|
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ |
| Before World War One British society largely denied women the recognition and rights enjoyed by men. This all changed, however, in the war described as 'everybody's war' - a war of unknown warriors. |  New pic needed
|
During both world wars the British Isles were under attack, which meant that the civilian population as a whole, as well as the soldiers fighting overseas, found themselves in some ways 'at the war front'.
'Zeppelin raids on London ... did have the effect of drawing everybody into the war.'
World War One (the Great War) is usually remembered as mainly a soldiers' conflict - with six million men mobilised to fight overseas, and the number of military casualties very high compared to those of civilians - but nevertheless the Zeppelin raids on London in April 1915 did have the effect of drawing everybody into the war. And as it progressed, the entire nation’s population and resources were harnessed to the war effort in one way or another, so most people came to feel involved in the conflict.
Wearing a uniform of some kind (whether in the forces or as a male or female police officer, postal worker or bus conductor) was an obvious way of contributing, but civilians working in a factory making uniforms, guns, ammunition, tanks or ships had every right to feel they were contributing as much to the war effort as a man with a gun. So, too, had dockers and miners.
Families with men at the front certainly felt part of the war, whilst clergymen who comforted the bereaved, or journalists who wrote stirring patriotic editorials, likewise had a key role as opinion formers.
Then, when food rationing was introduced in January 1918, following the German submarine blockade of 1917, previously uninvolved housewives, as they eked out their modest supplies of sugar and meat (the first two items to be rationed), could also feel they had a part to play. By this time the whole of Britain, effectively, was the Home Front, and the citizens collectively were the soldiers on that front.
In four interrelated spheres of the Home Front, the involvement of British society in the war effort had far-reaching effects on the country, though the degree to which the war speeded up pre-existing social pressures remains debatable.
First, World War One had an enormous impact on living standards, both in terms of poverty and health, improving the lot of many of the nation's poorest citizens. Next, through their war work, women gained a profile and rights in society that had previously been denied to them.
Thirdly, by 1918 the bargaining hand held by trades unions of organised labour were considerably strengthened by the key role they played in negotiating the pay and conditions of their workers in manufacture and production for the nation's wartime benefit. Finally, in general, the Home Front idea was a great social leveller and acted as a stimulus to wider social reform after the war.
Some historians argue that the war greatly increased opportunities for women, but often the advantages were short-lived. Although by the Armistice nearly five million women were working in industry and commerce, many would lose their jobs on the return of the men after the war.
In fact, many female workers merely exchanged their pre-war poorly paid jobs as domestic servants or in textile mills for better-paid opportunities elsewhere, as part of the war effort. For example, Robert Roberts, whose family ran a shop in Salford, remembered his customers of 1918:
'Some of the poorest in the land started to prosper as never before. In spite of the war, slum grocers managed to get hold of different and better varieties of foodstuffs of a kind sold before only in middle-class shops, and the once deprived began to savour strange delights ...'
'... I felt damned embarrassed when I walked into a pub ... one girl forestalled me saying, "You keep your money Corporal. This is on us", and with no more ado she … produced a roll of notes big enough to choke a cow. Many of the girls earned ten times my pay as a full Corporal ...Lyn Macdonald, 1914-18, Voices and Images of the Great War
After the introduction of conscription in March 1916, the government encouraged women to take the place of male employees who had been released from their normal occupations to serve at the front. Whereas in July 1914, 212,000 women worked in engineering and munitions, by 1918 the total was nearly a million.
The attractions were higher wages, better conditions and greater independence. Few would return to the poor wages and conditions of domestic service if they could possibly help it. The fact that some Home Front jobs were dangerous provided a further bond with men serving at the front. However, there were several spectacular accidents in the munitions factories, for example, and around 400 women died from overexposure to TNT whilst handling shells during the war.
'... I felt damned embarrassed when I walked into a pub ... one girl forestalled me saying, "You keep your money Corporal. This is on us", and with no more ado she … produced a roll of notes big enough to choke a cow. Many of the girls earned ten times my pay as a full Corporal ...Lyn Macdonald, 1914-18, Voices and Images of the Great War
After the introduction of conscription in March 1916, the government encouraged women to take the place of male employees who had been released from their normal occupations to serve at the front. Whereas in July 1914, 212,000 women worked in engineering and munitions, by 1918 the total was nearly a million.
The attractions were higher wages, better conditions and greater independence. Few would return to the poor wages and conditions of domestic service if they could possibly help it. The fact that some Home Front jobs were dangerous provided a further bond with men serving at the front. However, there were several spectacular accidents in the munitions factories, for example, and around 400 women died from overexposure to TNT whilst handling shells during the war.
The Home Front during 1914-18, however, embraced far more than women undertaking a new range of responsibilities. In some ways the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), passed in August 1914, symbolises what the Home Front idea meant. This gave government powers to commandeer economic resources for the war effort, imprison without trial, censor the printed or spoken word and greatly control a citizen’s life.
As well as rationing, public house opening times were restricted. This was as much to keep the nation fit for long hours at work, as to satisfy Lloyd George's anxieties over alcohol. Pubs could originally open between 5.30am and half past midnight - this was amended to midday to 2.30pm and 6.30 to 9.30pm daily.
The sense of a Home Front grew more acute as World War One ground on. In February 1917, German U-boats sank 230 ships bringing food to Britain, and over half a million tons of shipping in March. This, with the need to release even more men from agriculture to serve at the front, led to the creation of the Women's Land Army. Their task was to maximise the output from the land to feed the nation and counteract the effect of the U-boats.
Some farmers resisted this measure and the Board of Trade had to send officers around the country to persuade farmers to accept women employees. The strategy was successful, and by the end of 1917 there were over 260,000 women working as farm labourers. Elsewhere on the Home Front, rationing reduced the weekly consumption of sugar and meat in 1918.
Another way of releasing men was found with the formation in 1917 of the Royal Defence Corps of soldiers too old for the front, who could guard ports, main roads and railway yards. In many ways, they anticipated the Home Guard of 1940.
'The window rattled behind me: then all the windows rattled and we became conscious of the booming of guns getting nearer. 'At last the Zeppelins', Sidney said, with almost boyish glee. From the balcony we could see shrapnel bursting over the river and behind, somewhat aimlessly. In another few minutes a long sinuous airship appeared high up in the blue black sky, lit up faintly by searchlights ...
It moved slowly ... the shells bursting far below it - then there were two bursts that seemed nearly to hit it and it disappeared ... It was a gruesome reflection that while we were being pleasantly excited, men, women and children were being killed and maimed… There was apparently no panic, even in the crowded Strand. The Londoner persists in taking Zeppelin raids as an entertainment ...'Did you see the Zeppelins?' was the first question, in the most cheerful voice, which every man, woman and child asked each other for at least twenty hours afterwards ...' Beatrice Webb recorded her impressions of one on 8 October 1915
Beatrice Webb, Diaries 1912-24
'... all Londoners at least had every reason to believe they were on the front line ...'
In reaction to the Zeppelin raids of 1915-17 and Gotha bomber raids of 1917-8, some 200 posts of the Metropolitan Observation Service staffed by volunteers were established in 1916, which eventually formed the nucleus of the post-war Observer Corps in 1925.
With quasi-military jobs for civilians to do and anti-aircraft guns stationed in open spaces throughout the London Air Defence Area, all Londoners at least had every reason to believe they were on the front line as well.
The Home Front meant that by 1918, World War One had become truly a people’s war, and we should not be surprised, therefore, that the nation’s first Labour government was elected shortly afterwards, in 1924.
Like the earlier war, the nation’s labour was mobilised, and 500,000 women joined the uniformed services, and millions more worked in the factories and on the land. Both men (from 1939) and women (from 1941) were eventually conscripted.
Underlining the interplay between the Home Front and service abroad, one male conscript (they were called national servicemen, the very word ‘conscript’ being anathema to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1939) in ten was employed in the nation’s coalmines, such was the requirement for fuel. They were known as Bevin Boys, after the Minister of Labour.
In the reactivated Women’s Land Army, in 1940 Barbara Morris found herself near Dover in the thick of the Battle of Britain:
‘It was harvest time and I remember hearing a terrific screaming sound as a plane seemed to be coming down on top of me. I just ran and ran to the edge of the wood nearby… If we were not sure how things were going… we dived into the shocks of corn; otherwise we would look up and say, ‘it’s all right. It’s one of ours’… We did not pay much attention when planes fell some way off, we were too busy… At the height of the battle… one of our pilots baled out when his plane was shot up. As his parachute descended, he was attacked by a German…[and] landed badly wounded.
His plane fell on the roof of a barn of the neighbouring farm… An American bomber came down in some woods near us. We heard the engine cut out and saw the clouds of smoke; nobody could do anything. All the crew were killed… [Our tin hats] were too cumbersome and heavy to work in…[but] when I first heard an explosion from a German cross-Channel gun [and] found a piece [of shell]…in one of the fields…. [which] weighed four pounds… After that we took our tin hats with us wherever we were working… ’
Nicola Tyler, They Fought in the Fields, The Women's Land Army: The Story of a Forgotten Victory
ARP wardens (there were 1.4 million of them nationwide) were responsible for crowd control, rescue, demolition, supervising air raid shelters and enforcing the night-time 'black out', and were recognisable by the 'W' (for warden) painted on their helmet.
ARP was a reaction to the fear, shared throughout Europe in the 1930s, of annihilation from the air. Whereas Britain’s experience of 1917-8 air raids had resulted in 1,500 killed in just over 100 raids (compared with 750,000 killed on active service), in the 1930s government estimates calculated that 600,000 would be killed and 1.2 million injured in air raids in a future war.
'Every crumbling crash seems to mean [that] the next one [ie bomb] is going to be overhead'
In fact, civilian deaths in the UK from bombing totalled one-tenth the expected figure at 60,595. Thus many civilians were encouraged by an alarmed government to play their part in the Home Front, before the war actually started.
Once the Blitz started on London in September 1940, the ARP and AFS found themselves stretched to the limit, as this letter written over two days, 9th-10th September 1940, from an East End schoolteacher to his friend illustrates:
'... Dear Peter I would like to have written a nice cheerful letter but things are pretty grim here. After spending all Saturday night and all Sunday night in a public [air raid] shelter, miles from home and feeling worn from lack of sleep, I've just been bundled down another ... It's no use trying to tell what some parts of London look like. Sufficient to say it took me two hours to get to work this morning ... People are tight-lipped and strained.
AFS and ARP personnel are tired, dirty and unshaven, but still fighting. You can judge for yourself when I tell you that Winsor School is just a burnt-out shell ... Woolworths opposite the station is literally just a rubbish heap, and huge girders lie around like twisted hairpins ... And East Ham is lucky compared with scores of other areas ... For many people the worst disaster is the shambles that used to be Beckton Gas Works ... Considering it took an hour to boil a cup of water, and later the gas failed completely, it must have been pretty heroic to get the Sunday joint ready ... Nothing I could say could faintly describe the terror that fills everyone.
Every crumbling crash seems to mean [that] the next one [ie bomb] is going to be overhead ... I'm forcing myself to write on, to keep me from listening to the waves of bombers passing one's head. Three have gone by already… People are no longer ashamed of their fear, and the shelters are full to suffocation. Here goes another wave of bombers and the staccato of machine gun fire…I must try and get some sleep now ...and send it off in the morning ...'
Jonathan Croall, Don't You Know There's A war On? The People's Voice 1939-45
Items such as imported meats, sugar, tea, coffee, tobacco, chocolate and fruit which arrived by merchant ship and would become scarce if the Germans initiated another submarine blockade (which they did) were to be divided equally between all adults and children. Imported non-food items such as textiles, soap and petrol were rationed, too.
'... We had mincemeat, potato or cabbage, some kind of milk pudding, a lot of stodge, with sauces that became more and more watery ...'
You were entitled to buy basic foodstuffs to a weekly limit, whilst price controls, covering everything from wages and rents to food, tobacco and clothing, also came into force. The degree of restriction over an individual’s freedom seems incredible to us today, the more so as each familiy has to register at a shop where these items could be purchased and could not shop elsewhere.
Schoolboy David Howell recalled the effect of rationing on his school meals:
‘... which went from mediocre to unspeakable. We had mincemeat, potato or cabbage, some kind of milk pudding, a lot of stodge, with sauces that became more and more watery ...At one stage lunch consisted of rather watery soup, based on onions, followed by hunks of bread and cheese – that was our economy measure. Good red meat, which was rationed rather strictly, we had twice a week ... One wag said that ... dried eggs, which were in plentiful supply, should be called dregs ... Sweets were rationed, the making of ice cream banned after 1942, on the grounds that ... it had no food value, and was a diversion of valuable resources. All meat became very scarce ... So our diet became very monotonous. There were pies which were based on potato and carrot and – we thought it was sawdust – soya beans ...’
Jonathan Croall, Don't You Know There's A war On? The People's Voice 1939-45
If you had the money, but no coupons, you could not buy, although an illegal black-market grew up of traders willing to supply the unobtainable, but at a price. Thus a ‘make-do and mend’ ethos grew up, recycling old clothes, unpicking the wool from old pullovers to darn socks, for example.
One young mother remembered the austere wartime atmosphere of her Wiltshire village:
'The Women's Institute was the focal point of the village; you could always get ideas there about what to make out of what. Most of the women were walking about without stockings on, you just couldn’t get them. But we also used to get together in each other’s houses. I remember one Christmas time we made the children quite a lot of toys out of knitting wool – most of my youngest child’s toys were knitted clowns, policemen and soldiers that the ladies of the village had knitted. I was quite an expert myself on making do and mend.
People used to bring things to me from the village and say, ‘What can we do with this?’ – an old coat, perhaps, from which you could make a lumbar jacket for a boy or a skirt for a girl… There were dances too, although the blackout stopped quite a lot of social life. It was mostly women dancing together, of course, although there were more men around there than in some other places because it was a farming area, and farm workers didn’t get called up…’
Jonathan Croall, Don't You Know There's A war On? The People's Voice 1939-45
Four million evacuees had been anticipated, but only 1.5 million actually left. Nevertheless this was a mass migration, which traumatised many, and, once seen, who can forget the images of crocodiles of city children, identified by a luggage label tied to their person, trudging off into the unknown.
'... country folk learned for the first time how the city poor lived.'
The administration of even the third that actually left collapsed, and by January 1940 nearly one million had returned. When the Blitz (from September 1940 onwards) triggered a second, unplanned evacuation, the country became all mixed up, and to a certain extent, country folk learned for the first time how the city poor lived.
Young David Card remembered of his evacuation:
‘We had our little suitcases packed, and our little tabs tied on with string ... We were all given a large brown carrier bag, a tin of condensed milk, a tin of bully beef, a packet of biscuits and what seemed to me an enormous bar of chocolate ... We took off in coaches and eventually arrived in Deal, just round the coast from Dover. We were then parked off with the butcher’s assistant ... [and his] little family in Deal. We were living four in a room, with just a mattress on the floor, no real bed. There were tins baths too, as the houses didn’t have baths, which was not unusual for [the] ... area at that time. We went to the school; it was a tiny one-classroom school, the old village type of school, which was crammed with kids ...’
Jonathan Croall, Don't You Know There's A war On? The People's Voice 1939-45
Public awareness of the war was heightened by the sandbagging of public buildings and monuments, to protect them, and the growth of allotments (3.5 million by 1943) in every spare area of playing field or village green. Air raid sirens sounding ‘alerts’ and ‘all clears’ and the enforcement of a ‘Black Out’ from 1 September 1939 until the war’s end controlled the pace of life.
'Italian POWs working on farms actually gained better working conditions than Land Army girls'
The invasion scare of June-September caused all road and rail signposts and maps to be removed. A call for scrap metal to recycle into Spitfires resulted in the decorative iron railings surrounding many a civic park or garden being removed, whilst aluminum saucepans were collected by the million.
Everywhere, Home Front posters exhorted citizens to ‘Dig for Victory’, remember that ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’, whilst others repeated Churchill’s phrase ‘Let us Go Forward Together’.
It is easy to become romantic about this era, when the nation pulled together in its hour of need, but new research suggests that crime rates rose substantially during the black out, many cases of looting occurred and the black market flourished. Other injustices flourished.
Italian POWs working on farms actually gained better working conditions than Land Army girls, and exiles from Nazi Germany were – bizarrely - interned as enemy aliens on the Isle of Man – the very people who were sworn enemies of Hitler!
The fighter pilot Richard Hillary (who was killed in 1943) has left us with this popular picture of London during the 1940-1 Blitz, which in many ways captures the mood of the whole country at this time:
‘I had been put out of action before the real fury of the night attacks had been let loose, and ... had seen nothing of the damage. In the hospital, from the newspapers and ... those who came to see me, I gained a somewhat hazy idea of what was going on. On the one hand I saw London as a city hysterically gay, a city doomed, with nerves so strained that a life of synthetic gaiety alone prevented them from snapping. My other picture was of a London bloody but unbowed, of a people grimly determined to see this thing through ... London night-life did exist.
Though the sirens might scream and the bombs fall, restaurants and cocktail bars remained open and full every night of the week ... Whilst the bombs were dropping on London (and they were dropping every night in my time in the hospital), and while half of London was enjoying itself, the other half was not asleep. It was striving to make London as normal a city by night as it had become by day.
Anti-aircraft crews, studded around fields, parks and streets, were momentarily silhouetted against the sky by the sudden flash of their guns. The Auxiliary Fire Service, spread out in a network of squads through the capital, was standing by, ready at a moment’s notice to deal with the inevitable fires; air raid wardens, tireless in their care of shelters and work of rescue, patrolled their areas watchfully ...’
Richard Hillary, The Last Enemy
Soon given the more dignified title of the Home Guard, we smile when we think of Captain Mainwaring, Sergeant Wilson and Corporal Jones in BBC Television’s Dad’s Army, but it was taken very seriously in the summer of 1940.
Over a million men enrolled, which provided a welcome activity for older veterans of War War One, though in the event of invasion, their military effectiveness would have been questionable.
As one Berkshire Volunteer observed:
‘I think that none of us will forget our first LDV route march. On it a quarter of a century slipped away in a flash. There came memories of the Menin Road, of loose, shifting, exasperating cobbles, of the smell of cordite and the scream of shrapnel , of the mud and stench and misery of Flanders, of hopes and fears in battles long ago ... There were few youngsters in that first platoon of ours ...’
Angus Calder, The People's War
Whilst historian AJP Taylor summarised their role in his own way:
‘The Home Guard harrassed innocent civilians for identity cards; put up primitive road blocks, the traces of which may delight future archaeologists; and sometimes made bombs out of petrol tins. In a serious invasion, its members would presumably have been massacred if they had managed to assemble at all. Their spirit was willing though their equipment was scanty. Churchill proposed to launch the slogan: ‘You can always take one with you’ if the Germans landed ...’
AJP Taylor, English History 1914-45
If nothing else, the Home Guard drilling with pikes and shotguns emphasised just how much more World War Two became a people’s war, fought from the Home Front, than World War One could ever have been.
The Home Front idea in 1914-18 was uniquely British. Other nations never mobilised their populations during World War One as the British belatedly started to do from 1916, or were occupied too rapidly to co-ordinate their labour on a national basis.
'... the nation re-activated the Home Front idea six months before the Second World War was declared ...'
The idea of a Home Front probably stirred the popular imagination only in the later stages of World War One, as in 1914 the nation expected it all to be ‘over by Christmas’. The sight of nearly five million women at work – some in uniform – the advent of rationing and air raids all brought this about.
By contrast, the nation re-activated the Home Front idea six months before the Second World War was declared, and probably exaggerated the threats to the nation, but involved everyone from the start.
The era of 1940s Britain when the nation all pulled together seems very distant and romantic to us now, but was caused by Britain’s pathetic lack of military and political preparedness for war and for that we must lay the blame at the feet of the politicians of the time. Had they correctly interpreted the threat from Germany, Italy and Japan, there would have been no need for a Home Front at all.
Published on BBC History: 2005-03-14
This article can be found on the Internet at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/trail/wars_conflict/home_front/the_home_front_01.shtml
© British Broadcasting Corporation
For more information on copyright please refer to:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/about/copyright.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/terms/
BBC History
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/