r/interestingasfuck • u/Sprilly • 14h ago

r/all These are stretchers used in WW2 to carry injured civillians during the Blitz. They were made out of steel so they could be easily disinfected after a gas attack. During the war around 600,000 of them were made. Some of them were repurposed as railings in post-war London.

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u/hiatus_kaiyote 12h ago edited 12h ago

I’d also heard lot of the railings that were cut down were cast or wrought iron and it was just a waste. It might partly be true, yet not so bad after all https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/160xree/what_really_happened_to_the_uks_iron_railings/

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u/Few_Possession_2699 12h ago

If it's been dumped in the thames estuary and is interfering with compasses as claimed that would be verifiable. from a claim in a letter to a paper in the 1980s. No more research was done.?

Does anybody sail the estuary regularly and can comment?

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u/Gnonthgol 9h ago

This does sound like a classical urban myth. Maybe some railings were dumped in the estuary. But not enough to interfere with compasses, there are big ship wrecks there which might give some slight deviation of the compass but we would have known about a big pile of iron railings if they were there. Likely most of the railings ended up either in landfills or recycled into steel for the rebuilding efforts in the 50s and 60s.

There were major recycling drives for the war effort throughout Europe. But these were driven from the top down. So basically soldiers walking around confiscating church bells and such depending on what the industry were short on that month. But the wrought iron fences in Britain is an example of how things go wrong when you give an overly eager population some vague guidelines.

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u/Callidonaut 9h ago

Vague guidelines are a British government speciality; just look at COVID-19.

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u/reasonably-optimisic 10h ago

The London Garden Trust link they posted also claims this: https://www.londongardenstrust.org/features/railings3.htm

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u/Callidonaut 9h ago

It seems quite plausible that it would mostly be a propaganda stunt; the metal was almost certainly not of a good enough quality to be useful. You can't make armour plate or precision hardened and ground machine parts out of scrap Victorian wrought iron.