A Green and Pleasant Land Read online

  One of the starkest differences between the early and late years of the 1930s was the intensification of government intrusion into people’s private lives, culminating in the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act passed on 24 August 1939. In effect, the Act turned the government of the United Kingdom into a benign dictatorship and allowed for the enacting of a great many Defence Regulations. These were divided into five parts: security of the state, public safety and order, ships and aircraft, essential supplies and work, and general and supplementary provisions. Defence Regulation 62 – under the heading of Essential Supplies and Work – was concerned with the control of cultivation and termination of agricultural tenancies, and 62A referred specifically to giving powers to local authorities to release land for wartime allotments.

  A second Emergency Powers (Defence) Act was passed on 22 May 1940, when the risk of invasion was at its height. As the historian E. R. Chamberlin put it:

  Passed in a single day, instantaneously it turned the United Kingdom into a military camp whose sole objective was military survival. Civil rights gained over a millennium of bitter struggle were suspended ‘for the duration’, for the Act thereafter allowed the government to issue, without further recourse to Parliament, what orders and regulations it considered necessary to prosecute the war.38

  During the course of the next year, 2,000 separate orders were made, ranging from the taking down of road signs to specifying what crops farmers were allowed to grow.

  As the international situation grew darker and darker in the summer of 1939, especially after the Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was signed on 23 August, civilians became extremely unsettled. They sometimes tried to allay their anxieties by solid toil in the garden. A journalist, Maggie Joy Blunt, who lived in a cottage in Burnham Beeches, Buckinghamshire, wrote in her diary that when she heard the news of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, ‘I returned to my cottage, believing wishfully that threatening clouds would pass. I began to prune ramblers.39 All that week I seemed to be perched on the top of wobbly steps in the late summer sun wrestling with dead rosewood and wavering crimson-tipped new shoots, waiting for news, waiting for news.’40 As it turned out, she had only ten days to wait for the news that she, and so many others, dreaded.

  CHAPTER TWO

  WHAT HAPPENS NOW?

  THE DAY WAR was declared, 3 September 1939, was a sunny, warm Sunday. Some people recalled going out into their gardens to try to come to terms with what had happened and to make solemn resolutions. Margery Allingham, the detective novelist, who lived in Tolleshunt D’Arcy, close to the Essex coast, described her feelings:

  ‘I went down to the end [of the garden] and sat under the laburnum and the fancy red oaks. I could smell the sea, and I watched the sky over the rookery in the Vicarage elms, more than half expecting that I should suddenly see the warplanes coming like starlings in the spring, making the sky black. If the boys were right, they were just about due.1

  The following day, Harold Nicolson, husband of Vita Sackville-West and owner of Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, wrote in his diary:

  I get up early. It is a perfect day and I bathe in the peace of the lake. Two things impress themselves on me. 1. Time. It seems three weeks since yesterday morning . . . 2. Nature. Even as when someone dies, one is amazed that the poplars should still be standing quite unaware of one’s own disaster, so when I walked down to the lake to bathe, I could scarcely believe that the swans were being sincere in their indifference to the Second German War.2

  It is hard to overstate just how anxious was the civilian population in those very early days of the war, and how convinced they were that the invasion of Britain was imminent. It seems rather obvious to us now that Germany, under its Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, and his National Socialist party, could not risk an invasion until it had subdued western Europe – in particular, France, with its five million soldiers or reservists – but that is with the benefit of hindsight and our knowledge of the larger picture. As far as the ordinary Briton was concerned, once the country had entered into the war on behalf of Poland, all hell would break loose.

  The memory of the deaths of nearly 1,500 British civilians on home soil from bombs dropped by Zeppelins in the First World War, the founding of an Air Raid Wardens’ Service in 1937, the false alarm before Munich in 1938 and the evacuation of thousands of children and mothers from cities on 2 September all fed this extremely twitchy mood. At the very least, the population feared a ferocious attack by as many as 30,000 German bomber planes.3 False alarms did not help the nerves: people in many places remember hearing a siren sound just after the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, finished speaking to the nation at 11.15 a.m. on 3 September. The population was perfectly aware that they would be targets for the enemy. They knew that major cities could be destroyed, however brave and skilful the pilots of RAF fighter planes. In 1932, Stanley Baldwin – former prime minister and well-known pessimist – pronounced his depressing but unarguable opinion that ‘the bomber will always get through’. The actions of the Italian air force against Abyssinian armies in 1935–6, the devastating bombing of Shanghai, Nanking and Canton by the Japanese in the summer of 1937, and of Barcelona and Guernica by German and Italian bombers in the same year, showed just what was horrifyingly possible. Indeed, the British government was of the opinion that Germany might strike even before war was declared. As Baldwin predicted in Parliament: ‘tens of thousands of mangled people – men, women and children – before a single soldier or sailor suffered a scratch’.4 Fear of the bomber was no idle or neurotic anxiety.

  In 1937, the Committee of Imperial Defence – the forerunner of the wartime Ministry of Information – calculated that, on the evidence of what had happened to Barcelona, there might be 1,800,000 home casualties, a third of them fatal, in the first two months of the war.5 So seriously did the government take the airborne threat that in early 1939 it issued one million burial forms to local authorities and began to stockpile collapsible cardboard coffins.6 Moreover, it was expected that German aeroplanes would also drop poisonous gas, hence the manufacture and distribution of gas masks to every member of the population at the time of the Munich crisis.7 An intensely gloomy report by a group of eminent psychiatrists from the London teaching hospitals and clinics, submitted to the Ministry of Health in October 1938, suggested that serious bouts of hysteria and incidences of nervous breakdown were a distinct possibility, with psychiatric casualties exceeding physical ones by as much as three to one. That would have meant at least four million people suffering from acute panic and other nervous conditions in the first six months of bombardment. These doctors envisaged the necessity for a network of treatment centres in bombed cities, clinics on the outskirts and mobile teams of psychiatrists.8

  Plans were drawn up for the evacuation of some government departments to seaside towns, and for the taking over of country houses to be used as army camps and hospitals. The government had an obvious duty to do everything it could to protect the civilian population from the worst effects of German bombing, so public surface shelters were built, basements of steel-framed buildings allocated, and in February 1939 local councils began to deliver Anderson shelters for erection in back gardens. These shelters for up to six people, capable of withstanding flying shrapnel although not a direct hit from a bomb, were named after Sir John Anderson, then Home Secretary, who instigated their development and oversaw manufacture from 1938 onwards. Families with an annual income below £250 were given a shelter for free, while richer households paid £7. By September 1939, one and a half million Anderson shelters had been distributed, and more than two million were erected in the course of the war.

  The Anderson shelter was designed by an engineer called William Patterson and consisted of six corrugated-steel sheets, bolted together to form a rounded arch, which had to be half dug into a trench in the garden. Fifteen inches of soil was to be piled on top and patted down, to help mitigate the effects of bomb blast, and to make the shelter look less obvious from above. Their very presence in
so many suburban and urban gardens underlined daily to civilians how serious things had become. And as it turned out, by no means all families found them congenial places to be during alerts and raids, especially since they tended to flood in wet weather. Civilians continued to worry that the shelters were conspicuous from the air, so many householders made them more appealing and less obtrusive by growing shallow-rooted rock plants, nasturtiums, marigolds, lettuces or marrows on the top, and rambling roses around the entrance. Some even grew rhubarb or mushrooms inside. But no one ever came to love them. Sir John Anderson, who was not known for his lively sense of humour, when complimented on the marrows growing on shelters, replied tight-lipped, ‘I had not intended the shelters for the cultivation of vegetables.’9

  The threat of immediate aerial bombing and the resulting casualties were worries enough for the government to deal with, but it also had reasons to doubt the stout-heartedness of civilians. There had been war-weariness in the general population during the last year of the First World War, exacerbated by extensive food shortages. In 1917 and 1918, a number of European countries, including Russia, had been radically destabilised by revolutionary mass movements. The Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian monarchies had been abolished. In Great Britain, there was a distinct mood of pacifism abroad in the 1920s and 1930s. This was exemplified by the success of the Peace Pledge Union, founded in 1934, which had more than 100,000 members by 1939. The Labour Party opposed rearmament until 1937 and voted against the introduction of conscription in April 1939. Even after the Munich crisis in September 1938, there were plenty of ‘appeasers’, calling for negotiations with Hitler. In the same years, the economic Depression and associated unemployment had widened the gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. Urban slums shocked liberal social commentators but little was done about them. Class-consciousness and snobbery were endemic. There was a gaping chasm between the Jarrow Marchers and the Bright Young Things.

  What is more, before the conflict, civilians had become increasingly vocal in their criticisms of government policies. There were a number of reasons for this, including a certain erosion of deference after the convulsions of the First World War, coupled with the fact that women of property over thirty had the vote from 1918, and were given it on equal terms with men from 1928. Ordinary people had begun to expect politicians to listen to them. The obvious result of increased participation in the democratic process was a growth in knowledge and interest in national affairs amongst the middle classes (although less discernibly amongst workers), and a more sceptical attitude towards their political masters.

  Taking all these factors into account, the government was pessimistic about how united and stalwart the civilian population could be relied upon to be in the circumstances of a new war. ‘For those planners, often of military background and somewhat contemptuous of anyone not in uniform, the average civilian was less the British bulldog than the pampered poodle: lacking in moral fibre, easily demoralised, neurotic under pressure and as likely to snap at its owner as at the latter’s assailant.’10

  Yet because the country needed to be put on a complete war footing, it was vital that those civilians co-operated fully and did not buckle. A breakdown in consensus at the beginning of the war would obviously have been disastrous. In order to avoid such a breakdown, the government thought it helpful, even imperative, for civilians to see themselves as front-line troops, with victory depending on them just as much as their brothers in the services. Much of the propaganda aimed at civilians during the war reflects this, as the widely-used expression ‘Home Front’ indicates.

  Right from the beginning, the policymakers worried over the very ticklish question of civilian morale. ‘Morale’ has always been a difficult word to define, although everyone knows it when they see it. A Cambridge psychologist employed by the Ministry of Information defined it as a lively and not too serious spirit of adventure which met emergencies clear-eyed and calmly. That is inadequate, since morale is also intimately connected with optimism. A better definition came from the social research organisation, Mass-Observation,11 in 1941:

  By morale, we mean primarily not only determination to carry on, but also determination to carry on with the utmost energy, a determination based on a realization of the facts of life and with it a readiness for many minor and some major sacrifices, including, if necessary, the sacrifice of life itself. Good morale means hard and persistent work, means optimum production, maximum unity, reasonable awareness of the true situation, and absence of complacency and confidence which are not based on fact.12

  That is certainly setting the bar very high, but it does at least include all the elements likely to promote good morale.

  Tom Harrisson, founder of Mass-Observation, wrote in 1940:

  British people can stand a tremendous amount of pain. Many (e.g. the unemployed) have been trained to intellectual pain for years. There is no danger whatever that morale on the home front will crack up, so long as morale is not treated as an ephemeral word, but is regarded as the attribute of human minds. And so long as these human minds are not regarded as uniform and just so many mathematical units, but are treated as variable and delicate human characters.13

  That surely was the key.

  If the reaction of Nella Last, a housewife from Barrow-in-Furness who wrote a diary throughout the war for Mass-Observation, was representative of the majority of civilians, the exact nature of morale worried them as well. On 27 April 1941, at the height of the so-called Barrow Blitz, she wrote: ‘What is “morale” – and have I got any, or how much? And how much more could I call on in need, and where does it come from and what is it composed of?’14

  The government’s anxiety to foster high morale meant that it sometimes fell into the trap of too much de haut en bas exhortation. As Margery Allingham put it: ‘Addressing the nation became a mania like diabolo,15 or so it seemed to us who were addressed. We were addressed like billy-o and, knowing just how important we were and how unnecessary it was to convince us that we had anything to do but fight, we were often dismayed.’16

  Reflections on how to maintain high morale led to a lively and long-lasting debate at the Ministry of Information, whose Directors during the war were Lord Macmillan, then Sir John Reith, followed by Duff Cooper and, finally, Brendan Bracken from 1941.17 One thing on which all were agreed was that the civilian population needed to be kept busy: ensuring people were occupied, in order that they did not have too much time to reflect on dangers or deprivations, was an important strand of thinking to be found in government circles, and definitely influenced their attitude towards the population growing some of its own food.

  Over the vexed question of whether to tell ‘the people’ the truth about the progress of the war, senior figures in the Ministry were divided. Some held the view that they could endure anything, provided that they did not think they were being hoodwinked or taken for fools. However, even if the MoI had been consistent about this, it was often thwarted by the service Ministries withholding all but the most anodyne facts about the prosecution of the war.

  In practice, during the first eight months of the conflict the civilian population was generally told very little about how the war was progressing, which was why the overrunning of neutral Norway by the Germans in April 1940 proved such a paralysing shock after the truth of the situation was finally revealed. Two months later, after the retreat of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk – a far more serious reverse than Norway – the country was taken into the government’s confidence by Winston Churchill, and his popular support did not suffer as a result. Indeed, quite the reverse.

  In the summer of 1941, Churchill remarked in Parliament, during a speech about the defence of Crete, that ‘the British nation is unique in this respect. They are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst, and like to be told that they are very likely to get much worse in the future and must prepare themselves for further reverses.’18 Understandably, people prided
themselves on being so perverse.

  The day before war broke out, wireless broadcasting became restricted entirely to the newly named Home Service, which came on air at 7 a.m. on 2 September and broadcast usually from 7 a.m. until just after midnight throughout the war. In June 1940, the Home Service was augmented by a Forces Programme. Both the government and the BBC’s bosses expected the Corporation to play a very important role in raising, or at least sustaining, civilian morale, although it took time before the Corporation’s broadcasts settled down to perform adequately the dual, and often contradictory, roles of informing and uplifting the people without giving any useful information to the enemy. As the historian of the BBC, Siân Nicholas, put it:

  As far as the government was concerned, the BBC’s most important wartime function was the swift dissemination of official information to the general public. War would disrupt virtually every aspect of normal life, and the general public would need to be advised how to cope. More than this, they had to be encouraged to identify their day-to-day hardships with the wider national endeavour . . . Radio’s immediacy, its directness, its sheer ubiquity, marked it out for this task.19

  The fear of helping the Germans, even tangentially, led to the suspension of broadcast weather reports on 5 September, much to the particular irritation of farmers and gardeners. These were not reinstated until 2 April 1945.

  High morale also depends partly on getting enough to eat and in sufficient variety; a hungry population is likely, by its nature, to be demoralised. This was the major challenge to the Ministry of Agriculture, under Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, as well as the Ministry of Food, after it was set up on 8 September 1939 with William S. Morrison as Minister.20 (The first Ministry was principally concerned with producing food, while the second had the equally vital task of distributing it, via a rationing system if necessary.)21 It is against the background of the government’s desire to keep morale high that we must view its attitude to civilians becoming engaged in domestic food production.