by Angus Calder
The brilliant film The Long Good Friday, originally conceived by its scriptwriter Barrie Keeffe in 1977, finally-released, as directed by a Scot, John Mackenzie, in 1981, makes, though obliquely, a subtler commentary on the relevance of the Myth of the Blitz in the era of Callaghan–Thatcher.
Harold Shand, the central figure of this very violent film, wonderfully acted by Bob Hoskins, is seen by Keeffe, in his own words, as ‘a Thatcher man gone mad – the ultimate self-made capitalist and utterly patriotic’. This gangster boss owns a yacht, possesses a posh mistress (named, piquantly, ‘Victoria’) and has the police and local authorities in his pocket. He is planning a major property development in the East End Docks area and is forging links with the US Mafia, whose chief envoy is Charlie, ‘the kid from New Jersey’ (played by Eddie Constantine).
At a party aboard his yacht, attended by local government bigwigs and the Mafia men, Harold tells his guests that he is a ‘business man … with a sense of history … Our country’s not an island any more – we’re a leading European state. And I believe … that this is the decade in which London will become Europe’s capital, having cleared away the out-dated.’ Yet, passing the docks later, he says to Charlie, ‘There used to be eighty or ninety ships in this dock at one time. They used to queue to get in.’ Charlie replies, ‘Don’t get nostalgic … Remember, you’re thirty-five miles from Europe here.’ Keeffe has detected a contradiction at the core of both Labourism and Thatcherism – a commitment to modernisation conflicts with patriotic nostalgia.
Shand epitomises further contradictions. He is casually racist. Going to Brixton with its large Caribbean population, he says, ‘This used to be a nice street, decent families, no scum.’ But he is sentimental about the poor. After torturing a ‘grass’, he cruises down a Brixton side street where a mother and child in tatty clothes are sitting on the doorstep of a decaying house, and remarks, much as George VI’s Queen once did apropos of blitzed Londoners, ‘These people deserve something better than this.’
He takes Charlie proudly to a pub which he bought, with true Ealing spirit, ‘To stop the big breweries turning it into a slum. It’s got Charles Dickens links, historical – very “olde London”. You’ll love it.’ As they approach the pub it blows up.
This explosion is the work of the IRA, now fatally interested in Harold’s affairs as a result of the indiscretions of certain subordinate gang members. As the mayhem escalates, the Mafia pull out. ‘Harold’, Charlie says, ‘this is like a bad night in Vietnam.’ His sidekick Tony snaps, ‘This country’s a worse risk than Cuba was. It’s a banana republic. You’re a mess.’ But Harold fights back verbally, calling them ‘wankers’:
Us British … we’re used to a bit more vitality … imagination … touch of the Dunkirk spirit – know what I mean? … What I’m looking for is someone who can contribute to what England has given the world … Culture … sophistication … genius … A little bit more than a hot dog – know what I mean? Look at you … the Mafia. I shit ’em.
The last we see of Harold, he is in the hands of the ‘Micks’, the IRA, who are driving him away to be murdered.19
Harold, as representative Cockney, has survived into a situation where wisecracks, sentiment and a sense of History cannot save him. As played by Hoskins, he is not ‘tragic’ but sympathetically comic, in spite of his propensity to bully and torture. He is a monster spawned in the ruins of blitzed Stepney, who finds that the Americans are no longer admiring and patient and the Celts can no longer be overawed. His only interest in ‘Europe’ is in leading it. In terminal crisis, the Dunkirk Spirit is the talisman by which he preserves self-esteem. His type, he believes, are never really beaten. He is wrong.
Keeffe might claim to have anticipated, in his Harold Shand, the outbreak of atavism among British politicians of most complexions which marked the decision to fight Argentina over that country’s occupation of some islands, known either as the ‘Malvinas’ or the ‘Falklands’, which successive British governments, Labour and Tory, had been trying to hand over to Argentina for years.
In retrospect the ‘Falklands factor’ was much less important than it seemed at the time in securing Mrs Thatcher’s re-election (with a slightly decreased share of the poll) in 1983. Inept and divided Labour leadership, together with the split in the opposition vote created by the rise of the Liberal–SDP alliance, would surely have made her return certain anyway.
To judge from speeches in the House of Commons, the opposition were fully as anxious to exploit whatever ‘Falklands factor’ there might be as the Iron Lady herself. Her image as Elizabeth I Redivivus, or Female Churchill, following her dispatch of the task force to oust the Argies from ‘our soil’, because it was inherently ridiculous, probably contributed to the intense dislike of her felt by a very large proportion of the electorate, whose views could not be adequately represented because of the antiquated ‘first past the post’ system by which the Mother of Parliaments was elected to serve under the inscrutable British Constitution.
Anthony Barnett, however, promptly showed, in a very lively analysis, that the Falklands affair was deeply revealing in regard to British political history since the war.
The invasion should clearly have been anticipated and prevented. Once it had happened – at the direction of a particularly brutal military régime with which British governments had previously cultivated good relations – Thatcher was in some difficulty when the House of Commons met to discuss the invasion on 3 April 1982, the day after the islands were overrun. Michael Foot, the Labour leader-erstwhile co-author of Guilty Men, Beaverbrook journalist, friend of the wartime US press corps – was possessed by the spirit of 1940, and by that noble tradition of liberal imperialism which conceived Britain to be moral leader of the whole world. He reminded the Commons of:
the claim of our country to be a defender of people’s freedom throughout the world, particularly those who look to us for special protection, as do the people in the Falkland Islands … Even though the position and the circumstances of the people who live in the Falkland Islands are uppermost in our minds … there is the longer term interest to ensure that foul and brutal aggression does not succeed in the world. If it does, there will be a danger not merely to the Falkland Islands, but to people all over this dangerous planet.
Foot’s effusion was promptly acclaimed by a leading Conservative backbencher, Edward du Cann – ‘the Leader of the Opposition spoke for us all’. Another Conservative, Raymond Whitney, who had quite recently worked in Argentina for the Foreign Office and therefore knew something about the history of the crisis, was heckled and interrupted from his own benches as he tried to suggest that the interests of the islanders might best be protected by negotiation. A former Labour minister, Douglas Jay, said later in the debate that the Foreign Office was ‘a bit too much saturated with the spirit of appeasement’.20 So Thatcher was incited by opposition leaders as well as jingoistic Tories to liberate the 1,800 Falklanders (who had enjoyed no democratic rights, in fact, as UK citizens) by sending a mighty expedition.
As Barnett points out, ‘The stubborn, militaristic determination’ evinced by the Thatcher government, her instant creation of a ‘War Cabinet’ that met daily, was a simulacrum of Churchillism. So too was the language Britain had used to defend its actions. Both rhetoric and policy were rooted in the formative moment of contemporary Britain, the time when its politics were reconstituted to preserve the country as it ‘stood alone’ in May 1940.21
The rhetoric of the 1940 coalition, involved as it was with what Barnett called ‘Churchillism’, was the creation of many elements in British politics, rallying behind the new Prime Minister. As this book has tried to show, by mid-1941 – and still more by 1943 – it was a rhetoric in which Left had a bigger stake than Right, because the Left was sympathetic to New Deal America as the Right, on both nationalistic and doctrinal grounds, could not be; it could therefore translate into its own terms the Atlantic Charter and the idea that the war was being fought for ‘d
emocracy’ by the People. Deep at the core of Churchillism itself was collaboration between capital and labour: Churchill became Prime Minister because the Labour Party agreed to serve in his government, and his summoning of Bevin into the Cabinet put him, in effect, into a position where he could not resist trade-union claims and aspirations. But in return Labour and Liberal supporters of the coalition were committed – for the most part willingly – to elements in Churchill’s personal philosophy: to his majestic but simplistic view of English (British Empire) history culminating in a Finest Hour, to the nationalism which would make him describe the Eighth Army’s victory at El Alamein in the autumn of 1942 – rather than that of the US fleet at Midway some months earlier or the truly decisive Soviet victory at Stalingrad soon after – as the ‘Hinge of Fate’ in the Second World War; to his uncritical devotion to the Mother of Parliaments which Foot, above all, would come heartily to share.
Thatcher was able (albeit with only temporary and limited success) to clarify at last what the Tories wanted from Churchillism – not the whole forties package, which included consensus and commitment to social amelioration under state direction; just the rhetoric which had Britain standing alone in defence of freedom world-wide, recovering from an early reverse (for Dunkirk read ‘unforeseen Argentinian action’) and sweeping on to ultimate victory through the selfless courage of ‘her boys’. Foot obligingly offered her much of this rhetoric in his own inimitable oratorical manner. But it now seems as if Thatcher’s appropriation of parts of the Myth for Party advantage in 1982 may have helped to reduce the potency of the whole paradigm. The apparent growth of some real enthusiasm for British participation in the European Community by the later eighties and the strength of the economic and political pressures driving the country towards European union, suggest that recent British history will, by the end of the century, have been reinterpreted in such a way that the Myth of the Blitz will be recognised as a fact rather than asserted as a truth. This can be argued despite crude ‘anti-Kraut’ headlines in tabloid newspapers and the nationalist rhetoric of many active Conservatives. The mood of the populace during the Gulf War of 1991 was by and large ‘patriotic’ but not jingoistic. Suspicion of Myth-making media was widespread, not least in the media themselves.
Now that it seems that the Myth of the Blitz may be losing its magical hold, and that rational discussion even of the British Constitution which the Myth sanctifies will be encouraged by British concessions of sovereignty to European institutions, perhaps it is time to remember its better features? Sentimental as it may seem to present the English as mild, quiet people with great reserves of patience and tolerance, there was a lot to recommend this national ideal over any encouraged, between about 1850 and 1918, by proponents of imperial expansion. The Myth, while it dealt tenderly with antiquated elements in the British social structure, was firmly orientated against snobbery, selfishness and greed and could be given a forthrightly egalitarian emphasis. Involving the notion that the heroism of a united people deserved reward, it helped to promote the creation of a National Health Service after the war. If a disastrous conflation of state with community produced an excessively bureaucratic welfare state out of control by the People whom it professed to serve, at least the Myth had fostered the notion of the mutual responsibility of all for the welfare of all. Surveys of public attitudes half a century after Dunkirk would indicate that more than a decade of Thatcherism had not rooted out a preponderant attachment to public services involving public spending, and to the values of caring above those of moneymaking. The shades of Priestley and Murrow, Jennings and McAllister, if they attend to presentday Britain, need not feel disheartened with the legacy of their hectic, at times desperate, labours to seize from a frightening, often horrific war images useful for making a juster and friendlier society.
Laura Knight (1877–1970) produced strong images of women at war. Daphne Pearson, a clerk at WAAF headquarters, received the George Cross for saving the life of a pilot, at great risk to her own, in May 1940.
Dorothy Coke, an Official War Artist, shows Women’s Auxiliary Transport members in a gas-mask drill exercise.
‘War’s Greatest Picture’ was the Daily Mail’s caption when it published Herbert Mason’s classic image of St Paul’s Cathedral riding the ‘Fire of London’ on 29th December 1940.
A German poster for France by Theo Matejko blames the English for the destruction.
Compare the St Paul’s image with the drawing of a scene by the city wall of Boulogne, 1940, by German artist Josef Arens.
Air Marshal Barratt on the wing of a Hurricane epitomises Fighter Command derring-do.
In fact RAF fliers were entirely dependent on the women in the Operations (‘Ops’) Rooms.
In Moscow’s Mayakovsky Metro Station shelterers enjoyed more spacious and gracious premises than Bill Brandt’s Londoners on the underground platform at Elephant & Castle (see next picture).
The Ministry of Information commissioned the German-born photo-journalist Bill Brandt to depict shelterers in November 1940; a set went to President Roosevelt. Some images are very famous; these are not, for they don’t fall into ‘The Myth of the Blitz’. The couple under a quilt in the basement of a West End shop might come from some wacky Hollywood comedy.
People sleep in the bowels of a Bloomsbury book business.
Brandt shows a Sikh family sheltering in an alcove at Christ Church, Spitalfields.
Bert Hardy rivalled Brandt, a warmer photographer. Picture Post used his images to show that ‘London Could Take It’ – a man works on his income tax return in the ruins of his East End home.
Hardy’s image above, ‘surrealistically’, might have been called ‘Angelic Transfiguration of a Warden in E1’.
P.C.s Arthur Cross and Fred Tibbs systematically photographed air-raid scenes for the City of London police. Tibbs just happened to be passing when the Salvation Army headquarters fell down on 11th May 1941.
Leonard Rosoman’s nightmarish painting, A House Collapsing on Two Firemen, recalled an experience he had himself survived.
Jacko, the martyred fireman in Fires Were Started, was hardly braver than Bert Hardy, who climbed to photograph ‘The Man on the Ladder’ for Picture Post (see next picture).
On the morning after, firehoses still lay in Newgate Street while folk were carrying on as usual in Fetter Lane.
Was the amusing placard ‘faked’ by the photographer or his editor?
Quentin Reynolds in sentimental mood.
At a rare moment, three key figures in British propaganda are seen together, J.B. Priestley (left), Leslie Howard (centre) and Mary Adams (right) ‘share a joke’ with Canadian broadcaster L. W. Brockington (foreground).
Teamwork, again, is asserted in the documentary film Fires Were Started, directed by Humphrey Jennings.
Humphrey Jennings, seen here with the pianist Myra Hess.
‘Deep England’ – Frank Newbould’s poster was intended to stiffen the resolve of servicemen.
Filming Humphrey Jennings’s A Diary for Timothy (1945).
Ed Murrow, who towers over two friends in Trafalgar Square, reinforced the potent effect of Cecil Beaton’s photograph for the cover of Life (23rd September 1940).
Painters and film-makers stressed ‘team work’. Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) depicted shipbuilders on the Clyde.
Noël Coward’s film In Which We Serve (1942) showed naval ratings and their officers as staunch comrades under duress.
Bombs transfigured suburban England in William Wyler’s Hollywood film Mrs Miniver. A clergyman memorialises raid victims as martyrs of the ‘People’s War’.
John Gregson and Jack Hawkins in George More O’Ferrall’s Angels One Five (1952).
In Frank Capra’s U.S. documentary Battle of Britain, some shots came from feature films, like the Fighter Command ‘Scramble’ from Hollywood’s A Yank in the RAF.
But Capra’s image of Churchill smiling among his people is ‘true’ newsreel.
Bibliographical
Note
An enormous number of titles have been published which are relevant to the topic of this book, and huge reservoirs of archival material exist. No bibliography could be comprehensive, and my own reading has necessarily been rather opportunist and random. The references which follow will suggest, verb. sap., lines of further exploration. I am grateful for having had access to the resources of the Mass-Observation Archive, Princeton University Library and, as always, the National Library of Scotland.
Notes
1 Myth Making
Epigraph: A. Stevenson, The Fiction-Makers, OUP 1985, 9.
1 J. Keegan and R. Holmes, Soldiers, Hamish Hamilton 1985, 130.
2 T.H. O’Brien, Civil Defence, HMSO 1955, 386.