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How was Britain impacted by total war from 1939-51?
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Britain – The Socioeconomic Landscape, 1939-79
In this course, Dr Alex Windscheffel (Royal Holloway, University of London) explores Britain’s changing social and economic landscape from 1939-79. In the first lecture, we think about the impact of total war on Britain from 1939-51. In the second lecture, we think about the rise of consumer society in Britain after 1951. In the third lecture, we think about the influence of television on British society from the 1950s onwards. Next, we think about the evolution of football as a spectator sport in Britain from the 1920s onwards. In the fifth lecture, we think about the development of leisure activities and mass tourism in postwar Britain. In the sixth and final lecture, we think about the emergence of Liberal society from 1951-79.
How was Britain impacted by total war from 1939-51?
In this lecture, we think about the impact of total war on Britain from 1939-51, focusing in particular on: (i) Churchill’s acknowledgement of the Second World War as a war of peoples and causes, rather than of chieftains and princes; (ii) the fact that, until 1943, more civilians than combatants had been killed in the Second World War; (iii) the cheerful and self-sacrificing presentation of British people in wartime propaganda; (iv) the class equality presented in wartime and postwar productions like In Which We Serve, Reach for the Sky and Fires were Started; (v) George Orwell’s 1941 wartime commentary titled The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius; (vi) the capture of the nation’s feelings towards the war and leadership by William Beveridge’s 1942 publication Social Assurance and Allied Services, known as the Beveridge Report; (vii) the depiction of a proposed welfare state and social assurance in the Beveridge Report as the continuation of the wartime ideals of fair shares for all; (viii) the 1945 Labour Party Election Manifesto, which promoted the need for the “spirit of Dunkirk” in postwar Britain; (ix) the widespread exclusion of Welsh, Irish and Scottish people from the wartime presentation of the war effort; (x) evidence of a lack of unity in the reality of wartime Britain, including the prevalence of strikes; (xi) Millions Like Us (1943), a film which highlighted the impact of the Second World War on women; (xii) the conscription of women by the National Service Act from December 1941; (xiii) the ‘double burden’ faced by mothers working in wartime industries; (xiv) the enhanced policing of women’s behaviour during the Second World War, especially after the arrival of US soldiers in Britain; (xv) the campaigning for women to stay in work after the Second World War to help rebuild the country; (xvi) the gradual lifting of the marriage bar in certain sectors after the Second World War; (xvii) the wartime controls of industry and pricing put in place by the government and their ongoing postwar impact; (xviii) the nationalising of industries by Clement Attlee’s Labour government; (xix) the continuation of rationing in postwar Britain as a key reason for Labour’s loss of power in 1951.
I'm Alex Winshuffle.
00:00:06I am a senior lecturer in modern British history at Royal
00:00:08Holloway, which is part of University of London.
00:00:12We're one of the largest history departments in the country.
00:00:16We've got over six hundred undergraduate students and some
00:00:19thirty five permanent members of staff covering everything
00:00:23from the ancient world through to the contemporary world in
00:00:26our history programs.
00:00:31In the first lecture,
00:00:34I'm going to be talking about the effects of World War
00:00:35two on Britain and the subsequent years of austerity
00:00:39up to nineteen fifty one.
00:00:44World War two has often been described and remembered as
00:00:47the People's War.
00:00:52World War two, even more so than World War one, was the
00:00:54war of ordinary people as prime minister Winston Churchill
00:00:58declared in a famous radio broadcast after the Battle of
00:01:03Britain had begun.
00:01:06This is no war of chieftains or of princes.
00:01:09It is a war of peoples and causes.
00:01:13About four and a half million British men were serving in the
00:01:18armed forces by nineteen forty five.
00:01:22Some three hundred thousand Britons were killed in addition
00:01:25to about forty thousand, for instance,
00:01:29civilians killed in the first nine months of the blitz after
00:01:31September nineteen forty.
00:01:35And indeed, until the year nineteen forty three,
00:01:37more civilians than combatants had been killed.
00:01:40World War two prompted an examination of the meanings of
00:01:46British national identity and the idea of a British national community.
00:01:50In other words, what did it mean
00:01:56to be British?
00:01:59What did it mean to its inhabitants?
00:02:02What was worth fighting for in the face of renewed
00:02:04German militarism and aggress aggression.
00:02:08The wartime government produced propaganda
00:02:12that portrayed ordinary Britons as cheerful and,
00:02:15self sacrificing,
00:02:20stressing, for instance, the little ships that,
00:02:23were involved in the evacuation from Dunkirk early in the war
00:02:25or the resilience of Londoners facing the blitz by the
00:02:31Luftwaffe.
00:02:36And And the emphasis was very much put upon the idea of
00:02:37equality of sacrifice.
00:02:41There was also a central education cultural education
00:02:44program, which was put out by the BBC.
00:02:48And we can see ideas and images of national identity reflected
00:02:52on screen as well in wartime films such as In Which
00:02:57We Serve or Reach for the Skies or the documentary
00:03:02fires were started, which tended to show social
00:03:07classes as equals,
00:03:11stressing a sense of togetherness
00:03:14rather than individualism.
00:03:16The war was portrayed as a collective effort,
00:03:19which relied on the courage and the
00:03:24heroism of ordinary people rather than their officers.
00:03:27The socialist writer George Orwell in his,
00:03:32lion and the unicorn famously pictured the nation as
00:03:36a family, albeit Orwell said it was a family with the wrong
00:03:40members in charge.
00:03:45And many of these changes in the national mood and sense of
00:03:47national identity were embodied in the Beveridge report,
00:03:51which was published in December nineteen forty two just
00:03:56after the defeat of German forces at El Alamein.
00:03:59And William Beveridge depicted the proposed welfare states
00:04:04and the social insurance scheme very much as a continuation
00:04:09of these wartime ideals of, fair shares for all,
00:04:14rather than presenting the welfare state as a dramatic
00:04:20reconstruction of society.
00:04:23But partly as a result of a war, the Labour Party was able
00:04:27to shed its image of lacking patriotism that many had still
00:04:30held of it in the interwar period.
00:04:35And its nineteen forty five election manifesto
00:04:38proclaimed that we need the spirit of Dunkirk
00:04:42and of the Blitz sustained over a period of years.
00:04:45Of course, as many historians have pointed out, the idea
00:04:49of the People's War was also somewhat of a myth.
00:04:54The images which tended to be used of Saint Paul's Cathedral
00:04:59rising above the flames of a blitz
00:05:03or images of Cotswolds and the South Downs,
00:05:06images of the White Cliffs of Dover.
00:05:10These were all interestingly rather southern English images
00:05:13celebrating perhaps the the English countryside,
00:05:19which which had been celebrated in the interwar years,
00:05:23but which also tended rather to exclude the contribution of the
00:05:26Scots or the Welsh from the national war effort.
00:05:30There's also a sense in which all social classes weren't
00:05:35quite in it together.
00:05:38The Ritz Hotel, for instance,
00:05:40provided bedding in its basement so that its guests
00:05:42would not have to mingle with the common people in air raid shelters.
00:05:45Crime in wartime actually rose, and strikes were quite
00:05:51common, especially in nineteen forty four,
00:05:56although not reported in the newspapers of the time.
00:06:00The The other key aspect of the idea of the
00:06:06people's war, which historians have spoken about,
00:06:10was the impact of the war upon women and upon the
00:06:14civilian community or the home front.
00:06:18The impact of World War two on women was profound
00:06:22and, again, was celebrated in film,
00:06:26in films such as Millions Like Us from nineteen forty three.
00:06:29The writer JB Priestley,
00:06:35also in nineteen forty three,
00:06:37wrote that British women will no longer be content with what
00:06:40they had before the war.
00:06:44Younger women often served overseas in arm in the armed services.
00:06:47Some five hundred thousand or so British women served in
00:06:52uniform during the war in one of the auxiliary services.
00:06:56There were even one hundred or so female pilots,
00:07:01albeit in non combat roles, I.
00:07:05E. Flying transport planes or or moving troops around.
00:07:07Some two million British women worked in the munitions
00:07:12industry in World War two,
00:07:15just as millions of women had done in World War one.
00:07:18And in December nineteen forty one,
00:07:22single women actually faced conscription either into the
00:07:24armed forces or into the war industries
00:07:27or into agriculture, for instance,
00:07:31through the women's land army.
00:07:33This policy was, shortly afterwards, extended,
00:07:36to married women under the age of fifty without dependents.
00:07:39So mothers were the only group of women who were not conscripted,
00:07:44but even mothers came under economic
00:07:49and moral pressure to register for wartime service.
00:07:52And it was estimated in nineteen forty three that some
00:07:56six hundred and seventy thousand mothers with
00:07:59dependents were in employment.
00:08:02And for these women,
00:08:05they often face the so called double burden of of labor
00:08:07and of childcare.
00:08:12And you even have some local authorities setting up
00:08:14nurseries for childcare, in many places.
00:08:17So there are profound changes in women's employment,
00:08:22but also profound changes to women's lives and women's circumstances.
00:08:26Some of these were seen as having more negative effects.
00:08:32For instance, wartime led to more women, especially
00:08:35unmarried women getting pregnant,
00:08:39or illegitimate children being born to married women while
00:08:42their husbands were away.
00:08:46Young women depicted sometimes as good time girls
00:08:48were in particular blamed in the press for the
00:08:53rise in venereal diseases.
00:08:57And there was a lot of government and official concern,
00:08:59and policing of women's behavior,
00:09:04especially after the arrival of American GIs in late
00:09:07nineteen forty two, and even more so given there were some black GIs.
00:09:11So in this sense,
00:09:17women in the wartime were expected to contribute towards
00:09:19the national effort, but were also expected at the same time
00:09:22to remain good mothers and to remain sexually virtuous
00:09:26even whilst carrying out the work of absent men.
00:09:32There weren't many expectations that women's lives would simply
00:09:36go back to normal, go back to their pre war patterns
00:09:40after the conflict.
00:09:45But in fact, the effects of war continued to be felt
00:09:47for many years.
00:09:51I rationing continued.
00:09:53Buildings damaged in the blitz were unprepared.
00:09:56Men were demobilized only very slowly over several years.
00:10:00And as a result,
00:10:05many women were actually encouraged by the Ministry of
00:10:06Labour to stay in work.
00:10:08There was a campaign women in industry launched in
00:10:12nineteen forty seven.
00:10:17So by nineteen fifty one,
00:10:18more than twice the number of married women
00:10:20were in employment than had been in nineteen thirty one.
00:10:23And the so called marriage bar,
00:10:27which prohibited married women from working,
00:10:29was being lifted,
00:10:32especially in the civil service and in professions like teaching.
00:10:33So in that sense,
00:10:37the impact of the war upon women and especially on women's
00:10:39employment was profound.
00:10:42The other impact of so called total war was to change the
00:10:46nature, the very nature and the role of the state in modern
00:10:50Britain.
00:10:54The government during the war seized control of almost every
00:10:55possible economic resource that could contribute towards the
00:10:59wartime effort, And it put in place systems like economic
00:11:02rationing of consumer goods,
00:11:06control of prices, control of rents in the name of fair
00:11:10shares for all.
00:11:14We've already talked about conscription.
00:11:16There was allocation of labor to key wartime industries.
00:11:18And, again, these wartime changes,
00:11:23unlike after nineteen eighteen,
00:11:26were not reversed in the immediate postwar years.
00:11:28Governments remain committed probably until the late
00:11:32nineteen seventies to the idea of full employment.
00:11:35Industries were nationalized by the post war Attlee government,
00:11:40including transport,
00:11:44and key industries and utilities such as coal and gas.
00:11:46But, also, wartime austerity didn't end in nineteen forty five.
00:11:52It's interesting that despite the creation of a welfare
00:11:59state, despite the new NHS from nineteen forty eight,
00:12:01there are actually very few new schools or new hospitals
00:12:06built in this period.
00:12:10Rent and price controls continued after the war.
00:12:13And above all, rationing remained.
00:12:17Bread was rationed until nineteen
00:12:19forty eight, cloves until nineteen forty nine,
00:12:22and sugar until nineteen fifty three.
00:12:26I think the unpopularity
00:12:30of rationing, the continuation
00:12:32of wartime rationing,
00:12:35is actually a major reason in explaining why the Labour
00:12:38government of Clement Attlee,
00:12:41elected in a landslide in nineteen forty five,
00:12:42had lost power and the conservatives and Winston
00:12:46Churchill were to return in nineteen fifty one.
00:12:49
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Windscheffel, A. (2024, June 28). Britain – The Socioeconomic Landscape, 1939-79 - How was Britain impacted by total war from 1939-51? [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/britain-the-socioeconomic-landscape-1939-79
MLA style
Windscheffel, A. "Britain – The Socioeconomic Landscape, 1939-79 – How was Britain impacted by total war from 1939-51?." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 28 Jun 2024, https://massolit.io/courses/britain-the-socioeconomic-landscape-1939-79