Men at Work

The Working Man in British Culture, 1939–1945

Linsey Robb

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137527479
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Men at Work explores the cultural portrayal of four essential wartime occupations: agriculture, industry, firefighting and the mercantile marine. In analysing a broad spectrum of wartime media (most notably film, radio and visual culture) it establishes a clear hierarchy of masculine roles in British culture during the Second World War.

1

Finding the Lost Working Man

Dennis Higton, who worked as an apprentice engineer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, was 18 years old when war broke out in 1939. In an interview conducted for the British Library he recalled:

I wanted to fly, before I could fly of course, and I’d already lost one or two mates in the air. And whenever I saw a Spitfire I thought, oh, my God, I could do that as well as that, I hope it’s not difficult. And I applied to join the air force, you know, formally. I got a real reprimand for the first one, did it again and got a really heavy reprimand, and I thought, well, I don’t know, keep trying and they’ll give in. And I did it for a third time and of course you have a medical every time you, and of course you’re absolutely fit as a flea and enthusiastic. And I got a really – they told me if you do this again we’ll send you to prison because, you know, this is – you’re in occu – you’re in a reserved occupation and that’s what you’re supposed to be doing, you can’t sort of dart off and do a different job because you want to. And I remember saying that my dad wouldn’t like that if I was sent to prison, you see… Oh, I wanted to fly. And these things were coming – they’re killing people in the streets, you see. Also you’d see your friends who’d joined up and come back from the front or something and I thought, well, damn me. If you’re a sensitive chap – and every now and then white feathers were given to people like me, you see, ‘cause the person who gave the white feather thought the chap in civilian clothes was a coward.¹

Like many of his generation Higton was keen to be in uniform; eager to do his bit and defeat the Nazi menace sweeping across Europe. Indeed, a war of the scale of the Second World War required a vast number of soldiers, sailors and airmen. Many men volunteered for military services and men aged between 19 and 41, later extended to men up to the age of 51, were liable for conscription. At the peak of armed forces employment in 1944, 5 million British men were employed by Britain’s three military services. Yet there were exceptions. Those men who, like Dennis Higton, were employed in jobs which were listed on the Schedule of Reserved Occupations as essential to the war effort were exempt from military service. Reserved occupations covered a large range of jobs, both white-collar professions (such as medicine and dentistry) and blue-collar trades (including electrician, agricultural labourer and docker). Dennis was one of the roughly five million men in reserved occupations and one of a total of 10 million men of fighting age not in uniform.² Dennis’s story highlights the allure of military service and the desperation that many of these men and boys felt to be in uniform as well as the persistence with which many attempted to escape the perceived shackles of civilian service.³ However, generally because of their age (the young as well as the old), ill-health, or (as Dennis notes) their objections to warfare, those men left on the home front were considered to be sharply distanced from the wartime masculine ideal. Indeed, the predominant contemporaneous image of the British home front during the Second World War was of a largely feminised space in which women donned overalls and uniforms to replace the men who had left to join the armed forces. Such an image is repeatedly drawn, and therefore reinforced, in current British popular culture.⁴ Yet without these men Britain’s war could not have been waged. Soldiers, sailors and airmen alone could not win a protracted total war. Men with highly prized technical skills were required to make the bombs, planes and ships that the military so voraciously needed. Men were required to ferry cargoes across the globe of goods which could not be made on British soil. Men were required to till the fields so that both the civilian population and the military could continue to wage war. Men were required to risk their lives defending Britain’s people and property as bombs rained from the sky. Yet these men are rarely acknowledged, in neither popular culture nor scholarly works. This book, therefore, restores Britain’s forgotten workers to the historical record.

British civilian men, to date, have been largely omitted from the historiography of the Second World War, which has instead focused on military histories and, in a social and cultural context, shown an overwhelming focus on women’s contributions to the war. Despite a huge body of research on women there remains a dearth of social and cultural research regarding men in this period. However, the issue of British masculinity and the Second World War is a burgeoning area of research. Sonya Rose’s Which People’s War? and Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-Bird’s study of the Home Guard, Contesting Home Defence, have both explored the question of masculinity on the British home front as well as considering how certain groups of civilian men were perceived by British society.⁵ Martin Francis’s The Flyer has also provided an excellent socio-cultural history of the RAF in wartime.⁶ Additionally, there are a wealth of populist works on the Home Guard and the Bevin Boys, although such books generally fail to engage with notions such as masculinity.⁷ However, the overwhelming focus of these studies is on men in specifically wartime roles. To date there has been no systematic study of men who continued in their pre-war occupations. There have been no studies of, for example dockers, shipyard workers, merchant seamen or farmers. This book examines how civilian men at work were represented culturally, as well as responses to such depictions, to understand how such men were viewed and understood in wartime Britain. To do this it focuses on four key wartime occupations: farming, industrial occupations, the fire services and the Merchant Navy. This book therefore fills a gap in the literature by focusing on the men who aided the war effort and maintained the home front by undertaking civilian work.

The state and the working man in war

War drastically changed the employment landscape in Britain. Partly this was attributable to the increased demand for labour, which revitalised many industries (for example shipbuilding) which had seen prolonged atrophy as a consequence of the inter-war period of depression. In addition, the state attempted to place all necessary labour under its control to make best use of the nation’s ultimately finite manpower resources.⁸ In January 1939 Ernest Brown, then Minister of Labour, declared:

In the conditions of modern war it [is] of vital importance that those employed in various occupations should know in what way they could best serve the nation’s needs, that they should not through patriotic fervour on the outbreak of war leave those occupations for something else which, though more spectacular, might not be more important.⁹

In light of such beliefs the Schedule of Reserved Occupations, henceforth referred to as the Schedule, was compiled by the British government during the 1920s and 1930s in preparation for the projected military and civilian manpower needs required to sustain and win a protracted war. The main aim of the Schedule was to ensure that men needed for jobs on the home front, in occupations related both to the production of munitions as well as those necessary for the continuation of civilian life, were prevented from joining the armed forces. The state, as well as the media, constantly reiterated the need to prevent the mistakes made in the First World War, in which unchecked conscription led to a severe shortage of skilled men for necessary jobs on the home front.¹⁰ In April 1940, Robert Richards, MP for Wrexham, stated in the House of Commons:

....but it seems to me that the lesson which every nation has learned since the last war is that this war will be won, if won at all, on the home front rather than on the military front... I think that conclusion was come to very clearly by all the nations engaged in this sort of warfare at the end of the last war. It appears to me that in the last war there were two quite different periods, the first being what I may roughly describe as the Kitchener period, when an attempt was made to get everybody into the Army, and the second being what I may respectfully call the Lloyd George period, when it was realised that it was of very little use getting everybody into the Army unless the Army was adequately equipped.¹¹

On this basis a list of occupations was drawn up by 1925. This preliminary catalogue was revised from 1937 onwards in response to the growing likelihood of war in Europe.¹² In January 1939 it was published in newspapers as well being sent to each household in pamphlet form, along with other details about civilian participation in the event of war. The Schedule was organised by occupation and covered a wide range of jobs, from those of clear wartime importance, such as engineering and agricultural workers, to those of less obvious significance, including the civil service and trade union executives. Each occupation was given an age of reservation above which recruitment into the armed services was prohibited. The age varied according to occupation, depending on the predicted numbers required and the occupation’s centrality to the prosecution of a successful war. For example, engineering trades were reserved at 18, but trade union executives were not reserved until the age of 30.¹³

Despite the preparedness of the British government, the Schedule was subject to constant scrutiny and revision throughout the war. Indeed, in December 1940, the Schedule was radically overhauled in response to William Beveridge’s manpower calculations, which revealed a critical shortage in the numbers of men available for the military. The process of block reservation by occupation was removed and instead men were reserved only on work which was considered of ‘national importance’.¹⁴ In 1941 the government additionally implemented the Essential Works Order. It too constricted the flow of workers to ensure the highest efficiency of key establishments during the war. The order denoted those places of work essential to the war effort and prevented those employed in such establishments, regardless of their reserved status, from leaving without a week’s notice. Similarly, it prevented their employers from dismissing them except in the case of gross misconduct.

The necessity of maintaining a strong core of civilian labour was widely accepted across the political spectrum, with little dissension towards their control and exemption from military service being recorded. Declarations, such as those made by the MP for Stretford in the House of Commons, Anthony Crossley, in February 1939 in response to the public release of the Schedule, that ‘The booklet might well have been headed: “You will be serving your country best by being a scrimjack”’ were exceedingly rare.¹⁵ Yet, the situation did have its inequalities. Civilian male wages rose by 75% in the course of the war.¹⁶ An estimated income for an unmarried private rank soldier was around £3 a week, rising to around £4 a week after three years’ service. The average civilian male net earnings after tax was £5 2s 0d a week in 1942–43.¹⁷ As such, what little opposition did occur towards the process of reservation generally centred on the inflated wages (or in some cases the perceived inflated wages) that some civilian men received in wartime. In April 1940, Lieutenant-Colonel Amery, MP for Birmingham Sparkbrook, stated in a Commons debate that he wished to emphasise ‘the fact that men who are reserved are reserved only because it is in the nation’s interest to reserve them and that they have no moral right to be in a better position than men in the fighting line.’¹⁸ Similarly, John Rathbone, MP for Bodmin, stated in August 1940:

[A] point which crops up, time and again, is the disparity between the rates of pay of men and officers and those of civilians. I travelled in the train the other day with an Hon. Member whom I am proud to call my friend. He said it had made him sick to see a man in civilian dress earning £3 10s. or £4, or £4 10s. a week or more, not under military law, working in an establishment next door to a fellow doing exactly the same job, but in khaki, earning only 1s. 6d. a day. The fellow who is in khaki goes back to his barracks and has a job to pay for his extra packet of fags, while the fellow in civilian dress goes to the pub and lets out there every manner of military secret, and nothing whatever can be done about it.¹⁹

Like the disapproval of the scheme in general, these criticisms occurred fairly infrequently, but do indicate that some held the view that those in civilian occupations were not being asked to shoulder their fair share of the sacrifice of wartime, especially when compared to the hardships imposed upon those in the armed services. This book, therefore, examines the extent to which such views were present in wider cultural depictions.

Masculinity and war

Notions of masculinity, or indeed masculinities, are the central focus of Men at Work. While until relatively recently masculinity was seen as a singular constant, it is now largely viewed in the plural. This reflects the fluidity in what constitutes a ‘man’, depending on such factors as culture, class, race, religion, nationality and time-period.²⁰ Connell, in the seminal book Masculinities, argues for the existence of what is termed ‘hegemonic masculinity’, which ‘refers to a particular idealised image of masculinity in relation to which images of femininity and other masculinities are marginalised and subordinated.’²¹ Drawing on the theories of Antonio Gramsci, Connell uses the expression ‘hegemonic’ to describe the way in which a social class exerts cultural ‘leadership’ or dominance of other classes in maintaining the socio-political status quo.²² Yet this raises questions about the relationships between different masculinities. Indeed, perhaps the most useful aspect of Connell’s theory in this study is in the exploration of such relationships. He states ‘different masculinities do not sit side by side like dishes on a smorgasbord. There are definite social relations between them. Especially, there are relations of hierarchy, for some masculinities are dominant, are subordinate or marginalised’.²³ Connell also states, in conjunction with James W. Messerschmidt, that ‘hegemonic masculinity was not assumed to be normal in the statistical sense; only a minority of men might enact it. But it was certainly normative. It embodied the current most honoured way of being a man, it required all other men to position themselves in relation to it’.²⁴ This certainly seems true of wartime Britain where the uniformed man, while not numerically superior, as we have seen, became the pinnacle of British citizenship and every other occupation or wartime role was discussed in relation to it. As Corinna Peniston-Bird notes, during the war, ‘men did not have a choice whether to conform or reject hegemonic masculinity: they positioned themselves in relation to it’.²⁵ The concept of masculinity as hierarchical, therefo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Finding the Lost Working Man
• 2 Digging for Victory: Farming in Wartime Culture
• 3 The Attack Begins in the Factory: The Male Industrial Worker in Wartime Culture
• 4 Heroes on the Home Front: Firefighting in Wartime Culture
• 5 For Those in Peril on the Sea: The Merchant Navy in Wartime Culture
• 6 All in It Together?: Reflections on the Masculine Hierarchy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index