Determinaciones realizadas

2.2 Manchester and other British Cities

Calder, Gardiner and Ponting, unlike Harrisson, neglected the Manchester Blitz, a pattern that has been repeated by much of the literature, which was surprising since the death toll was disproportionally high, but the city’s newspapers brought out pictorial souvenirs, the tone mirroring the language seen earlier in Front Line. This chapter will go on to discuss the

99 Ibid, p. 314

imperatives that dictated what appeared in national newspapers and the local press was more constrained because to criticise would have been to attack its target audience. The Daily Dispatch and Evening Chronicle, both Kemsley newspapers printed in Manchester, produced Our Blitz: Red Skies over Manchester in 1945, and Manchester at War, which used the archive of the Manchester Evening News, was published in 1986.¹⁰⁰ Both provided valuable photographic records, but the tone of their text repeated the unrealistic optimism that was typical of what appeared in the local press in 1940 and 1941: ‘It is in pride but not vain-glory, in humility but not self depreciation, we tell the story of the two nights of the Blitz.’¹⁰¹ They told a very selective story because analysis of other sources will suggest that despair, not pride, was a dominant emotion in the aftermath in bombed out areas of Manchester.

Simon Wright’s Memories of a Salford Blitz and Read’s A

Manchester Boyhood In The Thirties and Forties were more grounded in reality.¹⁰² Wright’s pamphlet was short, only 30 pages, and was a series of recollections. Mrs L. McGuire spoke of her mother ‘being hysterical’ with fear: ‘It was really terrible’.¹⁰³ Read recalled the sense of shock as

Manchester’s complacency was shattered by the Luftwaffe’s bombs in the Christmas Blitz but had no recollection of the consequent plummeting morale in the city reported by Home Intelligence, a possible example of a child being shielded from his parents’ darkest feelings. Ron Freethy’s Lancashire v Hitler also lacked detail of the Christmas 1940 raids but was

100 Hayes, Red Skies; Hardy, Cooper and Hochland, Manchester at War.

101 Hayes, Red Skies; p. 14.

102 Simon Wright, Memories of the Salford Blitz. Christmas 1940 (Manchester: Richardson, 1987); Read, Manchester Boyhood.

103 Wright, Salford Blitz, pp. 11-12.

informed by interviews with people who lived through and beyond the bombardment, most notably recalling the insensitive dropping of leaflets by British bombers on the first anniversary of the Manchester Blitz, an incident that led to the panicked onlookers being criticised in the Manchester

Guardian.¹⁰⁴ This will be returned to at the end of the thesis.

That incident, as this thesis will show, was indicative of the gap between reality and what was appearing in newspapers, a theme examined by Evans, a Manchester schoolboy in 1940 who would become ‘arguably Britain's greatest editor of the second half of the 20th century’.¹⁰⁵ His faith in what he saw in print was undermined when he encountered listless and demoralised soldiers on a beach in Rhyl, north Wales. Evans, who would become deputy editor of the Manchester Evening News in the 1950s en route to editing the Sunday Times and The Times, was 12 when he met

‘still’, ‘pale’ men lying on the beach. He recalled that his father tried to strike up a conversation with soldiers who, he subsequently learned, had been evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk.¹⁰⁶ The response was muted and dispirited. It was also illuminating for a boy with ambitions to be a journalist. Evans wrote:

We had been encouraged to celebrate Dunkirk as some kind of victory. A Daily Mirror front page I’d seen pinned up in our boarding house had the headline ‘Bloody Marvellous!’ How was it then Dad found nothing marvellous, only dejection, as he moved among them? ¹⁰⁷

His reaction articulated many of the questions that will be confronted in this thesis:

104 R. Freethy, Lancashire v Hitler: Civilians at War (Newbury: Countryside, 2006).

105 Donald Trelford, ‘My Paper Chase by Harold Evans’ (Observer 13 September 2009)

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/13/my-paper-chase-harold-evans> [accessed 21 January 2012].

106 Evans, Paper Chase, p. 5.

107 Ibid.

Later in adulthood it was easier to understand how predictive headlines could turn out to be wrong than to reconcile what we had experienced at Rhyl… How did newspapers come to conclusions? Were they acting at the request of the government? Was there a deliberate and widespread gloss on Dunkirk? Would that have been justified as a means of

sustaining morale at a crucial time? Should newspapers take account of such imperatives or just report things as they see them?¹⁰⁸

Coventry has received more attention than Manchester. An estimated 568 people died in November 1940 on a night that has led to myths and fallacies of its own, the most poignant being that Churchill had been informed the raid was coming but failed to forewarn the city for fear of letting the Germans know their codes had been broken.¹⁰⁹ Norman

Longmate exonerated Churchill, writing: ‘No citizen was left to die, no humble home left to burn for reasons of high strategy’, and the Prime Minister’s private secretary appeared to bear that out.¹¹⁰ John Colville recalled being told to go to a deep shelter by Churchill with the words:

‘You’re too young to die. Tonight London is going to be flattened.’¹¹¹ That night the capital was spared and the huge bombing force flew north to Coventry. Allan Kurki also debunked that myth but spent too little time on this and other controversies, although he did underline the psychological effect the raid (code-named Moonlight Sonata by the Germans) had on Britain.¹¹² Coventry was regarded as a Nazi atrocity in Britain and in the United States, something that Frederick Taylor stated was an over-reaction.

Coventry was a centre for light manufacturing and engineering, including

108 Ibid, pp. 7-8.

109 Forgotten Voices of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain, ed. by Joshua Levine (London:

Ebury, 2006), p. 306.

110 Norman Longmate, Air Raid: The Bombing of Coventry, 1940 (London: Hutchinson, 1976), p. 266.

111 Levine, Forgotten Voices, p. 41.

112 Allan W. Kurki, Operation Moonlight Sonata: The German Raid on Coventry (London:

Greenwood, 1995).

bicycles, cars, airplane engines and – ‘fatally’ – munitions. ‘A city of more than 320,000 inhabitants, was therefore, in terms of what little law existed on the subject, a legitimate target for aerial bombing.’¹¹³ Taylor was being deliberately pragmatic, the human voice from Coventry was revealed by Joshua Levine who mined interviews collected in the 1970s by the Imperial war Museum Sound Archive. Thomas Cunningham-Boothe described firemen, blinded by the ferocity of the heat, having to be led away from the fires; Dilwyn Evans spoke of those same fire fighters impotently having to watch the blazing buildings as water ran out; and Joan Batt could not forgive: ‘I still feel hatred for the Germans. They took everything off me.’

114

Levine also included interviews from Liverpool that demonstrated that the picture of resilience painted by the newspapers was not universal.

Leslie Hyland’s mother would scream and shout during the raids – ‘She felt every explosion was coming towards her’ – while Herbert Anderson stated that the city was the only place where he witnessed peace demonstrations:

‘There were small groups marching with banners indicating that they wanted an end to the war.’¹¹⁵ This was refuted by a Liverpool Echo

journalist Arthur Johnson in a secret diary in which he denied the existence of the peace marches or that the city was placed under martial law: ‘A man was sent to prison for a month at Manchester for spreading such rumours, all of which were completely baseless.’¹¹⁶ This was a rare exception in an

113 Frederick Taylor, Dresden: Tuesday 13 February 1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p.

117.

114 Levine, Forgotten Voices, pp. 390, 414.

115 Ibid, pp. 359, 412.

116 Arthur Johnson, Merseyside’s Secret Blitz Diary (Liverpool: Trinity Mirror, 2005), p.

155.

impersonal account that was strong on the bomb damage – most of which was not reported in his newspaper – but surprisingly weaker when it came to describing the minutiae of personal lives caught up in world events and the raw emotions exposed by the Merseyside Blitz. Pat Ayers, too, produced a factual account, focusing on Liverpool’s women, many of whom went to work in the city’s factories at rates of pay around half those of men. She concluded that British women were victims of a ‘confidence trick’ on a massive scale:

Their economic need and their patriotism were exploited by men in positions of power; by the government, the trade unions, by private employers and by a nation anxious to win a war but not prepared to facilitate… equal pay or adequate facilities.¹¹⁷

Ayres did concede there were positives accrued, however, listing: an acceptance of married women in the workplace, the regularisation of part-time working in factories, and a revision generally of women’s place in British society.¹¹⁸

Ayers’s arguments underlined that, while most cities in Britain were bombed by the Luftwaffe, the experience between 1939 and 1945 was not uniform and could be determined by gender, geography and timing. The literature viewing the Second World War from a regional perspective shows that, while it was the Many as much as the Few who sustained the drive to defeat Nazism, it was also a struggle that involved the United Kingdom as a whole (rather than just south-east England). This thesis concentrates on Manchester, but individual regions, cities and towns had versions of the Second World War that were uniquely their own.

117 Pat Ayers, Women at War: Liverpool Women 1939-45, (Birkenhead: Liver, 1988), p. 55.

118 Ibid, p. 56.