The Demobilisation of Everyday Life

Abstract

The publication of Angus Calder’s monumental The People’s War in 1969 initiated a paradigmatic view of the home front in wartime Britain as a revolutionary ‘ferment of participatory democracy’ (18), which despite his own partial recantation and other revisionist attacks, still retains a powerful hold over the social imagination. It is a complex question as to why M-O is included in this configuration, despite the fact that both versions of it were working for a state bureaucracy which gradually gained control over the social sphere and dulled the promise of a new world. Obviously, its inclusion can be explained in part by the process already described in which the voices recorded came to signify more than Madge and Harrisson intended. Yet the extent to which these voices, either dissenting and assenting, were heard at the centre of government in the war cabinet and the House of Commons — and can still be heard by us today via publications stemming from the archive — was due to the drive and ambition of M-O’s two leaders. Moreover, there is a strong sense that Calder’s vision deliberately combines Madge and Harrisson’s utopian dream of active leaders speaking for the led with the oppositional idea of the observers and observed giving voice to an autonomous emergent mass society: With parliament muted, with the traditional system of local government patently inadequate, with the army conceding the soldier’s right to reason why, with the traditional basis of industrial discipline swept away by full employment, the people increasingly led itself. Its nameless leaders in the bombed streets, on the factory floor, in the Home Guard drill hall, asserted a new and radical popular spirit. The air raid warden and the shop steward were men of destiny, for without their ungrudging support for the war it might be lost; morale was in danger. ‘Morale’ — that word which haunted the politicians, the civil servants and the generals. What the people now demanded, they must now be given. Had they taken the tubes as deep shelters? Oh well they must keep them … Were they depressed by their conviction that victory would be the prelude to a new slump? Then plans must be made to ensure that life really would be better for them after the war. So the people surged forward to fight their own war, forcing their masters into retreat, rejecting their nominal leaders and representatives and paying homage to leaders almost of their own imagination — to Churchill, to Cripps, to Beveridge, to Archbishop Temple and to Uncle Joe Stalin (18).