Wartime London Research Articles

Женское лицо войны в прозе современных британских писательниц

The contribution of British women to the victory in World War II was great: unmarried women under 30 were mobilized to Women’s Auxiliary Service, to work in industries and in the so-called Land Army. During the Blitz –a period of intense bombing of London and other British cities in 1940–1941–women worked in voluntary teamsclearing rubble, in ambulances and in hospitals. Descriptions of the bombed, burning city are numerous in the books of writers who witnessed the war (G.Greene, E.Bowen, and others). The war changed the everyday life of British women and their social roles drastically. The life of women in the wartime London is described in M. Spark’s novel The Girls of Slender Means(1963), but in subsequent years the topic was not much discussed in literature. The return of British literature to national history took place at the end of the 20th century. In the 21st century, the wartime women’s life and fight is reflected in the following novels by contemporary women writers: S.Waters The Night Watch, K.Atkinson Life after Life, E.Healey Elizabeth is Missing, K.Morton The Secret Keeper, and others. All the novels are based both on wartime documents (witnesses’ diaries and memoirs) and on literary tradition. Each of the writers describes the heroic struggle of women during the Blitz and their everyday life; wartime daily life and its constituents acquire a symbolic, even ideological meaning. The novels analyze similar themes and problems, but the writers use different points of view and narrative techniques. S. Waters uses reverse com-position, her characters are marginal from the point of view of public morals. K.Atkinson’s novel is a com-plex postmodern narration where numerous plotlines are interwoven. E.Healey mostly relies on memory games, while K.Morton uses popular literature techniques. Two categories –memory and history –are em-ployed in all the novels to show and to reconstruct the role of British women in the WWII victory.

The French Press in Wartime London, 1940–4: From the Politics of Exile to Inter-Allied Relations

This article examines the history of the French press that was based in London during the Second World War, focusing on its contribution to political debates of and about French exile, its relationship to the British government and its role in shaping inter-Allied relations. The article begins by outlining the development of British policy towards the foreign press based in London before examining three publications: the left-leaning daily France, the Gaullist weekly La Marseillaise and the monthly cultural and political periodical La France libre. By drawing on the contents of these papers alongside a variety of French, British and American archival material, the article shows that while the French press in London had a limited readership, it exercised significant influence among political elites either side of the Atlantic during the war and helped shape the terms of French debates over the meaning of Gaullism well into the post-Second World War period.

A Lawyer in Exile: Johannes M. de Moor and the Circulation of Legal Knowledge in Wartime London

Abstract De Moor’s biography illustrates how people and ideas travelled between and within national and transnational spaces. He played a role in the circulation of legal knowledge in the transnational epistemic community, more precisely between the Cambridge Commission and the London International Assembly. In thinking about the future of the international order and the place of nation states within it, De Moor came to embrace the idea that state sovereignty and the rule of law had to be recalibrated and that, as a logical conclusion, war crimes could be prosecuted internationally. In London, he became an advocate for a universal organization backed by an international court and an international armed force. He envisioned an international rule of law as the underlying system governing the international order.

Blitz Spirits: Ghosts of London and the Nation in Second World War Britain

This article examines the workings of ghosts in Second World War London, particularly what they reveal about the experience, representation, and management of life under fire. It brings together urban-historical, psychological, and cultural/commemorative approaches in tracing how ghosts were used to articulate the turbulence of bombardment. Arguing that ghosts represent a useful tool for bridging the gap between different readings of wartime London, the article pays attention to the universal dimensions of air raids and particular local variations. The article suggests that the workings of ghosts—and the psychology of believing more broadly—represent an important, if neglected, aspect of the civilian experience of war.

Harold Pinter and Elizabeth Bowen: Men and Women at War

Using the Harold Pinter Collection held at the British Library, this article investigates Harold Pinter’s 1989 screenplay and television film of Elizabeth Bowen’s 1949 novel The Heat of the Day. It argues for the detailed and direct ways in which Pinter used Bowen’s language and dialogue to convey the complexities of wartime London. However, it also suggests that Pinter’s adaptation deliberately excludes elements of women’s experiences of the Second World War in favour of a more masculinised presentation of war and the spy genre.

'This Age of Clichés' and 'Equality of Opportunity ... For What?' Two articles by Alex Bloom†

Two short articles by Alex Bloom, written in wartime London, expose the easy recourse in educational policy to fine-sounding phrases — in this case 'equality of opportunity' — and offer a vision of education based on the spirit of cooperation and the common good.

Publishing ‘Paper Bullets’: Politics, Propaganda and Polish-English Translation in Wartime London

During World War II, publishing was an important element of the war effort for both the Allies and the Axis powers. Wartime propaganda and cultural diplomacy relied primarily on books, magazines and the daily press. The exiled governments in London, including the Polish government, undertook a major effort to translate, publish and promote numerous books and pamphlets that would appeal to British readers and thereby help to sway public opinion. This paper focuses on translation as an important aspect of wartime publishing that has not yet received much scholarly attention. It offers a contribution to research into the role and place of translations in wartime publishing by discussing the Polish government-in-exile's translation and publishing campaign. Drawing on various archival sources, it demonstrates that publishing translations was an important part of wartime cultural diplomacy and led to the development of extensive state-private networks that brought together exiled governments and British publishers. By analysing this material in a broad cultural context, the paper highlights the historical, ideological and political relevance of translation studies research to wartime publishing and censorship.

Modernity as Trauma and Frederick Ashton’s Dante Sonata

In January 1940, amid the confusion of wartime London, the Sadler’s Wells Ballet opened its somewhat cautious season with a premiere of Frederick Ashton’s new work Dante Sonata.[1] Conceived after the September 1939 declaration of war, the ballet is Ashton’s response to the developing events of the Second World War.

Sherlock Holmes and the Nazis: Fifth Columnists and the People's War in Anglo-American Cinema, 1942–3

During the Second World War Universal Pictures produced three key Sherlock Holmes films. In each of these pictures, released in 1942 and 1943, Holmes was appropriated for the war effort. The Great Detective was transposed into wartime London where, in effect, he became the ultimate counter-intelligence agent who foiled the plots of Nazi infiltrators and sympathisers. The films retooled Holmes from his detective origins and place him into the spy genre, as was required for maximum propaganda value. Three key propaganda themes emerged from the films: first, that Britain was engaged in a ‘People's War’ in which Holmes was able to emerge victorious thanks to the contributions and assistance of ordinary members of the British public; second, that the public needed to be vigilant against the threat posed by Nazi agents and fifth columnists; third, that the USA and Britain were bound together by mutual respect and cultural ties and that collaboration between the two powers would achieve victory. Each of these themes was key to the British propaganda effort and emerged as a staple trope in British media. The Holmes films had, however, been produced by an American studio in Hollywood. Nevertheless, the American film-makers were typically able to produce successful ‘British’ propaganda pieces, drawing upon British propaganda tropes, which succeeded on both sides of the Atlantic. That success did not necessarily lie in the films' artistic merits – in fact, they were regularly savaged by critics in that respect – but because their propaganda messages were sufficiently subtle that they were rarely noted upon at all.

From Gaullism to Anti-Gaullism: Denis Saurat and the French Cultural Institute in Wartime London

This article explores the case of the French cultural institute in London which found itself at the nexus of Gaullist as well as anti-Gaullist networks during the Second World War. By analysing the support that the institute’s director, Denis Saurat, brought to Charles de Gaulle in the early days of Free France, the article contributes to our understanding of the formation of Free French political thought. This study analyses Saurat’s shifting position in the movement, from being Gaullist to becoming an active partisan of anti-Gaullism. The examination of Saurat’s networks and politics helps to re-appraise further trends of anti-Gaullism caused by leftist views not least regarding the lack of democratic principles that characterized Free France in 1940–2. Finally, Saurat’s anti-Gaullism was also prompted by his refusal to put the French cultural institute in London at the service of de Gaulle and support Free French propagandist, cultural and academic ambitions in the world. Overall this article argues for a reassessment of London-based leftist anti-Gaullism understood not just through issues of personalities and democracy but also through the prism of cultural diplomacy and propaganda.

Moving Wartime London: Public Transport in the First World War

During the Great War public transport in London was put under extreme pressure. Services suffered from staff and material shortages, fuel rationing, and requisitioning. Despite this, over 300 million more passengers travelled in 1918 than in 1913. The Metropolitan Police was forced to relax rules governing passenger safety on trams and buses, ‘straphanging’ became endemic, and trains were crowded ‘almost to danger point’. This article examines how the impact of the First World War on London's public transport represented both an ‘interlude’ and a permanent discontinuity. While the female transport worker was the personification of wartime exceptionalism, the rise of the female commuter and the entrenching of the ‘rush hour’ as part of the commute remain even today as a more permanent legacy of the Great War.

Nine Innings for the King: The Day Wartime London Stopped for Baseball, July 4, 1918 by Jim Leeke

Nine Innings for the King: The Day Wartime London Stopped for Baseball, July 4, 1918 by Jim Leeke

“This fabulous flotsam”: Michael Moorcock’s Urban Anthropology in “London under London”

Abstract Michael Moorcock is often described as “one of the most prolific and varied writers working in Britain” (Malcolm 146). His success as a writer and editor of science fiction and fantasy literature is well established, but he is also the author of two novels about London, Mother London (1988) and King of the City (2000). Hardly known, Mother London by Michael Moorcock, offers itself to a variety of approaches that have been widely discussed in the context of studies on English literature during the Thatcher years, post-modernism, and psycho-geography. The novel resonates with the author’s own childhood in war-time London without being autobiographical. It tells the story of three Londoners who were traumatised during the Blitz. The following article focuses on the mysteries of subterranean London that represents the hidden and unconscious identities of its inhabitants in the post-war period.

An ‘Impatient Modernist’: Mulk Raj Anand at the BBC

Mulk Raj Anand's self-description – in a 1945 broadcast about war-time London – as an ‘impatient modernist’ highlights Anand's ability to harness the velocity of broadcast production, transmission, and reception into an aesthetic of speed. Pairing Anand's unpublished BBC scripts with his war-time novel The Big Heart (1945), I show how Anand's work remediating contemporary texts for broadcast accompanied a shift in his approach to writing fiction, using the technique of intertextual scaffolding to accelerate composition. This article proposes that the name of Anand's impatience was realism – that Anand's fascination with literary modernists such as Joyce and Woolf was tempered with a desire for the immediacy and social embeddedness of realism and that broadcasting encouraged Anand in his attempt to pair modernism's cosmopolitanism and polyvocality with realism's speed, engagement, even ephemerality. Challenging the often feeble distinction between realism and modernist anti-representational technics, Anand's radio writing captures the contradictions of combined but uneven development.

‘Afterwards to see a Cinema show’: The diary of a London cinema-goer in 1915

This article examines the records of cinema-going contained in the unpublished 1915 diary of Archibald Walker, a young, upper-middle-class ‘man about town’ living in wartime London. It considers the role of cinema in the context of Walker’s everyday life, and uses his diary to reconstruct a snapshot of the contemporary entertainment landscape of London’s West End. It then situates cinema in relation to two other West End leisure venues that Walker frequented: the variety theatre and the gentlemen’s club.

Cityscape, soundscape, timescape: Wartime London, Paris and the aural poetics of urban space

Cityscape, soundscape, timescape: Wartime London, Paris and the aural poetics of urban space

The Polish-Czechoslovak Confederation Project in British Policy, 1939-1943: A Federalist Alternative to Postwar Settlement in East Central Europe?

This article examines the Polish-Czechoslovak confederation project of 1939-1943, which was seen by its proponents in wartime London as the core of a potential Central European Federation. The author devotes special attention to British policy, as it helps not only to understand how the project fitted into British and Allied post-war planning, but also to reveal the various alternatives that were being considered for postwar settlement in East Central Europe. The main reason for the confederation project’s failure was the well-known Soviet veto. However, there were other factors that made the USSR’s policy so decisive.

Pound for pound champions: the myth of the Blitz spirit in British newspaper discourses of the City and economy after the 7 July bombings

This paper analyses the myth of the Blitz spirit in British newspaper discourses of the City and economy after the London bombings on 7 July 2005. The Blitz spirit is a popular story of Britain during the Second World War, uniting together with defiance and resilience to overcome the threat of invasion from Nazi Germany. Through Barthes’ model of myth, this paper discusses the myth of the Blitz spirit in memories of wartime London. A critical discourse analysis then explores the ideological impact of Blitz spirit discourses in hyperbolised coverage of City traders and the economy in 2005. I argue that the ideological complexities of Western economics and the free market were suppressed by a myth that sought to bind social classes together through evocations of British, wartime solidarity and defiance. But, this paper also argues that Blitz spirit evocations among City traders were contradicted by discourses that discussed British citizens as consumers through anxieties about the economy after the bombings.

Pamela Churchill, Wartime London, and the Making of the Special Relationship

Pamela Churchill, Wartime London, and the Making of the Special Relationship

South Asians Writing Resistance in Wartime London

The title of the magazine Indian Writing (IW), edited by four South Asian writer-activists – Iqbal Singh, Ahmed Ali, Krishnarao Shelvankar and Alagu Subramaniam – in wartime London suggests both it...