Geoffrey G. Field describes World War II as the pivotal event of twentieth-century British history. It certainly appears that way in British labour historiography. Politically, the pivot is Labour's emergence in 1945 as a party of majority government. The significance of this development has naturally occasioned a running debate, much of it focusing on the radicalizing or otherwise effects of wartime social change. Field's account makes extensive use of contemporary printed sources as well as research in collections like the National Archives, the Mass Observation Archive, and the Imperial War Museum. Even so, it is his command of this daunting body of secondary literature that particularly impresses. A bibliography is omitted, presumably on grounds of cost, but would have provided an important tool of reference in its own right. Moreover, though breadth of citation can sometimes mean a hit-and-miss attitude to matters of detail, this is emphatically not the case on those issues I was best able to judge here. As a register of our current understanding of the subject, Field's readable, persuasive, and informed account should hold a prominent place in the literature for some years to come.
Its ambitions nevertheless go somewhat further than that. Field's central contention is that class, and more specifically the experience of the working class, has suffered a relative neglect in this historiography. Not only does he want to “bring class back in”; he holds that the war years saw a deepening of class identities, partly through attenuation of the regional and sectoral divisions of the interwar years, and that this provided the basis of a more durable, though always contested, postwar social settlement. The book concludes with chapters on the political developments that culminated in Labour's electoral breakthrough in 1945. Against the so-called apathy school of the 1990s, notably “England Arise!” of 1995,Footnote 1 they deploy polling and other evidence to reaffirm a “left” or social-democratic reading of the war years as a political watershed. Against recent assumptions of continuity, the book as a whole depicts the war as a major catalyst of social change whose lasting effects included higher wages, full employment, and a transformation of the social standing of British workers.
The argument is developed through diverse contexts, from leisure and the family to the world of organized labour. Across so broad a historiographical landscape, Field inevitably takes up some of the themes and preoccupations of existing literatures. This is true, for example, of the focus on engineering and mining in his chapter on the “industrial front”. Munitions factories also figure centrally in the chapter on women's mobilization, where there are also sections on the women's auxiliaries and women as housewives. Field therefore does not overlook gender issues in his readiness to identify class cohesion. He does, however, warn against overstating gender antagonism and the exclusiveness of the male industrial worker. Against recent accounts like that of Sonya Rose, he also argues convincingly that the war years saw a validation of traditional masculine work cultures and the status of manual labour. Nationally this was epitomized and articulated by Ernest Bevin, who figures more here than any other individual, and who would surely have responded robustly to the “white feather campaigns” of whose claimed significance Field is justifiably sceptical.
Munitions workers enjoyed particular visibility in popular culture, as in the film Millions Like Us, discussed here, or a novel like J.B. Priestley's Daylight on Saturday. A focus on munitions may thus be justified by the symbolic as well as the strategic importance of these industries. Nevertheless, like the wider body of literature on which he draws, Field has a good deal less to say about such numerically (and electorally) considerable groups as the rail, distributive, or textile workers. He is surely right to question Rose's identification of a hegemonic masculinity with the figure of the soldier-hero. Nevertheless, it may be that notions of the war effort underpinned intra-class hierarchies of occupational prestige in ways that are not really explored here, and yet which Field's own weighting of evidence may itself implicitly corroborate.
Other sections of the book rely more heavily on original research. This is true, for example, of the section on moral panics in the chapter on the family, and of the wide-ranging discussion of Britain's new conscript army. Field remarks here on the longstanding gulf between social and military historians, which arguably is especially characteristic of British historiography, and of a political culture in which, more than most, the “social” has equated with the civilian. If so, it would further complicate notions of the soldier-hero, and Field's reconstruction of the “citizens’ army” shows how class-based civic identities came into conflict with the discipline, social segregation, and general “bullshit” characteristic of the British army. By the end of the war this gave rise to overt forms of politicization, commonly registered in terms of a radicalized “forces’ vote”. Its basis, according to Field, was “less a Marxisant economic idea of class, than a dichotomous language of ‘Them’ and ‘Us’” that reproduced and reinforced the “class solidarity” of society at large.
The stricter type of Marxisant historian might wonder how far Field's own use of class goes beyond this dichotomous sense of social difference. His definition of class is one of “structured inequality […] produced and reproduced in economic, social, cultural, and political relations”, whether in the workplace, family, community or beyond. In the absence of any real discussion of how this inequality was produced and reproduced, this seems a somewhat descriptive and open-ended formula tending towards a “them and us” social history but with a greater working-class bias.
Symptomatically, Field's account begins with a chapter on the evacuation, as did Calder's classic The People's War of 1969.Footnote 2 His subsequent chapter on the Blitz also parallels Calder's narrative, though without even Calder's “prelude” on the 1930s, the war itself appears almost as a bolt from the blue. In the chapters on industry and the army, Field's class-based perspective means bringing to the fore the self-activity of the working class, in particular the radicalized minority whose contribution to wartime political developments he rightly underlines. In other sections, despite the Thompsonian overtones of his title, his working class is less clearly the active agent of its own remaking, and Field does not entirely avoid the diffuseness of what he calls “the ‘People's War’ effect”. Notably, his chapter on leisure and culture provides much fascinating detail, but principally of provisions for the working class and representations of the working class, with limitations and a sense of social distance (as in the work of CEMA) to which Field rightly draws attention.
This ambiguity in the use of class has possible implications for the wider argument. One issue might be how fully a class-orientated analysis can be developed within such a tightly framed chronological framework. Field is rightly suspicious of the backward projection into the war years of an (assumed) postwar age of apathy. Nevertheless, his own account offers only sketchy indicators of British society as it entered the war, and his concluding extrapolations forward are somewhat speculative in nature. The claim is not, perhaps cannot be, supported that for a “very high proportion” of the postwar electorate voting became “almost an automatic badge of class identity”. To characterize the Tories’ postwar recovery as “slow and modest” is also questionable. An obvious objection to accounts like “England Arise!” is that they offer no comparative yardstick by which wartime radicalization might be properly evaluated. Field, however, does not take up this point. He is surely right to note how Labour in the immediate postwar decades consolidated the electoral advance it had made in 1945. What might have registered more is that, even in their hour of retribution, the Tories themselves gained almost 40 per cent of the popular vote, and thus some millions of working-class endorsements attesting some deeper resilience of the old society
Field's overall verdict is that the war transformed the “power and status” of British workers in ways that persisted until at least the late 1960s. This formula, “power and status”, is employed more than once and it could be that the two concepts are too easily conflated. Field has unanswerably demonstrated the emergence of a new inclusivity in the wartime conception of the nation. Nevertheless, his own account clearly shows how changing representations need to be distinguished from the persisting inequalities which they could also help to dissimulate, and on which basis changing representations could themselves just as quickly change again. There was an international dimension to the wartime political shift which Field here barely notices. Nor, by the same token, does he fully register the fact that postwar full employment and higher wages were in no way a specifically British phenomenon, or that the promise of a more thoroughgoing transformation was everywhere eviscerated by the Cold War. Field has provided a superbly documented account of the centrality of class to the history of wartime Britain. What perhaps he also shows is how these real but limited advances could in time become effaced in Britain's collective memory, in just the way he describes in his final pages. That only underlines the importance of his timely corrective.
