The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  He got on extremely well with British pressmen. Arthur Christiansen, editor of the most successful British daily, the Express, became a close friend and slept in Reynolds’s flat during the Blitz. Reynolds rather slavishly admired Christiansen’s proprietor, Beaverbrook, and claimed to be on good terms with him socially. Quite how seriously the British Establishment took him before the arrival of Beaverbrook’s crony Brendan Bracken as Minister of Information in 1941 is not clear; he certainly did not, during the Blitz itself, get chances to meet Churchill such as were accorded to Ingersoll and Murrow. But he identified sturdily with the British case, despite the opinion of his magazine’s proprietor that America should not be drawn into war: when the editor of Colliers, Charles Colebaugh, received a Reynolds story called ‘England Can’t Lose’, he cabled: ‘YOU ARE PROBABLY CRAZY BUT CALL SHOTS AS YOU SEE THEM. WE WILL PUBLISH EVERYTHING YOU WRITE.’ And they did.39

  Reynolds became a close friend of Sidney Bernstein, Deputy Director of the film division of the Mol. When a New York agent cabled him that Dutton would publish a book moulded out of his Colliers articles, Reynolds took advantage of doctor’s orders – a week in bed after he had broken two ribs falling over a table in his flat when it had no electricity – to retreat to Bernstein’s farm in Kent (he managed to get an official Admiralty car to take him), and there worked away with scissors, paste and a part-time secretary from the village. The result, a few months later, topped the US best-seller lists: he called the book, with flamboyant unconcern for accuracy, The Wounded Don’t Cry.

  Meanwhile he had scripted and narrated, at Bernstein’s suggestion, a seminal short documentary called London Can Take It. Though made to Mol requirements by the Crown Film Unit (as Grierson’s GPO Unit was renamed in August 1940), it had been released in the USA as ‘by Quentin Reynolds’, with no mention on screen of its official, propagandist provenance. It had been highly successful. When Reynolds returned to New York early in 1941 he was surprised to be met at the harbour by fellow pressmen anxious to interview him. A country-wide lecture tour in favour of British war relief had been arranged for him. In clubs, churches, schools and so on, Reynolds found audiences rather apathetic – it was still not their war – but generous: he raised nearly $200,000 dollars for the charity. Warner Brothers backed London Can Take It for nationwide release. (Ben Robertson, who had travelled back with him, was meanwhile making speeches and broadcasts on behalf of the British cause all the way from Boston to Georgia.40)

  After his return to Britain, where his book was selling well, Reynolds improved his establishment contacts: he had not previously met Nancy, Lady Astor, but was now invited to lunch at her mansion, Cliveden, famous as the haunt of a ‘set’ of pre-war appeasers. He wavered about going: not only had her ‘set’ let the free world down, she was also a ‘militant prohibitionist’. But Murrow, also invited, talked him into it: ‘You may meet people there who can be helpful to you.’ Indeed, Duff Cooper was there, as well as his soon-to-be successor at Mol, Bracken, and Mol’s influential Walter Monckton, to enjoy the delicious salmon sent to Lady Astor by friends in Scotland. Soon after, at Bernstein’s suggestion, Duff Cooper agreed that a Postscript by Reynolds would pep up the regular series. Reynolds penned an abusive open letter to Goebbels, ridiculing the latter’s boss as ‘Mr Schickelgruber’. Delivered on 29 June 1941, it became front page news. Reynolds’s friend Christiansen printed the full text in the Express. The BBC forwarded 7,000 letters to Reynolds in the next few days – one of them from Churchill, who thought the broadcast ‘admirable’, and one which said, ‘God bless you, Yank … You had the whole Elephant and Castle Underground Station roaring.’41

  Reynolds soon followed the war to Russia, though he could certainly have prospered in Britain as a result of the public’s affection for him. After Murrow, he must be seen as the most influential US contributor to the Myth of the Blitz. Before discussing London Can Take It, it is worth looking at The Wounded Don’t Cry, published in Britain with extra sections denied to the avid US public, by Cassell’s, the publishers Reynolds shared with both Churchill and Murrow.

  The first Reynolds offering accepted by Colliers had been a short story, and he had continued to work at times in that genre. There is no doubt that he shaped his Blitz stories for literary effects of the kind which Murrow would have spurned as untruthful and sensationalist. Bernstein would reminisce that ‘Quent was very popular in a different way from Ed … He was a good drinker and so on.’42 A predilection for darts and pints in pubs and drinking sessions with young servicemen is a well-advertised part of Reynolds’s authorial persona. Unlike Murrow, this crony of Ernest Hemingway’s made his own personal participation and reactions central in his war reportage. Comparing his post-war autobiography (1964) with his wartime books, it appears that, by his own tacit admission, he invented a good story about meeting Roosevelt’s advisor Harry Hopkins at 10 Downing Street.43

  It is more puzzling, at first sight, that he should have manipulated the events which gave him one of the effective, vivid ‘short stories’ in The Wounded Don’t Cry. As he tells it in the wartime book, he is out with women working in the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service. Three dead women, sisters, are brought out of a burning house, then the child of one of them, three years old, her long golden curls ‘strangely untouched by fire’. The effort to resuscitate her fails, giving rise to a peroration typical of Reynolds’s burly rhetoric:

  I know this isn’t a pleasant story to read. It isn’t a pleasant one to write. It’s much better to read and write about the fighter pilots, the ‘gay, laughing-eyed knights of the air’. Sure, that’s what war is. Glamorous and exciting … But that isn’t the war I see in London every night. This is the war I see. If you want a front seat to the war, come and stand over this three-year-old child with me. Don’t be afraid of the bombs that are falling close, or the spent shrapnel that is raining down on us. You want to see what war is really like, don’t you? Take another look at the baby. She still looks as though she were asleep. This is war – full style, 1940. This is the war that Herr Hitler is waging.44

  The event in question evidently did move Reynolds, so greatly that he returned to it in his autobiography. From the later book, it appears that the driver of the ambulance was not the woman in charge of the ambulance station, but a girl, Ethel, who features in the wartime report as coming on duty despite losing her home and family the night before. As well as altering this important detail, Reynolds increased the number of women killed in the cellar from two to three, and made them sisters. The victims, it seems, were in fact mother, daughter and granddaughter, Gloria. The baby’s father had been lost at Dunkirk – in The Wounded Don’t Cry he is merely described as ‘in the army’. In that book, a kind of ‘punch line’ is offered. The doctor in attendance says of the three-year-old, ‘Maybe she’s better off dead’, and Reynolds himself ripostes ‘Nobody’s better off dead.’ If we believe the later memoirs, it was Reynolds, thinking of Gloria’s dismal future in an orphanage, who spoke the first line, and the freshly bereaved driver, Ethel, who made him repeat it and, with ‘contempt in her eyes’, said, ‘harshly’ – making him ‘feel very small’ – ‘Nobody’s better off dead.’45

  If we assume that only original notes or a very vivid memory could have permitted Reynolds, over twenty years later, to change a tale already committed so effectively to print, we must conclude that either literary considerations, or propagandist ones, influenced his original handling.

  Perhaps both can be detected. Reynolds’s persona, that of the tough, optimistic, angry reporter, as always in the thick of the action, is given force by his retort to the doctor, and would be compromised by reference to the sentimentally pessimistic, almost defeatist feeling admitted in the later account. But it may also be the case that Reynolds felt he should make the episode harrowing – the Nazis, aiming at a hospital, kill yet another small child nearby – but not too completely disturbing. Ethel, in the wartime version, represents bravery, ‘taking it’ and ‘carrying on’;
but her emotion, expressed at the climax, would distract attention from the image of the dead child. The fact that the British Expeditionary Force lost many men in its retreat to Dunkirk and at the port was not a useful topic to allude to in the autumn of 1940. But why three grown women? Why sisters? Is Reynolds deliberately or unconsciously delving into the myth-kitty, where three is a more folkloristic number than two (there are three little pigs and three bears)? A trio of sisters vaguely echoes myth and legend. A last, prosaic explanation might be that he wanted to spare any friends or relatives of the victims possible emotional harassment arising from publication of their stories with detail which might serve to identify them. But the bereaved ambulance worker is presented in such detail …

  Anyway, bluff, jovial, honest Quent was not quite the straightforward fellow he seemed, and, as we have seen, London Can Take It was not the personal creation of a ‘neutral’ reporter which American audiences, if sufficiently gullible, were lured into taking it to be.

  11

  Filming the Blitz

  Despite the clouds of war, propaganda was still a dirty word in Britain, and advertising was considered vulgar … So, while desperate efforts were being made elsewhere to catch up with the lethargy and neglect of the thirties, practically nothing was done to plan or prepare for the dissemination of official information …

  Somebody must have been thinking ahead, however, because … about ten days before the actual declaration of war, we were ordered to make a short instructional film, based on an official handbook, called If War Should Come. This was just a straightforward statement of what the public should do when the air raids sounded …

  The fatal Sunday of 3 September 1939 came, and immediately after Chamberlain’s speech, saying war had been declared, the sirens went off. To this day, no one seems to know with certainty whether it was a genuine warning or a mistake. What was certain was that nobody behaved the way they were supposed to in our film. Everybody just went into the streets and gawped at the sky, delighted in the balloons, laughed at the air raid wardens, and chatted with each other in the new-found camaraderie that – alas – makes people so nostalgic about wars. The authorities obviously thought again, our little film was canned, and the thousands of copies presumably scrapped.

  Harry Watt, Don’t Look at the Camera

  VIRTUALLY EVERYONE IN Britain must have seen a fairish proportion of London Can Take It, whether or not they have been told what they were watching. Film of the Blitz is surprisingly rare. At that time, as many now don’t realise, it was impossible to film events spontaneously and synchronously. A film-editor, Dai Vaughan, explains why in his fine book about Stewart McAllister and Humphrey Jennings: ‘Slower emulsions demanded bulky lighting. 35mm synch cameras could not be hand-held; and sound recording equipment, rather than being something you slung over one shoulder, was something you drove around in.’1 Hence effective sequences of Blitz-in-progress were likely to be very rare. The aftermath of Blitz was easier to film. Some efforts by amateurs raise subversive questions about the representative quality of certain magnificent photographs which show defiant ‘Cockneys’ coming out of the ruins, or stricken ‘Cockneys’ being lifted out by rescue workers. Rosie Newman, a lady who happened to have colour film, a camera and time on her hands, filmed post-Blitz scenes in London. The effect of colour, when one sees her work, is disturbing: the Blitz is a black-and-white story in the classic photographs. Rescue work in progress seen in the middle distance looks like a street-mending operation and yields no discreet reminders of painted Renaissance Pietàs.

  So the images provided for Reynolds to script over in London Can Take It have been recycled almost every time events in 1940 have been narrated on TV. J. B. Priestley, for instance, used most of the film in 1940: A Reminiscence, screened by the BBC in 1965. He did duly acknowledge that this was a ‘documentary’ featuring Reynolds. He did not comment on the provenance of certain other elements in his compilation, perhaps because the producer, Ed Rollins, didn’t remind him where they came from. Shots of women factory workers singing ‘Yes, My Darling Daughter’ and of Myra Hess playing Mozart in one of her famous lunchtime concerts in London’s National Gallery are used to support as factual assertion what Priestley had hoped for in a Postscript quoted earlier (see here). There was, he states a quarter-century on, a ‘sudden demand for music and the arts’ in the summer of 1940 – people demanded ‘at last, a higher quality of life’. In fact, the images used were filmed by Humphrey Jennings in the summer of 1941, for the masterpiece Listen to Britain, credited jointly to himself and McAllister.

  I once sat discussing with a TV producer a planned series (it was, eventually, a good one) on Britain during the Second World War. He poured scorn on the work of the Crown Film Unit. Its importance had been greatly exaggerated. The public of the day liked feature films – who watched those worthy propaganda documentaries? In due course, it was with wry amusement that I noticed how, presenting the Blitz, his team had lifted an admittedly wonderful shot (of a fireman filthy after a night attacking a conflagration) from Jennings’s film Fires Were Started, made in 1942 and reconstructing the heyday of the Blitz.

  The truth is that Crown Film Unit material, especially Jennings’s, has always been used to fill a gap. It took months to produce, for Fires Were Started, a vivid impression of what it had been like to fight great Blitz blazes. It was – and, as Boorman’s Hope and Glory shows, remains – the case that portraying Blitz in continuous sequences, rather than through a series of cuts between shots filmed separately, is very expensive.

  Lots of British wartime feature films included short Blitz episodes. Jane Fisher argues that ‘the Blitz motif’ was used again and again to evoke key propaganda themes for British and US audiences. The Blitz proved that the British Had All Been In It Together (which was ‘democratic’) and had Taken It (which showed their strong moral backbone) and had Carried On (working towards well-deserved victory). She refers to the 1943 feature Demi-Paradise, aimed at the Home Front audience and designed, not very surreptitiously, to prove the superiority of the British way of life over Soviet communism, which had by this time strong appeal for the British ‘masses’. A young Russian, Ivan, visits a British shipyard which is making a propeller to his design; all his prejudices against Britain are swept away when he witnesses how people behave during a German raid on the yard.2 In Noël Coward’s In Which We Serve (1942), the survivors of HMS Torrin, sunk off Crete, cling to a raft. At one stage they sing ‘Roll Out The Barrel’ to cheer themselves up – this ditty was identified with cheery community singing in shelters. We learn about the men through flashbacks. We see the pregnant war bride of Shorty (John Mills) in Plymouth refusing to move down to the shelter in a raid; she goes instead to a chair under the stairs. When a bomb scores a direct hit, Freda survives and gives birth to a seven-pound son. But Kath, wife of Walter (Bernard Miles), Shorty’s fellow crewman, is killed. When Shorty gets a letter and breaks the news to Walter, the latter exhibits profound British restraint: ‘I think I’ll just go out on deck for a bit. I’m glad Freda’s all right.’ The experience of the sailors, dive bombed by JU 88s, strafed in the water, is matched by that of civilians like Freda in Plymouth (a point which would not appeal to Nicholas Monsarrat). The splendid performance of Coward himself as robust but humane Captain Kinross is matched by that of Mills as a mere able seaman. ‘Class’ is a factor in naval life – the film would have been implausible if it had been suppressed – but the officers, apart from Kinross, are less fully and sympathetically presented than men from the lower decks. Class is sublimated in ‘service’ to a common cause, which is all very Myth-of-the-Blitz-like. The ship transcends the men, the Royal Navy transcends the individual ship – England transcends all.

  However effective the Plymouth Blitz episode was in this film, or, say, the bombing of a factory in Millions Like Us, where it emphasises the role of women war workers as ‘front-line soldiers’, such clearly fictionalised items could not be easily recycled in post-war TV programmes
claiming factuality. Hence London Can Take It, Listen to Britain, Words for Battle and Fires Were Started, all Crown Film Unit documentaries, all involving Jennings, have continued to provide images of British Blitz behaviour. ‘Together’, as Aldgate and Richards put it, the Jennings films ‘decisively shaped and defined the image of Britain at War that was to be circulated round the world and handed on to the generations to come.’3

  Jennings is a man whose charisma – attested to so strongly by friends and colleagues – seems curiously detached from the written evidence provided by his own poems, letters and articles. Unlike ‘Quent’ Reynolds or ‘Jack’ Priestley’s personalities, his does not leap forth vividly from anecdotes told by him or about him: the fascinating talk which friends admired has vanished, literally, into the air. One is left with an irritatingly imprecise impression of a typical leftist intellectual from a background in the professional classes and Cambridge University, saturated in English literature, fascinated by continental surrealism, who used the cameras which he directed, and the talents of McAllister as film-editor, to express visually and aurally perceptions and ideas which are never resoundingly uttered in his creative and non-creative writings. Because he became the Crown Film Unit’s most admired director, there has been a tendency to exaggerate his hand in documentaries (including London Can Take It) where his part was auxiliary. The Unit went in for teamwork – Jennings’s individualism attracted the suspicion of John Grierson before that dominie left his charges to work in Canada. ‘A minor poet’, Grierson grumbled long after, ‘a very stilted person … a little literary. He was fearfully sorry for the working class … safely, safely sorry for the working class …’4