The Battle of Britain in the Modern Age, 1965–2020

The State's Retreat and Popular Enchantment

Garry Campion

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030261092
• eBook ISBN: 9783030261108
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica

The Battle of Britain has held an enchanted place in British popular history and memory throughout the modern era. Its transition from history to heritage since 1965 confirms that the 1940 narrative shaped by the State has been sustained by historians, the media, popular culture, and through non-governmental heritage sites, often with financing from the National Lottery Heritage Lottery Fund. Garry Campion evaluates the Battle's revered place in British society and its influence on national identity, considering its historiography and revisionism; the postwar lives of the Few, their leaders and memorialization; its depictions on screen and in commercial products; the RAF Museum's Battle of Britain Hall; third-sector heritage attractions; and finally, fighter airfields, including RAF Hawkinge as a case study. A follow-up to Campion's The Battle of Britain, 1945–1965 (Palgrave, 2015), this book offers an engaging, accessible study of the Battle's afterlives in scholarship, memorialization, and popular culture.

© The Author(s) 2019

G. CampionThe Battle of Britain in the Modern Age, 1965–2020https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26110-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Longest Enchantment?: The Battle of Britain in Society and Culture, 1965–2020

Garry Campion¹

(1)

Great Doddington, UK

Garry Campion

End Abstract

Adapting Braudel

The basic premise of this book is a simple one: that the State’s muscular championing of the Few’s prowess during the Battle of Britain was a mantle eventually assumed by the voluntary sector from the 1970s, which has remained significant to the present time. ¹ Whilst the State—namely the government, and the Air Ministry—were active in establishing and promoting the Battle of Britain as a decisive wartime event into the later 1950s, thereafter official interest fell away even before Churchill’s death in 1965. The reasons for this are not wholly clear but were in part shaped by a sense that the Few—an elite—had had considerable adulation since 1940, and others—the Many—deserved credit too. Thus, during the 1960s and 1970s both Conservative and Labour governments shied away from any further official commemoration of the RAF’s fighter pilots through monuments and memorials. ²

The period from 1965 to 2020 therefore witnessed the transition from history to heritage, this becoming more apparent during the 1970s with the establishment of the Battle of Britain Museum at the Hendon RAF Museum site—initially a voluntary initiative—and other nascent museums established by individuals and groups. Except for the RAF Museum which has benefited from some State funding, private groups, or individuals in the voluntary, or third sector, have established all monuments, memorials, museums, and heritage sites during the last forty years or so. ³

To understand this transition, we should briefly consider the eighty years since 1940, which is also explored in more detail in the latter part of this chapter. Culturally, the Few’s valorisation and subsequent legendary fame in private and popular memory ⁴ evolved in three key stages: the first was the journalism and propaganda of the event itself during 1940; the second, from 1941, its wartime propaganda and post-war history up to the mid-1960s, when historical accounts simply repeated earlier narratives; and the third, its progression from history to heritage, ⁵ more evident from the later 1970s to 2020. These three dimensions intertwine and overlap each other, much in the way that the influential and celebrated French historian Fernand Braudel ⁶ argued that ‘[H]istory may be divided into three movements: what moves rapidly, what moves slowly and what appears not to move at all’. ⁷ It is useful here to consider this model further (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Adapting Braudel’s historical structures framework (Compiled by the author)

Braudel had developed this approach in response to his assessment that ‘time moves at different speeds’, and specifically, the problems of reflecting this in his magnum opus on the Mediterranean during the age of Phillip II. ⁸ Therein, Braudel favoured an approach acknowledging the longue durée, or longer-term historical structures of underlying significance. This could be characterised, he suggested, as ‘the history of man in relation to his surroundings’, and that ‘which unfolds slowly and is slow to alter, often repeating itself and working itself out in cycles which are endlessly renewed’. ⁹ The intermediate aspect in Braudel’s model was social history as it related to change or stasis within populations and economies over long periods of time, perhaps centuries. ¹⁰ Braudel likened this aspect to ‘a history of gentle rhythms, of groups and groupings, which one might readily have called social history [as originally understood by the term]’. ¹¹ Here, ‘economies and states, societies and civilizations’ acted as ‘deep-running currents’ affecting the surface, but more, how these might come into play within the context of war through actual conflict and emerging military technologies. ¹²

His final, more familiar element in historical practice is the history of events, l’histoire événementielle . Here, evental history, often the preserve of the journalist or chronicler recording and analysing short-term events, focused upon specific dates and personalities, and was central to the narrative, often involving politics. This aspect is that which corresponds most closely to the Battle of Britain as an historic event. Interestingly, Braudel viewed this latter aspect of history as ‘surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs’, ¹³ and ‘[A] history of short, sharp, nervous vibrations … [where] the slightest movement sets all its gauges quivering’. ¹⁴ Clearly, Braudel believed that in order to fully understand the historic context of an event, or series of events, it was essential to consider it from different temporal perspectives, yet which were connected within the broader spectrum of the warp and weft of history.

Given the relatively short span of time since 1940 it is clearly not possible to apply Braudel’s model in the manner he developed for his work on the Mediterranean over several centuries, but these principles can be adapted to explain how the Battle of Britain became such a significant event in British popular history and memory. For instance, if we instead modified Braudel’s model so that his l’histoire événementielle refers to the initial period of the Battle’s official history, namely the propaganda war from July to October 1940 based upon air communiques and journalism, this is clearly a period ‘where the slightest movement sets all its gauges quivering’, not least in the claims for aircraft shot down by either side. This is history moving ‘rapidly’, itself capable of being divided into separate phases in tandem with the shifting elements of the air war. ¹⁵

Noted above, the central period of the Battle’s evolving history was from 1941 to the mid-1960s, though the foundations for this period had already been laid by the later 1950s. Adapting Braudel’s model for this middle phase, ‘a history of gentle rhythms’ affecting the surface, it is evident that even by war’s end the popular view of the Battle had already settled, subsequent histories not disturbing this interpretation. Of this period, one can confirm that it appeared to move ‘slowly’, not least in that even by 1957 the narrative established in 1941 was already dominant. Braudel’s the longue durée, which ‘is slow to alter’ and ‘endlessly renewed’, can be equated to the latest phases of the Battle’s historiography, from the latter 1960s to 2020, where heritage, building upon the dominant narrative , reaffirms the key elements through sites, places, memorials, and monuments. With few exceptions this period’s history ‘appears not to move at all’. Unintentionally, the author’s books follow this pattern: The Good Fight reflects l’histoire événementielle ; The Battle of Britain, 1945–1965 captures the middle period when the historiography moves slowly; and this current volume addresses the longue durée, which includes the Battle’s heritage.

Heritage and the Battle of Britain

Heritage is essentially the physical representation of a historic event or events through places, sites, artefacts , and other dedicated media. ¹⁶ Inevitably, heritage evolves from history in the sense that an event must first be identified as significant through its historiography, thereafter being eventually represented through the former examples. ¹⁷ In some instances the memory of a site may be more valuable or evocative in popular or private memory than the physical site itself, the Nazi death camps an example. ¹⁸ Returning to Braudel’s adapted model, his thelongue durée (that period reflecting longer spans of time where history ‘appears not to move at all’), best reflects the Battle’s settled, mostly uncontested place in popular British history. At the Battle’s eightieth anniversary , in addition to its extensive—if narrowly focused and calcified—historiography, it is also necessary to explore its heritage within this wider paradigm, whether through a conserved airfield, visitor attraction or other media initiative to represent it.

A key factor is the Battle’s steady transition from an event familiar to the wartime generation, thence through popular memory to those born during the war, and finally, to one which as time passes, is properly absorbed into ‘history’—in the same manner that the First World War is now perceived. In other words, historiographically, the settled view remains dominant, subsequent revision making little further impact upon how an event is perceived in popular memory. This is not to say that the heritage relating to a specific historical event can only evolve once its historiography has attained a mature, rather unmoving state, but it is fair to say that one generally follows the other. Numerous examples abound of this relationship, especially r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Longest Enchantment?: The Battle of Britain in Society and Culture, 1965–2020
• 2. The Narrow Margin: The Battle of Britain in History, 1965–2020
• 3. An Exceptional Few: Leaders, Heroes and Their Memorialisation
• 4. A Piece of Cake: Consuming the Battle of Britain
• 5. The State’s Retreat?: The RAF Museum and the Battle of Britain Hall, 1978–2016
• 6. Spitfire Summer: Museums and Heritage Sites
• 7. An Enduring Legacy?: Battle of Britain Airfields
• Back Matter