Milton Keynes during the Cold War

Another DRAFT chapter in Milton Keynes The City of Legend. Are you old enough to remember the Cold War. Here are some of my MK memories.

It is said that if you can remember the 1960’s you weren’t there.

If you can remember the Cold War you don’t know what you are talking about.

Well I was around in the 1960’s, it was my teenage decade. I was around in the Cold War, all of it, and I can remember so much but to be honest with you all I don’t have a clue what I am talking about !

January 1967 and Milton Keynes was born. As the year moved on we had the Summer of Love which while happening in San Francisco echoed around the world. I was sixteen, going on seventeen and having left school was working as a retail management trainee in Birmingham. The Summer of Love, a protest against the evil of war – The Vietnam War.

Harold Wilson’s government gave us Milton Keynes, it  gave us our Open University but right

across the nation it gave my generation our lives. Wilson refused to allow our country to be drawn into the Vietnam War. Where would I  be, where would others of my age be, where would our country be, where would Milton Keynes be if we had been a part of Vietnam ?

At school I asked a teacher what the Vietnam War was all about, he replied that he did not know and doubted anyone did. How many can answer that question today  ? Those who were in favour of the war would say it was part of the Cold War and the prevention of communism. I have studied the events of this terrible war which ran from 1^st  November 1955 to 30^th  April 1975, it was all about denying Vietnam independence and fearing such would lead to communism spreading within the Cold War.

Living in the times history has dubbed the Cold War it was not a case of IF there will be World War Three but  WHEN will World War Three happen ? People have asked me how did we all live our daily lives with the Sword of Damocles hanging over us ? We just got on with our lives, perhaps I am looking back through rose-tinted glasses but there was far more positivity within society in the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1990’s than we experience today.

When Barry Hines published his book Kestrel For A Knave in 1968, followed by the film version Kes, it was a teenage success well into the 1980’s. Did you read it at school ? Barry Hines also wrote the script for Threads in 1984 which was set post nuclear attack in England’s tenth largest city, Sheffield. Today’s population of Sheffield is around three quarters of a million, here in Milton Keynes there are around one quarter of a million of us.

The Berlin Wall came down on Thursday 9^th November 1989 and I don’t mind telling you there was more than one tear in my eye as I watched reports on television news. The Cold War was over.

January 1967 to November 1989, Milton Keynes from its early childhood through to its adolescence was part of the Cold War, part of the Cold War as was every town, city and country in the land.

The nuclear attack siren for Bletchley Water Eaton was located on the roof of Leon School’s tower block. There were others all over the New City but as with thousands up and down the country, all  semi-secret. I only know of this siren as I worked at Leon. Had that siren sounded in defence of attack it would have given but two minutes, one hundred and twenty seconds warning of a nuclear explosion. Stand somewhere, anywhere in Milton Keynes and count  to one hundred and twenty. How far  could you  run in order to find shelter  ? What kind of shelter could there be within which to escape an atomic bomb ?

The kitchen and dining room area of Leon School were included within the government’s civil defence plan for Milton Keynes. Perhaps now forgotten there would be many other locations so named across the designated area.

Bletchley Park may have been the home of the codebreakers in World War II but it also played a role within the Cold War. Driving or walking along Whalley Drive adjacent to Bletchley Park a series of aerials and radar scanners could be seen, secret but clearly visible. These belonged to the Diplomatic Wireless Service communicating with embassies and their secret services with the Cold War. Part of what we call today GCHQ.

Living in Bletchley  Park in the early 1970’s when Britain faced a fuel and power crisis there were three day working weeks and television shut down at nine o’clock. Power cuts were frequent. Not in Bletchley Park. When the National Grid switched off the lights a generator somewhere in the park took over. We were all told this was left over from the war but surely that was a lie. Over twenty years since the war ended to say it was left over from the war cannot be true. It was a fully maintained up to date piece of equipment on hand to keep the transmitters and receivers of Bletchley Park’s Diplomatic Wireless Service working.

At ground zero a nuclear explosion would vaporise anything and everything, everybody in the vicinity. The blast then spread out destroying everything in its path, Within the blast was the deadly nuclear fallout.

How far is it from South Milton Keynes, Bletchley to Bicester ? Twenty-seven miles. It would take about an hour for someone in Milton Keynes to find shelter from the fallout of a nuclear  bomb dropped on Bicester. Why would Soviet Russia want to drop a nuclear bomb on Bicester ?

During the Cold War Bicester was one vast military encampment. Take a look at housing standing today from the time and their former use is clear.  There still is a military presence but tiny compared to what it once was. There were airfield from which low flying aircraft roared overhead across Milton Keynes every day. One former Bicester airfield now houses HMP Bullingdon, shortly before its entrance the road is crossed by the lines of a narrow gauge railway which was used to move weapons and equipment from one area of the base to another.

World War One, The Great War to end all wars, gave us World War Two. World War Two gave us the Cold War. Thank god it never turned hot.