The Home Front Project: a Year on the Road

2005 was a great year for oral history. It was the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War – and an opportunity to tap the vast reservoir of life experiences that are to be found amongst the civilian veterans, most of whom are now in their eighties. Home Front Recall, funded largely by the Big Lottery, brought together many local efforts to document such memories across the country, from the Eastside Community Heritage project in East London to the Herbert Museum in Coventry. The results are a potent reminder of how important oral testimony is to constructing personal and collective memory.

One such effort was the Home Front Voices Project, which with backing from the National Pensioners Convention (NPC), the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the TUC Library Collections at London Metropolitan University, aimed to discover the men and women who formed the backbone of the ‘production front’ – those who worked in the factories, mines and docks but also on farms, in new nurseries, post offices, shops and in the civil service. This was a ‘forgotten army’: even the recent history of the Home Front by Juliet Gardiner, Wartime: Britain, 1939–1945 (2004) makes virtually no mention of wartime production or its workforce. It was only thanks to the project that the hugely popular ‘Living Museum’ exhibition in St James's Park, London contained any significant information about the workplace or trade unions. But the response to the project proved that the workplace veterans themselves had not forgotten their experiences and that, in popular memory, the Second World War is always yesterday.

With the inspirational example of oral historians Studs Terkel and Raphael Samuel, I set off on a tour throughout Britain in order to conduct the interviews. Travelling the length and breath of Britain in 2005 was for me a sort of personal odyssey, a way of getting back on to the ‘shop floor’ after over a decade of teaching in Further and Adult education. It also took me back to my childhood in the west London borough of Fulham where my parents had survived being ‘bombed out’ twice during the Blitz. They had rarely talked about the war, as though the memories were too painful. So it was with mixed feelings that I embarked on the project.

The help of older people's networks and organizations such as local pensioners’ groups and trade-union Retired Members Associations (RMAs) was crucial. Requests to be interviewed flooded in from villages, towns and cities all over Britain, and a variety of local centres offered hospitality. In Gloucester, at the offices of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), interviews were held in a kitchen where I sat clutching a firefighter's axe, recording people like Albert Cook, who had been a teenager working in the London Docks during the Blitz. In nearby Kidderminster, Margaret Phelan shocked me with her account of being chased round the dairy where she worked as a milk tester by an irate farmer with a shot gun whose batch of milk she had rejected.

I realized the contribution that oral history could make in the classroom, and imagined how much history lessons would have benefited during my schooldays in the 1960s when it was all chalk, battered textbook and talk. Now I was meeting the actual ‘citizens’ of James Hinton's important book Shopfloor Citizens, Planning and Democracy in the British Engineering Industry, 1941–47 (1994): John Drinkwater, for example, an optical instrument worker or June Hart, who worked in an aero factory. Through the testimony of such people we discover how citizenship was ‘manufactured’ in the wartime factory. We realize too that they went on to form the backbone of the post-war trade-union movement, and they are the key to the modern pensioners’ movement. What this generation of Home Front veterans went on to do after the war, in the 1950s and 1960s, becomes crucial to our understanding of modern Britain.

Back on the road again, in the east Midlands, interviews were held at Leicester Age Concern, amidst the clatter of dishes and a photocopying machine...