1/13/2024 0 Comments Wwii gas mask‘They will have no one but themselves to blame.’ Another wrote to the Yorkshire Post suggesting two shillings as a suitable fine for those caught without a mask.īut despite pressure in some quarters, including demands in Parliament, Churchill’s government resisted calls to introduce fines. ‘If, and when, a gas attack comes, those idiots who have not deigned to carry the mask, which has been given to them free of charge, will die,’ wrote a correspondent to the Gloucester Echo. But the cautious types gave as good as they got. These he described as ‘ultra-cautious types, the suburban rate-payer type,’ and they were looked down on by the 80 per cent who didn’t carry a mask. In Orwell’s opinion about 20 per cent of Londoners still carried their gas masks. ‘As soon as war started the carrying or not carrying of a gas mask assumed social and political implications.’ ‘The issue of them is simply a symbol of national solidarity, the first step towards wearing a uniform,’ he wrote in his diary in June 1940. Vans fitted with loudspeakers toured town and city centres but, as the Crawley Observer noted on May 18, ‘despite the appeal very few local people were seen carrying them after.’Īmong those in London who refused to carry a mask was George Orwell. Each week in the city the police retrieved hundreds that had been discarded in buses, pubs and cinemas.Īfter the German invasion of the Low Countries on May 10, 1940, the government (now led by Winston Churchill) launched a fresh campaign about the importance of gas masks. Noted the ‘complete indifference’ to the carrying of gas masks. ‘The gas mask has almost disappeared in civilian circles,’ said the paper. The Luftwaffe were nowhere to be seen so what was the point? People flocked to the seaside at Easter, with the Liverpool Echo reporting that it had never seen Blackpool so busy. Fashion labels brought out their own cases, including a popular suede triangular container with two short handles that resembled a second handbag.īut as the ‘Phoney War’ stretched into 1940, a growing number of Britons dumped their masks. Mannequins in the windows of city department stores were fitted with gas masks, and the Queen appeared in public sporting a grey velvet corduroy gas mask case on her shoulder. Instead the government enlisted the media and business to try and win round the public. for using his as a football, but while there were penalties for damaging government property, there were none for refusing to carry a mask. The government requested that people carry their mask with them at all times in its flimsy cardboard container there was no obligation but it was strongly recommended.Įach week in Birmingham the police retrieved hundreds of discarded masksīut the Luftwaffe didn’t arrive and people soon tired of going everywhere with their mask. In 1938 the government began issuing gas marks to the entire population and most people had one when war began on 3 September 1939. Privately, the Ministry of Health predicted that 600,000 Britons would die in the first six months of the aerial war, with a further 1.2 million wounded. Books were written and official pamphlets distributed, warning the public of the likely death toll in the event of a prolonged German air offensive. In 1938 Neville Chamberlain’s government, aided by a coterie of academics and intellectuals, launched its own ‘Project Fear’. Britain was next in Hitler’s sights and an aerial gas attack was what the government feared most. Unlike today’s virus, the threat facing the country in the summer of 1940 was a destructive Nazi war machine that in a matter of months had torn through most of western Europe. Exactly 80 years ago the same argument was raging, with the country split between those who wanted the wearing of gas masks to be made compulsory on pain of financial penalty, and those who maintained it should be an individual choice. Britain has been here before when it comes to furores about face masks.
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