The Myth of the Blitz
Page 28
Strachey’s rhetoric was certainly directed at US opinion – his book was published in America as Digging for Mrs Miller – at a time when that had to be convinced that Britain could and would fight on though no decisive counter-offensive against the Germans was possible. But the British themselves had to be convinced that they could not only survive, but win. And Priestley’s message of June 1940 – that the Nazis were incapable of conquering British humanity and British humour, linked to the immemorial properties of the English landscape (as, later, they would be to London’s long and proud history) – was a crucial complement to Churchill’s ringing calls for heroism on the part of every man, woman and child. People might very well doubt if they were capable of heroism. But most could feel that they shared in such invincible ‘national traits’ as fairmindedness, kindness and ‘sense of humour’.
Priestley’s broadcast of 16 June took up a topic which would tickle that sense of humour for decades: he describes his first outing with the Local Defence Volunteers, not yet renamed the Home Guard. He cannot yet acknowledge on the air the most comic feature of this force – its near-total lack of martial equipment. Rather, he makes the group, with its ‘cross section of English rural life’, typify Deep England: ‘Even the rarer and fast disappearing rural trades were represented – for we had a hurdle-maker there; and his presence, together with that of a woodman and a shepherd, made me feel sometimes that I’d wandered into one of those rich chapters of Thomas Hardy’s fiction in which his rustics meet in the gathering darkness on some Wessex hill.’ The phlegmatic calm of these rustics – ‘simple but sane men’ – derives from immemorial habit: the countryman ‘sees this raiding and invading as the latest manifestation of that everlasting menace which he always has to fight – sudden blizzards at lambing time, or floods just before the harvest’. The situation really is frightening – these homes in the valley below where ‘our womenfolk’ knit as they listen to the news might be bombed at any moment. Searchlights are seen, sirens heard, from ‘our two nearest towns’ – bombs, gunfire. But after the All Clear Priestley feels, he says, ‘a powerful and rewarding sense of community; and with it too a feeling of deep continuity’. He ends by reciting Hardy’s ‘In Time of the Breaking of Nations’.28
The left-leaning politics which begin to feature in Priestley’s scripts from 23 June onwards are therefore soaked in traditionalist values. The Nazis represent modern corruption – ‘the darkening despair of our modern world, shaping itself into one vast dark face – a German dark face …’ In any country falling under their domination – by implication, even in Britain – there will be kindred elements ready to collaborate: ‘Let the Nazis in, and you will find that the laziest loudmouth in the workshop has suddenly been given power to kick you up and down the street …’29
On 30 June, he complains that the war isn’t being fought in the right spirit by the nation’s rulers: ‘Sometimes I feel that you and I – all of us ordinary people – are on one side of a high fence, and on the other side of this fence, under a buzzing cloud of secretaries, are the official and important personages: the pundits and mandarins of the Fifth Button! and now and then a head appears above the fence and tells us to carry our gas masks, look to our blackouts, do this and attend to that.’ The war shouldn’t be so dreary: ‘I’d have bands playing everywhere, and flags flying, and as much swagger and glamour as the moment will stand.’ The British are ‘still, as we always have been, at heart an imaginative and romantic people’. The bureaucrats – ‘Complacent Clarence, Hush-Hush Harold, and Dubious Departmental Desmond’ – are contrasted with ‘Two Ton Annie’, evacuated from a mainland hospital to the Isle of Wight, where Priestley lived, at the outbreak of war: a fat, sick woman, but an ‘indomitable lioness’ roaring out repartee ‘like a raffish old empress’.30
‘Two Ton Annie’ and the rustics in the Local Defence Volunteers preluded a string of cheerful images: a duck and her ducklings on a pond in Hampstead Heath late at night – she has asked no bureaucrat’s permission to be there, and is mentioned to represent the ‘creative energy’ which opposes Nazi ‘death worship’; Churchill digs Bevin in the ribs in the House of Commons – the two halves of the English people and English history, aristocrat and working man, sit side by side; then, after a week of heavy bombing on London, ‘the Dome and Cross of St Paul’s, silhouetted in sharpest black against the red flames and orange flames … like an enduring symbol of reason and Christian ethics …’, while the Cockney spirit of Dickens’s Sam Weller burgeons. A giant pie, there ever since Priestley can remember, is still to be seen through the boarded-up window of a bomb-damaged shop in Bradford, ‘every puff and jet’ defying ‘Hitler, Goering and the whole gang of them’.31
Priestley’s gift for bringing big ideas together with homely examples is well exemplified by his Postscript for 11 August. It begins:
The other day I saw two thousand people push aside what remained of the meat pies and fried plaice and chips they’d had for lunch, lift their eyes and ears towards an orchestra consisting of four young women in green silk, and then, all two thousand of them, roar out: ‘Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, How You Can Love’. And having paid this tribute to Johnny and applauded the four young women in green silk, these two thousand people, who were mostly young and feminine, and very natty in their coloured overalls, returned – much heartened – to another five or six hours’ work at their machines.
He goes on to describe a ‘grimmer, more masculine’ engineering works nearby where men attend machines for ‘ten to eleven hours a day’, then ‘rapturously’ listen to a small concert party, ‘The Night Howls’, telling old jokes. Such tribute to these contributions to gaiety and relaxation by Basil Dean’s ENSA organisation, ‘joining songs and high jinks to hard work’, establishes Priestley’s non-élitist stance. But the government should go further, to sponsor ‘great symphony orchestras peeling out the noblest music, night after night, not for a fortunate and privileged few, but for all the people who long for such music’. As well as ‘comedians in the canteens’ there should be productions of great plays. The ‘quality of our life’ should be raised. ‘No burden, it seems, is too great for the people. Then there can’t be too rich and great a reward for the people.’32
What Priestley is implicitly advocating is the systematic state support for the ‘high’ cultural forms which would indeed begin during the war and eventuate in the creation of the Arts Council of Great Britain. The ‘politics’ of Priestley’s broadcasts were non-partisan, as he hotly insisted. But their left-ward impulse was all the more insidious for being expressed so commonsensically, without clichés or jargon. The war is an episode in the ‘breakdown of one vast system and the building up of a better one’, in which ‘ordinary decent folk can find not only justice and security but also beauty and delight’. The ‘change from property to community’ is implicit in the united struggle against Hitler. Why shouldn’t ‘working men’ take over the gardens of rich people who have fled to America? The young men fighting unselfishly for everyone in the RAF deserve job security after the war and Priestley takes from his postbag the views of one of them, a former salesman, who doesn’t want to go back to the ‘old business life’, with its cut-throat competition, after the co-operation and the spirit of ‘giving’ he has experienced in the Force. Nazism is conflated with greed, privilege and ‘despair’ – ‘hope’ is found in communitarian values, which flourish already everywhere in Britain ‘among the decent common folk’. All that is needed to bring about a just society is the active involvement of such ‘folk’ in running their own lives, through a revitalised democracy.33
Alderman Roberts of Grantham and his daughter Margaret Hilda can hardly have been among Priestley’s horde of admirers. But the demotion of ‘free enterprise’ in favour of communitarianism was always latent in the Myth’s structure, in its basis in opposition of ‘English’ (or ‘British’) values to those attributed to Nazism. That Conservative ministers, with support from press magnates, elements of ‘high society’ a
nd business interests, had ‘appeased’ the ‘Nazi bullies’ was another major reason why the developing Myth often assumed a radical, socialistic character.
It could however be given a right-wing, imperialistic character, and its anchorage in English landscape and English history made this quite easy. Arthur Mee, the evangelical Christian imperialist who edited the Children’s Newspaper, brought out a collection of his own articles – Nineteen Forty: Our Finest Hour – which received four printings between January 1941 and March 1942. The style is coarse and strident, whereas Priestley’s is thoughtful and calm, but the sentiments are often very similar (note, in the quotation which follows, another example of the phrase ‘thousand years’):
It is not in parliaments that this country is herself; her spirit lives in her deep silences, in her little hills and dales. It lives in those enchanting haunts where William Blake strolled piping down the valley wild and John Wesley rode on horseback talking to the people on the village greens. Here Peace has made her home for a thousand years and here it seems as if nothing could break the spell of the little island with its far-flung power.
Only the words ‘far-flung power’ involve un-Priestley-esque sentiment. Under the spell of his own rhetoric, the Christian Mee, in an article called ‘It Will Never Be The Same Again’, sounds as socialistic as Priestley:
the thought that we are not as others, the willingness to die rich while so many live poor, the reluctance to bear our share of the burdens, the scorn for those who seek to improve their lot, the belief that some are born to toil and some to rule, the idea that wealth gives rights and that those with power can use it as they please – all these must die in that new world which is now being shaped in the furnace of sacrifice and suffering and death.34
Nevertheless, in the same year Mee published his Book of the Flag: Island and Empire, aimed at a youthful readership and replete with ineffable boasting. All the good things in the modern world (including, bizarrely, ‘The Monroe Doctrine which has made America safe for democracy’) can be attributed to ‘the most successful colonisers the world has known’ – not least ‘the idea of playing games, especially cricket which has in it the core of something which cannot live with narrowness and pettiness and selfishness. We have led the way with gardens, one of the chief sources of human delight.’ Mee even seeks to convince his readers of the ‘wonderful’ fact that England is set exactly ‘in the middle of the earth’ – this is apparent, he alleges, if we take a globe of the world. England is ‘a place of hope and refuge for the race of men, a central shining beacon on the earth. Freedom’s Own Island, yes, but Nature’s too.’ Her ‘green carpet is the loveliest in the world. Her rivers flow through the fairest landscapes. Her little lanes bring us to scenes unmatched in any country in the world.’ A five-page aerial survey of the island includes nine lines about Scotland, less than one line about Wales … 35
It is a relief to turn from such outpourings to the Dandy Monster Comic annual for 1941, where there is just one strip referring to the war. Desperate Dan, that unshaven cowboy and eater of cow pie who lives in a terrain more like lowland Scotland than Texas, tries to knit himself a jumper out of wires using telephone poles as needles. Inadvertently, he creates a chain, which he agrees to sell to a sea captain who needs it for his anchor. When Dan throws it to the boat, it sinks. He fishes it out, holds it upside down to empty the water out, throws it back into the sea – where a U Boat sinks it. Using his chain as a lasso, Dan hauls ashore not only the British boat but no fewer than three U Boats. A naval gentleman, observing this, gives him a £50 reward. ‘Frizzle mine Aunt Von Fanny, Danny der Desperate has our goose cooked’, says a German submariner. Dan remarks, ‘I guess old Addie will feel pretty sick over this.’ 36 Mee, fortunately, was not without competitors in the juvenile market.
Radio propaganda could no more credibly employ Mee’s nationalistic ego than it could revel in biff-bang comic heroics. One of Priestley’s most significant colleagues among broadcasters to the USA was Leslie Howard, very well known as a star of the prodigiously successful Gone With The Wind. Leslie Howard Steiner (1893 – 1943) was the son of a Hungarian Jewish immigrant, but returned to England when he could have lived safely and lucratively in the USA, and made himself more than useful to the national effort as broadcaster and film-maker until German fighters, probably directed to destroy him personally, hit the plane in which he was travelling over the Bay of Biscay on his way back from a lecture tour in Spain and Portugal.
Howard was certainly not identified with left-wing ideas, but his one Postscript for the British audience received a significantly more favourable response, according to BBC listener research, from working-class than middle-class people. He directed and starred in the feature films Pimpernel Smith (1941) and The First of the Few (this latter about the ‘boffin’ R. H. Mitchell who had designed the Spitfire but had died before the war). Both were enormous box office successes, both developed elements of the Myth. In both, Howard, remarkably, played an intellectual, with heroic, even romantic qualities. With his blond good-looks, pleasantly cultivated accent, dry humour and rather absentminded air, Howard’s screen image could merge the typical Englishman with the typical intellectual. As Aldgate and Richards remark in their survey of British Second World War cinema, with his ‘dreamy, other worldly air’ he represented the ‘visionary aspect of Englishness’, suggested by the music of Elgar and Vaughan Williams, and apparently seen in action in the persons of such eccentric heroes as Lawrence of Arabia and Orde Wingate.37
In Pimpernel Smith Howard plays an Oxford archaeology professor with a secret life: he rescues anti-Nazis from pre-war Germany – artists, intellectuals, scientists. His courage and gentle humour go along with the message that England is fighting to save civilisation, high culture, intellect. According to one set of rankings, Howard rose from being the nineteenth most popular British star in 1940, to the second by 1942. Meanwhile, the London Daily Mail in July 1940 had described him as ‘Number 2 public speaker to J. B. Priestley in the overseas service’. The BBC valued his ‘great success in the American transmission’ very highly – when Priestley dropped his transatlantic broadcasting in the autumn of 1940, Howard’s going on seemed ‘particularly important’. Between 16 July 1940 and 7 August 1941, he gave twenty-two talks on the North American Service.
He knew the USA very well, and stressed to listeners there that he had spent ‘most of his adult life’ in their country. He described for them a Battle of Britain airfield, the work of the Observer Corps, the maintenance of ‘business as usual’ in London, frankly (as it were) raising question of the extent to which his own talks were propaganda. The British, he said, were very bad at propaganda, and took it up only ‘cautiously, politely and with a painstaking rectitude’.
He was an appropriate person, vaguely aristocratic as his screen image was, to grasp the thorny problem of US dislike of British class distinctions as represented by such institutions as the monarchy, the House of Lords and Oxbridge. Britain was democratic, he explained over the air in mid-August 1940, but he defied anyone to prove this – ‘for it is a paradox, and our constitution is not a document like that of the United States, it is simply an instinct in the minds of the English, an instinct which governs their laws, their institutions and their behaviour’. He insisted in other broadcasts that Britain shared in the principles of the US Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The principle of tolerance, which Britain stood for, was ‘one form of that freedom for which the Greeks fought at Marathon, and Bruce’s Scots at Bannockburn, and Elizabeth’s English in the Channel and the French at Valmy, and the American colonists at Saratoga’.
So the English, or British, in their own special way, stand for the universal spirit of liberty. Pressing this point – and he seems to have made such points seem convincing – Howard abdicates, as it were, on behalf of his countrymen, the purportedly moral rule of Empire. Paradoxically, English institutions somehow represent the spirit of Scots, and of French and Amer
ican revolutionaries, who fought against English power. This may have some kind of emotional coherence, but intellectually it is hardly convincing. Paradoxically, the man who was so good at playing English intellectuals expresses to US listeners a mystical, anti-intellectual, conception of English character. The English are marked, he tells them in mid-October 1940, by:
qualities of courage, devotion to duty, kindliness, humour, cool-headedness, balance, commonsense, singleness of purpose. But there is a master quality which motivates and shines through all these – that of idealism. Mind you, you have to be smart to spot it. The English do their best to conceal it, and they succeed pretty well … In my case it is the Englishman in me that is able to unearth it and the American in me that is able to stand off and marvel at it.38
Freed from its usual validating links with Deep English landscape, team games and flower shows, we have here, surely, the wholly ineffable concept of Englishness at the heart of the Myth: distillation of the post-Smilesian concept of the Gentleman.
It is as elusive as the relationship between English nationalist music and English landscape: you feel that if you are English, to adapt Howard; you recognise it if you’re not. Concluding this section, I cannot resist citing a deliciously ‘English’ exchange between the composers Julius Harrison and Elizabeth Poston, transmitted to North America on 29 September 1941. The BBC ‘plugged’ English music in its broadcasts abroad, including Harrison’s Bredon Hill, a rhapsody for violin and orchestra not heard nowadays but apparently ‘in the mould of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending of a quarter century earlier’, and certainly much admired by other composers of the school, Moeran and Ireland. It was given its ‘first world performance’ on radio beamed at North America and introduced ecstatically by the announcer as ‘witness to the eternal spirit of England. Julius Harrison, Worcestershire born of generations of countrymen, lives in sight of Bredon Hill.’