In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, a new urgency has come to asking questions about developments in British identity. This book explores the imaginative appeal of the island, which has always resonated strongly in Britain, dealing with developments in local and national identity broadly concerning the period 1930â1969, with a final chapter on 1995 to the present. Whilst considering the national and global scales is always relevant, the book focuses on a very local scale, using a regional study to unravel the motif of the island, and showing how deeply embedded this island thinking has been both on micro-scales and at the level of the nation. My focus is on coastal Suffolk in the east of England, a mostly flat land leading to heaths, marshes, rivers and the North Sea. This little patch of the country is closed in on the south by the River Orwell, on the west by the road from Ipswich, on the north by the River Blyth and the village of Southwold, and on the east by the sea. Referred to as an âisland within an islandâ, this corner of England provides fascinating stories of a nation looking both outwards and inwards, trying to understand itself. As the countryside was given greater importance in mapping out Englishness during the twentieth century, this area was characterised as giving a glimpse into a more authentic, older version of England. It was also home to the early developments in radar, the project to âmake Britain an island againâ after the early twentieth-century advances in aerial warfare had raised fears of Britainâs vulnerability to aerial attack. Post-war narratives of radarâs development there extended the motif of the âisland nationâ and the myth of the âheroâs warâ.
Following the Second World War , the tendency to look to the skies for invaders carried on in another guise, as a craze in amateur studies of bird migration saw the nationâs coast become dotted with bird observatories in a chain reminiscent of the wartime chain of radar stations. Described as âthe heritage we are fighting forâ during the war, birds and their watchers provide interesting insights into contemporary cultural imagination and identity. In another intermingling of war and birds, wartime flooding prompted the return of the avocet to this area of the country, the protection of which sparked a key episode in the history of British nature conservation . The avocetâs protection in the late 1940s was full of ex-servicemen and behaviour that seemed to reenact wartime watching and guarding and the recovery from violent wartime experience through reorientation to local nature. The project of creating British nature reserves took off in earnest in the post-war years, raising questions about exactly which ânatureâ was seen as in need of setting aside as islands of conservation. The reserves created for the avocets on the Suffolk coast, Minsmere and Havergate Island, provide a window into the changing attitudes to nature in the 1950s and 1960s. Finally, ideas of conservation and heritage took another form much later in this same area, when a former military-scientific research site became a National Trust nature reserve in 1995. Referred to by locals as âthe Islandâ, Orford Ness and the experiences there allow us to trace contemporary formulations of wildness, war and nation.
In John Gillisâ book, Islands of the Mind (2004), he explores how islands have occupied a central place in the collective imagination and history of the Western world. As he claims, âwestern culture not only thinks about islands, but thinks with themâ (Gillis 2004, 1). Focusing specifically on the island-as-nation metaphor, Fiona Polack writes that âan islandâs boundaries provide the sort of fixed limits that make it a perfect microcosm of ⊠national concernsâ that are âless easily containable or comprehensible in other locationsâ (Polack 1998, 217). This book explores narratives of isolation and enclosure in the run-up to and aftermath of the Second World War , with a final chapter on memorialisation of twentieth-century warfare. It uses a variety of narratives about the region of coastal Suffolk to unpick layers connecting to ideas of England, its national past, its nature, its relationship with militarisation, and our place in it. In a world in which English nationalism has been on the rise for some time, some have argued that the Brexit vote should primarily be understood as a response to Englandâs loss of faith in the once-glorious British project, or what political commentator Anthony Barnett (2017) refers to as âthe lure of greatnessâ. This book explores developments in how the nation related to itself during the mid-twentieth-century fall of the empire, using a highly local focus to trace broader themes of isolation, defence, heritage and nostalgia.
1 Island Nation
In 1940, Graham Clark wrote that âWe are so accustomed to think of ourselves as islanders that we sometimes tend to forget that Britain is part of the European continent from which she has at certain intervals in her history become temporarily detachedâ (Clark 1940, 1). This was not part of a political text, but the beginning of a book on Prehistoric England, one of the new âBritish Heritage Seriesâ that the publisher Batsford had begun the year before. Literature about the countryside had grown in popularity in the 1930s in what geographer Catherine Leyshon (see Brace 2003) has called the popular discovery of the countryside. During the Second World War , the countryside focus grew to encompass the nationâs heritage and its nature, and the English countryside was presented as what the âpeopleâs warâ fought to protect. The special importance of the countryside during the Second World War can be seen in J. B. Priestleyâs popular âPostscriptâ broadcasts, many of which referred to the countryside. In a particular broadcast in June 1940, he spoke of a âpowerful and rewarding sense of communityâ experienced in the countryside, when he spent a night with the local village guard helping keep âwatch and ward over the sleeping English hills and fields and homesteadsâ (Priestley 1940, 12). Continuing his study of the deep heritage of the island nation, Graham Clark wrote that âFrom the moment that geographical continuity with the continent was broken our insularity became a factor of immense significanceâ, since Britain existed âwithin a barrier behind which we could develop our own distinctive civilisationâ. The separation also came with the threat of these barriers being penetrated, however, as Britain became the ânatural victim of those who coveted her natural wealthâ, and Clark describes the âwaves of invadersâ over the few thousand years of Britainâs history (Clarke 1940, 5, 8).
There is a slippage from England to Britain between Priestleyâs and Clarkâs 1940s narratives, and this shifting scale of reference will recur throughout this book. For many of those who we will encounter, the frame of reference is England and Englishness. Indeed, the identification of England with the island, although false, has been âan unwavering one among English writers and other English peopleâ (Beer 1990, 269). This quote is from literary scholar Gillian Beer, who argues that âThe island has seemed the perfect form in the English cultural imagining ⊠Defensive, secure, compacted, even paradisalâ (Beer 1990, 269). That appeal can be seen in another of Batsfordâs series, the Face of Britain, which included John Inghamâs book on The Islands of England. Many of Inghamâs claims about âisland feverâ seem to operate on a double level, referring to the national âislandâ at the same time as the smaller islands within the archipelago. As Ingham put it, âthe lure of islands never fades; it is as old as it is irresistible; and who among us, at one time or another, has not dreamt of possessing a small, self-sufficient kingdom of his own? Perhaps we English, with our insatiable curiosity about the sea, and reared on a tradition of Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson, are particularly prone to this emotionâ (Ingham 1952, 14). Ingham attributes his interest in islands to Ronald Lockley, a naturalist who pioneered the establishment of bird observatories on the islands around Britain, beginning on his island of Skokholm in the mid-1930s, and expanding around the nationâs shores in the late 1940s and 1950s. Like Ingham, Lockleyâs Islands Round Britain describes how âThere is something about a small island that satisfies the heart of manâ, going on to discuss the feelings of ownership and control over the place: âa kingdom of our own set in the silver seaâ (Lockley 1945, 8).
Sea is as important as land for the island concept, as Beer observesâland surrounded by sea, offering a vast extension of the island, and allowing the psychic size of the body politic to expand, bumping into othersâ territory. From the early twentieth century and through the period considered by this book, the âislandâ of Britain was seen anew in two important aspects. With the rise of the aeroplane, it was seen from above, challenging the notion of the seaâs extension. As H. G. Wells commented in 1927, you cannot fly to dominions around the empire without âinfringing foreign territoryâ, whereas it had been possible in the steam-ship era to sail from England around the empire through international waters, which are requisitioned as part of the island (Wells 1928, 131). Seen from the perspective of the aeroplane, the island seemed suddenly much more fragile. As Wellsâ quote reminds us, along with the sea, the empire was the second great extension of the island nation, and the second to be lost in the twentieth century. Vulnerable , and reduced in size, what would happen to the island nationâs view of itself, an England that was suddenly c...