The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  Priestley, the socialist, gives this cottage no occupant, nor does he wonder about the size of the occupant’s wage, nor ask if the cottage has internal sanitation and running water. His countryside exists only as spectacle, for the delectation of people with motor cars. Of course, he does not specify where this ideal cottage may actually be found outside paintings, nor name the foreign countries where no wild flowers (it seems) grow near the dwellings of agriculturalists. Had he been upbraided with these sins of omission, being a man of quick mind, warm heart and fluent pen he would of course have dashed off a piece welcoming the recent improvement in conditions for rural workers, or deploring their continued exploitation in some areas by the ‘tied cottage’ system. It is characteristic of this versatile circus artist, swinging from rope to ideological rope before jumping off to stand steady and erect on the back of some sturdy horse of cliché, from which he will proceed to defy a few tame ruling class lions, that he can harmonise every kind of contradiction into very readable ‘Georgian’ prose.

  Priestley also wrote a foreword to The Heart of England, published by the same firm (Batsford) in the same year. The author, Ivor Brown, was a Scot. Priestley, the indefatigable light essayist, appears here not as Jolly Jack but as Grumpy Jack. Brown, as an outsider, is far too kind to suburbia, Priestley says – ‘I do not see men and women of character emerging in any great numbers from this Americanised urban life’ – and Brown flatters the English by dwelling upon their political good humour and tolerance which, Priestley avers, largely derive from mere apathy.

  Brown himself is both tolerant and thoughtful. He is not uncritical of English suburbia – ‘Far too many of the new “estates” are a Welter of sham Tudor villas, without style or dignity of any kind.’ He doesn’t like the shortage of public buildings – public houses, even, are scarce. But he is kind about that way of life which involves the ‘tiny garden’, the ‘midget’ motor, the ‘ubiquitous’ radio, plus the tennis and clubs, bowling greens, evenings out at the cinema and occasional nights on the town.9

  Brown’s thoughtful, semi-detached appraisal of England reminds one at times of George Orwell, then a far more obscure writer. When I interviewed J. B. Priestley in the mid-sixties, he asked me, gloomily and rhetorically, why everyone now talked so much about ‘this man Orwell’. ‘I said’, he went on, ‘everything that Orwell said, but people don’t talk about me.’ Priestley was in a sense correct: notions corresponding to most of Orwell’s characteristic ideas can be found in one part or another of Priestley’s enormous output. But Priestley never pulled them together into arguments and stories and images which people would find haunting. I offer this anecdote because one does indeed find a degree of consensus among numerous writers in the late thirties about the essence of the English character. It relates to the ‘moderation’ of the English landscape, as Priestley chose to regard it, and to the ‘tolerance’ which Brown, amongst others, associated with the character of Anglican religion, which, he argued, typified the capacity of ‘the English mind’ to ‘accept foreign doctrine without becoming doctrinaire’.10 An Anglican cleric, Dean Inge, in a volume of essays on The English Genius edited by Hugh Kingsmill which appeared in 1938, claimed that Christianity was stronger in Britain than in any other European country. Church attendance figures would have suggested otherwise, but for Inge they were immaterial: ‘Ethically, we are still a Christian nation.’ The ‘typical Englishman’ is ‘humane’, moved to ‘violent indignation’ by cruelty, ‘stoic in repressing his feelings’, contemptuous of those ‘who give way to emotion’.

  He is, by intention at least, just, and will not take an unfair advantage:

  ‘Fair play’ for him is a duty which should govern his conduct in almost every relation of life. Most of these principles are integral parts of the ideal of a gentleman, which is recognised everywhere as our chief contribution to ethics, and which is very far from being the standard of one class only.11

  In a different book from this, I think I could show how the ‘ideal of the gentleman’ as a classless phenomenon was crystallised by a Scot, Samuel Smiles, in the aftermath of the Crimean War and in the interests of peace between the classes: Smiles stated polemically – and influentially – what was implicit in such novelistic creations as George Eliot’s Adam Bede and Dickens’s Joe Gargery. Priestley’s idea, though, that every Englishman is a country gentleman at heart points to the importance of the village in so many presentations of ‘Englishness’. The ideal village – it may be in Sussex, or in the Cotswolds, or in Jane Austen’s Hampshire – contains a pleasant Anglican vicar, an affable squire, assorted professionals, tradesmen and craftsmen, many of whom will be ‘characters’, plus a complement of sturdy yeomen and agricultural workers learned in old country lore. It has a green, on which the village team plays cricket, with the squire or his son as captain. It has an annual flower show – this was one tradition which greatly moved H. J. Massingham because it was ‘virtually the only survival of the communal village festivals that were older than the Feast of Flora’ – and under ‘the great marquee’ rich and poor, ‘natives and strangers’ mingle in a reawakening of ‘Gothic democracy’.12

  P. G. Wodehouse, whose fictions (steadily aimed at the vast American market) must have powerfully influenced US perceptions of ‘English character’ between the wars, had a great deal of fun with the various elements of the ideal village. But the vision survived his parodistic games with it. Certainly there must have been villages which approximated closely to the ideal, if one overlooked rural slums, incest, and so on. American tourists can still, if so disposed, find places in Deep England which will cater for their fixed idea that the manorial village is ‘typically English’; when Andalusian singing is offered to tourists in (Catalan) Mallorca as ‘typically’ Spanish, and ‘Tudor’ feasts are advertised in Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, what is deemed ‘typical’ of anything can be created almost anywhere.

  One of W. H. Auden’s several distinctions was that he rudely rejected the notion of Deep England which had acquired a hold. He begins a poem of 1934:

  To settle in this village of the heart,

  My darling, can you bear it? True, the hall

  With its yews and famous dovecote is still there

  Just as in childhood, but the grand old couple

  Who loved us all so equally are dead;

  And now it is a licensed house for tourists,

  None too particular. One of the new

  Trunk roads passes the very door already,

  And the thin cafes spring up over night.

  The sham ornamentation, the strident swimming pool,

  The identical and townee smartness,

  Will you really see as home …?13

  His verse of the thirties, while rarely preoccupied with landscape, offers shocks to Georgian nature-tasters. From the top of the Malvern Hills (Deep England is especially sacred here, haunted by the shades of Langland and Elgar), Auden’s speaker hears ‘saxophones … moaning for a comforter’ and refers to the great west country cathedrals as ‘luxury liners laden with souls’. He admired instead the dour scenery of the north, and in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ (1936) mockingly extolled it, together with that of the Black Country, near which he himself had been brought up:

  There on the old historic battlefield,

  The cold ferocity of human wills,

  The scars of struggle are as yet unhealed;

  Slattern the tenements on sombre hills,

  And gaunt in valleys the square-windowed mills

  That, since the Georgian house, in my conjecture

  Remain our finest native architecture.

  On economic, health, or moral grounds

  It hasn’t got the least excuse to show;

  No more than chamber pots or otter hounds:

  But let me say before it has to go,

  It’s the most lovely country that I know;

  Clearer than Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on

  The view from Birmingham to Wolverham
pton.

  Long, long ago, when I was only four,

  Going towards my grandmother, the line

  Passed through a coal-field. From the corridor

  I watched it pass with envy, thought ‘How fine!

  Oh how I wish that situation mine.’

  Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery,

  That was, and still is, my ideal scenery.14

  Auden’s spell-binding effect on his own generation of intellectuals is well attested. His intellect seemed vast, his verse technique was beyond question brilliant, and his revolt against the values of the upper and middle classes was timely after the débâcle of the Great War and in an era of novel political creeds which had in common the intention of transforming society. His impact on the precocious Benjamin Britten, some years his junior, is audible in the latter’s cycle ‘Our Hunting Fathers’, which sets a poem by Auden and other verses chosen by Auden. First heard at the Norwich Festival in 1936, in one of the heartlands of squirearchical Deep England, it was deliberately intended to annoy the local gentry. (It also upset Britten’s mother.) Auden had found a seventeenth-century hawking song. After the harvest, men fly birds at small creatures over the bare fields. One of the birds named is ‘German’, another ‘Jew’: Britten emphasises this. The English countryside is the scene of persecution.15

  In another collaboration of that year, the two men worked on the famous documentary Night Mail for John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit. Grierson, a Scot with a fervent belief in the educative potential of documentary film, had originally set up the Unit to serve the Empire Marketing Board. The Post Office had taken it over. Its reward was a string of remarkable films produced by a talented creative team of men (no women!) who included the experimental New Zealand artist Len Lye and the avant-garde Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti, as well as more conventional film-makers. Basil Wright and Harry Watt were in charge of Night Mail: Auden provided verses, Britten music.

  Night Mail represents very well the counter-Georgian tendencies in the sensibility, at this time, of younger intellectuals. Its remit is to explain how letters are taken by train from London to Scotland. It gives an efficient account of the routines involved, using lightly dramatised documentary techniques, employing real postal workers to act themselves. The narrator’s excitement mounts as, in the dark, the train enters the industrial north, a land of romance: Auden’s famous verses finally take it over the Border into morning, and Scotland.

  The documentaries supervised by Grierson, and those inspired more or less by his principles but executed outside his Unit, were not meant to be about England, Englishness, Britain and such matters. But they did develop approaches out of which wartime film-makers could create images serving to include dirty, decayed but vital industrial England in the overall image of the country for which men must fight and die. Other forces in English culture contributed, including the commercial cinema.

  The anti-aesthetic character of northern industrial townscapes had been compounded by the effects of depression and mass unemployment. Not all of Deep England got off lightly, but fresh prosperity came to much of the south-east in the thirties with the new ‘light industries’ and the suburban life-style to which their products related. Over large areas of the north (and Wales, and Scotland) unemployment reached catastrophic heights and remained very high as the depression receded. Since its results were very often, for individuals, emigration or demoralisation, it was not the seedbed of revolution which leftists thought it should be. The ‘national’ coalition put together in 1931 won comfortably in the 1935 election: it was utterly dominated by the Conservative Party. However, the conditions prevailing in the north had awkward implications for the social cohesion of Britain and its governability. Sympathy for ‘northern hunger marchers’ was by no means confined to Communists and socialists.

  Hence the commercial film Sing As We Go, directed by Basil Dean and released in 1934, has a significant place in cultural history. It is based on a story by – who else? – J. B. Priestley, the master harmoniser of social discords. It stars Grade Fields, the very popular Lancashire singer. At its beginning, the closure of a cotton mill in Lancashire throws out of work not only Gracie but Hugh, the manager’s son. Grade leads the dismissed workforce out of the mill with linked arms, with a chorus of the film’s title song. Gracie then goes to Blackpool, the great holiday resort of the era, in search of seasonal employment, gets into a variety of amusing situations, but is on hand to lead the workers back in when the mill, thanks to a wonderful technological innovation, is enabled to reopen. The film’s ideological import is transparent: the unemployed can still be cheery, find other jobs, have fun; the management are really on their side; and somehow everything will come right in the end. But it pioneers in giving a lively and positive character to the industrial workforce and its female members and in providing a voice (however unconvincing now) in the cinema to the north: Launder and Gilliatt’s Millions Like Us (1943), about ‘mobile women’ conscripted into ‘war industry’, is a weightier movie by far but probably owes something to Gracie’s precedent.

  Meanwhile, the conscience of intellectuals from the public-school and Oxbridge-educated professional classes had been stirred by the plight of the mysterious industrial north. Old Etonian George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier was by far his most successful book before Animal Farm; its documentary account of life in a coal-mining area played on the guilt of Left Book Club members. Likewise, Tom Harrisson, a Harrow-and-Cambridge product, returned from living on a South Sea Island with people whom he chose to present as ‘cannibals’ with the conviction that he was an ‘anthropologist’, and proceeded to Bolton, Lancashire, to dwell with the natives there and survey their strange customs. His project came under the aegis of Mass-Observation, which Harrisson founded, together with the poet Charles Madge and the latter’s friend Humphrey Jennings, early in 1937. Some dozens of students, writers and artists went north for longer or shorter periods to work with Harrisson in Bolton. It may seem absurd to suggest that places like Manchester and Leeds, intensely and justifiably proud of their own local traditions and their place in national life and history, needed to be brought into the mainstream of consciousness of English identity by young Oxbridge types who thought you could observe northerners as you did birds or New Hebrideans. But northern businessmen, trade unionists and local historians did not manage the BBC or the Ministry of Information or film propaganda: Oxbridge graduates did.

  Auden himself left for the United States before war started and made it clear that he had no intention of coming back. But his close friends MacNeice and Britten, who were also in the States, returned (though Britten, as a pacifist, could not express his love for his native land very actively). It was a favourite right-wing canard of the early war years to imply that Auden’s ‘cowardice’ and lack of patriotism typified those who had looked to him for leadership: it was, in fact, from his followers that he had fled, disliking his own position as artistic–political guru. In practice, the intellectuals who had identified themselves as anti-fascist by supporting Republican Spain, preponderantly got over their pacifistic or Leninist qualms and served the British war effort with conviction.

  Such experimental tendencies in thirties artistic production as literary documentary, vox pop radio, socialist pageantry, and even surrealism, adapted perfectly well to the service of the war effort, while Marxist scientists did very valuable war work.

  Tendencies in painting in the thirties are of interest here. British art had seemed to ‘lag behind’ exciting developments on the Continent. In 1933 the distinguished painter Paul Nash (1889–1946) led a short-lived group, Unit 1, which gathered together the sculptors Moore and Hepworth and the painter Ben Nicholson along with others interested in abstraction in art and ‘un-English’ ideas. These people were actually drawn to different foreign ideas: while Nicholson’s work related to the constructivists, Nash was attracted towards surrealism. A younger generation developing in a climate much affected by Marxism would gravitate
towards neo-realism. There was a lot of life in avant-garde British painting at this time; it was very diverse, and generalisations hardly convey it.

  However, transactions between avant garde artists and ‘landscape’ are worth exploring even at the cost of excessive generalisation, such as we might complain of in Ian Jeffrey’s summary:

  During the nineteen twenties, while memories of the Great War were still vivid, artists and writers envisioned Britain sometimes as a pastoral haven and sometimes as a multi-coloured pleasure garden. They continued to do so during the 1930s, although at the same time new images of landscape were established: in these the countryside increasingly featured as an orderly worked terrain of farmland and quarry.

  Jeffrey detects a sense of retrospective threat in landscape depictions: the nightmare of the Great – and mechanised – War was associated with a loathing of the industrial Midlands and north and fear of modernisation.16 Yet Nash – whose own images of the disaster of 1914–18 had been as powerful as any – was one of those attracted, in spite of the general tendency, towards modernist forms.

  There was a market for representations of England-as-idyll such as Alfred Munnings provided. There was also a market for bold poster art. Smoothed and refined modernist forms suited the selling of cars, cigarettes and other items associated with the ‘fast’ life-style of the well-to-do.

  The success of E. McKnight Kauffer as a poster artist showed that such commercial work could be not only lively but somehow distinguished. The Shell Oil company, fuelling the new motor vehicles, had a corporate problem of conscience and a potential ‘image’ problem: cars and lorries destroyed the purportedly idyllic peace of Deep England, a point long mythologised in Grahame’s ever popular Wind In The Willows, where the outrageous Toad goes poop-poop here and there in an automobile.

  Shell in 1930 announced that it would not advertise on roadside hoardings, and was duly praised for its stand by a leading arbiter of taste, Clough Williams Ellis. The company commissioned from serious artists bills to be stuck on lorries, with such legends as ‘Everywhere You Go You Can be Sure of Shell’, and ‘See Britain First on Shell’. These depicted English ‘beauty spots’. Thus Kauffer drew ‘Stonehenge’ – and Paul Nash painted ‘Rye Marshes’. Ben Nicholson and Graham Sutherland were other avant-garde artists who contributed posters.17