GEOFFREY G. FIELD. Blood, Sweat, and Toil: Remaking the British Working Class, 1939-1945.

Abstract

World War II and the working class are hardly topics that historians of Britain can be accused of ignoring. Geoffrey G. Field brings the two together here, critiquing the historiography that has emphasized national unity and the rhetoric of a “people's war,” as well as those who regard the war's political results by 1945 as representing either a policy consensus or an indifferent apathetic popular politics. Field's case is that the dominant category fashioning popular experience of the war was class, and that class was altered by the war. He contends that “the war experience nationalized workers, both in a patriotic sense and in forging closer class unity and the sense of a common political agenda” (p. 6). Blood, Sweat, and Toil then can be located alongside the works of those historians who have reasserted the salience of class in mid-twentieth-century British history—notably James Hinton, Selina Todd, Jon Lawrence, and Mike Savage. And if Field's book lacks some of their conceptual engagement or forensic subtlety, it compensates by covering a broad sweep of wartime life: the Blitz, evacuation, children, work, the family, leisure, film, J. B. Priestley, the BBC, politics, and—importantly, since this is not just a home front history—non-civilian experience. The book is at its best in vivid, traditional social history accounts of the dislocations wrought by war, the transformation of everyday practices like shopping by bombing as well as rationing. Field delves into the Beveridge Report, the black economy, women's parliaments, the land army, and the people's convention, amongst other topics. Many of these have been well documented by historians, and in addition to government reports, opinion polls, the Mass Observation Archive, and diaries, Field mines the extensive secondary literature to great effect. With the occasional recent exception (Alan Allport's work on the emotional traumas of demobilization; Andrew Thorpe's look at micropolitics in Parties at War: Political Organization in Second World War Britain [2009]), the real achievement of Blood, Sweat, and Toil is its masterful synthesis of the war's voluminous bibliography (not that there is a bibliography in the book itself, unfortunately).