(Cross posted to Britain at War)

I’m always wary of jumping on the bandwagon and criticizing TV shows based on the marketing – and if the number of newspapers who picked this up is anything to go by, it’s been a very successful press release… but it’s hard not to have a knee-jerk reaction to the news that Channel 4’s 2010 season of ‘factual’ programmes will include a ‘science-history’ programme, ‘Blitz Street’:

To mark the 70th anniversary of this pivotal event in British history, Tony Robinson presents a four-part science and history series which gives just a flavour of what it must have been like to live under such constant bombardment, and explores, crucially, why the Blitz failed.

The series – coming to Channel 4 in early 2010 – constructs a typical row of terraced houses on a military base. With the help of Ministry of Defence scientists, the street is subjected to a range of real large-scale high explosives and incendiaries, similar to those used by the Luftwaffe. Using a wide range of scientific sensors and gauges, there are precise measurements of the blast waves and dangerous after effects of flying shrapnel.

The series follows the nightly cat and mouse battles that took place between the Luftwaffe in the air and Britain’s ground defences, with barrage balloons and anti-aircraft guns. Also tested are the internal Morrison and garden Anderson shelters.

Blitz Street explores the profound psychological phenomenon that was the ‘Blitz Spirit’. A large number of eye-witnesses, many of them speaking for the first time, recount their amazing stories of survival.

And that kneejerk reaction is of course that this is not just tasteless but poorly thought out (surely Tony Robinson hasn’t exhausted the national supply of buried ruins so completely that he has to create them as well as dig them up?) and not terribly informative (is the solution to the ‘Blitz Spirit’ really to be found in the blast effects of German bombs?)

But think further. I actually reckon this is a brilliant piece of experiential history – because, as I’ll suggest in next week’s lecture, the broadest ‘blitz experience’ wasn’t being directly under the bombs, but hearing and seeing them from a distance, perhaps with the aid of the radio, newsreels or newspapers. So  ‘Impossible Pictures’, the production company, have decided to allow us to share that experience of simultaneously spectating and incorporating resilience into the national mythology. How remarkably subtle.

Either that or it’s another celebrity-centred effort to emulate Top Gear, with a middle aged man blowing something up in an effort to make science and history ‘interesting’, which is how all TV now has to be.

Serving Soldier is a new online collection drawing on the holdings of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at Kings College London, and concentrating on the lives of British soldiers from the 1880s to the outbreak of the Second World War. New material is still being added to the site, but what’s there already looks useful and interesting, including letters home from a young Alan Brooke about his life as a junior officer in India, a good quality selection of British First World War posters, and much ephemera relating to life in and out of barracks at the start of the twentieth century.

Just over a week ago, I gave a paper on Death in Britain in the Second World War at the Institute of Historical Research Military History seminar. Apart from falling victim to the Institute’s habit of wrapping the laptop security cable around the speaker’s chair (thus forming a highly effective booby-trap that toppled me like a felled tree and nearly provided the most ironic end for a historian since Robert Darnton was massacred by those cats), it went pretty well. Here are some reflections.
I spoke about three areas – the relative absence of work on death in Britain in the Second World War (although that may be changing), particularly compared to its predecessor – it would be unthinkable to write about the First World War and not discuss bereavement and mourning, whereas the subject is often passed over in studies of 1939-45; the difficulties of defining death from enemy action/operations of war (both at the time and later) and what the spread of death has to tell us about ‘equality of sacrifice’ in terms of geographical region and class.

Although I revisited a lot of the material visitors to this blog may already have seen in terms of calculating the numbers of dead, preparing the paper did force me to engage in some research. I searched out and read Pat Jalland’s Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth Century Australia: War, Medicine and the Funeral Business (Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 2006), which is very interesting on the effect of social and medical change plus the experience of the First World War on mourning in the Second. Jalland makes a good case that it was harder to mourn expressively the second time around, although the Australian case, with so many bomber crew and POWs, may have been distinct. I tracked down a variety of quotes about the balance of civilian and service casualties over the first years of war:

‘…until September 1941 the enemy had killed more civilians than combatants’ (A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945 (Oxford: OUP, 1965), 502)
‘…it was not until late 1942 that total British uniformed casualties in the war exceeded civilian.’ (M. Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory (London: Routledge, 2000), 70)
‘British civilian casualties were higher than military ones until after the invasion of Europe on 6 June 1944.’ (J. Bourne, ‘A personal reflection on two world wars’, in P. Liddle, J. Bourne and I. Whitehead, eds, The Great World War 1914-45 I: Lightning Strikes Twice (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 18) and
‘Until the middle of 1944 there were more civilian deaths than military’ (P. Stanksy, The First Day of the Blitz: September 7, 1940 (London and New Haven: Yale UP, 2007), 4)

and finally traced them back to the ur-source, which is, as I suspected but couldn’t find, Richard Titmuss, in the brilliant chapter on the Arithmetic of Stress in Problems of Social Policy:

‘Not until two years of war had passed did the number of civilians killed fall below the total of fatal casualties among soldiers, sailors and airmen. Not until over three years had passed was it possible to say that the enemy had killed more soldiers than women and children.’

As can be seen, this couple of sentences seems to have been subsequently misquoted by other historians. I can’t find a source before Titmuss making this sort of comparison (although Leslie Hore-Belisha did compare road casualties to military losses in the middle of the war (‘Carelessness exacted a greater toll than valour’, ‘1942 Road Casualties Higher than 1939-41 War Losses’, Daily Express, 19 April 1943, 3). It would be good to know if anyone has one. What you certainly don’t get is any idea that these were politicised numbers at the time, as the services fought over manpower and endeavour, and the Treasury, services and IWGC discussed who’d get a war grave and a pension. The point I tried to get across is that any number we come up with for deaths is probably wrong – it’s the recognition of how complex this area was and how much it meant at the time that matters.

Finally, I made use of various bits of number crunching to suggest that although the consequence of the Blitz – a large number of civilian deaths, many of them working class – was unusual and very different from 1914-18, conscription didn’t mean that the burden of military death was equally borne. In fact, it seems disproportionately to have been borne by Scots and social elites – I will come back to this topic in a later post – which makes the Second World War look in some ways rather like the First.

Both in the course of delivering the paper, and in the questions that followed, it became apparent to me that I need to do some follow up research as well. I need to:
1) try to work out where Titmuss got his numbers from. Intriguingly, there is a PRO CAB file on the provision of statistics for the official historians, but I also need to look at Titmuss’s papers in the LSE.
2) actually look at the legislation passed about pensions and compensation – I’ve been referring to it because it’s in the files I’ve been reading, but I’ve not read it myself, and it would clear up some definitions in my mind.
3) look at the Adam Papers in the LHCMA to see what discussions the Adjutant General was having with Churchill about casualties
4) look in the Churchill College archives to work out why Churchill didn’t pay more attention to casualties in his writing of The Second World War.
5) complete a survey of as many as possible university and public school memorials, comparing First and Second World War totals.
6) work out how to crunch numbers to see whether RAF deaths were geographically evenly distributed.
7) Make it clear, in future iterations of this paper, why it is that I use pre-war county population estimates as a means of calculating the spread of bereavement, rather than wartime totals.
present the statistics of Blitz deaths differently – the way I showed them this time round didn’t make it clear how concentrated they were.
9) continue research at the CWGC – I was there for most of the day before the paper, and there’s a lot of great material to be dug into about the definition of deaths and overseas personnel.

That might seem like a lot – and this has been more an aide-memoire than a post perhaps – but I actually think it should be do-able between now and when I present the next version of this paper, in March: by which point it should be close to submission as an article as well.

Professor John Ramsden, my colleague at QMUL until his retirement last year, died a few days ago. Peter Hennessy’s obituary from the Guardian captures much of John and in no way overstates his achievements. John had first shown the remarkable academic generosity that he displayed to me throughout the time I knew him when he invited me to take part, as a graduate student, in a conference he was organizing on The Great War TV series. When I later got a job at QM, he was appointed to be my mentor during my probationary period, a job he fulfilled with equally balanced rigour and charm. His plainspokenness was of real value in guiding a novice through some of the tricks of the trade. As Professor Hennessy points out, John showed his respect for people by always speaking honestly. He did me great service, both intellectually and in terms of personal confidence, by reading and commenting on the manuscript of my book before publication. Afterwards, he said to me: ‘It’s a really good read Dan, but I do think it’s a shame that your generation hasn’t really been taught how to write.’ There’s no way in words of conveying why that generated so much affection within me. On one of the student feedback forms from the First World War course we taught together, an anonymous undergraduate wrote ‘John Ramsden: if Carlsberg made lecturers’. That got it absolutely right; he will be much missed.

Courtesy of the IMDb’s list of quotes from Millions Like Us:

Charters: Talking of wartime sacrifices, Caldicott – do you remember old Parterton?
Caldicott: Chap with all those rubber plantations in Malaya?
Charters: Yes, that’s the fellow. Do you remember his valet, Hawkins?
Caldicott: Yes.
Charters: He’s evacuated to Weston-super-Mare.
Caldicott: Really?
Charters: Parterton’s simply livid. Hasn’t dressed himself for 30 years.
Caldicott: What’s he going to do about it?
Charters: Follow him. To Weston-super-Mare.
Caldicott: Oh, by the way, how many mines have we laid here this morning?

(Cross posted to Britain at War)
As in previous years, the anniversary of the sinking of the battleship Royal Oak was recently marked by the replacement of the flag that ‘flies’ from the sunken vessel – this time, seventy years on from the first Royal Navy disaster of the Second World War. You can read more about the ship, what happened to it, and the commemorations – and see some amazing pictures – at this site.

That the village of Turville, where the film Went the Day Well was shot, was also the setting for the outdoor scenes in The Vicar of Dibley. Dawn French versus German paratroopers: why hasn’t that movie been made yet?

I picked this book up pretty much at random a couple of months ago, because its title and subject looked interesting – it’s a 1935 novel set on 1930s Clydeside, based around the relationship between Danny Shields, a riveter, and Leslie Pagan, the son of the shipyard owner. To be honest, I was struck by it because I wanted a well-written source on shipbuilding, but it turns out that it touches on older interests of mine as well. Shields was Pagan’s batman when they were both infantrymen during the First World War, and their emotional link as a result is a central facet of the book. It seems to draw on some of Blake’s own experiences: according to the DNB, he was wounded on Gallipoli (before becoming a journalist, and then a director of Faber and Faber after the war). Regimental reunions – formal and informal – crop up repeatedly. Blake apparently believed that he’d ‘failed with his proletarians’ (DNB again), and there is something a bit patronising in the depiction of Danny, but the meditations on the connections between old soldiers are heartfelt – and complex. Here’s Blake on a formal reunion dinner, ‘fantastically mixed as to type, disposition and social standing’:

The King, the Country, the Regiment… None of these symbols furnished an explanation. Few men ever fought for an idea. Old Colonel Gall over there, rolling in the fat, false profits of stockbroking, would be absurdly generous to any individual case that might appeal to him and could yet classify the unemployed as ’shirkers’ and work and vote against them. Tall Fred Tierney, to whom he was speaking, professed Revolutionary Socialism and would, according to his utterances, hang all stockbrokers from the lamp posts. Yet here they were, and scores of pairs like them, melted into a harmony by a sentiment. But of what? Of hard experience shared, of common congratulation on escape, of esteem for fundamental worth? There was no answer. Significant, perhaps, that they all talked, and loudly, of ‘the Old Mob’. There was the symbol, possibly. Strange, however, that the spirit did not prevail in the conduct of their lives and affairs in industrial civilisation! Could it be that the warmth of the reunion was an illusion? Perhaps it was the expression of a fundamental reality,. Perhaps it was nothing at all.

(G. Blake, The Shipbuilders (Edinburgh, 1993 (first published 1935), 259.

Leslie is put off by the toasts and speeches at dinner, but there is a moment when everyone can revel in their (drunken) camaraderie, before they become quarrelsome and the party eventually breaks up. It’s a fascinating portrait – well worth a look for anyone with an interest in the remembrance of the First World War.

A belated juxtaposition to the Waugh quote below:

Inequality of Sacrifice

There is growing evidence of a feeling among certain sections of the public that ‘everything is nto fair and equal and that therefore our sacrifices are not worthwhile’. In particular, there is some belief that the rich are less hit by rationing than ‘ordinary people’ for the following reasons:

a) they can eat at expensive restaurants

b) they can afford to buy high priced goods in short demand, such as salmon and game

c) they can spend more on clothes and therefore use their coupons more advantageously

d) they receive preferential treatment in shops, as ‘people giving large orders are favoured and the poorer people wanting ‘little bits’ are refused.

e) They receive preferential treatment as regards petrol rationing. To quote a postal censorship report: ‘ We can see Big Bugs riding in their posh cars and poor beggars can’t get petrol for business’.

The feeling of ‘inequality of sacrifice’ between the services and civilians, frequently mentioned in these reports, continues. Ill-feeling between the two is said to be growing as tales of slacking in factories, high wages and black markets increase the belief among servicemen that civilians are not pulling their weight.

(Ministry of Information, Home Intelligence Division Weekly Report No 77, 25 March 1942, National Archives, Kew, INF 1/282)

There are some problems with the way that these reports were assembled, but as Ira Zweiniger-Bargielowska has shown, these were far from isolated or unjustified sentiments. What interests also interests me here is the mention at the end of the perception at the time of a service/civilian split.

The Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has written a poem (at the request of the BBC?, it’s slightly unclear) to mark the passing of the last British combatant veterans of the First World War. You can read a transcript and listen to her read it (at least UK readers can do the last bit, not sure if international readers can).

I could have done without the Owen quote, and I wonder whether the last post trumpet was her idea or the producer’s,  but I don’t think it’s a sentiment that many will disagree with.