HUNDREDS of people watched when Oxford became a disaster zone for a day.

Emergency service teams swung into action as fires broke out all over the city.

Exercise Undaunted was launched on November 14, 1954, to test the effectiveness of the Civil Defence Corps.

Our interest in the Corps, which was set up to take pressure off the emergency services in the event of war or other catastrophe, was revived by a letter from reader June Tallant (Memory Lane, February 15).

Mrs Tallant, of The Triangle, Wheatley, recalled that her father, Peter Jeffers, was a Civil Defence member and wondered if anyone remembered him.

The 1954 exercise was one of the most ambitious ever held.

Civil Defence volunteers were joined by ambulance crews, firemen, police, Army units and the Home Guard.

The first emergency of the day came when four cottages in Friars Street, St Ebbe’s, caught fire.

Then the war room at St Aldate’s police station received reports of a “terrific explosion”, soon confirmed as an atom bomb.

Later, a fire broke out at Windmill Cottages in Headington, but it wasn’t fierce enough for the fire chief – he poured paraffin on the flames to make the exercise more realistic.

All the time, teams rushed to the scenes to put out the flames and carry out rescue work, rest centres were opened to receive the homeless and supply them with food, drink, clothes and comfort, and emergency feeding centres were set up.

‘Casualties’ were said to be “revoltingly convincing, one grey-haired woman groaning horribly and another with a great deal of blood”.

Afterwards, a conference was held at St Aldate’s police station, where the verdict was that “everything went according to plan”.

But there was concern that few Civil Defence members had taken part. It was thought that the exercise might increase recruitment, but that appears to have been a forlorn hope.

Six years later, when new Civil Defence buildings costing more than £20,000 were opened near Oxford Airport, at Kidlington, the organisation still had only 415 local recruits.

The contract to erect the complex was one of the strangest ever signed – builders were told to put up factories and houses, then smash them up.

Members used them to practise rescue work. But the ‘ruins’ had a short life.

In 1968, volunteers attended a farewell party at Oxford Town Hall after the Government disbanded the corps.