The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  Even the self-consciously Marxist Left was to some extent won over. Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, founded in 1936, was a phenomenal success although, or because, it was under Communist Party influence; it appealed to young people thrust left-ward by the spectre of fascism on the Continent, and by 1939 had 57,000 members and 1,200 local groups.22 Its selectors of titles, besides Gollancz himself, were Harold Laski, the leading ‘Marxist’ theoretician within the Labour Party, and John Strachey, the chief intellectual guru of the Communist young. Laski’s ‘Marxism’ was a mule crossed with Liberalism. While he could not reconcile it with the New Deal, he announced in 1936 that the USA had ‘a chance of showing that there is a genuine alternative to Fascism and Communism’. Two years later he wrote, albeit in the Chicago Law Review, not Gollancz’s Left News: ‘If our age emerges satisfactorily from this period of blood and war, I believe that the Roosevelt experiment in America, with all its blunders and follies, will be regarded by the historian as having made a supreme contribution to the Cause of Freedom.’ Strachey was expelled from the USA in 1935, but nevertheless revisited it in 1938. He now concluded that the New Deal was a partial model for a transitional Programme for Progress, to cite the title of his Left Book Club volume published in 1940.

  Between Strachey’s arrival at this new opinion and his book’s publication, he, Laski and Gollancz had fallen out with the CPGB, over the Nazi–Soviet pact and the ‘revolutionary defeatist’ line taken by the Party; Gollancz removed the Left Book Club, which was his personal property, from CP control. Nevertheless, Strachey’s book carried forward the Party’s commitment in the late thirties to a popular front against fascism involving progressives and sincere anti-Nazis from all parties. His aim was to provide a basis in economic theory for socialist collaboration in a political situation after the war, in which the balance of political power would be such that the government represented ‘the people’ but contained or co-operated with ‘forces and parties which were not socialist’. He saw the ending of unemployment as crucial, and presented a ‘six-point programme’ for action involving the promotion of all kinds of public or mixed investment and enterprise of a non profit-making kind; the lowering of the rate of interest to all borrowers; the redistribution of income by progressive taxation; the payment for greatly increased pensions, allowances and other social services, so long as unemployment existed, with newly created money rather than taxation; the development of a national non-profit-making banking system; and strict public control over the balance of foreign payments. While still claiming to be a Marxist intent on full socialism, Strachey saw this as a programme transitional towards that goal. Having enunciated it, he turned to analyse the New Deal at length.

  It was ‘by far the greatest programme of public enterprise for pacific purposes’ which the world had ever seen. To ‘a greater or lesser extent’ it had actually carried through the first four points of Strachey’s programme, and Roosevelt’s devaluation of the dollar was in effect equivalent to the sixth. All the failures of the New Deal were due to the tragic neglect of Roosevelt and his allies to take charge of the US banking system. In short, Britain’s leading Marxist theorist was convinced that, had it embodied his fifth point, the New Deal would have represented a perfect equivalent to the transitional policy, towards socialism, which he would advocate to the Left Book Club, for Britain. He saw clearly that FDR, and even his progressive advisers, didn’t want to follow the ‘socialist’ way of doing things implied by taking control of banks. He discerned that the National Recovery Act of 1933, while producing progressive codes of employment, had basically been a vehicle for cartelisation via trade associations. Yet he praised the manner in which Roosevelt and his allies, by contrast with the socialist Léon Blum in France, had fought back against recession in 1937 – ‘the progressive forces of America proved to have greater courage and greater skill than their European equivalents’. He believed that these ‘progressive forces’ must and would move forward to save the New Deal and transmute it to something better.23

  America, then, was a land led by a genuine anti-fascist and democrat which had shown how socialism might be feasible elsewhere. So entrenched did such optimism about America become in the non-Communist British Left that even the views of Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt’s challenger for the presidency in 1940, as expressed in his One World (1943), would be widely approved and quoted in left-wing circles – for instance, his call for ‘the orderly but scheduled abolition of the colonial system’.24 While US anti-imperialism was sometimes so vehement that it annoyed even Fabian gradualists on the right of Labour opinion, it was convenient to invoke in calls for the granting of self-government to India.

  And in 1940, approval of America helped the non-Communist Left fight a battle which it saw as all-important against the CPGB and other ‘defeatist’ elements. The Soviet Union had betrayed the anti-fascist cause, however temporarily and for whatever discernible rational motives, when doing a deal with Hitler in the autumn of 1939. If the USA was far from being the socialist paradise which many had thought Russia represented, it could be made a reason for hope: hope that the Old Gang, Chamberlain and his friends, would be buried by ‘progressive’ opinion in America as well as Britain; hope that Hitler could be defeated and that, from victory over Nazism, the British people could proceed to create a ‘New Order’ at home, and help to build one of worldwide scope.

  Let us now have a look at what, beneath much rhetoric, went on at ‘the desperate edge of now’ from September 1939 onwards.

  *

  What the British people expected in September 1939 was a repetition of the 1914–18 war of attrition and siege on the Western Front, combined with the novel horror of air raids on a huge scale, and perhaps with German gas attacks on civilians. What they experienced was a perturbing phase of anticlimax, during which class divisions in British society were demonstrated and exacerbated as at no time since the 1926 General Strike.

  It is conventional to write of the ‘intense and genuine sense of national unity’ engendered in Britain by the Second World War, of a ‘mood of national solidarity and endeavour’.25 The increased propensity of middle-class persons to vote Labour in the 1945 general election might plausibly be seen as the result of such a ‘mood’, and the experience of mass evacuation of slum dwellers into respectable areas in 1939–40, and the degree of urban deprivation which it revealed to shocked rural and suburban householders, as ‘part of an entire involvement of the worthy middle class with the neglected multitudes brought about by the dislocations of war’.26 Yet as James Cronin has pointed out, taking election results as a gauge, the period from 1939 to 1951 saw class polarisation in Britain as never before.27 Labour maximised its working-class support, achieving in 1951 (when it lost) the largest popular vote ever recorded in British electoral history, and still a record. The Conservative Party rallied the middle classes. The Liberal Party, briefly, was almost extinguished, left with a few strongholds on the eccentric ‘Celtic fringe’. Without denying that evacuation stimulated the social consciences of many ‘worthy’ middle-class people, and gave credibility and urgency to projects for social reform, it seems fair to enquire whether it did not also have a bearing on the strong class prejudices so marked in post-war Britain.

  Between the world wars official circles in Britain had been obsessed with the role of the bomber in war. As early as 1925, British Air Staff was predicting that casualties in London alone in a new war would begin at the rate of 5,000 on the first day, and settle down at 2,500 a day. It predicted a collapse of morale, and added that there was no possible defence against this sort of attack. This theory of the ‘knock-out blow’ had continued to dominate Air Staff thinking and to influence government decisions. A novel called The Gas War of 1940, by ‘Miles’ (S. Southwold), appeared in 1931 and prophesied London’s destruction:

  In the dark streets the burned and wounded, bewildered and panic-stricken, fought and struggled like beasts, scrambling over the dead and dying alike, until they fell and we
re in turn trodden underfoot by the ever-increasing multitude about them … In a dozen parts of London that night people died in their homes with the familiar walls crashing about them in flames; thousands rushed into the streets to be met by blasts of flame and explosion and were blown to rags.

  Deeply impressed by reports of the horrible effects of bombing in China by the Japanese, Stanley Baldwin averred in the House of Commons on 10 November 1931: ‘I think it is well … for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can prevent him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.’28

  In 1937 British experts reckoned that Hitler’s Germany, if war broke out, would bomb Britain at once and carry on for sixty days. There would be 600,000 people killed and twice that number injured. Already, air-raid precautions were under way – the Air Raid Wardens’ Service had recruited some 200,000 people by mid-1938, and wardens, with police, were on hand to direct British civilians into shelters as sirens sounded in London on 3 September 1939, less than a quarter of an hour after Chamberlain had announced the beginning of war.

  But that was a false alarm. And the fact that bombs did not in fact rain down on British cities, while fortunate in itself, provided an awkward context for mass evacuation. On 1 September 1939, one and a half million people were stuffed under a government scheme from cities into ‘reception areas’. The scheme was voluntary. About half the schoolchildren from England’s ‘evacuation areas’ left, somewhat over a third from Scotland’s: 827,000 children in all, together with 524,000 mothers and children under school age going together, a few thousand expectant mothers, a few thousand handicapped people, and a lot of teachers.

  All these were to be billeted on householders in the ‘reception’ areas. The local billeting officers were in general volunteers with no experience as urban social workers. For various reasons, the scheme was certain to produce social mismatching of hosts and guests. While better-off people were often able ‘unofficially’ to send children to stay with rural friends, poorer parents could rarely do this. The evacuation areas were mostly zones of high population density, characterised by poverty and overcrowding, where working-class people maintained a higher birth rate than the middle classes, who lived in suburbs deemed less vulnerable to attack. Many poor children knew little or nothing about the countryside. Many well-to-do country householders had had no conception of the ways of life of slum dwellers in London, Merseyside, Birmingham, Glasgow and other cities. Had the Luftwaffe in fact attacked Britain at once, sympathy might have overridden resentment. But it didn’t, and a clamour of protests from guests and hosts alike was heard. Billeting officers were ‘bombarded’ throughout September and October by requests from householders that their evacuees should be removed. In Newbury, Berkshire, for instance, rebilleting averaged forty to fifty transfers weekly. In neighbouring Maidenhead the numbers were higher – 750 transfers in three months. By early November the Education Officer of the London County Council was driven to breakdown and two months’ absence from work, after coping with the streams of enquiry and criticism flooding into his office.29

  The great focus of complaint was the verminous condition and dirty habits of many evacuees. At an extreme, in Bridgnorth in Shropshire, which received evacuees from the notorious Scotland Road area of Liverpool, 70 per cent of the evacuees were estimated to harbour vermin. Skin diseases were sadly common. Many children were very badly clothed and shod. Coming from areas where baths were rare and communal lavatories disgusting, many children lacked modern ideas of hygiene. Children in such a state might be pitied and forgiven, but mothers from the slums seemed to belong to another, and worse, race. R. C. K. Ensor, a distinguished historian, wrote to the Spectator from one of the home counties that many of them were ‘the lowest grade of slum women – slatternly, malodorous tatterdemalions’. Another historian, W. L. Burn, echoed him in the same journal: only a third of the evacuated women were tolerable; the rest thought of evacuation as ‘a cheap country holiday of infinite duration’; and the evacuees were increasing the burdens of middle-class women whose houses were ‘chronically understaffed’ (that is, short of domestic servants). Town children, Burn continued, represented ‘the antithesis of all that the decent patient country housewife’ had ‘striven to instill into her own children’. A Berkshire Congregational Church journal asked the same question – was there ‘any necessity for the spoliation of decent homes and furniture, the corruption of speech and moral standards of our own children …’?30

  As the Phoney War continued, class war abated. The evacuees largely went home – in England and Wales four-tenths of the schoolchildren and nearly nine-tenths of mothers and children under five had retreated by the beginning of 1940. Those who remained would mostly have found billets where they were accepted or even loved. Travis L. Crosby has recently pointed to ‘the most significant aspect of the evacuation story … Generally speaking, it seems that wealthy and middle-class householders avoided evacuation duty. Working-class inhabitants of the reception areas welcomed the evacuees – or at least tolerated them in a benign fashion.’ He quotes a regional administrator for the Women’s Voluntary Service: ‘We find over and over again that it is the really poor people who are willing to take evacuees and that the sort of bridge-playing set who live at such places as Chorley Wood are terribly difficult about it all.’ So far from Christmas inducing feelings of charity and goodwill among such ‘sets’, it seems that their hostility actually increased as they sought to clear their homes so that they could entertain relatives and friends, or used shutting up house for the holidays as an excuse for forcing evacuees out. In many areas, rural district councils actually ‘supported wealthy householders’ actions’, rather than trying to implement official national policy fairly. In March 1940 a rural district council in Wiltshire wrote to the Ministry of Health refusing evacuees on the grounds that large houses could not be used because ‘the servant problem is acute and it would be unfair to billet children on them’.31

  Middle-class memories of the horrors of September 1939 resurfaced a year later as bombs did begin to fall heavily. Professor Crosby thinks that ‘attitudes may have hardened as the raids reversed the flow of drift back and pushed large numbers of evacuees once again into the countryside … The billeting controversy remained rooted in class prejudice.’ A letter to the Windsor Express in October 1940 actually suggested, quite explicitly, ‘concentration camps’ for evacuees, and local councils in reception areas did actually discuss mass segregation. And even the novel horror of V-1 bomb attacks in 1944 did not stop ‘class-engendered hostility’ to the reception of evacuees.32

  Racialism was a subordinate but not unimportant element in this hostility. Many inner-city dwellers, notably in London, were Jewish, and even well-behaved Jews were not acceptable to many ‘bridge-playing’ persons in reception areas. Seaport cities had sizeable ‘coloured’ minorities. In a letter actually published in the USA in 1941, in a book called War Letters from Britain, the wife of an RAF pilot rejoiced that she had no evacuees herself. She told a friend that they had ‘caused more trouble than the Germans. They come from the worst part of Liverpool and the colour varies from black to yellow.’33

  Gloria Agman was evacuated, aged twelve, from London for a second time after the Blitz began. In a village in the Midlands, between Rugby and Leicester, she and her four-year-old brother were billeted on a couple who ran a pub in addition to the man doing full-time farm work. They were welcomed ‘with affection and generosity’. Most of the time village children and evacuees got on well together, but occasionally they formed into hostile gangs:

  In the skirmishes between Village and Evacuees, my place was clearly defined; but there were times when both groups united to attack me as a ‘rotten Jew’. (Apart from my brother and me, there were only two other Jewish children in the village, and they never once came out to play with anyone.) My defence against this was of limited effectiveness, but it helped to protect me from total isolation and hu
miliation when these attacks came. I found an ally. My closest friend throughout much of my stay in the village was a half-Chinese girl from London who was exposed to the same experience as mine, except that she was called a ‘dirty Chink’. We had a pact. I never called her ‘Chink’ and she never called me ‘Jew’.

  Aged thirteen, she won a scholarship and was sent to school in Northampton. Here she was billeted on a ‘tight-lipped family, doing their Christian duty but without any warmth’. She pretended to be Church of England herself. This self-protective hypocrisy meant that she could not allow her ‘obviously Jewish’ parents to visit her. ‘And I had to listen in silence to the seemingly unending stream of anti-Semitism which these people directed towards “those filthy Jews” who lived down the road.34

  Clearly, evacuation, like other wartime phenomena such as the direction of labour and conscription into the forces, did help to mix people in Britain together as never before and gave a basis for a new degree of mutual respect and understanding, where those people were disposed to be kindly and tolerant. 1 shall return later to the role of this factor in promoting social reform during and after the war. But heightened social awareness among some sections of the middle classes clearly did not exclude the sharpening of prejudice in others. As Kenneth O. Morgan has written, ‘There was much latent anger and passion in British politics after 1945. Mass-Observation data, private surveys by sociologists such as Mark Abrams, and BBC opinion analyses confirmed the very high degree of political commitment, in which voters unhesitatingly proclaimed themselves Labour or Conservative …’35 In July 1948, Aneurin Bevan, the Labour Minister responsible for introducing the National Health Service, made a speech in which he referred to Tories as ‘lower than vermin’. Around this period he himself was subjected to extraordinary vilification. He was physically assaulted by an angry member in White’s Club. Packets of excrement came through his postbox. He began to carry a stout stick when he went out for an evening walk.36 Wittingly or unwittingly, the prime promoter of a major social reform aimed to eradicate lice and skin diseases, the very minister responsible for providing better housing for the urban poor, had hit on the phrase most likely to inflame many middle-class householders who had sought to justify their refusal to accept evacuees at the height of national crisis: ‘lower than the vermin’, they had been identified with the slum dwellers whom they couldn’t accept as British like themselves.