HOME MORALE REPORT
PORTSMOUTH AIR RAID

Ministry of Information,

(Southern Region)

16th January, 1941

Portsmouth was heavily raided on the night of January 10th. At first sight it looked as if the damage done was less severe than that at Southampton. A more detailed inspection, however, changed that impression. One realised that probably just as much damage had been done to houses and streets as in Southampton. The difference was that Portsmouth is more than twice as large as Southampton and that the damage was more scattered. The Portsmouth Guildhall, on the other hand, was completely gutted as a result of incendiary bombs, whereas the Civic Centre at Southampton, though damaged, was left to some extent usable.

The morale in Portsmouth was excellent, and, if the size of the trek of refugees to the country is any criterion, better than Southampton. The firmness of morale is attributed to the way in which the population is stiffened by a large admixture of the fighting services and also to the stimulating effect of an exceptionally large number of soldiers and sailors doing demolition work, etc. In this connection it may be noted that French prestige was given a much needed “boosting” by the presence of working parties from the French Navy, who, from all accounts, did extremely well.

The Head of the local Labour Exchange told me on my last visit to Portsmouth on January 14th that he had been tremendously impressed by the spirit of a large number of women who had been bombed out of their employment at various corset factories. He said that they were the happiest crowd of unemployed he had ever seen, in spite of the fact that many of them had lost their houses.

Morale was helped by the fact that there was no repetition of the raid on the night of the 11th. During the 10th there had been a fairly heavy exodus to the country owing to the expectation of a second attack. During the afternoon, indeed, the one roadway out of Portsmouth was crowded with refugees on foot and in every form of conveyance from baby carriages to heavy lorries. The fact, however, that there is only one road out of Portsmouth rendered the spectacle delusive as an indication of mass evacuation. According to figures given at a meeting of the L.I.C. on January 15th, there were, in point of fact, about 2,000 official evacuees scattered around neighbouring towns like Petersfield and Fareham and in the smaller places many more people were, of course, sleeping out of town, a practice which to some extent has been indulged in ever since the earlier raids.

In the town four of the ten Rest Centres had been closed by Tuesday, the 14th, and it was expected that more would shortly be dispensed with. Also it seemed that a proportion of their occupants were not would-be evacuees but people who had been bombed out of their houses and were waiting to see if they could get alternative accommodation.

The quietness with which the raid was taken, together with the fact that the local newspaper was not bombed out, decided the local authorities not to issue, or ask us to issue, special bulletins, or loudspeaker news. Official loud-speaker work regarding the boiling of milk and water, location of Rest Centres, emergency ration cards, etc., etc., were left to the Police, to whom we turned over our six Ministry of Information loudspeaker oars on the understanding that, if we wanted any or all of them back, we could have them at once.

As will be seen from the report of the L.I.C. meeting of January 14th, the solidity of the Portsmouth home front was slightly compromised by patches of defeatism of the type which asks “Why go on? This is a hopeless business. We hit the other fellow, and he hits us, and neither gets anywhere”. It was stated that this kind of talk could be heard in 38 - 2 -the dockyard as well as in the streets. It was also stated by the two representatives of the Conservative Party at the L.I.C. that the Communists and other subversive elements were doing their best to exploit it. Nothing, however, was ascertainable which would indicate that defeatism of this sort exists in anything more than small, isolated pockets. It is believed at Portsmouth, as at Southampton, that the majority of its victims are probably women.

A much more significant symptom of the prevalent spirit was to my mind afforded by our L.I.C., the membership of which settled down to discuss our emergency arrangements for the next blitz, the inevitability of which they took for granted with complete equanimity. The same spirit characterises the local authority, the stalwart efficiency of which is another factor on the side of good morale.

The L.I.C. voiced a rather prevalent complaint that those responsible for the first anonymous bulletin of the raid early on the morning after it, had let Portsmouth down pretty badly by the light-hearted way in which they dealt with what they ought to have known even then was a first-class raid. It was strongly pointed out that the fuller details that can be given after a raid, the better the effect upon local morale. Great stress, of course, was laid upon giving the name of the Towns as quickly as possible.

The L.I.C. stressed the fact that there was a certain restlessness in the town about the destruction of the Guildhall. People, it was said, were wondering how the Council could convincingly ask shopkeepers and householders to guard their own property when it had obviously failed, according to common gossip, to guard its own property. The Committee, indeed decided that unless the Council issued a statement on the matter, it would ask the War Emergency Committee for a statement which, if not published in the press, could at any rate be disseminated orally through the town by the Home Front League.

The chief lessons provided by this incident regarding public morale seem to be

(1) that one cannot have too many loudspeaker cars giving official announcements and directions;

(2) that about the most important of these announcements and directions concerns the addresses of Information Bureaux and the addresses of Rest Centres;

(3) that the addresses of the Food Office, Communal Kitchens, bakeries and food shops also need a maximum of continuous broadcasting.