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SOUTHAMPTON

There have been three really bad raids on Southampton, the first during the last hours of Saturday, November 23rd, the second and third at the same time on November 30th and December 1st.

DAMAGE AND CASUALTIES

These three have left Southampton worse damaged than Coventry, according to journalists and others who have visited both places.

Casualties were, however, relatively small. They total about 370, of which probably half were fatal. This was due partly to the large proportion of incendiary bombs used, especially on November 30th, and to the fact that there are comparatively few residents in the business part of the town and around the Civic Centre, where the attack was particularly intense. Also a long apprenticeship to raiding has made the population shelter-conscious. Last Saturday (December 7th), when a repetition of the raiding was apprehended, the streets were deserted after dark.

If the centre of the town is more damaged than the centre of Coventry, some of the outer erections of the town are in a worse plight than the West End of London. Parts of the industrial suburbs, such as Woolston are indeed, almost as badly hit as the centre of the town. The greater part of the damage was due to fire, and the excellence of the fire-fighting service stresses the fact that a concentrated attack by incendiary bombs presents a problem which has yet to be solved. Of that problem the water supply is the most formidable ingredient. Another thing that hampered the Southampton fire-service was the sudden discovery that the junctions of pipes brought in from outside did not always fit local ones.

Damage to important industries was surprisingly small.

THE SERVICES

The services were all affected but in varying degree. The telephone entirely knocked out; the electricity services were only partially compromised; the water supply was badly hit, and, though important repairs were quickly made, portions of the community are still completely without running water or lack an adequate supply; the gas works were seriously damaged and transport was inevitably dislocated; and the municipal offices at the Civic Centre were rendered well-nigh untenable. The worst disability imposed upon those in authority, however, came from the break-down of communication. For some time after the second and third raids contacts were largely a matter of chance.

THE POPULATION

The population was shaken but undismayed. There was no panic or looting. There was considerable evacuation, partly official but mainly spontaneous. The ‘trek’ to the country was pathetic to see, and the quarters found were often inadequate. But it was not a panic movement. Men went mainly to escort their women-folk, and the women often on account of their children. The large majority of the workers were anxious to return by day for their work. With very few exceptions, the personnel of the different services met the emergency effectively. The same cannot be said of all the chief municipal officers. There were cases when good intentions did not produce equally good results.

MINISTRY OF INFORMATION ACTIVITIES

The Regional Commissioner arrived at Southampton early on each Sunday. On both occasions he called a conference morning and afternoon of the appropriate officials. On the first Sunday those conferences were attended by the R.I.O. and on the second Sunday the D.R.I.O. was there as well.

On the first Sunday the R.I.O. did not have much to do, except to manage the press and keep in touch with Reading and London. It was not then considered necessary to use loudspeakers or to introduce other emergency measures.

On the second Sunday it was evident that emergency measures would have to be brought into action, and this was still more the case on the Monday (December 2nd). Our activities can be summarised as follows:

PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT

(1) On arriving on December 1st, the R.I.O. and D.R.I.O. attended the meeting held by the Regional Commissioner of the local officials. After this meeting, a report was drafted by the Regional Commissioner to the Ministry of Home Security in such a way as to ensure the right sort of official bulletin. The press was given the same “ slant”.

(2) Help to local press : The office of the Southampton Daily Echo was pulverised, and the staff proceeded to Bournemouth to bring out the paper in the office of a sister newspaper.

We were able (a) to arrange with the Ministry of Transport for extra petrol for the Echo's delivery vans, (b) to get extra coupons for numbers of the staff to go backwards and forwards from their homes,(o) through Headquarters, to help the Echo continue its P.A. service.

The Echo's emergency arrangements have worked well. It did not miss its Southampton sales a single day.

The national newspapers were also on sale in Southampton all through.

(3) National and Foreign Press . Help of the usual sort was afforded the representatives of the national and foreign press, personally conducted tours, guidance, interviews, etc., etc.

(4) Posters and Notices . We assisted in the preparation of notices issued by the Regional Commissioner, the Mayor, etc. Of these, there were two (a) a proclamation, signed by the Regional Commissioner and the Mayor, asking refugee workers in the country to return to work,(b) a poster giving a time-table of buses and trains for the journey to and fro.

These posters were distributed over a wide rural area and in the appropriate towns by members of the Reading staff using their own cars, by one of our film unit cars and its driver, and by the Home Front Leagues of the New Forest and Winchester and neighbourhood, and, of course, members of the appropriate Local Information Committees.

(5) We also used four loudspeaker vans in this area, in which members of the Reading staff, the Secretary of the New Forest Home Front League and L.I.C., and Mr. Rose of the Southampton L.I.C. were the speakers.

LOCAL INFORMATION COMMITTEES AND HOME FRONT LEAGUES

The Southampton L.I.C. did not function during the emergency. The reason for this is obvious; members, with one exception, whose help would have been useful, were engrossed in the emergency duties which fell to them as members of the community. This perhaps, reveals an 35 - 3 -inevitable weakness of L.I.Cs. in similar circumstances. The member of the Southampton L.I.C. who did function was Mr. Rose. Mr. Rose is the local Labour agent, a member of the A.R.P. Committee and of our Regional Advisory Committee. The value of his assistance to us and, indeed, to the Regional Commissioner's organisation cannot be exaggerated.

The Southampton Home Front League did not function. Its Secretary has become soured by the long delay that there has been in supplying him with promised assistance. This was unfortunate, as it is to the wider Home Front League organisation rather than to the L.I.C. to whom it would appear that we shall have to look for help after intensive air-raiding. The membership of the Home Front Leagues is large enough and broad enough (unlike that of L.I.Cs.) to afford us what ought, with a little organisation, to be useful allies and points of contact.

One thing, in any case, the incident has brought out, namely, that the neighbouring Ministry organisations have a useful role to perform when a centre is badly raided. The Secretaries of our organisations for the New Forest and Winchester and neighbourhood immediately reported. The former, as said above, himself manned a loudspeaker van, and both used part of the Home Front League membership in getting out posters and helping us to reach the refugees.

There is scope for a further organisation of this work.

ASSISTANCE TO REGIONAL COMMISSIONER

We acted and are acting as public relations officer to the Regional Commissioner and to his Deputy, whom the Regional Commissioner left as his representative for as long as the crisis might continue at Southampton. Mr. Gammons spent the greater part of the last week in Southampton, and, thanks to his energy and local knowledge, was on more than one occasion able to be of use to Mr. Bernays in public relations matters. Thus, when trouble with Labour threatened, he called in Mr. Rose, who quelled the rising storm and removed its causes. Mr. Rose has now, in addition to his other duties, taken on that of local Labour adviser to the Regional Commissioner's office.

GENERAL OBSERVATIONS

It was not necessary for us to exercise all the emergency functions which might fall to us. The uninterrupted arrival of the national and local newspapers, and the fact that the electrical services, and therefore the B.B.C., were not for long comprehensively deranged, rendered an emergency bulletin unnecessary.

Nor did we do all the loudspeaker work that might have fallen to us, as the local police cars dealt with the boiling of drinking water and milk, the necessity of conserving water, etc. The municipal authorities also undertook the posting of notices about the location of emergency Departments, etc.

On the whole, our activities during the Southampton incident were much what we expected them to be. Valuable lessons have, however, emerged from our experiences.

CONCLUSIONS

These conclusions may be roughly summarised as follows:

(1) It is essential to be prepared for a complete breakdown of communications with the outside world and even as between different parts of and activities in the afflicted area. One must, in fact, be prepared for a situation in which none of the ordinary aids to work are forthcoming.

(2) The Ministry's representative must work even more closely with the Regional Commissioner than at the Regional capital. He must not only deal with the press on behalf of the Ministry of Information; he must act as the press officer of the Regional Commissioner, of the other Government Departments, and quite possibly of the City Departments. His duties as public relations officer of the Regional Commissioner also promise to become important.

(3) The appointment of a local journalist (the editor of the weekly paper) as press liaison officer with the local A.R.P. Control is useful, especially at first. During the early days the services of this officer were most useful in establishing connections and in helping to deal with the visiting press.

(4) The Reading office must have in readiness a more elaborate organisation for “blitz” emergencies than we had contemplated.

(5) As part of this organisation, the control of an adequate number of loudspeakers and the cars for them is essential.

We relied, by previous arrangement, upon the Regional Police pool of loudspeaker cars on this occasion. The arrangement was not satisfactory. The police service was tardy and inadequate, and our work among the refugees was hampered thereby.

(6) Local Information Committees in the raid area and their personnel are not likely to be of much use to us.

(7) The Home Front Leagues, with their larger and more widely spread membership, might, on the other hand, be extremely useful.

(8) Neighbouring L.I.Cs. and Home Front Leagues can have a valuable part in our scheme.

The procedure which it seems advisable to follow in the event of other serious air-raiding in the light of the lessons learnt at Southampton is dealt with in a separate report.

37

HOME MORALE REPORT
PORTSMOUTH AIR RAID

Ministry of Information,

(Southern Region)

16th January, 1941

Portsmouth was heavily raided on the night of January 10th. At first sight it looked as if the damage done was less severe than that at Southampton. A more detailed inspection, however, changed that impression. One realised that probably just as much damage had been done to houses and streets as in Southampton. The difference was that Portsmouth is more than twice as large as Southampton and that the damage was more scattered. The Portsmouth Guildhall, on the other hand, was completely gutted as a result of incendiary bombs, whereas the Civic Centre at Southampton, though damaged, was left to some extent usable.

The morale in Portsmouth was excellent, and, if the size of the trek of refugees to the country is any criterion, better than Southampton. The firmness of morale is attributed to the way in which the population is stiffened by a large admixture of the fighting services and also to the stimulating effect of an exceptionally large number of soldiers and sailors doing demolition work, etc. In this connection it may be noted that French prestige was given a much needed “boosting” by the presence of working parties from the French Navy, who, from all accounts, did extremely well.

The Head of the local Labour Exchange told me on my last visit to Portsmouth on January 14th that he had been tremendously impressed by the spirit of a large number of women who had been bombed out of their employment at various corset factories. He said that they were the happiest crowd of unemployed he had ever seen, in spite of the fact that many of them had lost their houses.

Morale was helped by the fact that there was no repetition of the raid on the night of the 11th. During the 10th there had been a fairly heavy exodus to the country owing to the expectation of a second attack. During the afternoon, indeed, the one roadway out of Portsmouth was crowded with refugees on foot and in every form of conveyance from baby carriages to heavy lorries. The fact, however, that there is only one road out of Portsmouth rendered the spectacle delusive as an indication of mass evacuation. According to figures given at a meeting of the L.I.C. on January 15th, there were, in point of fact, about 2,000 official evacuees scattered around neighbouring towns like Petersfield and Fareham and in the smaller places many more people were, of course, sleeping out of town, a practice which to some extent has been indulged in ever since the earlier raids.

In the town four of the ten Rest Centres had been closed by Tuesday, the 14th, and it was expected that more would shortly be dispensed with. Also it seemed that a proportion of their occupants were not would-be evacuees but people who had been bombed out of their houses and were waiting to see if they could get alternative accommodation.

The quietness with which the raid was taken, together with the fact that the local newspaper was not bombed out, decided the local authorities not to issue, or ask us to issue, special bulletins, or loudspeaker news. Official loud-speaker work regarding the boiling of milk and water, location of Rest Centres, emergency ration cards, etc., etc., were left to the Police, to whom we turned over our six Ministry of Information loudspeaker oars on the understanding that, if we wanted any or all of them back, we could have them at once.

As will be seen from the report of the L.I.C. meeting of January 14th, the solidity of the Portsmouth home front was slightly compromised by patches of defeatism of the type which asks “Why go on? This is a hopeless business. We hit the other fellow, and he hits us, and neither gets anywhere”. It was stated that this kind of talk could be heard in 38 - 2 -the dockyard as well as in the streets. It was also stated by the two representatives of the Conservative Party at the L.I.C. that the Communists and other subversive elements were doing their best to exploit it. Nothing, however, was ascertainable which would indicate that defeatism of this sort exists in anything more than small, isolated pockets. It is believed at Portsmouth, as at Southampton, that the majority of its victims are probably women.

A much more significant symptom of the prevalent spirit was to my mind afforded by our L.I.C., the membership of which settled down to discuss our emergency arrangements for the next blitz, the inevitability of which they took for granted with complete equanimity. The same spirit characterises the local authority, the stalwart efficiency of which is another factor on the side of good morale.

The L.I.C. voiced a rather prevalent complaint that those responsible for the first anonymous bulletin of the raid early on the morning after it, had let Portsmouth down pretty badly by the light-hearted way in which they dealt with what they ought to have known even then was a first-class raid. It was strongly pointed out that the fuller details that can be given after a raid, the better the effect upon local morale. Great stress, of course, was laid upon giving the name of the Towns as quickly as possible.

The L.I.C. stressed the fact that there was a certain restlessness in the town about the destruction of the Guildhall. People, it was said, were wondering how the Council could convincingly ask shopkeepers and householders to guard their own property when it had obviously failed, according to common gossip, to guard its own property. The Committee, indeed decided that unless the Council issued a statement on the matter, it would ask the War Emergency Committee for a statement which, if not published in the press, could at any rate be disseminated orally through the town by the Home Front League.

The chief lessons provided by this incident regarding public morale seem to be

(1) that one cannot have too many loudspeaker cars giving official announcements and directions;

(2) that about the most important of these announcements and directions concerns the addresses of Information Bureaux and the addresses of Rest Centres;

(3) that the addresses of the Food Office, Communal Kitchens, bakeries and food shops also need a maximum of continuous broadcasting.

39

COPY
SECRET
COWES AIR RAID - NIGHT MAY 4th - 5th

The Deputy Regional Commissioner (Mr. Asbury) ordered a post-blitz conference at Northbrook House, Cowes, at 12.30 hours May 5th. This information was not issued by Regional Headquarters until 9.07 hours. Osman and Ede left by road at 9.45 a.m. to make the rendezvous at Portsmouth Fire Station at 11.15. There the N.F.S. was detailed to check in the party and transport them by launch to the Isle of Wight.

Most of the post-blitz conference party made the rendezvous on time except the Deputy Regional Commissioner and his officers. The party waited at Portsmouth Fire Station until after noon when there was still no news of the Regional Headquarters staff and the party moved off without them.

It was by this time impossible to arrive in Cowes for the 1230 conference. The launch had to put in at Ryde in compliance with shipping restrictions at Cowes. At Ryde a motorbus took the party to West Cowes. Just before the bus reached the town, it met the Deputy Commissioner's car leaving Cowes and one of his officers informed the party that the conference would be held at Newport at 3.15. That meant an almost immediate turn-round and return to Newport but it was agreed that the last quarter of a mile to Cowes should be covered in the hope that there would be time for the party to get into touch with the various officials on the spot.

Road diversions, however, delayed the journey and as it was impossible to drive into the town itself because of the damage and of unexploded bombs, the party had to leave the bus on the outskirts. Only ten minutes could he allowed for the members of the party to see the town before the bus had to start on its journey back to Newport.

Thus at the conference, which was held at the County Hall, none of the Reading people had any first-hand knowledge. The following facts were learned from local officials:

The greater part of the damage was to industrial property, although there was a considerable amount of civilian damage. Four factories were destroyed and 20 others damaged, between 4000 and 5000 workers being affected. It was expected however that many of them would be able to do some sort of work and others would be set to work on demolition and repair. The canteens at White's and Saunders-Roe were both destroyed and 2500 mid-day meals would be needed the following day.

A rough estimate of the casualties was given as 51 killed and 180 injured.

All A.R.P. services were fully extended and a great deal of help was given by the military. This included the service of a field ambulance unit. Royal Engineers undertook demolition work.

Houses damaged numbered between 200 and 300 and between 500 and 600 homeless were dealt with at six rest centres and billeted before the end of the day.

No food stocks were damaged and it was stated that the feeding facilities were adequate, including the supply of meals to the factories.

Water supplies to domestic consumers were partially affected, but the drought had depleted the reservoirs and sea water would be used.

Electricity supplies were interrupted and this in turn affected the gas supply at West Cowes which depends upon electricity for feeding operations and the supply was reduced to one tenth. The West Cowes 40 - 2 -system had about twelve fractures which were under repair but a call was made for 12 military to do manual stoking until civilian labour could be recruited. The Last Cowes gas position was worse.

Communications position was bad following serious damage to the exchange. At the time of the conference 12 subscribers were connected but there was only one doubtful line to the mainland (to Southampton) and that failed later. The industrial people urged the quick restoration of the air-raid warning system at the principal factories which, it was felt, would help towards the return of the workpeople.

Roads were reasonably clear although there were a number of diversions because of unexploded bombs. Railways continued their normal service until later in the day when there were suspensions for the same reason and supplementary road transport had to be arranged.

As to the emergency information service, the resources of the local Urban District Council seemed to have been sufficient. An Information Centre (which M.O.I. representatives visited for a few minutes) was opened at Northbrook House and was reasonably well used. The necessary information for bombed people was available at the rest centres and there appeared to be no evidence of people lacking information and direction. The police superintendent stated that he had two loudspeaker cars but he did not find it necessary to use them.

The offer of the loudspeaker vans which we had ordered to stand by at Portsmouth and Southampton was not accepted and no reason why it should have been accepted was apparent.

It was unnecessary for M.O.I. representatives to stay and they returned to headquarters the same night. Several representatives of the departments concerned with communications and industrial restoration remained.

7th May, 1942.

41

COPY
Weymouth Air Raid, April 2-3

GDHO/ADW/F.12/27

To: Home Division

From: D.R.I.O., Southern Region No.6

With reference to your minute HP.730/6 of the 11th instant regarding the lack of co-operation between the local controller and our Emergency Information Officer.

As I mentioned in my minute to you of the 13th instant we had already made representations to Regional Headquarters on this matter, and I saw the Senior Regional Officer immediately on his return from Weymouth where he had been conducting a local inquiry into the working of the Controller.

It is quite clear that Regional Headquarters are very dissatisfied with the Controller's present arrangements and method of working and are taking up the matter very strongly with him.

The trouble appears to be that the Controller kept matters very much in his own hands and would not delegate work to other officials which resulted in unsatisfactory reports and a great lack of contact with other Departments, and their local officials. I understand Regional Headquarters are now insisting on the appointment of a Deputy Controller who will be in charge of the Intelligence side of the Report Centre so that information will be available to such officials and representatives of other Departments who are fully entitled to be conversant with the situation. They are specially noting to the Controller that close contact should be maintained with our Emergency Information Officer.

I explained to the Senior Regional Officer the results of our not having up-to-date information particularly in regard to the damage to the “Dorset Daily Echo's” plant, and stressed that in future if it is necessary to bring into operation any skeleton telephone service, it is essential that our E.I.Os. ‘phones should be maintained.

I trust that as a result of the action being taken by Regional Headquarters there will be complete co-operation between the Controller and our E.I.O., which should exist in future.

With regard to Captain F.W. King, our Weymouth Emergency Information Officer, we are not altogether satisfied with him as our E.I.O. as he is not particularly popular locally and is inclined to be tactless and throw his weight about. We may have to make a change but at the moment there is nobody suitable locally to nominate in his place and we are therefore for the time being carrying on with him.

17th April, 1942.