Sir John Anderson and the Anderson shelter

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. He is fifty-six years old. He is Sir John Anderson, born in 1882 to David Anderson the Edinburgh stationer and Janet Brown of Forfar, schooled at George Watson's College and the University of Edinburgh, in the Indian Civil Service from 1905, Governor of Bengal from 1932, in his first month back in London on the Lord Privy Seal's bench. He is in his standard Edinburgh-Whitehall costume, the long pinstripe morning coat, the watch-chain, the silver dispatch box on the desk.

On the desk, in front of him, are three documents. A typed memorandum from Air Vice-Marshal Sir Frederick Bowhill of the Home Defence Committee (Bowhill, an Edinburgh man like Anderson, has been pressing the file since June). A printed report by Mr William Patterson and Mr Oscar Carl Kerrison of the Patterson Engineering Company on a corrugated-iron domestic shelter the company has prototyped at Manchester. And a inked sketch, drawn by Patterson on the back of his card, of the shelter as it would be set up in the back garden of a Manchester terraced house, with a six-foot-by-four-foot footprint, six curved iron sheets, and a step at the entrance.

He thinks: the Civil Defence figure is that there will be one hundred and fifty thousand civilian dead in the first three weeks of bombing of London. The figure has been agreed since the Air Staff exercise of 1924 and is, by the Air Ministry's own assessment, conservative.

He thinks: the deep-shelter argument has been argued in the Cabinet since June. The deep-shelter argument is that the population goes underground at the alert. The deep-shelter argument is wrong because the population is in too many places at the alert and there is not enough underground in any of those places.

He thinks: Patterson's surface-shelter is not the technically optimal answer. Patterson's surface-shelter is, however, an answer that I can put in two million back gardens by next September.

He thinks: if I sign the order this afternoon, the Treasury will not block it because Munich is eight weeks ago and the Treasury is in retreat.

He thinks: if I do not sign the order this afternoon, the schedule of two million units by September is eight months gone, and the country has Anderson shelters for half of London by Christmas of 1939 and not for the other half until 1940.

He thinks: the shelter will, by the Air Ministry valuation, save thirty thousand lives if it is in the gardens at the rate of one and a half million by the autumn of 1939. It will save sixty thousand if it is in the gardens at the rate of two and a half million.

He thinks: I do not enjoy the convention by which the shelters will, in the popular usage, take my own surname. The convention is that they will be called Anderson shelters because the order will be signed by me. The convention will outlive me. I will be remembered, in the popular memory of this country, principally as a man who built two and a half million corrugated-iron sheds in back gardens. I have done other work and the other work will not be remembered. The other work was the Bengal famine of 1943, on which I will fail to do enough, and the wartime Treasury, on which I will succeed. The popular memory of this country will not register either. The popular memory of this country will register the corrugated-iron shed in the back garden, and that is the country, and the country is, in the balance, correct.

He picks up the pen and signs the contract for two and a quarter million units at the Patterson factory and the four shadow factories nominated, on the eight-page contract Bowhill has prepared, at the foot of page 8, in his usual neat Whitehall hand. He folds the contract. He puts it in the dispatch box. He buzzes for Bowhill. The dispatch box goes back to the Air Ministry by six o'clock.

By the outbreak of war on the third of September 1939, about one and a half million Anderson shelters had been delivered free of charge to British householders earning less than two hundred and fifty pounds a year, and another two hundred thousand had been bought at small cost by householders above the means test. By the height of the Blitz in November 1940, about three and a half million Anderson shelters were in British back gardens. The Home Office post-war assessment of 1948 concluded that the Anderson shelter, properly installed (sunk three feet into the soil, covered with at least eighteen inches of earth on the roof, properly drained), was effective against direct blast at fifty feet from a five-hundred-pound high-explosive bomb, the standard Luftwaffe payload. The Home Office estimated that the shelters had saved between forty and sixty thousand civilian lives during the air war.

Sir John Anderson held the Lord Privy Seal's brief from 1938 to 1939, was appointed Home Secretary at the outbreak of war (where he ran the civil-defence brief in continuous form), then Lord President of the Council from 1940 to 1943 (where he ran the wartime Cabinet's domestic-economic committee, the Anderson committee, that managed Britain's home front), and finally Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1943 to 1945. He was elevated to the peerage as Viscount Waverley in 1952. He died in 1958, seventy-five years old. The popular memory in Britain, by the observation of every twentieth-century historian, has remembered him principally for the corrugated-iron shed in the back garden. The shelter was named for him by the convention of Civil Defence in 1939; the convention was not retracted in his lifetime, despite his repeated requests. 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.