‘Serve to Save’: Gender,Citizenship and Civil Defence in Britain 1937–41

In the Second Reading of the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) Bill in the Commons on November 15 1937, James Ede, Labour MP for South Shields, recounted a blackout practice in Southampton in which he had participated. During this exercise, he recalled, ‘three young ladies – the most attractive young ladies in Southampton’ had been designated as casualties, bandaged, sat against a wall, and then forgotten for the rest of the night. At 7a.m. someone released them and later that morning they walked into a council meeting of male ARP officers to complain about their treatment. ¹ Ede told this story in order to illustrate the disorganized nature of ARP and the chaos that he believed would result from an actual attack on Britain, but it also serves as a striking picture of the ways that ARP was gendered, with women on the margins of the planning, organization and enactment of the civil defence of Britain in the Second World War.

Between 1924 and 1939 successive governments planned for a war that would involve the aerial bombardment of civilian populations. ² From 1940 until 1945, Britain experienced such a bombardment which, although it took a very different form from that imagined in the interwar years, had killed and seriously injured 146,777 civilians by the end of the war. ³ Throughout this period ARP was divided into two branches: passive civil defence, which included the provision of shelters and gas masks, first aid and medical treatment, evacuation, blackout, and the organization of ARP wardens, and active civil defence, which included the Air Force, Anti Aircraft Batteries and searchlights, and was staffed by the military. The need to organize civilians within passive defence, to defend the home, the community and ultimately, the nation, against aerial warfare entailed an articulation of citizenship and its repositioning, as Sonya O. Rose has argued, as ‘active citizenship … linked to social responsibility and participation in civil society or in public affairs.’ ⁴ The ‘good citizen’ of wartime would be willing to not only put the needs of the collective before those of the individual but would also, in some circumstances, be willing to risk their life in defence of their family, their community and their nation. Outside the military the duties of the wartime citizen could be carried out in a number of ways: working in war industry, joining the Home Guard and enrolling in civil defence services were just three of the more visible ways for civilians to demonstrate their commitment to the war effort. Within the planning and organization of civil defence in the 1930s and 1940s, civilians were explicitly addressed as citizens whose membership of a democracy meant they had a duty to participate in ARP; informed that civil defence had become one of the ‘ordinary duties of citizenship’ as ‘what could be more democratic than making national defence the concern of every man and woman in a democratic state?’ ⁵ The demands of wartime were multifarious, ranging from evacuation to conscription, from rationing and shortages to bombardment, but nowhere were they more closely linked with the duties of citizenship for civilians than in civil defence.

Citizenship however, despite being an ‘equalizing word’, evocative of common privileges, rights and duties embedded in membership of a state or community, is experienced in profoundly different ways by members of different groups within the state or community. ⁶ Existing as a legal set of rights and duties, and closely linked to ideas of belonging and nationhood, citizenship is an elusive concept which is nonetheless particularly prevalent at times of national crisis and conflict. In wartime and in preparations for warfare, the duties of citizenship take precedence over its privileges, as individuals are asked to place the collective needs of the nation over individual desires and freedoms. ⁷ As numerous theorists and historians have demonstrated, these duties are closely shaped by gender: in First World War Britain for example, women’s primary duty was the biological and cultural reproduction of the nation, whilst men’s duty was to fight. ⁸ The Second World War however, with the widespread threat of aerial bombardment and the wider acceptance of the need to fully utilize women’s labour outside the home, provided a profound challenge to gendered divisions of citizenship. The threat of bombing and the resulting organization for civil defence, while in some ways cutting across the gendered duties of citizenship by mobilizing men and women in the defence of the home, in other ways strengthened them by positioning the woman and her family within the home as the primary target of bombing raids.

As Susan R. Grayzel has argued, the changing nature of warfare in the first half of the twentieth century entailed the militarization of the domestic home and the civilian population, as they became targets of aerial warfare and as successive governments attempted to plan for their protection and to transform them from potential victims to potential defenders of the home and the home front. ⁹ This complex web of relationships, between the meanings of death in wartime for civilians and for combatants, and the meanings of citizenship in total war, underpinned the construction and implementation of ARP policy in interwar Britain. The state, recognizing the need to organize for the civil defence of those in the home, had to find a means to mobilize and address its civilian populations in a manner which both placed them as active members of a nation at war, engaged in the defence of the home and the nation, and attempted to maintain a distinction between civil society and the military. In part, this was a matter of keeping up military morale; if men at the front were told they were fighting to defend the home, that home needed to be as unchanged as possible, a domestic idyll rather than a militarized zone. But it was also a gendered distinction, and one that had implications for the recruitment of men for ARP work. The perception of women as the primary potential victims of air raids meant they were encouraged to take responsibility for defending the home and its occupants in ways ranging from teaching children how to use gas masks, to evacuation and membership of the Air Raid Warden’s Service. However, this involvement of women in civil defence had the potential to create an image of ARP as a feminized service, undermining both the appeal of ARP to men, and the masculinity of men in the service, an identity already threatened by their status as non-combatants.

Although recent research has displaced the image of the interwar period as a retreat to domesticity for women following the temporary liberation of the First World War, the domestic idyll was nonetheless prevalent. ¹⁰ The interwar years saw masculinity as well as femininity re-imagined as men alongside women recognized the attractions of a domestic, family based identity; an attraction driven no less by the growth of the suburbs, falling birth rates and the availability of new domestic appliances than by the horrors of a militarized masculinity during the war. ¹¹ However, the growing threat of aerial warfare in the 1930s emphasized both the vulnerability of the domestic and the underlying continuities of its gendered nature, with men increasingly imagined as defending the home, and women positioned within it, as the primary potential victims of bombardment. In a striking reflection of traditional models of femininity and masculinity, women were, until 1941, only associated with passive civil defence, undertaking a range of activities within the passive defence of the country. After 1941, when members of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) were employed on anti-aircraft work for the first time, women began to operate within the ‘active’ branch of civil defence, albeit in a manner designed to protect existing gender identities as far as possible. ¹² The discourse of citizenship that represented ARP service as ‘the duty of every citizen’ was therefore a complex one in terms of gender. ¹³ At one level, it had to address ‘every citizen’, men and women; all were needed to create an efficient ARP service that would defend the home and the nation in wartime. On another level however it functioned in highly gendered ways. Whilst male members of ARP services were addressed in a manner which accentuated their masculinity and linked it with the men in the Forces, such a discourse was not easily available to women who, in a complex and often contradictory manner, had to negotiate between models of femininity which emphasized their duty to the home and models of citizenship which emphasized their duty to the wartime nation. As Alison Oram has argued, during wartime women were both ‘treated as citizens who owed certain ‘masculine’ responsibilities towards the state’ while at the same time ‘the connection between femininity and family life was strengthened’. ¹⁴ This article demonstrates how the gendering of warfare, the subject of much historical debate, can be traced through the development of civil defence both before and during the war, arguing that despite the need to attract as many civilians to ARP services as possible, civil defence had the potential to destabilize existing discourses of both masculinity and femininity by placing women alongside men as defenders of the home and was consequently represented and organized in such a way as to minimise this potential disruption. ¹⁵ Continuity, not change, shaped gender roles within civil defence. The article begins by outlining the emergence of civil defence policies in the interwar period, and the impact of aerial bombardment on Britain during the First World War on these policies.

The shape of future wars had preoccupied government and, eventually, the public imagination, since the mid 1920s. ¹⁶ During the First World War the direct impact of warfare had extended to the British home for the first time in centuries. Air raids on England killed 1413 people between 1915 and 1918 with the heaviest raids on London, where 670 died. ¹⁷ Dying for one’s country was no longer the prerogative of the uniformed soldier, a fact brought home by the daylight raid on East London of 13 July 1917, in which 162 people were killed, including 18 school children at Upper North Street School, Poplar, which suffered a direct hit. ¹⁸ This raid provoked outrage at the killing of non-combatants on British soil, particularly the young victims who died in the school. At the inquest into their deaths the coroner stated that ‘these boys and girls have died as truly for their country … as any of our men at the front or on the high seas’ a sentiment echoed by the Mayor of Poplar at their funeral the following week, when he claimed that ‘they have died for England’. ¹⁹ Despite this blurring of civilian and combatant identities, women and children appeared as distinct from men in most public commentary of the raids, with the German Air Force accused of lacking ‘the courage to meet our men’ whilst being ‘very brave against women and children’ ²⁰ . Women were seen as behaving unsatisfactorily during raids, with claims in parliament that ‘hundreds of young ladies in government offices’ were ‘exposing themselves to very great danger’ by rushing outside to view raids, supplemented by reports at coroners’ inquests of raids when ‘women swarmed out into the street’ and one incident when a policeman was killed whilst trying to compel female workers who had ‘run down into the street from excitement and curiosity’ during a raid to seek shelter. ²¹ Although the raids of the First World War helped to create a ‘war of nation against nation’ rather than ‘army against army’, it was also a war in which the behaviours and identities of the new civilian victims of warfare were understood as gendered. ²²

The issue of the gendered identity of air raid victims, and their relationship to the nation at war, continued to shape wartime and interwar policy and planning regarding air raid precautions, strengthening the gendered identities which some believed had been weakened by the demands of total war. ²³ While the civilian victims of air raids were described by a coroner as being, like soldiers, ‘not afraid to die for their country’ they never fully shared the identity of the male combatant as they remained essentially passive, unable to fight the enemy that was attacking them. Much debate in the press and in parliament following the air raid of 13 June 1917 focused on the issue of reprisal raids of Germany, and the question of British bombers targeting German women and children. Meetings took place across London to call for reprisal raids and a petition, signed by the mayors of several London boroughs, was submitted to Parliament to call for such raids. ²⁴ In Parliament, MPs called for ‘stern and swift reprisals’ against German towns and letters to The Times demanded reprisals and drew parallels between ‘innocent people being bombed’ and the ‘innocent’ British soldiers at the Front. ²⁵ Alongside this discourse of a nation at war, with civilians taking their place alongside combatants as targets of total warfare, ran a counter argument, which emphasized the difference between combatant and civilian. This difference was most often articulated in terms of gender and age, with women being placed alongside children as innocent victims of war who should be protected at all costs. The Times published letters arguing that ‘the systematic slaughter of women and children’ by British bombing raids would be a ‘crime against humanity’ and one, simply signed ‘A Mother’ stated that:

Should I live to see Englishmen sent to murder in cold blood German women and children and harmless civilians then indeed I should begin to ask ‘Have my sons died in vain’? ²⁶

Despite the extension of warfare to include the targeting of civilians, and despite subsequent attempts to describe the impact of air raids as uniting civilian and combatant within the wartime nation, the civilian targets of air raids continued to be distinguished from the armed forces in a manner that often emphasized their sex.

This gendered division between the armed services and civilian air raid victims was maintained throughout the planning for the defence of Britain against aerial bombardment which took place throughout the inter-war period. In January 1924 the Committee of Imperial Defence, which planned defence measures for the nation and the Empire, appointed an ARP Sub-Committee to oversee measures to defend civilian populations against this threat. This Committee administered and co-ordinated civil defence planning until 1935 when, amid rising international tension, an ARP department was formed at the Home Office. The optimism that had shaped much thinking on international relations in the 1920s gradually faded during the 1930s, with the government rescinding the ‘Ten Year Rule’ in 1933 and appointing a Defence Requirements Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence to oversee re-armament. ²⁷ In 1934 government scientists began to design a respirator for civilian use and in 1935 the first circular on ARP was issued to Local Authorities. Stanley Baldwin’s prescient and much quoted statement that ‘the bomber will always get through’ was swiftly becoming a widely shared belief, strengthened by the bombing of Spain, Abyssinia, Iraq and China, and underpinning policy decisions regarding defence throughout the 1930s. ²⁸

This shift in government policy was matched by a growing public concern, expressed through peace activism, criticism of government planning and novels, plays and films which explored, in often gratuitous detail, the impact of a future war on the civilian population. ²⁹ Echoing Clement Attlee’s argument that the best person to advise governments on aerial bombardment would be ‘the mother of some child who had been killed by bombing’, these representations of a future war often focused specifically on the impact of war on women and children, two social groups who were lumped together as a handy signifier of the horrors of aerial warfare. ³⁰ In What Happened to the Corbetts, one of the less lurid examples of ‘air war fiction’, Nevil Shute traced the impact of high level aerial bombardment on a middle class family, emphasizing the effects of warfare on day to day domestic necessities and the subsequent social breakdown, panic and disease which ensued. The family were saved, not by government intervention, but by the father’s sailing skills and ownership of a boat on which he carried them to the relative safety of France, before departing to Canada to join the Services ³¹ Perhaps more representative of the genre, and certainly more salacious in its description of the impact of poison gas, a favourite and recurring theme of both the popular literature and, increasingly, civil defence planning in the 1930s, was the 1935 novel Air God’s Parade. This anti-war novel described massive gas attacks on London which left ‘the ground carpeted with the dead and dying’. ³² Probably the best known example of the genre was H.G. Wells’ portentous 1933 ‘future history’ The Shape of Things to Come, reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement as foreseeing ‘no better than wars and plagues and the disintegration of our civilisation the world over’. ³³ Wells’ dystopian vision was made into a popular apocalyptic film in 1936, the opening sequence of which ended with a ‘slow and eloquent track into the body of a child buried in the rubble.’ ³⁴ Women and children repeatedly function as symbols of innocence in the film, appearing as victims of heavy explosive, gas warfare and the subsequent onset of disease and social disintegration, situated within the home and the domestic and against the male world of warfare, destruction and despotism.

As well as serving as a shorthand symbol of the horrors of aerial warfare, women were also repeatedly represented as the only sex who were able to prevent war or, if they failed in this duty, as ultimately responsible for war. George Cornwallis-West’s The Woman Who Stopped War (1935) told the story of a beautiful war widow who became the mistress of a wealthy arms manufacturer and used his money to fund her secret organization of women who vowed to strike if war threatened. War was averted because ‘the women of the enemy answered the call with the same alacrity as the English women’, demonstrating the common interest of women across nations so beloved of feminist pacifists of the period. ³⁵ In contrast Joseph O’Neill’s Day of Wrath (1936) has a woman responsible for laying Britain open to a devastating gas attack. ³⁶ Fiction authors were not alone in their gendering of the impact of and defence against aerial warfare. J.B.S. Haldane’s vociferous 1938 critique of civil defence planning ARP predicted a future war in which aeroplanes would be used to attack civilians with machine guns, shells, poison gas and explosives. Haldane drew on his experience of the Spanish Civil War to depict the impact of aerial warfare on the human body, and while avoiding the hyperbole of much interwar fiction which drew ‘terrible pictures of great cities wiped out in a single ‘knock out blow’ air raid, and wide areas poisoned for years on end’, Haldane nonetheless utilized his scientific expertise alongside his experience of war to predict that, without careful planning to protect British civilians, the casualty rate of any future war would far outweigh that of the past. ³⁷ While Haldane’s chief target was the British government, whom he believed to be possessed of a criminally laissez faire attitude when it came to the protection of civilians, he also criticized the ‘women voters of England’ whom, he claimed ‘have not done their duty in this matter’. Arguing that babies and children would be amongst the chief casualties of aerial warfare, Haldane compared his female contemporaries, ‘interested in the various shows, from the coronation to the latest murder or fashionable wedding’ unfavourably to the earlier generation of suffrage campaigners, who believed that ‘the women voters would see to such matters’ and ensure that, if war came, children would be protected. ³⁸ Women then were not only to be the primary victims of aerial assault, but were also partially responsible for it; ignoring their ‘natural’ pacifism, which Haldane saw as inherent in their role as mothers. Despite their new power as voters, Haldane argued, women were guilty of allowing politicians and policy makers to continue on the path towards a disastrous and deadly war without giving adequate thought to the protection of civilians.

Women and children were often singled out as the primary targets of aerial warfare, with ‘any future war’ imagined as being ‘more dangerous for non-combatants such as old people, women and children, than for the soldiers themselves’. ³⁹ Aerial warfare, claimed the publisher Geoffrey Faber, was the ‘last crime of scientific barbarism’, imagining a war in which ‘the enemy bombs our women and children’ and ‘we … deliberately bomb his.’ ⁴⁰ The government became increasingly concerned about the impact that such attacks would have upon the morale of both the nation as a whole and, more specifically, upon that of the combatant man. As Baldwin had argued in 1932, ‘the fear of seeing his wife and children killed from the air’ was a new and powerful means of breaking the morale of the serviceman in wartime. ⁴¹ Throughout the 1930s civil defence preparation was reviewed and reconsidered, with the amounts of capital investment, manpower and casualties to be expected creeping ever upwards. In 1937 the Air Raids Precautions (ARP) Act was passed, making it compulsory for local authorities to organize for the civil defence of their populations. The Act estimated that over one million extra personnel would need to be recruited for ARP. Of these, almost half would be women.

The ARP Act of 1937 marked a significant shift in the relationship of the civilian citizen to the wartime state. Civilians now had defensive duties to undertake; alongside members of the armed services they were responsible for the defence of the nation. They were to fulfil these duties however not through taking up arms in battle, but by defending the domestic home and those within it. The new pattern of warfare acted to break down many of the ‘home front/war front’ divisions which had shaped the British experience of war for centuries. As The Times argued in January 1938:

The development of the bomber has bought the front line of war to the very doors of a nation which for centuries has been safe from enemies. And the object of the bomber is not to defeat the rival air force but to terrify into submission populations whose women and children and homes are attacked and destroyed by fire, explosive, and gas. ⁴²

Populations would be attacked, but they would also be mobilized to defend themselves, their families, homes, communities and ultimately, their nation, against attack. Women, represented so often as symbolizing the horrors of aerial assault, would also be called upon in this defence. However, despite the blurring of the boundaries between civilian and combatant that this new sort of warfare entailed, gendered boundaries between the civilian woman and the combatant man were largely maintained. One of the ways that this was achieved was through careful management of women’s work in the defence of the nation.

The ARP Act laid the foundations for the organization of civilians for civil defence throughout the Second World War. The Act was based on the premise that civil defence was the ‘fourth arm’ of the defensive forces of the nation and formalized the separation of active defence, which remained the responsibility of the military, from passive defence which was ‘essentially work for civilians … the field of the householder, of the father of a family, of the local council and of the local Red Cross.’ ⁴³ Haldane, writing in the Daily Express, argued that civil defence itself was divided into three lines. The first line of defence was the fighter plane, the second was the anti-aircraft artillery and the third was ‘defence for individual citizens’. ⁴⁴ The civilian members of this fourth arm or third line would be voluntary and largely unpaid, driven, it was hoped, by a combination of patriotism and self interest. Passive defence was broken down into six general sections: police, fire service, wardens, first aid (including ambulance drivers) heavy rescue squads and gas detection and contamination. Of these, women were to be utilized in the fire service, where they would be employed in clerical and telephone work, in first aid posts and ambulances and as wardens. ⁴⁵ The main source of employment for women in civil defence was in first aid, where it was estimated that 362,500 women would be needed, the majority, 302,000, being utilized as workers in First Aid posts, the equivalent of military casualty clearing stations, where casualties would be assessed and triaged prior to evacuation to hospital. ⁴⁶ Concerns were raised within the Home Office regarding the use of women’s labour in civil defence, particularly around the willingness of sufficient numbers of women to volunteer and their abilities to carry out ARP work once they had volunteered. Following Trenchard’s theory of air warfare and the importance of the ‘knock out blow’, the Home Office expected a ‘period of intensive air attack’ to open the next war which would make ‘enormous demands on the physical stamina and endurance’ of ARP personnel. This, it was argued, meant that much of the work could ‘only be done by young and active men’ who could gradually be released for military service or for industry as the focus of warfare shifted. ⁴⁷

Recruitment for the new service was somewhat patchy with membership in the large towns and cities, especially London, far lower than required. ⁴⁸ By March 1938 ARP volunteers in London only totalled 22,291, less than one-third of the estimated total numbers needed for the defence of the city at that point. Of these, the poorest boroughs had recruited the lowest numbers: volunteers registered in Bethnal Green numbering only 80 out of a required 2000 whilst wealthier Kensington, with 2000 enrolled volunteers, was only 600 short of its aim of 2600. ⁴⁹ This was in large part due to the demands of paid labour on the time of the working class; of more immediate concern was the lack of young men coming forward for registration for ARP work. According to the Daily Telegraph, many of the boroughs that had recruited well were complaining that ‘a disproportionate number of women are included in their present strength’. ARP was particularly short of the younger men believed to be necessary to the efficient functioning of the service, the Daily Telegraph noting the ‘need for young men in ARP where fitness is essential.’ The same article attempted to link ARP with military service, arguing that ‘responsible duty in the country’s ARP service will, in the event of war, be considered as important as active service in the Army, Navy and Air Force.’ Newspaper correspondents did not doubt men’s patriotism or sense of civic duty; instead, they argued, men were reluctant to sign up for ARP because they ‘were doubtful about their position in the event of war’. The lack of clarification regarding the potential dual demands on young men in wartime had the effect of creating the ‘erroneous impression’ that ‘ARP is a service reserved for men who are too old and unfit for active service, and women.’ ⁵⁰ The belief that civil defence would employ women, the unfit and the infirm was indeed a factor in the apparent reluctance of young men to enrol, one man in his mid 30s complaining that he ‘felt a fool’ because he was ‘put in with a lot of old boys and women’. ⁵¹ Like the Home Guard later in the war, ARP could symbolize unity and solidarity that was ‘both enthusiastic and voluntaristic across class, age and regional boundaries.’ ⁵² At the same time however, and again paralleling the Home Guard, its linkage with the home and home defence could be seen as problematic for the masculinities of the men within the organization, working in passive defence, often alongside women and older volunteers who were excluded from the active defence of the nation. The need to recruit as widely as possible, and to address volunteers as citizens with a specific duty in the defence of the home which was not a military duty, appeared to combine with uncertainty regarding the eventual role of young men in wartime to make ARP, in its early years, an often unattractive service for this group.

A recruiting campaign set out to address this specific shortage. The ARP posters that were part of this campaign were highly gendered in their address to men, attempting to emphasize the masculine nature of the work. A poster by Frank Gardner, ‘Serve to Save’ represented the ARP worker as a stern, besuited man holding a shield inscribed ‘A.R.P.’ with a woman and baby cowering behind him. ⁵³ The ARP worker pictured here, whilst obviously a civilian, was nonetheless marked out as separate from the woman, the child and the domestic home that he was defending. Less striking but carrying a similar message is a poster showing a smiling civilian man against a blue sky emblazoned with the words ‘ARP – Here’s A Man’s Job!’ ⁵⁴ Posters recruiting men for first aid and stretcher parties described them as ‘A Real Man’s Job’ and a poster recruiting for the Air Raid Warden’s service described it as ‘A Responsible Job for Responsible Men’. ⁵⁵ The emphasis on the ‘manliness’ of ARP work in the posters directed at men demonstrate the potentially problematic nature of this work for masculinity; defending the home, passive rather than active, it was a service which could easily become associated with the domestic and the feminine, marked out clearly as separate from the masculine, active military services. In order to counter this, publicity emphasized the masculine duty of defending the family and the home. To a large extent and undoubtedly spurred on by the Munich crisis of 1938, the campaign worked, with a Mass Observation survey of ARP in Fulham in the summer of 1939 finding the borough had ‘proportionately more men than women’ volunteers, of whom 42 per cent were aged between 15 and 35. ⁵⁶

In contrast, posters which set out to recruit women for ARP often played down the gendered identity of potential female recruits. Posters aimed at women tended to the simple and straightforward, often simply stating ‘women wanted’ against a plain background. One poster, by R. Fran Sutton, pictured a range of women in civilian dress marching together whilst below, a gas masked figure of uncertain sex, positioned against a burning background states ‘It’s The Women We Need’. ⁵⁷ The civilian clothing of the women contrasts with the military formation in which they appear to be marching, emphasizing the duty of the female citizen in the home to undertake some sort of work to protect that home and, by extension, the community and nation. The potential linkage between ARP and femininity may have been strengthened in public perception by the creation of the Women’s Voluntary Services (WVS) in 1938. ⁵⁸ The original remit of the WVS shows clearly the linkage of women with the home, now in need of defence, which underpinned so much thinking on civil defence. It was hoped the WVS would not only successfully mobilize women in the defence of the home, but also, by the ‘energising of women’ ensure that ‘men would also receive stimulation and volunteer for service’. ⁵⁹ The Times welcomed the organization, arguing that ‘the work involved is in many places admirably suited to women’ as ‘the care of casualties or of patients in hospital wards is peculiarly the woman’s gift.’ Women, the article continued, could often make more suitable ARP workers than men as ‘once a woman has found her niche in an ARP service there would be no conceivable reason for disturbing her in the event of war.’ Unlike the recruitment campaign aimed at encouraging more men to enrol for the service, The Times emphasized the essentially civilian nature of ARP which, at that point was non-uniformed and ‘had nothing military about them’. ⁶⁰ ARP training for women also had another, less tangible benefit according to The Times: their participation would help to alleviate the ‘psychological danger of panic in air attacks’, something women were believed to be particularly vulnerable to according to an earlier article in the same paper which had stated that ‘The typical figure of panic is that of the frantic mother asking what she must do to save her children.’ ⁶¹ In the discourse of civil defence which greeted the foundation of the WVS it was imagined as work that was particularly suited to women, its defensive role being represented as an extension of women’s ‘natural’ abilities to nurture and care for those in need of protection.

The formation of the WVS was not universally welcomed however. The Daily Mirror reported concerns that the new organization would add to ‘the confusion’ that already existed around ARP organization and recruitment. Moreover, despite membership being open to any woman between 16 and 65, the perception existed that the WVS would be dominated by women from the upper classes, and would ‘become a social organisation’. W.P. Kelly, MP for Rochdale, complained of ‘the danger … that dowagers in cocked hats and smart uniforms will become the commanding officers of the women’s ARP organisation, which should of course be entirely free from class distinction.’ ⁶² The MPs Ellen Wilkinson and Edith Summerskill echoed this in the Commons, where Summerskill accused the WVS leadership of having ‘no practical experience of the people in the industrial and congested areas’ and Wilkinson claimed that the way in which the WVS was organized meant that women’s voluntary work had been ‘put in the hands of fashionable ladies and young debutantes’. ⁶³ In their suspicions about the leadership of the WVS these MPs were to be proven right: while the WVS was successful in recruiting working-class women as members, leadership of the organization remained firmly in the hands of the upper classes. Nevertheless, the success of the organization in recruiting widely from the working class should not be underestimated. As Mass Observation (MO) demonstrated, married working-class women had less time to devote to voluntary work than their middle and upper-class counterparts as the dual demands of paid work and housework combined to ‘bear more heavily on the older women in the lower social classes than on those in the upper and middle classes’. ⁶⁴ In an attempt to widen their appeal and to counter the perception of them as an organization of leisured ladies, the WVS published a poster which would ‘appeal to the ordinary woman … who would be only too willing to shoulder their part of the responsibility in any emergency that might arise if the facts were brought to their notice and they were told how they might help.’ ⁶⁵ Unfortunately, the original model for the poster was revealed as foreign, so she was swiftly replaced by a ‘typical representation of the womanhood of Britain’ who was ‘a sensible sort of girl’ and ‘not too provocative’. ⁶⁶ For Lady Reading and the WVS, the ‘sensible’ British woman’s capacity for public service cut across the divides of social class and political belief that had appeared to threaten the status quo in the interwar years.

Class combined with gender to be a potential source of division within ARP recruitment and organization. The Labour movement had largely been hostile to ARP preparation during the 1930s, seeing civil defence as making warfare more likely. By the end of the decade however, many on the Left had reluctantly acceded to the necessity of preparing for air raids, with even the Communist Party arguing for deep shelters and urging its members to enrol as wardens in order to create ‘a body of men and women who carry out their duties in the interests of the people.’ ⁶⁷ In 1939 MO was commissioned to investigate public feeling regarding ARP. Focusing on the predominantly working-class London suburb of Fulham, which had famously elected a Labour MP on a ‘pacifist’ platform in 1933, MO found that while ARP attracted proportionately more men than women there was a relative shortage of younger men, who were instead joining ‘more active attractions such as the Territorial Army, the Auxiliary Fire Service, the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve and so on’. ⁶⁸ Older women were also in relatively short supply as volunteers, though, as MO, pointed out, ‘many of the married women have not sufficient spare time for ARP duties’. ⁶⁹ MO was interested in people’s reasons for volunteering for ARP work; numbers were still below the estimates of what would be needed in wartime, and the government remained reluctant to introduce compulsion to civil defence work. ⁷⁰ When MO asked ARP workers their reasons for volunteering, the answers were wide ranging. Whilst many were only able to articulate a vague sense of their motivations, such as the 28 year old man who replied, ‘I suppose I volunteered more or less to do my bit – the same as everybody else’ or the 23 year old woman who expressed ‘a desire to be in it somehow’, other respondents drew on gendered notions of service and citizenship. Whilst few women were as openly political as the 48 year old woman who claimed ‘I wanted to do something rather than sit at home like we did last time’, others stated that ‘it’s up to women at home to do their bit’ (woman, 29) and ‘as I was a woman with a certain amount of leisure, it was up to me to do what I could’ (woman, 53). Men were more likely to openly identify their service with a sense of public duty and sometimes to see it as an extension of military service, such as the man aged 45 who replied ‘it’s in the blood isn’t it? I done four and a half years in the Great War, so it comes natural really.’ A 35 year old man claimed to be motivated by a ‘sort of civil spirit … public duty’ whilst another man, aged 60, saw it as part of his role as a man in wartime, stating he had joined ‘because I happen to be a man – you might say a gentleman.’ ⁷¹ MO’s assessment of the motivations of Fulham residents was that whilst men were slightly more likely to enrol for ARP work out of a ‘sense of duty’, or a wish to ‘protect the family’ than women, women were more likely to be motivated by a ‘desire to help’ and ‘patriotism’ than men and also more frequently saw voluntary work as both a ‘hobby’ and a means of ‘personal advancement’. ⁷² MO concluded that, despite a shortage of young, male volunteers, due, they suspected, to confusion about their role in wartime, men were more attracted to ARP work than women, who were constrained by the demands of paid work, marriage and childcare. ⁷³

By the summer of 1939, ARP preparation and organization was underpinned by a new sense of urgency. Public air raid shelters began to appear in the streets and Anderson shelters were delivered to homes around the country. Blackouts were practised and evacuation plans were finalized. The Civil Defence Act of 1939 gave the government and local authorities wide-ranging powers to compel employers to enact ARP measures in the workplace. ⁷⁴ Nonetheless, numbers remained lower than required and at the end of March the Home Office estimated 1,182,582 people were enrolled for ARP work, against the 1,600,000 it believed would be needed in wartime. Of these, approximately 411,301 were women, primarily enrolled as volunteers in first aid, as ambulance drivers, clerical and communications workers with 104,729 female wardens. ⁷⁵ In a series of secret meetings, the Cabinet briefly considered introducing male conscription for civil defence, deciding against this as it would make ARP appear too ‘military in appearance’, undermining the concept of civil defence as ‘organized help by the civilian body’ in which the ‘risks accepted by soldiers, sailors and airmen’ would be extended to volunteers who might ‘give their lives for the help and protection of others.’ ⁷⁶ ARP was to remain a voluntary organization, which people were free to leave at will until 1940 when a series of measures attempted to ensure that ARP workers remained in their posts. ⁷⁷ At the outbreak of war, ARP was established as a civilian organization, calling on male and female citizens to participate in the defence of their homes, their communities and, ultimately, their nation against the threat of war from the air.

The memoirs of Barbara Nixon, who worked as an Air Raid Warden throughout the blitz of 1940–1, demonstrate that although ARP may have been imagined as gendered, the dangers attached to work in civil defence certainly were not. Wardens were expected to have local knowledge and authority, to be both someone trustworthy in an air raid and to act as a link between their community and central control, reporting casualties and bomb damage and directing emergency services. This of course meant that they would be out in the streets during raids and civil defence workers overall suffered 2379 deaths and 4459 serious injuries during the war. ⁷⁸ The Home Office had emphasized the importance of the ‘personal touch’ and ‘knowledge of his sector and the folk in his sector for wardens’, points underlined in the many handbooks on ARP published in the late 1930s, which also stressed that the warden would need to demonstrate ‘courage and ‘presence of mind’ as ‘he was placed in the front line of our civilian defence.’ ⁷⁹ As Nixon demonstrated, these were not purely male attributes; joining the Warden’s Service because she perceived it as ‘the most active and obviously helpful civil defence occupation open to women’ she experienced her first bombardment in September 1940. Describing the impact of the blast which threw her across the road she nonetheless worked to help the casualties, including a boy of 13 who ‘had one leg torn off’ a man trapped beneath a lorry and another with his ‘face shockingly cut away by glass.’ ⁸⁰ Women wardens, paid £2 per week against men’s £3, were nonetheless exposed to the same dangers as their male colleagues. ⁸¹

ARP demanded a new kind of citizenship; one which entailed defending the home and perhaps dying, or being seriously injured, in that defence. In this, ARP work paralleled the sacrifices that had traditionally been demanded of the male soldier, expected to fight and possibly die for his country, and can be understood as a key aspect of what Rose has termed ‘good citizenship’ in wartime Britain, which, she argues ‘focused on self sacrifice and placing the common good over individual interest.’ ⁸² To an extent, the address to individuals to become good wartime citizens by participating in ARP was not gendered; it had to speak to as wide a range of people as possible, crossing not only gender but also class barriers, appealing to both people’s sense of themselves as national citizens with concomitant duties and responsibilities, but also as members of families and communities that they would want to protect. When Sir John Anderson, the Minister in charge of ARP was interviewed for Picture Post in 1939 he described ARP as a ‘community service’ and emphasized the need for individual responsibility in his claim that, in wartime, ‘everybody must be his own air raid warden and help himself’. ⁸³ ARP then was a part of a wider discourse of wartime citizenship, in which all members of the nation had duties to carry out which linked their interests to those of the nation at war. In this, they were understood as civilians rather than an arm of the wartime services, even when an element of compulsion was finally introduced. ⁸⁴ In his history of the blitz on Stepney, Frank R. Lewey, the Labour Mayor, argued that wardens should not be thought of ‘as soldiers trained to danger’ but instead as ‘very ordinary businessmen and householders and quiet women; people … who only asked to be left alone in their little shops or their homes.’ ⁸⁵ While some wartime roles, such as combat or caring for evacuated children, were understood to be the responsibility of either men or women, participation in the civil defence of the nation, the community and the home was the duty of the ‘ordinary’, wartime citizen, both male and female.

However, this need for ARP to appeal to as wide a range of potential volunteers as possible was continually undercut by tensions around the gendered identities of civil defence workers. Home Office fears that too few young men would volunteer for the service were expressed again and again in the late 1930s. To an extent, the apparent lack of young, male recruits can be explained by expectations amongst this group that, when war came, they would be needed for military service. In order to counter this, the Home Office recruitment campaign emphasized the ‘manliness’ of ARP, presenting it as an extension of the military role of defending the nation, the home and the women and children within. This was not difficult to do. As the threat of aerial bombardment had been articulated repeatedly as a threat to women and children, emphasizing the protective element of ARP was simply a matter of placing men once again as the protectors of women and children in wartime, but this time as a civilian, not as a soldier. Particular aspects of ARP work such as the fire service and heavy rescue were only open to men, and films such as Jennings’ Fires Were Started (1943) and Dearden’s The Bells Go Down (1943) emphasized the heroic actions of men in these branches of civil defence. In this way, ARP could be understood as a traditionally male activity; another way for the good male citizen to protect those who were dependent upon him for their safety.

The problem with constructing ARP work as a means for the male citizen to actively defend women and children in wartime arose because these very women would often be serving alongside him. Despite the categorization of some aspects of ARP work as male only, just under 200,000 women served as full time and part time workers in civil defence when the service was at its peak strength. ⁸⁶ Civil defence could be understood as an extension of women’s domestic, nurturing role; if her home and children were under attack, it was only natural that she would wish to defend them. The involvement of women in ARP though could act to make it unattractive to many men; especially those who saw active combat as a more fitting means of articulating their citizenship. To counter this, and to ensure that male ARP workers could continue to be understood as heroic and masculine, ARP was gendered, in both the representation and the organization of the service. Women were only employed in a limited number of roles, predominantly those seen as an extension of traditional female roles of caring and communicating and were paid less than their male colleagues. Recruitment propaganda and press coverage largely played down the potential linkage between femininity and defence of the home, a link that was only emphasized in the work of the WVS. ARP had to appeal to women, and to address them as active citizens, but this could not be achieved at the expense of the masculinity of male civil defence workers.

ARP work, in many ways, presented an ideal way for the wartime civilian to demonstrate their commitment to the common good and their willingness to act as a ‘good citizen’, placing the interests of their fellow citizens and, ultimately, the nation, above their own. However, it also illustrates the tensions inherent in this discourse of good citizenship. Attempts to incorporate individuals and different social groups within a shared sense of citizenship and nationhood may be easier in wartime than peacetime, when there is an external enemy to unite against, but they remain potentially problematic. In wartime Britain, a shared sense of wartime citizenship had to overcome multiple divisions. However, whilst divisions of class, region and politics could, at least symbolically, be laid aside for the duration of the war, gendered identities remained important, a key indicator of continuities and stabilities in the wartime nation. The management of gender in ARP illustrates this well: while women, along with children as the new victims of aerial warfare, could be expected to defend the home as an extension of their role within it, their role in this defence threatened the masculinity of men who were being asked to defend the home both as a ‘natural’ aspect of manliness but also ‘to maintain the maximum war effort of the nation, the life of the nation, and to win the war.’ ⁸⁷ The articulation of ARP as active citizenship threatened the continuity of masculine and feminine identities and the emphasis on gendered differences within ARP can be understood as an attempt to preserve these identities, so far as possible, against the vast shifts of wartime.