CHAPTER 20

Great Britain at War

THE British experience of war between 1939 and 1945 was unique in that Great Britain was assailed and blockaded without having any of its home territory overrun and that its war effort was accompanied by changes in society and in the scope and structure of government which were presided over and directed by an established and virtually unchallenged government. In meeting their emergency the British were not able to superimpose a war economy on their existing peacetime economy, as the Americans did in the comparatively unruffled circumstances vouchsafed to them by physical inviolability and economic elbow room; nor could they, as the Russians did, fall back on the vastness of space and the rigours of autocratic rule to get the most in human labour and human endurance out of a patriotic people fighting against an enemy within the gates; nor, finally, were they left, as many continental Europeans were left, to face the present and shape a post-war future in the absence of a native government or in defiance of it.

To the question why Great Britain fought on in 1940 only an impressionistic answer can be given. It would take in an accumulation of factors, of which the most important are these. The Munich agreement of 1938 was a relief to a great many people who sensed the onset of a war which was never represented to them as a national or patriotic necessity. But Munich was also felt as a disgrace, and the sense of shame was compounded six months later when Hitler tore up the Munich agreement and completed his annexation of Czechoslovakia. That action finally revealed to the British that they had had enough of Hitler. The full story of the concentration camps was still to come but revulsion was now pressing hard against the dam of incomprehension. Moreover when war came, it came with a weird slowness, so that for nearly a year the British watched the approach of the storm; and all they saw nerved them for a fight where others had been unnerved. When prognostications of an unimaginable rain of death proved ill founded, the British found themselves spectators in a phoney, unnatural and yet humiliating war: no help was given to the Poles; no help reached the Finns, whose gallantry was at least equal to that of the Poles and more effective; Norway, a much respected country, was occupied by the Germans under the British nose. When the campaign in the west opened, the bombing of Rotterdam revived the German reputation for Hunnish atrocities in the First World War. France collapsed – a shock but in a sense also a release, since the British as a nation had no great opinion of the French and were as happy to fight, if need be, without a French ally as with one. Whereas Munich and the occupation of Prague and the growing evidence of Nazi barbarity had braced the younger generation for a fight, the bombing of Rotterdam stirred an older stratum of anti-German patriotism which, inclined also to be contemptuous of France, was undismayed by the prospect of single combat. And old and young were equally fortified by the retreat from Dunkirk which with a glorious perversity they regarded as a victory.

Something must be said too about British society. Although socially stratified to an extraordinary degree, this society was ideologically more coherent than most in Europe, less distraught by fascist or communist fissures, readier to respond unitedly to the generous humanity, the aristocratic chauvinism and the courage of a Winston Churchill. Furthermore, Great Britain was a singularly law-abiding, government-conscious and well-governed country. It was well governed not in the sense that the government was good for the people as a whole, but in the sense that government worked well within the limits set for it by the people who did the governing. Great Britain between the wars was not an agreeable place to live in. It was crowded with misery and injustice: estimates of the underfed in the worst years in the thirties go as high as twenty million. Little was done by government to help this large section of the nation and much of what was done was silly, for the governors were for the most part men of limited awareness and only moderate intelligence. Yet the temper of Great Britain did not become revolutionary. Rather did it become resigned in the face of chronic unemployment, killing poverty and the obscene slums which were among the most frightful places in which Europeans had ever been expected to live; and one of the main reasons for this resignation may be found in the fact that Great Britain had strong government. Strong government does not in this case mean repressive government but a government which never looked like breaking down or running down and which remained fully competent to perform its allotted tasks and preserve the formal framework of the nation’s life. Although government was bad in the sense that it was inadequate in conception and in performance, it worked. It accepted a deplorably narrow view of its functions, but this view was traditional and excited little rebellion (except of the intellectual kind) with the result that the machinery of government did not become discredited. There was in 1940 in Great Britain neither a feeling of disintegration nor a movement to take the opportunity to alter the system of government. The British did not rebel against inequality and injustice because on the whole they did not believe in equality or expect justice. These things were too abstract or remote to be pursued or regarded as ingredients in real life: real life in Great Britain was steeply graded, material goods and opportunities were seen to be unfairly distributed, and even the law was accepted as one thing for the rich and another for the poor. But this did not mean that the British were supine. It meant that their demands were peculiar. What they did require of their rulers was freedom for themselves – the note which was struck in the seventeenth century and has dominated all others ever since in English history – and financial honesty at the top, and because they got these things in large measure Great Britain was, despite blatant social inadequacies, law-abiding. Freedom and incorruption were the secular religion of Great Britain (religion in its essential Latin sense of something that binds together), and in hoc signo the British engaged the enemy as a united people. At Mons in 1914 desperate men had seen angels in the sky; at Dunkirk in 1940 they saw German aircraft; but what mattered on both occasions was not in the sky but in tradition.

For the British the crisis of the war came with the fall of France. This event left Great Britain alone, exposed to direct attack, committed to a vast industrial effort to re-equip its armed forces, and uncertain about its food supplies. Alongside the military problems of survival and riposte was a twofold problem of government. First, the direction of the war consisted in a series of choices. Great Britain could not simply do what it had not done earlier. Doing some things meant not doing others. Men, women and materials were needed in more places and for more purposes than they could fill and somebody had to decide which came first. Only the government could take such decisions and so the government found itself involved in a range of activities which it had not undertaken in peacetime. Secondly, the direction of the war had to command popular approval. This was to some extent assured by the very nature of the emergency and by the confidence inspired by Churchill personally, but British society was sufficiently sophisticated and emancipated to require to feel in broad terms that the conduct of the war was efficient and to see that it was fair. The military front was left by the public and also by Ministers themselves very much to Churchill and his professional advisers, but on the home front the government acknowledged the need to assume new responsibilities for an equitable distribution of the burdens of war and for post-war reforms. Churchill promised blood, toil, tears and sweat. But his government had to do more than promise what Clemenceau had called the grandeurs and miseries of war.

Social awareness and a social conscience were not a product of the Second World War. They can be glimpsed in British history in the earlier part of the century and indeed much earlier than that. In the thirties unemployment had thrust itself, with the help of the press, on public attention. Most people knew that slums existed, even if they had no idea what they were like. But the depression between the wars frightened members of the ruling class even more than it touched their consciences. They feared for their own standard of living (which they were apt to confuse with the wealth of the nation) and they were as much afraid of the poor as sorry for them. So they nailed their slogans to the mast of orthodox economics, demanded reduced expenditure even if it meant wage cuts, imposed heavy import duties to keep prices up and opposed schemes for the relief of poverty as utopian and a threat to the value of sterling which, by inverting their priorities, they regarded as more vital than finding work for the unemployed. The war, like previous wars, affected this emotional muddle in two ways. By throwing people together, whether in the armed forces or in fire-watching posts or in civilian billets or in the reception areas where urban evacuees migrated, it forced people to become rather less ignorant of each other’s circumstances than they had been, or had preferred to be, before. Shock, shame and comradeship created a positive desire for reform for idealistic reasons. Secondly, by creating an emergency which required the mobilization of the whole nation, war forced government to take note of the whole nation, to make it fit for the fight in body and spirit and to cater for its basic needs. The health and morale of the entire population became, in the Second World War, a matter of the first concern in the same way as the stamina of professional armies and their loyalty to their princes had been the essence of warmaking in earlier times. Looking after the whole population, in and out of uniform, became a function of government for practical reasons. On the material side it included the provision of food, accommodation, medical services, adequate working conditions, fair wages; on the spiritual side it involved justifying the war morally (not difficult with the Nazis as enemies), making people feel that their hardships were being equitably shared and assuring them a better society when the war was over and not merely a return to things as they had been.

The relief of poverty, however poverty may be defined, had long been regarded as a proper function of government, as witness a series of acts from the Elizabethan poor law to industrial insurance. During the war government came to provide for people for other reasons too: because they were pregnant or because they were old (even if they were not necessitous) or because they were very young. Therefore the war became a stepping stone in the slow and piecemeal progress from the concept of relief to the concept of welfare. Further, attitudes to poverty itself changed too. The old poor law had been administered locally; the right to relief existed only within the parish. But many people no longer lived all their lives in the places where they were born, and the increased mobility of the population in wartime finally destroyed a basis for poor relief which had long been out of date as well as inhuman. The poor became a charge on the nation instead of a charge on the parish, and local authorities ceased to have an interest in chasing away poor people who might by tarrying acquire claims on the local budget.

The immediate need in the early summer of 1940 was to re-equip the armed forces and survive the air bombardment which was bound to come. This meant specially hard work in specially difficult conditions. Many basic pre-requisites were missing. British industry was short of equipment, notably machine tools, and of certain raw materials, notably steel, rubber and aluminium. It was also short of factory space and of statistics about factory space: neither industry itself nor government knew how much space there was or how it was being used or how it might be adapted for war. Much effort was put into new building when it could more economically have been employed in conversion. There was not a serious overall shortage of manpower but there was a shortage of some special skills. There was also a ludicrous and throttling lack of statistical information about manpower – information about how many people were doing what where, for example, how many people were employed in the building industry. The first wartime government had done little to remedy these deficiencies and the second, taking office on the day when Hitler attacked in the west, still did not know what was scarce and what was not: it assumed, for example, that there could be no shortage of coal or shipping. Its difficulties were compounded by the losses of men and material in France, by the primitive inefficiency of much of British industrial management, and by unforeseen shortages of foreign currency. Required to build and equip new factories, to replace lost weapons and design and produce new ones, to feed the population, ensure a bearable standard of living and bearable working conditions, and to import essential minima of overseas raw materials, it was forced to plan in a time of unprecedented stringencies and turmoil.

There were three principal domestic upheavals during the war. They were caused by evacuations, the blitz and the break-up of families through the direction of men into the armed forces or to industrial work away from home and the flow of women into factories, agriculture and the services. The government assumed the task of regulating these changes and mitigating their unwelcome consequences. The complex series of measures introduced for these purposes covered the provision and rationing of food and other goods, the control of manpower and the regulation of working conditions, the control of prices, the provision of new social services for all classes of the population and the preparation of social reforms for post-war Great Britain.

Because the damage which the Luftwaffe would do to London and other big cities had been greatly exaggerated, the government had prepared, among other things, a plan for moving several million people out of the main target areas. The general principles, adopted in 1938, were: the designation of evacuation, reception and neutral areas; no compulsory removal, except from special areas where national security rather than personal security so required; schoolchildren to be moved en masse with their teachers; and the government to take compulsory billeting powers. When war came, close on 1.75 million people were moved by train and boat under the government’s scheme. They included very young children with their mothers, pregnant women, the blind and crippled, inmates of hospitals and prisons, and government departments. In addition two million people moved themselves (and over 8,000 went to the United States and Canada, one quarter of them with government aid). This migration of close on four million persons was smaller than had been expected, but the private enterprise element was larger: in some specially attractive areas official immigrants were outnumbered by eight to one. In general the arrangements at the points of departure were fair to good, the arrangements in the reception areas fair to bad. Owing partly to official parsimony and partly to the filling of prospective billets by unofficial, and usually more welcome, refugees the accommodation of the government’s charges sometimes verged on the chaotic, and the refugees were made to perceive the distaste of country people for what were called, and sometimes were, urban dregs. Elsewhere their reception was all that generosity could desire. But everywhere there was a bit of a shock. Town children were not only put out by the change of scene, they were also disturbed by being separated from their families and became the more prone to obstreperousness by day and bedwetting at night. The hosts looked with horror and for the first time at children whose clothes were thin and dirty and torn and whose hair had lice in it; some of them began to feel that much was being asked of them, even if there was a war on, others that not enough had been asked of them in peacetime to remedy the social ills of slum life which had never before been brought home to them. Such encounters may be salutary but they are hardly ever easy for either side. By the end of the year a million of the evacuees had decided that they would rather go back to the cities again. The discomforts of social adjustment, and the false sense of security engendered by the phoney war, repopulated the target areas. In 1940 a second evacuation took place when, after the fall of France, 200,000 schoolchildren were moved from London and other cities and some of the more exposed coastal zones were redesignated evacuation areas, but the partial failure of the first wave of evacuation caused a number of people to opt for bombing and death.

A secondary consequence of evacuation was an enormous increase in the mobility of the population. Military service and compulsory direction of labour had the same effect, and over the whole period of the war the number of moves made from one home to another inside Great Britain exceeded the total number of the population.

The London blitz, which began on 7 September 1940 and continued for seventy-six consecutive nights with only one intermission, caused great dislocation and some discontent, which were countered by solidarity and comradeship in adversity, by the efficiency of voluntary bodies and by the active sympathy and interest of superior beings like Churchill and the king and queen. Although the weight of the attack had been so far overestimated that the tonnage of bombs dropped on London in the whole war was less than what had been expected in the first two weeks, the damage per ton was higher and the trouble and danger caused by unexploded bombs (5–10 per cent of the total) unforeseen. Casualties per ton on the other hand were lighter – fifteen to twenty per ton in place of the estimated fifty to seventy, a reflection not only of happily inaccurate forecasting but also of the effectiveness of precautions ranging from shelters in basements, gardens and subways to rescue, ambulance and hospital services. On the other hand victims often did not know what relief services existed or where they were to be found. There was much improvisation, for the homeless turned out to be a bigger problem than the dead, and the raids came by night instead of by day. Sleeping facilities had to be provided in underground railways and other public places, and rest centres – mostly provided at this stage by private effort – were initially too few, under-equipped and overcrowded. At one point in 1940 there were about 25,000 homeless people in London and, in addition to death and destruction, human beings had to contend with lack of sleep, more dirt and more broken glass than most people had thought about, the blackout, sirens (reduced on Churchill’s command from a two-minute to a one-minute wail), an increase in the accident rate especially among children, queues, and a continuous strain which was not totally lifted until the war ended. Outside London air raids were less concentrated. In the attacks on cities and ports which began at Coventry on 14 November 1940, when 554 people were killed and much of the city including its cathedral destroyed, the dispersion of the effort over two dozen major targets lessened the impact on each. The renewed attack in 1942 – the so-called Baedeker raids – was a tip-and-run operation which did comparatively little damage, and the V weapons, arriving only in the summer of 1944, were too late to be a prolonged menace. Air raids killed 60,000 people, seriously injured 86,000 and slightly injured 149,000. Half these casualties occurred in London and two thirds of them while Great Britain was fighting alone.

The evacuation and the blitz were the two sides of a single coin depicting the parrying and withstanding of the enemy’s attack. In this attack the family, the basic unit in British society, was buffeted in its two vital parts: the link between the spouses and the care of the children within the family group. The British family had become smaller since the First World War, more compact perhaps but also more vulnerable. It no longer had so many older children to look after the babies; the older children were fewer and not enough older. With the father away and the mother perhaps doing part-time work there was no reserve for emergencies. Older relatives and friends, who might have been expected to lend a hand, were also more likely to be out at work and when the bombing began there were soon many houses with a room or two damaged and so without the extra space for taking somebody in for a night or a week. People who had moved might not have got to know their neighbours well enough to ask for the little services of neighbourliness. Looking after a family with these traditional longstops gone became a constant worry.

The separation of the spouses was another worry. Husbands and wives do not normally want to live apart. During the war one or both of the separated spouses was often in danger. Sometimes neither knew for certain where the other was. Letters took a long time and in any case not everybody was used to conveying feelings by letter; many letters were awkward, stilted compositions which said nothing of consequence except that the writer was alive and well, or alive and recovering from something or other; they were, as Wilfred Owen wrote in the earlier war,

… the sighs of men, that have no skill

To speak of their distress…

Many separations began on the morrow of marriage, and many of the married were unusually young. Although the marriage rate fell during 1942–4 (it had been abnormally high in 1939–40), there was an increase in the proportion of marriages contracted by persons between twenty and twenty-four and a very notable increase in the number of persons marrying under twenty-one – nearly one third of the women who married for the first time during the war were under twenty-one. The birth rate, which fell in 1941 to its lowest recorded level, rose sharply from 1942 onward.

The number of illegitimate births rose dramatically – from 26,574 in 1940 to 64,743 in 1945; the percentage of single and widowed women bearing children rose from a pre-war average of 0.55 per cent to 1.04 per cent. Separation was one cause: the number of husbands separated from their wives by military service may have reached 2.5 million at its peak, about a quarter of a million men served overseas continuously for the full five years of war, and very many more were absent long enough to promote the conception of bastards on one side of the family or the other. Civilian husbands too were separated from their families when they were sent to work in distant factories or their offices were moved wholesale from one place to another. Although attempts were made to keep families together, it was impossible in wartime to provide the necessary accommodation. The number of foreign servicemen in Great Britain varied between a quarter and half a million and rose to 1.5 million before the invasion of Normandy. Many of them contributed to the illegitimate birth rate along with the relaxation of moral conventions occasioned by war, separation and the shortened expectation of life.

But although the number of illegitimate births rose so that something like 100,000 children were born illegitimate during the war who would otherwise have been born in wedlock, there is no evidence of an increase in extra-marital sexual intercourse and the proportion of extra-marital conceptions in fact fell. One seventh of all children born in the last year before the war had been conceived extra-maritally, and nearly 30 per cent of mothers had conceived their first child out of wedlock. During the years 1940–47 one eighth of children were so conceived. The war affected what happened after conception. Whereas before the war 70 per cent of the parents who procreated before marriage got married before the child was born, during the war they did so less and less until in 1945 only 37 per cent married in these circumstances. In sum, the rise in the number of illegitimate births in wartime betokens no change in sexual behaviour but a decline in the opportunities available to couples to regularize the status of their misconceived offspring. The result was a magnified social problem, often misinterpreted as a moral one. The percentage of unmarried mothers under twenty-five dropped during the war, although in the higher age groups it increased. The biggest increase (41 per cent) occurred among the thirty to thirty-fives.

There were more divorces. The grounds for divorce had been extended by statute in 1937 and a number of men and women found in the services advice about divorce and a cheaper way of getting one, but the increase from 10,000 petitions a year just before the war to nearly 25,000 in 1945 reflected also a general loosening of family ties. Juvenile delinquency also increased, although it still concerned only a small proportion (between 1 and 2 per cent) of the young. Cruelty to children and neglect increased. So did truancy from school. But drunkenness was halved.

The government had to take cognizance of these social trends. The armed services adopted a liberal attitude towards applications for compassionate leave or compassionate postings by anxious husbands or fathers. By the end of the war requests in these categories were being made at the rate of 200–300 a day and about half of them were being granted. At home the government established and paid for services for pregnant women, young children, old people and even, with some reluctance and a good deal of secrecy, unmarried mothers. State care for pregnant women was a new idea. Before the war local authorities had been empowered – but not, except in the case of midwives, obliged – to provide services, but where they did so the quality varied extensively, some were very bad and the death rate was shockingly high. There was little comprehensive care embracing pre-natal, midwifery and hospital services because these services often came under different authorities. The war exacerbated the problem since displaced mothers were seldom able to have their babies in billets and there was an acute shortage of maternity beds in hospitals. The government therefore established emergency maternity homes, which had high standards and a low death rate and which proved to be one of the most successful of the government’s wartime incursions into the field of social welfare.

The unmarried mother remained a being apart. Practically her only recourse was to the old poor law and the workhouse; when she left the workhouse, even to go to work, she had to carry her baby with her in order to satisfy the authorities that she was not running away and abandoning it. She could get no public assistance outside the area to which she belonged owing to the rigid administration of the poor law by districts and the determination of each district to guard its territory against trouble and expense from beyond its borders; she was, for these as well as other reasons, unwelcome as an evacuee in a reception area. Apart from the workhouses there were in 1939 only four publicly assisted homes for unmarried mothers in the whole of England and Wales and further accommodation provided by voluntary organizations for 3,000–4,000 mothers per year – against a total of illegitimate births which, as already mentioned, passed 25,000 before the war began and then rose steeply. The death rate for illegitimate babies was twice the normal. The armed services assumed during the war some responsibility for the illegitimate children and so–called unmarried wives of servicemen, and the government, with a similar eye on morale, gave some niggardly assistance to those similarly situated in war industries, but for moral and financial reasons the government’s scheme was run in such a hole-and-corner way that many possible beneficiaries never got to hear about it. The war dented attitudes to the livelier consequences of adultery and fornication, but not much.

The government was bolder in grasping the nettle of venereal diseases, whose incidence roughly doubled during the war. New centres for treatment were established (some existed before the war) and considerable publicity was given to the dangers, causes and cures. Some newspapers, putting prudery before health, refused to accept the government’s advertisements. Doctors were given power to order patients to submit to treatment for venereal disease, as also for scabies, which, according to the Ministry of Health, was developing into a threat to the war effort. At one point the Rubber Control stopped the manufacture of contraceptives but this particular exercise of administrative discrimination in relation to a scarce commodity had to be reversed as a result of representations by interested parties – an example of the power of the consumer.

The care of children under five presented special problems since they were not evacuated with their schools like their older brothers and sisters and many of the mothers who had been expected to stay at home and mind them went out to work. The call-up of women was one of the more contested and controversial decisions of the war on the home front. It was foreshadowed early in 1941 when women were required to register on a limited scale. This step was partly a precaution and partly an appeal. It was hoped that women who had neither jobs nor household duties would go to work, but the number of such women turned out to be small and when industry, notably the aircraft industry, began to run into serious labour shortages the net was extended and the power to direct women to work was used. The lower age limit was eighteen and a half and the upper, fixed in October 1942 at forty-five and a half, was raised by steps to fifty. Women with husbands at home or children under fourteen were exempt, but they were nevertheless asked to work and 13 per cent of those with young children did so. Older women also volunteered for work. By the end of 1943 the female labour force had increased by over two million, half of whom were working voluntarily and for no pay. The consequences, during the war and afterwards, were considerable. Women undertook work which they had not done before and persisted in it after the war: the diversity of female labour was greatly increased (the main cause, together with higher taxation, of the decline in domestic service – from 5 per cent of households to 1 per cent). Women also became more accustomed to working after marriage, another change which stuck. It was discovered, to the surprise of some men, that in most jobs undertaken by women a woman was the equal of a man except when she came to be paid.

Day nurseries for very young children had first been established in 1880. They were expanded during the First World War but allowed to dwindle and in 1938 there were only 104 in existence. In addition there were nursery schools and classes, mostly in very poor districts, taking about 185,000 children, that is to say, one in ten of all children under five. There were also a number of children in workhouses. Voluntary and official bodies supported welfare centres, health visitors, medical attention and free meals. These services were cut when war began owing to a complete failure to foresee the problems which would arise when labour became scarce and even women with young children would be exhorted to go to work. Despite anxious prodding by the Ministry of Labour little was done for two years but thereafter the exigencies of the situation – and demonstrations in London and elsewhere – caused the government to pay more attention to this section of the population and before the war ended there were over 200,000 children in day nurseries or nursery schools. They were mostly run by voluntary organizations and paid for by the state. A small number of residential nurseries was also established, largely through American and Canadian generosity although the government ultimately agreed to foot the bill; they accommodated about 20,000 children. Finding premises, equipment and toys for all these establishments proved difficult; it so happened that the makers of cots had been specially unlucky in the blitz and at one point there was a shortage of rubber teats which had to be imported from the United States owing to a shortsighted prohibition on their manufacture in Great Britain; toys were made by air raid wardens waiting for raids and by prisoners, as well as being sent by sympathetic foreigners. Finding staff was also difficult and the number of mothers released for industry was not very much greater than the number of women employed to mind their babies, although it does not follow that the scheme was of minimal value since many of the child-minders could not have been usefully employed in anything except child-minding. The standards prevailing in the nurseries were high, epidemics very few and the idea of nursery schools caught on and survived the war.

In making provision for young children and pregnant mothers the government was extending to whole categories services which it had previously supplied only to the indigent, thus removing the stigma of poverty which had inhibited people from asking for what they needed. It had also to provide certain necessities for the whole population without distinction of class or category. The most important of these necessities was food.

Much of Great Britain’s food came from overseas. Enemy action and shortage of shipping endangered the nation’s food supply and created a corresponding need to produce more food at home. But Great Britain had very little surplus land to bring into cultivation. Therefore more food involved changes in uses of existing agricultural land and greater productivity per acre. This in turn meant more machinery, especially more tractors, and the modernization of agriculture which had been neglected during the pre-war years. Imports could be cut by increasing arable farming at the expense of livestock since feeding stuffs were largely imported. At the beginning of the Second World War Great Britain’s arable acreage was smaller than it had been in 1914 by 2.75 million acres. The government therefore gave generous grants for ploughing up unploughed land and for improvements such as drainage. It also helped marginal farmers – a policy which was continued after the war. In the course of the war ploughland expanded from under 13 million acres to over 19 million and tillage from nearly 9 million to 14.5 million. The number of tractors rose from 52,000 just before the war to around 200,000 at the end. Cereal crops increased by 50 per cent and so did potatoes. Milk production was maintained but the country’s population of pigs, poultry and sheep contracted sharply as imports of feeding stuffs fell from 8.75 million tons to 1.25 million. Yet the food value of this diminished animal population was considerably increased by more intelligent farming and its money value rose by 30 per cent at constant prices.

The needs of war changed both the structure of farming and even the landscape itself. In some areas small farmers retreated before the economics of a machine age until the average size of a farm was ten times what it had been. Much ploughed land did not return to pasture after the war. The Wiltshire downs, for example, which had been pasture land since neolithic times, were ploughed and have continued to be ploughed.

Local War Agricultural Committees were established to give advice (which was not always well received) on such comparatively new subjects as chemical weed control and soil analysis, to chide and if necessary evict bad farmers and to reclaim and work any derelict land that could be found. They had considerable powers and they used them. They also owned and hired out machinery. These committees consisted of unpaid local people assisted by paid officials, one of many examples of the blending of the voluntary system with the new expertise and the new concept of central direction. Although they were regarded by a conservative countryside as a regrettable and temporary necessity, their effects were salutary: output per acre was increased by 10–15 per cent, total production rose by 35 per cent with only a comparatively small increase in the labour force, neglected land was restored, finance became available and profits were made. The farmers with the most and best land did best, but all did better than before. After the war the powers of the wartime committees were perpetuated by statute (in more circumspect language) but the new committees used their powers much less.

Hardly less important than the production of food was its equitable distribution. Great Britain’s wartime rationing system was almost a work of art. The simplest form of rationing is to assign to every individual a given quantity of a limited number of specified substances. This system becomes somewhat less simple when the quantities assigned vary according to categories of consumers – infants, pensioners, heavy industrial workers, diabetics, etc. Furthermore even a comparatively simple system of this kind will not work unless the authorities can ensure the continuous provision of adequate stocks of the rationed goods at all places and times, a task which was particularly difficult in Great Britain’s case owing to the uncertainties of imports. But the British system was far more extensive and flexible than specific rationing of this kind. It embraced foods beyond the basic necessities and gave the consumer a certain range of choice. The system was tripartite: first, it specified precise rations of some foods, for example, butter Secondly, it rationed meat by price instead of by quantity, so that a family might either pool its rations to buy a good joint once in a way or choose to have less good stewing meat more often. (Offal, rabbit and chickens were off ration.) Thirdly, the system imposed a general limit on purchases in a wider area – biscuits, jam, oranges, sweets were examples – within which, however, the purchaser was free to choose. This was achieved by a brilliant, if simple, device called the points system. Every individual was allotted a certain number of points, represented in his ration book by tokens of varying point-value which he could exchange for rationed foods at any time in a prescribed period. The goods which fell within this scheme were graded so that, for example, a packet of biscuits or a tin of sardines cost so many points. The gradings were altered from time to time, upwards or downwards, in accordance with the availability of stocks, and the individual’s aggregate number of points in a quarter was also varied in order to increase or restrain his overall demand on rationed goods (other than specifically rationed ones). The points system introduced administrative difficulties since the consumer’s freedom of choice made it impossible precisely to predict the demands which were likely to be made in a given period in different parts of the country – people in the south-west might develop a marked taste for biscuits while people in the north-east were making a run on sardines – but the flexibility in demand and consequent alleviation of the monotony of wartime diet were worth the extra effort, and the scheme as a whole was a major success for government planning as well as a triumph for fairness. The opulent could not (in theory – though appearances sometimes seemed otherwise) get unfair advantages by eating large meals in restaurants because for any meal costing more than 5s. (25p) coupons had to be surrendered. No coupons were required in works canteens but these meals were limited to a value of 5s. – and usually to baked beans and a mass-produced wartime invention called, after the Minister of Food, a Woolton pie. There was little cheating or black marketeering. Besides food, clothes and household goods were similarly rationed. Each individual had a separate book of coupons for these goods. Overall purchasing power was restricted but within this general limitation the purchaser could choose whether to buy half a dozen yards of cloth or a pair of sheets or a new dress.

Food and household goods were also cheap. The government’s policy was to keep people healthy and vigorous by keeping the price of food down. Price controls were introduced in stages until by the end of 1942 they covered all goods in general demand. Special attention was paid to children, who, in this and other respects, were exceptionally well looked after during the war. They had different ration books and were provided gratis with milk, orange juice and cod liver oil (for vitamins) and meals in school. Standard – ‘utility’ – clothing and furniture were introduced, and utility clothing was exempted from purchase tax. These controls brought the cost of living down and, since wages were not brought down too, many people were financially better off during the war than they had been before it – a particularly grim commentary on the social outlook of pre-war governments. Average personal expenditure on food rose from 10s. 8d. (53p) to 14s. 6d. (72½p): that is to say, people continued to spend roughly between a quarter and a third of their net income on food, although by the end of the war they were buying at 14s. 6d. slightly less than they could have got for their 10s. 8d. at the beginning of the war. This stability was remarkable in view of the great increase in the cost of food. Home-produced food doubled in cost; imports, although reduced in volume (by 25 per cent), also doubled their cost. All in all the annual cost of food rose by £726 million, of which £472 million was paid directly by the consumer and £254 million was met by government subsidies. The extent of government intervention is shown by comparing this last figure with the pre-war cost of food subsidies – £72 million.

By this combination of measures – food production, rationing and price control – the government succeeded in ensuring an adequate, if monotonous, diet and an adequate, if uninspiring, supply of other basic goods. The first two years of war, with meat severely rationed and all imports of fruit discontinued, were a period of shortage but no danger to health. Civilian consumption was rather restricted by the shortage of steel, timber and aluminium, of which there was little left over for such things as kitchen utensils, furniture or sports goods. Textiles were also reduced by the transfer of labour from the textile industry to more urgent war production; part of the textile industry never recovered the labour and the markets which they lost. These were the years of the biggest cuts in civilian standards, personal expenditure on food dropping by 20 per cent during 1941, on other household goods by more than 40 per cent and on clothes by 38 per cent. There was, however, a compensating gain. The quality of what was available improved. The government imposed minimum standards on such goods as ‘utility’ furniture and fabrics, so that although richer people had to make do with goods inferior to what they had been used to, most people were getting a better buy than before the war. Design too, as well as the material itself and the workmanship, improved over a whole range of goods which had previously been turned out tastelessly for a public which was supposed not to care. Cheapness was no longer synonymous with shoddiness.

From 1942 life continued on a reduced plateau, which people at large accepted and the government maintained with such variations as it might introduce when supplies could be improved and the balance between military requirements and the demands of civilian morale could be adjusted. Housing began to present a bigger problem than food or goods. By the end of 1941 300,000 families were living in sub-standard houses and no fewer than 2.5 million persons in houses which had suffered bomb damage of varying degree. There was overcrowding and discontent, but the building industry was using the bulk of its depleted labour force (reduced by two thirds by July 1944) to build airfields and camps and to repair factories, railways and docks. From 1943, however, some of this labour had to be diverted to repairing domestic housing and converting large houses to accommodate more families. This work was given a high priority and in 1944 nearly 3.5 million men were engaged in repairing houses and maintaining and renewing industrial plant. They themselves created a lodging problem when they were drafted into cities in large numbers and their work was offset by the arrival of the V weapons but by the end of the war 40,000 houses were being repaired per week. Nevertheless the war left a massive housing problem which was only partially and temporarily eased by spending £150 million on ‘pre-fabs’.

Although enough food of the right sort is the basis of fitness, diet is not the answer to everything. People still get sick or tired or bored. The government was therefore obliged to assume responsibility for hospital services, to intervene in the regulation of working conditions and even to provide entertainment and other resources for filling in time.

Great Britain’s pre-war hospital services were an uncoordinated muddle, partially masked by the excellent and devoted work which went on in some sections of what could hardly be called a system. Hospitals included over a thousand voluntary hospitals which were unrelated to each other, many of them in shocking condition, short of equipment, antiquated and bankrupt.

The War Office had its own hospitals; local authorities, of whom the independent voluntary hospitals were inherently suspicious, ran others. Apart from London and a few other rich areas there was a serious shortage of doctors and nurses. Plans had been discussed before the war for a comprehensive state hospital service but they made little headway against the rivalries of the different hospital bodies. Estimates of likely civilian casualties produced an irremediable problem: about 250,000 beds could be made available by cramping patients and staff and lowering standards of care and hygiene as against an anticipated need for 1 million to 2.8 million beds. Fortunately the problem never materialized and the government was granted the right combination of breathing space and exigency to impose (against the protests of the War Office and by overriding the independence of local authorities) a regional system in which new hospital boards, covering wide areas, allotted varying functions to hospitals of all kinds in their areas. The coming of war was an accelerator which forced a highly unsatisfactory state of affairs on the attention of government, provided an excuse for the beginnings of action and laid the basis for a new system in which the distinctions between the different kinds of hospital would be eliminated by overall state control, and a more sensible area of management – the region – would replace both the single voluntary hospital and the variety of local authorities which were often too small or too poor to do the job properly.

Hospitals clearly existed to perform a public service. In 1939 this was not true of the railways, which were generally considered to exist to make a profit. They were also unprepared for war and barely fulfilled their function in it. Before the war it was assumed that there would be no lack of carrying capacity on the railways and that they could cope with twice the amount of normal goods traffic provided the turn-around of wagons was accelerated and passenger travel drastically curtailed. But curtailing passenger facilities has psychological, not merely statistical, consequences and there were in any case no solid statistical grounds for this optimism, the main effect of which was to absolve the government from making any overall plans for war transport. The first winter of war exposed the fallacy. The distribution of coal was held up to such an extent that a quantity had to be diverted to coastal shipping and for several weeks coal was given absolute priority on the railways in order to prevent a national outcry. This was only the foretaste of a crisis which was compounded by the strains of a population on the move, by bombing and by the closure of ports, which forced traffic away from the coastal and into the inland system. During 1940 deliveries of coal to London, to take a single example, were all but halved and the points of intersection of the main railway lines nearly quivered to a standstill; cooperation between the different railway companies was far from good. In the next two years, with less bombing and more planning, more coordination between the Ministries of Transport, Supply, Food and Mines, the institution of central control over rolling stock and road transport, and the loan of 400 locomotives from the United States and the War Department, things improved. By 1943 the government had established effective control over inland transport but it could not in wartime remedy the capital depreciation and mismanagement of the pre-war years and even as late as the penultimate winter of war about a hundred factories stopped work because they were short of coal. At this time the railways had increased by 50 per cent their capacity in terms of tons of goods carried per mile but they were also on the verge of collapse: government intervention and regulation were a salvage operation which averted disaster but could do no more.

Few things so frustrate industrial effort and fray tempers as traffic failures, and the railway failure during the war not only hampered production but also exasperated individuals who were kept waiting for trains (and buses) after long stints of overtime. Workers who had been moved some distance from their homes became specially disgruntled. Train fares were higher than corresponding bus fares with the result that trains were not used to full effect until fares were reduced and travel allowances given to the less well-paid workers. Transport was beginning to be regarded, at least in wartime, as a public service run for people and not as a commercial enterprise run for profit.

The government greatly extended its supervision of industrial life. Ernest Bevin secured the transfer of the Factory Inspectorate and the administration of the Factory Acts from the Home Office to the Ministry of Labour and expanded the whole concept of government intervention from safety in factories to welfare in industry. One of his first steps as Minister of Labour was the creation of a Factory and Welfare Division in his Department. All factories employing 250 people or more could be directed to install amenities such as canteens and to appoint welfare officers. Bevin considered that adequate transport for workers, day nurseries for their infants and the rehabilitation of the disabled all fell within the scope of government responsibility. The numbers of factory doctors and industrial nurses were increased; when the war began there were only thirty-five full-time and seventy part-time factory doctors in the whole country but by the time it ended there were 181 and 890. On the lighter side the BBC introduced ‘music while you work’ and outside working hours the government encouraged entertainers to make life as normal as possible. On the outbreak of war places of entertainment had been closed, but it was soon perceived that this mood was unhelpful and dance halls, cinemas, theatres and dog tracks were quickly re-opened and football matches resumed. Museums too re-opened, although their most precious possessions were removed from danger and stored in caves, country houses and other refuges.

The main tool for the regulation of the pre-war economy, in so far as it had been regulated and not left to sort itself out, was monetary – the budget. The main tool in wartime was, however, not monetary but human – the allocation of manpower. The armed services, which employed fewer than 500,000 men and women before the war, topped 5 million before it ended. If civil defence and munitions workers are added to the armed services the total number required in these occupations of first importance was 8 million in 1941 and 10 million by the middle of 1942. The civilian labour force remained roughly static but had to be considerably redeployed. On the one hand a manpower budget was introduced. All users of manpower, military and civilian, were required to assess their future needs. These assessments were always excessive, sometimes falsified, and they always added up to a total that was not available. The reconciling of these competing claims was a cabinet matter. Secondly, in the civilian sector sweeping powers were given to the Minister of Labour and National Service (Ernest Bevin from May 1940 to July 1945) to direct labour from one occupation and one place to another and to forbid workers to leave specified kinds of employment. Bevin was at first slow to use the powers given to him because he was so short of accurate statistics that he did not know what directions he ought to give. He was also careful not to introduce compulsion until the need for it had become evident to those who were to be compelled. He himself gave much thought and personal energy to explaining the needs, thereby creating a sense of participation and comprehension without which direction of labour would have been exceedingly unpalatable. There was virtually no hostility to the idea that certain categories of persons having special manual or intellectual skills should be exempted from military service if they could make a better contribution to the war effort in some other way. The basic criterion was no longer the equal exposure of all to the dangers of the enemy’s bullets but the graded contribution of each to a complicated mesh of national services. In one much debated instance Bevin directed young men away from military service not because they were specially skilful or specially clever but because a civilian service, coal getting, was desperately short of labour. At the beginning of the war, when there was unemployment in the coalfields, miners had been allowed to join the forces and the labour force had declined by 10 per cent before the government began to suspect that it might face a shortage of miners. Shortages of coal in the winter of 1940–41 were due to transport difficulties and not to supply. Coal was not rationed, but consumption was kept down by restricting the supplies allocated to coal merchants, and steps were taken to ensure that householders with storage space might not build up stocks in cellars at the expense of their less favoured neighbours. By 1942 it was clear that a serious crisis was at hand. With an ageing labour force, ailing machinery, incompetent planning or none, and a heritage of exceptionally bad labour relations the industry was unable to deliver the coal and the government created a new Ministry as a way of asserting central control. It also expedited and paid for the installation of modern machinery and decreed a national minimum wage – an important step in view of the low scale of pre-war wages in an industry noted for its insecurity and risks to health and life. In October 1943 Bevin directed that a proportion of the young men being called up for national service should be selected by lot for work in the mines instead of joining the armed forces – a direction which was popular neither with the recruits nor with the miners but which was necessitated by the decline of the industry and worked well enough to stem a further drop in the labour force and production in the mines. In the last eighteen months of war 21,800 ‘Bevin Boys’ were directed into the mines. In 1945 175 million tons of coal were mined, 56 million less than in 1939.

Control over labour was matched by control of industrial materials (through a Production Executive established in 1942 and later expanded into a Department of State) for the purpose of keeping a just balance between production for the armed forces and production for civilian consumption and morale. By these two main instruments the government indirectly controlled British industry and sought to make the wisest allocation of the nation’s resources in men and materials. Until the last year of war British industry produced 60 per cent of the munitions and weapons of war needed by British and Commonwealth forces, the United States contributing 25 per cent and the Commonwealth the remaining 15 per cent.

The manufacture and purchase of all these war materials and of essential civilian requirements had to be paid for. In financing a war a government has few options in the area of military supplies. It must buy or make all it can and pay for them by taxation and borrowing. Its choice is restricted to adjusting the balance between taxation and borrowing (when it does not have to do both to the hilt) and to spreading the burden of taxation in one way rather than another. In the area of civilian supplies, however, a government may feel less constrained. Subject to the obvious limitation of not calamitously underfeeding or overstraining its own people it may control the volume of goods supplied and their price with some regard to the financial implications. In other words it may screw down the level of privation more or less, and the less it does so – the more, that is, it eases the living and working conditions of the population – the more financial problems it creates for itself. In particular, a policy of cheap food and cheap household goods unaccompanied by wage control produces inflation. Great Britain did not abandon during the war the principle that wage rates ought to be fixed by bargaining and not by edict, the government accepted the principle that wages ought to be increased where they were particularly low or where productivity was boosted, and a steep rise in the cost of living early in the war produced inevitable wage claims. When these claims were met the working population had more money with which to buy cheapened goods. Wage rates were kept in check by voluntary restraint and a readiness to accept sacrifices, but nevertheless they rose substantially: between 1939 and 1945 money earnings increased overall by 81 per cent from a variety of causes, including wage increases (32 per cent) and overtime (20 per cent). Earnings rose faster than the cost of living index. (The figures were as follows. The rise in the cost of living index in 1939–41 was 26 per cent. Thereafter it rose only 3 per cent more. Since the index was an antiquated one it did not accurately reflect the real rise, which was somewhat greater. Given a pre-war base of 100, wage rates rose by the end of the war to 150, earnings to 180. The size of the civilian working population remained static.) But the gains of the working classes did not greatly disturb the economic gradation of British society. The rich and the very rich, although hard hit by direct taxation, found their compensations – the rich recovering after the war their ease and affluence through expense accounts and capital gains, and the middling and professional classes finding, somewhat to their surprise, that they were the principal beneficiaries of new social services such as subsidized further education of which the poor were often still too poor to avail themselves. Within the working classes the average wage of the unskilled worker rose from 70 per cent to 80 per cent of the basic wage of the skilled worker.

To contain inflation and keep borrowing within manageable proportions the government relied primarily on big increases in direct taxation: income tax, which stood at 7s. 6d. (37½p) when war began, was up to 10s. (50p) less than two years later. Purchase tax was introduced in 1940 – in two grades, 16.6 per cent and 33.3 per cent. An excess profits tax, designed to forestall complaints of war profiteering, was introduced at 60 per cent in 1939 and raised in 1940 to 100 per cent. The government laid down how much profit was too much – excess meant any increase over a specified pre-war standard and this incursion into the operation of a market economy was accepted as not only inevitable but, in the circumstances, proper. But purchase tax was to a large extent a concession to popular feelings against war profiteering and economically a disincentive to production, and in 1941 the government tried to resolve this dilemma between social and fiscal policy by promising to repay 20 per cent of the tax after the war. Revenue from direct taxation was trebled. Indirect taxation rose by 160 per cent. But the government still had to borrow. Half of all national expenditure during the war (other than purchases covered by Lend-Lease and similar credits) was met by borrowing, at home or abroad. The government introduced a variety of savings certificates and defence bonds to attract the pennies and the pounds of different classes of person. The bulk of the national deficit was met by home borrowing.

The country’s external debt rose by £3,500 million and a quarter of its overseas assets were sold. The United States government supplied Great Britain with materials to the value of $27,025 million under the terms of Lend-Lease (the pound sterling being at that time worth $5.00); taking into account goods and services rendered to the United States to the value of $5,667 million (in, for example, building camps and airfields for American forces in Great Britain) the net British debt to the United States was $21,358 million. Canada made a loan of $700 million free of interest in 1942 when Great Britain’s liquid resources in Canada ran out. This loan was followed by a gift of $1,000 million and by further loans totalling $1,800 million. Great Britain’s total bill for Canadian goods and services was $7,441 million, of which rather more than half was paid in cash. The United States and Canada were much the most important of Great Britain’s suppliers and creditors, but non-dollar aid from various other sources amounted to £4,000 million, that is to say an addition of nearly half the total of North American aid.

American Lend-Lease was a blessing but a mixed one. It became available when Great Britain was left with no other way to pay for American goods, and all British dollar holdings and other assets in the United States had first to be sold, sometimes at considerable loss. For more than two years after the passing of the Lend-Lease Act the value of the goods paid for in the United States in cash exceeded the value of the goods acquired on deferred credit under Lend-Lease. The conditions attached to the loans were stringent. No British goods manufactured even in part with raw materials supplied under Lend-Lease might be exported; goods for civilian consumption were excluded, so that Great Britain had to use gold or hard currencies to buy such things as tobacco, thus depleting its dollar reserves, which the United States had (privately) resolved ought to be allowed to stand no higher than $1,000 million; and Great Britain had to undertake to eliminate discrimination from its post-war trading system and therefore to abolish imperial preferences. Reverse Lend-Lease was given to the United States without any strings. In 1944 Lord Keynes led a mission to Washington to salvage Great Britain’s export business by persuading the American administration that exports were so vital to Great Britain that some conversion of industry to exports must be permitted during the war. Predicting a complete British collapse after the war, he was largely successful in his mission but in August 1945 Lend-Lease stopped in peculiarly damaging circumstances: goods to the value of $650 million which had either arrived in Great Britain or were on their way had to be paid for in cash. Great Britain, being completely incapable of earning dollars in this quantity immediately after the end of the war, had to borrow $3,750 million from the United States and accept burdensome conditions including a promise to make the pound convertible within a year of the ratification of the agreement by Congress. Until the end of the war Great Britain, like the United States, was in favour of free trade as the basis of the international post-war economy and had expressed this view in the Atlantic Charter (which declared that all states should have access on equal terms to the world’s trade and raw materials) and at the Bretton Woods conference which evolved the International Monetary Fund. The convertibility of currencies was an important element in this scheme of things and the British government was sufficiently optimistic to imagine that the pound could be made convertible within five years of the end of the war. It was shocked by the American demand for convertibility within one year and unable to persuade the United States that this was impossible – as it proved to be when the free convertibility of sterling in July 1947 caused such a rush for Great Britain’s reserves that it had to be discontinued after five weeks.

The purchase of war equipment in the United States was forced on the British government by the inadequacy of its own resources. American industry was not only bigger than British industry and immune from war damage but also more efficient technically and managerially and so quicker. By buying in the United States instead of at home the British government forfeited a measure of control over the nature of the product. It had, especially after Pearl Harbor, to persuade the Americans to part with materials and weapons which they needed for themselves and it had also to argue for designs which, although they were to be produced in the United States, were to be used by British troops and had to be as nearly as possible what British commanders wanted. These matters were handled through joint boards in Washington and by constant coming and going between the two capitals. Inevitably there were disagreements about weapon design and for the most part American rather than British designs were put into production. When placing orders with industry the American administration would order more than it needed for itself in order to cover possible, but not yet precisely ascertained, British requirements. What the British did not eventually want was sold on Lend-Lease terms to the Free French.

It remains to consider the post-war measures adopted in Great Britain while the war was still being fought, and here a caveat is needed. It is temptingly easy to see in the conduct of the war on the home front a compact in which people agreed to work and endure, to postpone attempts to better themselves and even forego some hard-won gains in return for promises of post-war reform. This is, however, a misleading analysis if it implies that the work and endurance were conditional on the promises. Post-war reforms were not needed as a bait nor were they offered as a reward. They were worked out – in the exceptionally difficult circumstances of war – as an instalment of something due, to which the accident of war and the ferment created by it in Great Britain contributed.

The impulse came from the Labour Party, which was the more insistent on wartime action because it did not expect to win the first post-war election. It was supported by Liberals and Tory reformers with similar aims and ideals, but opposed by the larger part of the Conservative Party and press which denounced social inquiry as a diversion from the war effort and, in extreme cases, as opening the door to communism. Churchill himself was hostile but consented under pressure to the setting-up of an interdepartmental committee of civil servants with Sir William Beveridge as chairman to consider Social Insurance and Allied Services. The first initiative had come from the TUC, and the appointment of the Beveridge committee was partly a way of fending it off. But the committee came to life in an unusual way. Beveridge was not only an exceptionally well-equipped civil servant but a much less retiring one than most with a keen desire for radical reform and a no less keen political sense. He perceived that a report of the usual kind signed by the whole committee would be too tame and he got everybody concerned to agree that it should carry his own signature alone. The report, published in November 1942, was a closely reasoned and numerate technical document but its main lines were clear enough and radical enough to evoke great enthusiasm and great hostility. Beveridge proposed the extension of social insurance to the entire population on a compulsory contributory basis by which the cost would be shared between employers, employed and the Exchequer. He also declared that social insurance required new policies in relation to health, education, housing and unemployment. The opponents of welfare on this scale, reading the signs rightly, had begun attacking the report even before it was published. Alarmed by the spectre of continuing high taxation, which they regarded as a temporary war phenomenon not to be sanctioned for fighting any evils save those of Nazism, they denounced Beveridge’s proposals as sapping the spirit and health of the nation. They were at the same time heatedly opposing Bevin’s Catering Wages Bill which was designed to prevent employers from taking advantage of employees in a notably disorganized and therefore ill-paid industry. This opposition ultimately failed but Conservative hostility to Beveridge succeeded in preventing him from being invited to pursue his work. He thereupon produced on his own a second report on Full Employment in a Free Society which placed the prevention of mass unemployment at the centre of politics, argued that a return to mass unemployment after the war was immoral, uneconomic and avoidable, and attacked the view that government intervention in social policy must lead to an unacceptable destruction of freedom. The government so far accepted the paramount duty of maintaining employment as to issue its own White Paper on Employment Policy. These documents ensured that post-war governments for at least a generation would at the very least pay lip service to the doctrine that a government should plan to prevent unemployment instead of hoping not to be plagued by it; they asserted, even though without gaining universal assent for it, the proposition that a high level of employment (rather misleadingly called full employment) might be a prior aim to the maintenance of a particular ruling exchange value for the pound.

In 1943 a Ministry of Reconstruction was set up to think about post-war problems. These included the control of the environment and land use, about which three reports were issued during the war; a Town and Country Planning Act was passed in 1944. New Education Acts were also passed for England and Wales (1944) and Scotland (1945). They extended free education to children beyond the elementary stage. They also introduced a test to be taken at the age of ‘11 plus’ in order, by dividing children into a clever minority and an ordinary majority, to enable the grammar schools to survive as separate and superior establishments. In terms of Great Britain’s past achievements in providing education for all these Acts were a definite step forward. They were comparatively un-controversial since the need for better education was evident on material as well as social grounds; the country needed more and better education in order to prosper and it had been shocked by the degree of ignorance and illiteracy revealed by the call-up of the nation to the armed forces. More controversial was the question of health and who should pay for it. A White Paper in 1944 on a National Health Service, raising the issue of a free and full medical (not merely hospital) service, was vague. It was welcomed by doctors as well as the general public but there was significant opposition to the idea of a salaried service and to the extinction of a private medical sector. It was, however, the precursor of the National Health Act which was introduced after the war by the Labour government along with a Family Allowance Act, a New Towns Act and a National Insurance Act.

The extension of the scope of government, whether to fight a war or to undertake a social transformation, affected the structure of government. Early in the war the Chamberlain government took sweeping powers by a series of legislative enactments, but it made sparing use of these powers and remained fundamentally a peacetime administration grappling with war problems rather than a war directorate prepared to accept and use the huge concentration of power foisted upon it by the nature of its responsibilities. The British system was government by the executive tempered by the executive’s own distrust of power; the executive could do pretty much what it wanted but was traditionally shy of straying far outside the tracks delineated by laissez-faire dogma. This reluctance to take and use power was fortified by British belief in the value of voluntary effort, a belief grounded in experience and justified in war when voluntary organizations old and new played a highly important role in conjunction with officialdom. Nevertheless the business of war required the creation of nearly a dozen new Ministries, an expansion of the central government and a complication of the machinery of coordination in Whitehall which accustomed Ministers, civil servants and the public to think of government in widening terms. War also raised questions about government away from the centre. During 1937–9 the country was divided into a number of regions under Regional Commissioners, appointed, not elected – prefects, in the continental vocabulary – whose functions extended beyond the strict problems of civil defence. The Regional Commissioners were general factotums of the central government. As such they could be expected to be suspect, but they became in fact popular owing to the manifest inadequacy of the existing patchwork of elected local governments, which were very uneven in size, financially weak and endowed with only partial authority in a number of fields. There developed a popular demand for increasing the powers of the Regional Commissioners and so an opportunity to reform the geography and structure of local government by combining the old elective principle with the new pattern, but this opportunity was missed and the regions were allowed to expire. A unified fire service and regional hospital boards were the principal survivors of a reorganization which was otherwise expunged because, war being regarded as an ephemeral and malevolent phenomenon, most of its products were so regarded too.

More specialized but more enduring was the acclimatization of science and scientists in the machinery of government and the processes of decision-making. This was another pre-war trend accelerated by war. It belied the view often expressed that modern science had become a world unto itself, inaccessible to non-scientists, however clever they might be. The Second World War saw – not of course in Great Britain alone – a revival of the term military science in the broad sense in which it had once been used to designate a partnership between the field commander-staff officer and the inventor-designer, of whom Archimedes and Leonardo da Vinci were the archetypes. This partnership had been broken in the post-Clausewitz age when war became a profession for professional soldiers (notwithstanding that many nineteenth-century commanders were very amateurish indeed), but it was reconstituted in the twentieth century for two main reasons. First, new weapons became increasingly complicated. The tank, the aircraft and the submarine were already very different from the rifle even before radio and radar made them more different still. Designing them, and thinking of defences against them, were highly technical matters. The purely professional soldier could no longer tell the expert what he wanted because he did not know. He had to rely on the expert to diagnose his problem and find an answer to it. This was how the scientists came to present the air force with radar as the answer to the problem of how to stop the bomber. The scientist, tackling problems instead of waiting to be given specifications, acquired an initiative in war, which however he could only exercise in close consultation with the non-scientist. Secondly, scientists developed a new role called operational research. In cooperation with the fighting services they watched the battle and evaluated results with their analytical tools. Having invented new weapons they did not merely hand them over but took part in a continuing debate about the most effective way to use them. Thus hard tests of the effects of bombing during the German-Italian retreat in North Africa and in the capture of the island of Pantellaria before the invasion of Sicily served to build up the case for using bombs in tactical attacks on rail and road communications rather than in the mass bombing of civilians, housing and factories. The debate on this particular issue was protracted and bitter, but the significant thing is not that this was so but that scientists took part in it at the highest and most intimate levels.

These activities – together with the less ferocious aspects of science such as the uses of penicillin, the development of sulphonamides, skin-graft surgery and shock therapy – altered the popular conception of the scientist as a special kind of being who resided somewhere in the wings. Science acquired a place at the heart of the machinery of government, in the practical business of the conduct of war and, by analogy and under the name of technology, in the development of industry. In addition people began to recall that science simply meant knowledge. They felt that they ought to have more of it, even if its arcaner specialities were beyond them. Hence the debate on Two Cultures in which educated people lamented their inability to understand what other educated people were talking about and deplored the division of their culture into parts. They raised their voices against this estrangement partly because it was intellectually unhealthy and partly, whether they perceived it or not, because the war had shown that the gap was not unbridgeable. Hence too the growing suspicion that a system of government by men and women versed in only half a culture might not suffice to keep the country abreast of the times.

When the war ended the cost had to be counted. There had been much death and destruction. Damage to life and property had been less than anticipated and less than in the First World War; deaths in action, including the merchant navy, were 380,000, half the total for the earlier war, to which had to be added another 60,000 who lost their lives as civilians. But the blitz had been short as well as sharp, the V weapons had arrived mercifully late and the battles which were specially British – the Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic and the North African campaigns were all fought by quite small bodies of men. Industrially there had been overstrain in some places. Inferior labour and materials had had to be used. The retail and distributive trades, the textile and clothing industries, building and pottery had all lost 50 per cent or more of their labour. Timber had been over-felled. There was a permanent loss of some craft skills. Some overseas investments had been sold and the reserves had been depleted; Great Britain parted with a third in value of its foreign investments and a third of its gold reserve. But the investments were recovered or replaced within a few years of the end of the war, and exports, cut by more than 60 per cent during the war, were restored to their pre-war level by the end of 1946. Here was vigour. The government was itself spending three quarters of the country’s gross national product in place of one quarter before the war. It was doing so because its military expenditure had been doubled and it had undertaken expensive social obligations. The latter held promise for the future. It had constructed buildings and plant, much of it transferred to private industry when the war ended. It had trained more skilled workers than the country had ever had before and spent more in scientific research and development. All major industries except the clothing industry were producing more than before the war despite bombing and other tribulations, and Great Britain emerged from the war as a pioneer in nuclear technology and with an electronics industry stimulated by wartime investment. It had the makings of a more sensible control of economic policy in the practice, initiated during the war, of making estimates of the national income and expenditure – a practice which was unheard of in pre-war Great Britain and which amounted to a revolution in budgeting. The foundations had been laid for radical reform after a generation and more of economic and social failures. Even the arts were recognized as something more than a peripheral eccentricity; a Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, created in 1939 with the help of the Pilgrim Trust, was later given a government subsidy and was preserved after the war under the name of the Arts Council. The strain and the achievement had been tremendous; there had been irreparable pain; the prospect was inspiriting.

War intensifies and simplifies emotions. Because of the pressures of an enemy at the gates the British people experienced a sense of community which loosened its class structure. Before the war the rulers saw their main enemy in Bolshevism, which was a threat to their class rather than to the state. During the war the threat was Nazism, which was hateful to all, and Germany, which was challenging the existence of the European nation state. Nazism enslaved human beings, Germany enslaved states, and both reminded the British of all classes that they were determined never to be slaves. The enemy therefore stimulated national unity – as Napoleon and other conquerors had done. In Great Britain this national unity was further fed by a new richness of communication between governors and governed. On the military side Churchill’s personality and talents not only inspired confidence but gave people the feeling that they were all in it together. On the social side – and it became more accurate to refer to non-military affairs as social rather than civilian – wartime planning and post-war planning added to the sense that the nation was one and that post-war Great Britain would be a better place than pre-war Great Britain had been. In terms of institutions war menaces democracy by requiring the suspension of democratic safeguards and processes, but in terms of popular participation and involvement in affairs war may – and in Great Britain did – nourish the substance of democracy even when it was temporarily dismantling some of its trappings. It gave more of the people more concern for and knowledge of affairs of state. They became, if not insiders, at any rate less outside than they had been. There was an enlargement of the body politic to something nearer the bounds of British society as a whole. The governors who had to look to the safety of the state and to the welfare of society were to that extent distracted from their pre-war preoccupations with the class interests and the imperial interests which had seemed to be their natural and proper business but which had either alienated or failed to stir the mass of their fellow citizens. The war made the British state more national and less imperial, more democratic and less oligarchic. It produced more social change than had ever been compassed anywhere in so few years, save only by revolution – and not often then. The ruling class abandoned the resistance of a generation to reform and therewith its own integrity. Society was no longer the same and the ruling class was no longer the same. The question for the future was whether, how far and for how long this impetus would be maintained; or how soon an enlarged ruling class would revert to the traditional role of ruling classes to keep things pretty much as they are, to institutionalize, to put a brake on change for fear of putting the skids under themselves. In July 1945 the British people manifested in a general election an uncommon seriousness and optimism about their common future. The main source of these feelings, and the main condition of their survival, was not simply the baneful fact of war but the clearing by war of the channels of communication within the nation. Soon after the end of the war these channels began to silt up again.