Divided We Stand

‘Blood, sweat and toil’ was what Winston Churchill promised the British people when he formed a Coalition Government in May 1940. The words were the rhetorical high point of Churchill’s first speech in the Commons as Prime Minister: ‘I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat”’.¹ It was a phrase that encapsulated the all-in-it-together spirit of sacrifice and hard work with which Churchill endeavoured to imbue the ‘war effort’. Churchill meant it to apply to the population as a whole. Geoff Field uses it as a lens under which to scrutinize the fate of the working class in the Second World War.

Field argues that the working class as a historical subject has been neglected in studies of the war of 1939–45, surprisingly in view of its status as a ‘People’s War’. He attributes this neglect to current interest in gender and the general effects of the cultural turn. As a historian engaged in ‘remaking the British working class’ (his sub-title) he aims to fill the gap with a detailed and thorough exploration of its social history in this era, pulling together and expanding on his earlier articles in a welcome synthesis embracing family, local communities, workplace, military service, and politics. Class, he considers, is expressed in the outlook of workers and in the class assumptions at the heart of representations in policy and propaganda. Thus class consciousness and the construction of class identities (rather than social stratification) are his concerns. He argues against notions of the wartime blurring of class boundaries characteristic of wartime films and reproduced by many historians subsequently.² Rather than creating a new harmony, he says, ‘the war deepened a sense of class identity and reshaped class relations’ (p. 6). His sub-title flags not only his endeavour as a historian but also his thesis that the war was the occasion for ‘remaking’ the British working class.

In spite of the sub-title, Field does not refer to the use of the concept of the ‘remaking’ of the working class by historians of the nineteenth century. Discussion in the 1970s and ’80s, stimulated by the work of Gareth Stedman Jones, centred on the idea that the radical working class of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century discovered by E. P. Thompson was transformed into a reformist class after 1850, no longer prepared to challenge industrial capitalism but intent on securing its place within it. Field’s World War Two ‘remaking’ does not imply the rebirth of a radical class, even if he agrees with Ralph Miliband that an anti-capitalist radicalism emerged in 1940–2, given voice by middle-class figures such as Richard Acland, G. D. H. Cole and Tom Wintringham, whose ambitions for social and economic change extended beyond the trade-union and labour-movement agenda. The ‘rise of labour’ that Field writes about, on the contrary, concerns an increasingly coherent and united working class, with a growing sense of entitlement to precisely the social democratic goals of the Labour Party, namely full employment, higher wages, social security and a national health service.

Field’s interpretation hinges on a demonstration that the interwar divisions within the working class were healed in wartime, resulting not only in an increased muscle of organized labour but a unity of purpose that galvanized the entire class. He is not the first historian to show that interwar regional differences in income, between the unemployed in the centres of traditional industry (Lancashire, Yorkshire, the North East, South Wales, Clydeside) and those in work in the Midlands and the South East, diminished in wartime. As Arthur Marwick and Angus Calder have both argued, this was the result of the revival of the heavy industries of the depressed areas by the demand for war production, the achievement of full employment, and a huge rise in trade-union membership (from...