by Angus Calder
By now, liberal and left-wing opinion was outraged by what had happened. Nor was Conservative opinion unaffected by a widespread revulsion in late July and August at the threat to civil liberties posed by ‘police state’ methods. The demise of the ‘Silent Column’ was one symptom of this; so was the rather ridiculous furore over ‘Cooper’s Snoopers’, the social researchers of the Wartime Social Survey who were studying public opinion, quite inoffensively, for the Mol.
I have argued that morale (however defined) remained potentially volatile thoughout 1940. But a positive tendency can be discerned between the time of Dunkirk – when Sir Nevile Bland’s broadcast of 30 May had inflamed what François Lafitte, who studied the aliens’ case at the time, described as ‘panic’ affecting ‘a large section of the public’ – and late August, when one of the younger Conservative MPs, Major Cazalet, said resoundingly in a House of Commons debate:
No ordinary excuse, such as that there is a war on and that officials are overworked, is sufficient to explain what has happened … Horrible tragedies, unnecessary and undeserved, lie at the door of somebody … Frankly, I shall not feel happy, either as an Englishman or as a supporter of this Government, until this bespattered page of our history has been cleared up and rewritten.47
Anderson himself on this occasion freely admitted that ‘most regrettable and deplorable things’ had happened. Already, internees were being released. By 13 February 1941 over 10,000 were free. Thousands went straight into the British army’s Pioneer Corps. As late as October that year, there were still over 3,000 Category C refugee men and women behind barbed wire, but, gradually, all but a handful were freed before the end of the war.48
In the First World War the gutter press had had its own way over ‘aliens’. It is to the credit of Churchill’s Cabinet that at the height of national emergency it pulled back before internments passed the 1914–18 total of 29,000, and reversed a policy which had been shown to be cruel and senseless. A cynic might suppose that it did so because it was frightened of the effect of unpleasant revelations on the Jewish, German and Italian communities in the USA. No doubt this factor did cross ministers’ minds. But François Lafitte, whose bitterly critical, very well-documented Penguin Special on The Internment of Aliens came out in November 1940 and sold approaching 50,000 copies, wanting to use this very factor to bring pressure on the government for further relaxation, was forced to admit that American publicity had not been bad: ministers had ‘been lucky, because the big American papers do not wish to make things awkward for them’.49
I believe that the turnabout on aliens represents the calming and hardening of morale, not least in official circles, as the Battle of Britain traced its patterns on southern English skies (when these were clear). It is an example of how the myth-making process (which would eventually ensure that the ‘bespattered page’ of which Cazalet spoke was rewritten with the aliens as an unimpressive footnote) was in itself conducive to good behaviour. Here was Britain Alone, fighting for democracy and freedom against totalitarianism. And men like Cazalet and Bishop Bell believed that ‘she’ must fight with clean hands, jealously preserving the liberties which permitted Lafitte to write and publish an anti-Establishment best-seller.
The evidence of a Gallup Poll is that even in July, only 43 per cent of the public wanted all aliens interned, as compared to 48 per cent who wanted harmless and friendly ones to be spared.50 I once placed that ‘only’ the other way round. But considering the panic-making tendencies of Bland’s broadcast in the midst of terrifying events, and the barrage of anti-alien propaganda put out by newspapers – of which the proprietors and journalists (especially those of Rothermere and Kemsley) were manifestly hoping, by inflaming racialist ‘patriotism’, to atone for their support for appeasement and worse before the war – I now think that the figures represent a modest triumph for traditions of British liberalism over such hateful propaganda as the article in Rothermere’s Daily Mail which ‘reported’ from Canada on 12 July:
In Montreal a shopkeeper told me that he is convinced that Hitler drove out the Jews and political opponents with the express purpose of sending Gestapo agents among them to the Christian countries that took them in. ‘Where did so many of them get so much money to live on?’ he said. ‘Poor refugees – huh! All they have to do is say Hitler was mean to them and we take them in and feed them and half of them are spies.’51
6
Day by Day
Who can observe this save as a frightened child
Or careful diarist? And who can speak
And still retain the tones of civilisation?
Roy Fuller, ‘Soliloquy in an Air Raid’
THE BLITZ (the bombing of 1940–41) exists for any curious person in an uncountable proliferation of published accounts and published and unpublished documents, as well as in the tape-recorded or filmed memories of ‘talking head’ survivors. No archive of such abundance exists for any other ‘major event’ in British history. It can be asserted with complete confidence that no ‘big secret’, no nasty fact or set of facts which could invalidate the Myth, will ever emerge: no such secret could possibly have been ‘covered up’. I recall the frisson of shock (and excitement) which I experienced in the sixties when, as a young researcher, I first read the then-unpublished reports by Mass-Observation for the government on morale in provincial towns under bombing. This was not what I’d learnt from published sources – here were people panicking, people in despair. Yet my own father had bravely published, in 1940–41, as much as could be said at the time (quite a lot) to suggest the confusion and demoralisation of bombed out people confronted with inadequate post-raid services, let down by the authorities. And it was not long before the Big Facts were clear to me: none of the incidents and public reactions which Mass-Observation described contradicted the Big Facts that British society and its institutions remained intact. British ‘war industry’ continued to expand, American supplies continued to enter through the horribly stricken western and southern ports – Liverpool, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Southampton – which the Royal Navy continued to use.
That many small secrets will always be hidden is indubitable. Successful after-raid looters have not written their memoirs. Cowardly people in local government have not advertised their shame. Yet the memoirs and documents which do exist testify so abundantly and frankly to panic, to horrified revulsion, to post-raid depression, to antisocial behaviour, that the general pattern is plain, and new particulars, however interesting for the inhabitants of such-and-such a town to which they relate, or to the families of those involved are, from the historian’s point of view, redundant.
As still more ‘careful diarists’ are published, as yet more ‘components of the scene’ (to quote another poet) are arrested from the fallible memories of millions of survivors, as the media and the oral historians continue to mine a seam that appears to be nowhere near exhaustion, every new ‘fact’ or ‘memory’ slots into the Myth. There is nowhere else for it to go, within the parameters of our present consciousness. The Myth that the British were Bombed and Endured stands, supported by the Big Facts.
Poets in this war were driven towards the Little Facts, towards the posture of ‘careful diarists’. Actual diarists writing about events and feelings in the year from May 1940 to May 1941 were already able to slot their ‘components’ into a recognisable ‘scene’. There was, to begin with, considerable scepticism about BBC Radio News and about the newspapers. Rumours were commonplace. What was actually seen by an individual often contradicted what was said to be happening. But gradually the ‘careful diarist’ was likely to take for granted a broad overview supplied by: the speeches of Churchill and Ernest Bevin; the broadcasts of Priestley; the BBC News – and perhaps the left-of-centre pages of Picture Post and the sturdy, heroically simple cartoons of the great David Low. There were also numerous, admittedly propagandist, films shown in the ever-popular cinemas, and, as publishers found time and paper to get them out, a large number of books about the Blitz in par
ticular; collections of Churchill’s speeches; biographies of Churchill. For a literate, thinking person, the personal ‘morale problem’ was thus: day by day you either believed the evolving Myth (which showed at each stage how Britain was invincible), or you relapsed into scepticism and fears. When you recovered from such an aberration, the Myth had already moved ahead to help you onwards.
This pattern can be found in two types of source unpublished at the time and clearly untampered with afterwards: the Home Intelligence Reports of the Ministry of Information, and material, including diaries, given to Mass-Observation by volunteers and employees, used fitfully by Mass-Observation in its investigations and then left untouched for several decades.
The director of Home Intelligence at Mol was Mary Adams (1899–1984), one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth century. Daughter of a farmer, she had grown up after his death in great hardship. After getting a first in botany at University College, Cardiff, she became a Cambridge don, leaving in 1930 to join the BBC, first as adult education officer, then as the first woman TV producer in the world’s first TV service: she was in charge of education, political material, talks and culture. After the war she held senior posts in BBC TV. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, ‘She was a socialist, a romantic communist… a fervent atheist and advocate of humanism and commonsense.’ It is important to note that these impulses held each other in check; also that she was married to a Conservative MP, Vivyan Adams – an anti-Nazi and social reformer. She brought to the work of surveying morale – on which she became the key authority in government circles – a will to beat Hitler controlled by habits of academic and scientific caution, and an exceptionally wide range of intellectual and political contacts.
Home Intelligence Reports1 – the initial title was ‘A Summary of Public Opinion of the Present Crisis’ – began on a daily basis on 18 May 1940. After well over a hundred of these, Home Intelligence switched to producing weekly reports, beginning with the period 30 September to 9 October, when London’s initial ordeal was still at its height. By late November, presentation had evolved so that the reports had an almost scholarly air. There was certainly no shortage of material from which to compile them. In ‘Weekly Report by Home Intelligence – No. 8’ (18–25 November) no fewer than thirty-seven different ‘references’ were listed. Few members of the public can have come near to guessing how many friends or strangers might be reporting on them to the government or to independent organisations aiding government. The regional information officers in various ‘provincial’ centres probably saw other bigwigs for the most part, but their club-room impressions were augmented by:
Summaries of the newspaper press prepared within the Mol itself, reports of the Mol’s ‘Anti-Lie Bureau’, and grievances voiced through MPs and combed from the papers of Hansard.
Reports from the Postal Censorship – these might result from examination of hundreds of thousands of letters. Also Telephone Censorship summaries.
Reports from police duty-rooms relayed by chief constables.
Reports by Mass-Observation (independent, though regularly retained by Mol) and the government’s own Wartime Social Survey.
BBC Listener Research reports and other material supplied by the Corporation.
Reports from the firm of W. H. Smith, which owned a very large chain of newsagents, notably at railway stations: their managers, through travelling superintendents, supplied information about comments and gossip concerning the war.
Reports from the managers of the large chain of Granada Cinemas.
Information from a wide range of organisations, including the Citizen’s Advice Bureaux, the Women’s Voluntary Services, and the right-wing Economic League, which interested itself especially in Communists.
Rather intriguingly, Scottish Unionist Whips’ intelligence reports (coming from those responsible at Westminster for keeping Conservative MPs from north of the Border in line), and special fortnightly reports from the regional/intelligence officer, Scotland, based in Edinburgh.
It has never been suggested that Mary Adams was a woman incapable of judging and correcting her own biases; in any case, she could not have looked through such a mass of material on her own, nor withheld access to it from colleagues. There is no doubt that the daily reports rushed out down to the end of September are somewhat impressionistic – but surely any dire threat to morale would have been detected? It is true that Adams was prepared to show such things to friendly US journalists in order to cement their conviction that Britain would fight on. But she was under no compulsion to do so: these documents had a heavily restricted, secret circulation. (The meeting within Mol on 27 September, at which Adams agreed to produce weekly reports specifying selected sources, laid down that these were to be ‘used as a guide for action by the departments of the Ministry concerned with publicity at home’, and not to be circulated outside it, except that ‘extracts without comment affecting other departments may be issued where action appears requisite’.)
It emerges from a draft memo in Adams’s papers how Home Intelligence created the reports. All incoming material was ‘carefully and completely read’ by two assessors who produced abstracts and summaries. They then compiled a report, of which the final version was written in conference with Adams herself. The ‘final interpretation’, she could claim, was produced by three people, each of ‘entirely different outlook’, all of whom aimed at objectivity.
The early daily reports convey rather excitingly the sense of public opinion reacting to a multiplicity of news and pressures, many of which dropped out of the Myth and were largely forgotten. Churchill’s broadcast of Sunday 19 May aroused entirely ‘favourable’ comment, though its effects were ‘still apparent’ on Tuesday, and these included worry over its serious implications among about half of 150 people interviewed house-to-house in London. On 23 May there was an ‘excellent reception’ for the Emergency Powers Bill, which effectively suspended all civil liberty for the duration of war. Both xenophobic ‘anti-alien’ feeling and wild rumours of airborne invasion abounded. On 24 May there was ‘the usual crop of rumours about “hairy-handed Nuns", parachutists, etc.,’ plus one beauty (as it seems now) about ‘a house full of blind refugees which [sic] were alleged to be in possession of machine guns’.
By 25 May, as allied collapse in France became evident, Home Intelligence was reporting ‘increasing confusion … bewilderment and disquiet’. It was already in the habit, perhaps partly conditioned by Adams’s political impulses, of indicating that upper- and middle-class morale was frailer than that of working-class men. A theme of its 1940 reports was serious public concern about the danger of invasion through Eire – this had surfaced before the end of May. Soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk were by 30 May ‘talking freely about their experiences, particularly in pubs. The effect of this is not good.’ Such talk would have included far from baseless stories about inadequate British Expeditionary Force equipment, poor RAF fighter support and sauve qui peut flight to the ships by officers. But on the 30th, optimistic press reports about the evacuation were said to have produced ‘a general calmness, allied with a new feeling of determination’. Next day, the return of the British Expeditionary Force was credited with giving ‘great emotional relief and producing elation. ‘Relief and elation’, Home Intelligence reported, continued on 3 June, and by the 4th, Dunkirk was ‘accepted as a “Victory", as a “lasting achievement… “’ and Home Intelligence was worried that morale was ‘too high’, based on ‘an inadequate realisation of the facts of the situation’. The popularity of J. B. Priestley’s classic Dunkirk broadcast of 5 June was strongly registered, though it is curious to note that, according to his Home Intelligence underlings, the Minister of Information, Duff Cooper, was, by ‘general view’ at least, rated the best of all radio propagandists; his growing ‘fan following’ was reported from Newcastle (11 June) amongst, especially, the working classes. This polished socialite seems an improbable rival for Priestley, but it appears that his attacks on It
aly went down well with ‘less sophisticated working-class feeling’.
One could go on right through the summer reports plucking out interesting pieces of detail. But it is enough to register here some of the daily verdicts on morale in general: ‘gloomy apprehension’, at least in middle-class circles and amongst women after the fall of France (17 June), ‘cheerfulness’ re-emerging by 27 June, by when early, light bombing raids by the Luftwaffe had been received calmly in various places; then, after a period of ‘cheerfulness and determination’, real dismay over the German occupation of the Channel Islands. Through this period, the great public enthusiasm for evacuating children to the Dominions suggests that people expected worse to come: it was somewhat dampened when the Arandora Star, carrying refugees to Canada, was torpedoed early in July. But throughout that month ‘cheerful’… ‘little change’ … ‘morale is high’ recur in general assessments, even if by 24 July Home Intelligence felt constrained to note that the ‘high pressure’ under which factories were working had produced ‘signs of fatigue’. By mid-August, revealing consistently high morale seems to have begun to bore Home Intelligence itself: its daily reports became shorter. On 15 August it declared that morale continued to be ‘high’ and that ‘intensified’ air raids had been taken with ‘calmness and courage’. Next day it reported, ‘Many people in Scotland are now awaiting impatiently “for their turn to come", and a first glimpse of a spitfire [sic] chasing a Dornier.’ From London, where daytime raids were now common, the message was that ‘people on the whole are excited rather than apprehensive’.