by Angus Calder
In 1934, the company launched a series of Shell Guides to the English counties, with the poet John Betjeman as general editor. These provided further opportunities for artists: Paul Nash worked on Dorset (1935). John Piper on Oxfordshire (1938). Piper was at that time, conspicuously, involved in abstract painting. Charles Harrison has deduced that from the mid-thirties Piper was preoccupied with ‘finding means to make the technical mannerisms of Modernist painting serve a fashionable interest in picturesque architectural detail or “gothick” landscapes’.18 Commissioned as an official war artist in 1940, he served by producing images of bombed churches in London, Coventry, Bristol and of the blitzed interior of the House of Commons. His war work would also include landscapes and pictures of intact country houses.
Nash, a far weightier artist, reconciled the attraction of English landscape with those of abstraction and surrealism. Certain prehistoric sites in Wiltshire where stone circles could still be seen offered shapes which were ‘naturally’ like forms favoured by modernists. Discovery of them in 1933 led Nash to embark on a series of paintings which presented Deep England at its deepest. His interest in continental surrealism flavoured such work after a time, but English landscape remained a recognisable presence in it. His dreamlike image from 1940, of an English sky crossed with the vapour trails of fighters, executed as an official war artist, is one example among many demonstrating that ‘surreal’ imaginings of the thirties had literal counterparts in 1940. What could be more ‘surreal’, for instance, than a blitzed, eviscerated bourgeois dwelling with a bloated barrage balloon floating above it?
By 1940, then, both Georgian and avant-garde currents in English culture had provided ample verbal and visual materials from which Myth could be swiftly fashioned. To enhance them, there was distinctively ‘English’ music available, thanks to the rise of a nationalist school. Though Elgar’s style was heavily influenced by German music, marches and other pieces by him were well known and readily identified as patriotic. Parry, in 1916, had set William Blake’s poem ‘Jerusalem’ for the ‘Fight for Right’ organisation: the aim was to stiffen resolve among the public against the temptation of a ‘premature peace’. By 1924 a musical dictionary could refer to it as a ‘new National Anthem’. It was taken up by the Women’s Institutes in 1924 – but also by the Woodcraft Folk a few years later: these were the Co-operative Movement’s socialist counterpart of Baden Powell’s imperialistic Boy Scouts. Meanwhile, Vaughan Williams, a most patriotic Englishman in spite of his Welsh name, had developed an idiom which could accommodate in modern orchestral works elements derived from the English past which appeared to give them a uniquely English flavour: the music produced in the era of the Tudors, who though (or because) Welsh seemed most Deeply English of all dynasties; and the tunes which he and others had discovered in the ‘folk-song revival’ of the turn of the century. ‘Greensleeves’ or ‘Jerusalem’, or a snatch from Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ marches, or the tune of a ‘folk-song’ much used in schools could instantly signify ‘England’ on a sound track.19
By the time war broke out in September 1939 the myth of the Blitz had been all but scripted. We can see this in the GPO Film Unit’s early war effort The First Days (1939), written by Robert Sinclair and using four of the Unit’s directors – Cavalcanti, Harry Watt, Pat Jackson and Humphrey Jennings.
This film claims to give ‘a picture of the London Front’. No bombardment from the air had occurred, of course. But as the first air-raid warning sounds Londoners file calmly into shelters. The friendliness of air-raid wardens is emphasised, used to point to a general phenomenon. ‘Friendliness – It has become the war-time equipment of all Londoners.’ A dramatised exchange of talk between strangers in a shelter follows.
This is a volunteers’ front. ‘Filling sandbags is everybody’s business’, and volunteers from both damp basements and luxury flats Go To It. A generation of young men reared to despise the ‘bogus romance of the battlefield’ are going into uniform ‘willingly’. In the East End, the Cockney Spirit is rampant – here is a ‘patient world, of adaptability and enterprise’. Nurses are knitting in hospital, waiting for casualties …
This ‘front’ is a ‘civilian front’ dominated by the ‘Cockney voice of London’. The city’s people are famous all over the world. ‘This is not twilight that has come to England, it is dawn, and dawn we hope for more than England.’
The Myth is ready, like raw pizza dough. It won’t take long to cook once spicy ingredients are arranged on it. When J. B. Priestley makes Britain at Bay with the GPO Film Unit for the Ministry of Information, in the summer of 1940, he has fresh flavours to hand.
The Americans will see this one. They respond to History. We begin with waves breaking on a beach (the island race), move on to Deep English shots of haymaking: ‘For nearly a thousand years these fields … have been free from foreign invasion.’ Cutting to scenes from industrial towns, we point out that at least ‘they are ours’. Near even the blackest towns, we say, there was always lonely peaceful countryside – until this war came. Shots of Germans drilling, Germans invading other countries, refugees on French roads, accompany an attack by Priestley on the Nazis. ‘This has left Britain alone, at bay’, he says as we return to the White Cliffs of Dover. ‘The future of the whole civilised world rests on the defence of Britain’, by the armed services, and ‘by all of us’. Shots follow of people ‘hurrying to man this island fortress’, factory workers drilling as Home Guard, ARP men in action. The voluntary nature of such effort is stressed. The script finally quotes Churchill – ‘We shall fight on the beaches.’
A structural feature of the Myth is emerging. Perhaps two columns of opposites will clarify it:
England (Britain)
Freedom
Improvisation
Volunteer spirit
Friendliness
Tolerance
Timeless landscape
Patience
Calm
A thousand years of peace
Germany
Tyranny
Calculation
Drilling
Brutality
Persecution
Mechanisation
Aggression
Frenzy
The ‘Thousand-Year Reich’ dedicated to war
It will be seen that each presumed characteristic of the Germans is (and has to be) opposed by a strong English opposite. A penalty is involved. The English, conquerors of a vast empire, famous once all over Europe for the violence of their politics, the clarity of their philosophical thought and their innovations in business and technology, must now be portrayed as gentle, pacific until provoked, and temperamentally at odds with merely rational thinking, with careful organisation, and with new-fangled machines. They fight not for their own Empire, their own interests, but for freedom all over the world. Spitfire pilots will help to give a more positive, warlike air to this self-image, but even they will be engaged in defensive action.
While Churchill’s matchless rhetoric could help sustain a will towards the aggression necessary to win the war, there is implicit in the developing Myth an understanding that England will be fully itself under a new, peacetime dispensation, in which qualities of friendliness and co-operative assistance, emphasised in war, will determine peacetime social relationships. So Priestley, as intimate Sunday-night broadcaster, has the difficult job of sustaining such hopes without creating frustration and, indeed, a yearning for peace.
In his autobiography, published in 1962, Priestley was not very forthcoming about his activities as propagandist in 1940. Rather characteristically, he says that his broadcasts to the British people were ridiculously overpraised in such a way as to nudge one to suppose that his unpublished and, at home, unsung broadcasts to the USA must have been quite something. The overseas broadcasts, he states firmly, were his ‘chief task on the air’. He broadcast several times a week, always late at night, ‘to America, the Dominions, and in fact through recordings transmitted every hour or
so, to all parts of the world where English was understood’. He had a gratifying postbag from Canada and Australia in particular. The call to give an extra Blitz broadcast to Canada saved his life in September 1940 when the section of the Langham Hotel, by Broadcasting House, where he would have been sleeping was ‘sliced off by a bomb’.20
The BBC initiated a series of ‘Postscripts’ to the nine p.m. News, in which well-known speakers were to explain events in a reasonable way, admitting British shortcomings and avoiding ‘exaggerated propaganda’. Priestley was brought in during the Dunkirk crisis because the Corporation, worried about lower-class morale, wanted a ‘contrast in voice, upbringing and outlook’ to the public-school educated RP speakers who dominated the airwaves. He was first given the Postscript slot on the Wednesday after the evacuation from Dunkirk was completed; thereafter, he occupied it frequently over several months, usually on Sundays: a total of nineteen broadcasts between 5 June and 20 October. His audience averaged 31 per cent of the adult population over this period, and he received 1,600 letters from members of the public.21
Home intelligence’s Weekly Report no. 5, for 11 November, remarked: ‘From a great number of sources there are reports of strong feelings because J. B. Priestley’s broadcasts have stopped. His views on social reform appear to be shared by the great majority.’22 However, they inflamed an influential minority in the Conservative Party to great rage. His first sequence of Postscripts ended at his own request: he was, understandably, very tired. In November, he made it clear that he wanted to come back with a series of talks which would be more or less overtly ‘political’. The press had widely deplored his absence from the air. Even Graham Greene, who had produced a satirical portrait of him (as ‘Savory’) in a pre-war novel, wrote in the Spectator, ‘For those dangerous months when the Gestapo arrived in Paris he was unmistakeably a great man.’ But when he reappeared after the Sunday News on 26 January 1941, a deputation from the 1922 Committee of Tory back-bench MPs protested to the Minister of Information, and Churchill himself complained that Priestley’s views on ‘war aims’ differed from his own. Priestley after this broadcast received 1,000 appreciative letters and 200 which were critical. As the series proceeded, BBC listener research showed that one of the Postscripts was approved by seventeen listeners out of twenty. After eight Postscripts, Priestley was taken off and replaced by the lively, independent-minded but right-wing A. P. Herbert. He refused to come back later to do ‘occasional’ Postscripts and it was widely assumed that he had been banned from the air.23
The very strong right-wing reaction against Priestley’s 1941 broadcasts highlights the contrasting fact that in the summer of 1940 he wasn’t thought to be more ‘controversial’ than other broadcasters. The public for his novels and plays – a very large one – was certainly for the most part middle class. His credentials as a sturdy patriot had been established by his popular travelogue of 1934, English Journey, and various celebrations of English landscape and character since then.
His Yorkshire vowels probably were, for many working-class listeners, a relief from ‘posh’ voices on the airwaves; but plenty of people shared them whose views were far to the right of his, and they cannot have been the sole or even main cause of his success. Taking his own word for it, though, it may be that features of his Bradford upbringing had helped make him a plausible ‘voice of the people’.
Priestley’s family had a tradition of manual work in Bradford’s woollen industry, but his father had become a teacher. His father’s political stance, as a member of the Independent Labour Party, meant that Priestley was exposed to a brand of socialism motivated by intense ethical concerns and indifferent to Marxist analysis. He was to remember it as ‘liberalism with the starch left out’. In retrospect, the Bradford community was one ‘where to a youngster the social hierarchy was invisible’. The wealthy owners of the mills did not live in the town and if they had come back, Priestley believed ‘a lot of men wearing cloth caps and mufflers would still have called them Sam and Joe’.24
Priestley’s impatience with theoretical socialism and his inbred egalitarianism were associated with a passionate nostalgia for the Edwardian England of his boyhood. The Myth of a Golden Age of peaceful, golden afternoons can be found elsewhere among writers of Priestley’s generation – in the elegant prose about cricket and music by another northerner, Neville Cardus, and in certain passages by George Orwell. It exists in obverse to the horror of the Great War trenches: before, innocence; after, disillusion. Priestley served in the army in France and barely survived. He did not write poetry or fiction about this experience: in his memoirs, he emphasises the fact that it instilled ‘class feeling’ into him – bitterness against the ‘boneheaded’ officer class which had killed his friends by its sheer stupidity. Though he became a wealthy professional writer and lived by choice in hierarchical Deep England, rarely returning to his native West Riding, a heartfelt animus against Conservative upper- and upper-middle-class elements would give his political utterances bite.
However, the notes struck in his famous Dunkirk Postscript were calm and national pride, the two reinforcing each other: ‘Now that it’s over, and we can look back on it, doesn’t it seem to you to have an inevitable air about it – as if we had turned a page in the history of Britain and seen a chapter headed “Dunkirk” …?’ ‘Nothing’, he said, ‘could be more English than this Battle of Dunkirk, both in its beginning and its end, its folly and its grandeur. It was very English in what was sadly wrong with it … But having admitted this much, let’s do ourselves the justice of admitting too that this Dunkirk affair was also very English (and when I say “English” I really mean British) in the way in which, when apparently all was lost, so much was gloriously retrieved.’ The Germans couldn’t have achieved such an epic – ‘That vast machine of theirs can’t create a glimmer of that poetry of action which distinguishes war from mass murder. It’s a machine – and therefore has no soul.’
The opposition of British improvisation and inspiration to German calculation and mechanisation was to be integral to the Myth. The navy’s use of pleasure steamers to bring the British Expeditionary Force home was a gift to Priestley, the celebrator in fiction of innocent fun of the fair, music halls, seaside concerts. So was the fact that one of them was called the Gracie Fields, which enabled him to imply that the industrial north, whence Gracie the woman came, was involved in spirit in this south-eastern operation.25
Priestley’s next Postscript, on Sunday 9 June, worked the oppositions of the adolescent Myth with sturdy, definitive simplicity. The loveliest spring and summer weather in memory – ‘I’ll swear the very birds have sung this year as they never did before’; ‘twinkling beeches and the stately nodding elms’ in the south of England countryside around Priestley’s home; ‘the round green hills dissolving into the hazy blue of the sky’. Remembering the terrible war news. Imagining the ‘peaceful and lovely’ English scene torn apart ‘to reveal the old Flanders Front, trenches and bomb craters, ruined towns, a scarred countryside, a sky belching death, and the faces of murdered children’. Reminding himself that the landscape ‘was there long before the Germans went mad, and will be there when that madness is only remembered as an old nightmare’. The anti-German invective which follows is, like so much in these broadcasts, a model for later writers. Simply and vividly, without grandiose phrases or obvious rhetoric, it characterises the German machine:
perhaps at this very moment, thin-lipped and cold-eyed Nazi staff officers are planning, with that mixture of method and lunacy which is all their own, how to project on to this countryside of ours those half-doped crazy lads they call parachute troops. This land that is ours, that appeals to us now in all its beauty, is at this moment only just outside the reach of these self-tormenting schemers and their millions who are used as if they were not human beings but automata, robots, mere ‘things’. They drop them from planes as if they were merely bombs with arms and legs. They send them swarming forward in battle as if they were not f
ellow-men but death-dealing dolls, manufactured in Goering’s factories. (My italics)
Priestley goes on to contrast a German propaganda film, Baptism of Fire, about the invasion of Poland, with the British film The Lion Has Wings: ‘Our film didn’t take itself too solemnly’, but the German one had ‘not a glimmer of humour or fun, or ordinary human relationships. It’s all machines and robot stuff.’ And of course such lack of humanity in them ensures that the Nazis will lose. ‘What they don’t understand … is that men also have their hour of greatness, when weakness suddenly towers into strength; when ordinary easygoing tolerant men rise up in their anger and strike down evil like the angels of the wrath of God.’26
This would become a staple of formal and unofficial British propaganda. Compare the conclusion of John Strachey’s Post D, published by Gollancz in 1941, a moving, lightly fictionalised account of the author’s experiences as an air-raid warden in London. At the end, Ford, Strachey’s third-person version of himself, writes ‘a sort of invocation to Hitler’: ‘Pay attention, Hitler. You have scattered the nations; you have easily deceived the statesmen, the generals, the bankers, the diplomatists.’ But now Hitler is up against ‘a different kind of people’:
You have encountered the unemphatic and the unassuming. It is not that they have done anything, nor ever can do anything, that you need fear – except one thing; they have survived. They have had the temerity to survive your bombs. Moreover, and this is serious for you, they have become not less, but more, themselves. They have become less, not more, like you: they have become less, not more, neurotic, unbalanced, fierce, cruel and suspicious … Make haste, or their quietness will echo round the world; their amusement will dissolve Empires; their ordinariness will become a flag; their kindness a rock, and their courage an avalanche. Make haste. Blot them out, if you can.27
