Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T15:09:43.254Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Social Patriotism and the British Working Class: Appearance and Disappearance of a Tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Geoffrey Field
Geoffrey Field
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Purchase
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The study of patriotism and national identity, once left to the likes of Sir Arthur Bryant, has been rediscovered by the mainstream of British historians. One source of this change is the growing influence of anthropology and literary theory on the discipline, encouraging closer attention to ritual, myth, and language. Another is a renewed focus on the modern state and the mechanisms by which it “intervenes” in civil society.

Type
Tradition and the Working Class
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 42 , Fall 1992 , pp. 20 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. See Bryant, Arthur, English Saga, 1840–1940 (London, 1940)Google Scholar and The Story of England (London, 1954)Google Scholar.

2. Nairn, Tom, The Break-Up of Britain (London, 1981).Google Scholar See also, Crozier, M., ed., Varieties of Britishness (Belfast, 1990)Google Scholar.

3. Samuel, Raphael, ed., Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, 3 vols. (London, 1989).Google Scholar On the Falklands conflict, see Aulich, J., ed., Framing the Falklands War. Nationhood, Culture and Identity (Milton Keynes, 1992)Google Scholar.

4. By “social patriotism,” I mean an inwardly focused patriotism, one that is oriented toward domestic social reform and implies some kind of new and improved Britain.

5. Claeys, Gregory, “‘The Lion and the Unicorn,’ Patriotism and Orwell's Politics,” The Review of Politics 47 (April 1985);CrossRefGoogle ScholarLutman, S., “Orwell's Patriotism,” Journal of Contemporary History 2 (1967).CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also, Orwell, George, “Notes on Nationalism” (1945), in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3, ed. Orwell, S. and Angus, I. (New York, 1968)Google Scholar.

6. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities (New York, 1983)Google Scholar.

7. MacKenzie, J.M., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, 1986);Google Scholaridem, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion (Manchester, 1984). See also, Reader, W. J., At Duty's Call. A Study in Obsolete Patriotism (Manchester, 1988);Google ScholarGrainger, J. H., Patriotisms: Britain 1900–1939 (London, 1986);Google ScholarPrice, R., An Imperial War and the British Working Class (London, 1972);Google ScholarCunningham, H., The Volunteer Force (London, 1975)Google Scholar.

8. Mass Observation, May 12th Mass-Observation Day Surveys (London, 1937);Google ScholarCannadine, D., “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the Invention of Tradition,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm, E. J. and Ranger, T. (Cambridge, 1983).Google Scholar See also, Scannell, P. and Cardiff, D., A Social History of British Broadcasting, vol. 1: Serving the Nation (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar.

9. Schwarz, Bill, “The Language of Constitutionalism: Baldwinite Conservatism,” in Formations of Nation and People (London, 1984);Google ScholarRich, Paul B., “British Imperial Decline and the Forging of English Patriotic Memory, c. 1918–1968,” History of European Ideas 9 (1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. McKibbin, Ross, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain 1880–1950 (Oxford, 1990), 24;Google ScholarHolmes, C., Antisemitism in British Society, 1876–1939 (London, 1979);Google Scholaridem, John Bull's Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871–1971 (London, 1988)Google Scholar.

11. Taylor, M., “Patriotism, History and the Left in Twentieth Century Britain,” Historical Journal 33 (1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. Addison, Paul, “Britain and the Politics of Social Patriotism,” in The Second World War as National Experience, ed. Aster, Sidney (Ottawa, 1981), 48.Google Scholar

13. “Cato,” Guilty Men (Gollancz, 1940). The authors were Peter Howard of the Daily Express and Frank Owen and Michael Foot of the Evening Standard. It quickly sold more than 200,000 copies. The decision to release Sir Oswald Mosley from prison in 1943 rekindled working-class indignation over sympathy for fascism in upper-class circles.Google Scholar

14. Orwell, , “The Lion and the Unicorn,” in Collected Essays, vol. 2, 94Google Scholar.

15. Titmuss, R.M., Problems of Social Policy (London, 1950);Google ScholarField, G.G., “Perspectives on the Working-Class Family in Wartime Britain, 1939–45,” International Labor and Working-Class History 38 (Fall 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. Harrisson, T., Living through the Blitz (London, 1976);Google ScholarMorgan, K., Against Fascism and War (Manchester, 1989);Google ScholarCalder, R., The Lesson of London (London, 1941).Google Scholar See also, Thorns, D., War, Industry and Society: The Midlands, 1939–45 (New York, 1989)Google Scholar.

17. Mass Observation, People in Production: An Enquiry into British War Production (London, 1942);Google ScholarPrice, R., Labor in British Society (London, 1986), chap. 7;Google ScholarHinton, J., “Coventry Communism: A Study of Factory Politics in the Second World War,” History Workshop 10 (Autumn 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also, Exell, A., “Morris Motors in the 1940s,” History Workshop 9 (Spring 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. Joyce, P., Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1840–1914 (Cambridge, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. Kushner, Tony, The Persistence of Prejudice: Antisemitism in British Society during the Second World War (Manchester, 1989)Google Scholar.

20. Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. “Out of the People: The Politics of Containment, 1935–45” Working Papers in Cultural Studies 9 (Spring 1976);Google ScholarHall, S., ‘The Social Eye of Picture Post’ Working Papers in Cultural Studies 2 (Spring 1972);Google ScholarConnor, W., The English at War (London, 1941);Google ScholarCostello, D.R., “Searchlight Books and the Quest for a People's War,” Journal of Contemporary History 24 (1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21. McLaine, I., Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (London, 1979). A study of contemporary images of Germans would also throw light on the values and attributes implied by the “People's War.”Google Scholar

22. Priestley, J.B., All England Listened (New York, 1967);Google Scholaridem, Out of the People (New York, 1941). The English countryside was also enshrined as a powerful patriotic symbol, but whereas Baldwin had joined it to Conservatism, Priestley and other wartime writers offered a left-wing variant of the pastoral mythGoogle Scholar.

23. Smith, A. C. H. et al. , Paper Voices: The Popular Press and Social Change, 1935–65 (New Jersey, 1975), chap. 3;Google ScholarConnor, R., Reflections in a Mirror (London, 1969);Google ScholarKimble, P., Newspaper Reading in the Third Year of the War (London, 1942).Google Scholar On Blimp. see Low, D., Autobiography (London, 1956)Google Scholar.

24. Cardiff, D. and Scannell, P., “Serving the Nation: Public Service Broadcasting before the War,” in Popular Culture, Past and Present, ed. Waites, B., Bennett, A., and Thompson, G. (London, 1981);Google Scholaridem. “Broadcasting and National Unity,” in Impacts and Influences: Essays on Media Power in the Twentieth Century, ed. Curran, J.Smith, A., and Wingate, P. (London, 1987);Google ScholarPickles, Wilfred, Between You and Me (London, 1949);Google ScholarWorsley, F., ITMA 1939–48;Google ScholarScannell, P., “Factory Programs for the Workers on British Wartime Radio,” unpublished paper (1991)Google Scholar.

25. Salmon, , quoted by Cardiff, and Scannell, , “Good Luck War Workers! Class, Politics and Entertainment in Wartime Broadcasting,” in Popular Culture and Social Relations. ed. Bennett, A., Mercer, C., and Woolacott, J. (Milton Keynes, 1986), 105Google Scholar.

26. There are many studies of wartime film. Among the most recent are Taylor, P.M., ed., Britain and the Cinema in the Second World War (London, 1988);CrossRefGoogle ScholarAldgate, A. and Richards, J., Britain Can Take It (Oxford, 1986);Google ScholarMurphy, R., Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1938–48 (London, 1989);Google ScholarPronay, N. and Spring, D. W., Propaganda, Politics and Film, 1918–45 (London, 1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar On women in film, see Lant, A., Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema (New Jersey, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27. Hodgkinson, A.W. and Sheratsky, R.E., Humphrey Jennings (1982);Google ScholarColls, R. and Dodd, P., “Representing the Nation: British Documentary Film, 1930–1945,” Screen 26 (January–February 1985);CrossRefGoogle ScholarMillar, D., “Fires Were Started,” Sight and Sound 38 (Spring 1969)Google Scholar.

28. Constantine, S., “Love on the Dole and Its Reception in the 1930s,” Literature and History 8 (1982)Google Scholar.

29. Pelling, H., Britain and the Second World War (London 1970), 251Google Scholar.

30. Calder, Angus, The Myth of the Blitz (London, 1991);Google ScholarGrafton, P., You, You and You: The People out of Step with World War II (London, 1981), is frequently cited by recent studies, although it is based on only forty-nine interviewsGoogle Scholar.

31. Lowe, R., “The Second World War, Consensus and the Foundation of the Welfare State,” Twentieth-Century British History 1 (1990): 175CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. Public Records Office (PRO), LAB 10/445, 28 January, 1944.Google Scholar On engineering, see Croucher, R., Engineers at War 1939–45 (London, 1982);Google Scholar on coal, Supple, B., The History of the British Coal Industry, vol. 4 (Oxford, 1987);Google Scholar and Broomfield, S.R., “South Wales during the Second World War. The Coal Industry and its Community,” Ph.D. diss., University of Wales, 1979.Google Scholar The Labor Conciliation Officers' detailed reports on labor relations are now available on microfilm: Conflict and Consensus in British Industrial Relations, 1916–48 (Brighton, 1985)Google Scholar.

33. Broomfield, “South Wales during the Second World War.” For references to public opinion about labor stoppages, see PRO:INF 1/282 (November 1943); PRO:WO/15772 (November 1943–January 1944). On servicemen's views, see Eighth Army News, March 14, 1944. See also, Parkin, D.J., “Contested Sources of Identity: Nation, Class and Gender in Second World War Britain,” Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1988Google Scholar.

34. Macleod, R. J., “The Development of Full Employment Policy, 1939–1945,” D.Phil. diss., Oxford University, 1979;Google ScholarMorgan, K. O., “The Rise and Fall of Public Ownership in Britain,” in The Political Culture of Modern Britain, ed. Bean, J. M. W. (London, 1987)Google Scholar.

35. Bell, P. M. H., John Bull and the Bear. British Public Opinion, Foreign Policy and the Soviet Union, 1941–1945 (London, 1990)Google Scholar.

36. Durbin, E. F. M., What We Have to Defend. A Brief Critical Examination of the British Social Tradition (London, 1942);Google ScholarStevenson, J., “Planners' Moon? The Second World War and the Planning Movement,” in War and Social Change, ed. Smith, H. L. (Manchester, 1986)Google Scholar.

37. Mackenzie, S. P., Politics and Military Morale: Current Affairs and Citizenship Education in the British Army 1914–1950 (Oxford, 1992);CrossRefGoogle ScholarSummerfield, P., “Education and Politics in the British Armed Forces in the Second World War,” International Review of Social History 26 (1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar On radicalism in the army and the mock “forces parliaments” that developed on numerous bases 1943–44, see Kisch, R., The Days of the Good Soldiers (London, 1985)Google Scholar.

38. Summerfield, P., Women Workers in the Second World War (London, 1984);Google ScholarSmith, H., “The Effect of the War on the Status of Women,” in Smith, , ed., War and Social ChangeGoogle Scholar.

39. Calder, Angus, The People's War (London, 1969)Google Scholar.

40. Pelling, H., “The Impact of War on the Labour Party,” in Smith, , ed., War and Social Change;Google ScholarMcCallum, R. B. and Readman, A., The British General Election of 1945 (London, 1947);Google ScholarMcCulloch, G., “Labour, the Left and the British General Election of 1945,” Journal of British Studies 24 (1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar A recent attempt to deflate the electoral significance of 1945 is Fry's, G. K. “A Reconsideration of the British General Election of 1935 and the Electoral Revolution of 1945,” History 76 (1991)Google Scholar.

41. Addison, P., “By-Elections of the Second World War,” in By-Elections in British Politics, ed. Cook, C. and Ramsden, J. (London, 1973);Google ScholarSibley, R., “The Swing to Labour during the Second World War: When and Why?,” Labour History Review 55 (1990)Google Scholar.

42.Addison, P., The Road to 1945 (London, 1975), 14Google Scholar.

43. The most comprehensive critique of Addison's view of the Coalition is Jefferys, K.. The Churchill Coalition and Wartime Politics, 1940–45 (Manchester, 1991);Google Scholaridem, “British Politics and Social Policy during the Second World War,” Historical Journal 30 (March 1987).Google Scholar See also, Webster, C., “Conflict and Consensus: Explaining the British Health Service,” Twentieth Century British History 1 (1990);CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMedLowe, , “Second World War, Consensus and the Foundation of the Welfare State.” Recent overviews of the consensus debate are Kavanagh, S. and Morris, P., eds., Consensus Politics from Attlee to Thatcher (Oxford, 1989);Google ScholarDutton, D., British Politics since 1945: The Rise and Fall of Consensus (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar.

44. Cronin, J. and Weiler, P., “Working-Class Interests and the Politics of Social Democratic Reform in Britain, 1900–1940,” International Labor and Working-Class History 40 (Fall 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the Labour Party in wartime, see Brooke, S. J., “Labour's War: Party, Coalition and Domestic Reconstruction 1939–45,” D.Phil. diss., Oxford University, 1988; idem, “Revisionists and Fundamentalists. The Labour Party and Economic Policy during the Second World War,” Historical Journal 32 (1989).Google Scholar

45. The Times, 4 June, 1945 (Churchill); Smith, et al. , Paper Voices, chap. 2; “Celticus” (Bevan)Google Scholar, Why Not Trust the Tories? (London, 1944), 13.Google Scholar See also, Schneer, J., The Labour Left, 1945 1951 (London, 1988)Google Scholar.

46. Morgan, K. O., Labour in Power, 1945–51 (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar.

47. On the war's impact on Labour's foreign policy, see Burridge, T. D., British Labour and Hitler's War (London, 1976). In 1948 over half of British exports went to the CommonwealthGoogle Scholar.

48. Crofts, W., Coercion or Persuasion? Propaganda in Britain after 1945 (London, 1989);Google ScholarWildy, T., “Propaganda and Social Policy, 1945–51: Publicity for the Social Policies of the Labour Government,” Ph.D. diss., University of Leeds, 1985Google Scholar.

49. On the dock strike of 1949, see Weiler, P., British Labour and the Cold War (Stanford, 1988).Google Scholar Also see, Smith, J.D., “The Struggle for Control of the Airwaves: The Attlee Governments, the BBC and Industrial Unrest, 1945–51,” in Post-war Britain, 1945–1964: Themes and Perspectives, ed. Gorst, A., Johnman, L., and Lucas, W.S. (London, 1989)Google Scholar.

50. Crofts, Coercion or Persuasion?, 52.

51. In addition to Crofts, see Nakamura, N., “Women, Work and War: Industrial Mobilisation and Demobilisation: Coventry and Bolton, 1940–1946”, Ph. D. diss., University of Warwick, 1984;Google ScholarRiley, D., War in the Nursery (London, 1983). Though generally supportive of the government, Mary Greive, editor of Woman, warned that “The housewife… has carried the heaviest end of the war and post-war living. Unless widescale and efficient means are taken to relieve her of some of the burdens of homemaking, appeals to take on full time work—however genuine their urgency—will only infuriate and antagonise her… Appeals to women's patriotism are not enough” (29 March, 1947)Google Scholar.

52. Foot, M. and Bruce, D., Who are the Patriots? (London, 1949): “The Guilty Men are still at large. They are unfit to govern” (9)Google Scholar.

53. Banham, M. and Hillier, B., eds., A Tonic to the Nation: The Festival of Britain 1951 (London, 1976);Google ScholarFrayn, Michael, “Festival”, in Age of Austerity, ed. Sissons, and French, Google Scholar.

54. Robertson, A. J., The Bleak Midwinter 1947 (Manchester, 1987)Google Scholar.

55. Laing, Stuart, Representations of Working-Class Life, 1957–1964 (London, 1986);CrossRefGoogle ScholarTiratsoo, N., “Popular Politics, Affluence and the Labour Party in the 1950s,” in Contemporary British History 1931–61, ed. Gorst, A. et al. (London, 1991)Google Scholar.

56. For the use of the Cold War in reinforcing nationhood in the U.S., see Lichtenstein, Nelson, Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Cambridge, 1982). For a dramatization of the themes of British patriotism and Cold War anticommunism in film, see Roy Boulting's High Treason (1951), a tale of industrial sabotage with a McCarthyite flavor. For the late 1940s, see especially Weiler, Labour and the Cold WarGoogle Scholar.

57. Cannadine, “Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual,” 157. See also, Nairn, T., The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy (London, 1988);Google ScholarZiegler, P.. Crown and People (London, 1978).Google Scholar and Broady, M., “The Organisation of Coronation Street Parties,” Sociological Review 4 (December 1956);Google ScholarShils, E. and Young, M., “The Meaning of the Coronation,” Sociological Review 2 (1953)Google Scholar.

58. On Powell, see Nairn, , The Break-Up of Britain, esp. chap. 6;Google ScholarJames, R. Rhodes, Ambitions and Realities: British Politics 1964–1970 (London, 1972).Google Scholar After a notorious speech in Birmingham in April 1968 (“like the Romans. I seem to see the river Tiber flowing with much blood”), Powell received over 100,000 letters, mostly supportive. See Spearman, D., “Enoch Powell's Postbag,” New Society, 9 May. 1968.Google Scholar

59. Quotation from the 1964 Labour election manifesto. See Williamson, Bill, The Temper of the Times: British Society since 1945 (Oxford 1990), 159.Google Scholar On nationalism and the culture of decline, also see Wright, Patrick, On Living in an Old Country (London, 1975);Google ScholarHewison, R., The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London, 1987)Google Scholar.

60. Hurd, Geoff, ed., National Fictions: World War II in British Films and Television (London, 1984)Google Scholar.

61. Thompson, E. P., “A State of Blackmail,” in Writing by Candlelight (London, 1980), 131Google Scholar.

62. Munton, A., English Fiction of the Second World War (London, 1989)Google Scholar.