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First published by Allen Lane 2016
Published in Penguin Books 2017
Copyright © Daniel Todman, 2016
Cover illustration: detail from England Expects by Cecil Walter Bacon, 1939 © IWM (Art.IWM PST 13959)
Cover design: Jim Stoddart
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-241-21700-9
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
List of Tables
A Note on Money, Weights and Measures and Military Formations
Introduction: War Stories
PART ONE
Prelude
1. Studies in Celebration
2. Ancient and Modern
3. Politics and the Slump
4. Politics and the Empire
5. Peace and War
6. Peace and Progress
7. State and Society
8. Division and Unity
PART TWO
From Peace to War
9. ‘More sufferings to come’
10. Czechoslovakia to Poland
PART THREE
Being at War
11. Limited War
12. Boredom
13. Escalation
14. The Battle of France
PART FOUR
Battles of Britain
15. Finest Hour
16. ‘What will happen now?’
17. The Battle of Britain
18. The Means of Victory
19. The Beginning of the Blitz
20. Taking It
21. The Battle of the British Empire
22. Britain Beyond the Blitz
23. Production and Reconstruction
PART FIVE
Total War
24. The Widening War
25. Atlantic Crossings
26. The End of the Beginning
Illustrations
Notes
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
For Alex and Agatha
For the whole period covered by this book, the UK system of money was based on pounds (£), shillings (s.) and pence (d.). Twelve pence equalled one shilling, and twenty shillings equalled a pound.
The sums of money referred to here are always those of the time – unless otherwise noted, they are not adjusted into constant terms to take account of inflation. There are several ways of translating these sums to put them into the context of the early twenty-first century. Which one is best to use depends on the context.1
In terms of household income and consumption, for example, £1 in 1937 bought goods and services worth £56.30 at 2013 prices.* Since, however, most people’s earnings and standards of living were relatively much lower in the 1930s than they are eight decades later it would be misleading to see an annual income of £250 as the equivalent of £14,080 – which is the value of goods that such an income would have purchased in 2013. In terms of social status, earning £250 a year in 1937 was worth about £61,330 in 2013 money. It’s important to bear in mind that during the war, both inflation and working-class earnings increased very rapidly. By 1941, the value of what you could buy with £1 had fallen to £42.24 in 2013 terms, and an annual income of £250 was the equivalent to earning £38,540 in 2013.
A lot of the expenditures discussed in this book are those of the state, rather than of individuals. To get a sense of their significance in historical context, it’s better to consider these in terms of their relative share of overall economic output. This rose significantly after the outbreak of war. To get a sense of government expenditure in contemporary terms, multiply figures from the late 1930s by 350, and those from 1940–41 by 250 or 200.
Readers who want to compute what any amount they find in this book is worth, using these measures and others, should make use of the wonderful calculator at the website www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare.
Weights are given in ounces (oz), pounds (lb), and tons; 16oz = 1lb, 14lb = 1 stone, 112lb = 1 hundredweight, 2,240lb = 1 ton. To convert to metric, 2.2lbs = 1 kg, 1,016kg = 1 ton.
Lengths are given in inches, feet, yards and miles; 12 inches = 1 foot, 3 feet = 1 yard, 1,760 yards = 1 mile. Area is given in square footage and acres; 640 acres = 1 square mile. To convert to metric, 1.61km = 1 mile.
Ship sizes are given in gross tons: a measurement of the total volume of all the internal enclosed spaces of a ship calculated on the basis one gross ton = 100 cubic feet. This is a different way of calculating ship size to the deadweight tonnage, which is the number of tons of 2,240lb that a ship can carry at its summer loading level. Ship movements through ports are given in net tons, which are defined as gross tonnage minus space not used for cargo.2
Unit strengths and organizations varied during the war, but to get a sense of the numbers involved when British military formations are discussed, it can be taken that at full strength in 1940–41:
Figures for divisions, squadrons or warships conceal a large number of base troops who were required to keep the complex machinery of war supplied and maintained. At the start of 1941, it was calculated that each division of 18,000 men required another 23,000 soldiers behind the lines, working in the maintenance and supply units that kept the fighting troops in the field.3
Tucked at the back of my desk drawer, in an old hearing-aid box, are the medals that could have belonged to my grandfather. The War and Defence Medals and the 1939–45 and France and Germany Stars were the sort awarded for service, rather than valour – and they match the three years that Charles Todman spent driving tanks and trucks in the UK before, transferred to a machine-gun battalion, he was sent out to North-west Europe at the start of September 1944. Their metal shines and their ribbons are unfaded. These are medals that have never been worn.
For most of the time that I knew him, Grandad showed no sign of thinking of himself as a veteran. He never went to the Royal British Legion, or belonged to a regimental association, or went to ceremonies on Remembrance Sunday. As a child, I was not regaled with his war stories. Only with reluctance could he be persuaded to name the guns wielded by my Airfix plastic soldiers, and when the film A Bridge Too Far made one of its frequent appearances on television, my grandmother, Nanny, told me to turn it off because it was too noisy. The medals he had actually received for his wartime service had been lost: given to his sons to play with, they had disappeared into the cracks that had opened up in the sun-baked garden of their Metroland house one summer in the 1950s. That seemed to sum up how he had decided to treat the war. Judging by the pictures they kept on their walls, he and Nanny were much keener on celebrating their post-retirement holidays, their grandsons, and the awards given to their home-made wine than on marking their participation in the Second World War.
Yet the war had been the defining moment of their lives. How else would a trainee accountant from London and a miner’s daughter from Tyneside ever have met, if military service hadn’t brought them both to a dance in the sergeants’ mess at the army camp at Barnard Castle? They first met when he picked her up after she fell on the floor, but in their wedding photos, Grandad in his uniform looks like the one who might be about to topple over. Her father had drunk him and his mates under the table the night before. Husband and wife obviously made good use of the last moments before he was sent to Europe, because their first child, my father, was born exactly nine months after his embarkation leave, at the start of May 1945. The Russians were in Berlin, the war in Europe was in its final days, and the midwife insisted that the boy would have to be called Victor to mark the occasion, thus ensuring that he would spend the rest of his life as a war memorial.
His parents never used that name in my hearing: they always called him Bill, his second name, instead. This was probably not just a matter of preference. Years later, Grandad was still angry that, although the fighting had finished, he had not been allowed home to see his new son. Instead, he was stuck in a recently surrendered Hamburg with his unit, waiting for further service in the Far East. The end of the war with Japan saved him from that, but he didn’t get a leave long enough to come home again until the end of October 1945. Unlike a lot of families, they didn’t have to deal with bereavement or disability, but the anxiety and the pain of separation – during the pregnancy, then during the first year of my father’s life, because Grandad wasn’t demobbed until May 1946 – must have been terrible. When he returned home, they put the war behind them and got on with their lives.
Yet they were also interested in, and proud of, their grandsons. After my first book was published, Grandad decided that it might be nice if I could have his medals. When the Ministry of Defence explained that they didn’t issue replacements, he bought new ones from a dealer to pass on to me. In a letter, he recalled some of what he had experienced during that final, bitter campaign, including the terrifying day that rocket-firing Hawker Typhoons mistook the target marking and attacked his unit rather than the Germans. My brother and I bought him a copy of the regimental history for his birthday, and he read it with apparent interest. After all these years, he said, it was good to know what had actually been going on.
In contrast to Grandad Todman, as I was growing up my maternal grandfather, Frederick Spackman, seemed to talk about the war every time we saw him. Fred had been a fitter with the London Transport Passenger Board and, having joined the Territorial Army in 1938, he spent the war repairing vehicles in workshops in Britain and Egypt. It was without doubt the most exotic thing that ever happened to him. The studio portraits taken by a wartime photographer in Cairo show Fred doing his best to look like Errol Flynn, but there wasn’t much swashbuckling in his stories. They were always the same. The motorbike accident that had put him in hospital, as one of the war’s first British casualties, on 3 September 1939. The time he knew more than the officer who had to test his mechanical knowledge. Keeping a chameleon, learning to repair watches and counting to ten in Arabic. The working of the Wilson epicyclic gearbox in the Daimler Armoured Car.
These tales were so familiar that we could repeat them word for word and, to us if not to him, they became something of a joke. Only at the end of his life did it become apparent that he could have told a different set of stories. The hasty first marriage conducted in the shadow of impending war. The wife who then told him that she was carrying a child and that she was not sure if he was the father. The belated divorce. All this had been written out of the family’s history: the strength of the taboo such that my mother, his daughter by his second marriage, had known nothing about it at all. While Fred was abroad, his estranged wife continued to draw an allowance from his pay, his father died and all his possessions were sold. On demobilization, he had to rebuild his life completely from scratch. Like most men of his generation, he did not enjoy unrestrained displays of emotion. Perhaps it was not surprising that he liked to keep his memories of the war closely controlled.
I tell these anecdotes not just as a means of paying tribute or claiming inherited authority, but also to make a point about the complexity and fluidity of our relationship with the past. What we put in and leave out of our history matters, but what we think we know can always be subject to change. Eighty years on from 1939, with the war disappearing over the boundary of lived memory, we can still question and rework the stories we tell about it, finding new meanings and turning the familiar strange.
This is the first of a two-part history of Britain’s Second World War, running from 1937 to 1947. In a way no other book has done, these two volumes join together histories that are usually told separately – strategic, political and economic, military, cultural and social – to build a broad and coherent picture of the country as it prepared for, fought and emerged from a total war. The books are written on the principle that if we want to understand the war, we have to grasp that fighting and home fronts, strategic decisions and economic effects, military contingencies and political opportunities were all interconnected. Only by linking them together can we start to understand the course and consequences of the war. Exploring the conflict from these different angles also allows us to follow its story at different levels: from the high politics of grand strategic decision-making, via the statistics of production, inflation and infant mortality, to the myriad of individual experiences that give a sense of what it was like to be caught up in (or left out of) great events as they happened. In so doing, we can see how some of the stories that were told to make sense of the conflict at the time continue to influence how we think about the war.
This is a history centred on the United Kingdom, but it is not just a British history. The Britain of the 1930s and 1940s was an imperial country, and the Empire was crucial to why and how Britain fought. The history of the Empire at war is not just one of shared service, but of exploitation, resistance, repression and the hope of liberation. The fate of the British Empire is one of the great stories of the war. In some ways, this is also an international history. What happened to Britain during these years only makes sense if it is seen as part of a global system. The plunge into war, and the course of the violence that followed, were shaped by the actions and reactions of the great powers. The vast extent of Britain’s economic and strategic interests meant that, from its outset, the consequences of the conflict stretched across the world. Perhaps most importantly, it’s important to put Britain’s experience of war into international context in order to understand how distinct it was, and just how lightly the British managed to escape from their second encounter with a modern total war.
To comprehend the course of the war, we need to have a sense of why battles were won or lost – and how people understood victory and defeat at the time – but wars consist mainly of things other than fighting. While the experience of combat and the history of military operations have their place in both these books, they spend more time on other aspects of the conflict: the factory, the food queue, the Whitehall office, the dockyard and the broadcasting studio. Putting combat in its place is a significant part of understanding what really mattered to the outcome of the war: the colossal mobilization of modern industrial economies to produce the weapons, food and equipment with which victory would be pursued. This was also a crucial factor in determining individual experience: for all the drama of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz in 1940–41, their impact on British life was marginal compared to the full employment, rising wages and increasing prices that resulted from the expansion of munitions production to meet the demands of the war.
In reconstructing history we have constantly to remember that people at the time could only guess at a future that to us is plainly known. No one in 1939 knew that the war would end in 1945. For this reason, both volumes of Britain’s War tell the story as it went along, rather than following each separate theme across the whole course of the war. This serves to emphasize just how much the conflict changed – for strategists, service personnel and civilians – as it went on. ‘Wartime’ was not an invariant condition. Two great changes – the Fall of France and Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union – bookend the year-long struggle to defend the United Kingdom which forms the centrepiece of this volume. Another – the entries of Japan and America into the conflict – forms the dividing line between this book and its sequel, which carries the story of the conflict past the eventual Allied victory to the moment of Indian independence in 1947.
This volume, Into Battle, tells the story from the descent into a European war during the 1930s to the explosion of a more global conflict at the end of 1941. At its heart is an argument about viewing 1940 not as a ‘Finest Hour’, but as the decisive year in twentieth-century British history. Ironically, even as the resilience of Britain and its empire vindicated at least some of the strategies adopted by the governments of the 1930s, the combination of Westminster machination, military defeat and economic escalation swept in a new political order that would shape British life for the next three decades. Meanwhile, by ensuring that Germany was unable to capitalize on its victory over France, British strength determined, for the last time, the future of the world. As Britain held out against a Nazi-occupied Europe, and Germany failed to subdue its sea-girt enemy, both combatants were driven to find the resources they needed to secure a decisive victory. Their desperation would turn the conflict into a bigger, more global war that neither was able to win. By December 1941, the beginning of the Second World War was coming to an end, but the real war was only just beginning.
Deep in the Underground station, the crush was growing worse. With the platforms already crammed, new arrivals kept pressing in. All but overwhelmed, railway staff and policemen tried to maintain calm. As the newcomers descended, the air grew thicker: the heat of close packed bodies creating an almost suffocating fug. Grumpy indignation and humorous resignation, however, eclipsed panic. On the packed platform, someone was trying to persuade their neighbours into another round of song.
Then a train rumbled in, and a fresh wave of passengers emerged. As their bedraggled replacements took the chance of escape, the newcomers pressed towards the exits, desperate to get outside and join in the fun. It was just after 6 p.m. on 12 May 1937. London was celebrating the crowning of a new king. And outside, the rain was pouring down.
The momentum of excitement had been building for some time. The previous weekend had seen the largest traffic jams London had ever known as sightseers flocked into the decorated streets. With the capital’s busmen on strike for shorter hours, gridlock had descended when thousands of visitors from the suburbs came in their own cars. Over the days that followed, spectators began to camp out in the most favourable spots to see the royal family on their way to and from Westminster Abbey. In the early hours of coronation morning, their slumbers were broken by the growing crowds, the testing of the public address system and the stamp of marching troops. Inside Buckingham Palace, the noise woke the king, who fretted that the archbishop of Canterbury might put the great crown of England on him back to front.1
The vast parade to the abbey got under way at half past ten. Twenty-seven thousand servicemen lined the route. The archbishop and the king having managed their respective duties well enough, the royal family returned home, accompanied by another 6,000 troops, drawn from every part of the armed forces and every corner of His Majesty’s realms – from the Life Guards, via the Bermuda Militia and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, to the Army Dental Corps. The rest of the abbey congregation, among them the Conservative MP Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, faced a long wait before they could emerge. Fortunately, some had brought provisions. ‘Chocolates were munched, and flasks slyly produced,’ Channon recorded, and he fell into a fawning reverie over the highlights of the ceremony: ‘the shaft of sunlight, catching the King’s golden tunic as he sat for the crowning; the kneeling Bishops drawn up like a flight of geese in deploy position; and then the loveliest moment of all, the swirl when the Peeresses put on their coronets’.2
Outside, 570 miles of steel scaffolding and 1,400 tons of timber had been used to construct viewing stands (covered and uncovered, depending on the status of the intended occupants) in which were seated 90,000 official and paying spectators. On Victoria Embankment, the London County Council had assembled 37,000 schoolchildren – sustained by the donation to each of a half-pint of milk and a packet of crisps by the Milk and Potato Marketing Boards – to pay shrill homage.3 Crowds packed the space between the stands. Over the forty-six hours of continuous service before and after the coronation, a record 5,669,000 passenger journeys were made on the London Underground – a number somewhat inflated by the continuing bus strike.4 Twenty thousand policemen were on duty, connected by a combination of wireless and telephones to three ‘nerve centres’ from which they could be directed to the points of greatest need. Despite the revelry, the total number of offences dealt with by Bow Street police court over the period of the coronation was rather less than normal for a weekday.5
Perhaps that was because it was so wet. The sun briefly pierced the drizzle as the royals made their way to the abbey, but as they returned the heavens opened. Nonetheless, the next day’s newspapers reported an enthusiastic reception from the crowds: loudest – as measured by the Daily Express ‘cheerometer’ – for, in order, Queen Mary (the king’s mother), the king and queen, and the street cleaners who picked up the horses’ dung from behind the cavalry and carriages.6
Some people weren’t sure for whom they were shouting. Three people back from the barrier on Great Marlborough Street, the balconies of the buildings opposite could be seen but not the road itself. A nineteen-year-old secretarial student from Kent who had come up to watch the big day therefore found herself at something of a loss when, at five past three, cheering began: ‘at procession we can’t see … Constant rumours as to who passes. Violet says she can lip-read people’s mouths on balconies … but seems to get same people twice. Much cheering on balconies for King. Not much cheering from behind barricades.’7
Once the parade finished, the barriers came down and the streets were turned over to the public, who now slid across carriageways coated in ‘a sort of papier-maché paste of old newspapers, bags, flags, pieces of cloth, etc, well mixed with a mud basis’.8 The more exhausted spectators departed, but the rest surged on in search of pubs and cafés to refresh themselves for further celebrations. Some gathered outside the palace, on the balcony of which the king and queen made three appearances to great acclamation. In Oxford Street, someone set up a radio, and ballroom dancing began in the middle of the road. Near Trafalgar Square, a woman stopped to look at photographs of the procession that had already been posted outside a news cinema:
Two working class men are also looking and they are making remarks about the people in the picture – ‘Look at the old girl, she looks as if she’s got toothache’ and at another picture of the actual crowning: ‘Look, they’re just putting it on his nut’. I said to one of them: ‘You’re not very loyal, are you?’ ‘Oh I’m patriotic all right, I’ve been up all night waiting to see the procession.’9
Across the UK, cities, towns, villages, streets and houses had been decorated and castles, cathedrals and council buildings floodlit. The street parties for which many poorer areas of London had been saving were rained off, as were the planned parades in Southend, Lincoln and Hull, but elsewhere a mixture of better weather and persistence won out. In Cardiff, there was a pageant illustrating the industrial and municipal progress of the city over the previous century, an air rally, a coronation ball, concerts and fireworks in the parks, a procession of boats on the River Taff, a military parade and a twenty-one gun salute. In Southport, the morning’s procession and civic service of thanks were followed by a display of tableaux, physical exercises and dancing by 3,000 schoolchildren at the ground of the local football club. In Liverpool docks, the great ocean-going ships were decorated with flags and lights. A civic procession made its way to the city’s cathedral, outside which, after the service, a ‘King’s Champion’ (in fact a local police inspector on horseback in replica medieval armour) led the crowds in affirmations of allegiance. Then came a flypast by No. 611 (West Lancashire) Bomber Squadron. In Glasgow, the Corporation paid for teas for thousands of schoolchildren, pensioners, invalids, poor mothers and the unemployed. Four thousand troops paraded the streets; 80,000 people went to Hampden Park to watch a display of physical drill and dancing by 1,500 children, followed first by daylight fireworks, then, that evening, by a sports carnival featuring an exhibition football match, a demonstration of air-raid rescue methods by a specially trained squad of police officers, and the massed skirl of 800 pipers.10
The writer J. B. Priestley watched the celebrations in pessimistic mood. By the late 1930s, Priestley was a multimedia celebrity with a string of successful novels and plays to his name. Progressive in his politics but averse to political parties, Priestley usually turned his fears about the modern world into a celebration of good humour, honesty and family loyalty. In the crowds below his window, however, he could see little hope for the future:
They had wandered away from religion but had not even arrived yet at science. Great music, drama, art, they knew little or nothing of these. They had lost the fields and the woods but had not exchanged them for a truly civilised urban life. Most of them probably did not know how to make love or even to eat and drink properly … So much wealth, so much time, so much energy could be spared for the crowning of a king … But to crown at last these people themselves, where were the wealth and time and energy for this task? Who would, after taking down the bunting and the lights, tear down the streets themselves and build a nobler, happier, beautiful Britain?11
The summer of royal occasions did not end with the coronation. The next day, the king and queen staged an unannounced drive through North London to see the street decorations for themselves. On 20 May, there was a full naval review off Portsmouth, in which the king inspected a procession of vessels six miles long, including the ten battleships and battlecruisers and four aircraft carriers of the Royal Navy’s Home, Mediterranean and Reserve Fleets, as well as the American USS New York and the German battleship Admiral Graf Spee. That evening, the whole armada was illuminated by a forest of lamps and cascading fireworks. Three days later, the royal family joined the representatives of the Dominions, India and the colonies to celebrate Empire Day with a service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s, and in July, the king and queen paid state visits to Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Official celebrations throughout the Empire mirrored those in the UK. On coronation day itself, Sydney Harbour Bridge was illuminated, first by lamps, then by a huge firework display. Brisbane floodlit its city centre and held church services, a ceremonial parade, a military sports show and a concert by massed choirs. Ottowans attended a parade of the military garrison, war veterans, scouts, guides and schoolchildren. Jamaica spent £5,000 on decorations and entertainment for children, the aged and infirm. In India, the viceroy processed through the Simla bazaar and attended the feeding of hundreds of the local poor.12
A British coronation was an international event. The New York Sun congratulated the British authorities for their success in labouring ‘loyally … to safeguard and buttress democracy in a period when its enemies at both extremes of political fanaticism bitterly assail its philosophy, belittle its accomplishments, emphasize its shortcomings, and unite in demanding its destruction’. Yet there was also a message from Adolf Hitler, sending his best wishes for ‘a long and happy reign for the welfare of Great Britain, Ireland, the oversea British Dominions, and India, as well as in the interest of the preservation of the peace of the world’.13
All this celebration could easily have been being held for someone else. The new king’s elder brother, formerly Edward VIII, now the duke of Windsor, had assumed the throne on their father’s death in January 1936, only to be forced into abdication that December because he was determined to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson. Edward’s insistence on a union that went against the teaching of the church of which he was head offended the morals of senior politicians in Britain and the Dominions. It also confirmed their suspicions of irresponsibility in a monarch whose charisma won popular acclaim but who was too ready to voice his own feelings on such sensitive issues as friendship with Germany or the condition of the unemployed. For almost the whole of 1936, the king’s affair with Simpson and the constitutional wranglings that resulted had gone unreported in the British press. When the news finally broke, it briefly appeared that public support might be rallied behind Edward. By the end of the year, however, he had gone, to be replaced by his brother – safely married and the embodiment of dutiful service.
Abdication in fact exacerbated Edward’s selfishness and lack of political acumen. Effectively exiled to the continent, and egged on by his wife-to-be, he was now embroiled in a bitter argument with his brother over money and titles. In the study of a French château, he became the first British monarch to hear his successor being crowned.14
He could do that because this was the first coronation to be broadcast on radio. The former king was far from the only listener. By the time of the coronation about 8 million British households had a radio licence, and in that week’s programming the coronation was inescapable. On the previous Sunday, for example, alongside the fairly normal Sabbath schedule – religious services from the chapel of St John’s College, Cambridge, and the Bethesda Methodist Chapel, Old Colwyn, a selection of light classical works played by the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra and a celebration of William Barnes, the early nineteenth-century Dorset poet – listeners to the BBC’s National Programme would also have been treated to a discussion of the religious significance of the coronation, a special service led by the archbishop of Canterbury, and a performance of the 1902 operetta Merrie England. For those who wanted something a little more modern there was the commercial competition: Radio Luxembourg had the ‘Ovaltine Programme of Melody and Swing’ and the ‘Kraft Show with Billy Cotton and Jack Doyle’, before a special talk on the coronation by the Conservative MP and former minister Winston Churchill – a programme provided by the broadcaster devoid of sponsorship as a marker of the solemnity of the occasion.15
On the day of the coronation, the radio meant that most people could listen in live. For such a national occasion, the BBC – with a plethora of commentators and radio personalities interviewing members of the crowd – was the only choice, and no local celebration was complete without a loudspeaker relaying the service from Westminster Abbey. In a Cambridge college, a young man: ‘Listened in to part of commentary on ceremony in common room with 9 people (4 conservatives, 3 liberals, 1 fascist, 1 fabian). General reaction: embarrassed grins, and outright laughter when the commentator was outstandingly loyal. Fascist stood for National Anthem. Conservative remarked “bloody fool!”.’ Nonetheless, they all ‘agreed that the Coronation was a good thing because it improved trade, gave ruling class prestige and broke down class barriers’.16
The wireless also allowed the king to address the peoples of his empire. At eight o’clock in the evening of the great day, after much practice and with considerable determination, the king took to the airwaves. His themes were family, duty and imperial fellowship:
Those of you who are children now will, I hope, retain memories of a day of carefree happiness … In years to come, some of you will travel from one part of the Commonwealth to another, and moving thus within the family circle will meet others … whose hearts are united in devotion to our common heritage. You will learn, I hope, how much our free association means to us, how much our friendship with each other and with all the nations upon earth can help the cause of peace and progress.17
Newsreel cameras had been positioned alongside the radio microphones, and their footage was rushed to cinemas where it was slotted into the normal programme. At a screening of the spy film Second Bureau in Carshalton, Surrey, that evening, for example, the main feature was stopped in the middle to show the first newsreel of the coronation. The audience clapped vigorously at every appearance of the king and queen. Then it stopped again for the radio broadcast of the king’s speech, starting with the national anthem:
Everyone stood up, uncertainly and at slightly different times, as they always do, with that rumbling noise of a crowd getting to its feet, and then sat down again for the King’s speech. The whole audience was silent and almost motionless throughout. We noticed the hesitation in the King’s voice, and his inability to pronounce his r’s properly. After the speech the national anthem again, everybody stood again, and a good part of the audience sang, gathering strength by the time they came to ‘send him victorious’.18
The coronation was also broadcast on a new television service, inaugurated only at the very end of 1936. Approximately 60,000 people, living within a maximum distance of 63 miles of the transmitter at Alexandra Palace and wealthy or well-connected enough to have access to one of the early sets, watched the procession live. Among them was the same Cambridge scholar who had listened to the abbey ceremony on the radio:
Saw televised procession in home of local tradesman. His wife and parents-in-law constantly remarked: ‘Isn’t it all wonderful,’ ‘After all, it just shows all this socialist nonsense up, doesn’t it?’ ‘This is the only country where you could have a ceremony like this, without fear of someone throwing a bomb’. They also exchanged anecdotes about the Royal Family, all of which had the same point – that the Windsors are really quite human.19
So human, in fact, that in private discussions with the BBC before the coronation, the archbishop of Canterbury had vetoed the broadcast of live television images from inside Westminster Abbey itself, lest they catch the king’s face spasming as he tried to overcome his stammer.20
Television was not the only way in which this coronation was being seen in a new light.21 It was also investigated by a recently created group called Mass-Observation, whose members hoped that the close study of everyday life might make the world a better place. From across the country, forty-three volunteers sent in detailed descriptions of their experiences and emotions on coronation day to the group’s London headquarters in Blackheath, while a team of twelve specially trained observers had mingled with the crowds in the capital. Thousands of copies of a questionnaire about the day had also been distributed, of which just under eighty found their way back to Blackheath. These eye-witness reports have peppered this account of the coronation. The material collected was published a few months later as a book, May the Twelfth.
Mass-Observation had begun as a mixture of artistic endeavour, political project and social scientific exploration. It germinated among a group of surrealist writers and artists gathered around the poet, journalist and sometime Communist Charles Madge. In his day job on the Daily Mirror, Madge had seen during the abdication crisis the gap between what the public actually knew and the ways that press and government talked about ‘public opinion’. He thought that a network of observers who recorded their day-to-day experiences and emotions might provide the evidence to increase understanding of how popular attitudes were formed.
At the start of 1937, a letter from Madge to the left-wing weekly magazine the New Statesman explaining this plan brought him into contact with Tom Harrisson – an ornithologist turned anthropologist, who had recently published an account of his time living among tribespeople in the New Hebrides and was now engaged on a similar investigation into the working-class inhabitants of Bolton. A talented self-publicist with a rising profile as a writer and broadcaster, Harrisson saw an explicitly political rationale for working out what people actually thought. Strengthening the connection between leaders and led was meant to bolster democracy. Together, Madge and Harrisson composed a letter to the New Statesman announcing the formation of Mass-Observation.
Although ostensibly allied, their projects remained separate. Harrisson led a rather chaotic team of observers who scrutinized what Boltonians did but seldom asked how they felt. Madge attempted to assemble a national panel of correspondents who wrote, strictly anonymously, detailed reflections on one day of their own lives each month. He edited May the Twelfth with his friend Humphrey Jennings, another poet and a film-maker. The book’s emphasis on bizarre juxtapositions showed more of Mass-Observation’s surrealist roots than its social scientific aspirations. On publication, it sparked fierce arguments with modernist writers who thought it too light-hearted and academics who condemned its lack of intellectual rigour.
Although the mass enfranchisement that followed the Great War had made ‘public opinion’ a political touchstone, the new science of opinion polling was still regarded with distrust by most professional politicians as a form of special pleading. Mass-Observation’s project left many reviewers uncomfortable at the idea of being observed by, as the right-wing weekly the Spectator put it, ‘busybodies of the left’. Harrisson, who was always keener on making arguments than art-works, later wrote off May the Twelfth as a ‘crazy idea’ edited by ‘a whole bunch of intellectual poets’.22 Priced at an expensive 12/6, the book was a commercial flop.23
Running through May the Twelfth was a tension between its celebration of ordinary people’s individuality and the observers’ sense of alienation. Madge’s recruits – disproportionately young and politically left-of-centre – were often suspicious of patriotism and the status quo, but also conscious of how unusual this made them. As a female typist explained, she had become ‘very bored with the word Coronation’, which she felt was being ‘artificially bumped up’. As the celebrations went on, however:
I was surprised how much I responded to the atmosphere of the crowd, the cheering, etc. I felt a definite pride and thrill in belonging to the Empire, which in ordinary life, with my political bias, is just the opposite of my true feelings.
Yet I felt a definite sense of relief that I could experience this emotion and be in and of the crowd. One becomes very weary of always being in the minority, thinking things silly which other people care about; one must always be arguing, or repressing oneself, and it is psychologically very bad …
Reviewing it all calmly afterwards, one sees how very dangerous all this is – the beliefs and convictions of a lifetime can be set aside so easily. Therefore, although people will probably always like pageantry, colour, little princesses, etc., and it seems a pity to rob them of this colourful make-believe element – nevertheless because it make it in the end harder for us to think and behave as rational beings when we are exposed to this strain and tension – I would definitely vote agin it. It is too dangerous a weapon to be in the hands of the people at present in power in this country.24
So what sort of country was it?