The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  Nevertheless, the British people, never invaded, could believe that virtually no one would have succumbed. This, combined with sheer exhaustion and with Labour’s victory in the 1945 general election, helps to explain the horrid inertia of English culture in the decade after victory. With Labour constructing, if not a New Order, then a welfare state, and with a middle-class backlash against fair shares and austerity in full swing, the leftist critics and experimenters of the thirties, already mostly co-opted into the wartime propaganda effort, were stranded as weary and rather puzzled defenders of the new Establishment composed of Labourites, statist ‘liberals’ and Planners. The career of Humphrey Jennings after Fires Were Started is sadly symptomatic.

  His next film was a neglected masterpiece, The Silent Village, in which the story of the Nazis’ destruction of the Czech village of Lidice was transposed to the Welsh coalfields. Jennings – who stayed with miners while filming and was overwhelmed by the way they seemed to live by Christian and communistic principles – knew perfectly well that Wales wasn’t England and that the Welsh still nursed sour memories of English conquest. The Nazi attempt to suppress the Welsh language is a vivid issue in his film. To the film’s main propagandist intention of inspiring will to fight against Nazism may have been added, in some official minds, the hope that it would encourage Welsh miners, in a vital industry prone to strikes and absenteeism, to put their backs more fully into it. But resistance by trade unionists to injustice is emphasised in Jennings’s story, and the film might well have had the effect of encouraging a Welsh combination of pride, paranoia and class war. The ideological ‘instability’ of The Silent Village is very satisfying.

  If Jennings’s Diary for Timothy (1945) is less successful (though more often seen), this cannot merely be because McAllister was no longer his editor. A month by month account of the final phases of the war is narrated for the infant Tim, born exactly five years after its outbreak. We follow the activities of Goronwy, the Welsh miner, Alan the farmer and Bill the engine driver, ‘all fighting in their ways’. Continued danger, austerity and trepidation are emphasised. The script, by E. M. Forster, produces a left-of-centre message, but in such a way as to suggest doubt rather than hope. Towards the end, Goronwy remembers unemployment after the last world war: ‘Has all this really got to happen again?’ After the three representatives of the People have gone ‘back to everyday life and to everyday danger’, the film concludes with a diatribe against ‘greed for money and power’. But the film’s generally downbeat, rather depressing, character is highlighted by shots of Myra Hess playing sombre music at a concert. Compared to counterparts in the Hess sequence in Listen to Britain, the faces in the audience are both more relaxed and sadder. Radio news of the abortive British airborne operation at Arnhem is cut in. It seems that the effort of building a better world must now proceed by dogged, unspectacular effort and rather stale principle, not by heady, Blitz-inspired, hope.

  Reviewing a book on The English by Ernest Barker in the Times Literary Supplement in 1948, Jennings demonstrated that he still could not achieve in prose the sense of clear and ample statement present in his best wartime films. Rather petulantly, he exclaims that the English aren’t ‘mild’, as they like to think they are. Ask the Scots and the Welsh – ‘It would be inadvisable to ask the Irish.’ He asserts that the English are ‘in fact a violent, savage race’ though ‘They have a power of poetry which is the despair of the rest of the world.’ (Sample surveys of the intelligentsia in Spanish-, Russian-, Urdu- and Chinese-speaking milieux might have caused him to retract this statement.) But, like Attlee’s government – which, in the interests of ill-fed Britain and of British world power greatly increased commitment to the colonial Empire, presided over a spate of new colonisation in Africa and sought to exploit the Empire’s resources more efficiently – Jennings favoured a new English expansion: only so could England retain Great Power status.10

  Working, through Ian Dalrymple’s Wessex Films (‘Deeply English Films’) for the Central Office of Information, which had succeeded the MoI in peacetime, Jennings directed Dim Little Island in 1949, a strange film brooding over British decline and trying to cheer people up. Four men ‘Speak for England’ to camera. Osbert Lancaster, cartoonist and expert on architecture, contends that the English have always ‘thank heavens’ remained ‘deaf to the appeals of reason’ – hence the glory of Dunkirk. James Fisher, the naturalist, celebrates British birds, and explains, Priestley-wise, that ‘For five bob you can get from almost any industrial city of the North’ into beautiful countryside. Vaughan Williams goes on about English folk-tunes. The remark in the film which, in retrospect, is saddest is made by John Ormiston of the engineering firm Vickers Armstrong: the British are no longer the best shipbuilders in the world, but are still the best sailors and can still compete.

  Jennings’s last film, Family Portrait (1951), was directed for Wessex Films ‘on the theme of the Festival of Britain’. This expo on the South Bank of the Thames had been planned by great and good members of the Lab.–Lib. post-war establishment as an arena of reaffirmation, a successor to the vainglorious Empire exhibitions of 1924 and 1938, which would be exempt from charges of jingoism. It was quite good fun, especially the associated Battersea Fun Fair. The incoming Tory administration of 1951 ensured that nothing remained for posterity except the valuable new Festival Hall. Jennings’s film is choppy, sentimental and confused. The script, by Jennings himself, tells us that the Festival is ‘a kind of family reunion … We still are a family … A very mixed family … but nevertheless we have resisted … invasion for nearly a thousand years.’ The diversity of people is matched by diversity of landscape and weather. After invoking Shakespeare, the film tells us that ‘for centuries the family has mixed poetry and prose together’. Jennings’s inconclusive fascination with the Industrial Revolution yields, after a celebration of James Watt (Scots are part of this family), the perception that it created ‘a new kind of poetry and a new kind of prose’. It is saddening to see the erstwhile surrealist hop round British history echoing clichés about English character. The family are innovators who love tradition, cherish domestic life but love pageantry. They have learned the ‘trick of voluntary discipline’ and their parliamentary system embodies compromise. Naturally, the Myth of the Blitz features here: ‘The Elizabethan journey ended with the Battle of Britain.’ That matchless invention radar involved ‘Prose and poetry again, but put together in a new way …’

  One sees all the more clearly how impressive is Bowen’s presentation of the poetry–prose, romance–technology dichotomy, in ‘Summer Night’. Lindsay Anderson’s acerbic but just dismissal of Family Portrait is worth quoting:

  He found himself invoking great names of the past (Darwin, Newton, Faraday and Watt) in an attempt to exorcise the demons of the present. Even the fantasy of Empire persists (‘The crack of the village bat is heard on Australian plains …’.) The symbol at the end of the film is the mace of Authority, and its last image is a preposterous procession of ancient and bewigged dignitaries. The Past is no longer an inspiration, it is a refuge.11

  Jennings’s last remit was to make a film for the European Economic Commission on ‘health’, as part of a series on The Changing Face of Europe. He looked at possible locations in France, Switzerland, Italy and finally Greece, where he slipped on the Island of Poros, fell from a rock and died. It is very sad that death came just as he was preparing to step outside the ideological paradigms of the ‘dim little island’ and perhaps to reactivate his youthful internationalism. But it could be that for his generation, or most of them, these paradigms and the Myth of the Blitz were ultimately inescapable. The most vital films coming from any British studio at the end of his life were, after all, the Ealing Comedies, which profoundly influenced the styles and themes of comedy in the rising medium of television.

  Charles Barr’s brilliant analysis of the output of Ealing Studios, published in 1977, is, or should be, well known. Perhaps its most important point, in ter
ms of the Myth of the Blitz, is its first:

  Asked to invent a typical Ealing comedy plot, one might produce something like this. A big brewery tries to absorb a small competitor, a family firm which is celebrating its 150th anniversary. The offer is gallantly refused, whereupon the boss’s son goes incognito from the big firm to infiltrate the small one and sabotage its fortunes. Gradually, he is charmed by the family brewery and by the daughter of the house, saves the company from ruin, and marries into it. Officials and workers unite at the wedding banquet to drink the couple’s health in a specially created brew.

  To make this really Ealing, lay on the contrasts. The brewery names; Ironside against Greenleaf, grim offices and black limousines against country lanes, ivy-covered cottages, horses, bicycles. Autocratic rule against the benevolent paternalism of a grey haired old man who collects Toby jugs. The beer itself: quantity against quality, machines against craftsmanship.12

  Barr can now reveal that this scenario was actually realised at Ealing Studios. But, whereas Ealing Comedy is thought of as a post-war phenomenon, Cheer Boys Cheer was released in August 1939. Again we see how the Myth of the Blitz was all but forged before May 1940. The country lanes and friendly manners of the Greenleaf English would confront the mechanised might of the Ironside Germans and win. At one point in Cheer Boys Cheer, the bullying chairman of Ironside is seen reading Mein Kampf …

  Michael Balcon, who from 1938 until they were taken over for television in the late fifties ran Ealing Studios much like a family business in a site on the village green of a London suburb, was the son of poor Jewish immigrants. He shared with Leslie Howard that special patriotic fervour which only assimilated outsiders feel. He believed that British films should be ‘absolutely rooted in the soil of this country’, and after he bought an estate in Sussex grew willow for cricket bats along the river. Charles Frend, who directed for Ealing the important wartime films The Foreman Went to France and San Demetrio London, and, in the early fifties, The Cruel Sea, seemed to Balcon ‘the ideal man to deal with any subject concerning the traditional English values’ – Frend was ‘born in Kent, educated at King’s School Canterbury, an expert on Kentish beer, with his roots firmly planted in the soil of this country …’.13

  Balcon’s patriotic commitment to supporting MoI policy was never in doubt – indeed, Ealing was ideally orientated towards the expression of one propaganda theme in particular. The slogan on the office walls was ‘The Studio with the Team Spirit’, and in such movies as The Bells Go Down (about firemen at war), Nine Men (an army patrol in Africa) and San Demetrio London (Merchant Navy men salvage their stricken tanker), all released in 1943, Ealing celebrated wartime teamwork. It was significant that in the first two the British teams were led by sturdy Scots, while The Foreman (who) Went to France (1942) was a Welshman with Scottish and Cockney sidekicks – their mission to rescue their firm’s plant from a factory in the path of German advance. Ealing teamwork was pan-British, and class-free.

  Balcon said in interview about his close-knit team (six out of ten Ealing features during his twenty years as captain were the work of just half a dozen directors), ‘By and large we were a group of liberal-minded, like-minded people. We were middle-class people brought up with middle-class backgrounds and rather conventional education … We voted Labour for the first time after the war: this was our mild revolution.’14 Ealing had a strong affinity with J. B. Priestley, who had produced the story of The Foreman Went to France, and when Priestley’s dramatic allegory calling for a future of co-operation rather than greed, They Came to a City, was filmed in 1944, it was Ealing which did the job. Cavalcanti and, over a longer period, Harry Watt provided a direct link with Griersonian documentary. The ethos of People’s War was imprinted on all the studio’s work.

  After the war Balcon characteristically proclaimed the aim of asserting British ‘greatness’ through Ealing movies. But Scott of the Antarctic (1948) celebrated the amateurishness which caused the British hero to fail in his race against the Nordic professional Amundsen. And the studio’s best earners, abroad as well as at home, were the quirky, delightful, ‘Ealing Comedies’.

  These are very diverse films made by directors of markedly varied proclivities. Passport to Pimlico (1949) was the only Ealing film directed by Henry Cornelius, a South African, but it was scripted, like several later comedies, by T. E. B. (‘Tibbie’) Clarke. Clarke, eventually an Oscar winner, had no reason to be nostalgic about the Blitz: he was discharged from service in the wartime police force after a recurrence of nervous asthma, not experienced since his childhood: he had loathed the ‘cruelty and horror … sickening destructiveness … white dusty filth … peculiar stink of fresh decay’ with which the Luftwaffe’s raids on London had assaulted his senses.15

  But Passport to Pimlico reworks the Myth of the Blitz in a peacetime context. What does a close-knit London ‘village’ community want to do with the huge bombsite which dominates its area? Shopkeeper Pemberton wants to make it a playground, the majority on the local council want to sell it at a profit for private development. The conflict is cast in Priestley-esque terms – fun-and-games and community spirit against private greed. When an unexploded bomb is set off by local boys, an underground cave is discovered which contains a treasure trove, together with medieval documents which prove that Pimlico is legally part of Burgundy. Pemberton, former air-raid warden, can reassume his authority of Blitz days. The community, as Barr puts it, can ‘go on being itself as it was in the war’. Eventually, of course, Pimlico is reintegrated into Britain, but not before, as Burgundy, it has abolished food rationing and pub licensing hours and given British cinema audiences sick of austerity and bureaucracy a vision of release.16

  Whisky Galore, directed by the brilliant young Scot Alexander McKendrick, presenting the theft of a cargo of precious spirits from a wrecked vessel by clever Hebridean islanders who totally outwit authority in the person of an honourable but stupid Englishman, has no Blitz bearings whatsoever. Nor does Kind Hearts and Coronets, Robert Hamer’s elegant and sadistic period comedy. The core of ‘Ealing’, Barr argues, is found in films scripted by Clarke. In The Blue Lamp, PC George Dixon (later to have a lengthy posthumous career from 1955 to 1976 as TV’s Dixon of Dock Green) is murdered by a young criminal so obnoxious that even the decent criminal fraternity help the police to track him down. Paddington police station houses a family. Dixon, the good bobbie, represents communal interests. The young assassin stands for a new, post-war type, disrupting the national family which won the war. Clarke’s Titfield Thunderbolt(1953) marks the moment where Ealing’s inbuilt tendency to identify with tradition and local identity degenerates into anti-modern fantasy. It has to do with the efforts of enthusiasts to keep a small railway branch line open. The ‘Thunderbolt’ which serves it is antiquated and picturesque. The implication is that old-fashioned steam trains represent, by their very impracticality, something very English, like Priestley’s uninhabited English cottage. Modernisation threatens such precious things. McKendrick’s The Maggie (1954), scripted by an American, William Rose, provides a Scottish equivalent, in which a picturesque old ‘Clyde puffer’ is saved from the scrapyard.

  By 1958, when Balcon gave up and moved on, his studios had clearly run out of capacity to cope positively with British life. Dunkirk, released in that year, shows, as Barr puts it, ‘a dispirited, sluggish country blundering its way to disaster’. The final, conventional assertions, made in commentary, that ‘Dunkirk was a great miracle … A nation had been made whole’ had not been vivified in the film.17

  Little of note was done with 1940–41 on the big screen thereafter until Boorman’s Hope and Glory. Nostalgia for the war was somewhat submerged in the essentially optimistic and forward-looking Britain of affluence and permissiveness. In the bad-tempered Britain of the seventies – a country skidding at terrifying pace towards second-rate status – angry left-wing dramatists turned to the war years, on stage and TV, to find the origins of present crisis in the betrayal of the people
after 1945. Ian McEwan’s Imitation Game and David Hare’s Licking Hitler both focused on secret war work – by scientists and propagandists respectively. They bring out the retrospective irony of the term People’s War, but don’t bear centrally on Blitz. Nor does Trevor Griffiths’s Country, which shows the Old Gang of moneyed Tories manoeuvring successfully to adjust to Labour’s 1945 election victory.

  Howard Brenton’s The Churchill Play, first produced in 1974 in Nottingham by Richard Eyre (who also encouraged the writers named above to dramatise the war), was revived by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1978. Brenton wrote in a preface of 1986 that the play was ‘at its root a satire against the erosion of civil liberties and union rights that began under Edward Heath’s Government and spread apace under Margaret Thatcher’s’.18 Therefore, alas, it remained pointful.

  In the Orwellian year, 1984, Brenton’s Britain has dozens of internment camps to accommodate strikers and other dissidents. Some inmates of one of them, encouraged by the camp recreation officer, who is a queasy middle-class, ex-public school liberal, put on a play. In this, Churchill rises from the coffin in which a grateful nation buried him in 1965. When it is performed before two MPs from the parliamentary select committee concerned with the camps, the actors use it as a springboard for an attempted breakout.

  Brenton is not totally unsympathetic towards Churchill, seen as a lonely depressive, the son of a tragically syphilitic father. But his role as imperialist adventurer in Africa is related to his actions, as pre-1914 Home Secretary, against Welsh miners: both are used to undermine his heroic status. He is confronted by antagonistic voices from blitzed Clydebank, blitzed London. The MPs who witness the play are respectively a smooth ‘Conservative-Labour’ government man and a guilt-ridden drunk labelled ‘Socialist-Labour’, so Brenton’s target is wider than his retrospective preface suggests. Post-war ‘consensus’, Labour ‘sell out’, Tory ‘compromise’ are all implicated in a tyranny which betrays the professed aim of People’s War.