The air raid shelter which protected speedway fans
By Tony Lethbridge
The Morrison Table Shelter was a metal cage with a steel top. When installed inside a house it could be used as a table but during air raids the occupants of the house could take cover inside it. Although the shelter was known as a Morrison, and named after Herbert Morrison the politican, it was designed by a dentist, Alfred Moss, the father of the great British racing driver, Sir Stirling Moss.
5918 Morrison shelters were issued in Exeter and saved many lives. In fact 293 were found intact among the ruins of bombed houses.
After the war most of the shelters went for scrap, but not all. When speedway was re established at the County Ground in 1947 building materials were in short supply but one of the Falcons' directors, Mr Bill Eastmond, had a number of Morrison shelters in his salvage warehouse behind the Thatched House Inn on Exwick Road. 242 shelter tops each measuring 6'x4' were used to construct the safety fence around the track, and remained in place until the spring of 2006 when the stadium was purchased by developers. Many riders hated the steel fence as they considered it dangerous, but top Falcons like Ivan Mauger and Vaclav Verner frequently rode with their back wheel against the fence to gain extra drive.
Naturally, being steel, the fence was very unforgiving and many a rider carried the scars to prove it. The final casualty was speedway official John Tombs who cut his thumb badly with a chisel while helping to dismantle the fence in 2006. Several panels have been preserved and one is promised to the national speedway museum in Hoddesdon.