The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Yet the greatest political effect of the war was the impact on class distinctions. In the armed forces, in civil defence, in the long shifts in factories, where former debutantes struggled to help make shells alongside former maids, and in the fields and air-raid shelters, accents subtly accommodated one another and old differences mattered a little less. (Only a little: Diana Mitford was nearly thrown out of her air-raid role because the other women could not stand her voice any longer.) Taxes soared – income tax went up early in the war to the unheard-of rate of 50 per cent – while the incomes of the skilled working classes, putting in long hours in the key factories, rose too. With less to spend money on, and endless drives for patriotic saving schemes, disposable incomes became far less unequal. Apart from the few at the very top, mostly invisible to the masses, distinctions in clothing, diet and lifestyle were blurred. Above all, the Blitzes subtly undermined the old rulers, who had brought the country to this pass, while it bolstered the confidence of the ruled. As the bombing went on, official Britain became more organized. Bunks were put in tube stations; reception and rest centres were set up; bigger shelters were constructed (albeit too late to be useful); the work of demolition and clearance was carried out. Anti-aircraft batteries were sited in the key city areas where they greatly cheered the population – though more civilians were killed by shards of falling shells than were German aircrew overhead.

  Yet the people at the sharp end were just the people; and the people who helped the people were overwhelmingly volunteers, folk like themselves, from their street, factory, office or club, now wearing a tin hat and an armband. More than any other organization, and thanks mainly to television comedy, we have remembered the Home Guard, first formed as the Local Defence Volunteers at the height of the Blitz. Within a few weeks of a radio appeal by Anthony Eden, the war secretary, 1.5 million men too old or too young to fight or prevented from full military service by their occupations had presented themselves to defend Britain from invasion. Every class of person from retired generals to village poachers, coal miners to schoolteachers, left-wing railwaymen to former rulers of the Indian Empire found themselves under rudimentary command. To start with, most had no kind of uniform other than an armband and paraded in bowler hats, caps and deer-stalkers rather than helmets. Their armaments were rudimentary, certainly while the evacuated regular army itself was lacking. In country districts there were shotguns to be had, but the Home Guard did indeed march around the country challenging the unwary with spears, golf clubs, pickaxes and ‘guns’ carved out of wood. One unit in Lancashire had rifles which dated back to mid-Victorian times – the Crimea and the Indian Mutiny – and even pikes.

  The Home Guard were both lethal and useful, though rarely at the same time. They were useful because they guarded endless stretches of coastline, railway stations, bridges and factories which would otherwise have used up the regular soldiers. They were lethal because, particularly in the early days, they tended to fire on or attack all manner of objects, from dimly seen cows moving around at night to cars which failed to hear quavering calls to stop. Quite a few drivers were killed. So were quite a few innocent animals. During Blitzes, they helped with civil defence, fighting fires, digging people out and leading survivors to safety. Later on in the war, they had acquired battledress uniforms, boots and helmets. They had rifles and sometimes even machine guns and had learned to use them. They had effective transport and had become a younger organization, boosted by teenagers who were then semi-trained even before they were called up for the full-time army. They had cavalry, moorland specialists, river patrols and even marines. They had brass bands, served in anti-aircraft batteries and developed a great enthusiasm for challenging the full-time soldiers in exercises. There is no doubt that the Home Guard became a satisfying alternative lifestyle for many men, partly a club, partly a self-conscious schoolboyish escapade which relieved wartime boredom. But by jumbling the classes, so that bank managers and executives would find themselves being inspected by postmen or factory workers, the Home Guard also shook the class divisions a little. It too was part of the People’s War. From the volunteer soldiers with pikes to the volunteer firefighters and bomb-disposal men, the women factory workers and nurses, this was a do-it-yourself response to a dictator’s war. Even more than the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the shake-up of society that accompanied it was a truly national experience. Official propaganda recognized it: in films and broadcasts the firefighters and the factory workers took central position, rather than generals or ministers.

  Soil and Salt Water

  Through 1940–41, when for most of the time Britain ‘stood alone’ – though with the Commonwealth and empire alongside her – life became rapidly drabber, harder, more equal. Rationing, which later became widely detested, was initially popular. Churchill warned Lord Woolton, the food minister, during the Battle of Britain that he should beware faddists: ‘The way to lose the war is to try to force the British public into a diet of milk, oatmeal, potatoes, etc., washed down on gala occasions with a little lime juice.’ This was a reaction to extreme plans for a ‘basal diet’ which would keep people healthy if the worst came to the worst. Woolton himself, who became very popular, knew rather more about these matters than Churchill did. He had been a department-store tycoon before the war, and a social worker before that. As Fred Marquis, he had become interested in diet when living in Liverpool’s slums: his next-door neighbour had died of malnutrition. He set himself the task of ensuring that everyone would now have enough to eat, even if it was dull food. The ‘Woolton Pie’, invented by the Savoy Hotel’s chef, was perhaps the most famous example. It consisted of mixed vegetables and oatmeal with a wholemeal crust. Yet Woolton’s reputation survived even the pie. His technique was to combine education about food with strict fairness. Among the results would be a huge expansion of free school meals, free milk for children and free juice for under-twos. The poorer British grew stronger and healthier during this siege.

  In the autumn of 1940 food was still reasonably easy to get, particularly meat. The fair and easily understood points system was first used for sugar, bacon, margarine and tea. The U-boat fleet was still small, and only just beginning to relocate to the French ports from where it would wreak its worst effects. By 1942 less than half the 55 million tons of food brought in each year before the war was getting through. Rationing had been steadily extended – tinned meats and vegetables, tinned salmon, dried fruit, condensed milk, canned peas, breakfast cereals, biscuits, syrup and oatflakes. This was popular because of the widespread and justified suspicion that the rich were avoiding their share of the pain, eating game and tinned luxuries out of reach for the common family. Non-profit ‘British Restaurants’, an idea which emerged from the Blitz and which were run by local authorities, offered cheap self-service meals in more than 2,000 locations. But normal restaurants, perhaps oddly, kept going too.

  Diaries of the war years show that many of the better off did manage to drink and dine remarkably well for a long time. Churchill’s private secretary Jock Colville, who certainly managed to, noted in a Censorship Report on ‘home opinion’ in February 1941 ‘a general expectation that this war must bring the end of class distinction and the abolition of great inequalities of wealth. There is no anti-democratic feeling. Obviously – and rightly – the fact that rationing and shortages affect the rich very little, since they can pay the extra price and feed in well-stocked restaurants, is causing some bitterness.’ Beer, bread, potatoes and tobacco were never rationed during the war, but a grey diet of pies, hotpots, fake sweets and cakes made from stodge, cheerily advertised by Woolton and Cripps, atop a huge propaganda effort of pamphlets, leaflets, press adverts and broadcasts, eventually drove most people mad. Horse-meat, seabirds, whale meat and other nasty surprises could be found lurking in the kitchen. A vigorous black-market economy began to flourish.

  Food was the most important rationed item, but soon petrol began to be unobtainable for private cars, and clothing was tightly contro
lled. As with furniture, china and cosmetics, the range being produced was radically cut down to make production more efficient. ‘Utility’ clothing from a narrow range of textiles, with a maximum number of buttonholes and pleats and a limited variety of underwear, arrived in 1942. Women found that most kinds of decoration were now banned and that skirts became shorter, jackets boxier. Men, already finding it hard to get razor blades, found they were allowed fewer pockets, no turn-ups on their trousers, no long socks and shirts which were so short they didn’t tuck well into waistbands. Most forms of furniture stopped being manufactured and a limited stock of ‘utility’ designs was offered instead. Cups came in white only, often without handles. Pencils were reduced to only a few kinds; the same went for bedding and household goods. Any form of ‘frippery’ was officially condemned. Even toys went on to the list of banned products. All this was brought about and policed by a new state machine which operated with something of the same rigour and attention to detail later found in post-war Stalinist Russia.

  This found acceptance not only because it seemed to reduce class divisions when the besieged country needed to feel united, but because it was self-evidently necessary. More than 40,000 merchant seamen were drowned, blown up or burned to death keeping the sea lanes to Britain open. The Battle of the Atlantic was fought out between U-boats and aircraft, convoys and mines, German raiders and tiny corvettes, with both sides inventing and then countering new technologies – a never-ending zig-zag of successes and failures. This was the real siege. Both Churchill and Hitler had envisaged a sea war still dominated by the old capital ships. Both were wrong. There were buccaneering fights, notably the sinking of the large, if outdated, battleship Hood by the newer German Bismarck, and the subsequent chasing down and sinking of that ship. In the Pacific war, the duels between the US and Japanese navies were very important, demonstrating how air power now trumped surface fleets. In the Atlantic, which mattered most to Britain, the capital surface ships became a sideshow. The life or death struggle was led from Brittany by Admiral Doenitz, the leader of the U-boat fleet, based in a sardine-merchant’s château; and in Britain by a polio-stricken civilian lawyer, Rodger Winn, who, along with a chartered accountant, ran the Royal Navy’s Submarine Tracking Room in an ugly concrete building near Downing Street. Their game of bluff, counter-bluff, changing tactics and secret intercepts was as important to keeping Britain in the fight as any other part of the war.

  By the end of the war, the Germans lost more than half the 1,157 U-boats they had built. Across the world’s oceans, submarines had sunk more than 2,280 ships, mostly U-boat sinkings of merchant vessels trying to reach Britain. Both sides had made serious mistakes. If Hitler had understood earlier the potential war-winning power of the U-boats and spent more on building up and improving his fleet, he could have starved Britain of food and fuel in the spring of 1941 before America was ready to join the war. Had Britain used more aircraft to fight the U-boats rather than bomb German cities, she might have seen off the U-boat threat and saved the lives of tens of thousands of seamen. But war is always a competition about mistakes as well as insights. Both sides developed new technologies, from ‘snorkels’ allowing U-boats to sail long distances underwater, and ever deadlier mines on the German side, to refined airborne radar, depth charges and code-breaking on the Allied side. Small shifts could lead to huge effects.

  To give just one example: the breaking of the German Enigma code and the exploitation of secret traffic by the British academics, chess masters, mathematicians, linguists and military men at Bletchley Park was one of the war’s most celebrated scientific success stories. (It should be remembered that Polish mathematicians and agents, French spies, British naval boarding parties and lackadaisical German intelligence officers were all part of the Enigma tale too.) Without Enigma intercepts the Submarine Tracking Room would have been half blind. The machines worked by scrambling information with three notched rotors, and in the summer of 1941, beginning to suspect that their codes may have been cracked, the Germans added a fourth rotor, greatly increasing the odds against code-breaking. Allied shipping losses rose four-fold.148 In the end, new radar systems, new anti-submarine rockets, new depth charges and new British naval ciphers would defeat even the ‘wolf-pack’ tactics of Doenitz. During their most dangerous phase, in 1941–2, the U-boat commanders and seamen became celebrities in Germany. But then the U-boat losses mounted. With air cover spreading even into the ‘Atlantic gap’ their kill-rates fell dramatically until, in the final year of the war, most of the once war-winning submarines were tied-up targets at home.

  This war of vast ocean wastes, appalling weather and applied science had a direct and almost immediate effect not only on what the British ate and how they dressed but on what Britain looked like, too. ‘Dig for Victory’, cried tens of millions of posters and leaflets. Parks, playing fields and verges were turned over to vegetables. Nearly 7,000 ‘pig clubs’ sprang up to raise domestic porkers. By the middle of the war a quarter of all fresh eggs were coming from people who had put up hutches and chicken wire in their gardens. Some 600,000 extra allotment gardens were carved out of lawns, flower beds and waste ground. Rabbits had a hard war. So did rats: about 1,000 of the famous 80,000-strong Women’s Land Army were employed as full-time rat hunters. But all this was as nothing compared to the expansion of mainstream agriculture. The amount of land under the plough rose by half. The land for potatoes doubled, and for wheat expanded by two-thirds, almost returning the look of rural Britain to mid-Victorian times. Downland, orchards and golf courses were all assaulted. It was not quite like the old days. British agriculture, like the German army, was still mostly horse-powered. Well over half a million horses were still working the fields by the end of the war. Yet meanwhile the number of tractors, mainly imported from America, had quadrupled. Excavators, new fertilizers and larger fields increased productivity. The voices down on the farm might be a mix of female cockney, broad Glasgow and foreign languages too: tens of thousands of Italian, and later German, prisoners were employed to harvest, milk, shear and sow.

  So even the quietest and most backward parts of Britain felt the effects of war, and the long battle of the U-boats and convoys. In 1939 rural Britain had been depressed and poverty stricken. It was not much written about, except by novelists, who sold a sentimental, pickled-in-aspic story of Saxon villages and humorous yokels. Agricultural Britain was largely ignored, both by the new Britain of light engineering and consumerism and by protesting left-wingers. It was left to struggling farmers, fox hunters and holidaymakers. Yet most farms had no mains water supply and only a quarter had electricity. Low farm wages, earth-floored cottages, minimal education and ageing villages were common to most of the country. In 1940, looking for ways both to employ artists and to protect the skills of traditional watercolour painting and drawing, there had begun a far-sighted scheme to record Britain before the Luftwaffe destroyed it. The Ministry of Labour, using American charity money, employed painters such as John Piper, Kenneth Rowntree and Phyllis Dimond to do just that. Their work adds up to a glorious and romantic picture book, but scarcely of Britain. It is mostly England and mostly villagey, rural England. Sir Kenneth Clark, the director of the National Gallery, had set out categories of subjects including ‘fine tracts of landscapes . . . old buildings about to be pulled down . . . Parish Churches . . . in a bad state of repair’ and country houses and parks because ‘these will be largely abandoned after the war and will either fall into disrepair or be converted into lunatic sanatoria’.149 Which made for charming pictures but were hardly the Luftwaffe’s central targets; the gap between how the people thought of rural Britain and how it really was both increased and then narrowed during the war. A wave of sentimentality about the old country, images of shire horses, swallows darting among the eves and old churches, was used to stiffen morale. And then, to their surprise, city dwellers – volunteer farm workers, Land Army girls, amateur pig owners and evacuees – began to learn the truth of country living. Many even
discovered that milk came from cows and potatoes did not grow on trees.

  Deserts, Olive Groves and Bitters

  The political challenges that shook Churchill were directly caused by military failures for which he himself was partly, though only partly, responsible. He was a great leader and a great politician. He was never a great general. Gallipoli had been a dreamer’s thrust, Norway too. (It is possible to spend too long poring over maps.) During the final days of the battle for France, Churchill had allowed his over-optimistic hope of keeping France in the fight to overwhelm military realities, arguing with generals until beaten back. In Greece and in North Africa the pattern continued. Today, though ‘Monty’, the ‘Desert Rats’, Rommel and El-Alamein are part of our folklore, it is often vaguely thought that the campaigns in Libya and Egypt were sideshows. This was what the Americans and Russians often said, but it was not true. Had Britain utterly defeated the Italians’ desert army early in the war, which came close to happening, then two years of fighting might have been avoided and the ‘soft underbelly’ of Nazi Europe would have been open to counter-attack by 1941. On the other hand, had British forces been ousted from Egypt by Rommel – and that seemed possible too – then a German vision of taking the oilfields of the Middle East in a pincer movement from the Caucasus and North Africa could have won the war for Hitler. The stakes were very high.