Bobbies, Bombs and the Blackout (Pt 1)
by Roy Ingleton

It is a bright, sunny and momentous Sunday morning, the 3rd of September 1939. The Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain has just made his historic speech announcing that Great Britain was now at war with Nazi Germany. As if to underline this announcement, the sirens suddenly begin to sound and, throughout Southern England, the ubiquitous British Bobby, carefully replaces his normal headgear with a blue-painted steel helmet, places a placard around his neck reading ‘Air Raid – Take Cover’, mounts his sturdy bicycle and sets off, blowing his whistle to attract attention. At least, that was the intention but, in many cases, this was the first time in their lives these policemen had used their whistle and at least one Kent officer discovered that his was full of fluff and quite unusable!

To our modern eyes, brought up on a diet of The Sweeney, The Bill, and other fast-paced police programmes, the idea of a red-faced, somewhat overweight constable trying to blow his fluff-stuffed whistle with what little breath he has left after pedalling up the High Street, may seem bizarre, even ludicrous, but things were different then. For one thing, there were 179 separate police forces as opposed to just 43 today. Almost every town of any size had its own police force, with its own chief constable and one constable recalls seeing the Chief Constable of Canterbury City proceeding majestically down the street in full regalia, complete with sword and ornate helmet – riding a bicycle!

But the nation was now at war and the police had a role to fill – one which they did so well that Winston Churchill, in a broadcast he made in 1942, said;

“If I mention only one of them [the civil defence services] tonight – namely the police – it is because many tributes have been paid already to the others. But the police have been in it everywhere all the time. And as a working-class woman wrote to me in a letter, ‘What Gentlemen they are’ ”.

The importance of the police role during the war is based on the fact that, throughout its history, the police service has been entrusted with all sorts of jobs that did not fit neatly into any other pigeonhole. But even the police were somewhat bemused when Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for War, announced on the wireless that he was going to form a force of local defence volunteers and appealed to all able-bodied men to report to their local police station to volunteer their services. But no one had warned the police and, when the queues began to form, they rapidly had to improvise quickly and compiled registers of volunteers’ details. It is not generally appreciated that it was also left to the police to find suitable civilians with military experience to lead these volunteers and it is to their credit that what was to become the Home Guard was quickly organised. Once the LDV officers had been selected the control and training was passed over to these worthies and the police took no further part in the organisation.

Of course, many policemen in those days were ex-servicemen with a Reserve commitment, which meant they were quickly recalled to the colours and other young officers were called up. In some places, the fact that many of the inhabitants of their town had been evacuated enabled the greatly depleted police force to cope. In Kent for example, the population of Birchington dropped from some 20,000 to around 800 and about 90% of all properties were unoccupied. Elsewhere the gap was filled by retired policemen who donned uniform once more for the duration and by a number of not-so-young men who became Police War Reserves. These were a motley crew: costermongers, hairdressers, carpenters, shopkeepers, cooks, farm-workers and so on.

One of the first tasks that fell on the police and the wardens was the enforcement of the blackout regulations – a task which some took very seriously, using ingenious methods, such as shooting out an offending light bulb with an air gun. In Folkestone, a policeman pasted sheets of newspaper over the window of a house where the occupants had failed to draw the curtains.