World War Two: Air Raid Shelters

Morrison air raid shelters in 1940s war-time Britain

Why choose a Morrison shelter?

Morrison shelters were for indoors. They took up a lot of space in a room and made the room look untidy, even though they could double as a table in daytime.

So people with large families tended to choose an outside Anderson shelter for air raid protection in the Second World War, rather than having to have more than one Morrison shelter indoors.

Morrison shelters were relatively quick to get to when there was an air raid, and they were also warmer than Anderson shelters because they were indoors. Many a tme I slept in one.

The location of a Morrison shelter

My parents had our shelter in the sitting room, i.e. the front downstairs room of our house. Only much later did I learn that it was called a Morrison shelter, as my mother just called it 'the shelter'.

Description of a Morrison shelter

As I was born in 1939, I was too small to see over the top of our Morrison shelter, and to me it was like a four poster bed with no legs, resting on the floor.

The tops of Morrison shelters were used as tables, but by the time I was big enough to see over the top of one, the war was over and our downstairs front room had returned to normal.

Setting up a Morrison shelter

The dash to the Morrison shelter when the siren announced an air raid

Whenever the air raid siren sounded, announcing the coming of an air raid, my mother would pick me up from my bed and deposit me in the Morrison shelter.

Then she would try to get her own mother who was living with us. That took time and effort. My mother would be screaming at her to come on and she would announce ponderously, "All right, all right, I'm coming". She was old, widowed and fed up with life, and I realise now that she probably didn't care very much whether a bomb hit us or not.

Inside a Morrison shelter

Our Morrison shelter had to sleep me, my mother and my grandmother. My father of course wasn't there. It was a tight fit, even though it was officially a double version. Incidentally I have only ever seen single ones since in museums.

The Morrison shelter contained a large mattress of sorts, sheets, blankets and pillows - all used for sleeping during the night-time air-raids.

During the latter years of the war, I was still up in the early evenings, and with my young ears I often heard the wail of a distant siren before my mother did. I always told her because it was fun to go into the shelter. It must have been awful for her, though, tired out at the end of a long day, having to organise her mother and me, and of course losing sleep in the process.

*Photographed by the webmaster in Lincolnsfields Children's Centre, Bushey

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