ABSTRACT
British cultural life during the war was a place of mixed feelings. Writers, dramatists, painters and poets produced work that was deeply informed by the conflict, where the familiar, essentially conservative language of patriotism, heroism and romanticism was set against the newer voices of disenchantment, rage and realism. Greater certainties about the conflict were expressed in the cultural dialogue of the ‘common people’. Here, the nature and purpose of the war were understood through a vocabulary of valour and pluck, and an unquestioning acceptance of Britain’s struggle, where culture was an unashamedly commercial enterprise. In their efforts to understand British wartime culture, historians have been inclined to divide its substance into the ‘high’ and ‘low’: where the ‘elite’ intellectual pursuits of poetry, literature, classical music and painting rubbed shoulders with the ‘popular culture’ of the people, as expressed in popular song, theatrical revue and cheap novelettes. This dual view of British ‘conflict’ culture still has some validity, but the war blurred its boundaries. During these years the response of the elite appeared to parallel that of the masses, all sharing a common of experience. Indeed it could be argued that the war became British culture.
