How to Build a Nuclear Shelter: The Manchester Playgroup that Taught Kids how to Prepare for Armageddon, 1981

It's every parent's worst nightmare: how does one entertain the kids during the school holidays, stave off the boredom and prevent the household from descending into a warzone? These days, desperate parents can plonk a screen in front of their child and ensure a few hours of peace; in times gone by, however, a little more creativity was required to occupy the kiddiwinks and prevent them from running wild. Hence the need for the half-term playscheme. For a tiny fee, parents of yore could pack their progeny off to the local community centre for a week of thrilling activities, safe in the knowledge that their children couldn't possibly be getting up to anything worrisome, dangerous or frightening... Or that was the idea, anyway.

Back in the summer of 1981, Manchester parents happily sent their children trotting off to Langley Community School's playscheme, blissfully unaware that their offspring - aged between six and twelve years old - would be spending their holidays learning about nuclear war and receiving instruction on how to build a fallout shelter. If they had known, it's likely that many of the parents in question would have demanded a refund of the club's 50p joining fee. 

Langley Doomsday Class, 1981

The mastermind behind the so-called Doomsday Class was a Mr. Dave Morton, who in the early eighties worked as a community tutor in the Middleton area of Manchester. Speaking to the Middleton Guardian in early July 1981, Mr. Morton said that the children attending his after school club 'had expressed an interest in nuclear war, so I thought it would be a good idea to have a class on the subject as part of our summer school.' The first two years of the 1980s saw a terrifying surge in nuclear tension: the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 brought the threat of an armed conflict between the superpowers frighteningly close, sending a terrified public scrabbling for any shred of knowledge on survival tactics they could get their hands on. The infamous Protect and Survive home defence pamphlet was issued by popular demand in 1981, while haunting programmes such as the BBC's If the Bomb Drops brought the apocalypse directly into front rooms across the country. With these horrors in mind, it's unlikely that Dave Morton's pupils had been 'expressing an interest' in nuclear war; more likely, they were absolutely terrified and seeking reassurance from a responsible adult.

What comfort, then, would a six year old derive from their teacher organising a class on what to do when - not if - the Bomb dropped on their home town? Not a jot, I'd assume. 

The Langley summer school ran from 23rd July to 31st July 1981, with a break on 29th July to give any ardent royalists among the kids the chance to watch the Royal Wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer. The fun resumed with gusto the next day, as was reported by the Manchester Evening News: 

'It was a typical bunch of happy children enjoying the long summer holiday from school, but their laughs and jokes belied the macabre message behind their grim game. For rather than the usual hide and seek or cowboys and Indians, they were rehearsing a race against death to see how quickly the could build a nuclear fallout shelter.' 

Langley playscheme, 1981

First on the day's agenda was a cheery talk from a group of civil servants employed by the Greater Manchester Emergency Planning Department. These happy-go-lucky individuals lectured the kiddies on the importance of the nuclear deterrent to Britain's security, before treating their young audience to a short film on 'the effects a nuclear war would have and how the chances of survival' could be improved by following government orders. Community tutor Dave Morton was quick to assure the press that his propaganda-laden playscheme was not endorsed by the government: 'We are not trying to indoctrinate people,' he insisted. 'We are getting a balance of opinions and hope this will spark youngster's interest in what will happen if there is a nuclear war.' 

Mr Morton declined to explain exactly why any rational person would want to spark a child barely out of nappies' interest in thermonuclear conflict. He was, however, quick to point out that the morning's lectures hadn't been all doom and gloom, and in fact may have left the infants feeling buoyant and optimistic: 'They were put at ease after the experts predicted that a bomb dropped on Manchester would leave survivors at Langley.'

This is hardly a comfort, given that any surviving children would likely be orphaned, horrifically burned and suffering from a lethal dose of radiation poisoning. Suppose mummy or daddy had been at work in central Manchester when the Bomb dropped; how long would a sickened, traumatised child last in a desolated landscape, fighting against other survivors for dead rats to eat and irradiated water to drink? Surely even the most naive child would realise that instant death would be mercifully preferable over this nightmarish idea of survival. 

Besides, the children would not have been 'put at ease' if they'd known that the Greater Manchester Emergency Planners were in fact lying through their teeth when they stated that there'd be survivors in Langley after a bomb on Manchester. The suburb lies roughly 5 miles north-east of Manchester city centre. As the 1982 expose Target North West revealed a year later, at this distance the effects of a 25-megaton bomb on Manchester would be as follows:

'At 4 miles: Metals vaporise as the air temperature soars to 10 million degrees Celsius. Death is instantaneous.

At 6 miles: Metals melt. A bus would simply melt around its passengers.

At 15 miles: Rubber and plastic burst into flames. Aircraft standing at Ringway Airport explode. Car tyres in towns as far away as Stockport melt.'

It's fairly safe to say that there in fact would not be many survivors at Langley. It's to be hoped that none of the six year old attendees had a lie detector stashed in their backpacks...

Target North West, 1982

The Doomsday Class then broke up for lunch, leaving the children to digest some unpleasant truths about nuclear war as they scoffed their jam sandwiches. Perhaps a few kiddos decided to forgo eating their lunch, preferring to stash their food in case the Bomb unexpectedly dropped while they were away from home and their fourteen day fallout period food hoard.

With the lunch break over, it was time for the real fun to begin: the eagerly anticipated nuclear fallout shelter building competition! In the school playground had been assembled a motley collection of the materials needed to 'build a nuclear shelter to government specifications': doors, old school desks, planks of wood, rope and sandbags. Propped against the climbing frame were large yellow signs emblazoned with radioactive symbols, to indicate that the area was that day not to be the site of childish games such as tag or hopscotch, but a location for a gruesome war game. Speaking to the Middleton Guardian three weeks before the Doomsday Class, Mr. Morton enthusiastically explained his plans. 'The shelter building will be fun and a game,' he said, before adding – in an awkward mumble, we can assume – that the 'serious message' of the exercise would be made fully plain to the juveniles taking part. 

Seemingly oblivious to the imaginary annihilation they were  about to  face, the children entered the playground barely able to contain their excitement, with many 'wearing pots and pans from the school kitchen as helmets', according to Mr Morton. Clearly, their morning instruction in nuclear weapons had not been overly effective if the children thought that a pan usually used for making rice pudding and other revolting school dinners would protect them from the full force of a thermonuclear detonation.  

Once the excited, cooking pan-clad children were assembled in the playground battlefield, they were given a brief demonstration on shelter construction from the Greater Manchester Emergency Planners, who were back after their morning lectures to instill more terror into the children, like pantomime baddies that just won't quit. After learning the best method for propping a door against a wall and stacking the flimsy structure with sandbags – or handbags, as the Middleton Guardian erroneously stated in their report of the event – the children were then taught to scurry inside their shelter and duck for cover beneath one of the provided school desks, there to remain for 14 days until radioactive fallout had subsided to a tolerable level. 

Mr. Morton set a stopwatch for the four minute warning period that the government insisted would be given before an enemy attack. As the teams stood poised with their construction materials, it was announced that Soviet missiles had been detected approaching the country. Attack warning red! Attack warning red! A blast on a whistle signalled that the four minute warning had begun. The children leapt into action, their hypothetical lives ticking away with every second that passed. 

Rather than the usual screams and howls of terror that would accompany the last minute construction of a nuclear fallout shelter, the air was filled with laughter, giggles and shouts of encouragement to teammates. 'The kids obviously enjoyed building the shelters,' a gleeful Mr. Morton told the press. 'To most of them it was simply a game rather than practice for what could happen in their lifetime.' 

Before we find out who was victorious in the shelter building competition, let's take a look at whether there was any point in teaching the children, who all lived in the local suburb of Langley, how to construct a flimsy shelter from pieces of plywood. 

Langley estate and the Three Sisters tower blocks

Langley was created in the 1950s to provide tenants of demolished slum housing with somewhere to live, with lofty ideals of improved housing, sanitation and public facilities such as playgrounds and sports centres. The estate comprised of 4,652 properties in total, of which two-thirds of the homes were two-to-four bedroom houses. The remainder of housing was made up of maisonettes and flats, including three mammoth tower blocks constructed in the mid-sixties, known locally as 'The Three Sisters'. For children living in a semi-detached house or two-storey maisonnette on the Langley estate, constructing a lean-to nuclear shelter may have been worthwhile, for their homes might offer a vague amount of structural protection, provided of course that any bomb was detonated far enough away to not vaporise the occupants instantly. Although fires would be raging and windows broken, letting deadly fallout dust drift inside, some level of structure may have remained standing.

For the hundreds of children who lived in the Langley tower blocks, however, a knocked together ramshackle shelter would be about as much use against a nuclear attack as a mop and bucket against a tsunami. Protect and Survive bluntly informed tower block residents that if they lived in a top floor flat and unless they were on good terms with their neighbours, they would be doomed if nuclear war began:

'If you live in a block of flats that is more than five floors high, it is important not to use the top two floors. (...) If you live too high up to be safe, you must make arrangements now with your neighbours in lower floors or make some suitable arrangements to shelter with someone close by'. 

Protect and Survive

The Langley tower blocks were 13 storeys high. (I could make a joke here about that being unlucky for some, but this is a serious blog, so I won't.) How likely is it that during a national emergency – with panic buying in full force and obtaining the basic means of survival near impossible – that an already overstretched family would gladly open their doors to their neighbours as the sirens wailed, inviting them in to share their scarce supplies? Not very. This would also apply if a flat tenant were faced with choosing 'someone close by' to shelter with; that someone would have to be a very trusted family member or close friend, as it's unlikely that most neighbours would be happy to ride out the apocalypse with That Bloke I Don't Know Too Well Who Lives in The Flats.

There's also the small problem of guaranteeing that one could leg it down thirteen flights of stairs and make it to one's pre-arranged shelter location within the four minute warning period. For an example of the impracticality of this proposal, see the episode of Only Fools and Horses entitled 'The Russians are Coming', in which Del Boy and Rodney time themselves getting from their tower block home to their DIY fallout shelter. 

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that teaching the children who lived in Langley's tower blocks to build fallout shelters was an entirely pointless endeavor. Up against a thermonuclear attack, their ramshackle structures would be like sitting ducks before a machine gun. Perhaps this explains the strange caveat that was printed on the certificates presented to the winning children in the shelter building contest... 

The unfortunate teams that failed to construct their bunkers within four minutes were patted sadly on the back and reassured that although they would certainly snuff it when the bombs started falling, they'd made a good effort and, after all, it's the taking part that counts. For the successful competitors, their prize was a snazzy certificate signed by the Langley playscheme tutors. Printed in miniscule writing at the bottom of the page was 'a note stressing that their shelters could not be guaranteed to stand up to a nuclear attack.' Ever aware that 'where there's a blame there's a claim', Langley playscheme bosses made certain that if nuclear war had occurred and the shelters their students had been taught to build didn't protect them, no livid parents could pop up after the apocalypse to sue the pants off them. Forward planning at its best. 

As the children filed out of the playground at the end of the day, clutching their certificates to their chests like bulletproof vests, it's likely that the traumatised youngsters felt consumed by a swathe of emotions: terror, anxiety and a bewildering confusion that something as devastating as nuclear war could be so fun. Was war something to be feared, or not? Would a nuclear attack truly mean pain, suffering and excruciating death, or would it be one great big sports day, a thrilling race for survival, as the grown-ups had insisted? Only time would tell. A 1983 survey conducted by ITV indicated that 70% of children predicted that nuclear war would happen during their lifetimes. The children who took part in the 1981 Langley playscheme will today be in their fifties. There is still time for their contemporaries' prediction to come to pass. Who knows, the Langley kids may get to play their war games again. For real.

 

Langley tower blocks being demolished, 2013

Rebecca Shaw 

Sources 

Liverpool Daily Post, 3 December 1983.

Manchester Evening News, 29 July 1981. 

Middleton Guardian, 10 July 1981; 25 September 1981.

Only Fools and Horses: 'The Russians Are Coming', BBC, 1981. 

Parliament Debate, 23 April 1990, 'Langley Estate, Manchester'. 

Protect and Survive, HM Government - all films available on YouTube.