WHEN the call went out in 1940 for volunteers to defend the homeland as Nazi invasion seemed imminent, 250,000 enrolled in the first 24 hours for the Home Guard that rose to a million strong in World War Two.

But there was no such rush when a recruitment exhibition was staged in the foyer of Blackburn's Cinema Royal in 1954 by the revived Home Guard. Like the rest of that spring and summer's country-wide drive for volunteers, it was a flop -- as was the government's entire bid in the Fifties to set up the force once more.

The original Home Guard was stood down at the end of 1945 following Allied victory. But the emergence of the Cold War with Russia and fears of the Soviets overrunning Europe -- and Communist infiltration of Britain's trade unions posing a threat from within -- led Winston's Churchill's government in early 1952 to restore Home Guard units like the 3rd Blackburn.

But the public was unmoved by the Red Scare and could not see the point of having a home defence force in peacetime, or in an age when wars stood to be fought with H-bombs, supersonic jets and missiles.

Against a target of 125,000 volunteers, only some 29,000 had been raised by 1953 -- with five officers for every one of other ranks. The effort fizzled out as Churchill retired in 1955, with the Home Guard being a mere cipher by the time it was scrapped in 1957.