Domestic Soldiers

by Jennifer Purcell

  The ‘poisonous ideas’ refer not only to the animosity towards the British, but also their aggressive racism. When racial matters cropped up in the news, Edie wrote with authority and sympathy, though not without a hint of racism herself. She held a deep conviction that the ‘colour bar’ should be abolished, not only throughout the empire, but globally. Early on in the war, Edie was happy to learn that the ‘coloured children of my country’, when given a chance, volunteered in droves. Military service was an excellent opportunity, she thought, to give them a good job, decent food and a chance to better themselves. Plus, it highlighted the treachery of Boers, demonstrating that colour was a poor indicator of loyalty.

  When famed West Indian cricketer Learie Constantine was refused a room in 1943 at a hotel in Russell Square, London, Edie was delighted to learn that he sued them. Although Edie told M-O that she felt ‘many English folk have no colour sense at all,’ this was not the first time that racial discrimination had reared its head in wartime British society. Just two years earlier, the distinguished Indian jurist, poet, novelist and vice-president of Delhi and Nagpur universities, Sir Hari Singh Gour, had been turned away by another West End hotel. Even the Royal Navy’s recruitment policy was questioned when George Price, a young man born in Edinburgh of a West Indian father, was refused entrance into the service in 1940.

  The problem of racism in Britain, however, became exacerbated once American GIs arrived en masse. By July 1942, just six months after Americans landed on British soil, complaints of American mistreatment of black Britons began to filter through official channels. Indeed, Constantine’s experience was directly related to this issue, for the hotel manager who denied the dynamic cricketer a room maintained that the American officers who frequented the hotel disliked the presence of blacks.

  Popular opinion in Britain seemed to be with Constantine. Newspapers covered the story and Parliament debated the issue, coming to the conclusion that, as Home Secretary Herbert Morrison put it, ‘responsible public opinion’ would ‘condemn’ discrimination against ‘a fellow British subject on the grounds of race or colour’.16 Learie Constantine won his suit. Still, this by no means solved the problems of race. Constantine, who also acted as a local Ministry of Labour welfare officer for Jamaicans in Liverpool, later complained to the ministry after being accosted by two American GIs in a pub that the government was unwilling to confront the issue with their allies. Indeed, it was a delicate situation, for Britain needed both American and imperial support.

  To Edie, the hotel incident shed light on British rule throughout the empire. ‘It is more than time that we decided if the coloured people in our Empire are to enjoy the privileges whites in it enjoy,’ she argued. Otherwise, ‘We should withdraw from their countries in favour of others who will afford them equality. We can’t have it both ways.’ Her openness towards ‘coloured people’, however, was tempered by an underlying assumption that they could not lead their own countries without help. They were, after all, as she put it, ‘children’ and according to Edie, it was therefore up to some other nation, presumably European or American, to give them equality.

  Even if her feelings were fraught with contradictions, at base, Edie saw herself as a champion for justice and equality. This was especially true in the shifting sands of women’s rights during the war. In August 1942, controversy flared on the home front when the government instituted compulsory fire-watching duties upon women. Women who were pregnant or who had children under the age of fourteen were exempt, but all others between twenty and forty-five years of age were required to either take turns watching at their place of employment or to register for local duties.

  Objections to this new directive abounded. Letters to the editors of newspapers across the country registered the variety of those complaints. Some women argued that they were already pulling double shifts, working in full-time employment and coming home to take care of their families; the addition of overnight fire-watching duty was entirely too much to ask, they thought. Men chimed into the debate as well. One man who wrote to the Liverpool Daily Post felt that the order placed women in dangerous work that should be carried out by men only, and was thus a ‘serious reflection on my manhood’. Others worried less about women’s physical safety, and instead felt that the order put women’s moral safety in jeopardy. In the darkness of the night, who knew what moral dangers women would face?

  Edie thought the moral panic embedded in this debate ridiculous. First, she argued, women were already doing the work: she had served as a firewatcher during Sheffield’s Blitz the year before and understood the realities of the work. To her, the moral arguments against women’s fire watching suggested that women could not be trusted in the presence of men under the cover of darkness. ‘If my husband had so little trust in me when the country called on me to do a duty away from home at night, I would tell him precisely where he gets off,’ she told M-O. She didn’t doubt that there would be liaisons, but she felt that the debate also demonstrated the ‘nonsensical’ idea that women’s transgressions were worse than men’s. ‘Does it not occur to men’, she enquired rhetorically, ‘who sleep with odd women that some man could be as indignant about them as they are at the thought of their wives doing it?’

  What truly infuriated Edie about the compulsory fire-watching order, however, was its underlying inequality: a woman injured in the line of duty did not receive the same compensation as a man. Under the Personal Injuries Act for civilians, men were given 7 shillings more per week than women who sustained the same injuries during civil defence work. Labour MP Dr Edith Summerskill, who fought in the House of Commons against this discrimination, summed up the issue when she asked the Minister of Pensions, Sir Walter Womersley, ‘Will the Right Honourable Gentleman say why a woman’s arm or leg is not of the same value as a man’s?’17

  This was the core of the issue for Edie, and, she told M-O, for the men and women alike who she knew supported women’s fire watching and equal compensation for injuries sustained during such work for the nation. When Home Secretary Herbert Morrison shut down Conservative MP Mavis Tate’s attempt to ensure that equal compensation would be part of the firewatching order before Parliament recessed in August 1942, Edie was furious. ‘It would serve the Government right if women refused,’ she told M-O. But, ‘Fortunate for the government, women are not so base as Gandhi and Co.’

  Things looked bleak that August for equal compensation, but soon the tide would turn. Fuelled by the efforts of Mavis Tate and Edith Summerskill, a committee was formed to investigate the matter in November. Based on their findings, the government reversed its stance on the issue, and in April 1943 equal compensation was granted for civil defence injuries.

  As things began to turn around for women’s rights in late 1942, so the tide began to change in the war. Rays of hope started to break through the bleak midwinter of the Allies’ war effort. After the devastating spring losses in the Far East earlier in the year, the British also found themselves in dire straits in Northern Africa, where British forces had been forced by German and Italian troops into pockets in eastern Egypt and near the Libyan port of Tobruk. At the end of June 1942, Tobruk surrendered, along with 30,000 British and South African troops. ‘Defeat is one thing,’ Churchill said of the loss at Tobruk, ‘disgrace is another.’18

  After Tobruk, General Erwin Rommel’s desert troops drove through Egypt to meet the British Eighth Army at El Alamein, about sixty miles west of Alexandria. Rommel would get no further. In late October 1942, British General Bernard Montgomery launched an attack that pushed the Germans 1,500 miles west, expelling them from Egypt and Libya. Two weeks after the attack began, British and American troops were landing west of the Germans on the shores of French Morocco and Algeria. Rommel now faced significant Allied forces on both the east and the west.

  The situation in Russia was also beginning to improve that November. On 23 November, over 200,000 Germans found themselves surrounded at Stalingrad. Though fierce fighting would ensue until Janu
ary, the Nazi advance into the USSR had reached its limit. Russia would not fall. In India, Japanese forces stalled in the eastern region of Assam. Still, it was only, as Churchill put it, ‘the end of the beginning’.19

  Edie’s luck also began to change at the end of the year. As required, she registered with the labour exchange in March 1942 and for most of the year, checked-in regularly with the exchange, going on the interviews they arranged, but was never offered a position. Indeed, though (or perhaps because) she ‘pestered’ the exchange so often during this period, she could do little more than laugh and throw up her hands in disbelief when she received a letter from them stating that she needed to fill in another form, and answer the same questions she had done many times before, or she would be stricken from the register.

  Edie complied with the order, re-registered and was given a New Year’s gift when the exchange informed her she was to start an office job at a steel company in Sheffield on 4 January. The job was part-time and, though she was thrilled to work in a position that she felt used her talents and also had a direct effect on the war effort, she soon found that working and keeping the home going was not an easy task in wartime. Receiving a wage packet for the first time in years certainly was gratifying, but this was balanced by the sobering realization that, while the government continually urged women to find work, the home front was not set up for women who actually heeded that call.

  Four days after starting the job, the thrill of her first pay packet adding bounce to her step, Edie made her way to the shops. The first stop was the butcher’s, and it was there that the reality of the double burden of work and domesticity sank in. Though it was only 12.30, she was told there was no meat left. ‘Where was our ration then?’ she angrily queried. The butcher only blinked and stared back at her blankly. After a few heated comments about the uselessness of coupons and rationing, she left empty handed and vowed never again to patronize that shop. She ‘traipsed around’ town for two hours, but still came home with nothing. For dinner that night, she pulled together what little food she had left and made vegetables with dumplings and gravy, feeling a little triumphant that the gravy came out quite nice. But her husband baulked at the lack of meat on his plate. Incensed by his attitude, she took a ‘firm line’ – ‘When I work full-time, I shall have even less time to shop … It is not my fault if I can’t get things’– and told him he could very well go hungry that night. He did.

  Chapter Seven: The Sun Never Sets

  1 Quoted in Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged our Age (New York: Random House, 2008), p. 500.

  2 Clementine Churchill, quoted in Mary Soames, Winston and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills (New York: Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt, 2001), p. 460.

  3 Winston Churchill, The Second World War: Vol. 3, The Grand Alliance (New York: Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt, 1986), p. 551.

  4 Quoted in Christopher Alan Bayly and Timothy Norman Harper, Forgotten Armies: the Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005), p. 120.

  5 Churchill, Vol. 3, The Grand Alliance, p. 539.

  6 Anne O’Hare McCormick, ‘Churchill Rises to “Grand Proportions” of History’, New York Times, 27 December 1941, c18.

  7 ‘Churchill Speech Hailed in Congress’, New York Times, 27 December 1941, p. 3.

  8 Quoted in Herman, Gandhi and Churchill, p. 478.

  9 Churchill, Never Give In!, p. 330.

  10 Quoted in Calder, The People’s War, p. 274.

  11 Quoted in Herman, Gandhi and Churchill, p. 481.

  12 Calder, The People’s War, p. 272.

  13 Quoted in Herman, Gandhi and Churchill, p. 489.

  14 Quoted in ibid., p. 489.

  15 Quoted in ibid., p. 493.

  16 Herbert Morrison, in Hansard Parliamentary Papers, Written Answers, 23 September 1943.

  17 Edith Summerskill, in Hansard Parliamentary Papers, Written Answers, 7 August 1941.

  18 Winston Churchill, The Second World War: Vol. 4, Hinge of Fate (New York: Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt, 1986), p. 344.

  19 Quoted in Calder, The People’s War, p. 305.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  FIGHT LIKE HELL UNTIL ALL ARE EQUAL

  Irene stared out at the hill behind her home. Once, horses grazed and farmers ploughed the soft and verdant slopes, but they had long since passed into memory, now only a lifeless, gritty mound glowered back at her: ‘Dull, black, low hedges’ cut across the barren hill like scars, and a melancholy slag heap arose to dominate the view just to the left of Irene’s back garden. As she turned away from the hill and entered the low mean building before her, she was utterly depressed; the hill view punctuated the gloomy, ‘God and man forsaken hole’ that Irene called home.

  She resented that she had spent years there, ‘wasting my talents’, making do, mending and patching the old, decrepit structure. Increasingly she was confined to her home by a variety of ailments, including rheumatism and sciatica; the bleak walls seemed to smother her. To Irene’s mind, what made it worse was that, with all its detractions, the cramped two-bedroom house wasn’t even hers. Though most of their friends and family had managed to purchase their own homes before the Great War or afterwards, Tom and Irene simply could not afford to. Grinding poverty and unemployment in the inter-war years had wasted away all of their savings, and uncertainty made them loath to consider buying, even when Tom was in work.

  The war changed all this. As early as April 1940, one journalist reported that Tyneside, where the Grants lived, was humming again after years of soul-rending, emasculating inactivity. Incomes began to increase as wages rose and the drive for more war materiel multiplied opportunities for overtime. By 1943, Britain was operating at near full employment: the 60,000 out of work consisted mostly of those who were moving from one job to another. In fact, the nation that only six years before had experienced nearly 70 per cent unemployment in some of its hardest-hit areas was now recruiting workers from abroad. In this atmosphere, Tom’s work at the chemical plant seemed secure, and the couple once again began saving.

  Chafing in the crowded, dingy and rented accommodation, Irene and her two daughters began searching for a new home that they could afford. Their search of the surrounding communities commenced in the winter and spring of 1942/43, as British and American troops were squeezing Rommel’s troops into an untenable position in Tunisia, and Russian troops were driving Germans out of Stalingrad. On 15 November, bells rang across Britain to announce the first significant Allied victory of the war at El Alamein. Most felt the celebration presumptive. Helen Mitchell was ‘appalled by the bells … They are ringing the bells now, but they’ll be wringing their hands soon,’ she was sure. For Irene, the bells sounded joyous, if a little premature: ‘It wasn’t as if war was over … Now let’s get on and not rejoice until something bigger shows,’ she thought.

  Rejoicing could wait until a solid victory was achieved, but the house search could not. While she and her daughters were enthusiastic about the possibilities of owning a new home, Tom was deeply concerned and did all he could to dissuade them from their endeavours. The wartime economic boom simply couldn’t last, he believed, and knowing how the peace had played out after the last war, the future looked bleak: all he could imagine was a replay of the hard times of the inter-war years. While Tom’s job remained stable, the family was comfortable, still he feared that it was financially dangerous to become homeowners.He was determined not to ‘be got into poverty again’, but Irene assured him that they had enough money to comfortably afford a new home. Still, he continued with the argument he always used to shut down Irene’s dream: high taxes, an economic slump and a worthless housing market would surely follow the war and ruin them if they made the move. ‘Oh! the pessimist!’ she exclaimed to her diary, ‘I say we’ve waited twenty-seven years and have a right to move for the sake of the girls (and me).’

  Quietly, she resolved not to give up despite Tom’s fears; she knew the finances bet
ter than her husband and now decided to take control of all housing matters, knowing Tom would eventually come around. With a new determination, Irene retired to bed, dreaming of a new home.

  Tom wasn’t alone in his dreary vision of the post-war future. Most people worried that, in peacetime, the economic hardships and unemployment that had plagued inter-war Britain would return, and the government would once again turn its back on the people. Very early on in the war, however, many were determined that this time it would be different; lessons could be drawn, they believed, from the callousness of inter-war public policy and the greed of vested interests. In 1940, from Dunkirk until the Blitz heated up in the autumn, J.B. Priestley built his stunning celebrity on this issue.

  In those uncertain and momentous days of 1940, hopes for a new world order abounded, and Priestley shaped the debate. In his Sunday night BBC Postscripts, he set the tone for the People’s War, reworking Churchill’s moving, but often officious and militaristic, rhetoric into a homely and uplifting chat, embracing everyone in the war effort, and, more importantly, mobilizing them for the People’s Peace. After the last war, Priestley lamented, the very ones who won the war were abandoned: veterans and their families were left to ‘take their chance in a world in which every gangster and trickster and stupid insensitive fool or rogue was let loose’.1 This time, he hoped, the people would work together to build an equitable peace: no one would be left behind.

  Most Sunday nights, after the nine o’clock news, that summer and autumn of 1940, J.B. Priestley introduced his burgeoning audience to ‘ordinary people’ and ordinary scenes he’d encountered on his travels across the country: cheerful, good-hearted people and the simple towns and countryside that were the backbone of the nation. For example, there was the young RAF pilot and his wife trying to cobble together a life during the Battle of Britain; the baker in Bradford who refused to close his shop after being bombed; the invalid who served up bubbly ‘repartee’ and spread cheer through the ranks as she was evacuated from a hospital on the Isle of Wight; even an indomitable mallard duck who bravely marshalled her ducklings despite the Blitz.2 In these evocative and heart-warming tales of Britain, Priestley reminded the people of the very best that lay within them, of the humour, the bravery and the humanity that made them not only different from the ‘automaton’ Nazis, but that would ultimately help them prevail against the forces of evil.3