Air Raid (or possibly Flood?) warning sirens

[magmo]

I have just got back from Clacton today. I was at Jaywik and saw exactly the same... same structure and everything it was just before you get to the Martello beach holiday site on the right in a small compound next to a modern day transformer so it would be fairly recent and was on land below high tide level so I would presume it is part of the flood warning system along that part of the coast.

 

[Zero]

EG those at Broadmoor to warn the locals of escapes!

Thats awesome nfo cheers

 

[Stormhawk]

They've got one at Ratcliffe On Soar power station in Leicestershire. It went off while I was on a group visit there with work about two years ago and it scared me to death. The tour guides were going on about how they test it every week because anything can happen - including terrorist attacks - but this was not a test. We were all huddled together in the middle of the car park next to our minibus waiting for the order to jump in and get out of there. It lasted about 15 minutes, turned out to be a false alarm and we carried on with the tour.

 

[marked-man]

This is on top of the Whittingham water tower, it looks almost identical apart from the colour scheme.

The water tower at Whittingham is a very late build in the scheme of asylum water towers, the asylum opening in 1873 relied on reservoirs for its water and the water tower is not on the 1938 OS Map so maybe a wartime or post war construction . The siren could be either for a modern war,but it was used to for fire drills.

 

[stevejd]

we had one of those at Rauceby, started out as RAF air raid siren when it was RAF Rauceby in WW2, then doubled up as a fire alarm (bloody noisy one) and a cold war alert for Sleaford nearby although newbies to area believed it was the escape alarm

 

[cstevens]

Ahh, thanks for that Reaps
Never knew that they had some on Asylums Water Towers (but it kind of makes sense) no need to build separate legs and the higher the better!
Have heard about those sirens at Broadmoor (see below link for more info)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A7414292

Lb

I remember that siren when I used to visit my Grandad near there - I now remember my Grandard telling me what it was for, but had forgotten until reading this - thanks for the macarb memory.

 

[Bax__]

Before the time of Pagers the Fire Service used these to alert the Retained/Part-time firemen that there was a fire. They also doubled to alert the public Air-Raids this moved on to a Nuclear Attacks as well. You used to find them on the roff of most country fire stations...

I remember as a kid after my grandfather got his first pager from the fire brigade the siren going off and I was under the impression WWIII had started...They were only doing the annual test to make sure it was working okay

 

[Lightbuoy]

Good bit of info there Bax -Thanks It seems that there were quite a few uses for these sirens!

Lb:jimlad:

 

[Pegasus2]

They were testing them in Selby about three months ago. I will have a wander and see if I can find the siren.

 

[Lightbuoy]

They were testing them in Selby about three months ago. I will have a wander and see if I can find the siren.

Cheers matey. Let us know how ya get on

Lb:jimlad:

 

[Anthillmob74]

hope no one minds me dragging this to the top again, i was going to make a post about air raid sirens but thought id do a search first.

i remember when i was a kid, about 8 years old, you could see the old sirens perched atop poles around the town i live in. there are none around anymore.

during the mid to late 80s for some reason the sirens went off when they shouldnt have when i was at school one day. the teachers went into a complete panic and made us hide under our desks. cannot for the life of me find anything on google about it but i know its been discussed on the boards of friends reunited for that school.

my mum was brought up in tooting and remembers hearing the wail of the siren that was situated at tooting bec asylum signalling an escapee, as did my ex's mum who lived in coulsdon and often used to hear the wail coming from cane hill.

 

[Engineer]

Sirens.

As said previously they were very common and in use for works time signals in the 50s & 60s.
Mill I worked at still has one for the main fire alarm.

 

[Lishyy.]

Where I live, there is an oil refinery close by and atleast once a week i hear a siren like an air raid siren being tested, my grandma tells me its the old air raid siren and once when there was an explosion i heard it going off for quite a while.

 

[LiamCH]

A couple of years ago I was in Lewisham, south London and I noticed an air raid siren mounted on a pole. It looked as though it might have last been painted in the 1980's or so.

 

[zimbob]

This li'l fella lives on top of the village hall in Cawdor, near nothing much of note, apart from a Distillery, and the former RAF Brackla, which I believe was shut directly after WW2...

 

[penance]

Unlikely given that WW2 air raid sirens were hand driven by local ARPs not electronic...

http://www.northants.police.uk/museum_new/exhibits/11/siren.htm

The ones commonly seen in these photos are all cold war era.

Sorry, not so. ARPs did use hand sirens for local warning in more rural areas.
The majority of cities and towns were equiped with the electric powered carter air raid siren, as pictured earlier in the thread.
The carter sirens were introduced around '37-38 and are the well known air raid wail from WW2.
many were kept and pushed back into service during the cold war years.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i1QAtET0ok[/ame]

 

[Cuban B.]

I was going into the derelict part of an asylum one night and just as I away to go inside an air raid siren went off! It scared the life out of me and made me run for cover as the thought of coming across an escaping knife wielding maniac patient runs through your mind. Probably just testing the fire alarm though.

 

[jonney]

I live in Willington in County Durham and as a kid we used to play in the old WW2 cold storage buildings (now long gone sadly) and they had an air raid siren on the top (same type as in the first pictures) which back in the early 80's used to be tested twice a year. That was until we discovered the power was still on and the location of the siren switch, then it used to get tested every couple of weeks by us (quick down the ladders, off the roof,across the railway platform and into the bushes before the police arrived). I never really thought about it being cold war as the old guy who lived next to us worked there during the war once told me that it regularly used to go off when he was at work and they all had to march off into the air raid shelter in the buildings cellars. Now I think about it though it makes sense that they would need to test them to make sure they were still working as back then the threat of a nuclear strike from the Russians was very real

 

[Andy__B]

Was on a caravan holiday in Hunstanton a few years ago and the siren next to the campsite went off - boy was it loud, totally unexpected and quite frankly disturbing. Apparently, this was used to warn of potential strong tidal surge along the coast there - scene of much loss of life along the East Coast in the great floods of 1953..

I don't think it's there anymore?