Corinna Peniston-Bird

Classifying the Body in the Second World War: British Men in and Out of Uniform

This article argues that the imaginary and the experienced body cannot fully be understood without an appreciation of the specific historical context in which they are formed. Offering a case study of military masculinity in Britain in the Second World War, the article examines the significance of the medical examination and subsequent physical classification of potential recruits to the Armed Forces in constructions of the male body. Individual responses, drawn from oral testimonies, are examined to explore the relationship between the discursive and experienced body. These suggest the power of the social body in defining the meaning of the individual body. Nonetheless, despite the dominance of physical classification in the definition of hegemonic masculinity, individual experiences reveal that the concept and meaning of physical grading could be negotiated in ways which introduced less stable and more multiple meanings of the individual body and its relationship to the national body

Women in the firing line: the home guard and the defence of gender boundaries in Britain in the second world war

Abstract The Home Guard is well known as a local volunteer force formed to protect Britain against invasion in 1940. Less familiar is the history of the gendering of the organisation. Although the boundary between male combatants and female non-combatants was put under pressure in the Second World War, womens presence in the Home Guard was resisted from within government and the military hierarchy. Participation in home defence would have required women to be armed, a step which the authorities were not prepared to take, in spite of the insistence upon it of women campaigners in and out of Parliament. This article explores the tensions within political discourse that arose as a result, and the eventual official compromise, as well as analysing representations of the gendering of home defence in popular entertainment during the War and since, and the implications of such constructions for the personal reminiscences of women Home Guards.

Introduction: Journal of War and Culture Studies

This special issue on ‘Silenced Mourning’ explores the emphases and omissions in mourning the war dead in twentieth-century Britain, a focus which permits a multifaceted exploration of bereavement within a single cultural context over time. Six articles consider the complexities of grief and loss as experienced or represented, with a specific emphasis on that mourning which could not easily find a public space for expression. The focus of this journal ranges from the bereaved individual to the immediate family circle, to the local community, and to the national community. The articles by Kate Kennedy and Oliver Wilkinson focus on the First World War and its aftermath; those by Linda Maynard and Lucy Noakes on the Second World War; and the contributions of Corinna Peniston-Bird and Wendy Ugolini trace memorialization from each war to the present day. Together these articles illustrate how coming to terms with absence and death was a cultural as well as a psychological activity. Silence is inextricably linked with, and situated within the cultural processes of remembering and forgetting (Passerini, 2006; Winter, 2010). Jay Winter defines silences as hidden deposits which are ‘concealed at some moments and revealed at others’ and insists that they must be examined as ‘part of the cartography of recollection and remembrance’ within twentieth-century history (2010: 3). The Italian oral historian Luisa Passerini has been at the forefront of theoretical reflections which acknowledge the importance of silence and omissions when addressing the construction of personal narratives (1987, 2006). Passerini describes the variety of silences that historians can discern, which range from the repressed memories of the silence of a people to those of personal remembrance. There can be no study of the emphases of history without a concomitant awareness of the silences that distort and dislocate, in narratives, in sources, in archives, in individuals and peoples. Michel-Rolph Trouillot explored the interdependence of the creation and silencing of historical narratives in his study of the Haitian Revolution (1995). Further recent engagement with the place of silence within cultural memory includes Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory. Armistice Day, 1919–1946 (1994), Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio and Jay Winter (eds), Shadows of War. A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century (2010), and Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy, journal of war & culture studies, Vol. 8 No. 1, February, 2015, 1–6

War and Peace in the Cloakroom: The Controversy over the Memorial to the Women of World War II

In 2005, as part of the sixtieth anniversary of the conclusion of the war, a memorial to the British women of World War II was unveiled in London’s Whitehall (see Figure 13.1). Every aspect of this memorial was controversial. As ‘the most public component of the material culture of war remembrance’ (Moriarty, 1997, p. 655) war memorials represent conflict in the context of – or even in the service of – peace. Memorials create interfaces between the public and the private, between the present and the past. There is a dynamic interplay between time periods which meet through the commemoration of an event, the design chosen, through the date of the conception and execution and the responses provoked. The heated debates this memorial provoked reveal the potential for tension between diverse communities of remembrance and the depth of personal investment in these symbols. The invocations of popular constructions of the meaning of the war by critics and advocates of the memorial also attest to the power of these constructions.

'I wondered who'd be the first to spot that': Dad's Army at war, in the media and in memory.

The Birmingham Popular Memory Group suggested in 1982 that certain historical representations ‘achieve centrality and luxuriate grandly’ while others are ‘marginalized, excluded, or reworked’ (Popular Memory Group 208 11). Public media, including television and the press, play a significant part in creating these dominant constructions through their selection and amplification of constructions of the past developed elsewhere. Private memories contribute to but are also transformed by these dominant constructions. To understand this relationship calls for, as Thomas Bender puts it, ‘a simultaneous embrace of the public and private and the way meanings move back and forth between them’ (cited in Jackson Lears 586). This paper explores the cultural circuit between public representations and private memories by analysing three processes: how Jimmy Perry’s memories of the Home Guard were transformed into the television situation comedy Dad’s Army; how the paradoxical messages of the series (Dad’s Army) were transformed and simplified through its adoption into English vocabulary (‘Dad’s Army’); and how this fed back into Home Guard veterans’ memories, both public and private. This research has its origins in my involvement in a Leverhulme project (1999 2000) designed by Professor Penny Summerfield (University of Manchester) which had three dimensions: to examine the political history of the Home Guard; to gather and analyse representations of the Home Guard in popular culture both during the war and after, and to interview the men and women who had served in the force. We published our findings in Contesting Home Defence in 2007. Both the Home Guard and Dad’s Army had been the focus of academic investigation although only with superficial intersection: David Yelton and S. Paul Mackenzie have investigated the military influence and effectiveness of the force during the Second World War, while Jeffrey Richards has examined Dad’s Army as representative of British national identity and the reworkings of the meaning of the Second World War. This paper, however, focuses on the intersections between history, representation and memory, with a particular focus on the role of newsprint. On 14 May 1940, faced by the possibility of a German invasion, and alert to the dangers of fifth columnists, Anthony Eden, the British Secretary of State for War, announced on BBC radio the formation of the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV). Its members were to be men between the ages of 17 and 65 excluded from military service because of their age or their health, or because they were in reserved occupations vital to the war effort. Within days, over 250,000 volunteers had responded, and by the end of July 1.5 million men were said to have registered at their local police stations (MacKenzie 34 35). Thousands of women also joined the Home Guard: the official (capped) number by the stand-down in 1944 was 32,000 (Summerfield and Peniston-Bird ‘Women in the Firing

Commemorating Invisible Men: Reserved Occupations in Bronze and Stone

This chapter explores the emphases and omissions in the commemoration of British men on the home front in the Second World War, then and now. The materiality of memorials is considered against the historical theorisation of the construction of the People’s War, and the impact of the war on gender identities. The men who worked and survived on the home front constitute a highly diverse group, challenging to commemorative practices because of the multiplicity of roles encompassed, but also because of their relationship to military masculinity, and to women in both civilian and auxiliary occupations. This chapter thus explores the overt and covert hierarchies of war and challenges the existing models of the gender order in wartime to argue that the explanation for the invisibility of the civilian male at war and in subsequent commemoration must be sought in fuzzy not fixed gender boundaries.

The Grieving Male in Memorialization: Monuments of Discretion

Abstract In 2007, the Armed Forces Memorial was unveiled in the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. Its sculptures (Ian Rank-Broadley) include the grief-stricken family of a fallen soldier: his wife and son, his distraught mother and stoic father. The representation of bereaved civilian males in commemorative activities and representations is more rare and complex than the attribution of sacrifice, victimhood and patriotism accorded to female relatives, however. This paper examines the marginalization and mobilization of the male, and in particular the father, in public coverage of the casualties of war and more specifically on war memorials from the First World War to the present. It is a theme permeated by constructions of intersecting genders: of the fallen, of those left behind and of the war effort itself within and beyond the war years.