The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  Mary Adams liked and admired Tom Harrisson, the co-founder and, by the time of the Blitz, sole director of Mass-Observation, and she defended him against his critics inside the Mol. But she and her assistants certainly did not accept Mass-Observation’s views on morale under bombing unhesitatingly. Had they done so, their daily and weekly reports would often have made disturbing reading.

  In December 1940, Harrisson went to Southampton with an employee of the Ministry of Food. This man wrote a report, and on the copy of it in the Mass-Observation Archive, Harrisson’s hand has noted that the Minister of Food, Lord Woolton, ‘took this to the Cabinet’. The document asserted: ‘It seems likely that the almost total destruction of provincial towns will continue. There is no time to lose if the despair and suffering at Coventry and Southampton are to be mitigated elsewhere.’ It claimed, ‘That morale generally is deteriorating is the view of the Intelligence Branch of the Ministry of Information.’2

  In fact the Weekly Report at this juncture announced ‘no marked changes of morale’. What was the Ministry of Food man (Lionel Fielden, no mean writer) up to, perhaps with Harrisson’s connivance? Surely he was campaigning in the struggle for improved post-raid services, led in the press by Ritchie Calder of the Daily Herald and New Statesman. Fielden was arguing that covered post-raid ‘feeding centres’ were needed around every city, with sufficient alternatives to obviate the risk of all being bombed simultaneously.

  Likewise, Mass-Observation’s report of 14 August 1940 on the government’s ‘“Stay Where You Are” Leaflet’ (File Report 349) was not innocent of polemical direction or of self-interest. To take the latter aspect first – it was crucially important to Mass-Observation, dependent financially on continued government commissions, to establish that its methods of questioning and observing yielded information about what went on in public opinion ‘below the surface’. Thus, this one declared: ‘In previous reports we have frequently asserted that while civilian morale is superficially good, it was not firmly based. But this conclusion had to be reached partly by intuition and partly by a study of what happened in France and Belgium. There was no direct evidence that people were likely to panic extensively in case of invasion.’

  But, lo and behold, when the new government leaflet advising people to ‘stay put’ in the event of invasion was tried by Mass-Observation on ‘320 persons in an urban and rural area’ (probably part of London, and Worcestershire), it yielded evidence that people would panic. By more than three to one, people were critical of the leaflet. There was a great deal of comment to indicate interviewees’ lack of confidence in their own or other people’s ability to ‘stay put’: ‘Usually specific spontaneous reference was made to panicking and refugeeing.’ Mass-Observation attributed this to all the publicity given to refugees in France. It then ticked off the Mol for the inadequacy of its propaganda and alleged that the schoolmasterly tone of the leaflet raised hackles. This was a favourite Mass-Observation polemic. If its views were credited at all, they should help guarantee further commissions for Mass-Observation, the organisation best equipped to test the submerged opinion towards which effective propaganda would have to be directed.

  I do not allege that Harrisson and his coadjutors were cynics profiteering in the crisis. Harrisson was manifestly a patriot and anti-fascist, and his criticisms of ‘Home Propaganda’ were generally shrewd and hence constructive. Polemic and unconscious self-interest – closely allied – may, however, have distorted Mass-Observation’s use of findings from what now seems a very small sample (for a start, if these interviews were conducted on doorsteps by day, as seems likely, those expressing opinions were unlikely to include an adequate proportion of active young and youngish people engaged on ‘war work’).

  However, ‘components of the scene’ could indeed look so very bad as to seem to justify fears of likely panic. A very young but extremely intelligent paid Mass-Observer, Nina Masel, reported from an East End base during the raids. As the big night raids began on 7 September she was joined by four more Mass-Observation ‘investigators’. What they said and heard, Mass-Observation could not refrain from pointing out, confirmed the conclusions of its ‘Stay Where You Are’ report. People weren’t staying. Immediately after the bombs on the afternoon of the 7th, people began quitting the area. Mass-Observation estimated that as many as six out of ten had abandoned certain streets – some of them untouched by bombs – by Monday evening. While the press ‘sentimentally proclaimed’ that old people refused to leave their ‘beloved homes’, it was in fact mostly older people who were going:

  The whole story of the last weekend has been one of unplanned hysteria … Of course the press versions of life going on normally in the East End on Monday are grotesque. There was no bread, no electricity, no milk, no gas, no telephones … The press version of people’s smiling jollity and fun are gross exaggeration. On no previous investigation has so little humour, laughter or whistling been recorded. (FR 392: Report on Evacuation and other East End Problems, 10.9.40)

  Many ‘refugees’ from the East End headed to Paddington station and on to Oxford. A sharp (again very young) paid Observer, Len England, reported from there on 19 September, when the city was reckoned to hold up to 20,000 ‘refugees’. The impression which they had brought with them that London was ‘a mass of smoking ruins’ had got across to local people, so that when England mentioned that he was going back there, ‘practically everyone was astonished: they seemed to have no idea that even parts of London were still habitable’. (FR 412: Evacuees in Oxford)

  But other ‘components’ in the same archive suggest why Home Intelligence, surveying the whole ‘scene’, was able to take a positive view of morale. Using Mass-Observation material, we can work from ‘periphery’ to ‘core’ of the Blitz experience.

  First, the diary, kept for Mass-Observation, of a woman aged twenty-three, living in Monmouthshire and working as a statistician in an engineering works producing valves.3 Because she kept her Mass-Observation diary from the outbreak of war, we know a lot about her. Because she sent her diary in by instalments, we know that she had no chance to note and ‘correct’ inconsistencies or impose hindsight on the material by revision or editing. She was a Cambridge graduate, engaged to be married to a young doctor. She was earnestly left-wing, and continued to attend Left Book Club meetings despite her distaste for the Communist line taken by the chief speakers. When bad news from Norway began she wondered (10 April) if she would be ‘put in a concentration camp’ because of the LBC books she owned. Two days later, feeling ‘an awful coward’, she wrote to say that she wouldn’t attend any more LBC meetings – ‘a friend’ had advised her that it wasn’t safe.

  Her reactions in May confirm that the early summer weather of 1940 was indeed glorious, and show how generalisations about public opinion can completely exclude deviant experiences: she was so preoccupied with cycling round Wales with her Jack that it seems she hardly noticed the fall of Chamberlain. On 19 May, after another trip to meet Jack in Shropshire, she wrote:

  This has been such a wonderful spring and the trees are so lovely, and, in spite of the war, I’ve enjoyed it all immensely. I listened to Churchill’s speech when I got back. It was a fighting speech and rather depressing. To my mind a nation under Nazi rule for a short period would be better than a nation completely wiped out if we intend to fight to our last man rather than surrender.

  However, on the 23rd she could express surprise at her own cheerfulness: ‘I suppose that I have a strong trait of the English belief that we shall muddle through somehow.’

  But she remained uncertain about the ethics of fighting the war. On 24 May she noted that part of the King’s speech was ‘hypocritical … He spoke of our policy of freedom, justice and peace but we hardly followed those ideals in the way we acquired our Empire, nor in the way we have governed it since.’

  Three days later: ‘If we have got to give in to Germany, I almost think it would be better to do it now, though I hate the thought of defeat as much as
anyone. But I think that I hate the thought of mass slaughter even more.’

  Gradually, the excitement of ‘living on a besieged island’ began to resolve such doubt. By 9 June, after Dunkirk, she was expressing frustration that no one in the area wanted her help in the evening – she’d ‘willingly help a farmer, or at a canteen, or with evacuee children’.

  The French surrender was a blow – ‘In the afternoon people were feeling that we had better give in.’ But, though she knew perfectly well that over-long hours of work were counter-productive, she kept wanting to do more.

  Air-raid warnings began in mid-June – ‘yellow every night for a fortnight’ – so she was asked to sleep at the works once a week. By early August, when a threat of strike by the workforce unless they got a Bank Holiday as usual prompted the sudden announcement of a day off, she could sound like a confirmed, even Blimpish patriot: ‘One hears a lot about the keenness of the British worker to increase war production. None of that spirit is shown among our men.’

  Her diary during this phase, however, suggests the very lively response which raids and the constant threat of raids provoked in her. On 17 August:

  We had to take Vi to Cardiff. We were caught in a raid half-way there, but they let us go on with only our headlights. I felt rather as though I was living in a film. There was a full moon, which gave the cold light one gets in night drives on the screen. We were stopped six times to show identification cards, and once or twice we saw bursts of anti-aircraft fire.

  On 29 August, ‘there was quite a pretty fireworks display over Newport’. On 13 September: ‘Miss Jones burst into my room this morning saying “We’ve brought a plane down! Isn’t it thrilling?” A plane was caught by the Newport balloon barrage last night and crashed in flames. Unfortunately, it crashed into the only house I have visited in Newport, killing the two children who were sleeping downstairs.’

  What with brief meetings with her fiancé and worries about her parents in south-east England, she was surely living at a high emotional pitch. All the more striking, then, that in her replies to Mass-Observation’s September ‘Directive’ questionnaire, presumably written at the end of the month, she stressed how ‘normal’ everything had become again. She now slept ‘very happily’ through the warnings and didn’t worry about bombs, though her lodgings were in a bungalow with no shelter. Her replies next month were aloof and disapproving about the apathy she detected in her corner of Wales – typists ‘as far as is possible … unconscious of the war’, workmen unabashed when their defective valves caused aircraft parts to be scrapped, young men thinking of conscription only as an inevitability like going to school. Unusually for the time, her politics were moving right-ward – to admiration of Churchill as war leader and moderate support for Labour’s post-war policies. The rest of her war was anticlimactic – marriage to Dr Jack, some months as a happy housewife, then years of boredom in office jobs during which her husband was posted to India. Inevitable, one muses, that some people in her kind of situation would come to look back on the summer of 1940 as a heyday of glorious life. But the main reason for introducing her case here is that it illustrates how a potentially ‘unreliable’ component of public opinion – Marxist, left-wing, inclined to pacifist impulses – emerged after a prolonged though light exposure to Battle of Britain and Blitz conditions, as a rather conventional patriot deploring the lack of war spirit in others.

  Perhaps her censure of Monmouth people was excessive and more shared her alertness than she conceded. But another ‘Directive’ reply, to the September questions, from an auto-didactic steel worker in Ayrshire, suggests that outside London and the south-east indifference to the war was possible. This man saw ‘no change’ in the mental attitude of his fellow workers. He himself read ‘as usual’ but cared less for the radio than before, ‘not because of the propaganda but because of the bad reception, a general complaint here’. He lived in a top flat, had no shelter, had never tested his gas mask and never carried it. ‘We wouldn’t know that there was a war on if we were not told, except for hearing the siren 13 times, so uneventful is even the siren that I didn’t get out of bed the last four times.’

  The Mol would have worried about his attitude. Yet surely the areas of relative calm where people carried on as usual were an important factor in balancing public opinion? It is likely that most Ayrshire workers would have rallied to defend the land of Kyle celebrated by Robert Burns had they seen any need to do so; but, according to Mass-Observation’s respondent, there was nothing to get excited about.

  However, when our next Observer, Bill Lee, a teacher in his late twenties, was returning from Cumbria to his home in suburban Middlesex on 15 August 1940, he was ‘momentarily’ thrilled on that clear warm evening to hear the siren sound All Clear, ‘as the war seemed such a remote thing in the Lake District, and the blackout was slackly observed in Keswick’. Travelling in and out of central London over the next few days, he was in a good position to see freshly how citizens were adapting to raids. Very many calmly ignored government advice to take shelter, as he did himself on 16 August when, after a warning had sounded, he phlegmatically finished his anchovy toast in the ABC teashop in Charing Cross Road, walked across to a News Theatre and got so engrossed in the screen that he soon forgot there was a raid on.

  Warnings and ‘light’ raids were now a commonplace in the straggling suburban lanes of Middlesex. Lee’s elderly parents, by 22 August, had decided not to bother to go to the shelter next door after the siren unless guns were fired or bombs dropped.

  A week later, Lee was at a Promenade Concert in the Queen’s Hall, listening to Brahms’s First Symphony, when at about nine p.m. a man in evening dress hurried through the orchestra and Sir Henry Wood stopped conducting. ‘Immediately there came from the audience a sound like mingled laughs and groans, with a few claps. The man announced that the siren had gone and asked anyone who wished to leave to do so at once. Here came loud applause.’ Apparently, no one left. The concert resumed after a couple of minutes. In the interval quite a number of promenaders (though fewer than usual) went out to sit on the steps of the church next to Broadcasting House. There were not many people in the streets, but taxis swooped about. The second half of the concert passed without incident. When it finished at ten twenty-five, Lee found that Piccadilly tube station was closed, as always in raids, but pushed on ‘through crowds’ to Leicester Square, brushing off a prostitute on the way.

  The tube out to Hillingdon took twenty minutes longer than usual. Walking home alone, well after midnight, Lee became aware of searchlights probing for a raider overhead. Then came a sound such as he had never heard before; followed by another of the same. He flung himself to the ground. The bombs were half a mile away but sounded much closer, ‘great explosions with no end of depth and body, much louder than [he] had expected bombs to be’. Getting up and finding no cover in sight, he sprinted to the bottom of the hill. Only thirty yards from home a voice called, ‘Is someone there looking for shelter?’ He was so terrified that he plunged into the garden of a house occupied by Women’s Auxiliary Transport service personnel and thence into their shelter – a V of trenches covered with zinc sheets, sandbags and earth. There were six or eight young women there in the pitch dark, with six inches of mud underfoot. They were in high excitement, having scrambled out of bed in night clothes and dressing gowns when bombs had made their house rock – ‘all scared … but keeping it down pretty well’.

  A young man with certain opportunities in mind might have lingered, but after a few minutes, with the sound of ‘the plane’ much less, Lee moved on to the shelter which his parents used, found the dense atmosphere unpleasant, went to his own house, put a kettle on … Then ‘the plane’ came back, so he turned off the gas and went and hid under a downstairs bed with cotton wool in his ears and rubber between his teeth. It is striking that Lee was convinced that there was just one German bomber up there, unchallenged by anti-aircraft or night fighters, wheeling around picking off one target in the area a
fter another. Such paranoia or solipsism was a factor in the process by which people under bombing were driven away from the larger issues of the war to concentration on their own local patch. Presumably the raiders (probably plural) were looking for one of the RAF stations in the area.

  ‘The plane’ came back twice while Lee was making cocoa for himself and tea for others. On the second occasion he thought ‘Bugger that, I’m not going to let this cool’ and took the tea through the hedge to the shelter next door. Very tired, he nevertheless couldn’t sleep. He went out several times to chat to the air-raid wardens, one of whom remarked ‘After another night or two of this we should be all done up’, and finally went to bed at three-thirty a.m., half an hour before the All Clear. In the morning a tradesman told him that three bombs had fallen on houses in Hillingdon, just over half a mile away, and one lad of eighteen had been killed.

  Next evening, at home, Lee simply typed on (a report for Mass-Observation) after the sirens sounded, despite heavy noises. However, his sleep was disturbed by the sound of ‘Nazi’ planes and distant thuds. Coming back by tube on Saturday 31st, Lee found that no one took much notice when the siren wailed: ‘No stir, little talk. It’s a hot day. Near Rayners Lane Station tennis and cricket are going on as usual. (A bomb fell here a few nights ago.)’ That night, Lee learned a little more about aircraft. Thinking he heard a ‘Nazi’ plane about nine p.m., he went out and saw an aircraft ‘with lights on coming down calmly into Northolt aerodrome’. So the ‘broken throb’ of a plane’s engines was not, as he had thought, ‘characteristically Nazi’.

  Lee’s pattern of reactions – indifference, sudden fear, curiosity, calm adaptation – was probably that of many young or youngish people under ‘light’ raiding. Reports by other paid and unpaid Mass-Observers in the same file, made after the bombers had invaded Greater London seriously, in mid-August, bring out the almost holiday-like atmosphere: neighbours in Battersea out in the streets on 15 August after the All Clear sounded, laughing as they chattered to each other; people in Whitehall on the same day ignoring wardens’ encouragement to take shelter; an hour frittered away next morning in a government office as workers swapped memories of what they did while the sirens sounded.