Читать книгу Dad’s Army: The Story of a Very British Comedy - Graham McCann - Страница 9

I think it’s true to say that at the present time this country of ours, because of its courage and its proud defiance, its determination to put an end to this international brigandage and racketeering of the Hitlers and Mussolinis and their riff-raff is the hope of all that is best in the world, which watches us with admiration.

J. B. PRIESTLEY¹

MAINWARING	You can’t win this war! See the sort of men that this country breeds?
U-BOAT CAPTAIN	Rather stupid ones.

DAD’S ARMY²

It all began, in a way, one day back in the summer of 1940. Shortly after nine o’clock on the evening of Tuesday, 14 May, Anthony Eden, Great Britain’s newly-appointed Secretary of State for War, began his broadcast to the nation on the BBC’s Home Service:

I want to speak to you tonight about the form of warfare which the Germans have been employing so extensively against Holland and Belgium – namely the dropping of troops by parachute behind the main defensive lines … [I]n order to leave nothing to chance, and to supplement from sources as yet untapped the means of defence already arranged, we are going to ask you to help us in a manner in which I know will be welcome to thousands of you. Since the war began the government have received countless inquiries from all over the Kingdom from men of all ages who are for one reason or another not at present engaged in military service, and who wish to do something for the defence of their country. Well, now is your opportunity.

We want large numbers of such men in Great Britain, who are British subjects, between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five, to come forward now and offer their services in order to make assurance [that an invasion will be repelled] doubly sure. The name of the new Force which is now to be raised will be ‘The Local Defence Volunteers’. This name describes its duties in three words … This is … a spare-time job, so there will be no need for any volunteer to abandon his present occupation … When on duty you will form part of the armed forces … You will not be paid, but you will receive uniform and will be armed … In order to volunteer, what you have to do is to give in your name at your local police station and then, as and when we want you, we will let you know … Here, then, is the opportunity for which so many of you have been waiting. Your loyal help, added to the arrangements which already exist, will make and keep our country safe.³

Now there could be no turning back: eight months into the war, and four days after the commencement of Germany’s offensive in the West, Britain was set to launch the largest, most quixotic and, in a way, least militaristic volunteer army in its history.⁴

The government, in truth, had never been keen on its formation, believing, to begin with, that such a force would find itself with far too little to do, and then later fearing that it might find itself trying to do far too much. There was one prominent political figure, however, who had supported the idea right from the start: Winston Churchill. On 8 October 1939, Churchill – then newly installed as First Lord of the Admiralty – had written to Sir Samuel Hoare, the Lord Privy Seal, with a proposal:

Why do we not form a Home Guard of half-a-million men over forty (if they like to volunteer) and put all our elder stars at the head and in the structure of these new formations? Let these five hundred thousand men come along and push the young and active out of all their home billets. If uniforms are lacking, a brassard would suffice, and I am assured there are plenty of rifles at any rate.⁵

Nothing came of the suggestion, however, as the military’s chiefs of staff were of the opinion that any danger of invasion or raids was slight so long as sufficient naval and air forces were guarding the sea approaches to Britain, and, as all of the belligerents settled into the six-month stalemate that came to be known as the ‘Phoney War’,⁶ it seemed as if Churchill’s notion of an army of ageing amateurs had been left to die a quiet death. Then, quite suddenly, things changed: on 9 April 1940, the Allies were startled by the first in a series of sudden and strikingly effective enemy thrusts when German units moved in to occupy Denmark and Norway; barely a month later, as the Allies were still struggling to come up with a suitable response to the events in Scandinavia, the main offensive began in earnest when Germany took control of both The Netherlands and Belgium. These developments transformed the public mood; now that it appeared possible that most, if not all, of the Channel coastline might soon be under German occupation, the prospect of England being invaded suddenly seemed startlingly real.

Anxiety swiftly took the place of apathy. There were fears of a fifth column, and fears of airborne landings. Facts may have been scarce but there was an abundance of rumours, and soon newspapers were full of speculation regarding the possibility that enemy agents were already operating inside the nation. The intelligence division of the Ministry of Information, which had been set up to monitor civilian opinion and morale, noted that such talk of espionage and sabotage was causing widespread unease, and ‘the situation in a few places has become slightly hysterical’.⁷ The prospect of parachute landings was, if anything, the source of even greater anxiety. The Home Office distributed a distinctly unsettling circular to the public informing them that ‘German parachutists may land disguised as British policemen and Air Raid Wardens’,⁸ and The Times ran a sobering editorial warning its readers that these enemy paratroopers ‘might speak English quite well. Some might be sent over in civilian dress to act as spies. The general public must be alert.’⁹

Something, clearly, had to be done, and, whatever it was, it had to be done quickly. The government had initially been reluctant to contemplate any policy which involved ordinary citizens being allowed to take matters into their own hands instead of relying on the orthodox forces of security and public order – namely, the Army and the police – but it soon found itself placed under mounting pressure from both Parliament and press to do precisely that.¹⁰ When reports started to reach the War Office concerning the appearance up and down the country of ‘bands of civilians … arming themselves with shotguns’,¹¹ the time had arrived for a serious rethink. Without pausing to determine whether its ultimate goal was to sustain or suppress this burgeoning grass-roots activism, the War Office proceeded to improvise some plans and, as one observer put it, evoked ‘a new army out of nothingness’.¹²

On Sunday, 12 May, at a hastily arranged meeting, a way forward was agreed. A breathless succession of ad hoc decisions followed throughout the next day until, at 8 p.m., all of the essential details had been assembled and readied for dispatch. It was originally intended that the first news of the novel force would be broadcast on the wireless by the man most responsible for the shape it was set to take – namely, General Sir Walter Kirke, Commander-in-Chief of the Home Forces – but Anthony Eden, recognising an early opportunity to impose his presence upon the public’s consciousness, decided that he should be the one to address the nation on this subject. As he sat down on that Tuesday evening and faced the microphone, he had two aims in mind: the first was to demonstrate that the government was responsive to popular opinion, and the second was to promote a policy which he hoped would curb any public propensity for spontaneity. He succeeded in doing the former, but the latter would prove far harder to accomplish.¹³

Before Eden’s broadcast had concluded, police stations up and down the country found themselves deluged with eager volunteers. On the Kent coast, the most threatened area, men were still queuing at midnight. Early the following morning the lines once again began to form, and throughout the rest of the day they grew longer and longer. Over the country as a whole 250,000 men – equal in number to the peacetime Regular Army – registered their names within the first twenty-four hours. One of those responsible for enrolling the applicants in Birmingham recalled his experience:

The weather was sweltering and we were allotted the small decontamination room in the police station yard … Applicants seemed to form a never-ending stream. They started to queue up as soon as they could leave their work and by 11 p.m. there were still scores of them waiting to enrol. Every night we worked until the small hours of the morning, trying to get some sort of shape into the organisation in preparation for the next day’s rush. Within a few days the platoon was three or four hundred strong and it seemed that if every police station [in the city] were experiencing the same influx, all the male population of Birmingham would be enrolled within a week or two.¹⁴

Form lagged behind content. The Local Defence Volunteers was launched without any staff, or funds, or premises of its own. An air of edgy amateurism accompanied its inception. No registration forms had been printed, so the police were simply instructed to ask each prospective new recruit four basic questions:

(a) Are you familiar with firearms?

(b) Occupation?

(c) What military experience have you?

(d) Are you prepared to serve away from your home?¹⁵

The applicants, noted the novelist Ernest Raymond, received a less than fulsome welcome:

The uniformed policeman behind his desk sighed as he said, ‘We can take your name and address. That’s all.’ A detective-inspector in mufti, whom I knew, explained this absence of fervour. ‘You’re about the hundred-and-fiftieth who’s come in so far, Mr Raymond, and it’s not yet half past nine. Ten per cent of ’em may be some use to Mr Eden but, lor’ luv-a-duck, we’ve had ’em stumping in more or less on crutches. We’ve taken their names but this is going to be Alexander’s rag-time army.’

As I passed out through the sandbags I met three more volunteers about to file in through the crack. I knew them all. One was an elderly gentleman-farmer who’d brought his sporting gun … Another had his hunting dog with him … All explained that they were ‘joining up’ … so I prepared them for the worst, I said, ‘Well, don’t expect any welcome in there. They don’t love us. And get it over quickly. I rather suspected that if I stayed around too long, I’d be arrested for loitering.’¹⁶

What momentum the fledgling LDV was able to gather originated from its untended but irrepressible new members. Eden’s initial message had asked merely for men to sign up and then wait (‘we will let you know’), but the first wave of volunteers, desperate to help frustrate the enemy’s knavish tricks, were in no mood to sit idly by. Like actors who had passed an audition for a play that had yet to be written, they gathered together and improvised. No later than a day after the call had come, the new men of the LDV had armed themselves with everything from antique shotguns and sabres to stout sticks and packets of pepper and, without waiting for official instructions, had started going out on patrol.

Membership continued to grow at a remarkably rapid rate: by the end of May the total number of volunteers had risen to between 300,000 and 400,000, and by the end of the following month it would exceed 1,400,000 – around 1,200,000 more than any of the War Office mandarins had anticipated.¹⁷ Order did not need to be restored: it had yet to be created. A rough-and-ready administrative structure was duly scrambled into place,¹⁸ and Sir Edward Grigg (the joint Under-Secretary of State for War and the man to whom Eden had handed responsibility for the day-to-day running of the LDV) spelled out ‘the three main purposes for which the Local Defence Volunteers are wanted’:

First, observation and information. We want the earliest possible information, either from observation posts or from patrols as to landings. The second purpose is to help, in the very earliest stages, in preventing movement by these enemy parties landed from the air, by blocking roads, by denying them access to means of movement, motors and so on, and by seeing that they are hemmed in as completely as possible from the moment they land. Their third purpose is to assist in patrolling and protecting vulnerable spots, of which there is a great number everywhere, particularly in certain parts of the country where the demands for local guard duties are really greater than the present forces can meet.¹⁹

Grigg then proceeded to cloud his clarification by adding that, ‘I do not want to suggest that it is the duty of the War Office to issue instructions in detail as to how these Local Defence Volunteers should be used … If we started giving instructions in detail the whole organisation would be at once tied up in voluminous red tape. Their general function is far better left at the discretion of the local commands.’²⁰ Such cautious guidance, though welcomed as better than nothing, did little, in itself, to lift morale. Deeds were needed, not words. The two tangible things most keenly anticipated by the Volunteers were still not forthcoming: uniforms and weapons.

Eden had stated quite clearly on 14 May that the LDV would ‘receive uniform and will be armed’. The following day, however, the War Office intervened to point out that for the time being only armbands bearing the stencilled initials ‘LDV’ would be available until a sufficient number of khaki denim two-piece overalls and extra field service caps could be manufactured (and no mention at all was made of any imminent issuing of weapons).²¹ A few enterprising individuals took matters into their own hands and fashioned their own versions of the LDV uniform: Sir Montague Burton, Leeds’s famous ‘popular’ tailor, promptly turned out 1,500 sets of well-cut battledress made from officers’ quality barathea cloth. The vast majority, however, were left to soldier on in civilian clothes amid fears that, with only a humble armband to identify them, they might end up being shot by invading Germans as francs tireurs.22 Eventually, after weeks of waiting,²³ official uniforms began arriving, but in some places the denims came without the caps while in other places the caps came without the denims. One commanding officer reflected on the sartorial chaos:

The issue of denim clothing forms a memorable epoch in [the history of the LDV]. If a prize had been offered for the designer of garments that would caricature the human form and present it in its sloppiest and most slovenly aspect, the artist who conceived the … denim was in a class apart. Though marked with different size numbers, it was always a toss-up whether a man resembled an expectant mother or an attenuated scarecrow.²⁴

The despised denims would be replaced during the autumn by ordinary Army battledress, yet the distribution of the new outfits proved almost as shambolic as that of the old. Whereas the denims had seemingly been designed for exceptionally well-upholstered figures, the battledress appeared to have been intended for ‘men of lamp-post silhouettes’, and it was not long before local tailors were busy carrying out covert conversions of two ‘thin’ suits into one to fit the somewhat fuller figure.²⁵

The wait for weapons was almost as long and, if anything, even more frustrating. While the War Office dithered, the new recruits, determined to equip themselves with something that resembled a firearm, again proceeded to improvise: an Essex unit, for example, made use of some old fowling-pieces, blunderbusses and cutlasses. One Lancashire battalion raided Manchester’s Belle Vue Zoo in order to take possession of some antique Snyder rifles, while another commandeered fifty Martini-Henry carbines from a Lancaster Boys’ Brigade unit (much to the latter’s annoyance), and a third acquired an impressive supply of six-foot spears. In Shropshire, a cache of rusty Crimean War cavalry carbines were returned to active service; and in London, fifty ancient Lee-Enfield rifles (used most recently by chorus boys in a patriotic tableaux) were liberated from the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.²⁶ By the end of May the War Office had managed to purchase 75,000 First World War-vintage Ross rifles from Canada and 500,000 well-worn. 300 Springfield and Remington P14 and P17 rifles from the United States, but neither of these orders would arrive before late June or early July, so, in the meantime, recruits were advised to make do with ‘this thing they developed in Finland, called the “Molotov cocktail’”, which, they were assured, would prove most useful in the event of an invasion by enemy tanks.²⁷

The LDV seemed destined during the sterner days of that first summer to remain dogged by such delays and diversions. The rank and file grew resentful, the public sceptical and the press scornful.²⁸ It was high time, argued the critics, that these amateur soldiers were taken seriously by professional strategists. Finally, in the middle of June, the beleaguered War Office deemed it prudent – in the light of plans for more than one hundred MPs to make a formal protest about its conduct²⁹ – to appoint Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pown-all as Inspector-General of the LDV (‘a nice thing to take over,’ he grumbled as he contemplated this ‘rare dog’s dinner’).³⁰ Pownall’s mission – and he had no choice but to accept it – was to turn the LDV into a well-organised, well-trained and effective fighting force. During the next two months, he duly attempted to rationalise the administration, speed up the supply of uniforms and guns, oversee the establishment of more appropriate methods of training and generally see to it that the force fitted as neatly as possible within the overall strategy for the conduct of the war.

If Pownall was prepared to do everything that seemed necessary to make the members of the LDV look like proper soldiers, then it soon became evident that Winston Churchill was equally determined to ensure that they felt like proper soldiers. Ever since he had replaced the broken-spirited Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister on 10 May, Churchill’s energy and attention had, understandably, been diverted into other areas, but by the middle of June he had begun to involve himself more directly in the affairs of the LDV. There was something inevitable about the way in which he proceeded to impose his formidable personality on this fledgling force: it was, for him, a tailor-made enterprise – a proud, worthy, One Nation, volunteer army of ordinary Britons united in their determination to defend their homes and defeat the invader. It was, to a romantic such as Churchill, an irresistible enterprise. He had to make it his.

On 22 June he asked the War Office to prepare for him a concise summary of the current LDV position.³¹ After considering its contents for a number of days, he came to the conclusion that one of the main problems with the force was its name. On 26 June he wrote a note to Eden, informing the Secretary of State for War that he did not ‘think much of the name Local Defence Volunteers for your very large new force’ – the word ‘local’, he explained, was ‘uninspiring’ – and he made it clear that he believed that it should be changed.³² Ever the shrewd populist, Churchill was right: the official title had signally failed to strike the right chord, and from the moment of its inception the force had been saddled with a number of nicknames – ‘Parashots’, ‘Parashooters’, ‘Parapotters’, ‘Fencibles’ – by the press,³³ and a variety of unflattering epithets – ‘the Look, Duck and Vanish Brigade’, ‘the Long Dentured Veterans’, ‘the Last Desperate Venture’ – by the more sardonic sections of the public.³⁴ Herbert Morrison, the Home Secretary, argued that a better name would be ‘Town Guard’ or ‘Civic Guard’, but Churchill bridled at the suggestion, exclaiming that such names struck him as sounding ‘too similar to the wild men of the French Revolution’. No, he declared, he had another, a better, name in mind for the LDV: his name, ‘Home Guard’.³⁵

Eden was far from keen, protesting that the term LDV ‘has now passed into current military jargon’, and that a million armbands bearing these initials had already been manufactured. ‘On the whole,’ he concluded, ‘I should prefer to hold by our existing name.’³⁶ Duff Cooper, the Minister of Information, agreed with Eden, complaining that not only would a name change prove too costly, but also that the adoption of a new name whose initials were HG ‘would suggest association with the Horse Guards or Mr Wells’.³⁷ Churchill was angered by such insolence: he was, after all, Prime Minister, and an astonishingly popular prime minister at that (the latest polls had revealed that, in spite of various setbacks, a remarkable 88 per cent of respondents continued to express confidence in his leadership),³⁸ and he had grown accustomed to getting his own way.³⁹ On 6 July he sent a curt note to Cooper, informing him in no uncertain terms that ‘I am going to have the name “Home Guard” adopted, and I hope you will, when notified, get the Press to put it across.’⁴⁰ The War Office, however, continued to resist, and General Pownall, while acknowledging, grudgingly, that ‘“Home Guard” rolls better off the tongue and makes a better headline’, was similarly obstructive, regarding the proposal as a ‘pure Winstonian’ publicity manoeuvre which would end up costing, by his estimation, around £40,000. He confided to his diary that the Prime Minister ‘could well have left things alone!’⁴¹

Churchill chose simply to ignore the objections, making a point of mentioning his preferred new name whenever and wherever he had occasion either to meet or to speak about the LDV. On 14 July, for example, he seized on the opportunity to broadcast the name to the nation, referring in passing to the existence ‘behind the Regular Army’ of ‘more than a million of the LDV, or, as they are much better called, the Home Guard’.⁴² Further resistance was futile. Churchill, as one of his colleagues freely conceded, possessed ‘a quite extraordinary capacity … for expressing in Elizabethan English the sentiments of the public’,⁴³ and there could only be one winner in this, or any other, war of words. On 22 July, Eden, after another awkward meeting with Churchill, wrote despairingly in his diary: ‘We discussed LDV. He was still determined to change the name to Home Guard. I told him that neither officers nor men wanted the change, but he insisted.’⁴⁴

Churchill had won. On 23 July 1940, the Local Defence Volunteers officially became the Home Guard.⁴⁵ From this moment on, the force would bear an unmistakable Churchillian signature. Sturdy, patriotic, loyal and dependable, the Home Guard, just like its spiritual leader, had ‘nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’, but was determined to achieve victory ‘however long and hard the road may be’.⁴⁶ The LDV appealed to the head, the Home Guard to the heart. Writers, drawn in by its rich composition, found it an easy force to eulogise and, in some cases, romanticise. C. Day Lewis, for example, wrote a lyrical account of how he had helped ‘to guard the star-lit village’,⁴⁷ while J. B. Priestley, in one of his regular BBC broadcasts, likened the first night that he shared on guard with ‘a parson, a bailiff, a builder, farmers and farm labourers’ to ‘one of those rich chapters of Thomas Hardy’s fiction in which his rustics meet in the gathering darkness of some Wessex hillside’:

I think the countryman knows, without being told, that we hold our lives here, as we hold our farms, upon certain terms. One of those terms is that while wars still continue, while one nation is ready to hurl its armed men at another, you must if necessary stand up and fight for your own. And this decision comes from the natural piety of simple but sane men. Such men, you will notice, are happier now than the men who have lost that natural piety.

Well, as we talked on our post on the hilltop, we watched the dusk deepen in the valleys below, when our women-folk listened to the news as they knitted by the hearth, and we remembered that these were our homes and that now at any time they might be blazing ruins, and that half-crazy German youths, in whose empty eyes the idea of honour and glory seems to include every form of beastliness, might soon be let loose down there.⁴⁸

There was nothing but society in the Home Guard. For the more retiring or aloof of individuals, moving straight from a pinched and hidebound privacy to a bold and busy community, the first rush of novelty proved acute. The poet John Lehmann set off to his local headquarters cradling ‘a volume of poems or a novel by Conrad’, but it was not long before he found himself listening intently instead ‘to dramatic detail of the more intimate side of village life that had been shrewdly and silently absorbed by the carpenter or builder in the course of their work. Gradually, the quiet, humdrum, respectable façade of the neighbourhood dropped away, and I had glimpses of violent passions … appalling vices … reckless ambitions … and innumerable fantastic evasions of the law.’⁴⁹ The age range (especially during that first year, when the official upper limit of sixty-five was not rigidly enforced) was remarkable, with raw adolescents mixing with seasoned veterans. One unit contained an elderly storyteller who claimed to have been nursed by Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, but, as this would have made him at least 104 years old by the time of the current war, the detail seems dubious. The real doyen is generally accepted to have been the sprightly octogenarian Alexander Taylor, an ex-company sergeant major in the Black Watch, who had first seen action in the Sudan during 1884–5, and had gone on to serve in South Africa and Flanders before finally answering Eden’s call, deliberately misremembering his date of birth, picking up a pitchfork and marching proudly off to help guard his local gasworks.⁵⁰

Old soldiers such as Taylor were simply grateful for the chance, once again, to take part, but there were other veterans who were impatient not only to take part but also to take over. ‘The Home Guard,’ wrote George Orwell (then of the Primrose Hill platoon), ‘is the most anti-Fascist body existing in England at this moment, and at the same time is an astonishing phenomenon, a sort of People’s Army officered by Blimps.’⁵¹ The character of Colonel Blimp – the round-eyed, ruddy-faced, reactionary old windbag with the walrus moustache who regularly lectured the nation (‘Gad, sir … ’) from the confines of David Low’s satirical cartoons⁵² – had long been laughed at; now, in the flesh, he had to be lived with. It made sense for the Home Guard to make full use of the most experienced military men in its midst, and it was therefore no surprise that its earliest administrative appointments were weighted towards retired middle-and senior-ranking officers. Not all of the old grandees could serve in higher appointments – an East Sussex company had to accommodate no fewer than six retired generals, while one squad in Kensington-Belgravia consisted of eight former field-rank officers and one token civilian.⁵³ The War Office privately acknowledged that it was inevitable that problems would be caused by ‘the masses of retired officers who have joined up, who are all registering hard and say they know much better than anyone else how everything should be done’.⁵⁴ The urgent need for class to cohabit with class had led to a quelling of old conflicts. The presence of these haughty, hoary ex-officers, however, ensured that they would never be cancelled entirely. In one Devon village unit, for example, a fight broke out between a retired Army captain who, it was alleged, had ‘roped in his pals of like kind’, and a young man who had ‘asked why he hadn’t been invited to join’ and had been informed that he did not measure up to the required social standards.⁵⁵ The novelist A. G. Street noted how the most snobbish of old soldiers would turn up for training ‘clad in their old regimentals, pleading that the issue uniform did not fit’, and would make men ‘almost mutinous’ by regularly flaunting the full regalia of a distinguished military past:

[I]n some cases it would seem that winning the war was a trivial thing compared with the really important one of always establishing rank and position. So they disobeyed orders and wore their old uniforms, just to prove to everybody that once they had been colonels. In fact, some of them, if given a choice between a heaven minus all class distinctions and a hell that insisted on them, would definitely prefer the latter.⁵⁶

The War Office, straining to strike the right diplomatic note, took steps to settle things down. ‘Though this is a deeply united country,’ said Sir Edward Grigg, ‘it is immensely various; and the Home Guard reflects its almost infinite variety of habit and type. The home-bred quality must not be impaired in order to secure the uniformity and organisation which are necessary for armed forces of other sorts. We want the Home Guard to have a military status as unimpeachable as that of any Corps or Regiment … But we do not want it to be trained or strained beyond its powers as a voluntary spare-time Force.’⁵⁷ On 6 November 1940, it was announced in the House of Commons that the Home Guard, ‘which has hitherto been largely provisional in character’, was to be given ‘a firmer and more permanent shape’; it was now, like the Regular Army, to have commissioned officers and NCOs, a fixed organisation, systematic training and better uniforms (battledress, trench-capes, soft service caps and steel helmets) and weapons (automatic rifles, machine guns and grenades).⁵⁸ On 19 November, Grigg announced that, as ‘there had been criticism’ of some of the early appointments, all existing and future officers would now have to go before an independent selection board, which would ignore each man’s ‘political, business [and] social affiliations’ and consider only his ability ‘to command the confidence of all ranks under the special circumstances and conditions of the locality concerned’. Likening the force to ‘a lusty infant … strong of constitution, powerful of lung and avid, like all healthy infants, for supplies’, he promised to remain attentive to its needs. ‘It is Britain incarnate,’ he declared, ‘an epitome of British character in its gift for comradeship in trouble, its resourcefulness at need, its deep love of its own land, and its surging anger at the thought that any invader should set foot on our soil.’ No one, Grigg insisted, wanted the Home Guard to lose the ‘free and easy, home-spun, moorland, village-green, workshop or pithead character [that was] essential to its strength and happiness’, but it had grown so fast – ‘like a mustard tree’ – that it now required ‘sympathetic attention to its needs and difficulties’ in order for it to become truly ‘efficient in its own way as a voluntary, auxiliary, part-time Force’.⁵⁹

Now that the Home Guard had won the War Office’s attention it was determined never to lose it. ‘They are a troublesome and querulous party,’ moaned General Pownall to his diary. ‘There is mighty little pleasing them, and the minority is always noisy.’⁶⁰ This constant carping was in fact their one reliable weapon. ‘The Home Guard always groused,’ acknowledged one former member. ‘Grousing is a useful vent for what otherwise might become a disruptive pressure of opinion. And in the Home Guard it was almost always directed to a justifiable purpose – the attainment of higher efficiency. “Give us more and better arms, equipment, instruction, practice, drill, field exercises, range-firing, anything and everything which will make us better soldiers”: that formed the burden of most Home Guard grousing.’⁶¹ Whenever prominent volunteers did not trust the War Office to act upon some particular request, they would simply go straight to the top and appeal directly to the ever-sympathetic Churchill. Pownall was well aware of which way the wind was blowing: ‘The H.G. are voters first and soldiers afterwards,’ he observed. ‘What they think they need, if they say so loudly enough, they will get.’⁶²

Pownall had never been happy in his onerous role as the Home Guard’s Inspector-General. In October, Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Eastwood⁶³ – a younger man championed by Churchill – took over the Home Guard and the changes continued to come. In November, Eastwood was ‘upgraded’ to the new position of Director-General and handed a more powerful directorate within the War Office.⁶⁴ The first half of 1941 saw a marked tightening-up of Home Guard organisation, as well as far more active involvement by regulars in administration and training. The first anniversary of the force was marked in May with a morale-boosting message of congratulation from King George VI, who also invited volunteers from various London units to stand on sentry duty at Buckingham Palace.⁶⁵ In November, it was announced that conscription would be introduced in order to keep the Home Guard up to strength. Under the National Service (No. 2) Act, all male civilians aged between eighteen and fifty-one could, from January 1942, be ordered to join the Home Guard, and, once enrolled, would be liable to prosecution in a civil court if they failed to attend up to forty-eight hours of training or guard duties each month. Once recruited, they could not leave before reaching the age of sixty-five (although existing volunteers had the right to resign before the new law took effect on 17 February 1942).⁶⁶ This influx of ‘directed men’⁶⁷ – the opprobrious term ‘conscript’ was avoided – changed the character of the organisation still further, erasing the last traces of the old LDV, moving beyond the original Corinthian esprit de corps and accelerating the transformation of an awkward political after-thought into an integral and well-regarded part of active Home Defence.

Some problems, however, proved more obdurate than others. One of these, as far as the men at the War Office were concerned, was women. Back in June 1940, the government – concerned, it was suggested, that other key voluntary organisations, such as the Women’s Voluntary Service, might in future be deprived of personnel due to increased ‘competition for a dwindling source of supply’⁶⁸ – had ruled that ‘women cannot be enrolled in the L.D.V.’.⁶⁹ The decision did nothing to deter the more determined of campaigners, such as the redoubtable Labour MP Edith Summerskill, who proceeded to form her own lobby group, Women’s Home Defence, and argued her case so persuasively and passionately that some of Whitehall’s frailest males branded her an ‘Amazonian’.⁷⁰ In spite of the fact that Churchill agreed with Summerskill, and in spite of the fact that thousands of women had been contributing to the force from the very beginning as clerks, typists, telephonists, cooks and messengers, the War Office would hold out until April 1943, when, having exhausted all excuses, it finally agreed to relent and permit women to serve, in a limited capacity, as ‘Women’s Home Guard Auxiliaries’.⁷¹ ‘It was generally felt,’ recalled one Home Guard officer, ‘that these conditions should have been more generous and that women should have been treated with more consideration. To mention one grievance, they were not issued with uniforms and this, according to rumour, was for some political reason. They were without steel helmets and service respirators, although at “Action Stations” they worked alongside with, and [were] exposed to the same risks as, the men.’⁷²

Weapons, or rather the scarcity of them, represented another persistent problem. Ever since the massive loss of weapons and equipment at Dunkirk, the production of standard military munitions had been fully taken up by the urgent needs of the regulars and nothing could be spared for the part-time force. Spirits did rise in 1941 when the Thompson (or ‘tommy’) sub-machine gun, a formidable weapon familiar to every film-goer from endless gangster movies, was issued, but soon fell again when it was promptly withdrawn and redistributed to the Commandos. Aside from a limited supply of outdated rifles, the Home Guard had to make do with bayonets, a variety of hazardous home-made grenades – such as the Woolworth or Thermos bomb (described by one disenchanted veteran as ‘just a lump of gelignite in a biscuit tin’)⁷³ and the Sticky bomb (a glass flask filled with nitroglycerine and squeezed inside an adhesive-coated sock – ‘when throwing it, it was wise not to brush it against your clothes, for there it was liable to stick firmly, and blow up the thrower instead of the enemy objective’).⁷⁴ Then there was the Sten gun, a cheaply-made but relatively effective weapon which was only made available at a gun-to-man ratio of one to four. It was summed up by one distinctly underwhelmed recuit as ‘a spout, a handle, and a tin box’.⁷⁵ There were also such strange and cumbersome contraptions as the Northover projector, which cost under £10 to produce, fired grenades with the aid of a toy pistol cap and a black powder charge, and was likened by one volunteer to ‘a large drainpipe mounted on twin legs’.⁷⁶ The most despised of all these weapons was, without any doubt, the pike. Although cheeky youths were known to cry out ‘Gadzooks!’ whenever pike-bearing Home Guards marched by, the 1940s version – consisting of a long metal gas-pipe with a spare bayonet spot-welded in one end – bore scant resemblance to its ancient forebears. Journalists dismissed them immediately as ‘worse than useless’ and ‘demoralising’,⁷⁷ politicians criticised them as ‘an insult’,⁷⁸ and incredulous quartermasters put them swiftly into storage. The frustration never faded: too many men, for too long a time, found themselves still unfamiliar with firearms.

A third abiding problem was red tape. In spite of the countless War Office assurances to the contrary, the Home Guard grew increasingly bureaucratic. ‘[T]oo much instructional paper – printed, cyclostyled, or typewritten – was produced and circulated,’ recalled one volunteer. ‘There seemed to be a paragraph and subparagraph to cover every tiniest event which could possibly happen, not only to every man, but to every buckle and bootlace. In consequence, the administration of Home Guard units tended to follow the placid, careful, and elaborate course of civil service routine, and many a man felt encouraged to take shelter behind an appropriate regulation rather than think and act for himself.’⁷⁹ The more that the living reality of war seemed obscured by its paper description, the more enraged the most recalcitrant souls, such as George Orwell, became. ‘After two years,’ he wrote, ‘no real training has been done, no specialised tactics worked out, no battle positions fixed upon, no fortifications built – all this owing to endless changes of plan and complete vagueness as to what we are supposed to be aiming at … Nothing ever happens except continuous dithering, resulting in progressive disillusionment all round. The best one can hope is that it is much the same on the other side.’⁸⁰

In spite of its myriad imperfections, however, the Home Guard went on to make a genuine difference. Ever since the start of the Blitz in September 1940, it had come to be valued not just, nor perhaps even primarily, as an anti-invasion force but also, and increasingly, as a vital contributor to civil defence – locating and extinguishing incendiary bombs, clearing rubble, guarding damaged banks, pubs and shops, directing traffic, assisting in rescue work, first aid and fire-fighting, and generally making itself useful in crisis situations. Tales of incompetence – often comic, occasionally tragic – would, inevitably, be told and retold (such as the time a bemused platoon from the 1st Berkshire Battalion mistook a distant cow’s swishing tail for some kind of inscrutable ‘dot-dash movement of a flag’, or the occasion when a Liverpool unit’s bid to train on a patch of waste land was thwarted by a gang of small boys who protested that ‘we was playing ‘ere first’),⁸¹ but the stories of compassion and courage were legion.⁸² One Buckinghamshire platoon, it was reported, ‘accommodated, fed and slept in their guardroom approximately 250 mothers and children turned out of their homes through time bombs. Half a dozen tired men of the night guard received and fed the refugees out of their rations, and then with umbrella and bowler hat went to town to do a “day’s work”.’⁸³ Communities were comforted, spirits were lifted, and lives were saved.

For all its invaluable versatility, however, the self-image of the Home Guard remained resolutely that of a fighting force, so as the fears of invasion started to fade, the feelings of redundancy started to form, and it became increasingly necessary for the government to find ways of reassuring the Home Guard that it still meant something, and still mattered. In May 1942, for example, its second anniversary was marked by a host of measures intended to bolster its self-esteem: a day of parades and field-craft demonstrations – ‘Home Guard Sunday’ – was held. Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Paget, the Commander of the British Home Forces, paid public tribute both to the progress that the Home Guard had made, and to the ‘spirit of service and self-sacrifice’ shown by its members;⁸⁴ the Prime Minister reminded the force that it continued to be ‘engaged in work of national importance during all hours of the day’, and remained ‘an invaluable addition to our armed forces and an essential part of the effective defence of the island’;⁸⁵ and King George VI announced that, as a sign of his ‘appreciation of the services given by the Home Guard with such devotion and perseverence’, he had agreed to become its Colonel-in-Chief.⁸⁶ Early the following year, Churchill – fearing that a forthcoming satirical film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, would encourage people to regard the Home Guard as little more than a comical anachronism⁸⁷ – urged the War Office to find further ways to make the force ‘feel that the nation realises all it owes to these devoted men’, adding that they needed ‘to be nursed and encouraged at this stage in their life’.⁸⁸ That May, following Churchill’s prompting, the third anniversary celebrations were greater and grander than ever: there was another ‘Home Guard Sunday’ – Churchill had wanted a ‘Home Guard Week’⁸⁹ – with ceremonial parades throughout the country and a march of 5,000 Home Guards through central London. The King, who took the salute, praised the force for attaining such a ‘high standard of proficiency’, and assured it that, as the Army directed its attention elsewhere, ‘the importance of your role will … inevitably continue to increase’.⁹⁰ Churchill was in Washington during the time of these celebrations, but he still managed to make the most memorable contribution with a lengthy radio broadcast designed specifically to restore a sense of pride and self-importance within the force: ‘People who note and mark our growing mastery of the air, not only over our islands but penetrating into ever-widening zones on the Continent, ask whether the danger of invasion has not passed away,’ he observed. ‘Let me assure you of this: That until Hitler and Hitlerism are beaten into unconditional surrender the danger of invasion will never pass away.’ Noting that any prospect of invasion hinged on the strength of the forces deployed to meet it, he reaffirmed his faith in the Home Guard:

[I]f the Nazi villains drop down upon us from the skies, any night … you will make it clear to them that they have not alighted in the poultry run, or in the rabbit-farm, or even in the sheep-fold, but that they have come down in the lion’s den at the Zoo! Here is the reality of your work; here is that sense of imminent emergency which cheers and inspires the long routine of drills and musters after the hard day’s work is done.

The Allies, he added, were now moving overseas, leaving the Home Guard with greater responsibility than ever: ‘It is this reason which, above all others, prompted me to make you and all Britain realise afresh … the magnitude and lively importance of your duties and of the part you have to play in the supreme cause now gathering momentum as it rolls forward to its goal.’⁹¹

The celebrations and speeches seemed to work, but not for long, and before any more bouquets could be brandished the realities of the strategic situation had started to sink in. During the first half of 1943, it had still been possible to contemplate the possibility of some sudden reversal in Allied fortunes; by the end of the year it had become clear that the Germans, now without their Axis partner Italy, were well on their way to defeat. The Home Guard, as a consequence, gradually lost its sense of purpose. All except the keenest Home Guards came to resent the obligation to surrender their evening hours in order to train for a non-existent battle, and absenteeism grew increasingly common.⁹²

The Home Guard’s long, slow, inexorable decline dragged on into 1944. The fourth anniversary of its formation was duly marked in May with the usual array of strenuously celebratory events; on this occasion, however, the applause failed to distract the men from their misgivings. After D-Day, in June, it was evident to all that what the future held in store was not battle honours but redundancy. On 6 September, it was announced that Home Guard operational duties were being suspended and all parades would from now on be voluntary.⁹³ At the end of the following month came confirmation of the inevitable: the Home Guard was to stand down on 14 November. Although few volunteers were entirely surprised by the decision to disband, many were taken aback by the speed at which it was set to be executed. ‘We learned that, like the grin on Alice’s Chesire Cat’, wrote one embittered volunteer, ‘we were to fade out, leaving no trace of our existence.’⁹⁴ It seemed for a time that the men would be ordered to give back their uniforms, but Churchill, anticipating the probable public reaction to such a patently mean-spirited act, intervened to cancel the plan, insisting that ‘there can be no question of the Home Guard returning their boots or uniforms’.⁹⁵

The end, when it came, was met with dignity. On Sunday, 3 December 1944, more than 7,000 Home Guards, drawn from units all over Britain, marched in the rain through the West End of London, and concluded with a parade in Hyde Park before their Colonel-in-Chief, King George VI. ‘History,’ he told them, ‘will say that your share in the greatest of all our struggles for freedom was a vitally important one.’⁹⁶ That evening, shortly after nine o’clock, the Home Guard, which had begun with one radio broadcast, ended with another – this one delivered by the King:

Over four years ago, in May 1940, our country was in mortal danger. The most powerful army the world had ever seen had forced its way to within a few miles of our coast. From day to day we were threatened with invasion.

For most of you – and, I must add, for your wives too – your service in the Home Guard has not been easy. Some of you have stood for many hours on the gun sites, in desolate fields, or wind-swept beaches. Many of you, after a long and hard day’s work, scarcely had time for food before you changed into uniform for the evening parade. Some of you had to bicycle for long distances to the drill or the rifle range …

But you have gained something for yourselves. You have discovered in yourselves new capabilities. You have found how men from all kinds of homes and many different occupations can work together in a great cause, and how happy they can be with each other. I am very proud of what the Home Guard has done and I give my heartfelt thanks to you all … I know that your country will not forget that service.⁹⁷

‘The Home Guard,’ sighed General Pownall back in the early days of its existence, ‘are indeed a peculiar race.’⁹⁸ If, by ‘peculiar’, he not only meant ‘odd’ but also ‘special’, he had a point, because in spite of the lingering imprecision of its status and the nagging inadequacy of its instruction, this unlikely alliance of the wide and rheumy eyed won real respect for its readiness to stand, and wait, and serve. ‘When bad men combine,’ wrote Burke, ‘the good must associate,’⁹⁹ and the men of the Home Guard did so without hesitation or fuss. At their peak they numbered 1,793,000;¹⁰⁰ their gallantry earned them 2 George Crosses, 13 George Medals, 11 MBEs, 1 OBE, 6 British Empire medals and 58 commendations; 1,206 volunteers were either killed on duty or died from wounds, and 557 more sustained serious injuries; they cost little, but contributed much.¹⁰¹ The glory passed them by, but not the gratitude.