War Britain Research Articles

An Artful Science: Activism, Non-Violence, and Radical Democracy in Cold War Britain

An Artful Science: Activism, Non-Violence, and Radical Democracy in Cold War Britain

A new phase of activism: women’s occupational organisations and married women’s paid work after the Second World War in Britain

ABSTRACT Focusing on the National Union of Women Teachers (NUWT) and the National Association of Women Civil Servants (NAWCS), this article looks at activism and campaigning for married women workers after the abolition of the marriage bar in both teaching (1944) and the Civil Service (1946). The article outlines the types of campaigning undertaken as well as the philosophical and ideological underpinnings in envisioning the married woman worker. Finally, the article places the campaigning both in the context of these two organisations’ longer histories and the distinctiveness of the late 1940s and 1950s in the history of (married) women’s employment in Britain.

Creating the People's War: Civil Defence Communities in Second World War Britain by Jessica Hammett (review)

Creating the People's War: Civil Defence Communities in Second World War Britain by Jessica Hammett (review)

The ‘People’s War’ in Concrete and Stone: Death and the Negotiation of Collective Identity in Second World War Britain

Abstract This article explores ideas and feelings about the burial of the war’s dead, and their memorialisation. It investigates the relationship between a drive to remember the conflict’s dead as members of the collective wartime nation, and a desire by many of the bereaved to emphasise familial ties and the individual lives of the dead. While this was not a new concern—and had already been seen, for example, in debates about where to bury, and how to commemorate, the dead of the First World War in Britain—it gained an additional politics in the Second World War. In this conflict, ideas about the nation, about the state’s duty to its citizens and about citizens’ reciprocal duties towards the wartime state were interwoven with ideas about domestic reconstruction in the war’s aftermath. This article traces the articulation of these ideas through contemporary discussions of, and feelings about, burial and memorialisation, using these as a means of thinking about the meaning of the ‘people’s war’ both during and after the conflict.

Renegotiating Citizenship through the Lens of the ‘People’s War’ in Second World War Britain

Abstract This article re-examines the importance of the ‘people’s war’ by exploring the word history of the phrase. The article shows that the term was widely used and understood on the British home front during the Second World War. Our focus is on how it provided a framework to renegotiate citizenship. Drawing on a wide range of popular newspapers, magazines and life writing, we argue that the ‘people’s war’ was a flexible concept. It was used, on the one hand, to explain extensions to the duties of citizenship and encourage participation, and, on the other, to demand a greater voice, recognition and rewards for citizens. This shaped the lived experience of wartime, and provided a language for ‘ordinary people’, as well as politicians and the press, to articulate their demands in the present and hopes for the future. We argue that the ‘people’s war’ remains an important historical concept. The process of negotiation through the lens of the ‘people’s war’ not only sheds light on wartime experience; it also suggests new ways to think through vernacular understandings of citizenship and the relationship between the people and the state, in the post-war world and beyond.

Kimberly Mair. The Biopolitics of Care in Second World War Britain. Mass-Observation Critical Series. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. Pp. 248. $115.00 (cloth).

Kimberly Mair. The Biopolitics of Care in Second World War Britain. Mass-Observation Critical Series. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. Pp. 248. $115.00 (cloth).

Breaking into British Academic Life in Second World War Britain: The Story of Rose Rand

Next article No AccessBreaking into British Academic Life in Second World War Britain: The Story of Rose RandKatarina MihaljevicKatarina Mihaljevic Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HOPOS Just Accepted Sponsored by The International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/726075 HistoryAccepted January 08, 2023 © 2023 The International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science. All Rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Calculating war, calculating peace: the Rockefeller Foundation and science research in Britain

ABSTRACT The history of reconstruction and philanthropic aid efforts in Western Europe after the Second World War ended cannot be fully understood without examining the wartime networks, scientific projects and miscalculations of Allied planners. This case study of a Rockefeller Foundation project in Second World War Britain shows that the war gave scientists studying human nutrition an opportunity to conduct research on an unprecedented scale, with an unprecedented level of government support. The war thus paradoxically extended the vitality of certain international health projects at a time when support for many public health institutions and personnel was suspended. Nutrition research projects in Britain made considerable gains in refining the measurement and definition of malnutrition during the war, yet had little access to information about the fallout from food shortages operating across the Channel in occupied territory. Planning a rational, efficient system for dealing with hunger in liberated post-war territories proved to be an elusive goal. Only with the end of war in Europe could Allied scientists begin to witness the full force and extent of starvation policies imposed on civilians and prisoners by the Nazi regime and its allies. After assessing full-fledged starvation cases in the spring of 1945, a number of researchers who had worked in wartime Britain turned to assessing nutritional deficiencies in wider populations in Western Europe. The reconstruction period in Allied-occupied Germany provided a new set of opportunities for testing the effects of civilian rationing policies.

Dying for The Nation: Death, Grief and Bereavement in Second World War Britain (Series: Cultural History of Modern War) by LucyNoakes, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020, p. 304, ISBN: 978‐0‐7190‐8759‐2.The Age of the Gas Mask: How British Civilians Faces the Terrors of Total War by Susan R.Grayzel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. xiv ± 273, ISBN: 9781108491273.

Gender & HistoryEarly View BOOK REVIEW Dying for The Nation Death Grief and Bereavement in Second World War Britain (Series: Cultural History of Modern War) by Lucy Noakes, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020, p. 304, ISBN: 978-0-7190-8759-2. The Age of the Gas Mask How British Civilians Faces the Terrors of Total War by Susan R. Grayzel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. xiv ± 273, ISBN: 9781108491273. Julie V. Gottlieb, Corresponding Author Julie V. Gottlieb [email protected] Department of History, University of Sheffield, UK Correspondence Julie V. Gottlieb Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Julie V. Gottlieb, Corresponding Author Julie V. Gottlieb [email protected] Department of History, University of Sheffield, UK Correspondence Julie V. Gottlieb Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 21 June 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12714Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Projecting Creative Processes: Art Films and Art Education in Post-war Britain

The relationship between film and art education has received little scholarly attention. This paper describes and discusses one instance in the long and multifaceted history of this relationship: the educational uses of nonfiction films about art and artists in post-Second World War Britain, known then invariably either as ‘films on art’ or ‘art films.’ As a new international genre (backed by UNESCO’s educational distribution schemes), it gained particular momentum in the UK with the Arts Council of Great Britain, a public body, set up after the war with a mission ‘to increase the accessibility of the fine arts.’ And one of the ways it did was via 16mm projection. Alongside building a substantial film library, in 1950 the Council, in collaboration with the British Film Institute (BFI), started a new mobile cinema scheme, the Art Film Tour, to directly engage with the nontheatrical cinema sector, especially its educational venues. By drawing on my research in the Arts Council Archive, I propose to adopt a ‘historical pragmatics’ perspective and to study the Art Film Tour’s media configuration as a dispositif (Kessler, 2018). In the 1950s, with an increasing number of art films dedicated to artists at work, art students encountered cinematic renderings of the creative process by renowned modern artists, such as Picasso, Henry Moore and Jackson Pollock. And therefore, I make a case for an inductive analysis of ‘showing making’ on screen and its implications within historicised art education contexts.

The Housing Project of Well Hall Garden Suburb and the Production of Spaces in First World War Britain

“Mother went in to work tonight, how I hate her on Sunday work!,” wrote fourteen years old Kathleen Biddlecombe in her diary, on Sunday, January 13, 1918. Kathleen and her family lived on 6 Cobbett Road, London, in Well Hall Garden Suburb—mostly known today as Progress Estate. Built between January and December 1915, in the first year of the First World War, the estate provided some 1,086 houses and 212 flats for the munition workers of the nearby Royal Arsenal factory in Woolwich. This article examines the First World War history of this housing project, by focusing on the diary of young Kathleen. Using the works of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certueau, the article probes the tensions between the ways this space was planned and built—in accordance with the agenda of the Garden City Movement—and the ways it was produced and used by its inhabitants during the war. It uncovers the production of space by the people whose houses were built along the Well Hall Road, where Route 44 of the Tram stopped to take them to and from the munition factory.

“My Heart Is a Piece of Stone”: Anxious Separations and Emotional Dislocations in British Correspondence from the Long Second World War

AbstractHistorians who write about emotion in wartime focus mainly on the experiences of front-line soldiers and of civilians under bombardment exposed to life-threatening events. However, in Britain in World War II, conscription, mobilization, and evacuation inflicted hugely disruptive separations on a large proportion of the population, and the emotions that they provoked have been under-examined. This paper excavates emotion in an unusually complete set of letters written by a British working-class couple between 1941 and 1946. Interpreting letter writing as a technology of the self, it explores their letter-writing practices and uses psychoanalytic theory to comprehend the anxieties that their letters document. Wartime and postwar separation, enforced by conscription, challenged their aspirations to a companionate marital style and added to the complexities of pregnancy and parenthood. The sickness and hospitalization of their baby in 1945–46, in the era before the establishment of the National Health Service, introduced a new dimension to separation. Occurring at a time when the couple were even further apart geographically than during the war itself and letters were the only regular means of connection, this trauma imposed massive marital and, particularly, maternal strain. By analyzing and contextualizing the increasingly fraught exchanges between a mother on her own and a man at the front line, this article throws new light on epistolary constructions of anxious separations and emotional dislocations in the long Second World War.

The battle on the river Somme and the historical politics in Britain

The article focuses on the commemorative experience of Britain in the context of a systematic study of the policy of memory at the present stage of the country's development. The main purpose of the study is to analyse the forms and ways of representing the Battle of the Somme in modern Britain as a historical reality, highlighting the main features of the British experience of preserving the memory of this event and transmitting it for a mass audience. The author proposes an attempt to trace the development of ideas in scientific and popular science materials concerning the event as a collective trauma, the memory of which has been reflected in British historiography since its formation in 1916. The collective memory of the events of the First World War in Britain is often ambiguous and debatable, especially the Battle of the Somme, which changed people's perception of armed conflicts. As part of the study of the British politics of memory, it was revealed that the "historical narrative" of the battle is to glorify the exploits of the expeditionary forces on the Western Front and at the same time criticise the commanders of the armed forces responsible for massive combat losses.

'What did you do to them Klaus?': The Klaus Fuchs Atomic Espionage Case and its Impact on the Scientific Community in early Cold War Britain.

The atomic spy, Klaus Fuchs, was one of the most notorious figures of the early Cold War. The story of his espionage and the impact it had has been the subject of extensive historical research. This article provides a new angle on the Fuchs case by examining the repercussions of his actions on his friends, colleagues, and the wider scientific community in Britain that have previously been overlooked. It argues that the subsequent fall-out led several atomic scientists to have their own loyalties questioned and be subjected to extensive and sustained surveillance. As the article will show, the inevitable era of suspicion that the Fuchs case ushered in did damage to the reputations, careers, and prospects of certain scientists. By examining the repercussions, the article helps to provide a first insight into the experience of some British scientists during the early years of the Cold War.

Eavesdropping on the Emperor: Interrogators and Codebreakers in Britain's War with Japan by Peter Kornicki

Reviewed by: Eavesdropping on the Emperor: Interrogators and Codebreakers in Britain's War with Japan by Peter Kornicki Roger H. Brown (bio) Eavesdropping on the Emperor: Interrogators and Codebreakers in Britain's War with Japan . By Peter Kornicki. Oxford University Press, 2021. xxx, 402 pages. $29.95. For decades after World War II, the extent of Allied success in breaking enemy codes and the contribution it made toward the defeat of the Axis powers remained classified. The gradual lifting of the veils of secrecy finally opened the archives to scholars and permitted participants to share their experiences. Regarding the Asia-Pacific theater of the war, the lion's share of attention went to codebreaking in relation to battles such as Pearl Harbor and Midway and to strategic decisions such as those regarding war termination. More recently, historians have produced a small but solid body of scholarship examining the intensive Japanese language programs required to exploit such cryptological successes, as well as to translate documents recovered on the battlefield and interrogate prisoners. However, reflecting the dominant role of the United States in the Pacific theater, the scholarship on wartime linguists has almost totally neglected the British contribution. 1 In Eavesdropping on the Emperor, Peter Kornicki endeavors to redress this deficiency and to thereby "reveal what made the Japanese-language training programmes during the war so successful, who the remarkable teachers and their extraordinary students were, and what unseen contributions they made to the war effort in all theatres of war" (p. xxviii). Kornicki's successful effort echoes the achievements of the men and women whose stories he tells. Indeed, recovering the personal experiences of British linguists, which is at the heart of Kornicki's account, constitutes one of the great strengths of his book. The reader meets an almost endless variety of people appearing and often reappearing throughout the book, and the details regarding these individuals and their experiences in various services, programs, and theaters of action should prove valuable to a wide array of researchers. Kornicki begins by demonstrating how, even as the likelihood of war with Japan loomed, British diplomatic and military leaders responded with [End Page 267] astonishing complacency to entreaties from knowledgeable academics and military officers about the dire need for Japanese linguists. He partly attributes this lack of action to the overall underestimation of the military threat posed by Japan, a prejudice that was only shattered by the successful Japanese operations during the first six months of the war. In response to these setbacks, the few academics, missionaries, military officers, and other individuals with close knowledge of Japan and its language then established language programs at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and the Bedford School. The instructors and students came from eclectic backgrounds ranging from professors at elite universities to working-class youths and enlisted servicemen. Together they confronted the daunting challenge of attaining a high level of proficiency in a difficult language in an extraordinarily short period of time. Success required not just personal ability but powerful motivation. Inspiration could come from many sources, but those already in service sometimes bore their own special incentives. Peter Laslett, who joined Fleet Air Arm in 1940 and was sent to learn Japanese in 1942, recalled that: "They … told us that if we couldn't read Japanese within a year we would be sent back to our ships. I had been on the Murmansk route, which was extremely dangerous, so I learned Japanese under sentence of being drowned" (p. 82). Kornicki details how these diverse students, once enrolled, engaged in truly intense study directed at mastering those aspects of the Japanese language required for their expected tasks, which included translation of decoded diplomatic messages, tactical wireless intercepts, diaries and orders found on the battlefield, and interrogation of prisoners. Graduates deployed to duty posts scattered as far as Singapore, Mauritius, India, Australia, Burma, and, eventually, occupied Japan. As was the case with their U.S. counterparts, most of these men and women returned to their civilian lives and never made use of their language skills again, but some went on to lay the foundations for the great postwar expansion of Anglophone Japanese studies. The tardiness of...

New England in the Royalist Imagination, 1637–89

Abstract This essay examines representations of New England puritanism in royalist print and manuscript polemic during the English Revolution of 1642–1660 and beyond. Royalist attitudes toward the North American godly colonies have been largely overlooked by modern scholars, who continue to privilege New England’s significance in intra-parliamentarian religious debates over its impact on the events of the civil war itself. As a result, they have neglected a substantial canon of hostile anti-puritan royalist literature that identified colonial puritanism, along with other malevolent international godly influences, as a horrifying example of the future awaiting old England if Charles I’s parliamentarian enemies were to triumph. As a pre-eminent puritan sanctuary from which some godly rebels had been recruited to perpetuate the civil war in Britain and to which domestic parliamentarians later allegedly intended to flee once their uprising had succeeded, New England thus occupied an important place in the royalist political imagination. Although royalist attitudes toward the American puritan colonies waxed and waned in significance during the revolutionary decades, and while New Englanders themselves may not have paid considerable attention to hostile royalist commentary, interested English readers and domestic parliamentarian polemicists alike paid a great deal of attention to the anti-colonial thrust of mid-century cavalier print. Moreover, certain aspects of royalist anti-New England rhetoric lived on to provide later anti-puritan commentators with a convenient explanation for the ongoing hostility of colonial puritans toward Stuart rule for decades following the Restoration.

Managing risk in the ‘danger zone’: Defensive infrastructure and public safety discourses on the north-east coast of England during the First World War

This article explores the development of nascent civil defence efforts during the First World War in Britain, through the use of urban case studies from the north-east coast of England. Whilst pre-war defence planning by central government and military authorities had been primarily concerned with the building of coastal gun batteries and strengthening the Royal Navy – in response to looming fears of invasion by a foreign foe – the war itself saw thousands of civilians on the ‘home front’ affected by war violence. Though they were many miles away from the conventional theatres of war, from late 1914, British civilians began to be killed and injured on their own soil by hostile battleships and aircraft. The largely improvised and dynamic multi-level response of central government, local authorities, the police and civilians indicated shifting relations between the national, local and individual. Fundamentally, early forms of civil defence were devised with pre-war notions of public safety in mind, while in the war context, these discourses were used to promote non-combatant resilience, particularly in urban coastal areas.

Elizabeth Bowen: A Literary Life by Patricia Laurence

Reviewed by: Elizabeth Bowen: A Literary Life by Patricia Laurence Robert Higney (bio) elizabeth bowen: a literary life Patricia Laurence Palgrave Macmillan https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030264147 357 pages; Print, $24.99 Elizabeth Bowen, born in 1899, liked to point out that she was the same age as the century, and across the decades of the twentieth her life and career trace a path as distinctive as any in English-language writing. The only child of an old and fairly respectable Anglo-Irish family, she was the sole inheritor of the Bowens' Big House in southern Ireland, Bowen's Court, and of a provincial aristocratic worldview that, at the time of her birth, was rapidly growing obsolete. She would go on to become friendly with luminaries like Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot in 1920s literary Bloomsbury; offset a loving and conventional marriage with a range of love affairs with men and women; serve as a London air-raid warden in the Blitz and occasional spy for Britain in World War II; teach for years in burgeoning postwar American universities, from Princeton to Wisconsin; and be acknowledged upon her death in 1973 as a widely known and respected international woman of letters. Works like The House in Paris (1935) and The Heat of the Day (1949) are full of unarticulated longing, tortuous syntax, Jamesian precision and uncertainty, stylish, striking women and vivid, strange, observant children. Such a life begs for biographical inquiry, and the publication of Patricia Laurence's deeply researched, innovative, and illuminating Elizabeth Bowen: A Literary Life is a significant event. Bowen loved the impersonal—manners, style, good form—and as Laurence points out in her book's introduction, she was deeply skeptical of biography, viewing it as the signature genre of vulgar personal life. Victoria Glendinning's 1977 Elizabeth Bowen: A Biography, while entertaining and written with warm affection for its subject, to some extent confirms Bowen's suspicions, proceeding in linear fashion and glossing over much (especially about the author's sexuality), perhaps out of consideration for then-still-living contemporaries. Until now, Glendinning's was the only biography available. [End Page 126] Laurence, by contrast, follows Bowen's own lead to "present a life that spotlights scenes or offers glimpses," a "biography through a kaleidoscope of faces, places, feelings, countries, and loyalties." Elizabeth Bowen: A Literary Life opens with an imaginative walk down "two paths" that shaped the terrain of Bowen's life: one by Bowen's Court, which "imprinted the past and immersed her in Anglo-Irish traditions," and one by the seaside villas of Hythe, England, "a landscape that nurtured the farouche, her untamed qualities." This tension between tradition and self-invention sets up an illuminating framework for Bowen's many contradictions. Laurence regularly draws on Bowen's fiction to add depth and color to the events of her life, and on Bowen's life to unlock some of the fiction's puzzles. This technique makes excellent sense in light of the clear accounting, early on, of all the things about Bowen that we have no way of knowing, whether due to circumstance or Bowen's own careful control of her archive. Laurence's approach is broadly chronological, but individual chapters range widely through time by following threads plucked from particular events or works. Many landowning Anglo-Irish were peripatetic, moving regularly between the Irish countryside, Dublin, and England, and Bowen traveled more than most. Her father's nervous breakdown when she was a small child sent her and her mother to various family estates and to Kent in southern England, where much of her childhood and education took place, and her summers were spent at Bowen's Court. Early chapters vividly depict this agitated early-twentieth-century childhood and the unusual variety of houses and locales, friends and relatives that shaped it. An intriguing detail on which Laurence casts particular light is Bowen's "stammer," which appeared in her childhood and affected her throughout her life. Bowen herself said little about it, but it is a topic where the breadth of Laurence's research becomes clear: by attending to the commentary of Bowen's friends and literary connections, Laurence shows...

Biblical Scholarship and Political Propaganda in First World War Britain

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‘Is Radioactive Iodine Present Equally in the Cream on Milk as in the Milk Itself?’: Lonely Sources and the Gendered history of Cold War Britain

AbstractThis article argues that one way to foreground and privilege women's perspectives on the Cold War is by re‐interpreting their historical experiences of food and drink. The article develops this argument by analysing one letter, from an unknown woman to the BBC, in the context of nuclear health concerns in early Cold War Britain. This article contends that where archival references to food, drink and women are ephemeral, a lonely source can describe historical experience that extends far beyond its singularity. While it would be easy to dismiss this letter as exceptional, it demonstrates one woman's informed and reasonable approach to an unstable and inexplicable topic. The article argues that divesting research from its traditional, masculine Cold War rules of perception contributes to a fairer view of previously ignored ‘feminine’ sources.