My special interest object is a 'general civil respirator' issued to the British people in the Second World War. These mass-produced objects have come to symbolize life in the UK, even though it has never been used in action: the much-feared poison gas bomb attacks never materialized. There are gas masks for adults, children, babies, horses … and even dogs. There are also complete gas mask hood systems for families.
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. 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.
The first gas masks were simple filters of damp cotton and were soon superseded by cloth bags soaked in chemicals. 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.
In 1934, the British government asked its scientists at the Porton Down laboratory to design a civilian respirator that could be mass-produced at a unit cost of two shillings. 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.
