Domestic Soldiers

by Jennifer Purcell

  The workplace also provided prime opportunities for both small-scale and large-scale theft. Pilfering was commonplace, be it a worker lifting a few tablets of soap to sell at a local market, overloading delivery lorries in order to sell the surplus, or pinching cutlery from the canteen (the London Transport Board reported 66,000 missing forks, spoons and knives in 1943 – a loss of £8,000). Edie’s integrity was tested one day at work when she came across three boxes of ‘Royal Sovereign pencils – Husband’s favourite’, and impossible to buy in wartime. The temptation to lift them passed, and Rutherford reported that she asked the management if she could buy a box for Sid’s birthday, which she was allowed to do.

  Bombed-out homes provided easy pickings for amateur thieves; professional thieves generally tended to stay away from blitzed areas where police, firefighters and other volunteers rushed to the scene, instead preferring to target unoccupied and unwatched homes in the countryside. Although many volunteers did their best to protect and store the property of bombing victims safely, sadly it was often those first on the scene or those responsible for clean-up who had the best opportunity to loot. In February 1941, six men from a rescue squad in Sutton were found guilty of looting and were sentenced to six months’ hard labour for stealing ‘a rug, clock, sweets, chocolate, sardines, salmon and corned beef’. Though perhaps a trivial haul of goods, what made this act particularly heinous was the fact that the men had ‘robbed the dead’ – four individuals had died in the blast.7 Several demolition teams were also caught stripping valuable lead from damaged buildings: twenty-eight soldiers and the metal merchant who bought the lead were found guilty of this offence while clearing a railway station in March 1941. Police officers were not immune to looting while on patrol, either. The fact that those entrusted to public safety were not beyond reproach led the Birmingham Police to caution the public that many blitz larcenies were in fact perpetrated by firewatchers.

  While some incidents of looting were obviously reprehensible, a great deal of moral ambiguity clouded the numerous crimes of opportunity produced by the Blitz. Two firefighters were charged with looting when police officers discovered them picking up items apparently ejected from a blitzed building. Although one pleaded with the police that he had a wife and children to look after and the other had a spotless reputation as a hardworking volunteer, the two were given four months’ hard labour for three lighters and a couple of pipes found on the scene. American news reporter Edward R. Murrow felt that such individuals were hardly criminals. He told his audience how the Blitz distorted the notion of private property:

  One has a strange feeling … in looking at the contents of a bombed house or shop, that the things scattered about don’t belong to anyone … Picking up a book or a pipe that’s been blown into the street is almost like picking an apple in a deserted and overgrown orchard far from any road or house.8

  Perhaps the most pernicious and egregious of wartime criminals were those who siphoned off a system created to help those desperately in need. Government schemes to aid evacuees or blitz victims were ripe for abuse. Those who billeted evacuees were entitled to 10 shillings and 6 pence for the first child and 8 shillings and 6 pence for each child thereafter. One billeting officer took advantage of this and made over £1,000 in one year by claiming allowances for fictitious evacuees before he and his partner were caught. The government also provided aid to repair bomb-damaged homes and to resettle those blitzed out of homes, leading some to falsely claim hundreds of pounds of financial assistance for bomb damage that was never sustained. Unclaimed furniture and other household goods from blitzed homes were kept in council stores to help those who had lost everything through bomb damage, but at a time when such commodities were rarely found on the open market, some council employees took advantage of this source of ready inventory to line their pockets.

  Britons felt a palpable ‘crime wave’ wash over the country in the last two years of war. Incidents of larceny, burglary and shop break ins soared during this period and into the first years of peace. Edie Rutherford was deeply concerned when this statistic hit close to home.

  Throughout the winter of 1943/44, numerous thefts and break-ins were reported in Rutherford’s block of flats. Laundry left unattended in the hallways went missing, and household items were lifted from flats. The crime wave at Prince Court that winter prompted a resident serviceman to install an alarm in order to soothe the fears of his wife while he was away on duty. The burglar was soon tripped up by this precaution and caught red-handed.

  Edie knew the offender. He lived on the first floor and ‘looked the type who would do a dirty deed like that’. The offender’s family was obviously not what Edie considered respectable: his wife had recently left him and three daughters (‘all by different fathers, so ’tis said!’ she told M-O) to live with a Canadian serviceman. Once the thief was apprehended, Edie understood how the unemployed collier was able to live for months without work. Though the police found many of the stolen goods tucked away in his flat, she feared that most of her neighbours would never see their property again.

  Edie was later incensed to learn the blackguard had been let out on bail after he appeared in court. ‘He is going about now brazen as brass,’ she huffed. In fact, the flats’ caretaker told her that the burglar had shown up at the police station after his release, brandishing an electric iron and had apparently told the constable, ‘This is the iron I pinched – you took mine away!’ ‘Can you beat that?’ Edie marvelled.

  As the war languished into its fifth year, a dark pall of gloom descended on Britain as people continued to cope with austerity measures and waited for the war to enter its final phase, which they knew would not come until, as Rutherford put it, ‘We jump onto the Continent.’ In that uneasy malaise of early 1944, the war seemed interminable. In February 1944, Irene Grant cried, ‘I never never see an end to the war’, and lamented the heaps of ‘misery and trouble’ that stalked the earth. Edie Rutherford proclaimed that she was ‘impatient of slackers, black marketeers and dodgers – mad at injustices to people who serve the country well and then get handed a raw deal’. Quite simply, ‘War is making me very weary of war,’ she announced to M-O. Furthermore, the future after the war seemed very far from promising. Increasing tensions between the Soviet Union and the Polish government-in-exile in London over the placement of the eastern border of Poland that January made Rutherford confide to M-O that she ‘dreaded the aftermath of this war’.

  The weariness and malaise might explain the rise in crimes of the period – from the white-collar antics of Lady Bountiful all the way down to stealing laundry out of baskets left in the hallways of Edie’s block of flats. It also goes a long way to explain the furore that developed over Spanish oranges that winter. In January, Britons learned that a shipment of oranges from Spain had been apparently sabotaged. Time-delayed bombs stuffed inside the crates went off on their journey to Britain; luckily, there was no damage done to the ship or the crew, but the precious cargo was destroyed. Expectant mothers and children had been entitled to cheap or free orange juice since 1942, but it was a rare and happy occasion when others were blessed with the fruit. The Ministry of Food, however, had made provision with Spain and Palestine in December 1943 to provide everyone on the island with a veritable windfall of oranges – one pound per head every month from January to April 1944. This warm and hopeful promise, announced to the public in an otherwise cold and dreary winter, made the destruction of the orange shipments all the more disappointing.

  The sabotage kicked off a firestorm of personal and diplomatic fury aimed at Spain. Irene Grant and Edie Rutherford, for instance, let fly several choice statements of hatred towards the Spanish and their leader, Francisco Franco, while The Times insisted on calling the event an ‘outrage’.9 Spain reacted quickly by promising to bring the saboteurs to justice and implementing preventive measures, but Parliament was not easily convinced. Although Natalie Tanner, who had lived in Spain for five years in the 1930s and knew how the Spanish go
vernment worked, thought that the bombing was orchestrated by Franco to cover up huge shipments of rotten oranges, the event soon escalated beyond citrus. Instead, it provided an opportunity to air numerous complaints about breaches in Spain’s neutrality during the war. Accusations surfaced that Spain harboured German spies, delayed Allied shipping and extended generous credit to Germany, especially for important armament materials such as tungsten ore.

  Britain and the United States reacted swiftly to the orange ‘outrage’ by withdrawing shipments of oil to Spain at the end of January. Nonetheless, oranges made it to the shelves in fits and starts that winter. Indeed, some even complained that Newcastle received so many Seville oranges that they were rotting in the stores. Irene Grant, who lived near Newcastle, however, protested that she couldn’t find any. When Edie Rutherford received her first allocation of oranges that winter, her husband was so shocked he wondered jokingly whether Edie had ‘robbed someone’s children’. By May, the air had cleared somewhat between the Allies and Spain, after Spain agreed to address the issues of spies and shipping, as well as to reduce significantly the delivery of tungsten ore to Germany.

  When the orange controversy erupted in January, an MP from Heywood and Radcliffe questioned the parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of War Transport, Philip Noel-Baker, regarding an incident in which some dockers reportedly refused to unload cargo from Spain. Apparently, the dockers argued that the potential danger involved in such work warranted a rise in pay. Noel-Baker dismissed the claim as untrue. Instead, the secretary asserted, dockers were never asked to do such work; rather, he claimed, specialized bomb-removal personnel and supporting troops unloaded the cargo. Whether the MP’s version of events or the official version was true, the conversation in Parliament highlights the very real problem of industrial action in the waning years of war.

  Although strike action was officially illegal during the war, the considerable challenges of enforcing such a law meant that there was very little the government could do when workers downed tools in numbers. The simple logistical problem of where to incarcerate hundreds, let alone thousands, of illegal strikers was only the start of the difficulties inherent in such legislation. Furthermore, all available workers were essential to the war economy – the government simply could not allow able-bodied workers to languish in prison for months under such circumstances. Nor could the government risk a general strike in sympathy for workers who had been sent to prison or slapped with hefty fines.

  When 4,000 miners walked out of a Kent colliery in 1942, the supposed ringleaders were thrown in jail and the rest were handed the choice of a fine or a fourteen-day prison sentence. The tension created by this hard line forced Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, to commute the sentences. Afterwards, prison sentences were never again handed out, though some offenders were given significant fines.

  Strikes occurred on a regular basis for the rest of the war. Although industrial action had lessened in the early years of war, by 1942 the number of days lost was back to peacetime levels of nearly 1.5 million. The years 1943 and 1944 saw an even higher number of days lost (1.8 million and 3.7 million, respectively), and 1944 set a record for the total number of actual strikes. Although war industry, transport and dockyards produced important strikes during the war, coal-mining experienced by far the majority of walkouts throughout the war. And in the cold spring of 1944, a major strike from the coal industry seriously threatened the warmth of homes and the productivity of factories across the country.

  Since the beginning of 1944, Irene Grant had complained about the abysmal quality of coal. Even the best quality was mostly stone and ash that Irene had to wash off in order to reveal a pitiable amount of usable coal. If the quality of the coal was poor, so too was the quantity: an outbreak of influenza, low pit productivity and transport problems coupled with stringent limits on coal deliveries introduced by the government that winter meant there was little to go around, even if it was mostly useless stone.

  In the south-east, deliveries of coal to consumers were down to a stark shadow of what they had been the previous year. In Kent, Helen Mitchell was bitten by depressingly cold weather and a coal shortage. Always concerned to act patriotically in theory, but rarely in practice, she admitted feeling ‘worried by intense cold of sitting room conflicting with desire to save fuel’. And in the damp, foggy chill of a Kentish January, it was her misfortune to spend hours coping with ‘this strange wartime fuel’ that continually clogged her anthracite stove. The winter of 1943/44 was not as bitter as the record freeze of 1940/41; nonetheless, gale winds blew, damp chill settled in the bones and snow flew in fits. With the coal shortage, it was an absolutely miserable winter.

  In Sheffield, a virginal blanket of snow christened the beginning of March 1944. Despite the fact that the sun blazed and danced upon the snow as Edie had never before experienced, the chill of early March stubbornly refused to diminish the snow for well over a week. ‘Seems to me more like Switzerland,’ the native South African marvelled to M-O.

  That March, against the backdrop of this dazzling winter landscape, nearly 200,000 men walked out of mines in South Wales and Yorkshire. It was a devastating blow to a nation already suffering coal shortages and preparing for the final push of the war. By the end of the month, Edie Rutherford reported that factories were shut down due to lack of fuel; nearby towns suffered gas and electricity cuts; and her block of flats was eking out the very last delivery of coke they could expect to see until the strike was resolved.

  It seemed resoundingly unpatriotic for the miners to down tools that winter, and indeed many owners, officials and consumers cried foul. But for all the accusations of shirking, radicalism and general indolence levelled at the miners, the true problem was much more complicated than simple laziness or treachery. The economic slump of the inter-war period had ripped the heart out of the coal industry. Many miners had been thrown out of work for long periods of time and, furthermore, the poverty and decline of the coal-mining villages meant that these communities often failed to reproduce the next generation of workers. When the war came, with its insatiable lust for coal, experienced miners were middle-aged and had suffered from years of privation and inactivity. In addition, equipment was antiquated, and many of the abundant coal seams of the nineteenth century were exhausted.

  The industry, therefore, limped along during the war with inadequate numbers of workers, poor investment and poor coal reserves. The government tried to ameliorate some of the problems by allowing conscription-age men to ‘opt’ out of military service if they agreed to work the mines. Some took up this opportunity, but not as many as the government would have hoped. Additional shifts were created, and experienced miners worked well over a full shift on a regular basis to make up for the shortages. (The frequently voiced term ‘shirker’ must have rankled with these miners.) Extraction of coal from thin and less-prolific seams with out-dated equipment was also dangerous, and nearly a quarter of miners suffered severe accidents during the last years of the war.

  With coal production well under what the war economy required, the government decided to send more men down the mines. In December 1943, the Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, enacted a plan which would send one in every ten men eligible for National Service to work the seams. Many of these so-called Bevin Boys resented being directed to the coal industry, and many of the miners themselves held little love for the unwilling amateurs. Those who patently refused to do the work were packed off to jail, while others were regularly lax in attending work. Aside from the danger and solitude of the work, one of the largest detractors to Bevin’s scheme was the fact that his ‘Boys’ were paid the dismal wage of a miner. Work in war armaments was far more lucrative.

  The massive walkout that left families shivering and factories gasping for coal in March and April 1944 was ignited by the poor wage levels in the mines. Strikes and arbitration during the war had lifted the minimum wage of miners to £4.3s in 1942, and in early 1944 this was raised to £5. While this was
well above the pre-war minimum, grave miscalculations in the pay structure that was set with this new minimum drove experienced workers to the edge, for the new guidelines wiped away wage differentials. Miners with years of experience could now expect to make the same wage as the volunteer workers who had opted for the mines over the military as well as the Bevin Boys. Moreover, soon after the minimum was implemented, it was announced that manual workers were making on average well over £6.

  In this light, the anger levelled at miners was perhaps a bit unfair. And, indeed, despite the gravity of the situation, some Britons seemed willing to apply understanding to the situation. Though one of her conservative friends spewed forth condemnation on the miners (and the working classes in general), Natalie Tanner was very sympathetic to the miners’ plight. Pinched by the cold, Edie Rutherford nonetheless also registered her support of the strike, feeling that the miners had been abused for long enough. To Irene Grant, the continual animosity and inefficiency in the mines only pointed to the fact that the industry must be nationalized. Indeed, Grant felt most industry and land should be handed over to the people, as they should ‘belong to everyone’.

  On Friday 7 April, the same day Rutherford noted the closure of several factories for want of fuel, Edie also announced that the miners had agreed to return to work the following week. Differentials were put back in place, and the miners emerged from the strike with the highest minimum wage of all industries. Angered at the intransigence of the miners at a critical period in the war – when the nation prepared for the invasion of Western Europe – Ernest Bevin wanted revenge. He was convinced that Trotskyites had orchestrated the strike, and to stave off future agitation the Minister of Labour would not rest until draconian anti-strike legislation was enacted. Under Regulation 1AA, convicted agitators could expect a prison sentence of five years or a fine of £500. Although the creation of the regulation resulted in a firestorm of criticism from the left in the Labour Party (led by Welsh MP, Aneurin Bevan) and nearly split the party just one year before its great electoral win, Regulation 1AA was never used.