The subsequent debate in parliament on 5 October between pro- and anti-appeasement MPs several times dwelled on the image of bloodshed. Colonel Sandeman Allen praised the prime minister, saying ‘there is no blood on our hands, and there might easily have been so’, mentioning a speech the previous night that had quoted the first chapter of Isaiah: ‘When you come to make prayers, do not have blood on your hands.’ This argument was countered equally effectively by the Welsh MP David Grenfell, who invoked the honour of sacrificing one’s life for the good of the country. He claimed that negotiation with Hitler would lead to the ‘threat of extermination’ for many in Eastern Europe, especially in Czechoslovakia. ‘I can sympathise’, he intoned:

Once the war had started, this motif of spilled blood in the service of protecting one’s country found its most powerful rhetorical performance in Winston Churchill’s speech to parliament on 13 May 1940. Churchill borrowed his imagery from earlier speeches from two very different sources: the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–82), and the former president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919).

The speech was made three days after Churchill became prime minister and came to be famous for the phrase ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’, which he had also used in a speech delivered to his cabinet when he met them earlier that day. The purpose of the parliamentary speech was to recruit support for a new all-party government. In it, he outlined the government’s policy:

Their relationship to meat – as slaughterers, butchers and eaters – was one of the key ways in which the Nazis sought to represent Jews as impure and a danger to ‘civilized’ German society. While on the one hand vegetarian associations were banned in Nazi Germany, key members of the party including Hitler himself paraded their vegetarianism, and Nazi animal protection laws safeguarded animals from ill-treatment. In this scenario, ideologically the Nazis became the protectors of animals, while Jews were vilified for harming them. This negative stereotyping of Jews focused on the act of slaughter, and especially the ways in which they spilled animal blood.

The Nazis were obsessed with kosher slaughter, in which the animal is killed by slitting its throat and allowing the blood to drain out, so the meat can be eaten without blood – as is required by Judaism. To the Nazis this caused needless added suffering to animals, and in their eyes it allowed them to characterize the Jews as vicious animal-haters. Images connected to kosher slaughter featured in the vehemently anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer. An article in 1937 pictured a Jewish man dressed in a long black cloak guiding a cow towards a building, carrying the caption ‘The Jewish butcher leads the cow to the slaughterhouse’. The men in the background, presumably gentile Germans, look on with distaste and alarm.

In a later issue, the subject was further twisted by Nazi propagandists in a more forthright and vivid way. In 1938, a photograph of a dead cow hanging upside down was featured with the title ‘A Horrible Image’. The accompanying article described in gruesome detail the dispatching of the animal – which was slit across the throat to the vertebra, causing blood to spurt all over the walls – and the animal’s attempt at escape, concluding ‘what a horrible death’. The religious nature of slaughter was then introduced, with three photographs of a rabbi opening the wounds and pulling out a lung, into which he must blow to see if the beast is healthy. If it is, then the meat is deemed kosher; if diseased, it would then be sold to non-Jews to eat.

Thus, in an inaccurate caricature of their relationship to blood, Jewish people were branded by Nazis as inhumane killers, and their religious practices were mocked and turned against them as a symbol of their ‘impurity’: a powerful tool indeed for recruitment to the Nazis’ anti-Semitic mission.

The whole operation was an enormous logistical feat, jointly run by the military and the Red Cross. By the end of the war, some 6.7 million volunteers had donated more than 13 million pints of blood. To run this operation, the Blood Donor Service itself had to recruit more than 100,000 volunteer staff, as well as myriad doctors and nurses.

According to one of the first historians of the organization, deliveries involved a range of methods to transport the blood to the furthest theatres of fighting: it was delivered ‘on the backs of mountain-climbing mules, on litters carried by natives in the jungles of the South Pacific, and in planes which at times dropped the plasma by parachutes to troops on land isolated from normal supply’. So successful was the campaign that General Dwight D. Eisenhower commented: ‘If I could reach all America, there is one thing I would like to do – thank them for blood plasma and whole blood. It has been a tremendous thing.’

This was the month in which Churchill delivered his famous speech declaring Britain’s intention to resist German aggression, rousing Britons to fight on the beaches, landing grounds, fields, streets and hills, and never to surrender. When it came, the battle was fought in the skies of southern Britain, as the Germans sought to force Churchill’s hand into a negotiated peace. The bombing of British airfields soon gave way to the bombing of British cities.

It was in this fevered atmosphere that Arthur reappeared. He was a king whose traits and story could be used in a number of ways to bolster the nation’s spirit. As a legendar...