To police the new blackout, in March 1937 the Home Office appealed for 300,000 "citizen volunteers" to be trained as air raid precautions (ARP) wardens, rather unfairly immortalised in the television series Dad's Army officiously telling householders to "put out that light".
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/nov/01/blackout-britain-wartime
From what I can gather, even though the blackout itself caused many injuries,
Some of the early work that ARP wardens had to contend with was enforcing the blackout that was introduced on 1 September 1939 and lasted until April 1945 (5). Shop windows were darkened from 6:00 pm as were houses – requiring heavy curtains or blankets to ensure that no light escaped. Streets in almost darkness were dangerous with a large increase in injuries – 20% of the population reported as having suffered blackout related injuries in the first 4 months that they were in operation.
Road deaths increased around 40% when compared with pre-war fatalities. Regular readers will recall that a few years earlier Lewisham streets were noted as being some of the most dangerous in London.
https://runner500.wordpress.com/tag/arp-wardens/
most Brits willingly complied.
However, Jason Alexander's tweet oversimplifies the matter:
Blackout measures introduced in 1939, where external lighting had to be limited during hours of darkness and extinguished during air raids, were certainly the subject of complaints. Historian Robert Mackay writes that at the time, the public felt this measure was the most inconvenient aspect of the war, due to the lack of bombs in late 1939 and early 1940. He adds that those enforcing blackout, such as volunteer ARP wardens, were unpopular. Blackout measures also led to a rise in traffic and road-related deaths early on in the war, which at one point were higher than Royal Air Force and Navy deaths according to a report in the New York Times. Despite frustrations, blackout was a successful measure, with most UK cities described from the air as “comprehensively darkened”.
https://fullfact.org/online/blitz-spirit-tweet/
Also:
Other safety measures weren’t perfectly adhered to. The Centre for War, State, and Society at the University of Exeter notes that a significant cause of death early on in the Blitz was due to a failure to find shelter, with bodies pulled from the rubble indicating that victims had been sleeping in upstairs rooms.
Unlike with those refusing to mask up in public, in this case, those who refused to go to a public or other recommended shelter, were mostly hurting themselves. Though, as with COVIDiots, the injured or dead put added stress on services such as healthcare workers, and in the case of those refusing to take shelter, rescue workers.
= new reply since forum marked as read
