Do Not Be Alarmed: Morecambe's Cold War Nuclear Sirens
Morecambe, Tuesday 20th March 1962. 11am.
You don’t hear the sirens at first. You’re at the fairground, and the distant wail is drowned by the screams of joy coming from the rollercoaster.
The rollercoaster pulls into the station and the screaming stops. Now you can hear the sirens. A deep, steady note howls through the air, growing louder as more sirens across town are activated. This is the warning the world has dreaded. You have four minutes left. The world has four minutes left.
And then, as suddenly as they started, the sirens stop. The last droning note hovers in the air for a few seconds like a dying bee, until it too fades into silence. An uneasy silence. Eventually, somebody laughs. Then you begin to laugh. You’ve just remembered what you read in the local paper last week: this was a drill.
Morecambe’s ‘Moaning Minnies’
On February 12th 1953, an inconspicuous little notice appeared in The Morecambe Guardian. Signed by the Town Clerk, Roger Rose, the advertisement invited contractors to apply for the dubious honour of ‘erecting seven air-raid sirens in the Borough’. Only eight years had passed since the Second World War had ended, rationing would still be in force for another year, and yet here was the government preparing for another war, and a nuclear one at that.
The lucky contractors who won the job were the North Western Electricity Board's Lune District division and a construction firm called Barrow Brothers Limited. The electricity board would deal with the wiring, while Barrow Brothers would be responsible for ‘preparatory work, constructing concrete bases and hoisting and fixing sirens in position at seven sites’ across Morecambe and Heysham. These sites were: Morecambe Fire Station on Clark Street (conveniently located next door to Civil Defence HQ); Hest Bank Pumping Station; Broadway; Trimpell; Alexandra Road; Stanley Road, Torrisholme and Heysham Library.
Some of these sirens would have been mounted on the rooves of buildings (such as at Morecambe Fire Station, the only siren site I’ve been able to find photographic evidence of), while others would have stood atop unassuming telephone poles, hence the need for ‘concrete bases’.
In larger cities and towns, the mechanical sirens used to alert the public to conventional air-raids during the Second World War (affectionately dubbed ‘Moaning Minnies’ at the time) were frequently taken from local government basements, dusted off and repurposed for use as nuclear sirens at the beginning of the Cold War. Records housed in the Lancashire Archives indicate that, upon investigation, seven of Morecambe's existing air raid sirens were found to be in full working order when they were plugged in. Two of the sirens, however, had degraded and would need to be repaired. Morecambe Town Council paid around £30 to contractors to complete this task, equating to roughly £720 today, according to the Bank of England's inflation calculator.
Nearby Lancaster Police Station would have been responsible for triggering the sirens, had a nuclear attack been heading our way. Once incoming missiles had been detected by the RAF Fylingdales’ Early Warning Radars – also known as The Golf Balls – a message would have been immediately passed by the UK Warning and Monitoring Organisation (UKWMO) to police stations across the country. The officer who answered the dreaded call on his station’s red phone (yes, they often really were red) would then have activated the local sirens, although probably not before turning his underpants brown. By then, we would have had less than four minutes left.
Testing Times
Morecambe’s sirens were tested simultaneously at least three times (although they were tested separately on other occasions), with notices announcing the tests appearing in the local press in 1957, 1962 and 1963. These notices made frequent use of the headline, ‘Don’t Be Alarmed’, a hilarious pun that the writers were clearly very proud of.
To ensure that people weren’t too alarmed by a sudden air-raid warning blaring over town on a Tuesday morning, the sirens sounded the ‘All Clear’ signal (one continuous, steady note) during the tests, rather than the dreaded rising and falling tones of the ‘Attack Imminent’ signal. Still, if you hadn’t read the paper the week before and were oblivious to the test, hearing the sirens suddenly start wailing like a banshee would probably still be enough to make you spill your eleven o’clock brew.
‘Upon hearing the all-clear, you may resume normal activities…’
In 1993, the Cold War had thawed and the UK Government pulled the plug on the country’s siren network. According to a UKWMO memo from 1991, ‘some £3 million per annum [was] being spent in upkeep [of the sirens] by taxpayers’, which, given that many of the sirens were manufactured before or during the Second World War, seems a bit of a rip off. An increase in the number of houses with double glazing was also given as an argument for scrapping the sirens: what’s the point of having a Four Minute Warning if nobody can hear it from behind their windows?
Double glazing wasn’t an issue during the siren tests in 1962, although Morecambe residents were nevertheless being ‘asked to co-operate by filling in forms stating whether or not the sirens [could] be heard in different parts of the area’.
The question is, would you actually want to hear a siren announcing that you only had four minutes left to live? Let’s fill in the form together…
By Rebecca Shaw
Sources
The Morecambe Visitor, 14th March 1962; 14th June 1957, British Newspaper Archives.
The Morecambe Guardian, 12th February 1953, British Newspaper Archives.
Civil Defence records and documents, housed in Lancashire Archives.
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