretches of night work and lack of sleep’, escaping to the Golf Hotel, in Dumfrieshire, leaving his duties in the care of a Mr Bedlow and Mr Brocklebank.72

Damage and displacement At 58 Upton Road, a house and shop property was reported to have received a blast that caused cracks in the gable end and front wall. The roof had been ‘practically stripped of its covering’. The owner-occupier was encouraged to ‘take steps to make the roof as water-tight as quickly as possible, as there is no reason why the shop should not function as before’. This advice illustrates some of the tensions at play in the corporation and the emergency services’ response to the raids. Precisely when the local authorities should intervene to perform immediate repairs to homes and property had been defined in the War Damage to Property under the Housing (Emergency Powers) Act of 1939. In Wallasey, precisely how the act was to be interpreted came to be disputed following a series of raids in August 1940. The Town Clerk would write to Sir Harry Pritchard,

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secretary of the Association of Municipal Corporations in London for advice. The letter and response were circulated among the other Merseyside corporations.73 Evans was concerned, and it was confirmed by Pritchard that several points of consideration should be undergone before the proviso of the powers was used. This referred to four points: first that the building was unfit for housing purposes but that it would be, at reasonable expense, capable of being rendered so; that the lack of housing accommodation made it necessary ‘that the building shall be repaired, and that the person having control of the building is unable or unwilling to carry out the work, and also that the temporary repairs are immediately necessarily’.74 With those points satisfied the authority could move on with the repairs and charge those costs to the owner, which would be payable at the end of the war. Those funds would be made available to the local councils from the Ministry of Health. Should they move ahead without regard to them, then the owner may not be liable. The policy underwent considerable discussion and rethinking. The act itself was described, during the second readings of the Repair of War Damage Bill in the Commons, as a policy of ‘speed and urgency’.75 The legislation was considered to have been imperfectly designed in a way that led to unnecessary delays and holdups in putting housing back into circulation and their residents back into homes.76 The large numbers of people potentially turned out of their residences before repairs could be made became a chief consideration of the Rescue Corps, aware of the pressure this would place on existing housing stock, billets and makeshift accommodation. Into the surveyor’s calculations was the speed at which properties should be repaired and put back into use. As the centre of Birkenhead came under heavy attack in September and October 1940, the evacuation of a block of flats was balanced against the speed at which a contractor could be put to work on the flats. If this work could be achieved within three days, it could ‘relieve the congestion of the PAC (Public Assistance Centre)’.77 The floating population created by the bombing produced the urgent need for temporary shelter. Rest centres were run by the PAC to provide places of initial reception. By 1940, there were seven in Birkenhead, equipped with blankets, heating, crockery, food, tea and even babies’ feeding bottles.78 The rest centres would be alerted by the police and the emergency control room, whereupon two members of the PAC would head to the centre helped by a team from the WVS, before the evacuees arrived. Relays would abound during the Blitz, and the rest centres were no exception. By 9.00 am those who could not be taken to stay with friends or relatives, or had no other means, would be taken by buses

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to one of the two emergency rest hostels in the town. By 1940, another hostel building was being procured. Maintaining this system required a system of resupply and distribution, particularly for food, to keep the 1,500 blankets in circulation and to replace items that might have been stolen, such as cutlery. By 1940, the Birkenhead hostels took about a fortnight to empty as its residents were eventually rehoused. The Guardian of 31 May 1941 reported that all empty houses in Liverpool were to be requisitioned by the Civil Defence Emergency Committee, along with the fact that ‘the number of persons who moved at night from the central to the outer areas had diminished to a comparatively small figure, and to accommodate those people a few of the city’s rest centres in the outer areas had been opened’. For those rehoused into temporary billets, there was then the problem of recirculating furniture for the tens of thousands of houses newly occupied.

Conclusion The rescue corps converge several different apprehensions of the Blitz on Merseyside and Liverpool that we have been considering through the book thus far. Testimonies and accounts of those who were there describe the utter intimacy of the workers with the material built environment, and the populace affected by the bombings. There is perhaps no closer view to the damage of the Blitz than that of the rescue worker, asked to tunnel through fire or collapsed building to reach a body and taught to carry the body back on their way to safety. From this view ‘from below’ (Hewitt 1983), the rescue workers’ relation to the city was almost as intimate as it was to the human. Reports document a detailed story of thousands of homes damaged, a landscape which was buffeted, pulled and clawed at by the pressure waves of the bombs. One report of number 2 Rose Cottages, Birkenhead found serious cracks in the front elevation of the main windows, evidence of the buildings’ inexorable pull by the suction of a shell blast.79 This was a position, however, which had to pull back from the sensuous encounter with the raids and their effects. The rescue corps, as we have seen above, had to make decisions on the buildings they encountered, and collate this information into reports for the coordination of response, for damage inspectors, utility providers and so on. While Liverpool and Bootle would receive the worst of the punishment during May, Birkenhead did not go unscathed. On 7 May, serious damage, demolishment and permanent evacuations were ordered in Bennett’s Hill (which had suffered greatly since earlier attacks that

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week on 2 and 3 May), Normanston Road, Bentley Road and Oakdene Road, all closely packed Victorian and Edwardian properties,80 also Glenavon Road, Prenton Hall Road, Claughton Road and Bright Street.81 Just a few days earlier a high explosive bomb had exploded onto the South Wing of Bidston Court, functioning as the ARP First Aid Depot. Early in the morning of 12/13 March, a bomb hit the municipal hospital, making contact with the top landing of the staircase to the wards. By late March far more abstracted reports of roads and their damage were required. A landmine exploded above the gasholder on Patten Street, destroying the arch top. Weighbridge house was damaged. Caretaker cottages received roof damage. The metre house adjoining the cottages received considerable damage. 82 At Park Station, large calibre bombs fell on Duke Street Bridge. One landmine burst above the property, the parapet walls to the bridge were destroyed and the building and covered platform also damaged. The station, it was recommended, should be demolished.83 Numbers 21–41 on Pensby Street (11 houses), 21–41 (11 houses) and 1–19, 2–20 and 22– 41 Stoke Street (31 houses) and all houses on Neston Street were demolished. On Wellesley Street, widespread devastation and fires made rescue work difficult, and 35 houses were demolished.84 Thus the rescue squads were in a critical position to reshape not only the lives of the population through their rescue but also the landscape of the urban environment. In 1942, a curious scheme was initiated to begin clearing the vast amount of debris collected during the Blitz. Bootle’s housing stock, as already discussed, had been drastically reduced by the air raid damage, and when it was safe to do so, the town begun a period of clearing the fractured buildings and others that needed pulling down. Their solution for the rubble was to recycle it as a form of coastal protection. The location was Hightown, Crosby, the coastline and beach just north of Bootle. The building debris was not particularly sorted, or even crushed to form a more even aggregate; instead it was deposited as whole bricks, sections of wall and lumps of sculpted stonework and building facades. What remains is an astonishing landscape of bits of Bootle’s buildings. Captured in photographer Tom Fairclough’s arresting series of photos, Collateral, can be seen a peculiar beach scene of rocks, a strange patina of stonework, lintels, Belfast sinks, brickwork, mosaic tiling, columns and other architectural and domestic materials, now attracting the occasional tourist and dog walker to Bowen’s (1948) phantasmagoric forms. Or, for the most part, they go unseen. The chaotic movement of the Blitz has now gone and the buildings have found a place to rest in a much slower process of erosion; finally, they can be found smoothed, their once sharp corners rounded not just by memory, but the rip of the wind and the wash of the sea.85

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Figure 7.2 Some of the remains of Bootle’s bombed architecture in Tom Fairclough’s Collateral. Source: Reproduced with kind permission of Tom Fairclough.

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Moreover, the Ministry of Information, charged with the task of sustaining public morale, was for most of this period, a troubled institution, whose own morale was low […] And yet, by any measure, public morale held up: no hysteria, no mass panic, no defeatism. (Mackay 1999: 141, 145) In the author’s note to his remarkable modern account of Liverpool, Walter Dixon Scott tries to come to terms with the city and its environs, expressing his utter ‘bewilderment’ – a standard idiom of modern writers apprehending the whirlwind of modern life (Dixon Scott 1907: vii). Scott writes something quite revealing. That the book attempts what Scott calls the ‘instant effect’, the apprehension of the ‘active, tangible quality, the Liverpool of the present day’, is important, and not only for a wider movement of literary and artistic expression of which he was part (Dixon Scott 1907: vii). He would add that he drew infrequently on books and testimony but rather ‘upon the private reports of his own senses’ (Dixon Scott 1907: vii). It is hard to believe the quality of Scott’s prose written at the age of twenty-eight, but his impressionist account of Liverpool is fascinating for not just in the way it portrays Liverpool but how it seeks to portray the city. To know Liverpool in Scott’s approach is to feel it from an impression of its environment drawn through the tastes and sensations and visual impressions of moving through its landscape. Liverpool in Scott is grasped, fast. In this chapter, we deal with the various ways in which Liverpool was known, and made known, as a way to get to grips with it, sometimes from a distance by government departments worrying about the city’s problems, or attempting to make sense of the symptoms of an air raid. At other times, it was local newspapers or air raid wardens taking the pulse of the city, to feel out its conditions, its temperature. By all accounts, we will suggest that Scott’s imaginative and lyrical rendering of Liverpool, relying, as he confesses, on his own senses, is not so

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distant from the way Liverpool was tested, probed and measured during the Blitz. We will examine how the notion of ‘morale’, that slippery, difficult thing, lay at the heart of much of this endeavour to know Liverpool’s Blitz. Civilian morale was of concern for many different reasons, and it concerned many different people and organizations (see discussions by Jones et al. 2004, 2006). Many were invested in Liverpool’s morale as an indicator of industrial production, a sign of political apathy and defeatism, a measure of the effectiveness of bombing raids turned into calculations of ratios of tonnage and area and a window into the everyday lives, thoughts and feelings of a population under threat. Everyone had a stake in morale. In September 1940, a letter to Tom Harrison of MO contained an account of the various stages of response to constant enemy bombing. Entitled ‘An MO investigator’s subjective analysis of the gradual process set in motion inside himself since the aerial Blitzkrieg started in earnest’, it detailed the following stages: Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4 Stage 5 Stage 6 Stage 7 Stage 8

It won’t be much; various mild forms of wishful thinking about regularity of raids, weather etc. Nervous strain. Upsetting effect of siren. Try not to care Hatred of siren. Tension of plane noises. Erratic but nervous sheltering policy Fear. Immediate sheltering on sirens Decline of fear. Lot of looking up at sky; getting on roof at night etc. No more upset by siren. Certain amount of rashness Sensible sheltering on approaching danger Gradual carelessness and no longer sheltering at gunfire, unless plane also audible or bomb explosions. Completely unaffected by the sirens Pretty matter of fact. Not terribly affected by gunfire. But definitely tired of whole business1

The problem of morale In locating morale (Mackay 2002), even in Liverpool, it is difficult to separate it from the kinds of matrices of representation, measurement and abstraction we are presented with in scholarly discussions of the target and targeting during air war and histories of bombing. Indeed, as Helen Jones has argued, ‘morale […] is a concept that during the war was, and has been since, difficult to define

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and measure’ (2006: 8). But while Jones chooses to focus on other questions noting the elusiveness of the concept, this chapter is interested in exactly what was meant by morale and how it was examined during the Blitz on Liverpool and Merseyside. As we saw in previous chapters, part of this book investigates how morale was seen as a target, and how that idea came to be reflected in the preparations and mechanisms designed to protect Liverpool and Merseyside. Of course, morale bridged the concerns of both bombing and protection. As geographer Gregory (2011) and many others have explored (Chow 2006; Kaplan 2006), targeting has a long history which has meant engaging forms of visualization and examination, sequences of interpretation and analysis and deliberative processes of selection and decision-making over a suitable target. The kind of aerial reconnaissance performed on Liverpool which enabled the Luftwaffe to target the city’s ports and industrial buildings was one step in a chain of sequential processes that would render a distanced place or thing knowable and, in some ways, governable. While we will go some way to contextualizing what morale was and how it was thought of in this chapter, we are primarily interested in how morale interfered with other things. In other words, how can the ways morale was understood tell us about how Liverpool was imagined and represented during the Blitz? Dittmar Süss has suggested that ‘morale governed the way in which class and gender issues were viewed’ (2013: 74), especially in relation to evacuation. Similarly, we can ask in what ways efforts to measure, guide and manage morale can tell us more about the construction of citizenship, belonging, identity and morality during the Liverpool Blitz?

Targeting Morale became an object of targeting later in the war (Biddle 2009; see Hays Parks 2005 for comparisons between USAAF and RAF policy); having evolved from an earlier period of colonial policing in the Middle East (Meilinger 1996; Satia 2006), it would infuse bombing policy. But morale was also identified and understood through a similar but inverted process of targeting used for defence and protection. Part of that understanding was a concern within many different departments of state for the political will of the population. Earlier arguments of the interwar air power theorists had suggested that air war would strike at the heart of the population’s will to go on, a knock-out blow resulting from physical as well as morale destruction (Gollin 1984; Holman

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2010, 2014). As Richard Overy (2013) explains, ‘The politicians, Churchill included, generally understood morale in political terms: heavy pressure from bombing would include a social and political collapse, perhaps even a revolution’. As we have seen already, under civil defence and air raid precautions, within Liverpool and elsewhere, an architecture of preparedness, coordination and response was deployed which did not necessarily seek to stop a bomb from falling, but sought to prepare the ground for the event if and when it would. Morale, if strengthened, could provide the tonic that would solidify and strengthen the populace – not open up differences, but undergird class solidarities to withstand the pressures of attack. As Süss argues within the broader context of morale in civilian protection, ‘social harmony was an essential element in the discourse of morale’ (2013: 73), issues for which Liverpool became symptomatic in the context of the first waves of evacuation. Morale was something that bombing would affect, but more precisely it was taken as a sort of measure of vulnerability or a disposition of response, even if it seemed to elude measurement and correlation. The relationship between morale in the sense of civilian defence and offensive bombing was, however, not entirely asymmetric. The Air Ministry would work with the Ministry of Home Security’s experiments department to fathom how understandings of air raid damage to morale in Britain could inform Allied bombing policy overseas. The problem for the government departments concerned with civil protection was that they could not identify morale as an object in and of itself; they could not really define it apart from the ways in which they might try to influence it. For chief scientists such as Solly Zuckerman it was ‘not entirely mathematical’ (Zuckerman 1978). How would this relate to Liverpool and Merseyside? Well ideas of morale would shift during the course of the war. As Overy suggested, the attacks on Britain, especially those in Liverpool, were largely economic in intent, and not primarily about terrorizing the population and damaging its morale. The timing of the shift is interesting, but perhaps coincidental in that in May 1941, the minister of economic warfare sent a memo suggesting the ineffectiveness of military targets and largely the potential for widespread economic effects by concentrating on industrial centres or large cities, just like Liverpool. Overy argues that ‘the idea stemmed from the effects of German bombing on the British workforce’, quoting from the report, ‘“British experience leads us to believe that loss of output […] through absenteeism and other dislocation consequent upon the destruction of workers” dwellings and shopping centres is likely to be as great as, if not greater than the production loss which we can expect to inflict by heavy damage’ (Overy 2013).

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It is essential to our story that we understand that in the context of the experience of bombing by populations in cities like Liverpool, morale began to be viewed by the authorities as ‘a barometer of productive performance rather than political outlook’. The term had meaning for not only Britain’s offensive bombing policy but also, reciprocally, its measures of protection, although the concept of the barometer would be contested by others such as Mass Observation (MO), who also focused many of their provincial intelligence reports on Liverpool and Merseyside. Morale was ‘a description of economic attrition – a form of “industrial blockage” – in which the working class population was attacked’, and we might add defended ‘as an abstract factor of production whose deaths, disablement or absence would have economic consequences’ (Overy 2013).

Morale and productivity It is difficult to say for certain whether the May Blitz truly determined an important shift for some government departments. We can say that Liverpool was of particular concern for its morale and its relationship to the productivity of the port and dock industries. By 1942, and once the dust had settled in Liverpool, the Home Office continued to try to assess the effects of damage of air raids on the economic life of the community. Liverpool, and especially Bootle, which was hit so hard during the May Blitz, provided a central focus for this research, recognizing the port’s importance in shuttling a third of Britain’s exports and 20 per cent of the country’s imports from its docks and warehouses. Because of the port’s esteem, and concerns of its fragility, the ministry used Bootle as a case study through which they could understand the impact of bombing on morale, and the consequences of that interaction on absenteeism and the mobility of the population – two important variables in industrial production. As we saw earlier, they were also important indices in the public’s broader sense of living through the war. Interestingly though, the findings from the reports show that there was no ‘appreciable interference with dock activities from labour shortage, since reduction in activity from other causes was always greater than reduction in available labour’.2 Bootle effectively stood in for Merseyside and, maybe elsewhere, found to be representative of the region as a whole with its ‘essentially working-class population and varied industrial character’. The analysis of the town’s demographics revealed a ‘falling trend in the population since 1927, and the large daily migration of workers into and out of the city’.3 The migration and daily mobility practices of Bootle’s population were believed to have been

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accelerated by the war. For every 100 people living and working in Bootle, eighty-six lived there and worked outside, while 102 lived outside and worked in Bootle. The report estimated that during May, 103 metric tons had been dropped on Bootle. In sampling the various households and using employment data from the labour exchange, 45 per cent of the total estimated population of 54,500 were believed to be workers, and representative of the district. Bootle was found to have a total working population of 15,500 males and 8,800 females. The total proportation of men at work over sixty was high at 43 per cent, though 63 per cent of adult women were not at work. By far the highest number of workers were in ‘Distributive trades’, then ‘War Industries’ and next ‘Dock Labourers’.4 The research estimated that some 200,000 man hours had been lost during the raids. This was believed to be a conservative estimate considering other factors that might have reduced the efficiency and output after a raid, perhaps debris and transport disruption, shortages of electricity or communications failure. Given around half the population were believed to be absent, there may have been consequences for the output of the other half that remained. Considering the rhetoric surrounding dock labour, the government services and dock services were thought to have suffered less than expected. Building, transport and war industries each lost a week; dock labourers, and those moving oil, grain and sugar in other related distributive trades and other industries lost two and a half to three weeks. Of course, there were exceptions to this assessment. Women were seen to have suffered most, except in war industries located outside the main target area. An extreme case was seen in a family which had spent six weeks living in a rest centre outside of Bootle, and only returned to work when they moved into a new house. Despite the rhetoric deployed by Liverpool’s leaders that trekking was not occurring in large numbers discussed earlier, the report focused heavily on the mobility and migration of Bootle people during and following the raids, finding that trekking was only pipped by the large numbers of the evacuated population. Through the raids, the proportion remaining at home fell to a minimum of 49 per cent for workers and 34 per cent for non-workers after the raid of May 7/8. Migration was classified into three main types: 1. Movement in town – including all changes of residence, and those who used their old homes during the day but slept elsewhere in Bootle. 2. Trekking – persons who slept outside Bootle but used their own homes during the day. 3. Evacuation – all others who slept outside Bootle.

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Trekking peaked on the evening of 8 May, reaching 25 per cent of the working population, the total number sleeping outside Bootle was 25,000 – around 18,000 had moved to places within daily reach of Bootle and 3,000 had completely left the area. Some 10,500 persons were trekking daily for distances up to twenty miles. This dropped off considerably a year later, but notably dockers in the sample had some of the lowest rates in terms of residing in Bootle in November 1942. This may have had much less to do with the belief that the dockers were acquiescing, and probably more because dock workers tended to live in more heavily bombed areas than others. Less than a quarter of those who moved right out of the district returned between May 1941 and November 1942. Indeed, between July 1940 and July 1941, the number of employed persons’ insurance in Merseyside area went down from 453,700 to 411,700. The ministry also examined the effects on shipping. No significant delays were reported except during May. Of the seventy-six ships that were discharging, nineteen were delayed for periods of one to fourteen days, and of the twentyseven ships loading, six were delayed for periods from one to seventeen days. This represented a total delay for ships discharging of 732,000 ton days and for ships loading 236,400 ton days. The estimated port days, for example, the amount of days the port had to make up from delays, of 73,200 tons, would equal three port days given the average tonnage unloaded daily during 1940 was 28,000 tons. Local labour shortage only contributed 5 per cent of total delays. The main causes to the disruption were ‘direct damage to berths and quays’ and ‘shed damage’. Unexploded bombs also caused considerable interruptions. Other causes included the non-availability of electricity, damage to ships and cargo on ships and delays due to ‘changing berths’. The lack of electricity was to cause fifteen ship days, shed damage seventeen, ship damage ten, unexploded bombs on docks, quays roads and in shops, twenty-three days and delays due to changing berths thirteen. There was little apparent permanent loss in the labour force at the port. There was a temporary fall in early May, but by 13 May, the number registered had risen to 16,300. Other issues caused by the raids included dockers being distracted by debris clearance and damage to dock equipment. This had the effect of depressing ‘the apparent output per man by about a third for one week’.5 In other words, the effects on dock productivity were quite severe. But it was not compounded by other damage to Liverpool’s infrastructure. The heavy hits to the railways would have had a greater effect had ‘the material damage on the dock estate been less serious’.6 In other words, had demand actually been higher, then Liverpool would have felt the impact of the Blitz that much more, but as it

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was, the wider disruption of Liverpool’s extensive distribution networks was not as consequential as it could have been in compounding the impact on the docks. Liverpool’s May Blitz and the huge damage to Bootle continued as one of the ministry’s main case studies for Blitz morale under Dr Emmens’ review of morale following the ‘Baedeker raids’ in the middle of the war.7 Bootle, while not part of the raids in 1942 and 1943, was compared to Greenock, York, Canterbury, Norwich, Exeter and Clydebank; although Emmens does not go too much into its rationale, it appears Bootle was identified as a place of bad morale and susceptibility. The boundaries between Bootle and Liverpool also seem continuously slipped over in the study. According to Emmens’ report,8 morale went beyond real material damage; it could show that a certain ‘spirit’ would be lacking, a failure to ‘respond readily to whatever attempts at compulsion may have been made’.9 This gave towns such as Liverpool a kind of negative constitution to the shock of attack. Readers were sceptical of Emmens’ assessment, finding it difficult to believe that ‘morale vulnerability’ could ever be used to direct bombing policy, and that not enough data was available, but his report and its measures are particularly interesting in helping us to understand how morale was being understood more widely in relation to Liverpool, and those systems of regulation and response we are concerned with. Indeed, in Emmens’ understanding that a raid is ‘treated as the stimulus which provokes symptoms in the town from which we may judge its morale, and a disproportionately strong reaction’, the study would comprehend raids as a measure of diagnosis, not to be ‘treated as evidence that the raid in itself has weakened morale, but that it has revealed the existing or potential weaknesses’.10 While the reports are careful not to attribute especially Greenock’s depression to the ‘inferiority of its people’, it seems to express a certain analysis of the city and its populous as dangerous or susceptible. Emmens looked for correlations between press reporting and absenteeism, finding, however, that it ‘was not possible to predict, from the local press, the degree of reaction to be expected’.11 Generating some forty-two categories of analysis and correlation to intensity and absenteeism, many of these categories were seen to be ‘useless, in that no correlation between the intensity of the raids or the absenteeism in the towns and press reports was apparent’.12 The ‘outstanding examples of relatively useless categories’ were: 1. visits by royalty, ministers of the crown (except the comments by or about the visitors) 2. the drafting of workers or military into the city

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savings and war charities the attitude to the enemy crime and drunkenness rumours letters and messages of sympathy accounts of isolated experiences in the bombing.

That which bore closest relevance to absenteeism in press reports was seen in the adverse criticism of the response to ARP and post-raid services, from which a provisional list of ‘threshold’ press responses was drawn up. For both Bootle and Greenock, at 2.8–3 days lost per worker the following items occurred in the towns: A) B) C) D) E)

mild adverse criticism on the spirit of the people after the raid criticism of the efficiency of ARP in both towns frequent mention of evacuation and trekking trouble with evacuation and billeting mild to strong criticism of housing repair and accommodation, post-raid relief, the local authorities and the government F) mild criticism of shelters G) post-raid increases in ARP and relief services. The intensity of the raids, evacuation and trekking percentages and tonnage, would be then correlated with survey material from the Ministry of Information social surveys. Indeed, numbers of looters convicted did bear some relation to this criticism too, as was the number of schooldays lost.

Mass atmospherics The research and experiments department gives us a particularly abstracted and calculative impression of the quality of Liverpool’s morale from the distanced perspective of government and state departments, but it was not the only form of the watching of Liverpool’s morale that made its way to the ministry. Reports of morale from the chief officers of police from the North West region were widely circulated. An excerpt of reports from June to July 1940 gives us a window into the snapshots the Home Office was collecting on Liverpool’s and Merseyside’s morale. In Southport, the reports saw a ‘state of tension’ in anticipation of invasion. The inhabitants feared that invasion by troop-carrying aeroplanes

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could be attempted on the Southport foreshore and adverse comments were heard regarding the steps taken to defend the foreshore.13 Other ‘real concerns’ were over petrol, especially from the large numbers of the middle classes motoring in their cars to Southport on holiday and at weekends.14 Inside these petty class differences and concerns, the police reports demonstrate considerable anxiety at the relationship between poor morale and industrial action, which could have wider potential consequences. For example, a dock labour dispute arose around the discharge of flour from SS Freemantle at Canada Dock and the use or prohibition of hooks to move the bags. The dispute was ended when special hooks were obtained. Moreover, several Liverpool Corporation bus drivers complained of the long ‘spread over’ of their duties, and declined at first to take late buses to pick up workers from the Airframe factory at Speke – the Rootes shadow factory nearby the 1930s Art Deco airport terminal. The men did eventually comply and the matter of overtime was reported as being under negotiation. On 1 July, a number of dockers refused a half day’s work in Liverpool as it would mean the loss of three days’ unemployment pay. Appearing before a Ministry of Labour tribunal, two men were arrested and fined for disorderly conduct. William Gallacher, communist MP for West Fife, was also mentioned in the report. Having addressed meetings of workers in Liverpool, it is probable that Gallacher was believed to be stirring communist sympathies during his time in the city. He would support Irish workers in Liverpool in questions to Parliament that August.15 This level of reporting would surely scrape at the surface of reports focused on Liverpool from other sources. Air raid reports on Liverpool were received; one came to the Ministry of Home Security in May from The Economic League, hardly new to quiet dealings with the Home Office, or providing information on communist infiltration in the labour movement. ‘[V]ery extensive damage on Merseyside has brought about widespread complaint, and the very grimness of the people has a menacing note’, the report stated.16 The report, however, was clear in its resolve that this was not from the ‘submerged tenth’ but the average worker. The views presented were much more than those of ‘slum dwellers’ but ‘respectable’ workers’ wives and families. The report came from an informer who had spent several nights among a group of families who had regularly trekked outside of the city to the village of Maghull (ironically a psychiatric hospital and centre for the War Office seeking to investigate the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers during the First World War17) where ‘trekkers’ had been supplied with tarpaulins in order to sleep on in the open fields. ‘After an hour listening to the remarks’, which included criticism of Churchill, the reporter noted that ‘one is

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left with a feeling of dread.’18 The report was forwarded to the Home Office and an acknowledgement sent back to the league. The Board of Trade were also concerned with ‘“problem” towns or areas’. Their report, marked ‘Secret’, requested information for each town with this status, and solicited correspondence and information regarding why certain industries and businesses had located there.19 The report required basic economic indicators, including the numbers of retired or unoccupied persons. In 1931, these were 405,458 male and 450,230 female aged fourteen years and over. By 1939, the population of Liverpool’s local authority and nearby towns had dropped to 822,400; by September of that year the national register figures had it at 733,191 and by 31 March 1943, the registrar general had it at 660,300, suggesting severe depopulation.20 Another set of indicators about Liverpool would be collected and analysed by the organization Mass Observation. MO had realized the profit in techniques that could find ‘indications of the latent trends of public opinion and provide us with the temperature of certain situations’.21 The choice of temperature as an index is important. The organization’s leader, Tom Harrison, would describe the MO reports as ‘acting as a thermometer of morale rather than a barometer’.22 By this he meant that the reports were less anticipatory than other modes of reporting purported to be. They were not intended nor focused on gauging the future of social relations; rather in the spirit of Scott’s impressionist account, they offered ‘thermometer check-ups on barometer research undertaken by other organisations’. They quickly took the pulse of feeling, registering current mood, but no more than that. Later we will see that MO rubbed some people up quite the wrong way, especially as their intelligence fed into the Home Office. They were especially not appreciated by the most indignant Hodsall, who would write quite a trenchant critique – as mentioned in Chapter 7. Nonetheless, they had a knack of influencing the right people, and their work in Liverpool is fascinating if we explore their reports in the city before, during and after the May Blitz.

A moral(e) geography Dated 10 January 1941, a lengthy MO report on Liverpool and the North West makes interesting and stark typologies of the population and its morale, continuing the ways in which morale was used as a way to articulate social difference, as opposed to any binding ties of class solidarity.23 The report

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concerned the period between 24 December and 3 January. The upper- and middle-classes are seen as passive, holding little in the way of morale to speak of, which was perhaps redolent of the shortage of voluntary services. The city atmospheres reproduce the widely held impressions we have already seen of Liverpool as a city full of, or plagued by, delinquency, threatening to pollute elsewhere: The streets are full of children and they have taken advantage of the blitzed atmosphere. Child hooliganism is quite a typical feature of any Liverpool observation at present. Juvenile crime has not increased, but child crime (under 14) is becoming a serious problem.24

In amongst the carnival atmosphere, running amok as it were, the report compared Liverpool to a tourist resort, given the tribe of the ‘ultramorale’, the sailors. This group were supposed to be possessed with an excess of morale.25 We quote at length from the report which likens Liverpool, again, to some kind of holiday town embodying the qualities of a carnivalesque destination of loose behaviour and loose morals (Urry 1990; Shields 1992): The casual visitor who got off at any one of the central stations of Liverpool any time from 9 to 12 at night, on any night of the week, would probably form an estimate of Liverpool morale which went far beyond the very reasonable degree of goodness we have already described. The centre of Liverpool after dark is a mixture between a bumper supper night at Cambridge (when Pembroke is head of the river) and a Bank Holiday at Blackpool. Nowhere have we seen more drunkenness, more singing and shouting and catcalling, more picking up, or more people being sick. And this atmosphere overflows from the pavements into hotels and alleyways.26

The ‘good cheer and cheering’ associated with naval ratings MO deciphers – in tune with Scott’s opening account of Liverpool some years before – is simply intuited: a visitor arrives at one of the central stations, and MO takes the pulse of that arrival. For some, MO suggests that the mood may be negative, but they found there to be no evidence that ‘Liverpool people disliked this behaviour’; in fact, they went on to suggest that ‘quite a number probably liked it. The sailors brought an atmosphere of revelry and holiday, which they continued throughout air-raid warnings, and which was in direct contrast to the depression atmosphere of Blitz.’27 In stark contrast to the good morale of the sailors and the general atmosphere of good cheer, the dockers appeared to exude an atmosphere of lethargy and depression. Outside the dock area, MO found ‘innumerable versions of work

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evasion, exploitation of overtime rates, etc.’, albeit ‘[i]rrespective of the facts’.28 At the heart of these suspicions, it was suspected that dockers were delaying things by deploying tactics of a slower rate of moving boxes. MO worried that no matter how false these statements might be, they were still ‘having a mischievous effect’.29 A strong impression was garnered of Liverpool that was at once, ‘largely administrative and economic’, but at the same time ‘psychological and illogical’.30 They largely recorded the private and public moods and perceptions of the population, which, even in the quietest moments, could have real shout and potency. Despite this morale weakness, MO found what can only be regarded as other stereotypical views of the city and its working class, finding a certain toughness about Liverpool, having already endured not merely the crisis of wartime but the depredation of economic depression and declining working and living conditions. The city and wider area was seen to have survived on through some of the worst examples of poverty and chronic unemployment. Some of this capacity for endurance was put down to the sea. It was noted that the mariners’ wives and families were used to them being away for long stretches of time. For Tom Harrison, Liverpool demonstrated ‘a hardy northern tradition of endurance’ (cited in Beaven 2005: 219). The geography of the city helped too, MO making quite an explicit, literal connection between the city’s urban geography, the bombings and their effect on morale. It was found that the ‘centre, the heart of their city’, hadn’t received a huge amount of damage, at least by January 1941, when the report was made. The reporter concluded that the sense of limited damage to the city’s core, and its recognizable landmarks remaining somewhat unscathed by that point, was an important strength to morale, while the wide streets prevented major disruption, greatly reducing ‘the dislocation of transport, which is a very important factor in keeping up the morale of big towns, especially among shoppers and industrial workers’.31 This morale geography of Liverpool extended to the region, and found notable comparison to the scene the reporter found in Manchester. What we see is a vivid and noticeable shift from one city to the other. This transition is described to be ‘like going from an atmosphere of reasonable cheerfulness into an atmosphere of barely restrained depression’.32 The report marvelled at the perceptible difference of atmosphere, only an hour away from Liverpool by road, an ‘atmosphere with which they had grown familiar in the south’.33 A ‘vitality’ was lacking in the social life the reporter witnessed. In Liverpool, 500 people could be found in a dance hall, ‘with an enemy plane overhead. In Liverpool, you don’t have to listen to raid and war talk all the time.’34

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The MO reports are now well known to have been highly critical of both government and local authority policy, and, indeed, the human failings and social niggles the Blitz stirred up. In Liverpool, they suggested that the provision of shelters was inadequate, drawing from a social worker who suggested that the city had gone back in time to a level of ‘squalor’; it was ‘almost Hogarthian’.35 They found the Women’s Voluntary Service to be embattled by local criticism, working ‘in the difficult atmosphere of a town which is run by political bosses, jealous of their own prestige, expert at red tape, and suspicious of any intrusion on what they regard as their territory’.36 The report felt that ‘the Emergency committee has not carried general public confidence in Liverpool, and has increased the gulf between the leaders and the led’.37 Some of the incoherence of morale leadership was mirrored in the geography observed in Manchester, a spatial incoherence, an ‘un-coordinated, topographically incoherent, overlapping, jumbled-up nondescript place’.38 Reports of Britain’s vital centres like these were not taken lightly. The Home Office took particular issue with the contents of the reports as well as their accuracy. This came to a head when several reports of Liverpool were circulated by the Admiralty as a snapshot of Liverpool’s morale and the consequences for morale by Liverpool’s civil defence measures. A note from possibly Gater, then joint-secretary at the ministry, or maybe Herbert Morrison to William Mabane, the parliamentary secretary – a position he would share with Ellen Wilkinson – described the report as ‘the most extraordinary mixture of fact, fiction and dangerous mischief ’, presuming that the authors were part of the ‘intelligensia’ and could be ‘better employed in doing something useful for the community’.39 The other issue was how the report was circulated within the navy and Admiralty. A tense discussion between the Admiralty and Herbert Morrison of Home Security began. Morrison was concerned with just why the Admiralty could find any use in the reports which predominantly concerned civil defence: ‘To my mind it is very much like somebody with no naval experience of training circulating reports upon the morale of the Navy and its effectivity in action.’40 The First Lord of the Admiralty A.V. Alexander responded that the director of naval intelligence was keen to assess the morale of ports like Liverpool on several grounds set out in the letter to Morrison, including the morale of the naval ratings, how those ratings would be affected by local morale as they moved from ports and dockyards and whether ratings could be affected ‘by the condition of their families at home’.41 If we follow the correspondence further, we find that the reports on Liverpool were considered by Home Security to have provided an insight into the workings

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of civil defence, and by implication the ministry. We could conclude that the territorial jealousies MO were reporting within Liverpool and Manchester’s local authorities were being directly reproduced in Whitehall’s own turf wars. Within Home Security, a memo suggested that it could be possible that MO would be lent directly to them: Were we to accept the offer, then I think the Admiralty would rightly object if we employed Mass Observation to provide us with an ex parte account of the Fleet in action: for of course it can equally well be argued that food supplies and so on are so much a matter of concern to us in our efforts to maintain the morale of the civilian population that it is important we should satisfy ourselves that the Fleet is all right!42

Herbert Morrison would add to the memo, ‘I agree. Follow up.’ The secretary’s drafted reply, eventually sent to the First Lord, drew on some of this memo and altered the wording. He felt very strongly that the reports should come to the admiralty independent of the ministry and regional machinery, and that ‘potential ill-founded criticisms would not be checked’: What would your reaction be if we used the Mass Observation groups to provide with an ex parte statement of the Fleet in action or of conditions in the Naval Dockyards – for it could equally well be argued that, in these days when the civilian population as much in the war as the Armed Forces of the Crown and their morale is of equal importance, it is necessary for us to be aware of the state of morale amongst naval ratings because of its repercussions upon the civilian population.43

Commander Hodsall’s criticisms were more detailed, presenting the view that the ministry were capable of their own balanced judgement of activities, and that they actually had people within the local and regional machinery. Hodsall found several inaccuracies of fact in the MO report, too, and thought MO’s methodology to be just as problematic, ‘suggesting a general attitude of defeatism not confirmed by the Ministry’s own reports and observations’. The MO approach allowed its results to be infected by ‘an atmosphere of barely restrained depression’, reported by persons with a ‘defeatist bias’.44 While MO was taken with a heavy dose of scepticism from Home Security, the Ministry of Information had formed a very different view of MO altogether, commissioning from them weekly intelligence reports from different parts of the country. Between 3 and 10 June 1941, the team conducted a study in Liverpool, Birkenhead and Bootle. Contrary to the reports for the Admiralty, the Liverpool of this study showed quite a different inflection, having a ‘depressed and sordid

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atmosphere’ following the May Blitz raids.45 This was partly put down to ‘its blackness and the number of very poor seen in the streets, and is enhanced by the Blitz debris’.46 Birkenhead faired better in the report, being described as ‘strikingly more cheerful’.47 The report noticed the ‘difficulties in emergency’ owing to the separation of the suburbs and boroughs of Merseyside, separated ‘rather artificially’ under its own authority, complicating billeting, rest centre provision, hospitals and poor coordination.48 The earlier reports admired by the Admiralty are here perhaps intensified. The population were found to be fatalistic, but solid and resilient; ‘though dour by temperament […] they stood their eight-day ordeal with fortitude and seem able to readjust to normal conditions’.49 Morale was found to be in general good, but a strong ‘undercurrent of anxiety’ existed.50 As before, some of this was located in opinions of the dockers, and the temporary and mobile accommodation shippers, dockers and sailors occupied, such as the Sailors’ Society ‘dog’s home’ – a gloomy cubicled building. A free church hostel built for 250 held 600 men, while the Mersey mission opened a hostel annexe.51 Mixed entertainments and dances were run by the Catholic apostles of the sea. Girls acted as hostesses to seamen in a ‘happy, healthy atmosphere’.52

Morale and mobility In the measuring of morale, we can see that mobility, and its provision and coordination, was a vitally important facet of the impressionistic accounts of Liverpool’s Blitz mood and atmosphere. Trekking, in particular, was both a sign of low morale and potentially the loss of courage, as well as an indication of government deceit. For contemporary historians the practice was not a sign of a population cowering in irrational panic, but a perfectly normal and ‘rational’ (Gardiner 2011: 177) ‘response to a specific set of circumstances’ (Field 2011: 76). The official line was not only that trekking was frowned upon but also that it was happening in very small and insignificant numbers. As Brian Foss (2007) has noted, trekking would go completely unrepresented in the official war art collections. The MO Home Intelligence Reports contradicted this representational absence, finding trekking to be far more widespread. The report also found local officials to be quite unsympathetic to trekking, believing the practice to be spreading panic. The city itself was transient and difficult to grasp. As already discussed in relation to the courts, bad morale and morality was to be found in the shelters, given the tendency for salacious behaviour by many seamen and foreigners.

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‘Young girls in their early teens run away from home and are sometimes “lost” in shelters for weeks at a time.’53 Rumours were another particularly mobile problem of morale. Outside Liverpool and Bootle, stories circulated that the area had given up to the bombing and were spreading the cheer of defeatism, not good morale. ‘People here were said to be parading through the streets demanding peace. There were also reports equally without any Truth, that there had been serious riots in Liverpool, as a result of which martial law had been declared’, began a Home Intelligence report.54 These rumours were repeated in Manchester, London and further afield. What is interesting was the reaction to the rumour. As the intelligence report noted, the authorities went considerable lengths to try to quash news like this. The report explained that ‘the tales of rioting and peace demonstrations are dying down; this is attributed to their exposure by Lord Derby at a public meeting, to strong leading articles in several Lancashire newspapers, and to word of mouth dissemination of the true facts’.55 The mobility and, indeed, veracity, of these rumours was given even greater scrutiny by the courts. Surprisingly, the northern circuit of the bar was found to be another vector for rumour to move. It was also the place where they could be quashed by Recorder E. G. Hemmerde at Liverpool’s Quarter Sessions at the end of the intensity of the bombing in May.56 During his time in Manchester while the May Blitz was underway, Hemmerde found himself subject to reports from colleagues that Liverpool’s Town Hall had been reduced to ‘a mass of rubble’; he soon ‘found that to be completely false’.57 During a stay in the legal district of Temple, London, ‘another member of the Bar told me that the town had been for some time under martial law and things were desperate’; he went on to add, ‘That was nothing but a lie.’58 Hemmerde wanted to do something about this tendency of ‘the old women of both sexes’, who should go ‘chattering in this way’.59 Going further, he stated that ‘people of this profession should not disgrace the law and the Northern Circuit’.60 False rumours such as these were cracked down on hard. One such case appearing in Manchester was of Mr Edward Jonas Osman, 47, who was found guilty of ‘publishing a statement relating to matters connected to the war which was likely to cause alarm and despondency’.61 Osman was accused of having entered a bar on Cross Lane on the night of 9 May 1941. He began a conversation with three young women and proceeded to describe the situation in Liverpool, where he explained he had just come from. ‘The people of Liverpool have let us down’, he was said to have told them, while putting his hand over his mouth as if to convey something secret; ‘they have surrendered, and have started parading the streets carrying banners. They have also put white sheets on all

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the buildings’.62 He also told them that Liverpool was under martial law, that the city had been closed off and that Manchester and Salford were likely to be next. Unfortunately for Osman, his words were overheard by a company sergeant major who went out of the bar, found another soldier whom he put in place to stand guard near the door and alerted the police. After being questioned by investigating officers, Osman admitted to not having visited Liverpool for well over a week and that he wanted to look ‘big’ in front of his audience. Officer Langford of Liverpool CID explained to the court that Osman’s assertions were quite false, also adding that ‘the people of Liverpool, especially the poorer ones, had stood up to the air raids very well’.63 This is also the criminal case referred to by Lord Derby in a newspaper article entitled ‘Slanders on Liverpool’. Lord Derby is reported as remarking: I see that a man has gone to prison for saying that Liverpool was showing the white feather. I want to give the lie very openly and very directly to that. I am glad to have this chance to tell you that though Liverpool and the district have gone through a very bad time they are standing up to it as one expects them to stand up … the spirit of Liverpool is as high and the determination to win is as great as in any part of the United Kingdom.64

Several newspapers played their part in attempts at scotching rumour mongering by attempted humour; the Guardian printed results of a competition of poetry denigrating rumour mongering – mentioned in despatches were the following two pieces of doggerel sent in from Liverpool:65 Sipping his pint of old and mild Just like some large, precocious child, Old Percy set, with wicked glee, All sorts of rumours floating free: ‘They say’, was how his tales began, Of maybe ‘My wife knows a man...’; But when he mentioned as a fact A war-time Prohibition Act A carpet salesman, playing darts, Pierced Percy in his private parts. He’d heard of silent gas-filled bombs from silent aeroplanes, Of germs dropped nightly from the sky on towns, and fields, and lances. He’d heard of spies within ‘The House’ and of their evil tricks. He’d heard of battleships we lost – of Churchill in a fix. So when they couldn’t get him to confess that he had lied. They did the one thing best for all – they had him certified!

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Morale was also a problem of mobility itself and the transport disruption caused by the start of the raids over the early May weekend. When the city returned to work, many bus services were cancelled or disrupted, the trams which had received major damage were out, railway services were closed and many private cars were parked on both sides of the main streets.66 The intelligence report showed that the Chief Constable had been blamed for some of this chaos, for because the traffic had not been managed, the transport department could not move the wrecked tramcars away from the city centre. The report was critical of the Chief Constable’s performance as well as the Town Clerk, who it accused of not providing the emergency information officer and his deputy with enough warning of the emergency so that they could deliver messages to the public. The ministry’s information vans helped with this task, transporting messages from families and relatives, to create a conduit of communication following the breakdown in the telephone lines. Official messages were transmitted to and from Liverpool and Bootle by police wireless through the ‘good officers of the Regional Commissioner’.67 The bulk of enquires, according to the report at least, ‘were on one point only – how to get out of Merseyside for at least one night’s rest’.68 MO considered that the lowing ebb of morale and stress on the population had made them apathetic, inclined to ‘argue and grumble about trivialities’, while their movements themselves appeared uncontrolled and disorderly, without proper steering or management.69 Large numbers of people were seen evacuating themselves from Stanley Road, moving with bundles of clothing. At Daisy Street School, the playground filled with people waiting for buses to take them to Walton Village. Along Huyton Road, the same uncontrolled evacuation could be found.

Conclusion Despite all of this measuring, monitoring and maintaining of morale and mobility, what is clear is that the raids were devastating. And while an organized movement for capitulation in the city never occurred, individually for some, the Blitz was incredibly difficult to live through and many, for a moment, did feel like giving up. All the monitoring, measuring and maintaining in the world was not going to change this. Take this interview with a fire officer, having worked seventy-two hours non-stop apart from a few hours’ sleep on the roundabout opposite Lewis’ department store. He had toiled to put the fires out, drawing water from the

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Adelphi Hotel’s swimming pool. The fireman’s wife recollected the events that followed: The main thing that I’ll never forget was when Mr Williams came in. He had all his tunic on. He just came in and he almost fell through the door and he said to me. His face was black. Just like a chimney sweep. You could only see his eyes. He said to me ‘Mary we’ve finished’. ‘England is finished’. ‘The whole city is blazing. The buildings were just left’. I said, ‘Well what have you come home for then?’. He said, ‘We’ve just had to let them burn out because we can’t get any water. If “Gerry” comes over tonight he’ll just take us. The war is finished. There’s nothing more that we can do’.70

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The Legacy of the Blitz

Lord Haw Haw nightly gave out greasy warnings about how Liver birds would learn to fly, but they survived the war and still dominate the Liverpool waterfront. […] Liverpool became completely shut off from the outside world. There were no telephones or postal services […] then quite suddenly the raids stopped. The drifting smoke cleared and the sun shone again. Liverpool was saved.1 Three-quarters of a century have passed since the devastating and concerted bombing raids were carried out by the Luftwaffe over Merseyside and other British cities and towns during 1940–41. The majority of those who experienced such a time of fear are no longer alive. However, memory is not simply individual in nature; it is also collective and cultural, as witnessed by the recent celebrations of the Liverpool and Merseyside Blitz, through which other oral history projects such as Finest Hour and Merseyblitz have coincided. During the Liverpool Blitz harsh lessons were learned, horrors experienced, sometimes subsequently recorded and therefore relived, lives forever altered and governmental policies challenged and changed. The legacy of the period of ‘Blitzkrieg’ also continues to play a part in both our local and national life; and in a post–9/11 and 7/7 world there are some parallels with living with the everyday threat of domestic terror.2 It is these aspects of the Blitz and its legacy that this chapter addresses.

The immediate legacy The ten months of concerted bombing by the Luftwaffe over Merseyside left an immediate legacy of death, damage and destruction. Almost 500 roads were closed either as a result of being impassable due to bomb damage or in

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order to safeguard people from dangerous buildings, with the cost of repairs estimated in excess of £250,000 (Anon. 1946: 140–1; Whittington Egan 1987: 53–4). The responsibility of repairing and reopening the roads fell on Herbert Hamer, the city engineer and surveyor who had been placed in charge of the Civil Defence Debris Clearance and Road Repair Service.3 He called upon the services of some 6,000 men (including 3,000 armed forces personnel and some 1,000 men who had been made temporarily unemployed as a result of the Blitz) in order to address the problem. Over four-fifths of tramcar routes had also been damaged or otherwise put out of action, leading to major problems with the transport infrastructure in terms of both repair and getting the population to work on a regular basis. As we have seen public utilities in the form of gas, electricity and water supplies had also been badly affected. The movement of people was not the only problem; a major headache was the fact that over 110,000 houses had been damaged as a result of the Blitz – around half the total housing stock in Liverpool. Almost 3,900 people had lost their lives in the Merseyside areas of Liverpool, Birkenhead, Bootle and Wallasey, and many more had been injured (either physically or mentally), while the majority of the population of the area had their lives severely disrupted. Such disruption to everyday life and its concomitant necessities such as food, shelter and education was therefore the immediate legacy of the Liverpool Blitz. Despite the authorities’ best efforts, one of the major problems was the lack of knowledge about how those affected by loss or damage to their domiciles could be helped; a Justice of the Peace editorial after the first bombing raids remarked that: Much distress to people whose homes have been destroyed is caused by their lack of knowledge in regard to the powers of local authorities to help them. A great many people refuse to leave the district in which they have been living, for the reason that they believe they will not receive compensation if they go elsewhere. Others do not know that fares can be paid to send them to relatives, and similar points are constantly arising. Citizens advice bureaux are being set up in most places and police and civil defence workers are doing much good work in putting people in touch with the bureaux. In some districts, however, the work has been extended with the help of church and social workers who make it their duty to see that available facilities are known to people in doubt, and help them to take proper advantage of these services. This is a scheme which local authorities might well encourage – since it will help them to straighten out the difficulties of sorely tried people more speedily and with less confusion.4

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There was certainly a great deal of reported dissatisfaction and grumbling at the immediate post-Blitz administration of the city, as the following extracts from an MO diarist who was in Liverpool for three days shortly after the May 1941 raids explain: Liverpool opinion. The author of this report has been to nearly every important blitztown and studied it.5 To him, therefore, the two most striking features of the Liverpool set-up this time round were: A The almost universal criticism and dissatisfaction with post-Blitz administration. There has been dissatisfaction in other towns, but never from so many sources and with such vehemence as in Liverpool, where it was heard from working men and business men, Conservative and Labour, officials and anti-officials, parsons, service personnel, fire-watchers, wardens, and RAF pilots. B The superficially apparent atmosphere of ineptitude that seemed to oppress the town, the relative lack of energy with which outstanding problems appeared to being coped. The absence of any sign of vigorous reconstruction and rehabilitation activity on Sunday. The general feeling – it is difficult exactly to express it, but residents spoken to felt it too – that there was no power and drive left in Liverpool to counterattack the Luftwaffe. It was being left to the citizens of Liverpool to pick themselves up.

The diarist went on to note that the general feeling of those whose views he had noted was that: There was practically nothing anywhere apparently being done, with energy and imagination, to put a people back on its feet after perhaps the worst continuous battering any people have yet had in this country in this war.

If this collective negative and emotional depression was an immediate legacy, the mood remained largely unmentioned in the contemporary press; far more common were morale-boosting and regenerative stories with a positive spin such as that appearing in the Guardian of 24 May 1942 under the headline ‘The Re-birth of Liverpool “New shape of a Great Port”’, which gives rather a rose-coloured view of the life of Liverpool Docks and its employees. The report stresses that dockers are no longer casually employed, can expect a working week of fifty-four hours for a minimum weekly wage of £4 and can enjoy a daily twocourse meal at a works canteen for a shilling a time. The report is also at pains to stress that post-Blitz life continues as normal in Liverpool; ‘the population, in uniform and out of it, takes full advantage of the many forms of entertainment

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which Liverpool can offer. Concerts at the Philharmonic, variety at the Empire, and many cinemas are crowded night after night.’

Liverpool could take it As bad as it was, it could have been even worse. By 1940, total warfare was not new to the British populace; while the First World War had largely been fought overseas on the Western Front or in the Near East and Middle East, the civilian population of several large conurbations such as London, the Black Country and the east coast towns of Hartlepool, Scarborough and Whitby all experienced mass bombing campaigns conducted by either the German Navy or the Imperial German Air Service (in the respective forms of battleship attacks, aircraft and zeppelin raids). Deaths totalled almost 1,400, with over 3,000 non-fatal casualties. The shock of such raids was significant, but proved survivable, and valuable data were gathered regarding the effects of aerial bombardment.6 Similarly, the firsthand experiences of many British members of the International Brigade who had fought Franco and Hitler’s forces in Spain between 1936 and 1939, together with press reports and newsreel footage of the fate of Guernica following the aerial attack by the Luftwaffe in April 1937, illustrated to the British public the horrors that accompanied ‘Blitzkrieg’. Twenty-seven men from Merseyside gave their lives during the Spanish Civil War, and many more fought in the campaign.7 One of the most famous of these was Liverpool docker Jack Jones, who later became leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union. Lessons were learned (admittedly occasionally somewhat incompletely) from the study of both the First World War and Spanish Civil War bombing campaigns by the Luftwaffe in regard to successful physical, geographical and mental survival techniques. Despite this being only the second time in its history that Britain had experienced a terror campaign of mass bombing on civilian centres of population, there was not widespread panic in the streets of Liverpool or other major areas of settlement; people were not gassed in their homes, streets or workplaces; psychological neurosis did not become commonplace as a result of constant fear of bombing raids; and while morale was undoubtedly briefly dented, it was not damaged beyond repair. The people of Liverpool and surrounding areas (together with other cities) proved remarkably resilient; as Garnet (1995: 109) has stated, ‘the Blitz was treated as a new hazard but not an insuperable one’. It has been suggested that life in interwar Liverpool had been

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so difficult for many inhabitants of the city that ‘it would take more than a few air raids to make things significantly worse’, and MO reporters certainly spoke of the extremely high level of morale observed in the city in the immediate post-Blitz period (Hughes 1993: 17). This is perhaps best illustrated by the following quotation of a MO diarist: A man said to me, ‘Well we seem to be giving the Jerry airmen merry hell, but I don’t think that there Duff Cooper is telling us the real truth, why doesn’t he, we can take it, does he think we are a lot of ninnies? Why try to minimise the casualties, we who were in the last war know that you can’t drop ruddy bombs without doing damage, they want to stop treating us like kids and start to realise they are dealing with Britishers.’8

Perhaps unsurprisingly the government had been unwilling to publicize casualty figures following the onset of the Blitz, but by June 1941, it was willing to concede that this was, in retrospect, a poor decision. In a Commons’ debate on the publication of air-raid casualties, the following exchange took place: Mr. Kirby asked the Home Secretary whether he is aware that rumours have circulated in Liverpool after air-raids as to the number of casualties, which, being far from the truth, may have a demoralising effect upon the citizens; and if he will ensure in the future that an official report is published as quickly as possible, giving the exact number of casualties incurred in each raid, thus avoiding the spreading of false rumours which are difficult to counteract?

Mr Mabane replied on behalf of the government. For reasons given in his reply on 1 April to a Question by the hon. Member for Shettleston (Mr. McGovern) my right hon. Friend is not prepared to make a practice of giving figures of casualties arising from particular incidents or on particular days. Lists showing names and addresses of casualties are posted locally, and by this means full information is given to those directly concerned. Total casualties for the whole country are published at the end of each month. Rumours are, I am aware, put into circulation, but I am confident that credence is not given to them by the majority of citizens, and that the morale of the country has not in fact suffered.9

The maxim of the title of the 1940 film Britain Can Take It, which centred on Britain’s response to the outbreak of war and the beginning of German air raids, largely held true. There was loss, despair and resentment at a distanced or dispassionate government, but Liverpool, along with other towns and cities throughout Britain, could, and did, take ‘it’ in the sense that this pain was largely endured.10 Of course, the original version of the highly regarded and

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iconic GPO Film Unit short of the previously alluded-to Britain Can Take It was entitled London Can Take It, but it quickly became apparent that such a title was a mistake, being regarded as a snub by both Liverpudlians and other victims of the Blitz, and subsequent releases were made under the alternative title, with the Ministry of Information being at pains to point out that ‘the film is representative of what is happening in every other British city and town, where resistance to the intense aerial attack and powers of endurance are every bit as heroic’.11 However, perhaps the population’s ‘endurance’ is not really a useful yardstick with which to assess the longer-term post-war well-being of Merseyside following the Blitz, where social, economic and political health were brought much more into focus through Liverpool’s reconstruction and urban reform.

Post-war reconstruction – physical and mental Films and documentaries such as these had played an important part in helping to maintain morale during the war; witness the success of films such as MGM’s 1942 multi-Oscar-winning Mrs Miniver, in which Greer Garson played the eponymous heroine who endured all that the outbreak of war could throw at her and her resolutely middle-class family; Noel Coward’s stirring portrayal of the naval defence of Britain, In Which We Serve (1942, British Lion), in which all ranks of society (both military and civilian) are depicted in close cohesion for the survival of the British way of life; and finally, Humphrey Jennings’ 1943 Fires Were Started, a lightly fictionalized account of the bravery of firefighters during the Blitz in London.12 However, films also served another purpose. Even during the war, several film-makers (perhaps most notably the Boulting Brothers (Roy and John)) had one eye firmly focused on the post-war situation, both brothers being politically committed to a vision of a new Socialist future. John had been a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, driving ambulances for the Spanish Medical Aid Committee, and had consequently experienced modern warfare at first hand. The brothers, along with several other film-makers, therefore took the opportunity to put forward a vision of a post-war Britain ‘in all of which the underlying theme was that the war was only worth fighting for if it was the means to the creation of a better, fairer society’ (Mackay 1999: 153). The Labour government was not slow in realizing the value of post-war propaganda films and in 1946 created the Central Office of Information, which acted as a conduit for public information films and short documentaries that

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demonstrated Britain’s post-war potential to both domestic and international (primarily American) audiences.13 Britain Can Take It’s director, Humphrey Jennings, along with cinematographer Martin Curtis (father of present-day documentary film-maker Adam Curtis) made several short films under the auspices of the Central Office of Information designed to promote Britain’s post-war recovery through both a reminder of the past greatness of the island and its imminent potential.14 Films such as The Dim Little Island (1949) now appear to a post-modern audience as almost achingly elegiac for a lost world, but at that time they were regarded as fulfilling a useful purpose of rejuvenating Britain’s energy and vitality in a post-Blitz world; in the words of John Ormston (one of the four celebrity narrators of The Dim Little Island), imagining a sort of positive conflagration, ‘the fire is ready to be kindled. It only requires a match to be lighted to set the whole ablaze’.15 Jennings’ last completed film, Family Portrait (1950), was made in celebration of the forthcoming Festival of Britain and again posited an optimistic and somewhat utopian view of Britain’s post-war future that never quite materialized.

Looking to the future – a ‘new Jerusalem’? In a similar vein to the post-war aspirations of numerous films made during the conflict, local, regional and national governance also looked forward to a ‘new’ Britain. By 1943, it was becoming much clearer that the Allies were eventually likely to prevail over the German war machine (especially after the entrance of the USA into the conflict in late 1941 and the Italian change of allegiance in October 1943), and thoughts began turning to the challenges of post-war reconstruction of cities and urban areas ravaged by the Blitz. In February of that year, the Ministry of Town and Country Planning was created. One of its first tasks was to draft a bill that would allow for the compulsory purchasing of bomb-damaged areas for the purpose of redevelopment. The Minister of Town and Country Planning, Mr W.S. Morrison, stated during the second reading of the bill to Parliament on 12 May 1943 that ‘There are many areas, including some which have been very badly damaged by bombs in our urban centres, which are not subject to any planning resolution at all and therefore are under no form of planning control. There are rural areas similarly situated. The effect of Clause i will be to bring under planning control some additional 10,000,000 acres of land’.16 The Town and Country Planning (Interim Development) Act was passed on 22 July 1943, and it was the first of a series

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of such acts of Parliament culminating in the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, which gave considerable powers to local authorities in regard to post-war reconstruction of their towns and cities.17 Such enthusiasm for a ‘New Jerusalem’ was not restricted to national politics. The Ministry of Town and Country Planning also commissioned a number of regional plans for areas badly damaged by bombardment, including London and Liverpool. The latter’s plan was prepared by Francis Longstreth Thompson, a freelance planning consultant who later became planning officer for Essex. The plan, entitled Merseyside plan 1944: a report prepared in consultation with a technical committee of the Merseyside Advisory Joint Planning Committee at the request of the Minister of Town and Country Planning, covered an area of around 450 square miles, including Liverpool, Wallasey, Bootle and Birkenhead. The Guardian of 6 March 1945 reported that Mr Thompson ‘finds the establishment of good living conditions and the need for more industry are the outstanding requirements for the area’, and that ‘to re-employ the 100,000 prewar unemployed he estimates the factory area must be increased in the ratio of one acre to forty persons’. This was but a drop in the ocean in comparison to the amount of land needed to rehouse Merseysiders as a result of bomb damage and slum clearance – a total of over a quarter of a million individuals requiring at least 13,000 acres of development land. Such a gargantuan task demonstrates the huge effort required in the postwar reconstruction of bombed cities. Like many similar aims, the post-war reconstruction envisaged in Thompson’s plan never fully materialized in Merseyside due to a combination of factors including cost, lack of political impetus and changing focus.18 The Thompson plan had followed other attempts at rethinking urban development earlier in Merseyside during the 1930s, and it is not as if Liverpool had been without expertise, given Charles Reilly’s position as head of the School of Architecture, Patrick Abercrombie the Department of Civic Design, and Carr-Saunders and Caradog Jones could be found in the social sciences as we have already seen. Newly appointed Liverpool University Lever professor William Holford, with colleague and lecturer William Eden, set about exploring how Merseyside would implement the 1932 Town and Country Planning Act, working together to write the report The Future of Merseyside (1937).19 In their view, dealing with the pressures of urban sprawl and inner-city deprivation across Merseyside could only but falter under the fragmented oversight of different administrative units of local government. Their solution was a Merseyside County Council (Cherry and Penny 2005), which the war quickly stymied.

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As early as 1941 demands for post-war change were also being made by political organizations such as the communist-inspired People’s Convention (which met in London in January 1941, and ‘wanted Britain’s war aims to be clarified in terms of the sort of society that would be born out of the war’) or Sir Richard Acland’s Forward March movement (Mackay 2002: 82).20 The Forward March movement was shortly (July 1942) to merge with playwright J.B. Priestley’s 1941 Committee to form the socialist Common Wealth Party, which promoted common ownership of land and industry, openness in politics and a form of proportional representation, and his call for a new beginning was not unusual (Calder 1971: 548–50). The movement proved popular in Liverpool, with Acland attending a series of meetings in the city during the spring of 1942 – he spoke to a meeting of clergy organized by the Bishop of Liverpool, gave a talk at the Liverpool Luncheon Club and also addressed a public meeting at St George’s Hall. He told a Guardian reporter that: If the powers which desire to preserve the current system want to remain dominant and the policy of the Government is that the existing system must not be touched, one of two things is going to happen: either we are going to lose this war, or the war will be won for us by the Russians, the Chinese, and the Americans. […] It is essential that positive acts of Government policy should give us an unequivocal assurance that we are not fighting this war for the continuance of the existing economic system.21

Although both Forward March and the Common Wealth Party enjoyed limited success during the war, it was the Labour Party under the able leadership of Clement Attlee that swept to power in a landslide following the July 1945 general election under the slogan of ‘Let us face the future together’. Despite the fact that Churchill had successfully led the country under a government of national unity since May 1940 and had enjoyed unprecedented public approval during the conflict, it was clear that at the end of the war in Europe, the British people did not want to return to a Conservative-driven ideology dominated by a militaristic leader. Instead they decided in their droves that they wanted what the Labour Party’s 1945 election manifesto offered: ‘The nation wants food, work and homes. It wants more than that – it wants good food in plenty, useful work for all, and comfortable, labour-saving homes that take full advantage of the resources of modern science and productive industry. It wants a high and rising standard of living, security for all against a rainy day, an educational system that will give every boy and girl a chance to develop the best that is in them.’22

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The foundations of the Labour government of 1945–50 had been constructed during the war; many of the socialist members of the government of national unity had espoused and developed proposals aimed squarely at post-war physical and economic reconstruction of the nation, along with a new concept of the role of government. The Central Committee on Reconstruction problems, established in July 1941 and chaired by prominent theorist and economist Harold Laski, was typical of these forward-looking ideas; it investigated the social and economic parameters of a prospective future Labour government. Many of these parameters came to fruition in the immediate post-war period in what was arguably the most politically active government of the twentieth century. Aneurin Bevan’s 1946 National Health Act, finally effected on 5 July 1948 following spirited opposition from both the Conservative opposition and the British Medical Association, remains one of the most significant single acts of Parliament ever passed, while the implementation of much of the Beveridge Report in order to rid Britain of the ‘Five Giant Evils’ – squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease – led to the creation of the Welfare State. Both Bevan’s and Beveridge’s works were aimed squarely at post-war reconstruction. This was not just physical reconstruction; clearly political expediency played a part, with a realization that post-war politics would be different; a prescience of the possibility of a Labour government as a backlash to wartime austerity measures.

Post-war consensus on criminal justice? With such promises of a new utopia also came responsibilities; how was a postwar government going to deal with those individuals who failed to play by the new rules and continued to commit criminal acts, as we saw during the Blitz? Bailey argues that there was largely a post-war political consensus on crime – that ‘social order would be based less upon the traditional supremacy of law than upon reducing the sources of disorder’ (Bailey 1987: 289). This view had its roots in the desire of Herbert Morrison (home secretary from October 1940 to May 1945) to reform the criminal justice system by basing its responses to law-breaking on a more scientific and socially responsible footing, dealing with not only offending but also many of the perceived socio-economic causes of offending such as deprivation, family instability, lack of opportunity and so on. He was keen to reintroduce the Criminal Justice Bill (first promulgated by Conservative MP Sir Samuel Hoare in 1938 but shelved due to the outbreak of war) in order to address these issues.

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As a preliminary step, he created a body to look into questions of juvenile delinquency and prison reform. The Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders (ACTO) first met in early September 1944, and its membership included George Benson MP (chairman of the Howard League), together with Dame Lilian Barker (first female assistant prison commissioner) and High Court judge Justice Birkett as chairman. Its first meeting was reported in The Times, where its remit was stated to be wide-ranging; Morrison wanted the council members’ ideas to be ‘broadened, humanized and improved by discussions with and suggestions from men and women who would look at the subject from various angles and contribute ideas based on experience in various spheres of work’.23 Many of the findings and recommendations of ACTO were incorporated into the Criminal Justice Act 1948, which introduced far-reaching changes into the criminal justice system, including the abolition of penal servitude, hard labour and most forms of corporal punishment, together with significant improvements into the appointment and efficacy of the magistracy. It also incorporated several of Herbert Mannheim’s ideas regarding juvenile delinquency by significantly reducing the imposition of prison sentences on young offenders under the age of 21 and stressing the need for aftercare to be provided by the Probation Service.24

The modern Merseyside Blitz and the making of a myth In spite of these aims, in the second half of the twentieth century the post-war path for Liverpool and Merseyside was rocky. The period was filled with optimism yes, but characterized by numerous social and economic problems which the period had sought to heal, not cause. Sociologist Tony Lane (1978) would describe the prevailing policies of the late 1960s and 1970s as a peacetime ‘Blitz’ on the city, constituted by urban clearances, economic and social deprivation, cuts in public services, vast unemployment and social and industrial unrest following on from radical de-industrialization. Writing in Marxism Today, Lane (1978) depicts a twinned state of decay and poorly conceived urban renewal, leaving on Merseyside a ‘blitzed skyline’ of vast open spaces of left industrial wastelands on the city’s perimeter, and housing developments like the illfated prefabbed fifteen-storey apartment buildings the ‘Piggeries’ consisting of Crosbie, Canterbury and Haigh Heights built in 1965 in Everton (the MP David Logan would have a tower block named after him in the form of Logan Towers), which soon became uninhabitable before being suggested for demolition only a

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decade later and being torn down in the 1980s. In this ‘new Blitz’, Lane writes, ‘The decline of Liverpool is not simply statistical – it is visible. “It looks as if it’s been bombed” is a favourite local expression that does not exaggerate’ (Lane 1978: 337). Indeed, if the effect of the wartime blitz was to flatten, demolishing the city into the open spaces described at the start of this book, the clearances of post-war renewal also ‘erased’ parts of Liverpool, for Brian Hatton, ‘from the map’ entirely (Hatton 2008: 48). Lane depicts a slower and mostly non-violent death of the city’s social life, as detailed so graphically in Nicholas Broomfield’s documentary about the Liverpool clearances in Who Cares (1971) and the Kirkby rent strike in Behind the Rent Strike (1974), or Peter Leeson’s Us and Them (1970), regarding the destruction of the Scotland Road neighbourhoods when inner-city terraces were torn down for their inhabitants to be rehoused in new developments. The middle classes are mostly able to ‘evacuate’ the problems of the clearances, having bought their own houses. Those rehoused faced social destruction as their family and friendship networks were scattered horizontally across the city, and vertically into the poorly conceived high-rises: ‘People were not just set down with new neighbours, they were also placed in a different physical situation to them. So the collective discipline of the street was destroyed twice over – once by the break-up of local networks and once by sticking people up in the air’ (Lane 1978: 339). Noticing the prediction of Liverpool’s Chief Constable that martial law would be necessary to police the city ten years hence raises for Lane the spectre of looting and virulent theft, and the remarkable prospect of police cordons not to protect bomb sites, rescue workers or rubble-strewn streets, but middle-class neighbourhoods and the commercial city centre.25 The French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous photos of Liverpool in the 1960s, amidst a landscape partly still ruined by the wartime Blitz, illustrate something of a bridging between these two forms of urban destruction as children walk by the desolation of a wartime bomb site (Grunenberg and Knifton 2007). The intervening years did not see matters improve. Lane’s metaphor from the 1970s resonates today and is sometimes resurrected to apply to some aspects of Liverpool’s current redevelopment where the new blight has been recast not as reconstruction or renewal but regeneration. But as with the 1970s, Merseyside’s communities have not rolled over; alongside gentrification and revitalization, road widening, transport improvements and vast water-front projects can be found as some significant cases of housing activism in the face of neoliberal building policies deploying the instruments of housing market renewal pathfinder initiatives (HMRI).26

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Across the difficulties of these years, there is still a feeling that Liverpool’s horrendous experiences during the Blitz were largely unacknowledged by both the contemporary press (mainly in the form of newspapers) and subsequent historical accounts; witness the statement by Simon Jones, deputy head of the Museum of Liverpool Life, given at the time of the opening of a new exhibition: ‘Liverpool is a city with a powerful sense of pride in its history. The feeling that this has been an untold story lies at the root of the Spirit of the Blitz exhibition.’27 This allusion to the power of collective memory is challenged by Hughes in his book Port in a Storm; he comprehensively dismisses the myth that Liverpool was unmentioned as the recipient of bombing raids during the war, convincingly arguing that Liverpool’s raids were in fact reported as much as those of other large conurbations throughout the rest of Britain, but admits that subsequent retellings of the story of the period of the Blitz have through necessity (mainly due to the availability of newsreel footage) concentrated on London to the exclusion of other cities (Hughes 1993: appendix III). Of course, there are other ways to remember the Blitz on Merseyside even if public memorials to the wartime Blitz have until recently been surprisingly thin on the ground; Tom Murphy’s moving sculpture in the grounds of St Nicholas Church, Pier Head (unveiled on 7 July 2000), the Blackstock Gardens Memorial plaque (commemorating the large loss of life there on 21 December 1940), the marble memorial tablet dedicated to the parishioners of Holy Cross and the small (though very moving) memorial garden and plaque to those unfortunate inhabitants of Bootle who died while sheltering in the Cooperative store near the corner of Ash Street and Stanley Road on the evening of 7/8 May 1941 are among the more familiar. However, memory of the Liverpool Blitz lives on in the minds of both those who were unfortunate to experience it first-hand and their relatives to whom they recounted their feelings, emotions and memories.

Notes Chapter 1 1 2 3 4 5

6 7

City of Liverpool, Deaths Due to War Operations, Register of Burials, No 2. 352/ MD/1, LRO. IWM B7/23/1 Panic Bags: An extract from the Wartime Journal of an RAF wife. See Holdsworth (2013) for a book-length examination of the ‘intimate mobilities’ of family life. ‘Liverpool. Painted by J. Hamilton Hay. Described by Dixon Scott’ (A. and C. Black 1907, p. 26). These are reminiscent of Ernst Junger’s literary-aesthetic appreciation of total war during the First World War (Jünger and Hoffman 1917), what John Goodby, after Steven Sillars, called an alternation of ‘roaring emptiness’ with ‘an element of exhilaration’ (O’Neill 2010: 858–78). ‘Hygiene of Air Raid Shelters’, Liverpool CB, Report of Principal Regional Medical Officer for the North West Region, 24 October 1940, HO 207/1081, TNA. On the significance of filming Western Approaches in colour see Street et al. (2013).

Chapter 2 1 2

3 4

Justice of the Peace and Local Government Review vol. CIII 1939 No. 20 (20 May 1939), p. 333. The Lumiere film’s display of several ‘Sunlight Soap’ advertisements and billboards was almost certainly no accident. The Lever Bros brand had been featured in the first filmed advertisement, commissioned by the Swiss distributor of the product Francois-Henry Lavanchy-Clarke in 1896. The film about ‘Sunlight Seife’ was shown in New York’s Union Square theatre later that year. Koeck argues, ‘it seems hardly accidental that Promio positioned his camera in such a way that he had a good view of the advertisement board for “Sunlight Soap” mounted on the back of the Liverpool trams as they drove down Church Street, which can be seen as an early form of product placement’ (Koeck and Roberts 2010: 75). Greathead, J.H. and Fox, F. ‘Minutes of Proceedings’ (Institution of Civil Engineers, 27 February 1894, p. 4). ‘Liverpool Overhead Railway: A Failing Traffic’, Guardian, 16 August 1905, p. 9.

Notes 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24

203

‘Liverpool Overhead Railway Advertising Poster’, Museum of Liverpool, MMM.1992.43. ‘The Liverpool Overhead Railway’, Guardian, 9 January 1905, p. 8. ‘Troops Kill Two in Liverpool’, New York Times, 16 August 1911. See for example an article entitled ‘The Liverpool Strike: Armed Escorts for Perishable Goods’, Illustrated London News, 19 August 1911. This included workers from the Transport and General Workers Union, Carters’ and Motormens’ Union, Enginerement and Shipbuilding Federation, Building Trades Federation, Building Trade Workers, AEU Printing and Kindred Trades Federation, NUR, ASLE and F., RCA, National Union of Distributive and Allied Workers, National Union of General and Municipal Workers, Shipwrights, Boilermakers, Liverpool Trades Council, Birkenhead Trades Council, Bootle Trades Council and Wallasey Trades Council. ‘Through German Spectacles’, Kalgoorlie Western Argus, Tuesday 8 August 1916, page 6. Le Queux had explored similar ideas in German Spies in England (1915) and The Invasion of 1910 (1906), where once again Liverpool is a crucial pivot for any aggressor. ‘Aerial Defence’, The Times, Friday, 02 May 1913, p. 5. ‘Aerial Defence’, The Times, Thursday, 08 May 1913; p. 6. ‘Why Air Raid Precautions Are Vital’ The Liverpolitan, February 1937, p. 13. Ibid. Letter from to D. P. Maxwell Fyfe from Peter Stapleton Shaw, 28 March 1939, HO 207/1081, TNA. ‘PROPOSED EVERTON TUNNEL’. HC Deb 18 December 1935 vol 307 c1745. Letter from Peter Shaw MP to David Maxwell Fyfe MP, 28 March 1939, HO 207/1081, TNA. Ibid. HC Deb 21 November 1938 vol 341 cc1346-8. The Home Office received Liverpool’s proposal, which suggested the tunnel’s use (it would stretch 5,650 ft from entrance to entrance) as both a shelter and as a roadway to facilitate the speedy movement of goods and evacuees. Letter from Maxwell Fyfe to John Anderson, 20 January 1939, HO 207/1081, TNA. Osmond of the Home Office would suggest that Fyfe was ‘spinning’ of this dual purpose. Mr Osmond, Minutes to Commons sitting Thursday 16 March 1939, 18 March 1939, HO 207/1081, TNA. Report by Mr Hutston, 18 February 1939, HO 207/1081, TNA. ‘Public Air Raid Shelters’ Memorandum, City Building Surveyor’s (ARP) Department, 24 February 1939, HO 207/1081, TNA. ‘Air Raid Measures: Civic Bodies Conference in Liverpool’, Liverpool Post, 8 November 1935.

204

Notes

25 LRO Scheme for Liverpool’, Air Raid Precautions (Special) Committee, City of Liverpool, October 1935. 26 ‘Protection of the Port Against Enemy Air Raids’, R. J. Hodges, additional assistant to general manager of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, The Liverpolitan May 1937, p. 23. 27 Prevention of Violence (Temporary Provisions) Bill, House of Commons, 24 July 1939 vol 350 cc1047-127. 28 ‘Casualities Services Scheme’, Country Borough of Birkenhead, Department of the Medical Officer of Health, Air Raid Precautions, p. 2. BA. 29 Air Raid Precautions in Schools: Emergency Measures’, Birkenhead Education Committee, 26 September 1938, BA. 30 Ibid. 31 Memorandum to the Air Raid Precautions Committee, 8 April 1939, BA. 32 Circular Letter, D. Mathieson, 16 March 1939, BA. 33 ‘Air Raid Precautions: Voluntary Evacuation Scheme’, F.G. Foster, Medical Officer’s Department, 23 March 1939, BA. 34 Appendix B: Birkenhead Scheme, Home Office Air Raid Precautions Department, 27 September 1938, BA. 35 Letter from G. C. Scrimgeour, Cheshire County Council to E.W. Tame, Town Clerk Birkenhead, 31 October 1938, BA. 36 Letter from the Public Assistance Committee to E.W. Tame, Town Clerk Birkenhead, 6 October 1938, BA. 37 Scheme for the Evacuation of the Civilian Population into Cheshire from Part I: Manchester and Salford, Part II: Birkenhead, October 1938, BA. 38 ‘Instructions for Reception Officers’, Scheme for the Evacuation of the Civilian Population into Cheshire from Part I: Manchester and Salford, Part II: Birkenhead, October 1938, BA. 39 Ibid. 40 Letter to the Town Clerk, Birkenhead, 15 August 1939, BA. 41 Letter from the Women’s Voluntary Service for Civil Defence to Mr Tame, the Town Clerk, 15 April 1939, BA. 42 ‘ARP: Evacuation of School Children Helpers’, Birkenhead Emergency Committee, 1939, BA. 43 Letter from H. Deverill, Mayor of Birkenhead, 20 September 1939, BA. 44 Circular letter, the Regional Commissioner, 3 December 1940, BA. 45 Emergency Precautions, report of the meeting 18 December 1940, BA. The meeting was attended by the Town Clerk of Bootle, Public Assistance Officer Liverpool; Food Executive Officer Wallasey and the deputy food executive officer for Birkenhead. 46 Ibid.

Notes

205

47 ‘Provision of Emergency Shopping Centres for Bombed Areas’, Memo 36/1941, 7 May 1941, BA. 48 Meeting 20 May 1941, ‘Meeting convened for the purpose of discussing the probabilities of establishing Emergency Shopping Centres’, List of Attendees, BA. 49 ‘Mock Air Raid Reveals the Government’s Failures’, The Liverpolitan, June 1938, p. 7, LRO. 50 ‘Women Volunteers for A.R.P’, Liverpool Post, 2 August 1938, LRO. 51 ‘New Searchlight Depot’, Liverpool Post, 15 March 1938, LRO. 52 ‘Auxiliary Firemen’s Headquarters’, Liverpool Post, 10 June 1939, LRO. 53 ‘No Fun in the Fumes’, Liverpool Post, 18 July 1941, LRO. See also on an earlier scheme, ‘Surprise for Shoppers’, Liverpool Post, 30 June 1941.

Chapter 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

‘Air Raid Measures’, Liverpool Post, 8 November 1935, LRO. Ibid. Ibid. Herbert Morrison, HC Deb 01 March 1939 vol 344 cc1287-408, 1383. http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/ENG-LIVERPOOL/ 2000-09/0967946898. Civil Defence Report and Control Centres: ‘Staff Notes – 2nd Revision, December 1942’, 30 January 1943, BA. Letter from W. H. Baines to the Home Office, 8 May 1939, TNA HO 207/1080. Report of the Chief Regional Officer, Liverpool County Borough, 2 June 1939, TNA HO 207/1080. Letter to Sir Sydney Jones from George James, 8 September 1939, TNA HO 207/1080. ‘Home Security from Manchester’, Situation Report, 1800 Hours 28/11/40 to 0600 hours 29/11/40., 29 November 1940, TNA HO 186/557. Marked Secret, ‘Home Security from Manchester’: Report on Bombing Raid on Liverpool and Bootle on Night of 28/29 November 1940, TNA HO 186/557. Marked Secret, ‘Home Security from Manchester’: Regional Situation Report 06:00/22/12/40. To 18:00/22/1240, TNA HO 186/557. Conclusions of a Meeting of the War Cabinet held at 10 Downing St S.W.1, on Monday, 23 December 1940, at 12 noon, TNA CAB/65/10/29. Regional Situation Report to 0800/13/3/41, TNA HO 186/557. Regional Situation Report to 0800/13/3/41, TNA HO 186/557. Conclusions of a Meeting of the War Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street, S.W.1, on Monday, May 12 1941, at 5 pm, TNA, CAB/65/18/28.

206

Notes

17 Scheme for Application in Case of Breakdown of Main Report and Control Centre, County Borough of Birkenhead, Civil Defence, 1940, BA. 18 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/sutherland-devastation-1941-an-east-endstreet-n05736/text-catalogue-entry. 19 Report of R. O. Lloyd to the Town Clerk, 30 September 1940, BA. 20 Diary of Mrs G. Beck, IWM 89/19/1. 21 ‘Corps of Cyclist Messengers’, Liverpool Daily Post, 12 October 1939, LRO. 22 Ibid. 23 HC Deb 07 August 1941 vol 373 cc2077-8. 24 HC Deb 24 July 1941 vol 373 cc1040-3. 25 ‘Coordination of Measures to Deal with Heavy Air Attack’, Home Security Circular 168/1941, July 1941, LRO. 26 Ministry of Works and Buildings, Memo 65/1942, Appendix A. ‘Emergency First Aid to Buildings (Including Warehouses) and Plant Buildings (Including Warehouses and Stores)’, LRO. 27 ‘Provision of Emergency Shopping Centres Including Steel Booths for Bombed Areas’, Memo 66/1942, Ministry of Food, 11 August 1942, LRO. 28 ‘Women Fire-Guards’, Liverpool Echo, 2 September 1942, Cuttings, LRO. 29 The ‘Liverpool View’ was seen to be backed by Manchester’s Emergency Committee and Liverpool and London Chambers of Commerce. ‘Women Watchers: More Support for L’pool View’, The Liverpool Echo, 7 September 1942, Cuttings, LRO. 30 ‘Women Fire Watchers: L’pool-London Comparisons’, Liverpool Echo, 8 September 1942, Cuttings LRO. 31 ‘His Case for MPs. Why Women Should Not Fire-Guard at Docks’, Liverpool Echo, 23 September 1942, Cuttings LRO. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Hogan was referring to the famous Gypsy writer and astrologer Xavier Petulengro. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 ‘Dock Thefts at Liverpool’, Guardian, 21 December 1940, p. 4. 41 ‘His Case for MPs’. 42 Wasson explores these narratives in Fuller’s poem ‘The Growth of Crime’, and in Caught. The dock warehouses form a ‘broke, torn-up dark mosaic’, p. 45. 43 ‘A Dockside Difficulty’, Liverpool Echo, 17 February 1941, LRO. 44 Ibid. 45 House of Commons Debates, 12 February 1941 vol 368 cc1356-7. 46 ‘The Handling of Shipping’, Guardian, 25 February 1941, p. 10.

Notes 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

207

‘Mr. Morrison on Merseyside’, Guardian, 15 February 1941, p. 8. Ibid, p. 8. ‘Dockers Do a Good Job’, 10 May 1941, LRO. This was Pathe’s title of Wilkie’s filmed visit. ‘Wendell Wilkie’s Lightning Tour’, British Pathé, 10 February 1941. http://www.britishpathe.com/video/wendellwilkies-lightning-tour-on-sleeve-as-wendel/query/41+12. Wilkie had been unsuccessful in his presidential campaign against F.D. Roosevelt in the previous year, but became a fervent supporter of many of Roosevelt’s projects such as lend lease. ‘Mr Wilkie Sees Liverpool for Himself ’, Liverpool Post, 3 February 1941, LRO. Ibid. ‘New Zealand’s Premier’, Guardian, 26 July 1941, p. 8. Ibid, p. 8. ‘Women Fire-Watchers’, The Liverpool Echo, 29 September 1942, Cuttings LRO. ‘Mr Morrison in Liverpool’, Liverpool Evening Express, 24 September 1942, Cuttings, LRO. It was reported in the Liverpool Post that attempts had been made during the meeting to contact the minister but his engagements didn’t allow him. ‘Liverpool Fire-Guard Protest in London’, Liverpool Post, 24 September 1942, Cuttings, LRO; ‘Women Fire-Guards’, Guardian, 24 September 1942, p. 2. ‘Women Fire-Watchers’. Ibid. ‘Alderman Hogan Answers Morrison’, Liverpool Evening Express, 25 September 1942, Cuttings, LRO. ‘Women Fire-Watch’, Guardian, 7 October 1942, p. 8. ‘Dockside Is “special”’, Liverpool Echo, 6 October 1942, Cuttings, LRO. Liverpool Echo, 6 October 1942, Cuttings, LRO. ‘Firewatchers Found Asleep at Home’, Birkenhead News, 1942, LRO. ‘Women Fire-Watchers’, Liverpool Post, 6 October 1942, Cuttings LRO. Extracted from News Review, 8 October 1942, Cuttings, LRO. Guardian, 18 November 1942. Ibid. ‘Women’s Fire-Watching Order’, Liverpool Echo, 8 October 1942, Cuttings, LRO.

Chapter 4 1 2

Liverpool Echo, 5 May 1941. Times, 9 March 1941; Daily Mail, 9 March 1941; Daily Mirror, 9 March 1941. This usually apocryphal type of action has a long precedence; for example, ‘wreckers’

208

3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Notes of ships were often accused of similar practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Following the Earl of Wemyss’ shipwreck off the coast of Brancaster in the autumn of 1833, eleven women were drowned in their cabins, and wreckers were accused of stripping their bodies of jewellery and removing rings from severed fingers – see Cox (2010: 190–2) for further details. Although, in fact, it does not appear that any convicted looter was actually condemned to death in England during the Second World War. TNA HO144/21551. Quoted at http://www.theweek.co.uk/politics/3149/nation-looters-it-evenhappened-blitz. Birkenhead News, 14 July 1941. 1946 Watch Committee Review, 65. In addition to the well-known problems of crime statistics – see a summary of these debates in Godfrey (2014) – the introduction of an extraordinary raft of Defence Regulations designed to control the population during extraordinary times complicated matters still further. Watch Committee Report 1946:10. The Chief Constable believed that the public were very accepting of their trafficcontrol measures (1946:14). See for example, Liverpool Echo, 16 August 1940, 12 September 1940; Fifth Columnists (Liverpool Echo, 8 August 1940). For details of the IRA campaign, see Evans (2013); Thomas (2003: 338–40). In the rest of the country, the following year there were over 2,000 stoppages which led to the imposition of Defence Regulation 1AA, supported by the TUC, which made giving incitement to strike unlawful. Watch Committee Report 1946:64. Birkenhead Chief Constable’s Report 1940, LRO. W. Trotter, British Medical Journal, Part 2, Vol 18; 1939. Birkenhead Chief Constable’s Report 940: 8, LRO. Birkenhead Chief Constable’s Report 1940, BA. HC Deb 07 May 1940 vol 360 c1049. Memorandum of War-Time Lighting for Docks Issued by the Home Office, ARP Department, 1939, BA. Liverpool Echo, 3 August 1940. Ibid., 19 August 1940. Ibid., 23 August 1940. Guardian, 19 October 1939. Unpublished diary of PC Albert Edward Wilcock 1905–46, Chester Heritage Centre. While such behaviour was not officially condoned, neither was it seen as unreasonable; a comment in Justice of the Peace No 5 (3 February 1940), p. 59, perhaps sums up the prevailing view. Talking about the irresponsible use of torches,

Notes

26 27 28 29

30

209

the publication stated, ‘The remedy (not provided by the law, but the sensible citizen will not worry about a little illegality in such circumstances) is for the saner citizen to knock the torch to the ground and stamp on the bulb. We venture to prophesy that a summons for this wilful damage would not be granted.’ Liverpool Magistrates Court Registers, 21 February 1942, LRO. Liverpool Court Registers, 1944, LRO. Birkenhead Petty Sessions Criminal Registers, 1945, BA. Edinburgh Review, July 1852 (but the axiom had been around for a considerable time before then). For a summary of this literature see Cox (2014) and Godfrey (2014). Birkenhead Court Registers, 1–8 May 1941 BA.

Chapter 5 1

2

3

4 5

During the First World War he wrote the very popular Keep the Home Fires Burning, which was an enduring nostalgic and patriotic anthem for many years afterwards. Roodhouse (2013: 1–11) describes the Novello case in great detail, using it as a tool to interrogate public reactions to the black market. Novello was essentially found guilty of conspiracy to misuse petrol coupons supplied to him by a fan of his work. His claim that he misunderstood where the vouchers came from may have had some validity, but his claims that he needed them because he could not stand travelling by train received an unsympathetic response from the courts and the general public. The etymology of the word ‘spiv’ is disputed, but it was in common parlance in England by the mid-1930s. It is interesting to note the effect that the passage of time has had on the word – by the 1970s, the term had acquired a nostalgic and somewhat sympathetic aura, with the most famous ‘spiv’ undoubtedly being the ‘loveable rogue’ Private Joe Walker in the long-running television series, Dad’s Army. Liverpool Echo, 6 August 1940. Liverpool Echo, 1 April 1943. Britain of course had faced similar rationing during the last year of the First World War, but there appears to have been a rather different view with regard to the use of sugar in jam-making. Research has shown that almost half of the regulatory wartime offences prosecuted against women in Crewe, Cheshire, between 1914 and 1918 were for the wrongful acquisition of sugar for use in jam-making under the Sugar (Domestic Preserving) Order, for which the maximum sentence could be £100 fine or six months’ imprisonment – see David J. Cox and Paul Wilson, ‘The extra-ordinariness of everyday life on

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18 19 20

21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28

Notes the home front: women and crime in wartime Crewe, Cheshire 1914–18’, paper given at the Women’s History Network Annual Conference, University of Worcester, 2014. Sugar was in short supply following a successful U-boat campaign which saw over 85,000 tons of sugar sent to the bottom of the Atlantic between February and June 1917. The difference between attitudes in the First World War and the Second World War may be due to the fact that all sugar consumed in Britain during the First World War was imported, as sugar beet was not commercially grown there until the 1920s. Bread was, however, rationed for two years after the war ended, from July 1946 to July 1948. There were 893 food inspectors employed in 1944. Liverpool Echo, 6 November 1940. One inspector was commended for bringing in more than £3,000 over the length of his appointment. Unlike other foodstuffs, meat was rationed by price rather than weight. Liverpool Echo, 22 January 1941. Liverpool Echo, 15 April 1943. Liverpool Echo, 19 November 1942. Liverpool Echo, 31 March 1944. Liverpool Echo, 22 February 1945. Liverpool Echo, 17 March 1941. Guardian, 18 November 1942: ‘This case concerns what can really be termed a petrol speak-easy’. The perpetrators were found guilty of conspiracy to evade provisions of the Motor Fuel Rationing Order. Guardian, 22 May 1941. Liverpool Echo, 19 November 1942 Liverpool Echo, 11 March 1941. Other esoteric schemes were also devised. One such elaborate scam, whereby a formula for a cheap and plentiful petrol substitute would be provided for a fee of £400, was prosecuted by the Ministry of Defence – who were the intended customers for this ‘wonder fuel’ (Liverpool Echo, 14 January 1940). Liverpool Echo, 6 December 1940. Vegetarians received extra cheese rations in lieu of a meat ration. The People’s War Project (http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar) was organized by the BBC. This recollection (A3311056) forms part of the collection, and can be accessed via the website. http://www.1900s.org.uk/1940s-shopping-luxury.htm. Daily Mail, 6 September 1944; Evening Standard, 4 January 1945. Liverpool Echo, 4 December 1940. Liverpool Echo, 20 August 1940. The 1951 Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders reported that 5,000 soldiers were incarcerated in British military prisons during the Second World War

Notes

29

30 31 32

33 34 35

211

(Walklate and McGarry 2015). Many had been imprisoned for conducting looting or black market activities at home or while on service abroad. German officers’ pistols (Parabellum Lugers) were in particular prized ‘souvenirs’, with many British soldiers (including an uncle of one of the authors) attempting to smuggle them back into Britain. TNA BT 64/869. ‘Summary of prosecutions and penalties imposed’ in MAF 100/5, TNA, quoted in Roodhouse (2013: 31). Liverpool Echo, 27 February 1941. Similarly, the Guardian, 13 June 1942, carried an article concerning widespread corruption and fraud in timber diverted from ships to private contracts. Justice Stable is reported as stating, ‘this corruption will either be cut out of commercial life, or it will destroy the State, and I am determined so far as lies in my power to see that the second alternative is not going to take place’. Liverpool Echo, 1 March 1940. Liverpool Echo, 8 March 1941. Liverpool Echo, 12 March 1941.

Chapter 6 1

F. J. Marquis, later Lord Woolton, was a considerably influential figure in Liverpool and national politics. He was one of the founders of the Liverpool University Settlement, acting as first warden. 2 The Cambridge Evacuation survey would follow Liverpool’s own, discussed below – see Isaacs (1941). The Cambridge survey, led by Susan Isaacs, was welcomed by Cyril Burt as unique, supervised by an ‘exceptionally able and experienced research committee’ (Burt 1942: 71). 3 HL Deb 29 March 1944 vol 131 cc324-57. 4 ‘While Family Was in Shelter’, Liverpool Echo, 14 September 1940, LRO. 5 ‘Boy Housebreaker’, Liverpool Echo, 6 January 1941, LRO. 6 30th December 1940, Liverpool LRO. 7 See ‘A Boy Looter’, Liverpool Echo, 30 December 1940, LRO. 8 ‘Disgrace to Their Country, Liverpool Echo, 22 October 1940, LRO. 9 ‘Sabotage by Boys’, Liverpool Echo, 8 August 1940, LRO; ‘Juvenile Crime’, Liverpool Echo, 8 August 1940, LRO; ‘Boy Gangsters with Razors’, Liverpool Echo, 15 August 1940 LRO. 10 ‘A Barmaid’s Wounds’, Liverpool Echo, 7 April 1941, LRO. 11 ‘Cut A.R.P Telephone’, Liverpool Echo, 18 April 1941, LRO. 12 Birkenhead News, 28 September 1940.

212 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Notes Chief Constable’s Reports, 1939–45, Liverpool LRO. Chief Constable’s Reports, 1946, Liverpool, p. 79, Liverpool LRO. ‘Brothers Accused’, Liverpool Echo, 26 March 1941, LRO. Mass-Observation Archive, Air-Raids, 23/9/M, Liverpool. ‘Girls in Shelters’, Liverpool Echo, 11 November 1940, LRO. ‘You and His Girl Friend’, Liverpool Echo, 21 May 1941, LRO. Justice of the Peace, No 40 1940 (5 October), p. 550. Justice of the Peace, No 41 1940 (12 October), p. 565. Justice of the Peace, No 51 1940 (21 December), p. 707. ‘Shelter Hooligans’, Liverpool Echo, 6 December 1940, LRO. ‘Boys Take Sandbags’, Liverpool Echo, 23 August 1940, LRO; ‘Stolen Sandbags’, Liverpool Echo, 23 September 1940, LRO. ‘Boys Who Stole Bricks’, Liverpool Echo, 2 August 1940, LRO. ‘Turned into ‘Shambles’, Liverpool Echo, 16 October 1940, LRO. Birkenhead News, 19 October 1940. This lack of engagement with such organizations was clearly recognized as a potential problem by others apart from Bagot; Mackay (cited in Bailey 1987: 273) states that the various youth service corps throughout Britain were specifically exhorted to be used in order to combat juvenile delinquency. ‘L’pool Dead End Kids’, Liverpool Echo, 25 January 1941, LRO. Parliamentary Papers 1942–43, vol. VI, Cmd. 6404, HMSO, London. ‘Evacuation and Schools’, Liverpool Echo, 5 March 1941, LRO. ‘L’pool Dead End Kids’, Liverpool Echo, 25 January 1941, LRO. Liverpool Emergency Committee Minutes, 12 May 1941, LRO, p. 136. ‘Those Young Offenders’, Liverpool Echo, 10 February 1940, LRO; see also ‘Youth off the rails’, Liverpool Echo, 5 February 1941, LRO. ‘Tough Guys’, Liverpool Echo, 7 February 1941, LRO. A Liverpool Juvenile Delinquency committee was also set up by Hobhouse in 1946. Hobhouse was an interesting man. He was also involved in the earlier Population Commission and its report that promoted eugenicist ideas and a ‘three if you can’ policy. Hobhouse was also a director of the Alfred Holt and Company and the Straits Steamship Company, Liverpool’s most successful shipping businesses. Hobhouse to Gardiner, 13 September 1940. Liverpool Civil Defence Cadet Corps, lord mayor. ‘Civil Defence Cadets’, Liverpool Echo, 1 February 1941, LRO. ‘Air Training for Boys’, Liverpool Echo, 18 January 1941, LRO ‘Youth Service Corps, Justice of the Peace and Local Government Review, March 22nd, 1941, p. 169. Ibid. Letter from Hobhouse to Gater, 6 December 1940, TNA.

Notes

213

41 ‘Air Training for Boys’, 1941. 42 These theories were not new of course, and had been circulating in the inter-war period; see the Home Office Departmental Committee on the Treatment of the Young Offender, Home Office 1927: 6. 43 ‘Workers and Juvenile Crime’, Liverpool Echo, 31 January 1940, LRO. 44 ‘Alone in the Blitz’, Liverpool Echo, 23 May 1941, LRO. 45 Ibid. 46 ‘Jump in Boy Crime’, Liverpool Echo, 5 March 1941, LRO. 47 Others would suggest a more joined-up relationship between the police, education authority and probation service to better provide information on each case. ‘Treatment of Child Criminals’, Liverpool Echo, 27 January 1941, LRO. 48 ‘The First Time’, Liverpool Echo, 1 April 1941, LRO. 49 ‘You Are Warned!’, Liverpool Echo, 6 August 1940, LRO. 50 Caradog Jones’ masterful survey was appreciated by many and compared to Charles Booth’s influential studies of London. 51 As quoted in Starkey (2006: 543): ‘Dr C. O. Stallybrass, the Deputy MOH for Liverpool in the 1940s, believed that women helped to cause serious physical health problems in their families; their failure was an essential element in the aetiology of a particular sort of peptic ulcer found, so he said, only among men in “problem families”, and caused by the “illness and discouragement of a wife who has to go out to work, irregular and ill-cooked meals, family dissension”’. 52 ‘Is It Fair to Be Lenient?’, Liverpool Echo, 4 March 1941, LRO. 53 ‘Children (Curfew)’, HC Deb 9 July 1940 vol 362 c1082. 54 Ibid. 55 In the Commons debate of the Emergency Powers Bill, Logan would argue, ‘We will give to any Government, provided it is a legitimate Government working in the interest of one and all, every power it can exercise for the common welfare of the people’. EMERGENCY POWERS (DEFENCE) BILL HC Deb 22 May 1940 vol 361 c166. 56 ‘Juvenile Crime’, Liverpool Echo, 5 August 1940, LRO. 57 Chief Constable’s Reports, 1946, LRO. 58 The post-war youth culture in the city was, of course, given a huge lift by The Beatles (all of whom were born during the Second World War).

Chapter 7 1 2

Report of the Regional Commissioner for the North West to the Ministry of Information, 9 May 1941, HO 186/557, TNA. Ibid.

214 3

4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22

Notes As Robin Woolven has shown, just two weeks into the offensive on London and the city had almost been brought to a state of paralysis, 1,800 roads had been blocked, and three million tonnes of rubble had built up into mountains. Warren Fisher would be given the task of heading up his War Damage Survey working out of city hall. The War Damage Act 1941 would give adequate provision for the legal right of military, local authorities and contractors to enter private property and clear debris (Woolven 2013). Although Hosdall focused part of his report on the state of morale, he had been particularly critical of the MO reports. ‘The impression that we got was of a small band of people who got hold of all the defeatist people that could be found, went around trying to find something which broke down, and then condemned everything on the strength of it’ (Hinton 2013: 202). ‘Visit to Liverpool – May 4/5’ Wing Commander Hodsall, 1941 HO 186/557, TNA. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. From the Town Clerk to the Mersey Tunnel Joint Committee, 28 December 1940, BA. Letter from the Principle Officer of the offices of the Regional Commissioner of the North West to the Town Clerk, Birkenhead, 26 March 1941, BA, who was able to approve Hamilton Street, but not Rendel. Letter from the Birkenhead Town Clerk to the Regional Commissioner, 21 March 1941, BA. Liverpool Emergency Committee minutes 12 May 1941, LRO, p. 190. The land belonged to the estate of Thornton Hough, where William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme was born. Letter from D. Kenrick to the Headmaster of Conway Street, Boys’ School, 11 September 1939, BA. ‘Evacuation – Return of Evacuees to Birkenhead’, Letter to the Regional Commissioner, North Western Regional Offices, from the Town Clerk of Birkenhead, 26 September 1939, BA. Ibid. Letter from Wallace Pugh, Clerk to Oswestry District council, to the Town Clerk, Birkenhead, 12 December 1939, BA. These details were relayed to the West Midlands Traffic Area, presumably for wider coordination purposes.

Notes

215

23 ‘Birkenhead Education Committee, Evacuation Scheme’, figures enclosed in a letter from G.B. Dempsey Director of Education of the Education Committee, to the Town Clerk, Birkenhead, 13 September 1939, BA. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Suggested paragraph for the local press, 14 September 1939, BA. 28 See, for example, the report of the Director of Education G. B. Dempsey for the attention of the Birkenhead Emergency Committee, ‘Education of Non Evacuated School Children’, 9 October 1939, BA. See in particular the views of the Board of Education in their circular 1479, ‘School Children in Evacuation Areas’, 29 September 1939. 29 Titmuss’ interpretation has been since revised. John Macnicol (1986), for example, finds the post-war consensus achieved by what evacuation revealed to be something of a myth, instead reinforcing social and class differences. 30 The Our Town’s report was produced by the Women’s Group of Public Welfare, which arose from the Women’s Group on Problems Arising from Evacuation, under the National Council of Social Services. Their report received wide circulation and benefited from write-ups in The New Statesman, the Economist and elsewhere. Their sub-committee on hygiene, those attending its first meeting Amy Sayle, Irene Barclay, Elizabeth Denby, Mrs Henry Haldane, Letty Harford and Dora Ibberson, had, according to Welshman’s excellent discussion of the context, consequences and makeup of the group, the following terms of reference: ‘to explore the problems of rural water supply and sanitation, and of manners and customs in the home, that have been raised as the result of evacuation’ (Welshman 1999: 787). According to Welshman, the report tended to reproduce existing social and moral concerns over ‘problem groups’ and we might conclude that by implication with Liverpool, problem areas. 31 Stallybrass was deputy medical officer of Health for the City and Port of Liverpool from 1933 to 1948 and an important epidemiologist, author of some of the first textbooks in the discipline. 32 Report of P. Henderson, Ministry of Education, 3 November 1941, ED 137/227, TNA. 33 ‘Extract from Report of Dr David Fraser, Medical Officer of Health for the Urban District of Buckley’, 26 September 1939, BA. 34 The letter E. F. Mott to Board of Education, TNA ED 50/206, is referred to in Macnicol but Charles Francis is incorrectly referenced as CF. p. 17. Mott is interesting, particularly from the perspective of the ferment of concepts around Britain’s social problem groups and what Macnicol has called a conceptual move to its relationship with the notion of the family. Perhaps it is not coincidental

216

35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51

Notes that Mott’s wife Lillian became a staunch support of women’s suffrage and moves towards birth control in her position at the Society for the Provision of Birth Control Clinics in Liverpool. ‘Evacuation Allowance’, Catholic Herald, 3 February 1939, p. 11. HC Deb 02 November 1939 vol 352 cc2160-278. ‘Hotel Keepers and Unemployed Protest Against 8s. 6d. “Evacuation Allowance”’, Catholic Herald, 3 February 1939, p. 11. The article would also compare the rate against that provided for the welfare of the unemployed, who would receive only 3s per child and make curious connections between social welfare, industry and the evacuation. Letter of W. J. Tudor to E. W. Tame, Town Clerk and Chief Evacuating Officer, Birkenhead, 13 September 1939, BA. IWM 89/19/1, diary of Mrs G. Beck. Extracts from A. E. Curran 940 CUR, LRO. Report to the Town Clerk, 26 December 1940, Air Raid Rescue Corps, BA. ‘“Water Rats” Who Man the Motor Fire-Boats’, Liverpool Echo, 20 April 1943, Cuttings, LRO. Report of the Air Raid Rescue Corps to the Emergency Committee, 4 September 1940, BA. The chairman of the corps would add to the report that since writing they could report that the missing man had been found, located ‘in the remains of his bed, having taken the full weight of two floors and he was, therefore, badly damaged. Death would be instantaneous. The body was eventually removed to the mortuary and the unsafe portions of the three buildings were demolished and the three houses in question are now ready to be handed over to the owners’ (p. 2). Letter from the Air Raid Rescue Corps to the Town Clerk, 11 September 1940, BA. Report of the Air Raid Rescue Corps to the Emergency Committee, 9 August 1940, BA. Ibid. Ibid. Tasked with picking through the rubble for casualties during the London Blitz as a volunteer fireman, and a wider literary landscape coming to terms with the dismemberment of bodies made so present in the First and Second World Wars, novelist Henry Green’s work on a non-fiction book about the Blitz faltered as he was frequently brought to tears (see Hentea 2014). In her story The Heat of the Day (1998 [1948]), Elizabeth Bowen wrote that the lost and found parts of bodies marked, instead, an ‘apparitional landscape’ of peculiar presence (Hentea 2014), pervading everything. Ibid. Ibid. Letter to the Town Clerk, 16 March 1941, BA.

Notes 52 53 54 55

217

Letter to H. D. Ryalls, 14 March 1941, BA. Letter to the Town Clerk, 30 March 1941, BA. Ibid. Ten years later as a contractor, Lloyd would lead a team to the United States to New York to study American methods of manufacturing. Made up of seventeen engineers, architects and builders, the team were particularly interested in new means of efficiency to cut costs, and explore Washington, and housing and industry in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo and Boston. ‘British Experts Will Observe Building in US’, The Berkshire Eagle, 29 September 1949. The chair of the Air Raid Rescue Corps made the suggestion to Birkenhead’s emergency committee that all further discussion with owners, estate agents and tenants should happen with the local authority’s engineer’s department. we suggest that the question of carrying out the decisions taken, on our examination and also meeting the owners of the property and discussing alternative policies to demolition which may be put forward, and in addition there is the legal aspect of all these cases incorporating subsequent compensation, following the incident proper which is reported to you, from that point onwards the matter should be in the hands of permanent officials of the Corporation.

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

Letter from Lloyd to the Town Clerk, 30 October 1940, BA. The corporation would respond the next day, agreeing with the suggestions. They suggested, however, that it should come ‘with, perhaps, a warning that the department already have plenty to do’. Letter from the Town Clerk to R. O. Lloyd, 31 October 1940, BA. Report of R. O. Lloyd to the Town Clerk, 14 October 1940, BA. ‘Air Raid Incident – Clive Road, 9/1/41’, 15 January 1941, p. 5, BA. Ibid. Ibid. Letter from R.O. Lloyd to the Town Clerk, 11 January 1941, BA. Ibid. Ibid. ‘Air Raid 9.1.41 – Complaint by Mr R. O. Lloyd’, internal report addressed to the Super Intendant from Chief Inspector, 15 January 1941, BA. Ibid. Report to the Town Clerk By the Training Officer, 1 November 1941, BA. Letter to the Town Clerk, 4 November 1941, BA. Report Chief Inspector W.R. Jones to the Superintendent and Deputy Chief Constable, Air Raid Incident, Livingstone Road, 1/11/41, 3 November 1941, BA. Ibid. Report of Constable Stacey to the Chief Inspector, Air Raid Incident – Livingstone Street, 1/11/41, 2 November 1941, BA.

218 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81 82 83 84 85

Notes Report of the Air Raid Rescue Corps, 18 September 1940, BA. Letter from R. O. Lloyd to the Town Clerk, 19 September 1940, BA Ibid. Letter from Emrys Evans, Town Clerk of Wallasey to Sir Harry Pritchard, 15 August 1940, BA. Letter from Sir Harry Pritchard to Emrys Evans, 16 August 1940, BA. Repair of War Damage Bill, HC Deb 01 July 1941, vol 372 cc 1302–4. Ibid. Report of R. O. Lloyd to the Town Clerk, 1 October 1940, BA. Jas H. Woodward ‘Report upon emergency Rest Centres and Hostels as Requested by the General Purposes Sub-Committee of the Public Assistance Committee’, 25 November 1940, BA. Report of Lloyd, Chairman of the Birkenhead Air Raid Rescue Corps, to the Town Clerk, 29 October 1940, BA Report of the Air Raid Rescue Corps to the Emergency Committee, 4 May 1941, BA. Report of the Air Raid Rescue Corps to the Emergency Committee, 7 May 1941, BA. Report of the Air Raid Rescue Corps to the Emergency Committee, 17 March 1941, BA. Report of the Air Raid Rescue Corps to the Emergency Committee, 15 March 1941, BA. Ibid, p. 2. See the captivating online photographic exhibition by Tom Fairclough, based on his installation Collateral (2011). http://collateral.foliohd.com/.

Chapter 8 1

2

3 4 5 6 7

MO TC 23 box 6/H/air raid morale. The investigator had been in central London from 7 to 16 September 1940, and had therefore experienced the first week of the concerted German attacks on that city. ‘Effects on Labour in Bootle: Effects of the Merseyside Raids of May 1941’, p.1, Ministry of Home Security: research and experiments department, 1942, HO 196/16, TNA. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. So called due to the proclamation emanating from the German Foreign Office on 24 April 1942 which stated that ‘we shall go out and bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide’.

Notes 8 9 10 11 12 13

14

15 16

17

18 19

20

21

219

‘A note on the meaning and measurement of the morale o towns in relation to airraids’, C. Emmens, 1943, HO 199 4563, TNA. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. ‘Summary of Reports Received from Chief Officers of Police for the Period from Midnight 22nd June 1940 to Midnight 6 July 1940’, Office of the Regional Commissioner, 1940, HO 199/445 TNA. ‘Summary of Reports Received from Chief Officers of Police for the Period from Midnight 3 August 1940 to Midnight 17 August 1940’, Office of the Regional Commissioner, 1940, HO 199/445 TNA. HC Deb 15 August 1940 vol 364 cc948-9. ‘Liverpool and Merseyside: Air Raid Report’, 8 May 1941, accompanying a letter from the Economic League, 12 May 1941, HO 199/427, TNA. The Economic League had a history of passing intelligence to the state, were active in producing anti-communist propaganda and had close ties to the intelligence services. The author of the letter, then acting director of the league, was Captain Tom Gribble, who would eventually play a role in the Political Warfare Executive, an organization that perpetrated subservice activities reporting to the Foreign Office. Maghull was a military hospital primarily, but it became a centre for psychologists, anatomists, academics and doctors to pursue the study and treatment of shellshock, neurasthenia and hysteria. See the substantial discussions by Jones (2010) and Shephard (2003). Ibid. ‘For Headquarters Board of Trade: Information Required for Each “Problem” Town or Area’, Marked Secret, BT 64/3272. A letter forward from the Midland’s Regional Controller to the Board of Trade’s headquarters suggested Liverpool’s attractiveness because of its previously high level of unemployed female workers. British Enka, a silk manufacturer, later taken over by Courtaulds, built a factory in Aintree because of its proximity to effluent, the ICI chemical works at Widnes and nearby collieries. ‘Extract of a letter to S.A Sadler Forster’, 9 June 1943, BT 64/3272 TNA. Birkenhead was asking similar questions of itself in 1944. A letter from the Joint Committee of Dental Associations informed the Town Clerk that Birkenhead’s population had reduced from estimates of 147, 946 in 1931 to 115,400 in 1943. Letter to the Town Clerk, 6 October 1943, BA. ‘Mass Observation’, Memo to Mr Macadam from Mrs Adams, 5 March 1940, INF 1/262, TNA. Ivison Macadam was assistant secretary to the Ministry of Information. Mrs Mary Adams was then director of Home Intelligence having moved from a position as producer at the BBC. Adams was a friend of Harrison’s, and would eventually set up the Social Survey.

220

Notes

22 Letter to Mrs Mary Adams from Tom Harrison, 26 March 1940, INF 1/262, TNA. 23 The report looks to have been composed by MO on the 6th January and prepared for the Admiralty on the 10th. ‘Report on Liverpool and Manchester’, MO for the Admiralty, 10th January 1941, HO199/442, TNA. 24 Ibid., p. 3. 25 We are particularly grateful to Lara Feigel for encouraging us to develop this line of thinking further, to consider morale not only as an excessive thing resisting a governmental grasp but as an object it is possible to possess too much of (The Hidden Blitz, Workshop, Claus Moser Centre, Keele 2012). 26 MO, ‘Report on Liverpool’, p. 3. 27 Ibid., p. 5 28 Ibid., p. 6 29 Ibid., p. 6 30 Ibid., p. 6. 31 Ibid., p. 4 32 Ibid., p. 8 33 Ibid., p. 8 34 Ibid., p. 9 35 Ibid., p. 11 36 Ibid., p. 11. 37 Ibid., p. 10. 38 Ibid., p. 9. 39 Memo addressed to Mr Mabane, 28 January 1940, HO 199/442, TNA. 40 Herbert Morrison to A. V. Alexander, Admiralty, 21 January 1940, HO 199/442, TNA. 41 Letter from A. V. Alexander to Herbert Morrison, 23 January 1940, HO 199/442, TNA. 42 Mabane to George Gater, 27 January 1941, HO 199/442, TNA. 43 Letter from Herbert Morrison to A. V. Alexander 31 January 1941, HO 199/442, TNA. 44 ‘Reports by Mass Observation After Raids on Coventry, Bristol, Southampton, Cheltenham, Liverpool and Manchester’, by Harold Scott and Hodsoll, 27 December 1941, HO 199/442, TNA. 45 ‘Home Intelligence Special Report on Conditions in Merseyside’, Ministry of Information, INF 1/292, TNA. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 ‘Special Report on the Merseyside and Clydeside’, Home Intelligence, June 1941, INF 1/292 TNA. 52 Ibid.

Notes 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

221

Ibid. Home Intelligence Weekly Report, No 34, ‘May 21–May 28 1941’, INF 1/292 TNA. Ibid. Hemmerde is a notable character. A high-society figure, Liberal MP and King’s Council, Hemmerde came to serve as one of Liverpool’s youngest ever recorders. Several have noted his progressive attitudes. John Simpson picks up on Hemmerde’s stand against racism, which had brought a West Indian George Alexander Mcguire Roberts to his court for failing to turn up for Home Guard Duty in July 1944. Roberts attests to racial insults and was too intimidated to attend his ARP post. Hemmerde, upholding his views on ‘liberal polity’, fined him well under the standard £5 for the infraction, and only because he had pled guilty. He also complained at the impertinence of Roberts’ discrimination (Simpson 2010: 78; see also Summerfield and Peniston-Bird 2007). Hemmerde would also weigh in on the trial of the musician Eric Mareo (Ferral and Ellis 2002). ‘Recorder Rebukes Gossipers’, Guardian, 27 May 1941. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. ‘Wanted to Look Big: Lying War Rumours’, Guardian, 17 May 1941. Ibid. Ibid. Guardian, 19 May 1941. Guardian, 31 January 1940. Appendix 2. ‘The Raids on Merseyside- May 2–6’, Home Intelligence Weekly Report, No 34, ‘May 21–May 28 1941’, INF 1/292 TNA. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Interview No 2. Retired Fireman Mr Fred Williams and his wife. Search No 8. The May 1941 Blitz in Liverpool, LRO.

Chapter 9 1 2

3

IWM 95/14/1, ‘When Granny Wore Navy Blue’ (diary of Mrs B G Rhodes), p. 50. As if to underline the ongoing threat of domestic terror, as this paragraph was being written, news was coming in of the terrorist attack on the offices of the French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Hamer had considerable experience of both military and civilian engineering and surveying; he had been deputy engineer and surveyor of Stockport before signing

222

4 5 6

7 8 9 10

11 12

13

14 15

16 17 18

Notes up for military service in the Cheshire Regiment in 1915. He rose from the rank of private to major in the Royal Engineers and after the war returned to Stockport before being appointed as city engineer in Hull in 1930 and then joining Liverpool corporation in 1937 – see his obituary in Institute of Civil Engineers Proceedings, PART 1 (September 1952), p. 652. Justice of the Peace 42 (9 October 1940), p. 579. File Report 706 Liverpool, 22 May 1941. The British had in fact carried out the world’s first aerial bombardment (somewhat ironically on German Zeppelin sheds) as early as 22 September 1914 (see Castle 2011). The men are commemorated on a memorial plaque in the Liverpool offices of the Unite union – see http://www.international-brigades.org.uk/memorials. MO Diarist 5024AR warden chief assistant 14 August 1940. HC Deb 11 June 1941 vol 372 c207W. As, of course, did all the other cities throughout Britain and Europe that were bombed by either Allied or Axis bombers. Richard Overy has calculated that Allied bombers dropped a total of almost 2,000,000 tonnes over Europe during the Second World War, but no city surrendered as a direct result of such attacks (Overy 1980: 120). http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/443913/index.html. Mrs Miniver was based on a series of columns originally penned in 1937 by Joyce Anstruther for The Times. Fires Were Started used real-life firefighters in its cast for added verisimilitude. Now better remembered for its often shocking and innovative public safety campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s (to a whole generation of baby-boomers its films suggested that danger lurked everywhere both within and without the home), it was finally disbanded on 31 March 2012. For a biography of Humphrey Jennings, see Jackson (2004). The film was variously narrated by cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, naturalist John Fisher, composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and industrialist John Ormston of Vickers Armstrong. The film can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqQl5gi71Ug. Land of Promise: The British Documentary Movement 1930–50 (BFI 4 DVD set) is a fascinating compilation of documentary shorts including both The Dim Little Island and Family Portrait. HC Deb 11 May 1943 vol 389 cc500-85. For a detailed account of the various Town and Country Planning Acts enacted from 1944 to 1947, see Marmaras (2015). For a detailed account of post-war reconstruction and architecture, see Bullock (2002).

Notes

223

19 Of course Holford’s Lever chair stemmed from the large donation Lever Bros had made to the university, which was used to establish the Department of Civil Design, the first in the world. 20 The People’s Convention was ultimately unsuccessful, being disowned by the Communist Party of Great Britain in early 1942. 21 Guardian, 10 March 1942. 22 http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1945/1945-labour-manifesto.shtml. 23 The Times, 6 September 1944. 24 For an account of the act’s effects on the Probation Service, see Gard (2014). 25 For other wider discussions of this documentary history of Liverpool’s post-war problems see Roberts (2012). 26 See these comparisons in Moore (2012). 27 http://www.historytoday.com/simon-jones/liverpool-blitz.

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Online resources Chamberlain, J. (2012) ‘Prostitution in Inter-War Liverpool’, unpublished thesis, Keele University. Donohue, L. K. (2000) ‘Civil Liberties, Terrorism, and Liberal Democracy: Lessons from the United Kingdom’. BCSIA Discussion Paper 2000–05, ESDP Discussion Paper ESDP- 2000–01, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, August. McNamara, C. (2000) ‘The Backstage Story of Civil Defence’, ENG-LIVERPOOL-L Archives. Moore, R. (2012) ‘Liverpool Biennial – Review’, The Observer, 23 September, http:// www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/sep/23/liverpool-biennial-review-hmranfield Mortimer, G. (2011) ‘A Nation of Looters’, The Week, http://www.theweek.co.uk/ politics/3149/nation-looters-it-even-happened-blitz#ixzz3X7MKsYGo

Index Note: locators with ‘n’ refer to note numbers. Abercrombie, Patrick 196 absenteeism 172–4, 176–7 abstraction 19, 57, 63–5, 78, 170 Acland, Richard 197 activism 200 Acts of Parliament 196, 198 Adams, Mary 219–20 nn.21–22 adaptation 41 ADCC (Air Defence Cadets Corps) 137 administrations 51, 56, 60, 191 Admiralty 89–90, 182–4, 220 n.23 advertisements 29, 202 n.2 Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders (ACTO) 199, 210 n.28 AEU Printing and Kindred Trades Federation 203 n.9 agents provocateurs 106 Aigburth Road 63 Aintree 56, 219 n.19 Air Defence Cadets. See ADDC Air Ministry 90, 172 airport 52, 178 air raid display. See mock air raids air raid districts 58–9. See also specific entries Air Raid Precautions (ARP) 22, 24, 38–44, 52, 55–6, 58–60, 66–7, 69, 71, 87, 98, 101, 121, 124, 128, 133, 136–8, 144–7, 159, 161, 163, 166, 172, 177, 221 n.56 Air Raid Rescue Corps 50, 156–9, 164, 216 nn.43–5, 217 n.55, 218 n.70 air raid wardens 8, 12–13, 22–5, 52–3, 55, 59, 62–3, 66, 87–8, 95, 98, 101, 121, 133, 147, 156–9, 162–3, 169, 191, 211 n.1, 222 n.8 air-supremacy 33, 35 alcohol-related offences (drunkenness) 77, 79, 88, 96, 100–1, 130–1, 138, 141, 161–2, 177, 180

Aldred, R. 67 Alexander, A.V. 182, 220 nn.40–1, 220 n.43 Alfred Holt and Company 21, 212 n.33 Alker, Z. 83 Allibone, Harold 98 Allied bombing 18, 24, 222 n.10 Allied bombing policy 172 Allport, A. 83–4 Alsager 45–6 ambulances 6, 24, 43, 48, 136, 194 Anderson, John 39, 62, 203 n.21 Anderson shelters 56 Andrews, H.J. 52 Angel Hotel, Dale Street 67 Anglican cathedral 31, 137 Anstruther, Joyce 222 n.12 antagonism 25, 55, 160–2 anti-aircraft (AA) guns 12–13 anti-aircraft battalion 12 anticipation and preparation for the Blitz 27–53 accommodation 48–9 blackout experiment 43 ‘clearing houses’ 50 contingency plans for new wave of heavy raids 48–51 electricity and gas 48, 50–1 emergency legislation/powers 40–2 emergency plans and procedures 42–4 evacuation 44–8 First World War bombings, impact of 33–4 food and supplies of other goods 48–50 interdependencies 33–8 Liverpool as target/Liverpool’s vulnerabilities 27–38 medical preparedness 43–4, 48 mock drills 51–3

Index mutual cooperation pacts 49–50 policy coordination and consultation 40–1 public shelters 38–40 repairs and damage clearances 48–51 riots and strikes 31–2 Spanner’s thesis 34–5 water supply 48, 51 anti-communist propaganda 219 n.16 anti-gas measures 43–4, 137 anti-landing obstructions 147 anxiety 34, 44, 126, 141, 178, 184 archbishop 153 architecture 23, 60, 166–7, 172, 196 archival sources 21–2, 83 Argyle Street, Birkenhead 49, 161 Arkwright House 60 armband identification 46 armed forces 82–3, 109, 183, 190 Army Council 89–90 arrest 32, 42, 80–1, 103, 118–19, 127, 166, 178 Arrowsmith, John 127 Art Deco airport 178 Ashfield 63 ASLE and F. 203 n.9 Asquith, Justice 81 assaults 80–1, 84, 95–6, 132 Assize Courts 12 asthma 152 Astor, Viscountess 140 Atherton Street, Birkenhead 47 Atlantic Ocean 2, 5–6, 17–20, 123, 210 n.5 Attlee, Clement 197 austerity measures 119, 198 Australia 141 authoritarianism 75 autobiographies 5 Auxiliary Fire Service 163 Avon Street, Birkenhead 156 AWOL 100, 109, 114 Ayers, P. 121 baby-boomers 222 n.13 backup plans 13, 50, 65–6 Baedeker raids 176 Bagot, J.H. 134 Bailey, V. 198 Baines, W.H. 52, 60, 138 Baldwin, Stanley 33

233

Ballans, Edward 115 ballistic technology 33 banality 11–13, 18, 66 bank 65 bank robbery 85 Banner, Bob 21 Barclay, Irene 215 n.30 Barker, Dame Lilian 199 barrage balloons 10, 12 BBC 52, 111, 210 n.23, 219 n.21 Beatles, The 213 n.58 Beattie, J.M. 83 Beaufort Square flats, Birkenhead 155–6 Beaven, B. 181 Bedlow, Mr 163 Behind the Rent Strike (Broomfield, film) 200 Belchem, J. 16 Belfast 65, 166 Belmont Road Hospital, Birkenhead 58 Benedict Street, Bootle 116 Benjamin, W. 5 Bennett’s Hill, Birkenhead 165–6 Benson, George 199 Bentham Drive, Liverpool 3 Bentley Road, Birkenhead 166 Bevan, Aneurin 198 Beveridge Report 198 bicycles 67, 90, 125 Biddle, T.D. 15, 24, 171 Bidston Court 166 Bidston Moss 50 bigamy 83 billets/billeting 45–7, 49, 92, 110, 147–50, 153–4, 164–5, 177, 184 Birkenhead black market activities 117–18 contingency plans 48, 66 control room/main control centre 58–9, 61–2 damage and casualties 1–2, 64–5, 155–7 evacuation schemes 44–8, 148 food warehouses 48 heavy raids 155–8 juvenile crimes 128–30 medical preparedness 43–4 mutual aid 50 penalties for wartime crimes 94, 97 periods of hostility 44

234 population estimates 219 n.20 rescue work 64–5, 156–8 situation reporting 65 wartime crimes 1–2, 82, 86, 94–5, 101 Birkenhead City Treasurer 136 Birkenhead Corn Mills 162 Birkenhead Education Committee 44 Birkenhead Emergency Committee 45 Birkenhead Grain Warehouse 64 Birkenhead Grocer’s Association 49–50 Birkenhead Institution Laundry 43 Birkenhead Juvenile Court 128–9, 132, 142 Birkenhead Magistrates’ Court 94, 129 Birkenhead News 126, 132 Birkenhead Park 45 Birkenhead Records Office 21 Birkenhead Town Clerk 47, 158, 214 n.15 Birkenhead Trades Council 203 n.9 Birkett, Justice 199 Birmingham 33, 41, 48, 149 births, registered 45 Bishop of Liverpool 83, 197 Black Country 192 Blacker, C.P. 139 black market 83, 102–23 alcohol 112 background and creation of 103–7 clothing and textile 108, 112 consumer issues 118–120 daily activities of Merseysiders (customary practices) 118–21 dock and railway wholesale thefts 108–10, 112–23 false identities and forged documents 109–10 food 103, 107–8, 110–13, 116, 120 legal market operation 104–7 main centres 112 military materials 108 newspaper reports 115, 118 organized crime networks 108–9, 112–14, 118, 121–2 petrol 103–4, 108–9 pricing 107–8, 118 rubber (tyres) 103–4 scale and operation of 107–23 sentences/penalties 115–180 size of 114–15

Index stolen property 110 timber 211 n.32 tobacco (cigarettes) 108, 112, 115, 118 turnover 114 blackout period conditions 80, 84–5 emergency plans 43 fatalities 95 objective 99 offences 15, 22, 72, 80, 91–101 regulations 23, 82, 90, 93–4, 98–100, 102, 121 restrictions 14, 90–1 Blackstock Gardens Memorial plaque 201 ‘Blitz spirit’ 4, 82, 118 Board of Education 126, 137, 215 n.28, 215 n.34 Board of Trade 32, 69, 179 Bold Street, Liverpool 7, 52 bomb disposal officers 88 Bookman (magazine) 9 Booth, Charles 213 n.50 Boothby, Robert 104 Boothroyd, Harold and Douglas 132 Bootle casualties 190 communication pathways 187 daily mobility and migration 146, 173–5 damage and destruction 1–2, 165–7, 175–6 Dock Estate 114–16 emergency plans 40 evacuation 149, 174 memorials 201 morale 173–6, 185 mutual aid and assistance 60 police strike of 1919 32 population estimates 173–5 reconstruction efforts 196 refugee accommodation 48–9 rescue work 155 unemployment 17 youth delinquency 124 Bootle Trades Council 203 n.9 Borough Road, Birkenhead 1 boroughs 44, 48, 51, 64, 160, 184 Borstal Commissioners 128

Index Borstal institute for juveniles 127–9, 142 Boston 217 n.55 Boulting Brothers 194 Bowen, E. 143, 166, 216 n.48 Boxing Day 1940 155 Braddock, Counsellor 77 Bradley 33 Bramley-Moore Dock, Liverpool 28 Brazendale, Percy 67 bread 32, 105, 210 n.6 Brighton Rock (film, 1947) 130 Bright Street, Birkenhead 166 Bristol 86 Britain. See also specific entries black market 102, 113, 119 bombing policy 172–3 bombing raids 93, 192–3, 222 n.10 civil defence 38, 40, 51, 194 Cold War preparedness programme 51 Communist Party 223 n.20 delinquency 133, 215 n.34 exports 175 goods and food supplies 104–6 imperial power 73 industrial unrest 40 IRA violence 41–2 morale 172 rationing 209–10 n.5 rescue and recovery work 157, 195–8 seaports 34–5 wartime crimes 83, 93 youth service corps 212 n.27 Britain Can Take It (film, 1940) 193–5 British Enka 219 n.19 British Lion 194 British Medical Association 198 British Medical Journal 91 British navy 18, 21, 34–5, 182 broadcasts 40, 52 Brocklebank, Mr 163 Brogden, M. 100 ‘broken homes’ 134, 139 bronchitis 152 Bronfenbrenner, M. 120 Broomfield, Nicholas 200 Brunswick Dock 108 Buckingham Palace 81–2 Buckley, Cheshire 152 Bucklow 45

235

Buffalo 217 n.55 Builders, The (Jackson, film) 18 buildings, bombed 3, 10, 12–13, 22, 34, 41, 63–4, 71–2, 90, 102, 124, 144, 155–6, 159–61, 165–6, 171, 186, 188, 190, 199, 216 n.43 Building Trades Federation 203 n.9 Building Trade Workers 203 n.9 Bullock, N. 222 n.8 Bunney, E. 157 bureaucracies 13, 22, 51, 55–6, 78, 110, 159 burglary 15, 85, 110, 127 Burt, C. 123–4, 139, 211 n.2 Burtonwood 108 bus services 4, 6, 67, 88, 109, 111, 143, 155, 164–5, 178, 187 butter 101, 105, 113 Byrom Street, Liverpool 5, 32 cabaret shows 106 Café de Paris, Piccadilly 79 Cain, W. E. and C. A. 38 Calder, A. 1, 3, 93, 104–5, 159–60, 197 Cambridge Evacuation Survey 124, 211 n.2 Canada 51, 178 Canterbury 176, 199 Canwell, D. 33–4 capital punishment 80 Caradog Jones, D. 139, 196 Cardiff 16–17, 60 Cardiff, Jack 18, 20 cargo 32–4, 74, 108, 112, 156, 175 Carr-Saunders, A.M. 139, 196 Carters’ and Motormens’ Union 203 n.9 Cartier-Bresson, Henri 200 Castle, I. 222 n.6 Castle Street, Liverpool 8 casualties 41, 43, 63–4, 91, 157, 159, 192–3, 216 n.48 Catholic cathedrals 31 Catholic Herald 153 Catholics/Catholicism 6, 153–4, 184 celebrities 31, 52, 74, 103–4, 195 censorship 67, 154 Central Committee on Reconstruction problems 198 Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey) 80

236

Index

Central Office of Information 194–5 Cesarani, D. 3 Chamberlain, J. 88 Chamberlain, Neville 99 Channel Islands 105 Charlie Hebdo (French weekly) 221 n.2 Cherry, I.G. 196 Cheshire 45–6, 74, 98, 152, 209–10 n.5, 222 n.3 Cheshire County Council 45, 204 n.35 Cheshire Water Board 51 Chester 21, 49, 51, 138, 208 n.24 Chicago 217 n.55 children child crime 180 delinquent 15–16, 24, 123–44 detention centres 142 evacuation of 2, 13, 44–7, 110, 135–6, 138–9, 143, 148–55 infectious diseases in 151–5 parental care and supervision, lack of 127, 134–5, 138–42, 150 rationed food for 105 school 47, 134–6, 148, 150 separation from parents 133–4 vulnerable 44, 131, 155 welfare 136–8 Children Act, 1948 142 Children and Young Persons Act, 1933 134 Chinese population 88 Chow, R. 171 Churchill, Winston 99, 135, 172, 178, 186, 197 Church Street, Liverpool 7, 202 n.2 cigarettes 81, 99–100, 108, 112, 115, 118, 127, 162 City Engineers and Building Surveyors 22, 136, 190, 222 n.3 City of London 72, 158 civil defence 6, 13, 24, 40, 42–3, 47, 51, 55, 58, 66–8, 92, 124, 136–8, 153, 161, 165, 172, 182–3, 190 Civil Defence and Evacuation 153 Clangan, Mr 39–40 Clarke, D. 34, 112, 202 n.2 class ‘criminal’ 82 differences 151, 178, 215 n.29 and gender issues 69–78, 171

middle 178, 180, 194, 200 solidarity 172, 179 underclass 139 working 23, 32, 47, 77, 99–100, 102, 121, 140, 173, 181 Claughton Road, Birkenhead 166 cleansing department 50 clearance of debris 41, 43, 48–51, 68, 166, 175, 190, 196, 199–200 Cleveland 217 n.55 Clive Road incident 160, 217 n.57 clothing 43–4, 81, 99, 105, 107–9, 111, 120, 139, 150–1, 187 Clydebank 176 coal 50, 65, 108, 115 Cold War preparedness programme 51 Collateral (Fairclough, photos) 166–7, 218 n.85 collective memory 15, 189, 201 ‘colossal’ raid 50 Coltart Road, Liverpool 3 Combined Food Board 105–6 commerce 7, 9, 31, 76, 99, 105–6, 113, 154, 156, 200, 210 n.5, 211 n.32 commissioners 48, 63–5, 68–9, 75, 78, 89, 102, 128, 136–7, 143–8, 187, 199 commodity supplies 3, 34, 104 Common Wealth Party 197 communications 18–19, 23, 38–9, 45, 48, 55, 57, 60, 62, 66–7, 75, 89–90, 128, 137, 145–6, 148, 174, 187 Communist Party 178, 197, 223 n.20 compartmentalization 57–63 compensation 109–10, 118, 121, 190, 217 n.55 conscription 140 Conservatives 153, 191, 197–8 conspiracy 109, 209 n.2, 210 n.17 contamination, gas 37, 41, 43–4, 159 contraception 123 control centres 57–62, 66 Cook, Mr 158 Corbin, A. 73 corporal punishment 199 corruption 6, 211 n.32. See also black market cost of Civil Defence 43 court 113, 128 cutting 217 n.55

Index of damage 34, 39 of repairs 164, 190, 196 Country Life 9 Courtaulds 219 n.19 Coventry 1, 3, 48–50 Coward, Noel 194 Cox, D.J. 83, 117, 120, 208 n.2, 209 n.5, 209 n.29 Cresswell, T. 16 Crewe 21, 209–10 n.5 crime and criminality 15, 49, 79–102. See also juvenile delinquency alcohol-related offences 77, 79, 88, 96, 100–1, 130–1, 138, 141, 161–2, 177, 180 blackout offences 91–100 blackout regulations/restrictions, impact of 90–6 Cummins case 80–2 dealing with resistance 95–6, 98, 101–2 Defence Regulations 89–90 Defence Regulation prosecutions 92–5 looting 79–80, 82 magistrates courts 79, 82, 84, 89, 93–4, 96–101 Morgan case 81–2 murder 80–2 new laws attracting more crimes 23, 89, 102 policing and monitoring, challenges of 86–90, 95–102 press attention 79–82, 96 property offences 84–6, 97 publicized warnings about 82 punishment/penalties 80–2, 92, 96–100 rape and sexual assault 80–1 research studies 82–3 seasoned criminals 102 by servicemen 83, 85, 88–9, 210–11 nn.28–29 trends and statistical reports 83–7 England and Wales 83–4 Liverpool 83–6 national trends 87, 91–2, 100 undermanned police force and 86–7, 102 waning trust in government 23, 102 wartime vs. peacetime rates 86 Crime in Wartime (Smithies) 83

237

criminal justice 15, 20, 87, 198–9 Criminal Justice Act, 1948 142, 199 Crosbie 199 Crown Film Unit 18 Cruickshank, C. 105 Culshaw, W. 128 cultural history 73 cultural memory 189 Cummins, Gordon Frederick 80–2 Cunard line 31 Cunningway Road School, Birkenhead 136 Curran, A.E. 155–6 Curtis, Adam 195 Curtis, Martin 195 customary practices, workers’ 86, 120–1 cyclist messengers 67 Cyclists Touring Club 67 Dad’s Army (television series) 209 n.3 Daily Mail 79–80, 112 Daily Mirror 79–80, 82 dairy products 105, 107, 111–12, 119–20, 210 n.22 Daisy Street School, Merseyside 187 damage clearances. See clearance of debris Damage Report Form 60 David, Albert 83–4 Davis, T.C. 51 death sentence 80–2, 90, 94 debris/rubble 3–5, 22–4, 34, 38, 41, 50, 63–4, 66, 77, 132, 141, 144, 156–7, 160, 162, 166, 174–5, 184–5, 190, 200, 214 n.3, 216 n.48 debussing 47 decentralization 40 declaration of war 6, 47, 148 decontamination 41, 43, 159 defeatism 169–70, 183, 185, 214 n.4 Defence of the Realm Act, 1914 89–90 Defence Regulations 13, 15, 51, 55, 67–8, 83, 89–90, 92–4, 97–8, 100–2, 131–2, 140, 208 n.8, 208 n.12 de-industrialization 199 delayed action bomb 159 Dempsey, G.B. 215 n.23, 215 n.28 Denbighshire 150 Denby, Elizabeth 215 n.30 Department of Emergency Works 69 deportation 41

238

Index

depression 175–6, 180–1, 183–4, 191 Derby House 18–20, 147 detention 42, 132, 142 detraining 46–7, 149 Detroit 217 n.55 Devastation, 1941: An East End Street (Sutherland, exhibit) 66 Deverill, H. 204 n.43 diary entries 67, 98, 130–1, 154, 208 n.24, 221 n.1 Dickinson, William 112 Dim Little Island, The (film) 195, 222 n.15 diphtheria 152 District Co-op 49 Divisional Auxiliary Fire service 52 Dixon Scott, W. 9–11, 27–8, 31, 169, 202 n.4 ‘Dockers’ umbrella’ 28, 30 Dock Road, Wallasey 64 doctors 44, 152, 161, 219 n.17 documentaries 18, 83, 194–5, 200, 222 n.15, 223 n.25 Donohue, L.K. 42 Douet, Guilo 33 Dowler, John James 141 Downey, Richard 155 Downham Road, Wirral, Merseyside 147 drills 52–3, 137, 142 drunkenness. See alcohol-related offences Duke Street Bridge 168 dump sites 50, 69 Durning Road, Edge Hill 63–4 Dykes, William John 115 Earl of Wemyss shipwreck 210 n.2 Earls Court 154 economic conditions 3, 16, 34, 119–20, 139, 143, 172–3, 178–9, 181, 194, 197–9 Economic League, The 178, 219 n.16 Economist 215 n.30 Eden, William 196 Edge Hill 64 education 41, 44, 75, 123, 126, 134–7, 150–3, 190, 197, 213 n.47, 215 n.23, 215 n.28, 215 n.34 Education Act 135 Edwardian notion of citizenship 137 Edwardian properties 166 Egypt 81

Éire 103, 112–13 elderly population 12, 44, 125, 131 electricity 6, 11, 48, 50–1, 65, 98, 145, 163, 174–5, 190 Ellis, R. 221 n.56 Emden 38 Emergency Committee Birkenhead 45, 217 n.28, 219 n.55 Liverpool 52, 60, 68–71, 74–6, 78, 86, 138, 144, 146–7, 157, 159, 163, 165, 182 Manchester 206 n.29 Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, 1939 40, 67, 90, 140, 163, 213 n.55 emergency workers. See rescue work(ers) employment 5, 18, 65, 73, 75, 93–4, 106, 115, 123, 127–8, 134, 137, 174–5, 182–3, 191, 210 n.7 Emsley, C. 83, 85, 87, 113, 120–1 engineers 22, 29, 31, 50–1, 136, 156, 190, 217 n.55, 221–2 n.3 Enginerement and Shipbuilding Federation 203 n.9 England and Wales alcohol-related offences 101 crime statistics 80, 83–6 Defence Regulation prosecutions 92–3 juvenile crimes 124–6, 135 English Channel 18 entertainment 106, 132, 184, 191–2 escapism 73 Essex 196 Essex Street 52 eugenicist ideas 139, 212 n.33 Eugenics Review 139 euphemism 67 evacuation of children 2, 13, 44–7, 110, 135–6, 138–9, 143, 148–55 first waves of 148, 152, 172 local authority assistance 45, 49 logistical operation 46–7 mobility management 147–50 process 44–8 record-keeping 46 return 148–50 by road transport 4, 6, 47, 67–8, 88, 109, 111, 143, 155, 164–5, 178, 187 separation through 133

Index and spread of infectious diseases 151–5 tickets 46–7 by train and tramlines 4, 6, 34, 37, 45–7, 68, 77, 149, 153, 155 of women 44–5 Evans, B. 6, 42, 164, 208 n.11 Evans, Emrys 218 nn.73–4 Everton Tunnel 39–40, 199 Ewen, S. 52 excavation work 50–1, 159 exchanges (and gifts) 34, 112–14, 119 execution 81–2, 141 exercises, physical 52–3, 137 Exeter 176 exploitation 4, 14, 101, 181 expulsion 42 Factory Acts 95 failures, social policy 13–14, 16, 151 Fairclough, Tom 166–7, 218 n.85 Falfield Anti-Gas School, Gloucestershire 87 false reports 90 family disintegration 134, 151 instability 123, 198, 200 notion of 44, 215 n.34 ‘problem’ 139, 213 n.51 rations 119 separation and loss 16, 47, 106, 110, 133–4, 150–1 Family Portrait (Jennings, film) 195, 222 n.15 fear 23, 27, 34, 38, 42, 47, 72, 83, 85, 88, 93, 123, 130–1, 133, 137, 141, 148, 170, 177–8, 189, 192 Feigel, L. 159, 222 n.25 Ferral, C. 74, 221 n.56 ferry 5, 37, 49 Festival of Britain 195 Field, G.G. 153, 184 films 17–21, 28–9, 31, 52, 85, 130, 193–5, 202 n.7, 207 n.50, 222 n.2, 222 n.13, 222 n.15 fines/penalties 80–2, 92, 96–100, 107, 113, 117, 209 n.5. See also punishment Finest Hour 189 fire fighting juvenile 136–7

239

mock drills 52–3 women 72 firemen 13, 79, 108, 159 Fire Prevention (Business Premises) Order, 1941/1942 69 Fires Were Started (Jennings, film) 194 fire-watchers/fire-watching 13, 23, 69–72, 74–8, 86, 108, 128, 161–2, 191 first-aiders 13, 43, 68, 137, 157–9, 166 First World War 9, 15, 33–4, 83, 87, 123, 134, 141, 178, 192, 202 n.5, 209 n.1, 216 n.5, 216 n.48 fish 106, 111 Fisher, John 222 n.15 Fisher, Warren 214 n.3 ‘Five Giant Evils’ of Britain 198 Fleetwood 16–17 floating population 164 Flying Corps, Liverpool 38 food 2, 32 communal feeding 48 distribution 49 emergency plans 48–9 government regulations 104–6 hoarding 87 jam and preserves 105, 209 n.5 offences and penalties 104, 115, 209–10 n.5 prices 106 restrictions on restaurants/public catering 106 shortages 37, 105–7 stocks 49 theft 86, 101 food inspectors 106, 210 n.7 forged documents 109–10 Formby 48 Forrester, H. 5–7, 9, 127 Fortean scareships 34 Forward March movement 197 Foss, B. 184 Foster, F.G. 44–5 Fox, F. 202 n.3 Franco 192 Fraser, David 152, 215 n.32 Fraser, Frankie 120 Fraser, Peter 74 fraud 109, 211 n.32 free market 107

240

Index

Friedrichshafen 33 Future of Merseyside, The (report) 196 Fyfe, D.P. Maxwell 49, 203 n.16, 203 n.18, 203 n.21 Gallacher, William 178 Game, Philip Woolcott 89 gangs 4, 16, 24, 50, 65, 79, 110, 113, 118, 123, 125, 128, 130, 132–3, 136, 156, 159, 163 gaols 94, 96–7, 100, 103, 109, 115, 116 Gard, F. 223 n.4 Gardiner, J. 2, 107, 110, 113, 119, 131, 184, 212 n.34 Garner, E.H. 69 Garson, Greer 194 Garston school 57, 137 gas bombs 36–7, 41, 52, 186, 192 gas department 50 gas explosion/contamination 4, 6, 11, 37, 41, 43–4, 48, 50–1, 53, 63–5, 68, 160, 163, 190 gas masks 37, 53, 56, 80 gas test 52–3 gas warning 52–3, 63 Gater, George 182 General Election (1945) 197 General Post Office (GPO) 18, 69 geography 1, 3, 5, 14–16, 19–20, 34–5, 56, 58, 60, 62–3, 69–78, 137, 171, 179–4, 192 George V 31 German air superiority 33, 35 German Foreign Office 218 n.7 German navy 192 Gestapo 98 Gill Street 127 Gilmour School, Birkenhead 136 Gladstone Dock 74 Glenavon Road, Birkenhead 166 Glyn, Ralph 153 Godfrey, B. 83, 99, 117, 120, 130, 133, 208 n.8, 209 n.29 Golf Hotel, Dumfrieshire 163 Gollin, A.M. 171 Goodby, John 202 n.5 good citizenship 56, 75 gossip 14, 75 government of national unity 197–8 GPO Film Unit 194 Grayzel, S.R. 6

Greathead, J.H. 202 n.3 Great Homer Street, Liverpool 32 Green, Henry 216 n.48 Greenbank Road, Liverpool 136, 163 Greene, Graham 18 Greenock 176–7 Gregory, D. 17–18, 171 grey market 24, 104, 111–15, 118–21. See also black market Gribble, Tom 219 n.16 Griffiths, Thomas C. 38 group controller 60, 63 ‘Growth of Crime, The’ (Fuller, poem) 206 n.42 Grundy Street 63 Grunenberg, C. 200 Guardian 9, 42–3, 67, 73, 75–7, 109, 131, 165, 186, 191, 196–7 guilty 81, 109, 112, 120, 127, 139, 185, 209 n.2, 210 n.17, 221 n.56 Hagan, Mary 81 Haig, Harry 137 Haigh Heights 199 Haldane, Henry 215 n.30 Hale 45–6 Hallam, J. 31 Hamer, Herbert 190, 221–2 n.3 Hamilton Square 44, 147 hanging, death by 80–2 Harding, Arthur 120 Harford, Letty 215 n.30 Harland and Wolff 74 Harrington Dock 108 Harrison, T. 118, 170, 179, 181, 219 n.21 Hartlepool 192 Harvey, D. 5 Hatton, B. 200 Hawkins, Jack 85 Hawthorne Road, Birkenhead 163 Hay, D. 83 Hay, J. Hamilton 9, 11, 202 n.4 Hayter, John 98 hazards 6, 192 Heartfield, J. 3 Heat of the Day, The (Bowen) 216 n.48 Hemmerde, E.G. 185, 221 n.56 Henderson, P. 215 n.32 Hentea, M. 157, 216 n.48 Herculaneum Dock 108

Index heroes of Blitz-preparedness 55–6, 74, 133 Hewitt, K. 15, 165 Heywood, Lancashire 155 hierarchical organizational structures 57 higher courts 94, 98 Highfield School, Liverpool 136 Hinton, J. 214n.4 historical accounts 201 historiography 82 Hitler, Adolf 2, 75, 138, 192 Hoare, Samuel 42, 198 Hobhouse, J.R. 53, 136–7, 142, 212 nn.33–4 Hodges, R.J. 204 n.26 Hodsall, John 144–6, 179, 183 Hodsoll, Wing Commander 41, 43 Hodson, J. 86 Hogan, Alderman Luke 70–1, 75, 77, 206 n.34 Holdsworth, C. 5, 202 n.3 Holford, William 196, 223 n.19 Holman, B. 35, 171–2 Holt High School, Birkenhead 58, 136 Holy Corner 31 Holyhead 21 homecomings, soldier 113–14 Home Guard 81, 93, 127, 221 n.56 Home Intelligence 184–5, 219 n.21 Home Office 39–41, 43, 45, 51, 62–3, 67–9, 71, 74, 76, 82, 95, 138, 144–5, 173, 177–9, 184, 203 n.21, 213 n.42 Homepride Flour Mill (Paul Bros.) 64 hospitals 43, 57–8, 65, 79, 128, 152, 166, 178, 184, 219 n.17 hostility 9, 44, 98, 109, 154 Hough, Thornton 214 n.17 House of Commons 16, 39, 42, 67, 140, 153, 164, 193, 203 n.21, 213 n.55 House of Lords 125 housing 1, 3, 25, 48, 136, 164, 166, 177, 190, 199–200, 217 n.55 Housing (Emergency Powers) Act, 1939 163 housing market renewal pathfinder initiatives (HMRI) 200 Howard, Sergeant 160 Howard League 199 Hoylake 5, 45, 51 Hue and Cry (film) 130

241

Hughes, J. 12, 29, 112, 193, 201 Hull 3, 16–17, 222 n.3 humiliation 107 Hunslet Road, Liverpool 3 Hurrell Road, Birkenhead 128 Hutston, Mr 203 n.22 Huyton Road 187 Huyton Woods 2 hygiene 151, 215 n.30 Hylton, S. 3 hysteria 24, 157, 169, 219 n.17 Ibberson, Dora 215 n.30 ICI chemical works 219 n.19 ID cards 49 identity politics 153 illegal gambling 88, 98 immorality 123, 139 Imperial German Air Service 192 imperialism 31, 73 Imperial War Museum 21 impetigo 152 imprisonment 82–3, 94, 98, 104, 107, 115, 209 n.5, 211 n.28 incendiaries 69, 71, 87, 156 industry(ies) blackout regulation 99–100 breeches of the control of 93–4 decline 16, 28, 174 destruction of 132, 155 disputes 21, 23, 32, 40, 88, 199 and labour relations 3, 6, 28 munitions 140 networks 12, 16, 21, 28, 31–2 policing and surveillance of 88, 99–100, 120 port and dock 37, 173 production 170, 173 shipping 28, 31, 65, 74, 109, 120, 175 as target 90 textile 112 theft 128 workers’ customary practices 116, 120–2 working conditions 120 Infectious Diseases Hospital laundry 43 information 45, 60, 63, 69, 78, 89, 94, 154, 165, 169, 177–9, 183, 187, 193–5, 213 n.47, 219 n.21 infraction 99, 221 n.56

242 infrastructure 3– 6, 13, 28, 31, 38, 64–6, 69, 78, 128, 146, 155, 175, 190 inspectors of schools, Birkenhead 136 insurance 31, 110, 175 International Brigade 192 internment 3 inter-war period 23, 32–3, 36, 38, 40, 88, 213 n.42 invasion 73, 99, 147, 177–8 In Which We Serve (film) 194 IRA campaign 6, 41–2, 88, 208 n.11 Ireland 18, 112–13, 121, 178 Irish Guards 81 Irish Republicanism 16, 41 Irish Sea 33 Irvine, Angie 111 Isaacs, S. 211 n.2 isolation 32, 68, 152, 177 Italian change of allegiance 195 Jackson, K. 222 n.14 Jackson, P. 17–21, 222 n.14 James, George 62, 205 n.9 James Street, Wallasey 112 James Street Station, Mersey Railway 147 jam-making 105, 113, 209 n.5 Jarvis Robinson 74 Jennings, Humphrey 194–5, 222 n.14 Johnston, George 116 Jones, E. 170, 219 n.17 Jones, Edward Sidney 98 Jones, H. 130–1, 170–1 Jones, Jack 192 Jones, Sidney 131, 205 n.9 Jones, Simon 201 Jones, W.R 162, 217 n.67 Joseph, Shirley 103–4 Jünger, E. 202 n.5 jurisdiction 63, 67, 89 Justice of the Peace 131, 137, 190, 208 n.25 juvenile delinquency 15, 125–44 ACTO reforms 199 antisocial and unruly behavior 130–2, 208–9 n.25 armed gangsters 128 background 134 bombsites and shelters as crime hot spots 124, 127, 129–33

Index breaking and entering offences (burglary) 124–5, 127–9, 134, 136, 139 Cadet force 136–8, 142, 212 n.27 Chief Constable’s Reports 129, 135 courts 127–30, 132–4, 138–9, 142 crime statistics 124–6, 128, 134 Defence Regulation 23AB 131–2 detention in remand homes 127, 129, 133–4, 139 Education Act offences 135–6 factories and warehouses as venue for exploration and playing 132–3, 135 films depicting 130 gender and peak age of offending 125–6, 131 Hobhouse 53, 136–8, 142, 212 nn.33–4 kinds of 123 looting 127, 130, 133–4, 139 murder/attempted murder 128 pickpocketing 127 policing and monitoring 128, 130–1, 133, 135, 138, 140 press reports 126, 128, 131–2, 138–40 preventive measures 130, 134–40 punishment/fines 127, 129, 132, 134, 142 reform and rehabilitation 136–41 repeat offending 133 research studies 123–4, 133–4 rise in 124–9, 133–4 root causes 123–4, 133–4 sexual crimes 124 theft/larceny 124–5, 129, 132, 134, 136, 139 vandalism 130–2, 139 violent crimes 124, 128 voluntary bodies, role of 138, 140 wartime conditions as contributing factor 127 weapon offenses 127 juvenile prostitution 89 Kaplan, C. 171 Kenny, John 112 Kenrick, D. 214 n.18 Kent 105 Kent, B.H. 18 Kerr, M. 120

Index King, P. 83 King’s Surgeon 91 King Street, Liverpool 65 Kirby, Mr 39, 193 Kirkby rent strike 200 Knifton, R. 200 Knowsley House 18 Koeck, R. 29, 202 n.2 Kray twins 104 Kushner, T. 3 labour demand 123 disputes 16, 21, 66, 178 exchange 174 hard 115, 116, 142, 199 industry and 3, 21, 28 loss 175 movement 5, 29, 155, 178 organized 37 provision 69 shortage 173, 175 unskilled 50–1 Labour government 75, 191, 194, 197–8 Laird Street Car Sheds 155 Lambeth Bridge House, London 69 Lancashire 60, 74, 144, 155, 185 Lancaster, Osbert 222 n.15 Lane, T. 199–200 Langford, Officer 186 Laski, Harold 198 Lavanchy-Clarke, Francois-Henry 202 n.2 Lawrence, P. 130 Leader of the Opposition 28 League of Gentlemen (film, 1960) 85 Leeds 112, 149 Leeds Canal 11 Leeson, Peter 200 legacy of the Blitz 189–201 air-raid statistics 192–3 criminal justice consensus 198–9 effectiveness of bombing raids 170 immediate legacy 189–92 ‘new Jerusalem,’ utopian view of Britain’s future 195–8 post-Blitz administration 191–2 post-war reconstruction 195–8 post-war recovery films 194–5

243

resistance and endurance 194 Town and Country Planning Acts 195–6 legislation 13, 23, 41–2, 78, 89, 142, 164 leisure 7, 28, 36, 47, 67 lend-lease project 3, 207 n.50 Le Queux, W. 36–8, 43, 49, 203 n.11 Lever, William Hesketh 214 n.17 Lever Bros 202 n.2, 223 n.19 Leverhulme Investment Trust 147 Lewis, Henry 115 Lewis, Saunders 153 lice 153–4 licentiousness 88, 130 Liddell Hart, B. 35 Light Overground Railway (LOR) 28–31 Lime Street at Two (Forrester) 5–6 Lime Street Station 5, 12, 31, 33–4 Lister Drive Power Station 56 Liver Building 4, 31, 60 Liverpolitan, The 52 Liverpool Assizes 81, 98, 108–9 Liverpool Blitz. See also specific entries accounts of everyday life and peripatetic views 4–12 beginning of the blitz 29, 42 bomb damage and destruction 2–4, 8, 10–11 casualties 3–4, 6, 64–5 contingency plans 67 destruction, disruption and mobility 144–7 end of the Blitz 103 evacuations 2–4, 6–7, 12, 147–50 governance, protection and policing measures 4–7, 11–21 criminality 4, 15 mobilities 15–17 morale 15 pre-war failures 13–14, 16 Western Approaches to 17–21 IRA’s campaign 6, 41–2, 88, 208 n.11 as ‘lightning outrages’ 6 May Blitz 1–3, 6, 21, 29, 67, 139, 144, 155, 173, 176, 179, 184–5 pre-war Liverpool 7, 27–8 representations of 2, 8, 21–2, 24, 30–2 situation reporting and movement of messages 65, 67

244

Index

US intervention 108, 197 wartime crimes 3–4, 6, 64–5, 83–6 Liverpool Canal 11 Liverpool Chamber of Commerce 76, 206 n.29 Liverpool Children’s Court 128 Liverpool CID 186 Liverpool City Council 39, 109 Liverpool City Treasurer 43, 136 Liverpool Corporation 178, 222 n.3 Liverpool Courier 9 Liverpool District Association 32, 67 Liverpool Docks (dockers/dockworkers) 27–36, 41, 64 accommodation 175, 184 as ambivalent 73 blackout regulations and fatalities 95 customary practices 120 debris clearance 175 disputes 16, 21, 66, 98, 178 entertainment 184, 191–2 fire-watching, gender issues over 69–78 illegal gambling 98 illicit trades 113 licensing regulations 73 as liminal spaces 72–3 morale 73–4, 180–1 policing and monitoring 37, 77, 116, 120 strikes 37, 73, 88 thefts 108–10, 112–23 wartime crime 86, 118 working conditions 73–4, 178, 191–2 Liverpool Echo 76–7, 79, 82, 104, 115, 117, 138–9, 156 Liverpool Fortress Command 147 Liverpool Juvenile Court 127, 129, 134, 139, 142, 212 n.33 Liverpool Luncheon Club 197 Liverpool Magistrates’ Court 79, 98–9, 106 Liverpool Post 207 n.57 Liverpool Records Office 21 Liverpool Remand Home 134 Liverpool Scenes (Promio, film) 28–9 Liverpool Trades Council 203 n.9 Liverpool University 196 Liverpool University Settlement 211 n.1 ‘Liverpool View’ 206 n.29 Liverpool Wavertree 38 Liverpool West Derby 38

living conditions 154, 181, 196 Livingstone Street, Birkenhead 162 Lloyd, Robert Owen 50, 159–61, 163, 217 nn.55–6, 218 n.79 Llwyn Road, Shropshire 148 loans 43, 110 local authorities 15–16, 23, 40–1, 43, 45, 49–51, 55, 57, 67–8, 73, 75, 142–3, 146, 148, 151, 163, 177, 179, 182–3, 190, 196, 214 n.3, 217 n.55 Local Defence Volunteers (LDV) 147 Logan, David 39, 73, 95, 140, 197, 199, 213 n.55 Logan Towers 199 logistics operations 17, 21, 46, 56, 74, 157 London air raids, damage and destruction 2–3, 36, 127, 144, 196 air-raid shelters 81, 146 black market 112 docks 31, 72–3 emergency and rescue work 144 evacuation 149 juvenile delinquency 130 mobilities 143 rationing 106, 110 7/7 bombings 189 spivs 121 as target 17 wartime crimes 80–1, 86 London Auxiliary Fire Service 80 London Blitz 31, 80, 194, 216 n.48 London Can Take It (film) 194 London Chamber of Commerce 206 n.29 London Road 53 loneliness 150 looting 4, 15, 24, 79–80, 82, 85, 87, 90–4, 97, 101, 114, 118, 127, 130, 133–4, 139, 141, 161, 177, 200, 208 n.3, 211 n.28 Lord Derby 74, 185–6 Lord Mayor of Liverpool 38, 62 Lord Mayor of London 80 Lord Privy Seal 39 Lord Street, Liverpool 7–8 Lowenthal 33 Luftwaffe 1–2, 10, 17, 31, 72, 91, 100, 171, 189, 191–2

Index Lumière Bros. 28, 202 n.2 Lyster, George 29 Mabane, William 140, 182, 193, 220 n.39 Macadam, Ivison 219 n.21 Macilwee, M. 16, 99 Mackay, R. 15–16, 24, 42, 118, 161–3, 169–70, 197 Macnicol, J. 139, 151, 215 n.34 Maddocks, Mr 158 Maghull 64, 178, 219 n.17 magistrates courts 79, 82, 84, 89, 93–4, 96–101, 103, 106–7, 115, 116, 119, 127–9, 132, 136, 138, 141, 209 n.26 main control 52, 58–62 Manchester 29, 32, 41–2, 45, 60, 74, 136, 144–5, 149, 181–3, 185–6 Manchester Assizes 139 Manchester Emergency Committee 206 n.29 Mannheim, Herbert 199 Mannheim, K. 124 manslaughter 81 maps 18, 36, 38, 58–9, 62, 67, 71, 75, 147, 200 marches 88, 137 Mareo, Eric 221 n.56 marginalization 3, 73 Marmaras, E.V. 222 n.17 Marquess of Salisbury 28 Marquis, F.J. (Lord Woolton) 124, 211 n.1 martial law 32, 185–6, 200 Marwick, A. 123, 126 Marxism Today (Lane) 199 masculinity 70, 87, 133, 137 Mass Observation (MO) 130, 144, 170, 173, 179–84, 187, 191, 193, 214 n.4, 220 n.23 Mass Observation Archive 21 Mather Road 52, 66 Mathieson, D. 43, 204 n.32 Mathieson, Morley 162 Matless, D. 137 May Blitz. See under Liverpool Blitz Mayor of Birkenhead 47, 204 n.43 McGarry, R. 211 n.28 McNamara, C. 51 meat rations 35, 103, 105, 110–11, 116, 210 n.10, 210 n.22

245

meat thefts 86, 116 medical services 6, 43–4, 47, 80, 91, 133, 151–3, 161, 163, 194, 198, 215 n.31 Meilinger, P.S. 171 Mellor, L. 157 memorials 201, 222 n.7 memory 4, 22, 111, 166, 189, 201 memos 40, 69, 71, 95, 172, 183, 219 n.21, 220 n.39 Men of Letters (Dixon Scott) 9 Merchant Navy 21 Mersey Docks and Harbour Board 29, 41, 95 Mersey Estuary 52 Mersey Queensway Tunnel 31 Mersey Railway 5, 147 Merseyside Blitz black market activities 117–21 civil defence services 51 damage and casualties 2–3, 64 emergency preparedness 48, 51 evacuation 147–50 first phase 1–2 juvenile delinquency 15 local mutual cooperation pacts 49 medical services scheme 43–4 memorials 201 movement economy 145 post-war renewal 199–201 situation reporting 64 unemployment 16 wartime crimes 81–9 Merseyside County Council 196 Merseyside Juvenile Courts 129 Merseyside plan 1944 (Thompson plan) 196 Mersey Tunnel 49, 145–6 messages 34, 45, 60, 66–7, 177, 187 messengers 66–7, 137, 159 metaphors 55 methodology 21–2 Metropolitan Police Commissioner 102 MGM 194 military assistance 13, 27, 33, 49–50, 65, 89–90, 93, 104, 108–9, 116, 120, 123, 140, 142, 147, 172, 176, 194, 210 n.28, 214 n.3, 219 n.17, 221–2 n.3 milling centres 64 Ministry for Home Security 78, 88, 136

246

Index

Ministry of Economic Warfare 172 Ministry of Education 75, 151 Ministry of Food 86, 104, 106, 108, 113 Ministry of Fuel 98 Ministry of Health 39, 45, 69, 148, 164 Ministry of Home Defence 62 Ministry of Information 69, 169, 177, 183, 194, 219 n.21 Ministry of Labour 16, 69, 178 Ministry of Pensions 69 Ministry of Town and Country Planning 195–6 Ministry of Transport 39 Ministry of Works 69 miscegenation 88 Mitchell and Kenyon 31 ‘mobile force’ 88 mobility management 2, 5, 13, 15–17, 42–4, 56, 67, 104, 143–67, 173–4 communications disruption 145 damage and displacement 163–5 disputes between police/rescue workers/ local authorities 146, 148, 159–60 evacuation process 147–50 fire and rescue workers 155–6 morale and mobility 184–5 repair work 163–5 rescue and clear up work 156–63 and spread of infectious diseases 151–5 traffic control system 143–7 mock air raids 51–3 modernity 5, 10, 31 modern warfare 194 modus operandi 80 Monopack 21 Monroe, William and Thomas 129 monuments 7, 31 Mooney, Denis 96 Moore, R. 223 n.26 Moore, W. 120 morale 3, 14–15, 24–5, 39, 55, 65, 72–3, 99, 123, 137–8, 141, 144, 169–88, 191–4, 214 n.4, 220 n.25 geography 179–84 main causes of disruption 175 and mobility 184–7 MO reports 180–7 notion of 170–1 post-Blitz period 192–3

and productivity 173–7 targeting 171–3 vulnerability 176 Morgan, Alice 81 Morgan, Samuel 81–2 Morrison, Herbert 57, 64, 68, 71, 73–7, 182–3, 198–9 Morrison, W.S. 195 Morrison School, Birkenhead 136 Mortimer, G. 127 Motor Fuel Rationing Order 109, 210 n.17 Mott, Charles Francis 153, 215 n.34 Mott, E.F. 215 n.34 Mott, Lillian 216 n.34 movement economy 12, 33, 145 MPs 38–40, 75, 95, 140, 153, 178, 198–9, 203 n.18, 221 n.56 Mrs Miniver (film) 194, 222 n.12 muggings 85 municipality 23, 28–9, 31, 34, 41, 60, 78, 164, 166 munitions 33, 90, 114, 127, 140 Munster 41 murders 80–1, 128 Murphy, Tom 201 Museum of Liverpool Life 201 mutilated body 80 mutual cooperation 49–50, 60 ‘myth of the Blitz’ 3, 13 Nantwich 45 National Archives 21 National Assistance Office 109 National Council of Social Services 215 n.30 National Cyclists Union 67 National Gas Council 51 National Health Act, 1946 198 nationalism 31, 74, 153 National Loaf 105 national politics 196, 211 n.1 National Service 94, 137 National Union of Distributive and Allied Workers 203 n.9 National Union of General and Municipal Workers, Shipwrights, Boilermakers 205 n.9 naval defence 18–20, 34, 38, 68, 90, 182, 184–5, 196

Index Nazis 82 neoliberalism 200 nerve centres, networks of coordination and control 18–20, 55–78 central government support 68–9 circulation of instructions and information 57–63, 67 communication/record keeping 57–60, 62 contingencies and backup plans 65–9 defence regulations 67–8 emergency powers of police forces 41–2 incident and situation reporting 58–9, 63–5 local authority’s role and responsibilities 67–9 mutual aid and assistance 60 regional administration 60, 68–9 sub control centres reporting to main control centre 57–63 warden and equipment resourcing 62–3, 65 women firewatchers, debate over 69–78 Neston 45, 51 Neston Street, Birkenhead 166 neurasthenia 219 n.17 Newcastle 3, 16–17, 149 newspapers 6–7, 19, 21–2, 43, 70, 76, 79, 82, 96, 104, 110, 115, 120, 131–2, 141, 169, 185–6, 201 newsreels 31, 192, 201 News Review 77 New Statesman, The 215 n.30 New York 20, 27, 29, 32, 36, 202 n.2, 217 n.55 New York Times 32 9/11 attacks 189 Noble, Percy 18–20 noises 4, 10, 79, 170 ‘non-criminal criminals’ 102 Nordin, J. 120 ‘normal’ crime 100–1 Normanston Road, Birkenhead 166 Northbrook Street 63 Northern Europe 38 Northern Ireland IRA violence in Britain 41–2 terrorism act 42

247

North Wales 49, 60, 74, 76, 150, 153–4 Northway School, Birkenhead 136 Norwich 176 Novello, Ivor 103–4, 107, 209 n.2 novels 7, 22, 33, 36–8, 42, 49, 124, 127, 216 n.48 nuclear preparedness 51 NUR 203 n.9 Oakdene Road, Birkenhead 166 O’Brien, T.H. 40 occupational cultures 121 ocean liners 2, 32–3 Old Bailey 80–1 Old Hall Street 65 optimism 195, 199 oral histories 110–11 Ord, Frederick 116 organized crimes 72, 83, 108–9, 116, 120 organized labour 37 Ormston, John 195, 222 n.15 O’Rose, S. 70, 151 Osman, Edward Jonas 185–6 Oswestry 148–9 Our Town’s report 151, 215 n.30 ‘ovee’ 29 Overy, R. 15, 172–3, 222 n.10 Owens, Chief Fire Officer 21–2 Page, L. 123 Palestine 81 panic 10, 13, 16, 36–7, 39, 88, 124, 132, 169, 184, 192 Paramount cinema 6 parental control/oversight 127, 134–5, 138–42, 150 Paris 5 Paris, Alderman J.G. 52 parish 46, 201 Parker, W.E. 114 Parks, W.H. 171 Park Station, Birkenhead 166 Parliament 33, 40, 57, 68, 71, 73, 75–6, 91, 104, 131, 140–1, 178, 182, 195–6, 198 patriotism 82–3, 87, 209 n.1 patrols 86, 88, 99, 116, 131 Patten Street, Birkenhead 166 peacetime emergencies 40, 86, 118, 133, 140, 199

248

Index

Pearson, G. 123 pedestrianism 4–6, 91 Peel Street, Tranmere 132 penal servitude 98, 108, 161 abolition of 199 Peniston-Bird, C. 221 n.56 Penny, L. 196 Pensby Street, Birkenhead 166 People’s Convention 197, 223 n.20 People’s War Project 111, 210 n.23 petrol 69, 103–4, 107, 109, 119, 121, 156, 178, 209 n.2, 210 n.17, 210 n.20 petty crime 4, 15, 20, 72, 100, 115, 118–19, 129, 141, 159 Petulengro, Xavier 71, 206 n.34 phoney war 13 photographs 22, 31, 74, 92, 166, 200, 218 n.85 physical reconstruction 198 Picton Hall (amphitheatre) 76 Pier Head 201 pilfering 24, 83, 86, 108, 114–15, 118, 121 plaques 201, 222 n.7 Plymouth 18 police strike, 1919 32, 40 Police Training School, Mather Avenue 58 policing and monitoring. See also nerve centres, networks of coordination and control black market 105–10, 118, 121–2 crime and criminality 86–90, 95–102 dock areas 37, 77, 115–17, 120–1 governance, protection and 4–7, 11–21 industries 88, 99–100, 120 juvenile delinquency 128, 130–1, 133, 135, 138, 140 political movements 32 political organizations 55, 197 Political Warfare Executive 219 n.16 Ponting, C. 3 popular culture 33 Population Commission 216 n.33 population data 87 Port Director 73 Port Emergency Committee 41 Port in a Storm (Hughes) 201 Portland Street, Birkenhead 156 poverty 14, 16, 32, 115, 151, 181 prejudice 13, 90, 154

Prentice Road West 100 Prenton Hall Road, Birkenhead 166 press reports 33, 52–3, 60, 71, 75, 77, 81, 128, 137–40, 150, 176–7, 191–2, 201, 215 n.27 Prevention of Violence (Temporary Provisions) Act, 1939 41–2 Priestley, J.B. 197 Primrose Road, Bootle 1 Princes Avenue, Liverpool 7 Princes Park, Liverpool 7 Priory Road Council School, Birkenhead 136 prisons 32, 81–2, 94, 99, 103, 132, 186, 199 Pritchard, Harry 163–4 probation 82, 142, 199, 213 n.47, 223 n.24 problem families 124, 139, 213 n.51 procedures and protocols 13 prohibition 39, 42, 130, 178, 186 promenades 28, 31 Promio, Jean Alexandre Louis 28–9, 202 n.2 promiscuity 123, 133 property crimes 15, 79, 82, 84–6, 97, 120 prostitution 80, 88–9 Protestantism 6, 153–4 protests 6, 88 public assistance centres 48, 150 Public Assistance Committee (PAC) 45–6, 150, 164 ‘Public Dishonesty in Wartime’ (David) 83–4 public health 139 public order 42, 68, 101 Public Records Office 76 public safety campaigns 68, 89, 222 n.13 public services 51, 55, 67, 199 public shelter 39, 64, 92, 127, 132 pubs and clubs 73 Pugh, Wallace 214 n.21 punishment 80, 89, 128–9, 131, 138, 141, 165, 199. See also fines/penalties; imprisonment Queensferry crossing 49 Queensland Street, Liverpool 139 Quinn, A. 7–9 racism 133, 221 n.56 Radiant House 52

Index radio equipment 18, 114, 145 RAF (Royal Air Force) 18, 80, 171, 192 railway 5–6, 11–12, 17, 24, 28–38, 45–6, 49, 52, 63–4, 68–9, 74, 77, 86, 90, 108, 112, 114, 118, 120–2, 144, 147, 149, 153, 155–6, 175, 187, 209 n.2 Railway Workers Union 32 rape 81 ration books 110 rationing 4, 14 black market activities 103–4, 106–7, 115 clothing 105, 107, 111 coupons 87, 99, 103, 105–7, 109, 111, 119, 209 n.2 ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign 105 food 103–7, 111 food inspectors 106 forged coupons 109 government regulations 106 laws 103 petrol 103–4, 107 and price-fixing 107 restrictions on restaurants/public catering 106 RCA 203 n.9 realism 20, 53, 88 reception areas 136, 148, 150, 154–5 reception officers 46–7 recidivism 129 reconstruction/rehousing 4, 22, 25, 48, 157, 165, 191, 194–201 record-keeping 46 ‘red petrol’ 107 ‘red tape’ 56, 182 reformatories 142 regional authorities 16, 23, 48–9, 60, 62–6, 68–9, 75, 78, 136, 143–8, 183, 187, 195–6, 214 n.14 Regional Commissioner 48, 63, 67–9, 75, 78, 136, 143–4, 146–8, 187 Register of Burials, Liverpool 3 registration of evacuees 46 regulations 4, 12–16, 20, 23, 51, 53, 55, 67–8, 73, 77–8, 82–3, 89–102, 104–5, 107, 116, 121, 131, 140, 176, 208 n.8, 208 n.12 Reilly, Charles 198 religious sectarianism 5–6, 16, 153

249

Rendell Street, Mersey Tunnel 146 rendezvous areas 46–7 Repair of War Damage Bill in the Commons 164 repairs and damage clearances 35, 37, 41, 48–51, 65, 67, 143–4, 155–7, 159, 163–4, 177, 190, 192 Rescue Man (Quinn) 7 rescue parties 65, 157, 161, 163 rescue work(ers) 6–7, 13–14, 24, 50, 64–5, 88, 144–6, 155–66, 200 reserve centres 66 resilience 51, 184, 192 resistance 70, 99, 102, 194 rest centres 48, 64–5, 143, 151, 164–5, 174, 184 Restricted Dock Lighting 95 Richards, J. 18, 20 Rimmer, Constable 162 riots 32, 88, 185 River Dee 49 Riversdale Road 63 robbery 80, 85–6, 108–10, 113, 118, 120, 122, 131 Roberts, George Alexander Mcguire 221 n.56 Roberts, L. 29, 31, 221 n.56, 223 n.25 Rock Ferry, Birkenhead 45, 157 Rocky Bank Road, Birkenhead 163 Rodaway, George Henry 128 Roodhouse, M. 112, 114, 119–21, 209 n.2, 211 n.31 Roosevelt, F.D. 207 n.50 Rosenthal, M. 137 Royal Flying Corps 38 Royal Liver Building 31 rumour mongering 14, 25, 75, 154, 177, 185–7, 193 Rutter, Owen 18, 20 Ryalls, Mr 158–9 Ryder Street, Liverpool 110 safecracking 85 Sailors’ Society 184 Salford 45, 186 sandbags 12–13, 132 Sanders, James 115 sanitation 41, 47, 147, 215 n.30 Satia, P. 171

250

Index

Saving of Bill Blewitt, The (Watt, film) 18 Sayle, Amy 215 n.30 scabies 152 scales of authority and abstraction 63–5, 78 Scarborough 192 scarlet fever 152 Scarsbrick Road 63 Scotland Road, Liverpool 5, 32, 140, 156, 200 Scott, Alexander 115 Scrimgeour, G.C. 45–7 Second World War 83, 87, 103, 119–20, 124, 126, 141, 210 n.5, 213 n.58, 216 n.48, 222 n.10, 222 n.28 Second World War museum, Liverpool 18 secret scheme 66–7 Seely, Colonel 38 sensory overload 4, 7 septic sore throat 152 serious crime 15, 79, 81, 83–4, 94, 124 7/7 bombings 189 sexual offences 15, 80–1, 124–5, 133 Sharpe, J. 83 Shaw, Peter Stapleton 38–9, 203 n.16 Shawcross, Hartley 75 Sheffield 149 Sheller M. 16 shell-shock 3, 178, 192, 219 n.17 shelters 3, 7, 12, 39, 56, 64, 69, 71, 73, 79–81, 88, 92, 110, 124, 127, 129–32, 139, 141, 143, 146–7, 155, 157, 159, 164, 170, 177, 182, 184–5, 190, 201, 203 n.21 Shennan, Mr 56, 74–5 Shephard, B. 219 n.17 Shields, R. 180 shipping industry 12, 28, 31, 65, 74, 109, 120, 175 shock 3, 176, 178, 192, 219 n.17, 222 n.13 shoplifting 83 shortages 5, 21, 32, 105–7, 116, 173–5, 180 Sillars, Steven 202 n.5 Simpson, J. 52, 221 n.56 Simpson Street 52 simulations 18, 24, 53 sirens 13, 170 skilled labourers 160 Slatey Road 66

‘slum dwellers’ 178 Smithies, E. 83, 120 Smith Street, Kirkdale 115 social changes 148 social deprivation 25, 199 Socialists 75, 194, 197–8 social policy 16, 20, 151 Social Survey 177, 219 n.21 Society for the Provision of Birth Control Clinics, Liverpool 216 n.34 Soho 80 solidarity 172, 179 Southampton 32, 220 n.44 Southport 40–1, 48, 60, 69, 77, 177–8 South Road, Birkenhead 163 ‘souvenirs’ 114, 141, 211 n.29 Spain 52, 192 Spanish Civil War 192, 194 Spanish Medical Aid Committee 194 Spanner, E.F. 34–5, 55 special schools 137, 140, 142 Spectator, The (magazine) 9 speed and assembly 56 Speke 52, 178 Spiegel, F. 2, 21 Spirit of the Blitz exhibition 201 ‘spivs’ 83, 104, 110, 116, 121 etymology 209 n.3 Springhall, J. 137 SS Freemantle 178 SS Saxonia 31 Stable, Justice 98, 211 n.32 Stacey, Constable 162, 217 n.69 stages of response to enemy bombing 170 Stallybrass, Clare Oswald 139, 151, 215 n.31 Stanley Road, Liverpool 5, 187, 201 Stansky, P. 3 Starkey, P. 139, 213 n.51 starvation 14, 32, 35 St Georges’ Crescent, Liverpool 7 St George’s Hall, Liverpool 12, 31, 137, 146, 197 St Helens 41, 60 Stipendiary Magistrate 99 St James School 137 St John’s Market 107 St Nicholas Church 201 Storeton 50

Index Straits Steamship Company 212 n.33 Street, S. 202 n.7 street shopping centres 49 sugar 105, 108, 113, 177, 209–10 n.5 Sugar (Domestic Preserving) Order 209 n.5 survivors 88, 155–6 Süss, D. 15, 171–2 Sutherland, Graham 66 Sutherland, J. 33–4, 66 Sykes, Major 38 sympathy 39, 41, 106, 110, 131, 177–8, 209 n.3 Tame, E.W. 204 nn.35–6, 216 n.38, 216 n.41 Target for Tonight (Watt, film) 18 tear gas 6, 42 Technicolor 18, 21 technophobes 145 telephone communications 6, 13, 18, 40, 47, 63, 65–6, 75, 128, 136, 145, 187, 189 Temple, London 185 temporary market 49 terror 3, 32–4, 36, 42, 77, 172, 189, 192, 221 n.2 Terror of the Air (Le Queux, novel) 36–8 Thames 35 theatricality and performance 51–3 theft/larceny 3–4, 15, 24, 72, 79, 81, 85–6, 92, 97, 104, 107–8, 112–13, 115, 116, 118–21, 123–5, 129, 131–2, 134, 139, 141, 200 Thingwall Sanatorium 154 Thomas, D. 83, 101, 208 n.11 Thompson, Francis Longstreth 196 timber 50, 112, 211 n.32 Times, The 79, 199, 222 n.12 Timmis, Ellen 103, 107 Tipton 33 Titmuss, R.M. 151, 154–6, 215 n.29 Tobey, Dan 76 Tomlinson, N.C.H. 10 topophilia (‘love of place’) 31 Torrie, J. 15 totalitarianism 153 tourism 29, 49, 66–7, 74, 106, 144, 149, 153–4, 166, 180

251

Town and Country Planning (Interim Development) Acts 195–6, 222 n.17 Town Clerk 40, 47–8, 62, 136, 147–8, 150, 156, 158–60, 163, 187, 219 n.20 Toxteth School 137 trade 6, 14, 16, 24, 32, 34–5, 38, 49, 69, 75–6, 88, 104, 106–7, 109, 112–14, 116, 120–1, 142, 174, 178, 219 n.19 traffic accidents and fatalities 90–1 blackout regulations 90 control measures 50, 67, 88, 93, 143–7, 155, 187, 208 n.10 problems 10, 23–4, 29, 64, 86, 88, 108 restrictions 14 violations 93, 100–1 trams/tramways 1, 4, 6–7, 12, 29, 145–6, 155, 187, 202 n.2 transatlantic trade 23, 88 Transport and General Workers’ Union 192, 203 n.9 transportation 4–5, 16, 28, 39–40, 43, 45–50, 56, 60, 64, 68–9, 112, 141, 147, 152, 155, 158, 174, 181, 187, 190, 192, 200 Treachery Act, 1940 90 trekking 2–5, 76, 86, 147, 157, 174–5, 177–8, 184 Tribune 89 Trocadero cinema 6 Trotter, W. 208 n.15 tuberculosis 154 Tudor, W.J. 216 n.38 tunnel shelters 147, 203 n.21 Turner, John Henry 115 U-boats 6, 17, 20, 38, 105, 210 n.5 uncertainty 11, 13, 33, 47, 134, 148 unemployment 16–17, 50, 134, 138, 178, 181, 190, 196, 199, 216 n.37, 219 n.19 ‘unethical consumerism’ 119 unexploded bombs 64, 69, 88, 175 Union Square theatre, New York 202 n.2 United Nations 106 United States aid to Britain 3, 105–6, 195 audience to Britain’s post-war films 195 civil defense 51

252

Index

elevated railways 29 methods of housing and manufacturing 217 n.55 9/11 attacks 189 Republicans 74 servicemen 88 troops in Britain 88, 108 United States Air Force base 108 unskilled labourers 51, 123 Upton Road, Birkenhead 156, 163 Urry, J. 16, 180 USAAF 171 Us and Them (Leeson, film) 200 UXB 64 vans 32, 41, 49, 143, 187 vegetables and fruit 105, 111 vegetarians 210 n.22 vermin and disease, spread of 151–5 Victoria Monument, Liverpool 7 Victorian properties 12, 166 videos 31 violence 32 violence/violent crime 3–4, 6–7, 10, 16, 25, 32, 41–2, 80, 84–6, 96, 98, 124–5, 128, 130, 200 visual culture 28 volunteers 6, 23, 37–8, 44, 47, 52, 67, 87–8, 147, 155–6, 158, 160, 162–3, 194, 216 n.48 Walker Art Gallery 99 Walklate, S. 211 n.28 Wallasey 2, 40–1, 49–50, 60, 64–5, 77, 112, 163, 190, 196, 204 n.45 Wallasey Trades Council 203 n.9 Wallington Remand Home 127 Wallis, G. 150–3 Walsall 33 Walton Hall Avenue 63 Walton Prison 81 Walton Village 187 Wandsworth Prison 81 Wapping Dock Overhead Railway station 52, 117 war alter behaviour 119 War Cabinet 64–5 War Damage Act, 1941 214 n.3 War Damage Survey 214 n.3 Warden Organization 62–3

warehouses 3, 29, 35, 48, 52–3, 64–5, 70–2, 74, 77, 79, 85–6, 94, 101, 108–10, 114, 116, 132–3, 141, 173, 206 n.26, 206 n.42 war industries 174 war materiel 2 War Reserve 50 Warrington 41, 60 War Room of Region 10 (Northwest) 43 war work/war effort 6, 17, 21, 56, 67, 75, 97–8, 104, 118, 123, 128, 132, 140–2 Washington 217 n.55 Wasson, S.P. 31, 72, 206 n.42 Watch Committee Review, 1939–40 87–8 Water Department 50 waterfront projects 27, 189, 200 Waterloo 81 ‘water rats’ 156 Water Street, Liverpool 22, 147 water supply 9, 11–12, 48, 50–1, 53, 64–5, 93, 156, 163, 187–8, 190, 215 n.30 Watt, Henry 18 Wavertree 38, 63 Wednesbury 33 welfare 20, 25, 67–8, 134, 138, 151, 198, 213 n.55, 216 n.37 Welfare State 198 Wellesley Street, Birkenhead 166 Welshman, J. 139, 148, 151, 215 n.30 Welsh Nationalist Party 153 Western Approaches Command (‘Western Approaches’) 17–21 Western Approaches (Jackson, film) 17–21 West Kirby 45 West Midlands 33 West Midlands Traffic Area 214 n.22 Whitby 192 Whittington Egan, R. 190 Who Cares (Broomfield, film) 200 Wilcock, Albert Edward 208 n.24 Wilkie, Wendell 74, 207 n.50 Wilkinson, Ellen 71, 75–7, 182 Willetts, Victor 131 Williams, Fred 188, 221 n.70 Williams, Ralph Vaughan 222 n.15 Williamson, Mr 43 Williamson Art Gallery 66 Winstanley, Chief Constable 141 Wirral 5, 31, 49, 77, 136

Index women evacuation of (expectant) mothers and children 44–5 family problems caused by 139, 213 n.51 firewatchers 69–78, 128 illegal markets sustained by 119, 209–10 n.5 moral and physical safety 69–73 police patrols 130–1 rationed food for 105 suffrage 216 n.34 unemployed 219 n.19 volunteers 47–8, 52, 182 working class 77 Women’s Group of Public Welfare 151, 215 n.30 Women’s Group on Problems Arising from Evacuation 215 n.30 Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) 47–8, 182, 204 n.41 ‘wonder fuel’ 210 n.20

253

Woodchurch Road, Birkenhead 50, 147, 158 Woodside, Birkenhead 45, 149 Woodward, Jas H. 218 n.78 Woolven, R. 214 n.3 Worcestershire 111 Wormwood Scrubs 103 ‘wreckers’ 207–8 n.2 WWII Museum, Liverpool 18 York 176 Young Lag, The (Page) 123 youth clubs 142 youth culture, post-war 142, 213 n.58 youth organizations 134, 137–8 youth service corps 212 n.27 YouTube 222 n.15 Zeppelin raids 33–4, 192, 222 n.6 Ziegler, P. 13, 29 Zuckerman, S. 172