Cold War Bunker (1959 -1968)

Post date: Oct 07, 2016 5:32:48 PM

My thanks to former Wateringbury resident John Smith, now residing in Australia, for highlighting the existence of this post and to Joyce Manning for identifying its location and finding the reference on the KCC web-site Exploring Kent's Past at

http://webapps.kent.gov.uk/KCC.ExploringKentsPast.Web.Sites.Public/SingleResult.aspx?uid=MKe18075

The following information is based on this web-site and the recollections of John Smith's brother-in-law, Mike whose memoirs as a Wateringbury GPO linesman include further information .

The Royal Observer Corps (R.O.C) had an underground monitoring post in Wateringbury, one of a chain across the country, during the cold war to monitor nuclear explosions and fallout. It was located near Gibbs Hill at grid reference TQ 6762 5238 It was abandoned in 1968 and destroyed in 1992 following the standing down of the R.O.C. in 1991. These posts consisted of an underground bunker with entry from a locked steel plate that covered a 22ft deep vertical shaft down into a small room with a bunk bed for two observers. At that time John Smith's brother-in-law was a telephone technician with the P.M.G. and worked in the Wateringbury area. It was a part of his job to periodically check the two way intercom back to Maidstone Headquarters that was installed in this bunker.

There were about 30 other bunkers in Kent.

Information collected would have been fed into the regional HQ located at Brachers (solicitors) on the London Road in Maidstone, where an underground headquarters bunker, with a surface element, was built in 1960 for No. 1 Group of the R. O. C. The role of the Group HQ was to receive and process reports of the location and strength of nuclear bursts and the spread of radioactive fallout from such posts across its area of responsibility (Kent and the eastern parts of Surrey and Sussex). Scientific advisers in the Maidstone bunker examined information about nuclear bursts and predicted the spread of fallout. This information was communicated to the controls of armed services, and other recipients in a communications chain. Local communities could be warned of approaching radiation through the use of air raid sirens or maroons. The safest routes for the traffic of military vehicles and of the emergency services could be established as well as information collected about which airfields were at risk or, at the time, unusable from the spread of fallout