'The Warden and the Householder' Part 2: Cold War Film Analysis
'The Warden and the Householder' Part 2: Cold War Film Analysis
Welcome to part two of my look at one of the strangest and silliest Civil Defence films produced during the Cold War: 1961’s The Warden and the Householder. To make sure you’re up to speed with the nuclear lunacy we’ve seen so far, go back and have a read of part one. If you’re watching the film along with me, our next section begins at approximately 11 minutes in.
The Warden and the Householder: Part 1
Scene 7: A group of happy little kiddiwinks are in the school playground, merrily skipping and playing football, oblivious to the looming threat of nuclear destruction. All of the children are dressed in white school shirts, flitting about like doves. Suddenly, into their peaceful midst strides the ominous figure of Civil Defence Warden Mr. White, who is dressed head to toe in black. He pounds across the playground like the Grim Reaper on the warpath; one almost expects him to have a whetted scythe tucked under his jacket.
This sequence is eerily foretelling of a famous one recreated two decades later in the most famous nuclear war films, Threads, in which we see children playing in the yard of a nearly identical school. The children are distracted from their games by the arrival of a Civil Defence van carrying blankets and first aid equipment, which are carried into the school for storage until the time comes. In both films, and in spite of The Warden and The Householder‘s inherent silliness, these school scenes are amongst those I find most disturbing. The purpose of school, after all, is to equip a child with the skills they’ll need to lead a fulfilling future. What future have the children here got to look forward to? I shudder to think…
Inside the classroom, we meet the Headmaster. Recognising a like-minded professional man in Mr. White, he asks for the bald truth about the effectiveness of the recommended protective measures, “strictly off the record, of course.” The Headmaster is to be disappointed. Mr. White is a professional to the core and will not stoop to discredit his hobby of nuclear defence. He crosses his arms defensively, clamping his Hydrogen bomb pamphlet to his chest like a bulletproof vest.
“Everything we recommend to you,” he retorts, “is based on the latest information from our scientists, and in fact most precautions are simple common sense.”
The Headmaster is clearly not used to being put in his place. He squirms and gulps uncomfortably, giving us a chance to examine the children’s drawings tacked to the classroom wall behind him. The charming finger paintings and wax crayon doodles all share one common theme: home. Houses. Cottages with cute picket fences, four square windows and a door in the middle; the epitome of a child’s idealised image of the perfect house. The youngsters’ priorities and the focus of their dreams are concentrated on the notion of ‘home’ and the safety and stability that comes with it. How horrific, then, that all those comforts are shortly to be obliterated when the Bomb detonates.
This heart wrenching, horrendous notion seems to have occurred to the Headmaster, who, in an instant, has been converted to the cause of Civil Defence. “Don’t you worry, Mr. White,” he says, “I’ll start right away. We mustn’t forget the children; it’s our duty to do it for them.”
Children were often used as blackmailing ploys in Civil Defence recruitment materials, aiming to tug at the heartstrings of parents and anyone who considered themself to be a caring, responsible adult. Phrases such as ‘Don’t leave it to others to look after your children’ and ‘They need you in Civil Defence’ were common, accompanied by images of doe-eyed, weepy children aimlessly wandering barren nuclear wastelands in search of an adult to help them. The Headmaster in The Warden and The Householder would certainly have been susceptible to the guilt-tripping used in these posters, had he not already been miraculously converted to Civil Defence by the persuasions of Mr White.
It’s left up to our imaginations to decide quite how the Headmaster would ‘do his duty’ to protect the schoolchildren in his charge. Were he to follow the guidance given in Advising the Householder on Protection Against Nuclear Attack, he – or the school caretaker, more likely – would have to unscrew all the doors in the school and prop them against the walls, topped with bags of earth dug from the playing field. Then, when the warning sounded, he would cram in all the school staff and hundreds of terrified, screaming children. Imagine the noise. Imagine the smell. Those poor teachers.
Scene 8: We now find ourselves in an upper middle class neighbourhood. Immaculate semi-detached residences stand along a tree-lined street, their front gardens filled with roses and shiny cars parked on the drives. Proudly washing one of these gleaming cars is Mrs. Richards: fur coat clad, pearl-adorned and glamorously made up with permed hair and stylish makeup. Mrs. Richards is using the ultimate of 1960s luxuries to clean her car: a hosepipe. No bucket and sponge for her, oh no! Mrs. Richards declares that her husband believes he’ll be able to put out any fire after a nuclear attack with the hosepipe. Judging by the pitiful trickle of water emanating from the hose, however, I beg to differ. You’d struggle to put out a candle with that thing, let alone a raging firestorm.
The ever pragmatic and patronising Mr. White, who is stood in the garage doorway, is unimpressed by the Richards’ smug claim that their hosepipe can put out post-attack fires. “I dare say it could,” he says, “if there was any water running from the tap.” He then takes it upon himself to turn off the tap in the garage, revelling in the drama as Mrs. Richards peers gormlessly down the nozzle of the hose in bewilderment. Beaten, she picks up a simple bucket to continue cleaning her car; the suggestion is that, against hyper-modern weapons of mass destruction, traditional and basic defences are best, as if to remind viewers – and enemy countries – of the phenomenal, unbeatable might of Britain’s nuclear deterrent. No use in being cocky and thinking you can beat the Bomb with any modern technology of your own!
Mr. White smiles in smug approval as Mrs. Richards picks up her bucket. He also points out the merits of investing in a stirrup pump for fighting fires. These were popular during the Blitz, and rightly so; up against a relatively small incendiary bomb of the WW2 era, a hand-operated stirrup pump was highly effective. Against a nuclear weapon, on the other hand, it would be totally useless. In fact, it would probably melt. Mr. White, of course, disagrees: “Many people scoff at the idea of the old stirrup pump, they think it’s a funny way of fighting the H-Bomb. But remember, even big fires start as little ones!”
We now follow Mrs. Richards into the back garden to fill up her trusty bucket with water. The tap is located in the greenhouse – for some reason she can’t use that one we’ve just seen in the garage – which conveniently leads Mr. White into yet another nuclear protection speech. Mr. Richards, you see, has whitewashed the windows of his greenhouse to reflect the sun’s heat. This rather defeats the point of a greenhouse to my mind, but then I’m not a gardening expert. Mr. White explains that Mrs. Richards ought to treat her house windows in the same way, in order to reflect the heat of the atomic flash. Yet again, we’re being told that the men had it right all along; Mrs. Richards simply needs to follow her husband’s example and she’ll be perfectly protected from all those nasty rays, just like the happy tomato plants in the greenhouse.
As ridiculous as it sounds, slapping windows with Pure Brilliant White emulsion was one of the more sensible nuclear defence ideas to come out of the Cold War. A vast majority of a fireball’s heat would indeed be reflected back by a white surface, reducing fire risk exponentially. Of course, split seconds later the windowpanes would be smashed by the shockwave anyway and fly into the house like razorblades, slashing anybody hiding within. Take your pick: burn or bleed to death?
Having finished cleaning her car – a task which seems rather pointless when you consider the fallout dust that will shortly be descending – Mrs. Richards announces that she’s freezing and suggests they go inside to continue their uplifting chat.
Scene 9: Mrs. Richards’ front room is a plush and stylish sanctuary. Plump armchairs are illuminated by extravagantly shaded standard lamps. Well-pummelled cushions and stacks of magazines and books on the coffee table suggest that this is a favoured reading spot for cosy evenings at home. Mr. White naturally has a very strong opinion of all this chintzy homeliness: it has got to go. Waving his arms over Mrs. Richards’ belongings like a magician, he decrees that she should “remove anything which will burn, such as books and cushions, lampshades and suchlike as far away from the windows as possible.” Ideally, she should dispose of them completely.
Mrs. Richards takes the horrible suggestion that she chuck all her treasured worldly belongings into the bin and send them off to the tip to be crushed remarkably well. “Yes, I see,” she nods complacently. It’s as though she’s just been told that her home furnishings are now out of fashion and ought to be changed in order to remain on trend. Being a good, subservient citizen in awe of the overpowering might of nuclear deterrence, she happily agrees to have all the personal belongings which represent her individuality stripped away, to be replaced by bare conformity and subservience to the powers that be.
Moving on to the next room, Mrs. Richards steps in front of a mirror and begins to primp and preen her hair, smiling as she appreciates just how darn hot she is. As she curls a piece of hair around her finger, she flippantly asks, “What about the curtains? Will I have to take them down?”
Mr. White chuckles at the charming female preoccupation with appearance and homely pride, dependable even when faced with a cataclysmic world conflict. “Oh no,” he assures her, “if you want to keep them up, dip them in a flameproof solution. They’ll be all right.”
Mrs. Richards is happy: “Good. I’ll do that.” It’s to be hoped that the missiles don’t begin to fly immediately; remember, it is winter and freezing cold outside. How, then, is Mrs. Richards supposed to get her prized curtains dipped in flameproof solution – which I for one have never seen on sale at my local homeware shop – then line-dried outdoors and rehung in time for the war beginning? The whole progress will take even longer if she wants to iron them.
In suggesting that the curtains can be left hanging, Mr. White is actually going rogue against the advice given by his beloved Civil Defence Corps. The pamphlet in his clipboard, The Hydrogen Bomb, had explicit guidance on curtains, demanding that they must be taken down:
‘Any flammable material exposed to the heat radiated from the fireball may be ignited. Thus curtains in windows greatly increase the fire risk. […] Windowpanes should be whitewashed and anything flammable removed from doorways and windows’.
This scary passage is accompanied in the booklet by a drawing of a cute little lady in a puffball skirt and apron, obediently ripping her cherished curtains from their poles at the Government’s say-so. In the next image, her dollhouse-style home is shown erupting into flames as an example of what will happen if she doesn’t obey.
Fast forward to the Protect and Survive era, however, and the advice was the complete opposite of what had come before:
‘Remove net curtains or thin materials from windows, but leave heavy curtains or blinds as these can be drawn before an attack to protect against flying glass.’
It’s not explained how exactly one is supposed to distinguish between a heavy curtain and a light one. I, for instance, would say that the curtains in my bedroom are heavy, but then the cat manages to climb up and rip them pretty easily, so maybe I’m wrong. And what about blinds? Surely blinds are all made from light materials? They’re not likely to be made from toughened leather or neoprene, are they? No wonder Mr. White is confused about the guidance, and he’s supposed to be the expert!
Confident that her curtains will survive the end of the world, Mrs. Richards heads over to her grandiose fireplace and warms her bum on the roaring flames. Her all-knowing hubby, she says, believes that, “if this fallout stuff does come, he can load up the car and have everyone out of it in half an hour.”
Mr. White rolls his eyes; has he not just emphasised that modern technology is no match for the Bomb? Cars cannot outrun fallout dust! “The roads must be kept clear for the Civil Defence services going into the damaged areas,” he huffs. “And just remember, you might be driving right into the danger, not out of it. Besides, if everyone tried to push off into the blue, they might end up in the most unholy traffic jam, maybe still in the fallout area.”
Mrs. Richards shudders, clearly remembering when she last got stuck in a traffic jam on a sweltering Bank Holiday Monday. The thought of that, with radiation sickness thrown in for good measure, is too much to bear. She nestles closer to her fireplace, emphasising that home comforts and safety are to be preferred to running away during nuclear war. As Protect and Survive warned: ‘You are better off in your own home. Stay there.’
The camera now zooms in to focus on Mrs. Richards’ face. She’s lit in the manner of a film noir seductress, heavily shadowed to emphasize her razor sharp cheekbones. With a sneer on her lips, she says, “How on earth are we all going to stay in this one little room for days and nights on end? We shall all end up in the madhouse.” She chuckles maniacally, the flames in the fireplace flickering behind her like the gateway to Hell. Mrs. Richards here frighteningly resembles Norman Bates in the finale of Psycho; as we know, he too went a little mad sometimes, and that was without having to spend two weeks holed up in a fallout shelter with his spouse. Looking at Mrs. Richards’ sinister smirk, one gets the feeling that if the blast or fallout doesn’t kill her husband, if he gets on her nerves she’ll do the job herself.
Mr. White is lit in an equally murderous manner. Raising one eyebrow like a Bond villain, he comes out with his best one liner of the entire film: “Better the madhouse than the mortuary, Mrs Richards.”
And on that bombshell, Mr. White leaves, slinking away into the darkness of the hallway and leaving Mrs. Richards alone in her lair. These two are decidedly sinister. If this were a game of Cluedo, they’d be right at the top of my suspect list. I think it was Mrs. Richards in the fallout room, with the stirrup pump…
Next time: Mr. White’s quest to protect and patronise the residents of Nottingham hits a stumbling block as he encounters some local wallies who have some ‘very strange ideas’ about nuclear war. Our favourite worrier, Mrs. Jameson, pops round to have a snoop at how Mr. White has decked out his fallout room. And, we meet the dreaded Mr. Wells. Can he be converted to the cause of Civil Defence, or is he just a wrong’un after all?
The Warden and the Householder: Part 3
By Rebecca Shaw
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