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Here's To the Men Who Clear Up the Mess!

Discussion in 'The Home Front' started by Jim, Jan 29, 2007.

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  1. Jim

    Jim Active Member

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    Amongst the brave men who are in the very front line of Civilian Britain in its fight against the Nazi air raiders are the members of the Demolition .Squads and the Rescue Parties. Below we learn of what a district surveyor told a reporter on the "Evening Standard" of the responsibilities of these men and of the really splendid way in which they are shouldered.

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    The demolition squads of London's A.R.P quickly became experts in dealing with the ruins of houses that had been bombed. This picture shows one of the men dealing with a cistern that was hanging in mid air.


    When bombs are dropped, unless they fall in the middle of a vacant field or in the sea, there is always an aftermath of desolation and destruction to be cleared away. If men and women have been buried underneath the fallen buildings, then they must be dug out and attended to without delay; if masses of debris block the streets they must be cleared away; if the vital services are hit, which term includes not only railways and tramways, but gas mains and electric cables, water-pipes and sewers, they, too, must be put right. All these dangerous and difficult jobs are entrusted to the demolition squads and rescue parties of the Civil Defence organization.
    Generally speaking, these are raised from the outside staff of the various councils and they are under the control of the district surveyor. To take a typical instance, there are seven squads operating from the headquarters of this south-west London district.
    They come on duty at eight 0 'clock in the morning, and are supposed to be relieved at eight 0 'clock at night-but recently there have been so many demolished buildings to cope with that they have not always been able to relieve each other promptly, the district surveyor in charge told me. He said that the men were paid a little over £3 a week, and that when they worked overtime they did so without any extra wage.
    And, on their part, without any thought of it, he added.
    Crawling about wherever a bomb has torn its path of terror and destruction, these indomitable mercy men burrow and dig through mountains of debris to free children and women and men.

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    This picture shows the man disconnecting the pipes that connect to the cistern.

    Most of the rescue brigades have been recruited from the building trade.
    They are the type of navvy whom before the war you saw springing about the beams and joists of half-erected buildings, eating their lunchtime bread anti cheese perched in the most precarious positions, and endlessly wisecracking with their mates.
    They don't wisecrack any more. The things they have seen since the bombardment of London have stopped that.
    Nor, when they're out on a job, do they stop to eat-except if a Women's Voluntary Service mobile canteen should come near enough for them to grab a sandwich.
    There are ten men in every squad: foreman, carpenter, plumber, bricklayer, and six labourers, four of whom have been trained to give first-aid.
    “Sometimes," said the district surveyor, it is rather a long time before the debris can be cleared enough to let the ambulance men and stretcher parties through to where people have been trapped.
    "That is why our boys must know how to be able to alleviate suffering right away."
    When I called at headquarters there was no one in the downstairs room where the men sit waiting till they are called on duty; there was only a pile of their impedimenta picks and shovels and drills and the hooded torches which, when the bombers are overhead, are the only light they have to work by.
    All of the squads were out; some still working on the ruins caused in the night, others at home on their 24 hours off duty.
    Up against the walls of the little office were propped such relics as the fin end of a 500 lb ..Bomb, dug out of the ruins of a house; a jagged piece of metal, eight inches long, which had come hurtling from a wrecked upper floor and missed one of our foremen by an inch.
    "They are great men, these navvies," said the district surveyor quietly. "They work through raids; with bombs crumpling round them and the continual danger of houses collapsing on top of them, without turning a hair." And they're not all young men either; the best foreman we've got is a man of 70, who's quicker on the job than any of them." He told me that the men were standing the terrific mental and physical strain of their work with grand staunchness.

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    A car wrecked by a bomb in the area close to Oxford Street.


    Of course, it's no good pretending that some of them don't suffer from shock they'd have to be robots not to, seeing the things they do. And when that happens we try to get them an extra hour or two's rest, but that's not always easy to arrange these days and nights of blitzkrieg.
    I went with him to a row of houses two blocks away, where a squad was working on the havoc caused by two bombs which had fallen, one on each side of the road.
    The men were shoring up gaping walls, knocking ragged ends of glass from windows, digging a path through the mountainous pile of bricks and rubble strewn over the road.
    Two men, their faces white with dust, looked out of a hole in a wall and shouted a cheerful greeting.
    They're light-hearted about this particular job-by a miracle there were no casualties, for the people living in the houses most badly hit had got out of London only a day or two ago, said the district surveyor.

    This article was written in October 1940 for the news paper “Evening Standard”
     

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