Sir John Anderson and the Anderson shelter

Some decisions arrive at a desk in the form of paper that is already finished. The arguments have been had elsewhere, in cabinet rooms and on aerodromes and in the imaginations of staff officers projecting figures of the civilian dead against a London sky. What remains, at the desk, is the signature: the small administrative act by which a long argument is closed, a national policy is taken out of theory, and an unremarkable Edinburgh surname is fixed to a corrugated-iron shed in two and a half million back gardens for the rest of the century.

THE EDINBURGH MAN AT WHITEHALL

Sir John Anderson is fifty-six years old in the autumn of 1938. He is the son of David Anderson, stationer of George Street, Edinburgh, and Janet Brown of Forfar. He was schooled at George Watson's College and read mathematics and natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and took the Indian Civil Service examination in 1905 in the year that brought him to the top of the list. He has been Governor of Bengal from 1932 to 1937, has been home in London a year, and on Mr Chamberlain's personal request, a fortnight after the Munich agreement, has taken the Lord Privy Seal's brief with the portfolio for civil defence. He is not a politician by training and not a party man at all. He is, in the long Scottish tradition of administrators in Whitehall, a man who reads files and signs them.

The file on his desk this autumn is the oldest in the building. The Air Staff have held, since their exercise of 1924, that the bombing of London in the first three weeks of any future war will produce one hundred and fifty thousand civilian dead, and the figure has not been revised down since. The Cabinet has argued the deep-shelter question since June. The deep-shelter argument is that the population goes underground at the alert. The objection, which Anderson has set out in his own minutes, is that the population is in too many places at the alert and there is not enough underground in any of those places. What is wanted is a shelter the householder already owns, in a garden the householder already keeps, on a scale the country can be issued in twelve months. Patterson and Kerrison at Manchester have prototyped one in corrugated iron, six curved sheets and a step, six adults at a squeeze, three feet sunk into the clay.

THE AFTERNOON OF THE SEVENTEENTH

It is twenty past five on the afternoon of the seventeenth of November 1938, in the upstairs office of the Lord Privy Seal at 70 Whitehall, in the small room facing east toward the back of Downing Street. The fog has come up off the river since four o'clock and the lamps on the Embankment are already lit. Anderson is in his standard Edinburgh-Whitehall costume, the long pinstripe morning coat, the watch-chain, the silver dispatch box at his elbow. On the desk are three documents. A typed memorandum from Air Vice-Marshal Sir Frederick Bowhill of the Home Defence Committee, an Edinburgh man like Anderson, who has been pressing the file since June. A printed report from Patterson and Kerrison of the Patterson Engineering Company at Manchester. And an inked sketch, drawn by Patterson on the back of his card, of the shelter as it would stand in the back garden of a Manchester terraced house, six foot by four foot at the footprint, the step at the entrance neatly hatched in.

The room is quiet in the way that rooms in Whitehall are quiet, which is to say one hears the trams on Whitehall outside and a clerk's typewriter through the wall and nothing else. A second clerk has brought tea at five and taken the tray away. Bowhill is downstairs and will come up when called. The eight-page contract is on the blotter, turned to page eight, with the signature line ruled in pencil. The pen is uncapped.

A SECOND OF TIME IN HISTORY

The argument for the deep shelter is technically the better argument and Anderson knows it. A reinforced gallery sixty feet under London is proof against anything the Luftwaffe carries. The argument against the deep shelter is that there is not, in November of 1938, sixty feet of gallery for the population of London, nor the concrete to build it, nor the eighteen months to pour the concrete in, and the Air Staff's three weeks of bombing will begin in the autumn of 1939, or in the spring, or whenever Herr Hitler chooses. Patterson's surface shelter is not the technically optimal answer. Patterson's surface shelter is, however, an answer that can be put in two million back gardens by next September, at a cost the Treasury will not block because Munich is eight weeks ago and the Treasury is in retreat. The Air Ministry's own valuation is that the shelter, properly installed and properly buried, will save thirty thousand lives at the rate of one and a half million units by the autumn of 1939, and sixty thousand at two and a half million. The figures are conservative. They are the figures of his own department and he has not adjusted them.

There is also the small matter of the surname. The Civil Defence convention, already in informal circulation in the department, is that the shelter will be called by the name of the minister whose hand is on the order. He does not enjoy the convention. He has done, and will do, other work. He has governed Bengal for five years. He will, in 1943, be Chancellor; in 1940, Lord President of the wartime committee that runs the home front, the Anderson committee in the cabinet papers. The popular memory of the country will register none of it. The popular memory of the country will register the corrugated-iron shed in the back garden. That, on the whole, he is prepared to accept, because the country is, on the balance, correct: the shed in the back garden is what the country needs from him this winter, and the rest is for the historians.

He picks up the pen. He signs at the foot of page eight, in the small neat Whitehall hand he learned in the secretariat at Calcutta. He folds the contract into the silver dispatch box and closes the lid.

THE ORDER GOES OUT

He buzzes for Bowhill. The Air Vice-Marshal comes up the stairs, takes the box, takes the verbal confirmation, and goes out into Whitehall at a quarter to six. The contract is at the Air Ministry by six. The order is two and a quarter million pre-fabricated domestic shelters, of Patterson and Kerrison's design, to be manufactured at the Patterson works and at four shadow factories nominated by the Ministry of Supply, for issue free of charge to households earning less than £250 a year, and at a small charge to those above. The first deliveries are to begin in February. By the outbreak of war on the third of September 1939, about one and a half million Anderson shelters have been distributed; by the height of the Blitz in the autumn of 1940, about three and a half million stand in British back gardens, sunk three feet into the clay, covered with eighteen inches of earth on the roof, drained at the corner with a length of pipe the householder has cut himself.

THE GARDEN IN STEPNEY

In a back garden in Stepney, in the autumn of 1940, a woman whose name will not appear in any official record sits on the wooden bench inside her Anderson shelter with two children and a thermos of tea, and listens to the sky over the Isle of Dogs. The shelter is six foot by four foot. The corrugated iron sweats in the cold. The earth on the roof muffles the guns at Woolwich to a low thudding, and the bombs further off to a kind of subterranean cough. A five-hundred-pound bomb falls in the next street and the iron rings, and the children do not wake, and the tea in the thermos does not spill. By the Home Office assessment of 1948, the shelter she is sitting in, properly installed, is effective against direct blast at fifty feet from the standard Luftwaffe payload. By the same assessment, between forty and sixty thousand civilians in her country are alive at the end of the war who would otherwise not be, because of the contract signed in Whitehall at twenty past five on a November afternoon two years before, by a man whose name she would not, if asked, particularly remember.

THE COMMITTEE ROOM AT WHITEHALL

Anderson does not stay long at the Lord Privy Seal's desk. At the outbreak of war on the third of September 1939 he is moved to the Home Office, where he runs the civil-defence brief in continuous form, including the evacuation of London and the internment of enemy aliens. In October 1940 he is moved to Lord President of the Council, where he chairs the cabinet's domestic-economic committee for the duration, the committee the cabinet papers call by his name. In 1943 he is moved to the Treasury as Chancellor of the Exchequer, where he serves to the end of the coalition, and in the autumn of that year the Bengal famine kills between two and three million people in the province he governed before the war, and on which, by his own private account, he fails to do enough. He is elevated to the peerage as Viscount Waverley in 1952. He dies in 1958, seventy-five years old. The convention of 1939 is not retracted in his lifetime, despite, by his private secretaries' record, his repeated requests.

THE SHED IN THE BACK GARDEN

The great administrative decisions of a country are rarely the ones the country remembers. The country remembers the object in the back garden, the kettle on the iron stove, the small space three feet under the lawn where the family went at the alert. Of the man whose hand was on the contract the country remembers, in the end, only the surname, and the surname has been transferred, by a convention older than memory, from the man to the thing. The Imperial War Museum at Lambeth has, in its main hall, an Anderson shelter as installed in a Stepney garden in 1940. Visitors are encouraged to step inside. The interior is, by every account that has come up since 1940, quieter than the country expects.