British Cultural Memory and the Second World War

Lucy Noakes, Juliette Pattinson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781441142269
• eBook ISBN: 9781441149275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Few historical events have resonated as much in modern British culture as the Second World War. It has left a rich legacy in a range of media that continue to attract a wide audience: film, TV and radio, photography and the visual arts, journalism and propaganda, architecture, museums, music and literature. The enduring presence of the war in the public world is echoed in its ongoing centrality in many personal and family memories, with stories of the Second World War being recounted through the generations. This collection brings together recent historical work on the cultural memory of the war, examining its presence in family stories, in popular and material culture and in acts of commemoration in Britain between 1945 and the present.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: ‘Keep calm and carry on’

The cultural memory of the Second World War in Britain

Lucy Noakes and Juliette Pattinson

When the England football team played Germany in the European Championships in 1996, the Daily Mirror’s front cover superimposed tin hats on photographs of two England players, Stuart Pearce and Paul Gascoigne. This was accompanied by an article headed ‘Pearce in our time’ which reworked Chamberlain’s declaration of war speech of September 1939:

I am writing to you from the Editor’s office at Canary Wharf, London. Last night the Daily Mirror’s ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their football team from Wembley, a state of soccer war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently we are at soccer war with Germany …¹

The adage ‘Two world wars and one world cup’ references England’s previous victories. Indeed, the 1966 World Cup had featured in the 1969 film of the popular television series Till Death Us Do Part (1965–8, 1970, 1972–5). The main character, Alf Garnett, attends the England–West Germany final and, following the opposition’s first goal, taps a cheering German supporter on the shoulder, saying ‘Same as in the war mate, same as in the war. Started it off well, started off well but got well clobbered in the end, didn’t ya?’² The war is such a key aspect of British national identity that popular culture, in this case newspapers and film, frequently invokes it for comedic purposes.

Indeed, few historical events have resonated as fully in modern British culture as the Second World War. Despite it receding further into the distant past with that generation’s passing, it continues to have a lingering and very vivid presence in British popular culture so that even those who were born in its aftermath have particular ‘memories’ of it. Later generations have acquired a learned historical memory informed by successive narratives conveyed in a range of media, thereby adopting the memories as their own. As Geoff Eley asserts, ‘“Remembering” World War II requires no immediate experience of those years.’³ The memory of the war, which has remained potent and present throughout the past 70 years, has left a rich legacy in a range of media that continues to attract a wide audience: film, television and radio, photography and the visual arts, journalism and propaganda, architecture, museums, music and literature. The British memory of the war has also been maintained through cultural artefacts such as model aeroplanes and replica clothing, as well as mugs and bags adorned with punchy slogans such as ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’, and has lived on in advertising slogans such as those for Shepherd Neame’s Spitfire beer: ‘The Bottle of Britain’; ‘Downed all over Kent, Just like the Luftwaffe’; ‘No Fokker Comes Close’.

As Geoff Eley’s foreword to this volume notes, the memory of the Second World War has become increasingly visible, and contested, in post-Cold War Europe. The numerous acts of memorialization and commemoration that have taken place since 1989 can be understood, at one level, as a means of attempting to assert a continuity between a rapidly changing present and a shared past. At the same time, because of the difficult and contested status of much of what is being ‘remembered’, these acts become sites of struggle.⁴ In some instances, most visibly but not exclusively in Eastern and Central Europe, as Adam Krzeminski has argued, ‘the Second World War is still being fought’, albeit this time with museums and memorials, rather than armour and artillery.⁵ The existence of national myths and memories of the Second World War is not, of course, anything new. Many nations have looked back to the war years, in different contexts, as a touchstone for their ‘sense of self’ in the post-war period. In France, for example, the cultural memory of the war focused for a long time on resistance: a memory increasingly challenged and undermined by questions around collaboration which began to open up after 1968.⁶ In the Soviet satellite states of Eastern and Central Europe, and the former states of the USSR, memory of Nazi occupation was first framed by, and then overlaid with, the experience and memory of Soviet occupation. Entry tickets for the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, 1940–1991, for example, stated that ‘the Museum shows what happened to Latvia, its lands and people under two occupying totalitarian regimes from 1940 to 1991’.⁷ Over all of this lies the cultural memory of the Holocaust, increasingly positioned not only as the defining event of the Second World War, but as the defining event of the European twentieth century. In Tony Judt’s striking phrase, the Holocaust has become the ‘entry ticket’ to contemporary Europe.⁸ Despite its geographical isolation from mainland Europe, which protected it from the worst of the suffering that came with invasion, occupation, bombardment and internment during the war, Britain has not been immune to the impact of these ‘memory wars’, as the battle over the cultural memory of the war is restaged across a range of cultural texts, including academic and popular histories, museums and memorials. In recent years, for example, the isolated position of Britain in Europe in 1940 has been mobilized in support of opposition to British membership of the European Union,⁹ while historians have fought over the historical memory of the ‘people’s war’ and the meanings of consensus in the post-war period.¹⁰

The enduring presence of the war in all aspects of the public world is mirrored in its ongoing centrality in many personal and family memories, with stories of the Second World War being recounted through the generations. Many of the stories entered on the BBC’s ‘People’s War’ website, for example, were not written by those with personal experience of the war years, but by their families, using the space of the website to recount the stories that had circulated in their family and to open these up to a wider audience. One of the BBC’s recommended entries on the website, entitled ‘Coventry wartime memories: The night of the 14th’, begins with the statement ‘This is the story of my parents’, and, after vividly recounting their experiences of the bombing of Coventry in November 1940, concludes that the entry was written ‘as a tribute to my mother’ who ‘used to reminisce about the days in Coventry and say that she should have written about it.’¹¹ Marianne Hirsch, in her work on the ongoing impact of the Holocaust on survivors and their descendents, developed the term ‘postmemory’ to describe the multifarious means by which past events continue to shape the lives of survivors’ families.¹² While Hirsch is writing specifically about the long afterlife of particularly traumatic memories, the continuing presence of the Second World War in twenty-first-century Britain suggests that the legacy of other events, not necessarily always experienced or remembered as traumatic, continues to frame family relationships and identities. Family stories, alongside medals, photographs and the other material artefacts of war, are often preserved within families, forming intergenerational links and shared points of reference.

Thus, the cultural memory of the war, which is present in family stories, in popular and material culture and in acts of commemoration in Britain between 1945 and the present, includes both personal memories and narratives of war as well as publicly produced war memories. These ‘texts of memory’¹³ are produced in the present, and are not a direct representation of events of the past; they have to be understood within the historical context of their creation and articulation.

Conceptualizing memory

Memory itself is a notoriously slippery term, one which can act to disguise the production of particular representations of the past as much as it enables analysis of this production. While memory may be understood in an everyday sense as the processes through which individuals store and recount past events, simply remembering what happened, memory itself, on both an individual and a cultural level, is anything but straightforward. On an individual level, and with the exception of a small number of memory savants, we select and interpret events from our lives, ordering them and drawing on them in order to create a narrative of who we are. Memory thus involves forgetting, as much as it does remembering. As the Popular Memory Group argued in 1982, we structure our memories to make sense of our past and present lives.¹⁴ These individual memories, however, do not exist in a vacuum; they are shaped by time and place, by the forces of history, politics, culture, the economy and more that form the worlds in which we live. As Annette Kuhn asserts: ‘If the memories are one individual’s, their associations extend far beyond the personal. They spread into an extended network of meanings that bring together the personal with the familial, the cultural, the economic, the social and the historical.’¹⁵ These forces provide not only the conditions for remembering and forgetting, but, arguably, the very language with which memories can be articulated. For example, in Alistair Thomson’s oral history of the experience of Australian First World War soldiers, he found that many of the men that he interviewed made sense of their experiences by drawing on what he termed ‘the myth’ of the Anzac experience, with some relating scenes from the popular 1981 film Gallipoli as if they were their own personal experience.¹⁶ Similarly, Penny Summerfield explored the ways that many of the women that she interviewed for Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives made use of existing ideas about the Second World War, emphasizing stoicism, adventure and the forces of modernization and tradition to compose memories of their wartime selves which made sense in the present.¹⁷ Formulations of memory may be, on one essential level, psychological, but they are also social and cultural.

Some individual memories, of course, deny composure, the two-fold process described by Graham Dawson as both the process of ‘composing’ memories so that they may be spoken or shared, and the achievement of personal composure through this process.¹⁸ Experiences may not have been fully processed by the individual, and thus composure has yet to be attained. Most dramatically, the experience of events that we might understand as traumatic and as outside of everyday understanding are recalled differently than more mundane episodes. Some might recall vividly every harrowing detail, others report without emotion and with matter-of-fact detachment, while so...

Table of contents

• FC
• Half title
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword: Memory and the historians: Ordinary life, eventfulness and the instinctual past by Geoff Eley
• 1  Introduction: ‘Keep calm and carry on’: The cultural memory of the Second World War in Britain
• 2  The generation of memory: Gender and the popular memory of the Second World War in Britain
• 3  ‘War on the Web’: The BBC’s ‘People’s War’ website and memories of fear in wartime in 21st-century Britain
• 4  The people’s war in personal testimony and bronze: Sorority and the memorial to The Women of World War II
• 5  ‘When are you going back?’ Memory, ethnicity and the British Home Front
• 6  Remembering war, forgetting empire? Representations of the North African Campaign in 1950s British cinema
• 7  ‘A story that will thrill you and make you proud’: The cultural memory of Britain’s secret war in Occupied France
• 8  The ‘missing chapter’: Bomber Command aircrew memoirs in the 1990s and 2000s
• 9  Total war and total anniversary: The material culture of Second World War commemoration in Britain
• 10  Memory, meaning and multidirectionality: ‘Remembering’ austerity Britain
• Index
• Copyright