Registrations

Abstract

From the beginning of the Second World War until 1952, the UK maintained a National Register and issued all citizens with identity cards (one of only two times in which this has occurred—the other being during the First World War). The National Registration Identity Card was an intrinsic part of the logic of classification which guided life on the home front and organized individuals into categories of usefulness, vulnerability, and risk. Mirroring the simplistic basis of these categories, the National Registration Identity Card was notable for the paucity of information it contained. Rather than working as an authentic token which served to validate identity in itself, when it came to security, the card only really worked when read alongside the more richly detailed register to which it referred. Cross-checking between card and register and, more importantly, opening conversations which rested upon the potential for cross-checking, thus animated attempts to identity individuals in wartime Britain. In retreating from the radical subjectivity of modernist prose, writers of the period, such as Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen, produced characterizations that were as similarly shorn of depth as the categories that the home front pushed individuals into and the cards that identified them. In playing upon the genre of the espionage thriller, The Ministry of Fear (1943) and The Heat of the Day (1948) thus narrate identities that are defined by social position and by plots which confirm individuals as often precisely what they initially appear to be.