Domestic Soldiers

A work of this nature is never accomplished alone. Throughout the process of researching and writing this book, I have been blessed with encouragement and support from dear friends and family. I have met some wonderful people who have made contributions to this project in their own ways, and along the way I have managed to make some new friends. To all those who lent moral support, offered sage advice or helped to make my work easier, I am eternally grateful.

I would like to thank the staff at the Mass-Observation Archive at the University of Sussex who were not only incredibly helpful, but who also made life at the archive enjoyable. Special thanks to Fiona Courage, Karen Watson and Jessica Scantlebury, who were not only helpful during my research at the archive, but who also made it possible for me to pursue my research from abroad. I am also grateful to the staff at Mass-Observation for acting as my cultural interpreters as they so often did. Thanks to Simon, who not only helped with my work in the archive, but who also schooled me on the joys of cricket. Thanks also to Joy Eldridge, whose knowledge of the archive
was invaluable at the outset of this project. I especially thank her for sharing with me her memories of growing up listening to women’s programmes on the BBC with her mother. Special thanks to Dorothy Sheridan for sharing insights about the women, which proved integral to my research. I particularly want to thank her for working out solutions that helped me continue my work abroad. I would also like to thank the trustees of the Mass-Observation Archive for making available such an extraordinary and unique resource. All direct quotes from the diarists are copyright of the Mass-Observation Archive. I wish to thank too the archivists at the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham Park in Reading for their assistance in this project.

To Sandra Koa-Wing, thank you for your support and encouragement throughout my time at Sussex and in the early days of writing. I will always remember your laugh and the brightness with which you filled the archive. You are, and shall forever be, greatly missed.

Without the advice, support and encouragement of Claire Langhamer and Alun Howkins, I dare say this project would not have come to fruition. I am eternally indebted to Marjorie Levine-Clark, who has been a wonderful mentor, coach and advocate over the years.

I wish also to thank my friends, old and new, who lent their support and encouragement during this process. Special thanks to Jenna Bailey, who has given generously of her time and advice in combing over numerous drafts – thank you for your support and friendship. Over innumerable cups of tea and equally numerous emails, Andrea Salter and I contemplated the life of Nella Last – I could never have survived archival work (and Nella’s maddening handwriting)
without you! Thanks to Susan Gustin, Laura Rey and Donna Castle for your unfailing encouragement over the years. I wish also to thank Susan Ouellette for her advice and friendship, and of course, Jane Viens, without whose help absolutely nothing would ever get done!

Thanks to Jessica Cuthbert-Smith for a keen critical eye and to Jo Stansall for her help in this process. Special thanks to Leo Hollis, without whom this book would never have reached the light of day. Thank you for the helpful advice and criticism along the way, and, certainly not least of all, for infinite depths of patience.

Finally, to my family, who has been a source of love, encouragement and inspiration. To my father for instilling in me a love of history and for helping to fire my historical imagination on so many childhood trips to American Revolution and Civil War battlefields. Love and thanks to Bill and Kim for their continual support. Love and thanks also to Doug for sharing his love of history with me and for always supporting me in my endeavours. We are blessed to have you in our lives. Without the unconditional love and support of my mom, I do not think I could have made it this far. Thanks for reading my work (really, every single scrap of paper I’ve ever sent your way!) and for never failing to be my number one fan all these years. Finally, to Rob, for your numerous sacrifices and support, which I can’t possibly begin to enumerate here, and for patiently listening to me discourse endlessly on housewives and the Second World War, as always, my love.

It was 2 a.m. on a frosty Saturday morning in December. Helen huddled over a coal-fired stove, straining her ears to discern any trace of the Luftwaffe growling in the distance. Night after night, she complained, they ‘murdered’ her sleep with each wave of planes that passed over the draughty medieval residence on the Kent coast. Whether they dropped their bombs on her village or whether they passed over on their way to deliver death on another city, the anxiety was the same. Neither was the murmur of the RAF planes on their way to the Continent comforting: their engines signalled the same death and destruction for German cities that the Nazis rained upon English cities.

Tonight, she listened for ‘Firebomb Fritz’, but there was no sound. After weeks of raids, it was eerily silent: a ‘lovely thick fog’ had descended upon the south-east coast of England, thwarting air operations for either side. Helen shivered in the silence – the stove was wholly inadequate for the sharp chill of a December night. She cursed. The one night she volunteered for fire watching duty was the one
night she could have
managed some sleep. ‘What have I done for you, England, my England?’ she bitterly mused.

It was the definitive question of the war: what were you doing for the war effort? Stated another way, as seen in the wartime pages of the classic guide to middle-class housewifery,
Good Housekeeping
, women were questioned, ‘Is your conscience clear?’
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It was a simple, but stinging, call to action that underlines the nature of the ‘People’s War’. Before the first month of the war was done, the phrase had been coined in the upper echelons of government in recognition of the fact that everybody was important to the war effort. Soon afterwards, the title, and the idea that everyone had a part to play in the war, was picked up in popular venues: on the BBC, on the silver screen, in the newspapers and magazines. The People’s War was not – by its very definition, could not be – an entirely military affair. It galvanized everyone – woman, child and man – into action to protect Britain and to fight for a new future.

If your conscience chaffed, there were ways to soothe it. The People’s War was a war of small, ordinary, even mundane, feats compounded by the millions into incredible tides of action. Certainly there were the military campaigns, the triumphs and the defeats (and sometimes the triumphal defeats) of the battlefields, in the air and on the seas: Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, Singapore, El Alamein, D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, for example. And, of course, these defeats and victories were composed of numerous acts of the ordinary and the courageous, the cynical and the hopeful. It was no different for those at home.

Volunteering and paid work were some of the ways civilians might assuage the conscience of those who
stayed behind, but there was more to it than that. Every moment and every action counted: turning over your flowerbeds to vegetables, using less hot water, scraping the margarine paper till all the grease was gone, saying ‘no’ to a new pair of shoes … shivering on a cold December morning. The war lurked behind every act on the home front. This fact of the People’s War was invigorating and powerful for some, maddening for others.

Because every act was potentially heroic, anyone could be a hero. Because there was so much to do, there was also a wonderfully empowering flexibility about the People’s War. Whatever one did, or wanted to do, if it was done well and if it was deemed useful to the nation in its hour of need, it was important. But if one could be a hero, one might also be a villain; and if there was so much to do, one might not be doing enough, and the guilt could be crushing. For many, this was the day-to-day reality of the war.

It is a reality that threads its way through Mass-Observation diaries, tangled and entwined in the fabric of everyday life and relationships; sometimes the thread is barely discernible, sometimes it is a chaotic zigzag or a tangled mess; at other times it glistens like a strand of silver. In 1939, a group of intellectual avant-garde researchers, who had begun documenting everyday life in Britain two years previously, offered ordinary Britons an extraordinary opportunity: to write diaries about their day-to-day lives in wartime. The inquisitive researchers at Mass-Observation (M-O) also sent out surveys (called directives) with carefully constructed questions to understand life in Britain: what did one think about Churchill’s performance? How did one feel about the Germans? Did people believe BBC news
reports? Did one think British morals were slipping? Furthermore, M-O made it clear that any Briton who decided to participate wrote for an audience: their voices would be heard.

Though their names would be kept anonymous to the public, it was understood – indeed, the writers expected – that the staff at M-O read their submissions and reported on their findings to the rest of Britain through newspaper and magazine articles. (They probably did not know that, at least for the first part of the war, their observations were also distilled and reported to the government in the interests of understanding public morale.) Since M-O regarded the everyday lives and opinions of individual Britons as a crucial element necessary in exploring the true nature of British society, it was very much a part of the People’s War. In fact, many of its volunteers considered their writing as a patriotic act.

The diary project was a practical response to the war. With the outbreak of conflict in Europe and the potential disruptions to postal services, the group was unsure how to carry on its mission to document everyday lives. It would continue to send its directives to the cadre of volunteers it had accumulated since 1937, but in the event that this strategy failed, M-O asked its observers to keep diaries of their experiences and post them back to the organization if, and when, possible. Thankfully, the postal service continued to operate even during the hottest periods of conflict on British soil and M-O continued to collect and analyse the observers’ writings throughout the war, and indeed, well into the post-war period.

The writings of the observers leave a legacy of the war that is often forgotten. They remind us that
political leaders and battles were significant, but at the same time they were often only a small part of ordinary individuals’ lives. The experiences that the men and women of M-O shared with us also illustrate the extraordinary power of war to transform lives. More importantly, they offer us a human connection to the past; they tell us a story of the war, but also a story of themselves.

This book recounts the war through the eyes of six ordinary women who wrote for M-O. Women were in the vanguard of the People’s War; they stepped into jobs that no one would have ever dreamed permitting them to join in peacetime, let alone excel. If women are considered in the history books, it is these women workers who are most often remembered for their contributions to the war. But there are many others, who have been rendered faceless by the tide of history: ordinary women who had families to care for, who volunteered any scrap of time they could muster, who tried valiantly to contribute in their own ways while simultaneously juggling personal and domestic obligations. Though often lost in the retelling of the war, they and their struggles were – and are – significant parts of that story.

Through these six women, we can glimpse everyday life and the thoughts, fears and personal battles of ordinary women as they lived on the edge of history, not knowing from day to day, moment to moment, how the war or their lives would play out. The tale is bounded by the events – national, international, local and personal – that these women thought important at the time; it is shaped by their words and observations. They lived across England: Sheffield, Leeds, and Newcastle in the north, the shipbuilding town of
Barrow-in-Furness in Lancashire, Kent and the Bristol coast and Birmingham. All of them were middle-aged married women and most had children.
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Born around 1885, Irene Grant was the eldest. Before the war, she and her family had eked out a respectable existence in the working-class suburbs of Newcastle, but always teetered precariously close to poverty. For her, the People’s War offered the promise to make society more equitable: she rarely missed an opportunity to remind M-O that she was a socialist.

Nella Last was four years younger than Grant and lived in Barrow-in-Furness. She prided herself on her children and her domestic ability. The war gave her a chance to show off those skills. Though he’d rarely ever done so before the war, even her husband could not fail to recognize her abilities in wartime. Nella basked in the praise garnered from those around her, building up a confidence unknown to her in peacetime.

In much the same way as Nella, Alice Bridges found her voice in the war. She was born in 1900 and lived in the suburbs of Birmingham. The war unleashed a cheeky and playful streak that blossomed into a stubborn independence.

Natalie Tanner, who was born in 1902, enjoyed a freedom unmatched by the other women. She was not as constrained by the domestic demands that the others faced. Living in the rural countryside surrounding Leeds, Natalie was often found working in her garden, walking on the hills near her home or reading. But the social life of Leeds and Bradford always beckoned, and Natalie never failed to see a play at the local theatre, or a feature on the silver screen.

Natalie, Nella, Irene and Alice were early volunteers for M-O. Their diaries date from the beginning
of the war, but observers were also recruited throughout the war by word of mouth, via advertisements and through the various articles published by the organization. Both Edie Rutherford and Helen Mitchell began writing for M-O in 1941.

Like Natalie Tanner, Edie Rutherford was also born in 1902, and although her parents were both British, she was born in South Africa and was a fierce champion of the empire. The only woman without children, she lived with her husband in Sheffield. Edie’s diary was somewhat different from the other women’s: her tone and insightful, often amusing, commentary on both war and local events create the feeling of a friendly chat over the morning coffee and newspaper.

Helen Mitchell was born in 1894 and spent most of the war in Kent, though when the bombing and planes became too much, she often escaped to the coast near Bristol. Helen’s war was a desperate struggle to find her own voice. Her diary drips with a caustic sarcasm that reminds us that the People’s War was not always empowering.

The women in this book were housewives and mothers, all of whom wrote for Mass-Observation. They were ordinary women living in extraordinary times. Through them, we can view the struggles and triumphs of everyday life during the war. We follow them into their homes, watch them cook, knit, read or listen to the wireless. Through their eyes, we watch the skies anxiously for German bombers and walk through the rubble left behind. We hear them gossip, converse or fight with family members and neighbours. We see them cheer the government at one instant and doubt it the next. We hear their worries about the future and
learn of their pasts, of their hopes and joys, their fears and frustrations, their friends and families. Aware of the gravity of the times, we see them searching for ways to be a part of history and to contribute to their nation in its time of need. Finally, we watch them navigate the perennial human struggle: the fight to find voices of their own, to free themselves from others’ constraints, to live and define themselves on their own terms.

In many ways, they are our mothers, our grandmothers, our great-grandmothers. Their struggles in wartime were unique as well as universal. Their insights, their triumphs and their defeats reach far beyond the global conflict of the 1940s.

This is the story of life and war through their eyes.