Protecting the Public

Abstract

The last chapter concentrated on measures designed to ensure the survival of Britain as a war-making and economically viable state. As we saw, the government prioritised such measures to the exclusion of others. But to many within Whitehall, and to all those volunteers who took part in it, civil defence was about one thing: saving lives in an enemy attack. It was this desire to help one’s family, neighbours and community which drove many members of the public to serve in the government’s civil defence services. It was this desire also which ensured that evacuation was a policy priority for civil defence planners throughout the atomic age and which inspired the Home Office to repeated attempts, always doomed, to commit successive governments to undertaking a programme of shelter building. It is these three policies, shelter, evacuation, and the voluntary services which underpinned life-saving measures in the cold war. The government’s, and the public’s, fluctuating attitudes to them illustrate the limitations of civil defence as well as the role it was expected to play in Britain’s defence strategy. These policies had of course formed the bulwark of Britain’s attempt to save as many lives as possible in the Second World War when the nation came under heavy attack. All three policies formed a major part of the Home Front story, and it was widely assumed they would provide the backbone of civil defence policies during the cold war.