Model Air Raid Warden Training Buildings - cream house with circular hole in the roof

Wooden model of a plain single storey house with one half being a pitched roof and the other half a flat roof both painted red and made of wood. The house is painted cream with 8 windows and two doors which are painted blue with black outlines; the front door has a knocker painted in. The bottom of the house has been left open and there is a wall in the middle of the house. The inside of the house is unpainted. The roof of the house has a round hole located above the front door which goes through the ceiling into the house and which at its widest point is 21mm across.

Collection of twelve (12) painted wooden and metal buildings representing houses, churches and civic buildings, some with bomb damage. They are meant to represent the section of the northern Sydney suburb of Wahroonga for which Dr William Read was the responsible warden and were regularly used for weekly Air Raid Precaution (ARP) training and large scale exercise planning sessions at his home at Cleveland St, Wahroonga. A keen carpenter, Dr Read created the buildings and originally based them on a board, painted to represent the streets in his suburb, and his daughter states "He used these to play 'war games' with his fellow wardens and had them set up on the verandah of his home." Dr Read had served in Egypt at No 2 General Hospital with the Australian Army Medical Corps (AAMC) during the First World War, to the extent of moving his wife and three children to Cairo to be close to him. Upon his return to Australia, he ran the Hospital at Georges Heights which had been set up to receive the Gallipoli wounded.