tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/the-blitz-20075/articlesThe Blitz – The Conversation2024-01-03T13:19:02Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2186722024-01-03T13:19:02Z2024-01-03T13:19:02ZHow second world war bomb rubble was used to make 135 football pitches in east London<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564885/original/file-20231211-15-t8k7r9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=7%2C0%2C4785%2C2622&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Hackney Marshes football pitches with the city of London on the horizon.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/alandenney/26288830431/"> Alan Denney|Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>During the second world war, German forces dropped 28,000 bombs and almost 3,000 V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets on London. Nearly 30,000 people were killed. The damage to the built environment was extensive. </p>
<p>Within the London County Council area (roughly covering today’s inner London), more than 73,000 structures were totally destroyed. Local surveyors, construction workers, architects and engineers documented the destruction as it happened on hand-coloured maps, which are now held at the London Metropolitan Archives. Some 43,400 structures recorded on these maps were categorised as “<a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/bomb-damage-maps-reveal-londons-world-war-ii-devastation">damaged beyond repair</a>”. </p>
<p>City authorities were faced with the gargantuan task of figuring out quite where to put the millions of tonnes of rubble. My <a href="https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCA/article/view/25782">recent study</a> looks at the largest of these rubble dumps – at Hackney and Leyton Marshes in east London – and the remarkable afterlife it has had, as the wellspring of English grassroots football. </p>
<h2>When rubble choked the city of London</h2>
<p>Between December 1940 and 1946, 2.2 million cubic metres of concrete, brick and stone rubble were dumped on Hackney Marsh and 270,000 cubic metres on Leyton Marsh, raising the ground level by three metres. If piled together, the volume would have <a href="https://www.themeasureofthings.com/singleresult.php?comp=volume&unit=cm&amt=2470000&i=451">exceeded the Great Pyramid</a>. </p>
<p>In 2021 and 2022, I conducted an archaeological walkover and photographic surveys of the marshes. I struggled to find obvious evidence of the conflict. The rubble lies hidden under plants and soil with only occasional surface fragments of concrete and the odd brick hinting at the site’s wartime origins. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="An overhead shot of bricks on a dirt path." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564896/original/file-20231211-23-uw2x9d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564896/original/file-20231211-23-uw2x9d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564896/original/file-20231211-23-uw2x9d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564896/original/file-20231211-23-uw2x9d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564896/original/file-20231211-23-uw2x9d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564896/original/file-20231211-23-uw2x9d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564896/original/file-20231211-23-uw2x9d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bomb rubble fragments of stock bricks and granite setts eroding from pathways on Leyton Marsh, 2023 (10cm scale).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jonathan Gardner</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Comparing images from surveys by aerial <a href="https://www.lidarfinder.com/">lidar</a> (a laser-light technology used for 3D mapping) with historic maps shows how both sites are now marshes in name only. The elevation created by the rubble is visible both in sharp breaks of slope on the maps and, on the ground, in the unexpectedly steep staircases you have to climb in order to reach the football pitches from the bank of the River Lea.</p>
<p>Venture to neighbouring Leyton and Clapton and where the rubble came from becomes far more visible. Street after street showcase gaps where houses are missing in otherwise neat terraces. Modernist blocks abut awkwardly against Victorian townhouses. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A portrait shot of an east London street." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564899/original/file-20231211-15-tydx76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564899/original/file-20231211-15-tydx76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564899/original/file-20231211-15-tydx76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564899/original/file-20231211-15-tydx76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564899/original/file-20231211-15-tydx76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564899/original/file-20231211-15-tydx76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564899/original/file-20231211-15-tydx76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gaps in Victorian terraces, in Leyton, make visible the extent of the bombing suffered during the war.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jonathan Gardner</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The first weeks of the Blitz, in September 1940, saw London’s 29 borough councils increasingly unable to cope with a <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Blitz_and_its_Legacy/zBeoDQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1">backlog of 2.7 million tonnes</a> of rubble. It effectively choked the city, blocking miles of roads and rendering vital services inoperable. </p>
<p>By the end of September, the city-wide War Debris Survey and Disposal Service was established. Early dump locations it selected included disused gravel pits on Hampstead Heath and the site of the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, which had <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv23wf3ft.8?seq=30#:%7E:text=sand%20quarrying%20in%20the%20Second%20World%20War%20">been quarried</a> for sand to fill sandbags in the first years of the war. </p>
<p>As the bombing intensified, larger spaces were soon needed. The service turned its sights eastwards, to the wide-open marshland of east London.</p>
<p>The infilling was primarily undertaken to clear London’s bombed streets. It also had a more constructive purpose. A 1942 memo written by the Ministry of Home Security (now held in the <a href="https://search.lma.gov.uk/scripts/mwimain.dll/144/LMA_OPAC/web_detail?SESSIONSEARCH&exp=refd%20LCC/CL/CD/03/115">London Metropolitan Archives</a>) notes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sites for tips should be studied and selected. The opportunity may be taken to make up to new levels land which is subject to flooding or to improve other waste and uneven sites. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>How Hackney Marshes became a footballing utopia</h2>
<p>At the east London site, 250,000 cubic metres of soil from upriver reservoir construction was added to the rubble. This was then seeded to create 135 football pitches, as well as numerous cricket pitches and changing rooms. </p>
<p>This transformation represented a remarkable turnaround for the jumbled debris of a violent conflict and was noted as such, during the war itself. In 1942, the leader of the London County Council, Lord Latham, remarked that “the battle of London has helped to win a new playing field for future generations of Londoners”. </p>
<p>Though unmarked by commemorative plaques, the pitches themselves have become a vast footballing heritage site, the “utopia,” as founder of Hackney Wick Football Club Bobby Kasanga <a href="https://londonist.com/london/sport/hackney-marshes-a-sunday-morning-mecca">has put it</a>, “of grassroots football”. </p>
<p>In 1953, seven years after the pitches opened, a British Pathé <a href="https://www.britishpathe.com/asset/189053/">newsreel</a> reported a “six to ten month” wait for a booking: “A team lucky enough to get a dressing room shares it with their opponents – typical, this, of the sporting spirit of these Londoners.” </p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7GRu9OJQ1Bs?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The popularity of the site stemmed from it not only being the largest agglomeration of football pitches in the world, but also from its accessibility. It was a place where locals and recent immigrants to London alike could share their love for the beautiful game. </p>
<p>The Hackney and Leyton Football League, founded when the pitches opened in 1946, remains London’s largest and oldest league. It has cemented the reputation of the site, with legendary England players, including Bobby Moore and David Beckham, having trained there. </p>
<p>In 1997, Ian Wright featured along with Eric Cantona, Robbie Fowler and David Seaman, in a Nike <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gvTS_bZisQ">ad</a> soundtracked by Blur’s smash hit Parklife and shot on the marshes. Adidas, meanwhile, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgBZGyAW3Zk">flew Lionel Messi</a> on to the pitches by helicopter for a promo match, in 2010, only to have to drive him away by van when he was mobbed by fans. </p>
<p>As more rugby and cricket pitches have been added, the number of pitches has reduced down from the original 135 to 70. Hundreds of players from <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/gv4x3m/the-art-of-hackney-marshes-photographing-the-home-of-sunday-league-football">diverse, working-class communities</a> across London still flock there each weekend though. </p>
<p>UK photographer Simon Di Principe used to go to the marshes as a kid, with his mother, to watch his father play. His 2016 book, <a href="https://www.dazeddigital.com/photography/article/32632/1/capturing-hopes-and-dreams-on-east-london-s-football-pitches">Grass Roots</a>, documents a full season of these amateur Sunday league games, in what Di Principe has said is “a contemporary testament and celebration of what makes London a multicultural city”. </p>
<p>The marshes endure as a subtle reminder of the losses the people of London incurred during the second world war.</p>
<p>The successive grassroots campaigns that have thwarted a variety of proposed developments in recent years are a testament to the value the site continues to hold, for those future generations of post-war Londoners that Latham foresaw.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218672/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jonathan Gardner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>East London’s fabled football destination is the best example of how wartime rubble was repurposed to improve the city for its residents.Jonathan Gardner, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Archeology, The University of EdinburghLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1936882022-11-02T17:07:05Z2022-11-02T17:07:05ZUkraine war: lessons from the Blitz suggest Russia’s targeting of cities could backfire<p>Russian general Sergey Surovikin has a reputation for ruthlessness. Appointed the Russian military’s overall commander on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/08/russia-appoints-notorious-general-sergei-surovikin-ukraine">October 8</a>, the day the strategically vital Kerch Bridge was targeted by an explosion that badly damaged Russia’s main road and rail connection with Crimea, he has ordered savage drone and missile attacks on civilian infrastructure. Strikes on the capital Kyiv and the north-eastern city of Kharkiv have left large swaths of those cities without water and electricity.</p>
<p>Surovikin clearly hopes this is a strategy that will destroy civilian morale and cripple the Ukrainian will to resist. The 2016 targeting by Russia of non-combatant facilities such as hospitals in the Syrian city of Aleppo offer a model for his approach. But this was backed by Syrian regime forces on the ground. My research into UK newspaper coverage of the second world war suggests his approach will fail.</p>
<p>Germany’s second world war blitz on Britain for eight months between September 7, 1940, and May 11, 1941, for example. In the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/the-Blitz">first phase</a>, London was attacked on 57 consecutive nights. Houses, shops, factories, hospitals and schools were destroyed. Some 43,000 civilians were killed and one in six Londoners made homeless. </p>
<p>These raids were terrifying – but Londoners preferred to disguise their fear. On Sunday September 8, 1940, Eileen Alexander, a resident of Hampstead, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/09/love-in-the-blitz-by-eileen-alexander-review-romance-and-bombs">noted in her diary</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Another disturbed night on the drawing-room sofa … Bernard, Jean and I were nearly blown out of the window by gunfire from Primrose Hill – but we had a pleasant afternoon in Spite of All [sic].</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Prior to the blitz, Britain had experienced few civilian casualties, but now, ministers wondered how people’s morale might be maintained as living conditions deteriorated. Sir John Anderson, the home secretary, worried that Britons might prove vulnerable to mass panic. </p>
<p>Civil servants were ordered to monitor intelligence reports for evidence of the public mood. These indicated that panic was rare and determination to keep calm and “see it through” <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/026569148001000114">was the norm</a>. There was, however, much grumbling about class injustice – above all about unequal access to air raid shelters.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Children sit among the rubble of houses destroyed in the Blitz, London 1941." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/492986/original/file-20221102-23-lkdlxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/492986/original/file-20221102-23-lkdlxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492986/original/file-20221102-23-lkdlxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492986/original/file-20221102-23-lkdlxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492986/original/file-20221102-23-lkdlxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492986/original/file-20221102-23-lkdlxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492986/original/file-20221102-23-lkdlxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Homes destroyed but spirit unbroken: London during the Blitz.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Archive</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As the blitz spread to provincial cities, concern grew that relentless bombing of non-military targets might weaken morale. The German raid on Coventry on the night of November 14 1940 was among the most concentrated of the war. The medieval centre of the city was destroyed and nearly one in three homes rendered uninhabitable. From Coventry, Hilde Marchant of the Daily Express wrote: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is useless to try to find heroes in this city. Everyone from the children to the chief constable and mayor has been a hero.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In a piece which ran on November 16 1940, under the headline “Mrs Smith Hands out Cups of Tea as the Bombs Come down”, Marchant described Mrs Smith “handing out cups of tea from a mobile canteen”, which she operated throughout the raid. Meanwhile, Daily Mail correspondent William Hall described Coventry as “this brave city where defiant Union Jacks flutter from reeling, twisted lamp posts”.</p>
<p>You would expect reporters to emphasise people’s courage and resilience – but these qualities really were on display. Germany’s bombing did not destroy Britain’s morale. It caused death, suffering and acute misery, but the most common reaction was captured in Hilde Marchant’s report that “The whole of Coventry cries: BOMB BACK AND BOMB HARD.”</p>
<h2>Defeatist message fell on deaf ears</h2>
<p>The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) alone took a different line. Locked into support for a negotiated peace by Stalin’s non-aggression pact with Hitler, the CPGB’s mission was to persuade working-class Britons that their suffering was futile. Through the pages of its newspaper, the Daily Worker, it promoted the view that shortage of deep air raid shelters in poor areas was the consequence of deliberate anti-working class prejudice.</p>
<p>In January 1941 temperatures fell so low, it was reported that water froze in fireman’s hoses. The meat ration was cut from two shillings and twopence per week to one shilling and twopence. German bombing was intense in London and cities throughout the country.</p>
<p>The CPGB exploited misery ruthlessly in its crusade for a “People’s peace”. Its efforts peaked in a high-profile event, the “<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/hardcastle/1940/peoples_convention.htm">People’s Convention</a>” on January 22. Camouflaged as an innocent gathering of the progressive left, this united 2,234 delegates in London’s Royal Hotel and Holborn Hall. The Manchester Guardian (as it was called until 1959) described it perfectly as a carefully manipulated agent of communist propaganda into which “many excellent but gullible people have been enticed”.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="St Paul's on the London skyline during the Blitz, 1940" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/492987/original/file-20221102-26716-mtoesz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/492987/original/file-20221102-26716-mtoesz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492987/original/file-20221102-26716-mtoesz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492987/original/file-20221102-26716-mtoesz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492987/original/file-20221102-26716-mtoesz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492987/original/file-20221102-26716-mtoesz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492987/original/file-20221102-26716-mtoesz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">St Paul’s during the Blitz.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ministers were so concerned about the CPGB campaign that, on January 21 the new home secretary, Herbert Morrison, <a href="https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1941/jan/28/suppression-of-the-daily-worker-and-the">banned the Daily Worker</a>. The cabinet need not have worried – the People’s Convention <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1461670X.2012.680810">failed to inspire</a> significant hostility to the war effort. </p>
<h2>Bombing campaigns rarely succeed</h2>
<p>It should not have taken the wartime coalition long to understand that German civilian morale might be no more vulnerable to RAF bombing than British citizens had been to attacks by German bombers. </p>
<p>But training and equipping land forces to open a second front in Europe was a slow process. And, when Russia entered the war on the allied side, Stalin demanded action. So, long before D-Day, the RAF and US Air Force responded with colossal raids against German cities. </p>
<p>Compared to the 43,000 British civilians killed in the blitz, the estimates of German civilians killed by Allied bombing <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/oct/22/worlddispatch.germany">range as high as 600,000</a>. Like Britons before them, Germans emerged from air raid shelters, shaken and exhausted. They shook with terror amid colossal explosions. But they did not demand compromise, still less surrender. British policymakers had no compelling evidence to suggest they might. </p>
<p>Another important precedent backs this up. American bombers unleashed the heaviest air raids in history during the Vietnam war, without compromising North Vietnam’s ability to fight on.</p>
<p>Surovikin, who is known as the “<a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/butcher-syria-sergei-surovikin-russia-vladimir-putin-kremlin-ukraine-kherson/">Butcher of Syria</a>” faces a familiar dilemma in Ukraine. He must decide whether savage bombardment of civilian targets will advance the Russian cause. The likelihood is that it will consolidate Ukraine’s already passionate determination to resist. </p>
<p>Wars are not won by bombing campaigns alone – a successful aggressor must take territory. Ukraine will have a tough winter, but unless Russia’s bombardment is backed by a dynamic ground campaign, Surovikin’s strategy owes more to desperation than strategic purpose.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/193688/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tim Luckhurst has received funding from News UK and Ireland Ltd. He is a member of the Society of Editors and the Free Speech Union and a member of the Editorial Board of The Conversation UK. His book, Reporting the Second World War - The Press and the People 1939-1945 will be published by Bloomsbury Academic on 9th February 2023 </span></em></p>The failure of bombing campaigns during the second world war and Vietnam shows that to win a war you have to capture territory.Tim Luckhurst, Principal of South College, Durham UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1741892021-12-23T15:43:10Z2021-12-23T15:43:10ZTo get through the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to learn how to live in an ongoing disaster<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/438925/original/file-20211223-19-1w5rn2k.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C10%2C3600%2C2382&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">People wait in line — some for over two hours — at a PCR COVID-19 test site in Toronto.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young)</span></span></figcaption></figure><iframe style="width: 100%; height: 175px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/to-get-through-the-covid-19-pandemic--we-need-to-learn-how-to-live-in-an-ongoing-disaster" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>As Canada approaches the 700-day mark of the pandemic, the disaster’s state of play is as grim as it is discouraging. On Dec. 22, Canada reported 12,114 new COVID-19 infections — <a href="https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/canada-sets-new-single-day-record-for-covid-19-infections-1.5717161">a record for daily cases since the start of the pandemic</a>. </p>
<p>With a patchwork of <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/provinces-territories-travel-restrictions-covid-1.6284713">provincial pandemic restrictions across Canada changing daily</a>, many holiday season activities have either been scaled back or cancelled for the second year in a row. The context for these disruptions is that as we approach the end of 2021, <a href="https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/cp-newsalert-canada-surpasses-grim-milestone-with-30000-covid-19-deaths">the number of Canadians killed by COVID-19 has surpassed 30,000</a>.</p>
<p>At this point in the COVID-19 disaster, it is beyond the capacity of federal or provincial governments to provide a way out of this emergency. COVID-19 has no respect for norms or established practices of how we deal with disaster. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has resorted to suggesting <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/8466612/canada-omicron-covid-update/">Canadians hunker down to stop the spread of omicron</a>. </p>
<p>Canadians need to rethink their relationship to the pandemic by learning to live in a state of continual disaster for the foreseeable future.</p>
<h2>Contrasting messages</h2>
<p>In a wide-ranging federal government news conference, the Trudeau administration projected an approach of prudence.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SdCzyf1hAp4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Trudeau tells Canadian to ‘hunker down’ to get through the COVID-19 pandemic.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2021/12/22/trudeau-canadians-hunker-down-omicron-525998">Canadian approach is a stark contrast to the American approach</a>, which is to not panic about omicron and to try to enjoy the holidays. Pointed questions from reporters <a href="https://www.cp24.com/news/trudeau-freeland-push-back-at-biden-on-covid-19-holiday-gatherings-1.5717017">forced the Trudeau government to push back at U.S. President Biden’s message</a> that vaccinated persons could gather safely for the holidays, despite the spread of omicron. </p>
<p>Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland rejected the notion that <a href="https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/we-re-a-careful-country-freeland-contrasts-omicron-responses-of-canada-u-s-1.5717005">the federal government was in any way offering a counsel of panic or a counsel of despair</a>.</p>
<p>Leading up to the holiday season, common activities included <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/covid-19-rapid-tests-ottawa-ontario-holiday-blitz-lcbo-1.6289540">waiting in lines — sometimes futilely — at liquor stores to obtain take-home testing supplies</a>, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-rapid-antigen-tests-pcr-tests-covid-19-1.6294606">not being able to obtain testing results in a timely manner</a>, and <a href="https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/12/20/as-hunger-games-scramble-for-vaccine-doses-returns-toronto-officials-urge-residents-to-have-patience-persistence.html">a “hunger games scramble” for vaccination and booster appointments</a>. </p>
<p>Experiences such as these do not contribute to reducing panic or despair.</p>
<h2>The disaster cycle</h2>
<p>Emergency management planning often uses a four-phase disaster cycle: <a href="https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/mrgnc-mngmnt/mrgnc-prprdnss/mrgnc-mngmnt-plnnng-en.aspx">mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery</a>. In many instances of natural disasters, the four-phase disaster cycle model works well to dissect disasters and better understand them, providing lessons to manage future disasters.</p>
<p>In figuring out how to cope with disasters, the disaster cycle provides reference points to guide responses to a sudden emergency to eventual recovery. For example, an analysis conducted a decade after the <a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/history-of-geology/april--2009-the-laquila-earthquake/">2009 earthquake in L'Aquila, Italy</a> used <a href="https://doi.org/10.1108/DPM-01-2018-0022">the four-phase disaster cycle to dissect the response to a natural disaster</a>. </p>
<p>With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we’re still in the emergency part of the disaster. The reference points in the disaster cycle leading from response to recovery are lost, and recovery is not yet discernible. The public is too fatigued to maintain a constant state of preparedness. And the possibility of any mitigation is a distant dream at this point. </p>
<p>Recent research in risk management suggests that disasters are dynamic — <a href="https://doi.org/10.1108/FS-11-2019-0097">the event evolves according to the actions taken to counteract its impact</a>. Considering the changing nature of emergencies and responses incorporates innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership, situational awareness, resilience and learning. </p>
<p>A dynamic approach can help catalyse new thinking on how to deal with the uniqueness of disasters like COVID-19.</p>
<h2>The Blitz spirit</h2>
<p>Perhaps inspiration can be sought from London during the Second World War. Londoners hunkered down <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/what-life-was-like-during-the-london-blitz/">through an eight-month-long German bombing campaign</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/438926/original/file-20211223-27-18cb6qe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A bus leans against the debris from bombed houses" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/438926/original/file-20211223-27-18cb6qe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/438926/original/file-20211223-27-18cb6qe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438926/original/file-20211223-27-18cb6qe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438926/original/file-20211223-27-18cb6qe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438926/original/file-20211223-27-18cb6qe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438926/original/file-20211223-27-18cb6qe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438926/original/file-20211223-27-18cb6qe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Almost 20,000 civilians died in London during the Blitz.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:London_Blitz_9_September_1940.jpg">(H. F. Davis)</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Perhaps intangible traits like those of the <a href="https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Blitz-Spirit/">Blitz Spirit</a> are now needed — the ongoing disaster of COVID-19 needs to be met with a grim willingness to carry on. We have no other choice. </p>
<p>Somehow citizens subjected to months of air raids learned to deal with continual disaster. The tenacity and resilience shown during the Blitz can <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.7326/M20-4984">offer population level insights regarding the current trauma of COVID-19</a> and <a href="https://www.the-hospitalist.org/hospitalist/article/235449/coronavirus-updates/blitz-and-covid-19">offer suggestions to current day hospital workers</a> regarding fears of their hospitals being overrun. </p>
<p>According to historians, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/health/coronavirus-plague-pandemic-history.html">pandemics typically have two types of endings</a>. The first is the medical ending that is reached when the incidence and death rates plummet. The second is the social ending, where either due to fatigue or other reasons, individuals decide the pandemic is over for them, regardless of the science. Drawing a parallel to the Blitz, imagine the consternation of air raid wardens if individuals tired of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/nov/01/blackout-britain-wartime">blackout regulations</a> and turned on lights at night signalling their location to enemy bombers. </p>
<p>Going into 2022, it is time to accept that we can no longer manage our way out of this disaster. We just have to cope as best we can by hunkering down — there is no other choice.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/174189/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jack L. Rozdilsky is a Professor at York University who receives funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research as a co-investigator on a project supported under operating grant Canadian 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Rapid Research Funding.</span></em></p>Canadians need to rethink their relationship to the pandemic by learning to live in a state of continual disaster for the foreseeable future.Jack L. Rozdilsky, Associate Professor of Disaster and Emergency Management, York University, CanadaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1715362021-11-25T17:21:35Z2021-11-25T17:21:35ZMask wearing wasn’t disputed in previous crises – so why is it so hotly contested today?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433754/original/file-20211124-13-1eynnjs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=71%2C229%2C2276%2C1589&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Men wearing masks outside a military hospital in New York during the 1918 influenza pandemic.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/medical-men-wore-masks-avoid-flu-248206198">/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Across <a href="https://www.liberties.eu/en/stories/europe-mask-war-culture/18901">western countries</a>, people are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/29/face-masks-us-politics-coronavirus">polarised</a> over <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/15/masks-britain-culture-war-365370">wearing masks</a>. While some support wearing them as an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/17/wearing-masks-single-most-effective-way-to-tackle-covid-study-finds">effective counter to the virus</a>, others believe having to mask up is a <a href="https://theconversation.com/face-mask-rules-do-they-really-violate-personal-liberty-143634">contravention of their human rights</a>.</p>
<p>Our <a href="https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FW003813%2F1">interdisciplinary team</a> is currently exploring the role the media plays in influencing the British public’s thoughts and decisions on mask wearing. We’ve found that these polarised opinions have been reflected and reinforced by the media, where a clear divide has appeared. </p>
<p>Pro-mask messages are more present in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7989238/">mainstream media</a>, including in public health adverts and on TV. Conversely, anti-mask wearing sentiments are more common in personalised sources <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0957926520970385">like social media</a>. </p>
<p>Here, mask wearing is often associated with the historical commands of authoritarian governments. Some have even <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/21/politics/marjorie-taylor-greene-mask-mandates-holocaust/index.html">compared mask mandates</a> to the Nazi policy of forcing Jews to wear distinguishing yellow stars.</p>
<p>This split in attitudes is a relatively new development. People were more cooperative when asked to wear masks in response to earlier health epidemics and other dangers in the 20th century.</p>
<p>Indeed, a <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0252315">2021 study</a> outlines how approval rates for face coverings during earlier crises were far more collectively positive. During <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33319388/">influenza in 1918</a>, the <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(20)30342-4/fulltext">Blitz in Britain in 1941</a>, and the <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/wearing-face-mask-not-new-backlash-against-say-historians/">smog outbreaks</a> that occurred in the UK from the 1930s to the 1960s, masks weren’t contested like today. What explains this change?</p>
<h2>The tangibility of past crises</h2>
<p>The coronavirus is invisible to the human eye, and its worst effects aren’t seen publicly – they occur at home or in hospital wards away from people’s gaze. </p>
<p>Smog, on the other hand, could be seen. Similarly, the threat of a <a href="https://theworld.org/stories/2016-01-08/londons-forgotten-network-massive-underground-air-raid-shelters-being-found-again">Nazi attack in the 1940s</a> was manifested in smoke, debris and dust in the air after German bombing, as well as physical destruction and rubble. Even influenza in 1918, despite its symptoms being very similar to COVID’s, had arguably more publicly visual characteristics (such as vomiting and diarrhoea) that allowed it to <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7752013/">resist public scepticism</a>.</p>
<p>It may be that the actual visibility of these earlier crises made them seem more threatening, and so wearing a mask seem more necessary. Indeed, in a bid to make the dangers posed by COVID appear more tangible, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/24/un-chief-says-world-at-war-against-covid-19">politicians</a> and the <a href="https://www.cgdev.org/blog/us-losing-global-war-against-covid-19-and-national-security-issue">media</a> have invoked the language of war when discussing COVID, or used <a href="https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/will-governments-new-emotive-covid-ad-people-obey-rules/1705634">images of people on ventilators</a> to materialise the threat.</p>
<p>But such tactics have yielded significant debates among health professionals and linguists, as these produce questionable implications, such as potentially identifying infected people as <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10410236.2020.1844989">“enemies” who bear and spread the virus</a>.</p>
<h2>Variety of the media</h2>
<p>A second factor is that formerly, media was restricted to channels controlled or influenced by government, and these all gave positive depictions of masks. Today, however, there are many other channels, which allow for resistance. </p>
<p>During earlier crises, the media promoted mask wearing as a patriotic act. However, the media’s scope in the first half of the 20th century was far more limited than it is today. Promotion of mask wearing was mainly limited to <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/00333549101250S308">government-approved posters</a> and newsprint in the 1910s. </p>
<p>Mainstream radio didn’t exist until a decade later. And TV was only introduced in the 1930s but wasn’t widespread <a href="https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/373997">until much later</a>. Radio, print and newsreels were the main sources of public information during past eras of mask wearing. </p>
<p>By contrast, today’s media landscape – especially <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/mom-influencers-instagram-covid-19-coronavirus-mask-propaganda-misinformation-1033154/">social media</a> – allows for individual and personalised voices to be heard to an extent unthinkable in earlier decades. Media has become a way of <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0250817">denigrating</a> as well as endorsing mask wearing. </p>
<p>Even music videos provide an opportunity for people to speak out against masks, providing a stark contrast to the <a href="https://archive.org/details/ATishOo">propaganda films of the 1940s</a>. For example, in the video for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOkkWIOkWl8">Living the Dream</a> by US rock band Five Finger Death Punch, mask wearing is depicted as a way of enforcing people’s compliance in an authoritarian reimagining of America. Eventually, though, the public rebel, and are shown ripping their masks off as they head into battle against their hypocritical unmasked leader.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eOkkWIOkWl8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>Pressure to wear a surgical mask</h2>
<p>Although <a href="https://publichealth.jmir.org/2020/2/e18444/?utm_source=TrendMD">public information from the NHS and UK government</a> specifically promotes the use of any “face coverings” (including bandannas, scarves, old clothes and so on), such messages are nearly always <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0252315">accompanied by images of surgical masks</a>. Graphics that represent the need to wear a face covering nearly always depict a surgical mask. </p>
<p>And when looking at a <a href="https://www.lexisnexis.co.uk/">database of British newspaper reporting</a> from the COVID pandemic, it’s also clear that journalists refer to “masks” more often than to “face coverings”. Despite <a href="https://www.gov.uk/guidance/regulatory-status-of-equipment-being-used-to-help-prevent-coronavirus-covid-19?utm_source=Gov&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=MHRA_COVID-19_updates&utm_content=HCP7#face-masks-and-face-coverings">official guidance</a> only requiring proper masks to be used in medical settings, the way they are spoken about and depicted suggests other forms of face covering aren’t as broadly acceptable.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="An NHS poster telling people to 'wash hands, cover face, make space'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/431580/original/file-20211111-27-8614nm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/431580/original/file-20211111-27-8614nm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=330&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/431580/original/file-20211111-27-8614nm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=330&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/431580/original/file-20211111-27-8614nm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=330&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/431580/original/file-20211111-27-8614nm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/431580/original/file-20211111-27-8614nm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/431580/original/file-20211111-27-8614nm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A typical NHS poster from during the pandemic, with its face covering depicted as a surgical mask.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While there’s good reason for this – surgical masks have been <a href="https://www.caymancompass.com/2021/10/02/study-surgical-masks-more-effective-than-cloth/">shown to be more effective</a> than other forms of face covering – in the mind of the public, this may limit the scope of what is proper to wear. This may then lower people’s willingness to wear a mask, as it’s known that people are <a href="https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Z6iYwTFY5mIC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=restricted+choice+leads+to+rebellion+authority&ots=i38bbVGsn_&sig=Iq14oINjC_pTHzWNSu68sk6LxoA">more likely to accept</a> doing something if they <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0033-2909.134.2.270">perceive that there is choice</a> involved. </p>
<p>Yet in the past, the same pressure didn’t exist. During the influenza and smog outbreaks, attitudes towards <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-56085529">alternative face coverings</a> were more permissive, with non-standard masks even being celebrated among the <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/52412108">fashion-conscious cultures</a> of London and Manchester that were impacted by the smog epidemic. Surgical masks of the day would also not have so widely available. The leeway this offered may also have led to a less controversial response to mask mandates compared to today.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/171536/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nathan Abrams, Thora Tenbrink, Anaïs Augé and Maciej Nowakowski receive funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span> </span></em></p>How the pandemic is reported by the media can influence people’s behaviour.Nathan Abrams, Professor of Film Studies, Bangor UniversityAnaïs Augé, Assistant Researcher at the School of Arts, Culture and Language, Bangor UniversityMaciej Nowakowski, Research Assistant in Media Communications and Critical Discourse Analysis, Bangor UniversityThora Tenbrink, Professor of Linguistics, Bangor UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1420212020-07-13T13:31:30Z2020-07-13T13:31:30ZWhy Londoners in the blitz accepted face masks to prevent infection – unlike today’s objectors<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347066/original/file-20200713-62-l0k7ba.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C0%2C797%2C583&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">People going to work during the blitz.
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25092234">Imperial War Museum/Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As COVID-19 spread in Britain, journalists and politicians took to comparing the pandemic to the blitz. From the <a href="https://fr.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSL8N2B80B1">“blitz spirit”</a> to the <a href="https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1291070/coronavirus-uk-blitz-bombing-raid-death-toll-world-war-2-boris-johnson">death toll</a>, the German bombing campaign in the second world war has become a go-to for evaluating Britain’s response to the current crisis.</p>
<p>But <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/19/myth-blitz-spirit-model-coronavirus">some</a> historians <a href="http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/the-real-lessons-of-the-blitz-for-covid-19">have questioned</a> the usefulness of blitz comparisons. Coronavirus does not reduce buildings to rubble. Sunny references to the “blitz spirit” conveniently overlook the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/aug/29/blitz-london-crime-flourish-blackout">looting</a> that accompanied the blackouts. And though the death rates of the blitz and COVID-19 look roughly equal – the blitz saw deaths of around 43,000 while COVID-19 has killed <a href="https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/">nearly 45,000</a> – it’s unclear how this statistic is of much use. There is drama in this comparison, but not much substance.</p>
<p>An under-regarded but critical player in this comparison is the humble mask, an object that helps to show not how similar our moment is to the blitz, but how divorced. Mask-wearing was, in 1941, a completely uncontentious and even patriotic activity.</p>
<h2>Face masks in the blitz</h2>
<p>For the countless Londoners driven into <a href="https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-01-08/londons-forgotten-network-massive-underground-air-raid-shelters-being-found-again">communal shelters</a> by nightly German air raids, personal space had become a luxury. This was particularly so for those who sought shelter in the <a href="https://blog.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/2019/11/06/the-blitz-and-the-london-underground/">London underground</a>. For its perceived subterranean safety, by the blitz’s peak, some 150,000 citizens were sleeping in tube stations.</p>
<p>Though the dangers of close personal contact were not the only thing on the minds of concerned public health officials, preventing epidemic disease in the overcrowded spaces of the tube stations was a major concern. The mask emerged as a common-sense solution to the problem of thousands of shelterers suddenly using the tube’s damp, poorly ventilated spaces as their nightly abodes.</p>
<p>Eager to prevent an epidemic before it started, the Ministry of Health set up an advisory committee to investigate conditions in air-raid shelters, with special reference to health and hygiene. The official call for masks came in December 1940, two months into the blitz and just as flu season was getting underway, in a <a href="https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1940/nov/20/air-raid-shelters-and-the-public-health">white paper</a> that recommended their use alongside a raft of other preventive health measures. British scientists conscripted to the Medical Research Council’s <a href="https://mrc.ukri.org/news/blog/behind-the-picture-sneezing-for-britain/">Air Hygiene Unit</a> were <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/003591574103400302">convinced</a>: the “principle of wearing masks for protection against droplet infection” was a sound practice.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346582/original/file-20200709-62-2cbrpd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346582/original/file-20200709-62-2cbrpd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=150&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346582/original/file-20200709-62-2cbrpd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=150&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346582/original/file-20200709-62-2cbrpd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=150&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346582/original/file-20200709-62-2cbrpd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=189&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346582/original/file-20200709-62-2cbrpd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=189&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346582/original/file-20200709-62-2cbrpd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=189&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/the-anthill-podcast-27460">This article is part of our Recovery series – click here for more.</a></em></strong></p>
<hr>
<p>The Ministry of Health endorsed three types of mask: the standard gauze type (similar to today’s homemade masks); a cellophane screen (like today’s visors, but only covering the mouth and nose); and the commercially available “yashmak” (in the style of the Muslim veil), for the “fashion conscious”. The ministry ordered <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/52412108">500,000 masks</a> to be distributed as needed in the event of an epidemic and commissioned an instructional leaflet for shelterers.</p>
<p>British newspapers publicised the government’s new policy. On February 5 1941, the Times reported that Sir William Jameson, the chief medical officer, had endorsed the new masks, and, more colourfully, <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/dispatches-from-the-blitz-why-peter-ritchie-calder-was-a-true-war-hero-1989929.html">Ritchie Calder</a>, a journalist for the Daily Herald tried one out in public. “After ten minutes yesterday my anti-flu ‘windscreen’ ceased to be a source of ribald remarks,” he reported. “People round me became used to seeing me working in what looked like a transparent eye-shade which had slipped down my nose.” </p>
<p>Predicting that masks would become “as commonplace as horn-rim glasses”, Calder wrote that he could even blow his nose with his mask on. The only thing he couldn’t do “in comfort”, he reported, was “have a cigarette”.</p>
<h2>Sharp contrast</h2>
<p>A <a href="https://archive.org/details/ATishOo">short propaganda film</a> commissioned by the Ministry of Information and released in February 1941 also saw the mask message as self-evidently good sense. “If the shelter doctor or nurse gives you a mask,” the narrator exhorted, “well, wear it!”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347068/original/file-20200713-30-1yqocwa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347068/original/file-20200713-30-1yqocwa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347068/original/file-20200713-30-1yqocwa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347068/original/file-20200713-30-1yqocwa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347068/original/file-20200713-30-1yqocwa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347068/original/file-20200713-30-1yqocwa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347068/original/file-20200713-30-1yqocwa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Screenshot from propaganda film: A-tish-oo!</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">BFI</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The scientific and political consensus on masks that rapidly formed during the blitz stands in sharp contrast to the acrimonious debate that has unfolded over the past months alongside the UK government’s evident reluctance to compel people to cover their faces, even in crowded, indoor spaces. The humble face mask has become a polarising and polarised object.</p>
<p>If there is a lesson to be learned from the blitz, it may be that there is nothing inherently contentious or un-British about covering our faces to counter contagion. In 1941, masking up was accepted as a sensible, patriotic, British thing to do. </p>
<p>Despite protests to the contrary, the source of the COVID-19 mask controversy is not rooted in longstanding concerns about <a href="https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/06/01/why-are-britons-reluctant-to-wear-masks-to-contain-covid-19">individual rights</a> or <a href="https://www.salisburyjournal.co.uk/news/18571617.tom-bromley-why-dont-nation-wear-face-masks-/">British character</a>. We need to look elsewhere to find its source: to the general breakdown in communication and trust between experts, the government and members of the public, that became a <a href="https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/243/Lessons-History-UK-science-policy.pdf">mainstay of contemporary life</a> well after the blitz had passed and has been <a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/public-trust-scientists-will-decline-wake-covid-19">exacerbated by the pandemic</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142021/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Wearing a face mask during the blitz was uncontentious.Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, Chancellor's Fellow in History, University of Strathclyde Caitjan Gainty, Lecturer in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, King's College LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1407482020-06-16T12:25:51Z2020-06-16T12:25:51ZA myth to encourage Uncle Sam: how US journalists sold America the story of heroic Britain in 1940<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/341880/original/file-20200615-65952-13zb0kh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5991%2C3970&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Their finest hour: the Battle of Britain memorial at Victoria Embankment in London.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">CarlsPix via Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Of the myths initiated in the summer of 1940, none was more essential than that Britons were “<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11213968">all in it together</a>”. This image of a united people was a brilliant invention. It worked because it actually inspired the conduct it purported to describe and had the added benefit of influencing American opinion. Convincing Americans that Britain was capable of fighting on was an urgent priority. American journalists contributed enormously to its achievement.</p>
<p>Isolationism, the belief that America should avoid involvement in foreign wars, had widespread support in 1940. Joseph Kennedy, US ambassador in London, warned the State Department against involvement. Noting Churchill’s hunger for American aid, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1964/11/29/archives/father-and-sons-the-founding-father-the-story-of-joseph-p-kennedy.html">Kennedy advised</a>: “Unless there is a miracle, they realise they haven’t a chance in the long run.” </p>
<p>Such official pessimism was reinforced by questions about why, if it was a democracy, Britain still had an empire. There was widespread doubt whether its notoriously stuffy bureaucracy was capable of fighting a modern war and Americans wondered why Britain’s class system was so rigid.</p>
<p>Britain’s class-ridden social order offended America’s certainty that “all men are created equal”. The Britons of 1940 did not appear equal and American mass media did not depict them as such. Historian <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4289165">Angus Calder notes</a> that in the United States “a Disneyland conception of England as a country of villages, green fields and Wodehousian eccentrics” clashed with a harsher reality of inequality, injustice and snobbery.</p>
<p>This was depicted in The New York Times. It greeted Britain’s wartime coalition by reporting that observers “see in the new government evidence of a trend towards breaking down the class social structure which existed in England before the war”. But London correspondent <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1940/05/19/archives/coalition-meets-british-problem-new-cabinet-follows-precedent-and.html">Robert P. Post warned</a>: “Class distinction is very strong in this country. It will take some time before it breaks down completely.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342111/original/file-20200616-23235-11fvund.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342111/original/file-20200616-23235-11fvund.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342111/original/file-20200616-23235-11fvund.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342111/original/file-20200616-23235-11fvund.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342111/original/file-20200616-23235-11fvund.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342111/original/file-20200616-23235-11fvund.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342111/original/file-20200616-23235-11fvund.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">CBS radio broadcaster Ed Murrow (seen here in the 1950s with US president Harry Truman) was an influential voice in favour of supporting Britain’s war effort.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Maryland Library</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Journalism academic Philip Seib recalls that the <a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5422698&t=1592213434601">famous CBS radio correspondent Ed Murrow also worried about</a> “the inequities of the British class system”. However, as the Battle of Britain began, Murrow set off for Kent to witness aerial combat between the RAF and the Luftwaffe. Ably supported by American newspaper reporters, he would use the opportunity to guide American opinion in precisely the direction the British war effort required: towards the belief that Britain could win and was worthy of their support and admiration.</p>
<h2>‘Hell’s Corner’</h2>
<p>The journalists worked from an area of the Kent countryside just outside Dover, <a href="https://www.kentonline.co.uk/canterbury/news/kents-blitz-spirit-keeping-calm-and-carrying-on-224551/">known as “Hell’s Corner”</a>. A group of reporters, including Vincent Sheean of the North American News Agency, Ed Beattie, of the United Press, and Drew Middleton, of Associated Press, travelled down from London to this location from which, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4289165">as Middleton wrote</a>: “You could be on your back, with glasses, and look up and there was the whole goddamn air battle.”</p>
<p>If Middleton’s description indicates excitement, it is not misleading. Any reporter who has covered conflict knows that adrenaline plays a role as important as any commitment to public service. Indeed, adrenaline and commitment make excellent partners. They worked for <a href="http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/books/2019/6023.html">Ben Robertson of PM</a>, a left-leaning New York evening newspaper. Robertson promoted his paper’s anti-isolationist views in his reporting from Shakespeare’s Cliff, a mile west of Dover. He <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JLWuDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT131&lpg=PT131&dq=ben+robertson+It+was+not+we+who+counted,+it+was+what+we+stood+for.+And+I+knew+now+for+what+I+was+standing+--+I+was+for+freedom.+It+was+as+simple+as+that.&source=bl&ots=3lLATkYVUa&sig=ACfU3U2ZKTKWBimku-7igKI4N69DDqfczg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj9mfCt4oPqAhWpUBUIHX7aAXkQ6AEwAHoECCsQAQ#v=onepage&q=ben%20robertson%20It%20was%20not%20we%20who%20counted%2C%20it%20was%20what%20we%20stood%20for.%20And%20I%20knew%20now%20for%20what%20I%20was%20standing%20--%20I%20was%20for%20freedom.%20It%20was%20as%20simple%20as%20that.&f=false">recalled that</a>: “It was not we who counted, it was what we stood for. And I knew now for what I was standing – I was for freedom. It was as simple as that.”</p>
<p>Robertson was one of 150 correspondents who gathered on the cliff to witness the fighting, two-thirds of them American. The veteran British war correspondent Richard Collier notes in his book <a href="https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1500056675">The Warcos: The War Correspondents of World War II</a> that: “They had brought along their typewriters, their cameras and their binoculars but somewhere back in their London hotel rooms they had left behind their objectivity.”</p>
<h2>British virtues explained</h2>
<p>Virginia Cowles, a Vermont-born society figure and columnist whose work appeared on both sides of the Atlantic was <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/charlesmoore/8701504/Virginia-Cowles-The-American-who-saw-Britain-at-its-best.html">determined to promote the British cause</a>. On June 29 1940, she broadcast to the United States on BBC Radio. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Reports current in America that England will be forced to negotiate a compromise – which means surrender – are unfounded and untrue. The Anglo-Saxon character is tough. Englishmen are proud of being Englishmen. They have been the most powerful race in Europe for over 300 years, and they believe in themselves with passionate conviction … When an Englishman says: ‘It is better to be dead than live under Hitler’, heed his words. He means it. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Vincent Sheean of the North American Newspaper Alliance compared the RAF’s defence of the skies to <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=T7diBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA39&lpg=PA39&dq=Vincent+Sheean+of+the+North+American+Newspaper+Alliance+britain+madrid&source=bl&ots=-KJG54YOIm&sig=ACfU3U0S9-ma7t4NeHKM-lpXs8Vwi-9N2Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiOxciZ8IPqAhXHQhUIHeMwCo8Q6AEwAHoECDIQAQ#v=onepage&q=Vincent%20Sheean%20of%20the%20North%20American%20Newspaper%20Alliance%20britain%20madrid&f=false">the defence of Madrid</a> during the Spanish Civil War while, for PM’s Robertson, the battle conjured images of American settlers defending their stockades. Raymond Daniell of The New York Times <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=T7diBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA39&lpg=PA39&dq=Neutrality+of+thought+was+a+luxury+to+which+war+correspondents+in+that+first+World+War+could+afford+to+treat+themselves.+We,+their+successors,+cannot&source=bl&ots=-KJG54YPGo&sig=ACfU3U0VzJU_ezjfU3sRRhp3AkCDmycIIA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwipy7TA8IPqAhWRURUIHeQhDYgQ6AEwAHoECC8QAQ#v=onepage&q=Neutrality%20of%20thought%20was%20a%20luxury%20to%20which%20war%20correspondents%20in%20that%20first%20World%20War%20could%20afford%20to%20treat%20themselves.%20We%2C%20their%20successors%2C%20cannot&f=false">did not regard partiality for the British cause as a flaw</a>, arguing that: “Neutrality of thought was a luxury to which war correspondents in that first world war could afford to treat themselves. We, their successors, cannot.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342122/original/file-20200616-23247-10so5ax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342122/original/file-20200616-23247-10so5ax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342122/original/file-20200616-23247-10so5ax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342122/original/file-20200616-23247-10so5ax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342122/original/file-20200616-23247-10so5ax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342122/original/file-20200616-23247-10so5ax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342122/original/file-20200616-23247-10so5ax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Blitz: young children sitting in front of their bombed-out house in London, 1940.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">UK National Archives</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The American reporters were greatly assisted by the news department of the Foreign Office and the American division of the Ministry of Information. Initial plans to ensure that Britain’s story would be told effectively in the United States had been <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/46507c80-3ed1-11dd-8fd9-0000779fd2ac">prepared before the war</a>. Now Whitehall made sure that America’s news about the war was routed through London and moulded by British publicity and censorship.</p>
<p>Britons were not equal during the Battle of Britain or the Blitz that followed. The experience of evacuation had illustrated the extent of class division. Newspaper archives (sadly not available online) report that in September 1939, there had been cries of protest when children from inner-city slums were evacuated to wealthier middle class homes. Suffering in <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/dispatches-from-the-blitz-why-peter-ritchie-calder-was-a-true-war-hero-1989929.html">poorer areas of cities during air raids</a> would confirm it. </p>
<p>But total war inspired a desire for social justice. It culminated with the election in 1945 of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/mar/14/past.education">Clement Attlee’s Labour government</a>. The irony is that American journalists, few of them committed socialists, helped to inspire it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/140748/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tim Luckhurst has received research funding from News UK and Ireland Ltd. He is a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts and a member of the Free Speech Union and the Society of Editors </span></em></p>US correspondents in Britain played a big part in convincing the American public to support the British war effort.Tim Luckhurst, Principal of South College, Durham UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1359632020-04-09T12:31:05Z2020-04-09T12:31:05ZBook clubs and the Blitz: how WWII Britons kept calm and got reading<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326631/original/file-20200408-42853-1ap94wb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C2466%2C1763&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Pilots and air crew passing the time with books and newspapers.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">S.A. Devon, RAF official photographer/Imperial War Museum</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>These are unprecedented times – but, even so, comparisons are being made to the second world war in terms of the magnitude of the crisis that coronavirus represents. Some of this rhetoric is unhelpful but, as we bunker down into our homes and the government gets on a war footing, there is little doubt that the challenge to our liberty, leisure time and sense of wellbeing is real. </p>
<p>With early reports that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/25/book-sales-surge-self-isolating-readers-bucket-list-novels">book sales are soaring</a> while bookshops and warehouses close down and publishers reassess their lists, what can the reading patterns of an earlier generation tell us about getting through a crisis and staying at home?</p>
<p>The restrictions at the beginning of the second world war affected all aspects of day-to-day life. But it was the blackout that <a href="http://www.massobservation.amdigital.co.uk/">topped most people’s list of grievances</a> – above shortages of food and fuel, the evacuation, and lack of news and public services. Households were reprimanded and fined for showing chinks of light through windows, car lights were dimmed, and walking around, even along familiar streets, late at night became treacherous.</p>
<p>With the widespread limitations to free movement, the book trade was quick off the mark. Books were promoted by libraries and book clubs as the very thing to fight boredom and fill blacked-out evenings at home or in shelters with pleasure and forgetfulness. “Books may become more necessary than gas-masks,” the Book Society, <a href="https://thebooksocietysite.com/">Britain’s first celebrity book club</a>, advised.</p>
<h2>Selling tales</h2>
<p>I’ve been researching the choices and recommendations of the Book Society for the past few years. The club was set up in 1929 and ran until the 1960s, shipping “carefully” selected books out to thousands of readers each month. It was modelled on the success of the American Book-of-the-Month club (which launched in 1926) and aimed to boost book sales at a time when buying books wasn’t common. It irritated some critics and booksellers who accused it of “dumbing down” and giving an unfair advantage to some books over others – but was hugely popular with readers.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326764/original/file-20200409-158177-ceym9z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326764/original/file-20200409-158177-ceym9z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326764/original/file-20200409-158177-ceym9z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=813&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326764/original/file-20200409-158177-ceym9z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=813&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326764/original/file-20200409-158177-ceym9z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=813&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326764/original/file-20200409-158177-ceym9z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1022&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326764/original/file-20200409-158177-ceym9z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1022&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326764/original/file-20200409-158177-ceym9z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1022&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Boots Book-lovers’ Library flyer, c. 1939.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Boots Company archives, Nottingham</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Book Society was run by a selection committee of literary celebrities – the likes of JB Priestley, Sylvia Lynd, George Gordon, Edmund Blunden and Cecil Day-Lewis – chaired by bestselling novelist Hugh Walpole. Selections were not meant to be the “best” of anything, but had to be worthwhile and deserving of people’s time and hard-earned cash.</p>
<p>Guaranteeing tens of thousands of extra sales, the club had a huge impact on the mid-20th-century book trade, with publishers desperate to get the increased sales and global reach of what publisher Harold Raymond called “the Book Society bun”. </p>
<h2>Books will go on</h2>
<p>The Book Society guided readers through the confusion of appeasement and the run-up to the second world war with a marked increase in recommendations of political non-fiction examining contemporary geo-politics. The classic novel of appeasement was Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart (Book Society Choice in October 1938) in which a sense of malaise and inevitability of future war haunts the characters’ desperate actions.</p>
<p>When Britain finally declared war against Germany in September 1939, the Book Society judges were divided. Some were relieved that, as George Gordon put it, “an intolerable situation has at last acquired the awful explicitness of war”. But others were devastated, especially Edmund Blunden who was still traumatised from fighting in the first world war.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326767/original/file-20200409-188945-1risodt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326767/original/file-20200409-188945-1risodt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326767/original/file-20200409-188945-1risodt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326767/original/file-20200409-188945-1risodt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326767/original/file-20200409-188945-1risodt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326767/original/file-20200409-188945-1risodt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326767/original/file-20200409-188945-1risodt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326767/original/file-20200409-188945-1risodt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Book Society flyer, c. 1939.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The judges advised members that when they became weary of news, people “will turn to books as the best comfort”, as had happened in the first world war with the increase in reading and library membership. Publishers and booksellers faced huge challenges during the second world war, including paper shortages, problems in distribution, a vanishing workforce, and bomb damage to offices and warehouses. But there were more readers – and from a wider social class – at the end of it. Demand consistently outstripped supply as consumer expenditure on books <a href="https://journalpublishingculture.weebly.com/uploads/1/6/8/4/16842954/zoe_thompson.pdf">more than doubled between 1938 and 1945.</a> </p>
<h2>What people were reading</h2>
<p>Throughout the second world war, the Book Society varied its lists between books that offered some insight on the strangeness of contemporary life and works of fiction – especially historical fiction – that took readers’ minds off it.</p>
<p>Titles in the first group include comic novels by the likes of E M Delafield and Evelyn Waugh, as well as forgotten bestsellers like Ethel Vance’s Escape (1939) (an unlikely thriller set in a concentration camp) and Reaching for the Stars (1939), American journalist Nora Waln’s inside account of life in Nazi Germany.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326633/original/file-20200408-16182-ht4393.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326633/original/file-20200408-16182-ht4393.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326633/original/file-20200408-16182-ht4393.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326633/original/file-20200408-16182-ht4393.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326633/original/file-20200408-16182-ht4393.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326633/original/file-20200408-16182-ht4393.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326633/original/file-20200408-16182-ht4393.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Settling down with something to read underneath the arches during an air raid.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Imperial War Museum</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>More topical non-fiction became a priority as the devastation of the Blitz kicked in. <a href="https://biblio.co.uk/book/winged-words-our-airmen-speak-themselves/d/125884189">Winged Words: Our Airmen Speak for Themselves</a> (1941) and <a href="https://www.churchillbookcollector.com/pages/winston-churchill/231/into-battle">Into Battle: Winston Churchill’s War Speeches </a>(1941) were especially popular.</p>
<p>Historical fiction was consistently in demand. Half the club’s choices in 1941 were long novels with historical settings. As today’s readers prepare to batten down the hatches with <a href="https://www.thebookseller.com/news/mantel-maintains-number-one-print-market-hangs-1196500">Hilary Mantel’s 900-page latest</a> book, it is sobering to reflect on how an imaginative connection with the past has long helped readers find relief from the madness of the present.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-mirror-and-the-light-hilary-mantel-gets-as-close-to-the-real-thomas-cromwell-as-any-historian-133091">The Mirror and the Light: Hilary Mantel gets as close to the real Thomas Cromwell as any historian</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The other fail-safes in the second world war were the classics. As books already in print became scarce, the Book Society reissued new editions of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina. These were books that Walpole said he believed he could sit down with even through an air raid.</p>
<p>Indeed, Neilsen BookScan <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/25/book-sales-surge-self-isolating-readers-bucket-list-novels">has reported</a> a rise in sales of classic fiction as the coronavirus crisis deepens – including War and Peace – as readers use this unfamiliar time to knuckle down to the heavyweights. </p>
<p>You can also join a <a href="https://apublicspace.org/news/detail/tolstoy-together">War and Peace reading group online</a> if you want a bit of company. After the homeschooling, working from home, and everything else. Here goes.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/135963/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicola Wilson received funding from the British Academy to work on the Book Society. </span></em></p>Books were an important weapon on the home front in the second world war.Nicola Wilson, Associate Professor in Book and Publishing Studies, University of ReadingLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1348262020-03-26T15:55:15Z2020-03-26T15:55:15ZCoronavirus: positive test for Prince Charles brings royal role in national emergencies into focus<p>The announcement that <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52033845">Prince Charles has tested positive</a> for coronavirus highlights the acute dilemma the pandemic poses for the British royal family: how to display solidarity and leadership to a nation with a deadly disease hanging over it. </p>
<p>The prince has <a href="https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britain-royals/prince-charles-did-not-jump-the-queue-for-a-coronavirus-test-uk-says-idUKKBN21D0QI">faced criticism</a> for what some see as preferential treatment, at a time when even many frontline health workers are finding it impossible to get tested for the virus. Junior health minister, Edward Argar, <a href="https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britain-royals/prince-charles-did-not-jump-the-queue-for-a-coronavirus-test-uk-says-idUKKBN21D0QI">denied this</a>, saying the prince’s symptoms had met the criteria for testing. “The Prince of Wales didn’t jump the queue,” he told Sky news.</p>
<p>On the other hand, his condition shows that the royal family has no more immunity to the virus than anybody else.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1242816757217312772"}"></div></p>
<p>The present royal family actually owes its status to a virus: the <a href="http://www.englishmonarchs.co.uk/saxe_coburg_gotha_3.html">death of the Duke of Clarence in 1892</a> after an influenza epidemic meant that his intended, Princess Mary of Teck, had to marry his younger brother, the Duke of York, who in 1910 succeeded to the throne as King George V.</p>
<p>Showing leadership was so much easier in wartime. When Buckingham Palace was bombed during the Blitz, Queen Elizabeth was able to say that she was glad it had happened because she could “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/sep/13/queen-mother-biography-shawcross-luftwaffe">now look the East End in the eye</a>”. The royal family’s refusal to leave London – even in the face of the threat of invasion – displayed a sure sense of leadership. So too did the appearance of royals, including the young Princess Elizabeth, <a href="https://time.com/5287517/world-war-ii-queen-elizabeth-photo/">in uniform and doing their bit</a> – hands-on, as we would say today – for the war effort.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/323279/original/file-20200326-133007-1414tbi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/323279/original/file-20200326-133007-1414tbi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=686&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/323279/original/file-20200326-133007-1414tbi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=686&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/323279/original/file-20200326-133007-1414tbi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=686&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/323279/original/file-20200326-133007-1414tbi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/323279/original/file-20200326-133007-1414tbi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/323279/original/file-20200326-133007-1414tbi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Princess Elizabeth wearing military uniform in April 1945.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The International Museum of World War II</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Role models</h2>
<p>The idea of the royal family as a role model for the nation has its origins in the long malady of King George III. George’s reign had started with intense controversy about the political role of the crown, but in the later part of his reign he concentrated on cultivating the public image of his family as a model of virtuous family life, even adopting a “<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/cou.1996.1.2.004?journalCode=ycou20">Windsor uniform</a>” for them all to wear.</p>
<p>The king’s prolonged period of illness, which had a disastrous effect on his mental stability, provoked a wave of public sympathy, the more so as public disgust grew at the excesses of his son, the Prince Regent. When the throne finally passed from his offspring to Queen Victoria in 1837, she and Prince Albert resumed the task of fashioning the royal family into a role of moral leadership for the nation.</p>
<p>The first world war presented Victoria’s grandson, George V, with an acute dilemma. He was keen to be seen to provide leadership, though in truth he was essentially a figurehead. Nevertheless, he visited the front, distributed medals and provided a public image of a monarchy in touch with the nation. </p>
<p>The Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII who was to abdicate in 1936), however, suffered from acute frustration: he was an officer in the Guards, yet was prevented by protocol from going anywhere near the front for fear of his being killed or – worse – captured. As a result, he always felt that he had missed out on the defining experience of his generation.</p>
<p>It was a mistake that the royals did not make again: members of the royal family <a href="https://www.forces.net/news/why-armed-forces-and-royal-family-are-so-close">have regularly served in war</a> – most recently Prince Harry who performed <a href="https://www.royal.uk/prince-harrys-military-career">two tours of Afghanistan</a>.</p>
<p>The same rules applied on the Home Front. In the second world war, George VI made sure it was known the royal family were <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/queen-elizabeth-ii-supermarket-self-checkout-rationing-world-war-ii-royal-1433551">living on the same rations as everyone else</a> – the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret watched in silent fury as the lord privy seal, Sir Stafford Cripps, a vegetarian, “<a href="https://ivu.org/history/europe20a/cripps.html">consumed a whole week’s egg ration</a>” when dining with them.</p>
<h2>Show of solidarity</h2>
<p>A pandemic, however, is very different from a war. There are no bombs falling from the sky, but there are no safe places either, and it is difficult for royalty to stage the sort of managed photo opportunity usually needed for leadership in difficult times. A senior royal testing positive does not allow the queen to look the East End or anywhere else in the face if the fact of his having been tested at all underlines social difference rather than social solidarity. </p>
<p>The Palace is usually circumspect about issuing details of the health of senior royals, but this time it might be advantageous to keep the public informed of the prince’s progress.</p>
<p>A peculiarity of the British royal family is that the monarch is also supreme governor of the Church of England, and the queen clearly takes her religious faith seriously – her annual Christmas message is often couched in overtly Christian terms. Nobody looks to the monarch to preach, but it may be that in this time of threat, the queen might feel drawn to use both her political and religious authority to make a show of solidarity with her people. It is, after all, what many people think the monarchy is for.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/134826/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sean Lang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The pandemic makes it hard for the royal family to act as national figureheads as they have in past crises.Sean Lang, Senior Lecturer in History, Anglia Ruskin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1106472019-02-11T11:02:32Z2019-02-11T11:02:32ZMost women give birth in hospital – but it’s got more to do with World War II than health<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/257509/original/file-20190206-174890-vagz63.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=469%2C507%2C3818%2C2346&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Cuteness overload.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/mother-newborn-child-1239397081?src=IhLNHItx690vB_PilWMIvA-2-33">Shutterstock.</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.cqc.org.uk/sites/default/files/20190129_mat18_statisticalrelease.pdf">NHS maternity services are stretched</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/oct/15/infant-mortality-in-england-and-wales-could-soar-without-action-study-warns">infant mortality rates in the UK</a> are some of the worst in Europe. At last count, as many as <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/bulletins/birthcharacteristicsinenglandandwales/2017">97.9% of births</a> took place in hospital – despite the fact that hospital births aren’t always safer. Actually, the reason why the vast majority of women give birth in hospital has more to do with history, than with health outcomes.</p>
<p>During the early decades of the 20th century, the state was highly focused on making sure children survived into adulthood, as the national <a href="https://www.cqc.org.uk/sites/default/files/20190129_mat18_statisticalrelease.pdf">birth rate had been declining since 1918</a>. Funding was ploughed into maternity and child services, to give children the best start. At the outbreak of World War II, preparations began to evacuate pregnant women close to giving birth to emergency maternity hospitals in the countryside, for their confinement. </p>
<p>Until this time, most women gave birth at home, usually with the assistance of a midwife. But this became much more difficult during the war, as midwifery services had been moved to the emergency hospitals outside the UK’s major cities. Today, <a href="https://www.nhs.uk/news/pregnancy-and-child/nice-recommends-home-births-for-some-mums/">research tells us</a> that home births are often a safer option than hospital births. But while the NHS are trying to encourage women to consider home birth as an option, it’s proving hard to kick the nation’s habit of going to hospital. </p>
<h2>Wartime Evacuation</h2>
<p>On September 2, 1939, over 12,000 pregnant women left their homes to take up accommodation in rural areas to await the arrival of their baby. These women were expected to give birth in hastily amassed maternity “hospitals” provided by the Ministry of Health, then stay at their countryside billets for the remainder of the war. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256594/original/file-20190131-108334-tl80f9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256594/original/file-20190131-108334-tl80f9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256594/original/file-20190131-108334-tl80f9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256594/original/file-20190131-108334-tl80f9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256594/original/file-20190131-108334-tl80f9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256594/original/file-20190131-108334-tl80f9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256594/original/file-20190131-108334-tl80f9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256594/original/file-20190131-108334-tl80f9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Expectant mothers prepare to leave Hackney in 1940.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://health.hackneysociety.org/page_id__30_path__0p2p32p.aspx">Salvation Army Heritage Centre/The Hackney Society.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The evacuation <a href="https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/UN/UK/UK-Civil-Social/index.html">was often shambolic</a>, with reports of buses full of women ending up in the wrong places, while some had to hitchhike home with babes in arms. By the summer of 1940, night air raids were escalating, and this “emergency maternity service” was under increasing strain. There was a shortage of midwives, and medical staff were often in the wrong place at the wrong time. </p>
<p>Billets for women waiting to enter or leave hospital became increasingly hard to find. Pregnant women were seen as a troublesome type of evacuee in comparison with children and unattached military personnel, and the rates of compensation provided to householders for housing them were far lower than for other groups. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, there were more than 10,500 births in the emergency maternity homes in 1940, and this number almost tripled the following year. Even though the UK experienced less bombing during 1941, expectant mothers were leaving London for their confinements in droves. </p>
<p>The London boroughs were simply unable to meet demand for either home or hospital births. Bombing had destroyed a number of hospitals, and the upper floors of those still functioning were closed due to fears of further damage. Midwifery staff had been relocated to the country maternity homes and therefore there really was little choice for women but to go where the facilities were. </p>
<p>From mid-1942 onwards, some 1,000 to 1,500 women left the evacuation areas per month and emergency maternity homes were overflowing, meaning referrals had to be suspended. The bombs were no longer the reason that women were leaving the city to give birth – the beds were. Accordingly, in 1942 the government changed how it described the scheme, from an evacuation scheme to a “special scheme of country maternity homes for city mothers”. </p>
<h2>The hospital habit</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/257507/original/file-20190206-174887-1cpcsqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/257507/original/file-20190206-174887-1cpcsqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/257507/original/file-20190206-174887-1cpcsqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=624&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/257507/original/file-20190206-174887-1cpcsqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=624&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/257507/original/file-20190206-174887-1cpcsqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=624&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/257507/original/file-20190206-174887-1cpcsqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=784&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/257507/original/file-20190206-174887-1cpcsqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=784&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/257507/original/file-20190206-174887-1cpcsqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=784&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Student midwives with newborn babies at Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire, 1942.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mansion_Becomes_Maternity_Home-_Life_at_Brocket_Hall,_Welwyn,_Hertfordshire,_1942_D9026.jpg">Imperial War Museum.</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During the war, the state effectively constructed a national maternity system, with roughly 5,000 beds added to hospitals, which had offered strained and patchy maternity services at the onset of war. Prior to the Maternity and Child Welfare Act of 1918, state involvement in the delivery of babies would have been unimaginable. But following growing state investment and involvement before the war, the government had crossed the final threshold and taken responsibility for safe birth – where “safe” meant “in hospital”. </p>
<p>After constructing this national system, which meant that women could more easily access institutional maternity care, it proved difficult to reverse. When the Ministry of Health tried to close the evacuation scheme in 1947, its efforts were met with outcries from the London boroughs, which simply had no way of providing enough hospital beds for expecting women who wanted them. </p>
<p>The impact of this change resonated through the century: in the 1930s, home births in the UK accounted for over 90% of confinements, but by 1955 they made up <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/.../home-births-in-the-uk--1955-to-2006.pdf">just 33.4%</a>. By the 1980s, the practice of home birth was almost eliminated, with only <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/.../home-births-in-the-uk--1955-to-2006.pdf">0.9%</a> of births taking place at home. </p>
<p>This trend also emerged in other Western democracies throughout the 20th century, but for different reasons. For example, home birth had been declining sharply in the US before World War II, with around <a href="http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198229971.001.0001/acprof-9780198229971">70% of births</a> taking place in hospital by 1930. The US system also moved away from the practice of midwifery, to rely exclusively on the obstetric doctor. Only <a href="https://www.acog.org/Clinical-Guidance-and-Publications/Committee-Opinions/Committee-on-Obstetric-Practice/Planned-Home-Birth?IsMobileSet=false">0.9% of births</a> in the US in 2017 were at home, a quarter of which were unplanned. </p>
<p>Despite an increasing uptake in hospital births for more complex cases, the UK had largely held on to midwife-led home birth during the interwar period. The wartime arrangements accelerated what had been a slow-burning change. </p>
<p>Today, <a href="https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/CG190">NICE guidelines</a> actively promote home birth as a safe choice for women having second or subsequent babies, and in 2017 home births had risen to <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/.../home-births-in-the-uk--1955-to-2006.pdf">2.1%</a>. But it’s still very much the norm to go to hospital. Women may no longer need to trek to the countryside, but the urge is still the same. In this time of extreme NHS strain, women are still heading to where the staff, and beds are.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/110647/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carly-Emma Leachman receives funding from Nottingham Trent University and is also a member of the Labour Party. She is currently expecting her fourth child.</span></em></p>When World War II struck, the British government evacuated women to hospitals in the countryside to give birth – and the change still affects maternity care today.Carly Leachman, PhD Candidate, Nottingham Trent UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1039512018-09-27T09:57:30Z2018-09-27T09:57:30ZWorld War II bombing raids in London and Berlin struck the edge of space, our new study reveals<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/238188/original/file-20180926-48634-18wcjrb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C0%2C2968%2C2416&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Unleashing hell.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/b17-bomber-during-first-big-raid-251930686?src=euhsbZtAgSPa6Ln_G9E1Gg-1-0">Everett Historical/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The bombing campaigns of World War Two left an indelible mark on the world’s towns and cities and in the memories of the people who survived them. <a href="https://www.ann-geophys.net/36/1243/2018/">In a new study</a>, we found that the most destructive war in history also made its mark in our atmosphere.</p>
<p>In an age when long-term monitoring of the environment is increasingly important, scientists are turning to historical datasets for clues in solving present-day science puzzles. </p>
<p>One such dataset is the unique record of the Earth’s ionosphere – the electrified region of the Earth’s upper atmosphere, which was painstakingly recorded from 1933 onwards at the Radio Research Station near Slough. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/238178/original/file-20180926-48644-kr4t0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/238178/original/file-20180926-48644-kr4t0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238178/original/file-20180926-48644-kr4t0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238178/original/file-20180926-48644-kr4t0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238178/original/file-20180926-48644-kr4t0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238178/original/file-20180926-48644-kr4t0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238178/original/file-20180926-48644-kr4t0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Radio Research Station at Ditton Park, Slough.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The UK Solar System Data Centre</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Scientists at the RRS were monitoring the ionosphere as it was then vital for long-distance radio communications. Shortwave radio is reflected by the ionosphere and allows the signal to be transmitted long distances over the horizon.</p>
<p>They had noted that the density of the ionosphere was extremely variable and had set up the monitoring station in order to look for patterns in this variability. Much of this is due to changes in solar activity. </p>
<p>The ionosphere is created when x-rays and extreme ultraviolet light from the sun are absorbed by our atmosphere, electrifying it. We now know, thanks to a <a href="https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/">fleet of spacecraft monitoring the sun</a>, that not all of this variability can be explained by solar activity. Attention is increasingly turning to sources from the lower atmosphere and the ground.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/238175/original/file-20180926-48647-1mht3ig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/238175/original/file-20180926-48647-1mht3ig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238175/original/file-20180926-48647-1mht3ig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238175/original/file-20180926-48647-1mht3ig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238175/original/file-20180926-48647-1mht3ig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238175/original/file-20180926-48647-1mht3ig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238175/original/file-20180926-48647-1mht3ig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The ionosphere, ranging from 60km to 350km above the Earth’s surface, is sensitive to events below.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/near-space-photography-22km-above-ground-166207994?src=y8z_uMrbDMzk2SNuslcojQ-1-10">IM_photo/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But where to find ground events capable of leaving a signature at the edge of space? The answer lies in the past. World War Two witnessed an explosive arms race, which culminated, in its most extreme form, in the atomic bomb.</p>
<p>But most destructive energy still came from conventional weapons. Allied aircraft dropped over 2.75m tons of TNT, the equivalent of 185 Hiroshimas.</p>
<p>The RAF’s four-engined Lancaster bomber with its 11-ton payload could deliver more explosive energy than any other aircraft in World War II. The American Liberator could carry six tons, the Luftwaffe’s Heinkel 111 four. </p>
<p>Individual British bombs also grew more deadly. In 1944, two six-ton “Tallboys” capsized the German Tirpitz battleship, and the 11-ton <a href="http://www.bombercommandmuseum.ca/s,tallboy.html">“Grand Slam” could start landslides</a>. Such seismic events were, of course, few and far between. Most of Bomber Command’s effort was targeted not at specific installations, <a href="https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/raf-bomber-command-during-the-second-world-war">but whole cities</a>.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YuKyYn0B0dQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A newsreel from 1944, announcing the sinking of the Tirpitz. ZenosWarbirds/YouTube.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Here, too, the scale of ordnance was devastating. The RAF and US Air Force dropped 42,500 tons of high explosive on Berlin alone, plus 26,000 tons of incendiary bombs. </p>
<p>So-called “blockbuster” bombs – two, four or even six-ton barrels of boosted TNT – fused to explode a few hundred feet up, would blow off roof tiles and shatter windows within 500 metres.</p>
<p>Direct hits pulverised whole apartment blocks. Aircraft flying a mile above the blasts could have parts blown off and the pressure wave could even collapse the lungs of those caught within it. </p>
<p>Subsequent incendiaries would then penetrate structures, designed to set off a firestorm. This only fully succeeded twice – in <a href="http://ww2today.com/4th-august-1943-the-horror-of-hamburg-resounds-around-germany">Hamburg in August 1943</a> and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/02/remembering-dresden-70-years-after-the-firebombing/385445/">Dresden in February 1945</a> – when tens of thousands perished. </p>
<p>The strategic bombing war documents numerous other area bombing raids, each of which involved hundreds of aircraft and up to 2,000 tons of high explosive.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/238310/original/file-20180927-72336-1mq9hbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/238310/original/file-20180927-72336-1mq9hbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/238310/original/file-20180927-72336-1mq9hbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238310/original/file-20180927-72336-1mq9hbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238310/original/file-20180927-72336-1mq9hbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238310/original/file-20180927-72336-1mq9hbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1200&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238310/original/file-20180927-72336-1mq9hbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1200&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238310/original/file-20180927-72336-1mq9hbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1200&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A US survey on the bombing campaign against Germany. Current findings have doubled these casualty estimates.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Effects of Strategic Bombing on German Morale (1947), p. 8. US Government Print Office</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>How the Blitz helped modern science</h2>
<p>The German authorities’ punctilious recording of the times and payloads of raids, coupled with RAF Bomber Command mission logs, made it possible to construct a database of possible ground events which might have produced shockwaves capable of being detected in the ionosphere.</p>
<p>Ionospheric records from the Radio Research Station are now archived by the UK Solar System Data Centre at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK. The record shown below is for 08:30 on September 8, 1940, the morning after the start of the London Blitz when 700 tons were dropped by the Luftwaffe.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/238312/original/file-20180927-48665-5npas1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/238312/original/file-20180927-48665-5npas1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/238312/original/file-20180927-48665-5npas1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238312/original/file-20180927-48665-5npas1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238312/original/file-20180927-48665-5npas1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238312/original/file-20180927-48665-5npas1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238312/original/file-20180927-48665-5npas1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238312/original/file-20180927-48665-5npas1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Disturbances in the ionosphere recorded during The Blitz.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">UK Solar System Data Centre</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By combining data from 152 major bombing raids, it was possible to determine that the ionosphere was weakened, albeit only slightly, by these events. </p>
<p>While the exact details will require careful modelling, one suggestion is that, as the shockwaves travelled upwards through an ever-thinning atmosphere, the amplitude of these waves grew until they broke and, like waves crashing against a beach, deposited their energy high in the atmosphere as heat. </p>
<p>This change in temperature would have altered the chemical equilibrium in the upper atmosphere for a few hours, enhancing the loss of ionisation and weakening the ionosphere. While these events will have had no lasting effect in the ionosphere, a typical “blockbuster” bomb was equivalent to the energy in a lightning strike. </p>
<p>So, armed with an understanding of how much energy is required to perturb the ionosphere, we can now turn our attention to modern ionospheric data and the influence of natural phenomena such as thunderstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes.</p>
<p>This serendipitous connection between data sets from two apparently separate disciplines suggests that answers can be found in the least expected places.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/103951/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Patrick Major has previously received funding from the British Academy. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chris Scott has previously received funding from NERC. </span></em></p>Scientists studying the atmosphere found help in an unlikely place – the aerial bombing campaigns of World War Two.Patrick Major, Professor of Modern History, University of ReadingChris Scott, Professor of Space and Atmospheric Physics, University of ReadingLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/935132018-03-18T21:16:16Z2018-03-18T21:16:16ZBrexit and the lessons of history<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210788/original/file-20180316-104659-11ii0bv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=13%2C2%2C1500%2C808&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Gary Oldman plays Winston Churchill in the 2017 film _Darkest Hour_.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.dailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/ap17347191541574.jpg">Jack English/Focus Features </a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Two 2017 films, Christopher Nolan’s <em>Dunkirk</em> and Joe Wright’s <em>Darkest Hour</em>, once again take viewers back to a key period in British and European history. Barely 18 months after the <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/brexit-why-britain-voted-leave-european-union#szXEJgGFKtDZtGyD.97">Brexit referendum</a>, and at a time when the British are asking themselves some uncomfortable questions about their <a href="https://www.canburypress.com/store/p22/Brexit-What-the-hell-happens-now-Ian-Dunt-2018-Edition-ISBN9780995497856">future relationship with the European Union</a>, these two films have raised important questions about the country’s fundamental – European or non-European – identity. The weight of history, in particular the history of 1940, and the ways in which it is being represented in the media and elsewhere are essential elements in the debate over Brexit, fuelling the strong feelings on both sides.</p>
<p>In fact, these two films are only the latest examples of a genre that goes back to World War II itself and that praise the courage of the British at this most acute period of national crisis, a period that Winston Churchill famously referred to as the country’s “finest hour”. Wartime propaganda films such as <em>Mrs. Miniver</em> directed by William Wyler (1942) or post-war productions like <em>Battle of Britain</em> by Guy Hamilton (1969) established a certain idea of the war in Britain’s collective imagination. Music from Michael Anderson’s 1955 film <em>The Dam Busters</em>, with its associated imagery, remains one of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKefit30Tfg">favourite tunes of British football fans</a>.</p>
<p>In January 2018, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jan/29/german-ambassador-peter-ammon-second-world-war-image-of-britain-has-fed-euroscepticism">Germany’s ambassador in London asserted</a> that many people in Britain pay excessive attention to the past, in particular World War II, while focussing far less than they should on the present or the future. As a result, for many Britons, the overriding image of Germany and of the other European nations continues to be conditioned by past events that are becoming increasingly distant in time but which show few signs of losing their influence.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TFDumAPV0LY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption"><em>Darkest Hour</em> trailer.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Brexit, British victories and defeats</h2>
<p>So how should we interpret the images of Britain that are being conveyed by these films and what has their impact on the Brexit debate been? Quite rightly, both films have recognised the complexity of this history. Neither <em>Dunkirk</em> nor <em>Darkest Hour</em> attempt to mask the fact that for Britain the events of May-June 1940 were a catastrophe. The hesitations at the heart of the British government and the establishment, and even the temptation to sign a peace agreement with Hitler, are fully recognised in the accounts they give.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, it is the idea of Britain as valiant, heroic, determined in its resistance and its “Dunkirk spirit”, exemplified by Churchill’s famous <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkTw3_PmKtc">“We shall never surrender!”</a>, that underlies most popular visions of these crucial weeks in the summer of 1940. In this respect <em>Dunkirk</em> and <em>Darkest Hour</em> continue to evoke the history of 1940 in similar ways to previous generations of film productions.</p>
<p>For supporters of Brexit, above all those demanding a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jan/30/brexit-would-damage-uk-growth-says-leaked-cabinet-report">hard Brexit</a>, the essential lesson to be drawn from this history is that Britain is, both in its fundamental nature and in its national interests, different from – and for some superior to – the other European countries. This sense of difference and of separation takes various forms.</p>
<h2>A long history of difference</h2>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210927/original/file-20180318-104671-1ikmwjv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210927/original/file-20180318-104671-1ikmwjv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210927/original/file-20180318-104671-1ikmwjv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210927/original/file-20180318-104671-1ikmwjv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210927/original/file-20180318-104671-1ikmwjv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210927/original/file-20180318-104671-1ikmwjv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210927/original/file-20180318-104671-1ikmwjv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">General Charles de Gaulle in 1945: friend or foe?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:General_Charles_de_Gaulle_in_1945.jpg">Wikimedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>First, there is the geographical aspect. Charles de Gaulle liked to point out that “England is an island” and never missed an opportunity to underline this obvious fact in all his discussions of the relationship between Britain and the Continent. <em>Dunkirk</em> and <em>Darkest Hour</em> reinforce this same idea, frequently using the white cliffs of Dover and the sea as a backdrop to some of their most memorable scenes. They’re in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/286979-this-royal-throne-of-kings-this-sceptered-isle-this-earth">Shakespeare’s <em>Richard II</em> as well</a>, serving “as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier lands”. In the films, as in the past, the danger comes from across the Channel, from the continent. Britain is alone, an isolated fortress, threatened on all sides, but standing firm. Today’s Brexiteers are inclined to express similarly jingoistic sentiments.</p>
<p>Boris Johnson, a key figure among the Brexiteers and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/10/the-churchill-factor-how-one-man-made-history-boris-johnson">biographer of Churchill</a>, has frequently taken inspiration from the history of 1940. In an attempt to take up the mantle of his hero, Johnson has waged a combat against what he considers to be a new form of the continental menace, even going so far as to argue that the objective of the European Union, led by a renewed and increasingly confident Germany, is not far removed from that previously pursued by Nazi Germany: the establishment of a European super-state.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211157/original/file-20180320-31599-1rhijwv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211157/original/file-20180320-31599-1rhijwv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211157/original/file-20180320-31599-1rhijwv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=808&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211157/original/file-20180320-31599-1rhijwv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=808&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211157/original/file-20180320-31599-1rhijwv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=808&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211157/original/file-20180320-31599-1rhijwv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1015&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211157/original/file-20180320-31599-1rhijwv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1015&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211157/original/file-20180320-31599-1rhijwv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1015&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">French President Emmanuel Macron in 2018. Friend or foe?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/worldeconomicforum/39846698592/in/photolist-23H7KfG-YeDtJS-21LUo73-Zf9isA-Tnr4SP-Td8vUC-YNuQPE-Urtno1-YpQnou-UpoAzK-q62hJC-pqPm6n-G6aytt-UJfTkq-qnvAjh-FBWuzo-YeDsEN-YVzXKW-qnz3kH-YpQkMy-pqRzf4-qkhYVG-23H1sz9-YJjaKb-22FaQuW-qkhZdA-YJjb8f-HovMJ6-q6a7Sz-23HjcTj-YJjbk9-YUkxh3-YVzXdo-pqCa3U-XSmaxb-UxxXHm-qkhZ4Y-YeDyXN-YVzXfs-Cdieam-Gp9R5h-YVzYFd-E6Rzhr-21HUYsB-YVzXrQ-ZtXqo5-CdieEE-YJjbn3-21Fao3d-UBorfV">World Economic Forum/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Faced with this danger, Johnson called on his compatriots to once again assume the role of “heroes of Europe” just as their predecessors had done in 1940 and to “liberate” the country from the EU. Nigel Farage meanwhile has spoken of the risk of the country being reduced to some sort of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/feb/07/uk-politicians-briefly-unite-against-michel-barnier-brexit-demands">“Vichy Britain”</a> in the event of a “soft” Brexit in which the UK remains inside the European single market and the customs union.</p>
<p>In all of this discourse, the links to the past, and especially to the World War II, are clear: Germany is still regarded as a threat and the other Europeans, above all France, are seen as being all too willing to acquiesce in this new European order. Those in Britain who <a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Brexit+and+British+Politics-p-9781509523856">refuse to accept the outcome of the referendum</a>, or who favour a soft Brexit, are condemned as heirs of the appeasers of the 1930s. The most excessive arguments of this sort have been widely condemned across the political spectrum, although without always being contradicted. In many ways they reflect an opinion that is deeply-rooted in Britain and which has often been voiced in the media which for the most part has long been won over to the cause of Brexit.</p>
<h2>An old and on-going European debate</h2>
<p>This tendency to <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/297037/britain-s-europe/">use history in the European debate</a> is nothing new. At the beginning of the 1960s, when the Macmillan government was launching Britain’s first attempt to enter the then European Common Market, the ex-Prime Minister Clement Attlee expressed his outright hostility to the whole idea. Looking back on the record of the war, he asked why the country should want to be associated with the “Six” given that only a few years before Britain had “spent a lot of blood and treasure… rescuing four of them from the other two.”</p>
<p>In similar fashion, Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the Labour Party, famously declared in 1962 that entering the Common Market would mean “the end of a thousand years of history” and that while Europe had had “a great and glorious civilisation”, and could point to Goethe, Leonardo, Voltaire and Picasso, it had also had its “evil features” in the shape of Hitler and Mussolini. It was, he ominously warned, still far too soon to say which of these “two faces” of Europe would ultimately triumph.</p>
<p>The following year, the veto imposed on the British application by General de Gaulle that ended British hopes of entering the Common Market brought an angry reaction from Macmillan, who saw this as a lack of recognition on the part of the French leader for the assistance Britain had given him during the War. He sought solace in the lessons of Britain’s previous relations with Europe. The British, he said, had resisted such tyrants as Philip of Spain, Louis XIV, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler, and they would be quite capable of doing the same again now that they were facing a similar danger of a Europe dominated by de Gaulle’s France. In reality these attempts to find some comfort in Britain’s glorious past was a vain attempt to disguise his own impotence and that of his country.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/chRUCIk3K94?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption"><em>Dunkirk</em> trailer.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Britain’s place in the world?</h2>
<p>But should we regard the events of May-June 1940 as necessarily a distancing of Britain from the Continent or Churchill as a precursor of today’s Brexiteers? Can we see in the history being told in the films <em>Dunkirk</em> and <em>Darkest Hour</em> some sort of justification for, or explanation of, the <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/la/book/9781137005199">rising tide of Euroscepticism, or Europhobia</a>, that led to the result of the 2016 referendum? Or should we, on the contrary, recognise that Britain, by choosing to continue to fight on in 1940 and not to abandon the other Europeans, was never so European as in May-June 1940? In this case we need to see the story being told in these two films as proof of an engagement both for Europe and alongside the other Europeans.</p>
<p>As Churchill recognised in 1940, and which is clearly shown in <em>Darkest Hour</em> but which so few of the Brexiteers now appear willing to accept, Britain can never withdraw into some sort of island sanctuary, “leaving Europe” to find refuge elsewhere in the world – how? The inclination of so many Brexiteers to look back 75 years into the past and to refuse to accept that the power Britain enjoyed at that time has long since disappeared has seriously harmed the present debate and done nothing to address the real issues facing the country today.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkTw3_PmKtc">one of his most famous speeches</a> to the House of Commons in June 1940, re-created in the final scene of <em>Darkest Hour</em>, Churchill promised to continue the fight until victory was finally won thanks to the support of the British Empire, the Royal Navy and the New World. Today, however, the Empire has long since disappeared, and even the relations with the old Dominions such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand are far from providing Britain with the help that the country needs. The backing of the United States, uncertain in 1940, is once again in doubt given its present administration. The Royal Navy is a shadow of its former self and it seems most unlikely that the “little ships” who saved so many British and allied soldiers from the Dunkirk beaches in 1940 could do the same again today.</p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="http://bit.ly/2Fo4VUV">Click here</a> for a list of references to Richard Davis’ articles, including “Britain in Europe: Some Origins of Britain’s Post-War Ambivalence”, published in “Britain and Europe: ambivalence et pragmatisme”, edited by Claire Sanderson, Cahiers Charles V, December 2006, No. L. 41, pp. 15-38</em>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/93513/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Davis ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.</span></em></p>Not just period pieces, the 2017 films “Dunkirk” and “Darkest Hour” shed light on the intense Brexit debate, and raise important questions about Britain’s fundamental identity.Richard Davis, Professor of British civilisation, Université Bordeaux MontaigneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/878252017-11-23T11:02:04Z2017-11-23T11:02:04ZReading my grandad’s Blitz reporting makes it all the sadder to see social history repeat itself<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195575/original/file-20171121-6051-1ydmsj5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A German bomber flying over Wapping, September 7, 1940.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In one way, London saw the Blitz coming. Cities knew that the existence of bombers would bring this war right to them. From now on, war would mean the large-scale killing of anonymous civilians as strategic targets were hit from the sky. When the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/sep/06/london-blitz-bomb-map-september-7-1940">bombers first came</a>, on September 7, 1940, the authorities were expecting unprecedented civilian fatalities – up to 1.8m within 60 days, said one <a href="https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/UN/UK/UK-Civil-Social/UK-Civil-Social-2.html">1937 report</a>. In the event, the eight months of the Blitz saw <a href="https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/UN/UK/UK-Civil-Social/UK-Civil-Social-2.html">43,000</a> lose their lives.</p>
<p>But what London didn’t plan for was mass homelessness. The bombs took people’s homes on a scale, and at a speed, not seen since the first great fire of London. In the first six weeks alone, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=p32vBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT29&lpg=PT29&dq=250,000+homeless+blitz&source=bl&ots=FfNOJazb3K&sig=ibZiDd_ZSwDNkHPeiQypBhDD9qE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwimtom8ks7XAhWXHsAKHTA5BWQQ6AEISDAF#v=onepage&q=250%2C000%20homeless%20blitz&f=false">250,000</a> lost their homes. In Stepney, four out of ten houses had been destroyed or damaged by November 11. <a href="http://holnet.lgfl.org.uk/learningzone/londonatwar/airraid/p_theblitz.html">1.4m people</a> – one Londoner in every six – would be made homeless by May 1941. When it came to those surviving but displaced, it was <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/node/164697">as if</a> “some officials had never imagined what the Blitzkrieg would be like”.</p>
<p>Those words came from my grandfather, Ritchie Calder – at the time, a reporter for the Daily Herald. As the Blitz hit, he was pulled around the East End in the wake of fallen bombs, giving raw reports of their impacts on the ground. He typed nightly in the thick of the fires and sirens, at one stage describing “fiery confetti spatter[ing] the papers on the desk with singe-marks”. He offered, as the journalist <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/dispatches-from-the-blitz-why-peter-ritchie-calder-was-a-true-war-hero-1989929.html">Tim Luckhurst</a> has put it, “compelling stories fizzing with quotes, observations and the authentic voices of ordinary Londoners”.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bLgfSDtHFt8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The official propaganda machine was in overdrive, proclaiming “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLgfSDtHFt8">London Can Take It</a>” as if the responses of emergency services, government, civilians in general and “the people’s army of volunteers” were fluently in sync. My grandfather’s Blitz reporting gave a far less harmonious picture. Consistently impressed by the resolve and creativity of working-class Londoners, he grew exasperated by the sclerotic, fragmented ways in which local and national authorities responded to the city’s battering. If London was “taking it”, this was too often despite, rather than because of, what those in charge were up to.</p>
<p>In quick-spreading journalism and books (three in 1941 alone) he wrote of communities finding their own shelters when Public Assistance Committees lacked the power to provide even basic equipment, of local officials being left to deal ad hoc with impacts rippling right across London, of the hurdles posed by complex, varying boundaries between local authorities and services from water to energy, and all the time, most vividly, of the everyday human burdens borne amid these administrative gaps and failures.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195805/original/file-20171122-6072-zjqacr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195805/original/file-20171122-6072-zjqacr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=575&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195805/original/file-20171122-6072-zjqacr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=575&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195805/original/file-20171122-6072-zjqacr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=575&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195805/original/file-20171122-6072-zjqacr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=723&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195805/original/file-20171122-6072-zjqacr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=723&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195805/original/file-20171122-6072-zjqacr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=723&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ritchie Calder, 1940s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gideon Calder</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There were “the gasless, the waterless, the foodless and the wifeless”. There were wardens dealing with drastic incidents through the night without respite, electric light or any provision to feed them on the job. There was clergyman <a href="http://writingcities.com/2015/06/10/on-father-john-groser-rebel-priest-of-the-east-end/">Father Groser</a>, sleeping under railway arches with the bomb-disrupted, lighting a bonfire outside his church, breaking into an official food store to feed the homeless in the shelter he’d organised. There was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/04/my-hero-flora-solomon-ben-macintyre">Flora Solomon</a>, “one of the most remarkable women I have ever known”, running “Communal Restaurants” which, as government caught up with their success, became endorsed by the Ministry of Food and renamed “British Restaurants”. And consistent throughout: there was the poor helping the poor as officials argued over whose budget should be used for what.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/hidden-stories-blitz-changed-british-lives-forever/">One such story</a> – one of families being “left by a series of blunders to be bombed to death in a dockland school” – forms part of the first episode of BBC2’s <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09gtbh2">Blitz: The Bombs that Changed Britain</a>, in which Calder’s own story plays a role. In this episode, my cousin Simon and I follow the tracks of our grandfather’s reporting, reliving both the rich accounts of human resourcefulness and the pettiness and parochialism of local bureaucracies arguing about who was going to provide how many blankets to whom.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195584/original/file-20171121-6055-x9lxkj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195584/original/file-20171121-6055-x9lxkj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195584/original/file-20171121-6055-x9lxkj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195584/original/file-20171121-6055-x9lxkj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195584/original/file-20171121-6055-x9lxkj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195584/original/file-20171121-6055-x9lxkj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195584/original/file-20171121-6055-x9lxkj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Smoke rising over the London docks, September 7, 1940.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:London_Blitz_791940.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The ripples of that time extend all the way to now. Churchill’s war cabinet, unsettled by Calder’s writing, recruited him: he was <a href="http://digital.nls.uk/propaganda/calder/index.html">put in charge</a> of “White Propaganda” at the Political Warfare Executive. There were, as he wrote, compensations amid the bomb-disruption: seeds of new democracy, with people discovering “latent qualities of leadership”, finding a voice, becoming active in the organisation of their communities. </p>
<p>His calls for a <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/node/164697">Welfare Board for London</a> to coordinate the meeting of basic needs chimed with the soon-to-come <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/timeline/factfiles/nonflash/a1143578.shtml">Beveridge Report</a> of 1942 – published <a href="https://www.sochealth.co.uk/national-health-service/public-health-and-wellbeing/beveridge-report/">exactly 75 years ago</a> – and the momentum behind the post-war creation of a concerted welfare state to take local happenstance out of the provision of vital services. His son, Angus, born in the middle of the war, became, as a social historian, an extensive, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b080xzpc">influential</a> re-teller of the Blitz from the point of view of ordinary people.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195587/original/file-20171121-6055-16wsku3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195587/original/file-20171121-6055-16wsku3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195587/original/file-20171121-6055-16wsku3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=805&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195587/original/file-20171121-6055-16wsku3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=805&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195587/original/file-20171121-6055-16wsku3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=805&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195587/original/file-20171121-6055-16wsku3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1012&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195587/original/file-20171121-6055-16wsku3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1012&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195587/original/file-20171121-6055-16wsku3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1012&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Women salvage prized possessions from their bombed house.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Air_Raid_Damage_in_London,_1940_HU36206.jpg">IMW</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Lessons of the time <a href="http://www.historyandpolicy.org/opinion-articles/articles/the-blitz-can-show-us-how-to-respond-to-a-tragedy">apply anew</a> today. Much of the anger and sadness about <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/grenfell-tower-39675">Grenfell Tower</a> echoes Calder’s sheer incredulity at how authorities can preside, whether due to complacency or ideology, over crises not just entirely predictable – but <a href="https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2017/06/14/grenfell-tower-fire/">directly, publicly predicted</a>. </p>
<p>Government learned much from the war about how to do things better. But we find new throwbacks to that Blitz-era sclerosis. The shambolic and dangerous roll-out of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/nov/20/mistake-universal-credit-catastrophe-misery?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Tweet">universal credit</a> offers a masterclass in unlearned lessons about how to limit the human costs of policy. And local government, hollowed out by years of underfunding, operates under sustained adversity. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195586/original/file-20171121-6016-1ylaq56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195586/original/file-20171121-6016-1ylaq56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195586/original/file-20171121-6016-1ylaq56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195586/original/file-20171121-6016-1ylaq56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195586/original/file-20171121-6016-1ylaq56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195586/original/file-20171121-6016-1ylaq56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195586/original/file-20171121-6016-1ylaq56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Children of an eastern suburb of London wait outside the wreckage of what was their home.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/39735679@N00/1858202903">Ping News</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>We live with the tendency to think downwards from market criteria, to reduce measures of value to individual costs and benefits, rather than upwards from the lives and wisdom of the people whom those models are purportedly about – so that their needs and voices are squeezed out, and the public realm depleted. The space for debate about and humane negotiation of social challenges and the public interest is shrunk. This takes an everyday toll, sometimes on a catastrophic scale. As my dad wrote in his social history of World War II, <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1040534/the-people-s-war/">The People’s War</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>In general nothing emerges more forcibly from the Blitz than the contrast between laggard councillors, obsessed with their own prestige, and the self-sacrifice of the volunteers who strove indefatigably to remedy the position which bumbledom had created.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Grenfell’s entirely avoidable disaster, and its <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2017/oct/13/social-housing-grenfell-survivors-chaotic-government">aftermath</a>, speaks of a similar neglect of the position and agency of ordinary people, and lack of the most basic care for their safety. “Bumbledom” is surely too generous a term for this. The <a href="https://www.grenfelltowerinquiry.org.uk/">Grenfell Tower Inquiry</a> should tell us. But meanwhile the <a href="https://www.channel4.com/news/david-lammy-mp-remembers-friend-grenville-tower-fire-london">angriest, most exasperated reactions</a> ring truest. We should have known better in 1940. In 2017, all the more so.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87825/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gideon Calder currently receives funding from Health and Care Research Wales. He is a member of the Labour Party. </span></em></p>Government learned much from the war. But today we find new throwbacks to that Blitz-era sclerosis.Gideon Calder, Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences and Social Policy, Swansea UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/766892017-04-26T08:28:42Z2017-04-26T08:28:42ZTheir Finest – and how WWII triggered a bold cinematic renaissance<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166786/original/file-20170426-2848-16vy1d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">London's St. Paul's Cathedral during the great fire raid of December 29, 1940, during World War Two.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/londons-st-pauls-cathedral-during-great-249573019?src=Ck1TofJGIdbHtjq-wKK6wg-1-0">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>After some very <a href="http://www.itv.com/news/wales/2017-04-18/bill-nighy-discusses-filming-in-wales-and-new-film-their-finest/">positive reviews</a> and a Bill Nighy attended <a href="http://www.itv.com/news/wales/2017-04-18/bill-nighy-discusses-filming-in-wales-and-new-film-their-finest/">premiere</a> at the Welsh College of Music and Drama, World War Two romantic comedy <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1661275/">Their Finest</a> is now in cinemas.</p>
<p>Co-financed by BBC Films and shot partly in Swansea and on the beaches of West Wales, the narrative is concerned with the personal and professional development of Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton) as she embarks on a scriptwriting role for the Ministry of Information’s Film Division. And while the film successfully highlights the all-encompassing sexism of the era, it also offers a timely reminder of the importance of cinema to the war effort and to the upkeep of morale.</p>
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<p>On the day that war broke out in September 1939, the government indefinitely closed all sports arenas, theatres and cinemas fearing mass casualties at the hands of the Luftwaffe. Cinemas soon reopened, though, as the propaganda possibilities of film began to be realised. And, as <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Britain-Can-Take-Tony-Aldgate/dp/1845114450">Aldgate and Richards </a> point out in their excellent book on wartime cinema, average weekly attendances at picture houses rose from 19m in 1939 to 30m in 1945. Cinemas became, in the words of <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Peoples-War-Britain-1939-1945-1939-45/dp/0712652841/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1492602829&sr=1-1&keywords=the+peoples+war.">Angus Calder</a>, the new centres of communal life – indeed, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wales-Cinema-First-Hundred-Years/dp/0708313701">Cardiff’s Capitol cinema</a> had an air raid shelter in its basement that could cater for 1,000 people.</p>
<p>In the war years, cinema going was a constant in a world of uncertainty. It provided the cheap, familiar weekly relaxation pastime that it had done during the pre-war years as other leisure activities were either too expensive to participate in or unavailable.</p>
<h2>London can take it…</h2>
<p>As the figures make clear, many people were visiting cinemas who had not previously done so. Part of the reason for this was because cinemas were not only places of entertainment but also places where the masses could be informed of Britain’s war progress via the moving images provided by newsreels and documentaries.</p>
<p>The newsreels were an invaluable aspect of visual propaganda because they allowed the government, through the Ministry of Information, to communicate the conduct of the war precisely as they wished. Reports continually emphasised the righteousness and necessity of conflict contrasted with the brutality of Hitler and Nazi Germany.</p>
<p>Documentaries such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLgfSDtHFt8">London Can Take It</a> (1940) offered words and images which were to become central to the wartime (and peacetime) iconography of Britain. We see footage of St Paul’s in the midst of the Blitz, in darkness standing proud against the “symphony of war”. What’s significant is the presence of ordinary people and images of Londoners going about their business, carrying on with their lives while the carnage surrounds them. No Panic, no fear, no despair in London Town.</p>
<p>As an aside, the idea of London as undefeatable is a telling one as it seems that the personification of the capital as a key player in times of crisis has been apparent in recent times. Much of the narrative around the terrible events of the 7/7 terrorist attacks was around the strength and resilience of London and her inhabitants. </p>
<p>The sense of “Keeping calm and carrying on” is central to London’s historical identity, of course, and can be directly traced back to the Blitz and WWII. Then as now – as this is exactly the rhetoric employed by London Mayor Sadiq Khan after the dreadful recent events outside the Houses of Parliament. <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/sadiq-khan-london-attack-response-westminster-parliament-terror-a7644761.html">He said</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>London is the greatest city in the world, and we stand together in the face of those who seek to harm us and our way of life. We always have and we always will. Londoners will never be cowed by terrorism.</p>
</blockquote>
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<p>But the main purpose of all the films of the war period, whether fact or fiction, was to show a society united by a common purpose and a common goal. The fictional <a href="http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/454179/">Went the Day Well?</a> (1942) shows a village coming together to defeat the Nazi invaders in violence so graphic that it shocks to this day. </p>
<p>The film’s triumph is in juxtaposing the horrors of war with the tranquillity of British country life, and the fact that the community is saved by the actions of a rough and ready schoolboy and the local poacher is hugely important. The working classes, for the first time in cinema, were the initiators and planners of action instead of merely bit players.</p>
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<h2>The people’s war</h2>
<p>World War II was the people’s war and a total war in the sense that that the whole of the population had a part to play. Distinctions between the home front and the war front became superfluous as the conflict became part of everyone’s lives. Millions of people were affected in the most direct way possible – by widespread conscription, by evacuation, or by the immediate effects of the Luftwaffe’s bombing raids. Everybody without exception was affected by government taxation, curfews and rationing. The films produced by the Ministry of information attempted to illustrate this shared experience.</p>
<p>Even so, as historian <a href="http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/2810/1/Glancy%2C_Going_to_the_pictures.pdf">Mark Glancy</a> suggests, compulsory newsreels notwithstanding, actually paying to see a war film was not a crucial or preferred part of the cinema-going experience. People, perhaps understandably enough, sometimes wanted the relief of a comedy or the escapism of a Hollywood blockbuster. </p>
<p>Gone with the Wind (1939) is a case in point. Glancy relates that the Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh epic played in London’s Leicester Square from 1940 to 1944 and even when the Blitz was at its most ferocious people would queue outside for admittance. With this in mind, it’s not so surprising to learn that in 2004 the British Film Institute revealed Gone with the Wind to be the film which had been seen by more cinema-goers than any other in <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4051741.stm">UK movie history</a>.</p>
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<p>Their Finest is obviously competing in a completely different environment but its central theme of a woman getting on in a man’s world had great currency during World War Two as there was a movement of women into the workplace. In a series of unprecedented steps, the government introduced conscription and compulsion to work. From April 1941, all women had to register at the local employment agency and those aged 18 to 40 could be drafted into war jobs either locally, or, crucially, nationwide. </p>
<p>Women were immensely important to the idea of total war – the percentage of women in the civilian workplace alone in 1943 was 38.8%. At Bletchley Park, headquarters of the British Military Intelligence code breaking, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2014/nov/08/world-war-women-workplace-public-services">75% of employees were women</a> and films such as Millions Like Us (1943) emphasised the importance of women to the war effort.</p>
<p>Their Finest can, of course, be enjoyed without any knowledge of the above. But as we move further away from the events which so changed the fabric of this country, it’s useful to remember the facts that inform the fiction.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/76689/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Jewell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>As the bombs fell, people flocked to the movies.John Jewell, Director of Undergraduate Studies, School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/471112015-09-07T16:32:02Z2015-09-07T16:32:02ZBritain after the Blitz: how to rebuild a city fit for a post-conflict population<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94023/original/image-20150907-1977-12p24eo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:London/Showcase_picture/10_2009#/media/File:LondonBombedWWII_full.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It is 75 years since the bombs of the Blitz reduced buildings to rubble in cities across the UK. It <a href="http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780198604464.001.0001/acref-9780198604464">is estimated</a> that the operations of the German air force left as many as 43,000 civilians dead and 46,000 injured. Yet from the horrors of the Blitz emerged an <a href="http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409436980">opportunity to rebuild</a>. </p>
<p>In London in particular, the effort to rebuild was characterised by an implicit focus on addressing inequalities of the period, with a strong emphasis on public health. Attention was paid to ensuring the provision of proper housing, sanitation, recreational spaces, free education, the formation of the National Health Service (NHS) and so on. Concerns about the impacts of mass unemployment and poverty also <a href="http://tcbh.oxfordjournals.org/content/6/3/267.extract">factored into this approach</a> to post-conflict rebuilding. </p>
<h2>A history of inequalities</h2>
<p>These considerations were partly due to the problems that plagued the poorer parts of London in the pre-war period. When medical officers were recruiting in London’s East End during World War I, it was discovered that <a href="http://jfprhc.bmj.com/content/38/3/203.extract">over 37% of the population</a> had a physical impairment or condition which meant that their health was compromised. </p>
<p>The Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 to 1919 – which killed millions of people globally – affected <a href="http://jfprhc.bmj.com/content/38/3/203.short">almost every household</a> in the East End. And during World War II, the East End continued to be marred by poverty, overcrowded slums, criminality, dangerous and difficult working conditions, and a lack of sanitation and access to medical care. All of these factors were known to lead to impairment and ill health.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94055/original/image-20150907-1996-lwkbeq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94055/original/image-20150907-1996-lwkbeq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94055/original/image-20150907-1996-lwkbeq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94055/original/image-20150907-1996-lwkbeq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94055/original/image-20150907-1996-lwkbeq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94055/original/image-20150907-1996-lwkbeq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94055/original/image-20150907-1996-lwkbeq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Children in London’s East End left homeless by the Blitz.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/pingnews/1858202903/sizes/l">pingnews.com/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>Addressing these social and physical ills was a priority, alongside the rebuilding of historically important buildings and preservation of cultural artefacts. Yet despite these good intentions, many crucial steps were missed. For example, the existing disabled population and those who were left impaired during the war were neglected, throughout what was essentially a top-down planning process. </p>
<h2>A missed opportunity</h2>
<p>World War II was infamously characterised by the ideology of Nazism, which propagated inequality and the exclusion of certain groups from society. Yet when the opportunity came to rebuild truly equal cities in Britain, it was largely lost. Of course, remedies were sought to help heal the trauma of conflict. Oral and visual histories of those injured, disabled and killed were memorialised in museums and monuments such as the tombs of unknown soldiers. Victims were supported with medical and rehabilitative services, for example in <a href="http://www.buckshealthcare.nhs.uk/NSIC%20Home/About%20us/nsic-history.htm">Stoke Mandeville Hospital</a>, which is commonly credited as the birthplace of the Paralympic Games. </p>
<p>Former servicemen also <a href="https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/disability-history/1945-to-the-present-day/">campaigned for greater inclusion</a> in society. These campaigns have led us to think again about memorialisation: disabled people are now actively included in truth commissions, peace movements and the rethinking of cultural spaces, such as in Colombia’s <a href="http://www.centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/">National Museum of Memory</a>. </p>
<p>Although such measures are important and necessary in any post-conflict setting, they still frame the needs of disabled people as specialised issues within health systems, charitable aid or institutional contexts. We rarely consider them in our broader plans for rebuilding the structures, cultures, environments or even the economies of post-war societies, and we <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09687599.2015.1052044?journalCode=cdso20#.Ve10lm5Viko">don’t consider</a> how we can prevent disability in the way we reconstruct our cities. </p>
<p>It is possible to promote equality and peace in the cultures that arise in our cities after conflict – whether it’s through material designs, or national and international relations. Nagasaki in Japan is one example of a place where a <a href="http://visit-nagasaki.com/spots/detail/108">culture of peace is promoted</a> through education, ceremonies and the design of public spaces.</p>
<p>By excluding certain sections of society from discussions about rebuilding post-World War II, we consequently prevented their participation in public spaces. If an injured person does not have a say in how their city is rebuilt, they cannot tell planners about the features they need to access and enjoy a park, see a doctor, or travel using public transport. By discounting these voices, you recreate exclusionary citizenship, violate their rights and disable them. As a result of these oversights in the post-war period, large swathes of the London Underground are <a href="http://www.citymetric.com/transport/most-and-least-wheelchair-accessible-cities-quadriplegics-guide-1166">inaccessible to wheelchair users</a>. </p>
<p>Yet there’s hope for the future; cities can engage with the perspectives of disabled people, and this can pay huge dividends when it comes to addressing inequalities and creating truly sustainable and democratic societies. In Brussels, a more accessible underground was created with the <a href="https://www.afb.org/jvib/jvibabstractNew.asp?articleid=jvib051010">expertise and partnership of disabled people</a>. And so we see that it is possible to ensure that <a href="http://somatosphere.net/2015/05/making-disability-count-demography-futurity-and-the-making-of-disability-publics.html">disability “counts”</a> when it comes to public spaces and cultural heritage.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/47111/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Maria Berghs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>When buildings began to rise from the ruins and the rubble, the planners missed an opportunity to create a better society.Maria Berghs, Research Fellow, University of YorkLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/471092015-09-07T05:28:34Z2015-09-07T05:28:34ZLessons from history: the Blitz, the building boom and the people left behind<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93985/original/image-20150906-14636-1f0u1kr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Reconciliation by Josefina de Vasconcellos at Coventry Cathedral, first conceived in the aftermath of the war.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/bensutherland/5588599088/in/photolist-9vR2NG-rRssFF-9Rivay-d2DGJs-d2DH8h-n1Z3eR-hsMeD3-n25dSr-bn3DPZ-4C7Mjz-4CbK7N-d39oFu-63Rmwa-da7wY-j7zCK1-6cCHGp-qVsKSG-qUL9nH-nzi6fE-mYtXWK-mYu7X8-mYw29b-mWFZMX-fLsW5X-fLJCgL-6WTjEZ-fLrUCM-fLK2a3-mYujNn-mUTs5q-mWDuUQ-asz9FY-5UcHDy-5ZdJxA-cNaosh-6bmf4X-sUnr3-cNanoj-mYudZP-ayGv5i-5U8hKZ-rRtHzX-ryYsD5-n5caqp-mYzTVK-mYu28z-cNCoWU-n4zdrW-azeE7o-n4rp6Y">Ben Sutherland</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It was 75 years ago that the German aerial bombing campaign now known as the Blitz wrought destruction on British cities. Right across the country, from London, to Glasgow, to Bristol, tens of thousands of tonnes of explosives were dropped by the German Luftwaffe. Coventry – a city in the country’s Midlands – <a href="http://www.cwn.org.uk/heritage/blitz/index.html">suffered terrible devastation</a>: some 1,236 people were killed during 41 raids. But even before the bombing stopped, city officials took steps to implement an ambitious plan initially conceived to transform medieval Coventry by <a href="http://www.coventrysociety.org.uk/news/article/city-centre-planned-on-gibson-carpet.html">Donald Gibson</a> in the late 1930s.</p>
<p>There were three major priorities for rebuilding: the city centre (which suffered extensive damage), the creation of new housing estates on the edge of the city, and the renewal of the inner city, including Hillfields, which had been a heavy casualty of the war. Gibson’s plan for the reconstruction of Coventry was a modernist vision of pedestrian precincts and tower-block living. A 1945 government-sponsored promotional film, called <a href="http://player.bfi.org.uk/film/watch-city-reborn-1945/">A City Reborn</a>, announced:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There can be no thinking of returning to the good old days. The days of cramped houses and crippling streets. Of slums still living on in a lingering death from the last century.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>The rise and fall of Hillfields</h2>
<p>Originally the first suburb outside the city walls, Hillfields was a place of hard work and innovation. It was home to Coventry’s ribbon weavers, and later the manufacturers of sewing machines, bicycles, cars and motorbikes, including Humber, Lea Francis and Hillman. <a href="http://www.ccfc.co.uk/club/history/">Coventry City Football Club</a> grew from the team at the Singer factory, and played at Highfield Road in Hillfields for 106 years. As the heart of manufacturing in Coventry, Hillfields was an obvious target for German bombs.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93927/original/image-20150904-14617-1kon3uz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93927/original/image-20150904-14617-1kon3uz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93927/original/image-20150904-14617-1kon3uz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93927/original/image-20150904-14617-1kon3uz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93927/original/image-20150904-14617-1kon3uz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93927/original/image-20150904-14617-1kon3uz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93927/original/image-20150904-14617-1kon3uz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A model of the plan for Hillfields’ urban regeneration.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Coventy City Council</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When the plans for redevelopment were made, it was thought that tower blocks and landscaping would quickly erase the tightly packed rows of Victorian streets and back alleys, completing the process started by the Luftwaffe. </p>
<p>But initially, the efforts to rebuild Coventry were focused on the city centre’s pedestrian precinct, and new estates on the edge of the city. While other parts of the city rose from the rubble of war, Hillfields remained a clearance site, as captured by John Blakemore’s photographs from 1964.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93948/original/image-20150904-14636-1q8tqwd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93948/original/image-20150904-14636-1q8tqwd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93948/original/image-20150904-14636-1q8tqwd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93948/original/image-20150904-14636-1q8tqwd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93948/original/image-20150904-14636-1q8tqwd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93948/original/image-20150904-14636-1q8tqwd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93948/original/image-20150904-14636-1q8tqwd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93948/original/image-20150904-14636-1q8tqwd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Twenty years after the war ended, Hillfields remained in a terrible condition.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Blakemore</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Coventry City Council’s 1951 Comprehensive Redevelopment Plan earmarked over half of Hillfields for demolition, but a review in 1966 admitted that “in the immediate post-war period, little could be done in the way of urban renewal, because of more urgent priorities.” </p>
<p>By that time, Hillfields had stagnated. Clearance plans meant that the council, landlords and private owners were reluctant to maintain or improve properties. By the late 1960s, tower blocks rose slowly and uneasily amid Victorian streets, and some plots of land still remained undeveloped, as the post-war planners’ vision of Hillfields faded from view.</p>
<p>By 1970, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/60056513">it was reported</a> that less than half of Hillfields’ properties had hot water and an indoor toilet and bath, compared to the average of over 84% across the rest of Coventry. Numerous residents relocated, many to the new housing estates on the edge of the city, as Hillfields’ population dropped by half from its pre-war height of 20,000.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93945/original/image-20150904-14636-vdfd82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93945/original/image-20150904-14636-vdfd82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93945/original/image-20150904-14636-vdfd82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93945/original/image-20150904-14636-vdfd82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93945/original/image-20150904-14636-vdfd82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93945/original/image-20150904-14636-vdfd82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93945/original/image-20150904-14636-vdfd82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93945/original/image-20150904-14636-vdfd82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Primrose Hill St, where tower blocks on the right sit opposite Hillfields’ Victorian past, 1970s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Coventry City Council</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Prosperity declined and Hillfields became home to low-paid immigrants working in public services and insecure factory jobs, and <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/cdp-occasional-paper/oclc/3713991">experienced an influx</a> of homeless people, sex workers and drug users. In the middle of Coventry’s post-war boom, Hillfields residents were shut out of the city’s “New Jerusalem”.</p>
<h2>Tackling the problems</h2>
<p>At the end of the 1960s, the city council and national government belatedly sought to address the problems of areas like Hillfields. Poverty was being “rediscovered” and fears of US-style race riots in British cities led to resources being <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/poverty-inequality-and-class-structure/oclc/897590">poured into deprived areas</a>. </p>
<p>Coventry MP and secretary of state for social security, Richard Crossman, ensured Hillfields was designated one of 12 Community Development Project (CDP) areas. The CDP team spent five years researching with residents to identify problems and find solutions. The <a href="http://indiamond6.ulib.iupui.edu/cdm/ref/collection/CDP/id/3506">CDP concluded</a> that while problems lay in the communities, solving them required external “structural” change to promote greater equality in incomes, employment and housing.</p>
<p>In 1979, structural economic change did come, but in the form of Thatcher-era market forces that intensified Hillfields’ problems. Old migrants moved out and newer, poorer ones came in, maintaining the earlier pattern of those with the means abandoning the area. Yet Hillfields has remained a <a href="http://www.c-r.org/downloads/Review40.pdf">largely tolerant and socially cohesive area</a>. Area-based regeneration during the New Labour era from 1997 to 2008 created much-needed infrastructure, and enabled civil society organisations such as Working Actively to Change Hillfields (<a href="http://www.watchcharity.org.uk/">WATCH</a>) to tackle some issues.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/local-news/coventrys-hidden-poverty-crisis-how-3016210">Poverty has remained</a> despite interventions, and the continued celebration of market forces has contributed to further economic decline. With the advent of the economic blitz of austerity in 2009, the CDP’s call for “structural” change of the 1970s remains highly relevant today. However, faced with tightened budgets, the city council’s main planning response is again to reinvigorate the city centre and cut back on its support for communities. Our research has illuminated the lessons from history – now is the time to learn from them.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/47109/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mick Carpenter receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Benjamin Kyneswood receives funding from The ESRC/ AHRC Connected Communities Imagine Project.</span></em></p>Despite big hopes for rebuilding Coventry’s manufacturing heart after the Blitz, the tale of Hillfields became one of sad decline.Mick Carpenter, Emeritus professor, University of WarwickBenjamin Kyneswood, Research Fellow, University of WarwickLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.