Dorothy Sayers’s opening words, published shortly after the fall of France and the symbolic resurrection of Dunkirk, typically capture that moment of splendid isolation – dichotomously tensioned by patriotic resolution, yet fearful uncertainty – of the summer of 1940 which, in turn and in so many ways, encapsulates the popular image of Britain in the Second World War then and now. In 1940 Britain stood alone in Europe, and, according to Sayers (and many others), curiously was resolutely glad of this (‘Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!’, was apparently a common refrain);³ an island defeated yet still unconquered,...

The British cinema of the Second World War has typically been characterized in terms of its representation of ‘the people’s war’. The films which have attracted most critical attention are those which presented a picture of the British people at war, united despite class differences, and where the stories of individuals, heroic though they may be, were sublimated into the greater story of the whole nation pulling together at a time of national crisis. Commentators have identified, for the first time in British feature films, an authentic, true-to-life representation of ordinary men and women. Roger Manvell considered that films such...

The story of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) during the Second World War provides one of the great mythologies of wartime Britain, embodied in the image of a nation of ‘families clustered around their sets listening with reverence to speeches by Churchill, the news, or J. B. Priestley’s Sunday night talks’.¹ This image of the BBC uniting the nation around the wireless, providing the news, information and entertainment which kept the nation’s morale high through bad times and good, became one of the most enduring of the war, presented at the time in newspapers, films and over the airwaves themselves,...

An anecdote related by the former editor ofPicture Post, Tom Hopkinson, remains many years later a potent symbol of the supposed radicalization of the British electorate in the first half of the 1940s, which has given a particular significance to the Second World War as ‘the people’s war’.¹ Following the general election of 1945 Hopkinson was accosted by a Conservative politician who insisted that it was Hopkinson’s weekly illustrated magazine which had secured Labour’s huge success. Hopkinson demurred: theDaily Mirrornewspaper had been far more influential, he felt.² The story continues to have currency, and the idea that...

In October 1943, in an address to the International Sports Fellowship, Philip Noel-Baker anticipated that ‘we shall need more games, more sport, more physical training and recreation in this country when the war is over than ever we had before’. Although, in the same address, he claimed that games had been ‘the great leveller of men’, he was later to express the wish that participation in sporting competition should not be ‘reserved for those who are rich enough to afford the necessary time’.¹ Noel-Baker hoped, not only for a post-war growth in sporting and recreational activity, but also that the...

Angus Calder has suggested ‘that we, born since, have ignored how frightening and confusing the period from April 1940 through to June 1941 was for the British people. Perhaps we simply cannot comprehend that fear and confusion imaginatively.’¹ It may be especially the case that we cannot comprehend life in London in the Blitz, and the writing, which this essay explores, is often haunted by images of that city as embodying the experience of the Blitz. This essay is focused on the impact of the outbreak of the Second World War and the Blitz on some women writers who were...

Of all images of the composer in wartime, none is better known or more compelling than that of the half-starved Dmitri Shostakovich sitting in his unheated room in Leningrad writing his Seventh Symphony, while the Germans pounded the besieged city. An image of Ralph Vaughan Williams, at that very time completing his Fifth Symphony in the relative peace and comfort of his Dorking home, somehow does not have the same heroic drama. And yet there is an underlying similarity in the situation of the two men. Neither could ignore the war; this was total war, after all. Nor did they...

The Second World War, Kenneth Morgan suggests, proffered a release from that ‘class-bound straight-jacket’ which handicapped the arts in Britain before 1939: the ‘people’s war was generating a new people’s culture, with clear radical implications’.² Whatever view one takes of recent criticisms against the emergence of a popularist social radicalism generally in wartime Britain, Morgan’s comments undoubtedly capture the hopes of those influential left-of-centre educational improvers seeking to transform popular cultural practice during and after the war.³ Nor contemporaneously was the circulation of such ideas restricted only to an inner sanctum of the chattering classes.Picture Post– perhaps the most...

Towards the end of the momentous edition ofPicture Postof 4 January 1941, after the arguments for reform in areas such as employment, health, education and housing, the writer and broadcaster J. B. Priestley turned his attention to the quality of life.²Picture Postwas perhaps the most popular wartime forum for discussion of ‘reconstruction’, and its themes showed a marked convergence with sentiments expressed in the labour movement.³ Though not itself an organ of the movement, many of its writers were people of progressive views. The 4 January edition, entitled ‘A Plan For Britain’, included contributions from A....

The impact of the Second World War on social change has long been a subject of much controversy.² The centre of debate has, however, recently moved from perennial favourites, such as the role of women or the nation’s health, to the People’s Culture: the effect of the war on popular leisure, recreation, the arts and lifestyles generally. Did the war, for example, cause ‘people to be favourably disposed to “improving” pastimes’,³ a people’s culture for a people’s war, which quickly reverted to what Priestley characterized as the ‘silly, passive-style amusement’ of peacetime?⁴ Alternatively, is the judgement of Pat Kirkham and...

Caroll Levis’s filmDiscoveries, made in the summer of 1939 as a spin-off from his radio talent-show of the same name, while not destined to enter the canon of memorable British cinema, did contain one moment of cultural resonance. With war looming, the film rose to the occasion in a grand finale featuring Master Glyn Davies, the Welsh boy soprano, in midshipman’s uniform, surrounded by a huge chorus of bell-bottomed sailors, and warbling a new song by Ross Parker and Hughie Charles calledThere’ll Always Be An England.

The film was soon forgotten, but the song lived on: when war...

It is now something of a commonplace to remark, as E. H. Carr originally did, that history is ‘an unending dialogue between the present and the past’.¹ But in this particular book we might be forgiven for repeating Carr’s observation. Though there are ample academic reasons justifying a study of wartime cultural production, many of them alluded to by Nick Hayes in the Introduction, there is also a special British fascination with the war to be accounted for. More than 50 years after its conclusion, the war continues to engage the minds of British people. So much so that we...