So recently I’ve been hearing a large number of comments about whether or not people need to be genuinely worried about the UK’s second lockdown. One thing I’ve noticed that keeps coming up is that people who adhere to the lockdown rules are akin to ‘people who left their lights on during the Blitz’. Obviously the comparison isn’t really appropriate but it did get me thinking, were there large numbers of people who did actually leave their lights on in London and other towns/cities? I know in popular media there’s always a warden shouting ‘turn that light out’ to someone, but was this aimed at one or two select people? Or were there in fact thousands of people who genuinely believed that turning off their lights was something they weren’t obligated to do?
The blackout was unpopular, rated as the greatest inconvenience of the war every year by a panel surveyed by Mass Observation except in 1942 (when it was second). It was resented most during the first six months of the war as the feared aerial attacks failed to materialise, newspapers owned by Max Beaverbrook campaigned vigorously against it, and as traffic fatalities increased dramatically Wilfred Trotter noted in the British Medical Journal that "the Luftwaffe was able to kill 600 British citizens a month without ever taking to the air". Many were prosecuted for offences against blackout regulations - 300,000 in 1940, 925,000 by the end of the war.
Of those, however, the vast majority were due to careless or inattentive individuals rather than deliberate actions, enforcement of the regulations could be harsh verging on farcical - a woman was fined £1 for displaying what turned out to be the pilot light of her iron as she ironed in the dark, another man was fined 10 shillings for lighting a match to look for his false teeth after they fell out. It was all too easy to break the regulations in communal buildings - if an office worker failed to secure blackout blinds in a window before leaving work then a cleaner coming in after dark would illuminate the area by turning a light on. As well as the ARP warden and their cry of "put that light out!" (a trope firmly based in reality, by all accounts) other citizens were keenly aware that if bombers did see lights everyone in the area could be endangered, and there are records of crowds gathering around houses or shops displaying lights threatening to smash the doors down. Though people could be resentful of overzealous wardens, anyone flagrantly ignoring the blackout would receive little sympathy; if in the vicinity of an important factory or military installation then suspicions of deliberately signalling to the enemy would be much more serious.
Juliet Gardiner's Wartime: Britain 1939-1945 is good on the home front; Stuart Hylton's Reporting the Blitz: News from the Home Front Communities has some interesting local perspectives; on the blackout specifically there's Marc Wiggam's thesis "The Blackout in Britain and Germany during the Second World War". Wiggam has also contributed to a couple of articles on History & Policy particularly looking at parallels with the current situation: The real lessons of the Blitz for Covid-19 and Loosening lockdown: lessons from the blackout.