The spirit of the Blitz isn’t back, it’s bunk

The writer is professor of political history at the University of Nottingham and co-author of ‘The Churchill Myths’

During times of crisis, nations need their myths; they crave stories from the past that give hope that they will prevail over whatever disaster now faces them.

During the second world war, in the aftermath of Dunkirk, Britons comforted themselves with stories of how they had “stood alone” before, during the Napoleonic Wars, and still emerged victorious. To further boost morale the Ministry of Information even helped transform Shakespeare’s Henry V into a glossy movie starring Laurence Olivier. At the Battle of Agincourt, against all the odds, a few English archers defeated heavily armoured French knights.

Today the UK is once again, according to prime minister Boris Johnson, at war, but this time against a new kind of enemy: coronavirus. And, despite the unprecedented nature of the current crisis many Britons — of a certain age at least — are using the past to inspire them. Dame Vera Lynn, now 103, is not alone in invoking the spirit of the Blitz “when we all pulled together and looked after each other”.

All myths contain an element of truth or they cannot be sustained. But how far does this memory of the Blitz measure up to reality?

One early episode raises some doubts. Within weeks of the declaration of war in September 1939, and well before even one German bomb had fallen upon a British city, the government organised the evacuation of 1.5m working-class children and mothers to the safety of the suburbs and countryside. But instead of being welcomed with open arms by those better-off members of society with whom they were billeted, these evacuees were often deeply resented.

A Berkshire Congregational journal questioned the “necessity for the spoliation of decent homes and furniture [or] the corruption of speech or moral standards of our own children”. In the face of such Christian fellowship, 90 per cent of mothers and children had returned home by the first Christmas of the war.

Even once the mass bombing of Britain’s major urban centres began in the autumn of 1940, evidence of pulling together remains patchy. The Luftwaffe hit workers hardest by dint of the fact they lived closest to the factories and dockyards the raids were targeting.

But while many in London’s East End had to protect themselves under rat-infested railway arches during acute bombing raids, the Dorchester Hotel offered residents deep shelters with eiderdowns and silk sheets.

If there was any solidarity during the Blitz it was within those working-class communities worst affected. It was the same way they had helped themselves during the privations of the interwar depression. Many felt abandoned by the authorities, to such an extent that on one occasion when the King and Queen visited the East End — ostensibly to boost morale — they were booed.

But there were limits even to working class camaraderie. In 1943, 173 people were crushed to death as a panicking crowd tried to squeeze into Bethnal Green tube station at the start of an air raid. This disaster occurred in a Jewish part of London and the reactions to it exposed ugly prejudice. The Mass Observation reports picked up many anti-Semitic comments such as this one: “They lost their nerve . . . They haven’t got the steadiness like we have. We may be slow but we are sure. But the Jews are different.” West Indians and Africans also complained they were made unwelcome in shelters shared with white East Enders.

The Blitz failed to break down prewar divisions of class and ethnicity: pulling together had its limits. Even so, some of those who used communal shelters formed committees which helped organise catering and entertainments so there was some self-help going on. But the Blitz was far from the transformative collective experience of myth.

Perhaps no more than 15 per cent of London’s population took to the Tube or other public shelters during raids. For the most part, as the bombs fell, the vast majority stayed at home, under stairs or — if they were lucky enough to possess a garden — in an Anderson Shelter provided by the government.

Like today’s coronavirus crisis, the Blitz was largely experienced privately or within families: collective sacrifice and altruism was of the enforced sort, through rationing of food and clothes. As long ago as 1976, Tom Harrisson’s Living Through the Blitz exploded many of these myths, based on reports and testimonies gathered by the Mass Observation project during the war.

His findings — and those of many subsequent historians — have however been firmly rejected in the popular imagination. The “spirit of the Blitz” is just too comforting a story for Britons to abandon. If it inspires the country to stop bulk buying toilet rolls and to start helping ill neighbours, then perhaps it can serve a useful purpose in 2020 but as history, the spirit of the Blitz is bunk.

Letter in response to this article:

Prewar class differences broke down as people talked to each other / From Evelyn Adey, Eye, Suffolk, UK