by Trevor Royle
As war became inevitable in 1939 attitudes did change and, by the end of 1941, prompted by Johnston, Glasgow had provided shelters for 835,055 people, leaving a balance of 76,784 persons still without access to private or communal shelters. The protection was made up of the following types of construction:
1. Steel (Anderson) each providing accommodation for six persons.
2. Individual surface shelters (brick), accommodating six persons.
3. Communal domestic surface shelters accommodating from 12 to 48 persons.
4. Adapted basements giving accommodation for 50 persons per basement.
5. Morrison indoor shelters accommodating 4 or more persons.
6. Strengthening of tenement closes by strutting.
7. Special structural works to provide accommodation for invalids.11
The blackout of buildings during hours of darkness proved also to be a problem. Because so many Glaswegians lived in tenement buildings there were issues about turning off stair lighting because it was linked to external street lighting. Roof lights and gas-powered close lighting also caused problems – the Corporation estimated that there were some 3,300 closes in the city, and that the lack of lighting would create severe inconvenience and danger to those living in tenement flats. There were also difficulties with tenement buildings in Edinburgh where the Chief Constable attempted to resolve the issue by ordering that back green doors should be kept open and unlocked at night to enable wardens to inspect premises. Even so, a detailed reconnaissance carried out by the Royal Air Force in the days following the outbreak of war showed that little was being done, and that ‘generally speaking, lights were visible throughout the whole city, and vehicles in particular were clearly visible.’12 With a population of approximately 470,000, Edinburgh eventually required 7,175 ARP wardens, and a total of 30,000 public air-raid shelters were constructed including a number which were dug in Princes Street Gardens.
Advertisements also abounded in local newspapers extolling the benefits of ‘government approved lightproof cloths and papers, wood and steel shutters, blinds and curtains’ to ensure that no chinks of light were made visible to enemy bomber crews overhead. As a result of the regulations vehicles had to drive with dimmed lights, and had their bumpers and tyre sidewalls painted white, but as fuel rationing was in place and there were fewer private cars on the road this was not really an inconvenience, even though there were a number of minor accidents in the early days.
However, in Scotland difficulties with the blackout were exacerbated in 1941 when ‘double summer time’ was introduced to give an extra two hours of daylight during the normal one-hour advancement ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). During the winter months there was no return to GMT but instead a single hour’s advancement was applied. The move was introduced both as an energy-saving measure and to provide additional daylight for the farming community, especially during the harvest period. It also brought the UK into line with the rest of Europe, but while the move did benefit the war effort it caused problems in Scotland, especially in the north, where summer daylight was already long and winter daylight already short. According to James G. Pittendreigh, at the time a pupil at Skene Street School in Aberdeen, it was a dislocating time for all concerned.
When we got to school at 9 a.m., which was when we usually started, it was really only 7 a.m. and still pitch dark in winter. Before we could switch on the lights in the classroom we had to put up the black-out panels. As the windows of our classroom were rather large this took up a bit of time. Of course when it became daylight at about 10 a.m. this process was reversed using up more time. In summer time if we went to bed at 9 or 10 p.m. it was really only 7 or 8 o’clock at night and it was difficult to get to sleep. In fact in midsummer it was daylight until midnight! What this did to our biorhythms can only be imagined but we managed to live with it somehow.13
Young James carried a small torch with a dim light to give him a modicum of light when out in the evening, and remembered the wardens going round as darkness fell to enforce the blackout. Responsibility for ensuring those regulations was in the hands of 1.5 million Air Raid Precaution (ARP) wardens – men and women – who checked that the blackout was in place, maintained air-raid shelters and assisted rescue work following bomb attacks. Most were unpaid volunteers, and although the presence of the ARP warden was not always welcomed by those who failed to maintain a complete blackout, these officials did provide a vital service as they had to have good local knowledge both to assist the people in their areas and to direct rescue services after bomb attacks.
Another important measure was the creation in August 1941 of the National Fire Service (NFS) which provided a nationwide service consisting of existing local authority fire brigades augmented by a new force of part-time auxiliaries. A separate service was formed for Northern Ireland in 1942 but Scotland remained part of the NFS throughout the war, and this proved to be a drastic change for the 228 fire brigades which operated across the country. As a result of the emergence of the NFS the country was divided into six fire areas, with a Fire Force Commander who was responsible to the Secretary of State for Scotland. It was a fully integrated system: within each fire area, divisions and sub-divisions were formed with senior officers in command, and at each level there was a fire control room, reporting to the level above, until the last link was made with the major control for the UK in London. The creation of the NFS was intended as a wartime emergency measure with a restoration to the status quo once hostilities ended. By and large the legislation worked, and although there were familiar complaints that the auxiliaries were simply avoiding military service, the NFS came into its own during the Clydebank blitz of 1941 (see Chapter 6).
Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of the mobilisation for the defence of the UK homeland was the creation of the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV), or as they were better known, the Home Guard. The organisation was formed on 14 May 1940 when, just as the situation was deteriorating in France, the Secretary for War Anthony Eden broadcast to the nation appealing for volunteers to come forward to provide a part-time volunteer defence force whose primary task would be to counter the threat of invasion posed by German airborne forces. Volunteers, aged from seventeen to sixty-five, would not be paid, but Eden promised that they would be armed and would receive a uniform, and that ‘these duties will not require you to live away from your home’.
In the confusion of May 1940 when the heavens seemed to be falling, it was a drastic step. Militias of this kind had been formed before in time of war whenever invasion was a threat or national security endangered, and Eden’s request for able-bodied men to come forward was quickly heeded across the country. This was especially true in Scotland where the volunteer and militia forces had been enthusiastically supported in the latter part of the nineteenth century. On the day following Eden’s announcement 1,200 volunteers arrived at police stations in Glasgow to register. Edinburgh was similarly overwhelmed with large numbers of volunteers drawn from all levels of society, and in Aberdeen 600 also registered their interest on the first day. A week later the Glasgow Herald reported that a former provost of Greenock had come forward to offer his services despite being eighty years old.14 By the end of the war some 250,000 had served in its ranks, and the organisation itself had undergone several changes of role.
In an attempt to bring some order to the announcement, the War Office produced a chain of command which formalised the basis of the LDV’s structure and its relationship to the Regular and Territorial forces. At Scottish Command headquarters in Edinburgh Castle the responsibility for the new organisation was put in the hands of a General Officer Grade II (GSO II), a relatively senior staff officer, and below him at the three area headquarters was a GSO III to co-ordinate administration with local unpaid LDV organisers further down the chain of command. Less easily fixed was the provision of uniforms and weapons. The first issue was considered essential if the volunteers were not to be considered as fifth columnists, and therefore liable to be s
hot out of hand by invading German soldiers. Eventually a simple uniform of denim overalls was supplied, and while field caps were also worn, Scottish LDV units were permitted to wear a tam-o’-shanter bonnet provided that it was uniformly worn.15 Later still, LDV units were allowed to wear the cap badge of their local regiments so that those in Edinburgh could sport a Royal Scots badge while those in the northeast wore the stag’s head badge of The Gordon Highlanders. This practice was followed across Scotland with heartening results, and while it encouraged the gradual militarisation of the LDV it made the volunteers feel that they were an integral part of the larger regimental family.
The second issue was more contentious. If the volunteers were to have any realisable military role they needed to be armed, but in the early days modern infantry weapons were in short supply even for the regular forces. In some desperation, mixed with the eternal optimism that suffused the LDV throughout its existence, some units simply used whatever weapons came to hand. In rural areas shotguns and sporting rifles were ruled to be legitimate weapons by the War Office, and some older .303 rifles from the First World War were also made available. Eventually the government was able to import 500,000 US Springfield rifles, again of First World War vintage, but these were not universally popular as they used .300 calibre ammunition and had to be degreased on arrival.
So great was the enthusiasm for the new project that the government was forced to suspend recruiting at the end of July, by which time the LDV had attracted 1.3 million volunteers across the UK. Although the force was supposed to be strictly egalitarian in nature – initially there were to be no officers and no saluting – many of the group and zone organisers were retired officers, and the extant records reveal a sense of cohesion and soldierly discipline which helped the volunteers to believe that they were doing a useful job. In his record of the service of the 6th Perthshire Battalion, Lieutenant-Colonel A. D. Hunter made it clear that his men were no lambs to the slaughter but soldiers who believed that they would give a good account of themselves.
Reports had led the country generally to believe that the Germans of 1940 were better trained, better equipped, tougher and even more ruthless than counterparts of the first Great War. The veterans of 1914–18 did not altogether believe this, but they did believe that they would almost certainly be called upon to meet a very formidable enemy, who so far in the war had proved invincible, and that they would have to face and kill him under handicap of insufficient arms, very little training and none of the benefits of being a cohesive fore. Not least, they had known war at first hand and knew all war’s savagery and terror.16
In keeping with a tradition begun in the First World War when many Scottish Territorial battalions were formed from work or club associations – 15th Highland Light Infantry from the Glasgow Tramways Department, for instance – many LDV units had similar connections, notably with railway companies, the post office and industrial work places. Quite early on, there was also a change in title. Prompted by Churchill, on 31 July 1940 Eden agreed that the LDV should be known by the alternative title of Home Guard, and the appellation stuck. So, too, did another title, Dad’s Army, which was later to become the name of an immensely popular and successful television comedy series about a fictional English Home Guard unit in Walmington-on-Sea. On returning from the ineffectual intervention in Normandy, on 29 June 1940, Lieutenant-General Sir Alan Brooke wondered why ‘we in this country turn to the old men when we require a new volunteer force?’17 Later, when he was appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) in November 1941, Brooke changed his mind about their effectiveness but he continued to hold to the view that wars were not won by militias. As the historian of the Home Guard in Scotland has pointed out, there was a fair degree of pragmatism at work in creating the force, and as a result different areas produced different characteristics. Rural areas tended to attract larger numbers of retired officers, many of them quite senior and drawn from the landowning classes, while industrial areas in the central belt tended to be more egalitarian, at least in the early days. He also recorded the unusual fact that the 3rd Edinburgh Battalion, based at the Braid Hills Golf Club, included a judge, Lord Fleming, who ‘found himself on patrol one night with a fellow volunteer whom he had last seen in the dock before him in the High Court.’18
Fleming was later commissioned in the same battalion, another sign of the inevitable militarisation of the organisation. In November the government overturned its original plans for the Home Guard by announcing that ‘His Majesty has therefore been pleased to direct that King’s Commissions shall be granted to all approved commanders in the Home Guard, and that the Force shall also have a suitable complement of warrant and non-commissioned ranks. The commissioned, warrant and non-commissioned officers will bear the traditional titles of their ranks.’ Although the innovation was deprecated by those who had hoped that the Home Guard would remain an egalitarian ‘people’s army’ it was perhaps inevitable that it would be gradually subsumed into the structure of the armed forces. There was a catch, in that those commissioned were officers in name only, and to all intents and purposes they were still private soldiers who only held command and authority within Home Guard units.
Even so, the use of ranks gave rise to stock characters such the figure of the bumptious Captain Mainwaring in the television series Dad’s Army but as often as not there was some truth behind the caricatures. In the summer of 1940 the novelist Compton Mackenzie left his home in the south of England to return to Suidheachan, his house on the island of Barra which he had built a few years earlier. On his arrival he found a letter from Sir Donald Cameron of Lochiel, the Group Organiser for Inverness-shire, who invited him to take over command of the LDV in Barra, later part of the Hebrides Battalion, Home Guard. During the First World War Mackenzie had served as a staff officer and intelligence agent, and his position as a well-known author and local personality made him an ideal choice. Good novelist that he was, it also gave him some prime material for his novel Keep the Home Guards Turning (1943) which is a thinly disguised account of the doings of the Barra volunteers. He was not spoiled for choice in garnering his material; communications with headquarters in Inverness on the Scottish mainland 150 miles away were primitive, orders often took up to two weeks to arrive, and there was a stream of misunderstandings including the unexpected arrival of modern weapons including Lewis guns which promptly had to be returned.19
Set on the fictional islands of Great and Little Todday, the novel featured the absurd character of Hector Macdonald of Ben Nevis who had already appeared in the earlier The Monarch of the Glen (1941), and introduced the figure of Captain Paul Waggett who would resurface in similar guise as an officious English Home Guard officer in Mackenzie’s later and hugely successful novel Whisky Galore (1947). Such as it is, the plot of Keep the Home Guards Turning is thin – it involves an exercise in which Ben Nevis invades the Toddays to recapture a left boot which belongs to his own company – but Mackenzie had in fact based it on a real-life escapade in June 1941. At the time the Western Isles had been designated a Protected Area in which all movements were subject to possession of a military permit, and at the beginning of 1940 there had been a further restriction which required a separate permit to visit Barra. This arrangement allowed the Home Guard on South Uist to mount an exercise to test their neighbours’ security by mounting an ‘invasion’ across the five-mile stretch of water which separated the two islands. Although the invading force was supported by a platoon of Royal Engineers, Mackenzie’s Home Guardsmen successfully fought off the interlopers, allowing the novelist to boast to his friend Christopher Stone that ‘they tried a surprise landing’ but were defeated at their landing grounds at Eoligarry, Bruernish and Castlebay.20
Amusing though Mackenzie’s account was, it cannot disguise the fact that the Home Guard units took their responsibilities very seriously throughout their existence, and this was particularly true during the first year of operation when it seemed all too probable that Hitler’s forces m
ight attempt to invade the country by crossing the English Channel. There was also a much more serious side to their activities. From the outset the LDV and Home Guard acted as cover for top-secret Auxiliary Units whose task was to go underground and ‘stay behind’ to organise resistance in the event of an enemy invasion.
Fittingly for their objectives, not much was known about these shadowy units, and their personnel were encouraged not to discuss the nature of their covert activities. The units were the brainchild of two exceptional officers, Major (later Major-General) John ‘Jo’ Holland and Major (later Major-General) Colin McVean Gubbins, both of whom had extensive experience of irregular warfare, most recently in Norway where independent companies had been formed to organise resistance against the invading Germans. A handful of the officers involved in this operation were consequently employed by a new organisation called Military Intelligence (Research) or MI(R) which had been founded by Holland in March 1939. Designated as Intelligence Officers (IOs) they set about recruiting members of the Auxiliary Units from within the communities where the units would operate. A high premium was placed on local knowledge and field craft (gamekeepers and poachers both served in numbers) but according to a War Office directive to Home Guard commanders the main attribute required was an ability to remain tactful at all times: ‘Only reliable men of discretion are enrolled, and I am therefore to request that every assistance may be given by HG Commanders to Officers of Auxiliary Units in securing the right men for this duty though it is realised that it may mean the loss of a good man to the local Home Guard unit.’21
