Second World War Britain Research Articles

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.

Jacqueline Dawson Chittenden: A Forgotten Classical Scholar

AbstractThis article explores the life and career of Jacqueline Chittenden, a classical scholar whose story and voice exist in archives across the world, but whose achievements and career have hitherto been omitted from accounts of either classical or archaeological scholarship. Chittenden was an American archaeologist, classicist, collector, curator and cataloguer with close ties to the University of Cambridge and Newnham College. Her career flourished during and in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in Britain and is closely linked to opportunities that arose during this period. Through study of her curatorial work, collecting and academic publications, Chittenden emerges as a significant scholar whose work had important implications on the fields of archaeology and classics, and one whose work was shaped, and limited, by her gender. Chittenden's input in wartime Greek art exhibitions emphasised the voice of Greek women and their art of embroidery, revealing their contribution to the heritage of ancient Greece. This article discusses and evaluates Chittenden's work in order to give a better understanding of the significant role of women in the study of the material culture of the past and, in particular, the historiography of women's art and ancient religion.

English

The Management Science theory is one of the theories of management that attributes management effectiveness to the application of scientific methods. It goes a step beyond the famous scientific management theory by applying operations research tools and techniques to solving practical problems. Its origin can be traced to the Second World War in Britain. Its method of expressing business factors in form of variables allows for the accurate prediction of business phenomena and overall optimization of profits. The management science approach uses computer applications and operations research tools to solve business problems around quantitative management, operations research, total quality management and management information systems. Its major limitation is its inability to accurately predict business phenomena that contain behavioral elements. The theory ignores the importance of people, relationships and other non-quantifiable factors. Overall, the management science theory provides a new and proactive way of solving business problems by identifying relationships among different business variables that were previously considered unrelated and so, have provided modern businesses with a better way of doing things.   Key words: Management Science theory, scientific management theory, operations research, total quality management, linear programming.

Same Interviewee, Different Interviewer: Researching Intersubjectivity in Studies of the Reserved Occupations in the Second World War

ABSTRACT In 2008 and 2009, Arthur McIvor, director of the Scottish Oral History Centre at the University of Strathclyde, interviewed two men who were employed in reserved occupations in the Clydeside region of Scotland during the Second World War. In 2010, I reinterviewed the same two men as part of my PhD project exploring the wartime experiences of men in reserved occupations in the Clydeside area. The two interviewees were Henry (Harry) McGregor, born in 1922 in Glasgow, who worked as an engineer in wartime; and William (Willie) Dewar, born in 1924, also in Glasgow, and employed as a draughtsman in Hyde Park Railway Works in the Springburn area of the city during the war for the North British Locomotive Company. I thus found myself with a rare opportunity to compare the two sets of interviews, which had a common focus on the impact on masculinity of working in a reserved occupation. Little has been written on what happens when the same interviewees are revisited by different interviewers asking questions about the same subject area. This article briefly outlines the background of the reserved occupations before focusing on composure and relation of the reserved occupation war experience. I consider the literature on the popular memory of the Second World War in Britain and the extent to which the interviewees might have felt “prepared” for their interviews with me. The article offers a new and fascinating insight into the nature and practice of oral history, enabling a closer look at interactions among various factors at play, including memory, composure, and intersubjectivity, and how interviewees narrate their stories in the context of Second World War Britain.

The Trial of Neville Heath, the Popular Press, and the Construction of the Memory of the Second World War in Britain, 1945–1946

Abstract This article uses the press coverage of the sensational 1946 trial of Neville Heath for murder as a case-study for exploring how the memory of the Second World War in Britain was constructed in the immediate post-war period. Historians of Europe have described how painful narratives of occupation and defeat were suppressed, and more positive memories of timeless national values highlighted, in order to aid the reconstruction of national identity and gender relations. Although Britain had not experienced such upheaval, the nation did face troubling questions about the consequences of the war for criminality and violence. The popular press, however, discussed such issues in ways which did not call into question the central narratives of the ‘people’s war’. The trial of Heath highlights how questions concerning violence in Britain could be resolved: whereas post-war violent crime was understood in terms of short-term social dislocation rather than the psychological impact of the war, Heath’s sadistic violence was discussed using language which made it readily comparable to the German and Japanese war crimes being featured at the same time. As such, Heath was understandable as an individual, pathologised ‘type’ rather than as a symbol of the post-war British veteran.

Labour’s Finest Hour: Labour Electoral Victories after the Second World War in Britain and Australia, 1945 and 1946

This article offers a comparative analysis of the British national election in 1945 and the Australian federal election in 1946. Both elections resulted in Labour victories. Through an in-depth analysis of these election campaigns, the study aims to identify similarities and differences in the form of ideological appeals, and especially in the deployment of the languages of ‘class’ and ‘nation’. It thereby seeks to shed new light on the changing form of electoral appeals, the nature of post-war Labour ideology, and the contribution of both of these to Labour’s political success.

Vera Lynn on Screen: Popular Music and the ‘People's War’

AbstractBy the outbreak of the Second World War in Britain, critics had spent several decades negotiating the supposed distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow culture, as recent scholarship has shown. What has received comparatively little attention is how the demands of wartime living changed the stakes of the debate. This article addresses this lacuna, exploring how war invited a reassessment of the relative merits of art and popular music. Perhaps the most iconic British singer of the period, Vera Lynn provides a case study. Focusing on her first film vehicle,We'll Meet Again(1942), I explore how Lynn's character mediated the highbrow/lowbrow conflict – for example, by presenting popular music as a site of community, while disparaging art music for its minority appeal. In so doing, I argue, the film not only promoted Lynn's star persona, but also intervened in a broader debate about the value of entertainment for a nation at war.

The Dog and Cat Massacre of September 1939 and the People's War

During the first week of the Second World War around 400,000 companion animals in London alone were killed at their owner's behest. This was not a state directive. Little is known of this event although details of what was called at the time the pet ‘Holocaust’ or ‘Cat and Dog Massacre’ were not suppressed. Far from the Home Front of the Second World War in Britain being a ‘People's War’, as popularly described, in different ways the animal–human relationship was prominent. The massacre – and subsequent animal–human relationships – tends to undermine the notion of both a positive and exclusively human ‘People's War’.

Jüdische Eliten im Russichen Reich (Jewish Elites in the Russian Empire) , and: Crisis, Revolution, and Russian Jews , and: Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917: Drafted into Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: Jüdische Eliten im Russichen Reich (Jewish Elites in the Russian Empire), and: Crisis, Revolution, and Russian Jews, and: Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917: Drafted into Modernity Brian Horowitz Verena Dohrn , Jüdische Eliten im Russichen Reich (Jewish Elites in the Russian Empire). 482 pp. Cologne: Böhlau, 2008. ISBN-13 978-3412202330. €59.90. Jonathan Frankel , Crisis, Revolution, and Russian Jews. 324 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-0521513647. $85.00. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern , Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917: Drafted into Modernity. 307 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-1521515733. $95.00. The three books under review draw our attention to a number of approaches to writing the history of the Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe. Jonathan Frankel's features a conception of modern Jewish history that puts "crisis" at the center, while Petrovsky-Shtern and Dohrn seem to imitate the approach pioneered by Michael Stanislawski and John Klier, who showed an infinitely more complicated relationship between Jews and the Russian government than had been recognized before.1 Just as did Stanislawski and Klier, so too Petrovsky-Shtern and Dohrn inevitably interface with the so-called Lachrymose School of history, especially as practiced by Simon Dubnov, who still casts a shadow over the historiography of Jews in the Russian Empire.2 As [End Page 673] is well known, Salo Baron formulated the term to refer to historical studies that emphasize the persecutions endured by East European Jews.3 In Crisis, Revolution, and Russian Jews the highly influential and deeply mourned Professor Jonathan Frankel affirms the centrality of crisis as the motor of human history. That idea formed the basis for Frankel's two masterful monographs, Prophesy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917 and The Damascus Affair: "Ritual Murder," Politics, and the Jews in 1840.4 In the book's introduction he reveals the biographical foundation for his lifelong approach: That I emphasize the importance of crises in [Russian-Jewish] history seems to me natural enough given the times and the places that shaped my formative years. Even though I personally came through totally unscathed, it is nevertheless true that I grew to adulthood and maturity during a period when danger and drama were part of the woof and weave of history. As a child I lived through the Second World War in Britain; I reached my thirteenth birthday in July 1948, when the new state of Israel was fighting its war of independence; and since I moved to that country in 1964, it has experienced no less than six major armed conflicts, as well as two prolonged Palestinian uprisings. ... However, it was the June (or Six-Day) War of 1967 that first brought home to me the idea that crises, however short-lived, could actually serve as turning points in the course of history. (9) The essays in this volume, published posthumously by his wife, the esteemed scholar Edith Frankel, embody the "crisis" approach, which emphasizes the play of external factors in history—unexpected events, the actions of the Russian state regarding its Jewish subjects, and suprapersonal ideology (the various ideas of intellectuals about how to improve society).5 This volume opens with Frankel's famous article, "Crisis as a Factor in Modern Jewish Politics," in which he argues that the pogroms of 1881-82 transformed East European Jewry by ushering in awareness of the need for drastic change. In [End Page 674] the decades following the pogroms two million would emigrate to the United States, and a small but highly tenacious group would form the physical and ideological basis for a national home in Palestine. In the volume, Frankel also grapples with tensions that emerge from the "crisis" focus. In a number of articles he deals directly with biography, treating the relationship between the individual and the "crisis period" through which he/she was living. Frankel shows how individuals struggle with external factors, how they try to shape their reality in spite of strong countervailing forces. For example, in the article on the formative Hebrew author Yosef Hayim Brenner, Frankel traces the writer's ideological development from General Zionist to Revolutionary...

What Cannot Be Said. „Silent Dust“ (1949) and the Malevolent Veteran

“Silent Dust”, released in February 1949, was one of a group of films that explored the problems of the returning Second World War veteran. Although the maladjusted veteran is a feature of all major wars, it assumes an added significance in this instance because the Second World War, in Britain and America at least, is conventionally understood “almost universally as honourable and noble, fought with right and justice exclusively on the Allied side”. Angus Calder has argued that the dominant narrative constructed about the Second World War in Britain was what he terms the “myth of the Blitz”, a heroic myth of courage, endurance and pulling together. This myth, through its perpetuation in an enormous array of cultural practices - notably a cycle of combat films in the 1950s such as “The Dam Busters” (1955) and “Reach for the Sky” (1956) - became the accepted view and was almost impossible to dislodge. It was a myth that was officially ratified in the British state’s commemoration of the war and, like all dominant discourses, served to marginalise alternative constructions of the conflict, particularly those that represent it as a traumatic and possibly brutalising experience. By analysing “Silent Dust” in detail and in relation to its social and cultural context, I hope to recover this repressed narrative and restore it to its rightful place as an important discourse about the Second World War.

Moving Images: Propaganda Film and British Education 1940‐45

Village School (1940) and Children's Charter (1945) are two propaganda films produced on behalf of the British government at the beginning and the end of the second world war and are key visual sources for educational history, quite accessible but so far much neglected by educational historians. This paper examines the two films as case studies of the visual in the making of educational space at one moment in history. The historical moment is the second world war in Britain, and the space is the public space in which educational policies and ideologies are promoted. The two motion pictures are located in their historical context, followed by comparative and critical comments from three perspectives: the image as a document of relations between producer and consumer; the image as a medium of expression; and the image in its relation to a wider iconography of education. A major focus for this paper is the way in which promotion of a progressive curriculum and teaching method is inscribed within a film on schooling in wartime evacuation, and it also highlights the complexity of reading motion pictures, and especially propaganda film, as historical evidence.

Secular Changes in the Association of Parental Divorce and Children's Educational Attainment – Evidence from Three British Birth Cohorts

This article examines the secular trends in the overall association of parental divorce (or separation) and children's educational attainment at school-leaving age during the period spanning a quarter of a century since the second world war in Britain. The study presents a reanalysis of data from the three British birth cohorts which studied children born in 1946, 1958 and 1970. Equivalent educational attainment at the different time points is defined relative to the population distribution at the time, using the median level. The relative risks (with 95 per cent confidence intervals) of lower than median educational attainment associated with parental divorce (or separation) are 1.3 (1.2 to 1.5), 1.4 (1.3 to 1.5) and 1.4 (1.3 to 1.5) for the three cohorts respectively. These results refute the commonly held opinion that the effects of divorce on children have attenuated with the increasing prevalence of divorce.

Commemorating the Second World War in Britain: Problems of Definition

Day, November 11th, lay ahead when in the autumn of 1945 the British Home Office turned its mind to the commemoration of the World War, just ended. Armistice Day was the day on which the significance of the Great War of 1914-1918 had annually been remembered in Britain in remembrance ceremonies up and down the country, from the Cenotaph in Whitehall to the humble village memorial.' The issue before the Home Office was clear: should the Second World War be simply bolted on to the well-established ceremonies, though these had been in abeyance since 1939, or was it important to find a new day and thus signify, in whatever manner might be appropriate, that this people's war had a different order of meaning? In the event, though as will be seen not without consideration of alternatives, no separate day was identified. On Remembrance Sunday it has been the national custom ever since to reflect on the sacrifice made by the dead in two world wars. Such a public emphasis has had its enduring historiographical accompaniment. It is well-known that by the 1930s, if not earlier, British historians had largely turned away from that eager willingness to pin