Men in reserve: British civilian masculinities in the Second World War 9781526106131

Citation preview

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Men in reserve

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Cultural History of Modern War Series editors Ana Carden-​Coyne, Peter Gatrell, Max Jones, Penny Summerfield and Bertrand Taithe Already published Carol Acton and Jane Potter  Working in a world of hurt: Trauma and resilience in the narratives of medical personnel in warzones Julie Anderson  War, disability and rehabilitation in Britain: Soul of a nation Lindsey Dodd  French children under the Allied bombs, 1940–​45: An oral history Rachel Duffett  The stomach for fighting: Food and the soldiers of the First World War Christine E. Hallett  Containing trauma: Nursing work in the First World War Jo Laycock  Imagining Armenia: Orientalism, ambiguity and intervention Chris Millington  From victory to Vichy: Veterans in inter-​war France Juliette Pattinson  Behind enemy lines: Gender, passing and the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War Chris Pearson  Mobilizing nature: The environmental history of war and militarization in Modern France Jeffrey S. Reznick  Healing the nation: Soldiers and the culture of caregiving in Britain during the Great War Jeffrey S. Reznick  John Galsworthy and disabled soldiers of the Great War: Sith an illustrated selection of his writings Michael Roper  The secret battle: Emotional survival in the Great War Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-​Bird  Contesting home defence: Men, women and the Home Guard in the Second World War Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy (eds.)  The silent morning: Culture and memory after the Armistice Spiros Tsoutsoumpis  The People’s Armies: A history of the Greek resistance Laura Ugolini  Civvies: Middle-​class men on the English Home Front, 1914–​18 Wendy Ugolini  Experiencing war as the ‘enemy other’: Italian Scottish experience in World War II Colette Wilson  Paris and the Commune, 1871–​78: The politics of forgetting

http://​www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/​subjectareas/​history/​research/​cchw/​

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Men in reserve British civilian masculinities in the Second World War

v J u l iet te Pat t i n s on , A rt hur McI vor a n d L i n sey   Rob b

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Juliette Pattinson, Arthur McIvor and Linsey Robb 2017 The rights of Juliette Pattinson, Arthur McIvor and Linsey Robb to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 1 5261 0069 6  hardback First published 2017 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing

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The Second World War touched men’s lives in a variety of ways. We, therefore, dedicate this book to the memory of: Juliette’s grandpa, who served in the police in the East End of London until he was de-​reserved and, to his great frustration, had to leave his wife and two young children to fight in Burma. Jack Gale (1915–​95) Arthur’s father, who worked on the docks in Liverpool as a teenager before joining the Royal Navy aged eighteen in 1943, serving on a corvette doing convoy duty in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Arthur McIvor (1925–​92) Linsey’s great-​grandfather, who, after serving in the Imperial Camel Corps during the First World War, was a sergeant in the Home Guard during the Second World War protecting the streets of Crosshill, Ayrshire while waiting for his three sons to return from military service. John ‘Paw’ Robb (1892–​1974)

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Contents

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List of figures List of tables Acknowledgements List of abbreviations 1 2

Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man Raising an ‘industrial army’: the policy of reservation in the First and Second World Wars 3 ‘Making a contribution to the war effort’: reactions to reserved status, masculinity and the military 4 Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work 5 Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness 6 Outside the factory gates: reserved life on the home front 7 Forgotten: the missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations Concluding thoughts Appendix 1  Table of male interviewees’ details Appendix 2  An international perspective on wartime labour control Bibliography Index

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1 50 95 133 191 241 287 329 334 340 344 375

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Figures

1.1 John Nunney, Back Them Up!, TNA, INF 13/​123/​41 (1943) page 8 1.2 Leslie Oliphant, The Attack Begins in the Factory, TNA, INF 13/​123/​14 (1943) 9 1.3 Stanley Spencer, Riveters (detail), oil on canvas, IWM, ART LD 1375 (1941) 19 1.4 Anon., Give ’Em Both Barrels, IWM, PST 14082 (undated) 21 1.5 Sidney Strube, Put It There!, The Admiralty, TNA, INF 3/​ 1338 (undated) 22 1.6 Harold Pym, Combined Operations Include You, TNA, INF 13/​122/​21 (undated) 23 1.7 Anon., Join ARP –​Enrol at Any Fire Station, IWM, PST 13879 (undated) 25 1.8 Bowmar, ARP: Here’s a Man’s Job!, IWM, PST 0147 (undated) 26 1.9 Ashley Havinden, Wanted: Men for First Aid Parties. A Real Man’s Job, IWM, PST 13899 (undated) 27 1.10 Mass Observation Diarist 5118, 12 July 1941 33 1.11 Mass Observation Diarist 5065, 5 September 1942 33 2.1 To Starred or Badged Single Men . . ., IWM, PST 5049, December 1915 56 2.2 Percy Fearon (‘Poy’), Sketch Map of the Funk Holes of London, Evening Standard, 27 October 1916 57 2.3 The first page of entries from the ‘Schedule of Reserved Occupations for Use in Time of War’, TNA, LAB 45/​1 (1939) 64 4.1 Leslie Gilbert Illingworth, Daily Mail, 8 March 1944 177 5.1 Coughs & sneezes spread diseases, IWM, PST 14136 (undated) 201 v viii v

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List of figures 5.2 One of our Fighters is Missing if you are off Work with an Accident, IWM, PST 14324 (undated) 5.3 ’Ware Hitler’s Greatest Ally: Herr Septicaemia, IWM, PST 14196 (undated) 6.1 Bert Thomas, Evening Standard, British Cartoon Archive, BT0082, 12 April 1939 7.1 The Merchant Navy Memorial, Dover (photo by Juliette Pattinson) 7.2 The National Firefighters Memorial, London (photo by Juliette Pattinson)

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208 209 272 294 297

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Tables

2.1 Ratio of men in armed forces to civilian workers, 1938–​1945 page 82 2.2 Numbers of workers in engineering and shipbuilding, distributive trades, government and transport (millions) 83 2.3 Numbers of workers in engineering, agriculture, iron and steel industry, and shipbuilding 83 2.4 Numbers of men in armed forces, and workers in metals, engineering, vehicles and shipbuilding (millions) 88 5.1 Reported non-​fatal accidents sustained by men and women in factories, 1938–​1945 207

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Acknowledgements

This books stems from an idea that took shape at the University of Strathclyde. Juliette gave an undergraduate lecture in 2005 on masculinity on the home front wherein she remarked on the lack of scholarship on British civilian men. This resulted in discussions with Arthur, who was present in the lecture hall, and who had flagged up in an article in 2004 the need for ‘a systematic oral history of the “reserved occupations.”’ This led to a successful application to the AHRC for a Collaborative Doctoral Award on Glasgow’s war, the recipient of whom was Alison Chand, to record the testimonies of men in reserved occupations in the region. Wendy Ugolini was employed as a Research Fellow of the Scottish Oral History Centre to embark on a pilot project and an application was made to the AHRC for a two-​year project which was ultimately successful. Linsey Robb was then appointed the project Research Associate. Without the financial support of the SOHC, the University of Strathclyde and the AHRC, the memories of these men would have been lost forever. We would also like to thank our respective institutions: the Universities of Kent and Strathclyde and Teesside University. We are hugely grateful for the involvement of Wendy Ugolini at the project’s outset. And again at the end as she read and commented upon the entire manuscript. Each chapter also underwent external peer review and we would like to thank Ian Beckett, Mark Connelly, Geoff Field, Emma Newlands, Lucy Noakes, Corinna Peniston-​Bird and Tim Strangleman (and MUP’s anonymous external reviewer) for their insightful comments. We would also like to thank Marjorie Levine-​Clark who commented on our panel at the North American Conference on British Studies in Minneapolis in 2014 and Carole McCallum, the University Archivist v xi v

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Acknowledgements at Glasgow Caledonian. Finally, we want to sincerely thank the men who were interviewed for this project, for their generosity of time and their willingness to share their memories. Without their rich testimonies, this book would be a bland account of reserved occupation policy.

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Abbreviations

AEU Amalgamated Engineering Union AFS Auxiliary Fire Service AHRC Arts and Humanities Research Council ARP Air Raid Precaution ATS Auxiliary Territorial Service BEF British Expeditionary Force BJIM British Journal of Industrial Medicine CEMA Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts EMS Emergency Medical Service ENSA Entertainments National Service Association FANY First Aid Nursing Yeomanry IWGC Imperial War Graves Commission IWM Imperial War Museum IWM SA Imperial War Museum Sound Archive JPC Joint Production Committee RAE Royal Aircraft Establishment RAF Royal Air Force ROF Royal Ordnance Factory SOHC Scottish Oral History Centre STUC Scottish Trade Union Congress TGWU Transport and General Workers’ Union TNA The National Archives TNT Trinitrotoluene TUC Trades Union Congress WAAF Women’s Auxiliary Air Force

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man

During the Second World War, Peter Ciarella worked as an electrician for a shipbuilding firm on the Clyde. When asked during an oral history interview undertaken in 2013 if he felt that his job had made a contribution to the war effort, he replied:  ‘I think if it wasn’t for me we wouldn’t have won the war! . . . I’m quite sure! Yes definitely [laughter].’1 While Ciarella made these remarks in jest, it was certainly true that without men like him the war could not have been won. The British war effort needed not only soldiers to fire weapons but also civilians to make munitions, build ships, grow food and maintain a basic level of services on the home front. Indeed, in marked contrast to August 1914 when the popular belief held that the war would be over by Christmas, Britain embarked upon war with Germany in September 1939 with the recognition that the conflict was likely to be a protracted one. Survival required the mobilisation of all resources available, both material and human. Labour needed to be diverted from less essential industries to ones vital to the prosecution of the war. In the lead-​up to the outbreak of the war, therefore, the British Government had begun to organise and prepare for military conscription and the parallel control of its manpower resources. As Corinna Peniston-​Bird has explained, the fit young man was the target of conscription to the military services.2 To be eligible for the armed forces, a man had to be aged between nineteen and forty-​one –​ extended to between eighteen-​and-​a-​half to fifty-​one in December 1941 –​physically fit, passing a rigorous medical examination, and not be employed in an occupation considered essential to the prosecution of the war. Skilled male workers in a wide range of jobs, whose expertise was required on the home front, were to be prevented from being absorbed into the services. In 1922, the Government began to v1v

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Men in reserve draw up plans for the best use of all available resources in the event of another lengthy war, having learnt from the First World War, in which unchecked conscription had led to a severe shortage of vital manpower. This was periodically revised. With another war seeming increasingly likely in 1938, following discussions between the armed forces, industry and the Ministry of Labour and National Service, the Government devised a Schedule of Reserved Occupations, which made provision for ‘skilled workpeople who would be required in time of war for the maintenance of necessary production or essential service’ to be exempt from enlistment in the armed forces.3 This often meant that men who were in good health and aged within the call-​up range were prevented from undertaking military service. Yet to a remarkable degree, as Penny Summerfield has noted, the figure of the civilian male worker remains largely absent from popular representations of Second World War Britain.4 It is rarely acknowledged that in 1945, when membership of the services was at its highest, the proportion of men engaged in civilian employment (over 10  million) to those in the services (4.6  million), was approximately 2:1.5 Statistically, then, far more men remained stationed on the home front –​working either in heavy industries such as shipbuilding, coal mining, and iron and steel manufacture, or in ‘white-​collar’ occupations such as the civil service and the medical profession –​than were conscripted into the three armed forces. This book seeks to rescue the reserved man from obscurity, by utilising oral histories, autobiographies, archival research and visual sources, and, crucially, to make working-​class men, who are the focus of this study, visible as gendered subjects. It explores the invisibility of the reserved worker in both contemporary accounts and post-​war representations in a context that witnessed the primacy of the ‘soldier hero’. This term, which refers to an idealised yet largely imagined conceptualisation of British masculinity, is discussed by Graham Dawson in his ground-​ breaking cultural analysis of the imperial adventurers Henry Havelock and T. E. Lawrence. Dawson also examines the impact of narratives featuring these iconic soldier heroes on young boys like himself growing up in the post-​1945 period.6 The notion of the soldier hero makes evident that some forms of maleness are positioned hierarchically above other marginalised and subordinated masculinities. R. W. Connell’s concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ is relevant here in that it suggests that in any given society, one form of masculinity is culturally exalted, albeit never numerically dominant, and occupies the hegemonic position.7 During v2v

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man the Second World War, the man in uniform was held in high esteem. To be a combatant was to be deemed manly. By contrast, the man who was not defending his country on the battlefield, at sea or in the air was largely invisible culturally, and, by implication, considered less of a man. This polarisation of military and civilian masculinities, in which the young, fit, brawny, heroic serviceman was invariably constructed in opposition to the civilian male who was depicted, if at all, as less manly, old, unfit and ‘soft’, has led historians to conclude that civilian masculinity was challenged.8 In her study of female war workers, Penny Summerfield identifies this polarity and notes that civilian masculinity was regarded as being ‘in deficit’ and that non-​combatant men were ‘in some way impaired, and by wartime standards emasculated’.9 The uncertainty surrounding civilian masculinities was compounded by the influx of women into the labour market, including into areas that had been male-​dominated prior to the war. By 1943, 6.8 million women were engaged in wartime work –​an unprecedented level of female participation. Moreover, women workers were widely praised during the war in both film and print media and have been remembered subsequently as playing a crucial role.10 Civilian men on the other hand have been all but erased from popular memory or, alternatively, dismissed as being not ‘fit’ to serve in the forces. Summerfield notes the prevalence of this belief among her female respondents interviewed in the 1990s. One woman, a secretary employed in a number of factories in Birmingham, asserted:  ‘There were no men because they’d all gone to the war, there were just boys’, while another, working at the Vickers Armstrong factory in Blackpool noted: ‘There was no men. The men were all away.’ She then stated that those she worked alongside were either ‘older men, over forty five’ or ‘hadn’t passed the medical for the Forces’.11 Similarly, Janet Miller, one of our Scottish interviewees from the pilot project, and the only woman interviewed, had been a trainee teacher during the war. She recalled: ‘There were no men. The men were all in the forces . . . College was man-​less. There were a few I think who were maybe medically unfit . . . only two or three. But it was a time of man scarcity.’ She repeated later in the interview that ‘the men were all in the forces’.12 The absence on the home front of young, fit, civilian men is often (mistakenly) asserted by oral respondents, as the repetition of ‘there were no men’ in these three accounts makes evident. Yet the mean age of members serving in the Local Defence Volunteers, later renamed the Home Guard, a voluntary organisation formed in 1940 at the height of the invasion scare, was just thirty-​five, with many in their teens and twenties also joining.13 It would v3v

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Men in reserve appear then that the wartime civilian man is remembered as too old, too young or physically unfit, and is often depicted culturally in this way. Yet as John Tosh has asserted, adopting such an approach, in which cultural representation is emphasised at the expense of experience, often ignores the lived reality encountered by individuals.14 This book prioritises that lived experience, while recognising there is no such thing as an ‘unmediated lived reality’, a ‘pristine subjectivity’.15 It utilises newly recorded interviews with fifty-​six men who were deployed in reserved occupations in England, Scotland and Wales during the war, and who largely self-​identified as working-​class during the war as a result of their occupation. They are supplemented by interviews archived by the Imperial War Museum, the British Library and the Trades Union Congress (TUC), as well as written accounts such as memoirs. Together, they enable us to question how young, fit miners; iron and steel workers; shipbuilding workers; and dockers, who had to respond to the threats to masculinities posed by the entry of women to previously male-​dominated workplaces, navigated the wartime valorisation of the militarised body. Our sources reveal that wartime constructions of masculinity remained open to contestation. While capable of challenging civilian masculinities, the Second World War simultaneously reinforced them by bolstering the capacity to protect, and to provide by earning high wages, both of which were key markers of masculinity. This was especially the case for the young, working-​class ‘hard men’ employed in heavy industry who form the basis of our sample. This classic construction of masculinity was deeply engrained in pre-​war traditional heavy industry communities such as Glasgow and Clydeside, as Ronnie Johnston and Arthur McIvor have demonstrated.16 ‘Hard men’ were characterised by their breadwinner status, toughness and resilience, with their manliness forged in physically demanding and often hazardous and unhealthy manual occupations where they faced up to danger as well as to exploitative employers. This earnt them respect within their communities. Moreover, many factories, garages, yards and docks did not have to confront an influx of women and remained largely masculine spaces even during wartime. The testimonies we have collected among the country’s youngest wartime workers that do report the existence of female colleagues reveal that these ‘dilutees’ could enhance civilian men’s masculinities, rather than render them unstable. Some of our interviewees retrospectively attempted to negate the potential threats to masculinity by emphasising their workplace dominance over female dilutees. It should not then be assumed that all civilian men automatically felt emasculated by the soldier hero and the v4v

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man female dilutee. The personal testimonies we collected among working-​ class men who were deployed in manual trades, which are discussed in more depth below, suggest that there were a multitude of ways in which non-​combatant men could maintain their masculine status. This book uses subjective lived experience supported by a range of other documentary evidence to build up a picture that fundamentally complicates these notions, seeking to provide a much more nuanced interpretation of wartime masculine civilian status.

The soldier hero and the invisible male civilian Widely held understandings about wartime service reveal that there is a hierarchy of value attached to different forms of contributions, with combatants being most commonly situated at the top.17 Martin Francis’s engaging study, examining how Royal Air Force (RAF) air crew were represented in popular culture both during the war and since, notes that cultural memory focuses on the heroism and glamour associated with the ‘fly boys’.18 These chivalric knights of the air, who belonged to this relatively new branch of the forces, were generally young and middle-​ class, wore a striking blue uniform, mastered complex modern machinery, and could be seen engaging the enemy directly in dog-​fights over the south-​east English countryside during the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940.19 As pilot Richard Hillary wrote in his 1942 memoir, ‘in a Spitfire we’re back to war as it ought to be . . . Back to individual combat, to self-​reliance, total responsibility for one’s own fate. One either kills or is killed; and it’s damned exciting.’20 These men might be regarded as being at the pinnacle of this hierarchy, both during the war and since. They embodied manly heroism:  ‘the few’ to whom ‘so many’ owed so much. The Prime Minister Winston Churchill saw them as modern-​day equivalents to Knights of the Round Table and the Crusaders.21 J. B. Priestley’s influential 1940 radio broadcast Postscripts –​the most popular programme in British broadcasting history, with a third of adults listening in –​often lauded the heroic figure of the airman. His broadcast on 28 July 1940 centred on an RAF pilot, while on 8 September 1940 he asserted: ‘our airmen have already found a shining place for ever in the world’s imagination, becoming one of those bands of young heroes, creating a saga, that men can never forget’.22 These ‘young heroes’ are proclaimed to be ‘strong’ and ‘mighty youth’ in Humphrey Jennings’s documentary Words for Battle (1941). Cadets in the RAF gather round a Spitfire as the words of John Milton’s 1644 tract about press freedom, v5v

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Men in reserve Areopagitica, are read out by Laurence Olivier:  ‘Methinks I  see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks: Methinks I see her as an Eagle muing her mighty youth . . . .’ As with Churchill’s speech, there is a linkage here to England’s literary past into which the pilots are being interwoven. They become part of the cultural fabric and central to Britain’s understanding of self. The rhetoric used by Churchill, Priestley and Jennings was part of the creation of the myth of the heroic pilot as Britain was on the brink of defeat. This cultural exalting, of pilots in particular, but to a lesser degree of all servicemen, undoubtedly impacted upon young men who were keen to enlist. Durham teenager Ron Spedding, aged fifteen in 1939, recollected: As very young men [we] had actually looked forward to the day when we could join the armed forces and do our bit for King and Country. We would often imagine and fancy ourselves in a military uniform parading behind a brass band and sporting medals received for courage and valour. We really did believe that the most important thing in life was to fight and destroy the enemy, win the war and earn a share in the final victory and the glory. As I said, we were young, impressionable and very naïve.

His final sentence suggests that this may have been a retrospective critique of the war that developed over the next forty years, rather than a wartime mindset. His ‘innocence and illusions’ were shattered when his close friend serving in the RAF was killed, a stark and sobering reminder to him that ‘war was not a glorious game, not a splendid adventure’.23 While RAF air crew were positioned at the top of the hierarchy of wartime service, with RAF ground crew and naval and army personnel situated just below, civilian workers were located far lower down. Yet the State did attempt to convince the civilian working population of their necessity. The short film The Warning (1939) declared: War to-​day involves not only the fighting services, as it did in the past, but the whole population. And the people must be organised for their own defence. This involves Service! Service for Security. The better we are prepared to meet a hostile attack the less likely it is that an attack will be made. But we must be prepared, and it is the duty of every one of us to consider what part he or she can best play.24

This appeal was made to both men and women. There are no early filmic examples where reserved men are singled out for praise. As Linsey Robb notes in her examination of cultural representations of civilian men, the v6v

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man concept of reserved occupations was too diffuse and shifted frequently, thereby making it a poor choice of topic for film makers.25 Men in white-​ collar professions are omitted entirely from all forms of media for much of the war: the pharmacist and the doctor, whose work was not directly linked to the war effort except in providing services that facilitated the work of others, were not considered noteworthy.26 Even the industrial male worker is depicted far less frequently than the much lauded military man in wartime representations, and there was no noticeable shift as a consequence of the changing circumstances of the war. Indeed, civilian men barely featured in Priestley’s vignettes of daily life and were, as Penny Summerfield asserts, ‘a blank’.27 They were also missing from many wartime propaganda posters, scrutiny of which reveals the high status enjoyed by men in the air force, army and navy, and, by contrast, the fragile positioning of the male civilian. While there were a few instances whereby individual industries were targeted in propaganda posters reflecting the changing war situation, there were no examples that would have entered the mainstream. The poster series entitled ‘Back Them Up!’, which began in 1939 and continued through to 1945, attempted to emphasise the importance to the war effort of those on the home front, and yet the figure of the civilian worker, male or female, is entirely absent (see for example Figure 1.1).28 This is a physical rather than a rhetorical absence, with the posters instructing workers to support the muscular servicemen who are depicted in the heat of battle. This was not the only series to make the civilian worker invisible:  ‘The Attack Begins in the Factory’, launched during the North African campaign in 1943, used the same device of portraying servicemen engaging in combat, machinery, a defeated enemy and a devastated German city.29 The captions immediately beneath the colourful action illustrations are in a very small font and are easily overlooked:  ‘The new Airborne Army is now in action in Europe  –​ equipped by British factories’; ‘The big raids on Germany continue. British war plants share with the R.A.F.  credit for these giant operations.’ While the attack might have begun in the factory with the manufacture of weapons and machinery, it was rugged servicemen who played the active role in the offensive and who were visible in the poster. These poster series, which were designed for use in factories to remind civilian workers of their importance and were initiated to raise their morale and productivity, surely back-​fired. Indeed, none of our interviewees referred to these images unbidden and few could recall any propaganda aimed at them, even when presented with examples. v7v

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Figure 1.1  John Nunney, Back Them Up!, TNA, INF 13/​123/​41 (1943)

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man

Figure 1.2  Leslie Oliphant, The Attack Begins in the Factory, TNA, INF 13/​123/​14 (1943) v9v

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Men in reserve Wartime films also underscored the supportive silent role of civilian men. The highly acclaimed In Which We Serve (1942), written, directed, composed and starring Noel Coward, is one such example. ‘This is the story of a ship’, we are told, and the opening scenes set before the outbreak of the war feature shipbuilders riveting and welding as they construct the vessel HMS Torrin. This section lasts for only ninety seconds and there is no dialogue –​just the natural sounds of industry, accompanied by rousing music. The film then moves on to focus on the Royal Navy personnel, their domestic lives and the Battle of Crete in 1941, in which the ship receives a direct hit and sinks. The civilian men who were so crucial to the ‘story’ do not feature on screen again. Even wartime films set on the home front, including Went the Day Well? (1942), The Gentle Sex (1943), Millions Like Us (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944) and The Way to the Stars (1945), erase the young civilian man of conscription age from the screen, focusing instead on male military personnel, women and older men. Similarly, BBC radio, newsreel companies and newspapers generally ignored the man engaged on the home front in a civilian occupation.30 More general representations of the home-​front male, such as the man digging for victory in his allotment or propping up the bar talking carelessly and costing lives, were frequently depicted as middle-​aged or elderly, and rather comically as either puny or rotund.31 Some representations were less humorous and had a darker edge. Noel Coward’s 1944 poetic tribute to RAF Bomber Command, ‘Lie in the Dark and Listen’, led to objections by those in reserved occupations for its somewhat acerbic depiction of civilian men by a man generally perceived to have himself ‘dodged’ military service.32 Inspired by the sound of Lancaster bombers flying overhead on their way to unleash a night-​time raid on Cologne, Coward’s first two verses speak of the ‘English saplings with English roots . . . Riding the icy, moonlight sky’. The third verse turns to the ‘little citizens’ safe below in their ‘warm civilian beds’: Lie in the dark and listen. City magnates and steel contractors Factory workers and politicians Soft hysterical little actors, Ballet dancers, reserved musicians Safe in your warm civilian beds, Count your profits and count your sheep Life is passing above your heads, Just turn over and try to sleep.

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man Lie in the dark and let them go There’s one debt you’ll forever owe, Lie in the dark and listen.33

The poem perhaps points to some self-​loathing as Coward, one of the ‘soft hysterical little actors’ mentioned, invokes two reviled home-​front stereotypes, the profiteer and the pansy, and in a recording he disparagingly rolled the ‘r’ of ‘reserved musicians’.34 It was unproblematically used in 2006 at the dedication service of a Bomber Command memorial ledger-​stone at Lincoln Cathedral, thereby suggesting an enduring level of consensus around his depiction of these shirkers. It provides a useful insight into some of the prevalent attitudes towards male civilian workers who spent the war working on the home front in Britain rather than serving in uniform. Many historians point to the primacy of military masculine identity, embodied by the soldier hero, within popular discourse during the First and Second World Wars.35 In the First World War, the volunteer soldier was the epitome of manliness, proving his masculinity by his willingness to sacrifice himself in the defence of his family, friends, community and country.36 The inter-​war period, which witnessed an avalanche of published combatant memoirs, plays and poetry collections chronicling the horrors of trench warfare, cemented the soldier’s manly heroism.37 Tales from the trenches have been a staple of post-​1960s school curricula and university modules, television schedules and academic research, ensuring that the combatant is at the forefront of the popular memory of the First World War. In contrast, civilian men have been almost entirely forgotten. The First World War home front in popular memory is figured as a feminised space devoid of men who had all rushed to the colours and large swathes of whom were subsequently slaughtered at the Somme and Passchendaele. As such, all men who were not in the military were excluded to varying degrees from popular notions of ideal manliness and risked being seen as ‘non-​men’. Conscientious objectors occupied a particularly marginal position, as both Lois Bibbings and Nicoletta Gullace have illustrated.38 They were regarded as feminised or emasculated ‘un-men’ in juxtaposition to the exemplary figure of the volunteer soldier, and in some representations were depicted as sexual inverts.39 Rendered both invisible and unmanly by their failure to ‘prove’ their masculinity through volunteering and rejecting conscription, civilian men were relegated to a subordinate status, suspected of shirking. No wonder, then, that there was a dearth of male civilian autobiographies produced in the inter-​war period; their war stories were simply not regarded, either by themselves or by publishers, as sufficiently marketable. Yet Laura Ugolini’s v 11 v

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Men in reserve richly detailed study analysing middle-​aged, middle-​class Englishmen’s narratives suggests that there was no shortage of non-​published civilian men’s contemporary writing.40 There is a notable continuity between the First and Second World Wars linking manliness, understood here as ‘a set of practices and qualities related to a gendered identity’,41 with military service and, conversely, unmanliness with civilian status. Sonya Rose, for example, argues that the ‘successful enactment’ of hegemonic masculinity in the Second World War ‘depended on being visibly a member of the fighting forces’.42 Military uniform was, as we shall see in Chapter 3, a visual symbol of elevated status. In spite of the wartime rhetoric of a ‘people’s war’ in which everyone had a role to play, the categorisation of individuals as either civilians or combatants remained paramount.43 As Graham Dawson notes, the ‘civilian–​military distinction’ has taken the form of ‘especially acute’ ‘separate spheres’.44 Civilian men were often grouped with others who were prevented from fighting: women, the elderly and children. The experience of warfare was firmly incorporated into notions of maleness in the immediate post-​war period and since.45 Masculinity was tested to its extreme during the war, and combatants returned home with a sense that their sacrifices merited a better society. National Service until 1961 also continued to incubate military discipline, ‘making a man of you’. Consequently, those who had worked on the home front are often marginalised. As Penny Summerfield has questioned, if active service distinguished between men and women, and if manliness and heroism were embodied by the soldier hero, what becomes of the man who remained a civilian?46 The consensus among historians such as Summerfield, Peniston-​Bird, Bibbings and Gullace appears to be that civilian men were emasculated by women’s wartime roles, in particular their newly acquired skills, increased affluence, greater mobility and heightened sense of self-​worth, and were compared unfavourably to the uniformed soldier. Civilian men were perceived as isolated individuals, prioritising self-​preservation over collective survival, as we shall see in Chapter 2.47 Caught in a no-​man’s land between female war workers and male combatants, it is argued, men on the home front experienced a reduced sense of importance. Consequently, as Peniston-​Bird states, during the war, ‘men did not have a choice whether to conform or reject hegemonic masculinity:  they positioned themselves in relation to it’.48 However, as this book will show, the construction of working-​class masculinities within the wartime workplace remains open to contestation. While their manliness might have been challenged by being prevented v 12 v

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man from enlisting, remaining on the home front enabled married men to continue to protect their families at a time of considerable danger, as well as to obtain secure employment and high earnings, facilitating their provider role. Single men, too, enjoyed large wage packets as a result of hard graft in work that often aligned them with the war effort. Thus, rather than one coherent grand narrative of emasculated reserved workers, there are plural histories and multiple, shifting and competing constructions, which this book seeks to unpick.

Reclaiming the ‘worker hero’ The Second World War inevitably brought wide-​ranging changes to working practices:  unemployment was virtually abolished, the labour force swelled in size, the number of hours worked rose, real wages increased, factory welfare and medical facilities improved, occupational health-​and-​safety standards declined, and strikes were made unlawful, as we discuss in Chapters 4 and 5. War demands also saw a marked shift towards mass production methods, with more onus placed on unskilled and semi-​skilled work. Our book thus complements the recent work of Geoff Field, and others, who have examined wartime labour relations, by refocusing on the narratives, subjectivities and lived experience of male workers recounted in oral history interviews.49 Perhaps the most marked wartime labour change, however, was the influx of women –​especially older and married women  –​into war production to replace men conscripted into the forces, and the subsequent ‘dilution’ of the established labour force.50 In a rapidly changing work environment other important transformations both diminished and threatened civilian masculinities. Men felt a curtailment of their independence as they were subjected to wartime controls and direction. Moreover, for those working in factories, assembly-​line mass production techniques and new labour management methods could disrupt traditional work patterns, threaten cherished skills, and fragment male managerial and supervisory roles, eroding for example the power of the foreman, a central figure in the pre-​war and wartime workplace. The war saw the concentration of industrial production into larger units and the application of mechanisation, more efficient science and technology, and ways of organising work to maximise production of war-​related goods. This was perhaps especially evident in the new munitions and aircraft assembly, and component plants. These modern sectors of the economy accelerated by the war diverged considerably from its older, traditional sectors, such as coalmining and shipbuilding. v 13 v

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Men in reserve Reserved workers were prevented from leaving an employer by the Essential Work Order of March 1941 and could be directed to war-​ related work as and how the State dictated. ‘Excess’ profits were, at least in theory, restricted, and income taxes were introduced to help pay for the war. Lock-​outs and strikes were also declared illegal from 1940 under Order 1305 in a further attempt to impose discipline and maximise production for the war effort. These controls and reorganisations of work could be perceived as degrading, especially for craftsmen who put great store on their autonomy at work.51 While civilian male workers might have felt diminished by the exalting of combatants and undermined by restrictions on their worker identities, war concurrently also facilitated the rebuilding of traditional working-​ class masculinity. Indeed, twenty-​eight of our fifty-​six interviewees (50 per cent), who were aged between eighteen and twenty-​eight when the war ended, did not attempt to join the services. While some believed that there was no point in trying to enlist, others undoubtedly felt comfortable in their war work. This may have been even more pronounced among middle-​aged and older, married civilian war workers, who are outside our interview cohort, and who were less susceptible to the lure of martial uniform, as witnessed also in the First World War.52 Among the ways in which non-​combatant men maintained their masculine status were full employment and high wages. Historically, the ‘essence’ of masculinity has been variously located with reference to notions of the man as provider. In late-​nineteenth-​century Europe, a socialist iconography had emerged that idealised the figure of the masculine worker, who, in George Mosse’s phrase, ‘radiated manly strength’.53 In working-​class communities dominated by heavy industries, the prevailing inter-​war discourse stressed the tough, brutal struggle in the workplace to win coal, forge iron and make ships by men desensitised to danger and risk. A culture of masculinity was created in the workplace, and this was especially entrenched in areas like Tyneside, Merseyside, south Wales and Clydeside, where the dominance of heavy manual labour in industries like shipbuilding, iron and steel, and coalmining could provide an important site for the incubation, reinforcement and reproduction of macho values and attitudes. Place is key here, with regional identities shaping the way men configured their masculinities. There was in existence, for example, a particularly heroic civilian Glaswegian male identity, which drew on the tradition of the shipyards, and the conflict between male workers and particularly authoritarian, anti-​ trade-​ union employers. Writing about Clydeside, Ronnie Johnston and Arthur McIvor highlight how manual labour was v 14 v

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man widely regarded as ‘the pinnacle of masculine endeavour’.54 This is a point reinforced by the work of Alan Campbell, who notes that Scottish mining communities in the 1930s were often ‘suffused with a discourse of manliness’, with male youths encouraged by older miners to avoid displaying emotion and to play fighting games.55 Work and the economic and social status that went along with it were, in these areas, central to the formation of masculinity in the inter-​war period. However, the Depression had eroded masculinity because of mass unemployment and the inability of large numbers of men in these blighted communities to act effectively as ‘breadwinners’. At the peak of unemployment in 1932, over 3.2 million were out of work. In some places –​for example Jarrow in the north-​east –​ unemployment reached as high as 80 per cent.56 Victor Pritchett’s study of wartime shipbuilders referred to them as: scarred by the slump. They saw famous yards close. They saw places where they had spent years of their life put up to auction. A man’s sense of right and wrong, the resources of his character, are bound up with his work and the place he lives in and, like the rest of us, the shipyard worker feels he was torn up and that his roots are raw.57

The Depression rendered work, as Joanna Bourke argues, ‘a fragile basis for masculinity’.58 However, paid work remained the key arbiter of working-​class masculinity in the inter-​war period. Susan Kingsley-​Kent argues that despite its scarcity, ‘work conferred a status on working-​class men that no other attribute could replace. Certain jobs created a higher manly standing than others, at least for some men, even at the height of unemployment, when most men took any job they could find.’59 It is our contention that war ended this long period of high unemployment and, therefore, enhanced the capacity of men in the heavy industries to fulfil the manly provider role, bringing job security and relatively high earnings. This argument supports the work of Jessica Meyer and Martin Francis, who study wartime masculinities that foreground the importance of men’s domestic identities  –​their roles as good sons and husbands who provide and protect, even amongst fighting men.60 Being a ‘big earner’ was also historically a badge of masculine status in working-​ class communities, and this capacity was enhanced in wartime with full employment and the opportunities for overtime working at inflated wage rates. For example, average weekly working hours for men aged over twenty-​one increased from 47.7 hours in October 1938 to 52.9 hours in July 1943, and consequently average weekly earnings for men over twenty-​one employed in the manufacturing industry increased from £3 9s v 15 v

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Men in reserve in October 1938 to £6 4s in July 1944, while men employed in metals, engineering and shipbuilding whose average weekly earnings were £3 15s in October 1938 saw them peak at £7 1s in January 1944.61 There were exceptional examples of men working 80-​or 90-​hour weeks, and individual sheet-​metal workers deployed on fuselage assembly taking home between £20 and £25 a week.62 With pro-​active wartime policies by Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour, to control inflation and raise the wages of the worst-​off, such as labourers, large sections of the working class were clearly better off financially and more secure. As we shall see in Chapter  4, many of our interviewees constructed accounts that drew upon the associations among pay, manual labour, hard graft, getting your hands dirty, ‘working the tools’ and manliness.63 The dual meanings of the term ‘composure’, as discussed by Graham Dawson, are evident here: interviewees composed accounts of their wartime selves that allowed them to feel comfortable with their role, offering them composure.64 Such narratives, we argue, demonstrated their self-​ narrated contributions to the war effort and cast civilian men as worker heroes on a par with soldier heroes. This underscored what we term ‘patriotic masculinity’.65 Moreover, in significantly raising the level of risk and danger on the job, from wartime work intensification, longer hours, deteriorations in occupational health-​and-​safety standards and bombing raids, the ‘hard man’ mode of masculinity was bolstered.66 Exhausting wartime work regimes and higher risks were challenged by some, including Bevin, who pressed for normalisation of working hours after the production spurt following the drama of Dunkirk in 1940 had passed. Nonetheless, high work intensity was largely accepted by workers as their contribution to the war. It is our contention that this bodily sacrifice in the workplace, which to some extent paralleled the risks faced by those in the armed services, helped civilian working-​class men to rescue their battered masculinity, a consequence of the Depression, and represent themselves as performing patriotic masculinity by making a pivotal contribution to the war effort. Furthermore, the war deepened the capacities of workers to stand up to management, as workplace collective organisation was re-​ energised and shop stewards again saturated the industrial workplace. Thus, it can be argued that masculinity survived intact within many traditional working-​class communities dominated by the heavy industries. While our study focuses on working-​class masculinities, what of the men who did not derive their masculine status from undertaking dirty, heavy labour? Those who worked in professions such as dentistry and medicine during the war may have operated within the framework of v 16 v

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man ‘respectable’ or ‘tempered’ masculinity, an inward-​ looking, domestic sense of manhood, which according to Sonya Rose and Alison Light emerged in the inter-​war period.67 Light argues that ideas of the nation became ‘feminised’ in the 1920s, with a movement away from officially masculine public rhetorics of militarism and imperialism towards a ‘more inward-​looking’ sense of nationhood, focusing on the domestic and private spheres and encapsulated in the popular image of ‘the suburban husband pottering in his herbaceous borders’. Thus, Light maintains, ‘whilst the First World War belonged to Tommy Atkins, the true heroics of the Second were to be found in the actions of “ordinary people” on the “Home Front” ’.68 Civilian men emerged as valued figures within their own communities and embraced some of the opportunities afforded by remaining on the home front. Research by Sally Sokoloff, for example, shows how male workers in the Midlands were able to adopt a protective or supervisory role over the wives of absent servicemen, providing a ‘continuity of male authority’.69 Civilian men, whether working in heavy industry or the professions, should not, then, be assumed to have felt emasculated. Furthermore, in contrast to the widely held notion that civilian male workers were largely invisible in wartime culture, scrutiny of a range of media reveals glimpses of the reserved man. While not as prevalent as his references to aviators, J. B. Priestley does in fact make some allusions to reserved men in Postscripts. In his broadcast of 8 September 1940, he militarises their civilian identities, stating: ‘We see now, when the enemy bombers come roaring at us at all hours, and it’s our nerve versus his; that we’re not really civilians any longer but a mixed lot of soldiers –​machine-​ minding soldiers, milkmen and postmen soldiers.’70 On other occasions he acknowledged ‘ploughman and parson, shepherd and clerk’, who formed the Local Defence Volunteers (renamed the Home Guard in July 1940), and he described his own visits to war factories that ‘vibrated with power’, making reference to electric welders and shot-​blasters who had ‘turned tame’ the giants of machinery they worked with.71 A discourse from the early months of the war increasingly emphasised the masculine nature taken on by the men who remained at home. Images of men working in the bowels of the earth were regularly employed, as in Pritchett’s evocation of a wartime shipyard:  ‘You look down into the body of the ship, through the smoke haze to the riveters’ fires and watch the men step about there like little demons in the galleries of Dante’s hell.’72 A primeval motif is evident here with ‘demons’ grafting in the abyss and, as we shall see, other commentators also described shipyard workers as ‘demons’, v 17 v

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Men in reserve while artist Graham Sutherland saw tin miners as ‘a different kind of species’.73 Some wartime propaganda, such as John Baxter’s feature film The Shipbuilders (1943), emphasised the key role played by civilian men and idealised the heroic aspects of this toil in wartime, while author and journalist Beverley Nichols, who toured the Clydeside shipyards in 1941, depicted the average worker as ‘a man of fiery independence’ and ‘rock-​ hard patriotism’, who was ‘get[ting] on with the job’.74 This image of primeval power was also apparent in the paintings of ex-​serviceman Stanley Spencer, who was one of the most celebrated artists commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. It was re-​ formed in November 1939 to document Britain’s war, and 6,000 pieces of art were produced by over 400 artists, some of which featured civilian men at work. Spencer was sent to the Kingston shipyard in Port Glasgow, one of the yards owned by Sir James Lithgow, which collectively built eighty-​four merchant ships, the largest number constructed by any firm in the Second World War. Spencer visited in May 1940, staying for several weeks, and made a number of return visits to sketch and absorb the atmosphere of the shipyards. He had the unique method of swiftly sketching life drawings on a roll of toilet paper. He worked up his innumerable sketches into drawings and then finally painted huge murals using oil. He planned to paint thirteen large commemorative canvases that together would form a three-​tiered, 70-​foot panoramic frieze, but by the time the committee was disbanded in 1946 only nine had been completed.75 Each painting was named after the men who undertook a single activity, illustrating the specific divisions of labour in a shipyard –​Caulkers, Burners, Welders, Riveters, The Template, Bending the Keel Plate, Riggers, Plumbers and The Furnaces –​and were collectively known as Shipbuilding on the Clyde.76 Rather than painting spectacular events such as ceremonies to launch new ships, Spencer chose to focus on the everyday work tasks and tools of employees as they collectively constructed tramp steamers for the Merchant Navy, which were vital to the war effort in maintaining food supplies. This focus on the ordinary was very much in keeping with the ‘people’s war’, as illustrated in the work of realist documentary film maker Humphrey Jennings, among others. Spencer was struck by the men’s skill, workmanship, industry and sense of homeliness, and was drawn to the communal activity. He included himself in Welders as the second figure on the left, illustrating his admiration for the men. Strikingly, despite sketching women workers at the shipyard,77 all but one of Spencer’s final panels featured just male labourers. He also omitted foremen and employers, although in Riggers, three men wearing bowler hats are seen v 18 v

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man on the extreme right. This was, then, a study of the men, a celebration of the craft and physically tough nature of the work and an acknowledgement of communality, cooperation, collective endeavour and camaraderie. The canvases got increasingly more claustrophobic, peopled with more and more workers:  Caulkers (1940), the first painting, features four young men, while Plumbers (1945) features fifty-​three. While their group identity is underscored by their wearing of very similar clothing –​ baggy brown trousers and jackets, rust-​coloured shirts, and cloth caps –​ Spencer paints these men as individuals, absorbed in their own personal task. Colour and lighting are used to dramatic effect to interrogate the interplay between man and machine. The Edinburgh Evening News commented that Riveters provided ‘a vivid impression of life in a Clyde shipbuilding yard. The hundreds of workers . . . are seen working like very demons. There are no slackers on the Clyde’ (see Figure  1.3).78 Again, the word ‘demons’ is used to describe the graft of shipyard workers. As we shall see in Chapter 2, the term ‘slacker’ was in use within a month of the First World War commencing and had connotations of civilian men unpatriotically evading their military service; the reference to it here in the Second World War suggests that there was no such perception that these men were failing to fulfil their duty.79 Spencer was not alone in being commissioned to portray civilian men in their daily working lives: Henry Moore, who declined the invitation to be an official war artist, accepted a commission to paint coalminers from Wheldale Colliery in Castleford, Yorkshire, a pit previously managed by his father; William Roberts depicted burly munitions workers

Figure 1.3  Stanley Spencer, Riveters (detail), oil on canvas, IWM, ART LD 1375 (1941) v 19 v

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Men in reserve at Woolwich Arsenal, agricultural labourers and civil defence members; and Graham Sutherland sketched steel workers in south Wales and tin miners in Cornwall. Of this commission, Sutherland wrote: the deeper significance of these men only gradually became clear to me. It was as if they were a different kind of species –​enobled [sic] underground, and with an added stature which above the ground they lacked, and my feeling was that in spite of the hardness of the work in their nether world, this place held for them  –​subconsciously perhaps  –​an element of daily enthralment.80

Two of Stanley Spencer’s paintings of workers at the Lithgows Shipyard in Port Glasgow commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee were exhibited at the National Gallery in May 1941. Both Sutherland and Spencer featured in Out of Chaos (1944), Jill Craigie’s documentary about wartime art, but given its failure to secure distribution –​a result of its perceived lack of commercial appeal –​few people would have been familiar with these depictions of masculine civilian men at work. Far more people would have seen the various poster campaigns that featured civilian male workers. Many such posters endeavoured to emphasise the importance to the war effort of men on the home front, putting into visual form Churchill’s August 1940 message that ‘The front line runs through the factories. The workmen are soldiers with different weapons but the same courage.’81 Churchill also used the phrase ‘front-​ line civilian’, which Helen Jones terms ‘positive labelling’.82 The need for workers to exert their maximum effort was crucial in the summer of 1940 when the Battle of Britain was still ongoing and the threat of invasion was high. Bream’s ‘Remember –​They’re Relying on You,’ 83 for example, showed a helmeted industrial worker holding an electric drill powering a squadron of fighter planes flying in formation above a shot-​down German plane. An Admiralty poster, ‘Give ’em Both Barrels’ (Figure 1.4), featured a brawny factory worker and a very young naval rating, and Put It There! (Figure  1.5) depicted a male shipyard worker and a Royal Navy sailor shaking hands, their muscularity enabling them to crush the menace of the seas: a German U-​boat adorned with the face of a shark. Both posters make visual links between soldiering and working, emphasising parity of service. Similarly, Harold Pym’s ‘Combined Operations Includes You’ depicts a soldier firing a gun and a male factory worker working a lathe (Figure 1.6).84 They have exactly the same posture, facial expression and muscular physique, but whereas the soldier is surrounded by male comrades, the factory worker toils alongside female dilutees as well as men. v 20 v

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man

Figure 1.4  Anon., Give ’Em Both Barrels (undated), IWM, PST 14082

v 21 v

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Men in reserve

Figure 1.5  Sidney Strube, Put It There!, The Admiralty (undated), TNA, INF 3/​1338 Civilian men’s masculinities may have been augmented by the visual representations of soldiers in these posters.85 Unlike the ‘Back Them Up!’ and ‘The Attack Begins in the Factory’ series discussed above, these posters not only feature the civilian male but also state equivalence. Yet they reinforce the same message: the factory is central to military victory but the industrial worker, positioned below his military counterpart, is not as important. Moreover, the women in the background may render the civilian man’s masculinity unstable, their presence a continual reminder that women were employed to undertake similar work. These sources predominantly came from the State, which had a vested interest in maintaining the morale of civilian men. While a discourse emphasising the important contribution of male workers was in evidence to a limited degree and had the potential to alter the public’s perception of male civilian workers, posters –​which were destined for factory walls rather than bus shelters and billboards –​and war art were little seen by the general public. Nevertheless, some civilian men did recognise that the State was linking their work in the docks, yards and factories on the home front with the service of men in the military. L.  E. Latchford, a v 22 v

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man

Figure 1.6  Harold Pym, Combined Operations Include You (undated), TNA, INF 13/​122/​21 v 23 v

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Men in reserve Customs and Excise worker at the Swansea docks, for example, noted in his diary ‘The governmant [sic] is drawing a parallel between men in the services and men working on the “home front”.’86 Posters endeavouring to get civilian men to undertake civil defence duties after their working day also consciously played upon ideals of masculinity. The rather ethereal, waif-​like office worker  –​undoubtedly middle-​class, as he is depicted carrying his umbrella, briefcase and newspaper  –​could become whole again by joining the Auxiliary Fire Service and by donning a uniform and wielding a hose (see, for example, Figure 1.7). ‘ARP: Here’s a Man’s Job!’ depicts a strapping young man raising his bare arm and cheering (Figure 1.8), while ‘WANTED: Men for First Aid Parties. A Real Man’s Job’ (Figure 1.9) needed no visual image. These posters assert that civilian masculinity was just as ‘real’ as that of service personnel. That they had to label civil defence ‘a real man’s job’ explicitly, however, suggests that there was a very strong popular notion to the contrary. As Lucy Noakes recognises, particular effort had to be made in recruitment propaganda to demonstrate that civil defence was a ‘real man’s job’ given that men served alongside women.87 These posters were responding to a public consensus that civil defence ought to be undertaken by women and older men. Feature films and documentary films also include the figure of the reserved man, albeit infrequently, and he was rarely referred to as such. The most notable example is Humphrey Jennings’s feature-​length classic Fires Were Started (1943), which focused on the dogged commitment of London’s auxiliary fire brigades. The fire services were especially lionised, but so too were the Merchant Navy, depicted as heroes bravely facing the dangers of marine warfare in such films as San Demetrio, London (1943) and Western Approaches (1944). These two civilian occupations most directly confronted the dangers of warfare, and consequently were widely lauded and given a prominent place in British culture.88 Other examples of films featuring civilian men at work include John Baxter’s The Shipbuilders (1943), based on a novel by George Blake and starring Clive Brook, which is set in a Clydeside shipyard prior to the outbreak of war. The Demi-​Paradise (1943), a pro-​Russian film that sought to persuade the British public to admire their Soviet  allies, depicted British shipyard workers as hard-​working, grafting around the clock in their blitzed shipyard to complete on schedule an ice-​breaker. A more ambiguous representation is The Foreman Goes to France (1942), which features an industrial worker. However, by focusing on the fantastical rescue of industrial equipment from France as the Germans invaded rather than v 24 v

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man

Figure 1.7  Anon., Join ARP – Enrol at Any Fire Station (undated), IWM, PST 13879

v 25 v

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Men in reserve

Figure 1.8  Bowmar, ARP: Here’s a Man’s Job! (undated), IWM, PST 0147 v 26 v

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man

Figure 1.9  Ashley Havinden, Wanted: Men for First Aid Parties. A Real Man’s Job (undated), IWM, PST 13899 v 27 v

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Men in reserve on essential munitions production, the film does little to suggest the necessity of the ordinary civilian worker. While feature films sometimes included civilian figures in central roles, the contributions made by men on the home front were a staple of documentary films that projected an image of the ‘people’s war’. Transfer of Skill (1940), directed by Geoffrey Bell, provides factual commentary over silent footage of craftsmen aged between thirty and fifty. It shows how their skills were applied to war-​related work: a pre-​ war jeweller is shown making precision instruments; a watchmaker produces shell fuses; and a luxury boat builder, fisherman, fishing-​rod maker and model-​railway worker are all depicted in their new roles. ‘These are the men behind the front line. On the skill of their hands we depend to fashion our machines of war.’ Pat Jackson’s 1942 short Builders is set on a real building site on which an ordnance factory was being constructed, with three workers, Charlie, Bob and George, introduced to the audience. It incorporates shots of men on the building site and in the pub, playing cards and drinking beer. The objective of the film was to boost the low morale of builders by showing that their work was vital in building the factories that would supply the armed forces with weaponry. The voiceover proclaims:  ‘Every brick you lay . . . every minute of your working day brings the downfall of Hitler a little nearer.’89 Summer on the Farm (1943), directed by Ralph Keene, depicted the hard manual labour and crucial contributions made by male agricultural workers aged in their twenties, thirties and forties, who were assisted with ‘extra labour’ provided by local women, schools, Land Clubs and the Women’s Land Army. It targeted urban industrial workers to alert them to the importance of rural workers at a time when Britain was aiming to be self-​sufficient:  ‘Without the farmers and farmworkers, the industrial millions would neither eat nor work.’ A more uncertain representation is seen in the documentary film They Keep the Wheels Turning (1942), about female dilutees working in a garage repair shop alongside male colleagues. The voiceover both praises and undermines the male worker by noting ‘his is a civilian job but it’s like a service job –​he can be proud of it’. The most positive representations of civilian men can be found in Humphrey Jennings’s body of work: his documentaries consistently addressed the home-​front male. The voiceover in Heart of Britain (1941) made poetic references to the civilian war effort, mentioning ‘the valleys of power and the rivers of industry’. Listen to Britain (1942) featured shots of miners, train drivers, factory workers producing tanks and aeroplanes, v 28 v

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man and tractor drivers, and the prelude referred to ‘the clank of machinery and shunting trains’. Jennings’s 1946 documentary A Diary for Timothy focuses on a coalminer, a farmer, an engine driver and a convalescing fighter pilot. That three of the four featured characters are civilians underscores the important contribution that reserved men made to the war effort. Moreover, their masculinities are bolstered by the incapacity of the combatant. Actor Michael Redgrave, reading a commentary written by the novelist E. M. Forster, stated: You see this was total war. Everyone was in it. It was everywhere. Not only on the battlefields but in the valleys where Goronwy, the coal miner, carries his own weapons to his own battlefront in scenery which isn’t exactly pretty. If you looked across the countryside of England, that is beautiful, you can see Alan, the farmer, he has spent the last five years of war reclaiming the land and making it fertile. He has been fighting against the forces of nature all his life. And now with a mortal enemy on us he has to fight harder than ever. In London Bill the engine driver looks out of his cab at his battlefront. No longer taking holiday makers to the sea but taking the miner’s coal, the farmer’s crops, the fighting men’s ammunitions to where they have to go. Goronwy, Alan and Bill are all fighting in their ways.

As with J. B. Priestley, Forster employs militaristic language to envelop these men in an all-​embracing, inclusive vision of Britain at war. These documentaries were shown to members of the public in schools, village halls, factory canteens and churches, brought by mobile projection vans that toured the country. While audience figures are non-​existent, contemporary evidence suggests that up to 4 million viewed these short films and that they were generally well received.90 The civilian man was not, we would argue, entirely invisible from wartime culture: he can be found in films, paintings, posters and radio broadcasts. Contrary to the widely held view that civilian manhood was challenged, these representations could be heroic and manly. In this book we will argue that reserved men were not automatically emasculated by their service on the home front. As we shall see through the analysis of newly recorded interviews, archived oral testimonies and written sources, civilian workers were fully able to compose manly identities for themselves. Secure employment and high wages augmented their sense of working-​class masculinity, and the composure of narratives of hard graft was one way in which interviewees demonstrated a form of patriotic masculinity. The fact that these men were often in skilled trades, regarded by many as the aristocracy of labour, working in large groups in sometimes quite closed communities with a particularly masculine identity v 29 v

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Men in reserve before the war like the shipyards of Clydeside, helped shore up civilian masculinity.

Invisibility in academia and in the archives Despite these glimpses of the civilian man in wartime popular culture, it could still be argued that he has been erased both from post-​war cultural representations and from popular memory, as we explore in Chapter 7. He has also been rendered almost entirely invisible in academic study.91 While the fields of masculinity studies92 and workplace cultures93 are burgeoning, and although some historians of the First and Second World Wars have addressed wartime masculinities,94 before 2016 there were no published books that deal exclusively with the question of reserved occupation status in Britain during the Second World War. Moreover, no systematic nationwide collecting of interviews with male civilian workers on the home front in either war has ever been undertaken. In 2005, Ronnie Johnston and Arthur McIvor flagged up the need for ‘a systematic oral history of the “reserved occupations” ’,95 while historians examining the experience of war in Wales note that ‘another aspect of the conflict that would repay exploration in a Welsh context concerns the reserved occupations.’96 Recognising the omission, Arthur and Juliette made an application in 2008 to the AHRC for a Collaborative Doctoral Award focusing on ‘Glasgow’s war’ to remedy this. Alison Chand consequently undertook fifty interviews with male Clydeside reserved workers that were used in her doctoral thesis (now a book), examining the ‘lived’ and ‘imagined’ identities of her interviewees.97 ‘Bevin Boys’ –​young men who upon receiving their call-​up papers were randomly selected by ballot to work in the pits despite having no mining experience –​and Home Guards –​who served, initially voluntarily, in a civil defence capacity –​ have been the subject of a number of publications, but these tend to be populist, non-​scholarly accounts appealing to the general reader.98 The exception is Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-​Bird’s analysis of the Home Guard, which makes a significant contribution to our understanding of wartime masculinities.99 Our study of men with reserved status, some of whom joined the Home Guard, complements and builds upon their research. The relative cultural invisibility of the male civilian worker is also apparent in oral archives. Within national sound collections, no systematic recording had been carried out with those who were civilian workers for the duration of the war until 2005. We have unearthed and drawn upon v 30 v

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man in our analysis archival material held at the Imperial War Museum,100 the National Library of Wales,101 the British Library,102 Glasgow Museums103 and the TUC.104 While existing collections did not necessarily address the questions we would like to have asked, these interviews did yield some wonderful and insightful material into civilian workers’ lives. Some collections did indicate a clear bias in recruitment. The Imperial War Museum interviews showed an evident partiality towards men who held reserved status in the Second World War for a limited period and ultimately enlisted and served in the armed forces, while the TUC interviews understandably tended to represent a disproportionate number of union activists, and the main interest of these interviews was, predictably, trade unionism and industrial relations.105 While reserved workers rarely feature in sound archives, they can be found in written archives, such as the Ministry of Labour files, the University of Warwick’s Modern Records Centre106 and local trades councils. A useful overview of material held in local archives across the United Kingdom is the ‘Recollections of World War Two’ website but, strikingly, it does not contain the category ‘Reserved Occupations’.107 One website that does have such a section is the BBC’s ‘People’s War’ archive,108 an interactive online project that ran from June 2003 to January 2006 seeking reminiscences of those who experienced the Second World War in order to construct a digital archive for future generations. Of the 47,000 written documents received in response to the BBC’s call, 199  ‘stories’ were about reserved status. These can be found under the title of ‘Reserved Occupations’ in the ‘Working Life’ section. Many of those listed as ‘reserved occupations’, however, were in fact not: incorrectly filed under this heading were a large number of Bevin Boys. Rather than being prevented from going into the forces because of their skilled employment, these young men were directed into the mines, having been balloted upon receiving their call-​up papers. The scale of the response by those who had been employed in jobs listed on the Schedule of Reserved Occupations –​just 0.5 per cent of the total number of stories submitted –​suggests that they did not feel their stories were worth sharing. This indicated starkly the pressing need for our study to recover such experiences before they were lost forever. Themes discussed by these online contributors mirror those highlighted in our interview cohort. Tom Tommins, for example, who worked at Fairey Aviation in Stockport, stated:  ‘I could not help feeling that there was something going on which was far more exciting than factory work.’109 The reserved men who made contributions to the ‘People’s War’ archive were as reluctant to discuss work-​based issues as some of our interviewees, preferring v 31 v

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Men in reserve to recount tales of food shortages and civil defence work. Nevertheless, it was the enthusiasm of the few who wanted to record their memories in the ‘People’s War’ archive, indicating the lingering significance of the Second World War in their lives, that we were keen to tap into in conducting our nation-​wide, oral-​history-​based project. Despite the lack of both scholarly and museum-​curatorial attention on the reserved occupations, there is a wealth of source material with which to work. Contemporary records exist in the form of documentary and feature films, radio broadcasts, paintings, posters, newspaper articles, parliamentary records, Home Intelligence reports, and the diaries and reports collated by Mass Observation. This organisation was established in 1937 by anthropologist Tom Harrisson, journalist Charles Madge and documentary film maker Humphrey Jennings. They were committed to the creation of an anthropology of the British people, a ‘science of ourselves’, and their first project entitled ‘Worktown’ looked at the lives of ordinary people in Bolton.110 Over twenty books were published by Mass Observation based on a wealth of material amassed about daily life in Britain from 1937 to 1948, when Mass Observation closed.111 During the war, 500 people regularly kept diaries that they submitted monthly, and there were also ‘directives’ sent to volunteer observers asking them to respond to specific questions and special surveys. File reports were compiled, including analyses of excerpts of overheard speech and elicited responses. The information collated by Mass Observation provides rich source material about the home front. While recognising the methodological issues that arise in utilising an unrepresentative source that privileged the voices of middle-​class respondents, many historians have used the archive in their research,112 and some of the diaries have been published.113 Over fifty diaries of men who were employed in reserved occupations such as teaching and civil service are held, ranging in length from one entry for one year to extensive entries covering five years. A nineteen-​year-​old surveyor’s pupil from Trowbridge in Wiltshire, for example, kept a diary from August 1939 until December 1944. At one point he wrote about his registration at the Labour Exchange, noting that some men were ‘scared stiff ’, stuttering and mislabelling their jobs (Figure 1.10). Mass Observation also enables the researcher to access the thoughts of older men during wartime, something that cannot be captured in new oral interviews. In 1942, a forty-​nine-​year-​old male teacher from Woking in Surrey, who kept a diary for nineteen months, recorded his thoughts on miners, another group of reserved occupation workers, who had been accused of ‘slackness’ (Figure 1.11). v 32 v

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man

Figure 1.10  Mass Observation Diarist 5118, 12 July 1941

Figure 1.11  Mass Observation Diarist 5065, 5 September 1942

In contrast to these diarists, who were employed in middle-​class occupations, working-​class men, the focus of our study, were much less likely to contribute to Mass Observation. More germane to this research were the file reports collated by Mass Observation on topics such as ‘Absenteeism and Industrial Morale’ and ‘Sport in Wartime’, and the publications People in Production and War Factory.114 With this diverse source material available, from contemporary written records and visual sources to archived interviews, we embarked upon a study to rescue the reserved worker from obscurity. Central to the v 33 v

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Men in reserve reconstruction of the experiences of civilian male workers was the collection of oral histories with working-​class men who worked in reserved occupations during the war.

The interview sample We sought to conduct interviews with men across Britain in order to investigate how reserved men articulate their wartime experiences and their participation in the nation at war, and, in particular, how they retrospectively position themselves in relation to the hegemonic discourse of military masculinity dominant in the wartime period. Advertisements were placed in Saga Magazine and The Teacher, as well as in local newspapers in Manchester, Newcastle, Coventry, Liverpool, Cardiff and Swansea, and generated an encouraging response. Interviews were conducted with fifty-​one male reserved workers in 2013 and 2014. This built upon the pilot oral history study we conducted in 2008 with six male (and one female) reserved workers in Falkirk and Glasgow. As one later withdrew from the project, our interview sample consists of fifty-​six men who were employed in reserved occupations during the war. Details can be found in Appendix 1. Our interviewees were aged between eighty-​six and ninety-​six when they were interviewed. The youngest had been just twelve when the war started, and only eighteen when it ended; the oldest had been twenty-two in September 1939 and twenty-​eight in May 1945. Seventeen of the men, the youngest of the sample, had undertaken apprenticeships in reserved trades. The number of men still alive who seventy years ago were engaged in reserved occupations is small, and thus the sample was inevitably skewed towards the lower age group. Sadly, one of our respondents died the morning he was to be interviewed. The low age of our cohort during the war meant that all but seven interviewees were single during the war and none had children. The fact that their memories of war were rooted in their youthfulness undoubtedly shaped their accounts and perhaps explains the apparent enthusiasm of so many for wanting to join the services, something we examine in Chapter 3. Older, married men who had fathered children understandably might have been more reluctant to leave their families, as they had been in the First World War.115 In addition to marital status, the youthful wartime age of our interviewees also impacted disproportionately upon occupational and class representativeness. We were keen to capture the memories of men who had been employed during the war in middle-​class, v 34 v

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man white-​collar professions, but many of these roles were reserved at a higher age:  accountants and actuaries, for example, were reserved at thirty; pathologists, physicists and university professors at twenty-​ five. If any were still alive they would have been aged over ninety-​five. None came forward. Interviews were conducted with several draughtsmen; a bank worker; a town planner; and two laboratory workers and a researcher at Porton Down, the site in Wiltshire that experimented with chemical weapons  –​some of whom self-​identified as middle-​ class. The vast majority of men who responded to our advertisements, however, had been based in manual industrial trades, building ships, aeroplanes and trains. Jobs in this sector tended to be reserved at eighteen later in the war and thus men available for interview in 2013 were much more likely to have been employed in industrial roles. Moreover, the vast majority of occupations listed on the Schedule were related to industry, with engineering the single largest field employing men throughout the war. Inevitably, engineering workers featured heavily in our sample, with fourteen having been employed in the industry. We also interviewed workers in factories, shipyards and railways; a miner; a cobbler; a farrier; and a mechanic. The class profile of our interviewees was thus overwhelmingly working-​class, although some identified as middle-​class in their later years. Many of those who took up our invitation to construct their memories responded to an advertisement placed in Saga Magazine, of which the readership is predominantly middle-​ class. While many of our interviewees had been born into working-​ class families and had undertaken industrial occupations during the war, they had been upwardly mobile. In contrast, men with a limited degree of social mobility, who were employed in industrial trades from the age of fourteen until they reached retirement age, were much less likely to have lived until their late eighties.116 Thus our sample was disproportionately drawn from the upwardly mobile working classes, the majority of whom had been employed in heavy industry. We were keen that our nation-​wide project achieve a geographical spread, and advertisements were sent to newspapers in major population centres such as Newcastle and Coventry, where there would have been a large number of wartime reserved workers. A call for interviewees was also placed in the South Wales Echo, which distributes to both Swansea and Cardiff, to try and elicit a response from Wales, but it only generated three replies, two of whom had moved to Wales after the war. Of the fifty-​six interviewees in our sample, two were based in Wales during the war, twenty in Scotland and thirty-​four in England (including eleven v 35 v

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Men in reserve from the south east, nine from the Midlands, six from the north-​east, five from the north-​west, two from the south-​west and one from the south). Although there were over 100,000 men in Northern Ireland in reserved occupations, there was no conscription and the Essential Work Order of 1941, to be discussed in Chapter 2, did not apply there.117 Thus, while we endeavoured to be comprehensive in our sample, it is not fully representative, either by class, age, geography or occupation. Our interviewees were generally young, single and childless in wartime, and upwardly mobile working-​ class men who worked in industrial trades. Moreover, some aspects of interviewees’ accounts were hard to draw out: details such as dates and wages were often vague. This was in part due to the fact that most of our reserved men were employed in the same industry after the war and found it difficult to locate in time certain experiences. Nevertheless, the cohort still permits valid conclusions to be drawn about the everyday lived experience and hitherto-​overlooked memories of young, working-​class British men who were employed in a range of reserved occupations. The largely working-​class octogenarian and nonagenarian respondents of our nation-​wide project were composing their narratives in 2013 and 2014 for Dr Linsey Robb, a self-​identified lower-​middle-​class Scotswoman aged twenty-​six. Our interviewees frequently commented on her rather strong Scottish accent, often leading to a discussion of the then impending independence referendum. Greenock shipbuilder John Allan told her that she ‘kent the score hen’, implying that she was aware of the hardships of working-​class life, an assumption that was presumably based on the way she spoke.118 Interviewees were also aware of her university position, deferring to her education and knowledge. Ewart Rayner, for example, referred to her as ‘Dr Linsey’ throughout the interview and in correspondence, while Frank Blincow declared ‘I wasn’t brilliant enough to go to university, unlike yourself.’119 In making such assertions the interview cohort made evident their perceptions of Linsey. As Juliette Pattinson notes, an intersubjective process occurs in the oral history interview in which the subjectivities of the narrator and the listener interact and influence the life story that is composed.120 Researcher Hilary Young, a Scotswoman in her early twenties, who conducted interviews with three Glaswegian men in their seventies about their experiences as husbands and fathers, similarly found that these men composed narratives about themselves specifically for a young, female interviewer. She noted the way that notions of feminism and the ‘new man’ impacted upon the accounts produced.121 Some men in our cohort undoubtedly v 36 v

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man responded to Linsey’s presence, showing that they had assimilated current gender norms and were positioning themselves as ‘new men’. They composed accounts that attempted to bridge the divide between their elderly male selves and their young female interviewer. Charles Hill, for example, who had been a lathe turner during the war, stated: Charles Hill:  There were quite a few workers drafted in. Quite a lot of, quite a lot of women came in, and they were surprisingly good at the job as well. Interviewer:  Mmm. Were they . . .? Charles Hill:  If that sounds a bit, ahh [laughter]. Interviewer:  No, no, it’s fine. Charles Hill:  I didn’t intend, didn’t intend it as such. There were, some, some of the women on, on turning lathes, same as I was doing and they, they really were very good at the job, which, I don’t know why it should be a surprise. I, I, I’ve always thought of it, providing it doesn’t need a lot of muscle, I doubt if there’s anything a man can do that a woman can’t do, at least as well as, if not better. I’ve always been a bit of a women’s libber [laughter].122

Hill attempted to negotiate the values that he perceived the young female interviewer brought to the encounter. Assuming that she was a feminist, he constructed an account that emphasised the proficiency of the female workers and ended with him positioning himself as a lifelong ‘women’s libber’.123 If an older male interviewer, such as Arthur, for example, had conducted the interview, it is unlikely that he would have made such a statement. It was specifically Linsey’s age and gender that stimulated such a response. This example, and the two interviews conducted by Arthur that were notable for their dominant interviewee narratives of ‘hard man’ masculinity,124 illustrate the intersubjective nature of the oral history encounter, as well as the fluidity of memory produced in the interview scenario. This dialogic mutability was especially apparent for those who had not been interviewed before and who had yet to settle upon a fixed account that gave them a sense of equanimity or composure.125 For nearly all the men, the interview was indeed the first time that they had been asked to reflect publicly upon their wartime experiences: only two, Eddie Menday and Willie Dewar, had been interviewed before. The interviews seemed to provide a sense of validation for participants whose wartime contribution has been marginalised in popular memory. Wartime engineer Eddie Menday, who had been interviewed previously by the TUC, stated ‘I’m so delighted that you’re doing this, because those people [in reserved occupations] seem to be forgotten.’126 Overall, our interviewees appear to have found the process of reminiscence and reflection on their wartime work a v 37 v

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Men in reserve rewarding and enjoyable experience.127 Interviews, which generally lasted an hour or two, were mostly conducted in the men’s homes, sometimes with a family member present. Key themes addressed in the interview schedule included work practices, attitudes towards and amongst workmates, the impact of dilution, exposure to risk, domestic lives, civil defence duties, post-​war employment and commemorative activity. The transcripts were uploaded onto Nvivo, a data analysis package, along with other oral interview material derived from the Imperial War Museum, the British Library and the TUC, and coded. The personal testimonies we collected revealed that the changing nature of war commemoration has had little influence on the ways that men now perceive and recall their wartime roles and identities. Despite an increasing memorialisation process that focuses on the contribution of those on the home front, discussed in Chapter 7, reserved men seemed neither comfortable nor confident that their stories fitted into the wider dominant narrative.128 John Hiscutt, for example, greeted Linsey at his front door by declaring his surprise that anyone was interested in his war experiences as he had such an ‘ordinary war’, a theme that was returned to in the course of the interview. Our interviewees, who were nearing the end of their lives, were asked to look back on their wartime experiences on the home front. Retrospective oral histories present the opportunity to conduct a dialogue at the cultural interface between past and present. Interviewees composed accounts that incorporated both wartime feelings and more recent ones. Some of their responses were undoubtedly retrospective, shaped by the lack of post-​war acknowledgement of their wartime service. While they may have felt comfortable with their sense of masculinity, this did not translate into being comfortable with their place in the wider war narrative. It was not just our interviewees who felt this way. This can also be seen in interviews conducted by others. Merchant seaman Stan Arnold, whose transcript is archived at the National Library of Wales, asserted: [T]‌hat was our job and you didn’t regard it as being of vital importance to save the nation. We all had to do our best, some getting more limelight than others, but there we are, we all, Keats was it who said, also stand and wait . . . While I have five war medals, I feel I didn’t really deserve them. I was at the various areas where medals were awarded and they came my way automatically. But not the hard work that so many of them had to fight in, blood and sweat and tears.129

Arnold’s ambiguity about both his wartime role of standing and waiting and what he perceived to be an undeserved post-​war recognition is clearly evident. Strikingly, he adopts Churchillian rhetoric here. Moreover, as we v 38 v

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man discuss in Chapter  3, many interviewees still keenly felt that they had somehow missed out when they were exempted from the armed services. Why did these men still feel this way nearly seventy years after the war had ended, and what does this tell us about their reserved status? By restoring the civilian male worker to the wider historical picture, a fuller, more rounded account of wartime masculine identities is revealed that illuminates the complexities surrounding the silences.

Structure of the book The book begins with an examination of the policy of reservation in the two world wars. Despite attempts to retain men with essential skills on the home front during the First World War, too many skilled men were able to enlist into the forces. Lessons were learnt from these mistakes and a more comprehensive Schedule of Reserved Occupations was devised in the inter-​war period. Despite being State-​mandated, the policy of reservation garnered much criticism in the press and in Parliament, with men derided as ‘scrimjacks’ and ‘scrimshanks’. This had the potential to emasculate reserved men. Chapter  3 examines reactions to reserved status. For many (particularly) young men who remained in civilian occupations the slight to their masculinities was keenly felt, even after the passage of several decades. Indeed, half of our interviewees sought to evade their reserved status and tried, sometimes in increasingly desperate ways, to enlist in the military. When this was denied many poignantly expressed their understandings of their wartime lives as ‘ordinary’ and ‘dead’, with one interviewee even describing himself as a ‘naebody’ thereby seemingly confirming the emasculation theory. However, half of our interviewees made no attempt to enlist, suggesting they were comfortable with their reserved status and contesting the perception that civilian masculinities were challenged. Chapter  4 investigates the lived experience of reserved workers in employment. While wartime popular culture may have challenged civilian men’s subjectivities through the celebration of martial masculinity and patriotic femininity, compelling many young men to try to enlist, the intensification of work during the war provided the capacity in industrial areas to rebuild traditional working-​class breadwinner masculinity, which had been fundamentally corroded during the mass unemployment of the 1930s. Full employment, relative job security, high earnings and empowerment in relation to management served to bolster reserved v 39 v

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Men in reserve men’s manliness and enabled interviewees to compose narratives representing themselves as making a pivotal contribution to the war effort through their performances of patriotic masculinity. This strongly challenges the emasculation thesis. Chapter  5 focuses on the bodies of reserved men, examining the impact of war upon health, fitness and well-​being. Workers’ bodies were subject to unprecedented scrutiny and intense levels of stress and danger during wartime. They were reconstructed after ‘going to seed’ in the 1930s and ‘put on the line’ to maximise war production. Reserved workers in heavy industries faced a sustained assault on their bodies, and in a context of heightened risk and danger of bodily damage, masculinities were validated in a way not dissimilar to the risks taken directly by those in the armed forces. The emasculation thesis is challenged here also. Chapter 6 explores reserved men’s lives outside work, examining how war impacted on their social, domestic and romantic lives. While the war was a time of upheaval and uncertainty, for many of our interviewees their lives remained remarkably constant in many ways. Sport, both spectating and playing, as well as cinema featured prominently in interviewees’ accounts. Moreover, the war brought adventure for some in the form of bombing raids and civil defence duties. Interviewees were, however, reluctant to admit to having leisure time in their narratives, which instead emphasised hard graft. This appears to confirm the emasculation thesis in that they felt compelled to downplay their leisure activities lest that be seen as an admission of shirking, a term that had been in circulation during the First World War and was resurrected in the Second. Yet unbidden revelations showed that, for the majority, they were able to enjoy their wartime youth, engaging in activities, such as sports, pub-​ going and courting, that underscored their manliness. Chapter 7 examines two aspects crucial to the construction of post-​ war official memories of reserved workers: public memorialisation and cultural representation. It discusses several memorials to civilian workers, including the Merchant Navy and the fire service, and analyses a range of literary, filmic and televisual depictions, including A Family at War (1970–​72) and Goodnight Sweetheart (1993–​99), in order to illustrate how reserved workers have been largely forgotten despite their crucial wartime contributions. The emasculation thesis appears to be confirmed by their omission in cultural memory. Thus on the one hand, the masculinities of reserved men were challenged, with civilian men feeling like ‘naebodies’, their war service considered unworthy of commemoration, lumped together with the elderly v 40 v

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man and the medically unfit, overshadowed by the perception of shirking, omitted from cultural representations during the war and subsequently erased from popular memory, which celebrates the combatant and the female dilutee. Yet the war could also be empowering for civilian men, facilitating a recuperation of breadwinner masculinity through the abolition of unemployment, provision of secure work and opportunities to earn high wages that enabled them to support their families. War work also enabled reserved men to perform masculinity through exposure to heightened risk and danger, married men to fulfil the provider role, and older men to reclaim a masculinity predicated on physical labour that had been diminished before the war. Reserved men also gained stature in wartime through the association of their work with the war effort. They were performing patriotic masculinity. Nevertheless, even those grafters who earnt high wages recognised they were at a distance from the celebrated soldier heroes. Their masculine status in the context of war was always less. Yet they were not emasculated ‘non-​men’ and nor were they lacking masculinity. A new language is required, one that does not flatten the contradictions and that takes into account the complexities of the ambiguous position of working-​class civilian men. By restoring the recollections and representations of reserved men to the historical record, this book breaks new ground, prompting a gendered re-​evaluation of life on the home front during the ‘people’s war’ in order to illuminate the complexities surrounding what it meant to be a civilian man in the Second World War, and questioning the extent to which these were second-​class, subordinate ‘men in reserve’.

Notes 1 Peter Ciarella, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 17 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​52). 2 Corinna Peniston-​Bird, ‘Classifying the Body in the Second World War: British Men in and out of Uniform’, Body & Society, 9 (2003), 31–​48. 3 Schedule of Reserved Occupations 1938–​39 (Provisional: Revision May, 1939), Cmd. 6015 (London: HMSO, 1939). 4 Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives:  Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 119–​20. 5 Peter Howlett, Fighting with Figures: A Statistical Digest of the Second World War (London:  HMSO, 1995), p.  8. The ratio is 3:1 if the 7  million women employed in industry and the half a million in the female auxiliary services are included: a total of 16,416,000 civilian workers to 5,090,000 forces personnel.

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Men in reserve 6 Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994). 7 R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), p. 77. 8 Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-​Bird, ‘The Home Guard in Britain in the Second World War:  Uncertain Masculinities?’, in Paul R. Higate (ed.), Military Masculinities:  Identity and the State (Westport, CT:  Praeger, 2003); Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-​Bird, Contesting Home Defence:  Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2007), p.  15; Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939–​1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 9 Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives, pp. 149, 123. 10 See for example the wartime feature films Millions Like Us (1943) and The Gentle Sex (1943); documentary films Jane Brown Changes Her Job (1942) and Night Shift (1942); and the pamphlet by Arthur Wauters, Eve in Overalls ([New  York]:  [British Information Services], 1943), as well as the post-​war publication by Vera Lynn with Robin Cross and Jenny de Gex, Unsung Heroines:  The Women who Won the War (London:  Sidgwick and Jackson, 1990). 11 Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives, p. 121. 12 Janet Miller, interviewed by Wendy Ugolini, 11 December 2008 (SOHC 050/​ 05). 13 S. P. MacKenzie, The Home Guard:  A  Military and Political History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 38; Summerfield and Peniston-​ Bird, Contesting Home Defence, p. 30. 14 John Tosh, ‘The History of Masculinity: An Outdated Concept?’, in John H. Arnold and Sean Brady (eds.), What Is Masculinity? Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2011), p. 23. 15 Ibid., p. 4. 16 Ronnie Johnston and Arthur McIvor, ‘Dangerous Work, Hard Men and Broken Bodies:  Masculinity in the Clydeside Heavy Industries, c. 1930–​ 1970s’, Labour History Review, 69:2 (2004), 135–​52. 17 Peniston-​Bird, ‘Classifying the Body in the Second World War’, pp. 36, 39. 18 Martin Francis, The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force, 1939–​1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008). 19 Garry Campion, The Good Fight:  Battle of Britain Propaganda and the Few (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 20 Richard Hillary, The Last Enemy (London: Macmillan, 1942), p. 85. 21 Angus Calder, The People’s War:  Britain 1939–​1945 (London:  Cape, 1969), p. 138. 22 J. B. Priestley, Postscripts (London: William Heinemann, 1940), p. 69. 23 Ron Spedding, Shildon Wagon Works: A Working Man’s Life (Durham: Durham County Library, 1988), p. 43.

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man 24 The National Archives (TNA), INF 5/​59, ARP (‘The Warning’). 25 Linsey Robb: Men at Work: The Working Man in British Culture, 1939–​1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 26 One exception is the 1941 film Cottage to Let, which includes the figure of an inventor. 27 Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives, p. 120. 28 See also TNA, INF 3/​1622, Ron Jobson, War in the Air (1942); TNA, INF 3/​ 1571, Marc Stone, War on Land (1943). 29 See also Imperial War Museum (IWM), PST 14360, Gilbert Rumbold, The Attack Begins in the Factory (1943); PST 14359, Roy Nockolds, The Attack Begins in the Factory (1943). 30 Linsey Robb, ‘“His Own Weapons to His Own Battlefront”:  The Civilian Working Man in British Culture 1939–​1945’, in Wendy Ugolini and Juliette Pattinson (eds.), Fighting for Britain?: Negotiating Identities in Britain during the Second World War (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015). 31 Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives, p. 120. 32 Sheridan Morley, Noel Coward (London: Haus Publishing, 2005), p. 90. 33 Noel Coward, ‘Lie in the Dark and Listen’, http://​www.207squadron.rafinfo. org.uk/​bomberommandlinccat h_​270806.htm (accessed 30 June 2014). 34 Noel Coward, Noel Coward on the Air: Rare and Unknown Broadcasts, 1944–​ 1948, audio CD (1999). 35 Dawson, Soldier Heroes; Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagermann and John Tosh (eds.), Masculinities in Politics and War:  Gendering Modern History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 36 Conscript soldiers, who were directed into the forces by law after January 1916, have, however, been excluded from ‘the prevailing imagery of both masculinity and soldiering’. Ilana R. Bet-​el, Conscripts: The Lost Legions of the Great War (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1999). 37 The emasculating effect of trench warfare did not demolish the figure of the soldier hero as the masculine ideal. Nevertheless, the position of male veterans was ‘not an easy one’, according to Jessica Meyer, Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p.  97. There were multiple identities created for servicemen after the First World War, including for the wounded and disabled. See Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home:  Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–​ 1939 (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2001); Ana Carden-​Coyne, Reconstructing the Body:  Classicism, Modernism and the First World War (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2009); Richard Carr, Veteran MPs and Conservative Politics in the Aftermath of the Great War:  The Memory of All That (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 38 Lois Bibbings, Telling Tales about Men: Conceptions of Conscientious Objectors to Military Service during the First World War (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 95–​6; Nicoletta Gullace, ‘White Feathers and

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Men in reserve Wounded Men’, Journal of British Studies, 36:2 (1997), 178–​206; Nicoletta Gullace, The Blood of Our Sons: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 39 Bibbings, Telling Tales about Men, pp.  103, 111. While most of Bibbings’s tales about conscientious objectors’ masculinity are negative, she notes that there were positive accounts that regarded them as honorable men possessing moral courage and discipline (p.  165). There were also personal narratives that resembled those of soldiers. Moreover, when contrasted with the reluctant conscript and the deserter, the conscientious objector could be configured as more heroic than some combatants. 40 Laura Ugolini, Civvies: Middle-​Class Men on the English Home Front, 1914–​18 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 4. 41 Arnold and Brady (eds.), What Is Masculinity?, p. 10. 42 Rose, Which Peoples War?, p. 153. 43 Peniston-​Bird, ‘Classifying the Body in the Second World War’, p. 34. 44 Graham Dawson, ‘History-​ Writing on World War II’, in Geoff Hurd (ed.), National Fictions:  World War Two in British Films and Television (London: BFI, 1984). 45 Pat Ayers, ‘Work, Culture and Gender: The Making of Masculinities in Post-​ War Liverpool’, Labour History Review, 69:2 (2004), 153–​67 (p. 156). 46 Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives, p. 119. 47 Brad Beaven and John Griffiths, ‘The Blitz, Civilian Morale and the City: Mass-​ Observation and Working-​Class Culture in Britain, 1940–​41’, Urban History, 26:1 (1999), 71–​88 (p. 75). 48 Peniston-​Bird, ‘Classifying the Body in the Second World War’, p. 45. 49 Geoffrey Field, Blood, Sweat and Toil:  Remaking the British Working Class, 1939–​1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 50 Penny Summerfield, Women Workers in the Second World War:  Production and Patriarchy in Conflict (London:  Croom Helm, 1984); Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives. 51 Stephen Meyer, ‘Work, Play and Power:  Masculine Culture on the Automotive Shop Floor, 1930–​1960’, in Roger Horowitz (ed.), Boys and Their Toys? Masculinity, Technology and Class in America (New  York:  Routledge, 2001), p. 17. 52 Ugolini, Civvies; Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 53 George Mosse, The Image of Man:  The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 123. 54 Johnston and McIvor, ‘Dangerous Work, Hard Men and Broken Bodies’, p. 140. 55 Alan Campbell, The Scottish Miners, Vol. I: Industry, Work and Community (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 238.

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man 56 Joanna Bourke, Working-​Class  Cultures in Britain 1890–​1960 (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 20. 57 Victor Sawdon Pritchett, Build the Ships: The Official Story of the Shipyards in Wartime (London: HMSO, 1946), p. 11. 58 Bourke, Working-​Class Cultures, p. 10. 59 Susan Kingsley-​Kent, Gender and Power in Britain 1640–​1990 (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 302. 60 Meyer, Men of War; Francis, The Flyer. 61 Howlett, Fighting with Figures, pp. 236–​7. 62 Mass Observation (MO) File Report 1157, ‘What Workers Really Earn’, March 1942. 63 Michael Roper, Masculinity and the British Organisation Man since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994 [1989]), p. 117. 64 Dawson, Soldier Heroes, p. 22; Penny Summerfield, ‘Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the Gendered Self in Oral History Interviews’, Cultural and Social History, 1 (2004) 65–​93 (p. 69). 65 This concept is inspired by Philomena Goodman’s notion of ‘patriotic femininity’, Women, Sexuality and War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 4, 16, 101–​26. 66 McIvor and Johnston, ‘Dangerous Work, Hard Men and Broken Bodies’. 67 Sonya O.  Rose, ‘Temperate Heroes:  Concepts of Masculinity in Second World War Britain’, in Dudink, Hagemann and Tosh, Masculinities in Politics and War, p. 178; Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 8–​10. 68 Ibid. 69 Sally Sokoloff, ‘“How Are They at Home?”:  Community, State and Servicemen’s Wives in England, 1939–​45’, Women’s History Review, 8:1 (1999), 27–​51 (p. 42). 70 Priestley, Postscripts, p. 68. 71 Ibid., p. 9, broadcast 16 June 1940; p. 49, broadcast 11 August 1940. 72 Pritchett, Build the Ships, p. 34. 73 Edinburgh Evening News, 8 October 1941; Alan Ross, Colours of War: War Art, 1939–​45 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), pp. 44–​5. 74 Sunday Chronicle, 26 January 1941, cited in Rose, Which People’s War?, p. 183. 75 Fiona MacCarthy, Stanley Spencer:  An English Vision (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1997). 76 Stanley Spencer, Caulkers, depicting four young men caulking a ship’s deck, August 1940; Burners, depicting fifteen young men wearing goggles, 26 August 1940; Welders, depicting thirty young men with helmet visors, 11 February 1941; Riveters, featuring twenty-​four figures, five of whom are women, December 1941; The Template, featuring twenty-​two figures, including a woman and a baby, May 1942; Bending the Keel Plate, depicting thirty-​nine people, October 1943; Riggers, June 1944; Plumbers, featuring

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Men in reserve fifty-​three people, March 1945; and The Furnaces, featuring eleven young men shielding their eyes from the furnaces, 15 February 1946. Keith Bell, Stanley Spencer: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings (London: Phaidon Press, 1992); ‘Stanley Spencer:  The Colours of the Clyde’, BBC2, 14 March 2014. 77 See for example pencil-​on-​paper sketches of welder Kathleen Chalmers, IWM, ART LD 6008 38; welder Susan Boner, ART LD 6008 18; Catthie McGolwon, ART LD 6008 60; six rough sketches of women finishers in the carpenter’s workshop, ART LD 6008 103 and 6008 79; and eleven rough figure studies of women welders in different poses, ART LD 6008 113. 78 Edinburgh Evening News, 8 October 1941. 79 The term did, however, have wider currency during the Second World War. Mass Observation, People in Production: An Enquiry into British War Production (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942), pp. 249, 366. 80 Ross, Colours of War, pp. 44–​5. 81 HC Deb., 20 August 1940, Vol. 364, 1132–​274 (1160). 82 Helen Jones, British Civilians in the Front Line: Air Raids, Productivity and Wartime Culture, 1939–​1945 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 197. 83 TNA, INF 3/​123, Bream, Remember –​They’re Relying on You. 84 IWM, PST 14077, Harold Pym, Combined Operations Include You. 85 It is very difficult to ascertain the impact and reception of specific Government posters. Mass Observation provides some evidence of responses to particular ones. For example, the poorly received Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory put ‘in a nutshell the isolation of Whitehall’; MO, Topic Collection no. 42, ‘Posters 1939–​1947’, p. 3. 86 National Library of Wales, MS 21773 D. L. E. Latchford, diary. 87 Lucy Noakes, ‘ “Serve to Save”:  Gender, Citizenship and Civil Defence in Britain 1937–​41’, Journal of Contemporary History, 47:4 (2012), 734–​53. 88 Robb, Men at Work. 89 David Lusted, ‘ “Builders” and “The Demi-​Paradise” ’, in Hurd (ed.), National Fictions, pp. 27–​30. 90 James Chapman, ‘The British Documentary Movement in the Second World War’, in Land of Promise: The British Documentary Movement, 1930–​ 1950 (London: BFI, 2008), p. 28. 91 For the First World War, see Ugolini, Civvies. 92 Sarah Chambers, Maud Bracke, Tracey Deutsch, Rosemary Elliot, Mary Jo Maynes and Stuart Airlie (eds.), ‘Men at Home: Domesticities, Authority, Emotions and Work’, Gender and History, special issue, 27:3 (2015); Arnold and Brady, What Is Masculinity?; Lynn Segal, Slow Motion:  Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (London: Virago, 1997); Connell, Masculinities; M. Mac an Ghaill and C. Haywood, Men and Masculinities: Theory, Research and Social Practice (Buckingham:  Open University Press, 2003); Stephen M. Whitehead, Men and Masculinities:  Key Themes and New Directions

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002); Stephen M. Whitehead and Frank J. Barrett (eds.), The Masculinities Reader (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). 93 Arthur McIvor, Working Lives:  Work in Britain since 1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Alessandro Portelli, They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Tim Strangleman, ‘Writing Workers:  Re-​Reading Workplace Autobiography’, Scottish Labour History, 46 (2011), 26–​37; John Kirk and Christine Wall, Work and Identity (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); McIvor and Johnston, ‘Dangerous Work, Hard Men and Broken Bodies’. 94 Francis, The Flyer; Meyer, Men of War; Summerfield and Peniston-​Bird, Contesting Home Defence; Rose, Which People’s War?; Gullace, The Blood of Our Sons; Dawson, Soldier Heroes; Ugolini, Civvies. 95 Ronnie Johnston and Arthur McIvor, ‘The War and the Body at Work:  Occupational Health and Safety in Scottish Industry, 1939–​1945’, Journal of Historical Studies, 24:2 (2005), 113–​36 (p. 113). 96 Matthew Cragoe and Chris Williams, Wales and War: Society, Politics and Religion in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cardiff:  University of Wales Press, 2007), p. 9. 97 Alison Chand, Masculinities on Clydeside: Men in Reserved Occupations During the Second World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016); Alison Chand, ‘The Second World War in Glasgow and Clydeside: Men in Reserved Occupations 1939–​1945’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Strathclyde, 2012); Alison Chand, ‘Conflicting Masculinities? Men in Reserved Occupations in Clydeside 1939–​45’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 34.2 (2014), 218–​36. 98 Tom Hickman, Called Up, Sent Down: The Bevin Boys’ War (Stroud: The History Press, 2008); Leslie W. M. Bills, Fettered Freedom: Life and Times of a Bevin Boy (Billericay:  Cavenham Marine, 2005); Reg Taylor, Bevin Boy: A  Reluctant Miner (London:  Athena, 2004); Warwick Taylor, The Forgotten Conscript:  A  History of the Bevin Boy (Edinburgh:  Pentland Press, 1995); David Day, The Bevin Boy (Oxford:  ISIS, 1995); Gill Holloway, A Bevin Boy Remembers:  The Drawings of T.  Holloway (Condicote: Henge, 1993); Derek Agnew, Bevin Boy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1947); Stephen M. Cullen, In Search of the Real Dad’s Army: The Home Guard and the Defence of the United Kingdom, 1940–​ 1944 (Barnsley: Pen and Sword Military, 2011); David Caroll, Dad’s Army: The Home Guard 1940–​1944 (Stroud: Sutton, 2002); Norman Longmate, The Real Dad’s Army (London:  Arrow Books, 1974); John Brophy, Britain’s Home Guard: A Character Study (London: Harrap, 1945); Charles Graves, The Home Guard of Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1943). 99 Summerfield and Peniston-​Bird, Contesting Home Defence. 100 http://​www.iwmcollections.org.uk/​qryMain.php (accessed 30 June 2014). 101 http://​ d iscover.library.wales/​ p rimo_​ l ibrary/​ l ibweb/ ​ a ction/ ​ s earch. do?vid=44WHELF_​NLW_​VU1 (accessed 30 June 2014).

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Men in reserve 102 http://​cadensa.bl.uk/​uhtbin/​cgisirsi/​x/​x/​0/​49/​ (accessed 30 June 2014). 103 http://​collections.glasgowmuseums.com/​ (accessed 30 June 2014). 104 http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php (accessed 30 June 2014). 105 Issues associated with reusing archived oral interviews, or ‘re-​analysing’, as Joanna Bornat puts it, are reviewed in April Gallwey, ‘The Rewards of Using Archived Oral Histories in Research: The Case of the Millennium Memory Bank’, Oral History, 41:1 (2013), 37–​50. See also Joanna Bornat, ‘A Second Take:  Revisiting Interviews with a Different Purpose’, Oral History, 31:1 (2003), 47–​53. 106 http://​www2.warwick.ac.uk/​services/​library/​mrc/​ (accessed 30 June 2014). 107 http://​www.recollectionsofwwii.co.uk/​ (accessed 30 June 2014). 108 http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​ww2peopleswar/​categories/​ (accessed 30 June 2014). 109 ‘From a Reserved Occupation to the Royal Navy’, http://​www.bbc. co.uk/​history/​ww2peopleswar/​stories/​21/​a1127521.shtml (accessed 20 August 2014). 110 David Hall, Worktown: The Astonishing Story of the Project that Launched Mass Observation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2015). 111 Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, Britain by Mass-​ Observation (Harmondsworth:  Penguin, 1939); Tom Harrisson, War Begins at Home, by Mass Observation (London: Chatto & Windus, 1940); Mass Observation, People in Production; Tom Harrisson, War Factory:  A  Report by Mass-​ Observation (London:  Victor Gollancz, 1943). Mass Observation was revived in the 1980s, and between 1993 and 2002 produced a series of occasional papers, http://​www.massobs.org.uk/​occasional-​papers (accessed 7 June 2016). 112 Penny Summerfield, ‘Mass-​ Observation:  Social Research or Social Movement?’, Journal of Contemporary History, 20 (1985), 439–​52; Nick Hubble, Mass Observation and Everyday Life:  Culture, History, Theory (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); James Hinton, The Mass Observers: A History 1937–​1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Penny Summerfield, ‘The Generation of Memory: Gender and the Popular Memory of the Second World War in Britain’, in Lucy Noakes and Juliette Pattinson (eds.), British Cultural Memory and the Second World War (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 113 Richard Broad and Suzie Fleming (eds.), Nella Last’s War: A Mother’s Diary (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1981); Simon Garfield, Our Hidden Lives: The Everyday Diaries of a Forgotten Britain 1945–​1948 (London: Ebury Press, 2004); Simon Garfield, We Are at War:  The Remarkable Diaries of Five Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times (London: Ebury Press, 2005). 114 MO, File Report 1631, ‘Absenteeism and Industrial Morale’, March 1943; MO, File Report 6, ‘Sport in Wartime’, October 1939; Mass

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Men in reserve: recovering the civilian man Observation, People in Production; Tom Harrisson, War Factory (London: Gollancz, 1943). 115 Gregory, The Last Great War, p. 94. 116 In Glasgow, for example, male life expectancy in working-​class districts in 2011 averaged 72–​4  years, while in especially deprived areas, such as Shettleston and Springburn, it was as low as 67–​9  years; http://​www. bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​scotland-​scotland-​politics-​29645276 (accessed 29 October 2014). 117 Roger Broad, Conscription in Britain, 1939–​1963:  The Militarization of a Generation (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 211. 118 John Allan, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 7 November 2011 (SOHC 050/​09). 119 Ewart Rayner, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 22 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​18); Frank Blincow, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 30 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​56). 120 Juliette Pattinson, ‘“The Thing that Made Me Hesitate . . .”: Re-​examining Gendered Intersubjectivities in Interviews with British Secret War Veterans’, Women’s History Review, 20:2 (2011), 245–​63. 121 Hilary Young, ‘Hard Man, New Man:  Re/​ Composing Masculinities in Glasgow, c. 1950–​2000’, Oral History, 35:1 (2007), 71–​81. 122 Charles Hill (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 16 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​37). 123 Not all interviewees responded to the female interviewer in this way; some denigrated the wartime contributions of women, as we see in Chapter 4. 124 Willie Dewar, interviewed by Arthur McIvor, 9 December 2008 (SOHC 050/​ 04); Harry McGregor, interviewed by Arthur McIvor, 13 July 2009 (SOHC 050/​05). 125 Pattinson, ‘The Thing that Made Me Hesitate’, p. 258; Summerfield, ‘Culture and Composure’, p. 69. 126 Eddie Menday, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 15 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​50). 127 The exceptions were one interviewee who withdrew from the study having read his transcript, and a further two who heavily edited their transcripts. The literal translation of the spoken word in writing has the potential to discompose the interviewee. Raphael Samuel, ‘The Perils of the Transcript’, in Rob Perks and Alistair Thomson (eds.), The Oral History Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). 128 See ‘Home Front Volunteers Honoured’, BBC News, 3 March 2000, http://​ news.bbc.co.uk/​1/​hi/​uk/​665102.stm (accessed 29 October 2014). 129 Stan Arnold, National Library of Wales, Wales at War transcriptions, ex 2458/​1. It was John Milton, not Keats, who in his poem ‘On His Blindness’ wrote ‘They also serve who only stand and wait’, meaning that everyone has a role to play.

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Raising an ‘industrial army’: the policy of reservation in the First and Second World Wars

Reflecting on the policy of reservation in the Second World War, Glasgow shipyard worker John Dickson asserted that there was ‘no point in robbing Peter to pay Paul. Or taking a skilled engineer out of skilled engineering to be a soldier’.1 In total war, industry was in direct competition with the military for a limited supply of men. The State needed to mobilise industry and labour just as much as it did combatants to fill the ranks of the armed services. Both world wars witnessed increased Government control to direct manpower to where it was needed. Despite attempts to retain men with essential skills on the home front during the First World War, too many skilled men were able to enlist into the forces. Those men who remained on the home front could experience derision, as ‘shirkers’ and cowards. Civilian men therefore had to negotiate their relegation to the subordinate status of unmanly ‘other’. Whereas errors were made during the First World War, with the Government lurching from one manpower crisis to another, a more systematic approach was adopted in the Second. Austen Chamberlain, the Chairman of a First World War organisation that became the Ministry of National Service, spoke of an ‘industrial army’ being raised that would supply the military forces. While merely rhetoric in the First World War, this became a reality in the Second. A  coherent policy of manpower was sketched out in the inter-​war period with the drafting of a (Provisional) Schedule of Reserved Occupations, which was fully implemented on the outbreak of war. This offered immunity from conscription to men who were employed in trades and professions that were listed. The Schedule was dynamic, adaptable and subject to constant revision, as the nation had to respond to the changing demands of the war. Despite being State-​ mandated, the policy of reservation garnered much criticism in the press and in Parliament. This chapter primarily utilises parliamentary records v 50 v

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Raising an ‘industrial army’ to track the evolving and complicated attempts to control manpower in the two world wars.

‘Starred men’: reservation in the First World War The Schedule of Reserved Occupations devised prior to the outbreak of the Second World War was not unprecedented and owed much to policy developed in the First World War. There were a number of attempts to control civilian manpower in order to maintain production and release men for the forces. This was prompted by large-​scale, uncontrolled volunteering in the charged atmosphere of the early months of the war, as patriotic euphoria spread, resulting in the loss of skilled men from the mines, munitions industries and other essential trades. Far more recruits were accepted into the forces than could be supplied with equipment. While volunteering was met with huge ‘social approbation’, as witnessed by the film footage depicting cheering crowds that gathered to see the volunteers march off to war, not volunteering was met with its corollary, ‘social disapprobation’.2 According to the Reverend Dr Andrew Clark, who collected ephemera under the title ‘English Words in Wartime’, the term ‘shirker’ was in use by 29 August 1914, and within a week so too was the term ‘slacker’.3 The perceived link between masculinity and duty allowed these terms of abuse to emerge. Clark noted in 1918 that his Essex parish of Great Leighs was ‘absolutely empty of young men’.4 However, contrary to popular perception, the home front was not denuded of men. Three-​quarters of fifteen-​to forty-​nine-​year-​old males did not volunteer prior to the introduction of conscription in January 1916.5 If we take into account the entire war period, including the last three years when compulsion was applied, 53.8 per cent of English and Welsh men aged between fifteen and forty-​nine did not serve in the forces.6 Remaining a civilian was, then, not a minority experience. Yet, as Stephen Garton notes about Australia, but which is equally applicable to Britain, the home front became associated with ‘women, domesticity, constrained masculinity and the shirker –​the non-​man’.7 Lois Bibbings supports this interpretation in her study of the archetypal shirker, the conscientious objector: ‘all men who were not in the military were, to varying degrees, excluded from exemplary notions of maleness’.8 While the roughly 16,500 men who applied for exemption on the grounds of conscience were ‘particularly marginalised’ because they were ‘the antithesis of the iconic figure of the soldier’, all men not in uniform were susceptible to having their masculinity called into question.9 ‘Are you a Man or are you a Mouse . . . a v 51 v

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Men in reserve rotter and a coward[?]‌’, asked one recruitment poster.10 Shirking came to be particularly associated with Jews, and, in part, led to anti-​Jewish riots in the East End of London and in Leeds in June 1917.11 Such allegations of Jewish shirking rested on anti-​Semitic unease about Jews’ loyalties towards Britain. But any man not in khaki was vulnerable to accusations of shirking and to the emasculating act of feathering. White feathers from a game cock’s tail, which were widely considered an indicator of inferior breeding, were presented to men of conscription age in civilian clothing. The idea originated with Admiral Charles Penrose Fitzgerald who, on 30 August 1914, tasked thirty women in Folkestone with handing these out. Imbued with the stigma of cowardice, they were intended to humiliate and embarrass men into volunteering. This was what Nicoletta Gullace terms ‘propaganda in action’, and was a fundamental reflection of perceptions of masculinity and gendered roles in wartime.12 The practice spread from Folkestone to London and further afield as a consequence of newspaper articles and theatre sketches.13 Macleod Yearsley, a middle-​ aged London ear surgeon, recorded in his diary that ‘the feeling against slackers, dodgers, and shirkers was awakening . . . Young girls of all ages . . . were parading the streets offering white feathers to young men in mufti [civilian clothes].’14 Recollections about the presentation of white feathers are captured in a number of Imperial War Museum interviews. George Wilkinson, a chemist in County Durham, was exempted from the forces and was on the receiving end of ‘very hurtful’, ‘very distressing’ and ‘rude remarks’ about his not being in khaki, which inclined him to stay at home rather than venture out on to the street where he ran the risk of being accosted and ‘insulted’.15 John Dorgan, in a long interview, recalled in detail and at length that his eighteen-​year-​old brother Nichol, who was working in a reserved occupation in a colliery, received a white feather in an envelope in the post. ‘He got up off the table, white face, went out of the house and that was the last time I ever saw the lad. He left the house and went to the Recruitment agent in Newcastle and joined the Durham Light Infantry.’16 This was not an unusual response.17 Nichol’s cajoling into enlistment had tragic consequences: he was wounded in France and subsequently died. In order to ward off shaming tactics an outward sign of exemption that attested to a civilian man’s importance to the war effort was introduced. The Admiralty began issuing war service badges to workers manufacturing munitions for the navy, and within six months had handed out 400,000. Similarly, the War Office distributed 80,000 ‘On War Service’ badges to men working in ordnance factories and in key armaments v 52 v

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Raising an ‘industrial army’ firms.18 This system was replaced in July 1915 when the newly established Ministry of Munitions became the sole badging agency.19 In a context whereby encouragement to enlist was strident, badges may, if prominently visible and seen by others, have defended civilian men against accusations of cowardice and being handed white feathers. Badges were a symbol of their participation in the nation at war: a protection against perceived shirking. Yet many men were employed in key jobs where the system of badging was not in operation, and their volunteering further depleted the manpower of essential industries. Consequently, in October 1915, a Reserved Occupations Committee –​an inter-​departmental group representing the War Office, Home Office, Board of Trade and General Register Office, and with experts to advise –​began to compile an inventory of reserved occupations. Men in all roles considered vital to the war economy, not just those supplying the Navy and working in ordnance factories, were regarded as being in a reserved occupation. In October 1915, 1.4  million were thus categorised.20 These ‘long and complicated lists and supplemental lists’ of ‘starred’ jobs included occupations such as transport worker, farm worker, clergyman, coal​miner, shipbuilder, factory worker and shopkeeper: roles on which depended ‘our subsistence, the maintenance of the machinery of our social life, and the export trade which is absolutely essential both for ourselves and our Allies’.21 Unmarried men who were below the age listed in the column next to the occupation were liable for military service; those at or above the age were exempt from call-​up. ‘Blacksmith’, ‘wheelwright’ and ‘mechanic’ were exempted at twenty-​five; ‘foreman’, employed in the mining and textiles industries, at thirty; and ‘bobbin maker’ and ‘turner’ in ironworks at forty-​one. Some occupations had different ages of exemption according to marital status. A married ‘woollen mule spinner’, for example, became eligible for exemption at thirty, whereas a single male woollen mule spinner could be recruited into the forces up to the age of forty-​one. Employers could appeal to local tribunals to retain men, with their consent, who were not starred and thus not on the list but were considered vital to their industries. By December 1915, 4,000 letters from firms had been received and discussed by the Reserved Occupations Committee.22 This deference to business interests characterised reserved occupation policy in the First World War to a far greater degree than in the Second. While some employers used their personal influence to obtain exemption for favoured workers, others pressurised their employees into enlisting, threatening dismissal if they did not volunteer.23 Yet the Committee, which comprised bodies with a vested interest in the provision of military v 53 v

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Men in reserve manpower, failed in its task to effectively distribute labour and manage the release of men from industry into the forces. As the pace of volunteering slowed, plans were implemented to increase numbers. Kitchener wanted to expand the weekly numbers of volunteers from 19,000 to 35,000, which was wholly unachievable sixteen months into the war.24 In July 1915, the National Registration Act was passed to stimulate recruitment and to ascertain how many men aged between fifteen and sixty-​five were employed in each trade. All men whose age fell within this range who were not in the forces were required to register, providing details of their employment. This was in effect a ‘workers’ census’.25 Labour exchanges starred the papers of young men who were engaged in essential industries. A National Register was compiled, grouping men by age and marital status. Single and married men were categorised separately, and both were sub-​divided into twenty-​three age classes. Young single men were to be called up first and married men would be conscripted only when all single men had been enrolled. Of the almost 5 million men of conscription age not in the services, 1.6  million were in starred or badged jobs.26 In October 1915, Lord Derby, the new Director-​General of Recruiting for the army, implemented the Group Scheme (popularly known as the Derby Scheme)  –​a ‘genteel form of conscription’27  –​ to try to avoid the need for compulsion by permitting men aged between nineteen and forty, in starred and unstarred occupations, to declare their intent for future service. On 22 November 1915 The Times published lists of the trades that were considered vital. The National Register was used to identify and canvas eligible men, encouraging them to attest. Between 16 October and 11 December 1915, 2,829,263 men responded to posters such as that shown in Figure  2.1 and attested for forthcoming service.28 Many were in starred or badged occupations.29 They were paid a day’s wages, categorised as a Class ‘B’ army reserve, issued with a khaki armband to make visible their willingness to serve and released back to civilian life until their call-​up, which would be done according to age and marital status. The first groups called up in December 1915, classes 2 to 5, affected single men aged between nineteen and twenty-​two. Married men, Asquith reassured the public, would only be called up once all available single men had been enlisted. Jay Winter calculates that while over 40 per cent of unstarred married men who were not in reserved occupations registered, just 31 per cent of single unstarred men did so.30 The failure of about a million unstarred single men to attest provoked harsh criticism. The Evening News published a series of ‘Cuthbert’ cartoons  –​the first, drawn by Percy Fearon and dated Friday 27 October v 54 v

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Raising an ‘industrial army’ 1916 (Figure  2.2), depicting white rabbits disappearing down ‘funk holes’, lying low in a ‘cushey [sic] place’ and a ‘cushy bed’, trying to avoid ‘the comb’. For Fearon, known as Poy, these ‘young eligibles’ served as a symbol of those who deliberately attempted to avoid military duty, especially those who had secured a Government or civil service post. Indeed, the term ‘Cuthbert’ entered the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a government employee or officer shirking military service’. Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s character in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Poy noted that Cuthbert was ‘feeble’, ‘nervously shilly-​shallying’ and that his ‘voice should quaver, and his knees quiver, and his whole air suggest a total inability to say “Boo” to a goose’.31 Cuthbert was endemic:  a children’s toy was produced, he made appearances in music-​halls32 and he featured in a poem in a Punch cartoon entitled ‘England’s Call to the Rabbit’. The poem begins: Come out, come out, and play the game;   Boldly vacate your burrow: Slack not nor shirk for very shame,   But be your watchword ‘Thorough’; Step forth as briskly as you can   And face the music like a man. Stay not to share the Cuthbert’s fate,   But chuck your role of coward . . . We are prepared to comb you out   By way of fuse or ferret . . .

This poem makes explicit the unmanliness of cowardly Cuthbert, a slacker who shirked his duty. It ends by instructing him to ‘insert your neck within a trap’.33 Such widespread negative constructions of civilian masculinity arguably placed the man on the home front in a precarious position. The failure of men to attest hastened the need for conscription. With the passing of the Military Service Act in January 1916 ending the voluntary system of recruitment, the provision of manpower became the responsibility of the bureaucratic State. Single men and widowers without dependent children, who were aged between eighteen and forty-​ one, were liable to be called up for service. Conscription only applied to English, Scottish and Welsh men; it did not pertain to Irish nationals. It was extended in April to include married men who had attested, which met with an outcry, as there were still single men who were yet to be summoned. Large numbers of starred men employed in particular v 55 v

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Men in reserve

Figure 2.1  To Starred or Badged Single Men . . ., IWM, PST 5049, December 1915 v 56 v

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Raising an ‘industrial army’

Figure 2.2  Percy Fearon (‘Poy’), ‘Sketch Map of the Funk Holes of London’, Evening Standard, 27 October 1916 trades vital to the war effort, who were now issued with a certificate of exemption rather than a badge  –​a much less visible sign of their patriotism  –​were initially exempt from being called up. While an array of emergency powers was passed, strengthening State control, it was at the local level that decisions were made. It was local military service tribunals that selected recruits and it was local committees, in dialogue with trade unions and employers, that decided who was exempt.34 This decentralisation empowered local tribunals, but regional inconsistencies hindered the coordination of a coherent, nation-​wide manpower strategy. Some were harsher than others, while many semi-​or unskilled men who were granted exemptions were incorrectly classified as skilled, and thereby wrongly starred and accused of being ‘shielded falsely from military service’.35 The perceived State-​assisted evasion was forcefully debated in both the Lords and the Commons. In passing the Military Service Bill, the Government, noted Sir Arthur Markham, MP for Mansfield, had ‘created these opportunities for men who wish to avoid military service . . . Thousands of men have gone out of their civil employment into these v 57 v

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Men in reserve so-​called reserved trades simply to escape the obligation of joining the Colours –​and for that reason and for that reason only.’36 While there were concerns about men evading their patriotic duty, it was acknowledged that some men ‘may not wish to be kept at home’ and would resent their reserved classification.37 Skilled men undertaking work directly associated with the war effort were not universally derided, however. A  Parliamentary Recruiting Committee poster from 1915 depicted a soldier and a male munitions worker shaking hands, a device used again in the Second World War to denote parity of service. The slogan stated ‘We’re both needed to serve the Guns! Fill up the ranks! Pile up the Munitions!’38 The status of civilian men may also have been augmented by slightly increased wages in the latter years of the war,39 stronger trade unions and their role as essential war workers with key skills.40 Furthermore, following the passing of the Conscription Act, employers could request that certain key employees be starred if they were ‘indispensable for the maintenance of the business of the employer’.41 Many employers were keen to retain their male staff and applied for exemption on their employees’ behalf. Anecdotal testimony notes that the owner of a gentlemen’s outfitters in Brighton, whose entire pre-​war male staff with the exception of one man had volunteered, requested that his last remaining male employee be exempt from call-​up because it would be unseemly for the new female staff to take customers’ inside-​leg measurements.42 In order to release starred men for the services, which were experiencing a shortage, in March 1916 the Reserved Occupations Committee withdrew some industries, and reduced the number of men who were starred and exempted by ensuring that no man under thirty-​one was permitted to remain in a reserved occupation and that all men requiring exemption had to have been in their trade since August 1915, when the National Register was compiled.43 In April 1916, a circular was issued listing roles that were deemed to be of national importance. Age limits were stipulated for single men in a reserved occupation who might be granted exemption. The list of occupations, with the exception of mining and shipbuilding, was adjusted frequently to respond to the changing demands of the war.44 A Manpower Distribution Board was established in August 1916 under the chairmanship of Austen Chamberlain to address the issue of competing manpower requirements. Without the power to allocate quotas for industry and the services, it failed. It was hampered by the War Office, which considered that it had priority over physically fit young men and decried what it v 58 v

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Raising an ‘industrial army’ perceived to be the indiscriminate badging of men by the Ministry of Munitions, which was still distributing daily between 1,000 and 1,500 war service badges in October 1916.45 It was replaced by the Department of National Service in December. A Schedule of Protected Occupations was then compiled, providing differing levels of safeguards to skilled men according to their occupations, ages and medical categories. Men graded in their medical examinations as ‘A’ who were undertaking badged and protected occupations were combed out and replaced by Category ‘C2’ and ‘C3’ men who were deemed fit only for home service.46 The changes to the scheme were not passively accepted by workers. Men in the Sheffield engineering industry went on a two-​day strike in November 1916 following the debadging of Leonard Hargreaves, a fitter at the Vickers works, who was called up into the Army Service Corps.47 His debadging was contrary to the assurances given to skilled men. The incident demonstrated that any change to men’s status required local trade union support. To try and end the dispute, the Trade Card Agreement was passed on 18 November, which enabled the Amalgamated Society of Engineers to issue trade cards to its skilled members to serve as guarantees against their conscription. Until June 1917, when the scheme was cancelled amid much controversy, this agreement gave the engineering unions the power to decide whether a man was retained on the home front or sent into the services. On the insistence of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, the Government continued to grant preferential treatment to time-​served, skilled engineering workers, guaranteeing in May 1917 that they would not be called up before male dilutees were conscripted.48 In February 1917, a National Service Scheme was instigated, requiring all men aged between eighteen and sixty-​one to enrol. This civilian version of the Derby Scheme moved men engaged in non-​essential work into other jobs, paying travel expenses if these were in another district and securing a minimum wage of 25s a week. Just 206,000 men enrolled, of whom 45,000 were already undertaking essential work. Only 388 men were moved into alternative employment. Chamberlain resigned in the summer and was replaced by Auckland Geddes. The Department of National Service became a full Ministry in November 1917, with full powers to control the allocation of manpower for both industry and the services. Geddes used the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) to shut down non-​essential industries and to move workers into key ones. He subordinated military manpower demands to those of industry: in particular merchant shipbuilding and the production of aircraft, tanks, iron v 59 v

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Men in reserve ore, food and timber. He did not go as far as imposing conscription on workers, however, relying on skilled men to volunteer their services in munitions industries. Finally, in December 1917, the Ministry of National Service began to compile a list of reserved occupations to ensure that industry did not forfeit skilled men to the services, that skilled workers transferred from less essential jobs to ones of national importance, and that men could be released for the forces without disrupting vital services and trade.49 These tended to be manual trades such as engineering and mining, although some white-​collar professions were also included, such as chemist and teacher. Moreover, it was proposed that men in all occupations under a particular age should be liable for military conscription and their exemption certificates be removed. This was eventually put into effect in February 1918 with the passing of the Military Service (No. 1)  Act and, two months later, the Military Service (No. 2) Act. The Schedule of Protected Occupations was revised; a ‘clean cut’ was introduced raising the minimum age of exemption for workers in protected jobs to twenty-​ three; and two age limits were set for those in non-​protected work, below which men were conscripted into the forces. The exemption certificates of all munitions workers employed in trades that were not listed on the Revised Schedule of Protected Occupations with a medical classification of ‘A1’ were withdrawn. This released weekly from the munitions industries 9,000 recruits, more than double the previous average of 3,700.50 But this was wholly insufficient to replenish the more than 31,500 casualties sustained every week in the second quarter of 1918.51 Thus, after three years of trial and error, in what was to be the last nine months of the war, the Government finally implemented a scheme to balance the needs of industry and the forces, so that, as Gerard DeGroot noted, ‘the army tail no longer wagged the government dog’.52 It succeeded in releasing 70,000 men from industry into the services at a time when manpower was operating at maximum capacity.53 On the eve of the Armistice, 2.5  million men were officially regarded as being in a reserved occupation.54

‘Scrimjacks’ and ‘scrimshanks’: the 1939 (Provisional) Schedule of Reserved Occupations In the inter-​ war years successive governments acknowledged that mistakes were made during the First World War. When men in occu­ pations vital to the prosecution of the hostilities were permitted to volunteer, the army expanded at such a rate that it could not be supplied, v 60 v

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Raising an ‘industrial army’ and too great a strain was placed on essential industry. ‘The first thing we must all appreciate’, noted the Minister for the Co-​ordination of Defence in May 1938, ‘is that any Government dealing with the use of man-​power to-​day would be almost criminal if they did not take account of the lessons of the Great War’.55 Similarly, in December 1938, Ernest Brown, the Minister of Labour, acknowledged: One of the clearest lessons of the Great War of 1914–​18 was the necessity for conserving the supply of skilled workmen employed in war industries. During the earlier part of the War great damage was done by the indiscriminate recruitment of men who would have been invaluable in making war material and in maintaining essential services. Indeed, efforts were made to recover men from the Army.56

Brown drew on his own personal experience to support his point. In early 1915, he and a colleague recruited to the military in two days 30,000 miners from the Rhondda in south Wales. Within nine months, the miners had been returned to the pits.57 As early as 1922, lists were drawn up by two sub-​committees of the Committee of Imperial Defence detailing occupations that would be essential if war resumed, preventing workers over a particular age from joining the services.58 This was the scheme on which the 1939 Schedule of Reserved Occupations was based. While foreign policy focused on appeasement, attempting to delay or avert war altogether, domestic policy was centred on implementing civil defence preparations. Legislation was passed, including the Civil Defence Acts of 1937 and 1939; new organisations were established, including Air Raid Precautions (ARP, 1937), the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS, 1938), the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS, 1938) and the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF, 1939); an evacuation scheme was prepared; trenches were dug; anti-​gas measures and a shelter policy were instigated, with gas masks and the means to construct air raid shelters being distributed; and public information leaflets were produced. A pamphlet issued in November 1938 informed the public that a list of reserved occupations was being drawn up in case of a national emergency. In December 1938, Sir John Anderson, the Lord Privy Seal, noted in the Commons: It will be made clear that these [reserved] persons can best serve the State by remaining at the work for which they have been trained. That is the form of national service in which they can be most useful, and it is from outside their ranks that the Government will look, at any rate in the initial stages, to find the recruits for all the various Defence services.59

v 61 v

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Men in reserve Having begun to compile the Schedule, the Ministry of Labour consulted in December 1938 with the National Confederation of Employers’ Organisations (later the British Employers’ Confederation) and the TUC. It also liaised with representatives of specific occupations:  with regard to coalmining for example, there was consultation with the Mines Department, the Mining Association (employers) and the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain. A  handbook was produced that provided examples of the types of work that were covered by the Schedule, and contained information on where to obtain advice.60 The full list, which was not distributed and was purely for reference, was incredibly detailed, running to sixty three pages, with a thirty-​page index setting out different ages for reservation within different occupations. There were three main categories of occupations: those of direct importance to the maintenance of the life of the community, such as ‘member of the medical profession’, ‘plumber’ and ‘prison warder’; those involved in the production of munitions for the services and commodities required on the home front, such as ‘fisherman’, the ‘merchant and shipping services’ and ‘coalmining’; and those possessing skills that could be used in industries essential to the war effort, such as ‘cartographer’, ‘theatre and film studio electrician’ and ‘watch-​maker’. The Schedule, with its mixture of white-​collar professional occupations (‘architect’, ‘pathologist’), lower-​middle-​class jobs (‘spectacle frame maker’, ‘French polisher’) and heavy industry trades (‘foundry worker’, ‘dock worker’), covered about 5 million men and affected the lives of a diverse range of class and occupational groupings. As illustrated in Figure 2.3, occupations were listed alphabetically on the (Provisional) Schedule of January 1939, from ‘accountant’ to ‘zinc manufacture’. There were 292 occupations in total. Generic industries, such as ‘metal manufacture’ and ‘mining’, had a number of occupational sub-​sections listed underneath. ‘Agriculture and horticulture’, for example, had five, including ‘farm worker (other than poultry and fruit farming)’; ‘forester, timber feller’; ‘gardener, nursery-​man, seed grower, fruit grower, hop grower’; ‘land agent’; and ‘poultryman’. Each of these occupations had specific roles listed underneath. ‘Farm worker (other than poultry and fruit farming)’ had twelve entries, including ‘Shepherd’ and ‘Pigman’. There were 1,463 entries listed on the Schedule. Many roles were grouped together under an occupation, such as ‘carter, horseman, ploughman’ under the sub-​section ‘Farm Worker’. In total, there were almost 2,500 individual roles mentioned on the Schedule. There was much deliberation not only about what occupations to include, but also v 62 v

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Raising an ‘industrial army’ when individuals should become reserved. A number printed next to a particular occupation referred to the age at which the worker became reserved. Men employed in these occupations who were at or above the age listed were prevented from enrolling for part-​time military service, which on the outbreak of war would become ‘whole-​time’. But they were permitted to register for any form of voluntary part-​time service on the home front, such as the national civil defence body ARP, private ARP services organised by firms or, following the formation in May 1940 of the Local Defence Volunteers, renamed the Home Guard in July 1940, service in this quasi-​military organisation. Those below the age of reservation were permitted to enrol in any form of military service in peacetime even though it would become whole-​time service in the event of war, making them liable to call-​up, subject to fitness and appeal. In wartime, men under the exemption age were to be permitted to enrol for whole-​time service in the military in their trade capacity.61 Put simply, the lower the occupation’s age of reservation, the more important the role. Of the nearly 2,500 roles listed in the January 1939 Schedule, just one, that of ‘lighthouse keeper’, was reserved at eighteen. Occupations reserved at twenty-​one included ‘meteorologist’ and ‘lock keeper’. Those with a reservation age of twenty-​three included ‘cutler’ and ‘surgical appliance maker’. Jobs listed as having a reserved aged of twenty-​five included ‘coastguard’ and ‘physicist’. Thirty was the age of reservation for ‘chocolate confectioner’ and ‘trade union official’. ‘Civil servant minor grade’ and ‘postman’ were reserved at thirty-​five. If no number was listed beside a role, all workers, no matter what their age, were subject to the restriction. This applied to ‘gunsmith’, ‘pharmacist’ and ‘x-​ray operator’. ‘In fixing the age of reservation for an occupation’, stated Ralph Assheton, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour, speaking in February 1941, ‘regard is had for all relevant factors, including the number of persons suitable and available for necessary work’.62 The specific ages attached to each occupation nevertheless prompted debate:  ‘Are not the age limits for some of the reserved occupations much too low?’63 Thus, reservation was on a block system:  men were automatically reserved en masse if they belonged to particular occupational groups and if they were of or above a specific age, irrespective of the exact work in which they were engaged. Employers of a worker under the reservation age or engaged in an occupation not listed on the Schedule could apply for deferment if they could prove that the man was crucial, could not be replaced and was considered to be of greater value on the home front than he would be if conscripted into the forces. v 63 v

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Men in reserve

Figure 2.3  The first page of entries from the ‘Schedule of Reserved Occupations for Use in Time of War’, TNA, LAB 45/​1 (1939) v 64 v

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Raising an ‘industrial army’ While age was fundamental to the policy of reservation, gender was largely irrelevant, at least on a superficial level. The Schedule did not explicitly state the gender of the individual undertaking the occupation. The sole exception in the (Provisional) Schedule of January 1939 was ‘schoolmaster, teacher (male)’, which was reserved at twenty-​five, whereas ‘schoolmistress, teacher (female)’ had no age listed, indicating that all female teachers were to be reserved. A  marriage bar was in place in this profession, only being dispensed with in 1944, and so the restriction on women in this occupation pivoted on marital status rather than age.64 All other occupations were to be regarded as covering both men and women. A  note inserted before the index of occupations states:  ‘References to men are to be read as including women.’ Yet as a distinct gendered division of labour was in operation in 1930s Britain, the majority of the occupations listed would have been undertaken almost exclusively by men. There were, for example, over a quarter of a million men employed in the iron and steel industry in June 1939 and just 13,000 women. Strikingly, so few women worked in shipbuilding that their numbers were not even considered worthy of recording.65 Furthermore, the gendered division of labour persisted during the war, curtailing opportunities for women to ­undertake work tagged as ‘male’. Parts of the engineering trade, for example, in which a large number of men were reserved, remained largely closed to women, and thus the Schedule reserving men indirectly impacted upon women. Marianne Lloyd, an engineering draughtswoman, was unable to undertake work for which she had been trained: ‘I didn’t seem to have the opportunity somehow because most of the men who had been reserved in those years, you see, they were already in their jobs.’66 Penny Summerfield notes that ‘the sexual division of labour had been rigidified by the reservation of male draughtsmen . . . Marianne’s account suggested that the Schedule of Reserved Occupations deprived her, as a woman, of opportunities which would have been open to men.’67 Women who were employed in occupations listed in the Schedule and who were at or above the age of reservation were permitted to volunteer for nursing and first aid services according to an explanatory note. When single women aged between twenty and thirty were conscripted in December 1941 under the National Service (No. 2) Act, those women who had volunteered prior to conscription and who were engaged in vital war work were reserved. ‘The same principles and procedure as to reservation and deferment will apply to women as to men; they will be exactly the same’, noted Bevin.68 There was ‘not to be a list of reserved v 65 v

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Men in reserve occupations [pertaining to women] as there was to begin with in the case of the men’.69 Women therefore had a different experience from men of reserved status, and while the relationship between the two genders remains central in a study of masculinities, this book focuses specifically on male experience. To ensure the widest possible distribution, in January 1939 every household, local office of the Ministry of Labour and post office received a National Service Guide. It provided information on the types of service for which volunteers were needed: the armed forces and their reserves and auxiliaries, as well as the various forms of civilian defence, including the police and auxiliary police, fire brigades and auxiliary fire services, the Merchant Navy, ARP, nursing, services related to the evacuation of children and a women’s land army. It specified roles that were suitable for older men and women to undertake, as well as indicating jobs that urgently required young volunteers. It encouraged the public to enrol on training courses in peacetime for the service they might wish to join on the outbreak of war. It also warned that skilled workers in scheduled occupations would be prohibited from enlisting, with the exception of ARP and corresponding trades in the forces, thereby seeking to ensure that volunteers should not be enrolled in services for which they would not be available in wartime because of the essential nature of their occupation.70 The guide provided information for men and women on the age limits, qualifications required, peacetime training and conditions of wartime service for each voluntary role to enable individuals to make an informed decision. It also included an application form to be completed and returned to the local office of the Ministry of Labour. This was a purely voluntary scheme, ‘a plan of free service, by a free people, for freedom’, rather than a form of conscription.71 The only stipulation was that those in essential occupations should not come forward. By June, 1.5 million had joined civil defence and over 300,000 had volunteered for the military services.72 The Schedule of Reserved Occupations, which operated in tandem with the National Service Guide, thus proved effective in ensuring that the services recruited only people who would be available if war broke out. Nevertheless, this also generated criticism: ‘There was far too much emphasis in the booklet on the reserved occupations. The booklet might well have been headed: “You will be serving your country best by being a scrimjack.” ’73 This derogatory word had close associations with the First World War term shirker. Yet classifying some occupations as reserved was acknowledged by most as crucial to winning any future war. The Minister of Labour, Ernest Brown, asserted: v 66 v

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Raising an ‘industrial army’ A nation can employ forces in the field for long periods only if it can provide sufficient food and goods and weapons in order to sustain effective action, and give them to a fighting force in sufficient quantities . . . Fighting forces in modern conflicts have become dependent on the general activities of highly specialised and highly mechanised industrial production.74

Following its publication in newspapers on 25 January 1939, the Provisional Schedule was widely commentated upon in Parliament and by trade unions. The Amalgamated Engineering Union, for example, was ‘by no means clear’ about the purpose of the Schedule.75 A Liberal MP expressed his dismay: [V]‌ery little progress is being made, and the whole thing is regarded as more or less of a flop, which is a most undesirable and unfortunate state of affairs. The list of reserved occupations is looked upon in a good many places rather as a joke. It was, of course, necessary to make a first attempt, and no doubt there will be a great improvement in future. A  great many people find it impossible to understand why certain people are to be in and others left out, and why certain ages are fixed.76

Similarly, the leader of the Liberal Party remarked that there were ‘a few quite obviously absurd cases which ought never to have been included’.77 The inclusion of gardeners, for example, was derided by one MP: ‘Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that an expert rhododendron grower has been refused to be allowed to enlist because he is in a reserved occupation?’78 Some MPs were clearly very frustrated: The type of these reserved occupations is astonishing. I have received a letter from a constituent who served as an officer in the last War and would like to serve as an officer again. He tells me he is a general salesman and a general salesman in the particular place where he works  –​they are a decorating firm –​is a man who, when someone calls at the shop and inquires about decorating his house, goes there to advise upon the scheme of decoration. He wisely said in his letter that when the first air raid comes to London no one will be wanting houses decorated and his job will have gone. What in the name of goodness is the use of keeping that man tied down in a reserved occupation when he is ready to do his part as a patriotic citizen in the fighting forces? We have in that large number of men, about 2,200,000, a reserve of strength which ought to be tapped.79

Whereas approximately 2.2  million men aged between eighteen and thirty were in reserved occupations, 2.3 million men were available for enlistment in the forces.80 This almost 50:50 ratio prompted the MP quoted above to reiterate his comments a month later:  ‘Does the right v 67 v

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Men in reserve hon. Gentleman realise that this Schedule as it stands at present prevents thousands of patriotic men doing their duty, and also gives an excuse to many others who want to “scrimshank” out of this duty?’81 Moreover, the TUC had deep concerns about the encroachment of the State into the working lives of their members and rejected the notion of industrial conscription.82 There were, however, some strong expressions of support. For example, the Glasgow Herald featured an article in January 1939 entitled ‘over 6,000,000 in Reserved Occupations’: Both those who join the Defence Services and those who are covered by the Schedule of reserved occupations, and therefore stick to those occupations, are engaged in what is truly National Service. There must be no feeling that one is more honourable than the other. Both classes will be serving the country’s interests in the way best fitted to their abilities. That is the official view.83

Glasgow, a city dominated in the 1930s by heavy industries, including engineering, shipbuilding, iron and steel, docks, and chemicals, was profoundly affected by the Schedule. Despite noting that working in a reserved occupation was as admirable as serving in the forces, the journalist inadvertently introduced a hierarchy of service. Distinction between the two ‘classes’ of men is thus embedded in this interpretation and, as we shall see, continued to shape understandings about civilian workers. The Schedule, like the First World War lists, was not static and was modified several times in the initial few months to meet changing priorities in the wake of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. New editions were published in April, May and August 1939. The April publication abandoned reservation for many of the listed occupations in order to release 630,000 potential recruits for the services, while the August version revised downwards to eighteen the reserved age for a lot of the industrial occupations.84 Thus, as Britain readied itself for war, the Schedule was frequently modified in preparation for the necessary balancing of military and civilian manpower. On the outbreak of hostilities, the Schedule was quickly implemented.

Reservation during the Phoney War Unlike the First World War, in which military conscription was passed eighteen months into the conflict, the State backed up its declaration of war against Germany on 3 September 1939 with the implementation v 68 v

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Raising an ‘industrial army’ of the National Service (Armed Forces) Act. In the first three months, 1.25 million men aged between eighteen and forty-​one without a conscientious objection, who passed the medical examination and were not engaged in occupations listed on the Schedule, were called up to join the armed service of their choice. The Schedule of Reserved Occupations also came fully into operation, preventing workers over the reserved age for their scheduled occupation from being called up. Those over eighteen who worked in reserved occupations and were under the age specified in the Schedule were available for posting to the armed forces in their trade or a similar one; they were not to be deployed for general service. Thus the implementation of the Schedule in wartime differed from the pre-​war version, as reserved men were no longer permitted to join the services in their trade irrespective of their age. This illustrates the Government’s recognition of the importance of industrial mobilisation. A further illustration is that, with the outbreak of war, a comb-​out began of the Territorial Army of men whose occupation was reserved at ages eighteen, twenty-​ one or twenty-​three, and who were at or above the age of reservation. Eight thousand men who were not employed in a corresponding military trade were returned to industry.85 Further comb-​outs occurred in December in the anti-​aircraft and coast-​defence units. While the absorption of ‘excess’ labour into the forces occurred rapidly without disrupting key industries, the mobilisation of industrial manpower was much slower. Despite increased cooperation between labour and management, with representatives of the British Employers’ Confederation and the TUC General Council forming a National Joint Advisory Council to consult with the Ministry of Labour –​now renamed the Ministry of Labour and National Service –​industrial mobilisation was sluggish. Moreover, while the Schedule precluded reserved men’s conscription into the forces, it did not guarantee employment on the home front. Despite the 1.25 million in the services and a further 1.25 million in civil defence, three months after the outbreak of war there were still 1.4  million unemployed.86 Many reserved men who were skilled in a trade listed on the Schedule were without work, some of them for many years. Concerns were expressed in the Commons within a month of the declaration of war about the numbers of men retained on the home front who were currently unemployed. Ernest Brown defended the policy by asserting: ‘The Schedule is based on the estimated requirements in industry when the national war effort is fully developed, and the fact that a man covered by the Schedule is at present out-​of-​work is not a reason for his exclusion [from the Schedule].’87 Large numbers of unemployed men v 69 v

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Men in reserve were volunteering part-​time as ARP wardens but were prohibited from taking up full-​time paid positions in ARP because they fell within the remit of the Schedule, which placed restrictions upon their engagement for whole-​time service in civil defence.88 Similarly, many female teachers at private schools who were made redundant when schoolchildren were evacuated on 1 September were prevented from taking up other employment.89 As a consequence of a Commons debate, they were removed from the Schedule in October 1939.90 Cooks, who were reserved at the age of thirty, were in demand in the rapidly expanding armed forces during the period of the Phoney War, and yet many skilled chefs remained without work on the home front.91 The application of the Schedule was temporarily relaxed so that chefs, both in and out of employment, were able to enlist for service as cooks in the forces, including those above the age of reservation. While this specific situation was resolved, the wider issue of civilian unemployment remained contentious for months. In February 1940, the Daily Mirror, true to its anti-​establishment stance, declared: Some of these reserved occupations have become so reserved that they’ve practically ceased to exist. Now that Mr Ernest Brown seems to have proved to his satisfaction that most of the 1,300,000 unemployed aren’t really unemployed (maybe they’re just pretending) perhaps he’ll have time to go into the ridiculous situation by which men are forbidden to work, and are at the same time asked to make their mightiest effort ever.92

Brown, and from 13 May 1940 his successor Ernest Bevin, repeatedly had to respond to MPs’ questions that raised the issue of different categories of reserved men who were unemployed, informing the House that those unable to find employment in their registered category were permitted to find employment elsewhere. The only restriction was whole-​time service in a civil defence organisation. That these questions were regularly posed indicates that the Schedule was unclear, confusing and not widely understood. From May 1940, men who had been unemployed for two months were permitted to volunteer for any civil defence organisation or armed service.93 A month later, in June 1940, unemployment was down to 434,000 men and 211,000 women.94 The Schedule was initially the only tool by which men could be prevented on industrial grounds from joining the services. From November 1939 onwards, a policy of deferment was also in operation. Employers of firms undertaking Government contracts could request that the military call-​up of ‘key men’ be deferred if they could prove that a man who was engaged in a reserved occupation but was under the age of reservation v 70 v

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Raising an ‘industrial army’ was undertaking work of vital national importance and could not be replaced. This was extended to cover ‘key men’ not engaged in reserved occupations. Within a year, employers had made successful requests for deferment for over 200,000 essential workers.95 In 1940, this system was extended to men engaged in work crucial to the maintenance of the life of the community, in law, accounting, banking, insurance, journalism, acting and trade unions, whose applications were overseen by committees staffed by members of the various professions, who could recommend deferments for individuals in these groups. In practice, this meant that a man doing a job in one company could be reserved, while another doing the same role in a different firm who was of the same age was liable for call-​up. Individual deferment, as Corinna Peniston-​Bird has noted, underscored the value of a man to the nation at war.96 It possibly also protected him from some of the abuse civilian men faced in the First World War. During the Phoney War, as with the first nine months of its existence, the Schedule was subject to revision. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour noted in April 1940: ‘The application of the Schedule of Reserved Occupations is working well; it is a flexible instrument which can be varied from day to day, and is being constantly varied and altered as circumstances change.’97 Nevertheless, it took time for workers to transfer from the contracting non-​essential consumer industries such as leather goods, pottery, hosiery and toys, to the expanding munitions sector and to transition from private civilian orders to Government ones. There was a shortage of materials, tools, floor space, managerial expertise and skilled labour required for munitions. There was also a high turnover of labour, much poaching of workers using higher wages as bait, and a large degree of wastage. In Margaret Gowing’s analysis, the sole achievement of the then Minister of Labour, Ernest Brown, was the Control of Employment Act passed on 21 September 1939, which gave the State powers of control over labour and prohibited employers advertising and filling new posts without official permission.98 Yet it was ineffective in finding a solution to the problems listed above. In his authoritative survey of manpower mobilisation, H. M. D. Parker asserts that the Control of Employment Act ‘belied its title. It provided no effective means of controlling the employment of manpower.’99 The act was circumvented by employers poaching skilled labour with the lure of higher wages and was undermined by trade union opposition wary of Government control of workers. Memories of the First World War and the loathed Munitions Act of 1915, which was regarded as a ‘workers’ v 71 v

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Men in reserve slavery bill’, came into play here. The mobilisation of manpower during the Phoney War was thus rather hesitant; the lack of strong government translated into an ineffective Ministry of Labour that failed to take bold decisions about labour control.

Bevin and the mobilisation of manpower With Churchill’s appointment as Prime Minister in May 1940 and the emergence of a coalition government, significant changes were made to the management of the economy. A market economy, in which a laissez-​ faire attitude largely predominated and decisions made by the Treasury regarding production were based on supply and demand using prices as a guide, was replaced by a centrally administered economy. Financial planning, which was predicated upon monetary resources to determine Government programmes, was abandoned, and physical planning, based on material resources such as available labour and steel, was implemented instead. The Treasury ceded responsibility to the War Cabinet and to Government departments responsible for the armed forces and for supplying them with munitions: the Ministry of Supply (army), the Ministry of Aircraft Production (RAF), the Admiralty (Royal Navy) and, from 1942, the Ministry of Production had priority over other areas with regard to scarce resources such as labour.100 On 22 May 1940, the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act was passed by the Coalition, conferring vast powers on the Government. This potentially controversial piece of legislation, which suspended democracy and withdrew civil liberties, was accepted swiftly. It even had the support of Ernest Bevin, who as General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union had been opposed to previous proposals for the direction of labour. Bevin was the newly appointed Minister of Labour. A trade union leader rather than an elected MP, his appointment showed that Churchill was fully committed to incorporating the unions in the war effort. The first Defence Regulation passed under this piece of legislation, 58A, empowered the Ministry of Labour to control all human and material resources, directing any individual into any form of work, and to exercise fully existing but little-​used powers over essential industries. Bevin spoke to trade union representatives asking for their cooperation and consequently all unions in the TUC supported the emergency powers legislation, pledging their resources to provide the military services with munitions. Thus, within a fortnight of the Coalition forming, a scheme for the full mobilisation of manpower under the Ministry of Labour that v 72 v

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Raising an ‘industrial army’ had been authorised with powers to direct labour had been approved by Parliament and accepted by organised labour and employers. This was in contrast to the First World War, in which most trade unions were bitterly opposed to industrial conscription. Bevin was advised by a Joint Consultative Committee, formed of seven members nominated by the TUC General Council and seven members from the British Employers’ Confederation, which played an active role in drafting industrial orders and regulations. One of the first orders to be introduced, in June 1940, was a Restriction on Engagement Order. This was to prevent the poaching of skilled labour with the lure of higher wages and required employers to hire workers only through employment exchanges. Provisions were also made to ensure that miners and agricultural workers, many of whom had already left to find better paid employment elsewhere, were prohibited from working outside their industries. Men who had previously been working in the shipyard industry but had sought employment in other trades during the inter-​war slump were located by the Ministry of Labour in the summer of 1940 and returned to the shipyards. With the commencement of the war proper following the ending of the Phoney War, new demands were placed on the munitions industries, which had to respond quickly. Nearly 64,000 vehicles and over 76,000 tons of ammunition were abandoned in France when the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) evacuated from Dunkirk.101 Moreover, a German invasion was considered to be extremely likely, and given the importance of air supremacy in fending off such an attack, fighter aircraft were required in large numbers. Between the first and third quarters in 1940, aircraft production increased by 93 per cent.102 There were no allocations for this increased expenditure; there was simply a priority system. In autumn 1940, the Government commissioned an inquiry into the demands of manpower and concluded that the heavy demands of the services would, according to Gowing, breed a ‘famine of men’ that in turn would breed a ‘hunger for women’.103 It also decided that a cap was needed on the size of the forces to ensure that industry would be able to supply them. It had become apparent that manpower was the primary restrictive factor on Britain’s capacity to wage war; there simply were not sufficient numbers of people to serve in the forces and to work in industry. In March 1941, Churchill imposed a ceiling of 2 million on the size of the army, the chief claimant on manpower; any larger and it would not be adequately equipped. While there would be an annual inflow of men who had reached the conscription age, the only cause for a reconsideration of v 73 v

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Men in reserve this figure would be heavy casualties or invasion. The ceiling was, however, later raised to 2.4 million. As military manpower needs grew, and as further age groups were conscripted and the reservoir of unemployed labour dried up, (with registered unemployment down to just 100,000 men and 98,000 women by June 1941),104 the numbers covered by the Schedule were reduced. The Ministry of Labour did this by first removing some occupations, second adjusting the age of reservation upwards so as to de-​reserve men while continuing to ensure that the demands of industry were met, and third permitting reserved men to become air crew. Changing the occupations listed on the Schedule was one way that men were de-​reserved and made available for posting to the forces. The occupational criteria for reservation status were refined, with some occupations being entirely removed from the Schedule. This was not unprecedented. In April 1940, gardeners, except those growing vegetables, who were crucial to the home front, were deleted. This was a result of complaints that ‘some were at present tending carnations’.105 But the Schedule was not static and other occupations were added as the war unfolded. Dust and refuse collectors were not initially reserved but were later included on the Schedule as part of the measures for the salvage campaign, with a reservation age of thirty five.106 Despite this de-​reservation of some occupations, there continued to be doubts about retaining so many men on the home front. The Scotsman in August 1940 argued ‘the list of reserved occupations is probably still too large. It includes men in professions and trades which contribute little to the war effort however much they minister to the conveniences of civil life’.107 Altering the reservation age for individual occupations was the second way that scheduled men were de-​reserved. In August 1940, for example, the age of reservation for male teachers was raised from twenty-​five to thirty. Many of the occupations that were reserved at twenty-​one and twenty-​three also witnessed increases so that by the end of 1940 –​with the Phoney War ended, France and the Low Countries invaded, the Luftwaffe ultimately repelled by the RAF in the Battle of Britain, and the Blitz having started –​few workers under twenty-​five were reserved.108 Ages continued to be adjusted throughout the war. The age of reservation for the police, for example, was increased in 1942. In the Provisional Schedule, there was no age listed beside ‘full time member of public police force’ so all those over eighteen were reserved. The reservation age was raised in June 1942 to twenty-​five, with policemen under that age becoming ‘de-​ reserved’ and made available for posting in the armed services, although v 74 v

75

Raising an ‘industrial army’ key members of the police aged under twenty-​five could be granted a deferment.109 Thus, in September 1942, 56,100 men were employed full-​ time in the regular police (not including full-​and part-​time auxiliaries), down from 68,400 on the outbreak of the war.110 Permitting men to join air crew was the third way to release reserved men for the services. From early 1941, all reserved men, with the exception of those in ‘scarcity’ occupations, were permitted to join the RAF or the Fleet Air Arm. This relaxation of the Schedule was because ‘the man-​power problems which arise in conditions of modern war bear with peculiar force upon the Royal Air Force, which requires a very high physical standard for its air-​crew personnel and which employs so many skilled tradesmen for maintenance.’111 A  sum of £47,000 was spent on newspaper advertising for recruits for RAF ground tradesmen and air crews from among men in reserved occupations.112 The Daily Record and Mail ran an advert in September 1941 purporting to be the words of a previously reserved man: ‘I was a motor fitter. But I wasn’t satisfied –​No sir! Thinks I, I’m fighting fit and only twenty-​seven. I could be giving it back to Jerry, up there!’ And although ‘I thought reserved men could not join air crews . . . but here I am!’, the advert reassured men that ‘Even if reserved you can fly with the RAF.’ ‘ “I never regretted swopping my old job –​important as it was” . . . You won’t regret it either if you follow his example.’113 The advert included a list of reserved occupations, such as carpenter, builder, blacksmith and bank clerk, which had released men into the RAF. For one Mass Observation diarist, an office worker from Ashton-​under-​Lyne, these adverts were ambiguous and confusing: Advertisement in Guardian about reserved men and flying duties; this is very misleading as RAF will not accept reserved men who have not been released by their firm. Very few firms will release their men. Rather unfair to men like myself, who even, given reasonable health, would not be released by their firms. I have tried unsuccessfully 5 times, and was given my present job on the strict understanding that I would not attempt to leave again. Other men tried considerably more often to my knowledge. These advertisements cause disaffection in factories and must gain very few replies.114

This diarist repeatedly attempted to evade his reserved status and enlist. These adverts presented the suggestion of joining up that was, ultimately, unachievable for many. Nevertheless, many young men interrupted their training apprenticeships, leaving their reserved occupations, to take up the opportunity of joining air crew. Such a distinction indicates a hierarchy of acceptable public service, in which even the State-​mandated v 75 v

76

Men in reserve retention of personnel in specific jobs could be got round through volunteering in the air force. That it was the RAF, rather than the army or navy, that was permitted to do this was undoubtedly a result of the type of war that had unfolded. The Battle of Britain, followed shortly by the Blitz, had taken a toll on air crew and more men were required to replenish that service. Moreover, RAF flight crew required a high level of technical knowledge and capability, qualities that could be found in many employed in industrial occupations. Donald McHutchon, who later joined the Merchant Navy, recalled the enforced departure of fellow students from his training course at a wireless college: At lunchtime a notice went up [that] all those between eighteen and twenty-​ five I think it was, would be conscripted into the RAF wireless or rear gunners. They weren’t at all pleased and there were only two of us left. I  was underage and there was one other guy over-​age, and all the rest went into the RAF, but they weren’t happy chaps at all [laughter].115

Strikingly, in contrast to the widely held belief that men flocked to the RAF, eager to be in the uniformed services, McHutchon asserts twice that the students were displeased and reluctant at being seconded to the RAF as rear gunners, a particularly dangerous role. The danger period of 1940, when the invasion scare was at its height, had been withstood, and hasty improvisations implemented by the Coalition Government to respond to the emergency had been generally accepted. It then had the breathing space to implement a longer-​term policy, which it began to initiate from early 1941. In January, Bevin turned to tackling the acute shortage of labour. He was committed to the principle that recruitment into the forces should be geared to the supply of material, rather than the other way round. One of his proposals was to revise the Schedule, which was presently reserving men according to their occupation and age so that the work on which they were engaged was the key criterion. This required further revision of the Schedule, including, first, adjusting the age of reservation upwards so as to de-​reserve men while continuing to ensure that the demands of industry were met, and second, the implementation of the double age of reservation. The age of reservation was repeatedly raised  –​quite considerably in many occupations. In April 1941, with the publication of the new Schedule, ages were only marginally increased. The same occupations were then subject to a more radical increase, instigated in either July or October 1941. A few occupations saw their age of reservation increased on all three occasions. Thus occupations that were reserved at twenty-​one, v 76 v

77

Raising an ‘industrial army’ for example, were raised to twenty-​five, while those reserved at thirty changed to thirty-​five or were de-​reserved. This successive raising of ages in reserved occupations released younger men for the services. A second method of releasing men for the forces was the labelling of occupations with two ages of reservation. From December 1941, double ages were implemented in certain essential industries  –​one at a lower age for key skilled and experienced workers in protected establishments within vital industries, and the other at a higher age for the occupation generally –​as it was recognised that within a particular occupation there could be considerable variation in the importance of the work undertaken by different individuals.116 The protected establishments were essential industries, such as shipbuilding and metal manufacturing, engaged for at least 80 per cent of their time on production for export or on Government contract work of especial importance to the war effort, as well as services that were crucial to the maintenance of the life of the community, such as the railways, docks, gas, water and electricity. These were entered onto a Register of Protected Establishments, and by December 1941, when the Register was closed, 100,000 firms had been recorded on it.117 Thus, establishments were divided into ‘protected’ and ‘unprotected’ depending on the necessity of the work they were undertaking. Protected firms benefited from acquiring and retaining the labour they needed to operate at capacity. Men working in ‘protected establishments’ doing urgent work of particular importance were reserved at a much lower age than those with the same skills engaged in less essential work in an unprotected firm. The difference could be as much as seventeen years: a boreman and driller could be reserved at eighteen if employed in a protected firm, but at thirty-​five if not.118 This revision transferred a considerable number of workers from less essential industries to more vital ones, but failed to release adequate numbers for the services. Another attempt to release reserved men into the services was to allow men to undertake corresponding trades in the forces. The Ministry of Labour in early 1941 permitted men to volunteer for call-​up as service tradesmen irrespective of the ages at which they were reserved. Additionally, twenty-​year-​olds employed in occupations with a reservation age of twenty-​one or above had their deferments cancelled and were made available for service trades. Some service trades, however, such as building and civil engineering, exceeded the requirements of the services, and an asterisk next to these occupations meant that men could be called up for general service. The Government thus responded to the fluctuating and competing demands of the armed forces and of industry. v 77 v

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Men in reserve Another way in which Bevin attempted to bring order to the manpower issue in 1941 was through the passing of a range of compulsory powers that enabled him to direct workers to specific industries. The introduction in March 1941 of the Essential Work (General Provisions) Order implemented the powers that the Government had been given under Defence Regulation 58A to ‘require any person to perform any service’.119 Firms placed on the Government list were regarded as ‘scheduled’ establishments engaged in ‘essential work’. This was defined broadly, as ‘work appearing to the Minister to be essential for the defence of the realm or the efficient prosecution of the war or to be essential to the life of the community’. The objective of the Order was to enhance Government control over workers and firms in order to ‘prevent loss of production owing to unnecessary turnover of labour, absenteeism or discipline’. There was to be no more casual sacking or giving notice:  employers in essential establishments were not allowed to sack employees until National Service Officers had been informed, and they had to give the worker seven days’ notice, while employees were not allowed to leave without going through the same procedure. Failure to comply resulted in a fine of up to £100 or up to three months’ imprisonment. Absenteeism became an offence under this order, liable to prosecution and punishment. Separate orders were implemented for coalmining, shipbuilding and ship repair, iron and steel, docks, railways, cotton manufacturing, building and civil engineering, boot and shoe manufacturing, electrical contracting, and the Merchant Navy, as their particular employment conditions were not applicable to the Essential Work Order. The Essential Work (Merchant Navy) Order implemented in May 1941, for example, established a Reserve to ensure that there would always be enough men to meet labour requirements and returned to sea thousands of men who had left the service since 1 January 1936. Agreements between the unions and employers’ associations enabled skilled workers in the engineering industry to be released by their employers to undertake urgent work elsewhere. Workers whose skills could be better utilised were encouraged to register at employment exchanges for a transfer. The Amalgamated Engineering Union, which berated Bevin for abandoning the voluntary principle, was highly critical of the Essential Work Order for compelling workers to surrender their freedom to move into higher paid work. It was the exception, however; other unions were very supportive of the Order as it offered an unprecedented level of protection to workers, with secure employment, guaranteed weekly wages, a minimum standard of working conditions, welfare arrangements and training v 78 v

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Raising an ‘industrial army’ facilities, and it made the termination of employment by employers harder. It was considered ‘amongst the most solid achievements gained by the Trade Union Movement during the course of the war’. So successful was the order that significant sections of the trade union movement wished to see an amended version implemented ‘as a permanent part of industrial regulation in times of peace’.120 In addition to the Essential Work Order, a second compulsory measure was authorised in March 1941: the Registration for Employment Order. The Ministry of Labour lacked information about civilian manpower (except for those in the engineering industry), and thus to help identify available labour, men above military age and women were required to register at employment exchanges, providing information about their current employment and household responsibilities. This resulted in 42,000 men being compelled to return to shipyards and mines.121 Yet despite these efforts, there remained a shortage of skilled labour in the first two years of the war and this spread to a shortage of all types of labour, both skilled and unskilled. At no point during the war was there a sufficient supply of skilled men to meet the needs of both the services and industry. A report by a committee chaired by Sir William Beveridge noted that the army in particular was widely misusing skilled men, deploying them on routine jobs that did not utilise their skills. Consequently, mechanical and electrical engineers were banned from joining the army in their service trades until August 1942. As a result of this shortage of skilled labour, wages increased, as we shall see in Chapter 4, which arguably served to bolster civilian masculinities. Despite this acute shortage of labour, criticisms were voiced about the surplus of reserved men in occupations that ought not to be exempt, who were perceived to be evading their duty. John Profumo, who as Secretary of State for War infamously had a brief relationship with Christine Keeler in 1961, was in March 1941 a twenty-​six-​year-​old Conservative MP, and a commissioned officer in the Royal Armoured Corps. He made a provocative statement lambasting the reservation policy: But has the House thought that here are still in this country great numbers of men who ought to join up –​young men like myself, capable, fit, with the muscle but without the will, men who are hiding behind the cloak of what are called reserved occupations? I could lay my hands on many such men, although I would prefer to lay my feet on them. I could give an example such as the man who calls himself a specialised ladies’ corset cutter. Is it more important for us to lace up our female sex than to lace the enemy? Up and down the country there are men who should be joining the Colours before

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Men in reserve we make all our women into soldiers, sailors and airmen. Let us rout out these people and put them into the Forces.122

Inflammatory statements such as this inciting violence towards men who were not in uniform make patently clear that the civilian male faced a continual struggle to establish that he was legitimately not in service uniform, something we examine further in Chapter 3. Profumo may have realised he went too far, and in a speech eight months later he backtracked, clarifying what he had said: I was not on that occasion referring to the millions of skilled workers up and down the country, many of whom would prefer to join one of the Forces but who are doing as excellent and gallant work as our airmen who rule the skies. I was referring to men who, through graft, influence and wangling, have secured for themselves cushion-​seated jobs.123

There is evidence to suggest that some men were indeed able to procure employment in a reserved occupation in order to evade being called up. A conversation was overheard in a London hotel between an older and younger man in which the former secured the latter a reserved job with a salary of £500 per annum, with travelling expenses, and a ‘finder’s fee’ of 25 per cent per annum.124 ‘Trust money to find a loophole to wiggle through’, commented the Daily Mirror in its report asserting that some were ‘using their wealth to BUY protection for their sons’.125 The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour endeavoured to respond to the many criticisms directed at men with a reserved status: The Schedule of Reserved Occupations does not merely give an excuse for not going to the war, but it says definitely that people who come under it cannot go to the war; so it is unfair to criticise civil servants or anybody else, if the Schedule of Reserved Occupations has prevented them from going into military service.126

By summer 1941, the shortage of both male and female workers had become evident and was impacting upon the forces, the munitions industries and the key war industries, such as coal. This manpower shortage was alleviated by the entry of new allies into the war  –​the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the United States in December 1941 –​and by drawing upon the last remaining reserve pool of labour:  women. Any further shortages caused by the transfer of male labour from industry to the services could not be plugged. Britain was operating at capacity. By late 1942, a thorough system of manpower budgeting had been implemented. The Manpower Budget enabled the planning of the economy v 80 v

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Raising an ‘industrial army’ through its allocation of the available labour supply, dictating the balance of personnel between the armed services and civil employment and, within the latter, between munitions industries and non-​munitions industries. Consequently, there was a continual effort to attain the maximum degree of mobilisation into the forces while avoiding excessive deployment of industrial workers. Too many men in the forces and too few workers in munitions would mean that the surfeit of service personnel would be ill-​equipped, lacking weapons, tanks, ships and aircraft with which to wage war, and the home front would be left without essential supplies. Conversely, insufficient numbers of servicemen and excessive numbers of civilian workers would lead to stockpiles of artillery, lost battles and increasing numbers of casualties. Or as The Times succinctly noted: ‘recruits are no use without equipment; equipment is no use without recruits’.127 The needs of the military therefore had to be carefully balanced against the requirements of the munitions industries. Yet the two were intimately connected: if one of the services decreased the number of new recruits and subsequently reduced its demands on its supply department, this had a knock-​on effect on the supply’s contracts, which meant that companies altered their work requirements. Thus, a reduction of men enlisting in the air force would impact upon the numbers of workers required in the industries supplying the RAF with uniforms, footwear, food and aircraft, for example. The added complexity was ensuring a balance between essential and non-​essential industries. From 1942 onwards, non-​munitions industries that were experiencing acute labour shortages were afforded allocations. A complex centralised system of quotas that rationed labour was implemented in what Keith Hancock and Margaret Gowing have called ‘a landmark of manpower history’.128 The Manpower Budget, which was the source of much bitterness between the Government departments responsible for production who were competing for allocation of scarce resources, reflected the fluctuating strategic and economic priorities of the State. Over a three-​ year period (May 1940–​ summer 1943), the forces expanded (from 2.2  million), taking in over 2  million more men (to 4.3 million) as Table 2.1 demonstrates; and almost 1.5 million men and women were absorbed into the metal, engineering, vehicle and shipbuilding industries as Table 2.2 illustrates (from 3,198,000 to 4,659,000). Of these civil employment occupations, engineering was the single largest field employing men throughout the war, followed by agriculture, iron and steel, and shipbuilding, as Table 2.3 illustrates. The increase in numbers of workers employed in these occupations was a result of, first, the v 81 v

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Table 2.1  Ratio of men in armed forces to civilian workers, 1938–​45 June 1938 June 1939 June 1940 June 1941 June 1942 Total of men and women in civil employment Men in civil employment Increase/​decrease Men in armed forces Increase/​decrease Ratio of all civilian workers to forces Ratio of male civilian workers to forces

June 1943

June 1944 June 1945

17,378,000 18,000,000 17,758,000 17,751,000 17,878,000 17,444,000 16,967,000 16,416,000 12,766,000 13,163,000 12,452,000 11,844,000 11,296,000 10,675,000 10,347,000 10,133,000 —​ +397,000 –711,000 –608,000 –548,000 –621,000 –328,000 –214,000 385,000 480,000 2,218,000 3,278,000 3,784,000 4,300,000 4,500,000 4,650,000 —​ +95,000 +1,738,000 +1,060,000 +506,000 +516,000 +200,000 +153,000 45:1 37:1 8:1 5:1 5:1 4:1 3:1 3:1 33:1

27:1

6:1

3:1

Source: authors’ table. Figures in bold taken from Howlett, Fighting with Figures, p. 38.

3:1

2:1

2:1

2:1

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Table 2.2  Numbers of workers in engineering and shipbuilding, distributive trades, government and transport (millions) June 1938 June 1939 June 1940 June 1941 June 1942 June 1943 June 1944 June 1945 Metals, engineering, vehicles and shipbuilding Distributive trade National and local government Transport and shipping

2.590

2.812

3.198

3.753

4.372

4.659

4.496

3.899

2.882 1.386 1.225

2.887 1.385 1.233

2.639 1.448 1.146

2.332 1.636 1.194

2.173 1.728 1.217

2.009 1.786 1.176

1.927 1.809 1.237

1.958 1.903 1.252

Source: authors’ table. Figures taken from Howlett, Fighting with Figures, p. 38.

Table 2.3  Numbers of workers in engineering, agriculture, iron and steel industry, and shipbuilding

Engineering Agriculture Iron and steel industry Shipbuilding and ship repairing

June 1939 June 1940 June 1941

June 1942

June 1943

June 1944

June 1945

1,901,700 618,000 246,100 144,700

2,425,500 627,000 258,400 249,300

2,472,600 621,000 239,700 249,300

2,377,800 647,000 230,600 249,300

2,130,600 683,000 216,800 252,300

2,087,400 602,000 255,000 203,100

2,294,000 619,000 267,100 232,400

Source: authors’ table. Figures taken from Howlett, Fighting with Figures, p. 38.

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Men in reserve virtual abolition of unemployment, down from 1,710,000 in June 1938 to 60,000 in mid-​1943 (and falling further to 54,000 in 1944), most of whom were either unfit for regular work or were changing jobs;129 second, the mobilisation of women, initially by a voluntary scheme encouraging enlistment through the introduction of War Work Weeks and then by compulsion from December 1941, with the passing of the National Service (No.2) Act, which conscripted single women aged between twenty and thirty, and later widened the age range and included married women;130 and third, the movement of workers from other civilian industries classed as ‘less essential’, such as textiles, glass, and boots and shoes. The huge cohort of workers released by these initiatives was supplemented by small numbers of skilled workers from overseas, such as the West Indians who arrived in 1941 to work in factories and workshops on Merseyside; Irish labour; prisoners of war; ‘friendly aliens’, such as Czechoslovakians, Norwegians, Belgians and Dutch nationals; and the mobilisation of the disabled.131 As projections for the numbers of men and women required in the services and civil defence were set, further combing out of the reserved occupations was needed in order to fulfil them. A major revision of the system occurred in December 1941 with the principle of block reservations by occupation being replaced with individual deferments:  a man now had to be doing a vital job in a key establishment in a reserved industry as well as meet the age requirements. A pencil-​and-​ink drawing by the cartoonist Ronald Niebour of Father Christmas, who thought that he might be de-​reserved after the festive period, was a response to this change in the policy of reservation.132 Moreover, from 1 January 1942 onwards, the age of reservation for all occupations, with the exception of the Merchant Navy, miners, employees of local authorities and agricultural workers, with both protected firms and those that were not, was raised a year at a time at monthly intervals until they ceased to be reserved.133 Individual deferments could only be granted to men undertaking work of the utmost importance. Existing deferments were re-​examined and those given to men under twenty-​five who were not in a scarcity occupation were annulled. This combing out of men from essential industries, which was made possible by the conscription of young single women in 1941, resulted in a gradual de-​reservation by age groups, the disappearance of occupational reservation, and the implementation of individual deferment of men and women according to the importance of their work.134 It also limited the power of employers, as they could no longer try to get rid of unwanted employees. Men that were affected v 84 v

85

Raising an ‘industrial army’ by this change in the system of reservation were either taken from less essential work to join the armed forces or were transferred into a munitions industry of higher priority than their previous occupation. With this change from block reservation to individual deferment, the official policy of reservation came to an end and the Schedule ceased to exist. A system akin to that used in the First World War, with military service tribunals making decisions about recruits, was then implemented. The decision-​making was decentralised with the establishment in 1942 of forty-​four District Manpower Boards, comprising a chairman, a deferment officer, a labour supply officer, a military recruiting officer in charge of the local branch of the Ministry of Labour, and a female officer. Each local board was responsible for implementing a thousand individual deferments a week. Men who became de-​reserved following the shift to individual deferments and men whose occupations were not on the Schedule were permitted to apply for a postponement of their call-​up to the forces on the grounds of hardship or conscientious objection135 to the appropriate District Manpower Board, which had the authority to grant a suspension if it was satisfied that a man was engaged on work of national importance and was indispensable.136 Less than one-​fifth (915,000) of the 5 million applications for deferment made in 1942 were declined.137 From 1942, reserved men were required periodically to complete a form giving information about the nature of their duties to ensure that individually they were making an adequate contribution to the national war effort. By 1943, most men called up to the forces were from occupations that had originally been reserved (as opposed to men who had come of conscription age). The de-​reservation of occupations was thus successful in releasing large numbers of men into the forces. Another procedure implemented to ensure that only highly skilled men of conscription age remained on the home front related to those deployed on industrial apprenticeships. Men in occupations with a reservation age of twenty-​five or less in December 1941 were granted deferment of their call-​up to the services until they completed their apprenticeships or turned twenty. This concession was retracted in 1943 in order to release eighteen-​and nineteen-​year-​old apprentices for the services, as it was deemed unjustified retaining an apprentice for two years who would be automatically released into the services and not offered deferment by the Manpower Boards on reaching twenty. Of the 44,600 apprentices in mid-​1943, over 8,000 had their existing deferments cancelled and they joined the services; three-​quarters went into general service, a quarter into corresponding service trades. The remaining v 85 v

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Men in reserve 36,000 apprentices, who it was deemed would certainly be precluded from the services or who might be granted a deferment by Manpower Boards when they turned twenty, retained their deferment.138 Seventeen of our interviewees had been apprentices and became reserved at eighteen as a result of the deferments. Another initiative to balance the needs of the military against those of the home front was the Bevin Boys scheme. The mass departures of skilled coalminers at the outbreak of war into both the services and other areas of civilian work, enticed by higher pay, and again in 1940 following the fall of France and the decline of British coal exports, had led to a severe shortfall of both labour and coal. Government attempts to return coalminers to the pits, through the Essential Work (Coal-​Mining Industry) Order of May 1941, through combing-​out of the services and other important war industries in 1942, and through schemes in 1943 to permit all men called up for the services and those in civilian employment (with the exception of those working on aircraft) to volunteer to work underground, were largely ineffective. Consequently, in October 1943, Bevin decided to implement a compulsory ballot, conducted fortnightly, conscripting men born after 1 January 1918 who passed the medical examination into the coal mines. If a number drawn at random from 0 to 9 matched the final figure of a man’s National Service Registration Certificate he would be drafted into the mines.139 So 13781, 13811 and 13991 would all be called up to the scheme if 1 was drawn. This funnelled one in ten young conscripts to the pits. If more men were required, two numbers were selected (such as 1 and 6), thus conscripting two out of every ten men, and if fewer men were needed, a two-​digit number (such as 81) was chosen. Numbers were drawn, observed by Bevin, after each new registration. The scheme affected all men, including those who had already undergone training in the Air Training Corps or Home Guard, excluding only those in highly skilled occupations who had been designated to the services to work in their trade, and men who had been accepted for flying duties in the RAF and Fleet Air Arm. The scheme, allocating to the mines 21,800 men aged between eighteen and twenty-​ five, was extremely unpopular. About 40 per cent appealed against the decision, citing preference for the services, claustrophobia or physical unfitness.140 Bert Mitchell’s testimony, collected at a meeting of the Bevin Boys Association near Cardiff in May 2005 and uploaded onto the BBC ‘People’s War’ Archive, records that receiving his call-​up papers instructing him to report to the coal mines was ‘a bitter blow when you saw all your friends going in the services’.141 After an accident, and his refusal v 86 v

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Raising an ‘industrial army’ to return to the pits, he was sent to prison for a month. Upon release, he was returned to the mines but was able to join the army when his call-​up papers came through shortly afterwards, ‘which is what I’d wanted to do in the first place’. He offers a very critical account of the decision to send inexperienced men down the mines: ‘I still feel bitter about it now . . . You had people going down there who had never seen a lump of coal in their lives and you had people in the army wanting to go back to work in the pits and they wouldn’t let them go back but they sent us down there.’ The Bevin Boys scheme succeeded in increasing the number of miners, but output continued to fall. The combination of these initiatives meant that 1943 witnessed the maturation of manpower budgeting and the height of mobilisation. By 1943, 45.3 per cent of the population of working age were either in the forces or in war industries such as munitions, shipbuilding, engineering, metalwork and chemicals.142 This intensity of resource mobilisation can be compared with Germany (37 per cent) and the United States (35 per cent). Only the Soviet Union achieved a greater degree of control over labour, with 54 per cent of its population deployed in war industries or the armed services. This has led Mark Harrison to conclude that the British economy was more fully mobilised, and for longer, than its American counterpart. From mid-​1943 until VE Day, the only available option, given that Britain was fully mobilised, was to redistribute the diminishing manpower from areas less vital to securing victory and able to spare labour to those that required it and were strategically essential. With the support of the American military and industry behind it, Britain was able to maintain an artificially high level of armed forces. As Table  2.4 illustrates, in the last year of the war, there were more men in the armed forces than civilians employed in the metals, engineering, vehicles and shipbuilding industries, which had throughout the war been the largest field employing civilians. The number of men directed into the forces increased each year, albeit in smaller annual increments, while the number deployed in civil employment decreased, as Table 2.1 above illustrates. Yet the ratio of men in industry to men in the forces was above 3:1 until June 1943, when it dropped to 2:1. If all civilian workers are included, male and female, then the ratio is even higher (4:1) until the last two years of the war, when membership of the forces was at its peak. As the war entered its final phase in 1944, gearing up for D-​Day and the push towards Germany, Mark Harrison notes that for every serviceman deployed, one worker was employed in munitions and two were employed in v 87 v

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Men in reserve Table 2.4  Numbers of men in armed forces, and workers in metals, engineering, vehicles and shipbuilding (millions)

Men in armed forces Metals, engineering, vehicles and shipbuilding

June 1938

June June 1939 1940

June 1941

June June June 1942 1943 1944

June 1945

0.385

0.480 2.218

3.278 3.784 4.300 4.500 4.650

2.590

2.812 3.198

3.753 4.372 4.659 4.496 3.899

Source: authors’ table. Figures taken from Howlett, Fighting with Figures, p. 38.

the civilian economy, ensuring the maintenance of the home front, for example through food manufacture.143 In the final analysis, it can be concluded that Bevin was largely successful in making industry meet the demands of total war and adapting to the difficulties it generated. As a 1944 publication on manpower stated, ‘We have solved the problem and passed the test. The people have been regrouped for total war.’144

Conclusion The Schedule of Reserved Occupations which operated during the Second World War in Britain was unparalleled internationally: although other countries implemented restricted labour control policies (see Appendix 2), the Schedule had its antecedents in the First World War. The distribution of badges to men engaged in skilled work, the starring of occupations that were deemed essential to the war effort and the compilation of lists of reserved occupations were indications that the State recognised the importance of skilled workers in key industries. Yet the specific direction of manpower occurred only in the final year of the First World War. Lessons were learnt from the mistakes made, in particular the rapid expansion of the army caused by unrestricted mass volunteering, which had had disastrous consequences for industrial productivity, and the tensions caused by the existence of two competing bodies, the Ministry of Labour and the Ministry of National Service. Consequently, on the outbreak of the Second World War, a single Ministry of Labour v 88 v

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Raising an ‘industrial army’ and National Service was established to coordinate policy and balance the needs of industry against those of the forces, and a Schedule of Reserved Occupations was devised during the inter-​war period and fully implemented with the declaration of war against Germany. The Schedule averted a repeat of the unrestrained volunteering of the first two years of the First World War, preventing the loss of skilled men from the home front who would otherwise have been absorbed within the forces. Its key strength was its flexibility, which ensured it could be continually revised, responding quickly to swiftly changing priorities of the war effort and balancing the need for manpower both in the services and on the home front. H. M. D. Parker, in his magisterial survey of manpower mobilisation, stated that ‘this was one of the most effective instruments that the Ministry of Labour devised’.145 Yet as the age and occupational criteria were continually adjusted and new procedures were frequently implemented, the process of reservation was, to many, unclear and confusing. It was also considered a failure by some, particularly those on the right who were opposed to controls: ‘I think the Schedule of Reserved Occupations works badly . . . I do not think that the Schedule has really worked well in the past, though, perhaps, it was necessary in the early days.’146 As the system of reservation changed from block reservation to individual deferment in order to release more and more men into the military, the Schedule became obsolete and manpower boards made decisions on individual cases. Yet the broader policy of reservation continued to control levels of manpower in the essential industries and shaped the lives of millions of men. We turn now from official reservation procedures to the rich oral data generated by our interview cohort, supplemented by personal testimonies archived elsewhere, in order to explore civilian men’s reactions to their reserved status. Notes 1 John Dickson, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 21 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​53). 2 Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 90. 3 Cited in ibid. 4 Andrew Clark, Echoes of the Great War: The Diary of the Reverend Andrew Clark, 1914–​1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 265. 5 Laura Ugolini, Civvies: Middle Class Men on the English Home Front, 1914–​18 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 124.

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Men in reserve 6 Ian F. W. Beckett, ‘The Nation in Arms, 1914–​18’, in A Nation in Arms: A Social History of the British Army in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 11. 7 Stephen Garton, ‘Return Home:  War, Masculinity and Repatriation’, in Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake (eds.), Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 191. 8 Lois Bibbings, Telling Tales about Men: Conceptions of Conscientious Objectors to Military Service during the First World War (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 95–​6. 9 Ibid. 10 Cited in Derek Birley, ‘Sportsmen and the Deadly Game’, in International Journal of the History of Sport 3:3 (1986), 288–​310 (p. 291). 11 David Cesarani, The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-​ Jewry, 1841–​ 1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 110. 12 Nicoletta Gullace, The Blood of Our Sons: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 2. 13 Ibid., p. 218. 14 IWM, Documents,12053, private papers of P. M. Yearsley, p. 19. 15 George Wilkinson, interview, 2 October 1985 (IWM SA, 9104). 16 John Dorgan, interview, 1986 (day unspecified) (IWM SA, 9253). 17 Gullace, The Blood of Our Sons, p. 70. 18 H. M. D. Parker, Manpower: A Study of Wartime Policy and Administration (London: HMSO, 1957), p. 2. 19 Humbert Wolfe, Labour Supply and Regulation (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1923), p. 37. 20 Ian F. W. Beckett, Home Front 1914–​1918: How Britain Survived the Great War (Kew: The National Archives, 2006), p. 34. 21 HC Deb., 21 December 1915, Vol. 77, 213–​437. 22 Ibid. 23 Ugolini, Civvies, p. 129. 24 Keith Grieves, The Politics of Manpower, 1914–​18 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 22. 25 Bibbings, Telling Tales about Men, p. 177. 26 http://​www.1914–​1918.net/​derbyscheme.html (accessed 7 August 2014). 27 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 11. 28 The poster was also published in Welsh: IWM, PST 5026, At ddynion sengl wedi eu rhoddi . . . (1916). 29 TNA, CAB 37/​139/​26, ‘Memorandum on Recruiting’, 1915. 30 Jay Winter, The Great War and the British People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 39. 31 Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice (New  York:  Clarkson N.  Potter, 1960), p. 37.

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Raising an ‘industrial army’ 32 Mark Bryant, ‘Fearon, Percy Hutton (1874–​1948)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2004), http://​www. oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​76097 (accessed 6 October 2015). 33 Sir Owen Seaman, Punch, 23 January 1918. Thanks to doctoral student Pip Gregory at the University of Kent for alerting us to this. 34 Adrian Gregory, ‘Military Service Tribunals: Civil Society in Action, 1916–​ 1918’, in Jose Harris (ed.), Civil Society in British History:  Ideas, Identities, Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 35 HL Deb., 15 March 1916, Vol. 21, 396–​409. 36 HC Deb., 15 March 1916, Vol. 80, 2103–​81. 37 HC Deb., 21 December 1915, Vol. 77, 213–​437. 38 National Army Museum, Edinburgh, 1977-​06-​81-​7, ‘We’re both needed to serve the Guns! Fill up the ranks! Pile up the Munitions!’ 39 However, according to James Hinton, ‘for most of the war wage rates lagged far behind the rise in prices’. James Hinton, Labour and Socialism: A History of the British Labour Movement, 1867–​1974 (London: Longman, 1992), p. 98. 40 Bill Horrocks, Reminiscences of Bolton (Manchester: Neil Richardson, 1984), cited in Laura Ugolini, Men and Menswear: Sartorial Consumption in Britain, 1880–​1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 85. 41 HC Deb., 20 December 1915, Vol. 77, 46–​8W. 42 Post by BeppoSapone, 7 June 2004, http://​1914–​1918.invisionzone.com/​ forums/​index.php?showtopic=15151 (accessed 7 August 2014). 43 HL Deb., 15 March 1916, Vol. 21, 396–​409. 44 TNA, WO 106/​ 372, ‘Conscientious Objection:  Work and Procedure of Tribunals’ (1916). 45 Grieves, The Politics of Manpower, p. 49. 46 HC Deb., 24 October 1916, Vol. 86, 920–​1. 47 David French, British Strategy and War Aims 1914–​1916 (Abingdon: Routledge, 1986), p. 235. 48 James Hinton, The First Shop Stewards’ Movement (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1973), p. 197. 49 IWM, K 77867, List of Certified Occupations (London: HMSO, 1918). 50 Grieves, The Politics of Manpower, p. 192. 51 Gerard DeGroot, Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War (Harlow: Pearson, 1996), p. 104. 52 Ibid., p. 103. 53 Parker, Manpower, p. 5. 54 Beckett, Home Front 1914–​1918, p. 39. 55 HC Deb., 30 May 1938, Vol. 336, 1765–​96. 56 HC Deb., 20 December 1938, Vol. 342, 2713–​833. 57 Ibid. 58 Parker, Manpower, p. 41. 59 HC Deb., 1 December 1938, Vol. 342, 597–​604.

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Men in reserve 60 Ibid. 61 HC Deb., 16 February 1939, Vol. 343, 1918–​20W. 62 HC Deb., 27 February 1941, Vol. 369, 607. 63 HC Deb., 27 February 1939, Vol. 344, 909–​10. 64 Alison Oram, ‘Serving Two Masters:  The Introduction of a Marriage Bar in Teaching’, in London Feminist History Group, The Sexual Dynamics of History:  Men’s Power, Women’s Resistance (London:  Pluto, 1983); Alison Oram (ed.), Women Teachers and Feminist Politics 1900–​ 1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). 65 Peter Howlett, Fighting with Figures: A Statistical Digest of the Second World War (London: HMSO, 1995). 66 Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives:  Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 122. 67 Ibid. 68 HC Deb., 4 December 1941, Vol. 376, 1285–​351. 69 HC Deb., 9 December 1941, Vol. 376, 1412–​500. 70 HC Deb., 20 December 1938, Vol. 342, 2713–​833. 71 Ibid. 72 Parker, Manpower, p. 53. 73 HC Deb., 27 February 1939, Vol. 344, 927–​1043. 74 HC Deb., 20 December 1938, Vol. 342, 2713–​833. 75 Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, MS S.259/​AEU/​4/​6/​19, Amalgamated Engineering Union monthly journal (January 1939). 76 HC Deb., 21 February 1939, Vol. 344, 227–​348. 77 HC Deb., 18 April 1939, Vol. 346, 166–​8. 78 HC Deb., 3 April 1939, Vol. 345, 2446–​8. 79 HC Deb., 8 March 1939, Vol. 344, 2161–​302. 80 HC Deb., 27 February 1939, Vol. 344, 909–​10. 81 HC Deb., 3 April 1939, Vol. 345, 2446–​8. 82 Scottish Trade Union Congress, ‘1939 Council Decisions’, GB1847 STUC; Scottish Trade Union Congress, Annual Reports, 1939–​45 (1940). 83 Glasgow Herald, 25 January 1939. 84 Parker, Manpower, p. 53. 85 HC Deb., 16 April 1940, Vol. 359, 817–​936. 86 HC Deb., 6 December 1939, Vol. 355, 706–​65. 87 HC Deb., 29 September 1939, Vol. 351, 1611–​12. 88 HC Deb., 28 September 1939, Vol. 351, 1471–​3. 89 HC Deb., 28 September 1939, Vol. 351, 1497W. 90 HC Deb., 26 October 1939, Vol. 352, 1535. 91 HC Deb., 13 February 1940, Vol. 357, 607–​8. 92 ‘Work Ban’, Daily Mirror, 2 February 1940. 93 HC Deb., 23 May 1940, Vol. 361, 281–​2. 94 Howlett, Fighting with Figures, p. 38.

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Raising an ‘industrial army’ 95 Parker, Manpower, p. 158. 96 Corinna Peniston-​ Bird, ‘Classifying the Body in the Second World War: British Men in and out of Uniform’, Body & Society, 9 (2003), 31–​48 (p. 32). 97 HC Deb., 16 April 1940, Vol. 359, 817–​936. 98 Margaret Gowing, ‘The Organisation of Manpower in Britain during the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 7:1 (1972), 147–​67. 99 Parker, Manpower, p. 60. 100 Peter Howlett, ‘New Light through Old Windows:  A  New Perspective on the British Economy in the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 28 (1993), 361–​79. 101 John Ellis, Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War (New York: Viking, 1990), p. 14. 102 Howlett, Fighting with Figures, p. 149. 103 Gowing, ‘The Organisation of Manpower’, p. 153. 104 Ibid., p. 38. 105 HC Deb., 16 April 1940, Vol. 359, 817–​936. 106 HC Deb., 12 June 1941, Vol. 372, 365W. 107 ‘Reserved Occupations’, The Scotsman, 3 August 1940. 108 George Q. Flynn, Conscription and Democracy: The Draft in France, Great Britain and the United States (Westport, CT:  Greenwood Publishing, 2002), p. 91. 109 HC Deb., 10 November 1942, Vol. 383, 2277W. See Jack Alderson, A History of the West Riding Constabulary, 1856–​1968 (self-​published, 2001), p. 66. 110 Howlett, Fighting with Figures, p. 45. 111 HC Deb., 11 March 1941, Vol. 369, 1173–​217. 112 HC Deb., 13 November 1941, Vol. 376, 66W. 113 ‘I Thought Reserved Men Could Not Join Air Crews … but Here I  Am!’, Daily Record and Mail, 26 September 1941, p. 3. 114 MO, D5039.1, diary for June 1941. 115 Donald Wray McHutchon, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 11 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​33). 116 HL Deb., 3 December 1941, Vol. 121, 164–​95. 117 Parker, Manpower, p. 146. 118 Ibid. 119 Cited in the Worker’s Pocket Series pamphlet Essential Work Order (London: Labour Research Department, 1943). 120 STUC Annual Report, 1944, pp. 19, 137–​8, Glasgow Caledonian University Archives, Glasgow, GB1847 STUC. The Essential Work Order was not revoked until 1949, although the numbers of workers covered under it dropped dramatically from 8.5  million in December 1945 to 185,000 in January 1947. Otto Kahn-​Freund, ‘Labour Law’, in Morris Ginsberg (ed.), Law and Opinion in England in the 20th Century (London:  Stevens and Sons, 1959), pp. 217–​18.

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Men in reserve 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128

TNA, CO 968/​40/​5, ‘Registration for Employment Order’, 1941. HC Deb., 18 March 1941, Vol. 370, 49–​109. HC Deb., 13 November 1941, Vol. 376, 74–​148. HC Deb., 25 November 1941, Vol. 376, 623–​720. Daily Mirror, 9 April 1940. HC Deb., 9 December 1941, Vol. 376, 1412–​500. ‘Best Use of Manpower’, The Times, 25 January 1941. W. K. Hancock and M. M. Gowing, History of the Second World War: The British War Economy (London: HMSO, 1949). 129 Howlett, Fighting with Figures, p. 38. 130 Penny Summerfield, Women Workers in the Second World War: Production and Patriarchy in Conflict (London:  Routledge, 1984); Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives. 131 About 300,000 disabled people were drawn into the labour market between 1941 and 1945. Angus Calder, The People’s War:  Britain 1939–​ 45 (London:  Cape, 1969), p.  388. Gavin Shaffer, ‘Fighting Racism:  Black Soldiers and Workers in Britain during the Second World War’, Immigrants and Minorities, 28:2/​3 (2010), 246–​65. 132 [Ronald Niebour], ‘I’m not certain –​but I think I’m being de-​reserved in the new year’, Daily Mail, 17 December 1941. 133 HL Deb., 3 December 1941, Vol. 121, 164–​95. 134 HL Deb., 22 October 1941, Vol. 120, 365–​84. 135 HL Deb., 3 December 1941, Vol. 121, 164–​95. 136 HC Deb., 3 March 1942, Vol. 378, 529W. 137 Calder, The People’s War, p. 505. 138 Parker, Manpower, p. 309. 139 Warwick Taylor, The Forgotten Conscript:  A  History of the Bevin Boy (Edinburgh:  Pentland Press, 1995); Tom Hickman, Called Up, Sent Down: The Bevin Boys’ War (Stroud: The History Press, 2008). 140 Parker, Manpower, p. 255. 141 Bert Mitchell, ‘I’d Rather Go to Prison’, 23 June 2005, BBC ‘People’s War’ Archive, article ID A4252330, http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​ww2peopleswar/​stories/​30/​a4252330.shtml. 142 Mark Harrison, ‘Resource Mobilisation for World War II:  The USA, UK, USSR and Germany, 1938–​1945’, Economic History Review, 41:2 (1988), 177–​92 (p. 186). 143 Ibid., p. 188. 144 Ministry of Information, Manpower: The Story of Britain’s Mobilisation for War (London: HMSO, 1944), p. 3. 145 Parker, Manpower, p. 473. 146 HC Deb., 3 December 1941, Vol. 376, 1144–​216.

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‘Making a contribution to the war effort’: reactions to reserved status, masculinity and the military

In 1939 Sid Archer was nineteen, working as an engineer in Gainsborough’s agricultural machinery manufacturer Marshall, Sons & Co. Sixty years later he was interviewed by BBC Lincolnshire for the British Library’s Millennium Memory Bank, an initiative to record the testimonies of ordinary people on the eve of the new century. Towards the end of the interview he reflected, unprompted, upon his wartime experiences: One of my regrets is that I was in a reserved occupation. I would like to have gone and fought a bit. I would have liked to have been in one of the forces, preferably the air force. I would like to have done that but there was never a chance. We was told we were building midget submarines and it did a lot of good. But it didn’t seem the same. I had a lot of friends I lost . . . A lot of lads went and I didn’t . . . It did seem, I often feel it. I say even my wife was in the forces and I wasn’t.1

A lingering disappointment in Archer’s life was not fighting in the Second World War. Despite his acknowledgement that close acquaintances who were conscripted into the services were killed, he wished he too had been able to enlist, repeating three times that he ‘would have liked’ to. This is all the more keenly felt because he perceived himself to be in the minority. In addition to his friends, even his future wife served in the forces, while he was denied the opportunity by a government that considered he was of more use continuing in his trade, thus making his separation from military service even more acute. Yet to Archer, constructing midget submarines ‘didn’t seem the same’ as fighting. He is not alone in expressing a sense of regret over his wartime experience. Of the fifty-​ six men interviewed for this project, twenty-​eight attempted to enlist in the military, of whom four were ultimately successful and a further two joined the Merchant Navy.2 Military service was evidently a powerful lure v 95 v

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Men in reserve to young men. This chapter explores our interview cohort’s reactions to their reserved status in order to understand fully what being ‘reserved’ meant to the men who were labelled as such. Current historical understandings emphasise the pervasive ideal of the military man in British wartime culture. This was not a new phenomenon. Graham Dawson states that ‘the soldier hero has proved to be one of the most durable and powerful forms of idealised masculinity within Western cultural traditions since the times of the Ancient Greeks’.3 However, the First World War arguably disrupted this reverence of martial masculinity. Alison Light, for example, argues that the inter-​war period saw the blossoming of an altogether more homely ideal as British society began to shun warfare.4 Indeed, in the 1920s and 1930s there was a proliferation of anti-​war literature, including Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, which, until recent works by revisionist historians, had long been considered to capture the anti-​war sentiment pervading inter-​war Britain.5 Undeniably, when the horns of war sounded for a second time in a quarter-​century the reaction was muted. The British populace in 1939 did not repeat the jubilations that had greeted the announcement of war in 1914.6 Welsh teacher Idris Davies wrote in his diary on 2 September 1939 that ‘It looks like another Great War. Appeasement has failed, as most of us knew it would fail . . . So here we are on the brink of war and ruin again. All the young men who were slaughtered in the 1914–​1918 shambles seem to have died in vain.’7 Davies’s fear of a repeat of the horrors experienced during the First World War was widely felt. When Britain declared war on Germany the next day, the planned-​for military mobilisation was put into effect with the passing of the National Service (Armed Forces) Act, and young men who were to be conscripted into the services had to be persuaded of the attractions of the military. As Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-​Bird argue, ‘political rhetoric recast and rehabilitated the heroism of soldiering’.8 Military service once again became the pinnacle of manliness. Yet this was a modified hero. Like the First World War Tommy, he was brave, courageous and willing to give up his life for his country. However, he was also kind, funny and had strong bonds to his mates. Sonya Rose identifies this ideal as ‘temperate masculinity’ and notes: ‘In order for men to be judged as good citizens, they needed to demonstrate their virtue by being visibly in the military. It was only then that the components of hegemonic masculinity . . . could cohere.’9 Yet this is perhaps too simplistic. As Connell notes, masculinity is experienced hierarchically and even the military were not an undifferentiated mass.10 v 96 v

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‘Making a contribution to the war effort’ The RAF, and in the summer of 1940 the fighter pilot in particular, were very much the pinnacle of the masculine hierarchy.11 Moreover, Linsey Robb’s research into the wartime depiction of civilian working men has demonstrated that while most civilian occupations were largely shown to be secondary, and no civilian occupation was ever as lauded as the military, those that faced high levels of danger –​namely the Merchant Navy and the fire services  –​were portrayed in ways that consciously aped the heroic depiction granted to the military.12 Culturally, at least, there was a hierarchy of masculinities that stretched from the home front to the battle front. This chapter explores how this complex hierarchy of masculine roles was experienced, and retrospectively expressed in oral history interviews, by men who had been engaged in reserved occupations. For some, as we shall see, a desire to enlist in the military, to wear uniform and actively to fight in the defence of one’s country was paramount, and overrode the need for their expertise on the home front. Attempts to escape their reserved status were met with varying degrees of success. For others, reserved status provided an opportunity to remain in their locale with their families, to earn high wages and to live in comparable safety, and was accepted and even welcomed. It might be tempting to adopt Penny Summerfield’s useful classification of her female interviewees  –​into ‘heroes’, who embraced the opportunity to serve actively and felt that the war could not be won without them, and ‘stoics’, who reluctantly tolerated the State’s direction of their labour –​ and apply this to our ‘heroic’ men, who sought to evade their reserved status and enlist in the forces, and our ‘stoic’ men, who accepted their retention on the home front. Yet this polarisation masks a more fluid spectrum of complex responses to reserved status, as we shall see.

‘Have you done your bit?’: the desire to enlist The uniformed soldier hero, who was fighting to halt the Nazi juggernaut and liberate occupied Europe, and the heroic female war worker, who was ‘manning’ the home front in the absence of men who had left to join the forces, were widely celebrated in film, radio, posters and print. The civilian man, on the other hand, was often invisible in popular culture, as Chapter 1 noted. Unsurprisingly, then, many men who were prevented from joining the services because of the intrinsic value of their occupations to the war effort were keen to escape their reserved status, enrol in the military, don uniform and serve overseas. Twenty-​eight of our interviewees attempted to enlist in the forces. Although most of those v 97 v

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Men in reserve interviewed understood the importance of their reserved work, many felt they should be doing ‘more’. Thomas Carmichael, for example, left his work in a Glasgow shipyard to become a Merchant Navy engineer. When asked if he knew how important shipyards were to the war effort he replied ‘in a way, yes, but I still thought I could be doing something more important at sea as an engineer’.13 Carmichael’s wartime experiences in the mercantile marine were centred upon the transport of cargoes that, although vital to the war effort, was perhaps no more ‘important’ than the building of ships. However, his service in the Merchant Navy took him to the front line of the Battle of the Atlantic, where he was subjected to the perils of torpedo and where on one occasion his ship was sunk, and to the freezing conditions of the Arctic Convoys. This danger brought him closer to the front line of war and thus he considered he was playing a more significant role: ‘Oh the work was very important . . . [W]‌e were making a contribution to the war effort.’ Wartime policeman John Cresswell was more explicit about his desire to do ‘more’ in his 2005 interview with the Imperial War Museum. He described how he and his colleagues decided to enlist: We got together to make ready to go in to the forces. There was no specific instruction except that we just decided that was what we wanted to do. We wanted to play our bit . . . Oh yes we discussed it and there we were. Young, fit young men doing our bit I know, in a civilian capacity, but we wanted to do more than that and we wanted to join the forces.14

With his senior officer’s permission Cresswell was ultimately accepted into the RAF as a pilot and saw active service in the Far East. His emphasis on their youth and fitness making them suitable for military service mirrors contemporaneous perceptions that civilian men left on the home front were somehow impaired, either mentally or physically, and therefore not up to the task of enlisting. Moreover, this emphasis on doing ‘more’ by joining the forces, with its concomitant connotation of civilian men doing ‘less’, clearly shows there was a perceived hierarchy of masculine roles during the Second World War in which military service was positioned securely at the top. For many young men, the pressure to be in uniform, or to be seen to want to be in uniform, was strong. For our young wartime cohort, the simple lure of the glamour of military dress was undeniably powerful. When asked why he wanted to be in the military Frank Blincow, a wartime apprentice draughtsman in London, responded that he ‘liked the uniform’.15 Similarly, Jim Lister, a Carlisle railway worker, remarked: ‘Well v 98 v

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‘Making a contribution to the war effort’ you’re a teenager and the uniform and one thing or another . . . There’s a lot of lads that’s in it just for the glory and whatever, the uniform.’16 Many interviewees highlighted the uniform as a specific attraction. This was undoubtedly because young men who were not visibly identified as combatants risked public censure. This had been especially evident during the First World War, as discussed in Chapter 2. Women’s readings of men’s patriotism, and by extension their masculinity, hinged upon khaki uniform, something that the male civilian conspicuously lacked. The uniform thus connoted far more than military service; it was an external emblem of the wearer’s fulfilment of his patriotic masculinity and national duty. In the Second World War, the willingness of civilian men to undertake unpaid voluntary work in the Home Guard, ARP and the AFS in addition to their full time jobs enabled civilian workers to adopt a uniform, thereby granting them access to the status that a military uniform bestowed, and allowing them to retain a sense of masculinity.17 Indeed, Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-​Bird, whose interviewees remembered their Home Guard uniform as a ‘prize possession’, argue that this is why some men were attracted to the organisation.18 It provided them with an essential signifier of martial masculinity, marking them out as a member of a military organisation that only those in the know might spot was not an army uniform. For Harry McGregor, one of our interviewees who had worked as an apprentice engineer in the Hyde Park Railway Works in wartime Glasgow, volunteering for civil defence was a route to a uniform that would impress. He recalled that he and his friend, who was serving in the Royal Marines, went to the cinema together: ‘I said “well, let’s go in our uniform”. They must have thought, you see when you get on the tram and “there’s a poor soldier there”, you know [laughter] . . . It made a bit of a difference. You had this, you had a flash, “Home Guard”, most people wouldn’t see it, just think you’re army.’19 Thus in spite of the wartime rhetoric of a ‘people’s war’, in which everyone had an important role to play, the categorisation of individuals as either civilians or combatants remained paramount, with many of our interviewees wishing to be categorised as military men.20 While McGregor endeavoured to pass as a soldier by wearing his Home Guard uniform, for others this was not enough. For young men wishing to get into a real military uniform and escape their reserved status, the armed services exerted a strong pull. The high status of the RAF and the Schedule’s permitting of reserved men to become air crew meant this service attracted particular attention. The blue air force uniforms were cited by a number of war veterans as especially desirable, reflecting v 99 v

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Men in reserve the high status of that particular service in wartime. It was particularly appealing to young men who wished to escape their reserved status. Alan Johns, whose story was uploaded on to the BBC ‘People’s War’ website, recollected: In 1942 I joined the Royal Air Force. I was in a reserved occupation on the railways and the only service I could join was the aircrew, for which I volunteered. When I joined up the aircrew wore white flashes in their forage caps to distinguish them from other RAF units, and I  was very proud to wear them.21

The flash, which was a visual signifier of being a member of the air crew, trumped even the generic uniform of the RAF. A Mass Observation diarist, an office worker but not reserved, was similarly keen to enlist in the RAF for its blue uniform: This week for me has been dominated by the announcement on Sunday Oct 1 [1939], of the calling up of the 20–​22 class. I shall have to go and am not really sorry –​in fact I’m looking forward to my training . . . I know of four [friends] who are impatient to be called up. Most lads seem to want to join the RAF which evidently has a big fascination. For myself the only temptation to join it is the blue uniform which I prefer to khaki.22

Martin Francis notes this phenomenon was widespread, stating:  ‘The most beguiling emblem of the flyer’s allure was their ashy blue uniform with the Flying Badge worn above the right upper jacket pocket. The blue uniforms of the RAF were a dramatic contrast with the drab brown uniform of the army.’23 Some of our interviewees similarly noted that the RAF held a particular attraction to themselves and their friends. Telephone engineer Walker Leith, who was eventually released to the army, declared he had wanted to join the RAF because ‘that was what everybody was, flying duties, everybody, all, most of your pals were talking of flying duties. It was a sort of, a romantic, well I wouldn’t say romantic, that’s the wrong word, but it was a sort of exciting thing to do . . . Glamorous, possibly, yeah.’24 While Leith was reluctant to use the word ‘romantic’ it is evident that it was an idealised image of life in the services that drew him to enlist. As noted in Chapter 1, the RAF was a new service, formed only in 1918, and with its youthful personnel who engaged their Spitfires and Hurricanes in aerial combat with Messerschmitts it had a glamorous reputation. Leith was not atypical in being drawn to the thrill of becoming a ‘flyboy’. These were young men who were susceptible to romantic notions regarding the military. Youthful naivety was certainly v 100 v

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‘Making a contribution to the war effort’ a key factor in Thomas Cantwell’s desire to leave his apprenticeship as a plater and enlist: ‘Well everybody was talkin’ about the war. You know, at eighteen, gullible and things like that, you know and we just thought, “why don’t we go and help?” That was the idea, in there and help.’25 This was the case for half of our interviewees, many of whom were not yet eighteen when the war began, with the oldest being only twenty-​eight at its close. Enthralled by the glamour of the uniform, these young men were eager to join the services.26 Older single men, husbands and fathers may have been less susceptible. Their world view was arguably different from younger reserved men or those with lesser familial responsibilities. Of our seven interviewees who were married by 1945, not one attempted to enlist. Furthermore, it is unlikely that the anti-​war literature, which is so commonly cited as an influencing factor on increasing pacifist sentiment, would have reached these young, single men. Instead they would have likely been subject to representations of war in stories and poetry that still depicted it in a positive way. Writing about his childhood in the inter-​war period, Glyn Loosmore, who joined the Special Operations Executive, parachuting into France after D-​Day,27 emphatically states why so many young men were eager to serve: [I]‌t was a time when most middle-​class homes possessed Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia. I urge you to look at the edition that was in print between the wars; it helped to shape a generation. It contains an extraordinary number of poems that extol heroism and self-​sacrifice. It gave boys of my generation the notion that it was praiseworthy to serve, and, if necessary, die for one’s country . . . ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, ‘The Last Fight of the Revenge’ and ‘How Horatius kept the Bridge’ . . . ‘The Private of the Buffs’, ‘The Red Thread of Honour’ . . . Grenfell’s ‘Into Battle’, and Hodgson’s ‘Before Action’. Learn those poems and you will probably want to be a soldier yourself . . . At school we used to sing Kipling’s ‘Teach us to rule ourselves always /​controlled and certainly night to day; /​That we may bring, if need arise, /​No maimed or worthless sacrifice.’28

Inter-​ war working-​ class households might not have held copies of Mee’s publication but boys from more humble backgrounds would have likely read comics and stories that, as Michael Paris notes, were populated by soldier characters. The Boy’s Own Paper, Chums, Modern Boy and Champion all used war stories in their pages, with some even setting adventures in the trenches of the First World War.29 Immersed in patriotic poetry and adventure literature, it is unsurprising that so many v 101 v

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Men in reserve young single men were eager to join the services despite knowing what happened to those who marched off to war over twenty-​five years before. For some others, brought up in radical working-​class communities in places like Clydeside and Merseyside, the lure to arms was linked not so much to patriotism but to a sense that Fascism was a threat to the working classes, a feeling that had drawn many young British men to fight on the side of the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War.30 With the shameful prospect of having to inform their future children that they had not ‘done their bit’, single men undertaking reserved occupations could also be motivated to enlist in the forces by the notion of their own legacy. Men understood that they were living through a momentous time and had a desire to play a central role in events. The need to be ‘doing our bit’, as Cresswell asserted, or to ‘go and help’, as Cantwell stated, was prevalent among our interviewees. With skills that could be useful in a military context, many of our cohort endeavoured to move out of their civilian trades into a parallel military one as permitted by the Schedule. Telephone engineer Ronald Tonge, who was content with his reserved status and civilian job, nevertheless felt compelled to enlist in the belief that it was better to die fighting for freedom than to lose the war and Britain become occupied. He recalled a specific propaganda poster, proclaiming ‘Men in Reserved Occupations Can Now Fly with the RAF’, which presented him with the opportunity to enlist: I can remember one . . . It said ‘change your overalls, volunteer for pilot, navigator, bomb aimer’ and it showed you a man at a lathe with his overalls, and then in flying overalls at the bottom. We were both, both Roy and I, happy at our work . . . But I think we both came to the conclusions that it would be better to be dead than lose. I mean it’s hard to get over to people . . . And if it takes volunteering for air crew, ’cause the reason, the big thing came was, that they were losing, a lot, and it wasn’t done lightheartedly, and I’m sure that my memory’s right, that we said, I mean we swore, well we might as well bloody well go down fighting, as lose. So we volunteered . . . What do we tell our kids when they say ‘What did you do in the war, dad?’ . . . Well, that was one of the things we said. There was a feeling that, have you done your bit?31

Tonge invoked an infamous First World War propaganda poster, ‘Daddy, What Did YOU Do in the Great War?’, to explain his reason for enlisting. Interestingly, as a single, childless man, Tonge was moved to enlist by imagining the shame that might fall on his then hypothetical offspring, a driving factor that may have been less persuasive to those reserved men who already had children. However, Tonge’s assertions suggests that, for v 102 v

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‘Making a contribution to the war effort’ many of our young interviewees at least, attitudes towards warfare had shifted little, regardless of the horrors of the First World War. Indeed, for many there seemed to be scant recognition that ‘doing your bit’ did not solely mean military service. That their reserved occupation status indicated that their civilian contributions were highly prized, by the State at least, did not seem to impinge on many men’s understandings of wartime contributions. For most young men, ‘to serve’ and ‘to do one’s bit’ had purely military connotations. Like Tonge, many interviewees did not attempt to enlist out of a burning desire for the uniform or a simple need to face combat. Indeed, in some cases the social and cultural pressure to be in uniform could make men attempt to enlist who had no desire to do so. John O’Halloran, who worked in aircraft manufacturer Napier and Sons in west London, stated: They [my employers] told me I was in a Reserved Occupation when I went there, and said that if I got call-​up papers, I mustn’t answer them. I was [to] give it to them and they would not let me go. But when I did receive them, I  felt a bit, not very brave to just sit behind them, and I  sneaked off and got interviewed. But because I’ve had a stiff leg all my life, well since four, they finally turned me down . . . I didn’t want to [join the forces], but I felt it was up to me . . . I didn’t want to hide behind the job, if you know what I mean? And I was good at signalling, I was a good Morse telegrapher, and I thought they might use me signalling. I didn’t want to go in. Because when the colonel said, ‘I’m afraid we can’t take you ’cos your stiff leg prevents you kneeling properly, and you can’t do this, you can’t do that’, said, ‘so I’m afraid we’re going to have to grade you number four and things will have to be very desperate if we ever call you up’. So, I said, ‘well for my sake, as well as the country’s, I hope it won’t be necessary’, and it wasn’t!32

O’Halloran twice stated that he had no desire to be in the armed forces and was relieved at being classed as medically unfit, thereby making military service highly unlikely. It is clear from O’Halloran’s testimony that he attempted to enlist not from a desire to be in uniform but from a sense of guilt and belief in doing one’s duty, a common feeling among our interview cohort. It was not that they yearned for military service but that they understood that they should appear to want to be in the military. Indeed, Corinna Peniston-​Bird notes ‘Working in a reserved occupation was only acceptable if the individual longed to join the Armed Forces, but nobly sacrificed his desire for the good of the country.’33 For some interviewees the mere act of attempting to enlist assuaged their conscience. Thomas Cantwell was turned down for the RAF because of his reserved status. When asked how he felt about this he replied: ‘Not too bad ’cos I liked v 103 v

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Men in reserve me, I liked workin’. So it was one of them things where you said “well we tried”. And we just went back. And that was the end of it.’34 Similarly, Jim Lister was accepted for service in the army but was returned to his job on the railways when he admitted he was in a reserved occupation. He stated: I think I was relieved in a way. I don’t know. It struck you, the feeling would have been different I  think if I  had been failed. If I’d have been failed at the medical or something like that. But eh, I knew when they said ‘you’re reserved’ that there was no good crying over spilt milk. There’s no way I was going to get [into the services]. I volunteered. I couldn’t volunteer for anything else, they wouldn’t have you.35

In contrast to physically impaired O’Halloran, Lister was able to maintain his masculine self-​image by drawing on his physical fitness. He understood that he was fit for the armed forces, but the Government needed his skills elsewhere. Physical prowess, which had been a key tenet of masculinity in the inter-​war period, remained so in wartime. Indeed, Emma Newlands’s examination of the body in the British Army during the Second World War notes the centrality of physicality. Many men were indignant when their allotted military grade did not match their own sense of their physical proficiency.36 Conversely, it seems, civilian men were able to draw on their physicality to reassure themselves of their masculinity when they lacked military uniform, an issue that will be explored more fully in Chapter 5. The principal reason for wishing to leave their reserved occupation and join the armed forces was a pervasive feeling of being ‘left out’. The language used by men to describe this was often extremely emotive. Craig Inglis, reserved cobbler and later Bevin Boy, who was based in his home town of Kilmarnock, Ayrshire throughout the war, recalled his feelings at both his brothers being in uniform: ‘Oh a wis proud of them. We thought they were the bees knees. But the ane that’s ninety two he wis one of Montgomery’s Desert Rats. The other wis a bomb disposal. And a wis naebody.’37 Inglis’s final statement is striking: without a military uniform he considered himself to be a ‘nobody’, a person without interest or worth. His lack of military service clearly still rankled nearly seventy years after the war ended. Later in his interview he stated ‘Everyone had gone . . . Every ane of them, bar two that were really, really medically unsound . . . You were jealous of them [in the forces]. The experiences they were gettin’. Finished up ye were no’ envious, yer really sad.’38 For Inglis to identify jealousy and envy, strong words with highly negative connotations, v 104 v

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‘Making a contribution to the war effort’ shows how affected he was by his lack of military service. Even more candidly, he admits that this coveting of his friends’ military careers eventually turned to sorrow at the thought of the experiences he was missing. Inglis was not alone in reacting so emotionally in recalling his wartime status.39 When talking about their lack of military service many of our interviewees invoked poignant language; indeed it was often the most animated and expressive part of their interview. When asked how he felt about his brother being in the forces, Harold Scragg, Tyneside mechanic, responded that the war had been ‘a dead life’. He followed this up by stating: ‘Time just rolled over. And so to me, in that particular time, that was a dead year or two because I think I should’ve been in the army.’40 Again, the imagery here is striking: Scragg notes that ‘time just rolled over’; it was a ‘dead’ period. He felt he was just marking time without making any contribution to the war. Moreover, the war made no demands on him. Frank Blincow, wartime apprentice draughtsman, similarly stated he was ‘robbed’ of the experience of being in the armed forces, while Walker Leith, who was eventually released from his job as a telephone engineer to join the Royal Signals, declared that he was ‘stuck around in a reserved occupation’.41 The concept of being ‘stuck’ was a recurrent narrative trope. Most men in reserved occupations were immobile, held statically in position in their communities while many of their contemporaries were scattered throughout the world fighting the war and even mobile women were being directed across the country to do war work. This loss of status could be keenly felt. John Hiscutt, who worked as a toolmaker in Plessey Company’s aircraft factory in London, noted: I think I lost out a bit in sort of [being] street-​wise as you might say. I just worked at home and didn’t leave my family and didn’t go anywhere. When the lads come out the army I mean you had to look after yourself obviously, but you know with, you had to be number one and look after yourself. I found out when they came back they were much more confident. It took me some while to get over that. As I say, I think they all came back more sure of themselves.42

Hiscutt felt he had lost out by remaining at home and that other men who had joined the forces had derived self-​assurance from the knowledge of their elevated status and their more worldly experiences. That this loss of masculine standing is invoked most regularly through what John Tosh calls ‘homosocial relationships’ is notable.43 As Connell argues, masculine ideals are not ingrained but rather socially constructed.44 As such, they are understood and expressed v 105 v

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Men in reserve socially: ‘relationships are constructed through practices that exclude and include, that intimidate, exploit and so on. There is a gender politics within masculinity.’45 For our interviewees their perceived loss was most evident when they were forced to make assessments of their peers. Such comparisons made many of our interviewees feel emasculated, challenging their sense of masculinity and often pressurising them into attempting to enlist. For our interviewees the desire to join up when they were young was palpable. In the First World War, the external pressure to volunteer was explicit with such shaming campaigns as ‘Women of Britain Say “Go!”’ and the aforementioned ‘Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?’ Other posters directly questioned the qualities of men who avoided military service, suggesting they would make poor husbands and fathers.46 However, recruitment strategy in the Second World War was much more measured and the State avoided such shaming tactics. The experiences of our interviewees mirrored this shift in popular sensibilities about warfare, with very few reporting any negative comments about being out of uniform. Fred Millican, who worked at engineering firm Vickers-​Armstrong as a metallurgist, stated: I was never sort of picked on and said, ‘well why are you not in the army?’ or anything, you know . . . ‘We’re fighting for King and Country’ . . . I never experienced that at all . . . There was never any problems. Everybody just seemed to accept you were either working, or you were in [the] forces. Nobody bothered.47

Engineer Eddie Menday stated:  ‘No, funnily enough, no . . . because I think people knew that everybody was in it together . . . [S]‌omebody was doing something, somewhere, along the line.’48 The wartime rhetoric of ‘all in it together’ permeated Menday’s consciousness and seemingly those of his wider community. In the collective endeavour of the ‘people’s war’, those manufacturing scientific instruments had as vital a role to play as the soldier. While outright praise for reserved workers was rare, the experiences of our interviewees suggest that there does seem to have been at least a tacit acceptance of their presence on the home front. Charles Hill, wartime toolmaker, emphatically disagreed with the questions regarding negative comments about his lack of uniform: Nobody said anything to me. I  don’t remember anybody, others [getting] criticised for it. I  think it was an accepted thing because the government decided you do this, you do that and you do that. And well it, you can’t argue, you know. I don’t doubt there are quite a few of them alive thought ‘why is [Charles] in a reserved occupation? Our so-​and-​so is in the army,

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‘Making a contribution to the war effort’ both the same age’ . . . I don’t doubt that went on but, nobody, no, nobody ever said it.49

Despite not experiencing any prejudice, Hill was convinced that his reserved status caused some people privately to query his ineligibility for service. Similarly, Derek Sims, aircraft factory worker, stated: ‘I can imagine somebody coming and saying “it’s all right for you, you’re in a reserved occupation”, you know, “I’ve got called up.” I can imagine that going on. But personally, I’d not met it myself.’50 For some interviewees, then, despite never having directly encountered any explicit resentment, there was an acknowledgement that others may have questioned their reserved status privately. They had internalised widespread cultural notions about what constituted valid male service and their own insecurities shaped how they thought others saw them. Rather than being external then, it would appear that the pressure to enlist often came from the men themselves. Aircraft worker Derek Sims hinted at the internalised nature of this pressure when he stated: ‘I think the pressures in the forces side is internally built. Yourself, you put yourself under pressure. You don’t really need somebody outside to get, chase you about, you do it, you’re chasing yourself about.’51 Similarly, John Stephenson, Yorkshire railway worker, stated: Oh no. No pressure. Just I  think all my mates, most of my mates and lads I used to knock about with at Northallerton, they’d all been called up. There were just two or three that was left and thought well we might as well join up ourselves. ’Cos they used to come home on leave and say they were having a nice time. They were alright so we’d join up and do the same thing. It was a different story altogether I think if we’d have gone in, but nobody, there was no pressure or anything like that. I mean I’d gone through, when I worked at the lemonade factory Bell and Goldsborough, them that bottled the lemonade, and delivering them to the army camps. I mean the camps and the army had priority and all this stuff and once I’d lost my wallet and a place at Scruton and when I got back I thought ‘oh hell’ . . . As I went into the camp one of the soldiers there said ‘I’ve got your wallet lad.’ You know, there was nothing to say ‘you should be in the forces’. He’s just found my wallet and gave it to me.52

Expecting trouble for being a physically fit civilian of enlistment age when he turned up to collect his wallet at the army base, Stephenson was surprised to find that the soldier was pleasant to him. Neither the soldier nor Stephenson’s friends who were conscripted ‘pressured’ him and made him feel that he ought to volunteer; rather, it was something he felt he ought to do. v 107 v

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Men in reserve There is, then, much evidence to contradict Sonya Rose’s assertion that ‘ill-​will was certainly widespread’ regarding those out of uniform.53 Animosity towards our interviewees’ reserved status was not routinely experienced and outright slurs were incredibly rare. As a cohort, they simply did not experience overt prejudice and abuse. However, that is not to say that negative reactions were non-​existent. One-​off episodes were reported by a couple of interviewees. Electrical engineer Ronald Quartermaine was trusted by his servicemen friends to escort their wives to and from dances in their absence, a request routinely asked by military personnel of civilian friends according to Sally Sokoloff.54 On one occasion, he was roughly treated by other military personnel who were resentful of his civilian status: I have been knocked about, I mean really physically knocked about by some of these groups of sailors . . . Because I came out with a girl and they thought I  was whatever I  was. That wasn’t pleasant, but that was, I  think, looking back on it, was understandable, you know. I didn’t blame them for that.55

Quartermaine ‘didn’t blame them’ for beating him, perhaps suggesting that he felt their actions were, if not justified, then at least ‘understandable’. They were, after all, fighting for Britain while he stayed at home, regularly attending social events. Perhaps they mistook him for a conscientious objector or assumed he was evading conscription; perhaps they were intoxicated. It was not only men in reserved occupations who experienced such hostility. Bevin Boys, who had been balloted to go down the mines upon their call-​up to the services, were also viewed with suspicion for not being in uniform. Warwick Taylor recalled: We did feel like outsiders, and mainly because there was a resentment because we weren’t in uniform. And some people thought [we were] either deserters, draft dodgers, some people even thought we were conscientious objectors and of course local police would often challenge you, because you weren’t in uniform. Everybody during the war virtually was in uniform of some sort. And this brought a bit of suspicion on you actually.56

Taylor’s assertion that ‘virtually everyone was in uniform’ is obviously hyperbole, yet highlights his own feelings that he was in the minority having been denied military service. Singled out by his lack of uniform, he felt like an ‘outsider’, liable to be questioned by the police, mistaken for someone ‘dodging’ their duty, objecting to the war or deserting. One of our pilot project interviewees, Bevin Boy Tom Myles, recounted the jibes aimed at him and a particularly unpleasant incident: v 108 v

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‘Making a contribution to the war effort’ I remember actually in Falkirk, it was not very often but it did happen. There’s a young able-​bodied eighteen-​year-​old walking in the streets. ‘Why are you no in the army, why are you no doing this, why are you no doing that?’ You know, and it did not sit well with me . . . But to be called a conscientious objector, and the Government made no move to advise people that this was happening you know, so folk would naturally, did think . . . I just used to ignore it to be quite honest. I always find that’s the best way. Just let them get on with it. Why get yourself into a kerfuffle you know and there’s no real need for it, because they’re just ignorant people. That’s really basically what it is. There was one [episode] in actual fact. It was a hen’s feather, and he came over and put it on the shoulder of my jacket. This was in the old New Market Street outside Aitken’s brewery in Falkirk. I can see and feel that whole episode to this day. And the man himself, I don’t think he was even sober to be quite honest, but it was just the way he looked at me and did this stupid thing. He knew me vaguely and he must have been planning to do something like this, you know. What do you do? Just ignore it and walk away.57

Although Myles attempted to disregard the ‘stupid’ incident at the time, ignoring the drunk who had ‘feathered’ him and walking away without responding, the lingering significance of this particular memory decades later is highlighted by his assertion that ‘I can see and feel that whole episode to this day.’ The man who targeted Myles wished to insinuate he was a coward:  something that Myles evidently was not, having been directed to civilian service by the State. Myles himself mentioned his ‘utter disappointment’ in being directed to the mines rather than being called up for military service, and his discomfort at being labelled a shirker clearly still irked more than half a century later. While it was noted in the Commons that ‘the white feather business is not overdone in this war as it was in the last war’, this branding of civilian men as craven was not uncommon.58 Sonya Rose notes:  ‘Frequently conscientious objectors were publicly shamed by being labelled “sissies”, “pansies”, and other terms denoting effeminacy and hinting that their sexuality was suspect.’59 Such scorn however seems much more frequent in the recollections of Bevin Boys than of reserved men. This perhaps reflects the Bevin Boys’ mobile status, as they were taken far from their homes to often close-​knit communities where they were without the support of friends and neighbours, were not known and where questions may have been asked about their capacity to undertake this arduous labour. It may also reflect that they were directed workers, sent to a job far removed from the idealised glamour of the armed services that they had been expecting. As we v 109 v

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Men in reserve shall see in Chapter 7, this had a profound effect on the ways these men recalled their wartime service. Reserved men, on the other hand, generally, but not always, remained in their locale, known to their communities as working in a protected establishment, prevented by the State from enlisting. The handing of white feathers to men not in uniform is more redolent of the First World War than the Second, yet although Myles was our only interviewee to make reference to this, it was not exceptional. The presentation of feathers was happening in sufficient numbers to be mentioned in People in Production, a 1942 Mass Observation publication. These slurs aimed at civilian workers could have extreme consequences, and a number of suicides had occurred in the wake of such incidents. Mass Observation noted that in an attempt to address this issue the Government was considering developing a badge for those rejected from military service on medical grounds.60 It was thought that men precluded from the forces ought, like the badged men of the First World War undertaking essential jobs, to have a visible signifier of their patriotism to ward off accusations of cowardice and shirking. Although badges were never implemented, such a measure does suggest that overt shaming of those out of uniform was more common than our interviewees experienced or acknowledged. For some young reserved men, their attempts to enlist were troubling to their parents. Their fathers had generally been of age to serve in the First World War and felt the injustice of fighting a ‘war to end all wars’ only to have their sons face the same dangers just two decades later. John Stephenson, wartime railway worker, recalled: My dad was a bit upset when I volunteered [unsuccessfully]. He said ‘you’re an idiot’. I mean he’d done his time in the first war. But he didn’t want me to do any time in the second war. Well I don’t blame him because, yeah I suppose he’d done his bit. He’d been wounded in the first war and he’d been gassed and God knows what.61

Wartime agricultural worker Alexander Ramage similarly recollected: [I]‌n March 1944 I volunteered for air crew duty. But I was rejected. I was too young. I needed my father’s permission. And it was not granted . . . Ah! I didn’t know until after, it was long [after], he was in Passchendaele. And he just didn’t want to see me involved. He lost, he lost a lot.62

The shadow of the heavy death toll of the First World War became a recurrent feature of our interviewees’ testimonies. While the figure of the absent father was not a key theme, given that nearly all of our interviewees v 110 v

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‘Making a contribution to the war effort’ were born after 1918, the loss of uncles, brothers and cousins featured heavily. Charles Lamb, Dundee shipyard worker, stated that ‘If I had been called up I think I’d have broke [sic] my mother’s heart. Because she lost two brothers in the First World War.’63 Similarly, wartime farmer Robert Bell’s Quaker pacifism was cemented by the loss of his cousin and brother in the First World War: My parents were very sensitive at the time about the issue of the First World War, thinking it never should have happened and when news came through of all the killing fields. I was very conscious of it . . . Of course the most traumatic of all was first the death of [my] cousin, then in 1918 in April was the news that [my brother had] been killed . . . Now my parents, particularly my mother, I saw the scenes of the upset. That has had an enormous effect on my life right through time.64

It was perhaps surprising that the First World War did not feature even more prominently in interviewees’ narratives. This undoubtedly reflects their relatively young age during the Second World War. Indeed, none of those directly interviewed had any recollections of the earlier war, with the oldest having been born in 1916. Older reserved men may have felt differently about the war. Indeed, Welsh teacher and poet Idris Davies was thirty-​four when the war broke out in 1939, and was thus in a reserved occupation. However, Davies does not seem to have been aware of this and he assumed he would be liable for conscription. Moreover, the First World War loomed large in his fears about the new conflict. In December 1939 he wrote in his diary: The lovely weather continues, and I am very happy here. But now and again the thought of Khaki and Flanders mud, and filth, and death, can spoil one’s peace of mind. I don’t suppose I shall be here next summer. Anything can happen now. But I loathe and detest the thought of being dragooned in to the army, where life becomes so cheap and vulgar.65

Such use of imagery that invoked the death and destruction of the First World War was prominent in Davies’s personal writing, highlighting his wish to avoid a repeat of the earlier carnage. Reflecting the changing attitudes of the nation as a whole, Davies nevertheless reluctantly came to see the necessity of warfare. In June 1940, following the fall of France, he recorded his changed feelings: We shall have hell in this little island, but we shall fight on. I had my doubts a few days ago –​I thought of all the tremendous odds we had to face, alone; but I know in my heart that I would rather die fighting the Boche than live

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Men in reserve and be his slave. We shall fight on, and damn them all. Let them all come, we shall give them hell for hell. We have fought tyrants before, and beat them down, and as long as Britain is Britain, we shall always triumph over tyrants, be they foreign or native.66

That this emotional journey took place so early in the war perhaps explains why our interviewee cohort did not articulate anything similar. They, generally, were young boys and teenagers when the war began making them, possibly, impervious to changing reactions to warfare. Indeed, by the time they approached, and reached, the age of military service the war had long been considered just and necessary, again making it understandable that they had few qualms about warfare. Among our cohort, as we have shown, there was a widespread, though not blanket, inclination to serve in the forces. Reserved men identified a range of factors that stimulated their desire and reflected their understanding of what it meant to be a man in this period. These included a deep-​seated patriotism; the wish to don military uniform, taste adventure, do one’s duty; guilt; and the belief that one ought at least to try to join up.

‘You’re wasting my effing time . . .’: attempts to enlist in the military For many young men the internalised pressure to be doing something ‘more’ led them to attempt to enlist in the services. As we have noted, many of our interviewees tried, with varying levels of success, to extricate themselves from their reserved jobs and get into the military. This was often met with flat-​out refusal. Wartime Birmingham toolmaker Charles Hill recalled: ‘Most of us tried it in the early part of the war, and they said “where do you work?” “Oh sod off back to the Brooks Tools and don’t bother us down here, you can’t come.” So you didn’t bother going back.’67 Frank Harvey similarly recalled: Well when I  was eighteen . . . we went to a place in Manchester . . . This recruiting place. Waited about half a day in a queue. Went up to the counter in the RAF and he just said ‘where do you work?’ I said ‘Churchill Machine Tool’. He said ‘what are you doing here?’ and he used a rather rude word and told me to go away. He said ‘you’re wasting my effing time! Go away.’ Tore it up, threw it in the air. ‘Next!’68

For Hill and Harvey one attempt was sufficient to deter them from trying again. Moreover, it appeased their longing for military service and, v 112 v

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‘Making a contribution to the war effort’ perhaps, assuaged their vulnerable sense of manhood. However, others tried multiple times, often in an increasingly desperate fashion, to enlist. Stephen Smith, a wartime engineer, recalled: I was determined to leave ’cos I wanted to get into the forces . . . I joined the Royal Navy. I joined the Royal Air Force. Soon as you produced your card with the ‘Reserved Occupation’, they didn’t want to know . . . I tried several times. Yeah and I  remember with the, I  forget which armed force it was, I know, I thought I’d actually done it, because I got as far as having a medical, and I thought, ‘oh I’m not going to stop there’. And then you moved up the line, you know, you was all in these mass medicals, and the guy said ‘you, you, you can leave’. He said, ‘you’re Reserved Occupation’, so I was determined, I was determined to do what I could to get out but, and I tried a lot, I tried several times in Croydon. But each time the dreaded Essential Works Order came along and stopped it.69

That Smith attempted to enlist in several different services suggests military enlistment in any guise was the ultimate goal. Yet despite the Schedule preventing them from volunteering, there were authorised ways for men to leave reserved occupations. From October 1941, as noted in Chapter  2, reserved men were permitted, if they fulfilled the entrance requirements, to join RAF flight crew, or less commonly serve onboard submarines. It was also possible for reserved men to enlist in the services in their skilled trade capacity if there was demand. These were routes a small minority of our interviewees took, including Cecil Clements, who worked as a draughtsman for a central London ordnance company. Following bomb damage to the factory the entire production was moved by the Ministry of Defence to Wells in Somerset to ensure production continued. Clements found Wells to be highly enjoyable: ‘it was great. What a good life considering the lives of other people at that time’.70 His comfort in the cathedral city, as well as abundant amounts of tennis, became a recurring theme in his interview: ‘[I]‌t was good fun dare I say it? But it was good fun. And I felt a bit guilty . . . I began to think “well, we’re all doing this work and it’s a comfortable life” . . . I enjoyed my work but I ought to be in the forces really.’71 Clements repeatedly referred to his belief that he should be in uniform, a feeling that was only made stronger by his enjoyment of tennis in beautiful surroundings. Ultimately, after a year of trying, he was accepted into the RAF as a navigator in 1942. He spent the majority of his time in the military in Canada without seeing active service. Clements’s squadron were readying themselves for war in the Far East when America’s use of the atomic bomb ended the war against Japan. Speaking of his lack of v 113 v

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Men in reserve action, he noted: ‘I’m not too worried. I mean, that’s what we were destined for, as I say, particularly when they told us we were going to Japan, but the bomb fell . . . We didn’t even start to go over. The war was over, basically, so we were demobbed.’72 Ultimately, Clements attained ‘composure’ from the knowledge that he had served and had ‘done his bit’ as he understood it. That the war ended before he could put his skills to the test in a military capacity could not be helped. Enlistment was not just an issue of persuading the State to release a worker from essential work, however; it was also crucial to convince an employer. Stephen Smith recalled his negotiations with his when trying to secure his release so that he could join the Merchant Navy: But quite by chance I  was reading the newspaper at work, and it’s funny how it happens, and there was an advert and I should have been wary at the time, because this little advert thing said that the Merchant Navy would take Reserved Occupation engineers if they could negotiate their own release. Now why would they do that? [Pause.] I think it was because they was losing so many engineers, they were getting desperate . . . I was lucky that the management side of the company was not near where I was working, you know, the management was at Wimbledon, and we was at Streatham. So I  took my morning or afternoon off from work and went up to the Merchant Navy pool to get things going . . . It was easier than what I thought it was going to be. The firm was good to me . . . They realised that I was pretty desperate to go, so you know, they said ‘okay’.73

While Smith was ultimately successful, other employers were less amenable to losing their skilled workers. As we saw in Chapter  2, a Mass Observation diarist noted that ‘very few firms will release their men’.74 Miner William Ramage, who repeatedly attempted to enlist and came very close to joining the RAF, recalled just such issues: I wanted to join air crew too but they wouldn’t let me go. And at the finish we did get [to. They] allowed us to go for testing. At the music hall in George Street [Edinburgh]. That was the big recruiting place. Went there, oh, it wasnae just one interview, three or four interviews, passed everything. They asked me to go to Broughton High School in Edinburgh for night classes to bring forward my maths. I was good at maths. Yes, I passed it, then I got a short letter, ‘William Ramage, you are accepted, AC2.’ That was aircraft, second class. Everybody that went into the Air Force was AC2. ‘To be trained for FLTENG’, flight engineer. I was delighted. I was delighted. After about four weeks, three weeks, there was no sign o’ my call up papers . . . I wrote a rude letter to them asking why. Got a very quick letter back, ‘services no longer required’. They had got in touch wi’ the manager o’ the mine I was

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‘Making a contribution to the war effort’ working and asked if I could be released from what I was doing and join the Air Force, I was to go for air crew. He said ‘no, no, I need him here’, so I was turned down.75

His emphatic ‘delight’ in being accepted into the RAF and his subsequent continued attempts to enlist highlight just how strongly the desire to be in uniform was for many young men. Indeed, Ramage called his time out of uniform ‘sore to bear’. He nevertheless continued to attempt to enlist in the military and was eventually accepted into the army just as the war ended. While there were ways to leave reserved occupations lawfully, awareness that men were continually being refused entry into the services because of their essential work led others to resort to cunning invention. Miner Henry Barrett recalled: I’ll put it bluntly I fiddled my way out of the coal mine and into the Merchant Navy . . . I suffer from a mastoid. One ear was cut away as a boy . . . Going down the coalmine the ears click and things like that, going down the pit. Pithead baths, the heat, you go home on the bike freezing cold and the catarrh and I played on that. I was deaf. Only one ear but that was affecting my other ear so I eventually went to Bath Infirmary and they told me to pack the coalmines in. Which I’d deliberately done. If I’d wanted to stop there I would have stopped there. I was a single man and everyone else was away. All dressed up in uniform and everything else. I was a single man. Young. So I seen an advertisement in the South Wales Echo for firemen/​trimmers [to work in the engine rooms] at Cardiff docks, a well noted place and I done a fortnight’s training there and went away to sea.76

The strong lure of ‘dressing up’ in uniform once again becomes apparent as an incentive for enlistment. It is also notable that Barrett emphasised his youthfulness and single status, suggesting he felt his lack of familial ties made him ideally suited for the dangerous life at sea. Others went to even more extreme lengths to avoid civilian service. Some civilian men were even willing to face prison to achieve their ultimate goal. Wartime miner Thomas Chadwick repeatedly attempted to join the Merchant Navy: But I wanted to join up. I wanted to be in the thick of it. It sounds crazy . . . Well I ran away that many times to join the Merchant Navy, I was arrested in London, I was arrested at Southampton, I was arrested at Fleetwood with the trawlers. It got so bad that the chief constable, Mr Panfrey, said he’d better things to do than keep handling me, which I’ll never forget. In later years I got to know him and he said ‘you were a proper pain in them days but we realised what it was, you were young’. The pit, it was stupid really. I used to

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Men in reserve go and say to the boss ‘sack me or tell them I’m no good at what I’m doing’. And this went on and on until I went to court . . . I was absent from the coal mining industry . . . which was a very severe civilian offence. One of vital importance. He [the judge] said ‘at his age no man is that important in any industry and if he’s so keen for god sake let him go’ . . . I’ve made it, I’ve cracked it. I’m going. I came home from work one day and the beautiful buff envelope was on the mantelpiece.77

That Chadwick’s repeated attempts to leave the mines centred not on the military but on the Merchant Navy highlights the increased status of that service in wartime. Moreover, Chadwick’s reference to the ‘beautiful buff envelope’, as well as his willingness to risk prison, highlights just how prized being ‘in the thick of it’ had become. Indeed, extreme tales of attempting to enlist were fairly common, highlighting how, for many young reserved men, the blow to their masculine subjectivities was acutely felt. One of the only ways to become de-​reserved was to get dismissed –​ no easy task when the Essential Work Order forbade this for all but gross misconduct. However, some young men tried. Robert Alexander, apprentice electrician, recalled in 2001: I had a good apprenticeship and I said, ‘I don’t like this I’m going to get in the Navy.’ I tried to join up at sixteen. My mother said ‘if you’re going to mither me, I’ll let you go, you know, under protest’ so I had to go to a tribunal in Manchester which was okay. Three chaps . . . they explained they’d need men like me once the war was over. They’d have lost so many tradesmen and men that they’d be relying on people like me to be qualified tradesmen when the war was finished. I said ‘I want to go to the Navy.’ They refused me. So I went back to the works and got fired. That was the only way to do it. I got sacked. Instead of wiring the vans up I’d go wandering off and leave them . . . I wanted in the Navy so I got fired.78

The inexorable pull of military service felt by many young men once again becomes apparent. Even though Alexander was made explicitly aware of the importance of his civilian occupation he instead sought to enlist in the Navy, an ambition he ultimately fulfilled. Midlothian miner William Ramage tried a similarly nefarious route to enlistment: The war was just coming to an end when I went into the army. And I’d been trying and trying and they wouldn’t take me because of my employment. Eventually I went into rebellion . . . I stopped work. I’d had a bad incident underground. The deputy in charge treated me very badly, very badly and when I came up that day, I says ‘well, that’s it, I’m no’ going back’ . . . So

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‘Making a contribution to the war effort’ I didn’t go back. I went to see the manager, I says ‘if you give me the sack, I can go where I want’. ‘Oh no’, he says, ‘I’m needing you here.’ I went to see the manager o’ the Labour Exchange in Dalkeith . . . [H]‌e says ‘you know, of course, if you don’t work, you won’t [get] unemployment benefit’. I says ‘I know that sir’, but I stopped work and I don’t know how my father and mother suffered it, but I was idle for four, about four weeks. Then a letter came through the door, it was Mr Wilson that had signed it . . . ‘William Ramage, you’re required to report to Gordon Barracks, Aberdeen for military service.’ Oh dear, my heart surged . . . I couldn’t be, you wouldn’t believe the eruption that took place in my heart.79

The poetic language used by Ramage to describe how he felt at finally being able to fulfil his ambition of joining the military, his heart surging and erupting with elation, as well as his dramatic leap from the chair as he said the word ‘surged’, emphasises his sheer joy and relief. Similarly, his willingness to forgo his wages for several weeks again underlines how important a goal military service was. Cumulatively, these examples highlight just how strongly desired a role in the forces was for so many young civilian men and, therefore, how central it was to their masculine sense of self.

‘The making of me’: experiences in the military Those who managed to escape their reserved occupations and fulfil their desire to enlist were often extremely emphatic about their experiences, showing vast amounts of pride in their military achievements that were rarely mirrored in discussions of their civilian work. Walker Leith, who had been a telephone engineer before joining the army in the Royal Signals and being posted overseas in 1944, was effusive about his time in the military: Well I  think it was a terrific experience. It was, in a sense, the making of me as an individual. You felt that the experience was so, so unique. I mean I have to put it in the context that I wasn’t really in a real battle situation. In my occupation as Royal Signals, I just was providing communications . . . I went to France about six weeks after the initial landings on the sixth of June . . . And you had to cannibalise all the teleprinters and the equipment that came in, to make up working models. And it was quite a problem because you weren’t a big unit. I was on my own virtually. As a consequence I was working night and day. Just trying to get enough equipment going so that they could keep the communications to-​ing and fro-​ing. It was quite, it was, I’ll never forget! It was that arduous.80

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Men in reserve While Leith acknowledges that he never saw combat, this is irrelevant to him, and he is nevertheless able to achieve narrative composure: he was in uniform, in France, as part of the liberating army, something that he will ‘never forget’ and that was ‘a terrific experience’. His positive recollections of his martial activity can be set within a contemporary context that continually celebrates and praises the military experiences of the Second World War. Television programmes and films about the war abound in western culture. In 2014, a year where popular culture was focused primarily on the centenary of the First World War, these have included The Last Heroes (Channel 4), Generation War (BBC), The Monuments Men (director George Clooney), Fury (director David Ayer) and Unbroken (director Angelina Jolie). Public interest in the conflict shows no signs of abating. Such emphasis reinforces the notion that the depictions shown are worthy of both note and praise. As will be seen in Chapter 7, civilian men are largely absent from this persistent cultural focus. Perhaps one of the reasons those who joined the military can so easily discuss their experiences is that there is a widely known cultural language to do so. Indeed, Leith did not even feel the need to mention that ‘the sixth of June’ was D-​Day, assuming correctly that the interviewer would know the significance of the date. RAF pilot Ronald Tonge, who had previously been reserved as a telephone engineer, was similarly expansive about his experiences: ‘I wouldn’t have missed it. I think it was the most exciting part . . . Flying is great.’81 Tonge emphasised the large numbers lost in training: ‘there wasn’t one course without a fatality, we lost two. Training was on the brink.’ He never saw active service, instead serving his time training in South Africa. His emphasis on the danger of the training suggests that he felt he had to emphasise his military, and perhaps masculine, credentials as he did not achieve the apogee of battle experience. Midlothian miner William Ramage was also characteristically enthusiastic in describing his own experiences of the military: So I went up to Aberdeen. It was like playing, it was easy. The army was easy and I was good at it . . . The army was wonderful wi’ these lads, and of course the training, well, it was stiff but it was nothing to me, I mean, in the mines, I could handle anything, so I did my training . . . We went to Germany. Oh, I loved it. I just loved it.82

Ramage’s daughter Hilde was in the room throughout the interview. When her father got very enthusiastic about his military service she interrupted to remind him, affectionately, that he had never actually fought but instead had been stationed in Germany after the war had ended. Ramage v 118 v

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‘Making a contribution to the war effort’ retorted ‘I know that, but then I, on the other hand, I was prepared to take the chance on the front line. I’m prepared to take the chance.’83 His slip into the present tense illustrates the ongoing pleasure he derives from achieving his desire to get into uniform, albeit not in actual combat. Of our interviewees who joined the military, none in fact saw active combat. Some were in support or trade roles while others were simply called up or volunteered too late to be deployed. John Dickson, who worked in shipbuilding before joining the RAF, recalled that ‘it was May [1945] when we sailed. And we sailed from the Clyde to South Africa. So I had twelve months in South Africa. Which was pretty tough! We ran out of milk chocolate one day!’84 Similarly, Cecil Clements, who felt personally compelled to enlist because he was enjoying too much playing tennis in Somerset, stated:  ‘But it was, yeah, was great. And I  thoroughly, absolutely thoroughly enjoyed my three years in the RAF training to be a navigator. Because I never got on operations.’85 This lack of battle experience perhaps reflects a bias in our cohort, and it is feasible that had they seen violence and death this would colour both their memories of their army experience and their remembered desire to rush to the services from the relative safety of a reserved occupation.

‘I’m not a pacifist but . . .’: disinterest in military life While the ideal of the soldier hero was culturally pervasive in wartime Britain, it made little impact on some men’s lives. Twenty-​eight of our interviewees  –​exactly half  –​did not attempt to enlist in the services. Some were comfortable with their civilian status, accepting that the State knew best how to deploy manpower. Willie Dewar, who worked at the Hyde Park Railway Works in Glasgow, recalled somewhat resignedly: [I]‌just felt you did your job and that was the job you would do. If you were called up you would just have done another job. There was no feeling that I should have been in the army or I should have done this. You had a job to do, you did it and everybody was quite happy . . . [I]f you were called up you were quite happy. You could have volunteered, you might have not got away but the fact was you were doing a job to help the war effort and you were quite happy to do that.86

The overriding tone of this excerpt is that he passively accepted what the State dictated: being either directed into the services or, as he was, retained in reserved occupations. Either course would have suited him; he was ‘happy’ to help the war effort in whichever way the authorities v 119 v

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Men in reserve considered most useful. Alternatively, by positioning himself as a passive tool of the State he could abdicate responsibility for his own wartime agency, fending off cultural pressures to enlist. Some interviewees were more emphatic, stating that they were pleased not to have been called up. When asked how he felt about his friends being away in the army, wartime railway worker Daniel Donovan simply responded that ‘I was glad it wasn’t me’, highlighting that he too had no compunction or desire to enlist.87 For some, their relief at being granted reserved status was palpable. Gregory Fowler, wartime telephone engineer, noted: Well I  didn’t realise that it was a reserved employ, occupation, until I, at eighteen, went to register for national service. And then told [that] I was. [I was] not allowed to be called up until I was twenty-​one. I suppose a sense of relief to some extent . . . because it wasn’t a safe occupation being in the forces. If I had been called up at eighteen, as I would have been, I would have just have been in time for D-​Day.88

Others felt similarly fortunate, at least in retrospect, to have avoided service and been spared the outright horrors of warfare. Timothy Brown, wartime munitions worker in Newcastle, declared the navy did him a ‘good turn’ by declining him. When asked to expand on this statement he asserted: ‘Well, I might not be here, would I? . . . You never know, that was your luck of the draw.’89 Similarly, Frank Blincow, wartime draughtsman, stated: ‘I mean, now I’m grateful that I never did go into the air force. Because the odds are I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you . . . Well, you know what a “tail end Charlie” was.’90 This was common slang for the rear gunner in an aircraft who, given his vulnerable position in the rear of the aeroplane, was isolated from the rest of the crew and had a notoriously short lifespan. This was a position many were keen to avoid.91 Reserved status could provide a welcome means of evading military service. Poet and wartime AFS fireman Stephen Spender noted in a 1990 interview with the Imperial War Museum: I mean I’m not a pacifist but I didn’t really want to be involved in killing people. Sufficiently pacifist for that. I suppose I didn’t want to be killed either. I suppose I wanted to, I mean the war did offer honourable ways of being able to carry on with the work you believed was your vocation and not being sort of cowardly.92

While conscientious objection is, in scholarly works and the public imagination, popularly connected with the First World War, 61,000 men v 120 v

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‘Making a contribution to the war effort’ declared themselves conscientious objectors between 1939 and 1945. This was a significant increase from the 16,000 who had done so in the First World War.93 Spender mentions the ‘honourable ways’ of avoiding military service, suggesting some, at least, felt that non-​military service was preferable to life in the forces.94 Some of our interviewees reported similarly pacifist sentiments. Charles Lamb, Dundee shipyard worker, was resolute in his abhorrence of guns:  ‘I wasna in the Home Guard, I refused to handle a rifle, I was in the fire watching . . . Well, [a rifle] kills people! . . . You can kill enough people with a rifle, aye, I wasna going to shoot anybody.’95 Similarly, when Manchester turner George Dean was asked how he felt about being in a reserved occupation he responded: Didn’t bother me . . . No I was ’appy where I was . . . I don’t ever think if they’d ’ave given me a gun I’d ’ave shot anybody . . . I didn’t want to be a soldier, no. I couldn’t see any sense in it, honest . . . It’s all right saying ‘King and Country’ and all that, but to me, it don’t wash.96

Despite its prevalence in both our interviews and in wartime society, military uniform was not universally desired. Even within our youthful group of interviewees a significant number expressed no desire to enlist. Some men, of course, sought to avoid military service and enjoyed the relative safety and security of a reserved occupation. Nick Metson, for example, interviewed by the British Library in 1999, told the following tale: I didn’t want to go in the West Kents because the chap I was working with he’d been in the West Kents and he used to regale me with tale[s of] Ypres and Cambrai where he’d been and the mud and the rats and one thing and another. I thought ‘I don’t want none of that lark’ so I was trying to get in to munitions so then you’d be on a reserved occupation you see. A lot safer and a lot more money attached to it. I wrote to her [a girlfriend in Sheffield] and asked if there was any chance of coming up there and she wrote back saying ‘yes, mum says there’s a spare room’, she said ‘and you can come up and stay with us. There’s plenty of work.’ So I  packed my bags and went off up to Sheffield. And I went down to the Labour Exchange and straight [away] they gave me a yellow card and said ‘there you are, Metro-​Vickers.’ They wanted a lot of people down there. Obviously I was an electrician so I  was just right. So I  went down there and got a job, armature winding. Winding the armatures for to turn the turret round in the tanks they were making so I thought right I’m in and that was fine. Next thing was doom and destruction. A  letter came on a Thursday night when I  came home from work. It was from my mother giving me my call-​up papers which had arrived that day.97

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Men in reserve Metson was unusual in his openness about avoiding military service, especially in identifying such selfish motives as money and self-​ preservation. He was almost certainly in the extreme minority. Others sought reserved status because of their anti-​war beliefs. Frank Chapple, for example, got work along with other fellow communists as an electrician in the London docks.98 However, despite the general acceptance of the necessity of reserved occupations there was a persistent underlying suggestion of cowardice, namely that great swathes of men were actively seeking a reserved job to avoid military service. As we saw in Chapter 2, John Profumo stated in the Commons in November 1941 that there were men who ‘secured for themselves cushion-​seated jobs’ through either contrivance or influence, and urged the Ministry of Labour to instigate an inquiry to stop this ‘disgraceful’ behaviour.99 The State did monitor the numbers of men passing from non-​essential jobs into reserved occupations. In 1941, for example, around 6,000 men a month did so.100 However, the numbers of these men who were ‘legitimately’ transferring to meet the growing demand for war materials and essential services, as encouraged by the State, and of those that might be deliberately using this as a premise to avoid conscription, are not known. Nevertheless, the numbers represented only a tiny fraction of the millions who were in reserved occupations. Such low opinions of reserved men, although rare, also found parallels in the reminiscences of some reserved men themselves. Albert Bennett, for example, who was a reserved worker at the Rolls Royce Aircraft Factory in Crewe, noted: [W]‌ith the influx of the dodging of military service we had a lot of people coming in to do semi-​skilled work . . . The Battle of Britain was coming up so it was a reserved occupation, a very much reserved occupation. That was one of the things that upset me most of all. People were coming off a second-​ hand stall or a cheese stall behind the market and coming in . . . and getting a blue collar or a white collar and doing supervisory work which was a bit hard to take for what you might call a reasonably standard engineer. I tried to get away from the works. I tried to get away and I volunteered three times for the Navy.101

Bennett attacked those ‘dodging military service’ in two key ways. Not only were they army dodgers, and so emasculated cowards, but they were also unskilled traders rather than skilled craftsmen like him. Gordon Tack, apprentice boilermaker in Plymouth, similarly felt those he worked alongside were cowardly:  ‘I didn’t want to stay there. Didn’t want [to] work in the dockyard or with the people that were in it. You only had v 122 v

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‘Making a contribution to the war effort’ to have an aeroplane appear within ten miles of the place and the whole workforce disappeared down the shelters.’102 Again the suggestion of cowardice among the male civilian population is clear. However, strikingly, both of these men were keen to escape their reserved status and enter the military. As such their opinions may reflect their internalised notions of what constituted appropriate male behaviour, as well as their own fears about the assumptions made about their masculine status, rather than accurate representations of the fortitude of Britain’s civilian workforce.

‘We did something to stop the Germans’: valuing contributions to the war effort As we have seen, a hierarchy of value existed in wartime, with the military man at the top. There was, however, a marked variation in how civilian working men positioned themselves in wartime and in their interview narratives with regards to their responses to their reserved status. Some felt frustrated that their manhood had been potentially diminished because they were not in uniform. Others transmitted a remarkable degree of comfort with their reserved identities, having little sense of their masculinity being fundamentally challenged. Various reasons, including apathy, acceptance, relief, pacifism, money and self-​preservation, explain why half our interviewees did not attempt to enlist. In order to achieve narrative composure, interviewees chose from a range of masculine identities when talking about their reserved status. Men across the spectrum of responses to their retention on the home front often referred to the importance of their work to the war effort. Railwayman Jim Lister, for example, who had tried unsuccessfully to get into the services, recalled: ‘Well if there was nobody shifting munitions and coal and what have you, you’re not going to be much up to the war effort.’103 Engineering draughtsman Willie Dewar, who had not attempted to join the services, asserted: ‘It was more important to get the equipment than it was to get the fighting people.’104 Similarly, Manchester toolmaker Frank Harvey, who had tried once unsuccessfully to join the forces, stated:  ‘Without the engines which we were on, it was the machine tools that made the Spitfire engines, we wouldn’t have done anything, you know . . . Without doing it I don’t think we’d have won the war, because it’s no use you having aircraft if they’ve no engines in them.’105 Many men derived satisfaction from their contributions to the overall war machine. Indeed, a significant number of the interviewees who espoused such ideas did not try to v 123 v

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Men in reserve enlist in the military. When asked how he felt about being reserved, Harry McGregor, who did not try to leave his reserved employment at St Rollox railway works in Glasgow, commented: ‘it was a job you’d to do and that was it. You’re reserved occupation so you just had to do what you could do for the war effort, you know, and that was it.’ He continued:  ‘I preferred to be in a reserved occupation.’106 A  permutation of this was a sense that skills were required after the war for reconstruction, and thus craft apprenticeships had to be finished and any ambitions to be in uniform curtailed.107 In their oral testimonies, many male veterans also consciously endeavoured to associate themselves with the war effort, often emphasising that they had been in war zones facing bombing raids. When asked how he felt about being in a reserved occupation, Clydebank draughtsman Roy Miller retorted ‘We were bombed. I felt, well, just as much involved as the, and particularly people in London, people in London had a terrible time during the war. So there was no feeling that you weren’t doing your bit.’108 Miller’s family were bombed out of their home during the Clydebank Blitz in March 1941, causing them to lose several neighbours and most of their possessions, as well as resulting in a lengthy hospital stay for Miller’s father. Miller, who did not leave his reserved work to join the services, evidently felt he was in as much danger as a soldier and that his contribution should not be considered less for being civilian. Similarly, proximity to the means of waging war, including the production of tanks, planes and munitions, was important in the construction of masculinity among reserved workers. Recurring motifs in our interviews were Dunkirk, spitfires and hurricanes, Bletchley Park, Atlantic convoys, Sicily landings, and D-​Day. The interviewees’ masculinity was bolstered through direct association with the mission of war; they saw themselves as critical cogs in the machine of modern warfare where victory depended as much upon producing the goods as shooting the weapons. Respondents clearly found composure in this kind of narrative, which positioned them as playing an important and vital role in the war. Some men understood that they were ‘doing their bit’ in civilian clothes: they were reserved because their work was vital to the war effort. Alexander Davidson, who remained at a boat-​building firm in Portsmouth, stated: We didn’t mind really because we were doing a job for the Admiralty. It was a job that had to be done during the war. It was no good having sailors if you’d got nothing to sail them in, if you hadn’t got any boats. So it was Admiralty work we were on, so we were connected very closely with the services really

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‘Making a contribution to the war effort’ . . . We felt we were part, we were part of the war effort, that’s what it was really. You know, same as making guns or something else, and you weren’t actually firing them but you were making them.109

Davidson’s work in naval shipyards, unlike some other reserved occupations, was explicitly linked to the military, making it unsurprising that he felt himself to be intimately connected to Britain’s war effort. Other interviewees were similarly keen to stress the part they, and their firms, had played in key wartime events. Three interviewees were at pains to stress they had been involved, admittedly unwittingly, in the construction of the ingenious portable temporary harbours, known as Mulberry harbours, used in the D-​Day landings. Roger Major described his role in this feat of engineering. He stated: Found out later it was for making the Mulberry Harbours for D-​Day. They were made in sections, right the way down the coast. And then they were put together in Devon and then floated across. And they were a godsend. That was the essential part of D-​Day. The Mulberry Harbours. And they were all welded, you know and he, I mean we didn’t know it was only after the war that we realised it, what the job was.110

Being so closely involved in an essential part of the military war effort allowed these men to feel they had truly contributed to victory. As George Cross, employed building rolling stock, noted when asked if he felt part of the war effort: ‘Oh no doubt about it, no doubt about it, no doubt about it. We felt it and we got that quite often. Well, maybe some dignitary came to have a look around and, you know, and we got that impression that we were well thought of . . . You look on it as pride that we did something to stop the Germans.’111 When colleagues tried to join up, Cross recalled them being told:  ‘Back, back, back to work . . . We need you as much as we need the servicemen.’112 Moreover, reserved status itself could also become a badge of honour. Phillip Rogers, who worked in coalmining in wartime, used his reserved occupation status to prove his worth on the home front:  ‘I wouldn’t have been in a reserved occupation I  suppose if it wasn’t necessary. Somebody had to do it.’113 Similar pride drawn from reserved occupation status was seen in a Mass Observation industrial survey completed in 1942. Among other issues, the survey asked industrial workers if they felt their work was important to the war effort. Many responded that it was, giving their reserved status as proof of their importance and necessity.114 Furthermore, where large numbers of men were concentrated in particular working communities such as coal mines, shipyards, iron and v 125 v

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Men in reserve steel works, and industrial estates (like Hillington in Glasgow, Trafford Park in Manchester and the Great West Road in London), there was a shared wartime experience: it was the norm rather than the exception to be a civilian male worker. When asked if he ever thought of joining the armed services, Fred Millican, who worked in the huge Vickers-​ Armstrong factory in Tyneside which employed thousands in wartime, responded:  ‘By and large my immediate friends were all working in Vickers. So I suppose that was it. You just assumed you weren’t going to go.’115 The presence of these other reserved men validated Millican’s own existence on the home front by normalising his absence from the military. Similarly, shipbuilding draughtsman Roy Miller recalled:  ‘nearly all my pals in Clydeside were in reserved occupations of one kind or another’.116 In these places there was little sense of being outsiders or different, as the shared experience was of war work.117 For those surrounded by other reserved occupation workers there seems to have been little sense of emasculation. Working-​class men employed in heavy industry and other war-​related work could draw upon their identification as essential war workers and their close association with total war to bolster their sense of manliness.

Conclusion It is clear that, for our interview cohort at least, the lure of the armed forces was powerful. Out of fifty-​ six men interviewed exactly half attempted to enlist, often in increasingly inventive and desperate ways. Military service was a highly prized goal for lots of young men during the Second World War. While many, if not most, understood the importance of their civilian work, individually a number of our interviewees felt as if they should do something ‘more’, highlighting an obvious hierarchy of contributions to the war effort. That they were, more often than not, denied this chance resulted in strong emotions that clearly resonated over half a century later. Men described themselves as ‘stuck’, ‘robbed’ and ‘nobodies’, making their opinions of their own, ultimately vital, contributions to the war effort abundantly clear. However, we must avoid simple dichotomies and the tempting ease of categorising these men as either desperate to stay or eager to leave. While half of our young cohort of interviewees attempted to enlist, the majority were not driven by tub-​ thumping jingoism. Some were certainly desperate to serve in the forces as an end in itself, some resorting to extreme measures in order to fulfil this goal. However, many others felt they had to try to get into uniform to v 126 v

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‘Making a contribution to the war effort’ preserve their masculine sense of self, attempting to enlist when they had no real desire to be in uniform or see battle. Moreover, some men were comfortable with their reserved status. The reasons for this were diffuse. Some had an abhorrence of violence, often a result of their knowledge of the First World War. Others understood that their jobs were necessary, that they were providing the essential goods and services required to survive and win a protracted total war. Some were simply apathetic, happy to be sent wherever the State felt their services were best needed. Similarly, many drew succour from knowing their job ultimately aided the war effort. The reactions to their reserved status of our interviewees –​ mainly single men who were aged between eighteen and twenty-​eight at the end of the war –​therefore, represent a broad and complex spectrum of reactions to warfare.

Notes 1 Sid Archer, interview (British Library, C900/​0956). 2 The Merchant Navy, which was also a reserved occupation, was often seen in wartime as analogous to military service. It was certainly conveyed and understood as a much more war-​related role than the industrial jobs predominantly undertaken by our interview cohort. 3 Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 1. 4 Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 8. 5 Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (London: Anchor, 1929); Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London:  Victor Gollancz, 1933). There was, however, a great deal of continuity in the reverence of martial masculinities in this period, as we shall see. Michael Paris, Warrior Nation:  Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–​2000 (London: Reaktion Books, 2000); Martin Francis, ‘Attending to Ghosts: Some Reflections on the Disavowals of British Great War Historiography’, Twentieth Century British History, 25:3 (2014), 347–​67. 6 That is not to say that there was just one single reaction to the outbreak of either war. Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United:  Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012); Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 7 National Library of Wales, MS 10812 D, Idris Davies, diary. 8 Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-​Bird, ‘The Home Guard in Britain in the Second World War: Uncertain Masculinities?’, in Paul Higate (ed.),

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Men in reserve Military Masculinities: Identity and the State (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), p. 58. 9 Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939–​ 1945 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 160–​1, 196. 10 R.  W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge:  Polity Press, 2005), p.  77; R.  W. Connell, The Men and the Boys (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2000), p. 10. 11 Martin Francis, The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force 1939–​1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 12 Linsey Robb: Men at Work: The Working Man in British Culture, 1939–​1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 13 Thomas Carmichael, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 15 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 35). 14 John Cresswell, interview, 2005 (day unspecified) (IWM SA, 28932). 15 Frank Blincow, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 30 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​56). 16 Jim Lister, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 19 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​38). 17 This, however, was not unproblematic. Many in civil defence had to be convinced it was a ‘real man’s job’ because it was largely associated with women and older men. Lucy Noakes, ‘ “Serve to Save”: Gender, Citizenship and Civil Defence in Britain 1937–​41’, Journal of Contemporary History, 47:4 (2012), 734–​53. 18 Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-​ Bird, Contesting Home Defence:  Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 224. 19 Harry McGregor, interviewed by Arthur McIvor, 13 July 2009 (SOHC 050/​ 05). 20 Corinna Peniston-​ Bird, ‘Classifying the Body in the Second World War:  British Men in and out of Uniform’, Body & Society, 9 (2003), 31–​48 (p. 34). 21 ‘Some Wartime Memories of the Railways and RAF’, http://​www.bbc. co.uk/​history/​ww2peopleswar/​stories/​71/​a2280971.shtml (accessed 26 September 2014). 22 Mass Observation, D107, October 1939. 23 Francis, The Flyer, p. 24. 24 Walker Leith, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 2 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​26). 25 Thomas Cantwell, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 24 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​55). 26 At least, they told us in interviews that this was the case. Some of the twenty-​eight may have retrospectively assigned this impulse to themselves to construct a composed sense of self as being thwarted in their attempts to enlist. 27 Juliette Pattinson, Behind Enemy Lines:  Gender, Passing and the SOE in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

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‘Making a contribution to the war effort’ 28 Glyn Loosmore, letter written to Juliette Pattinson, 9 October 2000. 29 Paris, Warrior Nation, p. 151. 30 Jack Jones, a young socialist born in 1913, for example, had fought and been wounded in the Spanish Civil War and had attempted to leave his position as a trade union official in Coventry to join the services in the Second World War. Jack Jones, Union Man: An Autobiography (London: Collins, 1986), p. 104. 31 Ronald Tonge, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 28 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 24). 32 John O’Halloran, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 22 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 19). 33 Peniston-​Bird, ‘Classifying the Body in the Second World War’, p. 40. 34 Cantwell interview, 24 May 2013. 35 Lister interview, 19 April 2013. 36 Emma Newlands, Civilians into Soldiers:  War, the Body and British Army Recruits, 1939–​ 1945 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2014), p. 44. 37 Craig Inglis, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 10 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​48). 38 Ibid. 39 It was not only men in reserved occupations who recalled their dismay at being prevented from serving in the forces. Many Bevin Boys, who were directed by ballot to the mines instead of the services, were also frustrated. It was ‘a bitter blow’, noted Bert Mitchell; ‘I’d Rather Go to Prison’, 23 June 2005, BBC ‘People’s War’ Archive, article ID A4252330, http://​ www.bbc.co.uk/​ww2peopleswar/​stories/​30/​a4252330.shtml (accessed 15 September 2014). 40 Harold Scragg, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 9 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​47). 41 Leith interview, 2 April 2013. 42 John Hiscutt, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 25 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​42). 43 John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-​Class Home in Victorian England (London: Yale University Press, 1999). 44 Connell, The Men and the Boys, p. 12. 45 Connell, Masculinities, p. 37. 46 Unknown artist, To the Young Women of London (1915), IWM, PST 4903; unknown artist, Five Questions to the Men who Have Not Enlisted (1915), IWM, PST 5129. 47 Fred Millican, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 26 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​20). 48 Eddie Menday, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 15 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​50). 49 Charles Hill (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 16 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​37). 50 Derek Sims, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 20 February 2013 (SOHC 050/​012). 51 Ibid. 52 John Stephenson, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 23 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​39). 53 Rose, Which People’s War?, p. 179.

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Men in reserve 54 Sally Sokoloff, ‘“How Are They at Home?”: Community, State and Servicemen’s Wives in England, 1939–​45’, Women’s History Review, 8:1 (1999), 27–​52 (p. 42). 55 Ronald Quartermaine, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 4 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 28). 56 Warwick Taylor, National Library of Wales, Wales at War Transcriptions, ex 2458/​1. 57 Tom Myles, interviewed by Wendy Ugolini, 6 November 2008 (SOHC 050/​02). 58 HC Deb., 19 March 1942, Vol. 378, 1694–​702. 59 Rose, Which People’s War?, p. 175. 60 Mass Observation, People in Production:  An Enquiry into British War Production (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942), p. 85. 61 Stephenson interview, 23 April 2013. 62 Alexander Ramage, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 19 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 14). 63 Charles Lamb, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 3 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​27). 64 Robert Bell, interview (British Library, C900/​06514). 65 National Library of Wales, MS 10812 D. 66 Ibid. 67 Hill interview, 16 April 2013. 68 Frank Harvey, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 27 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​23). 69 Stephen Smith (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 19 February 2013 (SOHC 050/​11). 70 Cecil Clements, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 16 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​51). 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. 73 Smith interview, 19 February 2013. 74 Mass Observation, D5039.1, diary for June 1941. 75 William Ramage, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 29 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 043). 76 Henry Barrett, interview, 7 February 1996 (IWM SA, 16733). 77 Thomas Chadwick, interview, 1996 (day unspecified) (IWM SA, 16593). 78 Robert John Alexander, interview, 7 June 2001 (IWM SA, 21647). 79 William Ramage interview, 29 April 2013. 80 Leith interview, 2 April 2013. 81 Tonge interview, 28 March 2013. 82 William Ramage interview, 29 April 2013. 83 Ibid. 84 John Dickson, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 21 May 2103 (SOHC 050/​53). 85 Clements interview, 16 May 2013. 86 Willie Dewar, interviewed by Arthur McIvor, 9 December 2008 (SOHC 050/​04). 87 Daniel Donovan, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 21 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​16).

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‘Making a contribution to the war effort’ 88 Gregory Fowler (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 12 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​34). 89 Timothy Brown (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 8 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​30). 90 Blincow interview, 30 May 2013. 91 Francis, The Flyer, pp. 42–​3. 92 Stephen Spender, interview, 1990 (day unspecified) (IWM SA, 11627). 93 Rose, Which People’s War?, p.  171. Robert S.  W. Pollard, ‘Conscientious Objectors in Great Britain and the Dominions’, Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, 28:3/​4 (1946), 72–​82; Hazel Nicholson, ‘A Disputed Identity: Women Conscientious Objectors in Second World War Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 18:4 (2007), 409–​28. 94 For a discussion of the multiple constructions of conscientious objector identity in the First World War, including the ‘honourable man’ who embodied admirable qualities such as self-​discipline and commitment, see Lois Bibbings, Telling Tales about Men:  Conceptions of Conscientious Objectors to Military Service during the First World War (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 195–​229. 95 Lamb interview, 3 April 2013. 96 George Dean, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 28 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​25). 97 Nick Metson, interview (British Library, C900/​07557–​8 C1). 98 Frank Chapple, Sparks Fly! A Trade Union Life (London: Michael Joseph, 1984), p. 34. 99 HC Deb., 13 November 1941, Vol. 376, 74–​148. 100 TNA, LAB 6/​164, ‘Men who Change Their Employment after Registration in Order to Qualify under the Schedule of Reserved Occupations’ (1940–​41). 101 Albert Bennett, interview, February 2004 (IWM SA, 30023). 102 Gordon Hugh Tack, interview, 1996 (day unspecified) (IWM SA, 16699). 103 Lister interview, 19 April 2013. 104 Dewar interview, 9 December 2008. 105 Harvey interview, 27 March 2013. 106 McGregor interview, 13 July 2009 (interviewee’s emphasis). 107 Alexander interview, 7 June 2001. 108 Roy Miller, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 27 February 2013 (SOHC 050/​13). 109 Alexander Davidson, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 10 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​32). 110 Roger Major (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 26 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​21). 111 George Cross, interviewed by Wendy Ugolini, 7 November 2008 (SOHC 050/​03). 112 Ibid.

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Men in reserve 113 Phillip Rogers (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 19 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​15). 114 Mass Observation, TC 75-​2-​E, Industrial Survey 1941–​42 questionnaire. 115 Millican interview, 26 March 2013. 116 Miller interview, 27 February 2013. 117 See, for example, Harvey interview, 27 March 2013; Eddie Menday, http:// ​ w ww.unionhistory.info/ ​ w orkerswar/ ​ v oices.php (accessed 7 October 2014).

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work

The days at school are in the past A time to work is here at last For good or bad, I’ll wait and see What the world of men will mean to me . . . An office boy I then became, I found it clean but very tame. Marking the cards and making tea, This is not the job for me. A boy welder, that soon passed, Apprentice fitter, a trade at last. Construct, design, repair worn tools, To work with brass, steel and rule. The years roll by, we are now at war, We work as we’ve never worked before. Blackouts, rationing, the occasional bomb, We are sick and tired, but carry on . . . Women also work in this man’s domain To help the war effort, they explain. They swear and smoke and toil like men, This place will never be the same again.1

Ron Spedding, who started in a railway wagon works in Durham in 1940 aged sixteen and then remained there for the next forty-​two years, evokes in his poem what war work meant to him. It speaks of the construction of masculinity in working-​class jobs and of male identities in wartime. Working-​class masculinity oozes from the lines in this ‘hard graft’ narrative as he refers to ‘tame’ office jobs, the transformative impact of war, the trespassing of women into ‘this man’s domain’ and the heightened v 133 v

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Men in reserve intensity of war work. Spedding tried, unsuccessfully, to enlist with the RAF, like some of our interviewees, as we saw in Chapter 3. He recollected ‘feeling peeved and also a little guilty when some of my friends joyously told me they had been released and were off to join the Air Force’.2 Yet the Second World War afforded Spedding, and other men who were compelled to remain on the home front, opportunities and rewards, as well as restrictions and penalties. Strikingly, the impact that these changes had on civilian men has not, to date, been studied. This and the following chapter seek to fill this lacuna, utilising a range of sources including personal testimonies, both oral interviews and autobiographies like Spedding’s, in order to uncover the lived experience of men working on the home front. A range of discourses are evident within these personal accounts, from ‘frustrated combatants’ to those comfortable with their wartime masculinities; from heroic ‘graft’ and ‘sacrifice’ narratives through to activist narratives that eschew the dominant discourses associated with the ‘blitz spirit’. Together, they reveal that the impact of the war on male workers’ identities was complex and sometimes contradictory.

Masculinities at work before the Second World War Understanding the mutation of conventional gender identities during the Second World War requires awareness of working-​class culture and lived experience in the inter-​war period. Early twentieth-​century masculinity was intimately connected to employment as this provided the resources for fulfilment of the provider/​protector role, as well as a sense of self-​worth and esteem  –​the intrinsic rewards of purposeful labour. This economic role was, historically, the basis of men’s superiority over women. Before the Second World War, manual work was saturated with social value. In his autobiography published in 1935, Glaswegian David Kirkwood asserted that working men had a deeply competitive work culture, were always ‘scrambling for overtime’ and ‘lived their lives in their work’.3 Manliness was forged in a strong work ethic that existed in middle-​and working-​class occupations, and a powerful commitment to the breadwinner role. Working-​class masculinity, as anthropologist Daniel Wight has asserted, was incubated in hard graft and big earnings.4 Bert Coombes, a south Wales coalminer in the 1930s, commented that ‘men who do not do their share are treated with contempt . . . by their fellow workmen who are usually too ready to pour out their sweat and their blood’.5 There was a moral economy to labour. London cabinet maker Max Cohen reflected: ‘The notion is dinned into you from boyhood that v 134 v

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work he who can sweat is good, noble, moral; and he who can’t (for whatever reason) is bad, ignoble and immoral.’6 Across industrialised economies, work was considered one of the main ‘anchorages’ of male identity.7 The nineteenth-​century bourgeois ideology of ‘separate spheres’, which located men in the public world of work and placed women in the domestic arena, continued to hold a powerful influence. According to the 1931 Census, a period in which high levels of joblessness were witnessed, over 80 per cent of adult men were in full-​time paid employment, in comparison to less than 20 per cent of married women.8 Segregation in work was not immutable and male gender identities in reality were fluid, ranging across a spectrum from a ‘rough’, ‘hard man’ style of manliness to more ‘respectable’ masculinities; from dominant (heterosexual) to marginalised (homosexual) forms.9 The significance of place, occupation and social class in the inter-​war period are crucial to an understanding of gender identity and wartime transformations. There were marked differences in experience between the so-​called ‘depressed areas’10 of northern England, the west of Scotland and south Wales on the one hand, and London, the south and the Midlands, where job opportunities were growing, on the other. Although provider masculinity was culturally dominant within traditional working-​class communities everywhere before the Second World War, in the northern heavy industries ‘hard man’ modes of masculinity prevailed, whereas in the south ‘softer’ forms of ‘temperate masculinity’ were gestating in communities dominated by the new light-​engineering and consumer goods factories.11 Apart from the very worst years of the Depression in 1931–​32, ‘breadwinner’ masculinity was much less under assault in places like the fast-​ growing industrial belt around the North Circular in London and in the ‘sunrise’ light-​manufacturing industries of the Midlands. Male identities were nurtured in the tough street culture of the neighbourhood, in pubs and male-​dominated spectator sports like football, and were then forged in arduous, dirty, dangerous and all-​consuming manual labour in mines, factories, farms, shipyards, docks and building sites. With few exceptions, working-​class children felt destined for manual occupations, articulating a sense that office and shop work was effeminate.12 In the popular 1930s novel Love on the Dole the central male character, Harry Hardcastle, recalled his metamorphosis from an employee in the ‘cissy’ [sic] world of clerical work to a worker in an engineering factory in Manchester, where there were ‘great muscular men . . . Phew! But they were men’.13 Work in manual labour sculpted men out of boys. Entering blue-​collar jobs typically aged fourteen or fifteen, boys v 135 v

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Men in reserve were de-​sensitised to danger and socialised into a competitive, macho work environment. For some, like Jack Ashley, who started work in a large asbestos factory in Widnes not long after his fourteenth birthday in December 1936, this transition to ‘a new era in my life’ was marked by moving up from wearing shorts to trousers.14 The National Insurance card, which was given out to workers and to those who had completed their five-​year apprenticeships, was another marker of masculinity as it was a symbol of their capacity to earn and pay taxes as well as of their entitlement to social security. Max Cohen referred to it in his autobiography as a ‘[badge] of manhood’.15 Becoming a craftsman was equated with status as a man. Ron Spedding noted ‘I had reached my industrial mecca’ when he began as a millwright in a railway carriage works.16 Within this working-​class culture a powerful work ethic prevailed where the grafters with highest earnings, those able to get the trade union rate for the job, and those most capable of tolerating hazardous and unhealthy work environments were most exalted. The wage packet was the outward symbol of power, denoting the transition from childhood to manhood, dependency to independence, and bringing with it a raft of privileges and different treatment in the home and family.17 This was buttressed by a widely held view that men were superior to women in the labour market: more highly skilled, with greater experience, physically stronger and more committed to work. Waged employment was their domain: a masculine space largely free of women. The economic value of men was expressed in the wide wage differential between the sexes, with male full-​time workers earning on average over double that of women before the war.18 Standing up for oneself was also deemed a key attribute of this male working-​class culture. Peer pressure policed this, and young workers were socialised into the norms, rituals and practices of such behaviour.19 Transgression risked censure, the questioning of manhood and being labelled ‘sissy’, ‘queer’ or a ‘jessie’. One had to be seen to be a ‘real man’ in the face of work-​ hardened colleagues.20 Masculinity, then, was closely tied up with employment in the inter-​ war period and consequently the loss of work could be deeply emasculating. The experience of the dole, of under-​employment, of lower wages and insecurity cut deep into the male psyche in the 1930s, creating a crisis of masculinity. Labour market precariousness was directly responsible for rising levels of mental health problems, depression, nervous breakdowns, suicide and domestic violence.21 A man without a job lost status and was deemed a lesser man. The ultimate disgrace and loss of manhood came with admission to the poorhouse. The dominant cultural v 136 v

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work representations in photographs and social-​realist literature like George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) were of dole queues and unemployed men idly hanging around street corners.22 Social commentary included accounts of derelict communities shattered by mass unemployment, such as Ellen Wilkinson’s The Town that Was Murdered (1939) and Wal Hannington’s The Problem of the Distressed Areas (1937).23 Unemployment undermined a man’s sense of worth, gnawed at his dignity and self-​respect. This loss was felt deeply and expressed poignantly in workers’ personal testimonies, including oral accounts.24 A  sense of shame, impotence and humiliation pervaded many men’s memories of these years, as Ian MacDougall’s interviews with Scottish Depression-​era workers made evident.25 For working-​class men, dependency upon State benefits was deeply emasculating as it branded them as failing to fulfil what Marjorie Levine-​Clark has referred to as the ‘expectations of full masculine citizenship’.26 This emasculation was exacerbated by the economic necessity in poorer families for married women to undertake paid work, thereby usurping the male breadwinner role. Moreover, bodies were damaged in this process and there was a direct correlation between loss of work and ill health, as Stephen Thompson’s seminal work on south Wales has shown.27 Men’s bodies were honed in habitual manual labour, and with unemployment and under-​employment skill and muscle atrophied. George Blake referred to this in his novel The Shipbuilders (1935) when he wrote about out-​of-​work Clydeside shipbuilders ‘going soft in mind and body’.28 Workers were also more vulnerable to exploitation in this context, with the protective matrix of the trade unions being critically undermined following the failure of the General Strike in 1926. This was exacerbated by falling union membership and the neutering of the strike weapon for a decade thereafter.29 In the south and the Midlands the prevalence of anti-​ trade-​union cultures in the ‘new industries’ curtailed effective collective action, while in the northern ‘depressed areas’ and heavy-​industry heartlands the insecurities, petty injustices associated with resurgent managerial power, and erosion of the provider role with mass unemployment in the 1930s deeply emasculated workers.

Forging Stakhanovites: the pressures of wartime work The Second World War both challenged and strengthened civilian masculinities in complex ways. Fundamentally, the war provided men with jobs, security and the capacity to provide for their families. War work v 137 v

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Men in reserve quickly soaked up male unemployment and created a strong demand, especially for those with specialised and transferable skills that could be applied and adapted to the production of goods, materials and machines necessary for the prosecution of modern warfare. Unemployment fell from 1.7 million in 1938 to just 60,000 in mid-​1943.30 Writing in 1944, Labour MP and former Durham coal​miner Jack Lawson waxed lyrical about this transformation: A miracle came to pass. Men once forgotten were wanted. Also women. Depressed areas disappeared. Coal was wanted, ships, steel, guns, shells, ammunition, tanks, planes. The heavy industries were concentrated in depressed areas. A thing for the worldly wise to jibe at just yesterday. Coal is finished –​nobody wants ships or steel! And now! More coal and more. Give us ships. More steel. The heavy industries are everything. Will Britain forget that lesson? Will she forget the communities that almost perished and were discovered to be the life of the nation in her hour of need?31

For workers this was deeply empowering. As Max Cohen commented, ‘the scarcity of labour placed the working people, individually and collectively, in an almost impregnable bargaining position’.32 Moreover, middle-​aged, older, medically unfit and disabled men, who had been economically marginalised during the 1930s with high unemployment rates and downward pressure on wages, were drawn back into the labour force. A total of 310,806 disabled people were either placed in employment by Ministry of Labour officials or given training that led to their getting jobs during the war.33 For example, many elderly and disabled ex-​miners in south Wales were found employment in shell-​filling factories.34 As we have seen, those capable of tolerating the toughest and most dangerous working conditions and the longest hours, producing the most, and, consequently, taking home the biggest wage packets had always been exalted within working-​class communities. Now they had the added layer of respect in that they were directly contributing to winning the war. Like the Russian Stakhanovites, a movement of workers named after Aleksei Stakhanov, whose performances of immense productivity far exceeded set targets,35 these were the ‘big men’: the ‘workers not wasters’.36 Although there was not the same degree of praise by the State or the public for high production feats in Britain as in the Soviet Union, working men’s roles in wartime production raised their importance and status commensurately. Moreover, this eroded the subordination that had been such a feature of working lives in the Depression in many parts of the country. This rebuilding of civilian working-​class v 138 v

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work masculinity was felt most acutely in reserved work that was directly connected to the war effort, such as the production of tanks, guns, planes and ships, or service in ‘front line’ jobs in the Merchant Navy and firefighting. War work was characterised by increased effort and more fatiguing work regimes. Peggy Inman, the official munitions industry historian, notes how working hours of ten-​to-​twelve hours a day and sixty-​to-​seventy hours a week were common in war-​related work (and between eighty and ninety hours a week in ship-​repairing) in the months following Dunkirk. Long hours, Inman reflected, were ‘the badge of patriotism’.37 The central male character in Mark Benney’s semi-​autobiographical wartime novel, Over to Bombers, commented ‘we all wanted to set the pace, not follow it’.38 Similarly, foreman Alfred Cleeton in J. B. Priestley’s novel Daylight on Saturday was ‘ready to work until he dropped . . . for war production’.39 In a conversation about the whereabouts of others, engineer Angleby in Daylight on Saturday reflected:  ‘ “probably fighting somewhere. Which is more than I’m doing. Not my fault though”, he added apologetically.’ His girlfriend responded: ‘Don’t be a fool . . . I’ve learnt enough lately to know that you’re probably worth more to the war than a dozen of those chaps.’40 These novels depicted male war workers as essential to the war effort, stepping up as patriotic hard grafters, with the ultimate accolade being ‘a Dunkirk man’.41 The forced abandonment of so much heavy war equipment by the retreating BEF in late May and early June 1940, including 64,000 vehicles and 76,000 tons of ammunition, left Britain ‘appallingly ill-​armed’ and prompted a massive production drive across the country.42 Aircraft instrument maker Eddie Menday referred to the intense working pattern after Dunkirk: I was only sixteen when war broke out. And we still had to work the same hours as the men, particularly after Dunkirk, where we worked from seven in the morning to seven at night, every day. Let us off at four o’clock on Sunday, in case we wanted to go to church, so we were told. And that went on for seven weeks. And then they thought we were getting a bit jaded by that time, and of course, they then decided that we could have one Sunday off in three. And then gradually it came down to one Sunday off in two. Then we finished not so late on a Saturday, and so actually, it was Saturday afternoon and Sunday we were off.43

Accounts of the critical period of 1940, in which the Phoney War became very ‘real’ with Dunkirk, and then the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, emphasise ‘hard graft’ and long hours. Yet working patterns began to resume a less intense schedule, as Menday notes. It was increasingly v 139 v

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Men in reserve recognised that fatigue was cumulative, and the Ministry of Labour advised a maximum working week of sixty hours in July 1940, reduced to fifty-​five in September 1943.44 Yet there is evidence to suggest that in some industries this was not the case. Mass Observation noted that management had failed to absorb the lessons of declining productivity with longer working hours: Yet during the greater part of 1940 these lessons, mainly learned in the last war and statistically proven, were ignored. In many factories they are ignored now [1942]. One of the most important factories we studied was still working a 7-​day week, 11 hours a day, giving the workers one Sunday a month off.45

Significantly, Mass Observation found men were three times more likely than women to be working ‘excessive’ hours, defined as over ten hours a day.46 This was largely accepted by men, who rarely complained about lengthy shifts; only 3 per cent mentioned long working hours when they were asked what improvements might be made in their jobs.47 William Ryder, who worked at Woolwich Arsenal, recalled how keen men were for extra hours: Interviewer: During the war did you ever have to work overtime? William Ryder: Oh blimey yeah. I only had two Christmas Days off during the war . . . We often started at six o’clock in the morning and sometimes it was six o’clock at night before you got away and one or two occasions we worked all night . . . Pay wasn’t all that good really and a lot of pay was made up of overtime . . . The first two hours’ overtime of the day were at time and [a]‌third and the rest time and a half so that boosted your pay up a bit.48

Men were motivated to work long hours for a number of reasons. Undoubtedly for many there existed a powerful sense of patriotism, with men wanting to graft in order to contribute to the war. But part of the impetus lies with men’s entrenched notion of their provider role and their socialisation in the years of Depression, which sharpened a sense of needing to maximise earnings while there was the opportunity. This was linked to a widespread belief during wartime that after the war there would be a return to mass unemployment and the insecurities of the 1930s.49 The temporary ‘emergency’ suspension of hard-​fought-​for workers’ rights, such as the maximum statutory forty-​eight-​hour working week enshrined in the 1937 Factory Act, was largely accepted and even had the support of the men’s trade unions.50 Miner Bert Coombes was amongst v 140 v

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work those who noted the restrictions and frustrations associated with the ‘breaking of customs’, pointing in 1944 to the way union ‘rules’ were flouted in wartime, including demarcation (where tradesmen refused to allow anybody to undertake work except those specifically trained) and output limitation (sometimes referred to as ‘the darg’). ‘Old rules’, Coombes noted, ‘have been surrendered to the war need for coal’.51 This prioritising of production over ‘restrictive practices’ was largely accepted by reserved men as their way of contributing to the war. Mass Observation quoted a bricklayer who asserted ‘I am a trade unionist, and I want an 8-​hour day, but owing to the war I realise we can’t, so my 10 hours are about right.’52 ‘Real’ men endured lengthy shifts knowing they were for the duration only, and welcomed the opportunity that war provided to bolster their masculinity, which had been eroded by the insecurities of the Depression years. The extension of the working week and the sacrifice of time this entailed were enduring features of wartime and are a recurring motif in interviews with reserved men. They took pride in describing, and sometimes exaggerating, how they withstood such demands. D.  C. M. Howe, an aircraft fitter at Vickers Aviation, recalled the outbreak of war: The foreman came round and said ‘you know what that means from now on, it’ll mean much longer hours’. And of course it did. Once we started then there were no days off at all. It was seven days a week for days and days on end . . . But everyone really got down to it. It was amazing the amount of work . . . We used to churn out twenty-​four, twenty-​five aircraft in one small place like that . . . in a week. When I went to work on night shift some few weeks after that we used to turn over one complete fuselage overnight.53

Howe accepted that the outbreak of war resulted in longer shifts and fewer days off despite the fact that many of these additional hours were not paid at overtime rates. He and his colleagues ‘got down to it’ and ‘churn[ed] out’ ‘amazing’ results. The pride in their output is evident. This is even more apparent in Henry Barrett’s recollection of coalmining. He repeatedly mentioned that miners worked exceptionally hard, emphasising that while this was the case previously, wartime pressures exacerbated demands placed upon the body: ‘I’ve never seen work like it . . . you shovelled coal. You shovelled coal as fast as possible. I ran the road loading coal. Shovelling it and loading it on a chute. And running the road, I mean running the road, pushing drams as fast as you can. Stripped to the waist.’54 The pace at which he undertook his job is mirrored by the v 141 v

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Men in reserve speed with which he describes the ‘shovelling’, ‘loading’, ‘pushing’ and ‘running’, all of which were physically strenuous actions. In contrast to Barrett’s testimony emphasising his youthful energy, Scottish steel furnace worker Patrick McGeown, who was forty-​eight in 1945, described how he and his workmates ‘plodded along doing the best we could’. He recalled ‘a common and ever-​present weariness’ and ‘wondered how I would survive the hours on the furnace, but I always managed’. Despite his age, McGeown empathised with the young combatants and took ‘rather a pride in it’: ‘That seemed to be the way with most grown civilians. It was like a general front and we felt much in common with the men in the forces.’55 As with many of the older reserved workers, there was no evidence in McGeown’s autobiography of any sense of emasculation felt from being out of uniform. In a similar vein, aircraft factory worker Derek Sims recalled the numbing graft and fatigue of wartime: The hours were, oh they were, they were killers really. When I think about it, we coped with them, and I’m sure there was an awful lot of illness, that you know we never knew about. Because as a youngster you don’t really think about these things. Well I have seen my Dad, sit[ting] at the breakfast table and suddenly his head would nod like that, and he’d be asleep. [Pause.] You know there was no relent, no end or beginning to the day really, for them, especially right in the heat of the Battle of Britain. When aircraft were being shot down like nobody’s business, and had to be replaced [pause] and then the Navy wanted Hurricanes on their, on their ships. Yeah, it was, it was very heavy pressure.56

McGeown and Sims clearly associated workplace sacrifice with the war effort, stressing the importance of reserved occupations, playing up the physical effort required and expressing their toughness and masculine resilience, by noting ‘I always managed’ and ‘we coped with them’. Birmingham firefighter Edward Ashill articulated this fortitude in a typically heroic narrative that stressed wartime camaraderie and unity. Asked by the Imperial War Museum interviewer in 1990 what a fireman would look like after he had been engaged in fighting fires all night, Ashill stated: Well the vision of him is in his steel helmet, firefighting tunic and his rubber boots. His face black. He’s absolutely dripping wet through. He looked exhausted and tired and fed up but still managed to drag himself around. This was similarly true in the central areas when you had hour after hour after hour starting in the evening of the night before, all through the night, still burning the following day. Still the same firemen there, having had no relief, no rest, no food. They were just soldiering on.57

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work This rich description is evocative of the firemen depicted in the 1943 Humphrey Jennings documentary Fires Were Started. Indeed, Jennings’s work opens with the statement that ‘fires were fought’ and with explicit reference to ‘the stress of battle’ making evident the parallel with service in the fire brigades and service in the AFS.58 Ashill’s similar use of a military metaphor, that the firemen were ‘soldiering on’, is telling, denoting his belief in their parity. Like combatants, firemen were fighting on the front line, often with no respite or refreshment, stoically enduring extreme circumstances that risked their lives. Interviewees were keen to iterate the multiple demands upon their time during the war. They were full-​ time workers but they were additionally volunteer members of the Home Guard, ARP and AFS, and undertook aerial-​raid-​and fire-​watching duties. These supplementary wartime tasks, to be explored in Chapter 6, were articulated by interviewees as additional work, as sources of further diminution of energy and ‘free time’ that eradicated periods of relaxation and reduced sleeping hours and, for many, as an overwhelming sense of fatigue and exhaustion. Masculinity was endorsed through such sacrifice. Others emphasised in their testimonies the hard labour undertaken during the war. Liverpool docker Frank Deegan recalled that men ‘were working all out for the war effort –​ten hours daily and ten when on night work’.59 Wartime railway guard William McNaul asserted ‘you worked damn hard . . . Nobody said, thought that you were dodging anything.’60 His use of the term ‘dodging’ is interesting as it was not elicited, coming in response to a question about post-​war television programmes. Shipyard worker Ted Boyle referred to the war as a ‘nerve-​wracking time’ with the pressure of work exacerbated by wartime ‘cost-​plus’ contracts,61 which encouraged employers to ‘speed up’ and intensify the work: ‘The sooner they got the vessel built, the more profit. There was always somebody walking around saying: “What are you doing? You haven’t finished that job, have you?” ’62 The occurrence of air raids could add further pressure as working patterns were disrupted. Fred Clark, a wood machinist in an aircraft factory near Reading, recalled: But then it got so bad, you was working all hours God sent you . . . You were eight days straight off [working] and then two days off . . . We started at eight o’clock in the morning and you finished at eight o’clock at night. But then you had to get to work. I had to bike four miles to get there on me bike, ’cos you can imagine, these aircraft factories wasn’t in the middle of the town, they were out in the country where nobody could get at them! . . . Some of the chaps used to bike in from Slough which was twenty miles away! Some nights they couldn’t get home. So they used to carry on working ’til they

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Men in reserve dropped . . . We wasn’t tired, we was just bloody walking dead! . . . Matter of fact, you only lived from day to day. Matter of fact, I’ll go further and say we only lived from hour to hour. ’Cos when we got [to] the factory at the aerodrome, we felt shut in. Like a prisoner, you couldn’t get out!63

This is an extreme example of a ‘sacrifice’ narrative recalling vividly the numbing weariness of wartime work, the toll upon the body (which led to his collapse and breakdown) and the lack of choice and control. Clark’s use of the ‘prisoner’ metaphor to describe his sense of being incarcerated in the factory revealed his powerlessness. Other interviewees referred to being ‘inmates’ and to ‘slavery’ in their narratives to express this sense of subjection.64 These were conscious attempts by narrators to define their masculinity by highlighting the pressures of wartime work and other ‘duties’ they endured (such as Home Guard and fire watching), the sacrifices that had to be made and the grim conditions that had to be tolerated; we ‘survived’; we ‘pulled through’; we ‘coped’. ‘It was difficult’, aircraft worker Donald Kennedy recalled, ‘but we managed to keep going’.65 This echoes Penny Summerfield’s ‘stoic’ narratives of wartime women workers in that these men stoically endured circumstances not of their choosing.66 Occasionally reserved workers expressed a sense that the attraction of the armed forces was that it enabled a respite from the unrelenting fatigue of war work. Lance Liddle –​who worked in a light engineering factory from 1936 until he was conscripted into the army in 1941 as a result of the reservation age being increased, releasing men into the services –​recollected his relief at escaping the unremitting shift work: The truth is I was glad to get out . . . Overtime was compulsory. You had to work a Saturday one week and a Sunday the next . . . Now actually speaking I was on me knees. I was wore out. You couldn’t take time off. Overtime was compulsory, you had to work. I was really, I was run down. I think I was really tired and I was fed up. You couldn’t go anywhere, you couldn’t even go to the pictures, you were working a half-​shift . . . Then I did a week’s night shift and you still got nowhere ’cos you start work at half past eight at night and actually I was quite pleased when they called us up, I thought I’d get out in the fresh air.67

Liddle’s construction of an account about joining the forces in order to get ‘fresh air’ and to put a stop to overtime, changing shift patterns and crippling fatigue reveals how one ex-​serviceman viewed his reserved work as more exhausting and constraining than being in uniform. Reserved workers were also pressured from all quarters to maximise their efforts. This included, officially at least, the trade unions v 144 v

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work and, in contrast to the First World War, many on the far left, with the Communist Party amongst the strongest supporters of the wartime productivity drive after the entry of the Soviet Union into the war in June 1941.68 Mass Observation emphasised how pervasive and influential this ‘propaganda’ could be. Radio, posters and the press all exhorted workers to increase their production levels. The Glasgow Herald, albeit with a predominantly middle-​class readership, quoted the production discourse of the Chairman of the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce in February 1942: ‘Unless everyone pulls his weight and works to capacity we stand a poor chance of winning this war.’69 This was at a time when Allied victory looked doubtful, with German naval successes and the disastrous fall of Singapore. Visits to factories by Ministry of Labour officials, armed-​forces officers, disabled servicemen and assorted VIPs helped to maintain this sense of urgency and inspire war work efforts. Many war workers remembered such visits. Derek Sims recalled Lord Beaverbrook visiting the aircraft factory where he worked in Buckinghamshire and inveigling them from a balcony to increase their output to a rate of 600 hurricanes a month.70 Others spoke of foremen and supervisors cajoling them in ‘pep talks’ to ‘think of the boys at the front’.71 In a similar vein, wartime Bevin Boy Roy Deeley paraphrased a speech made by Churchill in 1943: ‘Some will say I was in the army, some will say I was in the Navy, but you can say with equal pride I cut the coal.’72 There were, however, physiological and psychological limits to over work and a slow recognition through the war that the ‘science’ of production had to replace ad hoc and knee-​jerk extensions of the working day and week. Bevin supported the ‘adjustment’ in the number of hours worked after the ‘production spurt’ following Dunkirk, as well as advocating for retention of a one-​week annual holiday.73 Production and hours picked up again in 1943–​44 in the run up to D-​Day and again tailed off and returned virtually to pre-​war norms in the final year of the war. In some cases, uncontrolled and effusive expression of Stakhanovite masculinity had to be reined in and regulated for the long haul. Some workers voted with their feet, with absenteeism rates rising after sustained periods of long working, overtime, weekend working and loss of holidays.74 Occasionally not going to work was a way that war workers expressed their agency in the face of the wartime ‘speed-​up’ and tighter disciplinary regimes. Glasgow was identified as a particular ‘blackspot’ for absenteeism.75 In part, this was an expression of autonomy and workers’ rights to determine their own work rhythms. When south Yorkshire coal owners tried to enforce working on New Year’s Day 1942 miners responded with v 145 v

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Men in reserve 95 per cent absenteeism.76 Docking of pay was relatively ineffective as a penalty when bonus schemes, piecework and overtime working enabled lost wages to be quickly made up. Employers also complained that, despite the Essential Work Order and prosecutions for serious absenteeism, both the Ministry of Labour and local National Service Officers lacked the power to tackle ‘chronic slackers’.77 Absenteeism and bad timekeeping, according to Mass Observation, were clearly gendered.78 A  Ministry of Labour inquiry estimated absenteeism rates in 1943–​44 were around 6 to 8 per cent for men and 12 to 15 per cent for women.79 This is suggestive of the continuities of the sexual division of domestic labour and family responsibilities into wartime, the exhaustion of many women, and the distance of men from caring and nurturing roles. The slow pace at which the State opened nurseries exacerbated the problem. Men more frequently cited ‘pleasure’, including attending sports events such as football matches, as reasons for absenteeism from work. This suggests that unequal distribution of resources within family units may well have revived in wartime with the increased earning and spending power of men. After the post-​Dunkirk production surge there were experiments to reduce fatigue, ease boredom and raise output. These included official rest periods, known as ‘tea breaks’; live workplace shows such as the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA); and radio broadcasts such as ‘Music while You Work’, ‘Workers’ Playtime’ and ‘Works Wonders’.80 Mass Observation reported that listening to music ‘helped production in a small but significant way’, acting as ‘a mental rest-​pause without any stopping of effort’.81 It had, according to Christina Baade, both a medicinal effect, acting as a ‘drug’ or ‘tonic’, and a disciplining one, creating more ‘docile instruments of production’.82 Civilian working-​class masculinity was clearly bolstered by the wartime demand for male labour, which resulted in full employment, job security and long hours. Indeed, reserved men frequently drew upon a discourse of graft and sacrifice in their personal narratives to emphasise their contribution to the war effort and display their patriotic masculinity. For this, they were well recompensed.

‘Quids in’: the rewards of wartime work Civilian masculinity was further endorsed through high earnings, with male workers earning considerably more than soldiers. Comparisons with soldiers’ wages are, however, difficult because the remuneration v 146 v

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work systems were different: soldiers received a low basic wage (initially 14s a week, increased to 17s 6d a week in 1941) but did not have to pay for food, accommodation, clothing and transport. The latter ‘benefits’ were estimated to have a value of 35s a week in a Government report on forces’ pay in 1942.83 Dependants’ allowances were also paid to married soldiers with children. In 1942, for example, having two children brought an additional allowance of 15s. There were small increments to these soldiers’ wages for every year of service, small additional payments for ‘proficiency’ and a higher rate of pay if promoted. All this amounted to an estimated income for a newly enlisted, unmarried, private-​rank soldier of around £3 a week (taking into account that soldiers did not pay tax), rising to around £4 a week after three years’ service. This compared unfavourably with the average civilian male net earnings after tax of £5 2s a week in 1942–​43.84 The widespread popular view that male civilian workers earnt considerably more than soldiers may have been an exaggeration when other non-​wage ‘benefits’ for soldiers are taken into account, but there was still a significant earnings differential in favour of reserved men nonetheless. Moreover, during the war real earnings, which take prices into account, rose significantly for reserved male workers. Ian Gazeley asserts that average real earnings rose by around 20 per cent between 1938 and 1945.85 When broken down by gender, social class and skill it is evident that the Second World War witnessed some levelling (or convergence) with a reduction in wage differentials.86 Average female earnings rose by around 90 per cent during the war, while male earnings rose by 75 per cent. Concurrently, wages rose faster for manual than non-​manual workers, while the wage differential between unskilled and skilled male workers narrowed from around 70 per cent in 1939 to around 80 per cent by 1945.87 A  key factor in wage levelling was the awarding of flat-​rate bonuses to wages across the board in wartime.88 The meaningful differential as far as breadwinner masculinity was concerned, however, was the pay of women. The average earnings of women compared to men hardly changed through the war, drifting up somewhat from around 48 per cent pre-​war to around 52 or 53 per cent by the end of the war.89 While the hourly wage rate differential between men and women narrowed significantly in key sectors like engineering, this was offset by men working longer hours and more overtime.90 Another feature of wartime work is the reversal of the fortunes of the most vulnerable groups of male employees during the 1930s ­recession: those who were older or disabled, the skilled manual workers v 147 v

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Men in reserve in the ‘traditional’ depressed heavy industries and the unskilled where unemployment rates had been highest. Wartime work, like soldiering, could also ‘make a man of you’, and boys expressed a sense of achieving manhood earlier as a result of the pressures and opportunities of war. At seventeen, for example, Jack Ashley felt he was ‘doing a man’s job at the factory’ and ‘demanded a man’s wages’, while he also looked forward ‘to fighting in the Air Force when I was eighteen’.91 Ashley related here both to traditional breadwinner masculinity and to military masculinity. The relatively high wartime earnings of male workers, especially of the unskilled and semi-​skilled, could provide more surplus for masculinity-​ affirming leisure activities, such as drinking, gambling, and going to the dog racing, horse racing and football: a factor explored in Chapter 6. As Thomas Carmichael, a wartime Merchant Navy engineer, recalled about his wages and war bonus: ‘Oh I was quids in. I was really in the money by that time.’92 Some interviewees expressed a sense of guilt at their wages compared to soldiers and commented on some resentment expressed towards them.93 This was evident in House of Commons debates, within Government and amongst sections of the public who criticised ‘excessive’ earnings of reserved workers. Home Intelligence reports from London in July 1940 noted:  ‘Discontent expressed at differences between soldiers’ allowances and high pay of men in some reserved occupations; equality of sacrifice asked for’.94 Wartime engineering turner John Thomas Murphy claimed in his 1942 autobiography Victory Production! that ‘it is impossible to move among the soldiers and sailors and airmen of all ranks without hearing scathing comments on the civilian population: on the munition workers who take home £10 to £15 a week’.95 Lieutenant-​ Commander Gurney Braithwaite spoke in the Commons of the ‘extraordinary and disgraceful discrimination against the rank and file of the Forces as compared with those in reserved occupations’, who he noted were able to ‘get fat’ on high earnings.96 Similarly, the Admiral of the Fleet and MP for Portsmouth, Sir Roger Keyes, asked: Why should those who are in reserved occupations have advantages over their brothers and sisters in the Fighting Services who get no increases of wages and no extra pay for overtime on Saturdays and Sundays, but who sometimes have to fight and work the clock round in terrible conditions, especially at sea[?]‌Surely, such inequality of service to the State is thoroughly illogical.97

These comments of 1941–​42, which reflect the biased upper-​class viewpoints of Keyes and Braithwaite, were made at a time when public v 148 v

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work confidence in the Government’s prosecution of the war was particularly low and criticisms of workers’ and management performance were frequent. Mass Observation noted, however, in August 1941 that ‘the question of difference between civilian and Service pay is not a major live issue.’98 Army diarists complained of small pay, but this was ‘not related unfavourably to the better pay of civilians’. Indeed, there were ‘extremely infrequent references’ to civilian pay. Offsetting wartime workers’ wages to some extent were the hikes in income taxes and rising cost of living in wartime.99 Earnings could also be affected by shortages in the supply of raw materials and labour, which generated anger and accusations of bad management and inept Government supply officials amongst workmen. This could affect take-​home wages considerably because of low basic wage rates and the prevalence of piecework, where wages were directly tied to production. A woman married to a skilled aircraft factory worker noted in her diary for Mass Observation: ‘My husband last week earned no overtime or bonus, and his flat rate was not big enough to pay the household bills, let alone his expenses. We had to draw £1 from the bank.’100 This sense of unpredictability may well have put more pressure on war workers to graft to maximise their wage packets. The shift from time-​wage rates, which gave a weekly basic wage, to payments-​ by-​ results wage systems and incentivising through bonus schemes extended further in wartime. This was a significant aspect of ‘scientific management’ and was married with a marked shift towards mechanisation, flow production and assembly-​line work techniques, associated with Fordism.101 The work pace of some workers, in vehicles and aircraft manufacture for example, was dictated by the speed of the production track. Charles Hill, a semi-​skilled lathe operator, noted:  ‘It isn’t the way I like working because everything had to be done in a rush.’ Hill was paid on piecework and this could vary: ‘Some of the prices were ridiculous. I mean it was ridiculous how they say “X amount for these and Z for these”, and the next job they don’t pay quite as much. You can argue, [but] “no, no, that’s what we pay, and this is it.”’102 Coalminers were traditionally paid by results and work was further incentivised by wartime bonus payments. As coalminer Henry Barrett noted: ‘It was mad working down there. They [coalface workers] were on a bonus. Their mates, their gang, were doing it so they had to do it. They worked so hard . . . it’s unbelievable.’103 A contemporary reflected: ‘The miner is a big man when it comes to winning the war.’104 According to a Ministry of Labour survey in July 1941 around 60 per cent of workers in the engineering sector were paid by results rather than by time.105 It was also usual for an extra rate v 149 v

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Men in reserve to be paid for night shift work, and the latter extended significantly in wartime. Results-​driven wages contributed to the over-​work culture in wartime. All the examples collected by Mass Observation in 1942 of the highest earners in wartime production were men, and a feature of these high earners was working long overtime hours.106 Whether paid by time or by some version of payments by results or piecework, men were preoccupied with job security and with protecting and maximising earnings. Harry McGregor, who worked as an apprentice engineer in a Glasgow railway locomotive works, stated:  ‘you cut corners to get money, you know . . . It all meant work for money. It was all about money.’107 McGregor made repeated references to high wages: ‘I was earning more money at home than if I had been in the army’; ‘I prefer to be in a reserved occupation, you know, because I think the wages were . . . two shillings a day or something like that in the army, you know. And I was earning more at Hyde Park’; ‘I think most of the army thought, wished that they were in a reserved occupation.’108 Another respondent, Willie Dewar, reckoned this was a cause of friction: male workers ‘were getting the extra money. And that was a wee bit of a sore point with the army people. They weren’t getting big money, they were only getting a certain amount of money per month.’109 Charles Lamb, wartime shipyard worker, recalled with some pride buying his first wallet and being able to save £25 in it over a year during the war.110 While manual workers on essential war work saw their wages rise substantially, non-​manual, professional and other middle-​class occupations fared worse. Most middle-​class employees were not paid directly by results, did not earn bonuses and worked less overtime. One survey found that office and administrative staff salaries had risen by 10 per cent, whereas manual workers’ wages had increased by 71 per cent between 1939 and 1942.111 Moreover, Dudley Seers notes that while working-​ class real net incomes had risen by over 9 per cent, middle-​class ones fell by over 7 per cent.112 There were large differences within middle-​ class incomes, with professionals, clerks and foremen, according to Guy Routh, being particularly badly hit (comparatively).113 In this respect, the wartime economic value of reserved working-​class men markedly exceeded that of middle-​class men. Higher earnings came at a cost, however, as Jack Jones, a Transport and General Workers’ Union official in wartime Coventry, argued: They were working long hours of work. Working under great pressure. We used piecework extensively. In many cases it was six, seven days a week of

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work work. I  suppose it could be argued that they were doing well financially out of it, because it was piecework in the main, where I  was. The incentive was the more you did, the more you earned. I would say workers got tired towards the war, physically tired, because of the demands of that sort of working. But there was no feeling that it would have been better in the Forces, or alternatively that people were shirking going in the Forces. Young men who were eligible went in, and those who were required to work in the factories, and it was a question of were required, it was essential work in the factories, had to work hard, and long hours. But it wasn’t exactly a gift, not to go in the Forces.114

Jones’s narrative provides an insight into the way that enhanced wage packets linked to high productivity in wartime enabled breadwinner masculinity to be bolstered among reserved men. He refers to the heavy demands that wartime work placed upon the body, and by asserting that men were not regarded as shirking by remaining on the home front, he denies the emasculating potential of civilian status. The fact that he feels he has to rebut the accusation of shirking in his narrative simultaneously illustrates the power of the ‘cultural circuit’. Coined by Graham Dawson, this term refers to the feedback loop between personal accounts and public discourses.115 As referred to in Chapter 2, workers shirking in wartime is a powerful motif in post-​war public discourse across a range of cultural products, including television and film.

Validating masculinity: skill, strength and expertise Civilian masculinity was also validated by reference to skill, experience, physical prowess, and technical and scientific expertise. These were attributes that were much in demand by the war economy and this in turn enhanced the economic and social value of such men. Strong, skilled and experienced workers were required to endure the rigours of long working hours and the pressures of war production in the mines, ironworks and shipyards. While unemployment and under-​employment in the 1930s had reduced the demand for hard physical graft, war work enabled muscles to be honed and workers again to extract maximum capital out of their physical strength and capacities to lift, push, dig, hammer and sweat. Craftsmanship was also again in demand, with apprenticeships operating as the traditional rite of passage through which many young men became adults, entering a world of more secure employment and more regular and higher wages with a ‘trade’, the status of which was now enhanced and endorsed by the State by being classified as ‘reserved’. v 151 v

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Men in reserve Male and female trainees, known as dilutees, also required experienced workers to train them, and this drew many older, retired male workers back into the workplace. Bevin Boy Ron Deeley recalled: A lot of the old men came back. These men must have been sixty or seventy. But these men looked after us. We can only be grateful because they saved us many times from stupid things we might be doing in the mine. I’m always grateful to these old men, the miners, who’d come back in to the pits to help the war effort.116

The war also brought demands for technical skills and for supervision, management and leadership, with upward promotion common from semi-​skilled and skilled positions to those of chargehand, foreman, superintendent and, in some cases, manager. In becoming a ‘leading hand’, with more discretion, responsibility and autonomy on the job, perhaps supervising women and fellow male workers, masculine status was enhanced. For young men the attainment of skilled status, and hence full manhood, could be accelerated. Adult male dilutee electricians, for example, could truncate the traditional five-​year apprenticeship, advance to exempt status and attain a ‘skilled card’ after just a few months of training. They could then earn similar wage rates to existing skilled men. Nineteen-​year-​old apprentice electrician Frank Chapple, for example, made a formal complaint and, together with other apprentices, was upgraded. This also caused ructions. His foreman ‘nearly had an apoplectic fit when I presented my employment card –​a skilled man and not yet 21!’117 In these ways working men found both traditional and alternative routes to maintaining and bolstering their manliness, which in part at least negated the countervailing pressures associated with not being in uniform. In traditional heavy industries, such as coalmining and shipbuilding, for example, the proportion of the labour force that was skilled hardly changed through wartime.118 In exceptional cases, some skilled crafts, such as the boilermakers, flatly refused to allow dilution throughout the war. Masculine pride was also evident in the craftsmanship and the scale of men’s work, as, for example in shipbuilding. In Victor Pritchett’s study of wartime shipyards, one worker is quoted as saying ‘shipbuilding is a man’s job. You’re one of thousands who are making something big.’119 Beneath a photograph of masses of men leaving a Glasgow shipyard Pritchett inserted a caption:  ‘they swarm the streets; they own the city’. Skill also denoted higher earnings, as mechanical engineer Roger Major recalled:  ‘If you were a good worker, and you were highly skilled, you made a lot of money.’120 v 152 v

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work Experience and skill mattered. Middle-​aged and older male skilled workers would be promoted more rapidly to supervisory and ‘staff ’ roles, as George Dean, an apprentice engineering worker in the A. V. Roes aircraft factory, explained:  ‘The setters that were doing it were men, anything from forty upwards you know, to sixty-​five, they got foreman’s jobs and charge hands, you see, all that sort of staff work.’121 William Ryder, a thirty-​year-​old semi-​skilled worker at the Woolwich Arsenal, for example, found himself promoted to chargehand and supervising middle-​ class male dilutees.122 Men might be promoted to positions of authority because of their age, rather than based on their ability. Mass Observation reported: One of the jokes current in industry is the story of the man of 41 who registered and was asked what he wanted to do in munitions. He said he would like to start as a labourer. The Ministry of Labour interviewer replied: ‘As a labourer? No fear. You’ll start as a foreman and work your way down.’123

This quip about an older man being parachuted into the workplace to act as a supervisor rather than a labourer plays on the fact that even in wartime male gender and age conferred status, irrespective of lack of training and experience. This was a complex process, however, and the war undoubtedly witnessed deskilling as well as upskilling, degradation in male status as well as upgrading. There were victims of wartime changes in production and labour management as well as beneficiaries. In the American context, Stephen Meyer has argued that the combination of Taylorism, Fordism and technological change in flow production methods was inherently emasculating because it threatened skilled labour: ‘their work became unmanly’.124 Such methods spread more slowly in Britain before the war, largely being confined to cars, electrical consumer goods (such as hoovers and radios), artificial fibres, plastics and chemical manufacture, as there was less of a skill shortage than in the States. In Britain, as noted, there was much upgrading and upskilling that went hand-​in-​hand with job fragmentation during wartime. While deskilling in wartime was evident in munitions, aircraft manufacture, vehicles and light engineering jobs where assembly line flow production was most developed, it was relatively insignificant in the traditional heavy industries. Welding in the shipyards (replacing the process of riveting) provides perhaps the only significant example of deskilling, which was exacerbated by female dilution. The imperatives of wartime production, however, could lead to training being subverted and emphasis being put on routine operations and short, repetitive work-​cycle times. Ronald Wakeman moved v 153 v

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Men in reserve in wartime from Shorts aircraft manufacturing in Rochester, Kent, to a job making gun carriages in Bowaters munitions factory in Northfleet, Kent. When asked if he liked the work he responded ‘I didn’t like it at all . . . it’s too much like mass production. There was no craftsmanship in it, it was just a matter of assembling it. This was the sort of work I’d done as an apprentice.’125 Similarly, a Clydeside shipbuilding draughtsman recalled being denied autonomy and discretion during wartime when Denny’s converted from producing paddle steamers to warships, as the design plans were all drawn up externally by the Royal Corps of Naval Constructors at the Admiralty.126 In practice, the application of Fordist flow production and Taylorite rationalised ‘scientific management’ methods that were corrosive to skilled-​craft masculinity were limited in Britain in the 1940s. This was a result of managerial complacency and conservatism, and in part a reflection of stronger trade unions. Moreover, product markets were very different for Britain compared to America. Britain retained a larger niche in bespoke, tailor-​made products requiring high levels of skill, such as ships and locomotives. The Bedaux managerial system through which Taylorism was popularised in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s was only taken up by some 250 or so large firms and was discredited in wartime through the association of Bedaux with Nazism.127 More typically, our interview cohort was upwardly mobile in wartime, rather than deskilled. Some respondents expressed a deep sense of pride and achievement in being able to apply their skills, experience and physical capacities to useful war work. This was very evident in the testimonies of shipyard workers. Charles Lamb, for example, commented: ‘They needed shipbuilders . . . Anybody I suppose could fire a rifle but there wasnae everybody that could work in a shipyard.’128 Similarly, shipbuilding worker Alexander Davidson recalled: We used to find shortcuts sometimes to do the work and get it done. We took pride in our work, you know. And it had to be good. I mean, you couldn’t be slovenly about something that men’s lives depended on. They had to drive the boat and get it there and in the face of the enemy and if the boat broke down before it got there, they’d be taken prisoners, you know, if they weren’t shot at, you know.129

Despite taking ‘shortcuts’ in order to complete the workload according to target, Davidson recognised that the necessity for quantity could not be at the expense of quality. ‘Men’s lives depended on’ the skill of the shipbuilders. v 154 v

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work The war also provided a lot of opportunities for reserved workers to combine conceptualising work with execution, rather than having the thinking removed from the task at hand, which was a key element of Taylorism. There was encouragement, for example, for new production ideas and improvements through redesigning jobs. In engineering especially, wartime meant constant changes in designs, types of orders, production runs and technologies. This called for reorganisation of work practices and renegotiations of wage rates, which increased the power of workers and their trade union representatives on the shop floor in order to make the changes quickly and efficiently. Apprentice plater Thomas Cantwell described how he successfully improved a plate metal job by welding on support bars, thus earning the accolades of work colleagues and recognition from management: ‘[T]‌he lads were comin’ to me and sayin’ “that’s the best one that’s ever been done here” [laughter]. But hey I grew another two inches [laughter]! And anyway so the manager must’ve seen that as well, you know, and I  got a list of jobs after that.’130 Cantwell was evidently proud of his invention and the praise he received, joking that he had grown in stature. John Hiscutt reflected with a touch of arrogance that his craft was at the top of the pile in engineering, recalling: ‘Tool making is considered the cream of engineering and I can do it but not many other people can.’131 Mark Benney commented in his fictionalised account of ‘tooling up’ a bomber factory:  ‘the work had nothing of monotony in it . . . it was deeply, deeply satisfying’.132 The last paragraph of the novel sees the workmen gathered outside to witness the first completed machine fly over the factory: ‘We watched till it was long out of sight, then looked at each other, unashamed of the pride shining through our eyes. After all we had built it . . . and it was a beautiful and powerful thing. Weapon for weapon, we felt the skilled slaves of our enemies had nothing so good to show.’133 For draughtsmen the work could be as much art as labour: It was a very skilled job . . . One of the things as far as draughtsmen are concerned, it isn’t just the technical part of the job. It’s the layout of the drawing, the quality of your printing and it’s a work of art. Draughtsmen look upon their work as [a]‌work of art. So having been to the Ipswich School of Art for fifteen months or so you, it’s something inside you. You wanna make a good job of a drawing.134

In a similar vein John Allen spoke passionately about the ‘art’ of shipbuilding: v 155 v

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Men in reserve [S]‌hopkeepers, other tradesmen, office workers, they hadn’t a clue what the shipyard was all about . . . [T]hey find it amazing what you were able to do in the shipyard and how you could put all these plates together and ships together, the bow ship, the propellers, everything like that. How you could walk the beams. That was an art itself.135

In these reserved men’s accounts which describe both manual and non-​ manual jobs as ‘art’, we get a sense of the meaning of wartime work and the creativity and importance of male identities. In similar ways, masculinity was nurtured and sustained in the wartime coalmines, where despite desperate labour shortages only men were employed in all underground operations. In wartime, as in peacetime, coalminers’ masculinity was forged through working in a tough, dangerous environment and through applying acquired skills, knowledge and experience to the process of winning the coal. ‘Big hewers’ who could sustain their energy through a long work day and get the most out of thin seams or tricky geological conditions were revered within the community. William Ramage recalled how he had worked a particularly difficult seam: I did that for a long time. I was good at it too. That thirty feet was, took a bit o’ shifting. There were some o’ the lads that, out by, they wondered why basically we were making more money than them, you know. One or two o’ them tried it, oh, they were lost. You needed the strength, the skill, the know-​how. For instance, when you fired your shots, four feet deep, you had a mountain o’ coal to shift before you could get a, we used steel bars, corrugated steel, seven and a half feet long . . . We did it ourselves. We didn’t shout for a hand because there was nobody there to give you a hand. It was tough, but it was very rewarding in the fact that we knew we were good at what we could do.136

Ramage’s sense of pride in the job, his independence and confidence in his masculine prowess as a producer are evident here. His narration of extracting thirty feet of coal ends with the comment: ‘thirty feet, eh. It separated the men from the boys. Lots o’ people couldn’t do it. But I was one o’ the chosen few that could do it [laughter].’ A  competitive environment co-​existed with camaraderie within male working-​class culture. Men strove to produce more than one another: to be the ‘top dog’.137 The war provided an environment conducive to the expression of such values. Nor were the dominant cultural and economic forms of masculinity necessarily mutually exclusive in wartime. William Ramage is an example of someone who embraced both traditional ‘hard man’ notions of v 156 v

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work masculinity and hegemonic military masculinity, expressing a persistent desire to enlist, eventually ‘escaping’ the pits into the army.

‘Women flooded in’: reserved men, female labour and dilution The notion of women surging into and dominating war work is a pervasive one within both popular culture and historiographical treatments of the home front. The very presence of women in the spaces that men once occupied is often regarded as inherently emasculating. There is some truth in this interpretation: women were called up according to age and marital status and did penetrate significantly into the wartime workplace. At the peak in 1943 they constituted 39 per cent of the total labour force compared to 26 per cent in 1938. In the engineering sector the proportion of women employed grew from 10 per cent in 1939 to 34 per cent in 1943; in transport from 5 per cent in 1939 to 20 per cent in 1943; in metal manufacturing from 17 per cent in 1939 to 46 per cent in 1943.138 However, the populist notion of a tsunami of women flooding into, and dominating, the wartime workplace by replacing men, thereby challenging male identities and undermining masculinity, needs to be seriously qualified. Between two and three times as many men (10.7 million in 1943) were working on the home front compared to men in the armed forces (4.3 million), while 2.2 million additional women, most of whom were married, were recruited into the wartime civilian labour force, up from 4.6 million in 1938 to peak at 6.8 million in 1943.139 While there were more women and fewer men (around 2.5 million fewer men by the end of the war) in wartime industry than pre-​war, what is significant is that men still represented the majority of wartime workers (61 per cent), around half of whom were reserved. Labour-​market segregation by gender was challenged by wartime circumstances, but nevertheless it did persist, in terms of both horizontal and vertical segregation.140 There continued to be large swathes of work, including coalmining, iron and steel works, the railways, docks, heavy engineering, construction, and shipbuilding, that remained almost totally monopolised by men and that continued to be regarded as ‘men’s work’. In Builders (1942), one of the few wartime propaganda films devoted exclusively to reserved workers, there are no women on screen.141 Ewart Rayner recalled that the tool room where he worked at Shorts Aero in Rochester remained all men, but the ‘machine shop’ v 157 v

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Men in reserve next door was mixed, with a large influx of women.142 In lighter manufacturing, the entry of women proceeded more rapidly, although even here most skilled and supervisory jobs remained dominated by men, and female apprenticeships were virtually unknown. There also continued to be a dangerous work ‘taboo’ that excluded women from the most hazardous and chronically unhealthy and dirty jobs, which were culturally deemed to be only suitable for men. This was legitimised by protective patriarchal legislation, such as the 1842 Act that banned women from employment underground, and regulations from the 1890s, for example preventing women from working in the white lead industry amidst fears about the negative impact of the work on women’s reproductive capacity. When women were exposed to danger and ill health –​for example in explosives factories –​emphasis was placed on protecting their bodies and on providing rest breaks, while men were deemed capable of looking after themselves. Agnes McLean, the leader of the equal-​pay strike at Rolls Royce, Hillington near Glasgow in 1943, recalled that young male workers did not have to go on courses, whereas women did, and that women were not allowed to set the machines: ‘there was unskilled men and others, and we were the others, and we were below even the unskilled’.143 How then did reserved men recall and represent women workers in their retrospective personal accounts? Some did not refer to female workers in their narratives and had to be asked directly about female colleagues. Charles Lamb, an apprentice shipwright in wartime, for example, apologised for his omission: Oh well, the women, the women welders. Oh sorry aye, women, girls come in and they were, put through a course, or fast course, and they were good. They were very good. Aye . . . Just as well you mentioned that dear. Aye I was forgetting about the, the girls, aye, they were mixed in with the men.144

Others mentioned women spontaneously, such as Geoffrey Cooper, who recalled how female workers were ‘accepted’ and ‘respected’ at RAF Farnborough where he was based during the war, and noted that there were a number of female scientists, ‘some of them fairly high rank’.145 Rural blacksmith Alexander Ramage ‘admired’ the ‘Land Girls’ who ‘mucked in’, noting ‘they were a real contribution’.146 Fred Millican recalled that in Vickers arms works in Newcastle women were integrated during wartime quite smoothly: ‘I never noticed any sort of animosity or anything like that, no. I think they were appreciated, what they were doing, and as I say some of them did quite heavy work, you know, men, what you would v 158 v

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work traditionally say “men’s work”, yes.’147 These more gender-​tolerant representations were in part a reflection of shifting gender roles since the war and the absorption by older men interviewed in the twenty-​first century of greater respect for women borne out of changing roles over the past fifty years. This was evident in Derek Sims’s narrative. He had joined the RAF in 1942 and later visited on leave the aircraft factory where he had previously worked: Derek Sims: There weren’t that many [women] when I was there, but when I visited that aircraft factory when I was in the Air Force . . . oh the place was absolutely running alive with ladies. They were doing everything, you know [laughter]. About the only thing the men were doing was making the tea [laughter]! Interviewer: Were they well accepted by the men in the factory? Derek Sims: Oh yes, yes they were, because they were very, very good engineers. They had been trained by the men of course . . . Some of them in the Design Department of course had been to college. It was about the time when I think ladies were starting to feel their feet, you know, and saying you know, ‘we’re part of this’, you know, ‘we can do what he’s doing’, which was fair enough, they could.148

Sims’s generally positive and effusive commentary about the reception of women in his old workplace was qualified by the point that ‘they had been trained by the men of course’. In a similar vein, Roger Major waxed lyrical on how efficient the new female workers were in the engineering factory he worked in, telling a long anecdote about a ‘brilliant’ female crane operator. Strikingly, however, he observed that ‘the older men resented them [women workers], yeah. Wouldn’t show them anything. They thought, “oh, they’re taking my job off us”, aye that was, I mean it was the attitude.’149 Major recognised that age influenced attitudes towards women at work. Among our cohort of interviewees, who were all young men during the war, there appears to have been a more liberal attitude towards the influx of women into the workplace. Certainly there is little overt discrimination expressed in our interviews. Some recalled the excitement of having more young women around to talk to and the opportunities that created for romance and sex, as we explore in Chapter 6. Younger men had less capital invested in work experience and skills, and perhaps felt less threatened than older craftsmen who were concerned to protect wage differentials and control the flooding of labour markets with what they perceived to be an unskilled and cheap reserve army of labour. These v 159 v

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Men in reserve older workers would have been more socialised into traditional values that defined a married woman’s role as homemaker and mother and the man’s as breadwinner. Many of these older men would also have had bitter memories of the 1930s when their labour was deemed surplus to requirements, and this partly conditioned their defensive response. These men were more set in their ways and more likely to begrudge change and perceive women dilutees as a threat. John Thomas Murphy, aged fifty when the war started, noted in his wartime autobiography that the entry of women to his railway engineering factory was ‘cursed by most men’ and that ‘generally the men were reluctant to give anything away’.150 This must have been recognised as a common occurrence, as the documentary film They Keep the Wheels Turning (1942) shows the displeasure of a garage foreman at being allocated female dilutees, his initial scepticism changing to admiration as he acknowledges their capabilities. Men on the shop floor had similar reservations that were overcome by female colleagues’ competence. Thomas Cantwell, for example, recalled: ‘And I remember these girls coming in, and I was sayin’ this “women welders?!” [laughter], you know. And then when they came in, some of them, they were quite good. And all they had was two weeks’ trainin’, and onto the shop floor to weld.’151 Cantwell, who at the age of nineteen had a relationship with one of the welders, iterated ‘And she was a good welder [laughter]’. Similarly, railwayman Ron Spedding recalled in his published memoir: ‘At first, the women were considered a source of amusement and thought incapable of doing the rough and heavy work expected of them. But they proved their critics wrong.’152 Women were employed ‘in the heat, noise and dirt of the forge and the Smiths’ shop. Some even operated heavy drop-​hammers –​a job considered rough and undesirable by any standard.’153 While acknowledging the significant role of wartime women workers, strikingly a substantial cluster of male reserved workers defined the contribution of women in a dismissive way, implying lesser capacities when it came to paid work. This was also a way of discursively affirming masculinity. This mirrored Summerfield’s female war workers who downplayed the role of men, erasing them from their memories. In men’s recollections, women, who performed a supplementary role, were trained and supported by men. Some men made revealing assumptions about management being opposed to the entry of female labour and women not wanting to work but being forced to do so. Frank Harvey, for example, a machine tool operator in Manchester, recalled this was because ‘it was men’s jobs really’.154 In his autobiography, Oxford tinsmith Arthur Exell recalled: ‘These girls weren’t quite up to it and they were a bit fed up . . . v 160 v

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work kicking against it and staying away from work. They were giving the management a lot of trouble for not trying with their work and taking lots of time off . . . Absenteeism amongst the women was really terrible.’155 Wartime engineering turner John Thomas Murphy noted of women dilutees ‘some, of course, were dumb and slow’.156 Harry McGregor represented the apprentice strikes in 1941 as a reaction to women, earning more, which he clearly regarded as undeserved and a slight on his youthful masculinity. Women, he recounted, were ‘pushing barrows from one shop to another and they were getting four pound a week, and we’re getting an apprenticeship and practically nothing, and that’s why we went on strike. We were out for six weeks.’157 There was a tendency among reserved men to represent women as being of less value, less capable and dependent upon men in the workplace. It was men that set up their machines and supervised them, and women were represented as ‘belonging’ to men, almost as if they were their property. George Dean recalled:  ‘the foreman had said, “I’ve got your new girl here, George, this is so-​and-​so.” ’158 The process of dilution was one that invariably saw women brought in at the lowest level, on unskilled, poorly paid work. Jim Lister recalled that in the railways where he worked men were promoted to do the most skilled and the heaviest, and consequently best-​paid, work: Every fitter had a labourer . . . his mate. But what they done after that, they put women on the labouring to the fitter. And these fellers was used for other jobs, such as a mate of mine up in Edinburgh, he was in a signal box . . . They started to learn women in the signal boxes and when they’d done that . . . he was [transferred] on [to] the shunting.159 ’Cos you couldn’t ask women to do shunting with the big poles and the hooks and what have you.160

Shunting was one of the most dangerous jobs in railway yards, with a very high accident rate. It was not deemed suitable for women because of the physical nature of the work, and a protective ethos governed this type of labour. Lister provides an insight into the process that ensured such work was not allocated to women, who, he implies, were less ‘able’. In a similar narrative, John O’Halloran, a wartime clerk in Napiers Engines and Motors in London, recalled women ‘teeming’ in the offices but not on the shop floor, commenting ‘working large machine tools didn’t seem to be their forte’.161 Mark Benney, a wartime dilutee retrained as a skilled reserved tool-​ room engineering worker, depicts women workers in his wartime novel Over to Bombers in a similarly dismissive vein; they were resented by v 161 v

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Men in reserve the men largely as a nuisance and a distraction. While one character, Vera Stone, is strong, respected and very capable, she is regarded as the exception to the rule. The vast majority of women recruited to the work are disparaged as indifferent, ‘docile’, bored, ‘lazy and stupid’, ‘frail, temperamental, irresponsible’, with a poor work ethic and high absentee rate. They are depicted as more interested in their appearance than their output, spending an inordinate amount of time in front of the toilet mirrors.162 They were deployed on simple, unskilled work because they were deemed incapable of anything more complex, made the men’s tea and ran errands for them, and were excluded from the responsible and the ‘dirty work’.163 Moreover, women were blamed for most of the mistakes (‘snags’) picked up at the inspection stage. Most of the working men of Benney’s fictional bomber factory, particularly the older male craftsmen, did not want to work with the women, were hostile to them and only reluctantly trained them.164 Benney’s central character is sympathetic, yet comments: The women were another problem altogether. Industry as we know it is a man-​made world. There is no place within its framework where women can function fully and at their ease. But equally it is difficult to imagine any industrial framework in which women as we know them could function satisfactorily . . . Women in our factory –​with a very few exceptions –​behaved with an exaggerated degree of femininity.165

There was, then, a marked tendency by reserved men in both fiction and reality to diminish the contribution made by women in the wartime workplace. Richard Fitzpatrick, an unskilled Glasgow chemical factory worker, noted: They [female workers] were mostly out in the yard, y’know, doing odds and ends, but never in the furnace shop or the crystal house or the store. They were mainly in different jobs out in the yard, very few women . . . Once the war finished the women all disappeared, y’know, bar the, where you made your breakfast, the women worked in there.166

Fitzpatrick trivialises the contributions made by women by noting they were ‘doing odds and ends’ and performing gendered roles in the canteen, providing for the needs of men and thereby enabling men to perform their vital work. Semi-​skilled worker William Ryder described the women he came into contact with during the war in Woolwich Arsenal, London: William Ryder: Ah only they were more or less cleaners. They used to keep the gangways clean and that sort of thing. It was hardly the hardest job in

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work the world . . . They were a nuisance . . . Well you could never find them when you wanted them [laughter] . . . You had to keep your eye on them. Like I say I never had much dealings with them. I used to just order the gear for them and leave them to it. I had my work cut out. .  Interviewer:  What other jobs did they do besides this sweeping? William Ryder: There was some what they called diluting mechanics. Fitters. They used to do a bit of fitting. Fitting the mechanism of guns. They were classed as dilutee fitters. That was a sort of semi-​skilled fitter. Interviewer:  How did they perform on that job? William Ryder:Well I never had a lot of dealings with them because it was all little stuff they were fiddling about with. I  never had any dealings with them. Interviewer:  You mean small scale work? William Ryder:  Yes, little bits and pieces. I was more or less dealing with hundreds of tons.167

Ryder provides a ‘rough masculinity’ interpretation. The concept of ‘rough masculinity’ has been used to define the culture and behaviour of male working-​class manual labourers; semi-​skilled workers (such as car assembly-​line workers); and those involved in heavy, dangerous work (such as mining and construction). This is in contrast to the ‘respectable masculinity’ of non-​manual office workers, professionals, management and craft artisans, where conceptualisation, ‘pen-​pushing’ and technical mastery prevailed and where the culture stigmatised married women working.168 Ryder highlights the importance and superiority of men at work and the lesser roles of women. The women employed on undemanding cleaning tasks, who often absconded, were a ‘nuisance’ and needed to be under continual supervision, and the female dilutees who were merely ‘good enough’ to ‘fiddle’ about on the easy, light work were no threat to Ryder’s masculinity. Their presence was acknowledged, but they were dismissed as inferior and regarded as being of little importance. Working-​class men positioned themselves, therefore, in relation to women. As the work of Penny Summerfield has shown, women invariably entered the labour market on subordinate terms, usually as unskilled dilutees, temporarily replacing men.169 It was common for men to be promoted and women to be deployed to undertake routine unskilled and semi-​skilled roles, sometimes with work being reorganised and split up. This fragmentation and deskilling of tasks further enhanced the masculine status of men remaining on the original intact work, whose earnings and prestige in the workplace could be augmented by the presence of v 163 v

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Men in reserve women. Higonnet and Higonnet’s concept of the ‘double helix’ is applicable here.170 With its two intertwined and equidistant strands, the helix illustrates the progress and regress that women experienced both during and in the aftermath of the two world wars, as well as the consistency of women’s subordination to men. In peacetime, the home in which women predominated was subordinate to the masculine arena of work, upon which more prestige was conferred. With the mobilisation of women in wartime into roles that had previously been undertaken by men, women acquired a new status. This resulted in the feminine strand of the helix ascending. Prompted by their new combatant role, men’s status rose concurrently, leading to the masculine thread also moving forward. The helix illustrates that women’s increased status in wartime did not challenge the gender hierarchy, as the relative positioning between the sexes in terms of prestige remained intact. The concept of the double helix can be applied to a purely civilian context as well. Women may have assumed new roles in the workplace, but given their limited training, fragmentation of tasks, deskilling, lower pay and the recognised temporary nature of their participation in the labour force, women remained subordinate to civilian men, who continued to be employed, often having undertaken lengthy apprenticeships, in jobs that were not broken down into component parts but were retained in their complex entirety; enjoyed higher pay; and would continue in these roles after the war. As long as reserved men could feel that women were still subordinate to them and that the change was a temporary wartime emergency measure then masculinities remained intact, relatively unscathed. The continuities in the wartime sexual division of labour and gender identities are often underestimated. While there were significant challenges and transgressions, masculinity largely survived wartime pressures partly because there were clear limits to what women were allowed to do; their ‘encroachment’ was time-​barred, contingent and defined. Mass Observation reported in 1942: In the factories . . . no doubt there are women in key positions; they are blanketed by masses of men . . . The atmosphere is rather that the women are helping the men and temporarily taking over for the men to do something more important. The atmosphere is strictly masculine still . . . [E]‌verywhere the machinery, the control, the arrangement, the psychology of leadership and incentive is determined by men.171

Where women did ‘encroach’ in the workplace, reserved men could salvage their pride by recognising that the situation was temporary, as it v 164 v

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work had been a generation before. As Glasgow draughtsman Willie Dewar put it: ‘the whole story was that once the war was over the girls would be made redundant and the men would get their jobs back, so that was agreed’.172 This patriarchal exclusionary strategy was strongly supported by the male-​dominated trade union movement, which played a key part in the wartime rebuilding of traditional breadwinner masculinity. Working-​class men consciously positioned themselves in relation to other men, as well as to women. There were evident frictions in wartime dilution, involving men. In firefighting, for example, the formation of the AFS created enormous tensions and was opposed by some regular fire chiefs, such as in Birmingham. When asked about why there were ‘mutual resentments’ between regular firemen and dilutees, Edward Ashill recalled: [A]‌s far as the auxiliary fire service were concerned, many of the auxiliaries were getting ranks which were superior to that of the regular firemen and therefore there was this great resentment on the part of the regular that they were, as it were, being bypassed in favour of people in the AFS who obtained ranks in the Auxiliary Fire Service and latterly of course in the National Fire Service.173

Kenneth Holland, a fireman in wartime Oldham, reflected:  ‘I’m afraid there was a view among regular firemen throughout the country that the auxiliary fireman was a lesser mortal.’174 Similar tensions around dilution existed within the coalmines when the Bevin Boy scheme was established in December 1943. In some cases where the miners were paid bonuses these were not shared with the conscripts, who were not deemed as deserving as the ‘real men’, who cut the coal.175 Reluctant draftees to the pits had to prove themselves as men in a highly dangerous workplace where safety was reliant upon the actions of others. Hierarchies of male labour prevailed, and the position of reserved men was complicated by wartime dilution and the bringing in of quickly trained outsiders for the duration. To some extent, these conflicts were about defending masculinity, in that they defined work that was manly and hence was deserving of bonus payments and promotion. Masculinity, then, was not only classified in relation to women workers in wartime but was also labelled by reference to fellow male employees who were considered less manly. This was most evident across the manual/​non-​manual divide. Rough masculinity, for example of the shipyard riveting ‘black squads’, looked down upon office workers as effeminate and craftsmen as aloof and privileged. John v 165 v

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Men in reserve Allan, an unskilled Clyde shipyard worker employed as a jobber and then a platers’ helper, called these ‘the gentlemen’s trades’.176 They were considered a ‘cushy number’ with more security and better work conditions compared, for example, to working out in the open in all weathers on a building site or in a shipyard. Railwayman Ron Spedding stated that ‘signing chits, sweeping floors, making tea, running errands and worst of all being dressed complete with collar and tie was not my idea of engineering, wagon building or man’s work’.177 Middle-​class draftees and volunteers into the mines were regarded as lesser men, not to be trusted, and recognised as less capable until they could prove themselves. Roy Deeley recalled:  ‘any hard work some of them would sort of take it off you because we were a bit softer than they were. They were quite tough.’178 Deeley, who had volunteered for the pits, recalled a black-​ faced miner refusing to let him court his daughter because he was not man enough, and being the butt of some ribbing for his politics: ‘they called me Tory boy because of my standing up for Churchill and everything. “Roy Roy the Tory Boy”.’179 While masculinity was recouped and affirmed in accounts of the inferiority of women workers, it could, then, be defined in relation also to dilutee men. William Ryder, who as we have seen had been disparaging of women workers, also expressed his hegemonic, working-​class breadwinner masculinity by positioning himself in relation to what he regarded as weaker and more effeminate middle-​class male dilutees: William Ryder:  Well why I think they made me chargehand was maybe the men we had were directed in there, they were older than me and they were men that were like, there was a fishmonger, a man had a salad stall, men that were in business and not used to hard work, not used to heavy work because these slings that we used to pick guns up with were sizeable . . . Interviewer:  But you said these people were directed to work in the arsenal. Was it like conscription? William Ryder:  I suppose it was a kind of conscription. But I think some of them nipped in there a bit sharp to avoid getting called up in to the forces. I’m not going to say they did but in the main they were older than me. Interviewer:  And you said they weren’t used to muscular work so how did they perform? William Ryder:  Well we had to knock them into shape.180

Doing hard physical labour and supervising middle-​class men, as well as ordering material for female dilutees and having them perform some v 166 v

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work of the least skilled mundane servicing roles like cleaning, positioned this interviewee nearer the top of the work hierarchy and affirmed his masculinity. He considered himself important because only he knew how to do the job and he was promoted to a position where he supervised and trained the dilutees. Ryder’s story of ‘lesser men’ entering the domain of those accustomed to hard manual labour in wartime is mirrored in other accounts. London carpenter Max Cohen, for example, recalled wartime dilution of labour in the building trade with the influx of ‘hammer and saw’ men attempting, in his view, to ‘bypass military service’. Cohen clearly regarded these male dilutees with contempt, describing them as ‘incompetent’, ‘ignorant’ and ‘an economic liability’.181 Cohen also noted the tension in wartime between working-​class craftsmen and a university undergraduate on a building site who was derided for his ‘superior air’, lack of proper craftsmen’s tools, limited knowledge and poor work ethic, and was accused of ‘months of aimless idling’.182 There was a conscious attempt to distance legitimate reserved workers from interlopers considered to be trying to find a safe haven. In coalmining, Bert Coombes expressed a similar disdain for ‘the modern cult of the clean clothes and clean hands job’, arguing that ‘in war once again the value of the manual workers has suddenly been discovered’. Mining, Coombes asserted, ‘needs great skill and tests the energy of real men’.183 Jack Ashley also described the ‘two worlds’ of office and manual workers in the copper factory he worked in where he was a shop steward during wartime: ‘The office staff wore clean suits, collars and ties, and the women neat dresses, whereas we all wore dirty overalls. They came in at nine o’clock in the morning whilst we clocked in at seven-​thirty. They were given sick-​leave pay; we were not.’184 Such divisions in experience were linked to manly attributes, suggesting a widely held view amongst working-​class male youths and adult men that ‘pen-​pushing’ jobs were effeminate. Michael Roper has argued, in one of the most comprehensive empirical studies of masculinity in the British workplace, that British work culture associated physical and dirty manual labour with manliness. He cites a post-​war manager:  ‘If you weren’t running around hitting bits of iron with hammers and wielding a spanner you weren’t a man.’185 Reserved men in manual trades positioned themselves hierarchically above effeminate, middle-​class pen-​pushers, older men brought back in to help; and young apprentices who lacked the experience and skill; as well as female dilutees. v 167 v

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Men in reserve

Squaring up to management: masculinity, trade unions and strikes For working-​class men, standing up for your rights in work, including facing up to the bosses and bullying foremen, had always been an important marker of masculinity, signalling toughness, independence and autonomy. Liverpool docker Frank Deegan recalled one of the leaders of the protest against wage cuts at the naval base in Invergordon in 1932:  ‘I thought here’s a real man, prepared to fight even the state for a decent wage.’186 Similarly, Scottish coalminer and union official Alec Mills commented:  ‘If you were a weak man you would have did what the boss said.’187 Having conviction and being assertive made a man. Jack Jones, a Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) official, commented on his admiration for men who ‘breathed defiance’ rather than be ‘subservient and compliant’; he had great respect for Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin.188 Sonya Rose has noted that the Chamberlain Government was associated with effeminacy –​failing to stand up to Hitler –​and the Coalition Government with Labour representation, headed by Churchill, with ‘fighting manhood’.189 This is nowhere more apparent than in the David Low cartoon of May 1940 depicting the Cabinet, fronted by Churchill and Bevin, striding forward and rolling up their sleeves to get on with the job.190 The maintenance of some autonomy, control and dignity at work was central to male work culture, whether a lesser skilled labourer or a skilled tradesman. Talking about his father who was a foundry worker in Falkirk and ‘very red’, Tom Myles recalled:  ‘God help the boss that came and interfered with his work.’191 Collective organisation was a powerful tool to maintain dignity at work and extend workers’ rights. Historically, trade unions were capable of enabling breadwinner masculinity by negotiating higher wage rates and by keeping women out of skilled jobs, as Cynthia Cockburn’s study of the printing trade and Sian Reynolds’ account of Scottish bookbinders demonstrate.192 Unions were strong proponents of the family wage and the ideal of the male breadwinner. Max Cohen noted how getting the union rate for the job in the building trade in the 1930s was ‘a touchstone of the utmost significance . . . [T]‌he staggering information that you managed to get “the rate” in a workshop of lesser paid men aroused not merely astonishment, and a certain measure of awe, but, inevitably, envy.’193 In this respect, collective organisation in wartime –​being ‘part of the union’ –​critically bolstered working-​class masculinity. Industrial action, including striking, could v 168 v

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work be directly associated with manliness, while non-​unionists were denigrated as effeminate ‘scabs’. Jack Jones recalled in his autobiography: ‘as children we got to know what strikes were about and what a terrible person a “scab” was’.194 Wartime circumstances accelerated the revival in trade unionism. Union membership rose from a nadir in the Depression of less than 4.5 million in 1933 (around 25 per cent of the total labour force and 30 per cent of male labour) to 7.9 million in 1945 (39 per cent of the total labour force and 45 per cent of male workers).195 By the war’s end, over 80 per cent of men in the key industries, such as coalmining, shipbuilding, heavy metals, railways and transport, were unionised. Moreover, after a sharp decline following the defeat of the General Strike in 1926, the number of strikes increased in wartime despite their illegality under Order 1305. The year 1944 was the highest on record since the 1880s. Wartime strikes were characterised, however, by their short duration, with around 90 per cent lasting less than a week. Consequently, the number of working days lost remained relatively low, at around half the rate of the First World War, although this was still more than double the average of the 1930s.196 Aircraft factory worker Ronald Wakeman remembered just one strike where he worked, and that lasted just forty-​five minutes before management relented and reinstated a wage bonus scheme.197 Shipyard worker Charles Lamb recalled several strikes and how sometimes just the threat of a strike achieved the desired aims: ‘The union fella went to see the manager and said, “if there’s no waterproofs down at the small harbour, or the harbour when we go in the next docking, we’re walking out”. So the next time . . . they were there.’198 Both anecdotes are suggestive of the shifting balance of power in the wartime workplace, which was in stark contrast to the 1930s. For relatively militant reserved workers such as the coalminers and shipyard workers, the memories of the defeats, humiliations and unilateral control of the employers during the Depression years critically influenced their behaviour during wartime, as did fears of a return to mass unemployment after the war.199 Employers and managers were widely distrusted by working-​class reserved men, and wartime reports signalled that in places like Clydeside class antagonism was persistent and was as important as hatred of Hitler.200 The 1930s witnessed a wide range of managerial industrial relations strategies, but mass unemployment certainly empowered the bosses. In the early stages of the war reserved workers could face recalcitrant anti-​union bosses determined to impose strict discipline in the workplace to ensure maximum productivity for v 169 v

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Men in reserve the war effort. Activists like Jack Jones and Jack Ashley reported on the struggles of organising non-​union workplaces against autocratic management in Widnes and Coventry, while Mass Observation noted the ‘tough and antagonistic’ attitude of northern shipyards towards their workers.201 Men who left at 4 p.m. instead of 5.30 p.m. on Christmas Eve 1941 to go shopping were locked out, sacked and victimised throughout the region, and machinery dismantled to ensure the factory did not work again.202 However, power relations shifted significantly as the war progressed. The war took trade unionism to many places it virtually had not touched before, such as Coventry, and to smaller firms that had previously been virulently anti-​ union.203 The Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) rose from 334,000 members in 1939 to 825,000 by 1945, while the numbers of shop stewards more than doubled in the engineering and metals sector.204 These transformations in industrial relations are well covered in the literature.205 However, the gendered aspects of this story have been overlooked: a lacuna we seek to remedy. Trade unionism as a movement worked to protect and advance workers’ rights and was not an exclusively male activity. Although women had been involved in a considerable amount of organisation and strike activity before 1939, the war significantly boosted female union membership, which reached 1.6 million in 1945, equating to around 1 in 4 female workers.206 Nonetheless, the trade union movement remained dominated by men in terms of its leadership and membership. With 6.1 million male members in 1945, it was the interests of men that took precedence.207 Policies reflected an acceptance, rather than a challenge, of the separate-​ spheres ideology, such as the notion of the male breadwinner wage and statutory exclusion of women from some areas of employment, such as mining. There were few women delegates to either the TUC or Scottish TUC, and only a handful in positions of power in trade unions above the shop floor. The vast majority of wartime strikes involved male workers, with around 50 per cent of all working days lost in the war through strikes of male coalminers alone.208 Other strike-​prone wartime workers were the male shipbuilding workers, heavy-​engineering workers and dockers. Sylvia Walby has demonstrated how the majority of trade unions practised discriminatory policies against women, and the craft unions predominantly refused to allow female membership.209 The AEU finally relented in 1943, and only then in the face of pressure from the general unions, including the TGWU, which had recruited women dilutees in engineering. Craft unions like the AEU worked to control women’s wages and prevent undercutting of the male rate, thereby protecting the core v 170 v

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work interests of male craftsmen. The British trade union movement continued at all levels to be dominated by men. There was a tension between class interests and male workers’ interests in unions and industrial relations. To a large degree, male interests were dominant, as evidenced by lukewarm support for ideas such as equal pay, abolition of the marriage bar and equal access to all jobs. Sue Ledwith has noted that ‘cultures of exclusionary masculinity’ are deeply embedded in manual trade unions.210 The patriarchal strategy of the trade unions was evident in their insistence on the maintenance of the dangerous-​work taboo and on statutory protection for male workers’ rights in the Restoration of Pre-​War Practices Act (1942). This mirrored the widespread view that women were only participating in the male world of paid work in a temporary and subordinate capacity. Referring to wages, wartime TGWU official Jack Jones recalled:  ‘I have to admit that there was latent and sometimes very open opposition from working men to women receiving higher rates.’211 Even in the TGWU, a general union markedly more ‘progressive’ on gender issues than the skilled craft unions like the AEU, ‘the stewards took the line of least resistance when confronted by the avarice of the men’. When his wife Evelyn put the women’s case in 1941 for a fair slice of gang piecework earnings in Coventry she was told by the trade union convenor Len Brindley to ‘piss off ’.212 Wartime industrial relations were complex, although on balance the war empowered working men and facilitated the rebuilding of working-​ class masculinities. The resurgence of trade unions was part of this. The State intervened to control both management and labour, with Bevin explicitly promoting a policy of trade-​offs. Wartime restrictions on the movement of labour, under the Essential Work Order, and the banning of strikes, under Order 1305, were balanced by statutory improvement of working conditions and welfare, with, for example, canteens and improved on-​the-​job medical facilities, State-​sponsored extension of trade union recognition and collective bargaining rights, removal of managerial power to victimise, and the maintenance of wage levels. A pivotal element of this for breadwinner masculinity was the introduction of the ‘guaranteed week’ in all workplaces covered by the Essential Work Order. For reserved men this virtually wiped out casual employment, endemic during the 1930s, for example among dock workers. Bevin also directly intervened to raise the wages of some of the lowest-​paid reserved workers, including agricultural labourers. Encroachment into managerial decision-​making terrain, for example regarding production decisions, rate-​fixing and overtime, was common by the end of the war in key v 171 v

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Men in reserve sectors employing large numbers of reserved men, like engineering and metals, as well as coalmining. As Jack Jones commented: ‘What we were doing was challenging the divine right of management, and they didn’t like it.’213 Bert Coombes noted that in the new wartime Pit Production Committees ‘master and workmen are meeting at a new angle . . . [T]‌his new discussion is one of management.’214 The key change, perhaps, was that reserved workers’ right to negotiate was supported by the State as a trade-​off for union support on wartime production.215 As the last resort, unions took disputes to conciliation officers and on to arbitration and, in wartime, invariably won. In squaring up to management, reserved workers now had the State mostly, although not wholly, in their corner. As Geoff Field has shown, the extension of collective bargaining rights was a marked feature of the war: Joint Production Committees (JPCs) in workplaces encroached on matters that had previously been considered managerial ‘prerogative’, such as production, rate setting and overtime, while by the end of the war around 85 per cent of the 17.5 million workforce, and virtually all reserved male workers, were covered by voluntary or statutory collective bargaining.216 Wartime circumstances thus endowed power upon civilian workers as a group, while particularly empowering working-​class reserved men. For those wartime reserved workers old enough to have been of working age in the 1930s this could re-​energise them with status and confidence that had been eroded by the experience of mass unemployment in the Depression. This was expressed, for example, in the virtual disappearance of victimisation for strikers and curtailment of indiscriminate sackings by 1942. Both had been marked features of the 1930s. An immigrant engineering worker commented in 1942:  ‘I am surprised you have so much freedom over here. If one of the workmen wants a day off he takes it, and nobody can stop him.’217 Absenteeism and bad timekeeping continued to occur through the later years of the war. In 1943–​44 the TUC identified fatigue amongst war workers as a root cause of absenteeism and campaigned to get a reduction of compulsory Home Guard and fire watching duties.218 For blue-​collar workers, the revival of their trade unions and particularly the extension of collective bargaining to the shop floor in wartime, with the proliferation of shop stewards and the JPCs, were other important ways in which working-​class masculinities were rebuilt after the ravages of the inter-​war Depression. By the end of 1943 there were 4,500 JPCs operating across the engineering and allied sector alone, covering some 3.5  million workers.219 Shop stewards and representatives at the JPCs v 172 v

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work were overwhelmingly men, and they wielded considerable power and responsibility. Cultural disincentives to the participation of married women, as well as real practical constraints of the ‘double burden’ of work and domestic duties, left little time for volunteering for union posts or attending meetings. The exceptions tended to be single and childless married women. How then did reserved men recall the role of trade unions and their participation in collective organisation and strikes in their personal testimonies? There was a range of responses as we shall see, from ‘activist narratives’ from committed union men and officials through to the apathy and indifference of inactive members and non-​unionists and the bitterness of actively anti-​union men. However, what is striking amongst our cohort of fifty-​six interviewees is the collective amnesia on strikes during wartime. The relative silence is linked to the ways in which reserved men retrospectively reconstruct their narratives in the early twenty-​first century. To attain composure and emphasise their masculinity in the face of cultural censure, most respondents played down involvement in trade unions and strikes. The latter smacked of unpatriotic division and self-​ interest, which jars in narratives framed around personal graft and sacrifice as individuals’ contribution to the war, as well as the popular myth of wartime harmony and everyone ‘pulling together’. John Stephenson recalled being a member of the National Union of Railwaymen, but that there were no strikes in wartime, while Jim Lister commented:  ‘There wasn’t the trouble because you were all pulling together . . . There was no confrontation. If they were wanting anything done, they give and take. They gave and took a lot more during the war than they would do after.’220 Another wartime railwayman, William McNaul, recalled when asked about strikes: ‘No. No, nothing like that. Wasn’t allowed . . . No, no, no you daren’t do anything like that.’221 This denial and marginalisation of strikes was repeated across other war industries. Munitions worker William Ryder recalled:  ‘I mean during the war [we] daren’t dream of striking.’222 Manchester toolmaker Frank Harvey recalled: ‘There was no strikes in there because I’m not too sure, but I think there was a bit of a law about, you were barred from striking actually you know, by the government, you know, but that never come into it, because they knew that people were losing their lives.’223 What is perhaps most surprising is the virtual erasure of unions and strikes in the oral testimonies of men in the most well organised and strike-​ prone wartime sectors, such as coalmining, shipbuilding and heavy engineering. Wartime Bevin Boy Warwick Taylor commented: v 173 v

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Men in reserve I can recall no industrial disputes whatsoever. You’ve got to realise this is wartime of course . . . There was no time for nonsense like industrial disputes. And of course it was work and pay . . . Everybody during wartime was absolutely keyed up and they put maximum effort in to everything right across the country.224

Sheffield mining wages clerk Phillip Rogers could not recall if he had been a trade union member and noted in a similar vein to Taylor: ‘I don’t seem to remember there being [a]‌strike, at that time. I think they [the miners] were too glad to have work and knowing the importance of it at wartime.’225 Scottish Lothians coalminer William Ramage admitted there were ‘occasional strikes’, quickly qualifying this: ‘But it never affected us down here.’226 Alexander Davidson could only recall one shipbuilding union, despite there being seventeen across the different trades in the shipyards: ‘They didn’t do very much during the war because, you know, there was no call for it really.’227 Willie Dewar recalled an apprentices’ strike in the Hyde Park Railway Works in Glasgow: ‘we all went out on strike . . . which was a daft thing to do during the war years’.228 In response to the question ‘were you in a trade union during the war?’ sheet-​metal and forge worker Alfred Thomas remarked: ‘[T]here was no such thing as trade unions during the war. I  was always a trade unionist, always a leftie, but during the war that didn’t apply. You were just like the army, you did your job, full stop.’229 Thomas’s assertion that male workers were ‘just like the army’ represents a powerful motif in men’s testimonies, pervasive enough that they misremembered the activities of unions and strikes that contradicted a dominant wartime narrative of ‘graft’, ‘sacrifice’ and ‘pulling together’ for the war effort. This association with war was an important way that reserved men out of uniform bolstered their masculinity. Stephen Smith recalled: ‘strikes were virtually forbidden . . . There were some strikes, like the, you’ll find out in your studies, the Betteshanger coal-miners went on strike in Kent . . . By and large there were no strikes ’cos the foremost thing was to defeat Hitler.’230 The erasure of wartime unions and strikes in personal memory is also likely to be a product of the Thatcher Government’s assault on trade unions, the media barrage against strikes and overly powerful unions, and the sharp decline of union membership over the past thirty years, now at the lowest level since the 1930s. For more than three decades, post-​1945 trade unions earned cultural legitimacy and became a respected part of the fabric of British society. Since the 1970s, their social and cultural standing has eroded, paralleled by a substantial decrease in trade union v 174 v

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work membership, collapsing from over 50 per cent of the workforce, down to 25 or 26 per cent by 2010–​14.231 Several of our respondents explicitly referred to what they regarded as later ‘abuse’ of power by the unions, or tarred them with being controlled by communists.232 When Charles Hill was asked ‘Was there a trade union?’, he responded ‘Yes, but they had nowhere near the power they’ve got these days.’ He recalled a wartime strike in Coventry where the men were prosecuted, but noted ‘I’ve always felt striking was a rather stupid weapon anyway.’233 Miner William Ramage offered the view that ‘they werenae like the militant people that appeared later, you know. Arthur Scargill and that lot.’234 London war worker Eddie Menday recalled that trade unions were more active after the war than during it. When asked about the occurrence of wartime strikes, he responded hesitantly: ‘No, that was illegal. I mean, certainly, not in the engineering, I think there was, there was one or two strikes, in, in other industries up north I know of, that, uh, certainly, certainly not, uh, in our area.’235 The fractured nature of his answer suggests a degree of discomfort and discomposure. Many interviewees clearly did not want to be associated with trade unions and strikes, which if admitted would have tarnished their narratives of selfless hard graft, patriotically doing their bit for the war effort. However, there were individuals who were capable of constructing their stories in different ways, rejecting or modifying dominant discourses. Amongst the exceptions to this collective amnesia are the wartime trade union officials, shop stewards and activists who usually framed their narratives in divergent ways, emphasising the pivotal role played by unions; the agency and resistance of workers in wartime; and the persistence of class conflict, as opposed to ‘harmony’.236 These ‘activist’ testimonies tended dualistically to portray employers as the villains and unions as the heroes, regarding the strike weapon, used in response to managerial exploitation, as fully justified even in wartime and necessary to win the war. There were old scores to settle, and activist reserved workers often framed their narratives with reference to the context of exploitative autocratic management behaviour in the 1930s’ Depression, the unequal sacrifice in wartime and the importance of protecting and extending workers’ rights. Trade union officials were also reserved, and the records of the TUC indicate that it lobbied hard to represent the occupational interests of union officials and staff. There were fears, for example, that employer control over reservation gave management the power to get rid of union activists that they found troublesome, as they could ‘let him drift into the v 175 v

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Men in reserve Forces’.237 They also opposed rescindment of reserved status as punishment for absenteeism and ‘misconduct’, and fought against the raising of the age of exemption for union officials from twenty-​five to thirty, then thirty-​five, on the grounds this would ‘wreck the trade union machine’. After the switch to individual deferment the TUC continued to represent the interests of their reserved officials and staff at the Manpower Board, applying for deferral and lobbying the Minister of Labour.238 Member unions were also circularised to advise them not to appoint new officials under the age of thirty-​five because of the risk of call-​up.239 Some significant concessions were made, indicating the power of the TUC as a pressure group in wartime.240 In 1945, attention was switched to trying to get preferential release from the forces of trade union and employer organisation officials to try to tackle what the TUC referred to as the ‘staffing problem’ within the trade unions.241 Some trade unions were not immune to temptations to exploit the Schedule of Reserved Occupations. Walter Southgate, an exempt fifty-​year-​old chief clerk to the sheet-​metal workers’ union, recalled being asked by the union General Secretary to step aside, on full pay, to enable a younger man to be promoted to this reserved occupation in 1940. Indignant and principled, Southgate refused, ‘fell out of favour’ with the union hierarchy and, as a consequence, ‘suffered a nervous breakdown and walked out of the job’.242 A clutch of male working-​class ‘activist’ autobiographies and oral testimonies provide an alternative discourse on reserved status, the role of trade unions and industrial action in wartime.243 Jack Jones in Coventry and Jack Ashley in Widnes played important roles rallying workers into unions in previously poorly organised workplaces.244 As a young nineteen-​year-​old, Jack Ashley had to overcome his initial reluctance to organise a strike as he had previously briefly served in the army before being medically discharged. In this respect, like William Ramage, Ashley perhaps encapsulated the competing and intersecting ideals of manhood circulating in wartime: the military and the industrial. He subsequently narrated trade unionism and strikes, as did Jones, not as unpatriotic and undermining the war effort, as much popular discourse such as the cartoon in Figure 4.1 suggested, but rather as a legitimate action against autocratic employers, intransigent foremen, and managerial ‘bullying’ which was inimical to good industrial relations and hence to the successful prosecution of the war.245 Workplace culture among reserved workers was notably radical in areas like Clydeside and Merseyside. Among clusters of union and labour v 176 v

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work

Figure 4.1  Leslie Gilbert Illingworth, Daily Mail, 8 March 1944 activists, radical class consciousness was capable of trumping patriotism. As in the First World War, for some on the far left anti-​war sentiment ran high, at least up until June 1941 when the Soviet Union entered the war. Scottish Communist MP for Fife Willie Gallacher recalled militant shop stewards in Glasgow early in the war giving Bevin ‘a hell of a time’ when he came up to speak publicly, because they perceived Bevin’s wartime controls over labour mobility and strikes as ‘put[ting] the screws on them far more roughly than on the employers’.246 Bevin was capable, albeit reluctantly and under pressure, of using draconian State powers, including prosecutions and the threat of call-​up against striking reserved workers:  for example against apprentices in 1940–​ 41 and 1944, at Betteshanger Colliery in Kent in 1942, and against ninety strikers at the v 177 v

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Men in reserve Hyde Park Railway Works in Glasgow.247 Indicative of the radical workplace culture in Scotland was that seventy-​one prosecutions of strikers under Order 1305 took place there, compared to only thirty-​eight in the whole of England and Wales.248 However, these were unusual interventions, only involving in total some 6,300 strikers, and more often than not strikes were short and allowed to play themselves out without punitive legal action. Liverpool docker, communist and Spanish Civil War veteran Frank Deegan constructed a narrative that revelled in his shirking of fire-​ watching duties and railed against profiteering by the bosses: ‘This was a capitalist war and I had no real desire to fight.’249 Similarly, Frank Chapple was a young reserved electrician in wartime Liverpool and London and a Communist Party member who initially abhorred the war. He recalled in his autobiography how ‘strikes were our contribution to the war effort’ and recited involvement in several walkouts at Royal Ordnance Factory building sites in 1939 and 1940, noting ‘we were a real bunch of bloody-​ minded reds’. In one case Chapple and co-​conspirators were sacked and the military were called in to march the strike committee off the premises. Some communists like Chapple actively sought ways to avoid call-​up: I had no wish to be called up to fight for a cause I didn’t believe in so I got into the docks to work, which put me in an exempt industrial category. I  worked for a firm of ship-​repair electricians . . . Most of London’s leading Communists from the ETU [Electrical Trades Union] were in the docks, carefully exempt from war service, but there was a remarkable lack of enthusiasm for war work. Whenever you walked into a ship’s engine room, you stepped over people sleeping or playing cards. Patriotism was a bit of a joke.250

Deegan’s and Chapple’s testimonies provide a marked contrast to the dominant ‘graft and sacrifice’ narratives –​devoid of politics and industrial conflict –​that were so prevalent amongst our interviewees and other accounts of the war. Significantly, however, Chapple and other communists identify a change in 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. He left the Young Communist League, ‘started to enthuse for the war and wanted to get into action’ and was called up to the army in April 1943. From 1941 communists were amongst the most vociferous supporters of the wartime production drive and amongst the fiercest critics of strikes and any other action liable to disrupt production. Reserved tinsmith and communist Arthur Exell recalled: That’s all we ever thought of, do you see, during the war, was the war effort. We had to win . . . Some of us inside were trade unionists and Party members

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work . . . We didn’t try to dodge anything. Some people thought we were mad, but we thought we were up against it. We had to win. So therefore we did everything we could for the sake of production.251

Exell saw work as being associated closely with the war effort. In a clear expression of Stakhanovite masculinity, Exell and the Communist Party factory group went on to form a ‘shock brigade’ offering their services to management, expressing a willingness to do any job as needed ‘any place and at any time’. The position of reserved men towards the war effort was thus affected by politics and by place, and subject to change as the war proceeded. Jack Jones perhaps represents the more mainstream reserved trade union official from a Labour rather than a communist background: I think the general feeling was that it was essential to win the war. I mean, to some extent, if people started to grumble, you could always say: ‘Well, go in the Forces!’ Couldn’t you? I was quite willing, myself, to go in the Forces. I’d been in the Territorial Army, I’d been used to weapons. I’d fought in the Spanish War, you know. So it wasn’t a problem for me, other than the fact that I was a union official and expected to get the maximum [production] for the war effort. So I  understood that. I  think we did more for the war in Coventry than many of the workers who went from Coventry into the Forces!252

Jones was completely comfortable in his reserved role in wartime. He was a Labour councillor in Liverpool and a TGWU shop steward before taking up a reserved full-​time union official post as Coventry Organiser for the TGWU in 1939. He was a strong supporter of the war effort and had volunteered to join the army before being told by Bevin that he would be of better use as a reserved trade union official working in Coventry to build the TGWU and ensure maximum production for the war effort. There is no sense of emasculation through not being in uniform evident in his testimony. Rather, there is a clear sense of how the political and economic environment enabled working-​class masculinity to be rebuilt in the workplace, with the unions reinvigorated as workers’ armour in squaring up to management. Indeed, any sense of emasculation was not evident across a cluster of autobiographies of older wartime reserved workers consulted here, who appear remarkably comfortable in their wartime roles. As Jones put it, ‘Productivity was accepted as a major responsibility of the trade unions. I saw the workforce as the soldiers at the rear, a major factor in winning the war against Fascism.’253 v 179 v

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Men in reserve

Conclusion The war facilitated the reconstruction of traditional male breadwinner masculinity that had been so corroded in the 1930s by the vulnerability of labour markets, un(der)employment, low wages, and the loss of power and dignity at work. This chapter has argued that working-class masculinity was rebuilt in the wartime workplace, bolstered by full employment, long hours, large wage packets, stronger trade unions and the esteem that came with being a valued reserved worker that could face up to the greater pressures and intensity of the wartime productivity drive. Reserved men’s status as indispensable ‘skilled workers’ and ‘experienced labourers’ provided some compensation for not being combatants. While a sense of emasculation is clearly evident among half of our interviewees, who positioned themselves in relation to the dominant military man, the lived day-​to-​day experience and material circumstances of reserved work significantly augmented workers’ sense of manliness, both economically and socially. The hegemonic wartime discourse of masculinity that exalted the combatants co-​existed in tandem with traditional breadwinner and ‘hard man’ notions of masculinity within working-​class communities. For reserved men, then, the objective circumstances of war were ultimately empowering and ­enabled a rebuilding of breadwinner masculinity. Notes 1 Ron Spedding, Shildon Wagon Works: A Working Man’s Life (Durham: Durham County Library, 1988), p. viii. 2 Ibid., pp. vi–​vii. 3 David Kirkwood, My Life of Revolt (London: George Harrap, 1935), p. 251. 4 Daniel Wight, Workers Not Wasters:  Masculine Respectability, Consumption and Employment in Central Scotland (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 1993). 5 Bert Coombes, These Poor Hands (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939), p. 44. 6 Max Cohen, What Nobody Told the Foreman (London:  Butler and Tanner, 1953), p. 63. 7 Lynne Segal, Slow Motion:  Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (London: Virago, 1997), p. 297; Christina Jarvis, The Male Body at War (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004). 8 Arthur McIvor, A History of Work in Britain, 1880–​1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 36, 38.

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work 9 Stephen Meyer, ‘Work, Play and Power: Masculine Culture on the Automotive Shop Floor, 1930–​1960’, in Roger Horowitz (ed.), Boys and Their Toys? Masculinity, Technology and Class in America (New York: Routledge, 2001). 10 Jack Lawson, A Man’s Life (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1944), p. 189. 11 Ronnie Johnston and Arthur McIvor, ‘Dangerous Work, Hard Men and Broken Bodies:  Masculinity in the Clydeside Heavy Industries, c. 1930–​ 1970s’, Labour History Review, 69:2 (2004), 135–​52; Pat Ayers, ‘The Making of Masculinities in Interwar Liverpool’, in Margaret Walsh (ed.), Working Out Gender (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London:  Routledge, 1991); Miriam Glucksmann, Women Assemble:  Women Workers and the New Industries in Interwar Britain (London: Routledge, 1990). 12 This persisted well into the post-​ war period. Paul Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Farnborough: Saxon House, 1977). 13 Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole (London: Penguin, 1933), p. 48. 14 Jack Ashley, Acts of Defiance (London: Reinhardt Books, 1992), p. 22. 15 Cohen, What Nobody Told the Foreman, p. 22. 16 Spedding, Shildon Wagon Works, p. 47. 17 Paul Willis, ‘Shop Floor Culture, Masculinity and the Wage Form’, in John Clarke, Charles Critcher and Richard Johnson (eds.), Working Class Culture (London: Hutchison, 1987). 18 McIvor, A History of Work, p. 192. 19 Edward Gaitens, Growing Up (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936); Ralph Glasser, Growing Up in the Gorbals (London: Pan, 1987). 20 Coombes, These Poor Hands; George Blake, The Shipbuilders (Edinburgh:  B&W Publishing, 2004 [1935]); Abe Moffat, My Life with the Miners (London:  Lawrence and Wishart, 1965); Alan McKinlay, Making Ships, Making Men (Clydebank: Clydebank District Libraries, 1991). 21 Annmarie Hughes, ‘Representations and Counter-​ Representations of Domestic Violence on Clydeside between the Two World Wars’, Labour History Review, 69:2 (2004), 169–​84. 22 George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (London:  Victor Gollancz, 1933). 23 Ellen Wilkinson, The Town that Was Murdered (London:  Victor Gollancz, 1939); Wal Hannington, The Problem of the Distressed Areas (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937). 24 Nigel Gray, The Worst of Times:  An Oral History of the Great Depression in Britain (London:  Scolar Press, 1986); Max Cohen, I Was One of the Unemployed (London: Victor Gollancz, 1945). 25 Ian MacDougall (ed.), Voices from the Hunger Marches:  Personal Recollections by Scottish Hunger Marchers of the 1920s and 1930s, 2  vols. (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990–​91); Ian MacDougall (ed.), Voices from Work and Home (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2000).

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Men in reserve 26 Marjorie Levine-​ Clark, ‘The Politics of Preference:  Masculinity, Marital Status and Unemployment Relief in Post-​First World War Britain’, Cultural and Social History, 7:2 (2010), 233–​52 (p. 248). 27 Stephen Thompson, Unemployment, Poverty and Health in Interwar South Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006). 28 Blake, The Shipbuilders, p. 159. 29 Chris Wrigley (ed.), A History of British Industrial Relations, Vol. II: 1914–​ 1939 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987). 30 Peter Howlett, Fighting with Figures: A Statistical Digest of the Second World War (London: HMSO, 1951), p. 38. 31 Lawson, A Man’s Life, pp. 189–​90. 32 Cohen, What Nobody Told the Foreman, p. 142. 33 Steve Humphries and Pamela Gordon, Out of Sight: Experience of Disability, 1900–​50 (Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers, 1992), p. 132. 34 Peggy Inman, Labour in the Munitions Industries (London:  HMSO, 1957), p. 181. 35 Stakhanov allegedly mined over 100 tons of coal in less than six hours in 1935. 36 Wight, Workers Not Wasters. 37 Inman, Labour in the Munitions Industries, pp. 290, 294–​5; GB1847 STUC, Scottish Trade Union Congress, Annual Report, 1941, p. 64. 38 Mark Benney, Over to Bombers (London:  George Allen and Unwin, 1943), p. 192. Benney, a journalist and novelist before the war, was writing from first-​ hand experience as a reserved wartime aircraft factory worker. 39 J. B. Priestley, Daylight on Saturday (London: Heinemann, 1943), p. 25. 40 Ibid., p. 300. 41 Ibid., p. 183. 42 John Ellis, Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War (New York: Viking, 1990), p. 14. 43 Eddie Menday, http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php (accessed 15 November 2014). 44 Inman, Labour in the Munitions Industries, p. 295. 45 Mass Observation, People in Production:  An Enquiry into British War Production (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942), p. 158. 46 Ibid., pp. 160–​1. 47 Ibid., p. 161. 48 William Edward Ryder, interview, 10 September 1999 (IWM SA, 19662). 49 Mass Observation, People in Production, pp. 239–​42; Tom Hanlin, Yesterday Will Return (New York: Viking Press, 1946). 50 Inman, Labour in the Munitions Industries, pp. 127–​8, 308. 51 Bert Coombes, Those Clouded Hills (London: Cobbett Publishing, 1944), p. 43. 52 Mass Observation, People in Production, p. 162. 53 D. C. M. Howe, interview, 1 May 1990 (IWM SA, 12882). 54 Henry Barrett, interview, 2 July 1996 (IWM SA, 16733).

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work 55 Patrick McGeown, Heat the Furnace Seven Times More (London: Hutchison, 1967), pp. 160–​1. 56 Derek Sims, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 20 February 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 12). 57 Edward Ashill, interview, 9 October 1990 (IWM SA, 11580). 58 Linsey Robb, ‘“The Front Line”: Firefighting in British Culture, 1939–​1945’, Contemporary British History, 29:2 (2015), 179–​98. 59 Frank Deegan, There’s No Other Way (Liverpool: Toulouse Press, 1980), p. 62. 60 William McNaul, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 27 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 22). 61 Government contracts for war-​related material, such as ships, were agreed at actual cost plus a percentage for ‘profit’, usually 10 per cent. 62 Ted Boyle, http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php (accessed 15 November 2014). 63 Fred Clark, http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php (accessed 15 November 2014). 64 Craig Inglis, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 10 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​48); Alfred Thomas, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 3 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​45). 65 Donald Kennedy, http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php (accessed 15 November 2014). 66 Nevertheless, while women often felt uprooted, men in framing their stories in this way would not deny that they were in their rightful place. Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives:  Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). 67 Lance Liddle, interview, March 2005 (day unspecified) (IWM SA, 27263). 68 Richard Croucher, Engineers at War (London: Merlin Press, 1982), pp. 143–​4. 69 Glasgow Herald, 7 February 1942, p. 5. 70 Sims interview, 20 February 2013. 71 Harry McGregor, interviewed by Arthur McIvor, 13 July 2009 (SOHC 050/​ 05). 72 Roy Deeley, interview, 26 January 2000 (IWM SA, 20055). Churchill’s exact words were ‘One will say, “I was a fighter pilot”; another will say, “I was in the submarine service” . . . and you in your turn will say with equal pride and with equal right, “We cut the coal.” ’ 73 Chris Sladen, ‘Holidays at Home in the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 37:1 (2001), 67–​89 (pp. 70, 76). 74 Mass Observation, People in Production, pp. 173–​81, 187–​201. 75 Glasgow Herald, 23 September 1941, p. 7. 76 Mass Observation, People in Production, p. 181. 77 Ibid., p. 200. 78 Ibid., pp. 188, 193; MO, File Report 1631, ‘Absenteeism and Industrial Morale’, March 1943.

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Men in reserve 79 Cited in Inman, Labour in the Munitions Industries, p. 277. 80 Marek Korczynski, Michael Pickering and Emma Robertson, Rhythms of Labour:  Music at Work in Britain (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2013). 81 MO, File Report 1249, ‘Radio’, May 1942. 82 Christina L. Baade, Victory through Harmony: The BBC and Popular Music in World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 60–​78. 83 Parliamentary Papers, Pay and Allowances of the Armed Forces, Cmd. 6385 (London: HMSO, 1942), pp. 2–​3; HC Deb., 10 September 1942, Vol. 383, 332–​495. 84 Ian Gazeley, ‘Manual Work and Pay, 1900–​70’, in Nicholas Crafts, Ian Gazeley and Andrew Newell (eds.), Work and Pay in Twentieth-​Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 69. 85 Ibid., p. 75. 86 Penny Summerfield, ‘The “Levelling of Class”’, in Harold L. Smith (ed.), War and Social Change:  British Society in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), pp. 182–​3, 186; Ian Gazeley, ‘The Levelling of Pay in Britain during the Second World War’, European Review of Economic History, 2 (2006), 175–​204. 87 Summerfield, ‘The “Levelling of Class’ ”, p. 183. 88 Gazeley, ‘Manual Work and Pay’, pp. 74–​5. 89 Ibid., p. 69. 90 Geoffrey Field, Blood, Sweat and Toil: Remaking the British Working Class, 1939–​1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 150. 91 Ashley, Acts of Defiance, p. 32. 92 Thomas Carmichael, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 15 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​35). 93 Ronald Tonge, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 28 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​24). 94 Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang (eds.), Listening to Britain: Home Intelligence Reports on Britain’s Finest Hour –​May to September 1940 (London: Vintage Books, 2011), p. 220. It was also observed that conscientious objectors were in ‘safe jobs getting good salaries while other people’s sons and husbands are facing danger for a few shillings a week’; ibid., p. 156. 95 John Thomas Murphy, Victory Production! A Personal Account of Seventeen Months Spent as a Worker in an Engineering and an Aircraft Factory (London: John Lane, 1942), p. 138. 96 HC Deb., 17 December 1941, Vol. 376, 1965–​2043. 97 HC Deb., 25 March 1942, Vol. 378, 2001–​116. 98 MO, File Report 827, ‘Service and Civilian Pay’, August 1941 (original emphasis). 99 Mass Observation, People in Production, p. 165. 100 Ibid., p. 169. 101 Henry Ford had developed the mass production system in car manufacture in Detroit and this had spread to Britain, with Ford setting up his

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work first British plant in 1911 in Manchester. He was influenced by the ideas of the ‘prophet’ of scientific management, Frederick Winslow Taylor. An American ‘efficiency engineer’, Taylor promoted the idea of timing jobs and analysing them with a view to breaking them down to raise productivity. Such changes in customary ways of doing work were not popular with sections of the workforce –​especially the craftsmen –​and the trade unions. See Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1911). 102 Charles Hill (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 16 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​37). 103 Barrett interview, 2 July 1996. 104 Field, Blood, Sweat and Toil, p. 113. 105 Mass Observation, People in Production, p. 163. 106 Ibid., pp. 165–​8. 107 McGregor interview, 13 July 2009. 108 Ibid. 109 Willie Dewar, interviewed by Arthur McIvor, 9 December 2008 (SOHC 050/​04). 110 Charles Lamb, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 3 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​27). 111 Mass Observation, People in Production, p. 171. 112 Dudley Seers, Changes in the Cost-​of-​Living and the Distribution of Income since 1938 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949), pp. 5, 8. 113 Guy Routh, Occupation and Pay in Great Britain, 1906–​ 1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 106–​7. 114 Jack Jones, http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php (accessed 15 November 2014). 115 Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes:  British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London:  Routledge, 1994), pp.  3–​5. See also Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 7. 116 Deeley interview, 26 January 2000. 117 Frank Chapple, Sparks Fly! A Trade Union Life (London: Michael Joseph, 1984), p. 33. 118 Inman, Labour in the Munitions Industries, pp. 140–​3. 119 Victor Sawdon Pritchett, Build the Ships: The Official Story of the Shipyards in Wartime (London: HMSO, 1946), p. 11. 120 Roger Major (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 26 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​21). 121 George Dean, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 28 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​25). 122 Ryder interview, 10 September 1999. 123 Mass Observation, People in Production, p. 112. 124 Meyer, ‘Work, Play and Power’, p. 17.

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Men in reserve 125 Ronald Wakeman, interview, 16 February 1995 (IWM SA, 14963). 126 Major interview, 26 March 2013. 127 Charles Bedaux was caught by the Allies helping to construct an oil pipeline in North Africa for the Germans. Craig Littler, The Development of the Labour Process in Capitalist Societies (London: Heinemann, 1982); McIvor, A History of Work, pp. 93–​108. 128 Lamb interview, 3 April 2013. 129 Alexander Davidson, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 10 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​32). 130 Thomas Cantwell, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 24 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 55). 131 John Hiscutt, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 25 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​42). 132 Benney, Over to Bombers, p 94. 133 Ibid., p. 236. 134 Bernard Casburn, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 31 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 57). 135 John Allan, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 7 November 2011 (SOHC 050/​09). 136 William Ramage, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 29 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 43). 137 Arthur McIvor and Ronald Johnston, Miners’ Lung:  A  History of Dust Disease in British Coal Mining (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 267–​9. 138 Howlett, Fighting with Figures, pp. 38, 47, 50. 139 Ibid. 140 Horizontal segregation by gender refers to the penetration of women across different occupational groupings and jobs. Vertical segregation by gender refers to the penetration of women into jobs by status, from ‘top’ jobs as employers and managers, down through skilled manual and non-​manual work, to semi-​skilled and unskilled jobs. 141 Linsey Robb, Men at Work: The Working Man in British Culture, 1939–​1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 142 Ewart Rayner, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 22 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​18). 143 Neil Rafeek, ‘Agnes McLean, 1918–​1994’, Scottish Labour History Society Journal, 30 (1995), 121–​30 (pp. 122–​3). 144 Lamb interview, 3 April 2013. 145 Geoffrey Cooper, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 21 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 17). 146 Alexander Ramage, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 19 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​14). 147 Fred Millican, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 26 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​20). 148 Sims interview, 20 February 2013. 149 Major interview, 26 March 2013. 150 Murphy, Victory Production!, pp. 47, 52.

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work 151 Cantwell interview, 24 May 2013. 152 Spedding, Shildon Wagon Works, p. 6. 153 Ibid., p. 7. 154 Frank Harvey, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 27 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​23). 155 Arthur Exell, The Politics of the Production Line:  Autobiography of an Oxford Car Worker (Southampton:  History Workshop Journal Pamphlet, 1981), p. 55. 156 Murphy, Victory Production!, p. 52. 157 McGregor interview, 13 July 2009. 158 Dean interview, 28 March 2013. 159 Shunting involved marshalling and moving trains between the yards and platforms, hooking on locomotives and detaching defective carriages. 160 Jim Lister, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 19 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​38). 161 John O’Halloran, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 22 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 19). 162 Benney, Over to Bombers, pp. 105–​10. 163 Ibid., p. 175. 164 Ibid., pp. 108–​9; 209–​10. 165 Ibid., pp. 203–​4. 166 Richard Fitzpatrick, interviewed by David Walker, 13 August 2004 (SOHC 022/​01). 167 Ryder interview, 10 September 1999. 168 Meyer, ‘Work, Play and Power’, pp.  13–​32; Michael Roper, Masculinity and the British Organization Man since 1945 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1989). 169 Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives. 170 Margaret R. Higonnet and Patrice L.-​R. Higonnet, ‘The Double Helix’, in Margaret R. Higonnet , Jane Jenson, Sonya Michael and Margaret C. Weitz (eds.), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 171 Mass Observation, People in Production, pp. 106, 112 (emphasis in original). 172 Dewar interview, 9 December 2008. 173 Ashill interview, 9 October 1990. 174 Sir Kenneth Holland, interview, 18 April 1991 (IWM SA, 12015). 175 Deeley interview, 26 January 2000. 176 Allan interview, 7 November 2011 (SOHC 050/​09). 177 Spedding, Shildon Wagon Works, p. 47. 178 Deeley interview, 26 January 2000. 179 Ibid. 180 Ryder interview, 10 September 1999. 181 Cohen, What Nobody Told the Foreman, pp. 134–​5. 182 Ibid., p. 134. 183 Coombes, Those Clouded Hills, pp. 58–​9.

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Men in reserve 184 Ashley, Acts of Defiance, p. 40. 185 Roper, Masculinity and the British Organization Man since 1945, p. 117. 186 Deegan, There’s No Other Way, p. 10. 187 Alec Mills, interviewed by Arthur McIvor and Ronnie Johnston, 19 June 2000 (SOHC 017/​C1). 188 Jack Jones, Union Man: An Autobiography (London: Collins, 1986), p. 44. 189 Sonya Rose, ‘Temperate Heroes: Concepts of Masculinity in Second World War Britain’, in Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (eds.), Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 186. 190 David Low, ‘All Behind You, Winston’, Evening Standard, 14 May 1940. 191 Tom Myles, interviewed by Wendy Ugolini, 6 November 2008 (SOHC 050/​ 02). 192 Cynthia Cockburn, Brothers (London:  Pluto, 1983); Sian Reynolds, Britannica’s Typesetters (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989). 193 Cohen, What Nobody Told the Foreman, pp. 48–​9. 194 Jones, Union Man, p. 17. 195 George Bain and Richard Price (eds.), Profiles of Union Growth: Comparative Statistical Portrait of Eight Countries (Oxford:  Wiley–​ Blackwell, 1980), pp. 37–​8. 196 Inman, Labour in the Munitions Industries, pp. 392–​4; Field, Blood, Sweat and Toil, pp. 101–​11. 197 Wakeman interview, 16 February 1995. 198 Lamb interview, 3 April 2013. 199 Inman, Labour in the Munitions Industries, pp. 8, 85, 128. 200 Mass Observation, People in Production, pp. 245–​6. 201 Ibid., p. 46. 202 Ibid., pp. 26–​7. 203 Jones, Union Man, pp. 87–​95. 204 Field, Blood, Sweat and Toil, pp. 97, 100. 205 Ibid.; Croucher, Engineers at War; Wrigley, A History of British Industrial Relations, 1939–​1979. 206 Bain and Price, Profiles of Union Growth, p. 40. 207 Arthur McIvor, Working Lives:  Work in Britain since 1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 207. 208 Inman, Labour in the Munitions Industries, pp. 392–​6; Field, Blood, Sweat and Toil, pp. 104–​5. 209 Sylvia Walby, Patriarchy at Work (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 210 Sue Ledwith, ‘Gender Politics in Trade Unions:  The Representation of Women between Exclusion and Inclusion’, Transfer:  European Review of Labour and Research, 18:2 (2012), 185–​99 (pp. 185–​6, 191–​3). 211 Jones, Union Man, p. 113.

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Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work 212 Ibid. 213 Ibid., p. 102. 214 Coombes, Those Clouded Hills, p. 34. These mining committees paralleled the Joint Production Committees established throughout engineering and the metals sector from 1942. Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–​1945 (London: Cape, 1969), pp. 396–​9; Croucher, Engineers at War, pp. 161–​74. 215 Jones, http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php. 216 Field, Blood, Sweat and Toil, pp. 92–​5. 217 Mass Observation, People in Production, p. 193. 218 Trades Union Congress, Annual Report, 1943, pp. 212–​13; 1944, p. 152. 219 Calder, The People’s War, p. 398. 220 John Stephenson, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 23 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 39); Lister interview, 19 April 2013. 221 McNaul interview, 27 March 2013. 222 Ryder interview, 10 September 1999. 223 Harvey interview, 27 March 2013. 224 Warwick Harry Taylor, interview, 18 April 2002 (IWM SA, 30468). 225 Phillip Rogers (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 19 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​15). 226 William Ramage interview, 29 April 2013. 227 Davidson interview, 10 April 2013. 228 Dewar interview, 9 December 2008. 229 Thomas interview, 3 May 2013. 230 Stephen Smith (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 19 February 2013 (SOHC 050/​11). 231 Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, Trade Union Membership 2014: Statistical Bulletin (June 2015), p. 5, http://​stats.bis.gov.uk/​UKSA/​tu/​ sa20100430.htm (accessed 31 August 2015). 232 Willie Dewar, Cyril Beavor and Charles Hill. 233 Hill interview, 16 April 2013. 234 William Ramage interview, 29 April 2013. 235 Eddie Menday, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 15 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​50). 236 http://​ w ww.unionhistory.info/​ w orkerswar/​ v oices.php (accessed 15  November 2014). 237 Trades Union Congress, Annual Report, 1941, p. 282. 238 Trades Union Congress, Annual Report, 1942, pp. 93–​4; 1943, p. 132; 1944, p. 153. 239 Trades Union Congress, Annual Report, 1943, pp. 132–​3. 240 Trades Union Congress, Annual Report, 1941, pp. 145–​6; 1942, pp. 93–​4. 241 Trades Union Congress, Annual Report, 1945, p. 180. 242 Walter Southgate, That’s the Way It Was:  A  Working Class Autobiography 1890–​1950 (Oxted: New Clarion Press, 1982), p. 135.

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Men in reserve 243 http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php. 244 Jones, Union Man, pp. 87–​118; Ashley, Acts of Defiance, pp. 34–​46. 245 Ashley, Acts of Defiance, pp. 34–​43. 246 William Gallacher, Last Memoirs (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1966), p. 274. 247 Di Parkin, Sixty Years of Struggle:  History of Betteshanger Colliery (Deal: Brightsea Press, 2007), pp. 37–​52. 248 Calder, The People’s War, p. 396. 249 Deegan, There’s No Other Way, p. 58. 250 Chapple, Sparks Fly!, p. 34. 251 Exell, The Politics of the Production Line, p. 56. 252 Jones, http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php. 253 Jones, Union Man, p. 104.

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness

Oh it was a dangerous place to work, the docks. There was quite a few dockers drowned during the war  –​blackout. You had to feel your way aboot. Most of us had torches. You always walked well away from the quayside . . . Well, there was that many casualties during the war, you know, it wis just another thing actually. It wis only the immediate family and the immediate friends. And all they would say was, ‘Oh, that was hard lines on so-​and-​so.’ And then you went away.1

The hazards of heavy industrial work and the ways in which bodies were exposed to heightened risk and danger in wartime are made evident in this recollection of Leith docker Bobby Rodger. By associating workplace injuries and deaths with ‘casualties’ Rodger positioned himself in relation to dominant discourses about wartime loss of life, and in the process affirmed his masculinity in his reserved occupation. Because of the prevailing patriarchal sexual division of labour men monopolised the most dangerous work, and much of this in wartime was reserved, including most jobs in the mines, iron and steel works, docks, and shipyards. Historically, there is a strong association between working-​class manual labour and occupational injury and disease, with heavy industries like coalmining, shipbuilding, and iron and steel working characterised by high levels of risk-​taking, occupational mortality and disability. The war impacted upon reserved workers’ bodies in myriad ways. The risk threshold was reconfigured and the level of workplace death and disability deemed culturally acceptable shifted. The heightened work intensity we noted in Chapter 4 was largely tolerated by workers, together with the related rise in risk; accident rates; exposure to toxic materials, such as asbestos, as the Chief Inspector of Factories noted in August 1945;2 and aerial bombardment. The bodies of civilian manual v 191 v

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Men in reserve workers were subject to unprecedented scrutiny and control, higher levels of State regulation, and intense degrees of stress and danger during the war. They were managed and moulded better to withstand the pressures of war, paralleling, to some extent, what happened to recruits in the armed forces. This chapter examines how reserved workers’ bodies and their identities as men were shaped, and how reserved men retrospectively narrated their embodied experience of war. The focus is on the experiences and discourses of manual workers and of those in working-​class reserved occupations. Non-​manual labour was much more benign, although some clerical and professional work in wartime, such as the Civil Service, could be subject to long working hours and intensified work regimes, and the pressures, strain and stress associated with these. Some 7  million men were subjected to forces-​enlistment medical examinations during the Second World War. Men’s bodies were graded on a scale up to 4: those categorised 1 and 2 were deemed fit for armed service and were ‘exalted’.3 Reserved men, most of whom were refused a medical on the grounds that they were in essential war work until policy changed in 1943, found themselves in a difficult position.4 How did young, fit miners, iron and steel workers, shipbuilding workers, and dockers, who, as we have seen, had to respond to the threats to masculinities posed by the entry of women to previously male-​dominated workplaces and the potentially emasculating deskilling reorganisations of work, navigate the wartime valorisation of the militarised body? If their bodies were deemed as being of lesser value relative to combatants, alternative ways to embody service to the State may have needed to be found. Soldiers’ bodies were transformed by training and combat.5 As masculinities are expressed through bodies, reserved men, denied access to the body drilling and discipline of the army, had to achieve this in wartime in other ways. Reserved workers’ bodies were also changed by the wartime emphasis on civilian fitness and by the regularised and intensified work regimes of wartime that we discussed in Chapter  4 when there was a new focus on ‘workers’ bodies, psychology and welfare’.6 Reserved men’s bodies were also flesh and blood, and they were vulnerable to damage. This chapter places working-​class male workers’ bodies at the centre of the analysis in order to examine the extent to which they were affected by the experience of greater risk and danger, poorer safety standards, pressure, and stress in the wartime workplace. It explores the ways they articulated this, made sense of it and represented it in their own narratives. v 192 v

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness

‘Made of iron’: work and the body Bodies are gendered:  the male body, as R.  W. Connell has argued, is a marker of masculinity. It is read as symbolising strength through physicality and furnishing the capacity both to protect and to provide.7 The breadwinning role was a central aspect of masculinity that, as we have noted, was undermined during the years of mass unemployment in the 1930s. Work was felt and experienced through men’s bodies in peacetime and, as we shall see, to an even greater extent in wartime. Historically, masculinity was embodied in a normative figure expressing muscular strength whose performance reinforces male identity.8 Miners, for example, attracted interest because of their honed, muscular bodies. The novelist Walter Greenwood commented in 1939 that miners were:  ‘short, stocky, muscular, rarely carrying any superfluous flesh, he has to be hard as nails . . . [C]‌oal getting calls for specially developed muscles.’9 Similarly, George Orwell described miners who ‘work as though they are made of iron . . . [N]early all of them have the most noble bodies.’ He resorted to a military metaphor, asserting: ‘no one could do their work who had not a young man’s body, and a figure fit for a guardsman at that’.10 In the first half of the twentieth century doing heavy physical manual work well to the best of one’s capabilities was fundamental to traditional working-​class masculinity, and to status and respectability in one’s working-​class community. Muscular masculinity was also deemed, however, to represent inner qualities; a fit body was associated with a fit mind.11 The capacity to tolerate and endure the toll that heavy industrial work imposed upon the body in hazardous, unhealthy, dirty, repetitive and exhausting work regimes pointed to revered working-​class ‘hard man’ qualities. In a study of British construction workers between 1918 and 1970, Nick Hayes has asserted that ‘within the “cult of toughness” that pervaded industrial life, industries and occupations were instinctively graded according to how masculine they were, and workers and managers identified with, and constantly sought to prove themselves against, such social constructs’.12 The heavy industries, such as coalmining, and manual jobs like forestry and fishing, dockwork, navvying, and building, were positioned towards the top of this hierarchy of pre-​war manly occupations. Workers gained standing and esteem within their peer group for the ability of their bodies to withstand stress, face up to dangers, show no fear and get the job done. The connection between bodily well-​being and work was made starkly apparent during the First World War when, in one of the infamous surveys into the physical fitness of potential recruits, the Minister of National v 193 v

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Men in reserve Service noted ‘occupation and health are intimately interdependent’.13 While work was evidently good for health on a number of intrinsic and extrinsic levels, it could also be damaging, dangerous and toxic. Work potentially interacted adversely with health in many ways, inducing fatigue, causing accidents and repetitive strain injuries, exposing workers to irritating and carcinogenic chemicals, while also incubating occupational diseases, among the worst of which were those associated with the inhalation of dust and gases. Before the war, official figures indicate, however, a progressively declining rate of mortality and bodily damage from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, as occupations changed, trade unions protested, State intervention increased and workplaces became safer.14 Yet there were still 147,810 officially recorded deaths in factories, mines, the railways, shipping and construction between 1900 and 1939.15 For every accidental death there were perhaps three seriously disabling injuries. Additionally, there were an indeterminate number of subsequent deaths and chronic disabilities caused by occupational diseases and hazards, such as pneumoconiosis and exposure to asbestos. Because of the nature of the data-​gathering and under-​reporting, the official statistics grossly underestimate the real toll that industry inflicted on the body, both male and female. Much, though, depended upon where they worked. It was predominantly the expanding, relatively prosperous, modern sector of the economy, such as electrical engineering, cars, aircraft and consumer goods, that registered the greatest improvements in occupational health-​and-​ safety standards before the Second World War. The new factories embodied the latest innovations in design and construction and were generally much better illuminated, heated and ventilated, and had the most modern welfare and sanitary arrangements. Electric power substituted for steam and gas and facilitated a cleaner, brighter and less accident-​prone work environment.16 Conversely, it was in the older, depressed, staple and heavy-​industrial sectors of the economy that industrial health standards stagnated in the inter-​war years. In 1933 the Factory Inspectorate identified mining, textile manufacture, iron working, heavy engineering, work at sea and shipbuilding as providing the least healthy working environment, deemed to be the result of older factory architecture, design, space utilisation, technology, old habits and entrenched attitudes.17 The building industry might have been added to this list. These were industries dominated by male labour. The undermining of trade unions in the Depression also removed a significant protective agency from the scene, while the –​albeit temporary –​rolling v 194 v

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness back of the State meant that the pace of reforming regulation slowed. For example, a new Factory Act, first mooted in 1922, was not passed until 1937. Moreover, improving health and welfare was an expensive proposition that many of the hard-​pressed companies in the struggling basic sectors could ill afford in the Depression. In a cut-​throat marketplace, employers were wary of adding to their costs. Effective preventative measures, such as the employment of works’ doctors, nurses and welfare officers, was rare before the Second World War. Nevertheless, the well-​ established and relatively comprehensive regulatory code of the British State provided significant protection for many workers’ bodies. The Mines Acts, Factory Acts, Trade Board Acts, Workmen’s Compensation Acts and plethora of ‘Special Regulations’ covering the ‘dangerous trades’ did much to counteract the worst excesses of the most unscrupulous employers. The long-​delayed revision of the Factory Act of 1937 brought in a forty-​eight-​hour week as a maximum for female and young workers; regulated permissible overtime to a maximum of six hours per week; introduced rest pauses and guidelines on weight-​carrying; extended medical inspection; and made the provision of washing, seating and cloakroom facilities compulsory in all factories. As Vicky Long’s research has shown, this was part of the ‘healthy factory’ movement in which the TUC was an important player.18 However, legislation tended to lag behind much of the ‘best practice’ of the most progressive employers in the new industries.19 There remained, moreover, a tendency to regulate for what were considered the most vulnerable workers, women and children, and a wide gap persisted, especially in male-​dominated workplaces like mining, building sites and the shipyards, between the legislation and actual workplace practice, with much evasion, subversion and ignorance of the statutory framework. In wartime, these pressures were heightened as production targets needed to be met. A Glasgow sheet-​metal worker who started work in 1942 ruefully reflected on his body as a commodity and the abuse it endured: The filth that we worked in right fae fourteen years of age. And being a man with no education, the only thing you had was the muscle in your arm and what experience you got with metal, and a very willingness to work. I would go in and say to people, ‘Yes I’ll do that in that time.’ And whatever it took to do that [job] I would do it. Silly now, looking back through the years, you know.20

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Men in reserve Physical strength, toughness, endurance and discipline to work regimes were values that were similar to those required in the armed forces, and it is no coincidence that army recruiters saw working men acculturated to hard physical work (such as agricultural labourers) and facing danger everyday of their working lives (such as coalminers) as among the best material for combat.21 In official instructions issued to the recruitment Medical Boards in 1940, hard physical occupations like mining, navvying and blacksmithing, despite their wartime reserved status, were identified as a ‘guide . . . that he is fit for the higher grades’.22 South Wales miner Bert Coombes noted in 1944: ‘In the army miners are counted as making ideal soldiers because their work has made them hard, intelligent and very well used to danger.’23 Bodies were put on the line, with large wage packets, sometimes comprising danger money bonus payments:  the reward for those most willing to take risks working underground, at sea, at heights, and with fast-​moving heavy machinery and hot metal. There was a prevailing widespread cultural assumption among men in such communities that their bodies were attuned to danger, more able to cope with and withstand these pressures with fortitude and strength, whereas women’s bodies were assumed to be physically weaker, vulnerable and in need of protection.24 As Emma Newlands has shown, soldiers’ bodies and minds were examined, drilled, trained, experimented upon and disciplined to high levels of fitness to withstand the physical and psychological demands of warfare and to be effective fighting machines in combat zones where they faced extreme levels of risk and danger. Combatants’ bodies were managed in the Second World War to an unprecedented degree. Military masculinity was thus wrapped up in muscular, fit bodies. Soldiers were also meant to be capable of controlling their emotions, including showing no fear. While there were clear divergences in experience, Newlands refers to some parallels in the ways military and civilian bodies were classified for compensation and argues that ‘the soldier’s body . . . was just another form of “working body”, rendered productive through the same processes of rationalisation that were affecting other civilian men and women’.25 In manual labour in the heavy industries, and in construction and agriculture, there was a not dissimilar training and socialisation of the body from a young age in order to become inured to risks and dangers. In the reserved occupations there was a focus on the fit male body analogous to that in the armed forces, especially among young men who might look towards emulation of ‘heroic’ combatants. Workers’ bodies thus v 196 v

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness needed to be honed, hardened and regulated to withstand the heightened stress, pressures, risks and dangers of intensified war work. For civilian workers, masculinity was reconstructed, to a degree, through devoting their bodies to the service of war work; in maintaining fitness for labour; in the ability to tolerate long sustained working hours, as we saw in Chapter 4; and in applying their strength and endurance in a gallant sacrifice in the face of heightened risks and dangers. This was most evident in the Merchant Navy and the firefighting services, where casualties were highest. However, across a wide swathe of wartime industries workers also faced heightened risks of stress, breakdown, accidents and chronic industrial diseases through exposure to chemicals and toxins used less discriminately in wartime. Moreover, war workers also faced the threat of aerial bombardment. While the war demanded fit bodies of its reserved workers, the workplace also had the capacity to harm, disable and destroy bodies. Being able to withstand these threats and assaults on the body defined being a man in wartime, and while ‘hard man’ masculinity in the workplace might not have been as culturally ‘exalted’ as military masculinity, it did provide a site for manliness to be reinforced within the reserved occupations. In reconstructing their wartime lives in autobiographies and oral interviews reserved workers recalled their own lived experience in the pressure-​pot of war. Their narratives frequently play on these masculinity-​ affirming attributes of standing up to work intensification and the dangers of wartime work in mines, shipyards and war factories. Testimonies of reserved workers in manual trades are peppered with references to the grim, inherently unhealthy work environment during wartime, and to heightened hazards and risks of war work. Damage to bodies and minds is a recurring trope. Although they were not in uniform, reserved men were involved in sacrifices and performed manly roles nonetheless in everyday struggles in the wartime workplace.

Under surveillance: honing, disciplining and regulating the reserved body The impact of war upon civilian workers’ bodies has attracted some interest from scholars, although this continues to be an acutely under-​ researched area.26 It remains a matter of urgency to get beneath the statistical body counts of occupational injuries and deaths to a deeper understanding of what wartime regulation of bodies and the heightened risk and damage to bodies meant and signified. Sonya Rose has argued v 197 v

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Men in reserve that the Second World War brought a renewed emphasis on physical fitness among civilians that was ‘reinforced by the militarization of the home front’. She refers to propaganda in the early stages of the war cajoling workers to get fit and associating hard training with military success.27 But war work itself honed bodies. The shift from mass unemployment and irregular and casual work in the 1930s to full employment and longer working hours in 1940–​41 resulted in workers muscling up, the hardening of their bodies and the re-​disciplining of their minds to the imperatives of production. As the doctor in the documentary film It Began on the Clyde commented to a worker in 1941: ‘You’ve been off work far too long and you are still a little soft.’28 Bodies that had gone ‘soft’ in the Depression were now sculpted and re-​energised. Extra cheese and meat rations for transport and heavy-​industry workers (and milk and vitamin supplements supplied by some companies) paralleled additional provision for the fighting forces and recognised the body’s need for more calories to endure the intensity of labour.29 A miner recalled that his body ‘was like steel. I was a hard man then.’30 Stakhanovite levels of productivity were only possible with bodies that were well fuelled and in shape, and minds that were sharp. To achieve, and sustain, fitness for war work, civilian bodies were subject to unprecedented levels of scrutiny, regulation and control paralleling to some extent what was happening in the forces. There were several aspects to this. Reserved status, as we have seen, effectively meant workers’ bodies were under the authority of the State, to be forcibly retained in their work or to be moved around the country according to the needs of war. The concept of the compliant, docile body, associated particularly with the work of Michel Foucault, became much more of a reality in wartime in the reserved occupations as well as in the armed forces.31 Yoked to an intensified wartime work regime and greater levels of risk, reserved workers’ bodies became simultaneously valorised –​as manly, irreplaceable, tough, indefatigable and vital to the war economy –​as well as undermined, both through unfavourable comparisons with military bodies and through higher levels of accidents, disease and stress. Soldiering could make a man of you, but so too could exposure to the punishing and dangerous work regimes of wartime industrial occupations. Coventry trade union official Jack Jones recalled that Stafford Cripps’s nephew, who had just left university, asked him if he could be found a job that would toughen him up before his admission to Commando training. Jones secured a position for him in a Ford company foundry, asserting ‘I doubt if his Commando training was any harder, if as hard, as the job he did at Ford.’32 v 198 v

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness In wartime the monitoring and surveillance of workers’ bodies reached unheard-​of levels. After mass reservation of blocks of workers gave way to individual deferment in December 1941, each reserved worker was registered and a case had to be specifically made for their retention. They became the subject of scrutiny in a contest over bodies for the military or the workplace. They were also medically examined from this point to ensure swift relocation to the armed forces if and when necessary.33 Unknown ailments could be discovered in this process. Enlistment medical examinations identified any existing health issues –​such as rheumatism or tuberculosis  –​and GPs were given access to this information, which could then be provided to workers on request.34 Winning the war meant conserving, repairing and getting the most out of workers’ bodies. By 1942–​43 some Royal Ordnance Factories (ROFs) had developed quite sophisticated methods of evaluating workers’ bodies not dissimilar to the enlistment medical examinations. In one such factory in Bridgend, Wales, for example, over 10,000 men were ‘medically graded’ in 1943 into three categories: 55 per cent were graded ‘A’, deemed fit enough to have contact with potentially harmful chemicals (such as trinitrotoluene (TNT)); 22 per cent were graded ‘B’, fit to work in other ‘non-​contact’ departments; and 23 per cent were graded ‘C’, as ‘unfit’, with disabilities such as vision defects, neurosis, heart problems, hernia, bronchitis, pneumoconiosis, rheumatism and arthritis.35 To try to ensure workers lasted the duration and remained as productive as possible the ‘science’ of human factor management was endorsed by the State and applied by employers. A significant innovation in wartime factories was the broadcasting of music. While primarily aimed at women workers and as a ‘palliative’ to the dehumanising tendencies of wartime mass production, programmes such as Music while You Work claimed to act as a ‘medicinal tonic’, disciplining and geeing up flagging bodies ‘using Americanised popular music to coerce the efforts of British assembly line workers’.36 Morale could affect bodily performance at work. ‘Mechanised music’ was a product of the growing discipline of industrial psychology, itself an example of increasing interest in the body at work in the 1930s and wartime.37 In the aircraft factories and the ROFs work might be timed and production incentivised through bonus schemes, and reorganised with workers spaced out to perform short, deskilled work processes on flow production tracks. Time-​and-​motion studies were designed to raise efficiency and productivity, by eliminating unnecessary body movements in the labour process and reorganising work to make it less fatiguing.38 In v 199 v

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Men in reserve J. B. Priestley’s wartime novel based on an aircraft factory, Daylight on Saturday, this process was introduced through a key character: ‘Angleby is my name. I’m in charge of Progress Development. Ever heard of it?’ Nelly [a wartime dilutee] said she hadn’t. ‘Our job’, said Mr Angleby, ‘is to find out the quickest and easiest ways of doing things. That’s sensible isn’t it? And we’re always glad to have suggestions from anybody.’39

Workers were being encouraged to move their bodies in more efficient ways: trained and drilled, in a way not dissimilar to the army, to repeat movements exactly; to cut out anything superfluous; and to be a predictable, better and more productive machine. Photography and film were deployed by management in some wartime workplaces in this quest to rationalise the body movements of workers, pioneered by the inter-​war workplace motion studies of Lilian and Frank Gilbreth.40 This was officially endorsed by the Government in wartime and developed in its most advanced form in aircraft manufacture. The Ministry of Aircraft Production established a Production Efficiency Board employing the British expert in motion study Anne Shaw, who had pioneered its use at Metropolitan Vickers in Manchester before the war. Workers were instructed at a new ‘Motion Study Training Centre’ in the technique, which used film to examine and record bodily movements and then rationalise them, ostensibly aiming, as Peggy Inman noted, ‘at lightening the task of the worker, so enabling him or her to produce more without greater effort’.41 Many reserved craft workers, however, despised this process of obtaining knowledge from them and the interference in their customary ways of doing the job and using their bodies, associating motion study with Taylorism, time study and reduced piece-​rate earnings. Reserved foremen, for example, felt this as an erosion of their masculinity and their authority and, according to Inman, put up the most opposition because they ‘felt they were being taught the job anew after having practised it for many years’.42 Nevertheless, astounding leaps in production were reported as a result of these changed, ‘rationalised’ uses of workers’ bodies in wartime.43 Bodies were yoked to the strategic needs of the war economy. Absenteeism was more systematically recorded and missing bodies punished (with pay docking and fines), disciplined and morally stigmatised. Workers were encouraged to take responsibility for their bodies, to look after themselves to keep fit, healthy and accident free. These strategies mirrored developments in the armed forces and reflected new ideas about citizenship and masculinity. People were exhorted to ‘keep the v 200 v

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness nation fighting fit’. The infamous ‘Coughs & sneezes spread diseases’ message (Figure 5.1) applied as much to the workplace as to the home and community, with the message repackaged to ‘A careless sneeze may cause more absentees.’ The spread of medical facilities, and increased numbers of doctors and nurses and first aid in industry, again encouraged by the State, can be interpreted as an effort to extend medical monitoring and treatment of workers’ bodies to ensure maximum efficiency; those who broke down, were ‘wounded’ in workplace accidents or damaged by industrial diseases could be subject to swifter medical intervention, patched up and returned to the industrial front line. Medical services in industry thus spread rapidly in wartime, on the docks, and in shipyards, factories and mines. Some ports developed a separate medical service covering the docks.44 These were the field hospitals of industry, providing medical attention close to the industrial front line. Bevin was responsible for rationalising existing patchy provision with the Factories (Medical and Welfare Services) Order (1940), which included the compulsory provision of welfare supervisors, nursing and first aid services, and company doctors, particularly targeting the largest companies. Numbers of medical personnel in industry during the Second World War more than doubled, and these were especially concentrated in the ROFs.45 This is

Figure 5.1  Coughs & sneezes spread diseases, IWM (undated), PST 14136 v 201 v

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Men in reserve particularly remarkable, given the demands on medicine by front-​line forces, and is another example of the importance given to workers’ bodies during the war and of the privileging of reserved workers’ bodies over other civilians. The Glasgow engineering company William Weir’s, for example, had its own medical officer by 1945 –​Dr W. Aitken –​who was involved in a range of preventative initiatives, as well as curative and palliative care.46 In response to a question about health-​and-​safety provision, wartime aircraft factory worker Derek Sims recalled: Health was very good. They had a very fine medical section there and if you catch yourself or anything like that you went straight there. They were very good. The sister there was a super lady. In fact she carried on when I . . . came back to them after the Air Force. And I walked along the corridor one day and she came, she said, ‘Mr Sims, I haven’t seen you for your heart checkup! Can you come down?’ [laughter] And I used to have to go down to the surgery . . . [S]‌he did blood pressure and checked your teeth . . . gave you a good checking over . . . But it was good, they did look after you health-​wise, well they had to. Food-​wise, we were looked after too. We got some food in that canteen which wasn’t for sale outside, banana for instance. I mean bananas were unheard of and so were oranges. But we always had, on the table, a bowl, with bananas, oranges and apples. It was very good. Where they got them from, don’t ask me!47

Sims was clearly very impressed with the increased attention given to body maintenance in the factory in wartime. The establishment of works canteens that he refers to was also enforced in larger industrial premises of over 250 workers by the Factories (Canteens) Order (1940), and their provision of nutritious food made a contribution to the health of wartime workers, helping undoubtedly to counteract fatigue, increase productivity and improve morale.48 Coalmining provides a good example of this intensified surveillance and regulation of the wartime civilian body. In 1942 the respiratory disease coal​workers’ pneumoconiosis, which was recognised to be epidemic in mining communities, was added to the list of prescribed industrial diseases –​already including nystagmus, rheumatism, silicosis, beat hand and beat knee  –​for which compensation could be awarded under the various amendments of the Workmen’s Compensation Act, introduced in 1897. This came after a lengthy campaign by the miners’ trade unions and sympathetic medical advocates and political allies, and after a long process of epidemiological research that exposed miners’ bodies to hitherto unseen levels of medical scrutiny. The relatively new tool that enabled miners’ bodies to be monitored for the presence of dust disease v 202 v

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness was the X-​ray machine. By the end of the war the vast majority of miners in areas most affected by pneumoconiosis had been X-​rayed, and the level of bodily ability and disability thus identified, catalogued and recorded.49 This was facilitated by the establishment in 1944 of a comprehensive Mines Medical Service, which took responsibility for medical surveillance, preventative measures, and treatment of minor injuries and disease. In their oral testimonies miners referred to this assault on their bodies both with a recollected sense of dread and with pride that they were strong enough to extract the coal even while tissue was being calcified and lung function destroyed by the coal-​and rock-​dust they inhaled. The X-​ray represented the point at which men’s bodies could be checked: their capacity for work gauged from the inside as well as the outside. Hidden disabilities and germs such as tuberculosis could be identified and exposed, and capacities for work starkly defined, with disability levels precisely quantified from 0 to 100 per cent, marking the transition between manly work and emasculation as a disabled dependant. With the wartime manpower shortage, reserved men’s bodies assumed pivotal importance, given that they were the repositories of scarce skills and experience. They were precious and needed to be conserved, and, when damaged, quickly repaired. This resulted in the spread of rehabilitation services to pivotal groups of reserved workers such as coalminers, dockers and railwaymen. The coal-​mining industry played a pioneering role in rehabilitating workers’ damaged bodies in wartime, which built on inter-​war practice, for example in orthopaedics in Lanarkshire. Mining communities had what were probably the largest proportions of disabled men in the country. The luxury Gleneagles Hotel, used in the 1930s for the pampering of upper-​and middle-​class bodies, was commandeered by Secretary of State Tom Johnston as a wartime rehabilitation centre for injured coalminers. Techniques developed in military rehabilitation were utilised at Gleneagles and other miners’ rehabilitation centres, again suggestive of the proximity of civilian to combatant experience. In wartime there was also the utilisation of excess hospital capacity in the Emergency Medical Service (EMS) hospitals to treat wartime workers’ fatigue and breakdowns.50 This started in Scotland under the auspices of Johnston, who commandeered the EMS hospitals, set up ostensibly to treat air raid casualties, in order to care for ill, injured and stressed reserved workers. This was depicted in the short film It Began on the Clyde (1946). It centred on an exhausted Glasgow shipbuilding worker at the height of the production drive in 1941 who was restored to full fitness and virile manhood after a spell recuperating in an EMS v 203 v

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Men in reserve hospital. A Ministry of Information photographer captured coalminers receiving sun-​ray rehabilitation treatment at a Midlands colliery in 1944; the caption on the image reads: ‘As good as a week in Blackpool’.51 Other exhausted reserved workers were sent home or to ‘the country’ for recuperation, as experienced by the fictional character Richard Roe in Henry Green’s novel Caught, having endured nine weeks of constant firefighting in the capital.52 Before the Second World War a clear demarcation existed between disabled soldiers and disabled civilians, with an official policy preference towards ex-​combatants in rehabilitation services, including preferential treatment in compensation and disability pensions and in re-​employment. Marjorie Levine-​Clark has discussed the ‘politics of preference’ in Government welfare policy in relation to the First World War and the inter-​war period.53 Joanna Bourke has noted that while injured combatants were compensated on the grounds of ‘disfigurement’, injured workers were recompensed on the lesser rate of loss of earnings.54 The miners’ trade unions were among those who protested against this discrimination of the work-​wounded, in which the damaged bodies of ex-​servicemen were considered more worthy of treatment and rehabilitation and received higher pensions than civilian workers.55 This State valorisation of the hierarchy of masculinities that placed the armed services at the top narrowed significantly during the Second World War, with the range of treatment and rehabilitation services introduced for war workers noted above, but also through significant changes in civilian and workers’ compensation policy. Crucially, as Newlands has argued, disability pension rates came to align more closely by the end of the war.56 After two increases in Workmen’s Compensation rates in 1940 and 1943 civilian workers were receiving the same compensation rates as class V soldiers –​the lowest ranked –​for equivalent levels of disability from work injuries and disease. Civilians disabled as a result of enemy action were also awarded the same under the Personal Injuries (Civilians) Scheme, which had been introduced in September 1939. These changes suggest a significant shift during the war in how the State assessed the value of war workers, bringing them up to something like parity with combatants.57 This commodification of damaged bodies was apparent in the White Paper produced by the Workmen’s Compensation Advisory Committee in 1944: This system is in many respects like that which is the basis of war pensions schemes. It thus recognizes a certain similarity between the position of the

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness soldier wounded in battle and that of the man injured in the course of his productive work in the community. Neither is liable to have his pension reduced on account of what he may earn after the injury; each is compensated not for loss of earning capacity but for whatever he has lost in health, strength and the power to enjoy life.58

The outcome was the scrapping of the existing Workmen’s Compensation system and its revamping into the National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act (1946), together with common schedules for the same payment for servicemen and workers sustaining similar injuries and levels of disability. There were then a series of medical, statutory and collective interventions, recognising civilian workers’ bodies to be a vital resource in wartime. Julie Anderson has shown how the Second World War was a watershed in rehabilitation, marking a transition from ‘rest cures’ to active physiotherapy, enabling more social inclusion of people with physical impairments and the ‘repositioning of disabled people from societal drain to valued workers’.59 In a campaign from 1941 spearheaded by Bevin, over 300,000 disabled people were found work, or training that led to employment.60 One legacy of the greater wartime risks of accidents and chronic disease (explored further below) was an increased number of workers with impairments, swelled by those injured in combat and in bombing raids. A  neglected aspect of the history of twentieth-​century warfare is the story of disabled people’s lives: the pressures, threats and opportunities war posed for them, the process of ‘resettlement’, and the coping strategies and welfare facilities available to them.61 The 1944 Disabled Persons Act was meant to address such needs but in reality its influence was limited, failing to tackle effectively the economic and social inequalities of disabled people in the immediate post-​war decades.62

‘He too is a warrior facing danger every day’: accidents, risk and the body At a number of levels health-​and-​safety standards deteriorated in wartime. The protective statutory health-​and-​safety regime was relaxed, workplace inspections became more difficult and there was a prevailing milieu that prioritised getting the work done in wartime without any quibbles about health and safety. In the context of the war the latter seemed irrelevant. Heightened risk of bodily damage was absorbed and internalised as an element of the wartime sacrifice for working-​class reserved men, who were acutely aware of the dangers faced by those v 205 v

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Men in reserve called up to the armed forces. In war factories, ‘Inspectors have also met a certain criticism that accident prevention is rather an unworthy subject for consideration in wartime, when the men in the forces are taking every kind of risk.’63 The additional dangers of air raids added to this prevailing sense that health and safety in the workplace was somewhat redundant. This shifting risk-​acceptance threshold was usually endorsed by the men and to a large extent condoned by their trade unions, although struggles over fair compensation for injuries and deaths at work went on. Mass Observation noted in 1942: ‘In view of its evident importance to production, the extent to which industries and unions concern themselves with the health of their workers is noticeably slight.’64 For some unions this reflected a fear of members being dismissed on medical grounds. At the same time, rank-​and-​file activists criticised trade unions’ absorption of the wartime production ethos, at any cost, even where workers’ bodies were being seriously compromised by unsafe practices, as with unloading toxic materials at the docks.65 While there were dissenting voices, reserved workers appear to have largely accepted a heightened level of risk. This was part and parcel of wartime patriotic masculinity on the home front. Working men were embracing these processes that had the potential to damage their bodies as their way of contributing to the war. As we have seen, the wartime economy witnessed the rapid diversion of resources and personnel into war-​related work, which included the expansion of intrinsically heavier and more hazardous work in the Merchant Navy, firefighting, munitions production, shipbuilding and repairing, aircraft manufacture, steel making, engineering, construction, and dock work. The numbers of men and women killed in industrial accidents increased significantly, from an official –​and underestimated –​ total of 13,052 between 1935 and 1939, to 14,463 between 1940 and 1944.66 The majority of these figures would undoubtedly have been men. Non-​fatal industrial injury rates rose more sharply, as Waldron has calculated, from 29 per 1,000 in 1938 to peak at 43 per 1,000 in 1942 –​an increase of about 50 per cent.67 This contributed significantly to the rising number of disabled people during wartime. As the official figures for the manufacturing sector reported by the Factory Inspectorate show (Table 5.1), the death and injury toll rose sharply in the first period of the war and declined in 1944–​45 as the intensity of production slackened and fewer totally new and inexperienced production workers were employed. This trend continued in the immediate post-​war years. Between 1945 and 1949 the rate of industrial deaths was down 34 per cent on the previous v 206 v

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness Table 5.1  Reported non-​fatal accidents sustained by men and women in factories, 1938–​45 Year

Non-​fatal accidents

1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945

179,159 192,371 230,607 269,652 313,261 309,924 281,578 239,802

Source: Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories, Cmd. 6992 (London: HMSO, 1945), p. 6.

five-​year period. This highlights the hazardous nature of work in wartime relative to the period before and after. The heightened risks prompted the Ministry of Labour to initiate several prominent poster campaigns, in conjunction with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, to raise awareness of the dangers of wartime work. They included the 1942–​ 43 Percy Vere series, ‘Look Out in the Blackout’, and several that explicitly linked the war to the workplace, such as ‘Fewer Accidents:  Victory Sooner, One of Our Fighters Is Missing if You Are off Work with an Accident’ (Figure 5.2) and ‘Ware Hitler’s Greatest Ally: Herr Septicaemia’ (Figure 5.3).68 A wartime worker at the Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) munitions factory at Ardeer in Ayrshire noted: ‘We were in more danger every day of our lives than [from] any aeroplane dropping anything on us.’69 The increased risk was especially noticeable for female workers in wartime, which rose steeply as women tended to shift from relatively benign to less safe work. Nevertheless, almost three times as many adult men (about 200,000) reported accidents at the production height of the war in 1943 than did women (about 73,000), while boys were three times as likely as girls to be injured at work.70 This was the product of the persisting dangerous-​work taboo. Firefighting was one of the occupations that were segregated, as Birmingham fireman Edward Ashill recalled: They weren’t in the front line. They weren’t combat troops as you might say. They didn’t participate in firefighting. At least I knew of no case where

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Men in reserve

Figure 5.2  One of our Fighters is Missing if you are off Work with an Accident (undated), IWM, PST 14324 v 208 v

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Figure 5.3  ’Ware Hitler’s Greatest Ally: Herr Septicaemia (undated), IWM, PST 14196 v 209 v

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Men in reserve women were firefighters as indeed there are women firefighters today. But that was considered to be not a good idea in the wartime period.71

The association of the job with ‘combat troops’ in Ashill’s testimony is indicative of an attempt to tie the work closely with the war effort. The prevailing situation in the coalmines, another sexually segregated workplace, reflected this increase in risk and bodily damage. During the war years there was a steady rise in fatal and non-​fatal accidents, measured per 100,000 man-​shifts worked; at 181,059, recorded injuries in 1945 were some 40 per cent higher than in 1938.72 This was a cause for concern among the miners’ trade unions. The Mid and East Lothian branch of the National Union of Scottish Mineworkers passed a resolution in April 1941 identifying ‘the alarming rise in the number of accidents in the mines’, and asserted that longer working hours during wartime were the main culprit.73 The problem was deemed serious enough for the Government to appoint a Mining Safety Commission in 1941 to enquire into health and safety in the wartime pits. Peter Henderson, President of the Scottish TUC, said of the miner in 1943: ‘He too is a warrior facing danger every day of his life, his battle being fought under dangerous conditions. Hundreds are wounded daily and at least five are killed on each working day.’74 The use of the terms ‘warrior’ and ‘battle’ linked the work of the miners to the war effort. The message here was that, like soldiering, mining was risky and routinely damaged bodies. Miners took much of this danger for granted, and it clearly validated their sense of masculinity. Wartime Bevin Boy Tom Myles recalled an incident in which a pick struck a man’s hand: ‘the only reaction [was] “What the hell did you do that for?” ’75 When injured and off work in wartime, reserved workers and their families had to cope with loss of income and dependency upon an improved but still patently inadequate Workmen’s Compensation benefits system. Maximum benefits were set at 35s a week with an extra 5s for a married man. Benefit rates were brought up to two-​thirds of average male earnings by 1944/​45 but no payment was made for the first three lost days from work. Reserved south Wales coalminer Bert Coombes wrote his book Those Clouded Hills (1944) while recovering from a work accident. His narrative is a vitriolic critique of an outdated compensation system that undervalued workers’ bodies, arguing that the ‘hateful system’ treated the wounded man as ‘a malingerer’ and left him with anxiety ‘over the repayment of debts that have accumulated during his injury’.76 Serious disabling injuries and disease were a particularly contested v 210 v

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness terrain, where insurance doctors examined men to assess the extent of disability and the rate of recovery, and insurance companies tried to pressurise disabled men to accept a single lump-​sum payment to clear all liabilities. Coombes reflected: On pay day at the average colliery you may see a long queue of men with bandaged arms, or heads, or swinging along on crutches. It has the appearance of a dressing station behind the battle front. There is no glory attached to this queue because they are the wounded of the industrial battle. Nor have they any smile on their features as they go in one by one –​they do not expect any friendly faces or remarks in that place where they are examined by the insurance doctor.77

Coombes’s use of military metaphors ‘battle’, ‘wounded’ and ‘dressing station’ serve to link the role of the coalminer and the dangers he faced with the risks faced by combatants. In his comment ‘There is no glory’ we see, however, the belief that industrial workers were further down the hierarchy of masculinities than their military counterparts. The Merchant Navy was a highly unusual wartime reserved occupation with a correspondingly special public status. Proportionately, risks paralleled the armed forces. There were 30,248 merchant seamen killed during the Second World War, with an additional 4,654 missing and 4,707 wounded.78 Our interviewees spoke in quite matter-​of-​fact ways of being torpedoed and sunk, and taking to lifeboats awaiting rescue. Merchant Seaman Donald Wray McHutchon recalled being sunk several times during the war, on one occasion spending six days in a lifeboat before being rescued. He developed a nonchalance about being sunk, despite the loss of life on each occasion. However, he expressed a particular fear of aerial attack and of fires: ‘That was one thing that terrified me’, he recalled: ‘the thought of having to dive into burning, a sea covered with oil’.79 The workplace injury and mortality rate also increased because of the inexperience of large segments of the wartime workforce. These ‘green’ workers could put more experienced reserved men at risk. This was evident in the factories, mines and docks. One reserved Scottish docker recalled: ‘During the war there was quite a few extra hands brought in . . . men wi’ no’ much experience or practical sense. So the danger was all the more for them –​and for men workin’ wi’ ’em.’80 The accident book of the Lanarkshire coal-​and iron-​producer William Dixon showed a definite increase in the number of accidents involving inexperienced staff during the war. Miners, the management asserted, needed to use a little more v 211 v

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Men in reserve ‘foresight’ and to be better trained and supervised.81 Draughtsman Willie Dewar also recalled the problems of the inexperienced: Oh aye we had accidents . . . You had . . . people who were given a short training on working machines. Aye they weren’t fly enough for certain things. People going on to grinding machines and putting the job [the piece of metal, component, bolt or piston being worked upon on the grinding machine] against the grinding machine the wrong way and the stone breaking and the thing came back. Some were hit in the face, some were killed, some fell down pits you know.82

Age and disability could also increase risks. Fred Clark, a wood machinist in an aircraft factory recalled: Christ, we had accidents every day. We had one on my job. They couldn’t afford to waste another senior bloke on me, so they used to bring in, well, they brought in an old man for me. Well, he was bloody useless! He wasn’t strong enough, for a start. Inexperienced people were the ones doing it. But then, what could you do? You couldn’t get anybody else. Or, if you could, you weren’t allowed.83

This particular older man had his fingers sliced off in an accident at work, having failed to follow instructions. Clark commented: ‘I suppose he wanted to appear good, he was getting on in years, course he was a bit slow, as well. And of course, that was the end of him. Never seen him no more.’84 Similarly, Willie Dewar remembered an older foreman who was killed when he had an asthma attack as he climbed a ladder to attend a fire at the top of a crane. Dewar went on to recall accidents he experienced himself, including one from ‘larking around’, acting the ‘big man’ and trying to follow another worker vaulting over sharp metal plates prepared for assembling: ‘There was never a time when there wasn’t somebody hurt somewhere or other.’85 In these anecdotes of personal damage and of fellow workers being injured, reserved men were indicating their value as experienced men who shrewdly appreciated the danger points at work as well as recognising their status as ‘real men’ in being able to withstand the risks and hazards they faced every day. Workers were caught between an intensified productionist wartime managerial (and national) culture and a macho work milieu policed by peer pressure that revered high earnings and ‘hard men’. This could lead to protective clothing and devices such as helmets, goggles, masks and safety harnesses being ignored if they were incompatible with production, earnings and maintaining a masculine image. v 212 v

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‘There was no health and safety’: risk and male work cultures in wartime Despite official, corporate and trade union efforts to safeguard bodies and promote workplace health and well-​being in wartime there were a wide range of countervailing pressures and circumstances that militated against health and safety. These included the production imperative; management resistance; unavoidable external dangers, including the blackout and bombing; and a wartime workplace culture that encouraged workers to go faster, earn more, and ignore safety precautions and accept more risk. This built on a pre-​war, working-​class, masculine work ethic that revered the big earner and the ‘hard man’. For example, Nick Hayes asserts that men in the building trade between 1918 and the 1970s had a particularly defined macho work site culture that stressed self-​reliance, toughness, endurance and physicality. Moreover, they prioritised the wage packet over safety and any improvements in welfare, such as canteens and toilets, on which they were often ambivalent.86 A prevailing theme in reserved workers’ personal accounts was that health and safety was irrelevant, and welfare amenities unimportant to real men fighting the war on the home front. Wartime shipyard worker Charles Lamb reflected: ‘safety first itself was non-​existent.’87 There was much tacit ignoring and subversion of health-​and-​safety rules and regulations during the war. Fred Millican, who was a reserved worker in Vickers arms factory in Newcastle, recalled:  ‘health and safety regulations, I would say were, if they existed we didn’t know about them’.88 In these stories reserved men were reflecting a dominant, high-​risk, male workplace culture, attempting to reassert their masculinity to be like combatants and perhaps to some extent compensating for any sense of emasculation felt through not being in uniform. Male workers across a whole swathe of the heavy industries, including mining, shipbuilding, and iron and steel, as well as agriculture and construction, were socialised into high levels of risk and danger, and it became even more acceptable in wartime to mirror the risks taken by those in the armed forces. Hyde Park Railway Works apprentice Harry McGregor recalled that this was a taken-​for-​granted part of wartime working life: ‘There were quite a few accidents. You know people got killed in there. And that was it.’ He returned to this later, repeating ‘You never thought anything about that really. Just worked away and that was it.’89 Our interviewees frequently made reference to the dangerous nature of the work they did in wartime and the lack of safety provision. These v 213 v

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Men in reserve danger-​and-​sacrifice narratives almost all included anecdotes about particular injuries sustained by themselves or colleagues. Alfred Thomas was transferred to Scotland to work in iron forging, where he sustained a serious burn to the face. He recounted his story of hospitalisation and treatment, followed by an emasculating transfer to different work, where his face would not be affected by the heat, in which ‘women were working mostly’. His narrative, like many others, referred to a different world where, in his memory, there were few or no safety measures in the workplace compared to the present day, where health and safety has, as he put it, ‘gone overboard’. He equated the present-​day situation with being ‘childish’, thereby affirming his own manliness in these dangerous work spaces.90 Referring to building locomotives, Glasgow draughtsman Willie Dewar stated: ‘It spits back at you, it throws oil at you, it will burn you and it will also kill you’,91 and yet workers appear to have rarely worn protective goggles. ‘We should have. We never thought about it’, he noted. Later in the interview he alluded to how the workers would ignore protective gear such as helmets, gloves or goggles to avoid risking slurs against their manliness from workmates: ‘Oh he’s a “jessie”, you know. A “jessie” was, well, like a woman, you know . . . The majority of them [workers] that was sort of child’s play to wear gloves, “oh no”, or wear glasses. “No, no”, but nowadays you’re forced to do that.’92 Dewar added weight to his assertion that fellow workers did not protect themselves and that safety rules could be ignored with another anecdote: People who worked in the Joinery Department sawing the wood, most of them had pieces of their fingers off because they used their hands. And one of the girl, lady inspectors came in and one of the guillotines we had, there wasn’t a guard on it and she insisted that a guard was put on it. So I got the job of making a guard . . . So I got a, made a sort of wire mesh type of thing. The man could hold it up, put it up, hook it while he was measuring for where he’s going to cut then as soon as he started the machine bring this down. And that was the idea. So I went, put it up. Well, after about a month I went down to see what was happening and it was tied up. He wasn’t using it because it was taking time, whereas nowadays the machine won’t operate unless the guard’s down.93

When Americans appeared in some shipyards later in the war they were pilloried for wearing hard helmets, heavy safety boots and gloves by hardened Clydeside workers. Shipyard worker Thomas Stewart recalled: ‘you would scoff at them working with gloves . . . daft!’94 Peer pressure was significant here in a tough work culture that sneered at any refusal to v 214 v

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness take what were considered to be acceptable and normal risks on the job. Young men might also do daring acts to prove their manly credentials on the job. A  Clyde shipbuilder John Allan recalled how some of the younger yard workers would climb up and over the ship’s hull in a display of bravado. On one occasion one of these young men froze and Allan had to go up and rescue him.95 Other workers, especially the older, more experienced ones, looked after themselves. Long before hard hats and ear defenders, workers improvised to protect themselves, using cotton wool in the ears or fashioning ‘muzzles’ around the mouth out of muslin, hankies or old clothes. For some miners women’s underwear, including nylon stockings and brassieres, were recycled as respirators. These men clearly put practical protection first and felt secure enough in their masculinities that they worried little about preserving their manly image.96 In the most dangerous reserved occupations working men’s bodies bore the scars of their work, and this too could be revered and a source of pride and identification as the embodiment of tough masculinity. Miners’ bodies could be riddled with blue scars from injuries and cuts impregnated with coal-​dust, while others could point to their X-​ray medical panel assessments showing varying levels of respiratory incapacity, evident to fellow workers in their breathlessness when they had to walk up an incline underground, or a hill or slope on the surface. Some men showed their wounds to the interviewer with evident pride. Identifying one scar, Ewart Rayner was quick to indicate: ‘That didn’t hurt, they just put three stitches in.’97 Wartime Clyde shipbuilding worker John Allan commented: ‘I’ve got marks on my body from working in the shipyard.’98 His narrative focused on the dangers of the job, the toughness required and the lack of any significant safety provision: ‘And you had no safety. They didn’t supply you with gloves. They didn’t supply goggles. They didn’t supply you with helmets. Nothing.’ Allan described in great detail the hazards of shipbuilding work in wartime, including an evocative account of working at heights and on staging and metal beams across the ship without safety harnesses. He recalled how inured workers were to these dangers: ‘There was a lot of things that happened in the shipyards but the men who worked in the shipyards didn’t call it unusual. They knew what happened, they knew the hazards were just part of the job. They knew the dangers. It would have frightened the life out of some people.’99 In expressing how this was ‘just part of the job’ Allan was referring to a power dynamic that was almost taken for granted: that management expected the men to accept a certain level of risk and bodily damage as a trade-​off against high wages. This production imperative co-​existed v 215 v

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Men in reserve with a work-​health culture in which risk-​taking was normalised and where it was assumed that men should naturally do the most dangerous work, as with the killing in the armed forces.100 Men adapted to danger using their own accrued knowledge, intuition and experience to minimise the chances of bodily injury. In response to the question ‘Was your work ever dangerous?’, railwayman Jim Lister commented: ‘Aye but like everything else, you were taught well. You had to watch.’101 In the wartime workplace, however, these risks were inevitably heightened. When asked if he appreciated the greater risks being taken, docker William McNaul replied: ‘Well I was doing my bit for the war effort. That’s what we were doing ’cos I  mean all sorts of things cropped up. [Pause.] So that’s all it was, it were, you either do that or else you go into the clink!’102 Significantly, he referred here both to the moral pressure of wartime, ‘doing my bit’, and to the prevailing punitive sanction of going to prison. There were imprisonments under the Essential Work Order and defence regulations, including for absenteeism.103 Such punitive action was relatively rare for land-​based workers; seamen, on the other hand, appear to have been much more systematically disciplined. Tony Lane has calculated that some 2,912 merchant seamen were convicted in magistrates’ courts after cases were filtered through local tribunals between 1940 and 1945, most for absences without leave.104 In a sense this mirrored the military court martial for desertion in imposing some discipline upon recalcitrant workers. That coercion was hardly ever necessary for male reserved industrial workers is an indication, perhaps, of how far such workers were committed to maximising output for the war effort and of the extent to which reserved men embraced and internalised heightened exertion, risk and danger as part and parcel of their expected manly roles in wartime. The youthful profile in 1939–​45 of our interviewees, who were then all aged under twenty-​eight, may have exaggerated this heroic representation of dangerous work in wartime. Occasionally narrators were aware when being interviewed later in life that their wartime selves were less careful about their bodies, less fearful, more daring and macho. How this was represented in oral narratives is revealing of masculine identities. Merchant seaman Leonard Fifield, aged eighteen at the onset of the war, recalled in an interview with the Imperial War Museum: No one knew what to expect. Our bosun, he’s been in the first war, he told us some pretty hoary stories of what it was like. He’d been in the Navy. Irish bosun in the British Navy believe it or not. And he told us all stories that

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness day of what was going to happen but I don’t think at that age we took it in too deeply.105

In response to the question ‘Did the losses in the convoy prey on your mind?’, he responded: ‘No, too young I think too young. You only want to feed like mad and get as much sleep as possible [laughter]. I’m not pretending to be brave but that is, that was the attitude. But now I’d be shit scared to use a nautical expression. I  really couldn’t, but at eighteen you can.’106 Asked ‘Were you ever worried about the dangers of the U-​boats?’, Esme Adams recalled: ‘Well, you see that’s the point and I’m really ashamed to admit it but I was young and that never even crossed my mind. I never even gave it a thought. It was just sheer stupidity on my part.’107 Similarly, Edward Ashill reflected on the risks of firefighting during wartime raids in Birmingham: Well I was a very young man at the time and it didn’t have a profound effect upon me. It became almost second nature going out night after night. Very often when you heard the bombs coming down, the characteristic screech of the bomb, a lot of the time you would tend to lie on the ground and flatten yourself out and on the other hand there were other times when it was happening so often you just stood there and chanced your luck.108

Significantly, he went on to comment that he was more anxious for his wife and children than he was for himself. Similarly, a Belfast firefighter James Hughes recalled the Blitz: ‘the bombs were dropping. But I never got feared. I never got frightened. I wasn’t scared whether I got killed or not, to be honest with you. The fear leaves you, so it does.’109 We see mixed emotions in these merchant seamen and firefighter narratives, ranging from indifference and admission of anxiety –​‘I’m not pretending to be brave’ –​to a heroic discourse where respondents are concerned to emphasise their masculine credentials as fearless workers making a vital contribution to the war effort by laying their bodies on the line. In these ‘front line’ occupations, a higher risk threshold was accepted as men’s contribution to the war effort:  their way of doing patriotic masculinity. The relaxation of statutory controls over health and safety during wartime contributed to the higher rates of injuries and deaths on the job. While factory welfare provision widened (notably medical and canteen facilities), Factory and Mines Acts were widely ignored during the war. The number of regulators and inspectors declined, and those remaining were burdened with other wartime duties, such as ARP, which diverted them from policing health-​and-​safety regulations. As a result, one medical v 217 v

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Men in reserve expert noted in a 1943 lecture on the ‘health of the factory worker in war-​ time’ that ‘the role of Factory Inspectors in recent years has tended to become more that of the welfare adviser to employer and employed, with sanctions well in the background’.110 In wartime Coventry, TGWU official Jack Jones tried to report breaches of the Factory Acts, but recalled that ‘inspectors weren’t easily available, there were too few of them and if they paid a visit the employer seemed always to know about it in advance’.111 In shipping, the ‘plimsoll line’ around the hull had been established from the 1880s as a safety measure to determine the safe depth a ship could run at when fully loaded with cargo. In wartime this was raised to enable more cargo to be transported. One wartime merchant seaman commented on the consequences of this and elaborated on the sense of fear during storms at sea: I have to say the first time you’re in a Force Ten gale in the North Atlantic you just wonder what the hell you were so stupid ever trying to get into it. It was absolutely frightening . . . I guarantee that anybody, particularly on oil tankers, ’cos they’re so low, we only had eighteen inches of freeboard between the deck and the sea level, you know, we were very, very low, and when you get into a Force Ten gale, it really is frightening. All the plates creak and groan, and some of the rivets come out, you know. It is quite stressful.112

Smith’s testimony does not conform to the dominant heroic war account, in that he repeatedly makes reference to his frightened emotional state. In land-​based workplaces the blackout made matters even worse. Safety training was affected by the blackout and neglected in the early phase of the war, as the emphasis was placed upon maximising production. Scottish Mines Inspectors identified this as a key problem in the surface processes during wartime, lamenting that over half of all coal-​mining accidents that occurred in this period were avoidable.113 In one case in 1944 a young trainee miner fell to his death down an unfenced shaft during the blackout.114 The docks were a particularly hazardous working environment during the blackout, as we saw at the start of this chapter. Tommy Morton, a Leith docker, recalled a colleague drowning and recounted his own experience: ‘Ah wis once caught in the blackout at night and it wis surprisin’ how hard it wis tae get oot. Ye ken, ye thought ye knew the place. There were that many things lying aboot, chains and things, ye could trip over.’115 Fatigue and exhaustion were also key factors in rising injury rates at work, as was a wider milieu of corporate and managerial complacency and irresponsibility. Occupational health expert H.  M. Vernon argued in v 218 v

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness 1945 that management failed to foster a strong safety culture, noting that just 20 per cent of firms with over 1,000 employees in 1945 and less than 1 per cent of smaller firms subscribed to the ‘national safety first movement’.116 Mass Observation recorded the prevalence of conservative and short-​sighted labour management, and the failures of a preventative approach during wartime, which it referred to as ‘backward industrial science’.117 It argued that overworking, long hours and the lack of job rotation that came with repetitive, boring work and poor levels of job satisfaction led to a sense of unhealthiness in self-​ assessments and that this was significantly more prevalent among men than women.118 After the war an official Government inquiry lamented the slow diffusion of the ‘human factor’ research findings of the inter-​ war years and the failure to influence State wartime labour policies.119 A profit-​oriented, productionist managerial culture was a key factor in high levels of workplace accidents, disease and related disability. What is evident is that working conditions and exposure of bodies to risk and stress in wartime varied significantly from industry to industry and region to region. Considerable differences in experience existed between ‘front line’ reserved occupations, like the Merchant Navy and firefighting, where danger and stress was on a par with the armed forces, and the coalmines, factories and shipyards, where wartime work intensity, bombing and the blackout raised levels of risk, although not to the same degree. Moreover, the modernised, light-​manufacturing, ‘sunrise’ industries, clustered more in London, the south-​east and the Midlands, were where working conditions were somewhat more benign, while the older more anachronistic and dangerous heavy industries were concentrated in places like Tyneside, Merseyside, Clydeside and south Wales. This was another facet of the north–​south divide in the country. Company welfare provisions were much less extensive in the older industrial sectors than the new, and Mass Observation noted in 1942 that this ‘welfarism’ was least evident in Scotland and south Wales.120 This was structural but also a product of prevailing workplace and managerial cultures. Thomas Ferguson, Professor of Public Health at the University of Glasgow and Medical Inspector of Factories (Glasgow), commented just after the war: ‘The traditional heavy industry of Scotland –​and especially of Clydeside –​is apt to be Spartan in its outlook: employers and work-​ people alike have been bred in a hard school. It would be idle to pretend that Clydeside is accustomed to regard industrial health as a high priority.’121 Engineering apprentice Roger Major reflected on the work conditions in an old heavy-​engineering factory he worked in early in the war: v 219 v

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Men in reserve Working conditions were terrible. There was no floor. It was just dust, there was no walls, if it were snowing or galeing and you happened to be working there, near the edge of the shed, you just got soaked. There was no heating, there was no facilities for washing your hands or anything. It was primitive.122

An effort to express his manly toughness and fortitude in being able to face up to the elements and work in such ‘primitive’ conditions is in evidence here. He added, moreover, that output and standards were maintained despite this because ‘they were excellent, skilled workers’. After two years Major moved, with evident relief, to what he described as a ‘modern factory’.

‘With no regard for . . . the welfare of the workmen’: unhealthy, dirty and toxic work Wartime also witnessed heavier exposure of reserved workers to a range of toxic materials and to work practices that increased rates of chronic occupation-​related diseases and poisoning. This ranged from relatively minor problems, such as dermatitis, to life-​threatening contact with chemicals, fumes, and carcinogenic dusts and oils. Short-​term sickness related to work, such as anaemia and nervous disorders, rose during wartime, as did long-​term illnesses, including TB. This was partly the consequence of workers crowding into factories, new personnel being introduced who were potential germ carriers, and the pressure during wartime to go into work even when feeling ill and thereby spreading germs.123 The passage of the Factories (Standards of Lighting) Regulations (1941) improved the quality of artificial light in wartime workplaces. Nevertheless, the official medical historian of the Second World War referred to the growth of what was termed ‘blackout anaemia’, caused by overwork in environments that were badly ventilated, artificially lit and had high temperatures, which had a ‘psychologically depressing effect’.124 Stress and what was termed ‘neurosis in industry’ were also much in evidence during wartime.125 A Professor of Surgery at Glasgow University noted in March 1945 the connection between the rising incidence of stomach ulcers and ‘the general state of nervous tension over the war situation’ and ‘the physical weariness resulting from the great increase of overtime work and civil defence duties at that time’.126 Illingworth was referring here to stress, or ‘neuroses’, which he connected to war work as well as to ‘the war situation’. Stress was evident within the military v 220 v

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness in wartime, and the subject of increasing investigation. There was also a growing recognition that stress was significant within the reserved occupations, and a special investigation into ‘neuroses in industry’ was established by the Government research body the Industrial Health Research Board in 1944. It reported in 1947 that its investigation of 3,000 workers in thirteen engineering factories had found that 8 per cent of workers had a form of disabling neurosis and 16 per cent minor forms, with a quarter to a third of all illness-​related absence caused by this.127 In accounting for it, research in the 1940s regarding stress in the armed forces and the workplace focused on individual characteristics, not socio-​ environmental factors.128 While the war was a catalyst for stress studies, the focus of medical research remained the armed forces, as the work of Mark Jackson and Nicholas Rasmussen has shown, where work on steroids and amphetamines to treat combat-​and flying-​stress and improve performance developed significantly during the war years.129 This was aided by military sponsorship and by US and British cooperation in knowledge-​sharing on medical research, including on stress and ‘neuroses’, as Stephen Casper’s work has shown.130 Where there was sustained interest in stress-​related illness on the home front it related to aerial bombardment, the civilian equivalent of shell-​shock. In Britain, however, a study commissioned by the Medical Research Council and conducted by eminent psychiatrist Aubrey Lewis in August 1942 argued that other factors, including domestic and work-​related stresses, contributed to much more widespread levels of wartime mental illness than were at the time acknowledged.131 Nevertheless, Lewis stressed the fortitude and resilience of the British under bombardment, something that was criticised by US psychiatrists as wartime propaganda.132 Clearly, there was a reluctance on the part of the British State and within industry to acknowledge the levels of stress caused by long working hours and compulsory overtime. Maintaining morale was a major preoccupation of a nation at war. In 1944 one of Britain’s foremost occupational health experts admitted that medical research had neglected stress at work and that in wartime ‘some of the reports have not been published for security reasons’.133 As Vicky Long has shown, the TUC were also slow to acknowledge mental health issues associated with work, and retained a focus on physical health and safety up to and through the Second World War.134 Mental health problems were stigmatised. Stress was widely considered within working-​class culture to be something that ‘real men’ did not experience and hence is rarely admitted in autobiographical accounts or articulated in oral testimonies. Willie Dewar commented: ‘You never thought v 221 v

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Men in reserve about stress then. You just carried on.’135 Wartime aircraft-​factory wood-​ machinist Fred Clark is one of the rare examples who did acknowledge stress. He recalled: ‘people started to collapse. I collapsed meself. 1941. Ulcerated throat and tonsils. Which the doctor said was the first sign of a nervous breakdown. It was the hours we was putting in.’136 This narrative denotes physical weakness and diverges from the dominant stories of heroic sacrifice. ‘Nervous breakdown’ is a feminising phrase. Just as some soldiers were broken by the conditions of battle, similarly some working men were damaged by the wartime conditions of the factory, shipyard or mine. Contact with chemicals and the inhalation of gases, fumes and insidious dust also increased during wartime, exacerbated by the blackout. Dermatitis cases multiplied as workers became exposed to various skin irritants.137 Deaths from gassing at work increased by 70 per cent during wartime and injuries from this cause rose threefold, including a sharp rise in carbon monoxide poisoning. Most cases were in munitions, chemicals, explosive-​manufacture and metallurgy. Reserved vehicle worker Arthur Exell recalled a bad case of poisoning in Morris Motors, where he got an acid spillage over his head that resulted in blindness for a time and four months in an eye hospital. His masculine credentials were emphasised in the way he constructed his story, stressing that the accident had come about from a change in work introduced ‘to save the women’, and how he coped: ‘I did not get any compensation, and went back to work as soon as it was possible.’138 Dockers and other transport workers also found themselves exposed to greater risks during wartime because of the materials they were handling and the pace they were working at. Tom Murray recalled how during 1941–​42 dockers at Leith were unloading dangerous chemicals for making explosives without any protective clothing whatsoever. It was only after a threat of a strike, and Murray’s intervention as a Leith Trades Council activist, that the dockers were issued with protective gear and ARP equipment.139 The restriction of ventilation caused by wartime blackout was a particularly acute problem in the metal-​working foundries and iron and steel works, where work conditions in older plants were notoriously primitive and the dust disease silicosis was already rampant before the war.140 In his autobiography Scottish reserved iron worker Patrick McGeown recalled: The blackout not only kept the bright lights in but it kept the dust and the gas fumes in too. It had been thrown up in panicky haste and with no regard for ventilation, or the welfare of the workmen. Many times we worked in a

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness grey haze which was sometimes thick enough to blot out the furnace next to us. We were all in it, furnace men, pitmen, scrap men, crane men, and all the maintenance trades, and it ruined many a chest before it increasingly improved.141

Reserved workers were also exposed more systematically to asbestos during the war. This had been recognised as a toxic material to work with as far back as the 1890s in Britain, and statutory controls were introduced in 1931 when asbestosis was also designated an industrial disease for Workmen’s Compensation purposes. Because of its insulating properties and heavy use in munitions manufacture and shipbuilding and repairing, asbestos became a top-​priority wartime material. Manufacturing was, thus, stepped up, notably in the asbestos factories in north-​west England, including the asbestos multi-​national Turner and Newall.142 The main wartime exposure sites were the Clyde, Mersey and Tyne shipyards and the royal dockyards at Rosyth and Portsmouth. During the war some asbestos workers, including sprayers, were protected to a degree by law under the first Asbestos Regulations (1931). However, most of those reserved tradesmen, such as ships’ joiners, plumbers, electricians and boilermakers, who were employed ‘in the vicinity’ of asbestos insulation engineers, laggers and sprayers in the shipyards, were not protected at all. A reserved Clydeside asbestos lagger recalled working in the yards during the war where he used the most dangerous blue asbestos to insulate destroyers and sloops bound for the Atlantic convoys: We had sprayers there. They sprayed on the blue –​the blue was fireproofing –​and white asbestos. But you couldnae see the place for dust . . . If you went in to this place days and days after the sprayers had finished, and you’d see maybe a streak of sunlight coming through –​you’ve seen maybe years ago in the old picture houses when all the smoke went through –​well this was just fibres you saw. It never ever left.143

In some cases additional wage bonuses were conceded as recognition of the toxic nature of the product, as on the Clyde.144 This danger ­money was not uncommon in such circumstances. The shipbuilding companies continued, however, to frustrate attempts by the Government’s Medical Research Council to investigate work conditions, and refused to introduce medical examinations in wartime for shipyard workers exposed to asbestos on the grounds that this would ‘be likely to have a disturbing influence on the workpeople, and to aggravate labour difficulties’.145 Here we see the continuation and exacerbation of unhealthy work practices through the withholding of medical surveillance, ostensibly trumped by v 223 v

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Men in reserve the imperatives of wartime production. In the face of industry opposition the State failed to press the issue and adequately protect workers despite being aware of the hazards of asbestos use in lagging and what Donald Hunter, a prominent occupational health specialist, called in 1934 the ‘murderous’ nature of asbestos spraying.146 It was not until the very end of the war, in August 1945, that HM Chief Factory Inspector A. W. Garrett circularised the shipbuilding and repairing companies indicating: I am concerned by the considerable development during the war years in the use of asbestos, either alone or as a part of a mixture, in the Shipbuilding and Ship Repairing Industries mainly for the purpose of heat and sound insulation, and the accompanying increase in the number of workers exposed to risk of injury to health through asbestos . . . While asbestos dust may not have any apparent effects at first, experience shows that, particularly if the workers are exposed to the dust in substantial concentrations, serious results are apt to develop later. It is therefore important that, even if the work will only be temporary, all reasonably practicable steps should be taken to reduce the risk to a minimum.147

The timing of Garrett’s asbestos statement suggests that exposure risks were not advertised during wartime, which was perhaps to maintain morale. Some medical research papers showing risks and levels of diseased and poisoned bodies were delayed. For example, publications concerning new chemical hazards –​such as the effects of exposure to TNT, the chemical compound used widely in explosive shells –​were postponed until 1944.148 There was no statutory regulation protecting shipyard workers from the hazards of asbestos-​dust until the Shipbuilding Regulations of 1960. Other industries, including construction and furniture, also witnessed a rise in asbestos use during wartime, mostly unregulated. One Clydeside joiner noted how problems with the supply of plywood led to substitution with asbestos, including in the making of ‘utility furniture’: There was no such thing as protective clothing, masks or anything. So all through the war the main thing was we worked that asbestos by hand, with our hand-​saws and our files, planes, and what not . . . We cut all that stuff and used it extensively. Around about us and overhead and in a confined area. There would be a number of people working and they would be saturated, but we never thought anything of it . . . It was unavoidable that you breathed in the material.149

In stressing that there was no protection for the body this narrative reiterates the stoicism of men working in such conditions, where there was little or no health and safety provision and they were inhaling toxic dust into v 224 v

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness their bodies in the process. This was what manual workers were expected to do in their everyday work lives: ‘we never thought anything of it’. In wartime, moreover, the policy of suspension on medical grounds was relaxed to enable men to continue working, even though this increased exposure to injurious dust could exacerbate respiratory disability.150 While impossible to measure with any accuracy, such conditions contributed to the very high mortality rate among men from asbestos-​related diseases, including the cancer mesothelioma, in post-​war working-​class communities, especially port cities like Glasgow, Liverpool, Newcastle and Portsmouth. It was not only in shipbuilding and repairing that environmental conditions deteriorated for reserved workers during wartime. A rise in dust inhalation at work was common across the traditional heavy industries as a result of the ventilation restrictions caused by the blackout which, as we have seen, Patrick McGeown referred to in his autobiography, combined with increased mechanisation and longer hours. The first three years of the war resulted in a markedly worse work environment in coalmining, where increased mechanisation and the speed-​up of work led to greater quantities of dust being generated at the coalface, while the relaxation of the protective Mines Acts and reduction in inspections contributed to a high tolerance of toxic dust levels underground. The effects were evident in mining communities. South Wales miner Bert Coombes wrote movingly in 1944 of miners whose ‘chests have gone’: Most of them pass their nights sitting in a chair because they dare not lie down. They know they are dying, that their lungs are hardening into cement or being ripped into bits by coal dust. Their every word is an effort and every movement needs a struggle to complete . . . There is something uniform in all of them –​bright eyes, dry taut skin, and bodies which are only bones with a tight parchment covering.151

Tissue damage from dust inhalation was likely to affect health adversely in the future. Toxic dust inhalation in the heavy industries, including coalmining, left a long legacy of disability and premature death among reserved workers long after hostilities ceased. Pneumoconiosis rates peaked in coalmining in the later 1940s and the 1950s.152 Anxieties over the synergy between tuberculosis and pneumoconiosis led to mass sackings through fear that affected workers would spread infection among colleagues. The crisis of these breathless pneumoconiotic ‘lungers’ plagued the south Wales coalfield, where the problem peaked in the 1940s.153 The disease was incurable, so nothing much could be done for v 225 v

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Men in reserve the worst affected beyond palliative care. Reserved workers emphasised the dangers of war work in heroic struggle-​against-​the-​odds narratives and affirmed their masculinity in this story-​telling. Less was said about resistance to health-​threatening work regimes, or about wartime efforts to control these hazards and innovations in prevention, welfare, medicine and rehabilitation designed to protect and sustain the bodies of these men whose production was vital for the war effort. While both service and work forged masculinity during wartime, making men out of those who were willing to stand up to these challenges to their bodies, they were also capable of damaging bodies, of disabling and emasculating.154 However reserved workers’ identities were affected by wartime risks and damage to bodies, what is evident is that sharply rising female employment led to a cluster of welfare, hygiene and environmental changes that also benefited the health of male workers. These could be welcomed by the men, as this quotation of a Clydeside foreman shipwright illustrates: When women labour came in, there was an introduction of canteens, leisure rooms, improved toilets, and for the first time, lockable toilets. Hitherto, the toilets were a metal trough where the men sat in a line with no privacy, no toilet paper, no running water. There was no means of cleaning yourself. But, as I say, with the arrival of women things did begin to improve . . . They became pets. After all, they were the sisters or the daughters of work mates. They were respected. It was appreciated that they had a good improving influence in the shipyards, that when the girls got their rest room, we says, ‘Well can we not at least have toilets you can sit on properly?’. When the girls got the facilities for washing and so on, we said, ‘Well, at least can we not have a door on the toilet, and how about supplying some toilet paper?’ you know. So we learnt from them.155

This excerpt encapsulates both traditional chauvinism, with references to ‘girls’ and ‘pets’, and a recognition that the introduction of female labour opened some men’s eyes and helped to improve welfare standards across the board. Similarly, Durham railway worker Ron Spedding recollected that toilet facilities improved with the arrival of female workers as modern amenity blocks with flush toilets were constructed. Whereas ‘washing one’s hands was frowned upon and the facilities were primitive’, with men plunging a piece of red hot steel or iron into a tin or bucket of cold water, new wash basins with hot running water and soap were provided for female workers.156 Manchester machine-​tool operator Frank Harvey also recalled changes to basic facilities: v 226 v

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness There was an ambulance room there you know. The only time they ever expanded it and did it was when the females came in ’cos it wasn’t adequate then. It was all right for the men [laughter]! But it wasn’t adequate for the female staff. Even though there wasn’t a lot of them so they changed it all and rebuilt it and it was okay. Well you know everything was rather primitive them days.157

The implication here is that management expected men to put up with unhygienic conditions and that tough men could tolerate the ‘primitive’ environment they were inured to but that the new women dilutees could not be expected to. It was widely accepted that working men needed less protection from the State. Working hours were not regulated by statute for men, and when the Government’s ‘Rest Break’ scheme was first introduced to provide an antidote to fatigue and overstrain caused by blackout conditions it initially only applied to women.158 Deeply embedded patriarchal attitudes persisted. Men’s bodies could ‘take it’ while women were widely assumed to have different, physically weaker and more vulnerable bodies, requiring more welfare provision and protective State regulation. Just like the recalcitrant and transgressive soldiers that Newlands’s work examines,159 reserved workers were capable of subverting and mediating the wartime pressures to monitor, regulate and discipline their bodies, and did react to dangerous and toxic work environments. They were not just victims, but agents too. There were rank-​and-​file protests against the most blatant forms of exploitation –​such as the Leith dockers refusing to load asbestos –​and strike levels rose sharply in wartime despite their illegality, as we saw in Chapter 4. Trade union shop stewards and officials also continued to fight compensation battles through the war in the face of employers, managers and insurance companies determined to keep costs down.160 Moreover, one important achievement in wartime, as previously noted, was parity for the first time in financial compensation levels for injuries between lowest-​ranked soldiers and workers. In wartime, however, resistance by reserved workers to bodily exploitation was tempered by a sense of patriotic duty. And male manual workers, long acculturated to danger and poor working conditions, were more apt to accept this than were female workers.161 The Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) medical officer reported in 1944 that in one plant where there was exposure to toxic chemicals ‘many of the workers quietly left the shed, went around the back and had a quiet and private vomit several times a week and never volunteered the information or even made complaint’. He continued: ‘Many other instances in various trades could be given.’162 While higher levels of regulation, discipline, v 227 v

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Men in reserve danger and risk were not always as mutely accepted as this, they were widely tolerated as they offered reserved men ways to assert their masculinity in wartime ‘sacrifice’ and in their performance of patriotic duty. For younger reserved men this perhaps also provided an opportunity to rebuild and reconfigure an eroded sense of manhood associated with being denied the opportunity of ‘exalted’ combatant status.

‘We were targets’: war production and aerial bombardment Apart from the increased risk of injury, accidental death and chronic occupational diseases in wartime, reserved workers frequently also faced the threat of aerial bombardment during the war. Although relatively few workers were killed directly from bombing raids while at work, the risk was very real. Helen Jones notes that people died at their workplaces in aircraft works and other factories, at docks, on trains and in other workplaces, and in night and day raids, and that men were more likely to be killed than women.163 Engineering workers were killed at work during the Coventry Blitz, when twenty-​one factories took direct hits or were burnt down in the subsequent fire, and stories circulated about other deaths while at work during raids, including at Cardiff docks.164 Air raid warnings could fail, particularly later in the war when almost-​silent V-​2 rockets were deployed, and there were always some workers who did not seek shelter, including firemen and the police, where casualties were significant. Over 1,000 firemen were killed and some 7,000 seriously wounded in the Second World War.165 Bombing was, as we note in Chapter 6, a recurring motif in oral testimonies, and stories of bombardment risk might also be interpreted as another way reserved men reconstructed their masculinity discursively in their autobiographical and oral narratives. Aircraft factory worker George Dean recalled: When the first sirens went, right everybody stopped, all the machinery stopped, all the lights dropped, and they just ’ad little lights, leading you down the alley, all got together, you know, got all the girls out, like. I was inclined to chase past them, you know, but you ’ad to take your time and go outside and then you ’ad to get in these shelters, until you ’eard the all clear, then you come out, and you started up again.166

In this performance of chivalrous masculinity, Dean somewhat reluctantly followed procedure, reining in his anxiety and natural ‘flight’ instinct to ensure they ‘got all the girls out’. v 228 v

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness Helen Jones argues that many workers chose to continue to work during raids: ‘choosing to run life-​and-​death risks at work for no financial gain’ was one of the ‘most extraordinary aspects of wartime life’.167 Initially it was official Government policy, reiterated at the highest levels, that workers should seek shelter and protect themselves from possible injury through bombing raids. In the early months of the war, air raid sirens went off frequently and for long periods. As experience accrued, factories were relocated from towns and cities to the countryside, and rooftop spotters were introduced in 1940 to minimise the time spent away from work in shelters. Concerns over aircraft production led the Government to encourage working during raids, with Churchill using the phrase ‘front-​line civilian’ to valorise such behaviour through what Jones has called ‘positive labelling’.168 While responses were varied, increasingly workers ignored sirens and voluntarily opted to continue to work, relying upon the rooftop spotters for warning. Slough aircraft worker Fred Clark recalled being locked into the factory during raids and being terrified: ‘We dreaded it, really. Because we were inside, but we were a sitting target!’169 Usually working beyond the siren was voluntary, as Jones has shown.170 When asked what happened when the sirens went, Manchester machine-​tool operator Frank Harvey recalled: ‘you always stayed where you worked’.171 Jack Jones, a TGWU official, protested to management to no avail when working beyond the siren was introduced at Humber–​ Hillman car factory in Coventry in November 1940.172 In some places workers took shelter while the rooftop fire watchers stayed on duty. Eddie Menday recalled a story of his father nonchalantly kicking incendiary bombs off his factory roof and complaining of his scuffed shoes the next day.173 Another of our interviewees, marine engineer George Hackland, recalled the dangers of his role as a rooftop spotter, qualifying the notion that being reserved meant a protected and ‘safe job’.174 Ewart Rayner remembered taking shelter during a raid in which the factory was hit and the fire watcher killed, despite his being inside a specially constructed protective steel dome.175 Roger Major reflected on the poor state of the shelters in his works and weighed up his chances, concluding: ‘I mean, you’re better off in the factory, you’ve got a sporting chance [laughter]!’176 His criticism led directly to the construction of new shelters on the company sports ground. Railway workers also found themselves at increased risk of enemy fire. Jim Lister recalled one incident when a driver and his fireman were killed when a carriage full of ammunition blew up.177 Others remembered their feelings of dread of the V-​1 rockets and virtually silent V-​2 flying bombs, which posed a particular threat to factory v 229 v

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Men in reserve workers in London and the south-​east because of their limited range. ‘We almost ignored them in the finish’, aircraft factory worker Norman Cooke recalled, ‘you weren’t bothered’.178 London factory worker Eddie Menday recalled loss of life in the Vickers plant that was bombed179 and remembered the dangers associated with the rockets: I suppose one of the nastiest things, really, was towards the end of the war when the V-​2 dropped on Packard’s Company. It was one morning, I think it was timed about half nine . . . Suddenly, hearing this almighty bang. Explosion. I was working a milling machine . . . and so it was with everybody in the whole factory. They all dropped to the floor. It was uncanny in many ways. And the alarm went that there was danger, but of course, not us! We all rushed out to see what it was and there was the debris, coming down then, from Packard’s, in quite a state. And the fire starting. And somebody said:  ‘Look! That’s all going to come down on us in a moment’, so we all dashed back in again and sort of thought, oh, well . . . So a sort of a sigh of relief and a thought: ‘Good job’. A puff of wind or whatever, and it could have easily been on us. Easily.180

The persistent focus on air raids in oral testimonies represents a desire to draw upon well-​worn tropes of wartime, something we return to in Chapter 6. This was common in women’s and children’s testimonies too, and signifies perhaps a natural preoccupation with the exciting and dangerous aspects of war.181 However, as with the heightened risk of work-​ related accidents, injuries, breakdown, stress and disease, these evocative narratives of bomb damage, ‘near misses’, and the risk to life and limb of aerial bombing also served to reconstruct discursively masculinities that may have been threatened by reserved men’s lesser status as non-​ combatants. Civilian workers are reminding us in oral testimonies and autobiographies that risk was ever-​present, that they also faced extreme dangers and they stood up to these manfully. It is evident that reserved workers made sacrifices in wartime in a not so different way from those in the armed forces.

Conclusion The war was felt and experienced through the bodies of reserved working men in diverse and complex ways. Occupational medicine, welfare and rehabilitation were all expanded during hostilities. Concurrently, the pressures of war production led directly to a rise in occupational injuries, disabilities and disease. In this context, there were threats to embodied v 230 v

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness masculinity as well as opportunities to rebuild it. Reserved men’s bodies were subject to an unprecedented level of medical surveillance, monitoring, regulation and control by the State that could jeopardise masculinity. New technologies and ways of doing work, including flow production, new machine tools, mechanisation, Taylorism and motion study threatened to deskill, disrupt and diminish autonomy and independence through moulding bodies to the pace of the track or the imperatives of wartime output maximisation. While there were significant improvements in occupational health and safety in large factories and sectors like munitions, aircraft and vehicles, change was slower in smaller workplaces and the older, heavy industries like mining and shipbuilding. Government-​driven regulation and reforms tended to promote efficiency and address safety and welfare issues, with far less concern about chronic illness and long-​term damage to workers’ health. Undoubtedly wartime experience on the home front edged some reserved workers towards becoming ‘docile bodies’ and this posed a threat to male identities constructed around notions of independence, discretion, skill and autonomy in the labour process. Concurrently, however, full employment and the sustained long working hours of wartime enabled muscles to be honed and labouring bodies to be reconstructed after the ravages of the Depression. Moreover, an alternative site of masculinity could be drawn upon in narratives about the heightened hazards and exhausting nature of wartime work regimes. Workers’ personal testimonies indicate they were not just victims but also active agents in these processes. The exposure of bodies to increased risks, life-​threatening danger, overwork breakdowns and disabling occupational diseases in wartime enabled reserved men to shore up and reconstruct their sense of manliness and enact patriotic masculinity. Notes 1 Ian MacDougall (ed.), Voices of Leith Dockers (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2001), pp. 76–​7. 2 A. W. Garrett, cited in Clyde Shipbuilders’ Association, minutes, August 1945, Mitchell Library Archives, Glasgow. 3 Corinna Peniston-​Bird, ‘Classifying the Body in the Second World War: British Men in and out of Uniform’, Body & Society, 9 (2003), 31–​48 (p. 44). 4 A. M. Stewart, J. W. Webb and D. Hewitt, ‘Social Medicine Studies Based on Civilian Medical Board Records: I. National Service Rejects’, British Journal of Preventative Medicine, 9 (1955), 19–​25 (p. 19).

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Men in reserve 5 Emma Newlands, Civilians into Soldiers:  War, the Body and British Army Recruits, 1939–​1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). 6 Christina Baade, Victory through Harmony: The BBC and Popular Music in World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 61. 7 R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). 8 George Mosse, The Image of Man:  The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Carol Wolkowitz, Bodies at Work (London: Sage, 2006). 9 Walter Greenwood, How the Other Man Lives (London: Labour Book Service, 1939), p. 32. 10 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937), p. 21. 11 Mosse, The Image of Man, p.  24. See also Ina Zweiniger-​ Bargielowska, Managing the Body: Beauty, Health, and Fitness in Britain 1880–​1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 12 Nick Hayes, ‘Did Manual Workers Want Industrial Welfare? Canteens, Latrines and Masculinity on British Building Sites 1918–​1970’, Journal of Social History, 35:3 (2002), 637–​58 (p.  647). See also Ronnie Johnston and Arthur McIvor, ‘Dangerous Work, Hard Men and Broken Bodies: Masculinity in the Clydeside Heavy Industries, c. 1930–​1970s’, Labour History Review, 69:2 (2004), 135–​52. 13 Ministry of National Service, 1917–​1919, Report, Vol. I: Upon the Physical Examination of Men of Military Age by National Service Medical Boards (London: HMSO, 1919), p. 16. 14 Arthur McIvor, A History of Work in Britain, 1880–​1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 130–​45. 15 Department of Employment, British Labour Statistics:  Historical Abstract (London: HMSO, 1971), Table 200. 16 Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories, Cmd. 4657 (London: HMSO, 1933), pp. 13–​14, 49; Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories, Cmd. 5802 (London: HMSO, 1937), p. 13. 17 Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories (1933), p. 41. 18 Vicky Long, The Rise and Fall of the Healthy Factory: The Politics of Industrial Health in Britain, 1914–​60 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010). 19 Ronnie Johnston and Arthur McIvor, ‘Marginalising the Body at Work? Employers’ Occupational Health Strategies and Occupational Medicine in Scotland c. 1930–​1974’, Social History of Medicine, 21:1 (2008), 127–​44. 20 A9 (anon.), interviewed by Ronnie Johnston, 1 February 1999 (SOHC 016/​ A9). 21 Major J.  A. Crawford, ‘The Undersized Recruit’, Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps, 73:1 (1939), 1–​39 (pp. 2–​5). 22 Ministry of Labour and National Service, Instructions for the Guidance of Medical Boards under the National Service (Armed Forces) Acts,  rev. 1940, TNA, WO 32/​4726 (300678), p. 3.

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness 23 Bert Coombes, Those Clouded Hills (London:  Cobbett Publishing, 1944), p. 2. 24 Wolkowitz, Bodies at Work, pp. 106–​7. 25 Newlands, Civilians into Soldiers, pp. 185–​6. 26 Alice L. Hepler, ‘“And we want steel toes like the men”:  Gender and Occupational Health during World War II’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 72:4 (1998), 689–​ 713; H. A. Waldron, ‘Occupational Health during the Second World War: Hope Deferred or Hope Abandoned’, Medical History, 41 (1997), 197–​212; Ronnie Johnston and Arthur McIvor, ‘The War and the Body at Work: Occupational Health and Safety in Scottish Industry, 1939–​1945’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 24:2 (2005), 113–​36; Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives:  Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Nicola Graham, ‘Occupational Health and Safety in Wartime Clydeside, 1939–​45’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Strathclyde, 2015). 27 Sonya O.  Rose, ‘Temperate Heroes:  Concepts of Masculinity in Second World War Britain’, in Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagermann and John Tosh (eds.), Masculinities in Politics and War:  Gendering Modern History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 184–​6. 28 It Began on the Clyde (1946). 29 Arthur MacNalty and W. Franklin Mellor, Medical Services in War (London:  HMSO, 1968), p.  336; E. H. Capel, ‘Nutrition and the Industrial Worker’, British Journal of Industrial Medicine (BJIM), 1:1 (1944), 48–​53; Ina Zweiniger-​Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain:  Rationing, Controls, and Consumption, 1939–​1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 15. 30 Thomas McMurdo, interviewed by Ronnie Johnston, 11 July 2000 (SOHC 017/​C20). 31 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish:  The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1991). Here Foucault develops the idea that the State is capable of creating regimes where individuals self-​regulate and internalise control and discipline, becoming compliant and docile (as in modern prisons and the military). 32 Jack Jones, Union Man: An Autobiography (London: Collins, 1986), p. 114. 33 Stewart, Webb and Hewitt, ‘Social Medicine Studies’, p. 20. 34 Ministry of Labour and National Service, Instructions for the Guidance of Medical Boards. 35 J. P. Elias, ‘Medical Grading of the Industrial Worker’, British Journal of Industrial Medicine, 3:1 (1946), 11–​14. 36 Baade, Victory through Harmony, p. 61. 37 Ibid., pp. 63–​4. 38 H. M. Vernon, The Health and Efficiency of Munition Workers (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 123. 39 J. B. Priestley, Daylight on Saturday (London: Heinemann, 1943), p. 46.

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Men in reserve 40 Elspeth H. Brown, The Corporate Eye:  Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884–​ 1929 (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 41 Peggy Inman, Labour in the Munitions Industries (London:  HMSO, 1957), p. 430. 42 Ibid. 43 Anne G. Shaw, An Introduction to the Theory and Application of Motion Study (London:  HMSO, 1944), p.  36; Inman, Labour in the Munitions Industries, p. 430. 44 Jim Phillips, ‘British Dock Workers and the Second World War: The Limits of Social Change’, Scottish Labour History Society Journal, 30 (1995), 87–​103 (pp. 98–​9). 45 Arthur S. MacNalty (ed.), The Civilian Health and Medical Services, Vol. I (London: HMSO, 1953), p. 312. 46 Glasgow Herald, 27 September 1945, p. 6. 47 Derek Sims, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 20 February 2013 (SOHC 050/​12). 48 Long, Rise and Fall of the Healthy Factory, p. 23. 49 Coombes, Those Clouded Hills, p. 51. 50 Julie Anderson, War, Disability and Rehabilitation:  ‘Soul of a Nation’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 89–​92. 51 IWM photographs, D18881, ‘Coal Miners:  Everyday Life in a Midlands Colliery, England, UK, 1944’. 52 Henry Green, Caught (London: Hogarth Press, 1943). 53 Marjorie Levine-​ Clark, ‘The Politics of Preference:  Masculinity, Marital Status and Unemployment Relief in Post-​First World War Britain’, Cultural and Social History, 7:2 (2010), 233–​52. 54 Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996), pp. 65–​7. 55 Anderson, War, Disability and Rehabilitation, pp. 187–​9, 194–​5. 56 Newlands, Civilians into Soldiers, pp. 204–​8. See also Peter W.  J. Bartrip, Workmen’s Compensation in the Twentieth Century (Aldershot:  Avebury, 1987), pp. 178, 185–​98. 57 Senior servicemen, however, continued to receive higher pensions: a captain, for example, was awarded around 50 per cent more and a colonel around three times the pension of a class V private soldier. 58 Social Insurance, Part II: Workmen’s Compensation Proposals for an Industrial Injury Insurance Scheme, Cmd. 6551 (London: HMSO, 1944), p. 5. 59 Anderson, War, Disability and Rehabilitation, p. 95. 60 Steve Humphries and Pamela Gordon, Out of Sight: Experience of Disability, 1900–​50 (Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers, 1992), p. 132. 61 This issue emerges prominently in occupational health circles towards the end of the war, including the Scottish group of the Association of Industrial Medical Officers; BJIM, 2:2 (1945), 124; BJIM, 2:3 (1945), 181.

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness 62 Anne Borsay, Disability and Social Policy in Britain since 1750 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Arthur McIvor, Working Lives: Work in Britain since 1945 (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp.  27–​36; Anderson, War, Disability and Rehabilitation, 192–​7. 63 Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories, Cmd. 6316 (London: HMSO, 1940), p. 4. 64 Mass Observation, People in Production:  An Enquiry into British War Production (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942), p. 203. 65 See Tom Murray’s scathing critique of the unwillingness of the TGWU to protect dockers exposed to dangerous chemicals at Leith docks in 1941–​42, in Ian MacDougall (ed.), Voices from Work and Home (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2000), p. 287. 66 McIvor, History of Work, p. 132. 67 Waldron, ‘Occupational Health during the Second World War’, p.  205. See also H. M. Vernon, ‘Prevention of Accidents’, BJIM, 2:1 (1945), 1–​9 (p. 1). 68 One of Our Fighters Is Missing if You Are off Work with an Accident, IWM, PST 14324; ’Ware Hitler’s Greatest Ally: Herr Septicaemia, IWM, PST 14196. 69 Isa Henderson, interviewed by Patricia Williams, August 1998 (SOHC 015/​ 03), cited in Patricia Williams, ‘Women Workers in Munitions Factories during the Second World War’ (unpublished honours dissertation, Strathclyde University, 1999), p. 62. 70 Stewart, Webb and Hewitt, ‘Social Medicine Studies’, p. 35. 71 Edward Ashill, interview, 9 October 1990 (IWM SA, 11580). 72 Ministry of Fuel and Power, Report of HM Inspectors of Mines, 1939–​46 (London: HMSO, 1948), pp. 6, 29. 73 National Union of Scottish Mine Workers, minutes of Executive and Organisation Committees (Annual Conference), 17–​19 April 1941, p. 7. 74 Scottish Trade Union Congress, Annual Report, 1943, GB1847 STUC, Glasgow Caledonian University Archives, p. 80. 75 Tom Myles, interviewed by Wendy Ugolini, 6 November 2008 (SOHC 050/​ 02). 76 Coombes, Those Clouded Hills, pp. 44–​57. 77 Ibid., p. 54. 78 MacNalty and Mellor, Medical Services in War, p. 354; Peter Howlett, Fighting with Figures: A Statistical Digest of the Second World War (London: HMSO, 1995), p. 43. 79 Donald Wray McHutchon, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 11 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​33). 80 Bobby Rodger, in MacDougall, Voices of Leith Dockers, p. 77. 81 Govan Iron Works, Accident Prevention/​Safety Committee minutes, 25 July 1941, Glasgow University Business Archives, UGD 1/​27/​1, p. 77. 82 Willie Dewar, interviewed by Arthur McIvor, 9 December 2008 (SOHC 050/​ 04).

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Men in reserve 83 Fred Clark, http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php (accessed 15 November 2014). 84 Ibid. 85 Dewar interview, 9 December 2008. 86 Hayes, ‘Did Manual Workers Want Industrial Welfare?’, p. 644. 87 Charles Lamb, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 3 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​27). 88 Fred Millican, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 26 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​20). 89 Harry McGregor, interviewed by Arthur McIvor, 13 July 2009 (SOHC 050/​ 05). 90 Alfred Thomas, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 3 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​45). 91 Dewar interview, 9 December 2008. 92 Ibid. Pilots were also known to refuse to wear goggles in the stifling temperatures reached in the cockpit, and on occasion sustained horrific burns as a consequence. Martin Francis, The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force 1939–​1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 138. 93 Ibid. 94 Interview with Thomas Stewart, 10 June 1996, 2000 Glasgow Lives Project, Glasgow Museums Resource Centre. 95 John Allan, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 7 November 2011 (SOHC 050/​09). 96 Johnston and McIvor, ‘Dangerous Work, Hard Men and Broken Bodies’, p. 143. 97 Ewart Rayner, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 22 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​18). 98 Allan interview, 7 November 2011. 99 Ibid. 100 David Walker, ‘“Danger was something you were brought up wi’ ”: Workers’ Narratives on Occupational Health and Safety in the Workplace’, Scottish Labour History, 46 (2011), 54–​70. 101 Jim Lister, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 19 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​38). 102 William McNaul, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 27 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 22). 103 Richard Croucher, Engineers at War (London:  Merlin Press, 1982), pp. 267–​8. 104 Tony Lane, ‘The “People’s War” at Sea: Class Bureaucracy, Work Discipline and British Merchant Seamen, 1939–​1945’, Scottish Labour History Society Journal, 30 (1995), 61–​86 (pp. 66–​70). 105 Leonard William James Fifield, interview, 8 June 1994 (IWM SA, 14147). 106 Ibid. 107 Esme Adams, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 2 November 2011 (SOHC 050/​ 08). 108 Edward Ashill, interview, 9 October 1990 (IWM SA, 11580). 109 James Hughes, http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php (accessed 15 November 2014). 110 S. A. Henry, Milroy Lectures, December 1943, cited in BJIM, 1:2 (1944), 128.

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness 111 Jones, Union Man, p. 93. 112 Stephen Smith (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 19 February 2013 (SOHC 050/​11). 113 Scottish Mines Inspectors, Annual Report (London: HMSO, 1945), p. 57. 114 Ibid., p. 58. 115 Tommy Morton, in MacDougall, Voices of Leith Dockers, p. 110. 116 Vernon, ‘Prevention of Accidents’, pp. 9–​10. 117 Mass Observation, People in Production, pp. 126–​7. 118 Ibid., pp. 202–​3. 119 Committee of the Privy Council for Medical Research, Medical Research in War: Report of the Medical Research Council for the Years 1939–​45, 1947–​48, Cmd. 7335 (London: HMSO, 1947), p. 22. 120 Mass Observation, People in Production, p. 256. 121 Cited in BJIM, 5:1 (1948), 184. Ferguson had been Medical Superintendent of the Gleneagles mining rehabilitation hospital in wartime. 122 Roger Major (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 26 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​21). 123 Richard Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy (London:  HMSO, 1950), pp. 523, 527; Arthur McIvor, ‘Germs at Work: Establishing Tuberculosis as an Occupational Disease in Britain, c. 1900–​1951’, Social History of Medicine, 25:4 (2012), 812–​29. 124 MacNalty, The Civilian Health and Medical Services, p. 310. 125 See the Proceedings of the Association of Medical Officers, 1944 (Glasgow group), cited in BJIM, 1:4 (1944), 263. 126 Professor C. W. Illingworth, paper to the Glasgow Group of the Association of Industrial Medical Officers, cited in BJIM, 2:1 (1945), 181. 127 Russell A. Fraser, The Incidence of Neurosis among Factory Workers, Industrial Health Research Board Report, 90 (London: HMSO, 1947). 128 David Wainwright and Michael Calnan, Work Stress:  The Making of a Modern Epidemic (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002), pp. 39, 41. This supposed individual ‘susceptibility’ to stress was used as a premise to cut armed forces’ pensions in the post-​war period. 129 Mark Jackson, ‘Evaluating the Role of Hans Selye in the Modern History of Stress’, in David Cantor and Edmund Ramsden (eds.), Stress, Shock and Adaptation in the Twentieth Century (New  York:  University of Rochester Press, 2014), pp. 35–​7; Nicholas Rasmussen, ‘Medical Science and the Military: The Allies’ Use of Amphetamines during World War II’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 42:2 (2011), 205–​33. 130 Stephen T. Casper, ‘The Origins of the Anglo-​American Research Alliance and the Incidence of Civilian Neuroses in Second World War Britain’, Medical History, 52 (2008), 327–​46 (328–​9, 336–​7). There is anecdotal evidence of amphetamine (Benzedrine) use by key war workers, but we have so far not been able to substantiate this with any hard evidence.

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Men in reserve 131 Aubrey Lewis, ‘Incidence of Neurosis in England under War Conditions’, Lancet (15 August 1942), 175–​83. 132 Casper, ‘The Origins of the Anglo-​American Research Alliance’, pp. 343–​4. 133 R. S. F. Schilling, ‘Industrial Health Research: The Work of the Industrial Health Research Board, 1918–​44’, BJIM, 1:3 (1944), 145–​52 (150). 134 Long, The Rise and Fall of the Healthy Factory, p. 142. 135 Dewar interview, 9 December 2008. 136 Clark, http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php. 137 E. Collier, ‘Prevention and Control of Cutting-​Oil Dermatitis’, BJIM, 1:2 (1944), 110–​13 (pp. 110–​11). 138 Arthur Exell, The Politics of the Production Line:  Autobiography of an Oxford Car Worker (Southampton:  History Workshop Journal Pamphlet, 1981), p. 52. 139 Tom Murray, in MacDougall, Voices from Work and Home, pp. 286–​7. 140 Mark Bufton and Joe Melling, ‘Coming Up for Air’: Experts, Employers and Workers in Campaigns to Compensate Silicosis Sufferers in Britain, 1918–​ 1939’, Social History of Medicine, 18:1 (2005), 63–​86; Susan Morrison, The Silicosis Experience in Scotland (Saarbrucken: Lambert Publishing, 2010). 141 Patrick McGeown, Heat the Furnace Seven Times More (London: Hutchison, 1967), pp. 159–​60. 142 Geoff Tweedale, Magic Mineral to Killer Dust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 143 A14 (anon.), interviewed by Ronnie Johnston, 26 January 1999 (SOHC 016/​ A14). 144 Clyde Shipbuilders’ Association, minutes, 20 April 1943; 16 March 1944; 10 May 1944, Mitchell Library Archives, Glasgow. 145 Clyde Shipbuilders’ Association, minutes, 30 March 1944, 16 June 1944. 146 Geoff Tweedale, ‘Sprayed “Limpet” Asbestos’, in G. A. Peters and B. J. Peters, Sourcebook on Asbestos Diseases, Vol. XX (Charlottesville:  Lexis, 1999), p. 88. 147 Cited in Clyde Shipbuilders’ Association, minutes, August 1945, Mitchell Library Archives, Glasgow. 148 Editorial, ‘Factory Inspection and Medical Science’, BJIM, 2:1 (1945), 49. 149 A8 (anon.), interviewed by Ronnie Johnston, 19 January 1999 (SOHC 016/​ A8). For a wider discussion informed by oral testimony see Ronald Johnston and Arthur McIvor, Lethal Work (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000). 150 Geoff Tweedale and Philip Hansen, ‘Protecting the Workers: The Medical Board and the Asbestos Industry, 1930s–​1960s’, Medical History, 42 (1998), 439–​57 (pp. 449, 452). 151 Coombes, Those Clouded Hills, p. 56. 152 In 1958, 2 million workers were thought to be suffering from respiratory disability caused by inhaling dust at work. HC Deb., 30 July 1958, Vol. 592, 1531–​43.

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Bodies on the line: risk, health and manliness 153 McIvor and Johnston, Miners’ Lung, pp. 278–​89. 154 Angela Turner and Arthur McIvor, ‘The Will to Get Well:  Rehabilitation and Disabled Miners in Britain, 1930–​1950’, unpublished paper to the Social History Society conference, 18–​20 April 2014. 155 Made in Govan: An Oral History of Shipbuilding on the Upper Clyde, 1930–​ 1950 (Glasgow: Museum Education Service, 1991), p. 30. 156 Ron Spedding, Shildon Wagon Works:  A  Working Man’s Life (Durham: Durham County Library, 1988), p. 6. 157 Frank Harvey, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 27 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​23). 158 MacNalty, The Civilian Health and Medical Services, p. 342. Of the nine ‘Rest Break’ houses at the seaside or in the countryside set up under the Rest Break scheme, eight were designated for female workers. Chris Sladen, ‘Holidays at Home in the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 37:1 (2002), 67–​89 (p.  70). Scotland was somewhat exceptional in using the Emergency Medical Service hospitals from 1941 to treat exhausted male reserved men, including shipyard workers. 159 Newlands, Civilians into Soldiers. 160 Jones, Union Man, pp. 90–​1; Coombes, Those Clouded Hills, pp. 44–​57. 161 Croucher, Engineers at War, p. 262. 162 M. W. Goldblatt, ‘Investigation of Toxic Hazards’, BJIM, 1:1 (1944), 20–​30 (p. 30). 163 Helen Jones, British Civilians in the Front Line: Air Raids, Productivity and Wartime Culture, 1939–​1945 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 59–​60. 164 Croucher, Engineers at War, pp. 108, 111. 165 Neil Wallington, Out of the Flames: The Story of the Fire Services National Benevolent Fund 1943–​ 2003 (Littlehampton:  Fire Services National Benevolent Fund, 2003), p. 13. 166 George Dean, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 28 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​25). 167 Jones, British Civilians in the Front Line, p. 197. 168 Ibid. 169 Clark, http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php. 170 Jones, British Civilians in the Front Line, pp. 195–​6. 171 Harvey interview, 27 March 2013. 172 Jones, Union Man, p. 99. 173 Eddie Menday, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 15 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​50). 174 George Hackland, interviewed by Wendy Ugolini, 24 July 2009 (SOHC 050/​ 06). 175 Rayner interview, 22 March 2013. 176 Major interview, 26 March 2013. 177 Lister interview, 19 April 2013. 178 Norman ‘Jack’ Cooke, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 8 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 46).

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Men in reserve 179 Menday interview, 15 May 2013. 180 Eddie  Menday,  http://​ w ww.unionhistory.info/​ workerswar/ ​ voices.php (accessed 15 November 2014). 181 Colin Perry, Boy in the Blitz: The 1940 Diary of Colin Perry (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000), pp. 57–​9.

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Outside the factory gates: reserved life on the home front

During the Second World War John Dickson worked as an apprentice marine engine fitter at John Brown’s shipyard in Clydebank. The slump of the inter-​war years, when hundreds of men were laid off, was followed by a boom, as the shipyard was revitalised during the period of rearmament that took place from 1935 onwards in response to the growing international crisis. The yard built and repaired ships, a service that was vital to the war effort. For Dickson, however, the war felt very far away: I enjoyed playing tennis, football. Yes, I mean, apart from the Blitz, and food rationing and clothes rationing, Clydebank was rather unaffected. Until the Blitz, you know. Okay, there was a war on. But it’s not affecting me. And John Brown’s was making battleships and Singers [sewing machine factory in Clydebank] are doing this [manufacturing weapons]. But the war was somewhere else.1

Until the night of 13/​14 March 1941, when it sustained a heavy air raid resulting in the deaths of 528 people and the destruction of thousands of homes, Clydebank had gone largely unscathed. The war was, as Dickson asserts, elsewhere. Unlike their contemporaries, who often fought and died across the globe, many reserved men were not at the heart of the war.2 Consequently, the war impacted upon reserved men in different ways than it did their friends and brothers serving in the military. Yet even for those on the home front the war intruded upon their lives: civilians were directed into work not always of their choosing; were denied opportunities to find better paid employment; were expected to work long hours, overtime and night shifts; and could be compelled to leave their communities to move to areas far removed from families and friends. Moreover, they could be separated from their loved ones who had been evacuated or were serving elsewhere; had to endure the tension v 241 v

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Men in reserve of waiting for news; were forced to withstand the strictures of rationing, the shortages of goods, reduced public transport, aerial bombing and the blackout; and were denied the opportunities of a seaside holiday, as beaches became out of bounds and scarred by barbed wire and pillboxes. Furthermore, the paternalism of the State curtailed many pre-​war enjoyments, including the temporary closure of cinemas and theatres and the short-​lived halting of professional sport in response to the declaration of war. While the war brought austerity and hardships, however, many continued to find enjoyment: dances were still held, cinema attendance figures soared and alcohol remained off ration (although spirits became harder to find and the price of beer, which was weaker, rose sharply, unrestrained by the Government, which derived a valuable source of revenue from its sale). A ‘pleasure boom’ was reported as being apparent.3 In 1941 there were record takings at the cinema and the highest profits ever for the tobacco, brewing and distilling industries.4 As noted in a 1942 Mass Observation report, ‘The more uncertain the future the more the value to be attached to present liberations and outlets, especially when people are working harder and having less time than ever before.’5 The State and its attendant bodies put great efforts into the maintenance of civilian morale: Home Secretary Herbert Morrison stated in early 1942 that ‘there must be, within reasonable limitation, recreation for the people’.6 The war even brought new entertainments, including Myra Hess’s lunchtime concerts in London’s National Gallery subsidised by the Council for Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), and workplace entertainments provided by the BBC and ENSA. ‘Popular entertainments’, noted Morrison in 1942, ‘act as a lubricant rather than a brake on the war machine’.7 Research undertaken on the leisure activities of working men and women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has revealed the popularity of music halls, public houses, dance halls, cinemas, gambling, smoking, spectator sports and holidaying in seaside resorts.8 Despite immense popular and academic historical attention to the Second World War, wartime leisure pursuits have remained under-​researched. There has been some work on official attempts to influence the general public, such as Robert Mackay’s study of wartime morale and Chris Sladen’s work on the ‘Holidays at Home’ scheme to provide overworked employees an opportunity to recharge their batteries.9 There has also been research undertaken on sport, in both the First and Second World Wars, and on cinema.10 There has, moreover, been some discussion of female leisured lives within broader studies of women’s wartime experiences that v 242 v

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Reserved life on the home front examine in passing the opportunities afforded by financial independence; freedom from parental constraints; increased mixing across class, gender and racial lines; and the presence of foreign servicemen.11 Our study provides an opportunity to explore wartime social lives on the home front, focusing specifically on civilian men. Although exactly half of our interviewees sought to join the armed forces, they were largely unsuccessful and spent the duration of the war in and around the streets in which they had grown up. As such they pose a challenge to the predominant understandings of wartime as a period of great mobility in which there were over 60 million changes of address.12 This chapter engages with competing constructions of leisure in wartime. While some wartime accounts perceived free time as a distraction from the more urgent duty of work, others saw it as a crucial morale-​booster, re-​energising workers before the next shift and rewarding them for their endeavours. Similarly, post-​ war accounts differ in their reconstruction of daily lives. Some men in their oral and written testimonies denied having leisure time altogether, some regarded free time as crucial to maintaining a sense of normality amidst uncertain times, while others constructed work hard/​play hard narratives. Through an examination of reserved men’s recollected social lives, this chapter explores the extent to which war impacted on those whose experiences do not fit with dominant understandings of the war.

‘I had work to do’: the disavowal of wartime leisure Writing in Picture Post in January 1941, J. B. Priestley noted that leisure was widely (and mistakenly in his opinion) regarded as a ‘stupefying, do-​nothing alternative to work’.13 Although he goes on to present an alternative way of understanding leisure, as we shall see, this commonly held perception of time away from work perhaps explains why leisure proved a difficult topic to get some interviewees to reflect upon. Many attempted to skirt the issue altogether, batting away questions regarding free time, insisting that they were too busy with their long working hours, voluntary civil defence activities and, for many, educational classes to accompany their apprenticeships. Alfred Thomas, a wartime Welsh steel worker, for example, declared ‘No, there was no time for hobbies. There was no facilities anyway. Oh no. Work. Work at the factory.’14 Similarly, Ewart Parkinson, who had been an apprentice town planner in Leicester during the war, reported ‘My week was busy . . . Before I was sixteen I had work to do every night. After I was sixteen there was work doing night school every night.’15 For some, this led to a feeling of isolation from the v 243 v

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Men in reserve general war experience. Douglas Gordon, who had worked as a wartime electrical engineer in Manchester, noted: I wasn’t terribly aware of very much. When you were working all the time and thinking about the matter in hand, by the end of the day you were ready for beddy-​byes. Indeed, I had no radio-​wireless and my real knowledge of what was going on was surprisingly little in hindsight.16

Given that the number of hours worked increased dramatically during the war, as we saw in Chapter 4, with some men working over sixty hours a week, such admissions are unsurprising. As John Scholey, wartime apprentice engineer in Leicester, noted, ‘we worked until, as I say, until half past seven. By the time we got home and had a wash and a brush up it was a bit late to go out.’17 The war robbed these young men of both their youth and their youthful pursuits. The cumulative effect of long shifts, overtime and night work for an extended period would have been exhausting. Men who had undertaken hard manual labour would have had little energy to participate in sport or go to the cinema in their precious time away from the workplace. A Mass Observation report on sport from December 1939 noted that frequent responses included ‘I have no time’, ‘I can’t get off my work’ and ‘too much work’.18 Of those interviewed, 43 per cent were busy on Saturday afternoons, undertaking work and civil defence duties. As the situation changed from ‘phoney’ to real war, the hours worked increased, leading to even less time for leisure. A 1941 report similarly stated that ‘pressure of work’ meant that there was ‘not enough time’ to attend spectator sports, with 76 per cent of respondents remarking that they went less than they had before the war.19 Likewise, opportunities to attend the cinema were curtailed. The letters to Picturegoer Weekly in 1940 showed that many workers complained they were missing the best films because of long working hours, combined with the blackout and poor Sunday listings.20 Railway worker William McNaul recalled ‘we worked a lot more . . . I had to work, hadn’t time to go to films.’21 In their autobiographies, male war workers also exhibited a reluctance to admit they had any leisure time during the war or enjoyed any hobbies or sports. Indeed, there are only a handful of references to what reserved men did in their time outside the workplace. Many of the memoirs make no mention of leisure activities during wartime at all, and are completely dominated by the landscape of work, industrial relations and labour politics. Others only fleetingly mention their wartime leisure hours. Arthur Exell admitted to being ‘crazy on dogs’ and to doing a bit v 244 v

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Reserved life on the home front of gambling on the races before the war, although he tempered this with a comment that there were ‘terrific discussions’ about politics ‘between the races’.22 He said nothing about such pleasures, however, during wartime, when his time away from work revolved around political activities with the Communist Party, reading political tracts and education classes to sharpen his knowledge of Marx. He recalled that during the war ‘my whole home life completely disappeared’.23 This speaks to the centrality of work in men’s lives in wartime and the importance of employment to constructions of breadwinner masculinity. The absence of references to leisure may also be partly attributable to the sorts of topics thought worthy of inclusion in memoirs focusing on working lives. There is also a significant discursive silence here; while the war certainly curtailed hours spent at leisure, arguably memoirs about free time clashed with the construction of a narrative of patriotic masculinity centred on graft and sacrifice for the war effort. War undoubtedly impacted on the time people had to enjoy pleasurable activities. In a Mass Observation study from March 1942 reporting the ‘chief things that people are doing less now’, half of the respondents noted that they were ‘spending less time on recreation’ and visiting cinemas, 70 per cent reported they were seeing less of their friends and a third stated ‘less frequent moments of happiness’. Conversely, the ‘chief things which people are doing more of since the war’ were working, staying at home, writing letters, reading newspapers and listening to the radio.24 Yet another report from the same month stated that 46 per cent of men polled listened less to music since the war had started, with one in five stating ‘much less’, while a July 1942 report concluded that men and women were reading less because of time constraints, although frequent air raids and ARP duty extended the opportunities to read.25 In April 1942, Mass Observation noted that ‘this is a war without Sundays, for every day is a work day’.26 Consequently, ‘one of the problems of war production is to disturb, temporarily, the traditional pattern of the British weekend . . . More and more factories are working complicated time systems unrelated to the work patterns of peacetime, on which pre-​war leisure pleasure was based.’27 The lure of double pay for working overtime on Sundays, however, was not sufficient to counteract this embedded habit of a ‘leisure-​concentrated weekend’, which sometimes resulted in high rates of Monday absenteeism. The ‘staggering of pleasure’ throughout the week, with Wednesday night visits to greyhound stadiums for example, might mitigate this, argued Mass Observation. Moreover, as the war itself was not static, neither was wartime leisure, and opportunities v 245 v

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Men in reserve for enjoyment were often necessarily curtailed by the exigencies of war. For example, the August bank holiday in 1940, at the height of the Battle of Britain when an invasion looked imminent, was officially cancelled; factories continued to be open and workers were not given the day off.28 While the paternalism of the British State in the early years of the war is widely remembered –​in particular the closing of cinemas and sporting venues  –​such actions did in fact continue throughout the war. Easter Monday 1942 was, for example, recognised by the Government as a bank holiday, and workers were entitled to a day off work. Nevertheless, all the large sporting meetings were cancelled as people were encouraged to ‘take a day of rest, not a day of frolic’, before returning with ‘renewed spirit’ to work the following day.29 While it was undoubtedly the case that longer working hours impacted on the amount of free time respondents had, as supported by Mass Observation evidence, this reticence among our interviewees to discuss their wartime leisure pursuits may also reflect their desire to highlight their hard work in wartime, lest they be accused of shirking. As noted in Chapter 4, many of our interviewees were keen to depict themselves as grafters and were at pains to highlight this as their contribution to the war effort. For them, patriotic masculinity was grounded in, and demonstrated by, their undertaking of physically tough work and long hours. None of our interviewees admitted to missing work, although absenteeism was prevalent, with men often citing ‘pleasure’ as their reason.30 Yet many of those interviewed were conflicted between emphasising, on the one hand, their youthful enjoyments and, on the other, their hard work. Timothy Brown, who worked in munitions in Newcastle during the war, for example, seemed unable to reconcile his notion that the war had been a good time with his insistence that he had had no free time: As far as I was concerned, it was a pretty happy-​go-​lucky good time. We, all right, we didn’t have all the extras that you’ve got, you know, like things now. I mean living now compared to then is, ooh, quite a difference, but it was, to me I always think it’s, I look back on it with happiness. I don’t think, look at it and say, ‘ooh it was an awful time’. I don’t. I don’t but, I knew, as I say we worked twelve hours a day, five days a week, and then you worked twelve hours a day on day shift. And the only day I got off was when I went to school on the Friday. And that was all other than that. It was all work, no play!31

Brown is clearly struggling to order his memories to deal with two diametrically opposed accounts as he veers from describing his war as ‘a v 246 v

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Reserved life on the home front happy-​go-​lucky good time’ to ‘all work, no play’. This suggests that his recollections of enjoying himself as a young man in wartime do not sit comfortably with his memories of his working patterns, nor with wider dominant images of wartime privations and suffering.

Facing a different kind of enemy: sport on the home front While many reserved men repudiated the suggestion that there was time away from work in which to enjoy themselves, others recalled spending their free time undertaking leisure activities. Eddie Menday, a wartime engineer, reported: But we carried on the best we could. And as I said, towards the end of the war, with restrictions being let go a little bit, cycling, cycle-​racing took place. Time trials out around the Reading area and around, little nearer to home, back of Staines, in the lanes there. So we managed that. And of course there were the football matches and rugby. So it wasn’t all quite the doom and gloom. We tried to adjust ourselves to a normal life as much as we could.32

Sport, both playing and spectating, was an important release valve, a mode of escapism, fulfilling the desire to lead a normal life and, as noted by Mass Observation in the early part of the war, ‘keeping war worries in the background for a few hours a week’.33 Sport was, according to Angus Calder, ‘another world with its own rules and its own energies’.34 In the days following the declaration of war a Government order closed outdoor sports meetings. On 4 September 1939, the Daily Mail reported that ‘For the moment, all sport has been brought to a halt. The concentration of Britain’s whole effort on winning the war makes its continuance undesired and inappropriate.’35 This was regarded as breaking ‘the spell of sport’, a ‘knock-​out blow, a complete scattering of the sport world to a standstill’.36 Some sporting venues remained closed for the duration of the war, being used for other purposes, such as Home Guard drilling areas (Wimbledon tennis courts), ARP centres (Arsenal’s ground, Highbury), billeting of troops (Hendon greyhound stadium), allotments (Twickenham rugby pitch) and prisoner-​of-​war camps (Kennington Oval). Ronald Tonge, wartime telephone engineer, recalled that Manchester United’s playing ground, Old Trafford, had a barrage balloon above it to protect it from bombing.37 The blackout initially stopped many sporting events that had previously been held at night-​time, such as greyhound racing, speedway, ice hockey, snooker, table tennis, wrestling and boxing, which was partially attributed by Mass Observation to ‘a general disinclination to go v 247 v

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Men in reserve far from home’.38 Both the Scottish and English Football Associations suspended all football matches played under their jurisdiction and professional footballers were released from their contracts, many being conscripted into the forces while others entered reserved occupations. Sunderland player and England international Raich Carter, for example, joined the AFS and, following two years of being booed by crowds and press abuse wherein he was labelled a shirker, enlisted in the RAF, becoming a physical training instructor.39 In contrast, Germany continued to field a team, playing thirty-​five international games between September 1939 and November 1942 against its allies, including Italy, neutral countries such as Sweden and Switzerland, and new satellite states such as Croatia and Slovakia. The initial ban, prompted by predictions of carnage if football grounds where thousands gathered were hit, was experienced as having a traumatic effect according to Mass Observation, with ‘deep repercussions’ emanating from the breaking of routines.40 The decision to halt sporting events was, however, soon reversed when the anticipated aerial bombardment of British towns and cities failed to occur and as their necessity for the upkeep of morale was realised. The therapeutic value of sport was recognised within Government circles. Sir John Anderson, the Home Secretary, for example, noted in 1939 that ‘experience has proved that if workers are to maintain their efficiency for more than a very limited period, some measure of relaxation is essential’.41 There was a resumption of most sports, including championship boxing, cricket at Lords and at county level, rugby union, National Hunt and flat horse racing, greyhound racing, tennis at Queen’s Club, speedway racing at Belle Vue, ice hockey, snooker, billiards and –​most significantly of all given crowd sizes –​football.42 By 9 September 1939, football grounds in areas considered to be at low risk were permitted to reopen. Within a fortnight, a revised programme of matches had been endorsed by the Home Office on the understanding that the needs of industry and national service would not be undermined. Crowd size was restricted to 8,000 in ‘evacuated’ areas, which had been designated before the war as possible bombing targets, and 15,000 in ‘neutral’ and ‘reception’ areas.43 Matches were played throughout the war by part-​time footballers, many of whom would have been in reserved occupations. Eighteen West Bromwich Albion players, for example, were employed by a tube manufacturer in Oldbury in early 1940.44 Professional footballers were supplemented by amateurs as sides were depleted by conscription. A  guest-​player system was introduced that enabled men stationed locally, home v 248 v

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Reserved life on the home front on leave or merely passing through the region, to play for a team. Aldershot, a third-​division side, was able to field seven international players who were based at the local army training centre. Teams, which changed considerably on a weekly basis, played in League and Cup matches, in home internationals among the constituent nations and in inter-​service matches featuring sides comprising the different forces. An England–​Scotland international drew a crowd of 78,000. The Football Association asserted:  ‘First class football undoubtedly supplies a very necessary relaxation to thousands of workers engaged on National Service.’45 Football could, then, be construed as patriotic duty. Photographs appeared in the press of footballing legends undertaking industrial work, or dressed in their service uniform, as opposed to sportswear. This is illustrative, assert Pierre Lanfranchi and Matthew Taylor, of the celebration of the mundane during the ‘people’s war’ rather than the spectacular.46 They note that football constituted ‘a barometer of normality and of the morale of the population’.47 This continuation of the everyday was indicative of a ‘business as usual’ attitude that constituted defiance in the face of Nazi aggression. Indeed, Mass Observation reported in December 1939: It might well be thought that first-​rate sportsmen were as important to the community as watchmakers, or curates, who are in reserved occupations. Sports like football have an absolute major effect on the morale of the people, and one Saturday afternoon of League matches could probably do more to affect the people’s spirits than the recent £50,000 Government poster campaign urging for cheerfulness.48

In the wake of the evacuation of Dunkirk, the productivity drive and the heightened invasion scare, there was a scaling back of organised sporting activities. There was a ‘modest revival’ in late 1940 that continued until early 1942, when the fall of Singapore triggered further restrictions. The Daily Express campaigned for a drastic restriction of sport while Stafford Cripps, then Leader of the House of Commons, made a speech in the Commons focusing on the need for greater austerity, additional sacrifices and further restrictions on leisure: We are not engaged in a war effort in which we can have as our motto ‘Business as usual’ or ‘Pleasure as usual’ . . . [D]‌og racing and boxing displays . . . are completely out of accord with the true spirit of determination of the people in this crisis in their history, and steps will be taken to see that such and similar activities are no longer allowed to offend the solid and serious intention of this country to achieve victory.49

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Men in reserve This part of Cripps’s much longer speech about unity was widely reported in the press and ‘received an exaggerated emphasis’.50 Neither the Cabinet minister nor the newspaper was out of step with public sentiment. A Mass Observation report from March 1942, for example, found that 46 per cent felt that horse-​racing ought to be stopped and 34 per cent thought that greyhound meetings should be prohibited; just 4 per cent, however, thought that football should be banned.51 The report proposed a ‘points rationing of leisure’ in which a monthly ‘fun book’, much like a coupons booklet used to allocate food and clothing, could be used alongside money to purchase cigarettes, a cinema ticket, or a visit to a dance hall or sports event, or be spent in the pub. It would have the benefit of making ‘people conscious of the value of the pleasure they are taking in war’.52 Mass Observation had previously reported that while many people are ‘still deeply interested in sporting matters’ they felt that it was not ‘proper to indulge their feelings in the present time’.53 Yet new sports such as baseball were introduced with the arrival in Britain of thousands of foreign servicemen who brought their own forms of entertainment with them.54 And as a positive outcome to the war was looking increasingly likely following D-​Day, the limitations placed on professional sports and their spectators were reduced.55 Wartime spectator sports, then, continued throughout the war on a skeleton schedule; were of a ‘makeshift character’; and were an important means of entertainment, of relaxation away from the long demanding hours of work and of raising morale.56 Some sporting occasions were also broadcast on the radio so that the public could listen in the privacy of their own homes. Wartime railway worker Jim Lister, for example, recalled that his father used to commandeer the family radio once a week to listen to boxing matches.57 In addition to listening and spectating, reserved men also participated in sport at a local level, playing football, cricket, tennis and rugby in amateur teams, and engaging in individual sports such as swimming, running, cycling and hiking. Willie Dewar, employee of Hyde Park Railway Works, for example, recalled the various sports he and his colleagues enjoyed: ‘They [Hyde Park Railway Works] had everything. They had football teams . . . They had boxing. Boxing was quite a big thing . . . But I was more into the badminton side of it and we were members of the West of Scotland League. So we would go out to different places and play games.’58 Similarly, lathe worker George Dean recalled: ‘All I was interested in was football, every minute of the day . . . [We] lived near the park over there. And as soon as I ’ad me tea, I was off with the ball, ’cos there was always someone playing, you know.’59 v 250 v

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Reserved life on the home front These activities served to raise the physical fitness as well as improve the mental health of participants. However, they were hampered by a number of obstacles:  swimming pools were closed to save fuel required to heat the water; playing fields, golf courses and parks were requisitioned by the State, ploughed up and turned into allotments to grow produce; and there was a lack of both public and private transport. Indoor sports such as darts, table tennis and billiards flourished, however, the blackout functioning to privatise leisure pursuits.60

‘It wasn’t a gay time but . . . ’: the pursuit of pleasure in wartime In addition to sport, other entertainments also continued to flourish during the war. Indeed, as J.  B. Priestley noted in his Picture Post article, rather than being regarded as a ‘do-​nothing alternative to employment’, leisure ought to be seen as an opportunity to exercise one’s imagination, to engage in hobbies and pursuits, and to enjoy oneself.61 One illustration of this was the events put on by CEMA.62 The organisation was established in December 1939 in the belief that ‘war should not crush beauty and the arts which expressed it’.63 It won a ‘mass audience’ for classical music, drama, painting and sculpture through its sponsoring of Art for the People exhibitions, bringing British artists’ work to provincial towns, Sadler’s Wells’s ‘utility’ opera to industrial towns, Ballet Rambert to factories and the Old Vic to Welsh mining villages. According to Paul Addison ‘the secret of its success was that it literally took art to the people, that is out of the provinces and into popular venues . . . factories and air-​ raid shelters’.64 Picture Post noted the popularity among city white-​collar workers of ‘music among the masters’ at the National Gallery: At lunchtime every day you can see queues outside the Gallery which you never saw in the old days. There are men and women, young and old, rich and poor waiting patiently in the cold up the steps of the Gallery and along the pavements . . . to hear Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin and Schumann . . . Strange things happen in wartime.65

Humphrey Jennings’s word-​picture Listen to Britain (1942) includes footage of a lunchtime CEMA concert held at the National Gallery. The scene clearly recognises the significance of bringing classical music to the masses. The camera pans on to the audience listening to the RAF orchestra: men and women of different ages, some in uniform, some in civvies. Angus Calder notes that people ‘were willing to venture their v 251 v

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Men in reserve new earnings on culture, to give it a try. And the war itself enhanced the escapist value of music.’66 Concerts were also put on by CEMA for workers, capturing what Nick Hayes has termed a ‘music-​while-​you-​eat’ audience.67 In 1940, a factory in Southampton hosted a concert ‘packed with 1,800 factory workers, mostly men . . . [who] clapped every item enthusiastically afterwards’.68 Skilled male workers were identified by CEMA as ‘converts’.69 However, a Ministry of Labour report from 1941 noted that the CEMA concerts were ‘failures’: They are being given to workers who don’t want them, and who –​as one factory manager said –​feel they have been cheated of their weekly fun. Another factory manager said that many of his men would appreciate good music but not in their meal break when they are tired and dirty.70

Bevin deemed CEMA ‘too ’ighbrow’.71 A  less elitist form of entertainment was also offered to workers. The Entertainments National Service Association, which had first performed its repertoire of songs, dances and sketches to service personnel, began in 1943 to play to civilian audiences in towns with the largest concentration of war industries. Mass Observation reported that ENSA concerts, often held in factory canteens at lunchtime, were ‘definitely looked forward to with considerable zest –​ perhaps more as a landmark in the week than for themselves . . . But there was too a certain eagerness for the concert itself. There was a more frantic rush than usual to get up to the canteen and grab a place the moment the buzzer went.’72 As noted in Chapter 4, many of our interviewees were making more money than they had done before the war. Yet there appears to have been no equivalent accumulation of savings, at least in the early part of the war, as both Charles Madge in 1943 and, much later, Penny Summerfield have shown.73 Despite exhortations from the National Savings Committee, much of this new-​gained wealth was spent on pleasure: indeed, there was little else on which to spend surplus money. Rationing, austerity and the curtailment of the manufacture of consumer goods as industries moved over to a war footing meant that disposable income was primarily spent in the pub, on tobacco and in the cinema. While 30 per cent of working-​ class budgets were spent on ‘non-​essentials’ such as alcohol, tobacco and entertainment in 1938, this rose to 34 per cent in 1942 as men and women sought solace in the pleasures these afforded.74 Consumption of beer increased by 25 per cent during the war, while a third of Mass Observation’s respondents to a 1941 poll about smoking stated that they were smoking more, most ‘considerably more’. This was even higher v 252 v

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Reserved life on the home front among men under forty (42 per cent) than those over (24 per cent). The report’s author concluded that a period of increased strain prompted people to smoke more and that this was especially high in the blitzed towns.75 The doubling of the price of tobacco between 1939 and 1942 and the steep rise in the cost of beer did not appear to deter most working-​ class men from drinking and smoking their ‘excess incomes’.76 Jack Jones, a TGWU organiser in Coventry, recalled that wartime ‘social life tended to be limited to the odd game of cards, a visit to a pub or club, or sometimes visiting friends in their homes’.77 However, he also recollected a ‘pleasant exception’ where he arranged a leaving party for a friend who got a commission in the army, blagging whisky and beer for around 150 people who had themselves a ‘reet good do’. A highlight of the shindig was the assembled throng, dominated by shop stewards, standing up and singing ‘God Save the King’.78 The third outlet that Madge identified on which people spent their surplus money was the cinema, which remained an affordable option. The Second World War has been regarded as a ‘golden age’ for cinema, with A. J. P. Taylor stating that cinema-​going was the ‘essential social habit of the age’.79 The anticipation of relentless aerial bombing resulted in the closure of cinemas on the outbreak of war. It was only ever expected to be short-​term however; the Daily Express announced the closures with the sub-​headline ‘Keep Calm and Keep Your Seats’, while a sign outside the Embassy cinema in Notting Hill Gate on 7 September 1939 stated ‘Closed until further notice. Nearest cinema open Aberystwyth 239 miles’.80 Cinemas in reception and neutral evacuation areas were reopened within a week, provincial towns in evacuated areas a week later, and London’s West End within a month of the outbreak of war. Writing in 1937, novelist Elizabeth Bowen stated emphatically her reasons for going to the cinema: I go to be distracted (or ‘taken out of myself ’); I go when I don’t want to think; I go when I do want to think and need stimulus; I go to see pretty people; I go when I want to see life ginned up, charged with unlikely energy; I go to laugh; I go to be harrowed . . . I go because I like bright light, abrupt shadow, speed; I go to see America, France, Russia; I go because I like wisecracks and slick behaviour; I  go because the screen is an oblong opening into the world of fantasy for me; I go because I like story, with suspense; I go because I like sitting in a packed crowd in the dark, among hundreds riveted on the same thing; I go to have my most general feelings played on.81

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Men in reserve Once the war had commenced, the need to be diverted and entertained, to see glamour on screen, not to have to think, and to ‘gin up’ life would undoubtedly have been heightened. Indeed, ‘war’ films were never the biggest box office draws; many cinemagoers preferred to watch Hollywood fare, such as Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz (both released in 1939), which were far removed from the actual war experience.82 As a branch member of the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association noted in January 1940, ‘People want something that will take them out of themselves and help them overcome the depression of the blackout . . . They do not want heavy drama –​they have all the drama they need in the news these days.’83 Mass Observation similarly reported that ‘there seems to be a growing tendency in leisure activities to steer clear of anything connected with the war’. Correspondingly, in 1940 references to the war in the music halls reduced from 30 per cent of the total to under 5 per cent.84 Moreover, despite the threat of bombing, the inconveniences of blackout and the limited public transport services, cinema attendance rose dramatically during the war. Indeed, by the mid-​1940s, when Britain’s population was 46 million, there were 30 million weekly cinema visits.85 The high ticket sales were a result of not just more people going to the cinema, but also the same people going repeatedly. One-​ third of adults went to the cinema at least once a week and more than 70 per cent of teenagers went weekly to the cinema.86 The typical cinema-​goer was young, urban and working-​class, and those living in Scotland, Northern England and the Midlands were more likely to attend than those in the south. Many British civilians used the cinema as a way of forgetting the war, as an outlet for escapism, sometimes with a romantic partner. American Hollywood films such as Gone with the Wind and Mrs Miniver (1943) remained the big draw despite the increasing popularity of British films.87 Between 1940 and 1943, of films made about the war those about the armed forces were the most popular. Notable examples include Convoy (1940), Target for Tonight (1941), In which We Serve (1942) and We Dive at Dawn (1943). From 1943, however, many more films were set on the home front and these drew large audiences. Box office successes in 1943 included Millions Like Us, The Gentle Sex, The Bells Go Down and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Comedies such as Turned Out Nice Again (1941), starring George Formby, and The Demi-​Paradise (1943), and costume melodramas such as The Man in Grey (1943) and The Wicked Lady (1945) were especially popular, proving to be a tonic to an audience who were war-​weary. v 254 v

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Reserved life on the home front Despite insistences that they had no leisure time many interviewees made reference to frequent cinema trips. Swansea steel worker Alfred Thomas, who, as noted above, had no time for hobbies, recalled that the cinema was ‘part of life . . . [Y]‌ou could go seven days a week to the cinema, you could go if you had enough money. Yes, for that was the biggest part of our lives. It was getting us away, divorcing ourselves from reality.’88 Cecil Clements similarly recalled going three or four times a week to see ‘anything that was going on really’.89 Like the cinema, dances remained a popular pastime, even for those who insisted they had no spare time.90 Frank Harvey stated that the war was not a ‘gay’ life but that he used to go ‘dancing like everyone else’,91 while Jim Lister noted that in his time off ‘it was always the dancing’,92 highlighting how pervasive a hobby it was for Britain’s wartime youth. Indeed, for some it was their favourite pastime. Miner William Ramage, who recalled that he used regularly to walk the four miles to and from the next village to attend dances, declared ‘I danced wherever I  could. I  was good at dancing.’93 Communist electrician Frank Chapple recollected organising Young Communist League dances at Ford’s, Dagenham and other ‘socials’, including a bank holiday ‘gala’, to raise funds for the Communist Party.94 Such statements again make clear that despite protestations to the contrary reserved men found time to enjoy their leisure time and that, often, the dangers of war were far distant from both mind and body.

‘Apart from the Blitz it was a nice time’: the incursions of war Wartime apprentice engineer John Scholey recalled his typical wartime weekend in Leicester: ‘Friday night was pub night, go and meet the Yanks. Talk to them. Saturday night or Friday night we might finish up in a dance hall. After the drink, and you’d still got to go to work on Saturday morning, but Saturday night, met your girlfriend, dance or cinema.’95 Indeed, in contrast to the insistence of diminished leisure time was the dogged avowal that ‘life went on’. Bernard Casburn, a wartime draughtsman, for example, stated that he ‘kept going as normal, really, you worked longer hours, you did a bit of fire watching, I did fire watching at the church as well. But I can’t say that I was badly affected by things that happened during the war.’96 For many of our interviewees the war was merely a backdrop to their working and leisure lives. Willie Dewar, employee of Hyde Park Railway Works in Glasgow, declared: ‘we had times that you never v 255 v

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Men in reserve thought about the war. If you were playing a game of badminton you were keyed up and you never thought there were boys out fighting for you outside and across the continent or different places.’97 Wrapped up in the moment, enjoying himself battling against an adversary on the badminton court, Dewar was, understandably, not thinking of the men who were facing an altogether different type of opponent. Retrospectively, however, he was aware of the disjuncture between his own leisure and the hardships of war. Similarly, Roy Miller, wartime shipyard worker, was insistent that ‘life just went on’ despite his own evidence to the contrary: Life just went on, the same as usual during the war. There was the Blitz, that was terrible. That’s a separate issue. There was rationing, but I  don’t ever remember being hungry. So the rationing was just an inconvenience more than anything else. The Blitz was the [pause] the bad bit, but otherwise, oh and the fact that every now and again you would hear about a friend, a possible former schoolmate, who had been killed in the forces, you know, that kept, that happened every so often. But generally speaking, life just went on. Just as, well always as it had. There was restrictions of course . . . But life just went on.98

It is clear that Miller, like many others, was struggling to negotiate his conflicting memories of the war. He went on to insist several times throughout the interview that his life was little altered because of the war. However, his second main point of reference was the night of the Clydebank Blitz in March 1941, where his family home suffered a direct hit. Consequently, Miller, aged nineteen, was trapped under the rubble for several hours, his next-​door neighbours were killed upon impact, his father was in hospital for several weeks and his family had to move across the city to a new home.99 The scale of the damage wrought on the town of Clydebank was immense: only 7 houses out of 12,000 were left unscathed, and 35,000 people out of a population of 47,000 were made homeless.100 The events have a central place in the popular memory of the war and many of our Scottish interviewees made reference to them.101 Miller, understandably, referred to this traumatic incident repeatedly and told various parts of the story several times. This episode was evidently a formative one for Miller and has remained central to his memories of the war subsequently. Yet while this seemingly directly contradicts the idea that his life was ‘the same as usual’ during the war, perhaps the drama of the attack served to render the rest of his war experience mundane. Indeed, it is clear from Miller’s interview that he considered the bombing of his home ‘a separate issue’, an exceptional occurrence unrelated to the rest of his war experience. While London sustained prolonged heavy v 256 v

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Reserved life on the home front bombing nightly from 7 September 1940 until 21 November, and then intermittently throughout the war, for those living elsewhere, provincial ‘blitzes’ could last just a few days. This perhaps led Miller, despite the obvious trauma he suffered, to conclude that he had faced comparatively little upheaval. Despite traumatic recollections such as the deaths of family members, friends and neighbours, for our interview cohort, the majority of whom were young men or teenagers in the 1940s, the war itself also brought new pleasures. Apprentice marine fitting engineer John Dickson, with whom we opened this chapter, declared that ‘apart from the Blitz it was a nice time’, while Harry McGregor, who had worked at Hyde Park Railway Works in Glasgow, fondly recalled ‘I enjoyed my war too. You had these ENSA parties come into the canteen.’102 As discussed above, ENSA and CEMA concerts could make the workplace much more convivial. Similarly, John Stephenson, who worked on the railways in wartime, recalled the pleasures of being in the Home Guard: On a Sunday you used to go to a place up about a mile and a half outside Northallerton, up a hill, and you used to always go out on exercises and make sure that you always finished up in this bloke’s pub so that you could always call and have a drink before you went home for your Sunday lunch. That’s all it was. It was having a nice time out of it, that was about a mile from Northallerton. You used to all meet up there, all stuck there and have a drink and that’ll do. You can go home now for lunch and put your uniform away ’til next week. As I say, we just thought [they] were happy days. You just used to do it for the fun of it.103

Clearly, for some, there was enjoyment to be gleaned from new war-​ related activities such as meeting in the pub following Home Guard duty, something that is discussed in further detail later in the chapter. Even air raids, a terrifying and devastating phenomenon that often occurred when people were asleep and that led to the loss of a great many lives –​about 60,000 in total –​could provide a similar source of exhilaration. Eighteen-​year-​old Colin Perry was working as a clerk when the war broke out. His diary entries highlight his palpable delight in watching the planes overhead: I tore hell for leather to the top of our block of flats, and standing on the window-​sill of the hall-​landing I  looked out over Surrey. Yes, thunder alive, there over Croydon were a pack of planes . . . I rushed to commandeer my excellent vantage point . . . At last, the war was here! At last I was seeing some excitement . . . The excitement was passing, and cooling my enthusiasm . . . My one regret was I had to be an onlooker; boy, if only

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Men in reserve I had been in one of those Spitfires –​oh Hell! those ’planes got me; I must be a pilot! . . . I think it is the most exciting moment I have known for a very long time.104

Some of our interviewees similarly recalled the excitement they had felt as young men and, for our youngest interviewees, as young boys, during aerial attacks. Bernard Casburn, who was a fourteen-​year-​old living in Ipswich when the war was declared, recalled the war as an ‘exciting’ time ‘[b]‌ecause we used to dash to the shelter and watch anti-​aircraft shells bursting out above, you know, and so on . . . I weren’t frightened at all. I would be now [laughter]! Not then.’105 His age is the key factor here. Indeed, Casburn admitted that fear was ‘something you grew in to’.106 Phillip Rogers similarly referenced his youthful excitement when his father, in a bid to avoid the bombing of Sheffield, inadvertently moved the family right into one of the heaviest-​hit areas of the city: We could hear what was going on, but we never had any bombs actually drop close to us, but when we moved over three nights later, we moved into it, right into where it was, down at the east end, virtually. Quite exciting, I remember it, but I mean that’s how you look at it at that age. You know, sort of look up in the air, and think ‘ooh what’s happening?’ [laughter]. 107

Youthfulness was a key theme in the men’s interviews, referred to by many as an explanation for their highly positive recollections. Ewart Rayner, wartime engineer, stated: ‘it was a very worrying time, it must have been, but being a boy virtually, you didn’t quite see [the] seriousness of everything until later on’.108 Similarly, Norman Cooke stated: It was all part of the adventure really, yeah. Yeah I mean, at that age, what was I, sixteen when the war started, twenty-​two when it ended. It was all, well I’d say an adventure really. I mean you weren’t too involved in anything happening. I mean it was the elderly people it affected more. I mean, both my grandmas were almost terrified of the air raids.109

Such memories of wartime ‘adventure’ are not unique. John Boorman’s semi-​autobiographical film Hope and Glory (1987) views the British home front during the Second World War through a child’s eyes. The film’s protagonist, Billy, clearly enjoys the nightly ‘fireworks’ the Blitz provides and explores the wreckages of bombed-​out houses with his friends as they play, as well as experiencing childish elation when his school is destroyed by a bomb. That such reactions are mirrored in our

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Reserved life on the home front interviewees’ testimonies undoubtedly reflects the youthfulness of many of our cohort. For the majority of our interviewees, regardless of age or wartime location, air raids and bombing played a central part in the construction of their wartime memories. The Blitz was a defining home front experience either endured first-​hand or observed on screen and read about in the newspapers by virtually everyone living on the British mainland during the war, and thus unsurprisingly features prominently in retrospective accounts. The air raid siren that accompanied Chamberlain’s declaration of war broadcast on the BBC prompted many to think that an attack was imminent. Ipswich draughtsman Bernard Casburn, for example, recalled that ‘The day that war was declared, which was a Sunday, I remember it well. My father, my brother and I started to dig a shelter in the garden thinking that there’d be air raids within five minutes. That sort of thing. Didn’t happen of course. Wasn’t really until 1940 that things sort of really got going.’110 When the aerial bombardment of British cities finally commenced, it inevitably caused some anxiety. George Dean, an aircraft worker in Manchester, recalled: ‘the first time the air raids went on . . . your stomach falls, because we’d seen pictures on the news and that about that in Spain’.111 The highly publicised bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, further highlighted by Picasso’s 1937 painting, which toured Europe and came to Dean’s home town of Manchester for a two-​week exhibition in 1939, was uppermost in many people’s minds, as was Stanley Baldwin’s assertion that ‘the bomber will always get through’. Nearly all interviewees could clearly recall intricate details of the effect of air raids on their towns and lives. Toolmaker John Hiscutt, who was living in east London at the time, spoke at length about this topic: We lived down in the shelter at nights. We used to live in it. We dug this big pit and got this corrugated shelter in it and every night that’s where we used to go. There was four . . . mugs in it. You’d come up in the morning and sort of rub your eyes. But it wasn’t the bombing so much. It was the shrapnel from the aircraft fire. I kept sort of thinking that it was all over. One evening I was ‘ah it’s all over now’ . . . And I was down the garden, whoosh in I went and crash, this bit of shrapnel fell right down and missed me by about a foot. If I’d dawdled it would, well it’s just one of those things . . . After that they had the doodlebugs. I can remember the first one coming over. I was getting ready to go out one evening. I  heard this vroooooom and it stopped and I thought what’s that? There was a whooshing noise. It dropped about three miles away [laughter]. It had gone overhead.112

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Men in reserve Similarly, Frank Blincow, our second-​youngest interviewee, who was just twelve when the war started, composed an account detailing the death of his friend in a bombing raid: He opened his front door one day to come out, literally as a bomb dropped in the street. And he was blown straight through. The house was a council house, and it had a passageway and rooms off of the passageway. And then there was a back door. And he was killed. He was blown, as he opened the front door, the bomb exploded in the road. And it blew him, literally, through the back door. And he was dead by the time he hit the ground, you know. And that is a lasting memory for me.113

Such a focus on this ‘lasting memory’ is repeated in other interviews. Many men indicated that their memories of these specific events were deeply ingrained. John Dickson, for example, labelled his memories of the Clydebank Blitz in March 1941 as ‘unforgettable’: I remember it is as if it was yesterday. I was at night school. And I’d come out at 9 o’clock. And not long after that, the sirens went off. I had a girlfriend then, and she was waiting for me outside the gates of Clydebank High. So I walked her home, she lived in Dalmuir. I walked her home and I walked back to Whitecrook Street. And the shrapnel was coming down like rain . . . I made my way home. And I remember turning into Whitecrook Street, and we had a tailor’s shop, Hips they were called. And there was, the window had been blown out. Front window. And there was a dummy lying on the pavement, suit on.114

The level of detail recalled here is impressive; the night of the Clydebank Blitz is clearly something Dickson remembers vividly. This recollection is rendered even more striking when compared to other interviewees’ wartime memories that were difficult to pin-​point in time. This was especially the case when they did not relate to highly memorable one-​ off events; the bombing of London, for example, was protracted and occurred in different phases of intensity throughout the war. Moreover, stories were composed by respondents that related to the period either before or after the war, rather than during it, and individual details were often unclear or could not be recalled  –​understandably, given that at time of writing over seventy years have elapsed since the war. The dates of some aspects of interviewees’ accounts were difficult to tease out; this was hampered by the fact that most of our reserved men continued to be employed in their roles after the war. Some spent the rest of their professional lives engaged in the same job and many in the same industry as during the early 1940s. It is not surprising then v 260 v

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Reserved life on the home front that questions requesting specific information –​about wartime wages, strikes and working conditions, for e­ xample –​could incur quite muddled responses that required follow-​up questions for clarification. By contrast, memories of one-​off events like the Clydebank Blitz retained a sharper focus. Moreover, many interviewees were keen to discuss air raids and bombing without any prompting, possibly because the Blitz is regarded as one of the three signal events of Britain’s war, along with the evacuation of the BEF from Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain waged successfully by the RAF, and is the dominant home front experience in popular memory.115 During a discussion of workplace dangers, Norman Cooke, for example, declared: ‘I mean, there was a war on and there was always a danger of bombs yer know and whatnot. And as I said Ewell was part of an alley for these flying bombs. And after that we almost ignored them.’116 The V-​2 flying bomb was a recurrent theme in Cooke’s recollections, to which he repeatedly returned with no prompting. Similarly, Greenock shipyard worker John Allan answered a question about the shipyards’ role in the war with a lengthy story about the Home Guard, before stating: [W]‌e used to have the shelters in the close but they were all strutted with metal poles, you know, they were reinforced. So when people heard the siren they just came out the house and went down to the bottom flat and just sat in there. And then of course I was in the warden’s post at that time and the, what do you call it? Incendiary bombs. It was like tin cans hitting the street . . . Clatter, clatter, clatter. That was incendiary bombs . . . You heard them coming down, clatter, clatter, clatter . . . You suffered more during the Blitz than you did in the shipyard.117

It could be argued that these men were drawing upon well-​worn tropes, given that the Blitz dominates the popular memory of the period. However, it is also likely that these material privations, hardships and dangers form such a central part of their stories as it represented the biggest change to their wartime lives. Moreover, such attacks put their lives in danger, thus paralleling the experiences of the armed forces. This was perhaps another reason why our interviewees were at pains to emphasise their Blitz experiences. As Allan notes, ‘you suffered more during the Blitz than you did in the shipyard’, in spite of the heightened danger and the increased occurrence of accidents, as discussed in Chapter 5. While these men, as reserved workers, continued their day-​to-​day employment, it was the death of friends in bombing raids or the fear of death from the v 261 v

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Men in reserve sky that changed their lives, perhaps rendering it unsurprising that it is these issues that are recalled most vividly seventy years later. However, reminiscences of wartime dangers did often lead interviewees to invoke well-​known wartime imagery. When asked about the atmosphere in their communities most interviewees told tales of neighbourliness and camaraderie, with several invoking the apocryphal tale about unlocked doors in crime-​free communities. As Mark Connelly notes, ‘all pulling together’ is a key part of the ongoing ‘Blitz myth’.118 Bernard Casburn, for example, stated: [P]‌ressure didn’t stop when you left work. Most of us were living in the London area. And we were living in Surbiton, in Chessingham, which is only the outskirts of London, and quite often we used to get the bombs jettisoned over us. If you got any sleep that night, you were very lucky, especially during the Battle of Britain and just after. But somehow we coped, and I think we coped by bringing everybody together. Never mind what your creed was, or religion, if you were in trouble, in you came, and the bed was made up for you. Usually under the table, but [laughter] yeah, it was, I think it was a time when I seen more togetherness if you like than at any other time since.119

Such a representation of togetherness must have had a basis in reality, as Lucy Noakes has argued: There must be an element of truth to the popular memory of the war as a time of national unity; it is clearly not enough to dismiss this memory as the creation of the ruling class, its existence evidence of a ‘false consciousness’ amongst the majority of the people. At the same time, we must remember that this memory is by no means the whole picture; it is a partial memory of the war which marginalises or excludes memories that do not fit with it. The reason for the continued dominance of a memory of unity during the Second World War must lie, in part, in the war itself.120

The themes of communality, the setting aside of pre-​war differences and the pulling together in unity against a common foe –​all ingredients of the ‘Blitz spirit’ –​emerged in many accounts. Eddie Menday, for example, mentioned a keenly felt wartime mood of collective unity: If anybody was in trouble at all or you know there was a bombing and whatnot, people would go in and try and get bricks and rubble away from houses to see if they could rescue people, you know. Didn’t have to be trained for it, they just went ahead and did it! This was the whole atmosphere of the nation in a way. That you know, this is it, this is war and we must do what we can.121

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Reserved life on the home front Nearly every interviewee gave evidence of an ‘all in it together’ attitude, suggesting they either recalled experiencing neighbourliness or were at least partially influenced both by wartime propaganda and by post-​war representations of the war as a time of unity.122 Such a focus on wartime neighbourliness was often accompanied by an acknowledgement that this is no longer the way of life. Jim Lister, a wartime railway worker, stated: Pitch black and yet you never heard of anybody being attacked or robbed. They’re doing it in daylight now. Aye. You never, you could have been dancing as well. Lassies went into the dancing and they could walk home at the night time and there was nobody got involved with them. No fear or anything. Not now, no.123

Similarly, the following conversation took place between Ewart Parkinson and his wife, who was present during the interview: Ewart Parkinson:  [T]‌here was no discussion of crime, stealing and burglary, nothing [of] that sort of thing in the papers. I’m not saying there weren’t any but one didn’t know about them. But there were in Britain, I think there was a very good sense of sharing, a common inheritance of the war and stick it out, win the war, the old line. But well basically we were happy, yes. From outside, we had to. Pat Parkinson:  I suppose any aggression was channelled into the war itself, wasn’t it? Ewart Parkinson:  Yes, I think so, I think so.124

While Parkinson grudgingly conceded that there must have been some crime during the war, most interviewees insisted that misdemeanours of any kind did not occur. While this is patently untrue, and has been central to the arguments of revisionist historians who have attempted to debunk the myths surrounding the Blitz spirit by highlighting the escalating number of convictions for looting, including of those in positions of responsibility, such as firemen and ARP wardens, it does reflect a common belief.125 While, of course, these recollections do at least partially reflect a reality, as with so much of the war experience memories of the war have become enmeshed with wartime myths, something that is also apparent in discussions of civil defence.

‘Wanted to have a go’: service in civil defence Successive British inter-​war governments planned for civilian participation in the event of warfare, recognising that a second total war would v 263 v

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Men in reserve require the involvement of the home front. As Lucy Noakes states, participation in what was to be known as civil defence became an ‘ordinary duty of citizenship’ during the war.126 There was an expectation that men and women would assume new responsibilities, such as becoming ARP wardens, fire watchers, members of the AFS (later subsumed into a National Fire Service); undertake medical services, including dispensing first aid and driving ambulances; and, most famously after its inception in 1940, join the Local Defence Volunteers, renamed the Home Guard.127 Three-​quarters of our interviewees undertook some form of civil defence duties. Of these forty-​two, twenty-​six chose service in the Home Guard. Most participants in civil defence were volunteers in their chosen service, although a minority were called up after the December 1941 National Service (No. 2) Act made compulsory enrolment a possibility in understaffed areas. Many workers spent some of their leisure time undertaking such non-​paid work. This added to the already great pressures on their time. Willie Dewar, worker at Hyde Park Railway Works in Glasgow, detailed his wartime schedule: Never time to sit back and then after the Clydebank Blitz they called us up for the Home Guard and they formed an Ack Ack battery out on Balmore Road. I was allocated a Sunday so every Sunday night you had to change into your uniform in your full kit and the army lorry picked us up in town and took us out to Balmore. Then we went on the gun for about half an hour for training and they had a NAAFI canteen and you got into the NAAFI canteen to get a meal or something. And then bedded down by eleven at night and it was Nissen huts that we had to stay in. The actual people who were working in the shipyards, they got away at six in the morning, but if you weren’t working in the shipyards it was 7 o’clock and by the time you got the army lorry into town then back home and changed into your boiler suit then on to your work, you worked a full day. Generally you did a guard duty which meant standing for two hours out in the cold looking at nothing in the blackout. So by the afternoon you were actually quite tired then you had night school to go to at night so you had a full day and night.128

Birmingham toolmaker Walter Shelley repeatedly highlighted that he regularly had to work all night in his auxiliary duties as a member of the AFS, before completing a full day’s paid work.129 As noted in Chapter 4, our interviewees often emphasised this as additional work, which exhaustingly constricted not only their leisure time but also their basic relaxation needs. Indeed, despite the hardships engendered by joining the Home Guard, AFS, ARP or ambulances, or volunteering for plane-​spotting duties, such v 264 v

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Reserved life on the home front service could also reinforce manliness in wartime, allowing for more direct association with the war than their reserved status allowed. Gerard Fiennes, who published his memoirs of his fifty years on the railways, joined the Home Guard in 1940, aged thirty-​four. He noted that even military uniform did not necessarily equate to active service. He took aim at a low-​flying aircraft, writing ‘I had fired a shot in anger which is more than many of my friends did in six years in the “army”.’130 The meaning of such activities varied, however. For some, such as Harry McGregor, an apprentice engineer in the Hyde Park Railway Works in wartime Glasgow, civil defence was a route to a precious petrol allowance and to a uniform that would impress. As we saw in Chapter 3, McGregor used to wear his uniform on social occasions hoping to pass as a soldier.131 Similarly, Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-​Bird in Contesting Home Defence write about a reserved draughtsman, Christopher Redmond, who cut the Home Guard flashes off his uniform before returning to his home town ‘on leave’.132 For Willie Dewar, a draughtsman, there was more of an explicit sense of duty and an expression of satisfaction from his contribution in the Home Guard, and pride in earning ‘two stripes’. Nonetheless, Dewar was clearly not completely enamoured with his pseudo-​military life, commenting: ‘I didn’t like the dress, it rubbed the back of my neck. I didn’t like the heavy boots, they rubbed my ankles. I enjoyed it up to a point, but I wasn’t a military man.’133 Moreover, most men were keen to discuss their civil defence roles, often referring to them without prompting or enquiry. As with discussions of bombing, this may reflect a desire to draw upon relatable wartime tropes and to emphasise that they, too, were doing ‘their bit’. This was patriotic masculinity in practice. Yet it may also reflect the fact that these activities were unusual and therefore may have seemed more interesting to relay to the interviewer than the day-​to-​day routines of working in a factory. They may also have been easier to date accurately and position within the war. Moreover, as with attempts to join the actual military, interviewees recognised that their youthfulness was a key factor in their eagerness to participate in these activities. In response to being asked what made him want to join the Home Guard, Yorkshire railway worker John Stephenson noted: Like the rest of the silly [lads], we were only young. I was only seventeen. They were all joining the Home Guard and doing this and getting the uniform and getting a gun and enjoying yourself going out. You used to go out every Sunday morning. There used to be a parade and you’d go all dressed up [in] the uniform, carrying, polish your gun. Then they used to go out running

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Men in reserve through the fields and one thing and another. It just, you thought you were doing your bit, which I suppose you were in a way, but if the Germans had come we’d have been no good because they’d have killed us all off, just like that [laughter]. Well, it’s all, you only got five bullets! [laughter].134

In being dismissive of the Home Guard, Stephenson signals the dominance of its representation in the popular television comedy, Dad’s Army (1968–​77). Walter Shelley, Birmingham toolmaker, similarly invoked his friendships as a reason for joining the AFS, declaring:  ‘I think because my friends were in it as well, from other departments, it was yeah, so we were all in a little group of our own there.’135 As noted in Chapter 3, internalised peer pressures had been a keen driving factor in pursuing military enlistment, a theme that clearly re-​emerged in discussions of civil defence. Some of our interviewees also posited in retrospect that their youth made them susceptible to patriotic notions. Swansea sheet-​metal worker Alfred Thomas stated: ‘Well I was young, I felt I was, like young people do, patriotic perhaps. I’ve lost a lot of that mind . . . I had heard of some of the things that were going on within Europe and felt that there was a need for people to join together and do what we could, you see.’136 John Scholey echoed these sentiments when he declared that he ‘wanted to have a go, sort of thing. No more than that’.137 Engineer Stephen Smith similarly stated: ‘Well it sounds a bit silly now but it was your bit towards the war effort. ’Cos don’t forget, you know, at the beginning part of the war, there was a dreadful feeling that Hitler might invade. And then we’d have all been up for the high jump.’138 Such sentiments constructing their motivations for volunteering for additional duties are only possible in retrospect. While Stephenson and Smith both labelled their desire to participate in civil defence duties ‘silly’, thereby suggesting their participation was trivial, invasion and bombardment were very real threats, especially in 1940–​41. This sense of threat was also a pervasive reason for wishing to ‘do their bit’. Miner William Ramage stated: ‘Just compulsion, everybody did. Because we were in dire threat of being invaded the next day . . . [T]‌hey put [obstacles] on the beaches all round Britain to stop gliders from coming in, to stop men from landing . . . It was high urgency, and it was done.’139 As such, our interviewees reflect the predominant fears of the British populace. Moreover, for many, participation in civil defence provided an obvious way to feel part of the war effort when their essential civilian skills prevented them from enlisting in the military. Cecil Clements, who worked as a draughtsman in Somerset, v 266 v

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Reserved life on the home front stated: ‘I felt I ought to be somewhere else at least. So this might be something to do and help along the way.’140 Tyneside mechanic Harold Scragg plainly stated that he joined the AFS ‘Because I couldn’t get into the army. Because my boss wouldn’t let us away. I mean, I wasn’t the only one.’141 Perhaps in light of this, many of our interviewees took great pride in their auxiliary roles. Plying hoses in the AFS and wielding guns in the Home Guard were the closest they got to serving in uniform. Geoffrey Cooper, researcher at the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) in Farnborough, declared: I was a private from the twenty-​seventh battalion of the Royal Hampshire Regiment! So I was a guardsman. There was I, an apprentice [pause] in army uniform, number two to a machine gun team. Being in the RAE was nothing like the Dad’s Army programme, if you’ve ever watched that. It’s far, far different now in our case, because as a Government Establishment, very serious, we could get what we want[ed] so we had six machine guns in our platoon, each would require a team of six to operate them.142

Cooper was keen to point out that his work in the Home Guard had been ‘very serious’ and important, and also that they were armed, making it clear he wished to distance himself from the buffoonish image of the Home Guard marching with pikes as presented in Dad’s Army. As Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-​Bird have noted, the cultural legacy of Dad’s Army is immense.143 Indeed, like their interviewees, very few of our reserved men mentioned their time in the Home Guard without making at least a passing reference to the popular BBC show. While Cooper was determined to convey his experiences were much more serious than the show’s depictions of civil defence, others were keen to point out the similarities. Glasgow railway worker William McNaul stated:  ‘Dad’s Army, it’s exactly the same as that. And if you think of me, I was Pike, because I had the heaviest gun and I had to carry it! I was the youngest lad, it’s exactly the same.’144 A cultural circuit is clearly at play here. This cultural image impacted on the way our interviewees constructed their memories of their civil defence service. Telephone engineer Walker Leith stated of his time in the Home Guard that: Yeah, first class, great, and in fact in the Home Guard, we formed a, well because commandos were another special sort of unit, we formed a small section, the youngsters, virtually most of the apprentices, went into this little commando section. And we abseiled down the front of the building and did sort of supposedly dangerous situations like that, just to sort of show our ability [laughter]. It was quite, a bit hilarious in a sense.145

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Men in reserve While Leith took obvious pride in his role as a ‘commando’ he could not help but undercut this image by declaring it to have been ‘hilarious’. This was, at least partially, because his skills were never drawn upon. Moreover, this declaration of hilarity perhaps highlights the way in which his modern understanding of the service conflicted with his wartime pride in being part of this pseudo-​military outfit. Ted Petty, wartime fitter at Vickers aircraft factory in Weybridge, similarly declared: The war years seemed part of a dream to me somehow, it was so unreal. Led an unreal life. Some of the greatest fun I had, and it really was fun, was when we joined the LDV [Local Defence Volunteers], latterly known as the Home Guard or Dad’s Army. There was a battalion formed at Vickers and I was fortunate enough to get into the armoured division where we had some, I  think it was seven Beaverettes, standard fourteen chassis with armour plated bodies, two big Bevereals which were big lorries with a 40 mm gun on the back and an old meadows tank and we had lots of fun driving round St George’s hills learning to drive these things and around the track here under the direction of Henry Quill who you will know was one of the pilots and has been quite a figure in aviation ever since.146

Like Leith, Petty has difficulty reconciling the seriousness of the job with its subsequent image, oscillating between describing his fun on one hand, and the serious weaponry and notable military personnel with whom he was affiliated on the other. Shipyard worker John Dickson summed up the general mood of our interviewees when he stated: ‘[I]‌t was fun. Well, you know, for a seventeen year old, it was, you played soldiers, you know.’147 This notion of ‘playing’ may have been reinforced by the fact that nearly half of our interviewees were in the Home Guard. Famously an anti-​invasion force for an invasion that never came, it is unsurprising that they can see so much humour in their experiences, not least because of the largely comedic image that has built up in the wake of the popularity of Dad’s Army. However, for those whose auxiliary services showed them the true horrors of war, the urge to mock and joke was virtually non-​existent. For example, Cyril Beavor, wartime apprentice engineer based in Birmingham, had been involved in the ambulance service as a first-​aider during the war, and recalled vividly, and repeatedly, the night several land mines were dropped near to his house: The people had gone into the shelters, and they were surface shelters. Because the water table was so high they couldn’t dig down. And they’d gone into the shelters, and there were two land mines came down, or parachute

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Reserved life on the home front mines. One landed on, in the middle of four shelters, just wiped the shelters out. One of the parachutes came down and people were outside, you know, looking to see what’d happened. Saw these parachutes coming down and thought they were parachutists. And decided to capture them. And you can imagine what happened when they blew up. One of my school mates was killed on that . . . We had, nineteen injured and killed ten, twenty . . . I went to pick up this stretcher, and it only, only, on it was a little girl of six. And her face was covered with a piece of gauze, she had bled or so. And as the, as I went to pick it up, the nurse moved across the stretcher to pick something up from the other side, and she knocked this gauze off, and her face was off. She died that night. Probably all alone, down in the bottom of the open space. There was a covered place, and we used that for [a]‌mortuary. And I suspect that’s where she died . . . Not nice.148

Beavor’s final understated ‘not nice’ belies the importance of the memory of this night to his wartime experiences. He referred to this incident early in his interview in response to a question about his childhood and made repeated reference to it throughout. His memories of the war were refracted through the prism of this traumatic event, which clearly had been a seminal experience. Beavor’s experiences highlight that to be out of uniform did not necessarily mean to be out of danger or to be automatically separated from some of the most traumatic events of war. While the overwhelming assertion from interviewees was that the war did not truly alter their day-​to-​day lives, it undoubtedly did impact upon them; for many, this was in quite fundamental and irrevocable ways. A similar pattern also presented itself in a very different topic that emerged within the interviews: discussions of romance.

All the girls prefer a soldier: romance and the reserved man Histories of sex and love in the war years focus often on the ways the war changed relationships, highlighting the liberation from parental controls and the aphrodisiac effect of impending death.149 A  similar picture is painted in popular culture, both during the war and after, which revelled in rushed courtships and hasty marriages, many of which were ultimately doomed to end in tragedy. Celia and Fred’s marriage in wartime classic Millions Like Us (1943), for example, is conducted hurriedly and ultimately ends when RAF flight sergeant Fred is killed in action. Celia’s upper-​class work colleague Jennifer embarks on a romantic friendship with the working-​class factory foreman, v 269 v

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Men in reserve Charlie, but this is abruptly halted by Charlie before it really begins. As such, civilian Charlie is denied the chance to become the focus of a romantic relationship. In real life, as on screen, the war added new complications and obstacles to personal lives. Claire Langhamer notes of many wartime romances that: Courtship etiquette adapted to the exigencies of war whereby [as Mass Observation reports] ‘love-​making had often to be done hurriedly on a 24-​ hour pass and in a district to which both were visitors’. For many involved in the war effort serious courtships were maintained only through the love letter, an intensely private communication although subject to military censorship nonetheless. In this context relationships developed away from the observations of family and community.150

This was certainly true of many wartime romantic experiences. Stephen Smith, who trained as an engineer before enlisting in the mercantile marine, told the following story: I married while I was in the Merchant Navy. Well when I first saw her, I knew I wanted to marry her. And I was friends with her brother. I was faced with a lot of competition, I suppose I shouldn’t say this, but I had to make best use of all forty-​eight [hour] leaves I could get hold of, you know! And we got together and a lovely time we had. I’d been coming backwards and forwards to see her, and then we wanted to get married, incidentally we was going to get married, we’d only known each other for ten days, over eighteen months. So it was a bit hit and miss, we was going to get married, and I went to the Registrar’s office, you know to get the papers, and they were fully booked. And so I had to go and plead my case to the Merchant Navy Board, who formulates crews, you know, and they put me at the bottom of the list, and we was able to get married on the seven-​day leave.151

Such a whirlwind romance and marriage, complete with impending debarkation, easily fits within the more stereotypical image of love and marriage in wartime. As in so many other ways, the testimonies of merchant seamen are often indistinguishable from those of the armed forces. Wartime popular culture emphasised the sexual desirability of the uniformed man. According to one pre-​First World War song, ‘All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor’.152 ‘With his pockets full of money’ and always ‘with a smile’, the sailor was ‘the ladies’ pride and joy’. During the Second World War, sailors and airmen were also generally highly regarded in popular culture. In a song from the 1942 American film Iceland, ‘patriotically inclined’ women are instructed to ‘be beautiful and dutiful’ and v 270 v

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Reserved life on the home front to consent to the attention of service personnel, as it is their ‘right to romance’: Listen little lady, it’s the order of the day Issued by the highest of authority Fellows in the service simply can’t be turned away You know that defence must get priority So if you’re patriotically inclined Heed the call to arm and keep this thought in mind. You can’t say no to a soldier A sailor or a handsome marine No, you can’t say no if he wants to dance If he’s gonna fight, he’s got a right to romance. So, get out your lipstick and powder Be beautiful and dutiful too If he’s not your type, then it’s still okay You can always kiss him in a sisterly way Oh, you can’t say no, no you gotta give in If you want him to win for you.153

As noted in Chapter  3, a uniform, which connoted status and sexual appeal, was the most visible way of showing that a man was serving his country. The cultural focus on the uniformed man as a love interest was also apparent in feature films such as The Gentle Sex and Millions Like Us. These recruitment drives for the ATS and industry respectively attempted to alleviate women’s concerns about the potential loss of femininity when donning khaki uniform and overalls by including a heterosexual love story. In both cases, the love interest of the main female character is a uniformed RAF pilot. Furthermore, the romantic fiction in women’s magazines such as Women’s Own often featured a military man as the romantic hero.154 A member of the Home Guard or a dock worker, in contrast, was not considered a suitable love interest by authors. In many instances, the allure of a serviceman was accentuated over the eligibility of a civilian man. In April 1939, for example, the Evening Standard published a cartoon titled There Has Been a Great Holiday Rush of Recruits in All Parts of the Country (War Office Official). The cartoon depicts a glamorous woman strolling arm-​in-​arm with a strapping man bedecked in his RAF blue uniform. In the background a slighter man in civilian clothing looks on forlornly, holding flowers clearly intended for the woman depicted. The second pane of the cartoon depicts the civilian v 271 v

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Figure 6.1  Bert Thomas, Evening Standard, British Cartoon Archive, BT0082, 12 April 1939 man dropping the flowers and rushing off in the direction of the recruiting office (Figure 6.1). Eighteen-​year-​old Surrey clerk Colin Perry recognised the power of air force blue, writing in his diary: ‘If I am to meet a girl I would rather I did before I go into the RAF, as a uniform does things; and if I found my girl after enlistment I should never know if she loved me truly or merely out of glamour, the passion of the moment.’155 Corinna Peniston-​Bird notes that women could actively be turned off by civilian men. She cites the case of Joy Harwood, a WAAF, who recollected an unsuccessful date with a civilian suitor who, dressed in trousers and a sports jacket, ‘struck me as ostentatious, even effeminate. I had become used to more rugged, real men and suddenly he irritated me beyond endurance. “I’m sorry, Maurice”, I said, “but I cannot bear the sight of a girl in uniform with a man in ‘civvies’.” I was being brutal but I didn’t mind.’156 As Sonya Rose notes, ‘men whose commitment to the war effort was suspect, even if they were neither COs nor accused of being pacifists, also were tarred with the brush of effeminacy or were considered sexually suspect’.157 Maurice, a man whose masculinity was called into question by his ‘effeminate’ style of dress, was in Joy’s eyes not a ‘real’ man, unlike the ‘rugged’ servicemen v 272 v

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Reserved life on the home front she was used to dating. Cumulatively, this suggests that the civilian man was often actively disliked in wartime. Similarly, Penny Summerfield’s seminal oral history research into the work of female war workers notes the discord between male and female workers, with many women suggesting that the masculinity of those still in civilian occupations was ‘in deficit’.158 Penny Summerfield and Nicole Crockett highlight testimonies that reveal that ‘men use various types of sexual harassment to police gender boundaries in the workplace’.159 Trade unions, too, were resistant to the influx of female labour, in many cases only allowing the employment of female labour with the understanding that it was temporary.160 Moreover, it is often noted that women found new attentions, both wanted and unwanted, when they moved into previously male occupations. Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield note: Teasing between men and women was rampant in the workshops. It was usually good-​natured, but the sexual undertones were not far from the surface and it must sometimes have been hard for women to bear. Doris White remembers the ‘caterwauling and whistling’ that went up in all male shops when girls walked through en route for the stores, and although she made light of it, she generally took a friend with her ‘not wishing to go alone’.161

However, for one of our young interviewees, in contrast to established tropes, it was he who was the butt of teasing from female workers. Ronald Quartermaine, who was working as an electrical engineer, recalled one incident where he found himself set upon by a ‘bevy’ of female workers when fixing sewing machines during the women’s lunch hour, a task he was warned to complete before their return: So I  went down and started the work on the machine and got the contacts wrong, but it was fixed up, got the machine working, went to the next machine, and of course, I forgot all about time . . . Next thing, I looked up and I was surrounded by a bevy of girls [laughter]. So I thought ‘uh oh’, well I said, ‘I’m sorry’, and got up, and they said, ‘where are you going?’ And I said ‘I’ve got to go’, ‘oh ho ho, no you don’t!’ [laughter]. I said ‘got to go’ . . . Next thing I knew, a bunch of girls I would say about, my guess is anything from the age of, sixteen up to twenty odd, you know, they grabbed hold of me, got me on to what they call, because they had a cutting bench, where they cut the cloth, and then sew it all up, on to the cutting [bench], and held me down. Next I know was I was stripped [laughter]. You know the indelible ink they use to put marks on clothes. Yeah? Well they all had a signature. I was covered in the stuff! Anyway, they all eventually had their good laugh and let me go. And I got dressed and went up, and the senior girl up top was in

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Men in reserve stitches, she thought it was very funny [laughter] . . . My mother when I got home, she called my father in, she even called my father, ‘come and see this!’ Because it took me months to get the stuff off! [laughter].162

Quartermaine’s gender is central to such a story. It must be remembered that our interviewees, although young, were part of the dominant grouping in terms of both their gender and their position in the workplace. As such they were perhaps more likely to be unaware of the stresses and strains of entering this new bewildering world. Had a woman been stripped of her clothes by a large group of young men it is very unlikely that such a story would have, or could have, been read in the same light-​ hearted way. Yet it is clear that Quartermaine did not feel emasculated by this event but rather read it as a humorous outcome of his failure to follow orders. Indeed, in contrast to the prevalent image found in wartime song, film, cartoons and written accounts, our civilian interviewees, speaking seventy years later, recalled no overt hostility towards them, and they were certainly not shunned as romantic partners. Conflict is entirely absent from the testimonies collected from our interview cohort. This may, yet again, reflect their youthfulness: these were not hardened trade unionists nor long-​serving workers, but rather youths for whom the chance to speak to women and girls occluded all other issues. Perhaps the most notable difference between the love lives of reserved men and those in the military was the continued, or even enhanced, potential for romance. A  common fear amongst those serving in uniform, who were often absent for long periods of time, was their wives’ and sweethearts’ increased opportunity for adultery. Indeed, such a scenario was the plot for the wartime film Waterloo Road (Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, 1945) starring John Mills as a soldier who goes AWOL in order to win his wife back from civilian spiv Stewart Granger. Such fears were understandably absent in the testimonies of reserved men. As noted in Chapter 4 the war fostered a growing female workforce. Instead of conflict, war brought for many men new opportunities for flirtation, dalliances and even marriage. Many remark on this phenomenon within the intimate space of an interview. Daniel Griffiths, worker at the steelworks in Ebbw Vale, noted of the new female labour force that ‘a lot of them married the people they were working with’.163 Similarly, when asked about the acceptance of female workers, Frank Blincow, wartime draughtsman, retorted:  ‘Well inevitably there were liaisons of course. I  mean v 274 v

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Reserved life on the home front you wouldn’t believe me if I  said there weren’t. ’Cos that is human nature.’164 Eddie Menday remembered that the men in his factory were particularly excited when the new female workers arrived: They suddenly decreed that ladies would come into the war effort . . . We heard they’d be coming on the particular Monday morning . . . [T]‌he amazing thing was that all the chaps turned up for work that morning all with collars and ties and their hair all nicely done [laughter] to welcome the ladies in. And it caused a few romances as well, if you’re not married, you know.165

Workplace flirtations sometimes developed into romance. Thomas Cantwell, wartime apprentice engineer, noted that he ‘went’ with a female colleague for ‘a good while’, noting too that she was ‘a good welder’.166 Similarly, George Dean went on several dates with women who entered his factory during the war.167 It is clear that, for our cohort at least, civilian status proved no impediment to romantic endeavours. The representation of the relationships between male and female workers was wholly positive. Testimonies from female war workers also point to the formation of relationships with co-​workers. Audrey Brown, who was drafted into work on the railways, married a colleague. She recollected: ‘It was all romance, they were all railwaymen –​you never had a chance to meet anybody else. It was lovely. Life was all romance.’168 Sue Bruley asserts that ‘there is no doubt that the Second World War was a very romantic war’, highlighting the presence of foreign service personnel on the home front and the availability of mass entertainment in the form of cinemas and dancehalls, which provided the ‘ideal territory for romantic encounters’.169 However, despite the enduring tenacity of this image, revisionist historians such as Penny Summerfield and Nicole Crockett, among others, have widely critiqued such a notion: ‘The construction of the Second World War as a time of heightened eroticism when sexual inhibitions were thrown to the wind is something of a voyeuristic invention.’170 The romantic and sexual relationships articulated by our interviewees do not bear out the notion of the war being a time of sexual liberation and promiscuity. Instead, the memories of our cohort highlight a great deal of continuity rather than change in the relationships they could expect with the opposite sex. Indeed, the interactions a large number of our interviewees recorded with women were very similar to those they would have noted had no war unfolded. For many, courting proceeded along pre-​war lines. Claire Langhamer notes that the cinema was the most popular courting venue in mid-​twentieth-​century Britain, and interviewees reported the v 275 v

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Men in reserve cinema as a favourite place to take their girlfriends.171 A number of our interviewees recalled that the cinema had provided the central venue for dating in wartime. Railway worker Jim Lister recollected: ‘I was courting at the time. We always went to the pictures on a Saturday’,172 while Alexander Davidson remembered: ‘We [he and a girlfriend] would go on a Saturday night, you know, and see a long film, you know. The one everybody wanted to see at the time was that very long one, Gone with the Wind. That was an epic, you know [laughter]. It was nearly four hours, I think, altogether.’173 Gone with the Wind, which played in cinemas in London’s West End almost for the war’s entire duration, was a big-​budget historical romance set in a glamorous location, with dramatic cinematography, sumptuous costumes and attractive lead stars. Set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, the film offered British audiences an escape from the humdrum existence of war-​torn Britain. It was, then, an ideal film to watch with a date, especially as this long film offered more time for intimacy. Dances, too, provided a welcome opportunity to –​as farrier Alexander Ramage put it –​get ‘stuck up to the girls as close as you can!’174 Indeed, Cyril Beavor recounted one particularly romantic evening after a dance: And I remember one night, having done the right thing and seen the young lady home who I’d been with in the evening. And then walked all the way home to my home. And I remember my father sitting up, and waiting for me. When I apologised and said I had to see this young lady home, you see, ‘you wouldn’t have expected me to do anything else, would you dad?’ you know. ‘No, of course you should.’ And he was a realist, my father. And as I turned to leave the room where I had been speaking to him, he said to me, and I can quote his words, ‘and you will brush your tunic down before you hang it up, won’t you?’ Because it was covered in grass [laughter]. So we had a good evening! And I won’t say more than that!175

Clearly for some of our interviewees, the war and their civilian status proved no impediment to romance, despite the emphasis to the contrary in popular culture. However, with long working hours and unpredictable shift patterns, finding the time and the energy for courting could be problematic. Jim Lister arranged to go to the cinema with a date and was delayed picking her up by nearly three hours, as he had had to work an additional four hours on top of his usual twelve-​hour shift: ‘You couldn’t plan to go anywhere.’176 It was, then, often the strictures of regular working life rather than the impediments of war and the lack of uniform that most hampered v 276 v

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Reserved life on the home front romantic endeavours. Geoffrey Cooper, who was nineteen when the war broke out and who worked at the Royal Aviation Establishment undertaking research, noted: I was attending a church, I was a Sunday school teacher. And I did a bit of organ playing as well . . . [H]‌alf a day spent at school and then three evenings a week as well. There had to be homework done, and that sort of thing. So my evenings and weekends were fully occupied. I didn’t start my courting ’til I was twenty-​one.177

It is clear that it was not the war that interrupted Cooper’s love life. Ronald Quartermaine told a very similar story when discussing his wartime love life: I was keen on girls. I lost more girlfriends because ‘oh, can’t you come to this dance? Can’t you?’ I said ‘look, I’ve got homework, I’ve got a class, I’ve got this . . .’ Aachh, you know, and that was it, and again, it was a choice, do I study, or do I go out with girls? And afraid I was, stupid enough for wanting to choose study, instead of girls.178

However, in the course of the war six of our interviewees married and several more did so in the immediate post-​war years, having courted in the war’s latter years. Clearly, despite the assertions of the popular song, not all ‘girls’ wanted a soldier. A traditional place for meeting prospective partners was at school, and indeed some of our interviewees married former classmates; Geoffrey Cooper, for example, recalled:  ‘The girl I married was at school with me, in the same class. And when I left school, I wrote her a letter asking her if we could be friends together, and I had a letter back, saying, she never had any opinion of me, and never will! I wish I’d kept that letter, ’cos I married her! [laughter].’179 As in preceding decades, church was also a popular place to meet prospective romantic partners.180 Despite claims to increasing secularisation in the twentieth century, Britain, according to Clive Field, ‘remained identifiably and self-​consciously Christian between 1941 and 1945 . . . [and] Christian moral values continued to exert a strong and defining influence’.181 Several of our interviewees identified as practising Christians, attending church regularly during the war and subsequently, while others expressed a belief in God even if this did not translate into active worship. Alexander Davidson regularly attended his local congregational church and met his future wife there.182 John Dickson asserted ‘I’ve always been Church of Scotland . . . I was in the Boys’ Brigade . . . And I  went to Bible class every Sunday morning and then I  think v 277 v

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Men in reserve church.’ He went on to note that ‘there was an ulterior motive in that because the girls went as well’.183 The focus in popular memory on the war as an aphrodisiac encouraging sexual experimentation and fleeting liaisons has masked the more mundane reality of continuities in romantic behaviours that existed especially for those who remained on the home front. As with their social lives in general, reserved men’s romantic lives were typified as much by continuity as they were by wartime changes.

Conclusions In a period that has long been defined by mobility and change, those in reserved occupations maintained a remarkable amount of continuity and normality. Many reserved men, especially those who were slightly older, remained in their pre-​war jobs, often lived in their pre-​war homes and largely continued enjoying their pre-​war leisure pursuits. However, their narratives of the war were enmeshed and tangled in wartime myths. Primarily this showed itself in their unwillingness to discuss leisure pursuits at all, not wishing to portray themselves as shirkers when popular memory emphasises the hardships of war, especially for the military man. Instead they often chose to rely on identifiable wartime tropes such as air raids and civil defence to link their war experiences to dominant narratives. This was their way of emphasising their patriotic masculinity: their role on the home front was to work in civilian occupations for the war effort, often in dangerous conditions and for long, tiring periods. Such hard graft and sacrifice allowed our interviewees to construct narratives that made their contributions to the war effort central. A disavowal of leisure activities reflects this emphasis. However, cinema trips, nights in dance halls and the stirrings of young romance featured heavily in our interviewees’ memories of the war, regardless of how much they collectively protested at their lack of free time. The war itself also brought new pleasures, whether that meant serving in the Home Guard, enjoying the company of the new female labour force or relishing the thrill of the nightly bombardments on Britain. However, for some of our interviewees relating these remembered pleasures was often contentious. For some, wartime enjoyments were little considered, and badminton or the cinema, for example, were not connected to the issue of the war. For others, their wartime enjoyments were reasonable, a pleasure not to be dismissed, especially in a world as fraught with dangers as wartime Britain. Yet for others the normality of their lives rankled, even becoming the v 278 v

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Reserved life on the home front impetus behind their decisions to try to enlist. While for some the issue of the war little impacted on their memories of their wartime youth, for others this was clearly not the case. They struggled to compose narratives that incorporated their obvious enjoyments on the home front with the notion of themselves as grafters in a country at war. For reserved men their leisure time was as fraught with narrative tensions as their working lives.

Notes 1 John Dickson, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 21 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​53). 2 Merchant seamen, who were neither on the periphery of the war nor on the home front, are not examined in this chapter. 3 MO, File Report 1149, ‘Some Thoughts on Greyhounds and National Unity’, March 1942. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 HC Deb., 8 January 1942, Vol. 377, 19–​20. 7 HC Deb., 12 March 1942, Vol. 378, 1177–​80. 8 John K. Walton and James Walvin (eds.), Leisure in Britain, 1780–​ 1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983); Annette Kuhn, An Everyday Magic:  Cinema and Cultural Memory (London:  I. B.  Tauris, 2002); Melanie Tebbutt, Being Boys:  Youth, Leisure and Identity in the Inter-​ War Years (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); Ross McKibbin, ‘Working-​ Class Gambling in Britain 1880–​1939’, Past and Present, 82 (1979), 147–​78; Keith Laybourn, Working-​Class Gambling in Britain c. 1906–​1960s: The Stages of the Political Debate (Lewiston: Mellen Press, 2007); Matthew Hilton, Smoking in British Popular Culture 1800–​2000: Perfect Pleasures (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); John K. Walton, The English Seaside Resort: A Social History, 1750–​1914 (Leicester:  Leicester University Press, 1983); John K. Walton, The British Seaside:  Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); David John Hindle, From a Gin Palace to a King’s Palace: Provincial Music Hall in Preston (Stroud: Tempus, 2007); Dagmar Kift, The Victorian Music Hall:  Culture, Class, and Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 9 Robert MacKay, Half the Battle: Civilian Morale in Britain during the Second World War (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2002); Chris Sladen, ‘Holidays at Home in the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 37:1 (2002), 67–​89; Jeff Hill, ‘ “When Work Is Over”:  Labour, Leisure and Culture in Wartime Britain’, in Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill (eds.), ‘Millions Like Us’?: British Culture in the Second World War (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999).

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Men in reserve 10 Derek Birley, ‘Sportsmen and the Deadly Game’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 3:3 (1986), 288–​310; Tony McCarthy, War Games: The Story of Sport in World War Two (London: Queen Anne Press, 1989); Fiona Courage and Jessica Scantlebury, ‘Mass Observing Sport’, in Recording Leisure Lives:  Sports, Spectacles and Spectators in 20th Century Britain (London: Leisure Studies Association, 2013); James Chapman, The British at War:  Cinema, State and Propaganda 1939–​45 (London:  I. B.  Tauris, 1998); James Chapman, ‘British Cinema and the People’s War’, in Hayes and Hill, ‘Millions Like Us’?; Norman Baker, ‘A More Even Playing Field?: Sport during and after the War’, in Hayes and Hill, ‘Millions Like Us’?; Anton Rippon, Gas Masks for Goal Posts:  Football in Britain during the Second World War (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2005). 11 Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War?:  National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939–​1945 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2003); Sue Bruley, Women in Britain since 1900 (Basingstoke:  Palgrave, 1999); Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives:  Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); John Costello, Love, Sex and War 1939–​ 1945 (London: Pan, 1985). 12 Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–​1945 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), p. 315. 13 J. B. Priestley, Picture Post, 4 January 1941. 14 Alfred Thomas, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 3 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​45). 15 Ewart Parkinson, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 2 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​44). 16 Douglas Gordon, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 23 November 2011 (SOHC 050/​10). 17 John Scholey, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 25 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​41). 18 MO, File Report 13, ‘Sport in Wartime’, December 1939. 19 MO, File Report 698, ‘Sports Questionnaire’, May 1941. 20 MO, TC Films 1937–​48, 17-​5-​C, letters to Picturegoer Weekly (1940). 21 William McNaul, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 27 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​22). 22 Arthur Exell, The Politics of the Production Line: Autobiography of an Oxford Car Worker (Southampton: History Workshop Journal Pamphlet, 1981), p. 64. 23 Ibid., p. 60. 24 MO, File Report 1632, ‘Some Notes on the Use of Leisure’, March 1942. 25 MO, File Report 1138, ‘Music’, March 1942; MO, File Report 1332, ‘Books and the Public’, July 1942. 26 MO, File Report 1199, ‘Work and Holidays’, April 1942. 27 MO, File Report 1149, ‘Some Thoughts on Greyhounds’. 28 MO, File Report 337, ‘Leisure’, August 1940. 29 MO, File Report 1199, ‘Work and Holidays’. 30 Glasgow Herald, 23 September 1941, p.  7; Mass Observation, People in Production: An Enquiry into British War Production (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942), p. 193.

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Reserved life on the home front 31 Timothy Brown (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 8 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​30). 32 Eddie  Menday,  http://​ w ww.unionhistory.info/​ w orkerswar/ ​ v oices.php (accessed 7 October 2014). 33 MO, File Report 6, ‘Sport in Wartime’, October 1939. 34 Calder, The People’s War, p. 374. 35 Daily Mail, 4 September 1939. 36 MO, File Report 13, ‘Sport in Wartime’; File Report 18, ‘Wartime Sport’, January 1940. 37 Ronald Tonge, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 28 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​24). 38 MO, File Report 13, ‘Sport in Wartime’. 39 Calder, The People’s War, p. 374. 40 MO, File Report 13, ‘Sport in Wartime’. 41 Baker, ‘A More Even Playing Field?’; MO, File Report 6, ‘Sport in Wartime’, October 1939. 42 Ibid. 43 Pierre Lanfranchi and Matthew Taylor, ‘Professional Football in World War Two Britain’, in Pat Kirkham and David Thoms (eds.), War Culture:  Social Change and Changing Experience in World War Two (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995), p. 189. 44 Ibid., p. 191. 45 Football Association Council minutes, War Emergency Committee, 4 March 1940, cited in Baker, ‘A More Even Playing Field?’, p. 133. 46 Lanfranchi and Taylor, ‘Professional Football in World War Two Britain’, p. 191. 47 Ibid. 48 MO, File Report 13, ‘Sport in Wartime’. This poster, bearing the words ‘Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory’, was designed to raise morale. Yet its implicit message was that the efforts of the masses (‘Your’) would ensure the continuation of the class system (‘Us’). Consequently, this costly poster campaign was not well received. The author of this file report notes that football in particular was much more effective in raising spirits. 49 HC Deb., 25 February 1942, Vol. 378, 230–​322. See also MO, File Report 1166, ‘Sir Stafford Cripps’, March 1942. 50 MO, File Report 1149, ‘Some Thoughts on Greyhounds’. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 MO, File Report 724, ‘Broadcast for North American Service’, June 1941. 54 Calder, The People’s War, p. 376. 55 Ibid., p. 377. 56 MO, File Report 6, ‘Sport in Wartime’; File Report 13, ‘Sport in Wartime’. 57 Jim Lister, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 19 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​38). 58 Willie Dewar, interviewed by Arthur McIvor, 9 December 2008 (SOHC 050/​04). 59 George Dean, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 28 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​25).

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Men in reserve 60 Baker, ‘A More Even Playing Field?’, p. 130. 61 Priestley, Picture Post. 62 F. M. Leventhal, ‘ “The Best for the Most”: CEMA and State Sponsorship of the Arts in Wartime’, Twentieth Century British History, 1 (1990), 289–​317. 63 Calder, The People’s War, p. 509. 64 Paul Addison, Now the War Is Over (London: Pimlico, 1995), pp. 135–​6. 65 Picture Post, 11 November 1939, cited in Nick Hayes, ‘More than “Music-​ while-​ You-​ Eat”? Factory and Hostel Concerts, “Good Culture” and the Workers’, in Hayes and Hill, ‘Millions Like Us’? 66 Calder, The People’s War, p. 373. 67 Hayes, ‘More than “Music-​while-​You-​Eat”?’, p. 234. 68 TNA, EL 1/​12, CEMA paper no. 68, ‘Factory Concerts for ENSA’, memo by E. M. Stokes, 12 September 1940. 69 Hayes, ‘More than “Music-​while-​You-​Eat”?’, p. 234. 70 TNA, EL 2/​29, H.  F. Rossetti, summary of meeting between Ministry of Labour and CEMA, 3 March 1941, cited in Hayes, ‘More than “Music-​while-​ You-​Eat”?’, pp. 218–​19. 71 Calder, The People’s War, p. 372. 72 While ENSA was often derided for providing poor-​quality acts –​‘Every Night Something Awful’ –​some, such as Tony Hancock, Joyce Grenfell and Terry-​ Thomas, went on to have long careers in entertainment. Tom Harrisson, War Factory:  A  Report by Mass-​Observation (London:  Victor Gollancz, 1943), pp. 76–​7. 73 Charles Madge, War-​Time Patterns of Saving and Spending (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943); Penny Summerfield, ‘The “Levelling of Class”’, in Arthur Marwick, Clive Emsley and Wendy Simpson (eds.), Total War and Historical Change:  Europe, 1914–​1955 (Buckingham:  Open University Press, 2001), p. 211. Madge’s study commented on a range of ‘saving cultures’ and was based on 1940–​42. We have no evidence of savings patterns from 1943. 74 Madge, War-​Time Patterns of Saving and Spending, p. 70. 75 MacKay, Half The Battle, p.  216; MO, File Report 776, ‘Smoking Trends’, July 1941. 76 Summerfield, ‘The “Levelling of Class”’, p. 212. 77 Jack Jones, Union Man: An Autobiography (London: Collins, 1986), p. 115. 78 Ibid. 79 A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914–​1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 313. 80 Daily Express, 30 August 1939; MO, File Report 24, ‘The Cinema in the First Three Months of War’, January 1940. 81 Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Why I Go to the Cinema’, in Charles Davy (ed.), Footnotes to the Film (London: Lovat Dickson, 1937), p. 205.

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Reserved life on the home front 82 Calder, The People’s War, p. 369. 83 Cited in Chapman, ‘British Cinema and the People’s War’, p. 41. 84 MO, File Report 337, ‘Leisure’. 85 Chapman, The British at War, p. 3. 86 Jacob Peter Mayer, British Cinemas and Their Audiences: Sociological Studies (London: Dennis Dobson, 1978), p. 255. 87 Calder, The People’s War, p. 369. 88 Thomas interview, 3 May 2013. 89 Cecil Clements, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 16 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​51). 90 Calder, The People’s War, pp. 176–​7. 91 Frank Harvey, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 27 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​23). 92 Lister interview, 19 April 2013. 93 William Ramage, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 29 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 43). 94 Frank Chapple, Sparks Fly! A Trade Union Life (London: Michael Joseph, 1984), p. 35. 95 Scholey interview, 25 April 2013. 96 Bernard Casburn, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 31 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 57). 97 Willie Dewar, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 28 October 2011 (SOHC 050/​ 07). 98 Roy Miller, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 27 February 2013 (SOHC 050/​13). 99 Ibid. 100 Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Pimlico, 2004) p. 37. 101 Dewar interview, 28 October 2011. 102 Dickson interview, 21 May 2013; Harry McGregor, interviewed by Arthur McIvor, 13 July 2009 (SOHC 050/​05). 103 John Stephenson, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 23 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 39). 104 Colin Perry, Boy in the Blitz: The 1940 Diary of Colin Perry (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000), pp. 57–​9. 105 Casburn interview, 31 May 2013. 106 Ibid. 107 Phillip Rogers (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 19 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​15). 108 Ewart Rayner, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 22 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 18). 109 Norman ‘Jack’ Cooke, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 8 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 46). 110 Casburn interview, 31 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​57). 111 Dean interview, 28 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​25). 112 John Hiscutt, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 25 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​42). 113 Frank Blincow, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 30 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​56).

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Men in reserve 114 John Hiscutt, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 25 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​42). 115 Lucy Noakes and Juliette Pattinson, ‘Keep Calm and Carry On: The Cultural Memory of the Second World War in Britain’, in Lucy Noakes and Juliette Pattinson (eds.), The Cultural Memory of the Second World War in Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 3. 116 Cooke interview, 8 May 2013. 117 John Allan, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 7 November 2011 (SOHC 050/​09). 118 Mark Connelly, We Can Take It!:  Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2004), p. 149. 119 Casburn interview, 31 May 2013. 120 Lucy Noakes, War and the British: Gender and National Identity 1939–​1991 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997), p. 25. 121 Eddie Menday, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 15 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​50). 122 See also Corinna Peniston-​Bird, ‘“All in It Together” and “Backs to the Wall”: Relating Patriotism and the People’s War in the 21st Century’, Oral History, 40:2 (2012), 69–​80. 123 Lister interview, 19 April 2013. 124 Parkinson interview, 2 May 2013. 125 Edward Smithies, Crime in Wartime:  A  Social History of Crime in World War II (London:  George Allen and Unwin, 1982); Donald Thomas, An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War (London: John Murray, 2003); Bad Boys of the Blitz, dir. Steve Humphries, Testimony Films, 2005; Wartime Crime, dir. Russell England, 2am Films, 2001. 126 Lucy Noakes, ‘ “Serve to Save”:  Gender, Citizenship and Civil Defence in Britain 1937–​41’, Journal of Contemporary History, 47:4 (2012), 734–​53 (p. 735). 127 Ibid.; Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-​Bird, Contesting Home Defence:  Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 128 Dewar interview, 28 October 2011. 129 Walter Shelley, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 16 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​36). 130 Gerard Fiennes, Fiennes on Rails: Fifty Years of Railways as Seen by Gerard Fiennes (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1986). 131 McGregor interview, 13 July 2009. 132 Summerfield and Peniston-​Bird, Contesting Home Defence, p. 225. 133 Dewar interview, 9 December 2008. 134 Stephenson interview, 23 April 2013. 135 Shelley interview, 16 April 2013. 136 Thomas interview, 3 May 2013. 137 Scholey interview, 25 April 2013. 138 Stephen Smith (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 19 February 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 11).

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Reserved life on the home front 139 140 141 142

William Ramage interview, 29 April 2013. Clements interview, 16 May 2013. Harold Scragg, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 9 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​47). Geoffrey Cooper, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 21 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 17). 143 Summerfield and Peniston-​Bird, Contesting Home Defence, p. 226. 144 McNaul interview, 27 March 2013. 145 Walker Leith, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 2 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​26). 146 Ted Petty, 1989 (day unspecified) (IWM SA, 18076). 147 Dickson interview, 21 May 2013. 148 Cyril Beavor, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 14 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​49). 149 Claire Langhamer, ‘Love and Courtship in Mid-​ Twentieth-​ Century England’, Historical Journal, 50:1 (2007), 173–​ 96; Costello, Love, Sex and War. 150 Langhamer, ‘Love and Courtship in Mid-​ Twentieth-​ Century England’, p. 195, citing MO, File Report 3086, ‘Love-​Making in Public’, February 1949. 151 Smith interview, 19 February 2013. 152 A. J.  Mill and Bennett Scott, ‘Ship Ahoy! (All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor)’, 1909. 153 Mack Gordon and Harry Warren, ‘You Can’t Say No to a Soldier’, performed by Joan Merrill in the 1942 film Iceland. 154 Noakes, War and the British, p. 68. 155 Perry, Boy in the Blitz, p. 176. 156 Joy Harwood, Imperial War Museum Documents Department, 88/​53/​1, cited in Corinna Peniston-​Bird, ‘Classifying the Body in the Second World War: British Men in and out of Uniform’, Body & Society, 9 (2003) 31–​48. 157 Rose, Which People’s War?, p. 176. 158 Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives, p. 149. 159 Penny Summerfield and Nicole Crockett, ‘“You Weren’t Taught That with the Welding”:  Lessons in Sexuality in the Second World War’, Women’s History Review, 1:3 (1992), 435–​54 (p. 447). 160 Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars (London: Pandora Press, 1987), pp. 170–​1. 161 Ibid., p. 207. 162 Ronald Quartermaine, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 4 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​28). 163 Daniel Griffiths, British Library Sound Archive, NLSC: Lives in Steel, C532/​ 074. 164 Blincow interview, 30 May 2013. 165 Menday interview, 15 May 2013. 166 Thomas Cantwell, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 24 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 55). 167 Dean interview, 28 March 2013.

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Men in reserve 168 Audrey Brown, interviewed by Helena Wojtczak, cited in Helena Wojtczak, Railway Women:  Exploitation, Betrayal and Triumph in the Workplace (Hastings: The Hastings Press, 2005), p. 192. 169 Bruley, Women in Britain since 1900, p. 114. 170 Summerfield and Crockett, ‘You Weren’t Taught That with the Welding’, p. 440. 171 Langhamer, ‘Love and Courtship in Mid-​ Twentieth-​ Century England’, p. 193. 172 Lister interview, 19 April 2013. 173 Alexander Davidson, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 10 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​32). 174 Alexander Ramage, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 19 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​14). 175 Beavor interview, 14 May 2013. 176 Lister interview, 19 April 2013. 177 Cooper interview, 21 March 2013. 178 Quartermaine interview, 4 April 2013. 179 Geoffrey Cooper, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 21 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 17). 180 Claire Langhamer, The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 92. 181 Clive Field, ‘Puzzled People Revisited:  Religious Believing and Belonging in Wartime Britain, 1939–​ 45’, Twentieth Century British History, 19:4 (2008), 446–​ 79 (p.  478). See also Tom Lawson and Stephen Parker, ‘Introduction: God and War. A Century in the Politics of Religion’, in Tom Lawson and Stephen Parker (eds.), God and War: The Church and Armed Conflict in the Twentieth Century (London: Ashgate, 2012); Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain:  Understanding Secularisation 1800–​2000 (London: Routledge, 2001). 182 Davidson interview, 10 April 2013. 183 Dickson interview, 21 May 2013.

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Forgotten: the missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations

In October 2013 the Daily Mail published an article titled ‘The Man who Hated Britain’. The article viciously disparaged the socialist politics of deceased academic Ralph Miliband  –​father of the then leader of the parliamentary opposition, Ed Miliband –​and raised the spectre of the influence of such politics on a future Labour Government.1 The article was widely condemned both by the press and by those on social media. Criticism of the Daily Mail did not centre on support of Ralph Miliband’s views but rather on the unfairness of an attack on a dead man and, strikingly, his role in the British Royal Navy during the Second World War. The television and newspaper coverage of the furore repeatedly accompanied the story with a photograph of Miliband in his naval uniform, serving to link him with a role he held briefly as a young man rather than emphasising his later career as a respected, if somewhat controversial, academic.2 This overt focus on Miliband’s military youth was mirrored by political commentators. Tim Montgomerie, a Conservative Party activist, argued in The Times: ‘Without any apparent evidence the Daily Mail accused the Labour leader’s father of hating Britain. This, after all, was a man who served for three years in the Royal Navy during the Second World War.’3 Those on social media websites were, unsurprisingly, more emphatic. Many on the social networking site Twitter declared Miliband a ‘war hero’ and regularly implied, or explicitly stated, that he should not have been attacked on this basis.4 Moreover, it further emerged that Peter Dacre, father of the Daily Mail’s editor, Paul Dacre, was a young journalist during the war and did not enlist. There is no evidence to suggest that he avoided military service: although journalism was not a reserved occupation, Peter Dacre was only nineteen when the war ended and so conceivably his age group never received their call-​up papers. Yet the widespread implication was that he had, v 287 v

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Men in reserve somehow, shirked his duty.5 Comments were also made about the Daily Mail’s owner Lord Rothermere’s strident support of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1934, both financially and in print. The newspaper’s sympathetic editorial position towards the BUF, as evidenced by the headline ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’,6 coupled with Peter Dacre’s war record, was used to cast aspersions on the Daily Mail. That this controversy took place almost seventy years after the end of the Second World War is testament to the venerated position the war, and its combatants, still hold in British society. Indeed, military service has clearly acted as a useful form of defence against attack, and any denigration, or perceived denigration, of those who fought in the world wars is swiftly, and often savagely, condemned.7 The implication of this heated exchange was the notion that the only valid contribution a man of fighting age could make in this period was to be in uniform and to risk his life for king and country, a belief that precludes the millions of men in reserved occupations. There is an overly simplified framework into which British wartime experiences, as portrayed in books, films and television dramas, have become artificially fitted. The British home front is predominantly depicted as a feminised space with women taking on traditionally male jobs surrounded by old and medically unfit men. Young, physically robust men are typically seen in the uniform of one of the three armed services. The figure of the reserved man is often, although not entirely, absent, despite his necessity to both British survival and Allied victory. This chapter recovers the increasingly infrequent depictions of reserved men in the post-​war period. Both official monuments –​those erected by the State –​and unofficial memorials, instigated and installed by local communities, are rare, with only a few civilian occupations in which men were employed being celebrated. Popular culture has been similarly reticent in showing the work of the millions of men who ensured a steady supply of war materials and food as well as providing vital civilian services. While some, largely negative, portrayals appear in the early post-​war period, this became increasingly uncommon in the 1980s, dwindling to almost absolute silence in the years since the advent of the millennium. This in turn has left some reserved men feeling that their contributions to the war effort have been either hugely undervalued or entirely forgotten. This chapter examines commemorative practices and popular representations of wartime service, both of which are invested with symbolic meanings that encapsulate memory and are what Pierre Nora terms ‘lieux de mémoire’ (sites of memory).8 These sites of memory form part of the wider cultural v 288 v

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The missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations context of remembrance and reveal what has shaped our interviewees’ sense of self in twenty-​first-​century Britain.

No monuments for munitions: memorialisation of reserved workers Memorials to the war dead in Britain have been erected since the Napoleonic Wars. Initially, they acted as a substitute grave for officers whose burial place was either overseas or unknown. The first British memorial to other ranks, depicting three guardsmen beneath a female embodiment of ‘Honour’, was constructed in 1859 in London to commemorate those killed during the Crimean War. Late-​nineteenth-​century regimental monuments recorded the names of rank-​and-​file men who were killed overseas, in part assuaging personal loss with public recognition and bestowing immortality on the dead. After 1918, memorials listed the dead in alphabetical order rather than by rank, demonstrating a transition towards what Inglis calls ‘equality in death’.9 The flourishing literature on memorialisation, largely centring on the First World War, has often polarised into an interpretation of war memorials as a conduit for personal mourning, as attested by the ‘grief school’, or as an ideological and political project to remobilise the disaffected, as identified by the ‘functionalist school’. Proponents of the former, including Jay Winter,10 emphasise the personal over the political, noting that the erection of a memorial is part of the process of grieving: an expression of private sorrow that facilitates public mourning. They provide a physical place at which the bereaved, who have been denied both a corpse and a burial service (as a result of a decision taken by the Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) that the dead were not to be repatriated but would instead be buried in British war cemeteries abroad), can mourn their dead. As David Cannadine notes, memorials were ‘spontaneously generated by the bereaved for their own comfort . . . This “cult of the dead” was not so much “an expression of patriotism” as a display of bereavement.’11 Similarly, Samuel Hynes notes: ‘Monument-​raising is an attempt by a society to deal with certain fundamental needs of those who survive a war. A monument records the dead, and so gives dignity to their undignified deaths.’12 About 40,000 memorials were erected in the aftermath of the First World War, transforming the landscape of Britain.13 The State took a lead in this, with the rituals surrounding the Cenotaph in 1919 and the burial of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey in 1920, while local communities sought to erect their own sites of mourning. v 289 v

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Men in reserve Abstract symbolic monuments, such as granite crosses, obelisks, cenotaphs, arches, columns and curved walls that used minimalist classical designs were popular, serving no other function than to pay tribute. There were also persistent calls for practical memorials, such as hospital wings, libraries, halls, infant-​welfare clinics and memorial parks. Some memorials combined these dual functions of monumentality and utility, such as clock towers and fountains. These functional utilitarian tributes were, however, ultimately rare in comparison to the huge number of stone monuments erected, not least because they were perceived to risk desecrating the memory of the dead with the mundanity of daily life.14 First World War memorials, therefore, commemorated the dead, not the war. In contrast to the ‘grief school’, functionalists, such as Bob Bushaway,15 note that there is more to memorials than simply grief and the remembering of the dead. Rather, they are instruments of politics that elevate the fallen and inhibit criticisms of the war, the Government and post-​ war society. In honouring the dead and pronouncing the righteousness of the fight, any concerns the public may hold concerning the financial and moral costs of the conflict and their knowledge of the often squalid and futile deaths of combatants that occurred on an industrial scale are assuaged, overlaid with a sanitised patina of heroism that realigns focus on the glorious dead. However, as T. G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael Roper assert, the reality perhaps lies somewhere between these two dichotomous positions. Indeed, they argue that ‘the politics of war memory and commemoration always has to engage with mourning and with attempts to make good the psychological and physical damage of war; and where people undertake the tasks of mourning and reparations, a politics is always at work’.16 The Second World War has generated far less debate than the First, undoubtedly because there was no comprehensive construction of memorials in the aftermath of 1945 that was equivalent to that which occurred after 1918. The war memorials that were newly erected were generally small, discreet plaques, such as that unveiled at St Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge in 1948 inscribed with the names of the fifty-​two members of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) who had died, or that erected in Holy Trinity Church, Ingham in Norfolk in 1946 to the memory of the eighty-​five merchant seamen who had attended the Prince of Wales Sea Training School and died during the war.17 A striking example of commemoration are the stained-​glass windows in Bristol Cathedral that were dedicated in 1951, depicting male and female uniformed representatives v 290 v

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The missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations of the ‘Nursing Services’, ‘St John’s Ambulance’, ‘Fire Services’, ‘British Red Cross Society’, ‘Bristol Police’, ‘Warden’s Service’, ‘Women’s Voluntary Services’ and ‘Home Guard’. Other memorials were utilitarian, and some, like the old Coventry Cathedral, were left in ruins to serve as their own memorial. Mark Connelly attributes this disparity to the more diffuse nature of suffering in the Second World War, with the line between ‘civilian’ and ‘soldier’ having become more porous.18 In the First World War, roughly 780,000 British people were killed.19 This included 1,516 civilians, 490 members of the Royal Flying Corps,20 and about 50,000 merchant seamen and Royal Navy personnel; the remaining losses were sustained by the army. Consequently, a coherent singular national narrative was constructed around the fallen soldier,21 and memorials were erected typically in busy public spaces in many cities, towns and villages  –​a marked shift from the nineteenth century, when monuments to the dead were often out of the public’s gaze. In contrast, in the Second World War, the British Army was not the only service to incur large casualties. Of the 266,443 British male service personnel killed, 144,079 were from the army, 69,606 from the RAF and 50,758 from the Royal Navy.22 Additionally, 30,248 Merchant Navy personnel were killed, 624 women died serving in the auxiliary services and 60,595 British civilians were killed as a result of the Luftwaffe’s aerial bombing campaign.23 There was also an increase in work-​related civilian fatalities that can be directly attributed to wartime working conditions. The range of wartime roles that the dead had undertaken made collective memorials both impracticable and meaningless. Additionally, the aftermath of the Second World War occasioned a prolonged period of austerity not conducive to the expensive business of monument-​building. Instead, many First World War memorials across Britain, including national ones such as the Cenotaph in Whitehall and local community monuments, were updated to incorporate the names of the dead of the recent war.24 The naming of the fatalities, a common feature of war memorials since the Boer War, facilitates the emergence of the ordinary soldier as a hero in the dramatic narrative of war, which had formerly been the prerogative of military leaders.25 As a consequence of this updating, the merchant marines, who worked transporting goods across the oceans and who had been the most commemorated of Britain’s wartime civilian workers during the conflict, were the first reserved occupation to be formally recognised. Sir Edwin Lutyens’s memorial to the merchant seamen ‘who have no grave but the sea’, constructed in 1928 in London’s Tower Hill Cemetery, was extended in 1955 to include the names of 24,000 men v 291 v

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Men in reserve who died at sea during the Second World War. This behemoth of a memorial commemorates the 35,747 men of the merchant marine buried at sea during the two world wars.26 Although a civilian service, and a reserved occupation, this memorialisation of the Merchant Navy fits within the ongoing ‘cult of the dead’ that David Cannadine identified and that later writers, such as George Mosse, have expanded upon.27 Yet it is the death of men at sea in a war zone that is memorialised, rather than their vital contributions in ensuring foodstuffs and munitions that were supporting not only the British as an island nation but the entire allied network. This has continued to be the case: Merchant Navy Day, instituted in 2000 and held on 3 September each year, commemorates the sinking of the British merchant ship Athenia just eight hours after the declaration of war in 1939. Merchant seamen were not only some of the first victims of the war but, as a group, were subjected to some of the most prolonged dangers and hardships. Indeed, as Churchill declared in December 1939, in his role as First Lord of the Admiralty, ‘only at sea has the war been proceeding at full scale since September 3rd’.28 Many more merchant seamen lost their lives than the official memorial acknowledges. In total, 30,248 Merchant Navy seamen –​a third of their total number –​were killed, the majority in the Battle of the Atlantic. A further 4,707 were wounded, 4,654 were reported as missing and 5,720 became prisoners of war.29 In comparison, of the over 5 million men in British military uniform during the Second World War 264,443 lost their lives in combat, 277,077 were wounded and 172,592 became prisoners of war. Clearly, the mercantile marine suffered proportionally higher losses despite not being official combatants in the war. This emphasis on death at sea, explicit in the Tower Hill Cemetery and the annual Merchant Navy Day, is apparent in recent commemorative activity. In 2003, a Merchant Navy war memorial plaque was unveiled by Churchill’s grandson at the Musée du débarquement D-​Day museum in Arromanches, Normandy on the anniversary of D-​Day. This was the site of the construction of the Mulberry harbours to facilitate the landing of personnel and equipment in Operation Neptune, the Channel-​crossing phase of Overlord, in June 1944. The plaque includes the following poem: Look out to sea and say a prayer For those who rest beneath They gave their lives that you may share A Europe that is free.

The poem conferring honour on the dead also features on a 2008 statue in Dover, Kent, commemorating the work of the Merchant Navy in the v 292 v

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The missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations Second World War (Figure 7.1). The memorial, which includes a plinth containing casualty figures, is a bronze sculpture by Vivian Mallock of a merchant seaman raising binoculars to his eyes in order to gaze out across the sea. Costing nearly £50,000, which was raised by the local community, it was also unveiled by Churchill’s grandson. It is a heroic death to help liberate Europe, rather than service on the home front, that is being remembered in the poem featured at both sites. The unveiling ceremonies ended with the Last Post, the bugle call associated with military funerals. This reliance on familiar military conventions gives added meaning to the commemoration and is just one of many illustrations of the unusual status that the mercantile marine had as non-​ uniformed civilians who were operating in war zones in circumstances of extreme danger. For example, they played a key role during Operation Neptune, landing military supplies and troops that were integral to the liberation of Europe. The men of the Merchant Navy were regarded as the ‘Fourth Service’, and throughout the war were generally celebrated in similar ways to those in the armed services and shown in a range of media to be brave, courageous British heroes, as Linsey Robb has noted.30 The mercantile marine were also regarded as part of the military services in post-​war commemoration. The Red Ensign, the flag of the mercantile marine, hangs on Britain’s national war memorial at the Cenotaph alongside flags for the army, navy and air force. Similarly, the 2005 ‘No Known Grave’ memorial on the Scottish island of Cumbrae incorporates silhouettes of personnel and insignias of the RAF, the Royal Navy, the British Army and the Merchant Navy, thereby coopting a civilian service into the memorialisation of the military.31 Moreover, the 1952 memorial to the lost men of the Merchant Navy in Liverpool includes the ‘Ode of Remembrance’ from Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’: ‘They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old . . .’ This poem is more usually associated with the military, serving further to blur the lines between civilian and military commemoration. This level of celebration seemed to perplex those of our interviewees who served in the Merchant Navy. In line with those in other reserved occupations they could often see very little merit in commemoration of their work. Indeed, wartime Merchant Navy engineer Stephen Smith stated ‘I can understand why . . . but people of my age, I think you find that they just did it, you know. It wasn’t heroes or anything like that.’32 The status accrued by men in the armed forces, both during the war and subsequently, was reflected on to the men of the mercantile marine. Their elevated position is fortified by the awarding of military-​style decorations. In the immediate aftermath of the war, v 293 v

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Men in reserve

Figure 7.1  The Merchant Navy Memorial (undated), Dover (photo by Juliette Pattinson)

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The missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations merchant seamen were the recipients of the War Medal, often mistakenly considered to be a victory medal, which was bestowed on all armed service personnel. Further duplication between the military and the civilian services was seen in specific campaign medals –​the France and Germany Star for e­ xample –​that were more commonly associated with the military. More recently, in 2013, after a sixteen-​year campaign led by retired naval commander Eddie Grenfell, the British Government began awarding the Arctic Star to the remaining Royal and Merchant Navy sailors who had served on the Arctic convoys to Archangel and Murmansk between August 1941 and May 1945, which generated much press coverage.33 With regard to commemoration of female workers, Corinna Peniston-​Bird has argued that ‘representations of conflict cannot escape wartime hierarchies of service’.34 This is equally true of the commemoration of male wartime contributions. The proximity to death, as evidenced by the excessively high casualty figures, their link with the armed forces and their role on D-​Day, perhaps explain why the Merchant Navy is the most venerated of the wartime civilian services; throughout the war, it found continual praise in all quarters: admiration that persisted into the post-​war period to the present, cemented by memorials and medals. Although they were not as widely celebrated as the mercantile marine, similar emphasis was seen in the memorialisation of Britain’s wartime fire brigades. Pre-​war firemen and those in full-​time employment in the AFS were in reserved occupations. Robert John Alexander, who escaped his reserved occupation status to join the Royal Navy by neglecting his tasks to ensure his dismissal, told the Imperial War Museum that: Those fireman never got the recognition they should have got. I’ve seen some great fellas in the Navy who’d dive in the water to pick survivors up but those firemen! It was the first dead man I’d seen . . . [A]‌ll these firemen with their face black and there was one lying on a stretcher with his tin hat on his chest, blackened face and I said ‘what’s wrong with him?’ One bloke said ‘oh he’s dead lad’. Machine-​gunned at the top of the ladder by the Germans. He was fighting the fire. Anyway, they couldn’t train them to fight fires like that. I’ve never seen fires like that. Even the regular firemen, and a lot of these were AFS, Auxiliary Fire Service. I thought they were great blokes looking back. Going up big ladders with 50 foot flames. Should be called the Royal Fire Service now for what they did I think. They did some great work those firemen.35

For Alexander it is clearly the bravery under fire and the danger of death –​two experiences that were seen as key traits of masculine identity during the war –​that merit praise, rather than the fire services’ vital v 295 v

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Men in reserve work in protecting the industrial and civilian people and properties in Britain while it was under bombardment.36 Such emphasis is also seen in official commemoration. The National Firefighters Memorial, ‘Blitz’, was erected in 1991 to honour the firemen who had died during the Blitz (Figure 7.2).37 Sculpted by John Mills, who also designed the 2005 memorial to the Women of World War II, the bronze figurative representation depicts a firefighter pointing in the direction of the imaginary fire and two others operating a hose. The memorial is located close to St Paul’s Cathedral, the subject of the iconic photograph that appeared in the Daily Mail on 31 December 1940, taken by Herbert Mason two days previously, during a raid that resulted in 163 dead, 16 of whom were firemen, with a further 250 firefighters requiring hospital treatment. The memorial, one of the first to commemorate a civilian group, is inscribed (using the same lettering as featured in ration books to capture wartime authenticity) with the names of 1,027 male and 24 female firefighters who were killed during the war, and with the description of Britain’s wartime fire services attributed to Winston Churchill, as ‘heroes with grimy faces’. Similarly, emphasis on remembering fallen firemen is also seen outside London. A  plaque has been erected in the Second World War-​themed museum in Eden Camp in Yorkshire naming all the dead of the fire services in Britain. There are also several smaller war memorials across Britain, acknowledging the deaths of local firemen in wartime. In Coventry’s St Mary’s Guildhall, for example, there is a plaque listing the sixty-​seven firemen who died in the Coventry Blitz. The Home Guard, which drew some of its volunteers from the reserved occupations, has also been recently commemorated. A granite pyramid, unveiled in Torquay on 11 August 2005 following a local campaign, commemorates all those who served in the Home Guard, acknowledges the 1,206 Home Guards who were killed nationwide and specifically names the 5 who died in Torquay in 1944. Strikingly, in noting who volunteered for service in the Home Guard, the website perpetuates the erasure from popular memory of men who were in the reserved occupations: ‘A force comprised of those too young to take their place in the regular armed forces, or of those mature people with much experience, who wanted to form a line of defence for Great Britain, should the brutal and ruthless invasion army of Nazi Germany land on the beaches or drop from the air’.38 Despite the overwhelming focus on the memorialisation of death, in recent years the narrative of commemoration has widened. The ‘cult of the fallen’, which both Cannadine and Mosse identified in the aftermath v 296 v

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The missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations

Figure 7.2  The National Firefighters Memorial (undated), London (photo by Juliette Pattinson) v 297 v

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Men in reserve of the First World War, is durable, still present and intact today and, as a result of the ongoing conflicts in the Gulf and Afghanistan, continually being supplemented. Armistice Day, renamed after the Second World War as Remembrance Sunday, remains a source of pride for many British people. Yet the function of memorials erected in the last twenty years is no longer primarily a conduit for sorrow, as the ‘grief school’ identified in relation to inter-​war memorials. For the Second World War especially, the process of commemoration is increasingly focusing on those who contributed, not just those who died. The inscription on a plaque set in 2000 in the floor of the ruined St Michael’s Cathedral in Coventry –​an iconic symbol of the provincial Blitz following its devastation on 14 November 1941 –​reads: ‘In gratitude to God and to commend to future generations the self-​sacrifice of all those who served on the home front in the Second World War’.39 A memorial recognising the contributions of the civilian population, as opposed to remembering those who had died, and one that does so in a non-​specific, communal way, would never have been erected in the years following the end of the war. This shift towards inclusivity, undoubtedly an astute political move made as veterans near the end of their lives, can also be seen on Remembrance Sunday, which since 1998 has included the Bevin Boys and, from 2000, the Land Girls. The British Legion note on their website that ‘The service at the Cenotaph is framed to ensure that no-​one is forgotten.’40 Indeed, many aspects of Britain’s war effort have now been the focus of this memory boom.41 Non-​humans are even remembered, with the unveiling of David Backhouse’s ‘Animals at War’ memorial in 2004 by the Princess Royal, an imposing £1.4 million monument in London’s Hyde Park.42 Featuring two bronze mules, a horse and a dog, as well as a catalogue of the number of animals killed, it is ‘dedicated to all animals that served and died alongside British and Allied forces in wars and campaigns’. Conscientious objectors, too, have been commemorated. In 1994 a rough-​hewn stone monument was placed in London’s Tavistock Square with a plaque reading: ‘To all those who established and are maintaining the right to refuse to kill’. Moreover, 15 May each year since 1985 has been designated as International Conscientious Objection Day. However, this memorialisation, although ostensibly general in focus, often centres on those who conscientiously objected to the First World War. This largely reflects modern understandings of that conflict and warfare in general. The contemporary image of the First World War centres on the futility and carnage of the Western Front, and it v 298 v

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The missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations is resistance to this slaughter that modern society honours. Similar emphasis can be seen in the ‘Shot at Dawn’ memorial, unveiled in 2000 at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. While for centuries cowardice or desertion had been punishable by death in military law, modern understandings of the mental strain of military service have recast these men as victims. That changing sensibilities have shaped commemoration practices is also evident, for example, in the case of Alan Turing. As a code-​breaker at the Government Code and Cypher School based in Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, Turing was largely responsible for the cracking of intercepted messages from the German ‘Enigma’ machine. His contributions to the war effort were, undoubtedly, great, and have been widely commemorated. However, while this level of celebration is unusual for civilian contributions, his post-​war life is as central to his heroic representation as his secret wartime work. In 1952 Turing was convicted of gross indecency (for committing homosexual acts), ultimately choosing chemical castration over a prison sentence. In 1954 he committed suicide. In recent times Turing’s legacy has been as much about celebrating sexual diversity as his contribution to Allied victory. For example, a monument to Turing was unveiled in Manchester in 2001. The statue is tellingly situated between the University of Manchester, his last place of work, and Canal Street, Manchester’s gay village. The memorial itself also highlights the dual reasons for his commemoration. It shows Turing sitting on a bench holding an apple, a symbol both of forbidden love and of knowledge. Moreover, the plaque at Turing’s feet reads:  ‘Father of computer science, mathematician, logician, wartime codebreaker and victim of prejudice’. Furthermore, in 2012 Manchester City Council, in conjunction with the Lesbian and Gay Foundation, set up an award in Turing’s memory to honour those who had made a significant contribution to the fight against homophobia, highlighting that his legacy is as equally bound up with his sexuality as with his genius. Turing, conscientious objectors and those executed for perceived crimes of cowardice are linked not by their wartime contributions, but by modern sensibilities concerning past injustices, and it is for these reasons that they are widely celebrated today. Similarly, the rise of feminism and the subsequent increased interest in women’s history has led to widespread memorialisation of women’s wartime work. Indeed, it is women’s war work that has been central to recent commemoration activities. Jay Winter’s assertion about the First World War is equally applicable to the Second: v 299 v

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Men in reserve Women are now at the heart of acts of remembrance because war has moved out of the battlefield and into every corner of civilian life. War brings family history and world history together in long-​lasting and frequently devastating ways. That is why women as well as men now construct the story, disseminate it, and consume it. Women join men in forming a new class of historical actors  –​what we now term ‘witnesses’, people who were there, people who have seen war at close range, people whose memories are part of the historical record.43

Most notably, in 2005 a memorial to ‘The Women of World War II’ was unveiled on Whitehall to commemorate, as the plinth states, ‘the vital work done by over seven million women’. Corinna Peniston-​Bird has explored the controversies regarding this monument, showing the fractious responses to each planned memorial as well as to the finished article.44 One of the most contentious issues was sculptor John Mills’s final design which features seventeen disembodied uniforms, coats and overalls, as well as handbags and gas masks, pegged up as if discarded after their final wartime shift, a temporary phenomenon necessary only for the duration of the national emergency. The adverse reaction to the memorial by many female veterans illustrates how the commemoration process can serve to marginalise and alienate.45 This monument is symbolic of the change in the nature of Britain’s commemoration of war. The location itself is significant, situated in the heart of Whitehall. On one side sits the Cenotaph, the monument designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens in 1919 memorialising Britain’s ‘glorious dead’. On the other sits a statue of a mounted Earl Haig. Upon this statue’s unveiling the Daily Mirror described how ‘The Duke [of Gloucester] paid tribute to the man who commanded the largest army the British Empire has ever produced and the leadership which inspired it and ultimately brought victory to the Allied cause.’46 However, Haig is now firmly associated with industrial-​scale slaughter on the Western Front during the First World War. The ‘Women of World War II’ memorial, commemorating the myriad contributions of women in industry, civil defence organisations and the auxiliary services, offers a collective, albeit not unproblematic, identity rooted in gender and constitutes a marked shift in the traditions of commemorative practices. In addition to a national memorial commemorating women’s collective endeavours on the home front, there are also monuments to specific organisations.47 The ATS, the largest of the three female forces with over 200,000 members, is the subject of a memorial conceived in 2004 by two ATS veterans, Mary Beeston and Margaret Rogers. They were dissatisfied with the design plans for the ‘Women of World War II’ memorial v 300 v

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The missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations and decided to commission their own monument, raising the necessary funds. The cement statue, featuring a seated uniformed member, was sculpted by Andy Decomyn and was unveiled at the National Memorial Arboretum, Staffordshire, in 2006.48 The 9,000 members of the Women’s Timber Corps are recognised by a 2007 memorial in the form of a life-​ sized bronze sculpture by Malcolm Robertson, unveiled in Aberfoyle in Scotland, and in a 2013 steel memorial entitled ‘Pull Don’t Push’ by Ray Lonsdale, featuring a felled tree and two ‘lumberjills’, situated in Yorkshire’s Dalby Forest. The Women’s Timber Corps was an off-​shoot of the much larger and better known Women’s Land Army. A  memorial to the Land Girls was unveiled in November 2012 in Fochabers in Moray, Scotland. In addition, a monument to the Land Army and Timber Corps was unveiled in October 2014 in the National Memorial Arboretum by the Countess of Wessex.49 Sheffield’s ‘Women of Steel’ and their work in Sheffield’s steel mills during the war are the subject of a sculpture by Martin Jennings.50 There were no plans to include on the memorial any reference to their male colleagues. Some of the men we interviewed agreed with this focus on women in post-​war commemorative practice. When asked about honouring wartime workers, Jim Lister, who had served on the railways, responded that ‘I think they could have done more for the women. Because as much as you [male workers] were taken away to do an arduous and harder job, they were filling your place in. And they could have gave them more consideration in that respect. I think so anyway.’51 Lister’s comment about the limited official recognition of women’s wartime contributions after the war sits uneasily in a narrative that emphasises the temporary nature and lesser value of women’s contributions as they plugged the gap made by the diversion of men to undertake more demanding work, something we discuss in more detail in Chapter  4. However, this propensity towards memorials celebrating female service arguably obscures the work of their male colleagues. Not a single industry that might be classified as ‘men’s work’ before 1939 and that absorbed women into its labour force during the war became female-​dominated. The notion of a feminised home front that is so central to popular memory has consequently shaped commemorative practices that have served to overshadow civilian men. This pattern of memorialisation follows, to some degree, a logical pattern. As Corinna Peniston-​Bird argues: The wartime hierarchy of service clearly maps onto post-​war commemorative practices. Service continued to be valued, in ascending order of

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Men in reserve status, on a spectrum defined at one end by death and danger, proximity to action, degree of self-​sacrifice, and overt and obvious connection to the war effort.52

In wartime, as in remembrance, female workers were praised above the men whom they worked alongside or replaced. However, most men in reserved occupations prided themselves on the fact that they were engaged in work that had an ‘overt and obvious connection to the war effort’  –​ the raison d’être of the policy of reservation  –​as they made planes, ships and bullets; mined the coal; and ploughed the land. Yet they are rarely mentioned, let alone commemorated. Perhaps, then, what are being memorialised are extraordinary contributions. Women left their more ‘traditional roles’ and went to work in unknown and often more dangerous jobs (albeit rarely into the most dangerous jobs). Public, and official, opinion therefore suggests that they are worthy of celebration and commemoration: they are, after all, ‘the women who won the war’.53 That it is this extraordinariness that merits memorialisation is also seen in the efforts put into commemorating the work of the Bevin Boys, who are one of the few groups of male civilians (albeit not reserved) to have been commemorated. Despite the fact that so many of the balloted Bevin Boys ‘hated every minute of it’,54 a collective identity has evolved. Neal Wreford’s testimony on the BBC ‘People’s War’ website asserts that when the Chatterley Whitfield Mining Museum in Stoke-​on-​Trent offered free admission to ex-​Bevin Boys one day in 1989 about fifty attended. A national association was formed and has campaigned vigorously for public recognition of their wartime contributions.55 In contrast, men in reserved occupations have never campaigned collectively, or in large numbers, for commemoration. Warwick Taylor, the vice-​president of the Bevin Boys Association and author of a book chronicling their history, recounted his long campaign for acknowledgement when he was interviewed for the Imperial War Museum: My basic concern was to get recognition for the Bevin Boys. We didn’t get nothing. We didn’t get medals, we didn’t [get] gratuity, demob suits, absolutely nothing. Completely secret underground movement if you like . . . and this recognition’s only just come out in recent years. First recognition we got was on the VE and VJ day commemorations in 1995 in May and August . . . This was basically at last able to get some form of recognition. Some people think ‘Bevin Boys? Who are they?’ And then we’ve got permission to march at the Cenotaph in London. Last year [1998] was the first year we were actually able to have a contingent of Bevin Boys marching. I was very happy to

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The missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations lead our contingent this year at the Cenotaph. We were all wearing miners’ helmets of course, leading the contingent I wore an original Bevin Boy helmet and the rest of them had the modern day, the white miners’ helmets and there was seventy of us and it was a very, very proud moment for us. At last we were getting that recognition.56

As Taylor notes, the Bevin Boys were officially acknowledged in 1995 –​ the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war in Europe and Japan –​in speeches made by the Queen; Prime Minister John Major; and Betty Boothroyd, the speaker of the House of Commons. In 1998 the Bevin Boys were included in the National Service of Remembrance at the Cenotaph. In 2006, Gordon Banks, Labour MP for Ochil and South Perthshire, called on the Government to recognise the Bevin Boys officially with an award similar to that available to military veterans.57 Consequently, in 2007 then Prime Minister Tony Blair announced a scheme of commemorative badges to be presented to those who had been conscripted to the mines, as well as volunteers, between 1943 and 1948. The first medals were awarded in 2008 by Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, in a ceremony to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Bevin Boy scheme, with medals still being issued as an ongoing process. Furthermore, in May 2013 a memorial to the work of the Bevin Boys was unveiled by the Countess of Wessex in the National Memorial Arboretum, the presence of royalty serving to underscore the prestigious nature of the event. The memorial bears the words ‘We also served 1943–​1948.’ For the Bevin Boys the issue of recognition was clearly important and emotive, and their obvious relief at finally being recognised highlighted just how deeply being forgotten had undermined their masculine sense of self. Indeed, Harry Parkes, a wartime Bevin Boy who designed the Arboretum memorial, told the BBC at its unveiling that the recognition gave ‘back our dignity that says we served our country . . . [I]‌t’s given the Bevin Boys the right to stand tall and say I was a Bevin Boy . . . That is the answer to all my hopes and dreams for the last 70 years.’58 The Bevin Boys are atypical in the extent to which, as a civilian male service, they are venerated. Many reserved men stated that the Bevin Boys had endured an exacting time, toiling underground in challenging circumstances of extreme danger, and were deserving of their recognition. Walter Falconer, who was employed by an agricultural firm in wartime, declared: I can understand them maybe giving [a monument] to people that were down the mines or the pits, you know, which was a terrible, terrible job

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Men in reserve wasn’t it? I mean to go down a mine, oh, risk your life every day and lie in water or lie in a spot where there was only room for your body. And your hand, your hand couldn’t even be outstretched and you were trying to cut coal from a seam. Terrible job. I can understand that.59

Similarly, George Cross, who was employed building railway rolling stock, declared: ‘[T]‌he Bevin Boys, now I think they had the worst of it . . . [E]ighteen years of age, going underground and they’d never been underground in their life before. That must have been a big shock to them. But I didn’t regret that they were getting recognition and we weren’t.’60 Throughout the interviewing process for this project it was evident that Bevin Boys were singled out for special praise. This is undoubtedly a result of recent commemorative practices. Undeniably, coal was central to the war effort, needed for fuel in the home and in many industrial, transport and manufacturing processes. However, the 48,000 miners conscripted through the Bevin Boy scheme in 1944 and 1945 were a relatively small proportion of the roughly 800,000 who worked in mining and quarrying throughout the war.61 Yet those who were reserved and worked in the mines for the duration of the war, and arguably gave more to the war effort, are ignored in favour of a quickly trained temporary addition to the labour force. This incongruity did not go unnoticed by the interviewees. Craig Inglis, who was himself a Bevin Boy after being released from his reserved occupation as a cobbler, stated:  ‘there’s thousands of miners . . . And they never got recognised as such’.62 Despite such feelings, it is those for whom the war marked an extraordinary change from their peacetime lives who are commemorated. This reflects commemoration practices more generally, while also mirroring the forgotten experiences of civilian men from the First World War.63 However, there are indications that this is changing  –​the reserved occupations are not entirely without recognition. A parliamentary debate in May 2008 about whether wartime miners ought to have some recognition akin to the Bevin Boys’ badge resulted in a commitment by the former Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, John Hutton MP, to establish a way of acknowledging the contribution to the war effort ‘not just by the miners, but by those in other reserved occupations, too’.64 This was raised again in Parliament in February 2011. Marcus Jones, Conservative MP for Nuneaton, asked Charles Hendry, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, if he would bring forward proposals to acknowledge the contribution made by miners during the Second World War. Hendry responded: v 304 v

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The missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations Although coal miners who were already employed in the pits made a similar contribution to the war effort they were one of many reserved occupations such as railway and dock workers, farmers, agricultural workers, schoolteachers and doctors. It would not be right to single out one occupation for recognition when many millions of men and women who were employed in other reserved occupations also played a major role in the wartime effort.65

In June 2013, the issue of medals for reserved occupations arose once more. Dan Jarvis, Labour MP for Barnsley Central, asked Edward Davey, Hendry’s successor as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, what recent consideration had been given to official recognition for the service of non-​conscripts who worked in the mines. Michael Fallon, the Secretary of State for Defence, responded: There has been no recent consideration on extending wartime service recognition to those non-​conscripts who worked in mines during the Second World War . . . [G]‌iven the non-​availability of records and the length of time that has now passed it would not be possible for the Department to verify potential applications, hence the decision to focus recognition on the Bevin Boys.66

Despite the decision not officially to acknowledge the service of reserved occupation workers nationally, there has been one local initiative. In November 2008, a Scottish local authority, Falkirk Council, held a ceremony to award the Freedom of Falkirk Council Area, the highest civic honour that the Council can bestow, as well as a scroll and Freedom medal for distinguished service, to thirty-​six local men and women who served in reserved occupations during the Second World War. It was the first time a local authority had given the honour to those who served in the reserved occupations in recognition of their contribution to the war effort.67 Twenty-​one women and fifteen men attended the Freedom ceremony, representing categories such as engineers, fitters and munitions workers, as well as Bevin Boys. The town’s Provost –​the Scottish equivalent of mayor –​Pat Reid, declared: In times of war the home front is as vital as the front line. The men and women who made munitions, who dug for coal, who drove the trains, who helped feed the nation all made a vital difference. The people in reserved occupations were not given a choice but were required to stay at home. Many worked in factories which were prime targets for enemy bombers as well as volunteering for service in home defence. They deserve to have their service fully recognised and honoured.68

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Men in reserve The town’s Revd Gavin Boswell, who led a thanksgiving service for those honoured, similarly declared: These men and women would have served in factories, industry, munitions, the fields and may well have felt that because they were in these occupations that they couldn’t enlist at the time of the outbreak of the Second World War and may well have felt that they had played a lesser part and were not looked upon as the heroes of that time. So I think the occasion is particularly important as these men and women who stayed back at home to keep these industries going, keep the home front in shape and look after the nation here are just as important as those who served on the foreign fields of Europe or North Africa or further afield. It gives them a recognised honour, it gives thanks and it’s an acknowledgement from the community of what they did back in 1939–​45, but sad maybe in some ways that it’s taken so long for us to reach that point.69

Despite the validity of these statements –​Britain’s survival and victory did indeed rely on home front efficiency –​Falkirk has remained unique in its commemoration of reserved wartime workers. For those recognised, this sudden acknowledgement of their wartime work was unexpected. George Cross, employed at St Rollox railway works in Springburn, Glasgow, stated that it came ‘out of this blue [sic] . . . [Q]‌uite a surprise . . . [T]here are not an awful lot of people can say that they’ve passed on a little bit of their history too of the war. And I mean everything you hear about the war is the services.’70 Similarly, Walter Falconer, employed by a Falkirk agricultural firm in wartime, stated: Oh well, it was unexpected wasn’t it really. I can understand it being given to people who were in the forces, I reckon they’ve got to do that, but I never thought that they would . . . get round to giving it to people who were in reserved occupations . . . I never thought we would be getting [a medal].71

This lack of commemoration and recognition was, albeit infrequently, commented upon by those interviewed. Eddie Menday, who worked making scientific instruments in London during the war, argued: I decry the fact that whilst there’s memorials to many people, to the forces of course, and recently to Bevin Boys there’s not one to those who lost their lives in factories . . . The war workers. And this is why I’m so delighted that you’re doing this, because those people seem to be forgotten. You get these snips on television, okay, usually of a lady running a lathe, but there was so much more to it than that.72

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The missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations Menday felt strongly that those like him deserved recognition. Indeed, he recounted very similar views eight years earlier in an interview with the TUC.73 Yet he was in the minority. Most interviewees seemed as perplexed by the notion of remembrance as those honoured in Falkirk. When asked if he thought reserved workers deserved medals, Harry McGregor, who had worked at locomotive manufacturer Hyde Park Railway Works in Glasgow, responded ‘Never even gave it a thought, no. To me it’s a job. It was a job to be done and you get paid for it and that’s it.’74 Similarly, Alfred Thomas, wartime sheet-​metal worker directed from Swansea to Ayr in Scotland, responded to the same issue that ‘I’m not really interested in commemorations myself, the time’s gone. There’s actually no purpose in it.’75 Most men interviewed suggested that they were only doing their job, a job they had usually held prior to their reserved status and often continued to undertake after the war. For example, wartime east London aircraft engineer John O’Halloran stated ‘I mean obviously, there was a big debt owed to the reserved occupations for producing what they did. But they’d have to have done it anyway!’76 It became extremely apparent that very few men felt their wartime work deserved special attention. John Hiscutt worked in an underground aircraft factory based in disused London underground stations. He declared that he had an ‘ordinary war’: Well with the war or without the war I’d have still gone through the same process. I’d have still gone through it and done the same sort of work. I wouldn’t have had the wartime restrictions. It would have been peacetime restrictions, but there’d have been no great difference in the work. Only the conditions and the challenges I suppose.77

That work in a unique underground factory, complete with a tea trolley that used the rails of the underground, can be considered ‘ordinary’ is surprising. Artist Frank Dobson clearly did not think so, featuring it in his celebrated painting An Escalator in an Underground Factory (1944). It depicts one lone male factory worker exiting the building and a seemingly infinite number of stout-​ legged women beginning their shift, thereby reinforcing the wartime fallacy of a predominantly female industrial labour force. It is clear from these oral testimonies that during the war many reserved men felt inferior to those in the services. Half of our interviewees attempted to enlist, as discussed in Chapter 3, and as such the attitudes noted here may simply reflect internalised wartime hierarchies. Men in reserved occupations were little discussed and rarely praised in the war years, perhaps leaving our interviewees feeling that their contributions v 307 v

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Men in reserve were secondary to those who fought and died in uniforms across the globe. Furthermore, the lack of representation and memorialisation of men in reserved occupations in the post-​war period has reinforced this notion. Interviewees were often surprised that anyone was interested in their wartime lives. This perhaps feeds back into the general notion that only extraordinary contributions are deemed worthy of celebration. Alistair Thomson argues that such silences are common. Citing the case of his own grandmother he stated: ‘To some degree she internalised the pre-​eminence of men in the Anzac legend and believed that her own wartime story  –​in 1914 she was the first woman to study agricultural science in the Southern hemisphere –​was of less public significance than her husband’s military career.’78 It is likely that reserved men similarly absorbed the primacy and prestige of the armed services. Indeed, wartime hierarchies of sacrifice seem well embedded. Many interviewees when discussing remembrance and memorialisation focused not on contribution to the war effort but rather on danger and sacrifice, two key qualities of wartime manliness that became central to representations of military and civilian heroes. Men who thought that industrial workers should be commemorated often argued this on the grounds that they also died in the course of the war. Eddie Menday argued: There’s, as far as I  know, not one memorial to those who lost their lives in factories. And there was a lot. There was quite a few. For instance, the Vickers Works at Brooklyn’s were bombed one lunch time . . . And there was a loss of life during that time, when you think of Coventry and those people working nights, the nights of their big Blitz, you know. They lost their lives.79

However, the loss of life mentioned here by Menday was underplayed both during the war and after, as were the deaths caused by industrial accidents. Moreover, these deaths were different from those glorified in other memorials. These were not deaths bravely suffered by those who knew they were risking their lives in battle, but rather were a by-​product of industrialised modern warfare and a fate also suffered by many women and children. Indeed, as Lucy Noakes notes, ‘While the civilian victims of air raids were described by a coroner as being, like soldiers, “not afraid to die for their country” they never fully shared the identity of the male combatant as they remained essentially passive, unable to fight the enemy.’80 As such these deaths, both during and after the war, do not fit in with dominant narratives of commemoration. They cannot be made to sit comfortably with the desire to memorialise ‘the glorious dead’. These v 308 v

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The missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations deaths were not heroic or necessary and were, therefore, unsuitable for memorialisation. Moreover, as seen in previous chapters, the war did not generally prove to be a monumental break in reserved men’s working lives but was instead largely a continuation of lives they were already leading. Some of the men seemed more concerned with how their profession as a whole had fared since the war rather than either their occupation’s wartime contribution or their own wartime work. Fred Millican, who worked at Vickers making munitions, lamented that very few remembered Newcastle’s industrial past: Industry as such, I mean has virtually disappeared from Newcastle, the Tyne area. Now I mean there’s still bits, but not the . . . heavy industry which there used to be. So I think, in that respect, it’s a bit of [pause] history that’s gone. So I suppose it’s a pity if people aren’t aware of what was involved.81

Similarly, Roger Major, a wartime apprentice engineer in Newcastle, was at pains to convey the loss of industrial capacity with plant closures: It was in last night’s paper. I could hardly believe it, and I was looking at it, I pencilled in six that’s still in existence. [Pause.] The poor people now can’t get a job. Yeah I  could add forty to that list. There’s only six of us that’s still living, working, you know, yet all the factories that built the stuff during the war, you know, Parsons, they built turbines and, Radoes was where I worked, that one’s at the top of the list. It was thirteen thousand worked there, there’s thirty thousand worked at Vickers. It’s no longer there. Railroads are no longer there, it’s finished. There’s none of them, none of that hundred places there, there’s only six, there’s no engine, there’s one engineer, there’s no more engineers, no more, there’s no shipyards, there’s no mines, there’s nothing here.82

These interviews were conducted at a time when most of the industrial occupations these men had undertaken during the war are no longer in existence. Deindustrialisation, which began in the 1950s, saw the virtual disappearance of the traditional heavy industries (such as coal​mining, shipbuilding, locomotives, and iron and steel making) and the retrenchment of manufacturing. Some 3 million male jobs were lost in mining and manufacturing between 1951 and 1991.83 That said, for the ­majority of men interviewed they were in these occupations for a far greater length of time than the war years. Perhaps then it is understandable that they wish their entire way of life to be understood rather than the comparatively few years of war. v 309 v

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‘He’s got it cushy’: reserved occupations in post-​war popular culture While memorialisation is an emotive issue, it is perhaps less central to the process of memory creation than popular culture. As Michael Paris notes, ‘the popular memory of the Second World War has always been shaped more by the moving image than by any other form of cultural transmission’.84 Television, film, and to a lesser extent literature, all forms of Nora’s ‘lieux de mémoire’, or what Henry Rousso terms ‘vectors of memory’,85 are fundamental to remembrance. The national past is interpreted and conveyed to the public through literary and filmic treatments that solidify a ‘collective memory’ of the war and facilitate the neglect of marginal experiences that do not fit. Writing about the signal events of 1940, Malcolm Smith notes: ‘Dunkirk’, ‘the Blitz’, ‘Winston’:  these are not just neutral terms, they are totemic. They are ‘big facts’ of 1940. They are . . . largely based on visual images, the films of Humphrey Jennings and others, the photography. It is because they are visual, because they rely on the claim that ‘seeing is believing’ that they become very difficult to reinterpret. These visual images have become the essential shorthand by which the meaning of the war has been conveyed, in thousands of newspaper, magazine and televisual references. They carry with them enormously powerful discourses on British national identity, rooted into the popular memory of the war, embodying all the associations of phrases like ‘finest hours’, ‘backs to the wall’, ‘community spirit’, ‘people’s war’. The very fact that one need do no more than set these phrases down, without any need to explain them, suggests what one means by the mythic quality of 1940, and in itself testifies to the enormous success of the myth. Such phrases are the captions by which the visual images are translated into language, thus borrowing the truth that seeing implies.86

As Smith highlights, Britain’s popular conception of the Second World War has become increasingly simplified in the years since it ended, reduced to a series of signifiers and slogans. Moreover, within this conceptualisation there is little mention of the civilian working man. This is largely consistent with wartime culture. During the Second World War the concept of reserved occupations was only infrequently discussed in the press or the media and, because of its complex and changing nature, was little understood by either the men themselves or the wider public. This was further exacerbated by the media’s similar reticence to discuss men in reserved occupations, and those who were referred to were never labelled as such. Indeed, the vital labour of male farmers and industrial v 310 v

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The missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations workers, who despite popular imagery remained the dominant workforces in their respective industries, was rarely mentioned, and when it was it was relegated predominantly to little-​seen Government propaganda and programmes on the fringes of the BBC’s output. Firefighters and the Merchant Navy, the two civilian occupations that were considered more heroic, were widely praised, and often invoked comparisons to the most venerated of the male roles: the armed forces.87 However, the firemen fell out of public consciousness after the Blitz had ceased and their post-​war image failed to replicate their wartime glory. Moreover, Penny Summerfield has shown that in the post-​war period the men of the Merchant Navy were largely excluded from the narrative regarding the war at sea.88 The men of the reserved occupations were largely forgotten in post-​war culture –​one that, strikingly, was saturated with tales of the Second World War both in print, as Kenneth Worpole has shown, and on screen, as John Ramsden, Nicholas Pronay and Neil Rattigan have discussed.89 Stories and films produced during the ‘war boom’ of the 1950s, such as The Wooden Horse (Jack Lee, 1950), The Dam Busters (Michael Anderson, 1955) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957), were on the themes of escape, heroism, resistance and war crimes; they told of the bravery of upper-​class officers in the services, not civilian men’s or women’s contributions on the home front.90 The dominant popular discourse propagated in wartime of the ‘people’s war’ in which the home front was acknowledged as playing a pivotal role was replaced in post-​war representations with a reassertion of martial masculinity. Even the highly acclaimed 1973–​74 series The World at War, an episode of which, written by Angus Calder, was devoted to the British home front, failed to mention the reserved occupations.91 Footage of male aircraft fitters was shown briefly after images of female industrial workers, and was used as a prelude to discussion of strike activity and the Bevin Boys, something with which the viewer was much more likely to be familiar. Dunkirk (Leslie Norman, 1958) is one exception to the general omission of reserved men from the vast numbers of stories told about the Second World War. The film was the second-​biggest box office hit of 1958 and was one of the most successful of a spate of British war films in the 1950s.92 It tells the story of the retreat and evacuation from France through two distinct groups: a platoon of BEF soldiers stranded in France and a group of civilians who embark from Britain in their pleasure cruisers to aid the rescue. At the beginning of the film the character of John Holden, a small-​ factory owner played by Richard Attenborough, is introduced. Holden is explicitly stated to be in a reserved occupation. v 311 v

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Men in reserve Moreover, the term is used without explanation, suggesting it is a concept the film makers felt the audience would know and understand. However, Holden is roundly criticised for his civilian status. His friend and journalist Charles Foreman accuses him of exploiting the war for profit, exclaiming ‘a new baby, 200 gross of buckles, unlimited petrol and all the whisky you want. You’re sitting pretty aren’t you Holden? Yes it is a lovely war.’ When Holden protests that ‘the army’s got to have buckles doesn’t it?’, Foreman retorts ‘Especially if it’s caught with its pants down. Still someone’s got to make ’em. Let’s thank our lucky stars we’re not wearing ’em eh?’. Holden is considered a coward. He is not producing guns or bullets or even uniforms, but rather manufacturing buckles, a peripheral item of low importance, which serves to highlight his trivial civilian status. Later in the same scene Holden declares the war, still in its opening stages, to be ‘phoney’. Because of this he is challenged to ‘go outside’ by a merchant seaman who declares ‘you make me sick, all of you . . . It may be a phoney war to you but it’s not to all the boys at sea. Never has been.’ Moreover, when the scene concludes and Foreman leaves with his wife he says to her: Holden makes me sick. He’s like a lot more in this country. Is this supposed to be a war effort? . . . This debate in the House, where’s it got us? Chamberlain settled in as much as ever, patting us on the head and saying that everything’s going to be alright so that little squirts like Holden can sit back on their sub-​contracts and make more money than he ever did in peace time.

As such the film makes clear that being a civilian is undesirable and, by profiteering from war contracts, is perhaps even downright crooked. The film constantly reaffirms that the only valid contribution men can make to war is in the military, or pseudo-​military, sphere. The character of Holden is redeemed not by a realisation that civilian service is necessary in industrialised warfare but through enacting militaristic behaviours. Holden himself begins to question his civilian status, which he had originally accepted, stating ‘I don’t feel right about things sometimes . . . About this war I don’t really feel I’m doing enough. Like the other night in the pub with that navy, navy bloke’. Holden, with Charles Foreman, is persuaded to take his boat across the channel to French shores. Although faced with bombing and gunfire, he survives, but Foreman is killed by gunfire from a Stuka. Holden overcomes the problem of having a damaged engine to save a number of British soldiers. In the final scene, depicting Holden’s return to Britain alongside the military personnel v 312 v

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The missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations he has rescued, he is mistaken for a soldier. This error causes Holden to smile with visible pride. The closing voiceover espouses the prominent wartime rhetoric of ‘all in it together’: ‘no longer were there fighting men and civilians, there were only people. A  nation made whole’. However, the film itself does not support such statements. Civilian status is openly and repeatedly the focus of derision and it is only by mirroring actions more commonly associated with the military that Holden redeems himself from his shameful civilian status. If 1950s cinema was the golden era for films narrating the British military experience of the war, the 1970s witnessed their decline, as audiences comprised mainly those under twenty-​five who had no experience of the war and who increasingly shunned previous celebrations of it. This demise coincided with the emergence of television dramas about the conflict that shifted the narrative away from the narrow focus on the forces. Over the next forty years television programmes were broadcast about the Home Guard (Dad’s Army, 1968–​77), Belgian resistance (Secret Army, 1977–​79), prisoners of war (Colditz, 1972–​74), a bomb-​ disposal unit (Danger –​ UXB, 1979), Anglo-​American love affairs (We’ll Meet Again, 1982 and the film Yanks, 1979), an RAF base (Piece of Cake, 1986), children’s experiences (Goodnight Mister Tom, 1998 and the film Hope and Glory, 1987) and life on the home front (Housewife, 49, 2006; Foyle’s War, 2002–​15 and the Doctor Who episode ‘The Empty Child’, 2005). Several of the BBC’s one-​off dramas ‘Play for Today’ focused on war, including Jack Rosenthal’s The Evacuees (1975), David Hare’s Licking Hitler (1978), Ian McEwen’s The Imitation Game (1980) and David Pirie’s Rainy Day Women (1984). These programmes were highly popular with audiences who, according to Michael Paris, were generally older and retained an interest in the war.93 They provided fictionalised accounts of a period that was, for many, within living memory. They had to accommodate the audience’s personal memories of the war, notes Sian Nicholas, as well as engage with popular myths that had developed since.94 This ‘repicturing’ of the Second World War in the 1970s mirrored wider social trends such as the development of social history and women’s history.95 James Chapman asserts that the ‘paradigmatic example’ of Second World War drama was Granada’s A Family at War, a series that ran for fifty-​two episodes from 1970 to 1972, focusing on the extended Ashton family in Liverpool.96 In A Family at War, as in much post-​war popular culture, civilian status for young men is often shown as something to be avoided at all costs. Characters facing the prospect of reserved status are generally shown to v 313 v

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Men in reserve baulk at the idea. One of the central cast, Tony Briggs –​a cousin of the Ashtons –​bristles when his father suggests he would be reserved in the family printing business, declaring, with obvious horror, ‘you wouldn’t hold me to that would you?’.97 As the series continues it becomes clear that Tony is burdened by his civilian status. This is most notable in relation to his family. All three sons in the central Ashton family, cousins of Tony, are actively involved in the prosecution of the war: eldest son David is an RAF pilot in the Battle of Britain, middle son Philip is in the 8th Army and sixteen-​year-​old Robert is transporting goods in the Merchant Navy. Moreover, their brother-​in-​law, John, is called up from the Territorial Army to France and is missing and presumed dead –​erroneously, it turns out –​after the retreat from Dunkirk. Tony is ashamed to be around his family, stating he ‘can’t face’ his aunt, whose sons are all embroiled in the front line, and feels that he would not be able to look John in the eye if he returned.98 In the end, Tony runs off to join the navy, with little reaction from his father or his extended family. A Family at War does not show Tony’s actions to be unique. Daughter of the main family, Freda, has an on-​ off relationship with Peter, a draughtsman and therefore a reserved worker. He increasingly expresses the pressures he feels to be in uniform as Tony did before him, as the following conversation between Peter and Freda’s brother Philip illustrates: Peter:  I don’t know if she’d [his mother] cope if I was away too. Philip:  You’re a draughtsman, it’s a reserved occupation. Peter:  I meant if I volunteered. Philip:  Why should you want to? Peter:  It’s not that I want to. I like my job. I think I can go a long way if I stick at it. Philip:  Does anyone say you ought to? Peter:  They don’t say it exactly. Well not straight out. Philip:  Well there you are then. Peter:  But I know a lot of them resent it. And their families. I can see them thinking looking at me. ‘He’s alright but my boy’s had to go. He’s got it cushy.’ Philip:  The only reason you haven’t been called up is because you’re more use where you are.99

In some ways the show accurately depicts the experiences of those in reserved occupations and reflects wartime fears and beliefs. As Chapter 3 has shown, the compulsion to enlist was rarely external but instead an internalised pressure to be in uniform and engage in fighting. This is acknowledged by Philip when he tells Peter’s mother:  ‘He might be v 314 v

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The missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations miserable if he stays. All his age group are gone or going. I don’t think you understand the pressure.’100 Indeed, it is clear that Peter is more concerned with the accoutrements of military life rather than objectively considering how he could best help the war effort. Philip tries, again, to convince Peter to stay in his reserved occupation: Philip:  Peter, this is a war of technologies. You’re needed where you  are. There’s any amount like me. Peter:  I’ll wear a label round me neck  –​‘technologist’  –​then everyone will salute.101

Similarly, when Peter finds Freda kissing an Australian pilot he declares:  ‘Women are all the same nowadays. Like some ancient tribe. Stick a bit of war paint on him and you can’t help yourselves. No decency. Why don’t you do like last time and start giving out white feathers?’102 It is this incident that steels Peter’s resolve, and he too enlists for the navy. Neither Tony nor Peter appears to have any trouble escaping his reserved status as they would have done in reality, although Peter is killed on ARP duty during the bombing of Liverpool before he can actually leave. This, perhaps, could be read as a comment on the inherent dangers of civilian life, and the blurring between military and civilian spheres. However, given Freda’s overly guilty response to Peter’s death, it is also likely that his demise was a plot device to heighten the emotion in this ultimately melodramatic show. Despite the overwhelming depiction of those in reserved occupations as eager to escape their civilian status for a life in the military, there were intermittent representations of reserved status that deviated from this accepted pattern. Freda’s eventual husband Ian Mackenzie faces no slurs on his masculinity nor ever intimates any desire to be in uniform. However, he is a doctor, a profession that carries a certain status that transcends wartime, and as such the necessity of his profession to civilian life is evident. Moreover, the secondary character of Colin, a machine-​ tool designer, openly declares he is happy in his reserved occupation: I’m in the royal civilians. The powers that be think I’m more use doing my own job. I’m Colin with the cushy number. Friends in the army and that . . . don’t jump to conclusions but I like being Colin with the cushy number. It beats being shot at. Don’t think me selfish but I’m just not a king and country man . . . There was a bloke at work who was convinced people stared at him. Thinking he was a conscientious objector or a consumptive or something. So for the last few months he’s been walking round with a limp so people will imagine he’s a war hero or something. Can you imagine that?103

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Men in reserve The programme once again captures the mainly internalised pressure reserved men felt in their civilian jobs. However, Colin is extremely unusual, as he is presented as immune to this pressure. Yet he is not an unambiguous character. His main storyline is as a potential love-​interest to Sheila, the estranged wife of David, the RAF pilot. Therefore, despite the fact that their relationship is never consummated, Colin becomes a morally ambiguous character. His attempts to seduce Sheila, although ultimately futile, undermine his positive discussions of his reserved status. More recent representations of reserved occupations are rare but are equally as critical as their earlier counterparts. In the two-​part ITV drama Murder on the Home Front (2013), based on Molly Lefebure’s 1955 memoir, a suspect –​a uniformed soldier –​says disparagingly to a police inspector ‘We can’t all be in a reserved occupation can we? Somebody’s got to do the fighting.’ Similarly, Claire Francis’s 2004 novel Homeland, set on the Somerset wetlands in 1946, includes a dismissive aside about the reserved occupations in a conversation between Frank Carr, a minor character who had remained on the home front throughout the war, and Billy Greer, a demobilised serviceman: ‘Didn’t get to the war then?’ Billy asked. ‘Reserved occupation.’ If Frank felt the smallest stirring of shame or embarrassment about this, he didn’t show it. ‘What –​withies [from willow farms] needed for the war effort, were they?’ ‘Not at the outset they weren’t. Arable and dairy was what they wanted to begin with’, Frank said stolidly. ‘We went and worked on arable farms, arable or dairy. But then they went and announced that they wanted withies after all. For parachute baskets and those panniers for the land girls . . .’ ‘So withymen been getting rich, have they?’ ‘Making a living that’s all.’ ‘You don’t say’, thought Billy, remembering the bright new tractor.

Billy takes note of Frank’s ‘soft plump skin’, ‘porcine stare’ and ‘broad pink snout’, and is ‘irresistibly reminded of an overfed porker’.104 While Billy is serving his country in uniform, risking his life, Frank is benefiting from wartime contracts, growing fat and getting rich. Later in the novel, Billy laments ‘An’ tell me this . . . How it is that the man who goes and fights for his country comes back ’n’ finds he counts for less than the bastard who stayed behind? How’s that, eh? I’ll tell you how –​’cos the bastard that stayed behind got himself all set up and made plenty of money, that’s v 316 v

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The missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations how.’105 Billy clearly places the ‘fault’ of Frank’s reserved status on Frank himself, a common emphasis in depictions of reserved men. Such a portrayal ignores the fact that reserved status was not a choice but rather was a State-​mandated curtailment of employment options. Nevertheless, despite their negativity these representations at least acknowledge the existence of reserved occupations. Most recent depictions of the Second World War have omitted reserved men almost entirely. This may represent the generational shift in film and television production, especially in more recent times. From the 1980s onwards, when the drop-​off in discussion is most pronounced, those working in the media as writers and producers are increasingly second-​hand viewers of the war, and are in turn reliant on popular memory rather than actual memory. Indeed, culture reflects, as well as shapes, common understandings. Televisual and filmic representations of the war became increasingly dependent on obvious signifiers and tropes to convey the Second World War, perhaps reflecting the way the war has become refracted, distilled and simplified in popular memory. Even in programmes where reserved men ought to be in abundance they are conspicuously absent, such as the –​now much ridiculed –​1990s time-​travel sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart about an unassuming television repair man who finds he has the extraordinary ability to journey back to wartime London.106 The wartime scenes take place predominantly in London’s heavily industrialised East End, in the Royal Oak pub. Yet instead of being frequented by young non-​uniformed men, the pub is populated by older men. The programme’s single reference to the area’s industrial contribution to the war effort is the inclusion of a brief allusion to female factory workers and their less than lady-​like ways.107 The presence in London’s East End of thousands of young men with a reserved status was simply not acknowledged by the scriptwriters. Instead these more recent programmes focus on the military, often explicitly correlating wartime masculine identity with militarism. In No Bananas, a 1996 BBC mini-​series about a wartime love triangle, and its subsequent novelisation, the character of Harry Slater, a soldier, returns from Dunkirk injured and questioning his role in the war. He raises the possibility of conscientious objection. His father is appalled, replying ‘You can’t do this to me . . . It’d be the end of [my life]. Bad enough Tom spivving, but at least he does something for the people. What does a bloody “conchie” do? Nothing!’108 Similarly, in Goodnight Sweetheart the central character, Gary Sparrow (Nicholas Lyndhurst), is constantly hounded, especially in the first three series, for his lack v 317 v

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Men in reserve of uniform. When Gary’s ‘estranged wife’, actually his unsuspecting grandmother, is suspected of cheating on him with a submariner, his girlfriend Phoebe’s father states ‘She’s taken up with a submariner. A  fighting man. A  real man. Not some pansy who writes love songs and pretends to be a spy’.109 Similarly, when attempting to buy shares at a bank Gary is asked by the manager how he made the money. Gary tells him he is a songwriter. The bank manager seems incredulous and responds ‘Instead of enlisting to fight the enemies of the king. Hardly the act of a patriot if I may say so’.110 Gary faces constant challenges to his civilian status. He is frequently suspected of being an enemy spy and faces regular slurs on his masculinity because of his lack of uniform. Even his surname Sparrow encapsulates his insignificance: these birds are common, unremarkable, lack colour, are small and are not known for their song. Given that our interviewees did not report harassment, it would appear to have been extremely rare, as noted in Chapter  3. Such a portrayal, then, seems to be not only a modern invention but a modern preoccupation. Reserved occupations do not fit well into this nostalgic, and heroic, view of the past. While in his opening speech in the first episode Gary laments the loss of the apprentice system, the programme as a whole celebrates wartime adventure and daring. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that a show where Gary stumbles back in time and finds work as a docker or shipwright would provide the same yearning for the past as is present throughout Goodnight Sweetheart. However, as during the war, this may reflect the fact that for those in reserved occupations there is no obvious story arc. For men entering the military, women embarking on new occupations and even children being evacuated to the countryside there is a clear storyline and a journey on which to take the characters: chronicling new experiences, new skills acquired, new friendships made. For reserved men who remained employed in their pre-​war, often low-​key, jobs the stories that can be told are not nearly as transformative nor as exciting. Consequently, they are rarely seen on page or screen. When they do make an appearance, most male civilians in recent representations of the war are generally shown to be unfit for service. This is the case in Foyle’s War, a detective drama set in Hastings, Sussex, which has been widely acclaimed since it was first broadcast in 2002 despite the fact that it chips away at the highly durable narrative of the war as a time of cohesion and social unity by focusing on crime on the home front.111 In ‘Fifty Ships’, for example, auxiliary firefighters loot blitzed houses:  a strikingly different representation to Jennings’s celebratory Fires Were v 318 v

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The missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations Started (1943). The two male leads who investigate these crimes are evidently outside the remit of the military. Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle (Michael Kitchen), a man in his fifties who had served in the First World War, exceeds the military’s upper age limit  –​raised to fifty-​one in the National Service (No. 2) Act –​and his Sergeant, Paul Milner (Anthony Howell) is invalided out of the army in the first episode having lost his leg during the Norwegian campaign.112 Indeed, medical disqualification is the most common trope applied to young men out of uniform. In the 1995 Angela Huth novel Land Girls, and its 1998 film adaptation, farm worker Joe (Steven Mackintosh) has asthma, transmuted to a heart condition in the film version, which prevents him from enlisting in the RAF.113 In contrast to the mobile women billeted on his father’s farm, Joe is literally grounded, rendered immobile by his health. Stella, one of the titular Land Girls, tries to convince him that ‘someone’s got to organize the massive job of feeding the country. Hallows Farm is making the sort of contribution you shouldn’t under-​value.’ However, Joe continues to feel his contribution to the war is minimal: Times like this [at a military dance] it hits you. Being one of the very few not in uniform. You feel such a rotten shirker . . . The day I failed my medical was the worst day of my life. Never forget it:  this icy room with that poster on the wall –​you know the one, Your Country Needs You. This cocky little doctor. Afraid your country doesn’t need you, my lad, he said. You can’t expect to fight the enemy if you’re fighting for your own breath. Stands to reason. I told him –​I told him I was much better than I had been as a child –​growing out of the asthma fast. But nothing would change his stubborn little mind . . . My ambition was to join the HAC [Honourable Artillery Company]. You’re wise and you’re right. But I can’t help the guilt, the shame. I’d rather be fighting.114

Despite his asthma Joe is depicted as physically fit, his muscularity on display in scenes that show him ploughing fields and mucking out cattle. This underscores his role as the romantic lead, bedding two of the three Land Girls and forming a romantic relationship with the third. Given the enduring popularity of home front fictions, and especially romance stories, it is unsurprising that writers seek to include civilian male characters as a permanent presence. However, it is less obvious why they often choose to focus on those deemed unsuitable for military service rather than the less emasculating option of a reserved occupation. It perhaps reflects the fact that the concept of reserved occupations is less and less remembered as the distance from the war increases. The popular memory of the home front v 319 v

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Men in reserve is a space occupied by women, children, and men who are either too old or not fit to join the forces. Men of conscription age who were physically robust have simply been erased from that memory. Moreover, it may also reflect the notion that reserved occupations were viewed, even in the period immediately after the war, as in A Family at War and Dunkirk, not so much as an absolute decree but rather as an obstacle to be battled on the way to the ultimate goal of military service: it could be avoided and therefore it should be avoided. Conversely, those who were medically unfit for service were in a less ambiguous position. While they might invite pity they were certainly not guilty of shirking, undoubtedly the greater crime in simplistic understandings of the Second World War at the end of the twentieth century. Moreover, many of the civilian men who are shown on the home front are often presented as figures of ridicule. This is most notable in the classic sitcom series Dad’s Army, scripted by Home Guard veterans Jimmy Perry and David Croft and broadcast between 1968 and 1977. The mainly aged men of Walmington-​on-​Sea are shown, despite much enthusiasm, to be ineffectual quasi-​soldiers. They continually bungle assigned missions in preposterously comic ways. Even the younger members of the platoon are incompetent. Private Frank Pike (Ian Lavender) is both too young for service (and is instead employed as an assistant bank clerk under Arthur Lowe’s Captain Mainwaring) and somewhat of a simpleton: a mollycoddled mummy’s boy wrapped up in a scarf. Moreover, the character of Joe Walker (James Beck) is a spiv, and it is strongly implied that he is shirking his military service, as his age falls within the call-​up range and he is physically fit. In one episode he declares that the reason he is not in the army is an ‘allergy to corned beef ’.115 Dad’s Army adheres to the typical trope applied to Britain during the Second World War and constantly reinforces it, given its almost constant presence on British television: civilian men were not in military service because they were either too young or too old, or were somehow avoiding service. While there were older men and teenagers in the Home Guard, there was also a large number of middle-​aged men, bringing the mean age in 1940 to about thirty-​five.116 One of the show’s co-​creators, Jimmy Perry, did acknowledge that while in reality the Home Guard had primarily comprised young and middle-​aged men the focus on the elderly was deliberately created for comedic effect. Indeed, it is the antiquity of this ageing band of would-​be soldiers that drives much of Dad’s Army’s humour.117 The civilian man as comic figure is also seen in the much later sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart. The regular character of policeman Reg Deadman (Christopher Ettridge) is continually shown to be a rather simple man v 320 v

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The missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations as well as an inept policeman. He even admits himself ‘I’m a bit of a Gurkha, I  take no prisoners.’118 The civilian buffoon is almost a staple trope of comedies and dramas set during the Second World War. The 1970s Anglia comedy series Backs to the Land, about three urban young Land Girls sent to Norfolk, depicts the farmer they are billeted on as the main source of the programme’s comedy. He is repeatedly shown being thwarted in his attempts to control the Land Girls, as well as being generally rather dim-​witted. He continually gets his words mixed up, exclaiming for example that his sons should never have gone to the army as they were in ‘reversed occupations’.119 He also ends up in manure more than is usual, even for a farmer. The equivalent figure in the more recent BBC drama Land Girls (2009–​11) is similarly shown to be the comic foil in an otherwise melodramatic show. Farmer Frederick Finch, played by comic actor Mark Benton, is overly affectionate with his pig, Chamberlain, and is constantly on the make, once being fooled into doing gardening by the planting of fake Roman coins.120 It is this representation of the civilian man as an inherently comic character that dominates recent portrayals of the British home front during the Second World War. However, this is a far from masculine image and contrasts poorly with the reverence bestowed on the uniformed man as discussed at the start of this chapter.

Conclusion It is clear that the men of the reserved occupations are Britain’s forgotten workers. They were the backbones of the British home front, providing not only the goods necessary to fight a protracted technological war but also the food, skills and services to allow Britain to weather a war of attrition. Regardless of this centrality to warfare and eventual victory, however, they have been almost entirely written out of Britain’s national wartime story. If the rituals of remembrance define what is to be remembered in post-​1945 Britain, with memorials and popular culture creating an official memory of the war, then the men in the reserved occupations have been omitted and have subsequently been forgotten. Despite the ongoing proliferation of war memorials and remembrance, no official, or indeed unofficial, recognition, excluding that given to the pseudo-​ military Merchant Navy and the fire services, has been granted to the millions of men who helped their country on the home front. Similarly, popular culture has been reluctant to include reserved men and examples that do often draw a less than favourable picture. Indeed, popular culture and official remembrance focus on the extraordinary: the women who v 321 v

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Men in reserve left ‘female jobs’ and stepped into dangerous factories and workshops, men drawn by lots who went down into the coalmines, and most notably the conscript army who fought and died on the war’s numerous fronts. To some extent this focus is understandable; the men who were reserved did little to capture the imagination. Indeed, their lives (aside from the typical wartime restrictions, hardships and dangers) changed little from their peacetime lives. Yet it is clear that without these men Britain’s war effort could not have been sustained.

Notes 1 ‘The Man who Hated Britain’, Daily Mail, 27 September 2013. 2 ‘David Miliband Criticises Daily Mail over Attacks on Late Father’, Guardian, 10 October 2013; see, for example, Ralph Miliband, Socialism for a Sceptical Age (London: Polity Press, 1995). 3 Timothy Montgomerie, ‘Wanting to Change Britain Doesn’t Mean You Hate It’, The Times, 3 October 2013. 4 For example: Christopher Ross (@chrispatross), ‘Ralph Miliband –​Working Class Hero, never was so many owed to so few [sic]’, 3 October 2013; Holly Baubles (@JonnieMarbles) ‘Just hearing that the Daily Mail –​who are smearing war hero Ralph Miliband –​may once have supported the Nazis. Anyone else got this?’, 3 October 2013. 5 Tom Pride, ‘How Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre’s Father Avoided the Front Line in WW2’, 3 October 2013, https://​tompride.wordpress.com/​2013/​10/​03/​ update-​on-​daily-​mail-​editor-​paul-​dacres-​father-​avoiding-​the-​front-​line-​in-​ ww2/​(accessed 18 March 2014); John Robb (@johnrobb77), ‘Ralph Miliband fought for Britain in the war and the Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere fought for . . .? And was friends with Adolf Hitler’, 3 October 2013. 6 Daily Mail, 8 July 1934. See Martin Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain between the Wars (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005). 7 For example, newsreader Jon Snow’s refusal to wear a poppy on screen since 2010 has been roundly condemned by certain sections of the British press. 8 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History:  Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), 7–​25. 9 K. S. Inglis, ‘War Memorials: Ten Questions for Historians’, in Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains, 167 (1992), 5–​21 (p. 7). 10 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (eds.), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); David W. Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism:  Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Great Britain, Australia and Canada, 1919–​1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1998).

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The missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations 11 David Cannadine, ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain’, in Joachim Whaley (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London: Europa, 1981), p. 219. 12 Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined:  The First World War and English Culture (London: Pimlico, 1992), p. 270. 13 K. S. Inglis, ‘The Homecoming: The War Memorial Movement in Cambridge, England’, Journal of Contemporary History, 27:4 (1992), 583–​605 (p. 585). 14 Peter Donaldson, Ritual and Remembrance: The Memorialisation of the Great War in East Kent (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006). A committee in Gillingham, Kent, planned for a shelter in a local park but finally decided on a cenotaph in the form of a cross, while New Malden in Surrey costed a memorial garden, a public hall, a nursing institute and an ex-​servicemen’s club but ultimately opted for a monument. 15 Bob Bushaway, ‘Name upon Name: The Great War and Remembrance’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Myths of the English (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). 16 T. G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael Roper, ‘The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration:  Contexts, Structures and Dynamics’, in T. G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael Roper (eds.), The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 9. 17 http://​www.pwsts.org.uk/​plaque.htm (accessed 29 April 2014). 18 Mark Connelly, The Great War, Memory and Ritual: Commemoration in the City and East London (Rochester: Boydell Press, 2002), p. 231. 19 Peter Howlett, Fighting with Figures: A Statistical Digest of the Second World War (London: HMSO, 1995), p. viii. 20 Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War: 1914–​ 1920 (Eastbourne: CPI Anthony Rowe, 1922), p. 504. 21 This is not to say that there were no conflicting or counter-​narratives. One mother wrote to the IWGC in 1919: ‘I am writing to ask you if you are erecting memorials for sailors as well as soldiers, as I  have lost my son at sea and should very much like a memorial erected in our village churchyard in commemoration of him.’ Letter to the IWGC, 31 May 1919, Commonwealth War Graves Commission Archive, Maidenhead, WG/​087, Part 1. Chatham Naval Memorial in Kent was erected partly as a result of public pressure. 22 Howlett, Fighting with Figures, p. 43. 23 Ibid., pp. 43, ix. 24 Jay Winter, ‘Sites of Memory’, in Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (eds.), Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), p. 321. 25 E.  W. McFarland, ‘Commemoration of the South African War in Scotland, 1900–​10’, Scottish Historical Review, 89 (2010), 194–​223. 26 http://​ w ww.cwgc.org/ ​ f ind- ​ a - ​ c emetery/ ​ c emetery/​ 9 0002/​ T OWER%20 HILL%20MEMORIA L (accessed 29 April 2014).

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Men in reserve 27 Mosse terms it the ‘cult of the fallen’. George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping Memories of the World Wars (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1990); Cannadine, ‘War and Death’. 28 ‘The Navy in Action’, Glasgow Herald, 15 December 1939, p. 6. 29 http:// ​ w ww.doverwarmemorialproject.org.uk/ ​ Information/​ D aybyDay/​ Merchant%20 Navy/​Merchant%20Navy2.htm (accessed 29 April 2014). 30 Linsey Robb: Men at Work: The Working Man in British Culture, 1939–​1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 31 http://​warmemscot.s4.bizhat.com/​warmemscot-​ftopic3342.html (accessed 29 April 2014). 32 Stephen Smith (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 19 February 2013 (SOHC 050/​11). 33 http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​22461359; http://​www.express.co.uk/​news/​ uk/​445064/​Hero-​receives-​Arctic-​Star-​medal-​for-​heroism-​in-​Second-​World-​ War; http://​www.dailymail.co.uk/​ news/​article-​2295766/​  Arctic-​Star-​David-​ Cameron-​pays-​tribute-​Navy-​heroes-​took-​supplies-​Russia-​Second-​World-​ War.html (all accessed 29 April 2014). 34 Corinna Peniston-​Bird, ‘War and Peace in the Cloakroom: The Controversy over the Memorial to the Women of World War II’, in Steven Gibson and Simon Mollan (eds.), Representations of Peace and Conflict (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 279. 35 Robert John Alexander, interview, 7 June 2001 (IWM SA, 21647). 36 Robb, Men at Work, p. 135. 37 The memorial was rededicated in 2003 to make it a universal monument remembering all those who have died firefighting in times of war and peace. 38 http:// ​ w ww.staffshomeguard.co.uk/ ​ D otherReminiscences92Devon.htm (accessed 1 July 2014). 39 ‘Home Front Volunteers Honoured’, BBC News, 3 March 2000, http://​news. bbc.co.uk/​1/​hi/​uk/​665102.stm (accessed 29 April 2014). 40 http://​www.britishlegion.org.uk/​remembrance/​how-​the-​nation-​remembers/​ remembrance-​sunday (accessed 6 May 2014). 41 For more on the concept of ‘memory boom’ see Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the 20th Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 42 http://​www.animalsinwar.org.uk/​ (accessed 29 April 2014). 43 Winter, Remembering War, p. 7. 44 Peniston-​Bird, ‘War and Peace in the Cloakroom’; Corinna M. Peniston-​ Bird, ‘The People’s War in Personal Testimony and Bronze:  Sorority and the Memorial to the Women of World War II’, in Lucy Noakes and Juliette Pattinson (eds.), British Cultural Memory and the Second World War in Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 45 Mary Abbott, a wartime FANY who was invited to the unveiling, was rather dismissive:  ‘Don’t think much of it . . . It’s a bit strange. All the greatcoats. Hmmm’. Mary Abbott, interviewed by Juliette Pattinson, 5 December 2006.

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The missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations 46 ‘To the Memory of Earl Haig’, Daily Mirror, 11 November 1937. 47 Recent campaigns for recognition are undoubtedly aided by technological advances that allow the formation of online ‘communities’ to campaign for commemoration. 48 http://​www.ncpb.co.uk/​photo-​album/​photo00044.htm (accessed 24 June 2014). Andy Decomyn, email correspondence with Juliette Pattinson, 24 June 2014. 49 http:// ​ w ww.bbc.co.uk/​ n ews/​ u k-​ e ngland-​ s toke-​ s taffordshire- ​ 2 9694149 (accessed 22 October 2014). 50 http://​www.womenofsteeltheconcert.co.uk/​the-​statue/​ (accessed 24 July 2015). 51 Jim Lister, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 19 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​38). 52 Peniston-​Bird, ‘The People’s War in Personal Testimony and Bronze’, p. 76. 53 Vera Lynn with Robin Cross and Jenny de Gex, Unsung Heroines: The Women who Won the War (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1990). 54 Neal Wreford, ‘A Bevin Boy Remembers’, BBC ‘People’s War’ Archive, article ID A3911023, 18 April 2005, http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​history/​ww2peopleswar/​ stories/​23 /​a3911023.shtml (accessed 1 May 2014). 55 National Servicemen who served in Malaya, Cyprus and the Suez Canal have similarly campaigned for recognition of their service, often using the Second World War as a reference point. However, in contrast to the Bevin Boys, they have largely been unsuccessful. 56 Warwick Harry Taylor, interview, 18 April 2002 (IWM SA, 30468). 57 http://​www.publications.parliament.uk/​pa/​cm200506/​cmhansrd/​vo060706/​ debtext/​60706-​0016.htm (accessed 6 August 2014). 58 ‘Bevin Boys Dedication at National Memorial Arboretum’, BBC News, 7 May 2013. 59 Walter Falconer, interviewed by Wendy Ugolini, 6 November 2008 (SOHC 050/​01). 60 George Cross, interviewed by Wendy Ugolini, 7 November 2008 (SOHC 050/​ 03). 61 Howlett, Fighting with Figures, p. 38. 62 Craig Inglis, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 10 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​48). 63 Janet S. K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 265. 64 HC Deb., 22 May 2008, 381. 65 HC Deb., 28 February 2011, 246W. 66 HC Deb., 13 Jun 2013, 415W. 67 Falkirk Council press release, ‘Homefront Heroes to Be Honoured with the Freedom of Falkirk’, 23 July 2008, www.falkirk.gov.uk/​about_​council/​news/​ press_​item.aspx?pid=2015 (accessed 23 August 2008). 68 ‘Freedom for Home Front Veterans’, BBC News, 19 November 2008, http://​ news.bbc.co.uk/​1/​hi/​scotland/​tayside_​and_​central/​7735789.stm (accessed 6 May 2014). 69 Ibid.

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Men in reserve 70 George Cross interview, 7 November 2008. 71 Falconer interview, 6 November 2008. 72 Eddie Menday, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 15 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​50). 73 Eddie  Menday,  http://​ w ww.unionhistory.info/​ w orkerswar/ ​ v oices.php (accessed 7 October 2014). 74 Harry McGregor, interviewed by Arthur McIvor, 13 July 2009 (SOHC 050/​ 05). 75 Alfred Thomas, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 3 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​45). 76 John O’Halloran, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 22 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 19). 77 John Hiscutt, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 25 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​42). 78 Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 5. 79 Menday interview, 15 May 2013. 80 Lucy Noakes, ‘“Serve to Save”:  Gender, Citizenship and Civil Defence in Britain 1937–​41’, Journal of Contemporary History, 47:4 (2012), 734–​ 53 (p. 739). 81 Fred Millican, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 26 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​20) (interviewee’s emphasis). 82 Roger Major (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 26 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​21). 83 Arthur McIvor, Working Lives: Work in Britain since 1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 12. 84 Michael Paris, ‘Introduction:  Film, Television, and the Second World War  –​The First Fifty Years’, in Michael Paris (ed.), Repicturing the Second World War:  Representations in Film and Television (Basingstoke:  Palgrave, 2007), p. 2. 85 Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’; Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1991). 86 Malcom Smith, Britain and 1940:  History, Myth and Popular Memory (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 4. 87 Linsey Robb, ‘ “Fighting in Their Ways”? The Working Man in British Culture, 1939–​1945’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Strathclyde, 2012). 88 Penny Summerfield, ‘Divisions at Sea:  Class, Gender, Race, and Nation in Maritime Films of the Second World War, 1939–​60’, Twentieth Century British History, 22:3 (2011), 330–​53 (p. 352). 89 Kenneth Worpole, Dockers and Detectives: Popular Reading, Popular Writing (London: Verso, 1983); John Ramsden, ‘Refocusing “the People’s War”: British War Films of the 1950s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 33:1 (1999), 35–​63; Nicholas Pronay, ‘The British Post-​Bellum Cinema:  A  Survey of the Films Relating to World War II made in Britain between 1945 and 1960’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 8:1 (1998), 39–​54; Neil Rattigan, ‘The

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The missing legacy of Britain’s reserved occupations Last Gasp of the Middle Class:  The British War Films of the 1950s’, in Wheeler Winston Dixon (ed.), Reviewing British Cinema 1900–​1992: Essays and Interviews (Albany: State University of New York, 1994). 90 For an analysis of the four films made in the 1950s featuring female protagonists, see Penny Summerfield, ‘Public Memory or Public Amnesia? British Women of the Second World War in Popular Films of the 1950s and 1960s’, Journal of British Studies, 48:4 (2009), 935–​57. 91 ‘Home Fires: Britain, 1940–​1944’, The World at War, Thames Television, 13 February 1974. 92 Penny Summerfield, ‘Dunkirk and the Popular Memory of Britain at War, 1940–​58’, Journal of Contemporary History, 45:4 (2010), 788–​811 (p. 807). 93 Paris, ‘Introduction: Film, Television, and the Second World War’, p. 7. 94 Sian Nicholas, ‘History, Revisionism and Television Drama: Foyle’s War and the “Myth of 1949”’, Media History, 13:2/​3 (2007), 203–​19 (pp. 203–​5). 95 Wendy Webster, ‘ “Rose-​Tinted Blighty”: Gender and Genre in Land Girls’, in Paris, Repicturing the Second World War, pp. 19–​20. 96 James Chapman, ‘Re-​ Presenting War:  British Television Drama-​ Documentary and the Second World War’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10:1 (2007), 13–​33 (p. 13). 97 ‘Lines of Battle’, A Family at War, ITV, 28 April 1970. 98 ‘The Breach in the Dyke’, A Family at War, ITV, 19 May 1970. 99 ‘If It’s Got Your Number on It’, A Family at War, ITV, 28 July 1970. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid. 103 ‘Hope against Hope’, A Family at War, ITV, 16 December 1970. 104 Clare Francis, Homeland (London: Macmillan, 2004), pp. 21–​2, 23. 105 Ibid., p. 251. 106 BBC Television, 1993–​99. 107 ‘It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie’, Goodnight Sweetheart, BBC1, 15 January 1996. 108 Peter Cave, No Bananas (London: BBC Books, 1996), pp. 183–​4. 109 ‘I Get Along without You Very Well’, Goodnight Sweetheart, BBC1, 16 December 1993. 110 ‘Don’t Get Around Much Anymore’, Goodnight Sweetheart, BBC1, 20 February 1995. 111 See Nicholas, ‘History, Revisionism and Television Drama’; James Chapman, ‘Policing the People’s War: Foyle’s War and British Television Drama’. 112 ‘The German Woman’, Foyle’s War, BBC1, 27 October 2002. 113 See Webster, ‘Rose-​Tinted Blighty’. 114 Angela Huth, Land Girls (London: Constable, 2012), pp. 171–​2. 115 ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Walker’, Dad’s Army, BBC1, 15 March 1969.

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Men in reserve 116 S. P. MacKenzie, The Home Guard:  A  Military and Political History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 38. 117 Corinna M. Peniston-​ Bird, ‘“I wondered who’d be the first to spot that”:  Dad’s Army at War, in the Media and in Memory’, Media History, 13:2/​3 (2007), 183–​202; Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-​Bird, Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2007), p.  183. The Home Guard had also had a largely comical image during the war; Corinna Peniston-​Bird and Penny Summerfield’, ‘ “Hey, you’re dead!”: The Multiple Uses of Humour in Representations of British National Defence in the Second World War, Journal of European Studies, 31 (2001), 413–​35. 118 ‘It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie’. 119 ‘A Miss Is as Good as a Male’, Backs to the Land, ITV, 15 April 1977. 120 ‘The War in the Fields’, Land Girls, BBC1, 8 November 2011.

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Concluding thoughts

This book has taken a socio-​cultural approach to address an area of scholarly neglect. By focusing on working-​class men who worked in industries classified as reserved occupations, we have rescued the civilian man from obscurity and inserted him back into the narrative of Britain’s war. It is hoped that by restoring the recollections and representations of reserved men to the historical record a re-​evaluation of life on the home front during the ‘people’s war’ has been prompted. This was no feminised space, but a world also populated by men who have subsequently been marginalised in popular memory. Few of our interviewees commented explicitly on masculinity as a key marker of their subjectivities. But paying attention to the construction of their stories about hard graft, long hours, large wage packets and lack of leisure time, it is possible to read the implicit workings of masculinity. Moreover, masculinity does not operate independently in the formation of subjectivity. It is always intertwined with other constructions of identity. Especially relevant in this context were age, class, national identity and occupational status, aspects that our interviewees were much more likely to reflect upon. Together, these cultural codes shape what it means to be a man. Drawing extensively upon the memories of male interviewees whose testimonies would otherwise be lost forever was a key goal. But while an important objective, this has not been solely a project of reconstruction and of recovering marginal experiences to ‘correct’ popular accounts of the home front. The book was also motivated by the widespread notion that any men who were not conscripted were emasculated by the penetration of women into areas of work previously dominated by men and were threatened by the hegemonic masculinity of the combatant. We wanted to subject these understandings to interrogation in order to scrutinise their veracity. A hierarchy certainly existed and was reflected in the narratives that v 329 v

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Men in reserve positioned civilian men below that of combatants. For many young men of military age between 1939 and 1945, being drafted into the forces and donning military uniform was a means of becoming a man. This was an important stage in the construction of masculinity, and the high status enjoyed by the soldier hero was celebrated on screen and in press. And indeed, half of our fifty-​six interviewees stated that they attempted to evade their reserved status by enlisting –​some repeatedly –​in order to, by their understandings, contribute more directly to the war effort. They were propelled by a variety of motives to try and leave their essential jobs and join the forces, including patriotism, adventure, shame and the overwhelming desire to wear military uniform. Some of these men constructed moving accounts of how they had felt like lesser men, ‘A wis naebody’ being perhaps the most poignant.1 The failure to get out of their reserved occupation was painfully recounted by some. Moreover, Mass Observation reveals that the resumption of the white feather campaign early in the war led to a number of suicides. Many of our interviewees reflecting on their wartime experiences nearly seventy years later did not regard their work as being of sufficient significance to be commemorated. And despite the Government’s preventing men in these highly valued essential roles from enlisting because they recognised the importance of their work to the war effort, there were lingering suspicions that some were shirkers ‘scrimshanking’ out of their duty.2 Sir Ralph Glyn, Conservative MP for Abingdon, asked Churchill in 1944 whether national service would be continued after the end of the war, as it would ‘enable men who have been in reserved occupations but are of military age to make their contribution of active service in the Armies of Occupation’.3 The explicit assumption here is that reserved men were not contributing actively in their industrial capacities. Such evidence suggests that civilian masculinities were indeed challenged and supports the thesis of emasculation. Nevertheless, this does not automatically mean that all men who were prevented from serving in the military felt inferior. Some displayed a remarkable degree of comfort with their reserved identities, having little sense of their masculinity being fundamentally challenged: ‘I didn’t fight against it. I  was quite happy.’4 Others recognised that the State needed them as much as it required service personnel. There was ‘no point in robbing Peter to pay Paul. Or taking a skilled engineer out of skilled engineering to be a soldier’.5 Parity of service and recognition of skill were emphasised in Government propaganda. There were many ways in which non-​combatant men could maintain their masculine v 330 v

331

Concluding thoughts status. An alternative site of (re)constructing working-​class masculine identities was the workplace. Men who laboured in the competitive, risk-​taking culture of heavy industry continued to foster a dominant mode of ‘hard man’ masculinity through their capacity to accrue high wages and their exposure to risk during the war. While reserved men often defined themselves within a framework of hegemonic masculinity, positioning themselves as below the status of the soldier hero, there was space for a recuperation of masculinity. Narratives were framed to express active and patriotic contributions to the war effort. The war provided ample opportunities for the expression of provider masculinity:  it brought full employment, job security, empowerment, long working hours and overtime, high wages, status, and promotion. Non-​ manual, middle-​class male workers benefited from these opportunities too, such as clerks, draughtsmen and engineers, who experienced accelerated career progression, as did some apprentices who were upgraded to the full male wage rate more rapidly.6 For others, exposure to more dangerous working conditions forged masculinity. The oral evidence suggests a wide range of experience across the cohort from clerks and draughtsmen to heavy-​industry labourers and craftsmen. For those in manual occupations, war work also facilitated the rebuilding of fit and honed civilian male bodies. A culture of masculinity was forged in the workplace, where men worked long hours, stood up for their rights, and made sacrifices in the more intensified and pressurised production environment of wartime. The war, then, could be experienced as empowering, enabling breadwinner masculine identities, which had been destabilised by the insecurities and job losses of the Depression, once again to flourish. Moreover, the masculinities of older men and those with impairments were enhanced by the need for more male workers, who retained a higher status than female dilutees with their limited training and job experience. In order to augment their masculinities, some reserved men positioned themselves in their narratives hierarchically above female workers, who were considered to be there purely for the duration to assist in the emergency. Thus, the war facilitated the reconstruction of working-​class masculinities, enabling reserved men to display their patriotic masculinity. This was their contribution to the war effort. In these ways, the thesis of emasculation seems flawed and too sweeping. Because the Second World War strengthened masculinities in these myriad ways, it is problematic to argue that civilian men were emasculated, challenged and lacking in masculinity. Such language risks v 331 v

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Men in reserve flattening out the incongruities and ambiguities of civilian working-​class male experience in the Second World War. The impact of the war on the identities of male workers was complex and sometimes contradictory. Understandably, given that it involved millions of men in an array of occupations, there was no single grand narrative of reserved status; the configurations of reserved masculinity conveyed through discursive and visual associations were often plural and ambiguous. Moreover, there were silences in their accounts that had meaning. Our interviewees did not acknowledge that strikes and industrial action had occurred, for example, air-​brushing out of their testimonies an aspect of conflict that undermines the almost monolithic notion of communality. Similarly, many struggled with describing their wartime leisure activities, conflicted between their youthful enjoyments and the desire to distance themselves from any suggestion of shirking. Existing language about civilian male status does not convey the ambiguity of shifting, multiple and overlapping constructions of reserved masculinity. These complexities surrounding what it meant to be a man in Britain during the Second World War need expression, as it is in these inconsistencies that we see masculinity being contested. Given that one of our primary goals was to give a voice to those who have been long silenced in stories of Britain’s war experience it seems fitting to end with the words of one of our interviewees. Eddie Menday, a London-​based engineer, asserted: I was there eight years in actual fact. And the end of the war they kindly presented us with certificates saying that we assisted the war effort. I  had it tucked away for years and I’ve recently brought it out and framed it. You know, I’m proud of that . . . I can be just as proud, particularly the long hours that we did, that it was a means to an end . . . I have to look back on those days with pride, because it was a very touch-​and-​go thing.7

It is clear, therefore, that while these were reserved men they were not men in reserve.

Notes 1 Craig Inglis, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 10 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​48). 2 HC Deb., 3 April 1939, Vol. 345, 2446–​8. 3 HC Deb., 2 August 1944, Vol. 402, 1379–​80. 4 Charles Lamb, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 3 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​27).

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Concluding thoughts 5 John Dickson, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 21 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​53). 6 For an example in fiction, see the rise of the young engineer Angleby in J. B. Priestley, Daylight on Saturday (London: Heinemann, 1943), to the position of works superintendent. 7 Eddie Menday, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 15 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​50).

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Appendix 1

Table of male interviewees’ details Name

Cyril Beavor

Wartime location

Midlands: Birmingham Frank Blincow SE England: London Timothy Brown NE England: (pseudonym) Newcastle Thomas Scotland: Portobello Cantwell Thomas Scotland: Ardrossan Carmichael Bernard Eastern England: Casburn Ipswich Peter Ciarella Scotland: Glasgow/​ Lochgilphead Cecil SE England: Clements Canterbury

Age in Wartime 1945 occupation(s)

Attempt to join forces? Success?

20

Apprentice engineer

No

Ambulance

Same

SOHC 050/​49

18

Yes –​ unsuccessful

Fire watching

Same

SOHC 050/​56

19

Apprentice draughtsman Apprentice engineer

Engineer

SOHC 050/​30

22

Apprentice engineer

Yes –​ unsuccessful

Same

SOHC 050/​55

24

Shipbuilding (then Merchant Navy) Apprentice draughtsman Shipbuilding

Yes –​ unsuccessful

Fire watching

Merchant Navy Same

SOHC 050/​35

Same

SOHC 050/​52

Apprentice engineer (then RAF)

Yes –​ successful

Same

SOHC 050/​51

20 23 22

Married? Undertook voluntary service?

Yes –​ unsuccessful

No No

Yes

Fire watching Home Guard Home Guard

Post-​war SOHC occupation archive catalogue number

SOHC 050/​57

335

newgenrtpdf

Norman Cooke

SE England: Epsom

21

Junior draughtsman

Yes –​ unsuccessful

Home Guard

Geoffrey Cooper William Cowan

SE England: Farnborough Scotland: Garelochhead/​ Glasgow Scotland: Glasgow Southern England: Portsmouth NW England: Manchester Scotland: Glasgow

25

Aircraft researcher

No

22

Shipbuilding (fitter)

No

Home Guard ARP

Conscripted SOHC 050/​46 to Air Force Ministry SOHC 050/​17 of Work Same SOHC 050/​59

18 20

Railway works Boat builder

No No

Firefighting

Same Same

SOHC 050/​03 SOHC 050/​32

23

Aircraft worker

No

SOHC 050/​25

20

No

20

Railway locomotive works Shipbuilding

Aircraft worker Same

19

Railway fireman

Yes –​ unsuccessful

24

Apprentice draughtsman

Yes –​ unsuccessful

George Cross Alexander Davidson George Dean Willie Dewar John Dickson

Scotland: Clydebank Daniel Donovan Wales: Rhondda Valley (relocated to London) Edward Drury Scotland: Dundee (pseudonym)

Yes –​failed medical Yes

Home Guard Home Guard Fire watching Home Guard

Same

SOHC 050/​ 04, 07 SOHC 050/​53

Railways

SOHC 050/​16

Draughts­ SOHC 050/​29 man (later oil salesman)

(cont.)

336

Table (cont.) Name

William Earnshaw

Wartime location

Midlands: Derby

Age in Wartime 1945 occupation(s)

23

Apprentice engineer

Attempt to join forces? Success?

Married? Undertook voluntary service?

No

Post-​war SOHC occupation archive catalogue number Same

SOHC 050/​ 40

Walter Falconer Scotland: Falkirk Gregory Fowler Midlands: Derby (pseudonym) Douglas Gordon NW England: Manchester

17 19

Agricultural worker Telephone engineer

No No

Same Home Guard Same

24

Electrical engineer

No

George Hackland Scotland: Edinburgh Frank Harvey NW England: Manchester Geoffrey HebditchSW England: Somerset Geoffrey Midlands: Sheffield Heyworth

25 24

Marine engineer (then Yes –​ successful Merchant Navy) Apprentice toolmaker Yes –​ unsuccessful

Same (later SOHC 050/​10 university lecturer) Fire watching Same SOHC 050/​06

24

Laboratory assistant

19

Charles Hill Midlands: (pseudonym) Birmingham John Hiscutt SE England: London

24

Steelworks laboratory No –​persuaded by father to wait for call-​up Toolmaker Yes –​ unsuccessful

20

Aircraft factory worker

No

No

Yes

SOHC 050/​01 SOHC 050/​34

Home Guard Same

SOHC 050/​23

Same

SOHC 050/​31

Home Guard Same

SOHC 050/​58

Home Guard Same

SOHC 050/​37

Same

SOHC 050/​42

337

newgenrtpdf

Craig Inglis

22

Cobbler

Yes –​ unsuccessful

Home Guard Same

SOHC 050/​48

Charles Lamb

Scotland: Kilmarnock Scotland: Dundee

20

Shipbuilding

No

SOHC 050/​27

Walker Leith

Scotland: Aberdeen

22

Telephone engineer (then army)

Yes –​ successful

NW England: Carlisle Roger Major NE England: (pseudonym) Newcastle Harry McGregor Scotland: Glasgow

22

Railway worker

Yes –​ unsuccessful

Fire watching Shipyard worker (later teacher) Fire watching; Same Home Guard Home Guard Same

21

No

Firefighting

Same

SOHC 050/​21

No

Home Guard Same

SOHC 050/​05

Donald Wray McHutchon

21

Engineering apprentice Railway locomotive works Merchant seaman

No

SOHC 050/​33

William McNaul Scotland: Glasgow Eddie Menday SE England: London

23 22

Railway worker Engineering

Yes –​ unsuccessful No

Children’s home manager Home Guard Chauffeur Fire watching Same

Roy Miller

23

Apprentice ship draughtsman

No

Fire watching; Home Guard

SOHC 050/​13

Jim Lister

Scotland: Glasgow

Scotland: Dalmuir

22

Ship draught­ sman

SOHC 050/​26 SOHC 050/​38

SOHC 050/​22 SOHC 050/​50

(cont.)

338

newgenrtpdf

Table (cont.) Name

Wartime location

Age in Wartime 1945 occupation(s)

Attempt to join forces? Success?

Frederick Millican

NE England: Newcastle

18

Apprentice metallurgist –​ aircraft factory

No

Tom Myles

Scotland: Falkirk

19

Bank worker (then Bevin Boy) Clerk –​ aircraft manufacturers

No Yes –​ unsuccessful

Firefighting

Fire watching Home Guard

John O’Halloran SE England: Acton

28

Ewart Parkinson Midlands: Leicester

19

Town planner

No

Ronald Quartermaine Alexander Ramage William Ramage Ewart Rayner

NE England: Blyth

20

Electrical engineer

Yes –​ unsuccessful

Scotland: Biggar

18

Apprentice farrier

Yes –​ unsuccessful

Phillip Rogers (pseudonym)

Scotland: Midlothian 22 SE England: 21 Rochester Midlands: Sheffield 17

Miner (then army) Yes –​ successful Apprentice toolmaker Yes –​ unsuccessful Coal-​mining clerk

No

Married? Undertook voluntary service? Ambulance

Post-​war SOHC occupation archive catalogue number Same (later teacher)

SOHC 050/​20

various

SOHC 050/​01

Clerk for aircraft manufa­ cturers Same

SOHC 050/​19

SOHC 050/​44

Engineering SOHC 050/​28

Merchant Navy Home Guard Same Home Guard Not known

SOHC 050/​14

Worked in family sweet business

SOHC 050/​15

SOHC 050/​43 SOHC 050/​18

339

John Scholey

Midlands: Leicester

21

Apprentice engineer

Yes –​ unsuccessful

Home Guard Same

SOHC 050/​41

Harold Scragg

NE England: Newcastle Midlands: Birmingham SE England: Carshalton

23

Mechanic

Yes –​ unsuccessful

Firefighting

Same

SOHC 050/​47

23

Apprentice in the Yes –​ unsuccessful experimental shop Apprentice electrical Yes –​ successful engineer (then RAF)

Same

SOHC 050/​36

Walter Shelley Derek Sims

19

Stephen Smith SE England: Croydon 22 (pseudonym) John Stephenson NE England: Newcastle Harold Stranks SW England: Exeter

21

Alfred Thomas

27

Ronald Tonge

Wales: Swansea (directed to Ayr, Scotland) NW England: Manchester

24

22

Home Guard Engineer

SOHC 050/​12

Fire watching; Engineer Home Guard Home Guard Same

SOHC 050/​11

Apprentice toolmaker Yes –​ unsuccessful (then Merchant Navy) Railway worker Yes –​ unsuccessful

Yes

Researcher at Porton Down Steelworker

No

Yes

Ambulance

Same

SOHC 050/​54

No

Yes

Home Guard Same

SOHC 050/​45

Telephone engineer (then RAF)

Yes –​ successful

Firefighting; Home Guard

SOHC 050/​24

Telephone engineer

SOHC 050/​39

340

Appendix 2

An international perspective on wartime labour control Britain was not alone in controlling its manpower resources. In wartime, and certainly in the highly industrialised warfare of the Second World War, all combatant nations were confronted with the challenge of balancing civilian manpower needs with the obvious requirement for military personnel. Despite being central to victory the issue of civilian manpower has, however, been widely neglected by historians. Britain’s wartime enemies had the most dissimilar labour policies. However, Germany did control its essential workers. In 1938, a decree for Securing Labour for Tasks of Special State Importance effectively conscripted labour, and by 1939 1.9  million workers had been subject to compulsory work orders.1 Over 6 million men were exempted from military service because of their essential skills.2 These workers, understandably, have been overshadowed by Germany’s other sources of labour. Historians have tended to focus on the conflicting Nazi ideologies towards women and work, as well as the 7 million enslaved workers from occupied Europe and Allied prisoners of war.3 Histories of Japan similarly focus on the country’s use of forced labour.4 Yet Japan also controlled domestic labour. A  General Mobilization Law drafted workers into industry, and an Employee Turnover Prevention Ordinance passed in 1940, for example, prevented workers from leaving without the permission of the local branch of the National Employment Agency.5 Additionally, as with most combatant nations, Japan relied heavily on female labour.6 Of Britain’s allies the United States was perhaps the most reluctant to exert any measure of control over its workforce. Unlike other combatant nations America did not instigate the conscription of women.7 When preparations for war began in 1940 there were still vast numbers of unemployed resulting from the Depression, and the lure of jobs and v 340 v

341

International perspective on wartime labour control increasing wages alone had been enough to ensure the absorption of 15 million unemployed workers between 1940 and 1943.8 America maintained the highest proportion of men not in the military of any of the combatants. The American Government was, however, forced to control the labour force to an unprecedented degree. In 1942 a War Manpower Commission was set up to deal with the issue of civilian labour.9 However, this control lacked centralised cohesion: agricultural labourers, merchant seamen and railroad workers were excluded from the commission’s jurisdiction.10 Moreover, the draft boards, which numbered 6,500, decided on military deferments and were locally controlled, and also reported to the Selective Service System (the body responsible for maintaining the register of those eligible for conscription), not the War Manpower Commission.11 This lack of centralised control created instability, failing to prevent high levels of labour turnover and strikes.12 Moreover, despite the increasing labour force, of both women and men, America faced a manpower crisis in 1943, and military historian Jerome Peppers argues it was only the war’s swift conclusion that spared America from a massive manpower disaster.13 Britain’s other allies more tightly controlled their civilian working populations and often in ways that mirrored the controls used in Britain. In the Soviet Union all men aged between eighteen and fifty-​one were liable for military conscription; only specialists declared vitally necessary to industry were exempt from military service. In addition, as was usual in combatant nations, industry became increasingly reliant on female labour, especially after Operation Barbarossa, when a policy of unrestricted enlistment of industrial workers was pursued.14 Moreover, in 1940 it was also made illegal to leave employment or change workplace.15 Canada, Australia and New Zealand all used a scheme of reserved occupations, a fact rarely acknowledged in their historiographies. However, the policies of these countries were not pre-​planned as in Britain, but rather were reactively responding to wartime exigencies. In addition, none of these schemes was as comprehensive as those instituted in Britain. This perhaps reflects the fact that these countries were on the periphery, somewhat removed from the heart of the fighting. Indeed, it was in 1942, after the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor brought war to the Pacific, that New Zealand introduced labour controls.16 Although plans for labour control based on the British model had been previously mooted, it was the Japanese attack that compelled them to implement a policy of labour control. This was introduced on 10 January 1942 and was very similar to the British Essential Works Order. The National Service Emergency Act v 341 v

342

Men in reserve meant that workers could not leave essential industries, mostly pertaining to munitions and defence construction, unless dismissed with the consent of the District Manpower Office.17 The attacks on Pearl Harbor also forced Australia to tighten their scheme of reserved occupations, introduced in 1940. Their initial scheme, although intended to prevent unchecked military conscription from essential industries, was not mandatory. From 1942 the Manpower Directorate put in place a much more rigid Schedule of Reserved Occupations that gave the Government powers to direct every individual to the most appropriate form of civilian or military service.18 The levels of control put in place in wartime Britain were thus extraordinarily tight and implemented with unparalleled forethought. This, however, reflects the unique position from which Britain was fighting. It was a democratic country, and indeed was ostensibly fighting to protect democracy, so had no recourse to the exploitation of slave labour.19 Moreover, although never a battleground, Britain was much more heavily involved in the fighting than any of its dominions, and as a result it had little choice but to scrutinise its manpower budget carefully. Finally, Britain was a small island nation with a more finite number of manpower resources and so could not withstand the manpower errors that a gigantic economic system, such as the United States, could accommodate without catastrophic consequences. Britain was thus unique among belligerent nations, both in its implementation of a system of labour control prior to the war’s start, and in its direction of manpower.

Notes 1 Adam Tooze, Wages of Destruction:  The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Viking Adult, 2007), p. 261. 2 I. C.  B. Dear, The Oxford Companion to World War II (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 61. 3 Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany (New  York:  Longman, 2001); Christopher Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000); Werner Abelshauser, ‘Germany:  Guns, Butter and Economic Miracles’, in Mark Harrison (ed.), The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 94. 4 Charles G. Roland, Long Night’s Journey into Day:  Prisoners of War in Hong Kong and Japan, 1941–​1945 (Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001); Stephen Kotkin, ‘World War Two and Labor:  A  Lost Cause?’, International Labor and Working-​Class History, 58 (2000), 181–​91 (p. 184).

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International perspective on wartime labour control 5 Andrew Gordon, The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry, 1853–​1955 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 268. 6 Dear, The Oxford Companion to World War II, p. 480. 7 Gerald D. Nash, The Crucial Era:  The Great Depression and World War II 1929–​1945 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992), p. 149. 8 Dear, The Oxford Companion to World War II, p.  921; Alan L.  Gropman, Mobilizing US Industry in World War II (Washington:  US Government Printing Office, 1996), p. 127. 9 Allan M. Winkler, Home Front USA: America during World War II (Wheeling: Harlan Davidson, 2000), p. 19. 10 Gropman, Mobilizing US Industry in World War II, p. 108. 11 Ibid., p. 105. 12 Richard Overy, ‘The Successes of American Mobilization’, in Mark A. Stoler and Melanie S. Gustafson (eds.), Major Problems in the History of World War II: Documents and Essays (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), p. 64. 13 Gropman, Mobilizing US Industry in World War II, p. 115. 14 Dear, The Oxford Companion to World War II, pp.  951–​2; Mark Harrison, ‘Resource Mobilisation for World War II: The USA, UK, USSR and Germany, 1938–​1945’, Economic History Review, 41:2 (1988), 177–​92 (pp. 187–​8); Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (London: Penguin, 1982). 15 Dear, The Oxford Companion to World War II, p. 947. 16 Nancy M. Taylor, The Home Front:  The New Zealand People at War (Wellington: V. R. Ward, 1986). 17 Ibid., p. 663. 18 Daniel Connell, The War at Home:  Australia 1939–​ 1949 (Crows Nest: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1988), p. 89. 19 Britain did however utilise German, Austrian and Italian prisoners of war as agricultural labour. They adhered to the Geneva Conventions, and the treatment of these workers was almost universally humane.

v 343 v

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Bibliography Dickson, John, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 21 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​53). Donovan, Daniel, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 21 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 16). Earnshaw, William, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 23 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​40). Falconer, Walter, interviewed by Wendy Ugolini, 6 November 2008 (SOHC 050/​ 01). Fitzpatrick, Richard, interviewed by David Walker, 13 August 2004 (SOHC 022/​ 01). Fowler, Gregory (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 12 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​34). Gordon, Douglas, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 23 November 2011 (SOHC 050/​10). Hackland, George, interviewed by Wendy Ugolini, 24 July 2009 (SOHC 050/​06). Harvey, Frank, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 27 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​23). Hebditch, Geoffrey, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 10 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​31). Henderson, Isa, interviewed by Patricia Williams, August 1998 (SOHC 015/​03). Heyworth, Geoffrey, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 9 October 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 58). Hill, Charles (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 16 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​37). Hiscutt, John, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 25 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​42). Inglis, Craig, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 10 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​48). Lamb, Charles, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 3 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​27). Leith, Walker, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 2 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​26). Lister, Jim, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 19 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​38). Major, Roger (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 26 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​21). McGregor, Harry, interviewed by Arthur McIvor, 13 July 2009 (SOHC 050/​05). McHutchon, Donald Wray, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 11 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​33). McNaul, William, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 27 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​22). Menday, Eddie, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 15 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​50). Miller, Janet, interviewed by Wendy Ugolini, 11 December 2008 (SOHC 050/​05). Miller, Roy, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 27 February 2013 (SOHC 050/​13). Millican, Fred, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 26 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​20). Mills, Alec, interviewed by Arthur McIvor and Ronnie Johnston, 19 June 2000 (SOHC 017/​C1). McMurdo, Thomas, interviewed by Ronnie Johnston, 11 July 2000 (SOHC 017/​ C20). Myles, Tom, interviewed by Wendy Ugolini, 6 November 2008 (SOHC 050/​02). O’Halloran, John, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 22 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​19). Parkinson, Ewart, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 2 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​44). Quartermaine, Ronald, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 4 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​ 28).

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Bibliography Ramage, Alexander, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 19 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​14). Ramage, William, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 29 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​43). Rayner, Ewart, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 22 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​18). Rogers, Phillip (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 19 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​15). Scholey, John, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 25 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​41). Scragg, Harold, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 9 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​47). Shelley, Walter, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 16 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​36). Sims, Derek, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 20 February 2013 (SOHC 050/​012). Smith, Stephen (pseudonym), interviewed by Linsey Robb, 19 February 2013 (SOHC 050/​11). Stephenson, John, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 23 April 2013 (SOHC 050/​39). Stranks, Harold, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 22 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​54). Thomas, Alfred, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 3 May 2013 (SOHC 050/​45). Tonge, Ronald, interviewed by Linsey Robb, 28 March 2013 (SOHC 050/​24).

Archived at Imperial War Museum (London) Alexander, Robert John, 7 June 2001 (IWM SA, 21647). Ashill, Edward, 9 October 1990 (IWM SA, 11580). Barrett, Henry, 2 July 1996 (IWM SA, 16733). Bennett, Albert, February 2004 (IWM SA, 30023). Chadwick, Thomas, 1996 (day unspecified) (IWM SA, 16593). Cresswell, John, 2005 (day unspecified) (IWM SA, 28932). Deeley, Roy, 26 January 2000 (IWM SA, 20055). Dorgan, John, 1986 (day unspecified) (IWM SA, 9253). Fifield, Leonard William James, 8 June 1994 (IWM SA, 14147). Holland, Sir Kenneth, 18 April 1991 (IWM SA, 12015). Howe, D. C. M., 1 May 1990 (IWM SA, 12882). Liddle, Lance, March 2005 (day unspecified) (IWM SA, 27263). Petty, Ted, 1989 (day unspecified) (IWM SA, 18076). Ryder, William Edward, 10 September 1999 (IWM SA, 19662). Spender, Stephen, 1990 (day unspecified) (IWM SA, 11627). Tack, Gordon Hugh, 1996 (day unspecified) (IWM SA, 16699). Taylor, Warwick Harry, 18 April 2002 (IWM SA, 30468). Wakeman, Ronald, 16 February 1995 (IWM SA, 14963). Wilkinson, George, 2 October 1985 (IWM SA, 9104).

Archived at National Library of Wales (Aberystwyth) Arnold, Stan, National Library of Wales, Wales at War transcriptions, ex 2458/​1. Taylor, Warwick, National Library of Wales, Wales at War transcriptions, ex 2458/​1.

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Bibliography Archived at British Library (London) Archer, Sid (British Library, C900/​0956). Bell, Robert (British Library, C900/​06514). Griffiths, Daniel (British Library, C532/​074). Metson, Nick (British Library, C900/​07557–​8 C1).

Archived at the Trades Union Congress (London Metropolitan University) Boyle, Ted, http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php. Clark, Fred, http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php. Hughes, James, http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php. Jones, Jack, http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php. Kennedy, Donald, http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php. Menday, Eddie, http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php.

Glasgow Museums Resource Centre (Glasgow) Stewart, Thomas, interview, 10 June 1996, 2000 Glasgow Lives Project.

Documentary sources Mass Observation (University of Sussex) D107, October 1939. D5039.1, diary for June 1941. D5065, diary for 5 September 1942. D5118, diary for 12 July 1941. File Report 6, ‘Sport in Wartime’, October 1939. File Report 13, ‘Sport in Wartime’, December 1939. File Report 18, ‘Wartime Sport’, January 1940. File Report 24, ‘The Cinema in the First Three Months of War’, January 1940. File Report 337, ‘Leisure’, August 1940. File Report 698, ‘Sports Questionnaire’, May 1941. File Report 724, ‘Broadcast for North American Service’, June 1941. File Report 776, ‘Smoking Trends’, July 1941. File Report 827, ‘Service and Civilian Pay’, August 1941. File Report 1138, ‘Music’, March 1942. File Report 1149, ‘Some Thoughts on Greyhounds and National Unity’, March 1942. File Report 1157, ‘What Workers Really Earn’, March 1942. File Report 1166, ‘Sir Stafford Cripps’, March 1942.

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Bibliography File Report 1199, ‘Work and Holidays’, April 1942. File Report 1249, ‘Radio’, May 1942. File Report 1332, ‘Books and the Public’, July 1942. File Report 1631, ‘Absenteeism and Industrial Morale’, March 1943. File Report 1632, ‘Some Notes on the Use of Leisure’, March 1942. File Report 3086, ‘Love-​Making in Public’, February 1949. Harrisson, Tom, War Begins at Home, by Mass Observation (London: Chatto & Windus, 1940). Harrisson, Tom, War Factory:  A  Report by Mass-​Observation (London:  Victor Gollancz, 1943). Madge, Charles and Tom Harrisson, Britain by Mass-​ Observation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939). Mass Observation, People in Production: An Enquiry into British War Production (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942). Occasional Papers, http://​www.massobs.org.uk/​occasional-​papers. TC 75-​2-​E, Industrial Survey 1941–​42 questionnaire. TC Films 1937–​48, 17-​5-​C, letters to Picturegoer Weekly (1940). Topic Collection no. 42, ‘Posters 1939–​1947’.

The National Archives (Kew, London) Only files referenced in the text have been included below. Many other files were consulted. CAB 37/​139/​26, ‘Memorandum on Recruiting’, 1915. CO 968/​40/​5, ‘Registration for Employment Order’, 1941. EL 1/​12, CEMA paper no. 68, ‘Factory Concerts for ENSA’, memo by E. M. Stokes, 12 September 1940. INF 3/​123, Bream, Remember –​They’re Relying on You (undated). INF 3/​1338, Sidney Conrad Strube, Put It There!, The Admiralty (undated). INF 3/​1514, Gilbert Rumbold, War at Sea (1943). INF 3/​1571, Marc Stone, War on Land (1943). INF 3/​1622, Ron Jobson, War in the Air (1942). INF 5/​59, ARP (‘The Warning’), production of film. INF 13/​122/​21, Harold Pym, Combined Operations Include You (undated). INF 13/​123/​14, Leslie Oliphant, The Attack Begins in the Factory (1943). INF 13/​123/​41, John Nunney, Back Them Up! (1943). LAB 6/​164, ‘Men who Change Their Employment after Registration in Order to Qualify under the Schedule of Reserved Occupations’ (1940–​41). LAB 45/​1, ‘Schedule of Reserved Occupations for Use in Time of War’ (1939). WO 32/​4726 (300678), Ministry of Labour and National Service, Instructions for the Guidance of Medical Boards under the National Service (Armed Forces) Acts, rev. 1940. WO 106/​372, ‘Conscientious Objection: Work and Procedure of Tribunals’ (1916).

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Bibliography Imperial War Museum (London) ART LD 1375, Stanley Spencer, Shipbuilding on the Clyde: Riveters (1941). ART LD 6008 18, Stanley Spencer, ‘Study for Shipbuilding on the Clyde, Miss Susan Bonar’. ART LD 6008 38, Stanley Spencer, ‘Study for Shipbuilding on the Clyde, Miss Kathleen Chalmers, Welder’. ART LD 6008 60, Stanley Spencer, ‘Study for Shipbuilding on the Clyde, Catthie McGolwon’. ART LD 6008 79. Stanley Spencer, ‘Study for Shipbuilding on the Clyde, Finishers in the Carpenter’s Workshop’. ART LD 6008 103, Stanley Spencer, ‘Study for Shipbuilding on the Clyde, Finishers, Carpenter’s Workshop’. ART LD 6008 113, Stanley Spencer, ‘Study for Shipbuilding on the Clyde, Figure Studies of Women Welders’. D 18881, ‘Coal Miners: Everyday Life in a Midlands Colliery, England, UK, 1944’. Documents, 12053, private papers of P. M. Yearsley. K 77867, List of Certified Occupations (London: HMSO, 1918). PST 0147, Bowmar, ARP: Here’s a Man’s Job! (undated). PST 2986, One of Our Fighters Is Missing if You Are off Work with an Accident (undated). PST 4903, unknown artist, To the Young Women of London (1915). PST 5026, At ddynion sengl wedi eu rhoddi . . . (1916). PST 5049, To Starred or Badged Single Men . . . (December 1915). PST 5129, unknown artist, Five Questions to the Men who Have Not Enlisted (1915). PST 13879, anon., Join ARP –​Enrol at Any Fire Station (undated). PST 13899, Ashley Havinden, Wanted: Men for First Aid Parties. A Real Man’s Job. PST 14082, anon., Give ’Em Both Barrels (undated). PST 14359, Roy Nockolds, The Attack Begins in the Factory (1943). PST 14360, Gilbert Rumbold, The Attack Begins in the Factory (1943). PST 14077, Harold Pym, Combined Operations Include You (undated).

Commonwealth War Graves Commission Archive (Maidenhead) WG/​087, Part 1, letter to the Imperial War Graves Commission, 31 May 1919.

House of Commons (https://​hansard.parliament.uk/​Commons) HC Deb., 20 December 1915, Vol. 77, 46–​8W. HC Deb., 21 December 1915, Vol. 77, 213–​437. HC Deb., 15 March 1916, Vol. 80, 2103–​81. HC Deb., 24 October 1916, Vol. 86, 920–​1.

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Bibliography HC Deb. 30 May 1938, Vol. 336, 1765–​96. HC Deb., 1 December 1938, Vol. 342, 597–​604. HC Deb., 20 December 1938, Vol. 342, 2713–​833. HC Deb., 16 February 1939, Vol. 343, 1918–​20W. HC Deb., 21 February 1939, Vol. 344, 227–​348. HC Deb., 27 February 1939, Vol. 344, 909–​10. HC Deb., 27 February 1939, Vol. 344, 927–​1043. HC Deb., 8 March 1939, Vol. 344, 2161–​302. HC Deb., 3 April 1939, Vol. 345, 2446–​8. HC Deb., 18 April 1939, Vol. 346, 166–​8. HC Deb., 28 September 1939, Vol. 351, 1471–​3. HC Deb., 28 September 1939, Vol. 351, 1497W. HC Deb., 29 September 1939, Vol. 351, 1611–​12. HC Deb., 26 October 1939, Vol. 352, 1535. HC Deb., 6 December 1939, Vol. 355, 706–​65. HC Deb., 13 February 1940, Vol. 357, 607–​8. HC Deb., 16 April 1940, Vol. 359, 817–​936. HC Deb., 23 May 1940, Vol. 361, 281–​2. HC Deb., 20 August 1940, Vol. 364, 1132–​274. HC Deb., 27 February 1941, Vol. 369, 607. HC Deb., 11 March 1941, Vol. 369, 1173–​217. HC Deb., 18 March 1941, Vol. 370, 49–​109. HC Deb., 12 June 1941, Vol. 372, 365W. HC Deb., 13 November 1941, Vol. 376, 66W. HC Deb., 13 November 1941, Vol. 376, 74–​148. HC Deb., 25 November 1941, Vol. 376, 623–​720. HC Deb., 3 December 1941, Vol. 376, 1144–​216. HC Deb., 4 December 1941, Vol. 376, 1285–​351. HC Deb., 9 December 1941, Vol. 376, 1412–​500. HC Deb., 17 December 1941, Vol. 376, 1965–​2043. HC Deb., 8 January 1942, Vol. 377, 19–​20. HC Deb., 25 February 1942, Vol. 378, 230–​322. HC Deb., 3 March 1942, Vol. 378, 529W. HC Deb., 12 March 1942, Vol. 378, 1177–​80. HC Deb., 19 March 1942, Vol. 378, 1694–​702. HC Deb., 25 March 1942, Vol. 378, 2001–​116. HC Deb., 10 September 1942, Vol. 383, 332–​495. HC Deb., 10 November 1942, Vol. 383, 2277W. HC Deb., 2 August 1944, Vol. 402, 1379–​80. HC Deb., 30 July 1958, Vol. 592, 1531–​43. HC Deb., 22 May 2008, 381. HC Deb., 28 February 2011, 246W. HC Deb., 13 June 2013, 415W.

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Bibliography House of Lords (https://​hansard.parliament.uk/​Lords) HL Deb., 15 March 1916, Vol. 21, 396–​409. HL Deb., 22 October 1941, Vol. 120, 365–​84. HL Deb., 3 December 1941, Vol. 121, 164–​95.

Mitchell Library Archives (Glasgow) Clyde Shipbuilders’ Association, minutes, 20 April 1943; 16 March 1944; 30 March 1944; 10 May 1944; 16 June 1944; August 1945.

Glasgow Caledonian University Archives (Glasgow) GB1847 STUC, Scottish Trade Union Congress, Annual Reports, 1939–​45.

Glasgow University Business Archives (Glasgow) UGD 1/​27/​1, Govan Iron Works, Accident Prevention/​Safety Committee minutes, 25 July 1941.

National Mining Museum (Newtongrange) National Union of Scottish Mine Workers, minutes of Executive and Organisation Committees (Annual Conference), 17–​19 April 1941.

National Library of Wales (Aberystwyth) MS 10812 D, Idris Davies, diary. MS 21773 D, L. E. Latchford, diary.

National Army Museum (Edinburgh) 1977-​06-​81-​7, ‘We’re both needed to serve the Guns! Fill up the ranks! Pile up the Munitions!’

Modern Records Centre (University of Warwick) MS S.259/​ AEU/​ 4/​ 6/​ 19, Amalgamated Engineering Union monthly journal (January 1939).

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Bibliography Government papers Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories, Cmd. 4657 (London: HMSO, 1933). Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories, Cmd. 5802 (London: HMSO, 1937). Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories, Cmd. 6316 (London: HMSO, 1940). Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories, Cmd. 6992 (London: HMSO, 1945). Committee of the Privy Council for Medical Research, Medical Research in War: Report of the Medical Research Council for the Years 1939–​45, 1947–​48, Cmd. 7335 (London: HMSO, 1947). Ministry of Fuel and Power, Report of HM Inspectors of Mines, 1939–​ 46 (London: HMSO, 1948). Ministry of Information, Manpower: The Story of Britain’s Mobilisation for War (London: HMSO, 1944). Ministry of National Service, 1917–​ 19, Report, Vol. I: Upon the Physical Examination of Men of Military Age by National Service Medical Boards (London: HMSO, 1919). Parliamentary Papers, Pay and Allowances of the Armed Forces, Cmd. 6385 (London: HMSO, 1942). Schedule of Reserved Occupations, 1938–​39 (Provisional: Revision May, 1939), Cmd. 6015 (London: HMSO, 1939). Scottish Mines Inspectors, Annual Report (London: HMSO, 1945).

Literary sources Radio and television programmes, and films Bad Boys of the Blitz, dir. Steve Humphries, Testimony Films, 2005. ‘Bevin Boys Dedication at National Memorial Arboretum’, BBC News, 7 May 2013. ‘The Breach in the Dyke’, Family at War, ITV, 19 May 1970. Cottage to Let (1941). ‘Don’t Get Around Much Anymore’, Goodnight Sweetheart, BBC1, 20 February 1995. ‘Freedom for Home Front Veterans’, BBC News, 19 November 2008, http://​news. bbc.co.uk/​1/​hi/​scotland/​tayside_​and_​central/​7735789.stm. The Gentle Sex (1943). ‘The German Woman’, Foyle’s War, BBC1, 27 October 2002. ‘Home Fires:  Britain, 1940–​1944’, The World at War, Thames Television, 13 February 1974. ‘Home Front Volunteers Honoured’, BBC News, 3 March 2000. ‘Hope against Hope’, Family at War, ITV, 16 December 1970. ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well’, Goodnight Sweetheart, BBC1, 16 December 1993.

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Bibliography ‘If It’s Got Your Number on It’, Family at War, ITV, 28 July 1970. It Began on the Clyde (1946). ‘It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie’, Goodnight Sweetheart, BBC1, 15 January 1996. Jane Brown Changes Her Job (1942). ‘Lines of Battle’, Family at War, ITV, 28 April 1970. ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Walker’, Dad’s Army, BBC1, 15 March 1969. Millions Like Us (1943). ‘A Miss Is as Good as a Male’, Backs to the Land, ITV, 15 April 1977. Night Shift (1942). Priestley, J. B., Postscripts, 16 June 1940. Priestley, J. B., Postscripts, 11 August 1940. ‘Stanley Spencer: The Colours of the Clyde’, BBC2, 14 March 2014. ‘The War in the Fields’, Land Girls, BBC1, 8 November 2011. Wartime Crime, dir. Russell England, 2am Films, 2001.

Paintings Spencer, Stanley, Bending the Keel Plate, October 1943. Spencer, Stanley, Burners, 26 August 1940. Spencer, Stanley, Caulkers, August 1940 Spencer, Stanley, Furnaces, 15 February 1946. Spencer, Stanley, Plumbers, March 1945. Spencer, Stanley, Riggers, June 1944. Spencer, Stanley, Riveters, December 1941. Spencer, Stanley, The Template, May 1942. Spencer, Stanley, Welders, 11 February 1941.

Correspondence Decomyn, Andy, email correspondence with Juliette Pattinson, 24 June 2014. Loosmore, Glyn, letter to Juliette Pattinson, 9 October 2000.

Songs and poems Coward, Noel, ‘Lie in the Dark and Listen’, http://​www.207squadron.rafinfo.org. uk/​bomberommandlinccat h_​270806.htm. Coward, Noel, Noel Coward on the Air:  Rare and Unknown Broadcasts, 1944–​ 1948, audio CD (1999). Gordon, Mack and Harry Warren, ‘You Can’t Say No to a Soldier’, performed by Joan Merrill in the 1942 film Iceland. Mill, A. J. and Bennett Scott, ‘Ship Ahoy! (All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor)’, 1909.

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Bibliography Tweets Baubles, Holly (@JonnieMarbles), ‘Just hearing that the Daily Mail  –​who are smearing war hero Ralph Miliband –​may once have supported the Nazis. Anyone else got this?’, 3 October 2013. Robb, John (@johnrobb77), ‘Ralph Miliband fought for Britain in the war and the Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere fought for . . .? And was friends with Adolf Hitler’, 3 October 2013. Ross, Christopher (@chrispatross), ‘Ralph Miliband –​Working Class Hero, never was so many owed to so few [sic]’, 3 October 2013.

Websites Bryant, Mark, ‘Fearon, Percy Hutton (1874–​ 1948)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2004), http://​www. oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​76097. Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, Trade Union Membership 2014:  Statistical Bulletin (June 2015), http://​stats.bis.gov.uk/​UKSA/​tu/​ sa20100430.htm. Falkirk Council press release, ‘Homefront Heroes to Be Honoured with the Freedom of Falkirk’, 23 July 2008, www.falkirk.gov.uk/​about_​council/​news/​ press_​item.aspx?pid=2015. ‘From a Reserved Occupation to the Royal Navy’, http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​history/​ ww2peopleswar/​stories/​21/​a1127521.shtml. ‘Home Front Volunteers Honoured’, BBC News, 3 March 2000, http://​news.bbc. co.uk/​1/​hi/​uk/​665102.stm. Mitchell, Bert, ‘I’d Rather Go to Prison’, 23 June 2005, BBC ‘People’s War’ Archive, article ID A4252330, http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​ww2peopleswar/​stories/​30/​ a4252330.shtml. Pride Tom, ‘How Daily Mail Editor Paul Dacre’s Father Avoided the Front Line in WW2’, 3 October 2013, https://​tompride.wordpress.com/​2013/​10/​03/​update-​ on-​daily-​mail-​editor-​paul-​dacres-​father-​avoiding-​the-​front-​line-​in-​ww2/​. ‘Some Wartime Memories of the Railways and RAF’, http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​history/​ww2peopleswar/​stories/​71/​a2280971.shtml. Trades Union Congress, Annual Reports, 1939–45, http://www.unionhistory. info/reports/ Wreford, Neal, ‘A Bevin Boy Remembers’, BBC ‘People’s War’ Archive, article ID A3911023, 18 April 2005, http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​history/​ww2peopleswar/​ stories/​23/​a3911023.shtml. http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​scotland-​scotland-​politics-​29645276. http://​www.iwmcollections.org.uk/​qryMain.php. http://​ d iscover.librar y.wales/ ​ p rimo_ ​ l ibrar y/ ​ l ibweb/​ a ction/​ s earch. do?vid=44WHELF_​NLW_​VU1. http://​cadensa.bl.uk/​uhtbin/​cgisirsi/​x/​x/​0/​49/​.

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Bibliography http://​collections.glasgowmuseums.com/​. http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php. http://​www2.warwick.ac.uk/​services/​library/​mrc/​. http://​www.recollectionsofwwii.co.uk/​. http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​ww2peopleswar/​categories/​. http://​www.1914–​1918.net/​derbyscheme.html. http://​1914–​1918.invisionzone.com/​forums/​index.php?show topic=15151. http://​www.unionhistory.info/​workerswar/​voices.php. http://​www.animalsinwar.org.uk/​. http://​www.cwgc.org/​find-​a-​cemetery/​cemetery/​90002/​TOWER%20HILL%20 MEMORIAL. http://​www.pwsts.org.uk/​plaque.htm. http://​ w ww.doverwarmemorialproject.org.uk/​ I nformation/​ D aybyDay/​ Merchant%20Navy/​Merchant%20Navy. http://​warmemscot.s4.bizhat.com/​warmemscot-​ftopic3342.html. http://​parlipapers.chadwyck.co.uk/​marketing/​index.jsp. http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​22461359. http://​ w ww.express.co.uk/​ n ews/​ u k/​ 4 45064/​ H ero-​ r eceives-​ A rctic-​ S tar-​ medal-​for-​heroism-​in-​Second-​World-​War. http:// ​ w ww.dailymail.co.uk/ ​ n ews/ ​ a rticle- ​ 2 295766/ ​ A rctic- ​ S tar- ​ D avid-​ Cameron- ​ p ays- ​ t ribute- ​ Navy- ​ h eroes- ​ t ook- ​ s upplies- ​ Russia- ​ S econd-​ World-​War.html. http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​1/​hi/​scotland/​tayside_​and_​central/​7735789.stm. http://​www.ncpb.co.uk/​photo-​album/​photo00044.htm. http://​w ww.britishlegion.org.uk/​remembrance/​how-​the-​nation-​remembers/​ remembrance-​sunday. http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​england-​stoke-​staffordshire-​29694149. http://​www.womenofsteeltheconcert.co.uk/​the-​statue/​. http://​w ww.publications.parliament.uk/​p a/​cm200506/​cmhansrd/​vo060706/​ debtext/​60706-​0016.htm. http://​www.staffshomeguard.co.uk/​DotherReminiscences92Devon.htm.

Published sources Newspapers, contemporary journals and magazines ‘Best Use of Manpower’, The Times, 25 January 1941. British Journal of Industrial Medicine, 1:2 (1944). British Journal of Industrial Medicine, 2:1 (1945). British Journal of Industrial Medicine, 2:2 (1945). British Journal of Industrial Medicine, 2:3 (1945). British Journal of Industrial Medicine, 5:1 (1948). Daily Express, 30 August 1939.

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Bibliography Daily Mail, 8 July 1934. Daily Mail, 4 September 1939. Daily Mirror, 9 April 1940. ‘David Miliband Criticises Daily Mail over Attacks on Late Father’, Guardian, 10 October 2013. Edinburgh Evening News, 8 October 1941. Fearon, Percy [‘Poy’], Sketch Map of the Funk Holes of London, Evening Standard, 27 October 1916. Glasgow Herald, 25 January 1939. Glasgow Herald, 23 September 1941. Glasgow Herald, 7 February, 1942. Glasgow Herald, 27 September 1945. ‘I Thought Reserved Men Could Not Join Air Crews … but Here I Am!’, Daily Record and Mail, 26 September 1941. Low, David, ‘All behind You, Winston’, Evening Standard, 14 May 1940. ‘The Man who Hated Britain’, Daily Mail, 27 September 2013. Montgomerie, Timothy, ‘Wanting to Change Britain Doesn’t Mean You Hate It’, The Times, 3 October 2013. ‘The Navy in Action’, Glasgow Herald, 15 December 1939. [Niebour, Ronald], I’m not certain –​but I think I’m being de-​reserved in the new year, Daily Mail, 17 December 1941. Priestley, J. B., Picture Post, 4 January 1941. ‘Reserved Occupations’, The Scotsman, 3 August 1940. Seaman, Sir Owen, Punch, 23 January 1918. ‘To the Memory of Earl Haig’, Daily Mirror, 11 November 1937. ‘Work Ban’, Daily Mirror, 2 February 1940.

Novels Benney, Mark, Over to Bombers (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1943). Blake, George, The Shipbuilders (Edinburgh: B&W Publishing, 2004 [1935]). Cave, Peter, No Bananas (London: BBC Books, 1996). Francis, Clare, Homeland (London: Macmillan, 2004). Green, Henry, Caught (London: Hogarth Press, 1943). Greenwood, Walter, How the Other Man Lives (London:  Labour Book Service, 1939). Greenwood, Walter, Love on the Dole (London: Penguin, 1933). Hanlin, Tom, Yesterday Will Return (New York: Viking Press, 1946). Huth, Angela, Land Girls (London: Constable, 2012). Priestley, J. B., Daylight on Saturday (London: Heinemann, 1943).

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Bibliography Autobiographies, memoirs and diaries Agnew, Derek, Bevin Boy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1947). Alderson, Jack, A History of the West Riding Constabulary, 1856–​ 1968 (self-​published, 2001). Ashley, Jack, Acts of Defiance (London: Reinhardt Books, 1992). Bills, Leslie W.  M., Fettered Freedom:  Life and Times of a Bevin Boy (Billericay: Cavenham Marine, 2005). Brittain, Vera, Testament of Youth (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933). Broad, Richard and Suzie Fleming (eds.), Nella Last’s War:  A  Mother’s Diary (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1981). Chapple, Frank, Sparks Fly! A Trade Union Life (London: Michael Joseph, 1984). Clark, Andrew, Echoes of the Great War: The Diary of the Reverend Andrew Clark,1914–1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Cohen, Max, I Was One of the Unemployed (London: Victor Gollancz, 1945). Cohen, Max, What Nobody Told the Foreman (London: Butler and Tanner, 1953). Coombes, Bert, These Poor Hands (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939). Coombes, Bert, Those Clouded Hills (London: Cobbett Publishing, 1944). Day, David, The Bevin Boy (Oxford: ISIS, 1995). Deegan, Frank, There’s No Other Way (Liverpool: Toulouse Press, 1980). Exell, Arthur, The Politics of the Production Line: Autobiography of an Oxford Car Worker (Southampton: History Workshop Journal Pamphlet, 1981). Fiennes, Gerard, Fiennes on Rails:  Fifty Years of Railways as Seen by Gerard Fiennes (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1986). Gaitens, Edward, Growing Up (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936). Gallacher, William, Last Memoirs (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1966). Glasser, Ralph, Growing Up in the Gorbals (London: Pan, 1987). Graves, Robert, Goodbye to All That (London: Anchor, 1929). Hickman, Tom, Called Up, Sent Down: The Bevin Boys’ War (Stroud: The History Press, 2008). Hillary, Richard, The Last Enemy (London: Macmillan, 1942). Holloway, Gill, A Bevin Boy Remembers:  The Drawings of T.  Holloway (Condicote: Henge, 1993). Jones, Jack, Union Man: An Autobiography (London: Collins, 1986). Kirkwood, David, My Life of Revolt (London: George Harrap, 1935). Lawson, Jack, A Man’s Life (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1944). McGeown, Patrick, Heat the Furnace Seven Times More (London: Hutchison, 1967). Moffat, Abe, My Life with the Miners (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1965). Murphy, John Thomas, Victory Production! A  Personal Account of Seventeen Months Spent as a Worker in an Engineering and an Aircraft Factory (London: John Lane, 1942). Perry, Colin, Boy in the Blitz:  The 1940 Diary of Colin Perry (Stroud:  Sutton Publishing, 2000).

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Bibliography Southgate, Walter, That’s the Way It Was: A Working Class Autobiography 1890–​ 1950 (Oxted: New Clarion Press, 1982). Spedding, Ron, Shildon Wagon Works: A Working Man’s Life (Durham: Durham County Library, 1988). Taylor, Reg, Bevin Boy: A Reluctant Miner (London: Athena, 2004). Taylor, Warwick, The Forgotten Conscript:  A  History of the Bevin Boy (Edinburgh: Pentland Press, 1995).

Pamphlets Wauters, Arthur, Eve in Overalls (New York: British Information Services, 1943). Worker’s Pocket Series pamphlet, Essential Work Order (London: Labour Research Department , 1943).

Books and book chapters Abelshauser, Werner, ‘Germany:  Guns, Butter and Economic Miracles’, in Mark Harrison (ed.), The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Addison, Paul, Now the War Is Over (London: Pimlico, 1995). Addison, Paul and Jeremy Crang (eds.), Listening to Britain:  Home Intelligence Reports on Britain’s Finest Hour –​May to September 1940 (London: Vintage Books, 2011). Anderson, Julie, War, Disability and Rehabilitation:  ‘Soul of a Nation’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). Arnold, John H. and Sean Brady (eds.), What Is Masculinity? Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2011). Ashplant, T. G., Graham Dawson and Michael Roper, ‘The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration: Contexts, Structures and Dynamics’, in T. G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael Roper (eds.), The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (London: Routledge, 2000). Ayers, Pat, ‘The Making of Masculinities in Interwar Liverpool’, in Margaret Walsh (ed.), Working Out Gender (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). Baade, Christina L., Victory through Harmony:  The BBC and Popular Music in World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Bain, George and Richard Price (eds.), Profiles of Union Growth:  Comparative Statistical Portrait of Eight Countries (Oxford: Wiley–​Blackwell, 1980). Baker, Norman, ‘A More Even Playing Field?:  Sport during and after the War’, in Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill (eds.), ‘Millions Like Us’?: British Culture in the Second World War (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999). Bartrip, Peter W.  J., Workmen’s Compensation in the Twentieth Century (Aldershot: Avebury, 1987). Beckett, Ian F. W., Home Front 1914–​1918: How Britain Survived the Great War (Kew: The National Archives, 2006).

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Bibliography Beckett, Ian F. W., ‘The Nation in Arms, 1914–​18’, in A Nation in Arms: A Social History of the British Army in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). Bell, Keith, Stanley Spencer:  A  Complete Catalogue of the Paintings (London: Phaidon Press, 1992). Bet-​ el, Ilana R., Conscripts:  The Lost Legions of the Great War (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1999). Bibbings, Lois, Telling Tales about Men:  Conceptions of Conscientious Objectors to Military Service during the First World War (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2009). Borsay, Anne, Disability and Social Policy in Britain since 1750 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Bourke, Joanna, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996). Bourke, Joanna, Working-​ Class  Cultures in Britain 1890–​ 1960 (London Routledge, 1994). Bowen, Elizabeth, ‘Why I Go to the Cinema’, in Charles Davy (ed.), Footnotes to the Film (London: Lovat Dickson, 1937). Braybon, Gail and Penny Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars (London: Pandora Press, 1987). Broad, Roger, Conscription in Britain, 1939–​ 1963:  The Militarization of a Generation (London: Routledge, 2006). Brophy, John, Britain’s Home Guard:  A  Character Study (London:  Harrap, 1945). Brown, Callum, The Death of Christian Britain:  Understanding Secularisation 1800–​2000 (London: Routledge, 2001). Brown, Elspeth H., The Corporate Eye:  Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884–​ 1929 (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). Browning, Christopher, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Bruley, Sue, Women in Britain since 1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999). Bushaway, Bob, ‘Name upon Name: The Great War and Remembrance’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Myths of the English (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). Calder, Angus, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Pimlico, 2004). Calder, Angus, The People’s War: Britain 1939–​1945 (London: Cape, 1969). Campbell, Alan, The Scottish Miners, Vol. I: Industry, Work and Community (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). Campion, Garry, The Good Fight:  Battle of Britain Propaganda and the Few (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Cannadine, David, ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain’, in Joachim Whaley (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London: Europa, 1981).

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Bibliography Carden-​Coyne, Ana, Reconstructing the Body:  Classicism, Modernism and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Caroll, David, Dad’s Army: The Home Guard 1940–​1944 (Stroud: Sutton, 2002). Carr, Richard, Veteran MPs and Conservative Politics in the Aftermath of the Great War: The Memory of All That (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). Cesarani, David, The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-​ Jewry, 1841–​ 1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Chand, Alison, Masculinities on Clydeside: Men in Reserved Occupations During the Second World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). Chapman, James, The British at War:  Cinema, State and Propaganda 1939–​45 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998). Chapman, James, ‘British Cinema and the People’s War’, in Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill (eds.), ‘Millions Like Us’?:  British Culture in the Second World War (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999). Chapman, James, ‘The British Documentary Movement in the Second World War’, in Land of Promise:  The British Documentary Movement, 1930–​1950 (London: BFI, 2008). Chapman, James, ‘Policing the People’s War:  Foyle’s War and British Television Drama’, in Michael Paris (ed.), Repicturing the Second World War: Representations in Film and Television (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). Cockburn, Cynthia, Brothers (London: Pluto, 1983). Cohen, Deborah, The War Come Home:  Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–​1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Connell, Daniel, The War at Home: Australia 1939–​1949 (Crows Nest: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1988). Connell, R. W., Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005). Connell, R.  W., The Men and the Boys (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2000). Connelly, Mark, The Great War, Memory and Ritual: Commemoration in the City and East London (Rochester: Boydell Press, 2002). Connelly, Mark, We Can Take It!: Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2004). Costello, John, Love, Sex and War 1939–​1945 (London: Pan, 1985). Courage, Fiona and Jessica Scantlebury, ‘Mass Observing Sport’, in Recording Leisure Lives:  Sports, Spectacles and Spectators in 20th Century Britain (London: Leisure Studies Association, 2013). Cragoe, Matthew and Chris Williams, Wales and War:  Society, Politics and Religion in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cardiff:  University of Wales Press, 2007). Croucher, Richard, Engineers at War (London: Merlin Press, 1982). Cullen, Stephen M., In Search of the Real Dad’s Army:  The Home Guard and the Defence of the United Kingdom, 1940–​1944 (Barnsley:  Pen and Sword Military, 2011). Davy, Charles (ed.), Footnotes to the Film (London: Lovat Dickson, 1937).

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Bibliography Dawson, Graham, ‘History-​Writing on World War II’, in Geoff Hurd (ed.), National Fictions: World War Two in British Films and Television (London: BFI, 1984). Dawson, Graham, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994). Dear, I. C. B., The Oxford Companion to World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). DeGroot, Gerard, Blighty:  British Society in the Era of the Great War (Harlow: Pearson, 1996). Department of Employment, British Labour Statistics:  Historical Abstract (London: HMSO, 1971). Donaldson, Peter, Ritual and Remembrance:  The Memorialisation of the Great War in East Kent (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006). Dudink, Stefan, Karen Hagermann and John Tosh (eds.), Masculinities in Politics and War:  Gendering Modern History (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2004). Ellis, John, Brute Force:  Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War (New York: Viking, 1990). Field, Geoffrey, Blood, Sweat and Toil: Remaking the British Working Class, 1939–​ 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Flynn, George Q., Conscription and Democracy: The Draft in France, Great Britain and the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2002). Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish:  The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1991). Francis, Martin, The Flyer:  British Culture and the Royal Air Force 1939–​1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). French, David, British Strategy and War Aims 1914–​ 1916 (Abingdon: Routledge, 1986). Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1975). Gardner, Martin, The Annotated Alice (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1960). Garfield, Simon, Our Hidden Lives: The Everyday Diaries of a Forgotten Britain 1945–​1948 (London: Ebury Press, 2004). Garfield, Simon, We Are at War: The Remarkable Diaries of Five Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times (London: Ebury Press, 2005). Garton, Stephen, ‘Return Home:  War, Masculinity and Repatriation’, in Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake (eds.), Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Gazeley, Ian, ‘Manual Work and Pay, 1900–​70’, in Nicholas Crafts, Ian Gazeley and Andrew Newell (eds.), Work and Pay in Twentieth-​Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Goodman, Philomena, Women, Sexuality and War (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Gordon, Andrew, The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan:  Heavy Industry, 1853–​1955 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

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Bibliography Howlett, Peter, Fighting with Figures: A Statistical Digest of the Second World War (London: HMSO, 1995). Hubble, Nick, Mass Observation and Everyday Life:  Culture, History, Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Humphries, Steve and Pamela Gordon, Out of Sight:  Experience of Disability, 1900–​50 (Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers, 1992). Hynes, Samuel, A War Imagined:  The First World War and English Culture (London: Pimlico, 1992). Inman, Peggy, Labour in the Munitions Industries (London: HMSO, 1957). Jackson, Mark, ‘Evaluating the Role of Hans Selye in the Modern History of Stress’, in David Cantor and Edmund Ramsden (eds.), Stress, Shock and Adaptation in the Twentieth Century (New York: University of Rochester Press, 2014). Jarvis, Christina, The Male Body at War (DeKalb:  Northern Illinois University Press, 2004). Johnston, Ronald and Arthur McIvor, Lethal Work:  A  History of the Asbestos Tragedy in Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000). Jones, Helen, British Civilians in the Front Line:  Air Raids, Productivity and Wartime Culture, 1939–​ 1945 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2006). Kahn-​Freund, Otto, ‘Labour Law’, in Morris Ginsberg (ed.), Law and Opinion in England in the 20th Century (London: Stevens and Sons, 1959). Kift, Dagmar, The Victorian Music Hall:  Culture, Class, and Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Kingsley-​Kent, Susan, Gender and Power in Britain 1640–​ 1990 (London: Routledge, 1999). Kirk, John and Christine Wall, Work and Identity (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Korczynski, Marek, Michael Pickering and Emma Robertson, Rhythms of Labour:  Music at Work in Britain (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2013). Kuhn, Annette, An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002). Lanfranchi, Pierre and Matthew Taylor, ‘Professional Football in World War Two Britain’, in Pat Kirkham and David Thoms (eds.), War Culture: Social Change and Changing Experience in World War Two (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995). Langhamer, Claire, The English in Love:  The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Lawson, Tom and Stephen Parker, ‘Introduction:  God and War. A  Century in the Politics of Religion’, in Tom Lawson and Stephen Parker (eds.), God and War:  The Church and Armed Conflict in the Twentieth Century (London: Ashgate, 2012). Laybourn, Keith, Working-​Class Gambling in Britain c. 1906–​1960s: The Stages of the Political Debate (Lewiston: Mellen Press, 2007).

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Bibliography Light, Alison, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991). Littler, Craig, The Development of the Labour Process in Capitalist Societies (London: Heinemann, 1982). Lloyd, David W., Battlefield Tourism:  Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Great Britain, Australia and Canada, 1919–​ 1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1998). Long, Vicky, The Rise and Fall of the Healthy Factory:  The Politics of Industrial Health in Britain, 1914–​60 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010). Longmate, Norman, The Real Dad’s Army (London: Arrow Books, 1974). Lusted, David, ‘“Builders” and “The Demi-​Paradise”’, in Geoff Hurd (ed.), National Fictions: World War Two in British Films and Television (London: BFI, 1984). Lynn, Vera, with Robin Cross and Jenny de Gex, Unsung Heroines: The Women who Won the War (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1990). Mac an Ghaill, Mairtin and Chris Haywood, Men and Masculinities:  Theory, Research and Social Practice (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003). MacCarthy, Fiona, Stanley Spencer:  An English Vision (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1997). MacDougall, Ian (ed.), Voices from the Hunger Marches: Personal Recollections by Scottish Hunger Marchers of the 1920s and 1930s, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990–​91). MacDougall, Ian (ed.), Voices from Work and Home (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2000). MacDougall, Ian (ed.), Voices of Leith Dockers (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2001). MacKay, Robert, Half the Battle:  Civilian Morale in Britain during the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). MacKenzie, S. P., The Home Guard: A Military and Political History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). MacNalty, Arthur S. (ed.), The Civilian Health and Medical Services, Vol. I (London: HMSO, 1953). MacNalty, Arthur and W. Franklin Mellor, Medical Services in War (London: HMSO, 1968). Made in Govan: An Oral History of Shipbuilding on the Upper Clyde, 1930–​1950 (Glasgow: Museum Education Service, 1991). Madge, Charles, War-​Time Patterns of Saving and Spending (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943). Mayer, Jacob Peter, British Cinemas and Their Audiences:  Sociological Studies (London: Dennis Dobson, 1978). McCarthy, Tony, War Games: The Story of Sport in World War Two (London: Queen Anne Press, 1989). McIvor, Arthur, A History of Work in Britain, 1880–​ 1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). McIvor, Arthur, Working Lives: Work in Britain since 1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

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Bibliography McIvor, Arthur and Ronald Johnston, Miners’ Lung: A History of Dust Disease in British Coal Mining (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). McKinlay, Alan, Making Ships, Making Men (Clydebank:  Clydebank District Libraries, 1991). Meyer, Jessica, Men of War:  Masculinity and the First World War in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Meyer, Stephen, ‘Work, Play and Power: Masculine Culture on the Automotive Shop Floor, 1930–​1960’, in Roger Horowitz (ed.), Boys and Their Toys? Masculinity, Technology and Class in America (New York: Routledge, 2001). Miliband, Ralph, Socialism for a Sceptical Age (London: Polity Press, 1995). Morley, Sheridan, Noel Coward (London: Haus Publishing, 2005). Morrison, Susan, The Silicosis Experience in Scotland (Saarbrucken:  Lambert Publishing, 2010). Mosse, George L., Fallen Soldiers:  Reshaping Memories of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Mosse, George, The Image of Man:  The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Nash, Gerald D., The Crucial Era: The Great Depression and World War II 1929–​ 1945 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992). Newlands, Emma, Civilians into Soldiers: War, the Body and British Army Recruits, 1939–​1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). Noakes, Lucy, War and the British:  Gender and National Identity 1939–​1991 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997). Noakes, Lucy and Juliette Pattinson, ‘Keep Calm and Carry On:  The Cultural Memory of the Second World War in Britain’, in Lucy Noakes and Juliette Pattinson (eds.), The Cultural Memory of the Second World War in Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Nove, Alec, An Economic History of the USSR (London: Penguin, 1982). Oram, Alison, ‘Serving Two Masters:  The Introduction of a Marriage Bar in Teaching’, in London Feminist History Group, The Sexual Dynamics of History: Men’s Power, Women’s Resistance (London: Pluto, 1983). Oram, Alison (ed.), Women Teachers and Feminist Politics 1900–​ 1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). Orwell, George, Down and Out in Paris and London (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933). Orwell, George, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937). Overy, Richard, ‘The Successes of American Mobilization’, in Mark A. Stoler and Melanie S. Gustafson (eds.), Major Problems in the History of World War II: Documents and Essays (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2003). Paris, Michael, ‘Introduction:  Film, Television, and the Second World War  –​ The First Fifty Years’, in Michael Paris (ed.), Repicturing the Second World War: Representations in Film and Television (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). Paris, Michael, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–​ 2000 (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).

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Bibliography Lane, Tony, ‘The “People’s War” at Sea:  Class Bureaucracy, Work Discipline and British Merchant Seamen, 1939–​1945’, Scottish Labour History Society Journal, 30 (1995), 61–​86. Langhamer, Claire, ‘Love and Courtship in Mid-​Twentieth-​Century England’, Historical Journal, 50:1 (2007), 173–​96. Ledwith, Sue, ‘Gender Politics in Trade Unions: The Representation of Women between Exclusion and Inclusion’, Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 18:2 (2012), 185–​99. Leventhal, F. M., ‘ “The Best for the Most”:  CEMA and State Sponsorship of the Arts in Wartime’, Twentieth Century British History, 1 (1990), 289–​317. Levine-​Clark, Marjorie, ‘The Politics of Preference:  Masculinity, Marital Status and Unemployment Relief in Post-​First World War Britain’, Cultural and Social History, 7:2 (2010), 233–​52. Lewis, Aubrey, ‘Incidence of Neurosis in England under War Conditions’, Lancet (15 August 1942), 175–​83. McFarland, E. W., ‘Commemoration of the South African War in Scotland, 1900–​ 10’, Scottish Historical Review, 89 (2010), 194–​223. McIvor, Arthur, ‘Germs at Work: Establishing Tuberculosis as an Occupational Disease in Britain, c. 1900–​1951’, Social History of Medicine, 25:4 (2012), 812–​29. McKibbin, Ross, ‘Working-​ Class Gambling in Britain 1880–​ 1939’, Past and Present, 82 (1979), 147–​78. Nicholas, Sian, ‘History, Revisionism and Television Drama: Foyle’s War and the “Myth of 1949”’, Media History, 13:2/​3 (2007), 203–​19. Nicholson, Hazel, ‘A Disputed Identity:  Women Conscientious Objectors in Second World War Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 18:4 (2007), 409–​28. Noakes, Lucy, ‘ “Serve to Save”: Gender, Citizenship and Civil Defence in Britain 1937–​41’, Journal of Contemporary History, 47:4 (2012), 734–​53. Nora, Pierre, ‘Between Memory and History:  Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), 7–​25. Pattinson, Juliette, ‘“The Thing that Made Me Hesitate . . .”:  Re-​examining Gendered Intersubjectivities in Interviews with British Secret War Veterans’, Women’s History Review 20:2 (2011), 245–​63. Peniston-​Bird, Corinna, ‘“All in It Together” and “Backs to the Wall”:  Relating Patriotism and the People’s War in the 21st Century’, Oral History, 40:2 (2012), 69–​80. Peniston-​Bird, Corinna, ‘Classifying the Body in the Second World War: British Men in and out of Uniform’, Body & Society, 9 (2003), 31–​48. Peniston-​Bird, Corinna M., ‘“I wondered who’d be the first to spot that”: Dad’s Army at War, in the Media and in Memory’, Media History, 13:2/​3 (2007), 183–​202.

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Bibliography Peniston-​ Bird, Corinna and Penny Summerfield, ‘ “Hey, you’re dead!”:  The Multiple Uses of Humour in Representations of British National Defence in the Second World War, Journal of European Studies, 31 (2001), 413–​35. Phillips, Jim, ‘British Dock Workers and the Second World War: The Limits of Social Change’, Scottish Labour History Society Journal, 30 (1995), 87–​103. Pollard, Robert S.  W., ‘Conscientious Objectors in Great Britain and the Dominions’, Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, 28:3/​ 4 (1946), 72–​82. Pronay, Nicholas, ‘The British Post-​Bellum Cinema:  A  Survey of the Films Relating to World War II Made in Britain between 1945 and 1960’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 8:1 (1998), 39–​54. Rafeek, Neil, ‘Agnes McLean, 1918–​1994’, Scottish Labour History Society Journal, 30 (1995), 121–​30. Ramsden, John, ‘Refocusing “the People’s War”: British War Films of the 1950s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 33:1 (1999), 35–​63. Rasmussen, Nicholas, ‘Medical Science and the Military:  The Allies’ Use of Amphetamines during World War II’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 42:2 (2011), 205–​33. Robb, Linsey, ‘“The Front Line”:  Firefighting in British Culture, 1939–​1945’, Contemporary British History, 29:2 (2015), 179–​98. Schilling, R. S. F., ‘Industrial Health Research: The Work of the Industrial Health Research Board, 1918–​44’, British Journal of Industrial Medicine, 1:3 (1944), 145–​52. Shaffer, Gavin, ‘Fighting Racism:  Black Soldiers and Workers in Britain during the Second World War’, Immigrants and Minorities, 28:2/​3 (2010), 246–​65. Sladen, Chris, ‘Holidays at Home in the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 37:1 (2002), 67–​89. Sokoloff, Sally, ‘“How Are They at Home?”: Community, State and Servicemen’s Wives in England, 1939–​45’, Women’s History Review, 8:1 (1999), 27–​52. Stewart, A. M., J. W. Webb and D. Hewitt, ‘Social Medicine Studies Based on Civilian Medical Board Records: I. National Service Rejects’, British Journal of Preventative Medicine, 9 (1955), 19–​25. Strangleman, Tim, ‘Writing Workers:  Re-​Reading Workplace Autobiography’, Scottish Labour History, 46 (2011), 26–​37. Summerfield, Penny, ‘Culture and Composure:  Creating Narratives of the Gendered Self in Oral History Interviews’, Cultural and Social History, 1 (2004), 65–​93. Summerfield, Penny, ‘Divisions at Sea:  Class, Gender, Race, and Nation in Maritime Films of the Second World War, 1939–​60’, Twentieth Century British History, 22:3 (2011), 330–​53. Summerfield, Penny, ‘Dunkirk and the Popular Memory of Britain at War, 1940–​ 58’, Journal of Contemporary History, 45:4 (2010), 788–​811.

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Bibliography Summerfield, Penny, ‘Mass-​Observation: Social Research or Social Movement?’, Journal of Contemporary History, 20 (1985), 439–​52. Summerfield, Penny, ‘Public Memory or Public Amnesia? British Women of the Second World War in Popular Films of the 1950s and 1960s’, Journal of British Studies, 48:4 (2009), 935–​57. Summerfield, Penny and Nicole Crockett, ‘“You Weren’t Taught That with the Welding”: Lessons in Sexuality in the Second World War’, Women’s History Review, 1:3 (1992), 435–​54. Tweedale, Geoff and Philip Hansen, ‘Protecting the Workers: The Medical Board and the Asbestos Industry, 1930s–​1960s’, Medical History, 42 (1998), 439–​57. Vernon, H. M., ‘Prevention of Accidents’, British Journal of Industrial Medicine, 2:1 (1945), 1–​9. Waldron, H.  A. ‘Occupational Health during the Second World War:  Hope Deferred or Hope Abandoned’, Medical History, 41 (1997), 197–​212. Walker, David, ‘“Danger was something you were brought up wi’ ”:  Workers’ Narratives on Occupational Health and Safety in the Workplace’, Scottish Labour History, 46 (2011), 54–​70. Young, Hilary, ‘Hard Man, New Man: Re/​Composing Masculinities in Glasgow, c. 1950–​2000’, Oral History, 35:1 (2007), 71–​81.

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Index

Note: an ‘n’ after a page reference indicates the footnote number absenteeism 33, 78, 145–​6, 161, 172, 176, 200, 216, 245, 246 prosecutions 78, 146 accidents incidence 194, 197, 198, 201, 205–​15, 217, 218, 230, 261, 308 prevention 214, 218–​19 protection 45n.76, 212, 214, 215, 236n.92 see also Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents agriculture 62, 81, 83, 196, 213 Air Raid Precaution (ARP) 24, 25, 61, 63, 66, 70, 99, 143, 217, 222, 245, 247, 263, 264–​5 , 315, 335 air raids 24, 67, 143, 203, 206, 228–​30, 241, 245, 257, 256–​63, 278, 308 Amalgamated Engineering Union 67, 78, 170 amphetamines 221 anaemia 220 Anderson, Julie 205 apprentices 34, 75, 85–​6, 101, 116, 124, 136, 151, 152, 158, 161, 164, 167, 174, 177, 243, 267, 331

armed forces 1–​2, 6, 28, 31, 40, 66, 69, 70, 72, 77, 82, 85, 87, 96, 103, 104, 105, 126, 144, 145, 157, 192, 196, 198, 199, 200, 206, 211, 213, 216, 219, 221, 230, 243, 254, 261, 270, 293, 295, 296, 311 army 6, 7, 54, 59, 60, 61, 69, 72, 73, 76, 79, 87, 88, 99, 100, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 111, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 144, 145, 149, 150, 157, 174, 176, 178, 179, 192, 196, 200, 249, 253, 264, 265, 267, 271, 291, 293 Royal Air Force see Royal Air Force Royal Navy see Royal Navy art 18–​20, 22, 251 asbestos 136, 191, 194, 223–​5, 227 Asbestos Regulations (1931) 223 Ashley, Jack 136, 148, 167, 170, 176 Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS) 61, 99, 120, 143, 165, 248, 264–​7, 295 badged men 52–​3, 54, 56, 57, 59, 88, 110 BBC ‘People’s War’ archive 86, 100, 129n.39, 302 Bedaux 154, 186n.127 Benney, Mark 139, 155, 161–​2, 182n.38

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Index Benzedrine 237n.130 Betteshanger colliery see coal​mining Bevin Boys 30, 31, 86–​7, 104, 108–​10, 129n.39, 145, 152, 165, 173–​4, 210, 298, 302–​4, 305, 306, 311, 325n.55, 338 Bevin, Ernest 16, 70, 72–​3, 76, 78, 86, 88, 145, 168, 171, 177–​8, 179, 201, 205, 252 Bibbings, Lois 11, 12, 44n.39, 51, 131n.94 Birmingham 3, 112, 142, 165, 207, 217, 264, 266, 268, 334, 336, 339 blackout 133, 191, 207, 213, 218, 219, 220, 222–​3, 225, 227, 242, 244, 247, 251, 254, 264 Blitz 24, 74, 76, 124, 134, 139, 217, 228, 241, 253, 256–​7, 258–​63, 264, 296, 298, 308, 310, 311, 318–​19 see also bombing boilermaker 122, 152, 223 bombing 16, 40, 124, 205, 213, 219, 228–​9, 230, 242, 247, 248, 253, 254, 256–​7, 258, 259–​60, 261–​2, 265, 291, 312, 315 see also Blitz Bourke, Joanna 15, 204 Builders (1942) 28, 157 building industry 28, 77, 78, 135, 166, 167, 168, 178, 193, 194, 195, 213 Calder, Angus 247, 251–​2, 311 Canterbury Tale, A (1944) 10 Cannadine, David 289, 292, 296 canteens 29, 162, 171, 202, 213, 217, 226, 252, 257, 264 chemicals 68, 87, 153, 162, 194, 197, 199, 220, 222, 224, 227, 235n.65 see also Imperial Chemical Industries

Churchill, Winston 5, 6, 20, 72, 73, 145, 166, 168, 183n.72, 229, 292, 293, 296, 330 cinema 40, 99, 242, 244, 245, 246, 250, 252, 253–​5, 275–​6, 278, 313 Civil Defence 20, 24, 30, 32, 38, 40, 61, 63, 66, 69, 70, 84, 99, 128n.17, 220, 243, 244, 263–​9, 278, 300 Civil Service 2, 32, 55, 192 clerks 17, 75, 150, 161, 174, 176, 257, 272, 320, 331, 338 coalmining 2, 13, 14, 62, 78, 86, 116, 125, 141, 152, 157, 162, 167, 172, 173, 191, 193, 202, 203, 218, 225, 309, 338 Betteshanger colliery 174, 177 disability in 203, 225 strikes 170, 173, 174, 175, 177 X-​rays 203, 215 see also Bevin Boys; mines Clydeside 14–​15, 18, 24, 30, 102, 126, 137, 154, 169, 176, 214, 219, 223, 224, 226 collective bargaining 171, 172 Communist Party 145, 178, 179, 245, 255 Young Communist League 178, 255 communists 122, 175, 177, 178–​9, 255 composure 16, 29, 37, 114, 118, 123, 124, 173, 175 Connell, R.W. 2, 96, 105–​6, 193 conscription 1, 2, 10, 11, 36, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 58, 59, 60, 65, 66, 68–​9, 73, 84, 85, 108, 111, 122, 166, 248, 320, 340–​2 Coombes, Bert 134, 140–​1, 167, 172, 196, 210–​11, 225 Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) 242, 251–​2, 257 Coward, Noel 10–​1

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377

Index cowardice 50, 52, 53, 55, 109, 110, 120, 122, 123, 299, 312 craftsmanship 14, 19, 28, 122, 124, 136, 151, 152, 154, 155, 159, 162, 163, 165, 167, 170–​1, 185n.101, 200, 331 see also skill ‘Cuthbert’ cartoons 54–​5, 57 Dad’s Army 266, 267, 268, 313, 320 dancing 242, 250, 255, 263, 271, 276, 277, 278, 319 danger 4, 13, 14, 16, 40, 41, 97, 98, 118, 124, 136, 158, 184n.94, 191, 192, 196, 205, 207, 210, 211, 212, 213–​14, 216, 219, 223, 227, 228, 230, 231, 261, 269, 293, 295, 302, 303, 308 danger money 196, 223 dangerous-​work taboo 171, 207 Dawson, Graham 2, 12, 16, 96, 151, 290 death 110, 111, 119, 191, 194, 206, 218, 225, 228, 229, 260, 261, 269, 289, 292, 293, 295, 296–​7, 299, 302, 315 deindustrialisation 309 Demi-​Paradise, The (1943) 24, 254 Depression (1920s and 1930s) 15, 16, 135, 137, 138, 140, 141, 147–​8, 169, 172, 175, 194–​5, 198, 231, 331, 340 dermatitis 220, 222 Diary for Timothy, A (1946) 29 dilutee 4–​5, 20, 28, 41, 59, 152, 153, 160, 161, 163, 165, 166–​7, 170, 200, 227, 331 dilution 13, 38, 152, 153, 157, 161, 165, 167 Disabled Persons (Employment) Act (1944) 205 disabled 43n.37, 84, 94n.131, 138, 145, 147, 203, 204–​5, 206, 211 disability 191, 203, 204, 205, 211, 212, 219, 225, 238n.152

disease 191, 194, 197, 198, 201, 202–​3, 204, 205, 210–​11, 219, 220, 222, 223, 224, 225–​6, 228, 230, 231 anaemia 220 asbestosis 223 carbon monoxide poisoning 222 dermatitis 220, 222 pneumoconiosis 194, 199, 202, 203, 225 silicosis 202, 222 stress 40, 192, 193, 197, 198, 203, 218, 219, 220–​2, 230, 237n.128 tuberculosis 199, 203, 225 discomposure 49n.127, 175 dockers 4, 170, 191, 192, 203, 222, 227, 235n.65 doctors 195, 201, 211, 305 double helix 164 draughtsmen 35, 65, 155, 331 Dunkirk 16, 73, 124, 139, 145, 146, 249, 261, 310, 314, 317 Dunkirk (1958) 311, 320 dust 194, 203, 215, 220, 222–​3, 224–​5, 238n.152 see also pneumoconiosis; respiratory disease; silicosis earnings 13, 15, 16, 40, 134, 136, 140, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 163, 171, 200, 204, 210, 212, 220, 224, 210, 212, 252 see also wages Electrical Trades Union 178 electrician 1, 62, 116, 121, 122, 152, 178, 223, 255 emasculation 3, 4, 11, 12, 13, 17, 29, 39, 40, 41, 106, 122, 126, 137, 142, 179, 180, 203, 213, 274, 329, 330, 331 Emergency Medical Service (EMS) 203–​4, 239n.158 emotions 15, 105, 112, 126, 196, 217, 218, 315 anxiety 210, 217, 228, 259 excitement 159, 257–​8

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Index fear 96, 111, 123, 158, 169, 175, 193, 196, 206, 211, 216, 217, 218, 225, 258, 261, 263, 266, 274, 314 pride 117, 125, 141, 142, 145, 150, 152, 154, 155, 164, 183n.72, 203, 215, 265, 267, 268, 270, 298, 302, 313, 332 shame 55, 102, 109, 137, 217, 313, 314, 316, 319, 330 employers 4, 14, 18, 53, 57, 58, 62, 63, 69, 70, 71, 73, 78, 79, 84, 103, 114, 143, 146, 169, 175, 176, 177, 186n.140, 195, 199, 219, 227 engineering 106, 123, 125, 135, 144, 147, 148, 149, 153, 155, 157, 159, 160, 161, 166, 170, 172, 173, 175, 189n.214, 194, 202, 206, 219–​20, 221, 228, 330, 337, 338 Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) 146, 212, 252, 257, 282n.72 essential industries 1, 2, 15, 28, 36, 51, 53, 54, 59, 60, 61, 62, 66, 71, 72, 77, 78, 79, 81, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 93n.120, 110, 113, 114, 115, 116, 126, 127, 146, 150, 151, 171, 192, 216, 266, 330, 340, 341, 342 Essential Work Order (1941) 14, 36, 78, 79, 93n.120, 116, 146, 171, 216 exhaustion 16, 142, 143, 146, 193, 203, 204, 218, 231, 239n.158, 244, 264 see also fatigue Exell, Arthur 160–​1, 178–​9, 222, 244–​5 Factories (Canteens) Order (1940) 202 Factories (Medical and Welfare Services) Order (1940) 201 Factories (Standards of Lighting) Regulations (1941) 220 Factory Acts 140, 195, 217, 218

factory inspectors 191, 194, 206, 207, 214, 218, 224 Family at War, A (1970–​72) 40, 313–​16, 320 fatigue 139–​40, 142, 143, 144, 146, 172, 194, 202, 203, 218, 227, 239n.158 see also exhaustion; overwork fear see emotions femininity 39, 45n.65, 162, 271 fiction see novels Field, Geoff 13, 172 Fire Service 24, 61, 99, 120, 143, 165, 248, 264–​7, 291, 295 see also Auxiliary Fire Service fire watching 334–​9 Fires Were Started (1943) 24, 143 first aid 24, 27, 290 First World War 2, 11, 14, 17, 19, 34, 39, 40, 43n.37, 50, 51–​60, 66, 68, 71, 73, 85, 88, 89, 96, 99, 101–​3, 106, 110, 111, 118, 120, 121, 127, 131n.94, 145, 169, 177, 193, 204, 289, 290, 291, 298–​300, 304, 319 fitness 1, 3, 103, 138, 196, 197, 288, 319–​20 football 135, 146, 148, 241, 247–​8, 248–​9, 250 Ford 184n.101, 198, 255 Fordism 141, 149, 153, 154 Foreman Goes to France, The (1942) foremen 18, 145, 150, 168, 176, 200 Foucault, Michel 198, 233n.31 Francis, Martin 5, 15, 100, 127n.5 Gentle Sex, The (1943) 24 Glasgow 4, 30, 31, 34, 49n.116, 50, 68, 98, 99, 119, 126, 145, 150, 152, 158, 162, 165, 174, 177, 178, 195, 202, 203, 214, 219, 220, 225, 255, 257, 264, 265, 267, 306, 307, 334, 335, 337 see also Clydeside

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Index Goodnight Sweetheart (1993–​99) 40, 317, 318, 320 Gullace, Nicoletta 11, 12, 52 ‘hard men’ 4, 212 health 2, 4, 13, 16, 40, 75, 136, 137, 158, 191–​231, 239n.158, 251, 319 diseases 191, 194, 197–​9, 201–​5, 210, 219, 220, 222–​5, 228, 230, 231 health surveillance 201–​2, 203, 223–​4, 231 hygiene 226 mental health 98, 136, 146, 221, 251, 299 occupational health 13, 16, 194, 218, 221, 224, 231, 234n.61, 191–​231 see also medicine; safety at work, welfare Heart of Britain (1941) 28 heavy industry 4, 17, 35, 62, 126, 137, 198, 219, 309, 331 Higonnet, Margaret R. and Higonnet, Patrice L.-​R. 64 Home Guard 3, 17, 30, 63, 86, 99, 121, 143, 144, 172, 247, 257, 261, 264–​8, 271, 278, 291, 296, 313, 320, 334–​9 Home Intelligence Reports 32, 148 hours of work 13, 15, 16, 138, 139–​40, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 150, 151, 180, 182n.35, 192, 195, 197, 198, 210, 219, 221, 222, 225, 227, 231, 241, 243–​7, 250, 255, 256, 264, 276, 329, 331, 332 see also overtime Hynes, Samuel 289 Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) 207, 227 In Which We Serve (1942) 10, 254 Industrial Health Research Board 221

industrial psychology 199 injury 191, 204–​5, 206, 210, 211, 216, 218, 224, 228, 229 Personal Injuries (Civilians) Scheme (1939) 204 see also accidents Inman, Peggy 139, 200 inspector of factories see factory inspectors inter-​subjectivity 36, 37 It Began on the Clyde (1946) 198, 203 Jennings, Humphrey 5, 6, 18, 24, 28, 29, 32, 143, 251, 310, 318 Johnston, Ronnie 4, 14, 30 Joint Production Committees (JPC) 172, 189n.214 Jones, Helen 20, 228, 229 Jones, Jack 129n.30, 150, 151, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 176, 179, 198, 218, 229, 253 Labour Exchange 32, 54, 117, 121 labour market 3, 94n.131, 136, 157, 159, 163, 180 Land Girls 158, 298, 301, 316, 319, 321 Langhamer, Claire 270, 275 Levine-​Clark, Marjorie 137, 204 Listen to Britain (1942) 28, 251 Liverpool 34, 143, 168, 178, 179, 225, 293, 313, 315 see also Merseyside Local Defence Volunteers 3, 17, 63, 264, 268 see also Home Guard London 24, 52, 57, 67, 80, 98, 103, 105, 113, 115, 122, 124, 126, 134, 135, 148, 161, 162, 167, 175, 178, 219, 230, 242, 253, 256–​7, 259, 260, 262, 276, 289, 291, 296, 297, 298, 302, 306, 307, 317, 332, 334, 335, 336, 337

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Index Long, Vicky 195, 221 Lutyens, Edwin 291, 300 managers 169, 186n.140, 193, 227 Manchester 34, 112, 116, 121, 123, 126, 135, 160, 173, 184n.101, 200, 226, 229, 244, 247, 259, 299, 335, 336, 339 manpower 1, 2, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 57–​60, 68, 69, 71, 72–​4, 78–​81, 85–​9, 119, 176, 203, 340–​2 masculinity 2–​4, 14–​15, 38, 51, 106, 123–​4, 133–​4, 141, 143, 156, 160, 164, 165, 168, 173, 180, 200, 226, 228, 231, 273, 315, 318, 329–​32 breadwinner 15, 39, 41, 135, 146–​8, 151, 165, 166, 168, 171, 180, 191, 193, 245, 331 hegemonic 2, 12, 34, 96, 157, 166, 329, 331 hierarchies of 44n.39, 51–​2, 96–​7, 167, 329–​32 military 2, 4, 11, 12, 15, 22, 34, 39, 43n.36, 43n.47, 96, 99, 148, 157, 180, 196, 197, 311, 330 muscular 41, 104, 145, 166, 179, 193, 196, 215 patriotic 16, 29–​30, 40, 41, 99, 146, 179, 206, 217, 228, 245, 246, 265, 278 respectable 16–​17, 163 rough 163, 165–​6 temperate 16–​17, 96, 135 see also ‘hard men’ Mass Observation 32–​4, 46n.85, 48n.111, 75, 100, 110, 114, 125, 140, 141, 145, 146, 149, 150, 153, 164, 170, 206, 219, 242, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 252, 254, 270, 330 mass production 13, 154, 184n.101, 199 McGeown, Patrick 142, 222, 225

McIvor, Arthur 4, 14, 30 medals 6, 38, 295, 302, 303, 305, 306, 307 medical examination 1, 3, 40–​1, 59, 60, 69, 86, 103, 104, 110, 113, 192, 195, 196, 199, 206, 215, 223, 225, 319–​20, 335 see also X-​rays Medical Research Council 221, 223 medicine 13, 171, 195, 201, 202, 203, 213, 219, 239n.158 see also diseases; health; occupational medicine memorials 11, 38, 40, 288, 289–​309, 321, 323n.14, 323n.21, 324n.34, 324n.37 memory 3, 5, 11, 30, 37, 40, 41, 48n.105, 95, 102, 109, 174, 214, 256, 260, 261, 262, 269, 278, 288, 290, 296, 298, 299, 301, 310, 313, 317, 320, 321, 324n.41, 329 mental health see health, mental Merchant Navy 18, 24, 40, 76, 78, 84, 95, 97, 98, 114, 115, 116, 127n.2, 139, 148, 197, 206, 211, 219, 270, 291–​5, 311, 314, 321, 334, 336, 338, 339 Merseyside 14, 84, 102, 176, 219 see also Liverpool mesothelioma 225 middle class 12, 24, 32, 33, 35, 36, 62, 101, 150, 166, 167, 203, 331 Millions Like Us (1943) 10, 254, 269, 271 mines 2, 13, 14–​15, 30, 53, 58, 60, 62, 78, 86, 116, 125, 141, 152, 157, 163, 166, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 189n.214, 191, 193, 194, 195, 196, 202, 203, 210, 213, 218, 225, 231, 237n.121, 251, 302, 304, 309, 338 Mines Acts 195, 217, 225 Mines Inspectors 218

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Index Mines Medical Service (1944) 203 see also coalmining Mining Safety Commission (1941) 210 Ministry of Information 204 Ministry of Labour 2, 31, 62, 66, 69, 72, 73, 74, 77, 79, 85, 88, 89, 122, 138, 140, 145, 146, 153, 207, 252 money 80, 121, 122, 123, 148, 150, 152, 156, 196, 223, 250, 252, 253, 255, 270, 312, 316, 318 see also earnings; wages morale 7, 22, 28, 33, 199, 202, 221, 224, 242, 243, 248, 249, 250, 281n.48 munitions 1, 13, 19, 28, 51, 52, 53, 58, 59, 60, 62, 71, 72, 73, 80, 81, 85, 87, 120, 121, 123, 124, 139, 153, 154, 173, 206, 207, 222, 223, 231, 246, 292, 305, 306, 309, 342 music 10, 11, 55, 114, 146, 199, 242, 245, 251–​2, 254 Napiers (London) 161 narratives 2, 12, 13, 16, 29, 36, 37, 38, 40, 44n.39, 111, 123, 134, 144, 146, 158, 173, 175, 178, 192, 197, 214, 216, 217, 226, 228, 230, 231, 243, 278, 279, 308, 323n.21, 329, 331 construction 16, 173, 228, 230, 243 framing 16, 173, 175, 278, 331 National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act, 1946 205 National Register (1915) 54, 58 National Service 2, 12, 50, 59, 60, 61, 65, 66, 68, 69, 78, 84, 86, 89, 96, 120, 146, 248, 249, 252, 264, 303, 319, 325n.55, 330, 341 National Service Acts (1939, 1941) 65, 69, 84, 96, 264, 319 National Union of Railwaymen 173 nervous breakdown 136, 176, 222 see also health; stress

Newcastle 34, 35, 52, 120, 158, 213, 225, 246, 309, 334, 337, 338, 339 see also Tyneside Newlands, Emma 104, 196, 204, 227 Noakes, Lucy 24, 262, 264, 308 non-​manual workers 147, 150, 163, 165, 186n.140, 192 see also clerks North British Locomotive Company (Glasgow) 150, 214, 307, 335, 337 novels 24, 29, 135, 137, 139, 155, 161, 182n.38, 193, 200, 204, 253, 316, 317, 319 nurses 65, 66, 195, 201, 269, 290, 291, 323n.14 occupational health see disease; health, occupational; overwork; safety at work; stress; welfare occupational medicine 230 see also health, occupational office workers see clerks; non-​manual Order 1305 14, 169, 173, 178 orthopaedics 203 Orwell, George 137, 193 overtime 15, 134, 140, 141, 144–​50, 171, 172, 195, 220, 221, 241, 244, 245, 331 see also hours; overwork overwork 219, 220, 231, 242 see also fatigue Parker, H.M.D. 71, 89 Pattinson, Juliette 36 Peniston-​Bird, Corinna 1, 12, 30, 71, 96, 99, 103, 265, 267, 272, 295, 300, 301 pensions 204–​5, 234n.57, 237n.128 People in Production (Mass Observation, 1942) 33, 110 ‘People’s War’ 12, 18, 28, 31, 32, 41, 86, 99, 100, 106, 249, 302, 310, 311, 329

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Index Personal Injuries (Civilians) Scheme (1939) 204 physiotherapy 205 pneumoconiosis 194, 199, 202, 203, 225 politics 63–​8, 166, 178–​9, 244–​5, 290 popular memory 3, 11, 30, 37, 41, 256, 261–​2, 278, 296, 301, 310, 317, 319 see also memory posters 7–​9, 20–​4, 46n.85, 52, 58, 102, 106, 207, 249, 295n.48 Priestley, John Boynton 5–​6, 7, 17, 29, 139, 200, 251 professionals 2, 7, 16, 17, 35, 60, 62, 65, 150, 163, 192 railways 28, 77, 98–​9, 100, 104, 107, 110, 120, 123, 133, 136, 143, 150, 160, 161, 169, 194, 216, 226, 229, 244, 250, 276 rehabilitation 203–​5, 226 respiratory disease 202, 215, 225, 238n.152 see also pneumoconiosis; silicosis Restoration of Pre-​War Practices Act (1942) 171 risk 14, 16, 38, 40, 41, 143, 191–​2, 196–​7, 197–​8, 206–​12, 213–​20, 224, 226, 228, 229, 230, 231, 304, 308, 331 Robb, Linsey 6, 24, 97, 157, 293 romance 269–​78 Rose, Sonya O. 12, 17, 96, 108, 109, 168, 197, 272 Royal Air Force 5–​6, 10, 72, 74, 75–​6, 81, 86, 97, 98, 99–​100, 102, 103, 113, 114–​15, 119, 159, 248, 261, 271, 272, 291, 293, 314, 319 Royal Navy 10, 20, 52, 53, 72, 113, 287, 291, 295

Royal Ordnance Factories (ROF) 199 Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (ROSPA) 207 safety at work 13, 16, 165, 192, 194, 202, 206, 210, 212, 213–​20, 221, 224, 231 San Demetrio, London (1943) 24 Scotland 178, 203–​4, 219, 239n.158, 254, 301 Schedule of Reserved Occupations 2, 31, 39, 50–​1, 51, 51–​60, 60–​8, 68, 69–​70, 74, 75, 76, 80, 85, 88–​9, 102, 113, 176, 342 acceptance of reservation 119–​23, 123–​6 attempts to evade reservation 97–​112, 112–​17 block reservation 63, 84–​5, 89, 199 deferment 63, 65, 70–​1, 75, 77, 84–​6, 89, 176, 199, 341 de-​reservation 74, 76, 77, 84, 85, 116 scientific management 149, 154 see also Bedaux; Fordism; Taylorism; time and motion study Shaw, Anne 200 Sheffield 59, 121, 174, 258, 301 Shipbuilders, The (1943) 24, 147 shipyards; shipbuilding 14, 15, 17–​19, 20, 24, 30, 35, 36, 50, 58, 59, 65, 68, 73, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 87, 98, 111, 119, 121, 125–​6, 135, 137, 139, 143, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155–​6, 158, 165–​6, 169, 169–​70, 170, 173, 191, 192, 194, 195, 197, 201, 203, 213, 214–​15, 219, 222, 223, 223–​5, 231, 241, 256, 261, 309 ‘shirking’ 11, 40–​1, 50, 51–​3, 55, 66, 109, 151, 178, 246, 248, 278, 288, 319, 320, 330, 332 shop stewards 16, 167, 170, 171, 172, 175, 177, 179, 227, 253 silicosis 202, 222

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Index skill 1, 2, 12, 13, 18, 28, 29, 31, 39, 50, 51, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 69, 70, 71, 73, 75, 77–​9, 80, 84, 85, 102, 113, 122, 124, 136, 137, 138, 147–​8, 151–​7, 158, 161, 166, 167, 168, 180, 186n.140, 203, 220, 231, 252, 330, 340 deskilling 153–​4, 163, 164, 192, 199, 231 upskilling 153 see also craftsmanship ‘soldier hero’ 2, 4, 5–​13, 16, 42, 96, 97, 119, 330, 331 Spanish Civil War 102, 129n.30, 178, 259 Spedding, Ron 6, 133–​4, 136, 160, 166, 226 Spencer, Stanley 18–​19, 20 sport 40, 135, 146, 242, 244, 246, 247–​51 Stakhanovite 137–​46, 179, 198 starred men 51–​60 see also badged men steel workers 2, 4, 10, 14, 20, 65, 68, 72, 78, 81, 126, 142, 157, 191, 192, 198, 206, 213, 222, 274, 301, 309 strength 14, 151–​7, 193, 196 stress 40, 192–​3, 197, 198, 203, 218, 219–​22, 230 see also nervous breakdown strikes 13, 14, 59, 137, 158, 161, 168–​79, 222, 227, 261, 311, 332, 341 Order 1305 14, 169, 171, 178 Summer on the Farm (1943) 28 Summerfield, Penny 2, 3, 7, 12, 30, 65, 96, 97, 99, 144, 160, 163, 252, 265, 267, 273, 275, 311 surveillance 197–​205, 223, 231 Taylorism 153–​5, 200, 231 They Keep the Wheels Turning (1942) 28, 160

time and motion study 199 trade unions 31, 57, 58, 59, 67, 71, 72, 79, 136, 137, 140–​1, 154, 155, 165, 168–​79, 194, 198, 202, 204, 206, 213, 227, 273, 274 Amalgamated Engineering Union 67, 68, 170 collective bargaining 171–​2 Electrical Trades Union 178 Joint Production Committees (JPC) 172 National Union of Railwaymen 173 National Union of Scottish Mineworkers 210 Transport and General Workers Union 72, 150, 168 Trades Union Congress (TUC), 4, 31, 37, 38, 62, 68, 69, 72, 73, 170, 172, 175, 176, 195, 210, 221, 307 Transfer of Skill (1940) 28 tuberculosis (TB) 199, 203, 210, 225 Ugolini, Laura 11–​12 unemployment 13, 15, 40, 31, 69–​70, 74, 84, 117, 137, 138, 140, 148, 151, 169–​70, 172, 193, 198, 340–​1 uniform 3, 5, 6, 12, 14, 24, 51, 80, 97, 98–​100, 106, 108, 115, 208, 219, 249, 264, 265, 268, 270–​3, 287, 300, 301, 312, 318, 330 Vickers 3, 59, 106, 121, 126, 141, 158, 200, 213, 230, 308, 309 wages 4, 13, 14, 15, 16, 29, 36, 41, 54, 58, 59, 71, 73, 78, 91n.39, 97, 117, 136–​7, 138, 146, 147–​52, 155, 159, 168, 169, 170–​1, 180, 196, 213, 215, 223, 261, 329, 331, 341 family wage 168, 170 guaranteed week 78, 171 soldiers 147 see also earnings

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Index Walby, Sylvia 170 Wales 4, 14, 20, 24, 30, 31, 35, 36, 38, 61, 86, 115, 134, 135, 137, 138, 178, 196, 199, 210, 219, 225, 228, 255, 266, 307 War Factory (Mass Observation) 33 war memorials 11, 289–​309 Way to the Stars, The (1945) 10 welding 10, 17, 18, 45n.76, 46n.77, 133, 153, 155, 158, 160, 265 welfare 13, 78, 171, 192, 194, 195, 201, 204, 205, 213, 217–​18, 219, 220–​8, 230–​1 Went the Day Well? (1942) 10 Western Approaches (1944) 24 white collar occupations 2, 35, 60, 62, 122, 251 white feathers 52–​3, 109–​10, 315, 330 Wight, Daniel 134 women 3, 4, 10, 12, 13, 18, 22, 24, 28, 37, 51, 52, 61, 65–​6, 66, 73, 74, 79–​80, 80, 81, 84, 105, 106, 133–​4, 134, 135, 136, 146, 147,

157–​67, 170–​1, 171, 173, 192, 195, 196, 199, 206, 207, 210, 214, 219, 222, 226, 227, 228, 271, 269–​78, 288, 296, 299–​302, 308, 311, 313, 315, 318, 319–​20, 329, 340, 341 dilution 13, 157–​67 reserved women workers 65–​6, 305–​6 sexual division of labour 147 157–​67, 186n.140 Woolwich Arsenal 20, 140, 153, 162 workmen’s compensation 195, 202, 204–​6, 210, 223 X-​rays 63, 203, 215 Young Communist League 178, 255 youthfulness 15, 34–​5, 40, 98, 100–​1, 111, 115, 121, 142, 161, 167, 216–​17, 244, 246, 255, 258–​9, 265–​6, 274, 279, 332

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386