The Myth of the Blitz
Page 1
Contents
Cover
About the Author
List of Illustrations
Title Page
Preface
1. Myth Making
2. ‘Finest Hours’
3. No Other Link
4. Celts, Reds and Conchies
5. Standing ‘Alone’
6. Day by Day
7. Formulations of Feeling
8. Fictions
9. Deep England
10. Telling It To America
11. Filming the Blitz
Epilogue
Picture Section
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
Copyright
About the Author
Angus Calder is Reader in Cultural Studies and Staff Tutor in Arts with the Open University in Scotland. He read English at Cambridge and received his D. Phil. from the School of Social Studies at the University of Sussex. He was Convener of the Scottish Poetry Library when it was founded in 1984. His other books include The People’s War (also available from Pimlico) and Revolutionary Empire. He has contributed to many Open University courses, notably on ‘The Enlightenment’, ‘Popular Culture’ and ‘Literature and the Modern World’.
List of Illustrations
1 Corporal J.D.M. Pearson, GC WAAF by Dame Laura Knight (Imperial War Museum, London)
2 ATS Air Raid Practice by Dorothy J. Coke (Imperial War Museum, London)
3 St Paul’s Cathedral, 29 Decemer 1940 (Popperfoto)
4 ‘C’est l’Anglais qui nous a fait ça!’ Poster by Theo Matejko (Musée d’Histoire Contemporaine – BDIC, Paris)
5 Destroyed Portion of Motorised French Units, City Wall of Boulogne by Josef Arens (US Center of Military History)
6 Air Marshal Sir A. Barratt leaving his Hurricane on landing (Imperial War Museum, London)
7 WAAF Plotters at work in the Operations Room of an RAF Station, Fighter Command (Imperial War Museum, London)
8 Shelterers in Mayakovsky Metro Station, Moscow (Alexander Meledin, Moscow)
9 Elephant & Castle Underground Station, 11 November 1940. Photograph by Bill Brandt (Imperial War Museum, London)
10 West End shop basement shelter, 7 November 1940. Photograph by Bill Brandt (Imperial War Museum, London)
11 Bloomsbury book business basement shelter, 7 November 1940. Photograph by Bill Brandt (Imperial War Museum, London)
12 Sikh family sheltering at Christ Church, Spitalfields. Photograph by Bill Brandt (Imperial War Museum, London)
13 A man working on his income tax return in the ruins of his East End home. Photograph by Bert Hardy (Hulton Picture Company)
14 A woman working at her sewing machine the morning after an air-raid. Photograph by Bert hardy (Hulton Picture Company)
15 The falling front of the Salvation Army headquarters. Photograph by Fred Tibbs (Museum of London)
16 Production still from Fires Were Started (1943), directed by Humphrey Jennings (© C.O.I.)
17 Newgate Street, 29 December 1940. Photograph by Arthur Cross or Fred Tibbs (Museum of London)
18 A House Collapsing on Two Firemen, Shoe Lane, London EC4 by Leonard Rosoman (Imperial War Museum, London)
19 The Man on the Ladder. Photograph by Bert Hardy (Hulton Picture Company)
20 Open-air milk bar in Fetter Lane, EC4, (Syndication International)
21 Quentin Reynolds, BBC Radio broadcaster (© BBC)
22 J.B. Priestly, Leslie Howard, Mary Adams and L. W. Brockington from the BBC Radio programme, ‘Answering You’ (© BBC)
23 Production still from Fires Were Started, directed by Humphrey Jennings (©C.O.I.)
24 Humphrey Jennings rehearsing Myra Hess in A Diary for Timothy (BFI Stills, Posters and Designs)
25 ‘Your Britain, Fight For It Now’. Poster by Frank Newbould (Imperial War Museum, London)
26 Production still from A Diary For Timothy (1945), directed by Humphrey Jennings (© C.O.I.)
27 Ed Murrow, BBC Radio Broadcaster (© BBC)
27a LIFE Magazine cover of 23 September 1940 (Photograph by Cecil Beaton, Courtesy LIFE Magazine/Katz Pictures)
28 Shipbuilding on the Clyde: Bending the Keel Plate (detail) by Stanley Spencer (Imperial War Museum, London)
29 Production still from In Which We Serve (1942), directed and produced by Noël Coward and David Lean (Kobal Collection)
30 Production still from Mrs Miniver (1942), directed by William Wyler (Kobal Collection)
31 Production still from Angels One Five (1952), directed by George More O’Ferrall (Kobal Collection)
32 Still from A Yank in the RAF, used in Frank Capra’s documentary film Battle of Britain (1942) (Imperial War Museum, London)
33 Winston Churchill among the crowds, from Capra’s Battle of Britain (Imperial War Museum, London)
For more information about Blitz and related still images see:
Buggins, Joanne, ‘An Appreciation of the Shelter Photographs Taken by Bill Brandt in November, 1940’, Imperial War Museum Review 4, 1989
Foot, M.R.D., Art and War: Twentieth Century Warfare as Depicted by War Artists, Headline, 1990
Hardy, Bert, My Life, Gordon Fraser, 1985
McCormick, K. and Perry, H.D. (eds), Images of War: The Artist’s Vision of World War II, Cassell, 1991
Rhodes, A., Propaganda – The Art of Persuasion: World War II, Wellfleet (Secaucas, N.J.), 1987
Seaborne, M., Arthur Cross – Fred Tibbs: The London Blitz, Nishen Photo-Library 3, 1987
Seaborne, M., Shelters, Nishen Photo-Library 7, 1988
THE MYTH OF
THE BLITZ
ANGUS CALDER
Preface
This book, commissioned in the early eighties soon after the war for the Malvinas, presents ideas which I began to develop in 1976 in conversation with Cairns Craig, Reid Mitchell and others at the Scottish Universities Summer School. We were more in fashion than we thought. When, in 1980, I became involved with the Open University’s new course on ‘Popular Culture’, I realised fully how ‘post-structuralist’ thinking by many people was focusing on the role of ideology in society and in history, and refusing to accept the ‘innocence’ of any narrative, any artefact.
There is little or nothing in this book which I could claim as original, except the perspective from which I have written it: that of a Scot, educated in England, who has lived through the collapse of Labourism, the rise of ‘Thatcherism’ and what Tom Nairn bluntly called, in his book of the mid-seventies, The Break Up of Britain.
I began around 1980 in reviews and articles and papers, well before this book was conceived, to write and talk about ‘the Myth of 1940’ and ‘the Myth of the Blitz’. I did so in a spirit of self-criticism, since I realised that many, perhaps most, readers of my People’s War (1969) had seen the book as confirming the Myth. Looking it over again, I saw that I had accepted almost without question the mythical version of ‘Dunkirk’, though elsewhere I flatter myself that I wasn’t beguiled.
However, as this present book asserts, the word ‘Myth’ should not be taken to be equivalent to ‘untruth’, still less to ‘lies’. Clive Ponting’s 1940: Myth and Reality, published as I was completing my work, while not without its uses for enquiring minds, commits this basic error (or so it seems to me). Ponting writes as if exposing scandalous untruths and cover-ups: in fact there is virtually nothing in his book which was not known by scholars, and all interested members of the public, in the sixties.
As I started writing this book, the same pitfall yawned under me. My anger, firstly over the sentimentalisation of 1940 by Labour apologists, then over the abuse of ‘Churchillism’ by Mrs Thatcher during the ‘Falklands War’, led me to seek, every which way, to u
ndermine the credibility of the mythical narrative – for instance, by questioning British ‘morale’. If I have steered away from the abyss, this is partly because I am reassured, in 1991, that the negative effects of the Myth on British societies have almost worked themselves out.
Most Scots have ceased to regard London as their capital – the question is whether Edinburgh or Glasgow more deserves the title. No inhabitant of Ulster, surely, can now believe that the Second World War had any healing effect on that society. The sacred mystery of the British Constitution is now being widely and very rudely questioned. The generation of Labourites for whom the war was unquestionably a ‘People’s War’ has now passed out of active politics. And ‘Thatcherism’, never as dominant as so many commentators supposed, is certainly not very popular now. The younger generations of Brits increasingly see the future of their countries in terms of participation in Europe.
So I now regard the ‘Myth of the Blitz’ as a ‘fact’, from the past, which, like (say) the Myth of the English Gentleman can be discussed quite coolly. Both myths, indeed, are still ideologically active – not yet, volcanically speaking, extinct. Both are inscribed in a vast number of texts still current, and both condition a great deal of ‘commonsense’ thinking. But neither has anything like its old dominance.
I write this despite the outbreaks of ‘anti-Kraut’ rhetoric in England which, with the reunification of Germany looming, disfigured the summer of 1990. The first was prompted by England’s appearance against West Germany in the football World Cup semi-final. The soaraway Sun newspaper predictably preluded this match with racialist invective: ‘WE BEAT THEM IN ’45 … NOW THE BATTLE OF ’90’; ‘HELP OUR BOYS CLOUT THE KRAUTS’. Its headline after England lost was ‘KRAUT YOU GO!’ Then came Nicholas Ridley’s hardly more restrained anti-German remarks in an interview which cost him his job as a Cabinet minister, but apparently received quite wide public support. It seems to me that the underlying trend of opinion is better indicated by the Sunday Sport of 6 May that year.
The Sport, of course, simply invents its front-page stories. The one in question was hilarious: ‘HITLER’S BONES FOUND ON BRIT BEACH’, with an obviously faked photograph of a skeleton giving a Nazi salute on the sands at Brighton. Amongst the ‘theories’ advanced by ‘experts’ as to how it got there was this: ‘Hitler’s death was fabricated and he lived happily for many years among the gay community of Brighton and dropped dead during a stroll on the beach and was washed out to sea.’ While Jews, homosexuals and others might find such levity offensive, the Sport is playing on the assumption that Hitler represents the depths of human evil, and is in no way reversing the judgement which the British made during 1939–45.
To identify the Sport with the Sun as an ideological agent would be quite false. In his regular column, Dave Sullivan (‘Speaking on Behalf of the Nation’), who actually owns the Sport, attacked Mrs Thatcher and the Sun. The Conservatives had just lost heavily, overall, in the local government elections, but press attention had primarily focused on one result, in Wandsworth, where the generally hated new ‘poll tax’ had been set artificially low. Sullivan commented: ‘Every paper carried news of the borough on its front page … The Sun even turned that one victory into total annihilation claiming “KINNOCK POLL AXED”.’ He went back to 1940:
Entrenched PM Margaret Thatcher showed true Dunkirk Spirit this week. Not by displaying bravery under fire. But by diverting the nation’s attention on to one gun battle … while, comparatively unseen, the whole shooting match threatened to blow her head off. The wartime propaganda victory came when military chiefs turned a massive defeat at Dunkirk into a ‘miracle rescue’ morale booster.
Rather confusingly, Sullivan went on to praise a British middleweight boxer who had just won the world title for showing ‘the true meaning of Dunkirk Spirit when he beat all the odds …’ However, as the accompanying photograph manifested, the boxer in question, Nigel Benn, was black: one could say that by incorporating a ‘New British’ personality with national tradition, Sullivan was striking a neat blow against racism.
To repeat, the Myth remains ideologically active. But Sullivan clearly credits its ‘natural’ quality, its definitive truth, no more than I do.
Though I spotted that issue of the Sport myself, I have, in my long journey towards a more relaxed view of the Myth, accumulated large intellectual debts, many of which I have no doubt forgotten: to people who tackled me, for instance, after I’d given papers at universities and arts centres. To mention just a few, far too selectively: working with Ian Potts and Jill Peck on their film Stranger than Fiction, about Mass-Observation, taught me, at last, something about how camera images work, and it was a pleasure to extend this knowledge by collaborating with Betty Talks on an Open University film centring on W. H. Auden and the GPO Film Unit’s Night Mail. Reid Mitchell was instrumental, in the last phase of my labours, in getting me to Princeton, where I gave a paper with the same title as this book to the Mellon Seminar on Nationalism and had many rewarding conversations. Reid, by showing me Frank Capra’s Battle of Britain, affected the final shape of the book: when I got back, I was able, thanks to Ann Fleming of the Imperial War Museum, to look at a shot list of that documentary.
I have particular debts to Tony Aldgate, to Susan Boyd Bowman, to Graham Dawson, to Alastair Thomson, to Jane Fisher and latterly to Nick Cull (without whose guidance I would have made little if any sense of the role of the US press corps in London) and to Mike Seaborne of the Museum of London. I have general debts to many people ‘in and around’ the magazine Cencrastus, set up by Edinburgh students after the Scottish devolution débâcle of 1979, and hope that this book is truly Cencrastoid, in the spirit of the Great Curly Snake of MacDiarmid’s poem. My gratitude to Tony Colwell of Cape and to Alison Mansbridge, who edited the book, is not merely formal. Thanks also to Henry Cowper for reading the proofs.
I owe more than I can say to many, many conversations over a dozen years with Dorothy Sheridan of the Mass-Observation Archive, and over quarter of a century with Paul Addison. Neither they nor anyone else I’ve mentioned has any responsibility for the faults of this book: I hope these two won’t mind if I dedicate whatever is worthwhile in it to them.
Finally, apologies to Kate (and Douglas) for all the hassle my writing has caused them …
Angus Calder
Edinburgh, 1986–91
1
Myth Making
In the event
the story is foretold,
foremade in the code of its happening.
In the event
the event is sacrificed
to a fiction of its having happened …
Anne Stevenson, ‘From an Unfinished Poem’
THE ‘BLITZ’ OF, on or over Britain in 1940 and 1941 was an unprecedented experience for the country’s people. The subsequent development of nuclear bombs makes it very unlikely that such sustained bombardment could happen again. Though people in other countries – from Spain in the thirties through to Iraq in the nineties – have experienced long periods of aerial bombardment, these have been associated with civil war or accompanied or followed by defeat or invasion. The British have never seen their own ‘Blitz’ as one example of a widespread twentieth-century phenomenon, as they must, to some extent, have done if Nazi troops had marched into ruined city centres, or even made unsuccessful coastal landings.
Two events just preceding the Blitz have acquired a similar aura of absoluteness, uniqueness, definitiveness – the evacuation of British troops from ‘Dunkirk’, and the ‘Battle of Britain’ fought in the air by Fighter Command. They overlap with, are part of, the Myth of the Blitz. Like the Armada when ‘God blew and they were scattered’, the bloodless miracle of the Glorious Revolution, or the providential triumph of Trafalgar, these were events in which the hand of destiny was seen. As events flattering the dominant particularism within Britain, that of ‘Britain’ itself, often referred to as ‘England’, all these have a status denied to Bannockburn, or the
Boyne, or Culloden, which, whatever their auras, evoke contestation among the island’s people. ‘The Blitz’ supports a myth of British or English moral pre-eminence, buttressed by British unity.
‘Blitz’ was named before it happened. Anticipating an attempt by Germany to bomb Britain out of the war, publicists had appropriated the word before 7 September 1940, the ‘official’ date for the start of the Blitz proper. It came from Blitzkrieg, ‘lightning-war’, applied by the world’s press to the swift German conquest of Poland in September 1939,1 and then to the rapid German advance in France and the Low Countries from 10 May 1940. As heavy bombing of London began in the late summer, the word ‘Blitz’ became ‘almost overnight a British colloquialism for an air raid’.2 But from the first it suggested more than that. It was instantaneously and spontaneously ‘mythologised’.
I don’t intend to provide much theoretical argumentation to justify my use of ‘myth’ and ‘mythology’ in this book. The word seems to me to impose itself because others don’t work. The ‘story’ of the Blitz has been told many times; I once told it myself, and will summarise it again in my next chapter. Since this story points to events which indubitably happened, and which are pretty well documented, to refer to the ‘fable’ of the Blitz would be absurd. ‘Legend’ is nearer the mark – Chambers Dictionary tells us that it can refer to ‘the body of fact and fiction’ gathered around an heroic or saintly personage or, by extension, an heroic event. ‘Myth’ also suggests untruth, but on a grander scale altogether – according to Chambers, its primary meaning is ‘an ancient traditional story of Gods or heroes, esp. one offering an explanation of some fact or phenomenon’. My case for applying the word to the Blitz is that the account of that event, or series of events, which was current by the end of the war has assumed a ‘traditional’ character, involves heroes, suggests the victory of a good God over satanic evil, and has been used to explain a fact: the defeat of Nazism. Furthermore, I can merge with this old definition some of the force of a new one.