The blitz, civilian morale and the city: mass-observation and working-class culture in Britain, 1940–41

Beaven, Brad; Griffiths, John

doi:10.1017/s0963926899000152

Cited by 26 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…Then, as now, societal recognition or understanding of the war experience was not generally available to the returning World War II veterans and, consequently, many suffered significant difficulties readjusting to civilian society. Those who lived in the war zones such as Britain, Europe, Southern Asia, or the Pacific (Beaven & Griffiths, 1999;den Velde, Deeg, Hovens, Van Duijn, & Aarts, 2011;Kuwert, Spitzer, Trader, Freyberger, & Ermann, 2007) experienced the full horror of war, whereas people in North America, Southern Africa, Australia, and New Zealand were largely protected from the war by geography and politics, and often did not understand this intensity of trauma. Where possible, veterans turned to their comrades from the war and veteran's associations to help them cope with their wartime experiences and process traumatic memories (Hunt & Robbins, 2001b).…”

Section: Discussion and Implications For Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

War Leaves an Enduring Legacy in Combatants’ Lives

Smith

Parsons

Hand

2014

Journal of Gerontological Social Work

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The memory of combat experience endures in World War II veterans. As veterans age, traumatic memory that previously may have been suppressed in the busyness of family and everyday life can re-emerge. Combat stress may affect not only the veterans, but also those people closely associated with them. Interviews were conducted with World War II veteran aircrew, wives, children, grandchildren, siblings, and friends to examine the impact of combat experience on the veterans and the family across the life course from the perspectives of the various participants. The combat experience significantly affected the life course of most.

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Section: Discussion and Implications For Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

War Leaves an Enduring Legacy in Combatants’ Lives

Smith

Parsons

Hand

2014

Journal of Gerontological Social Work

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“…With some it ended before it began, in ignominy: in the months before the outbreak of war gas masks became a favourite souvenir of the Munich Crisis for American tourists to take home with them. While the proportion of the population carrying their gas masks in the street never rose above approximately 75 percent, anxious Home Office officials monitored changing attitudes and practices of gas protection in the general public through the Mass Observation data gathering project (Beaven and Griffiths 1999;Harrisson 1976). At the time of the evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk in 1940, the percentage of the population carrying gas masks in the street rose from practically zero to around 30 percent; by August 1940 it had fallen to just ten percent (Calder 1992: 112).…”

Section: Disposalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain

Moshenska¹

2019

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How do children cope when their world is transformed by war? This book draws on memory narratives to construct an historical anthropology of childhood in Second World Britain, focusing on objects and spaces such as gas masks, air raid shelters and bombed-out buildings. In their struggles to cope with the fears and upheavals of wartime, with families divided and familiar landscapes lost or transformed, children reimagined and reshaped these material traces of conflict into toys, treasures and playgrounds. This study of the material worlds of wartime childhood offers a unique viewpoint into an extraordinary period in history with powerful resonances across global conflicts into the present day.Modern warfare is a unique cultural phenomenon. While many conflicts in history have produced dramatic shifts in human behaviour, the industrialized nature of modern war possesses a material and psychological intensity that embodies the extremes of our behaviours, from the total economic mobilization of a nation state to the unbearable pain of individual loss. Fundamentally, war is the transformation of matter through the agency of destruction, and the character of modern technological warfare is such that it simultaneously creates and destroys more than any previous kind of conflict.The material culture of modern wars can be small (a bullet, machine-gun or gas mask), intermediate (a tank, aeroplane, or war memorial), and large (a battleship, a museum, or an entire contested landscape). All share one defining featurethey are artefacts, the product of human activity rather than natural processes. In this sense, for example, the First World War's Western Front is as much a cultural artefact as a Second World War V2 rocket, a cold war early-warning radar station, wartime factories and bombed buildings, as are photographs, diaries, films, war souvenirs, and a host of conflict-related art forms. Similarly artefactual, though not always understood as such, are peoplethe war-maimed (sometimes fitted with prostheses), war refugees and their camps, collectors of memorabilia, and the post-conflict 'presence of absence' in towns and cities of large numbers of missing men, women and children. Each in their own waythrough objects, memories, attitudes and actionsperpetuate different engagements with conflict and its painful and enduring aftermath.The material culture of conflict offers a field of study which is both rich and fiercely relevant to the world which we inhabit. Wars and other forms of conflict have formed that world. Today we still live in the shadow of two world wars which set new standards for extremes of violence, and violent conflicts remain in progress across the globe as this series of books is inaugurated. These events have created a truly massive volume of material culture. The ways in which people engage with it is conditioned by society's equivocal attitude to violent conflict itself. As John Keegan wrote, 'We are cultural animals and it is the richness of our culture which allows us to accept our undoubted potentiali...

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“…The government was keenly aware of the fluctuating proportion of the population who carried gas masks on the street, and may have sought to encourage greater diligence. These data came from the plethora of overt and covert surveys of civilian morale in the early stages of the war, in which the public carriage of respirators was treated as an indicator of the fear of imminent attack (Beaven & Griffiths 1999).…”

Section: Live Gas Trainingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With some it ended before it began, in ignominy: in the months before the outbreak of war, gas masks became a favourite souvenir of the Munich Crisis for American tourists to take home with them (Hibbs 2009). While the proportion of the population carrying their gas masks in the street never rose above approximately 75 per cent, anxious Home Office officials monitored changing attitudes and practices of gas protection in the general public through the Mass Observation project, a pioneering combination of market research and ethnography in Britain from the 1930s onwards (Beaven & Griffiths 1999; Harrisson 1976). At the time of the evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk in 1940 the percentage of the population carrying gas masks in the street rose from practically zero to around 30 per cent; by August 1940 it had fallen to just 10 per cent (Calder 1992: 112).…”

Section: Disposalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gas masks: material culture, memory, and the senses

Moshenska

2010

Royal Anthropological Inst

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Gas masks are distinctive, iconic, and evocative objects. As a technology, a uniform, a symbol, and a mask, the gas mask defies simple categorization. In this article I use memory narratives to examine the active social lives of children's gas masks in Second World War Britain; their uses, misuses, and disposal. By focusing on the unique sensory aspect of the gas mask, I consider a range of interconnected themes, including the effects of poison gas, the aesthetics of childhood learning, and the connections between memory and the senses. This study builds on recent criticisms of social constructivism and ‘asymmetry’ in the study of people and material culture; the child's gas mask thus emerges not only as a social and physical mediator between children and the world at war they inhabited, but as an actor shaping the aesthetic experience and memories of that world. Résumé Le masque à gaz est un objet distinctif, iconique, évocateur. Équipement technologique autant qu'uniforme, symbole et masque, il défie les catégorisations simples. L'auteur utilise ici des récits de souvenirs pour étudier la vie sociale active des masques à gaz pour enfants dans la Grande‐Bretagne de la seconde Guerre mondiale, leur utilisation, leurs abus, leur mise au rebut. En se concentrant sur l'aspect sensoriel unique des masques à gaz, l'auteur aborde plusieurs thèmes interconnectés : effets des gaz toxiques, esthétique de l'apprentissage dans l'enfance, liens entre mémoire et sens. Cette étude se fonde sur la critique récente du constructivisme social et de « l'asymétrie » dans l'étude des peuples et des cultures matérielles. Le masque à gaz pour enfant apparaît ainsi non seulement comme un médiateur social et physique entre l'enfant et le monde en guerre dans lequel il vivait, mais comme un acteur donnant forme à une expérience esthétique et aux souvenirs de ce monde.

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The blitz, civilian morale and the city: mass-observation and working-class culture in Britain, 1940–41

Cited by 26 publications

References 0 publications

War Leaves an Enduring Legacy in Combatants’ Lives

War Leaves an Enduring Legacy in Combatants’ Lives

Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain

Gas masks: material culture, memory, and the senses

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