FINEPLACES tram extremely perilous – soon trams were allowed one shaded interior light but the blinds must always be drawn. Headlights and top lights were darkened. All street lighting was turned off, although for a short time a blue light was permitted on dangerous corners but this was quickly abandoned. Householders pasted strips of dark paper down the sides of their windows, shaded electric lights and gas globes and pasted opaque paper over fanlights. Factories with fanlights found it necessary to make elaborate arrangements for these to be covered nightly with tarpaulins. Fines were imposed on citizens who did not co-operate, magistrates vastly increasing the fines for a subsequent offence. Newsboys, tram conductors and others used bull’s-eye lanterns. Car headlights were also affected. Cyclists adopted many makeshifts: Local writer W.G. Clarke remarked ‘…I saw acetylene lamps with handkerchiefs tied over them, and ordinary stable lanterns with candles, laboriously fastened to the front lamp bracket’. The kerbs in the main streets were whitened. On September 20th 1915, the Home Secretary ordered that the regulations for lighting should apply from half an hour after sunset to half an hour before sunrise and this remained in force until the end of the war. From November, even the striking of matches became an offence, for which many were fined. Norwich had become the darkest city in the land, a ‘City of Dreadful Night’. Some protested that it was unnecessary but to no avail.
Humour In The Darkness On the nights of extreme darkness the conditions had a funny side. People were unable to find their own homes, or thinking that they had found their address, entered someone else’s. Folk lost their bearings and had to enquire where they were. Pedestrians walked into Modern sculpture on bins Riverside trees, lampposts, and other commemorating Boulton and Paul who people, got their foot stuck in made Sopwith Camel aircraft.
14 | August 2015
manholes, and tripped over the kerbs, sometimes causing serious injury. It was unnerving to hear footsteps behind you but not to know to whom they belonged. Worse still, some people proceeded by swishing their umbrellas in front of them as if in an imaginary sword fight. This resulted in serious injuries. Some had a luminous disc pinned to their clothing but to little avail. Best not to go out after dark unless really necessary. One other effect of the blackout, according to a report in the local press, was that the people of Norwich began reading ‘higher’ literature as they had to stay indoors a good deal more than usual. Norwich at this time was very much an industrial powerhouse - metal, hats, shoes, chocolate and mustard being famously made here – but was hardly a city famous for literature as it is today. The paper mischievously adds that ‘the Scots have always appreciated their literature’. Fines For Showing A Light To begin with, police and magistrates were unwilling to prosecute people for breaking the lighting regulations. This did not last and from mid-1915 to the end of the war the total number of people summoned for offences against the lighting regulations was 4, 042 and the total amount of fines inflicted was £1,357 10s 7d Zeppelins Attack Norfolk The main purpose of all this activity was, of course, to make the city as safe as possible from German Zeppelins. Norwich prepared for ‘air raid action’ sixty times during the war. The first major warning was on 19 January, 1915. Two Zeppelins were sighted about 8 pm over Bacton, heading towards Norwich. The electricity supply for the whole city was turned off immediately. At the beginning of 1915 the Kaiser had sanctioned the bombing of military and industrial targets along the British coast and in the area around the Thames Estuary but not London itself. On 19th January 1915,
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