But they had not thought it necessary to prepare any blood. In 1937, the secretary of state for war had been asked what the nation proposed to do about a mass blood supply. He said, “It is more satisfactory to keep our stores of blood on the hoof.”95 He meant that the best way to store blood was how nature intended: inside a human body. By the beginning of 1939, a single emergency blood depot had been set up in a bombproof building in the outer London suburb of Cheam. It was a depot in name only, with a capacity to store 1,000 pints, but empty. Planners expected it could be stocked within
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