ive just bought a WW2 babies gas mask/respirator hood for my collection and wondered if any of you chaps had any recollections of a young baby's respirator hood in use!!, its a very scary thing to put a child into and had to be hand pumped via a set of bellows .
This ghastly thing was universally hated during the war. My late grandmother was given one of these for her youngest child who screamed blue murder at the very sight of it. There was a very real fear that if a baby were enclosed inside the thing and the mother were incapacitated in any way ( eg knocked unconscious or stunned by bomb blast ) or even fell asleep due to exhaustion - the baby would asphyxiate.....
My nan says her Mum threw all the gas masks away just after they got them. They used to carry their sarnies around in the boxes... But this is the family that used to stand outside to watch the blitz from their garden in Balham...
