THE HOME FRONT

IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR

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INTRODUCTION

The Home Front has been part of conflict ever since wars began. Generations of British women and children learned to fend for themselves during the medieval wars of conquest, or during the naval wars, which were such a characteristic of the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s. But these were times when the people at home generally experienced the conflict at second-hand. Shortages and crippled veterans aside, the violence of the wars passed them by.

Everything changed in the First World War (1914-18) and the secret lay in the air and deep under the sea. One of the most tragic legacies of the twentieth century was the aerial bombardment of civilians and submarine warfare. In 1915 around 550 people were killed in England by bombs dropped from German Zeppelins. Large and cumbersome, these gas-filled airships brought terror on an unprecedented scale during twenty raids. By 1917, war had moved onto another chapter. Zeppelins were replaced by Gotha bomber aircraft. A single raid on 13 June 1917 killed more than 430 people, including 46 schoolchildren. By 1918, 1400 people had been killed in Britain by aerial bombs.

Tragic though these were, the new world economies based on empire meant that Britain became(and remains) hugely dependent on imports. The development of the submarine during the First World War was devastating. A single machine, unseen and unheard, could wreak havoc without warning, killing not only civilian passengers but sending vital cargoes to the bottom of the Atlantic. The sinking of the Lusitania off Ireland in 1917 was a body-blow as traumatic as it was a disaster.

When the Second World War broke out in 1939 plans were already afoot to create a Home Front. After 1918, a new philosophy of war had developed: ‘the bomber will always get through’ (Stanley Baldwin, 1932). This was part of a climate of very genuine terror throughout Europe. In 1931 a book called Valiant Clay was published by one Neil Bell. Painting pictures of burning cities and the inhabitants ‘blown to rags’, he reflected an abiding fear that the moment a war broke out a large proportion of the urban population would be wiped out in a few days. The bombing of Shanghai by Japan in 1932, and the havoc wrought on Guernica and Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War, made the prospects seem horribly vivid.

The Home Front grew out of a need not only to protect the public, but also to create the impression that they were being protected. Britain’s resources were also going to have to be conserved which meant doing without, and making the best of what there was to go round. The Second World War was also the greatest mechanized war in the world’s history. That meant colossal levels of manufacturing, produced by the people of Britain in Britain, together with imports of goods from the United States and the Dominions. It is always worth remembering that by far and away the largest proportion of the population remained in Britain throughout the war. In the end the Home Front was about motivating them, protecting them, and encouraging them.

The Home Front was also about controlling people. This was when the British people experienced government intervention in their lives in an unprecedented way. Every aspect of daily life was controlled – from free speech to the amount of toilet paper. Government information, instructions, and invectives poured through letter boxes. Many pleasures in life disappeared – the seaside was out of bounds, fledgling television ceased for the duration, while some fruit and vegetables became distant memories.

All this was conducted in an environment where home and family could be wiped out in seconds by a bomb crashing through the roof. Dozens of schoolchildren could be, and were, killed when bombs fell on their schools or a fighter strafed their classrooms. For the surviving children a whole new range of bizarre experiences was added to daily life, ranging from happy or horrendous experiences as evacuees to standing triumphant in a group with smug adults gathered around the tortured wreckage of a shot-down bomber or fighter in a suburban street.

In this world where a walk to school might mean strolling past a bus lurching drunkenly on the side of a bomb crater, or for a mother struggling to produce a meal from flour and dried eggs, there was an underlying sense of purpose. Even the blatant dishonesty of the Black Market, and criminal gangs who stole ration coupons, clothing and food, seemed to add a frisson of excitement. Many people who before the war would have condemned any kind of dishonesty delighted in the occasional chance to seize on a little taste of luxury. That sense of purpose has subsisted in modern memory and become a part of folk myth – today, anyone showing fortitude in the face of a flood or gas explosion is said to have ‘the Blitz spirit’. In every sense the best of times and the worst of times, the Home Front is still with us in a myriad places around the country. From the forgotten gas-mask hanging under the stairs to the fading pamphlets in drawers and rusting air-raid shelters in the gardens, they mark the time when along with North Africa, the beaches of Normandy, and the jungles of the Far East, every home across Britain stared war in the face. Indeed, during the first half of the war more British civilians than servicemen were killed.

SECURING THE HOME

It’s easy to forget in the twenty-first century that many British homes were once components of a battlefield. Millions of houses built in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in central, southern and eastern England, made up the domestic frontline. In fact, there had been such an explosion of urban house-building since the mid-1800s that the majority of the British population lived in towns by the outbreak of war.

The erection of estates of similar houses in close proximity went hand-in-hand with the development of public transport. In Eltham, south-east London, in 1910 Archibald Cameron Corbett, a Liberal MP and property developer, agreed to build a prestigious estate of semi-detached Edwardian houses only when a loop railway line had been built along with a station. The Eltham Park estate prospered and like many others contributed to the unprecedented growth of London. Home-ownership, and all the invested pride that goes with it, began to replace rented accommodation.

War brought government a very specific problem. It was essential that the workforce be kept close to places of work, and at work. Not only would that guarantee that vital war production could be maintained, but also all the normal services of government and life. The practical side to this is obvious, but there was also the question of morale. It was vitally important that the European images of refugees struggling along with carts piled high with possessions be not repeated in Britain. As it turned out though, the devastation of some places – Southampton in particular – did provoke people to leave in droves.

Converting the proverbial Englishman’s metaphorical castle into something approaching an actual fortress became a priority, in spite of the fact that when the war began in 1939 there were very real fears that millions of people were soon going to be killed by bombs. Trying to resist a direct hit was fairly futile but some of the greatest damage caused by a bomb is from blast and fire. Blast in particular could be devastating because a ‘pulsating air wave’ like the ripples from a stone dropped in a pond expanded outwards from the point of impact. The rapid change in pressure could cause the entire façade of a building to blow outwards. The inhabitants fell out or through the tumbling masonry, while passers-by were showered with debris.

It is not often appreciated that preparations for the Home Front were underway long before the declaration of war in September 1939. Even Neville Chamberlain, whose attempts to appease Hitler have traditionally earned him retrospective opprobrium, explained in October 1938 that ‘when war starts today, in the very first hour … it will strike the man in the street, or in the bus, his wife and children in their homes’.

Issuing a pamphlet in early 1939 advising people on domestic defence, Wing-Commander E.J. Hodsoll of the Home Office was unequivocal in his warnings. ‘In the future, our security as a nation may depend on the security of the home.’ Newsreels of the Spanish Civil War left him, his aides, and his readers in no doubt that they faced the prospect of high-explosive bombs, incendiaries, and poison gas.

The time was ripe for finding ways of defending the home. One of the first precautions was obscuring houses from the air, particularly during the night. As early as July 1939, a trial black-out run was tried out across the country, and air-raid exercises were conducted in many towns. Pamphlets offering guidance ‘if War should come’ were published, and manufacture began of items like gas-masks.

The watchwords were ‘intelligent foresight and preparedness’. However, a Mrs J.G. Sampson of Greenwich wrote to her local paper in mid-October 1939 to complain that ‘the recent winds have played havoc with the improvised black-out of brown paper and drawing pins’. She went on to point out that the government promise of cheap, standard, black-out material had yet to be fulfilled and would in any case require numerous fittings. She demanded the provision of an easily-installed blind without ‘all the rest of the paraphernalia’. Clearly intelligent foresight had yet to be matched with the means to fulfil it.

The practical advice was almost unlimited, and included advice on how an Englishman could literally turn his home into a castle. The ‘Refuge Room’ was a room set aside for specific reinforcement against the effects of blast and splintering. The idea was that it would withstand rather more knocks than the rest of the house, and needed to have as few doors and windows as possible. A cellar might seem the obvious solution but not all houses had them, and in any case they were susceptible to flooding from blown-up water mains, and to being completely blocked by falling debris. The recommended room for most people was the kitchen, or another room facing the garden.

Large timbers were supposed to be laid across the floor, supporting timber braces to hold up the ceiling. A blanket over the door, and rags or wet paper across windows and chimneys, would resist the ingress of poison gas – never used, but fear that it might prevailed throughout the conflict- while sandbags or boxes of earth would buffer the windows, the glass being secured by strips of gummed paper.

However well-protected a ‘Refuge Room’ was, the effort required to secure a room within a house was very considerable and ultimately depended on the original strength of the house itself. Not surprisingly, with the ominous rumblings of war well-established before its outbreak, some homeowners had already taken precautions, long before 1939, by erecting a purpose-built shelter. Many of these were ad-hoc arrangements, and took the form of freestanding concrete blockhouses, or subterranean rooms reached by a flight of steps.

The government did produce the Anderson Shelter, a prefabricated arched corrugated-steel structure, designed for DIY erection in a specially-dug hole in the garden. It was supposed to accommodate four to six people. This was normally adequate; many urban families had been denuded by the absence of evacuated children or of other members, men and women, working in the armed services. Other members might have been out during raids with the ARP service.

Many people will recall Andersons as long-lasting post-war playhouses (indeed the government even promoted them on the basis of their peacetime reuse as bicycle sheds), but their provision was in deadly earnest. The less well-off were provided with them free. In fact remarkably successful, despite its flimsy appearance, the Anderson Shelter was responsible for saving many people’s lives by withstanding blast, which had demolished their owners’ homes.

However, the Anderson Shelter was cramped, cold, damp and claustrophobic. Irene Gough, a child in London’s Blitz, recalls her father’s preference for remaining in the house, watching the bombardment from an open back door, attracted by the breathtaking sense of drama. Difficult though it is to imagine now, the sheer drama and danger of the period was attractive to some people who treated each day’s survival as a triumph. In fact, such attitudes had much to do with the resilient spirit which saw morale generally improve under bombardment.

To provide for people who either would not or could not have an Anderson, the Government also distributed the Morrison shelter, which, far from being a structure, was no more than a modified piece of furniture. Appearing in 1941, the Morrison was a steel frame, big enough for several people to lie under but small enough to serve as a table of sorts. It was supposed to be strong enough to be able to support piles of fallen masonry which, up to a point, it did.

Public shelters existed for places where there were no gardens, but in London one of the most popular refuges was the Underground system, though more affluent people repaired to basements in clubs and hotels. Others took a more fatalistic approach and stayed in pubs and cinemas. Public shelters did not appeal to everyone. The thought of spending a night in close proximity with dozens of other people, including the inevitable screaming child, was hardly an attractive one. They were not even necessarily safe. In March 1943 an accident on the stairs at Bethnal Green Tube Station led to 178 people being crushed or suffocated to death in the stampede.

None of this tells us anything about what coping with an air raid really meant. Those stories subsist in contemporary accounts and memoirs. In them, a world of patient tolerance survives along with chaotic panics in blinding darkness as parents grabbed sleeping children, or when elderly people, confused and disoriented by the howls of sirens, staggered out into the night waving torches to hunt for the enemy. The darkness was passed with a mixture of fitful sleep, fractious children, and outright terror giving way to squabbles over board games, cards and other entertainments pursued in the gloom.

The following morning could mean a bedraggled return to normality or the traumatic discovery that the house was in ruins, or that a family member had been killed by falling masonry, leading a few days later to a terse note from the local authority authorising collection of the body for burial. Looting was widespread, and many people discovered that some of their surviving possessions had been stolen. When a family survived the night, only to find their home was wrecked beyond repair the trauma of lost possessions and treasures was overtaken by the need to find new accommodation. Rest centres (often schools) provided an inadequate first stop, while government compensation was supposed to make good losses. But the process was agonisingly slow. Many Londoners relocated to ‘reception towns’ like Oxford. It was not until mid-1944 that the government started to produce prefabricated houses to house bombed-out families.

For those who experienced a direct hit and survived, the horror was waking up hours later, pinned down by rubble with fragments of masonry embedded in the skin, to the frantic efforts of shocked and traumatised rescuers. Usually entirely unable to remember the event itself, such bomb victims then had to come to terms with the loss of perhaps the rest of their entire families. Despite the warnings from Europe, official preparations in Britain for defence against bombing were very much less substantial than in Germany where fully-equipped public air-raid shelters were being constructed long before 1939. The pre-war manufacture date of some equipment, such as gas masks, and the delivery of around 1.5 million Anderson shelters, show that the British government anticipated that civilians would be directly affected but without much idea of what that would actually involve. Even once war had broken out a series of unseemly rows between national and local government ensued, widely covered in the press, over who was to pay for air-raid protection. If nothing else this provoked disbelief in some quarters that the enemy could be furnished with such detailed information on Britain’s level of preparation, or lack of.

Alongside everyday household utensils and equipment, homeowners were encouraged to keep their gasmasks handy at all times, and to prepare themselves with other gear. A stirrup pump for putting out fires was recommended, as well as scoops and buckets of sand for dealing with incendiary bombs. Books, games and toys to keep children entertained during hours of air raids had to be gathered up and kept ready. Enterprising manufacturers serviced this new market. The wireless set was essential. This was how the government kept the public informed on an immediate basis. Historically, this was the first mass media war.

FOOF, FUEL AND GARDENING

The Kentish Mercury wisely anticipated in 1939 that ‘it may be necessary during the coming months to practise economy’. The author of the ‘Economy Cooking’ column had no idea just how much, as the suggested recipes included as eggs, milk, and lemon juice were amongst the requirements.

During the First World War, still painfully close in many minds in 1939, the advent of submarine warfare introduced Britain to food shortages which led eventually to a rationing system being introduced before the war ended. Britain’s steady process of industrialisation and urbanisation in the 19th century had already led to dependence on imported foods. Around sixty percent was imported in 1939. These even included something as banal as the onion. The fall of the Channel Islands in the early summer of 1940 brought to an end most of Britain’s supplies of this unexpected casualty of the conflict.

In 1939, Britain had 21.6 million tonnes of merchant shipping afloat. Strangely, Germany took a little while to recognise the potential damage to be wrought by submarines on this highly susceptible target. The sinking of the Bismarck in 1941 brought to an end any German attempt at surface naval warfare, with resources being concentrated thereafter in the U-boat fleet. Until the cracking of ciphers used by the Germans, and progress in radar and aerial pursuit of submarines, Britain’s entire future started to look extremely insecure as the U-boats destroyed millions of tonnes of shipping and with them, millions of tonnes of vital food and war materiel being brought from the US and Canada.

In 1937 the Ministry of Food was established as part of the preparations for the expected war so that rationing could be established from the outset, with separate divisions charged with responsibility for different categories of food. Planning was based on geographical regions, each of which had its own administration operated through local food offices.

The principle was really very simple. An individual allowance of food, for example 170 g of butter for an adult in 1941, was obtained with money and the relevant coupons. If that person’s allowance had already been used then it was impossible for the shopkeeper to sell the product. Today, in an age of unprecedented abundance, this is almost incomprehensible. But at the time it was recognised as being extremely fair, in spite of the fact that wealthy people were still able to purchase restricted goods on the ‘black market’. In rural areas the issue was quite different. Local supplies of meat were quite likely suddenly to increase with the slaughter of, for example, a pig from which a whole village could benefit.

Although rationing reduced the quantity of food available, there is no doubt that the underlying fairness of the system meant that poorer people benefited. Official calculations of minimum nutritional requirements meant that some scarce foods like orange juice could be targeted, particularly at small children and pregnant women, rather than decorating an affluent breakfast table. Regulation of prices meant basic food remained affordable. The result was that pre-war levels of juvenile deaths, rickets, and other developmental abnormalities dropped significantly.

It was also comparatively easy for the government to present rationing, and food economy, as a moral issue. Posters exhorted the Home Front to do its ‘job in the Battle of the Atlantic’, pointing out that while peacetime waste cost money ‘waste in war costs lives’.

In the home this translated into making do with less, and making other things do when the required food or substance was unavailable. One wartime cookbook, written by Grace Birtwhistle, advised against frying foods as ‘it tends to make food more indigestible and so less nourishing’. Nothing could be more symbolic of wartime food economy and shortages than the dried egg, and more incomprehensible today in an age of factory farming which has made the fresh egg abundant and cheap. A daily radio programme extolled the virtues of preparing meals without meat and other economies.

Kitchen equipment was very considerably less than it is now, making it impossible to store many fresh foods for more than a day or two. Refrigerators were almost non-existent as a domestic facility, though they did exist, and most people had to depend on larders, and bowls of cold water to chill milk and butter. None of this was new, but in a time of shortage a jug of spoiled milk was a disaster, not an inconvenience. Similarly, the exhortations to contribute to ‘Spitfire Funds’ sent many housewives off with their spare saucepans, leaving them with reduced equipment.

The kitchen was of course one of the largest consumers of fuel. Government exhortations to save fuel encouraged the Home Front household to set itself a target of electricity and coal use. One of the required specifications was limiting baths to a depth of no more than 13 cm (5 in).

Naturally, the best way to improve food supplies was to grow, or rear, it oneself. Land previously left to waste was brought into cultivation, including public parks and railway embankments. This was the celebrated ‘Dig On For Victory’ campaign, which popularised the allotment system across the country. Farmland was also extended with some 4 million hectares (10 million acres) of grassland alone being ploughed up, with vast investment in machinery. Farmers who proved unwilling or unable to respond to the demands being made on them, were liable to find themselves summarily evicted – a ruthless side of the nation at war which is easily forgotten. Much of the extra work was undertaken by the Women’s Land Army.

As a result of this process Britain’s dependence on imported foods dropped to around one-third of her needs. Potatoes and carrots were available in comparative abundance as a result, despite their lack of immediate popularity as perpetual components of diets. It is important to remember that the availability of meat today is unprecedented in British history. Most people can expect to eat it twice or even three times a day. The roast chicken was once an occasional treat. During the war it became a luxury unless you had room to accommodate chickens in the garden along with rabbits, and this became increasingly common.

The psychological effects of food shortages were not entirely forgotten. The availability of modest luxuries from time to time, eased the sensation of nutritional gloom symbolised by the ubiquitous dried eggs and the indigestible ‘National Wheatmeal Loaf’. Rationing was modified to a points system which allowed a self-selected allocation of allowances amongst a range of goods. The arrival of American forces in Britain did much to renew a sense of promise. Often welcomed for their overwhelming generosity, US troops often took time out to donate foods and treats, particularly to local children. Food parcels also arrived from across the Atlantic which, by 1943, was becoming safer. Nevertheless, the shortages would remain long after the war.

WEAPONRY

In the Home Front, the most devastating piece of weaponry was the incendiary bomb. Small and dropped in colossal numbers, the incendiary caused untold damage across Britain. A high-explosive bomb could demolish a house and its neighbours in an instant but the damage was generally restricted to the vicinity. The laying waste of large tracts of British cities testified to the effectiveness of dropping vast numbers of incendiaries (weight for weight, some five times more effective than conventional explosive) at night.

A crude weapon, the incendiary exploited magnesium’s spectacular ability to burst into flames. The basic incendiary device weighed 1kg or 2kg and consisted of a cylinder of magnesium with a central core of thermite (a highly-combustible compound of aluminium and iron oxide), fitted with a flush steel tail and an explosive device in the head. The explosive was intended merely to start a small fire causing the magnesium and thermite, which burns at a temperature of around 3000 degrees centigrade, to ignite. At this stage they could be easily put out with a bucket of sand. But, once ignited, the bomb could burn for three to four minutes. Unattended, this was time enough to utilize the potential energy in the materials which went to make up a building, often by setting wooden rafters or furniture alight.

Anthony Swaine was a Canterbury architect who worked as a fire warden in Canterbury. In 1943 he witnessed a conflagration, which tore the heart out of the city’s medieval past. Running along the rooftops he grabbed once smouldering incendiary after another by their tails and hurled them into the street where they could fizzle out harmlessly. In spite of his efforts large tracts of the old city were destroyed that night, marked today by concrete post-war redevelopments.

Peter Elstob recalled a night racing around trying to extinguish them. He encountered a hysterical woman screaming that her mother was dead.

The incendiary had crashed through the roof and the bedroom ceiling, landing on the bed. All the smoke in the house was coming from the burning mattress and bedding. The bomb had long since burned itself out and the spray soon had the fire out. As the smoke cleared we could see an old lady in the bed. She was quite dead.

Once outside again we were grabbed by a little old man in a white muffler who begged us to put out some incendiaries lodged in his attic. We got these out fairly quickly but then he pointed to a ladder and an open skylight, saying there were more on the roof.

But the purpose of the incendiaries was not only to start fires of destruction. They acted as beacons too.

I started to spray the incendiary lodged by the chimney when I heard the sound of more bombs coming down and hugged the peak of the roof. Moments later a stick of small, 50-pound high explosive bombs fell in a line across houses and street.

The bombers, earlier in the evening, had dropped nothing but hundreds of incendiaries. But this wave, a couple of hours later, came back with instantaneous high-explosive bombs where the fires were brightest and most people were in the streets.

(Elstob 1973)

Incendiaries were not, in fact, especially reliable as individual bombs but the sheer numbers dropped could virtually guarantee a fire of sorts. They could be packed into containers holding up to 700 units. Today there is no more potent memorial to their effect than the ruins of Coventry cathedral. Only the steel tails of incendiaries which worked normally survive and these show traces of the burning, and the magnesium of the bodies.

Fire was so effective it is not surprising there were other methods. There were many variations on the incendiary, and these include more conventional looking bombs which had incendiary fillings, including an exceptionally unpleasant model called the Phosphorbrandbombe. Phosphorus formed part of the filling but was kept separate in glass containers. These shattered on impact, allowing the phosphorus to mix with oil and rubber in the rest of the casing. The resultant spreading and burning liquid could cause horrific injuries to anyone unfortunate enough to be covered by it.

Other bombs formed variants on basic high-explosive types and were known as SC bombs. Right up to the present time, and doubtless long into the future, examples of these have continued to turn up on building sites. As recently as late October 1999 an area of Reading town centre had to be cleared after yet another was exposed. Of various weights from 50kg to 2500kg, these contained TNT and other explosives like amatol (made of ammonium nitrate and trinitrotoluene). The explosion was set off by an electrical or mechanical fuse which either operated on impact or was set with a time delay. In fact, some models were equipped with a ring which was supposed to inhibit burial and make sure the explosion occurred on or close to the surface. The Luftwaffe also dropped aerial mines, and armour-piercing bombs, but these were primarily intended for destroying enemy shipping or military fortifications. Mines were supposed to be dropped in shipping lanes where they were supposed to wait until the proximity of a ship would set off their magnetic or acoustic detonation equipment. But, being also designed to explode on accidental impact with dry land (to prevent their mechanisms being dismantled for analysis), they could also cause major damage to buildings. This led to their intentional use on land-based targets during the Blitz with such devastating effect that immediate moves were made to censor any publicity about them.

Bombs had one advantage – there was normally a warning of enemy aircraft approaching, allowing the householder or worker time to rush to the shelter. The coming of the V-weapons later in the war changed all that. The V-1 was a cigar-shaped unmanned projectile with wings and a tail-unit, powered by a pulse-jet engine. Despatched towards south-east England from secret silos, the V-1 continued on its trajectory until the fuel ran out, marked by the characteristic abrupt end to the rattling burble of its engine noise – the only warning anyone below got. Then it fell to earth, setting off the explosive nose. During the summer of 1944 an average of over 100 per day were launched causing devastation. The psychological damage was probably greater because the V-1 could only be stopped by a high-speed fighter chase. The fighter pilot caught the V-1 up, and used his wings to flip the V-1’s wings over to make it crash in countryside.

The V-2, however, was unstoppable and inaudible. Gradually supplanting the V-1 from September 1944 on, the V-2 was a supersonic missile, which flew way beyond the reach of Allied fighters and defences reaching an altitude of 60 miles and speeds in excess of 3,500 mph. More than 1100 fell on England, and no-one knew one was coming until they heard the explosion. Even more terrifyingly, initially no-one knew what was causing the damage and leaving craters seven metres across. The V-2 had the capacity to wipe out a dozen or more houses or a whole town block at once, killing dozens of people and trapping thousands more under rubble.

THE PERSON

In our time cheap clothing is abundant, and high street shops creak under the weight of stocks of deodorants, cosmetics and personal grooming goods. Most of these would have been incomprehensible indulgences before the war. During the war even the basic hygiene priorities of the 1930s took second place to more pressing requirements.

Restricted to 13 cm (5 in) deep baths, the Home Front family member also had to choose between soap for the person or washing powder from his or her ration allocation. Razor blades became virtually unobtainable and had to be sharpened by running them over glass.

Clothes rationing began in mid-1941. Imported clothes were of course impossible, and factories which had produced civilian clothing went over to producing uniforms or completely different war equipment. An individual had sixty-six clothing coupons to spend a year, but a sense of how limited this was can be gleaned from the need to spend eight on a pair of pants and a vest. A complete outfit for a man or woman could pretty well clean the allocation out in an instant. In later years, the allowance was reduced, and together with steadily rising prices, caused the introduction of economical ‘utility’ clothing. Made to standard designs from specified materials, utility clothing was often resented for being drab but it gained widespread acceptance for making the best of a bad job.

Inevitably, the Home Front household resorted to make-do and mend, with endless recycling of curtains and bedspreads into dresses and other items though it has to be said that the background of the Depression meant these were already well-practised activities. Sock-darning, now almost a lost art, was routine, as was the repair of fraying trousers and the unravelling of wool to turn a worn adult sweater into a child’s.

In an age when tobacco consumption has declined in popularity, the dependence of the 1940s adult on cigarettes is difficult to appreciate. If anything, many people were more prepared to queue for cigarettes than anything else, only to find themselves with a highly-restricted choice of brands. At one stage in the war, women were officially exhorted to desist from smoking so that men could have first call on them.

GOING TO WORK

One of the unpalatable advantages of war is that it tends to bring with it full employment. The twentieth century saw wars taken to new heights of industrialised intensity. More people were involved in the actual fighting than ever before, and the requirements of materials were unprecedented. Not only that, but the decline in imports meant that many normal goods had to be produced at home.

The Home Front required more people to go out to work, and that particularly included women. The Great War of 1914-18 had already set a precedent, with many women working in munitions factories and leading to the social revolution in women’s rights in the inter-war years. Voluntary work was of vital importance. The Women’s Voluntary Service began in 1938, directly as part of the lead-up to war in the hope that women could be integrated into ARP work from the outset. It was dramatically successful, and the WVS badge became as familiar as the ARP badge in the Home Front, as the women ran rest centres, bomb-site field kitchens, nurseries and even mobile laundries, though occasionally they were seen by some people as rather too authoritarian for their own good.

(Above: A Spitfire worker)

This is an interesting and easily-overlooked aspect of the Home Front. Some individuals revelled in the petty authority their new-found status as officials in various capacities afforded them. Readily adopting uniforms, badges or titles, their enthusiastic exercise of authority was not welcomed by everybody.

There was a burgeoning need for factory workers. Britain lost vast quantities of material at Dunkirk and needed to produce more equipment for the army. Aircraft absorbed vast amounts of effort. A single Spitfire took around 15,000 man hours to build – equivalent to about 300 men or women working for one week. A single four-engined Lancaster bomber built from 1942 had about 2 million separate parts, and were eventually produced at a rate of one per hour. Not surprisingly, already by 1941 the need for labour was increasing in urgency. Advertisements appeared across Britain for women to start taking part in work, finally leading to conscription of women into the armed forces or industry by the end of the year. In 1943, some men conscripted into the forces were diverted into the mines to make good a steady decline in production – the so-called ‘Bevin Boys’, most of whom profoundly resented the imposition.

Women in the forces did not fight but they played vital roles in civil defence, intelligence, administration and catering. Women in industry worked on everything from production of domestic goods to manufacturing barrage balloons and welding components of heavy bombers. The Women’s Land Army, eventually numbering some 80,000, despatched women across the country to work on farms though they were subsequently assisted by prisoners-of-war. Some 100,000 women took jobs on the railways.

At the time this was comparatively radical – it was generally expected that married women in particular would stay at home, even if they had no children, while many young single women might have gone into service and were delighted to find that there was more to life than cleaning fire grates for the kind of affluent young women who expected never to have to work at all. The call-up created a ‘crisis’ in the labour market for maids and cooks. There was also a residual concern that women at work would end up taking jobs from men once the war was over. The same fears had happened during the Great War.

But there were psychological advantages, as well as considerable moral pressure to take part. For a woman at home, with her husband away with the armed services, loneliness was swiftly despatched with a job, especially if the job was linked to her husband’s role. Helping to build aircraft, ships or tanks, linked women in the Home Front directly to the battle front. Some women, whose childcare responsibilities would have exempted them, campaigned for government-financed nurseries so that they could contribute to a job, exclaiming ‘Nurseries for Kids! War Work for Mothers!’ An aristocratic young woman, launched into high society in 1939 and fully expecting a life of parties and a successful marriage, might find herself labouring in an aircraft factory by 1942. She discovered not only her own capacity for hard work and skills, but a world that she scarcely knew existed. The war was a great social leveller.

The overall result was that the majority of adult women under forty spent 1941-5 at work, with women up to fifty being brought in from 1943. At least eighty per cent of women found themselves involved in war work. The conditions tolerated would lead to riots today. Many people worked shifts lasting more then twelve hours, often seven days a week, while living in hostels or billets. The Land Army, for example, enjoyed one week’s holiday a year. This meant exhausted workers, susceptible to disease and infection like tuberculosis. For all this women were expected to work for significantly lower wages (often half) than their male colleagues. Those with families struggled to hold down jobs while also running homes. But the sense of purpose generally proved more pervasive, in spite of occasional strikes. Enthusiasm to be seen to be pulling one’s weight overcame the hardships, helped along by the morale-boosting sounds of the BBC’s Music While You Work played over factory tannoys.

It’s impossible to avoid the fact that going to work was also a social experience, with potential consequences. For women whose husbands were away fighting, it was not always easy to resist the temptation to ‘drift’, as it was called. Male colleagues, British, Dominion or US troops billeted nearby – all offered the prospect of companionship and relationships. After the war there was a substantial increase in the divorce rate, mostly on grounds of adultery.

One of the most memorable accounts of life at this time survives in the diary of a schoolboy called Colin Perry. A teenage boy at the time, with a job in the City of London, he meandered through the days of the Blitz with a juvenile fascination in racing to visit air crashes and bomb sites, mixed with observations of chilling vividness. On 30 September 1940 he went to work, as usual, by underground train, and noted in a puzzled fashion how many of his fellow passengers appeared to be reading about God and religion. ‘It is amazing the number of people who in these times turn to God. They … hope by their reading and thoughts God will help them.’

A few days later, Perry’s philosophising gave way to delight that an air raid disrupted his journey home, leading to ‘a lift to Trinity Road in a super American Nash. Oh, boy, it was good. I sat behind the glittering silver gadgets.’ His delight and unconcern at what seems to us to be an unbelievably terrifying prospect is blankly quashed by the matter-of-fact statement on 9 October that ‘as I write this by the Bank of England at any moment the Dorniers and Junkers may whip from the clouds and blast us all to smithereens.’ The black humour and fatalistic idea that if one was going to die, then that was that, made it possible for people to go to work and function normally with an inclination to live for the day. In an age when barely-detectable statistical risks from certain foodstuffs or operations lead to headline news, prosecutions and public outrage, we have lost any sense of the meaning of real risk

ENTERTAINMENT

The sheer struggle of surviving the war on the Home Front meant that escapism took on a new meaning. By 1939, cinema had become the main form of visual entertainment while the radio ruled the home, and the work-place where shows like Music While You Work helped diminish the sense of drudgery. The impact of American popular music had already been felt before the war in the black-and-white musical films of the mid-30s like Dames and 42nd Street. British dance bands produced their own ‘cover’ versions of songs like I only have eyes for you, and British singers like Al Bowlly, himself killed in the London Blitz, were immensely popular. During the war years, American influence steadily increased with the advent of musicals like Oklahoma (1943). This was the age of the dance band, with none being more famous than Glenn Miller, leader of the Army Air Force Band. Today, it is difficult to appreciate how much compelling difference the songs made to daily life. Judy Garland’s Somewhere Over The Rainbow, for example, from The Wizard of Oz, and Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again, became anthems for hope and nostalgia.

Britain produced a variety of celebrated movies to keep the Home Front rallied. Stirring films such as In Which We Serve (1942) brought the military world and Home Front together . In one memorable scene the Blitz leads to the destruction of a house in which two naval wives are staying. One is killed, and the other writes to her husband onboard ship, leaving him to tell his shipmate the terrible news. Such fictional tragedies mirrored the reality of the random fate of war and emphasised the shared risk of husbands and wives, wherever they were. Henry V was a more subtle attempt at stimulating a sense of national purpose and pride. Colour sensations from Hollywood like Gone With the Wind, which arrived in Britain in 1940, attracted vast audiences which often proved unmovable when air-raid sirens sounded.

CONCLUSION

The defeat of Germany in May 1945, and the defeat of Japan a few months later in August, might have brought to an end the fighting, but the Home Front remained. Rationing was to last until well into the 1950s. Shortages of just about everything were compounded by Britain’s desperate need to pay for the war. Manufactured goods were frequently designated for ‘export only’, and imported goods were few and far between. To make matters worse, homes and families had to readjust to the return of their menfolk, if they were lucky, or to face a future in which vital family members were never to return. It’s also true that the end of the war brought great relief, but also a sudden disappearance of purpose. For nearly six years, the war had provided an underlying dynamic to life. Values were radically altered in an environment where a night of bombardment could destroy a suburb. For all its horror, the Home Front was a world of purpose. With that purpose gone, there was a profound sense of anticlimax for some people. Looking back to those days, more than half a century ago, it’s not difficult to feel a pang of envy for an age which had a quality of spirit. Reviewing Channel 4’s 1940s House, the journalist Charlotte Raven observed that the war years were ‘the one time in modern British history when goodness and nobility brought more rewards than selfishness and greed.’

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CHRONOLOGY OF THE HOME FRONT

1938 May – Womens’ Voluntary Service founded

December – the government provides money for air-raid shelters

1939 April – budget provides £1.3 billion for defence

August – Treasures removed from London’s museums and galleries to safety

September – outbreak of war

1940 January – rationing of butter, bacon and sugar begins

May – Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister. Signposts removed.

July – Channel Islands fall to Germany

August – Germany starts a naval blockade of British waters

September – the Blitz begins. Petrol rationing introduced

October – ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign begun

1941 June – clothes rationing introduced

July – coal supplies restricted

1943 May – work for women aged 18-45 becomes compulsory

December – ‘Bevin boys’ sent to the mines

1944 April – prefabricated houses displayed in London. PAYE income tax introduced

June/July – V1 attacks lead to evacuation of children from London

August – Education Act introduces secondary education for all

September – V2 attacks commence

1945 April – blackout ended

May – Germany surrenders

June – Family Allowance introduced

August – Japan surrenders

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