![]() In 1936, a disused mill in Blackburn became a gas mask assembly-plant where, by the Munich Crisis of 1938, more than 30 million gas masks had been manufactured, requiring, amongst other components, a mind-boggling 90 million safety-pins. The result was the General Civilian Respirator, familiar to the Second World War generation and to later generations from films, photographs, and stories of the period. In 1934, the British government asked its scientists at the Porton Down laboratory to design a civilian respirator which could be mass-produced at a unit cost of two shillings (10p today). ![]() The German war artist Otto Dix captured the horrors and ironies of the gas mask, which seemed to transform men into monsters on the Western Front. By the end of that conflict, the pattern for modern gas masks had been established, with a face mask, eye-pieces, a chemical filter, and a container. The first gas masks were simple filters of damp cotton (moistened in extremis with human urine), and were soon superseded by cloth bags soaked in chemicals. The first gas masks for use in warfare were developed during the First World War, when the German military pioneered the use of chlorine as a weapon – the original WMD. First development Gas masks first became standard military equipment after the Germans pioneered chemical warfare on the Western Front of the First World War at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. There were gas masks for adults, children, babies, horses … and even dogs. This ubiquitous mass-produced object has come to symbolise life in Home Front Britain, even though it was never used in action: the much-feared poison gas bomb attacks never materialised. My particular object of interest is the ‘General Civilian Respirator’ issued to the British people in the lead up to the Second World War. UCL’s Gabe Moshenska muses on the extraordinary iconic significance of the gas mask.
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