Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-cjp7w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-02T12:50:21.915Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - ‘Fighting In Their Ways’? The Civilian Man in British Culture, 1939–1945

from Part Two - The Militarized Home Front

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2017

Linsey Robb
Affiliation:
cultural and social historian based at Teesside University. She is primarily interested in the social and cultural history of Britain during the Second World War and has a specific interest in the male civilian experience of war, an area in which she has published widely.
Mark J. Crowley
Affiliation:
Wuhan University, China
Sandra Trudgen Dawson
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
Get access

Summary

IN 1946 the British Crown Film Unit, part of the Ministry of Information, released the Humphrey Jennings documentary short A Diary for Timothy (Humphrey Jennings, 1946) which documented the closing months of the Second World War. It contained within it a glowing depiction of Britain's wartime civilian male workers, portraying them as central to the war effort and eventual victory. The narrator, actor Michael Redgrave, declared:

You see this was total war. Everyone was in it. It was everywhere. Not only on the battlefields but in the valleys where Goronwy, the coal miner, carries his own weapons to his own battlefront in scenery which isn't exactly pretty. If you looked across the countryside of England, that is beautiful, you can see Alan, the farmer, he has spent the last five years of war reclaiming the land and making it fertile. He has been fighting against the forces of nature all his life. And now with a mortal enemy on us he has to fight harder than ever. In London Bill the engine driver looks out of his cab at his battlefront. No longer taking holiday makers to the sea but taking the miner's coal, the farmer's crops, the fighting men's ammunitions to where they have to go. Goronwy, Alan and Bill are all fighting in their ways.

The militaristic vocabulary used in describing these workers makes evident the filmmakers’ wish to present them as central components of the war effort and the equals of their counterparts in the fighting forces. Moreover, the production notes for the film confirm that the filmmakers were consciously making parallels between these civilian jobs and the armed forces. The notes portray Bill's occupation as a ‘vital war job’ and, more tellingly, Goronwy is, when injured in a mining accident, described as being in ‘permanent danger as compared with temporary as airmen.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2017

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×