Lucy Noakes

‘Serve to Save’: Gender, Citizenship and Civil Defence in Britain 1937–41

In the 1930s the British government developed a system of air raid precautions as a measure against the aerial warfare which was increasingly becoming a feature of contemporary conflict. The air raid precautions system devised by the British government entailed, amongst other measures, the creation of a range of organizations such as the Auxiliary Fire Service and the Warden’s Service which depended upon the voluntary enrolment of British civilians for their success. This article traces the history of these organizations between 1937 and 1941, examining the discourse of citizenship which was drawn upon in their creation, recruitment campaigns and structure. Drawing on a range of primary sources, including government papers, parliamentary debates, press coverage and Mass Observation surveys, the article argues that the discourse of citizenship which was apparent in air raid precautions was complicated by issues of gender. The article concludes that the articulation of air raid precautions as an example of active citizenship had the potential to compromise the continuity of gendered identities in wartime and that the attempts visible within civil defence planning, representation and organization to preserve these identities should be understood as representing the threat that air raids, and defence against them, posed to the relationship between masculinity and femininity.

Gender, War and Memory: Discourse and Experience in History:

Hannah Diamond, Women and the Second World War in France 1939–1948. Choices and Constraints, Harlow, Pearson Education, 1999; pp. xiv + 231; ISBN 00582 29910 1 (hbk); 0582 29909 8 (pbk) Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War. Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War, Chapel Hill, NC and London, University of North Carolina Press, 1999; pp. xix + 334; ISBN 08075 2482 8 (hbk); 08078 48107 (pbk) Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives. Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998; pp. xiii + 338; ISBN 07190 4460 X (hbk); 007190 4461 8 (pbk) Deborah Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls. Women Workers in World War 1, London, I.B. Tauris, 1998; pp. xvi + 224; ISBN 1 86064 198 9 (hbk)

Gender, Grief, and Bereavement in Second World War Britain

Abstract This article examines the extent to which we can understand the emotional economy of mid-twentieth-century Britain, and in particular how, in wartime, the articulation and management of grief was gendered. After tracing the development of a discourse of stoicism and emotional restraint in the inter-war years, the article goes on to examine representations of responses to sudden death in a range of wartime cultural texts. Arguing that self-control, stoicism, and privileging the needs of the wartime community over the needs of the individual were widely posited as the best means of overcoming grief, the article finds that women were specifically advised that restrained self-management was the most patriotic response to bereavement, advice driven both by womens primary historical role as mourners and also by a long-standing understanding of women as being especially likely to be overwhelmed by their emotions. In conclusion, it suggests that while the emotional economy of mid-century Britain may have been successful in terms of enabling the British people to ‘carry on’ during a long and arduous war, it left a legacy of wartime loss that was to be felt for years to come.

Incarcerated Masculinities: Male POWs and the Second World War

Abstract This article serves as an introduction to the themed issue on Incarcerated Masculinities, providing an overview of the literature in this field, including both scholarly texts and personal memoirs. The issue addresses a variety of POW experiences and memories, ranging geographically across incarceration in Europe and the Far East, considers the representation and cultural memory of POWs in the post-war period and engages with the intergenerational transmission of traumatic memories in subsequent decades. This article introduces the experience, impact and legacy of captivity amongst men from Australia, Britain and France during the Second World War which are explored in depth in subsequent articles.

Representing, Remembering and Rewriting Women’s Histories of the First World War

As Dan Todman has persuasively argued, in the British popular imagination the First World War is associated with mud, barbed wire, the trenches and the Tommy on the Western Front. Perhaps inevitably, therefore, public commemoration of the war has often been dominated by a focus on the men in the armed forces, who risked or lost their lives for causes that at the time may or may not have seemed heroic, noble or simply unavoidable. The visual spectacle of Paul Cummins’ ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’, the art installation at the Tower of London in which 888,246 ceramic poppies filled the moat from 17 July to 11 November 2014, was the most visited artistic response to the war in its centenary years, while Jeremy Deller’s ‘We’re Here Because We’re Here’, commemorating the first day of the Battle of the Somme, provided a widely seen and moving memorial to the victims.22. ‘We’re here because we’re here’ marked the centenary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Hundreds of volunteers, working with the artist Jeremy Deller, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, the National Theatre and 1914–18 NOW, commemorated the centenary by re-enacting as soldiers in cities, towns and the countryside around Britain. First World War soldiers were seen at train stations, shopping centres, beaches, car parks and high streets. This vision of the conflict, focusing exclusively on the combatant dead, should not, however, become the only history of the conflict. There are, as the research brought together here demonstrates, multiple histories of the First World War.

‘My husband is interested in war generally’: Gender, family history and the emotional legacies of total war

ABSTRACT In the autumn of 2014, as Britain embarked on four years of activities to commemorate and mark the centenary of the First World War, the Mass Observation project asked its panellists to reflect on their feelings about the war. Over 180 people responded, writing about their family involvement in the war, about their thoughts and feelings on Remembrance Sunday 2014, and about popular representations of the war in the early twenty-first century. This article examines some of these responses, considering the extent to which gender and age shaped not only the panellists’ stated relationship to the centenary of the war, but also the language with which they expressed this relationship. It draws on ideas from the ‘emotional turn’ in historical studies to argue that older women, who often had a personal memory of the lived legacies of the war, drew on a particularly expressive repertoire to convey both an empathy with the men and women whose lives were shaped by the First World War, and to argue for a particular moral position with regard to warfare. These empathetic responses, which the article argues have much in common with family histories of the war, should be taken seriously by historians who examine the cultural memory of the war and who are often keen to dismiss the widespread sense of the war as a tragic blunder.

A broken silence? Mass Observation, Armistice Day and ‘everyday life’ in Britain 1937–1941

Between 1937 and 1941 the social survey organization Mass Observation collected material on the ways that the British people experienced and thought about the commemorative practices that marked the anniversary of the Armistice of 1918. What they found was that while people were largely united in their observation of the rituals of remembrance, their thoughts and feelings about these practices were diverse. For some, the acts of commemoration were a fitting way to pay tribute to both the dead and the bereaved. For others, these acts were hypocritical in a nation preparing for war. This article draws on the Mass Observation material to trace some of the diverse ways that remembrance was embodied in everyday life, practised, experienced and understood by the British people as the nation moved once again from peace to war, arguing that studies of the practices of remembrance alone tell us little about how they have been understood by participants.

Behind Enemy Lines: Gender, Passing and the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War. By Juliette Pattinson/Transnational Outrage: The Death and Commemoration of Edith Cavell. By Katie Pickles.

among Anglo-Indians that attests to the ‘intimate legacies’ of the colonial past (p. 289). In the tradition of scholars like Stoler and Strassler, Bear argues that the ‘after effects of colonial experiences’ manifest themselves in ‘bodily dispositions beyond narrative availability and in sentiments of nostalgia, longing, and propriety’ (p. 290). Ultimately, her ethnographic findings allow her to consider the after-effects of bureaucracy as transcending order and rationality. In the end, Bear argues that the afterlives of colonial bureaucracies continue to kindle the ‘production of emotion’ in the railway community today (p. 295). The two parts of the text each have important insights to offer. While Bear’s history counters a Whiggish narrative of railway development in India, her ethnography provides a rich view of postcolonial India as it unfolded along the railway lines. Yet it is in the marriage of history and ethnography that Bear makes her unique contribution. She claims that ‘anthropological histories’ are ideally poised to ‘make visible these intimate, unnoticed effects of colonialism and nationalism’ by moving ‘among archives, institutions, and lived experience’ (p. 296). This is, indeed, where the real contribution of this insightful book lies. It could, in truth, stand as two distinct studies, and there are times when the richness of the material makes the argument difficult to grasp on first reading. Perhaps Bear might bridge the gulf between the two parts of the book – which require a ‘change of scale’, according to the author – by focusing her subject more sharply on the Anglo-Indians who exemplify the postcolonial predicament (p. 157). Still, as it moves from history to ethnography, this inventive and subtle study allows us to grasp the relationships between bureaucracy and intimacy, between empire and family, and between past and present.