Indoor Home Shelters To Be Issued in England

Northern Advocate, 13 February 1941, Page 6

Indoor Home Shelters To Be Issued in England

[British Official Wireless ]

('Received 10.30 a.m.)

RUGBY, February 12. THE GOVERNMENT HAS ADOPTED A SATISFACTORY DESIGN FOR INDOOR HOME SHELTERS, AND WILL MAKE A FREE ISSUE IN CERTAIN AREAS TO PEOPLE WITH INCOMES BELOW £350 A YEAR. A proportion of the. shelters will be on sale. Announcing this in the House of Commons, the Home Secretary and Minister for Home Security (Mr. Herbert Morrison) said; “The course of events in the past few months has given strong emphasis to the advantages of a shelter within the home. “It achieves not only dispersal, but warmth and dryness, and avoids the discomfort of leaving home at night and the dislocation of family life.

Installation Indoors

“Experience of the effects of bombing has shown that houses afford more protection than was at one time supposed. “We therefore turned to the question of designing a shelter suitable for installation indoors, which should afford protection against the consequences of being pinned under the debris of a house brought down by a bomb exploding near it.”

yet in production, but wcVild be by the end of March.

Broadcasting a description of the new shelters the joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry for Home Security (Miss Ellen Wilkinson) said: “Our experts have produced a strong steel structure for inside the house. You can use it as a table for meals or work, so that the whole room is not put out of action at night. “Screens hook on the sides, there is the added protection of the walls of the house, steel top to support debris and a way of escape through the detachable ends and sides. Home Built

Mr Morrison said the shelter was designed for installation on the lowest floor of a house of two or three stories, and would accommodate two adults and one older child or two younger children. It would not be practicable in the early stages of distribution to cover anything like the whole country, and, accordingly, in consultation with regional commissioners, he had selected a number of areas to which priority would be given. Strong Steel Structure

“The table shelter has been so designed that householders can put it together themselves with a spanner and hammer—which is important because there is no labour to spare.” Miss Wilkinson added that shelters could only be produced to the extent of the share of steel allotted by the production executive. Regarding big shelters, she gave it as her opinion that the worst problems were over.

In answer to _a question, Mi’. Morrisdn said the new shelters were not