CIVILIANS AND GAS

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 29, 4 February 1937, Page 13

CIVILIANS AND GAS

WHAT BRITAIN IS DOING

Mr. Geoffrey Lloyd, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of the Home Department, in a broadcast address on January 12, said that in an air raid the right place for civilians, for many reasons, would be indoors in a room in which certain simple precautions had been taken—for example, by making it gas proof by pasting paper over openings and stopping up cracks with sodden newspaper, etc., says "The Times." This refuge room would be, so to speak, the first line of defence. But the Government regarded it as vital to have a second line of defence in the shape of the gas mask, for .use in case the gas-proof room was dam-, aged or to enable a person caught out of doors in poison gas to go to a place of safety.

Scientific and technical experts were set to work on a difficult and entirelynew problem: how to design and produce a simplified and improved gasmask which could be made by the million by mass-production methods. Alter a great deal of experimental work the Government experts succeeded in their tasks. Experimental production had been proceeding for some weeks; cutput was already running at the rate of 150,000 gas-mask containers a week, and it would shortly rise to 2,000,000 a month. The present stock of completed containers was to be numbered by the hundred thousand and that of face-pieces by the million. LOCAL STOKAGE DEPOTS. These gas-masks would be stored in local depots all over the country, so that it might be possible, if the need should ever arise, to distribute them to the whole civil population with the greatest rapidiy—before Sn emergency was actually upon us. One large regional depot in Manchester was at present quickly filling up. Gas-masks would be arriving at the first London depot in a few days. Other metropolitan depots would be opened in a .few weeks, and by Easter London would have a substantial proportion of its gas-masks. This would be the first country in the world to have gasmasks available for the whole of the civil population of the capital. At the same time provincial depots all over the country would also be filling up. Later on' arrangements would be made for any member of the public who wished to do so to try on the new gas-mask personally. These gas-masks had been actually tested and found completely effective in stopping every poison gas known to the Government which could be used in war. Wing Commander Hodsoll and he had worn the gas masks in special gas chambers on several occasions lately in lethal concentrations of poison gas, and they were none the worse for it. This provision of gas masks, though vitally important, was only one aspect of a great system of national passive defence against air raids which was being built up all over the country. The local councils would soon be asking for volunteers to help in the air raid precaution organisations. Some, indeed, had already done so, and had on the whole met with a thoroughly satisfactory response. He very much hoped that the satisfactory recruiting of volunteers would continue and spread to all parts of the country. In this vital matter of air raid precautions they had got to show that Britain, working as she did on a free and voluntary basis, could do the job as well as, if not better than, anyone else.