The People's War: Britain, 1939-1945

by Angus Calder

The Second World War was, for Britain, a 'total war'; no section of society remained untouched by military conscription, air raids, the shipping crisis and the war economy. In this comprehensive and engrossing narrative Angus Calder presents not only the great events and leading figures but also the oddities and banalities of daily life on the Home Front, and in particular the parts played by ordinary air raid wardens and Home Guards, factory workers and farmers, housewives and pacifists. Above all this revisionist and important work reveals how, in those six years, the British people came closer to discarding their social conventions than at any time since Cromwell's republic.Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys prize in 1970, The Peoples War draws on oral testimony and a mass of neglected social documentation to question the popularised image of national unity in the fight for victory.

Genres: History, World War II, Nonfiction, British Literature, War, Research, London

672 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Angus Lindsay Ritchie Calder was a Scottish academic, writer, historian, educator and literary editor with a background in English literature, politics and cultural studies.

He was a man of the Left, and in his influential book on the home front in the Second World War, The People's War (1969), he complained that the postwar reforms of the Labour government, such as universal health care and nationalization of some industries, were an inadequate reward for wartime sacrifices, and a cynical betrayal of the people's hope for a more just postwar society.

Other books include Revolutionary Empire (1981), The Myth of the Blitz (1991) and Revolving Culture: Notes from the Scottish Republic (1994).

Reviews

[Maru Kun · Rating 5 out of 5]

Plague won’t end inequality. It’s not the fourteenth century, and modern medicine means the average plague will only kill a few hundred million at most - not enough to change much of anything. If we want a more equal society, our best hope is mass mobilization warfare.

That, at least, was the dire prediction made in the excellent The Great Leveler (the reasons for this are discussed in my review). Recent events, plus a reading of “The People’s War”, seem to bear this prediction out.

"The People's War" is a comprehensive history of the home front in the United Kingdom during the Second World War. Every patriot knows about the Battle of Britain, Spitfires, Churchill, Anderson Shelters, the Home Guard, Dunkirk, Evacuees, Bevin Boys, V1s and V2s and that handy favorite of any Tory MP wheedling on about bootstraps and the Great Society while he closes the local library - Blitz spirit.

What’s left out of the reminiscences of those most nostalgic for World War Two (generally Brexiteers, pub bores and the few remaining Tory voters who all, coincidentally, were born just a few years too late to have actually taken part in it) is the overwhelming support WW2 engendered for a fairer society, ultimately embodied in the Beveridge report on poverty and the creation of the NHS.

The promise of a place at the back of the dole queue was not much of a promise for a soldier on the Western Front. And the country was sufficiently united by a common purpose (fighting the Germans) rather than divided by unscrupulous politicians (as it is today) that the government of the 1940s felt compelled to take some initiative against national poverty and for national health - something difficult to imagine ever happening in the 2020s.

“Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it” is always worth bringing out at some point. I was particularly struck by “The People’s War”s section on the UK medical system pre the National Health Service (the NHS was formed further to Beveridge's white paper in 1944).

This pre NHS system is so strikingly similar to where the NHS is heading today that it almost took my breath away. It’s worth going over a few details.

To quote a contemporaneous American authority on the changes: "The British have a socialized medical service simply because of the deplorable state of the old medical system." In the typical British fashion of half hearted amateurishness the UK government had little grasp even on how many hospitals were in the country until 1938 when it finally carried out a survey.

The pre NHS system consisted of two main components: the first part was over a thousand voluntary hospitals, not under public control, including prestigious teaching hospitals. The second part was public hospitals run by local authorities.

The voluntary, private hospitals relied on donations. But due to rising medical costs which private charity could not sustain, they had begun selling advertising space on their walls to patent medicine companies. The competition among these hospitals often led to wasteful expenditures on expensive new equipment, aimed more at impressing patients than providing comprehensive care.

A captive audience for high value drugs and the over-supply of overpriced medical equipment? Enough to make Baroness Mone drool.

This parallel system of private and public hospitals created numerous distortions. For instance, private hospitals preferred treating spectacular, curable cases over chronic patients, who posed financial risks (ironically a mirroring of the wants of today’s pharmaceutical companies, that prefer incurable diseases needing prescriptions for life rather than offering any definitive cures).

Voluntary hospitals usually handled short-stay cases, transferring chronic cases to municipal institutions, an early and classic case of socializing the costs and privatizing the profits that any modern Tory would be proud to see.

Geographic disparities in health care were also stark; for example, the wealthy London suburb of Kensington had seven times as many doctors per capita as South Shields, a depressed area in the northeast.

These disparities are still being fed today, exemplified by the crisis in UK dental care. For readers of this review from a developed country rather than an un-developing one like the UK, this crisis was illustrated by the situation in St. Paul's, a poor district in Bristol, where police intervention was necessary when the first NHS dental practice opened after more than two years. The police had to intervene to handle the crowds that came to try and sign up. Ukrainian refugees have returned home due to the superior dental care available there compared to the UK.

Some of the objectives outlined in the original 1944 NHS white paper, such as preventative medicine, seem as good as forgotten today. It's also notable that the British Medical Association (BMA) was initially opposed to the NHS, a stance not shared by the majority of doctors, sixty percent of whom supported the government's proposals more or less unreservedly. The BMA then carried out one of the earliest and most determined pressure group campaigns against the NHS, ultimately failing. I wonder if they would have failed today.

So, overall a great history book, and like all great history books one that has important lessons for how to run a country still. Unfortunately the majority of our MPs seem unable to read more than a tweet, so I suspect those lessons will remain unlearned.

[Marguerite Kaye · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read this before, but I went back to it after reading The Postmistress, to catch up on the detail of the Blitz.

I met Angus Calder at an Open University summer school, where I went to one of his lectures. He was part responsible for designing my favourite ever OU course, the Enlightenment. A bit of legend for lots of reasons in OU world, but regardless, IMHO a great writer with a real talent for making history accessible.

The Peopele's War is quite old (1969) and so a bit dated theory-wise, but it was one of the first books to question the whole myth of the great British spirit and the participation of the 'ordinary' person in the war. Whether you agree or not, Calder comes up with a brilliant mix of anecdotes, personal histories and actual facts which are persuasive and more importantly (unless you're writing a paper) entertaining. He was the first writer to bring the experience of the Home Front during WWII alive to me, and the first of the new breed of social historians that I read too. So maybe my rating is biased, but I'd highly recommend this to anyone interested in knowing a bit more without wanting to get too bogged down in academic arguements.

[Jarvo · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second world war holds a unique place in Britain's collective memory. It is forever remembered n the word's of Churchill (a great war leader but unfortunately also a great maker of myths) as our finest hour. It provides the go to sources of images and inspiration in times of difficulty. Hence lock down is now synonymous with Captain Tom, and the late Vera Lynn's 'we'll met again'. Hell, when the supermarket shelves were empty we even thought that a bit of rationing might do us good.

If you are at all like me and were brought up with war films on the TV every Sunday afternoon, your tendency was to try and find a more global view of things. You find out more about the conflict in the pacific, in which Britain has a very small part, and about Japan's war with China which is more or less untouched by western histories. You discover what total war meant on the eastern front, where Soviet losses in single battles were greater than British losses (soldiers and civilians) in the war as a whole. You can find perspectives from which our role in the whole affair was quite small.

Angus Calder's classic work of social history provides a suitable corrective. Living in Britain through the war might not have been like living in Leningrad, bit every aspect of life was transformed, even the details of the hours people worked takes the breath away. Calder makes broader points about the way society was, and wasn't, 'leveled-up' during the war and the impact this had on the creation of a welfare state. Ultimately there were few lasting moves to greater work place democracy, but some quite significant changes to health, social welfare, and education. This is a long book, which begins and ends brilliantly, but which might have too much detail for some in the middle.

[Martin Empson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful book.
Full review: http://resolutereader.blogspot.co.uk/...

[Jim Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a long book, but Calder wrote with a lightness of touch and wit that makes the topic, the British home front during World War II, easy to absorb. And it's a comprehensive work, probably the most comprehensive when published (1969) and still useful. This is not a military history, although Calder does provide a good overview of the events of 1940 as they were directly felt in Britain. Most of the discussion of military matters concerns how civilians responded to the changing war. Besides the USSR probably no other country imposed a system of such severe regimentation on its civilians as did Britain. All able-bodied men and women were expected to support the war effort directly, as members of the armed forces, workers in defense industries, workers on farms (the Women's Land Army helped mobilize labor to replace farmers and farm workers who were serving in the forces), or by volunteering time for civil defense. Rationing was severe, particularly in the area of clothing and household goods. There was no petro for private use after 1940, and even the beer was adulterated to save essentials grains.
One aspect covered in the book is the ineptness of the government's initial response to the war. A good example is the evacuation of children from cities at the war's beginning. Children were relocated from major cities, such as London, out of a fear that they would be injured in bombing attacks. The relocation program had not been well planned and it was poorly implemented. Schools were not well prepared for the relocation and many hosts and guests found themselves experiencing what we would call "culture shock." In addition, there was no bombing for the first 8 months of the war. As a result most children returned home too soon.
A similar failure was seen in the initial response to the Blitz in London. Because of a failure of government and non-governmental relief organizations many people were left without shelter and adequate food. Some services were improvised by members of the effected communities. The use of the Tube stations as deep shelters became a necessity due to the severity of the attacks and the lack of resources. Later services would be better organized by government.
The war brought out a sense of purpose for many and a willingness, at least at first, to "do something." This is perhaps best illustrated by the massive response to calls for volunteers for the Home Guard.
Politics during the war was rather static, especially from the creation of the collation government to mid-1944. Some political conflict did arise over labor policy. Later in the war, after the publication of the Beveridge Report, political conflict began to creep back into public life. Churchill would lose the election of 1945 because he misjudged the temperament of his country; the British people had been willing to sacrifice for the common good of winning the war and because of those sacrifices they expected a more open, equitable and just social order.
Calder gives a good account of the intellectual life of the country during the war including popular culture, such as movies and the BBC, and the more serious arts.
The book is well documented, with extensive footnotes to official sources and works published during the war. As Calder mentions it was one of the absurdities of a Britain dealing with extensive rationing that due to the fact that there were so few other consumer goods being produced the period was a good one for book publishers. The increased money that everyone had during the war could only be spent on a limited range of goods so the arts and popular amusements had "a very good war."
The war greatly changed British society. It is fair to say that the war led to the creation of the NHS, because the existing public and charity hospitals were not adequate to meet the needs that it created. The war led to a large investment in public housing, something that even the collation government encouraged, to replace the destroyed stock of private housing. Regimentation of industry and labor would provide the post-war Labour government with a template for the nationalization of major industries. And a weakened and poorer Britain, while on the winning side, would see its role in the post-war world curtailed from a world to a regional power.

[Peter Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a monumental work. It's also very comprehensive. But at just shy of 600 pages, it does leave you wishing that the war had been a bit shorter, perhaps by 200 pages or so.

It's not a challenging read, but for all of the use of the word 'People' in the title, it is pretty much the establishment's war. There are few voices in there from the actual people themselves. It also manages to feel Londoncentric. Scotland and other areas only make fleeting visits.

This having been said, it is still something that is worth reading.

[Beverly Keenan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite boring as it did not seem to include any class analysis regarding the inequality during the war, we weren’t all in it together then and we aren’t now.

[JW · Rating 4 out of 5]

The TL; DR could be “The Revolution never came”. But to be serious, you should read this book (and it’s not too long). Calder wrote an excellent socio-political history of Britain in World War II, although surely further research since 1969 (the publication date) may have changed our picture of the British Home Front. Would the author have reconsidered his disappointment with the state of England when victory came? Most likely not.

[Simon Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOST WORLDS

I had a sense, when reading Angus Calder's seminal "The Peoples War", of not just visiting one lost world (that of the home front during the second world war), but also that of the time the book was written in, late 1960's Britain; and not just because of (thankfully rare) sentences such as "For the New Britain rearmament meant a gay boom in aircraft production." The books discussions of the social and economic circumstances of wartime Britain are clearly written in pre-Neo Liberal times, when a mixed economy, a welfare state, and social cohesion were regarded as the norm. One could hardly imagine a writer tackling the vast subject of the home front in quite the same manner as Angus Calder did forty years ago, and his book is none the worse for that. On the contrary therein lies much of it's value in that "The Peoples War" allows the reader a double dose of time travelling: explicitly to the wartime 1940's, and implicitly to the post-war consensus that was still alive when this book was written.

At nearly 600 pages plus footnotes, bibliographical essay and index this book is difficult to pick up, but it is even more difficult to put down. Calder chronicles the home front in Britain, from the phoney war (called "The Bore War" at the time) to the general election which saw a landslide victory for the Labour Party in summer 1945, and reflects on a number of events in-between including the ascendancy of Churchill, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, rationing, evacuation, the mobilization of people and economy for the wartime struggle, the planning for a "peoples" post war Britain that would embrace all classes, and the V-weapon attacks.

Calder makes use of a vast amount of sources including Government records, the archives of Mass Observation whose job it was to gauge the mood of the British throughout the war, newspapers and memoirs. This vast mountain of information is intermixed with revealing and apposite anecdotes, and rendered in a readable prose that is at times melancholy and sad, though just as often wry and funny.

It's heartening that this piece of exemplarily social and political writing is still in print after four decades. It gives the reader a many-dimensioned picture of the effect that the war had on the home front. Additionally it tells the story of how the post-war consensus including education, social security, the National Health Service, nationalisation, etc went through its birth pangs. A good part of British Politics since the mid 1970's has been the story of the rolling back of the gains made during the war and in the immediate post war years, and part of the importance of this book is in its telling the story of how that consensus came about. A well recommended read.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must buy this - I read it for a paper I did for my master's degree and I remember it was a revelation to me.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very thought provoking.