ABSTRACT
From 1945 through to the 1980s, the people’s war of 1940 was a constant point of political reference, a moment deemed so sublime as to take it out of the realm of normal historical enquiry entirely. In the 1950s, the summer of 1940 was Mowat’s epilogue to Britain between the Wars, the moment when the British people found themselves again after the experience of the Depression. The implication was that 1940 was the point when history stopped and the present began. For another fifteen years, there seemed little else for historians to say about this. The official histories largely appeared in the 1950s. Though there were honourable exceptions, many were dry as dust. It was not until the late 1960s that any kind of serious historical debate began on the significance of the war years on the home front. As late as 1975, Paul Addison confirmed the Mowat projection that the war years saw ‘Baldwin’s consensus’ replaced by ‘Attlee’s consensus’, and the assumption appeared to be that that consensus was still with us. 1 In popular political discourse, too, 1940 provided the foundation myth of modern Britain. However, there were always major differences of emphasis within the myth, with widely varying political implications, over the significance of Chamberlain and the 1930s, over the role of the armed forces on the one hand and the common people on the other, over whether the war had been fought for collectivism or for individualism.
