ABSTRACT
The most powerful and enduring images of Britain in the second world war are associated with the home front: blitzed cities, communal air-raid shelters, the munitions factories of Britain’s industrial heartlands and crowds of evacuees waiting for trains which would take them to the relative safety of the countryside. These are the most familiar symbols of the concept that became known as the ‘people’s war’. To an unprecedented degree the burden of war fell on the nation as a whole from September 1939, testing the resolve of the civilian population as much as the power of Britain’s armed forces. The collective nature of the war effort was held to have produced profound social change: prewar divisions of class, wealth, status and power were allegedly set aside in favour of a new social cohesion which developed from the common experience of war and the shared aim of defeating the enemy. As the British faced the invasion scare of 1940, as the Luftwaffe attacked urban centres and as the nation prepared for the long hard struggle on the road to victory, rich and poor, male and female, majorities and minorities alike apparently submerged their differences and stood together in common defiance. The idea that the British developed a greater sense of collective consciousness in wartime which enabled them to make sacrifices, work together and abandon narrow self-interest in pursuit of a shared goal was continually promoted by government propaganda as a means of maintaining morale and heading off the danger of internal social conflict. The Ministry of Information and the BBC emphasised that the nation was fused together in a common cause and reassured the public that if they continued to work together, survival and eventual victory would be secured.
