Week 10 reflection

Another guest post by Dr McCarthy:

In this week’s lecture I attempted to tackle the massive subject of the war’s impact on family life in Britain. As soon as I sat down to draft the lecture I realised the scale of the task I had set myself; such a rich and fascinating topic could lead in any number of directions and there were serious choices to be made about how to organise a wealth of material and suggestive sub-themes into 50 minutes. I decided to focus on three key areas: relations between parents and children; relations between husbands and wives; and the position of women within the family.  What I hoped to do was get students thinking about how military imperatives, the physical transformation of the economy and the expansion of the state affected everyday domestic life, and how we might, as historians, begin to access the personal or emotional experience of the British people. I was keen to emphasise the diversity of experience – not all children were evacuated, not all marriages broke down, not all women went into the factories – whilst at the same time making some valid general observations, for example, about the hyper-mobility of the population during war; the emergence of the family as the object of social policy; and the stresses of prolonged separation for husbands and wives. I tried to leave students with the ‘takeway’ thought that, despite all the strains and pressures, family life did survive, although the balance of power within the household may, for some at least, have subtly shifted as a result of wartime experiences.

I’m not sure that I quite achieved all of that, and I rather ran out of time towards the end, forcing me to cut short my remarks on the industrial conscription of women and the ‘combat taboo’ which prevented women from bearing arms (historically an important marker of citizenship). I tried to follow this up in the seminar groups, as both are crucial for thinking about the ways in which understandings and enactments of wartime citizenship were differentiated by gender. I also played two of my groups the film which failed to materialise in the lecture: John Grierson’s ‘They Also Serve’, a 10-min short produced for the MoI in 1940 and addressed to ‘The Housewives of Britain’. It stimulated some interesting discussion about how women’s domestic responsibilities were being reframed as a form of national service, and also about the idealised image of the home projected in wartime propaganda. It’s available for viewing on the BFI’s InView if anyone else would like to take a look…

Book Review questions

There was a question about book reviews in one of my seminars today – ‘How can we bring in talking about other books in our reviews when we’ve got so much else to do? There doesn’t seem to be enough space.’

Entries for the Queen Mary Companion to Britain in the Second World War

This is some guidance for the many students to whom this is a new form of assessment.

As historians, we don’t always want to read a massive book to get the basics of a key theme, argument, event or personality. Sometimes, particularly when we’re just starting on a subject, or a piece of understanding is crucial but tangential, we want to get a grip on it quickly. This is where we might make use of a Companion – a collection of short pieces of writing that seek to explain the most important aspects of a subject clearly and concisely, and which can act as a brief introduction not just to the events, but to the ways historians have interpreted them. A Companion entry might be short (often shorter than the lengths in this assignment), but writing one is not easy. You have to condense a lot of knowledge into a small space, interest and even entertain the reader, and lay the groundwork for them to understand further reading on the topic. You should not underestimate how difficult this will be: you will have to make use of your skills of writing and editing, as well as making decisions about what to put in and what to leave out.

Week 9 reflection

This week’s lecture and seminar concentrated on the economy. In the lecture, I tried to give the big picture of how the economy adapted to war, which I painted largely in terms of state intervention. I described four different ‘cranes’ used to mobilise industry and society for war: investment in munitions production; control of key resources (including raw materials and labour); anti-inflationary policies; and the development of political and bureaucratic systems to gather data and prioritise allocations. I forgot to say that I think this is a particularly useful metaphor because it gets across the idea of economic efforts being inter-connected and balanced.

IWM on YouTube

The IWM has its own YouTube channel - not a lot of information about the films on offer – they need to look at how good the BFI’s version is – but this might be a useful source of visual material.

 

Book review suggestions

One of the seminar students last week suggested that I should make some comments about the reviews from last year’s Bomber Command course that are available on this site. Why did I choose them, and what was good about them?

I’m a bit uncomfortable about this for two reasons – first, pedagogically, I think it’s better for students to work out for themselves what makes these interesting, but imperfect, models, and second, ethically, I asked these students for permission to post their work up, not to discuss it in detail. So what follows is deliberately a bit general when it comes to critiquing them.

Nevertheless, I can see this might be a useful exercise, especially for those who haven’t done this sort of assessment before. So let me highlight some strong points: 

Week 8 Reflection

A guest post by Helen McCarthy:

In today’s lecture I tried to address the question of political transformation during WWII by interrogating the notion of consensus, a key category in historiography of the Home Front. Essentially, I wanted to get students warmed up for their seminars by pushing them to think about the relationship between the collective social experience of ‘total war’ and political change: how far did the transformations taking place in social relations under wartime conditions bring about a decisive shift in the centre of gravity of British political life?

Home Front Online Sources

Here are a few sources that you could use to bolster work on this part of the course:

For political attitudes, you could look at some of the posters prepared by the Conservative Party for the 1945 election

To get some moving images of what life was like, you could look at ‘Films From The Home Front’ or BFI InView

To find out more about politicians and people, you could look at the DNB’s own ‘Home Front’ page

For images, you could use the Imperial War Museum Photograph Archive

For an insight into the world of work, why not visit the TUC archives online?

Most of these are institutional sites, but you could also look at privately maintained ones such as ‘The Midnight Watch’ – lots of material on Fire Guards and ARP, or ‘Home Sweet Home Front’ (a very deep site, obviously a labour of love), and at those sites which focus on tighter geographical areas – for example, the Bath Blitz

Week 7 Reflection

This week in the lecture I talked about the ‘Battles’ of Britain and the Blitz. Although I was trying not to tread on the toes of seminar groups too much, inevitably the lecture was positioned in relation to ideas about 1940-41 being a defining moment of national unity and distinctly British heroism. I tried to adapt – rather than demolish – this mythic model in several ways: first by highlighting the importance of chronological development (ie invasion and spy scares predated the first, relatively light experiences of air attack, which in turn predated the Blitz), second by suggesting those places where the rhetoric of unity required the exclusion of individuals or groups, third by re-establishing the uncertainty, suffering and fear that also accompanied this period, fourth by suggesting that the ability to withstand this period of threat might owe as much or more to German incapacity as to British national spirit.
I thought I managed to get these ideas across pretty well, although one thing I hadn’t accounted for was the double reinforcement effect of my points about the ways in which the experience of the Blitz was class-determined coinciding with the same idea coming across strongly in the reading – with the result that class tended to get emphasised in the seminars more than geographical location. The urban-rural, east-west splits are probably as important in determining experience.
The seminars were okay. Some groups are still struggling to grasp the amount of preparation that needs to go in to running the session smoothly – but this is a learning experience! Slightly more worrying to me was that although I’d posted up a detailed set of suggestions about how to prepare, those groups that had done so often hadn’t followed it – particularly noticeable at the end of the seminar where students hadn’t planned how they’d conclude.
I’d prefer to tackle this as an issue of systemic, rather than individual, fault. In the long term, I can re-write the course so that students get taught about group-work and preparation more explicitly, and have their participation in seminars rewarded in terms of assessment. In the short term, perhaps I could make concrete suggestions in class about how to conclude, or even introduce a new requirement for groups to produce a ‘takeaway’ sheet to be handed out at the end of the session. But these seem quite authoritarian measures – I wonder how else I can encourage adequate preparation and engagement with the suggestions I’ve already put up?

Christmas Under Fire

Here’s another version of Britain under attack in 1940-41. Again, you can find out more at screenonline.