We Can Take It!

Mark Connelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317869832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Grande-Bretagne

`We Can Take It!' shows that the British remember the war in a peculiar way, thanks to a mix of particular images and evidence. Our memory has been shaped by material which is completely removed from historical reality. These images (including complete inventions) have combined to make a new history. The vision is mostly cosy and suits the way in which the Britons conceive of themselves: dogged, good humoured, occasionally bumbling, unified and enjoying diversity. In fact Britons load their memory towards the early part of the war (Dunkirk, Blitz, Battle of Britain) rather than when we were successful in the air or against Italy and Germany with invasions. This suits our love of being the underdog, fighting against the odds, and being in a crisis. Conversely, the periods of the war during which Britain was in the ascendant are, perversely, far more hazy in the public memory.

CHAPTER 1

Mr Chamberlain’s face: September 1939–May 1940

The first six months or so of the Second World War is not a period remembered or mythologised with any great clarity by the British people. The central myths and images of the period September 1939 to May 1940 are those of the declaration of war and lack of preparation and activity, evacuation and the role of the Royal Navy, the only element of the British armed forces actively prosecuting the war. This period is perceived as the one in which the British decided to pretend the war wasn’t happening and tried to laugh it into oblivion. It is probably because of this ludicrously misplaced complacency that this early phase of the war has left an unimpressive legacy. Few images have survived in the modern memory, and those that have, such as evacuation, are often linked exclusively with the blitz of 1940–41. Given the overwhelming association of Winston Churchill with the war, many can be forgiven for their haziness over 1939; after all, Churchill was not Prime Minister during this period. Churchill’s looming presence over the British memory of the war has turned Neville Chamberlain into a marginal figure, the warm-up for the main act. Yet it was during Chamberlain’s period as war leader that the foundations of Britain’s war memory and myth were laid. The fact that 1940 is the crucial year in the modern memory is connected intimately with the nature of the first months, for without the prerequisite of the ‘phoney war’ the myth of 1940 would have been robbed of its most significant aspect – that of starting off on the wrong foot – and this element is crucial to the British understanding of the war. In essence, September 1939 to May 1940 is all about starting off on the wrong foot. It was obvious at the time and its surviving fragmentary images have retained that association.

Britain is at war with Germany

The declaration of war in 1939 provided a tribute to the power of wireless. The newspaper press had been scooped by the BBC; wireless gave Chamberlain the ability to address the entire nation a quarter of an hour after the final ultimatum to Germany expired. Warned to remain close to their radios all morning, the British people heard his mournful tones bring the dreadful, but not unexpected, news. The hush that descended over the nation on that Sunday morning and the strange feelings the declaration evoked made a lasting impact on people. A middle-aged schoolmistress noted: ‘At 11.15 I went up, and we sat round listening to Chamberlain speaking. I held my chin high and kept back the tears at the thought of the slaughter ahead. When “God Save the King” was played, we stood.’¹ Joan Wyndham recorded listening to the broadcast in her diary, feeling sick, and later sitting out on the steps of her house. ‘The balloon barrage looked too lovely in the sun against the blue sky, like iridescent silver fish swimming in blue water.’² Indeed the stillness of the Sunday morning quickly became the essential image of the declaration of war. Within a few days of the outbreak of war, the General Post Office Film Unit started work on a short film recording the way in which London moved from peace to war. The First Days shows 3 September as an idyllic, leisurely day, with people setting out on bicycle rides, walking in Hyde Park or going to church. But then, cutting to shots of empty streets, the sound of Chamberlain’s voice coming through open windows is heard. This snapshot of Britain confirmed the way memory would recall the event: a lazy day, deserted streets and wirelesses in suburban houses. Frank Capra repeated this vision in his famous wartime documentary series, Why We Fight. As the title suggests, the series was designed to explain the reasons to its soldiers and civilians why America had entered the war. Episode two, ‘The Battle of Britain’, contained a scene in which a man walking along an empty street stops to listen to the voice of Neville Chamberlain coming through the open windows of a neat, suburban house fronted by a box hedge, a quintessential symbol of British middle-class respectability.

Since the war this image has been reconstructed many times. In 1970 Granada launched its drama series Family at War, which proved to be a huge success gaining a regular audience of around eight million viewers.³ The series opened with the various branches of the fictional Ashton family listening to the declaration of war on the wireless. Encapsulating the vision of The First Days, the shots revealed a quiet northern town, awaiting confirmation of its fate. The suburban branch of the family listened in the drawing room of a typical 1930s house, complete with bay window and sunburst decoration on the garden gate. Yorkshire Television’s fine history series for schools, How We Used to Live, which ran throughout the 1970s and 1980s, reconstructed the moment in exactly the same way. A lower-middle-class family sit round their radio in a typically 1930s suburban home, the front garden has a sunburst gate. This Betjemanesque view of England is the prism through which we see 3 September and has been used as a visual shorthand to establish mood and time even in programmes and dramas not overtly connected with the war.

John Boorman’s lavish film treatment of his semi-autobiographical story about growing up in the war, Hope and Glory (1987), provides the most completely realised vision of the confirmed image of the declaration of war. The film opens with Bill Rowan and his younger sister in a cinema watching the ‘Saturday morning pictures’. On the screen flicker newsreel images of Chamberlain and King George VI, from the nature of the commentary it is clear that war is imminent. The scene cuts to the following morning. Bill and his sister are playing in the garden of a suburban house, the sound of lawn mowers from the other gardens is audible. A voiceover of an older man (John Hurt) announces: ‘Sunday, 3rd September 1939. Everyone who was old enough and was there remembers exactly what they were doing.’ Suddenly the lawn mowers stop and all is quiet while Chamberlain makes his speech. The camera pans round the concerned faces of Bill’s mother and father. The room itself is a masterpiece of set design, a museum curator’s vision of a 1930s’ house, including Clarice Cliff-inspired crockery and leaded light sunburst windows. Boorman’s camera frames the memory, confirms it as a moment when settled, middle-class worlds, such as that of Bill Rowan’s Rosehill Avenue, were confident of who and what they were.

By remembering the outbreak of war in such a way, it perhaps reflects a national obsession with a world about to end, a way of life about to disappear, which, in turn, provokes a sense of nostalgia. Family at War’s credit sequence certainly appears to fit this interpretation: each episode opened with the shot of a beach bathed in evening sunlight, a sand castle topped by a Union Jack sat in the middle of the shot. The sand castle was then gradually washed away by the waves, accompanied by the elegiac, lyrical central section of the first movement of Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony. Made in the troubled 1970s, Family at War seems to provide a requiem for the British way of life.

Chamberlain fits into that old world, a remnant of an older age, someone who was definitely pre-war and out of place in an emergency that needed bold action. Neville Chamberlain was 70 years old when he declared war over the airwaves on the morning of Sunday 3 September 1939. He came from a family of politicians, had taken over the family power base of Birmingham and had served Conservative governments in a variety of posts before becoming Prime Minister in 1937. With his antique style of dress, Chamberlain gave the impression of being a Victorian. Always accompanied by his umbrella, he often wore a tall hat, starched wing collars and sober ties, all of which made him appear a man out of step with the age.⁴ Photographs of him in 1939 reveal a thin, reedy face, framed by a narrow band of grey hair. His metallic voice had something of the tone of a headmaster dutifully expelling a boy for bad behaviour. As Angus Calder has pointed out, his physical demeanour and looks made him a cartoonist’s dream.⁵ Having staked so much on ‘peace in our time’, having thought that a man like Hitler could be reasoned with, Chamberlain has become an object of our pity, irony and sarcasm. Treated with increasing irreverence as the war effort stagnated, Chamberlain can be regarded as a symbol of Britain’s rather ludicrous position in 1939: at war but not fighting, talking of a long war but making few preparations.⁶

For many, memories of Chamberlain are suffused with ridicule or humour. Spike Milligan’s wonderfully eccentric and deliberately mischievous memoirs frame Chamberlain as a buffoon. In Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall, Milligan notes that on 3 September, ‘a man called Chamberlain who did Prime Minister impressions spoke on the wireless’.⁷ Milligan’s wit is almost cruel, but it crystallises the accepted memory – Chamberlain as a man out of his depth, a man who impersonated Prime Ministers – with the hidden implication that, by contrast, Winston Churchill was every inch a leader, and a leader of wartime Britain too. Chamberlain is the ultimate paradox: remembered in order that he might be forgotten.

Mr Chamberlain, a man ‘who did Prime Minister impersonations’, looking suitably suburban, with his wife in St James’s Park (Hulton-Getty Images).

A similar thread can be found in Robert Westall’s work on childhood in wartime, Children of the Blitz. Interviewed many years later, adults worked their childhood memories into an acerbic mode when recalling Chamberlain. A man from Tyneside, born in 1930, recalled his impressions of the Prime Minister:

Mr Chamberlain’s broadcast was not impressive. I remembered him from the newsreels, coming out of his aeroplane after Munich, waving his little piece of paper and promising ‘peace in our time’. I thought he looked like a sheep, and now he bleated like a sheep. He talked about notes being sent and replies not being received. He regretted that a state of war now existed between Great Britain and Germany. He sounded really hurt, like Hitler was some shiftless council tenant who had failed to pay his rent after faithfully promising to do so.

That wasn’t the way to talk to Hitler; he should be threatening to kick his teeth in.… I knew there’d be trouble …⁸

Memory mixed with a few, repeated images and the value of hindsight seem to be combined here to paint a picture of Chamberlain that is not so much black as grey. Noël Coward’s 1942 film about life in the Royal Navy, In Which We Serve, included a scene in which the sailors are listening to the declaration of war. When Chamberlain announces his personal regret at the failure of negotiation, a sailor chirps up, ‘it ain’t exactly a bank holiday for us’. It complements the above recollection of Chamberlain; his ridiculousness was shaped and compounded by taking the war as a personal injury, almost implying that no else was sharing the experience of war.

Chamberlain has become a symbol of all that was muddleheaded, incompetent, irresponsible, complacent and, indeed, ludicrous about the first nine months of the war. With the British government taking no firm action to curb German aggression, other than to despatch the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to France where it dug in promptly and then did little else, the war settled down into mundane routine. This period is now known as the phoney war, but this phrase was one coined by the American press and the fact that it has entered our consciousness seems to reveal how far Britain has fallen under American cultural influences. At the time, it was known as the ‘bore war’.

The ‘bore war’ was full of rather bizarre moments, which would have been incredible if anyone but Chamberlain had been Prime Minister. Somehow Chamberlain is the guarantee that such things could and did happen. For instance, when the BEF landed in France the British censor strongly denied it, but the French papers were carrying the story. An obsession with secrecy clearly had not been combined with a genius for news management.⁹ The winter of 1939–40 brought heavy snowfalls and was the coldest for 45 years, public transport ground to a halt, and the Channel ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Mr Chamberlain’s face: September 1939–May 1940
• 2 A colossal military disaster: Dunkirk and the fall of France, May–June 1940
• 3 The fewest of the few: the Battle of Britain, June–September 1940
• 4 London Pride has been handed down to us: the blitz, September 1940–May 1941
• 5 Over-sexed, over-paid and over here: the home front, 1941–45, Yanks, women and Auntie Beeb
• 6 Bless ’em all: the British army, 1941–45
• 7 Take that, Fritz!: Commandos, prisoners of war and the boys’ own war
• 8 It ain’t half hot mum: the forgotten campaigns
• 9 Gotcha!: recasting the Second World War, 1945–2002
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index