Missing railings, Aylesbury. What actually happened to Britain's iron railings in WW2?
When iron gates and railings were cut down to help the war effort in the 1940s, what happened next is a mystery and has been a matter of conjecture for many decades.
Steelworks at places like Port Talbot, Shotton, Sheffield and Motherwell had been in business since the start of the twentieth century and their histories are well documented. Yet, while the removal of the iron is recounted by hundreds of eye witnesses, there are no similar reports of the lorries arriving at the steel works with large quantities of railings and gates to be loaded into the blast furnaces. Lord Beaverbrook (Minister for War Production) was nothing if not thorough and his logistics operations would have been geared to deliver the iron as promptly as possible to the steel works. The most likely explanation is that far more iron was collected - over one millions tons by September 1944 - than was needed or could be processed.
Faced with an oversupply, rather than halt the collection, which had turned out to be a unifying effort for the country and of great propaganda value, the government allowed it to continue. The ironwork collected was stockpiled away from public view in depots, quarries, railway sidings. After the war, even when raw materials were still in short supply, the widely held view is that the government did not want to reveal that the sacrifice of so much highly valued ironwork had been in vain, and so it was quietly disposed of, or even buried in landfill or at sea and the pertinent documentation shredded to avoid embarrassment.
Theories to its fate vary, but none have been substantiated. One comes from an interview with dockers in Canning Town in 1978 who worked during the war on lighters that were towed down the Thames estuary to dump vast quantities of scrap metal and decorative ironwork. They claimed that so much was dumped at certain spots in the estuary that ships passing the area needed pilots to guide them because their compasses were so strongly affected by the quantity of iron on the sea-bed! Another has the ironwork used as ballast in ships to Africa with unverified reports that houses can be found in ports on the West African coast, surrounded by decorative Victorian cast-iron railings.
One WW2 aircraft website has an account from a member saying that, running out of munitions towards the end of the war, the bombers flying over France were simply loaded up with cut-down railings, which they dropped on the enemy; a scenario worthy of those toe-curling post-war comedy films that always seem to star Brian Rix and Ronald Shiner that often do the rounds on Talking Pictures Channel.
Missing railings, Aylesbury. What actually happened to Britain's iron railings in WW2?
When iron gates and railings were cut down to help the war effort in the 1940s, what happened next is a mystery and has been a matter of conjecture for many decades.
Steelworks at places like Port Talbot, Shotton, Sheffield and Motherwell had been in business since the start of the twentieth century and their histories are well documented. Yet, while the removal of the iron is recounted by hundreds of eye witnesses, there are no similar reports of the lorries arriving at the steel works with large quantities of railings and gates to be loaded into the blast furnaces. Lord Beaverbrook (Minister for War Production) was nothing if not thorough and his logistics operations would have been geared to deliver the iron as promptly as possible to the steel works. The most likely explanation is that far more iron was collected - over one millions tons by September 1944 - than was needed or could be processed.
Faced with an oversupply, rather than halt the collection, which had turned out to be a unifying effort for the country and of great propaganda value, the government allowed it to continue. The ironwork collected was stockpiled away from public view in depots, quarries, railway sidings. After the war, even when raw materials were still in short supply, the widely held view is that the government did not want to reveal that the sacrifice of so much highly valued ironwork had been in vain, and so it was quietly disposed of, or even buried in landfill or at sea and the pertinent documentation shredded to avoid embarrassment.
Theories to its fate vary, but none have been substantiated. One comes from an interview with dockers in Canning Town in 1978 who worked during the war on lighters that were towed down the Thames estuary to dump vast quantities of scrap metal and decorative ironwork. They claimed that so much was dumped at certain spots in the estuary that ships passing the area needed pilots to guide them because their compasses were so strongly affected by the quantity of iron on the sea-bed! Another has the ironwork used as ballast in ships to Africa with unverified reports that houses can be found in ports on the West African coast, surrounded by decorative Victorian cast-iron railings.
One WW2 aircraft website has an account from a member saying that, running out of munitions towards the end of the war, the bombers flying over France were simply loaded up with cut-down railings, which they dropped on the enemy; a scenario worthy of those toe-curling post-war comedy films that always seem to star Brian Rix and Ronald Shiner that often do the rounds on Talking Pictures Channel.