'Air Raid Shelter' on eBay.

Great for rows with the wife/significant other!!

 

Well I was thinking of a place of shelter but if thats what you want to use it for go right ahead!!!!

 

My next door neighbour's got one in her garden. She uses it to store her lawn mower etc in it.

 

Well its never been tested so I guess that means its structurally sound!!

 

Communal Brick Air Raid Shelters were quite common in urban areas especially where residents had no back gardens.These brick shelters with a reinforced concrete roof of about 6 inches were normally built in roads which did not carry traffic and were notorious for people running into them at night by bike etc and on foot due to the poor visual situation imposed by the blackout control and rigidly imposed by Air Raid Wardens.Fog was an added hazard from solid fuel fires which make matters worse.They became dank places and after the war,they appeared to be the first structures to be dismantled by local government as they could not be put to much use.You would not find any newly married squatters taking up residence in these places which as shelters were devoid of windows.(Airfield domestic sites and temporary army camps were different and squatters flocked into them with the authorities unable to stop them finding accomodation.)

Those who had back gardens were issued with Anderson Shelters which were filled over with earth after the excavation which had to be done by the property occupier.The idea was sound but if the water table was high they were useless as a shelter unless the occupants stood in water.The quality of the sheeting was top class, being heavily galvanised panels curved at the top to form the roof and secured as a whole unit by galvanised nuts and bolts.Surviving shelters have been put to many uses and to their credit, the panels normally have lasted well and normally speciments can be seen with little rust after nearly 70 years.

 

Have seen these on eBay before. Normally they are the metal ones that need digging out. This would be a bigger exercise, but I can see some museums being interested in it.

 

The shelter we had in our back garden was to a four-year-old an impressive structure . My father, an inveterate do-it-yourselfer years before it became fashionable, had constructed it himself in late 1938 and early 1939, well before the outbreak of war and to the ill-concealed derision of friends and neighbours. But eighteen months later his family was protected by a two foot thick slab of concrete while the neighbours sheltered under their stairs or within flimsy structures of brick or corrugated iron covered by a few inches of soil. One of my earliest memories is of its construction, its walls being cast with barrowloads of concrete reinforced with steel mesh. It was mainly below ground and its design must have owed much to the dugouts my father had occupied on the Western Front just 23 years earlier. It was always known within the family as "The Dugout" and it almost certainly survives today, still defying efforts to demolish it.

After the alarm sounded the family would wait for a few moments at the french doors at the back of the house and when there seemed to be a lull overhead we would scurry down the garden, with me usually being carried in a blanket. We entered the dugout down several angled steps. Inside there were a couple of bunks, one above the other, made of rough wood and chicken netting. These were for my sister and my mother. I reclined in some sort of orange box wedged across the far wall. The three of us would spend the rest of the night in relative safety and comfort whilst my father and elder brother, if they were not elsewhere on Home Guard duty, would maintain a vigil up at ground level protected only by their tin hats. I don’t ever remember it as being uncomfortable - in fact it was quite cosy - but my main recollection is the ever-present smell of mustiness and of fumes from the paraffin heater and the hurricane lamp or candles which we inhaled over the following hours.

One was well aware of the seriousness of the situation - I once got thoroughly ticked off for allowing the torch I was holding to point briefly upwards as I went down the steps - but it never seemed particularly frightening, thanks, I suppose, to my parents protecting me from their worst fears. Nevertheless my own sense of security had been somewhat compromised by my sister who airily advised me one day that this massive structure would of course not survive a direct hit. This was a disturbing nugget of information which I did not find particularly helpful or welcome.

We spent many nights like that - I cannot remember how many. But as the war progressed and the siren continued to sound from time to time my father seemed to develop some sort of system to assess the risk. Sometimes I was allowed to stay in bed where I would lie awake, waiting for the wail of the all-clear and the feeling of relief. On other occasions I would be taken downstairs where it was deemed safe enough to sleep on the floor whilst unknown aircraft droned far overhead in the darkness. And sometimes it would be back to the orange box.

Whilst I should dearly like to see our dugout appear on eBay I am doubtful whether its present owner would get many bids.

Chris