No uniforms. No use of rank. No military vehicles. They were curious orders for an army exercise
The civilian minibus driver must have wondered what was going on when he dropped a dozen of us off in the middle of nowhere, next to what looked like a deserted factory depot. It was the summer of 1980.

I was a Territorial Army officer commanding a Royal Signals troop whose war-role was to survive the nuclear attack, restore communications and 'assist the civil authorities in the recovery period'. At that time, the Cold War was more bitter than ever. The Soviet Union was targeting more and more nuclear warheads on Western cities. Britain and America were threatening to deploy cruise missiles in response. Whitehall was about to re-publish Protect and Survive, a leaflet explaining how Joe Public could live through nuclear war by putting Bacofoil over the windows and hiding under the stairs.

Our hiding place was rather more substantial. When the minibus had left, we made our way inside the Regional Seat of Government bunker, known to us simply as The Hole. It was breathtaking. From vast central corridors hewn out of the rock, side galleries ran endlessly into the darkness. A quarter of a million square feet, hidden 200 feet beneath a sandstone ridge. There was a huge, clattering kitchen area, sleeping accommodation, a mass dormitory, official's quarters, restrooms, showers, lavatories and radiation-decontamination rooms.
The Hole was constructed during the Second World War as a ``shadow'' factory where aero engines were produced, safe from Nazi bombing. Mothballed at the end of the war, it found a new role during the Cold War. Our week-long exercise brought together government scientists, police, fire and ambulance chiefs and local-council officials (who rather spoiled things by going home at 5pm sharp every evening).

My troop provided the communications, manning a bank of dusty, ancient Creed teleprinters and an equally venerable Marconi radio. The Regional Controller who would have had wartime powers of life and death over every citizen in Nine Region (West Midlands, Warwickshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire and Hereford-Worcester) was played by a senior civil servant from Whitehall called Raymond. Raymond was a hoot. A product of public school and Oxbridge, he threw himself into the drama like a cross between Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln.

When he heard he had his very own radio troop, Raymond retired to his office and drafted a public broadcast to the fireballed, irradiated and possibly lawless citizenry of Nine Region. It ran to about eight pages and was pitched somewhere between the Gettysburg Address and Blue Birds Over the White Cliffs of Dover. It was a stirring call to stand firm, think of England, keep your pecker up and listen out for further instructions, coupled with the hint that any mutiny would be dealt with pretty damn quick.

'Will you tell him,or shall I?' asked my troop sergeant, brandishing the missive.

I did it, breaking the news to the Regional Controller that, actually, it wasn't that sort of wireless. People couldn't tune in to Hole Radio. It was a teleprinter link and anyway we couldn't send real names and locations.
' So what can you send?' Raymond asked earnestly.
'Well, usually we send radio checks and signal strengths. Although, to behonest, the set doesn't often work.'

Unable to address his public, Raymond returned to making decisions about whether to use firing squads on them. He never slept. Day or night, Raymond stayed alert and constantly busy. Two hundred feet underground, you tend to get day and night confused and so we came to rely on Raymond.
If Raymond had his slippers on, it was night. By the end of the exercise, I had developed a profound respect for senior civil servants and a deep depression about the prospect of nuclear war.

In the busy control room a team of government scientists traced the nuclear explosions on huge Perspex maps of Britain, each ground-blast or airburst leading into a hundred-mile plume of radioactive contamination.

Some areas were virtually unaffected. Chester, by the vagaries of Soviet planning and wind direction, was quite untouched by blast or radiation,its power stations humming, its air breathable, its water running clean and clear. Closer to home, Hades.

The teleprinters, silent at first, began to chatter with terse messages. Uncontrollable fires raging in Birmingham. Rioting in Kidderminster. Panic-stricken drivers jamming the M6. In the unnatural, fluorescent-lit bunker, breathing purified air and drinking recycled water, the gap between exercise and reality narrowed. As a teleprinter started up, you found yourself willing bad news on any other town, but not your own.

When a request for 20,000 cardboard coffins for Stourbridge came through, the TA soldier next to me who was from Stourbridge got up and walked away, red-faced, blinking hard. It was, in technical terms, a 'good' exercise. The radio worked well and hundreds of messages were passed. And yet when the final 'ENDEX' clattered over the teleprinter, the relief was awesome. We switched off, tidied up and went out through the huge steel door, drawing in great, grateful lungfuls of fresh air.

Today, thirteen years on and light years removed from the nuclear-dread of the 1980s, The Hole is up for sale. Whitehall is inviting offers and the publicity people are making much of the 'top secret' tag. But was it?

Before the exercise, one of our TA sergeants drove to 'Drakelow' to make quite sure we found The Hole on the day. He got lost and stopped a passer-by to ask directions.
'You looking for the secret place?' inquired the local.

That's how secret Number Nine Regional Seat of Government really was. And those of us who worked there strongly suspected that, if the warheads had started flying, one of the first would have had 'Drakelow' written all over it.