1940 - The great flap over a supicious whiff of musty hay

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The Great Flap of 1940 over a suspicious whiff of musty hay

By E S Turner

News: Bin Laden's henchmen 'killed in bomb raid'

WORRIED about receiving white powder in the post? Wondering whether to move away from tall buildings and find a bolt-hole in Devon? Afraid that David Blunkett is introducing a police state? Panicked by fifth-hand rumours about Arab plotters?

You should have been around in the Great Flap of 1940. It wasn't white powder that worried us then. Our nostrils were twitching for the scent of pear-drops, geraniums and musty hay - the sign that Hitler was trying out his poison gases. Still, we managed to joke about it. There was the one about the six children who put on their gas masks at a High Church service, mistaking the whiff of incense for musty hay.

Tall buildings were seen as a danger, not because suicide hijackers were likely to fly into them but because they could be a directional aid. A proposal to pull down "Solomon's Temple", near Buxton, was resisted by the Manchester Guardian: "Will it not occur to some diligent official that Salisbury Cathedral, the three spires at Lichfield or the twisted spire of Chesterfield are giving unmistakable guidance. . . It should not really be necessary to dismantle Blackpool Tower."

There were no nuclear plants to invite attack, but what if London Zoo were hit? During raid alerts, six keepers with rifles were ready to shoot any major carnivores freed to roam the capital. All poisonous and constrictor snakes were chloroformed by their sorrowing keepers, and so were black widow spiders. Meanwhile the nation was putting down its pets in such numbers as to leave ugly heaps outside the vets.

Estate agents surpassed themselves in finding funk-holes for those in need. A studio house in the "Sussex Highlands" was invisible from the air. Bath was "immune from all raid dangers". Five islets off Brittany were offered at £12,500 the group. Inaccessibility was the big selling point, as in "An Awful Place to Find, approached by a quiet lane, absolutely alone and screened by trees". Cruelly, the billeting officers sought out these secret places and unloaded parties of lice-ridden slum children on the occupants.

The government, under its Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, passed new restrictions on liberty so fast that the fleetest of lawyers could not keep up with them. Habeas corpus was ditched. Foreigners, dodgy or otherwise, were flung once more into that waiting receptacle, the Isle of Man. Suspected enemies of the state and the disaffected were imprisoned under regulation 18b. The state could commandeer your horse, your house or your hotel.

Some laws were apparently inspired by the IRA, active then as now. An Irishman called O'Shea could not get a job and changed his name, without permission, to Rigby, for which he was jailed for 21 days. Pigeons were allowed to fly only on national service. Weather forecasts were banned for the duration. Much of the seaside was out of bounds.

The real fun started when the government made it an offence to spread alarm and despondency, as by the circulation of false reports broadcast by "Lord Haw-Haw" on German radio. Pessimism as such was not punishable, but defeatism was. Prophesying that Hitler's flag would fly over Parliament earned a Bristol septuagenarian seven days' jail; for saying that it would fly over Buckingham Palace a Carlisle hotelier was fined £50.

Eventually Churchill urged an end to this nonsense. "His Majesty's Government has no desire to make crimes out of silly vapourings which are best dealt with on the spur of the moment by verbal responses from the more robust members of the company." Remember that, Mr Blunkett.

Mercifully, the infant television service had been strangled just before the war began, so that was one potential source of alarm and despondency out of the way. However, it was the first war in which mocking enemy voices had reached into British homes.

"What do I do if I come across German or Italian broadcasts when tuning my wireless?" was the question posed by the government in a newspaper advertisement. These broadcasts, readers were told, were just part of "a plan to get us down". They should "switch 'em off to tune 'em out", just to make the enemy waste their time.

A similar advertisement told the public what to do when faced with enemy parachutists. "I do not get panicky. I say to myself 'Our chaps will deal with them' . . . I remember that fighting men must have clear roads . . . I just stay put."

Diligent officials and jobsworths had a wonderful time. So did the police. Because of the threat from parachutists, motorists were forbidden to leave their cars without immobilising them, preferably by removing the rotor arm from the distributor. Those who failed to do so would find that the police had immobilised the vehicle by deflating the tyres.

It all sounds crazy now, almost as if the government had drawn up its own "plan to get us down", but get us down is what it failed to do. It was an exciting, bracing time. The exchange of daft rumours even helped to keep up morale.

We were alone against the dictators, but so what? And the Church was behind us - well, up to a point. In late 1939, hostilities had not really started, but both archbishops said it would be a just war. Then the Archbishop of York back-pedalled, saying that, while it was a righteous war, it was not a holy one, and we must avoid praying down our enemies. He thought that vicars, when praying for all our aircraft to return, would do well to add "if it be Thy will".

There was a notion abroad among churchmen that, when it really got going, the war should be waged "without enmity". Which wasn't quite the way the bayonet instructors were to put it.

E S Turner is the author of The Phoney War on the Home Front (Michael Joseph, 1961)

-- Anonymous, October 18, 2001


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