Newspapers of the period can be a good source of public attitudes to air raid precautions; long after the event, it's easy to think that such preparations were widely popular and people only too willing to get involved. However, newspapers tell a very different story. Even a brief look at the letters pages of 1935-39 will reveal dissent concerning 'peparing the war machine', 'waste of public money' attitudes and even pro-Hitler opinions in preference to communism.
This section contains abstracts of Eastbourne local newspaper articles from 1935. Eastbourne is a town on the south east coast of England, with a population of about 60,000 people in the 1930's. It is least famous for being the town where I was born, although I have never lived there.
I have chosen to look at local newspapers for several reasons. Firstly, air raid precautions were the ultimate responsibility of local authorities; the Government decided early on that to provide the projected air raid services from a single, central body would be far too complicated, and that as areas such as law and order and firefighting were already the concern of local government, A.R.P. schemes should be conducted at this level.
Under the Air Raid Precautions Act 1937, county councils, and the district and borough councils under them were obliged to draw up A.R.P. schemes and implement them. Therefore, the experience of every local authority in the UK was probably slightly different and varied. So while national newspapers are undoubtedly also a very good source of opinions, and often mention local issues, they do not devote as much column space to devote to them as local newspapers do.
The abstracts are the same as those accessible from the NBCD Periodical Articles Database, but are presented here three to a page in columnar format. Work is by no means complete; so far I have only managed to abstract articles from July 1935 to May 1938, and almost solely from the Eastbourne Gazette; there are still the Eastbourne Herald and the Eastbourne Courier to tackle. There's currently no search engine for this section, but these abstracts can be searched using the Periodical Articles Database search screen - to single out these abstracts type 'Eastbourne' in the Keywords field, or use the Periodical Title drop-down box to select either the Gazette or the Herald.
Because compiling these abstracts involves scanning through every single page of every newspaper of every year involved, it will inevitably take a long time to complete this project. What would be interesting is for somebody to undertake a parallel study of local newspapers in a different town or city to enable a comparison to be made.
If anyone is undertaking a similar project, please let me know!