The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  The shape of John Boorman’s narrative rules out such Tolstoyan radicalism, even though the last images of the film will be of children celebrating deliriously when they find that their school has been bombed flat. Bill, exploring ruins, is trapped by a gang of boys. Its nasty leader, Roger, tells him that it is their ‘territory’. Bill is inducted into the gang and joins them in an ‘orgy of destruction’ in a newly bombed house. The gang provide their HQ with expensive furniture, a wireless and a cocktail bar, where they smoke, drink beer and entice a passing girl to let them look inside her knickers. At home on leave, Clive sees his son running wild in the rubble, but does not intervene. From this, though, Bill is whisked by accident into idyll: the family’s home burns down – an ordinary fire, not a bomb – while they are all out. When Bill next day finds Roger and the gang looting his own home, he punches him in the face. For the rest of the film the family stay with eccentric Grandfather George in his large house up-river on the Thames, an arena for pranks and jollifications, where cricket can be resumed, where Dawn has her baby: all shall be well.

  Living with Grandfather means a sharp break from Rosehill Avenue and its values. The charming idiosyncrasy of these final scenes derives from the unique history of Boorman’s own far-from-ordinary extended family. Yet we haven’t escaped from the Myth’s paradigm, which contains the earlier episodes comfortably. The Shepperton scenes in Hope and Glory bring forward new elements in the Myth: English eccentricity, English love of boats and water, English landscape … My next chapter will look at the ways in which self-conscious propagandists – honourably – used such elements to give the Myth, which was spontaneously developing, definitive and durable shape. I should end this one by saying that I like Boorman’s film very much. I was born, in 1942, in a suburb adjacent to Carshalton. I share his sense of shame about such origins and can see, I think, how it was nevertheless impossible for him not to re-create his youth with such roundness and love that the warm motherly Myth settles on his film like a nesting bird.

  9

  Deep England

  Some of the damage in London is pretty heart-breaking but what an effect it has had on the people! What warmth – what courage! What determination. People sternly encouraging each other by explaining that when you hear a bomb whistle it means it has missed you. People in the north singing in public shelters: ‘One man went to mow – went to mow a meadow.’ WVS girls serving hot drinks to firefighters during raids explaining that really they are ‘terribly afraid all the time!’ … Everybody absolutely determined: secretly delighted with the privilege of holding up Hitler. Certain of beating him: a certainty which no amount of bombing can weaken, only strengthen … A curious kind of unselfishness is developing … We have found ourselves on the right side and on the right track at last!

  Humphrey Jennings to his wife, 20 October 1940

  AS THIS QUOTATION from Britain’s most remarkable wartime maker of official films amply shows, it is quite wrong to think of the ‘propagandists’ of 1939–45 as being like post-war advertising copywriters, or as clearheaded ruthless traffickers in cleverly worked-out lies and half-truths. Dr Goebbels himself worried a great deal in private about how things were going for the German cause, with which he identified himself completely. When Humphrey Jennings used the singing of ‘One man went to mow’ in a sequence of heartrending brilliance in his film Fires Were Started, he was releasing in artistically shaped form something which he remembered from the autumn of 1940, and which had meant a great deal to him personally.

  Paradoxical as it may seem, much of the most effective propaganda about 1940–41 – the speeches of Churchill, the broadcasts of Priestley and Murrow, the films which Jennings and others created for the Crown Film Unit, the cartoons of David Low - remains more impressive as literary and artistic production than almost all independently conceived poems, prose and artworks which address the Battle and the Blitz. This is not cynically to imply that Nazi and fascist equivalents may have equal strength: propagandists for Britain expressed humane values and the claims of human beings to individual and communal freedom, and these remain more than acceptable causes.

  Of course, each of the propagandists just named had a very strong individual personality, and peculiar preoccupations: Churchill’s delight in the broad sweep of history, Priestley’s in innocent holiday fun and games; Murrow’s memories of Wobblies in the lumber camps and their hero Joe Hill, ‘who never died’; Jennings’s troubled obsession with finding some interior essence of Britain. But all could draw on resources amply present in ‘English’ culture and English language, and on images of England and conceptions of Englishness developed so fully between the Great War and the Second that they had the aura of ‘natural’ existences rather than ideological constructs.

  To demonstrate the importance for propagandists of the English literary tradition is so easy as to be unnecessary. Blitzed Londoners became Dickensian; the cause of freedom was Milton’s; Donne’s assertion that ‘no man is an island’ echoed; the cadences of Gibbon and Macaulay could be heard in Churchill’s; Kipling’s soldiers had joined the Home Guard, along with Hardy’s Wessex villagers. (One rather surprising instance is worth noting: Professor Patrick Parrinder has pointed out to me that when Churchill in 1940 spoke about the ‘life of the world moving forward into broad, sunlit uplands’ he was probably indebted to H. G. Wells’s phrase ‘the uplands of the future’ in The Discovery of the Future, published in 1902. The great man was a fan who corresponded with Wells over forty years, and perhaps owed to him much of his delight in the potential of science and invention.)

  The creativity of English cultural tradition was not exhausted. Between the wars, two distinct and, indeed, largely antagonistic tendencies had enriched it: on the one hand, that represented by ‘Georgian’ poets and essayists and by certain painters, graphic artists and composers; on the other, that of ‘left-wing’ and ‘avant-garde’ intellectuals and artists seeking to reconstruct national taste and character. Priestley came from the ‘Georgian’ camp, whereas Jennings represented the ‘Auden generation’. That their visions of 1940 overlapped suggests that the power of wartime experiences to draw together people who would previously have had nothing polite to say to each other has not been exaggerated.

  Both Georgians and Audenisers were much obsessed with English landscape and countryside. Neither school gave thought to the crisis of British agriculture in the period, from which the Second World War rescued it, preparing it for an era of mechanisation and prosperity. The decline of rural crafts in the face of mass production struck a nerve; less so the pauperised condition of farm labour.

  The terrain under literary, pictorial and musical contestation might be described as follows. There was a Green and Pleasant heartland, ‘Deep England’, which stretched from Hardy’s Wessex to Tennyson’s Lincolnshire, from Kipling’s Sussex to Elgar’s Worcestershire. It excluded, self-evidently, the ‘Black Country’ of the industrial Midlands and the north with its factories and windswept moors. It included those areas of the Home Counties around London which had not been invaded by suburban development. Parts of Kent, for instance, were ‘deeper’ than anywhere, but areas of the county close to London were commuter territory.

  Suburbia, and the life-style identified with it (the little car kept in the garage for trips at weekends), had paradoxical effects. On the one hand, there were still fresh air, green woods, attractive riverbank scenes, fine old manor houses, within areas staked out for suburbia: a taste of ‘country’ pleasures was close at hand for many. Furthermore, the little cars, like charabancs from the cities, made it relatively easy for urbanites to penetrate and enjoy parts of Deep England hitherto hard of access. (Britain was far behind the USA in car ownership – with just 1,157,344 in 1930 compared to over 23 million in the land of Henry Ford: but that was still a quicker start than anywhere else in Europe, and over a million private petrol-driven vehicles already represented profound social change.)1 Drivers venturing into quiet, ‘unspoilt’ places meant that t
heir purportedly timeless beauty was, of course, vulnerable.

  Meanwhile, the march of suburban buildings, commonly with ‘traditional’ Tudorbethan elements in their design, such as fake beams, literally obliterated cherishable scenery. John Boorman’s suburb, Carshalton, developed over territory where the Pre-Raphaelite painters had once sought inspiration from nature. ‘Ribbon development’ along arterial roads was another blow to those used to, and indeed fond of, the railways which had transformed transportation and cut through every part of Deep England in Victorian days. The steam train had for many become an icon of Deep Englishness; the Baby Austin couldn’t be that. To some lovers of English countryside, recent developments seemed catastrophic. H. J. Massingham, a townee journalist who became a country dweller, inveighed with all the fervour of a convert against developments since the Industrial Revolution, which he saw as a disaster which had ‘destroyed the true England’. He disliked not only new housing developments, but also town people who ‘dropped out’, as we now say, to fiddle with ‘arts and crafts’ in rural places. The countryside for him was properly ‘a source of our daily bread and the indispensable foundation of our national well-being’.2 Suburbia, its enemy, was ‘detached from all other cultures, detached from everything’.3

  Yet probably suburb dwellers formed part of the large public for Massingham’s books, which between 1930 and 1950 he published at a rate of more than one per year. Perhaps some readers were attracted by an element of scientific rationality in his writing – his concern for what we now know as ‘ecology’. In the autumn of 1940 his latest book sturdily confronted the heroic population of the Green and Pleasant Land in their Finest Hour with an apocalypse caused, not by bombs, but by building. In Buckinghamshire, where he himself lived, ‘the bottoms and the alluvial strip’ had been ‘more heavily urbanised than the less fertile summits’, He cried out sorrowfully, ‘Only a handful of Englishmen regard this phenomenon as a tragedy for England, but a truth is not cheated by evading it, and one day by no means in the distant future that tragedy will close, like Hamlet, in a harvest of catastrophe.’

  Meanwhile, he found a little consolation in the fact that nearly thirty stone curlews had convened at their local meeting ground in the first October of the war and that the craft of the bodger, creating chair legs with a pole-lathe, still survived, if tenuously, in the Chiltern woods.4

  Judging from the frequency with which such images appeared in films and newspapers, the spectacle of huge shire horses drawing ploughs and the craft of stooking and stacking hay with pitchforks, had a considerable appeal for large sections of Britain’s overwhelmingly urbanised or suburbanised population. Hiking and rambling were popular with the working classes: the Ramblers’ Association was in fact left-wing, and organised demonstrations to keep open rights of way. But even manual workers seem, when seeking in the countryside an escape from everyday conditions, to have ignored its primary function. Men and women laboured in the countryside to produce food. Those best at it were unlikely to be smock-wearing ‘yeomen’ (though ironically the ‘yeoman farmer’, in a sense, was making a comeback: in 1910 only 10 per cent of farmland in England and Wales was owner-occupied, but the effect of high duties and taxes, which suddenly broke up great estates, was such that the proportion rose to 36 per cent in 1927, about three-quarters in 1973.5) Farmers were on the whole worldly people who maximised gains as best they could. One would not guess this from most of the outpouring of books in the years before and during the Second World War which celebrated the English countryside.

  As Howard Newby has pointed out, ‘real English countryside’, in the ‘idyllic sense’, has been ‘located only in the minds of those engaged in the search for it, on a few calendars and chocolate box lids – and in the wholly misleading paintings of John Constable’. Constable painted after ‘improvement’, including enclosure, had transformed England. Newby notes that ‘the eighteenth century landowner, through the agency of his hired landscapers, invented what we have now come to accept as picturesque natural beauty’, and, in the process, ‘provided a decisive break between ideas about nature and beauty on the one hand and a functional countryside on the other’, still marked in our own day.6

  Alex Potts has incisively analysed the values which were attached to the English countryside between the wars. He distinguishes the charabanc trip taking, say, East Enders from London to Epping Forest – a highly sociable outing – from the ‘cultural ideal of an intensely personal “away from it all” immersion in the beauties of “unspoiled” countryside’. This middle-class aspiration opposed itself both to the vulgarity of bus trippers and the ‘crass materialism and mindless socialising of the very wealthy country-house set’.

  The countryside’s attraction for middle-class people, Potts argues, lay ‘precisely in its distance from immediate social and material interest’. Middle-class people, feeling marginal, members of social groups with no ‘Heritage’, wanted to ‘possess a true inner identity’ more valuable than the merely external ‘social persona’.

  From the later Victorian years down to the First World War, Potts continues, the notion of ‘race’ and ‘stock’ was paramount in nationalism: ‘Englishness was an essence residing in a race which was to be found in its purest form in the country, preserved by an honest and traditional way of life.’ (A harmless version of such thinking is easily found in Massingham.) But in the inter-war period, ‘a nationalist ideology of pure landscape’ came into its own. Theories of racial identity were transferred to the inanimate landscape.

  The new medium of photography was exploited by the wave of countryside books which followed H. V. Morton’s best-selling In Search of England (1927). The camera, skilfully positioned at the right time, could produce images of extraordinarily trim, lush and fertile farmland ‘set off by small controlled pockets of picturesque shrub and tree, excluding any implications of shabbiness or the unkempt’. This paradigmatic view of what the ‘real England’ was like supplanted, between the wars, ‘Claudian parklands, Welsh mountains, and Derbyshire dales’ – ousted, in fact, the dominant traditions of landscape painting in England since the eighteenth century, and even the authority of the great J. M. W. Turner. Victorian taste had favoured river, harbour and coastal scenes which could be made to look like old Dutch paintings, dramatic hill and mountain views, and plangently ‘romantic’ perspectives of desolate marshes, empty woods, cold winter afternoons.

  Critics and artists in England in the twenties and thirties opened up an art-historical dead end and proclaimed it to be the highway of English landscape tradition. The work of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century watercolourists, and their contemporary John Constable, was thus canonised, and gave a basis for emulation, in spirit if not in technique. ‘English landscape’ was brought down from Turneresque heights, and tamed. Its essence was located in the southern counties. The Blakeian visions of early nineteenth-century Sussex by Samuel Palmer also influenced some painters.7

  J. B. Priestley, a city-bred northerner but a resident by choice of Deep England, was typically generous to the variety which actually characterises the island’s scenery when he introduced a ‘pictorial survey’ by various hands called The Beauty of Britain, published in 1935. But he emphasised repeatedly the common characteristic of ‘exquisite moderation’. There were genuine mountains in the Lake District, but you could climb two or three of them in a day. You could wander alone in the remoter parts of the Yorkshire Dales. ‘Yet less than an hour in a fast motor will bring you to the middle of some manufacturing town which can be left and forgotten just as easily as it can be reached from these heights.’ (My italics)

  A car, he observes, ‘will take you all round the Peak District in a morning. It is nothing but a crumpled green pocket handkerchief.’ The essential English landscape ‘looks like the result of one of those happy compromises that make our social and political plans so irrational and yet so successful. It has been born of a compromise between wildness and tameness, between Nature and Man.’ P
riestley goes on to discuss the suburb. There is a ‘great deal to be said’ for it. ‘Nearly all Englishmen are at heart country gentlemen. The suburban villa enables the salesman or the clerk, out of hours, to be almost a country gentleman.’ But ‘against’ the suburb, he has to say that suburbs ‘eat into the countryside in the greediest fashion’ and that it ‘might be better if people who work in the cities were more mentally urban, more ready to identify themselves with the life of the city proper’. Having delivered himself of these rather dangerous remarks, he reverts to ‘that exquisite balance between Nature and Man’, and becomes ineffably nationalistic:

  We see a cornfield and a cottage, both solid evidences of Man’s presence. But notice how these things, in the middle of the scene, are surrounded by witnesses to that ancient England that was nearly all forest and heath. The fence and the gate are man-made, but are not severely regular and trim – as they would be in some other countries. The trees and hedges, the grass and wild flowers in the foreground, all suggest that Nature has not been dragooned into obedience. Even the cottage … looks nearly as much a piece of natural history as the trees: you feel it might have grown there. In some countries, that cottage would have been an uncompromising cube of brick which would have declared ‘No nonsense now. Man, the drainer, the tiller, the builder, has settled here.’ In this English scene there is no such direct opposition.8