[brian walden] you can never go back

You can never go back

By Brian Walden

In his weekly opinion column, Brian Walden considers how World War II changed British society.

Last Sunday was VE Day.

I don't want to talk nostalgically about Britain's "finest hour", even though it was. I was at school in those years and schoolboys are ideal observers, having nothing else to do.

Sixty years after the events I now have a chance to make the points that nobody would have listened to at the time.

On Sunday, 3 September, 1939, I sat in the living room with my father and mother to hear Neville Chamberlain's radio broadcast.

The occasion had been deemed so grave that my mother had unlocked the best china from a cabinet in the front room. We drank tea from cups with a brownish gold pattern on them whilst Chamberlain said: "This country is at war with Germany ... May God bless you all."

Chamberlain was an inflexible, cold, arrogant man, whose concessions to Hitler had been unwise. His judgment of the Nazis had been wrong, whereas Churchill's turned out to be right.

I grant that, but still I'm sorry to see the state of his reputation these days. Some people speak of him as if he was as much to blame for the war as Hitler.

He wasn't.

His actions were often mistaken, but his motives were pure. He'd been as shocked as anybody by the appalling military casualties of World War I and he wanted to spare Britain from another bloodbath.

An important point about Chamberlain is that Britain went to war in 1939 without enthusiasm, but utterly united.

The united society soon became the fully mobilized society. I don't think the British people realised this at the time. The older men were air-raid wardens, or in the Home Guard. A lot of women had joined the forces, become land girls, gone into munitions factories or were clippies on the buses.

But anybody would have told you that we couldn't match the merciless regimentation of Nazi Germany.

The wartime British had a healthy respect for the efficiency of the Nazi war-machine. An exaggerated one as it turned out, because when the statistics were compared after the war it emerged that Britain was much better mobilized for total war than Germany.

How did the freedom-loving British manage to direct so many people to go where they were needed so quickly?

The answer, I suspect, isn't one that people would like. It spoils too many illusions. The Britain of those days was a socially disciplined and deferential society. Most people did what they were told and tried not to cause any trouble. Authority was respected.

The monarchy, Parliament, the law courts and the police all enjoyed great prestige. The British didn't have to be coerced into doing their patriotic duty. Once it was pointed out to them by the authorities, they were only too eager to do the right thing.

Yet it was in the war years that the pillars supporting this social deference began to crumble rapidly.

All at once it seemed that nearly everybody rejected the norms of pre-war society. After Churchill became prime minister, nobody of any prominence wanted to hold out against state control to regulate social and economic life.

The great upheaval in British society didn't come with the Labour landslide in the House of Commons in 1945. It came years earlier during the Churchill coalition government.

Never before or since have I experienced a mood of egalitarianism and classlessness like it. Rationing and the blitz produced an intense sense of unity and a belief in fair shares.

Though as poor as a church mouse, as a school boy I was occasionally kicked off half-empty buses in case my seat might be needed by a worker.

"Workers Only," the clippies would cry sometimes, stopping you from getting on the bus in the first place. It was a very noticeable social change.

Chamberlain's failures broke the spirit of what we might call the officer class in society. They felt they were to blame in some way. They now keep apologizing for being what they are."

Being labelled a worker was the title that carried highest status on the home front during the war.

Winston Churchill's radio speeches were every bit as inspiring as the legend says they were. More so I think, because the words - many of which are now familiar - produced a startling impact when fresh.

From an early stage in his premiership it was understood that there would be no going back to the past. My elders didn't seem to realise there'd been a massive swing politically to the Left. At by-elections, the Conservatives lost seats to anybody who ran against them, providing they looked respectable.

In 1939 I was a subject of the British Empire, which purported to be a world power with deep-seated financial security and an ordered social system that had endured for generations.

After the war, financial security had gone, the Empire was disappearing, there were massive social changes and Britain was no longer a world power, though most of us - including our leaders - didn't realise it at the time.

Some revisionist historians have suggested that if we could have negotiated peace with Germany after the fall of France in 1940 we could have preserved the Empire and our financial resources.

I don't agree with that, but I do remember a conversation with a German in the war. The Albion Bottle factory in Birmingham had German prisoners of war used as labourers and the sergeant who led them said to me: "We Germans and you British have more courage than sense. But at least we shall never fight again."

The pointlessness of European wars had become clear to most people.

An American Secretary of State, Dean Atchinson, put his finger on our new problem. In 1962 he said: "Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a new role." Perhaps we still haven't.