Dunkirk Read online

  Shortly before Cable Street, Diana’s father, Lord Redesdale, had given a speech to the House of Lords, protesting at ignorant British attitudes towards the Nazis. The most common mistake, he claimed, related to the Nazi treatment of Jews. The reality was that no Germans interfered with the Jews so long as they behaved themselves. And if the Germans felt that the Jews were a problem, Redesdale said, they should be allowed to deal with that problem as they thought best. Had the Nazis arrived in Britain, they would clearly have had ready-made support among the upper ranks, as well as the lower orders.

  Another extreme – communism – was gaining support among young Britons. One of these, Winston Churchill’s nephew, Giles Romilly, wrote, ‘Youth has a clear choice. Either they must side with the parasites and exploiters . . . or with the working class to smash the capitalist system and lay the foundations of the classless society.’

  In 1936 and 1937, thousands travelled to Spain to fight against Franco with the International Brigades. Once again, the vast majority were young working-class men – though not all. Penny Fiewel was a nurse working in Hertfordshire. A colleague asked her if she would volunteer for Spain: ‘I said I knew nothing about Spain – I didn’t know anything. She said I wanted educating, so she told me all about Spain, how the nuns were taking Franco’s side, and of course, it grabbed my heart – I was young and very emotional.’

  Penny soon found herself in a field hospital on the front line, treating terrible injuries and teaching Spanish nurses to do the same. When bombs first fell near her operating theatre, it was invaded by civilians desperate for shelter. One man collided with her in the dark, and as she pushed him away, her fingers became sticky. When the lights were back on, she saw that half of the flesh on the man’s face had been blown away. Long before Hermann Goering launched the Luftwaffe’s raids against London in September 1940, Penny Fiewel was experiencing the brutality of area bombing. The Spanish Civil War – as illustrated by Pablo Picasso – was teaching the world to dread the bomber.

  Months later, Penny was badly wounded during a raid. Waking up in a barn, naked except for bandages wound tightly around her chest and abdomen, she was in terrible pain. And as she lay recovering in hospital, the raids continued. ‘These were nightmare days,’ she says.

  The war was ultimately won by Franco’s nationalists, with help from the Germans. This was a clear violation of a non-intervention agreement signed by Germany – and a warning of the dangers of trusting Hitler. But just as Britain’s leaders were tentative in their handling of the economy, so they were tentative in their handling of the Führer.

  This was understandable. Britain had won the First World War – but her economy had been badly damaged. (As of 2017, astonishingly, the country still owed a large amount of First World War bond debt.) The greatest loss, however, was human. Much of Britain’s young male generation had been killed, wounded or traumatised, and the nation’s leaders were desperate to consign the war to history. They wanted to believe in a new peaceful world order based on the League of Nations – and were reluctant to focus too closely on events in Germany. Equally, they did not want to impose the high taxes that would be needed to rearm. Overall, therefore, it was easier for collective heads to remain in the sand where they could ignore the war cries of men such as Winston Churchill.

  And although Britain’s politicians disapproved of Hitler’s methods, they did not initially identify him as an existential threat. As future United States President John F. Kennedy explained in his 1940 book, Why England Slept, ‘It is only fear, violent fear, for one’s own security . . . that results in a nation-wide demand for armaments.’ Such fear did not exist in Britain until it was almost too late.

  Germany, by contrast, could hardly rearm quickly enough. And the two nations’ respective pre-war attitudes, one conservative and placatory, the other radical and ruthless, would come to a head in the events of May and June 1940.

  But for all the difficulties Britain and her people faced in the years leading up to war, there was another – more positive – story emerging. Just as in America, and, in its own dark way, Germany, a distinct youth culture was forming. ‘Youth has broken out like a rash,’ stated a Picture Post leader in early 1939. Everybody, it claimed, was talking about ‘youth’, from journalists to politicians to church leaders: ‘What causes all this present chatter about “youth”? It is partly that we are in an age of transition, and older people are stamped by the institutions in which we have lost faith. We hope that youth will do better!’

  Here is a striking similarity between our three nations. The depression and the apparent failure of the previous generation were allowing the young to forge a new identity. But in Britain, this new identity was being exercised by single wage-earners, aged fourteen to twenty-four, who had more expendable income than any other sector of society. The nation’s burgeoning youth culture would not have grown so quickly had it not offered such a boost to the economy.

  A survey conducted in 1937 in a deprived area of Manchester concluded that working children from even the poorest families ‘would have holidays and outings and new clothes, while probably the parents, the mother certainly, stayed at home and wore old clothes’. We are witnessing the birth of the teenager – before the word was even coined. For, by keeping a considerable amount of their earnings to themselves, these young people had a far superior standard of living to the older members of their family.

  Much of their money was spent watching (mainly American) films. Most young people watched at least one film a week, some watched many more. And not only did they watch films, they learned from them. They copied fashions and hairstyles, accents and attitudes. Boys wore slouched fedoras, girls delivered Scarlett O’Hara-style putdowns. According to the diary of a girl from a working-class Manchester suburb, an average 1938 Monday evening was spent watching a George Formby film with a friend, discussing the film (as well as boys and clothes), and then returning home to listen to dance music and talk to her family – about films.

  Plenty of teen money was spent in dance halls. George Wagner (a sapper who would be evacuated from La Panne in May 1940) was sixteen in 1936, when he became a regular dance hall attendee. Despite being a shy boy, dancing was his chief hobby. ‘It was a place where you met all the girls,’ George says, ‘that was the main thing.’

  Wearing suit, tie and waistcoat, bought by his mother (he had only graduated to long trousers at fourteen), George would walk a few miles to the Palace Ballroom in Erdington with three of his closest friends. The dances were run by Harry Phillips, who would walk around the floor, partnering boys and girls. No alcohol was served, so any of George’s friends who wanted a drink would have to go to a local pub and lie about their age. A five-piece dance band played popular American music – George’s favourite song was ‘Deep Purple’ – as young men plucked up their courage to approach young women. George says:

  You used to chat them up, see if you could take them home. I didn’t have a particular girlfriend, not in them days, I was too young. I would walk them home and probably have a little snog when you got up to the gate. But they were very looked after in them days. Sometimes parents would be watching out of the window in the lamplight. ‘Come on! You’re late!’

  So what were the differences between young wage-earners of this period and those of previous generations? Their instincts had not changed, but their behaviour had. They were now keeping far more of their wages to spend on themselves, and they had their own interests and pursuits. Before the First World War, there were very few – if any – pursuits that appealed only to the young. The music halls and cheap theatres were equally popular with all ages. It is hard to overestimate the growing independence and importance of youth at this period – and without the depression, it is hard to imagine how such developments could have taken place.

  But at the same time, we should be careful not to ascribe our own modern attitudes to 1930s teens. We may want to imagine that they were ‘just like us’, but the truth is more nuanced. A
t the same time as he was learning about girls, George was very much a boy of his own time. He and his friends loved nothing more than pitching a tent in a field, pinching a bit of coal from the railway to start a fire, and cooking whatever they found in the fields. George would find an acorn, poke a straw into it, fill it with cigarette ends, and use it as a pipe. ‘If my mother had known,’ he says, ‘I would have got a thick ear.’ Youth attitudes may have been changing, but most young people remained innocent by today’s standards.

  And we should also remember that young people were not alone in experiencing new pleasures and entertainments. Entirely British in flavour, accessible to all ages, a popular culture was also developing. It took the form of cheap luxuries and diversions available to people who could not afford the essentials. This, according to Orwell, was the logical result of the depression, as the manufacturer’s need for a market coincided with the half-starved populace’s need for cheap distractions:

  A luxury nowadays is almost always cheaper than a necessity. One pair of plain solid shoes costs as much as two ultra-smart pairs. For the price of one square meal you can get two pounds of cheap sweets. You can’t get much meat for threepence but you can get a lot of fish and chips . . . And above all, there is gambling, the cheapest of all luxuries. Even people on the verge of starvation can buy a few days’ hope by having a penny on a sweepstake.

  These trends are still with us today – although many of the specific diversions have now disappeared. Two British dances, enjoyed by all ages, in the late 1930s, were the Lambeth Walk and the Chestnut Tree. One was a pastiche of cockney culture, the other was based on a nursery rhyme. Compared with the primal danger of Swing, that edgy American import, these dances were cosily British in their eccentricity.

  In Blackpool, the country’s favourite seaside resort, the diversions were equally British. One involved a woman named Valerie Arkell-Smith. Masculine in appearance, Arkell-Smith had spent years passing herself off as a retired army colonel – and had married an unsuspecting woman in the process. Following Arkell-Smith’s release from prison for making a false statement on her marriage certificate, an impresario signed her up to feature in a Blackpool sideshow. Billed as a woman who had recently had a sex-change operation, Arkell-Smith lay in a single bed, while a young woman lay alongside her in another bed, the two beds separated by flashing Belisha beacons. The conceit was that the pair had recently married but Arkell-Smith had placed a £250 bet that, for twenty-one weeks, they would not touch one another. Spectators paid twopence to view the odd, sexless bedshow, shouting obscenities at the ‘couple’.

  Another sideshow was stranger still. Harold Davidson had been the rector of the parish of Stiffkey in Norfolk. He had been defrocked after an ecclesiastical court found him guilty of immoral conduct with a variety of women. Outraged at the verdict, Davidson had first embarked on a hunger strike (in an attempt to prove that God would not allow him to starve) before sitting for months in a barrel on Blackpool Promenade, trying to raise enough money to launch an appeal. The following year, he abandoned the barrel, and chose to appear inside a lion’s den at Skegness Amusement Park. This would be the end of the ecclesiastical road for the ex-Vicar of Stiffkey; the lion turned on him, and ate him in front of a paying audience.

  It is often repeated that the 1950s gave rise to American-inspired youth culture, as well as a popular culture of cheap luxuries – but the pre-war period was clearly there first. And just as the American and German economies recovered as the 1930s wore on, so the general standard of living in Britain improved considerably.

  One measure of this was the growing vibrancy of particular areas – such as Soho in London’s West End. The traditional French and Italian cafés and restaurants were joined by Chinese, Spanish and Hungarian restaurants. Considering that in 1939, less than 3 per cent of Londoners had been born abroad (compared with 37 per cent today), Soho was a genuine hub of cosmopolitan activity. A Picture Post feature noted expanses of cheese, garlands of sausages, rows of straw-covered Chianti bottles, tins of anchovies, olives and fruits, dishes of sweets and coloured beans, and glittering espresso machines. ‘The shop windows of Soho,’ it observes, ‘are crammed, gay, glowing and vivid.’ Even more surprisingly, Denmark Street, on the other side of Charing Cross Road, housed a Japanese community, where the truly intrepid could eat Japanese food. This is not a picture one readily associates with the 1930s.

  Similarly, at this time, recognisably modern jobs emerged. Bill Taylor could neither read nor write – yet he worked as a long-distance lorry driver. When his firm gave him a delivery note, he would study a map for the place name that most resembled the one on the note. Then he would draw a straight line between his start point and end point, and circle every large town on the way. When he arrived in each town, he would stop and ask the way to the next. ‘None of the guv’nors I worked for ever knew I couldn’t read,’ he says, although he admits that ‘it had been easier when I’d started on the horses because some of the horses knew where they were going.’

  One perk of Bill’s job was the existence of ‘lorry girls’ who hung around the cafés. ‘You’d take them from one town to another,’ he says. ‘Sometimes they’d stop with you a whole week, sleep with you and keep you company.’ In return the driver bought the girls food and cigarettes. ‘When the wives found out,’ says Bill, ‘a lot of marriages broke up.’

  Sam Tobin, meanwhile, was a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman in north London. On Monday mornings, before setting off on the road, he would join fellow salesmen in a motivational singsong:

  All the dirt, all the grit,

  Hoover gets it every bit,

  For it beats as it sweeps as it cleans . . .

  Sam’s day then became a struggle to be allowed into suburban homes, where he would demonstrate his vacuum cleaner on samples of sand that he carried with him. ‘It was pretty soul destroying,’ he says, ‘and if it was bad weather, or if Electrolux salesmen had done your territory, it was very difficult to get a demonstration anywhere.’

  But perhaps the most modern job under way in Britain was being carried out by a recent Jewish immigrant from Poland. Joseph Rotblat was a physicist working in the field of radioactivity who arrived in Britain in April 1939. Earlier in the year, he had read about Frisch and Leitner’s discovery of nuclear fission, and it had occurred to him that a staggering release of energy might be possible if a chain reaction could be triggered in a very short time. Initially, he pushed this idea – for an atomic bomb – out of his mind, so concerned was he by the horrifying prospect of creating what would now be called a weapon of mass destruction. But by the time he arrived in Britain, Rotblat had figured that the Nazis might be working on a bomb, making it his duty to share his thoughts with British scientists. ‘Perhaps, in my own mind,’ he says, ‘I was the first person to develop the concept of the nuclear deterrent.’ As a result, Rotblat approached Sir James Chadwick, the discoverer of the neutron. Chadwick approved of the idea, and granted Rotblat two assistants. The dark march of atomic progress had begun.

  But for all the period’s changes, the most anticipated and dreaded was the outbreak of war. Many young men began volunteering to join the British army, while limited conscription was introduced for twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds in April 1939. In the last war, volunteers had joined up enthusiastically, keen to fight for King and Country, eager to put the Kaiser in his place. A quarter of a century on, emotions were more muted. Nevertheless, the 1939 generation showed itself, on balance, to be quietly dutiful and aware of the need to confront Germany.

  But there were many who joined up oblivious to the political situation, unconcerned with any sense of duty. Thomas Myers, the young Durham coal miner with whom we began this chapter, joined the Territorial Army in early 1939, because, he says, it was the fashionable thing to do. ‘Everybody wanted to be in the Territorials, it was chaotic there were that many joining.’ Yet he had no interest in politics. ‘I didn’t know war was coming,’ Thomas says, ‘I didn’t know any
thing about Hitler.’

  When pressed, he adds that he joined in order to get the occasional weekend away, and evening out. To young men trapped by work and community, the army offered a break from monotony and social restrictions. It offered adventure. George Wagner, the keen dancer from Erdington, says, ‘We joined and it was something to do. On top of that, you got paid a bounty, and on top of that, once a year, you used to go away for a fortnight training. It was great.’

  Anthony Rhodes, a young Royal Engineers officer, was given a long-serving army batman (a servant). Rhodes describes this man as seeking a niche, a quiet place where he could rest in indefinite seclusion. There were peacetime soldiers, in other words, who were attracted to the army by its lack of adventure.

  And to some, the army provided a solution. Thomas Lister, a young man from Durham, had not been able to settle down to anything. At the age of fourteen, he had been sent by his father for an interview with an electrical engineer. He had taken one look at the workshop floor – ‘it looked like the jaws of hell’ – before walking away. He became an errand boy for Burton’s Tailors before becoming ‘a bit fed up with it’. After that, he had a spell as a wholesale fish salesman. But without a calling, or any particular direction, he would find the enforced discipline and comradeship of the army attractive. And it solved the problem of what he would do with his life – temporarily, at least.

  Germany

  To be young – and racially pure – in Adolf Hitler’s Germany was to be important. In Hitler’s eyes, the country’s future greatness depended on its young people – but it wasn’t their intelligence or initiative that he looked to encourage. Clever weaklings were not going to improve the country’s situation. Tough, healthy and strong-willed boys and girls were needed. ‘The weak must be chiselled away,’ he said in 1938, ‘I want young men and women who can suffer pain. A young German must be swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as Krupp’s steel.’ And though it would never be publicly admitted, they must also be brainwashed to adopt his ideology. Pure by blood, stripped of free will, they were going to make Germany great again.