Antecedentes

In terms of the printed word, the creation of a mythical stoicism began from the start of the Second World War. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony argued that the state and ruling classes cannot enforce control over any group or structure unless other, more intellectual, methods are entailed and the media play a central role in creating an ‘acceptable’

consensus.⁴⁴ The earliest government publications had the dual purpose of maintaining morale while purporting to be publications of record, including Front Line 1940-41, which was published by the MOI in 1942, and was typical in combining the facts the government was prepared to release and simple propaganda.On the Blitz it stated: ‘The failure to disturb civil morale or to reduce appreciably the flow of production was complete. The great German offensive against the back gardens and front parlours of Britain met with total defeat.’⁴⁵ This was premature, simplistic and misleading, and this thesis will show that it conformed to the propaganda model adopted by

44 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, pp. 21-43.

45 Ministry of Information, Front Line 1940-41: The Official Story of the Civil Defence of Britain (London: HMSO, 1942), pp. 158-59.

newspapers in 1940 and 1941. The emphasis of the German offensive, it suggested, was on gardens and houses, the front parlours where people spent most of their time at home, not the factories and warehouses fuelling the war effort that were the real targets of the Luftwaffe. Notwithstanding Goering’s ambition to demoralise the British population, why would the Germans prioritise front parlours over the means of war production? That Britain had not been bombed into submission was correct, although the writers had no way of knowing that was going to remain the case at the time, but to dismiss the effects on morale was to distort the case, as the following chapters will show.

Front Line’s view on Manchester was similarly rose tinted, stating the city had been ‘big enough to take the raid without much upset or disturbance’.⁴⁶ It added:

Manchester typifies many of the elements in British democracy to which Hitlerism is most repugnant… The city had been early to perceive the threat from Germany and to respond to the government’s call for civil defence preparations. When the test came the wardens, rescue and casualty services were ready.⁴⁷

This was a fabrication. The MOI knew this because Home Intelligence inspectors had sent a report in January 1941 that had highlighted the dramatic fall in morale in the city after the Christmas Blitz.⁴⁸ The same Home Intelligence report was also critical of the local authority and a lack of preparation of the city’s facilities for the homeless, something Front Line barely registered.

On the fires that rampaged through the city, Front Line admitted

‘Manchester, like the rest, was caught off guard’ and, later, it conceded that

46 Ibid, p. 104.

47 Ibid, pp. 104-05.

48 Mass Observation, FR 538.

the fire fighters lacked cohesion: ‘The auxiliary firemen and their regular comrades had not yet had an opportunity to become welded into a single, well-exercised unit. The problems of mobilisation, command and water-relay were therefore the more formidable.’⁴⁹ Buried in a mound of eulogies, this was the only suggestion that Manchester’s emergency services had lacked organisation in December 1940. Yet contemporary witnesses wrote of fires raging out of hand, buildings were dynamited to stop the flames spreading and 700 fire fighters had to be rushed from London and its outskirts to help put out the blazes.⁵⁰ These accounts strongly counter the assertion the city took the raid (singular, it should be noted) without upset or disturbance. The MOI had received reports from Manchester, Coventry and other British cities emphatically stating that civilian morale had been disturbed to the point that some people were questioning whether it was worth continuing the fight.⁵¹

Front Line typified the tone of publications during the war, reinforcing the idea that the British ‘could take it’, a necessity if the fight against Hitler was to be maintained. It was a precondition, after all, of Britain not suing for peace when its allies, Poland and France, were swept aside by Hitler’s Blitzkrieg. The historiography for the two decades after the war reflected this narrative, taking its lead from Churchill, whose ‘finest

49 Ministry of Information, Front Line, pp. 105-06.

50 Our Blitz: Red Skies over Manchester, ed. by Cliff Hayes, (Bolton: Aurora, 1995), p. 18;

M. J. Gaskin, Blitz: The Story of 29th December 1940 (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), p.

38.

51 Mass Observation, FR 495, Coventry, November 1940; Report 538; Report 620, Manchester Air Raids, March 1941; Report 706, Liverpool, 22 May 1941; Report 839, Manchester Industrial Atmosphere, 14 August 1941; Box 1, Propaganda and Morale 1939-42.

hour’ speech had created the template. Churchill’s own six-volume apologia, The Second World War, was typical:

These were the times when the English, and particularly the Londoners, who had the place of honour, were seen at their best. Grim and gay, dogged and serviceable, with the confidence of an unconquered people in their bones, they adapted themselves to this strange new life, with all its terrors, with all its jolts and jars. ⁵²

As the war leader, Churchill had a vested interest in exaggerating the stoicism of the public, but even he hinted that the above was an idyllic portrayal, and by no means universal, when he added that the Blitz had brought ‘so many problems of a social and political character’.⁵³ Yet his positivist argument was so persuasive that historians subscribed to the tale of unyielding morale and tenacious determination until the late 1960s and, as this thesis shows, the imagery endures in the popular mind-set. Taylor, normally a challenger of historical clichés, recorded that, for every civilian killed, 35 were made homeless, with all the social problems that implied, yet wrote of ‘the unshaken spirit of the British people’ and that the raids

‘cemented national unity’ in his English History 1914-1945, first published in 1965.⁵⁴ Taylor’s evidence for this fortitude did not come from analysis of contemporary correspondence but was inferred by two votes in Parliament:

the defeat by 341 to four in December 1940 of a motion by the Independent Labour Party for a negotiated peace, and a similarly overwhelming majority of 297 to 11 backing the suspension of the Daily Worker the following month.⁵⁵ ‘Not a dog barked,’ he wrote of the latter, failing to take into

52 Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, II, Their Finest Hour (London: Cassell, 1952), p. 293.

53 Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Annual Report 2010-11 ([n. p.], 2011);

Churchill, Finest Hour, p. 301.

54 Taylor, English History, pp. 502-03.

55 Ibid, p. 503.

account the ‘deep sense of disturbance’ expressed by the National Council for Civil Liberties, concerns on the political left and a series of readers’

letters that appeared in the Manchester Guardian and other newspapers.⁵⁶ He also failed to ask whether either vote by MPs in the relative safety and comfort of the House of Commons was a true reflection of the mood in the bombed out streets of London, Manchester and Coventry.

Churchill’s interpretation of the resilience of the British people was endorsed by official sources, among the first of which was framed by Richard Titmuss in 1950. His study argued that not only was morale sustained throughout the war but also the mental health of the nation

improved thanks to a universal will created by national necessity.⁵⁷ O’Brien was equally sanguine, writing of the Blitz: ‘The phrase “London can take it”

became current and there is small doubt that this reflected the reality of the situation.’⁵⁸ He added that the evacuation was relatively small and that there was no panic, assertions that have since been contested by historians who have studied contemporary accounts.

This canonisation of the British civilian in the Second World War,

‘the grotesque angelism’ as Trevor Harris described it, was first confronted by Calder with The People's War: Britain 1939-1945.⁵⁹ This book,

published in 1969, was the first extended challenge to the positivist reading of the Second World War and was hugely influential on the subsequent

56 ‘Democracy and Minority Opinions’, Manchester Guardian, 27 January 1941, p. 8; ‘A Blow at the Freedom of the Press’, Manchester Guardian, 28 January 1941, p. 10;

‘Freedom and the “Bounds of Good Sense”’, Manchester Guardian 13 February 1941, p.

10.

57 R. M. Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, (London: HMSO, 1950), cited in ‘Edgar Jones and others, ‘Civilian Morale During the Second World War: Responses to Air Raids Re-examined’, Social History of Medicine, 17, 3 (2004), pp. 463-79 (p. 463)

58 O’Brien, Civil Defence, p. 401.

59 Trevor Harris, ‘Why is There a Myth of the Blitz’ (Observatoire Reunionnais des Arts)

<http://laboratoires.univ-reunion.fr/oracle/documents/219.html> [accessed 9 March 2012].

historiography and the arts, the director Richard Eyre citing 20 works, films, television and theatre, that emerged from its conclusions.⁶⁰ The People’s War drew on oral testimony and the work of Mass Observation that moved beyond London and the semi-mythological construction of deepest England to the industrial cities of the north, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Calder stated that the conventional version of events, while true in parts, did not remain intact when confronted by the evidence and that the popular image was created by propagandists with the willing acquiescence of the press: ‘Some journalists of the period created a myth of the Cockney wisecracking over the ruins of his world, which is as famous as the myth of the Few soaring into battle with laughter on their lips, and equally

misleading.’⁶¹

Surprisingly given that he was challenging myths, Calder subscribed to that of Dunkirk in People’s War, something he eschewed when he

returned to the subject in 1991 with The Myth of the Blitz, a more relentless debunking of the image of the plucky Londoner.Calder argued that the Blitz Spirit formed the third part of a wartime trilogy of semi-truths that also included Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain. Dunkirk, he stated, was hailed as snatching victory from catastrophe, and while 199,000 British and 139,000 French soldiers were evacuated across the Channel, it was a defeat, as even Churchill acknowledged when he described it as a ‘colossal military disaster’.⁶² The Battle of Britain was won by ‘the Few’ although the

numbers were not as balanced against Fighter Command as the myth insists,

60 Paul Addison, ‘Angus Calder (1942-2008)’, History Workshop Journal, 70 (2010), 299-304 (p. 303).

61 Calder, People’s War, pp. 165-66.

62 Taylor, English History, p. 486; Broad, Churchill, p. 288.

an assertion that has since been endorsed by other academics, including Ferguson, who wrote: ‘Britain was not the underdog; the odds were about even.’⁶³ The army, the RAF, the Royal Navy and a flotilla of small ships had defied Hitler, the Blitz represented the British people’s turn and in 1940 there were many examples contributing to the narrative of defiance. Calder cited Mollie Panter-Downes, of the New Yorker, who wrote:

It would be difficult for an impartial observer to decide today whether the British are the bravest or merely the most stupid people in the world…

The individual Englishman seems to be singularly unimpressed by the fact that there is now nothing between him and the undivided attention of a war machine such as the world has never seen before. Possibly it’s a lack of imagination, possibly again, it’s the same species of dogged resolution which occasionally produces an epic like Dunkirk.⁶⁴

Leaving aside the transformation of Dunkirk from a defeat to an ‘epic’, another voice might have asked: did the individual Englishman, or Briton, have any choice?

Instead, fuelled by an anger caused by Margaret Thatcher’s co-option of the ‘Blitz Spirit’ for the Falklands War, Calder argued that the chirpy East Ender and ‘we’re all in this together’ were stereotypes that hid the reality of an inequality of suffering and concealed less than heroic stories of despair, xenophobia and rising crime levels.⁶⁵ He also unpicked the unanimity of purpose, noting that Celtic nationalists, communists and conscientious objectors had different reasons for questioning the fighting of the war, while miners and other trades unionists did not need long memories to find supporting Churchill, a prominent government figure in the General

63 Knightley, First Casualty, p. 257; Ferguson stated Britain had 1,032 fighters compared to the Germans’ 1,011 and, in the crucial period between June and September 1940, Britain built 1,900 fighters compared to Germany’s 775 (Niall Ferguson, The War of the World:

History’s Age of Hatred (London: Allen Lane, 2006), p. 393).

64 Cited in Calder, Myth, p. 107.

65 Calder, Myth, p. iv.

Strike of 1926, a debatable prospect. Calder quoted a letter from Beryl, Lady Mayhew, in which she painted an idyllic Norfolk country scene inhabited by ducks, turtledoves and kingfishers. He asked:

Gulls wheeled over Dover cliffs; kingfishers darted in alders; Britain awaited invasion with quiet confidence. Thus, it is clear, was the ‘finest hour’ prepared for. So why were thousands of innocent aliens interned?

Why were people in high places obsessed with the danger of a British fifth column?⁶⁶

Calder’s assertions provoked a fierce counter-reaction. John Ray claimed that the 12-month period from September 1940 was an ‘annus mirabilis in British history’ and asked what would have happened if the British had failed to repulse Hitler?⁶⁷ He added: ‘Sometimes these lessons are evaded by denigrators whose pens inscribe with metaphorical glee on the graves of the dead.’⁶⁸ Author Phil Craig in the Daily Mail stated that the

‘so-called Myth of the Blitz’ contained much that is true, and the

‘debunking version contains much that is exaggerated, contrary and just plain wrong’.⁶⁹ Craig also noted that the report of East Enders booing the Royal family was based on one entry in the diary of Harold Nicolson.⁷⁰ Craig was correct in that Calder did not provide further substantiating evidence to back Nicolson’s assertion, although he failed to ask why one of Churchill’s ‘strongest supporters’ would record this in his diary if it were unreliable?⁷¹

This drawing of the historiographical battle lines has moved in recent years as modern academics, most of whom were born after the war,

66 Calder, Myth, p.109.

67 John Ray, The Night Blitz: 1940-1941, (London, Weidenfeld, 1996), p. 12

68 Ibid.

69 ‘Bunkum and the Blitz’, Daily Mail, 26 August 2000, pp. 12-13.

70 H. Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1939-1945 (London: Fontana,1970), p. 112.

71 Ponting, 1940, p. 53.

have used Mass Observation and Home Intelligence reports to revise the story of steadfast morale. None has suggested that British morale was broken by the Blitz, but they have attempted to qualify the exaggerated claims of universal selflessness and enthusiastic cooperation that were made, frequently by the press. Typical of this approach is Ponting’s 1940:

Myth and Reality, which was published just before Calder’s Myth of the Blitz but owed a debt to People’s War and Calder’s collaboration with Dorothy Sheridan, Speak for Yourself, an anthology of Mass Observation reports from 1937 to 1949.⁷² Ponting also reported that morale fluctuated, the Ministry of Information recording ‘depression’ and ‘open signs of hysteria’ in Coventry, Bristol citizens feeling ‘let down’, looting and

‘wanton destruction’ in Portsmouth and Plymouth people questioning whether it was worth fighting on.⁷³ In his introduction Ponting wrote that his purpose was to strip away the myths created by Churchill’s memoirs and in this he succeeded, although the claims on the cover that it was a ‘startling account of the ineptitude and propaganda’ in 1940 was overblown given the number of books in his bibliography in which these same myths had already been confronted. Ponting approached his subject with the premise that the existence of the myth meant that there was a mass of lies that needed uncovering, a position as strong and simplistic as the myth of 1940 itself.

But this was not the only fault as he frequently failed to provide references when he made bold statements. For example, when he quoted the senior royal naval officer at Dunkirk as saying: ‘The French staff at Dunkirk feel

72 Speak for Yourself: A Mass-Observation Anthology 1937-1949, ed. by Angus Calder and Dorothy Sheridan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

73 Cited in Ponting, 1940, p. 164.

strongly that they are defending Dunkirk for us to evacuate, which is largely true,' no attribution was made, a surprising omission given that it differed so strongly from the accepted British version.⁷⁴ Similarly, when he claimed that civilians in provincial cities left in large numbers, where was the evidence when he stated: ‘In parts of Southampton after the bombing only one in five of the people were left’?⁷⁵ Which parts? Who did the counting?

Where did they go?

Nevertheless, Ponting provided a detailed account of the revisionist position, focusing on one year. Malcolm Smith’s Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory offered a longer a view, stretching back to the pre-war period when the myths of 1940 and 1941 found their origins in the extreme fears about the effects of intensive bombing.⁷⁶

77

74 Ibid, p. 90.

75 Ibid, p. 165.

76 Malcolm Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory (Abingdon:

Routledge, 2000).

77 British Cartoon Archive, ‘Very Well, Alone’ (Evening Standard, 18 June 1940)

<http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/record/LSE2791> [accessed 21 January 2013].

His aim, too, was to ‘trace the changing construction of what 1940 and the war have come to mean in the subsequent 60 years’.⁷⁸ Smith’s main premise was that 1940 was the watershed that exposed the failure of Conservative government in the 1930s and underpinned the consensus for social change between 1945 and the 1960s. He also entered an interesting debate about Britain’s international position, in which he claimed that the, albeit

qualified, victory in 1945 coloured the attitude towards the European Union.

‘Very well, alone’, the caption to David Low’s cartoon in London’s Evening Standard (above) read in the wake of France’s surrender and Smith

employed this to draw a line from that to the solitary position adopted by opponents to European integration since. This was a stretched connection and there were others too. His suggestion, for example, that the appeal of soaps such as Coronation Street and EastEnders derived from the story that began in 1940 – ‘it was the Blitz which made the community story a

principal argument in the interior monologue of the nation’ – overlooked several other factors such as class and locality.⁷⁹ The neighbourhood, urban and rural, had been a feature of working class culture and literature since the nineteenth century and to dismiss it is to forget, in addition to many more mundane local milestones, the villages bonded in grief at the destruction of the Pals Regiments in the First World War, mining communities during and after the General Strike, and the Tyneside support that propelled the Jarrow March.

Gardiner underlined the state of fear that existed in 1939 when she noted that within minutes of Chamberlain announcing the declaration of war

78 Ibid, p. 1.

79 Smith, Britain and 1940, p. 120.

the British public were given a reminder that they would be in the front line.

Sirens wailed over the capital, Londoners rushed to find the nearest shelter and braced themselves for an attack. But they were not in danger; it was a false alarm and the all clear soon sounded.⁸⁰ The terror and subsequent relief that would mark the Blitz had begun without a bomb being dropped or a bullet fired. That first alert, just 30 minutes into the war, was a metaphor for

‘expectation and fearful anticipation’.⁸¹ Gardiner used many of the same sources as Calder, including Mass Observation, but covered the bombing of provincial cities in greater detail and provided greater thoroughness and statistics to chart the rise in crime between 1939 and 1945. She noted:

‘expectation and fearful anticipation’.⁸¹ Gardiner used many of the same sources as Calder, including Mass Observation, but covered the bombing of provincial cities in greater detail and provided greater thoroughness and statistics to chart the rise in crime between 1939 and 1945. She noted:

In document Estudio de la relación entre acuífero y humedales en el área Mimbrales La Vera del Manto Eólico Litoral de Doñana, Huelva (página 59-63)