Divided We Stand

‘Blood, sweat and toil’ was what Winston Churchill promised the British people when he formed a Coalition Government in May 1940. The words were the rhetorical high point of Churchill’s first speech in the Commons as Prime Minister: ‘I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat” ’.¹ It was a phrase that encapsulated the all-in-it-together spirit of sacrifice and hard work with which Churchill endeavoured to imbue the ‘war effort’. Churchill meant it to apply to the population as a whole. Geoff Field uses it as a lens under which to scrutinize the fate of the working class in the Second World War.

Field argues that the working class as a historical subject has been neglected in studies of the war of 1939–45, surprisingly in view of its status as a ‘People’s War’. He attributes this neglect to current interest in gender and the general effects of the cultural turn. As a historian engaged in ‘remaking the British working class’ (his sub-title) he aims to fill the gap with a detailed and thorough exploration of its social history in this era, pulling together and expanding on his earlier articles in a welcome synthesis embracing family, local communities, workplace, military service, and politics. Class, he considers, is expressed in the outlook of workers and in the class assumptions at the heart of representations in policy and propaganda. Thus class consciousness and the construction of class identities (rather than social stratification) are his concerns. He argues against notions of the wartime blurring of class boundaries characteristic of wartime films and reproduced by many historians subsequently.² Rather than creating a new harmony, he says, ‘the war deepened a sense of class identity and reshaped class relations’ (p. 6). His sub-title flags not only his endeavour as a historian but also his thesis that the war was the occasion for ‘remaking’ the British working class.

In spite of the sub-title, Field does not refer to the use of the concept of the ‘remaking’ of the working class by historians of the nineteenth century. Discussion in the 1970s and ’80s, stimulated by the work of Gareth Stedman Jones, centred on the idea that the radical working class of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century discovered by E. P. Thompson was transformed into a reformist class after 1850, no longer prepared to challenge industrial capitalism but intent on securing its place within it. Field’s World War Two ‘remaking’ does not imply the rebirth of a radical class, even if he agrees with Ralph Miliband that an anti-capitalist radicalism emerged in 1940–2, given voice by middle-class figures such as Richard Acland, G. D. H. Cole and Tom Wintringham, whose ambitions for social and economic change extended beyond the trade-union and labour-movement agenda. The ‘rise of labour’ that Field writes about, on the contrary, concerns an increasingly coherent and united working class, with a growing sense of entitlement to precisely the social democratic goals of the Labour Party, namely full employment, higher wages, social security and a national health service.

Field’s interpretation hinges on a demonstration that the interwar divisions within the working class were healed in wartime, resulting not only in an increased muscle of organized labour but a unity of purpose that galvanized the entire class. He is not the first historian to show that interwar regional differences in income, between the unemployed in the centres of traditional industry (Lancashire, Yorkshire, the North East, South Wales, Clydeside) and those in work in the Midlands and the South East, diminished in wartime. As Arthur Marwick and Angus Calder have both argued, this was the result of the revival of the heavy industries of the depressed areas by the demand for war production, the achievement of full employment, and a huge rise in trade-union membership (from six to nine million) which ensured that wages rose ahead of prices and shifted the balance of power between labour and capital.³ The experience of such radically changed conditions of work, coupled with the inclusion in the Coalition Government of representatives of labour (Ernest Bevin, Arthur Greenwood and Herbert Morrison, as well as Clement Attlee and Stafford Cripps), gave workers a new sense of themselves as the backbone of the nation. It was accompanied by a rhetoric of fair shares for all and collective sacrifice, now believed to be necessary for achieving national unity, and so part of mainstream patriotism rather than the discordant message of left-of-centre moralists. National rhetoric was infused from mid 1941 with adulation for ‘Our Ally Russia’ which, as Sonya Rose has shown, in left-wing hands became a ‘veiled way of criticizing Britain’ and thus an expression of class feeling.⁴ Above all, the Beveridge Plan of December 1942 provided a blueprint for a more caring and just society, which gained in popularity the more caution the Conservatives expressed about it. All this brought Labour to power in 1945 with a clear majority of 180 seats, enabling it to implement an impressive programme of social reform and nationalization from 1945–51: the ‘rewards’ for working-class participation in the war effort identified by Stanislas Andrzejewski in the 1950s.⁵

This is close to the story that Ken Loach tells in his 2013 film The Spirit of ’45 and it is appealing, especially in these market-driven times of high unemployment and appalling disparities of wealth and income. One can, however, express reservations about an account centred on the ‘remaking’ of the working class, without subscribing to the arguments of Steven Fielding, namely that most people who voted Labour in 1945 did so either to reduce the expected Tory majority or because they believed they would benefit individually from full employment, social security and the NHS, rather than caring about the collective good.⁶ There are at least three aspects of the social history of the Second World War to inquire into further. What do we know about the complexities of social stratification in this period? How does the history of women workers relate to the idea of a new class unity in the Second World War? And how does the middle class fit into the picture of war and social change?

In 1958 David Marsh wrote that the war caused an expansion of the number of earners in the middle income brackets and an improvement in the position of those at the bottom.⁷ There is no doubt that some groups of manual workers improved their pay position markedly between 1939 and 1945, but there were wide variations in the increases that different groups of workers experienced. The earnings of agricultural workers and coalminers barely moved during the war, while those of male industrial workers, particularly in engineering and metals, rose rapidly. The earnings of men in the Midland engineering and aircraft factories reached undreamed-of heights by 1942. According to official figures the gap between the highest and the lowest average male industrial earnings (mining excluded) more than doubled during the war, increasing from 12s in 1938 to £1 8s 5d in 1945.⁸ Such discrepancies do not suggest that the war brought with it a trend towards the homogenization of working-class experience. This impression is sharpened if the gap between male and female earnings is considered. The same official figures show that at the end of the war women’s average weekly earnings in manual work were fifty-two per cent of those of men, compared with forty-seven per cent in 1938, and, as in the case of men, differentials between women in different industries widened: women clothing-workers were at the bottom and women working in transport were at the top.

As this suggests, the experiences of working women pose a challenge to the idea of a newly united working class. Although women constituted the majority of the increased numbers of trade unionists, they barely participated in the new trade-union strength. Few women were shop stewards, let alone union officials, and even fewer became members of the Joint Production Committees that some historians see as manifestations of labour’s newly acquired strength. On the factory floor, gender divisions were strong. Differentiation was profound – even if it were a source of fun, like the teasing remembered by oral-history interviewees such as Ethel Singleton, who was a welder at A.V.Roe’s engineering company in Manchester from 1941–5, and more obviously when it constituted harassment or discrimination.⁹ It was rooted in the persistence of entirely different expectations for female and male workers in terms of ‘bread winning’ and caring, riddled with contradictions though those often were.

Moreover, the degree of social mixing among women in wartime factories has been exaggerated: working-class women got working-class jobs and middle-class volunteers like Kathleen Church-Bliss and Elsie Whiteman, whose diary Sue Bruley has discussed, were in a tiny minority.¹⁰ Not only did members of different classes stay apart, but women’s experiences suggest that social differentiation within the working class was strong. Nora Vickers, the daughter of a skilled picture-restorer and a former elementary schoolteacher, was a centre lathe operator at a Royal Ordnance Factory during the war and enjoyed the blunt language and rough manners of the women she worked with, but her memories were infused by a ‘between two worlds’ discomfort. She did not really belong with these women, yet at home she no longer fitted in with her status-conscious upper-working-class family.¹¹ Nora herself became a clerical worker after the war. She was not alone in following that trajectory. The increasing number of women in white-collar work between 1930 and 1950 is symptomatic of profound changes in the economy and in class configuration. These women need to be included in the ‘indeterminate class’ of (male) technical, scientific, and literary workers that George Orwell remarked upon in 1941. Women from both working and middle-class backgrounds found work in offices and shops during and after the war. In terms of gender hierarchies they were subordinate: this development did little for gender equality. But in terms of class, their histories complicate the clear differentiation between social classes on which the idea of a remade working class rests.

Field acknowledges the multi-directional pulls of social change. Even though his overall argument is that the working class gained in strength during the war, with positive outcomes in terms of politics and social reform, he notes contrary developments. The very successes brought about by the immense wartime leverage of organized labour set in train postwar changes that obstructed the continuation of a collective consciousness of class power. The trade unions felt no need to modernize through reorganization and amalgamation; joint production committees fell by the wayside because neither side was committed to making them work; controls such as a national wages policy were unpopular with workers as well as bosses, since collective bargaining, in a situation of full employment, seemed to bring better rewards (at least sectorally). Universal benefits and full employment were well worth having, but the union movement did not wage class war to defend them in the 1950s and ’60s because their priorities lay elsewhere. Additionally, some historians have suggested that the welfare state (apart from the NHS) was too bureaucratic to command intense affection.¹² Finally, and more generally, even if the organized working class emerged from the Second World War with greater strength, its strong position was short-lived. After the war, as Stephen Brooke and others have argued, a coherent working class gradually disappeared as the wartime prosperity of Britain’s staple industries gave out, as the economy shifted from manufacturing to the service sectors, and as earnings differentials widened, giving rise to the ‘affluent worker’ of the 1950s on the one hand and to the child poverty of the 1960s on the other.¹³

What of the middle class and the Second World War? If wartime rhetoric, informed by the undeniable dependence of the polity on the sheer graft of the worker, contributed to working-class strength, what did it do to the middle class? Churchill certainly meant its members to contribute their ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ to the war effort, but an equivalent history to Field’s about ‘remaking the British middle class’ in the Second World War has yet to be written. However, it is a subject of growing interest, as recent debate in the pages of this journal indicates.¹⁴ Mike Savage has argued that there was ‘a subtle reworking of middle-class identities’ between 1939 and the 1950s, which he relates to the ‘growing assertion and presence of the working class’ in this period.¹⁵ This ‘reworking’, he argues, involved differentiating the middle class from the working class in new ways. Since claims for superiority based on high culture ‘carried little legitimacy in post-war Britain’, middle-class individuals distanced themselves from the working class, which they found threatening, by asserting the special value to the nation of their managerial, scientific and technical competencies. James Hinton, by contrast, has emphasized that middle-class observers registered class differences in accent, humour, style and manners as a source of embarrassment because of their divisive effects, rather than as a threat. Hinton claims that, far from rejecting high culture, individuals combined their interest in it with enthusiasm for scientific and technical developments. They did not see their taste for high culture as antithetical to democratic modernity, but regarded it as freeing them from conventional attitudes (middle-class or working-class), and drew on high culture to critique contemporary society and generate ideas for reshaping it.¹⁶ Both Savage and Hinton note the vigorous efforts that self-professed members of the middle class made to differentiate themselves from other segments of that class, such as ‘the suburban middle class’, and ‘the industrial lower middle class’.

The differences between Savage and Hinton centre on their contrasting interpretations of replies to Mass-Observation directives, underpinned by different methodologies. Understanding how middle-class Mass-Observers reflected on the personal implications of social change in the 1940s has become an important means by which to explore shifts in middle-class consciousness. The studies referred to suggest that we should look for a complex, stratified and, I would add, gendered, pattern of middle-class responses to wartime demands and exigencies. Indeed, some of the seemingly contradictory clues offered by other historians might be explained in this way. Thus Ross McKibbin has argued that the middle class was self-consciously modern and democratic in the 1930s. Middle-class involvement in the Left Book Club and consumption of Penguin Specials during the war reinforced the progressive trend.¹⁷ Field refers to the ‘suburban middle class’ supporting Labour in the General Election of 1945 (p. 377). Yet according to McKibbin the resulting middle-class progressivism was short-lived. It was transformed into anti-socialist reaction either during the war (which contradicts the idea of a middle-class Labour vote in 1945), or afterwards. McKibbin’s explanation is that the change was a reaction to the assertion of organized working-class power during the war and a response to the undermining of middle-class privilege by the postwar settlement.¹⁸ Other historians have added the loss of domestic servants and dislike of continued austerity to the pile. Yet this ‘voted Labour 1945, felt squeezed in the late 1940s, voted Conservative 1951’ story-line is not entirely convincing. As the Mass-Observers of Hinton’s and Savage’s accounts made clear, there were many components of the middle class with sharply different values and life styles. I cannot be the only middle-class child of the 1950s with memories of Labour stickers in the front windows of our dingy and dilapidated suburban house contrasting with the Conservative posters in the smarter windows next door, nor of the value my parents placed on the Co-op dividend and universal benefits while our next-door neighbours went on foreign holidays and sent their children to private schools. The British middle class, like the working class, has more than one history.

Field concludes with some reflections on the popular memory of the Second World War. In particular he notes that, as far as film and television are concerned, ‘the huge formations of miners, engineers, and munitions women, the trade unions, and class politics’ have ‘disappeared from view’ (p. 383). There is indeed a stark contrast between wartime depictions of the massed ranks of ordnance factory workers in the film Millions Like Us (1943), or the grimy crew of a crippled oil tanker in San Demetrio, London (1943), or the coal-blackened face of Goronwy who suffers a pit accident in Diary for Timothy (1945), and the focus of postwar films, such as The Cruel Sea (1953), The Dam Busters (1955) or Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), on the military struggles of small groups of heroic individuals, usually middle-class and rarely women. Film-makers’ resolute neglect of the home front until the 1970s signalled a desire to rework the military history of the war without the politics, and, in the main, without the working-class conscripts. All the same, the story of the Second World War told in the 1950s and ’60s was not a stable and uncontested one. The weaknesses as well as the strengths of middle-class masculinity, the finely graded distinctions between its internal strata, and their resonances with shifts in national identity, are probed in these films. Geoff Eley has observed that from the late 1960s to 2000 the Second World War was a ‘template for the popular political imagination’ that was fought over by left and right.¹⁹ Ken Loach’s 2013 film suggests that the contest continues.

Field worries at the end of his book that, for the majority of the population in the second decade of the twenty-first century, ‘the war is part of the nation’s heritage or belongs in the school curriculum, almost as remote as the Crimean War’ (p. 382). In fact, replies to a recent Mass-Observation directive (in 2009) suggest that memories of the Second World War transmitted through families, communicated in film, literature and television, and scored on the landscape, continue to feed the historical imagination of Britons across the age groups.²⁰ It is to be hoped that Geoffrey Field’s comprehensive and thought-provoking book will make a major critical contribution to the seemingly endless process of repositioning the Second World War in popular understanding.

NOTES AND REFERENCES