Dad's Army

by Graham McCann

  Churchill chose simply to ignore the objections, making a point of mentioning his preferred new name whenever and wherever he had occasion either to meet or to speak about the LDV. On 14 July, for example, he seized on the opportunity to broadcast the name to the nation, referring in passing to the existence ‘behind the Regular Army’ of ‘more than a million of the LDV, or, as they are much better called, the Home Guard’.42 Further resistance was futile. Churchill, as one of his colleagues freely conceded, possessed ‘a quite extraordinary capacity … for expressing in Elizabethan English the sentiments of the public’,43 and there could only be one winner in this, or any other, war of words. On 22 July, Eden, after another awkward meeting with Churchill, wrote despairingly in his diary: ‘We discussed LDV. He was still determined to change the name to Home Guard. I told him that neither officers nor men wanted the change, but he insisted.’44

  Churchill had won. On 23 July 1940, the Local Defence Volunteers officially became the Home Guard.45 From this moment on, the force would bear an unmistakable Churchillian signature. Sturdy, patriotic, loyal and dependable, the Home Guard, just like its spiritual leader, had ‘nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’, but was determined to achieve victory ‘however long and hard the road may be’.46 The LDV appealed to the head, the Home Guard to the heart. Writers, drawn in by its rich composition, found it an easy force to eulogise and, in some cases, romanticise. C. Day Lewis, for example, wrote a lyrical account of how he had helped ‘to guard the star-lit village’,47 while J. B. Priestley, in one of his regular BBC broadcasts, likened the first night that he shared on guard with ‘a parson, a bailiff, a builder, farmers and farm labourers’ to ‘one of those rich chapters of Thomas Hardy’s fiction in which his rustics meet in the gathering darkness of some Wessex hillside’:

  I think the countryman knows, without being told, that we hold our lives here, as we hold our farms, upon certain terms. One of those terms is that while wars still continue, while one nation is ready to hurl its armed men at another, you must if necessary stand up and fight for your own. And this decision comes from the natural piety of simple but sane men. Such men, you will notice, are happier now than the men who have lost that natural piety.

  Well, as we talked on our post on the hilltop, we watched the dusk deepen in the valleys below, when our women-folk listened to the news as they knitted by the hearth, and we remembered that these were our homes and that now at any time they might be blazing ruins, and that half-crazy German youths, in whose empty eyes the idea of honour and glory seems to include every form of beastliness, might soon be let loose down there.48

  There was nothing but society in the Home Guard. For the more retiring or aloof of individuals, moving straight from a pinched and hidebound privacy to a bold and busy community, the first rush of novelty proved acute. The poet John Lehmann set off to his local headquarters cradling ‘a volume of poems or a novel by Conrad’, but it was not long before he found himself listening intently instead ‘to dramatic detail of the more intimate side of village life that had been shrewdly and silently absorbed by the carpenter or builder in the course of their work. Gradually, the quiet, humdrum, respectable façade of the neighbourhood dropped away, and I had glimpses of violent passions … appalling vices … reckless ambitions … and innumerable fantastic evasions of the law.’49 The age range (especially during that first year, when the official upper limit of sixty-five was not rigidly enforced) was remarkable, with raw adolescents mixing with seasoned veterans. One unit contained an elderly storyteller who claimed to have been nursed by Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, but, as this would have made him at least 104 years old by the time of the current war, the detail seems dubious. The real doyen is generally accepted to have been the sprightly octogenarian Alexander Taylor, an ex-company sergeant major in the Black Watch, who had first seen action in the Sudan during 1884–5, and had gone on to serve in South Africa and Flanders before finally answering Eden’s call, deliberately misremembering his date of birth, picking up a pitchfork and marching proudly off to help guard his local gasworks.50

  Old soldiers such as Taylor were simply grateful for the chance, once again, to take part, but there were other veterans who were impatient not only to take part but also to take over. ‘The Home Guard,’ wrote George Orwell (then of the Primrose Hill platoon), ‘is the most anti-Fascist body existing in England at this moment, and at the same time is an astonishing phenomenon, a sort of People’s Army officered by Blimps.’51 The character of Colonel Blimp – the round-eyed, ruddy-faced, reactionary old windbag with the walrus moustache who regularly lectured the nation (‘Gad, sir … ’) from the confines of David Low’s satirical cartoons52 – had long been laughed at; now, in the flesh, he had to be lived with. It made sense for the Home Guard to make full use of the most experienced military men in its midst, and it was therefore no surprise that its earliest administrative appointments were weighted towards retired middle-and senior-ranking officers. Not all of the old grandees could serve in higher appointments – an East Sussex company had to accommodate no fewer than six retired generals, while one squad in Kensington-Belgravia consisted of eight former field-rank officers and one token civilian.53 The War Office privately acknowledged that it was inevitable that problems would be caused by ‘the masses of retired officers who have joined up, who are all registering hard and say they know much better than anyone else how everything should be done’.54 The urgent need for class to cohabit with class had led to a quelling of old conflicts. The presence of these haughty, hoary ex-officers, however, ensured that they would never be cancelled entirely. In one Devon village unit, for example, a fight broke out between a retired Army captain who, it was alleged, had ‘roped in his pals of like kind’, and a young man who had ‘asked why he hadn’t been invited to join’ and had been informed that he did not measure up to the required social standards.55 The novelist A. G. Street noted how the most snobbish of old soldiers would turn up for training ‘clad in their old regimentals, pleading that the issue uniform did not fit’, and would make men ‘almost mutinous’ by regularly flaunting the full regalia of a distinguished military past:

  [I]n some cases it would seem that winning the war was a trivial thing compared with the really important one of always establishing rank and position. So they disobeyed orders and wore their old uniforms, just to prove to everybody that once they had been colonels. In fact, some of them, if given a choice between a heaven minus all class distinctions and a hell that insisted on them, would definitely prefer the latter.56

  The War Office, straining to strike the right diplomatic note, took steps to settle things down. ‘Though this is a deeply united country,’ said Sir Edward Grigg, ‘it is immensely various; and the Home Guard reflects its almost infinite variety of habit and type. The home-bred quality must not be impaired in order to secure the uniformity and organisation which are necessary for armed forces of other sorts. We want the Home Guard to have a military status as unimpeachable as that of any Corps or Regiment … But we do not want it to be trained or strained beyond its powers as a voluntary spare-time Force.’57 On 6 November 1940, it was announced in the House of Commons that the Home Guard, ‘which has hitherto been largely provisional in character’, was to be given ‘a firmer and more permanent shape’; it was now, like the Regular Army, to have commissioned officers and NCOs, a fixed organisation, systematic training and better uniforms (battledress, trench-capes, soft service caps and steel helmets) and weapons (automatic rifles, machine guns and grenades).58 On 19 November, Grigg announced that, as ‘there had been criticism’ of some of the early appointments, all existing and future officers would now have to go before an independent selection board, which would ignore each man’s ‘political, business [and] social affiliations’ and consider only his ability ‘to command the confidence of all ranks under the special circumstances and conditions of the locality concerned’. Likening the force to ‘a lusty infant … strong of constitution, powerful of lung and avid
, like all healthy infants, for supplies’, he promised to remain attentive to its needs. ‘It is Britain incarnate,’ he declared, ‘an epitome of British character in its gift for comradeship in trouble, its resourcefulness at need, its deep love of its own land, and its surging anger at the thought that any invader should set foot on our soil.’ No one, Grigg insisted, wanted the Home Guard to lose the ‘free and easy, home-spun, moorland, village-green, workshop or pithead character [that was] essential to its strength and happiness’, but it had grown so fast – ‘like a mustard tree’ – that it now required ‘sympathetic attention to its needs and difficulties’ in order for it to become truly ‘efficient in its own way as a voluntary, auxiliary, part-time Force’.59

  Now that the Home Guard had won the War Office’s attention it was determined never to lose it. ‘They are a troublesome and querulous party,’ moaned General Pownall to his diary. ‘There is mighty little pleasing them, and the minority is always noisy.’60 This constant carping was in fact their one reliable weapon. ‘The Home Guard always groused,’ acknowledged one former member. ‘Grousing is a useful vent for what otherwise might become a disruptive pressure of opinion. And in the Home Guard it was almost always directed to a justifiable purpose – the attainment of higher efficiency. “Give us more and better arms, equipment, instruction, practice, drill, field exercises, range-firing, anything and everything which will make us better soldiers”: that formed the burden of most Home Guard grousing.’61 Whenever prominent volunteers did not trust the War Office to act upon some particular request, they would simply go straight to the top and appeal directly to the ever-sympathetic Churchill. Pownall was well aware of which way the wind was blowing: ‘The H.G. are voters first and soldiers afterwards,’ he observed. ‘What they think they need, if they say so loudly enough, they will get.’62

  Pownall had never been happy in his onerous role as the Home Guard’s Inspector-General. In October, Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Eastwood63 – a younger man championed by Churchill – took over the Home Guard and the changes continued to come. In November, Eastwood was ‘upgraded’ to the new position of Director-General and handed a more powerful directorate within the War Office.64 The first half of 1941 saw a marked tightening-up of Home Guard organisation, as well as far more active involvement by regulars in administration and training. The first anniversary of the force was marked in May with a morale-boosting message of congratulation from King George VI, who also invited volunteers from various London units to stand on sentry duty at Buckingham Palace.65 In November, it was announced that conscription would be introduced in order to keep the Home Guard up to strength. Under the National Service (No. 2) Act, all male civilians aged between eighteen and fifty-one could, from January 1942, be ordered to join the Home Guard, and, once enrolled, would be liable to prosecution in a civil court if they failed to attend up to forty-eight hours of training or guard duties each month. Once recruited, they could not leave before reaching the age of sixty-five (although existing volunteers had the right to resign before the new law took effect on 17 February 1942).66 This influx of ‘directed men’67 – the opprobrious term ‘conscript’ was avoided – changed the character of the organisation still further, erasing the last traces of the old LDV, moving beyond the original Corinthian esprit de corps and accelerating the transformation of an awkward political after-thought into an integral and well-regarded part of active Home Defence.

  Some problems, however, proved more obdurate than others. One of these, as far as the men at the War Office were concerned, was women. Back in June 1940, the government – concerned, it was suggested, that other key voluntary organisations, such as the Women’s Voluntary Service, might in future be deprived of personnel due to increased ‘competition for a dwindling source of supply’68 – had ruled that ‘women cannot be enrolled in the L.D.V.’.69 The decision did nothing to deter the more determined of campaigners, such as the redoubtable Labour MP Edith Summerskill, who proceeded to form her own lobby group, Women’s Home Defence, and argued her case so persuasively and passionately that some of Whitehall’s frailest males branded her an ‘Amazonian’.70 In spite of the fact that Churchill agreed with Summerskill, and in spite of the fact that thousands of women had been contributing to the force from the very beginning as clerks, typists, telephonists, cooks and messengers, the War Office would hold out until April 1943, when, having exhausted all excuses, it finally agreed to relent and permit women to serve, in a limited capacity, as ‘Women’s Home Guard Auxiliaries’.71 ‘It was generally felt,’ recalled one Home Guard officer, ‘that these conditions should have been more generous and that women should have been treated with more consideration. To mention one grievance, they were not issued with uniforms and this, according to rumour, was for some political reason. They were without steel helmets and service respirators, although at “Action Stations” they worked alongside with, and [were] exposed to the same risks as, the men.’72

  Weapons, or rather the scarcity of them, represented another persistent problem. Ever since the massive loss of weapons and equipment at Dunkirk, the production of standard military munitions had been fully taken up by the urgent needs of the regulars and nothing could be spared for the part-time force. Spirits did rise in 1941 when the Thompson (or ‘tommy’) sub-machine gun, a formidable weapon familiar to every film-goer from endless gangster movies, was issued, but soon fell again when it was promptly withdrawn and redistributed to the Commandos. Aside from a limited supply of outdated rifles, the Home Guard had to make do with bayonets, a variety of hazardous home-made grenades – such as the Woolworth or Thermos bomb (described by one disenchanted veteran as ‘just a lump of gelignite in a biscuit tin’)73 and the Sticky bomb (a glass flask filled with nitroglycerine and squeezed inside an adhesive-coated sock – ‘when throwing it, it was wise not to brush it against your clothes, for there it was liable to stick firmly, and blow up the thrower instead of the enemy objective’).74 Then there was the Sten gun, a cheaply-made but relatively effective weapon which was only made available at a gun-to-man ratio of one to four. It was summed up by one distinctly underwhelmed recuit as ‘a spout, a handle, and a tin box’.75 There were also such strange and cumbersome contraptions as the Northover projector, which cost under £10 to produce, fired grenades with the aid of a toy pistol cap and a black powder charge, and was likened by one volunteer to ‘a large drainpipe mounted on twin legs’.76 The most despised of all these weapons was, without any doubt, the pike. Although cheeky youths were known to cry out ‘Gadzooks!’ whenever pike-bearing Home Guards marched by, the 1940s version – consisting of a long metal gas-pipe with a spare bayonet spot-welded in one end – bore scant resemblance to its ancient forebears. Journalists dismissed them immediately as ‘worse than useless’ and ‘demoralising’,77 politicians criticised them as ‘an insult’,78 and incredulous quartermasters put them swiftly into storage. The frustration never faded: too many men, for too long a time, found themselves still unfamiliar with firearms.

  A third abiding problem was red tape. In spite of the countless War Office assurances to the contrary, the Home Guard grew increasingly bureaucratic. ‘[T]oo much instructional paper – printed, cyclostyled, or typewritten – was produced and circulated,’ recalled one volunteer. ‘There seemed to be a paragraph and subparagraph to cover every tiniest event which could possibly happen, not only to every man, but to every buckle and bootlace. In consequence, the administration of Home Guard units tended to follow the placid, careful, and elaborate course of civil service routine, and many a man felt encouraged to take shelter behind an appropriate regulation rather than think and act for himself.’79 The more that the living reality of war seemed obscured by its paper description, the more enraged the most recalcitrant souls, such as George Orwell, became. ‘After two years,’ he wrote, ‘no real training has been done, no specialised tactics worked out, no battle positions fixed upon, no fortifications built – all this owing to endless changes of plan and complete vagueness as to what we are
supposed to be aiming at … Nothing ever happens except continuous dithering, resulting in progressive disillusionment all round. The best one can hope is that it is much the same on the other side.’80

  In spite of its myriad imperfections, however, the Home Guard went on to make a genuine difference. Ever since the start of the Blitz in September 1940, it had come to be valued not just, nor perhaps even primarily, as an anti-invasion force but also, and increasingly, as a vital contributor to civil defence – locating and extinguishing incendiary bombs, clearing rubble, guarding damaged banks, pubs and shops, directing traffic, assisting in rescue work, first aid and fire-fighting, and generally making itself useful in crisis situations. Tales of incompetence – often comic, occasionally tragic – would, inevitably, be told and retold (such as the time a bemused platoon from the 1st Berkshire Battalion mistook a distant cow’s swishing tail for some kind of inscrutable ‘dot-dash movement of a flag’, or the occasion when a Liverpool unit’s bid to train on a patch of waste land was thwarted by a gang of small boys who protested that ‘we was playing ‘ere first’),81 but the stories of compassion and courage were legion.82 One Buckinghamshire platoon, it was reported, ‘accommodated, fed and slept in their guardroom approximately 250 mothers and children turned out of their homes through time bombs. Half a dozen tired men of the night guard received and fed the refugees out of their rations, and then with umbrella and bowler hat went to town to do a “day’s work”.’83 Communities were comforted, spirits were lifted, and lives were saved.