Memories of the Air Raid Shelters

Oral histories with various people who remembered the air raid shelters have revealed several stories about what they may have looked like and what they were used for.  Although access was restricted it was still possible to get inside one of the shelters in 1970: ‘[The entrance] between [Wards] 3 and 5 was still open.  There was a slight raise before it, there was a concrete ramp which went down and then there was a flat area behind that and then there was a raised doorway sort of mounded up behind it so that it was actually raised from the ground behind, and there a door, a single door, which was reasonably large … I can remember that it had a metal sheet on the front … It was supposedly locked, chained and secured … but one of the orderlies … had access to it.  … It looked like it was always chained and padlocked until you actually came and knew the secret and you just opened it.’ (Steve Basso Interview 23/8/05).
 
John and Barry Critchley, who grew up in Daw Park and played in the air raid shelters as children in the early 1940s, remembered them as having plenty of room inside, with benches for seating along the walls.  The local children often used to wag school by hiding inside the shelters, even though it seemed a dark and scary place.  Steve Basso, a unit nurse who began work at the Repat in 1970, actually ventured inside one of shelters as part of his introduction to the hospital a remembers it in a similar vein—‘There were no lights, when they opened the door there was no electricity, no anything else … it was just all black.  I remember there was a trace of water in front of me on the floor.  He [Bluey, an old orderly] brought out his big standard torch [and] shone it down the end and I can remember that the torchlight didn’t reach the end of it.  It seemed to just go on and on.  There was something, it wasn’t dead straight down the walls—there was something along the walls, some dark object or inset or something … quite some way down.  I didn’t go in there because he was telling me terrible stories.’
 
Many of these ‘terrible stories’ were told deliberately to frighten new staff at the hospital, making it difficult to separate fact from fiction: ‘[y]ou wouldn’t believe the sort of stories we used to get told—[that] there are probably some bodies here from the war, [that] this is where they put the people that died that shouldn’t in surgery, all these sort of things that they tell young people when they first start in a hospital.  And you never really knew what was true and what wasn’t, and you didn’t want to really take the chance, just in case there were some bodies!’ (Steve Basso Interview 23/8/05).  The most persistent story is that the shelters came fully equipped with a wartime surgery, ready to be put into action at a moment’s notice: ‘Stories that we were told when I first started here from the orderlies that had been here included that … there were four theatres down there, [and] the corridors were wide enough to hold a hospital bed and have another hospital bed pass them at a push.  That there were ancillary rooms as well, that they were all fully equipped with instruments for surgery, with trolleys, supposedly [they] had kerosene lanterns, I think, rather than any electricity.  That they could hold 300 and something patients between three units at any one time.  … We were told very clearly by some of the older senior nurses when I first started here, too, that if needs be they could use them because everything was set up, the instruments, the trolleys, the trays, were all there.’ (Steve Basso Interview 23/8/05)