Book Review: Listening to Britain

SEVENTY years ago, as many people still living can attest, this country faced a crisis that makes our current economic difficulties seem petty.

We had been at war with Nazi Germany since September 1939. In the spring of 1940 Hitler's army rolled across Europe to the Baltic, the North Sea and the English Channel. Within a few weeks Britain went from being part of an anti-Nazi coalition to being the only enemy of Germany left standing on the continent, and the only nation in the world still in military opposition to a power that occupied most of western Europe.

The months that followed, the long months before Hitler called off his planned invasion of these islands and decided to turn east instead, were famously apostrophised by Winston Churchill as "our finest hour".

The summer of 1940 is so heavily draped in the legend of national survival and identity that it is difficult to see past the fabric to the real community behind. We know how our politicians and most of our historians view 1940: as a time of unprecedented and almost unqualified stubborn heroism. But how did the British people see it at the time?

Listening to Britain is an attempt to answer that question. Throughout 1940 a body named the Home Intelligence department was operating from a Whitehall office. Its director was a former BBC producer called Mary Adams. The function of Home Intelligence, according to Adams, was to discover "what the public is thinking" and to "provide an assessment of home morale".

To those ends Home Intelligence collected daily reports from its own regional observation officers and from other bodies across the country. Those reports from May to September 1940 have been collated and edited by Paul Addison and Jeremy A Crang of Edinburgh University. Uneven, impressionistic and frequently mundane, as the editors admit them to be, they shine a light into the minds of a citizenry which, whether it knew it or not, was living in its finest hour.

It was an Ealing Studios country. Some of the incidents, rumours and comments recorded by Home Information jumped straight out of Passport to Pimlico. It was noted approvingly in Birmingham in June 1940 that the absence of council road signs – which had been removed to baffle Nazi paratroopers – caused little difficulty to motorists as plenty of private hotel signs and directions were still standing. In Stoke-on-Trent a man picked up a German incendiary bomb, put it in a bucket of water, delivered it to his local police station, and then complained that the police retained the bucket.

The most common rumour by far, in a country alive with rumour, was of invasion by nuns. Nuns with hairy hands and deep, Teutonic voices were supposed to have appeared from the Scottish Lowlands to the West Country. Disguising Wehrmacht troops as the Poor Clares and dropping them on Bristol was apparently one of Hitler's secret weapons. The speed of the German advance towards the Channel was partly explained by their renowned engineering abilities – they had tunnelled under neutral Switzerland and come up on the outskirts of Toulouse.

But those were the grumbling, wondering fatalisms of a people under the cosh. What glows most fiercely through the pages of Listening to Britain is the resilience and optimism of the same men and women who believed in nuns with rifles.

Time and again Home Intelligence reported that the strongest resolve to defeat Hitler was to be found among the working classes – "the whiter the collar the less the assurance". While the industrial workers of the north, Wales and Scotland stood firm, there was seemingly "a considerable amount of Fascist feeling" in the Twickenham area.

Luckily, in 1940 the British working classes vastly outnumbered the inhabitants of Twickenham. They decided at an early stage that this was going to be a people's war, and that they would win it. Their priorities were adjusted. They wanted the old right-winger Winston Churchill as prime minister almost solely because he shared and articulated their own determination to defeat Nazi Germany and its allies at any cost – "We may have to fight Churchill after, but he's the man for us now."

The people, the majority of the people, were more ruthless than most of their politicians. They understood and applauded the Royal Navy's assault on the French fleet after France had fallen to Hitler, although it meant the death of over a thousand sailors who a few weeks earlier had been allies of Britain. The alternative – those French ships being deployed under German flags against British sailors – was unacceptable.

They complained loudly and bitterly to Home Intelligence that RAF bombers were returning from missions over Germany with their loads intact. Had the Luftwaffe been as finicky about target selection from the skies over Coventry and Bath? The road which led to the destruction of Hamburg and Dresden was trodden first by the British people, not by their representatives.

As Hitler knew, they – we, if we still are them – were a terrible enemy to choose. In the eyes of the rest of the world, Britain was beaten, isolated and on the floor. To the people of Britain, they were merely adjusting to the first body punches, finding their balance and getting ready to land the killer blow. Things might be a bit groggy in the opening rounds but the result was what mattered, and the result was simply never in doubt. "We always lose the first battle ... and win the last one."

In the meantime, they might get bombed out of house and home, "not even a cup and saucer left ... (but] I mustn't grumble."