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  • Blood, Sweat, and Toil: Remaking the British Working Class, 1939-1945 by Geoffrey G. Field
  • Joel Hebert
Blood, Sweat, and Toil: Remaking the British Working Class, 1939-1945. By Geoffrey G. Field (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. x plus 405 pp. $125.00).

For nearly seven decades, the Second World War has held a hallowed place in the British national imagination. As Geoffrey Field notes in his critical and compelling study of the war years, Britain had a “good war,” experiencing no divisive [End Page 980] occupation, fewer deaths than in the previous world war, and—in the end—a resounding victory. According to this triumphalist narrative, the conflict was a “People’s War,” where social divisions melted away as everyone came together to fight the Nazi scourge.

But as Field and others have shown, the war years were not without controversy. Field’s thesis is straightforward. Wartime issues involving women, children, soldiers, labor, leisure, and politics, and the discourses surrounding them, were greatly inflected by issues of class. Class divisions, for example, did not simply disappear in the countryside, as evacuated working-class children from London negotiated the starkly different social terrain of village life, nor amongst young women in munitions factories whose social standing was immediately betrayed the very moment they opened their mouths. The war years were a crucible of class tensions as Britain’s social strata came in contact with each other in new and different ways. These experiences reflected, deepened, and reshaped class identities. And yet, while Field seeks to rescue the working classes as historical subjects and class, in general, as an historical lens, he does not ignore the advances made since the cultural turn. He rightly gives consideration to gender, race, age, religion, and other social cleavages.

Structurally, Blood, Sweat, and Toil hangs together quite well, with thematic, yet loosely chronological chapters. Field’s most engaging and persuasive chapters bookend this study—in the early pages, encompassing the evacuation of children to the countryside, the Blitz, and the mobilization of women, and at the end, where he utilizes a “new” military history approach to show class rifts within the British armed services. Field has a knack for forcefully illustrating the stark social juxtapositions of people and space during the war. These dichotomies, memorably described, flesh out his argument. In the lower decks of a troopship bound for the Western Cape, for example, British soldiers sat packed to the gills. Cramped and sweaty in bunks and hastily arranged hammocks, they listened to the melodious echo of a string orchestra on the officer’s “A-deck” above. While these working-class soldiers took their meals 500 at a time, their officers sat down at white-clothed tables to five-course feasts.

Back at home, Field takes us through a bombed and blitzed London, as shell-shocked working-class families hunkered down in mass shelters at Tube stations. At the same time, upper-class families retreated to single family shelters or to private refuges in exclusive areas of the West End. Moreover, their wealth allowed them more easily to subvert the rationing system, while overworked mothers and daughters in the East End queued for hours for basic staples. And lastly, from London to the small rural villages of middle England, Field describes disoriented young evacuees wetting the bed, and afterwards their hosts chastising them as the offspring of inept working-class mothers with low social standards. Far from eliminating social divisions, Field shows how war—and the new social arrangements it necessitated—inflamed class tensions.

Blood, Sweat, and Toil benefits greatly from the decision by the publishers at Oxford to accord it conventional footnotes. This format allows us easily to track the author’s impressive archival work, clearly the result of many years of careful research. He relies on a diverse source base, drawing upon major private and public collections at key institutions, but he also takes advantage of some wayward archives. Along with traditional sources, Field makes good use of contemporary visual culture, including photographs, film, and art. He also brings in [End Page 981] important works of fiction. The photographs are particularly helpful, especially as Field discusses the evolving representations of London...

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