by Angus Calder
What Home Intelligence took to be a general mood of confidence and determination was not even affected by the withdrawal of British troops before Italians in Somaliland – ‘Fancy, the Wops, it’s disgusting.’ In fact, an implication which emerges strongly from the whole Home Intelligence series is that the more British civilians felt involved in the war at home, the less bad news from overseas fronts interested or affected them: the massive air raids of May 1941 would therefore neutralise somewhat catastrophic news from the eastern Mediterranean. According to Home Intelligence, the long standing controversy over when sirens should be sounded to warn of raids – sometimes they came too late, sometimes no bombs followed – was not enough to dampen high spirits.
It is crucial, perhaps, to the understanding of behaviour in bombed Britain to notice the following pattern:
From June onwards, light raids and warnings were experienced over many areas.
By August, during the Battle of Britain, London was experiencing frequent raids which were ‘heavy’ by earlier standards, though trivial by those set on 7 September.
Other cities experienced really heavy bombing only weeks or months after reported behaviour in London had fixed a key figure in the Myth, the ‘Cheerful Cockney’, firmly on a pedestal as a model for others to follow.
Now, it is the case that Mol-directed ‘Home Propaganda’ could help to create such a model of approved behaviour. But the Home Intelligence reports suggest that its salient features – including, by August, enhanced ‘neighbourliness’ shown after raids – were believed to have emerged spontaneously. Individual cases displaying cowardice, defeatism and selfishness could be treated as exceptional, once the test of 7 September and the week or so following had been endured. The exceptions may occasionally strike a late twentieth-century reader coming upon them as very impressive indeed. But the overall paradigm never had to shift to accommodate them: the tube shelterers, for instance, could quite quickly be incorporated as good, gutsy, essentially orderly Cockneys. This case, however, involved a continuing ‘left-ward’ shift in the paradigm, as the government appeared to concede that its previous shelter policy had been misguided. To the element in the Myth which already firmly attributed the troubles of the British Expeditionary Force in France and the RAF’s shortage of planes to the ‘Guilty Men’ of pre-war Conservative governments was now added the notion that the ‘people’, improvising bravely and brilliantly, were fighting the Luftwaffe without much direction from above. All triumphs of fire-fighting, rescue, post-raid feeding and so on belonged to ‘us’, the people; all bungling was due to ‘them’ – unpopular ministers, boneheaded bureaucrats, gutless local government personnel.
If the general analysis above is correct, then the key period of British adjustment to bombing occurred, in London, not after 7 September but before that date. Conditions in August were very much less frightening than pre-war forecasts had indicated. But they were severe enough, in a number of places, to generate patterns of response and adaptation which would be generally useful later.
A ‘Special Interim Report by Home Intelligence: AIR RAIDS: Reactions and Suggestions: July-August 1940’ summarises what Adams and her team made of the situation just before the great night attacks on London began. It asserted that people were worried by sirens, and in many cases angry about the apparent inefficiency of warning systems, but rapidly became insouciant if no bombs dropped. Continuous loss of sleep, however, could be a problem – as in Bristol, which had many night ‘raids’ without bombs, and where people tended not to bother to go to inconvenient shelters. There were ‘evidences of growing strain especially among women and children’ and the Communist Party was beginning to ‘make political capital out of siren and shelter difficulties’. However, Home Intelligence concluded: ‘There is no need to “improve morale", but there should be more appreciation, encouragement, congratulations and explanation.’ The writer of the last sentence quoted might have been remembering the ‘increasing’ criticism from Wales reported by Home Intelligence on 24 August, ‘that this region is not always mentioned in our raid communiques [sic] when it should be…’. Local pride was already strongly involved in post-raid reactions.
Home Intelligence began to register the steeply mounting impact of raids on London in its report of Monday 26 August. London had ‘come through a weekend of extensive raids with courage and calmness … East Enders experiencing screaming bombs for the first time expressed great fear but did not panic’ Next day: ‘Determination has not weakened, but our reports show a definite increase in apprehension … The realisation that night raids may persist throughout the winter is bringing despondency.’ On the 28th, growing effects of loss of sleep were generally reported but, in London, ‘Great neighbourliness was evident.’ However, on the 30th, Home Intelligence concluded that morale was ‘higher in the provinces than in London’, where ‘in some districts’ people had latterly expressed ‘considerable apprehension’.
It may be that the crucial adjustment in London was made in the week which included the first anniversary of the outbreak of war. On that day, Tuesday 3 September, Home Intelligence felt able to report that people ‘apparently’ were adjusting to sleeping through raids. On Friday 6th, ‘The public continue to take the bombing in good heart… An increasingly fatalistic attitude towards the effects of bombing is reported, and this appears to be coupled with a high state of morale … Co-operation and friendliness in public shelters are reported to be increasing.’ (So, also, were ‘cases of blatant immorality in shelters’!)
Hence, Home Intelligence’s reports after 7 September can retain a businesslike, even blasé, manner. On Monday 9th, it found ‘little sign of panic and none of defeatism’ in the East End, though it did notice ugly anti-Semitic feeling coming to the fore. Jews of the area provided a convenient scapegoat. If people from the East End evacuated themselves to the Kent hopfields or headed for London’s terminus stations, this was because they were ‘thoroughly frightened’, not a result of ‘defeatist feelings’, Home Intelligence concluded on 10 September. There was heavy ‘unplanned evacuation’ from the East End and London generally, but this (as Home Intelligence would stress later) was no bad thing for ‘morale’ if it meant that people of fearful disposition whose presence as workers wasn’t essential went, leaving behind the brave and the needed.
On 12 September, Home Intelligence felt able to report that morale was high, particularly in London, and that people were much more cheerful. Home Intelligence did not attribute the shift to Churchill’s latest speech – ‘well received but not so enthusiastically as usual’, since people who had convinced themselves that no invasion would happen disliked being reminded that one was still possible. The main morale-boosting factor, in London, was that after several days when it had seemed that no defence against bombers was being offered, a noisy anti-aircraft barrage had at last opened up: ‘“We’ll give ’em hell now” is a typical working-class comment.’ On the 17th, Home Intelligence reported that morale in London was ‘steady’ and that most people were settling down to the ‘new air-raid life cheerfully’. Car drivers were ‘giving lifts more readily’.
According to Home Intelligence, people outside London received an exaggerated impression of the damage which the capital was suffering. But ‘if London can take it, so can we’ was a common response (18 September). There was anger reported from Merseyside next day, however; Liverpool had been bombed by day with no RAF fighter cover apparent. ‘Liverpool considers that for its size its losses have been as heavy as London’s, and that it should have appropriate fighter protection.’ (Ironically, the rumour circulating in the north-west that East Enders had petitioned Churchill to end the war would be more than matched by one about a pro-peace demonstration in Liverpool itself during its ‘May Blitz’ of 1941: of all such figments of gossip, the ‘Liverpool peace demonstration’ would probably be the most durable, believed in even by sensible, scholarly persons decades later.)
By 21 September, after just two weeks of severe Blitz, H
ome Intelligence was serene. ‘Yesterday’s cheerfulness’ was maintained. ‘In London conversation is almost exclusively about air raids; it is gossipy, not panicky, and is centred in personal matters. There appears to be very little relationship between the “bomb at the corner of our street” and the war as a whole.’ Interest in war news was ‘very low’. In the invaded tube stations, ‘People are orderly, officials humane.’
By 8 October, when Home Intelligence issued the first of its weekly reports, the less excitable and impressionistic format was matched by a calm analytical posture. ‘Morale in general continues good … People now seem to be living from day to day.’ Some 120,000 letters investigated by Postal Censorship, and over 100 incoming reports each based (Home Intelligence claimed) on between 1,000 and 2,000 interviews, yielded no evidence weighty enough to contradict such generalisations. ‘From Dundee’, Home Intelligence reported, demonstrating its easy geographical comprehensiveness, ‘comes the sentiment – “if only they would give us a turn, they might give London a night’s rest”’
Whether this was actually said by an idiotic civic dignitary or a drunk in an hotel bar – indeed, whether anyone actually said this at all – was, and is, completely immaterial. ‘Provincial’ journalists, recently taken on a tour of London so that they could adjust their previously ‘overdrawn picture’, had certainly imbibed as they went around the view now shared with Home Intelligence by US journalists, Crown Unit film-makers, politicians of all parties and Londoners themselves, that in general Londoners were cheerful, and their gritty behaviour a wonder for the world to admire. The paradigm was firmly established. And if morale was anywhere less than wonderful, this was not because (for instance) corpses blown to pieces and collected piecemeal in sacks, or beloved children horribly burnt, were depressing matters to be aware of; it was because the authorities weren’t doing enough, or doing the right things, for the heroic People. The basic story was scripted, and could now be transferred en bloc to any other city.
While the institution of the George Cross for civilian bravery would recognise the heroism of individuals, feelings that Hull, say, or Sheffield had never had sufficient recognition for its 1940–41 ordeal would persist as long as survivors lived. A letter from Mr F. J. Mansfield, published by Bristol Labour Weekly (22 January, 1943), would foam furiously about the Mol’s official account of the Blitz, Front Line:
Frankly, I am greatly disappointed with the Bristol portion of this publication for the world. There are several errors in describing our losses during the blitzes, and apparently no mention is made of the raids we had prior to the general blitzing of the country. I think I am right in saying we began with raids in June 1940 – weeks before London. And what about the two mass day attacks on a neighbouring suburb of Bristol, if Croydon gets mentioned? … And again, our 12½ hour blitz receives no mention.
Paradoxically, such envy of London would reinforce London’s status as Metropolis and emphasise the paradigmatic character of its inhabitants’ experience. Thus Mr Mansfield is not denying that London ‘Took It’. But Bristol, he feels, Took It before London, and, later, Took blitzes of London-like ferocity. For every such ‘provincial’ chauvinist, the point was to prove that your city was as brave as London.
So on 4 November Weekly Report no. 5, noting the ‘continued cheerfulness’ of Londoners could add that bombs on Coventry had produced a similar response to that of the capital, and generalise safely: ‘It seems that the reaction of an urban community to heavy bombing is fairly consistent.’ A ‘large group’ of ‘jittery people of all classes’ fled, or, to put it more kindly, ‘evacuated themselves’. The more nervous of the remainder went at night to the ‘safest place near at hand’ – in London, the Underground stations, in Coventry the countryside where they could sleep in villages, fields, woods, cars, charabancs. There would be complaints about inadequate air defence and demands for deep shelters (fanned by the CP), but ‘petty grumbling’ would vanish. ‘The morale of most people is affected by severe bombing, and improves quickly when raids slacken.’
Grumbles were rife among the British people: Report no. 6 chose to interpret these as evidence of good general morale. Prices were rising, people were dissatisfied with pay in the services and in industry, ‘billeting problems’ between evacuees and hosts were back with a vengeance, raid victims faced problems getting compensation. But the latest Gallup Poll indicated that 80 per cent were confident that Britain would win. Report no. 9 (4 December) asserted, ‘In general morale continues steady and there is a general feeling that we shall win in the end, but only after a long struggle. In no less than 82 out of 88 returns from railway bookstalls, are the public described as “being confident of final victory”.’
One could selectively extract from these winter reports plenty of counter-mythic detail: many people in the poorer districts of Bristol talking about being let down by the government and of the possibility of a negotiated peace; a great increase in listening to German radio; 1,167 votes for a Christian Pacifist candidate in a by-election in Northampton, where the winning Tory got 16,587 (no. 10, 11 December); ‘Rapidly increasing grumbles’ about food (no. 11, 18 December). But such items seem insignificant when set beside the authoritative conclusions of Dr P E Vernon, Director of Psychology at Glasgow University, on individual reactions to air raids. From this and other evidence, Home Intelligence concluded that the number of psychological casualties in the raids had been ‘astoundingly small’. Up to 10 per cent of the population could normally be expected to cave in to ‘nervous illnesses’ when circumstances gave them an honourable excuse: hence the serious problem of ‘shell shock’ in the armed forces. The government had anticipated the problem while preparing for war by setting up two special psychiatric hospitals near London. But in practice, the suicide rate fell and ‘psychological’ casualties in London and elsewhere were very few. Home Intelligence suggested that whereas on the battlefield psychological breakdown permitted physical escape from danger, Blitz conditions ruled this out. ‘The refuges from bombing (the country and the deep shelter) are reached, not by having a breakdown, but by having sufficient determination to get there.’
A quarter of London’s population (as Report no. 14 revealed) might have left the city by November 1940. Big surges (up to 35 per cent) in population in safer places that were easily accessible – such as Hertford, Aylesbury, Reading, Gloucester-and in remote parts such as west Wales, might suggest where many of these had gone. But there were many other reasons, including the dispersal of industry, for people to move out; and resentment of rich self-evacuees or hostile treatment of poor ones were not signs of social order collapsing, but rather of the persistence of class resentments, abundantly present, but well contained, in Britain during the thirties.
Class war on Clydeside worried Home Intelligence, who paid special attention to the area. Mol’s office in Edinburgh reported in December 1940 (WR no. 9) signs of unrest in Scottish industry after ‘a long period of quiet’ and linked this to Communist penetration. Another report from Edinburgh at the end of February (WR no. 21) said that tales of slackness by workers and bad management were ‘common’. ‘Difficulties in industrial relations on Clydeside’, strong class feeling, bad transport and poor management were held to explain a Communist vote of 3,862 (Labour 21,900) in the Dumbartonshire by-election held at this time. But when the area had its first heavy raids in mid-March, Home Intelligence found a ‘striking similarity’ to the initial response in London’s East End, except that Glasgow came out ‘if anything, slightly better’. There was ‘remarkably little grumbling’ afterwards, and the engineering apprentices who were on strike (primarily, it seemed, over higher rates of wages paid to government trainees) ‘offered their services in any post-raid work’. In Clydeside a week later, Home Intelligence reported ‘a sense of relief at having been able to stand up to the ordeal’. By early April it could be stated that ‘In Glasgow, as an apparent result of the raids, there was much greater interest in and enthusiasm about the news than is usu
al’ and ‘A new feeling of partnership with the English blitzed cities …’
Around this time (31 March) the Mol produced ‘Advice on the Preparation of Broadcasts’, about conditions in badly-blitzed towns. ‘Those who remain in the town’, this remarked primly ‘often show a considerable amount of “cheerfulness” which is often thought to be synonymous with “high morale”. Joking is common.’ Such scepticism anticipates that of the scholar, decades later, who suspects that journalists and others mythologising the Blitz were often deceived by high spirits of the kind generated by crises, which proverbially ‘end in tears’. The sensible advice was that broadcasters should never generalise about the state of morale, as many listeners would find themselves to be exceptions, and people would resent a ‘standard’ being set up which they knew to be ‘impossible’. It was important to ‘shift attention from the present to the future’, emphasising ‘rebuilding, reconstructing, replanning … The future will be better than the past.’
Two points emerging from this can conclude our survey of the contribution of Mary Adams and her collaborators to the solidification of the Myth. Firstly, such people were not complacent, or easily fooled. If they presented, week in, week out, a positive view of British morale, this was presumably because their nationwide remit permitted them to distinguish temporary and local crises of opinion from general and repeated patterns. Scary Mass-Observation reports suggesting depression in Portsmouth or despair in Southampton referred to exceptional cases. London was a very large city, and an outbreak of panic, anti-Semitism or defeatism in one quarter of its East (or West) End was far from enough to determine morale in general.
Secondly, the irresistible left-ward impetus of the Myth at this time is clear. While Mary Adams was glad to encourage it because of her own political impulses, she and those who thought like her certainly did not create it. Of course people could not be expected to endure daily and nightly discomfort, the smashing of landmarks and of whole communities, increasingly austere standards of living and uncomfortable accommodation without some promise of a better future. And this would have to be Planned.
