Domestic Soldiers

by Jennifer Purcell

  Most were shocked by Churchill’s so-called ‘Gestapo speech’. The revered and respected war horse had opted to appeal not to a higher sense of Britishness and optimism, but rather to continue the fear and uncertainty of wartime; it was as if he had forgotten (or, indeed, had never learned) all that the people had fought for in the People’s War. Churchill and the Conservatives, dubbed the ‘National Party’ during this speech, seemed to have little agenda beyond rolling things back to the 1930s and running on the strength of the great man’s popularity. Even those who held an ‘admiration [for Churchill] … amounting to idolatry’, as Vita Sackville-West confessed, were shaken by his speech.2 Nella Last, who similarly harboured an unwavering love for Churchill, was also ‘disappointed’ with the speech. ‘I felt it lacked dignity – was a bit too “puckish” for the time or place,’ she wrote to M-O. ‘It will’, Nella was convinced, ‘start a bit of mud slinging and ear slapping.’ Those who were Labour supporters, like Edie Rutherford, listened with disgust. ‘Same old thing, and he’ll get in and all his pale,’ she spitted, ‘because most folk are still dead in ignorance in this country.’

  When Clement Attlee took the microphone the next night, his voice calm and reassuring, he stressed that Churchill had made a gaffe, for the Prime Minister ‘wanted the electors to understand how great the difference between Winston Churchill the great leader in war of a united nation, and Mr. Churchill the party leader of the Conservatives’.3 Indeed, Attlee struck a deep chord here, for many – as noted by M-O – felt Churchill to be a great war leader, but as Irene Grant had stressed often in her correspondence with M-O, ‘not for the people’. In fact, after Churchill’s speech, Irene noted it was a ‘grand marvellous Tory speech. . . we who wondered had he a little leftish feeling, now know he’s pure Tory with not a thought for the people.’

  From the beginning, when J.B. Priestley had gone on air in 1940 to push for a better future through the People’s War, Churchill had always been reluctant to entertain such utopian sentiments. In 1942–3, as people excitedly discussed Beveridge’s template for a new world order, he was obstinate. Churchill’s Gestapo speech was not only in bad taste for connecting Labour with Nazism, but it also reminded the people that he refused to look to the future – a better future. Attlee’s speech certainly threw a bit of mud, for instance, when he said, ‘when [Churchill] talks of the danger of Labour mismanaging finance’, he had conveniently forgotten ‘his own disastrous record at the Exchequer’ in the 1920s; but Attlee’s speech was much more hopeful and focused on the future. ‘The men and women of this country who have endured great hardships in the war are asking what kind of life awaits them in the peace,’ he asserted. ‘They seek the opportunity of leading reasonably secure and happy lives, and they deserve to have it.’4 Attlee talked about the questions that mattered as Britain looked to the future.

  The prime election issue, as Britons envisioned the future, was housing. Gallup polls in June found that 40 per cent of people considered housing to be the most important issue, far beyond even the next highest-rated, social security (14 per cent), and a majority polled believed Labour was the best party to handle it. The problem was massive: over three million properties, most of which were private dwellings, had been decimated in the Blitz. One answer to the problem was prefabricated houses. In Sheffield and its suburbs, new prefabs were erected and on view to the public in July. Edie Rutherford reported that the boxy non-descript houses looked ‘awful’ on the outside, but were ‘well fitted up on the inside’. The cost was astonishing, she reported: £900, ‘which seems terrible when one thinks of what one could get for that sum prewar’. Still, ‘Anything is better than mother-in-law.’ As one woman reported after visiting a post-war housing exhibition in London, ‘I’m so desperate for a house I’d like anything. Four walls and a roof are the height of my ambition.’5

  The extent to which the housing shortage was a major grievance that summer was illustrated in the actions taken by ex-servicemen in Brighton. Coming home from war and finding little or inadequate housing for their families, groups of ex-servicemen, dubbed ‘vigilantes’ by the press, began taking over empty houses. Many were frustrated at the bureaucracy involved in officially requisitioning unoccupied private property (some of which had stood empty for the entire war) during such a housing dearth and finally took the law into their hands.6 Several times during July Edie cheered for the vigilantes. ‘Hurrah for the Vigilantes. Maybe they are wrong, but why can’t authority do what they are doing? Until it does, I hope vigilantism spreads,’ she told M-O. Eventually, convinced by the movement, the Ministry of Health gave power to local authorities to speed up the process. Edie marked the news with a resounding, ‘Hurrah!’, happy to see ‘democracy in action. Who says it doesn’t pay to kick up a fuss agen all the laws?’

  By the time the Ministry of Health acted in July, the election had taken place, and on 26 July the results of the 5 July election were finally trumpeted on the BBC. Although a great deal of cynicism and some apathy shot through the campaign, voter turnout was an impressive 73 per cent, helped, in part by the beautiful summer weather the nation enjoyed on election day. Edie Rutherford and her husband cast their votes for Labour, as did Alice Bridges, Irene Grant and Natalie Tanner. Tanner had spent most of June and early July stumping for the party, helping out with administrative matters and attending party meetings.

  When she went into town on 5 July, Natalie ran into a friend who was a staunch Conservative, and, ‘Despite my red rose [he] stood me a glass of beer and I stood him one despite his National colours.’ After this friendly exchange, the man (a colliery owner) proceeded to tell Natalie that Labour simply could not nationalize coal mines. ‘You must have discipline in mines,’ he argued, ‘and our mines are so peculiar anyway that you can’t have up to date machinery in them, and anyway the miners don’t want labour saving equipment.’ Natalie felt as though she’d been transported back to the nineteenth century. Indeed, he even cited the machine-breaking Luddite movement of that century as evidence for his claims.

  Nella Last spent the early days of July on holiday at an old guest house in Bardsea, just up the coast road from Barrow. On the 5th, she and her husband went to Barrow to vote – Conservative – and then off to the market town of Ulverston. Few in Ulverston or at the guest house in Bardsea seemed interested in discussing the election. ‘I never saw so many people “caring less” about a thing,’ she observed. Election day passed enjoyably in Ulverston, with little talk of electoral matters among the crowd from Bardsea, but change was in the air. Stopping in a pub for a chat and swift drink, Nella noticed most of the customers were young women. Although they looked like ‘nice ones’, they were seasoned pub-goers who clearly knew how to order a pint. As the women sat talking, Nella was alarmed to notice that upon crossing their legs, they showed ‘well above bare knees’. With their cigarettes and relaxed attitude, ‘They seemed so “independent”.’

  Election Day for Helen Mitchell was exhilarating and rewarding. The woman who could barely get through a day of domestic work without taking a nap spent fourteen hours that day helping out at the Labour committee rooms. It was, she told M-O, the ‘most enjoyable day in years’. Unfortunately, the next day, she was ‘the little woman again’, doing laundry, sundry chores around the house and shopping in town. Later in the afternoon, she was amused to open the door to a gypsy, who told her fortune. ‘Good luck coming,’ Helen cheerfully announced, ‘shall marry again and move, very lucky!’

  Such promises were a welcome fantasy for Helen, who had been locked in a bitter struggle with Peter over living arrangements since April. It was an old tale – a story she’d relived over and over during thirty years of marriage. Peter had a predilection for what Helen called ‘genuine olde-worlde houses’ with history and charm, which she absolutely despised. For her, there was no charm, only dust, draughts and useless rooms that oozed centuries of filth that ensured her everlasting imprisonment in a domestic hell. He had moved her to Scotland after the First W
orld War, quit his job in Scotland once she’d finally felt comfortable there and moved to another unmanageable home near London and finally settled in Kent, all without taking Helen’s feelings into consideration or consulting her first. To make matters worse, Peter rarely lived in the houses to which he bound his wife. Instead, he treated his home as if it were a country hotel that he visited for the weekend, never considering that by doing so he made his wife no more than a ‘servant in own house’ – a phrase she used often to describe her situation.

  Anticipating the war’s end in April 1945, Mitchell began to look for a new home to replace the one she’d come to loathe. The media buzzed with excitement about rebuilding Britain with new efficient homes, and she hoped to find a small one that would enable her to keep up respectable appearances, and also allow time for her once again to teach elocution and become involved in theatre. Peter also seemed interested in finding a new home, but, as usual, the two had vastly different ideas. He wanted to move closer to work, and though he humoured her by looking at small houses, he soon became obsessed with yet another unwieldy home, in Beckenham. It was advertised in The Times as an ‘attractive detached house’ with nine bedrooms, three reception rooms, a billiards room, a three-car garage and garden – hardly the small modern home in the country Helen had envisaged.

  As he had done throughout their thirty years together, Peter once again made the decision to buy the house without consulting his wife. Furthermore, he spent an additional £375 (the house cost £3,500) purchasing ‘filthy old linoleum’, curtains, billiard room fittings and electric fittings – again, without her approval. Helen was ‘appalled’ and ‘shocked to the core’ by his utter lack of economy and taste. When Peter showed her their new home, she told M-O it was,

  Even more appalling than I thought … ragged linoleums … every room breaks out in the rich ornate vulgar style of the low wealthy business man. Kitchenry vast rambling and squalid. Whole place obscene. Light fittings give one stomach ache. I feel No! To live alone there and devote one’s life to trying to do the daily cleaning ending with late evening meals, beyond my physical strength and an insult to my beliefs in design and taste.

  She called it the ‘horror mansion’ or, in typically sarcastic fashion, ‘Linoleum Lodge’. To make matters worse, her husband had bought the rambling house with his workers in mind. She, the middle-class aesthete, could now look forward to sharing the vulgar ‘lodge’ with ‘toughs’ from her husband’s factory.

  During the summer of 1945, as the election campaign raged on the national scene, Mitchell struggled to make her husband understand how she felt about the prospect of moving into Linoleum Lodge. The rambling old house, with multiple lodgers, would mean, she argued, the continuation of her slavish existence. Furthermore, it would exacerbate her condition, since the house was closer to Peter’s work, and therefore, he would necessarily be home more often, wanting food and to be waited on. Neither Peter nor William would lend a sympathetic ear to Helen’s concerns. They insisted she could call on servants to assist her, but she knew the reality of the situation. Even if she could procure help, she knew there were very few who could live up to her exacting standards. Night after night, she fought with her husband, tried to coax him to change his mind, cried and otherwise bemoaned her damnable existence.

  In July and August, failing to dissuade her husband from his decision and confronting a vast mansion teeming with work and working-class lodgers, Helen toyed with ideas of escape. She could leave him; but Helen did not seem to entertain the idea of divorce so much as living apart. Though certainly fraught with problems, living separately had been a generally acceptable situation during the war – at least more successful than the prospects she faced that summer. Barring an ‘act of God’ or awaiting the second marriage that the travelling gypsy had assured Helen was her fate, it seemed the best option.

  Yet reality soon crept in. Without the consent of her husband, and, more importantly, without his financial support, the plan could never work. Helen had no income of her own, and felt unable to support herself alone. In a particularly acrimonious fight in August, she learned that he would not condone or pay for separate accommodations. ‘Consider my position slavish,’ she fumed to M-O, ‘work damned hard in a hellish house at jobs I hate and think marriage bloody awful.’ The only available avenue of escape now was the one she took at the end of this harrowing evening, and would continue to do for months: ‘to bed … doped heavily’.

  Aside from polling day, the one bright spot in the summer was the election return on 26 July. Though she had spent the day working ‘damned hard’, packing and cleaning, and though a ‘foul thunderstorm’ wore down her nerves, the results were promising. ‘Felt much less cynical and depressed as a result of the election,’ she wrote in her diary.

  Despite the auguries to the contrary (both a Gallup poll and Mass-Observation pointed to a Labour victory), most believed a Conservative victory to be a foregone conclusion. But Labour had won a landslide victory over Churchill’s National Party. ‘Well, well, well,’ Edie Rutherford enthused on the 27th, ‘who’d a thought it? Not I. Damn bad prophet me, but how GLAD I am.’ Natalie Tanner danced about her room in glee, and local Labour canvassers came out to Alice Bridges’ house to thank her for her support. ‘Yippee’, was all she had to say. Irene Grant was equally well chuffed.

  Labour picked up 212 seats to win a solid majority of 393 returned to Parliament, while the National Party could number only 213. Liberals were reduced to only twelve and, oddly enough, William Beveridge, the man who had whipped up such hope for building an equitable future in 1942, was among the casualties. Irene Grant’s Common Wealth Party was decimated. The leader, Sir Richard Acland, renounced his seat and threw in his lot with Labour, but in fifteen of sixteen fights, Common Wealth did so poorly it lost its deposit. Irene was not disappointed, as she had followed Acland’s lead and supported Labour, or more specifically, she stressed, ‘Socialism’. Labour had won a resounding 47 per cent of the vote, while the Conservatives made a respectable showing with 39 per cent.

  Nella Last and her entourage at the WVS were shocked at the loss. Mrs Lord, an organizer for the service, came in ‘flushed and upset’ at the news and ‘feared riots and uprising’. Another woman was incensed that Nella seemed unfazed. ‘You take things very calmly,’ she admonished. ‘Don’t you realise we may be on the brink of revolution?’ Although she felt the news was ‘fate’, Nella, the master of keeping up appearances, was inwardly stunned and ‘would have given a lot to be able to reach … for a bottle of sal volatile’.

  More than just the Conservative loss shook Nella’s delicately built wartime façade of confidence and happiness that summer. The end of the death and destruction in Europe was certainly welcomed, but the victory was hollow. She felt ‘no wild whoopee’ on VE Day, a function of the drawn-out sequence of events leading to Germany’s surrender, no doubt; but there was something deeper, for she looked at the end of the war as an end to her volunteer work. The bitter prospects of returning to pre-war life and the confines of home chaffed her newfound independence.

  With the war in Europe over, the existence of the WVS and other volunteer efforts was increasingly called into question. Nella began to have more free time, and capitalized on this freedom by frequenting the cinema and theatres more often – sometimes two to three times a week in June and July. She and Will spent a much-needed week-long holiday in Bardsea in the first days of July. But, while Nella enjoyed a welcome break after six years’ hard work, she sadly watched the slow dismantling of those wartime institutions that had given her a little more gumption, and certainly a lot more confidence and recognition.

  The realization that things were slowly grinding to a halt dawned on the women at the WVS and the shop in the waning days of May. The mood at the centre was sombre as women recalled the camaraderie and the good times they had together. There was a ‘shadow’ over them with the ‘feeling we soon will be scattered … it’s been grand to all work together,’ Nell
a wrote. When times were tough, there was always someone who joked, smiled or comforted. One of the women said she’d miss Nella and her cheeky ways most of all. ‘I’ll have no one to tease and torment me,’ she confessed to Nella. It suddenly struck Nella that everything was fading so quickly. Even the grouses and the office politics, the little arguments here and there, were passing. Their time together was now assuming a ‘golden hue of “do you remember”’, and the ‘little troubles like the blitz and its effect on the old building, pipes bursting and heating, times when Mrs. Waite [a WVS organizer] was so cross and difficult’ forgotten.

  It was the closure of the Red Cross shop, which she had helped build into a thriving enterprise during the war, that underlined the ending of an era. Nella confessed feeling pride in every little parcel sent to a prisoner of war through her efforts at the shop. She had put so much sweat and toil into the shop: cleaning up the space, scavenging for goods to sell, lovingly repairing the odds and ends that weren’t quite saleable, making dolls and clothes for sale, and – probably the most rewarding – chatting with customers and helping those in need. The young mothers and soldiers’ wives who frequented the shop often found a helpful hand and a titbit of useful advice when Nella was there. Reflecting on the three years of its existence one day, she ‘looked round the tatty shop … [and] thought of all the love and effort it had needed, like a sickly child, it had “taken a deal of mothering”’. She had poured so much into the shop, and ‘Now it will just go like blackout etc., having served its purpose,’ Nella wrote morosely.