"Whistling in the Dark": Memory and Culture in Wartime London

Folklore, April, 2001 by Bob Bushaway

"Whistling in the Dark": Memory and Culture in Wartime London. By Jean R. Freedman. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. 256 pp. $29.95. ISBN 0-8131-2076-4

I have an interest in this book for two reasons. Firstly, I believe that the importance of personal memory, made up collectively as local, or even national memory, has only begun to be realised by social historians, some of whom now write of "social memory" or "popular memory." Secondly, my own family come from South London and my mother survived the Blitz both in 1940-1 and during the attacks of the German rockets in 1944. She did this whilst my father was on active service overseas and it has become a strong part of our own family memory if not mythology.

It is appropriate that we connect the two terms "memory" and "mythology" and it is appropriate also to visit questions concerning their interconnectivity at a time when Britain's national mythology about the Second World War, at least as reported by the tabloid press, is being referred to as "obsessive" by our German neighbours. It has recently been suggested that we have made a coping mechanism of the War experience in our collective memory in order to make up for our lack of national self-confidence as we hesitate on the margin of "Euroland" and that, in some way, it has substituted for our loss of self-esteem as a nation following the withdrawal from empire. In that sense, Jean Freedman's title, Whistling in the Dark, might have a contemporary aptness as well as a historical one as we move towards the end of the century in which two world wars have had such an enormous impact on British society. Is it the case, then, that even our "Finest Hour" is being reassessed away?

Reassuringly, Jean Freedman's work, which she defines as the study of "speech, narrative and music" as memory-fixing agents in the construction of the most famous of historical images, wartime London, is not concerned with such reassessment.

"London can take it" became axiomatic to broadcasters and journalists at the time, especially when America's own position in 1940--notwithstanding lend-lease--was strictly neutral. That Britain "stood alone" after the fall of France on 22 June 1940 and before "Barbarossa" on 22 June 1941 has become a most powerful national sustaining ideology even if we have long ago accepted America's and the former Soviet Union's decisive contributions to the winning of the Second World War.

In France, Pierre Nora's pioneering work, Les Lieux de Memoire, unhappily translated into English by his American publishers as "Realms of Memory," provides a framework for any historian wishing to study the relationship between history, memory and their cultural reference points--images, sounds, institutions, memorials, buildings, texts and the many other iconic forms with which nations and peoples surround themselves in an attempt at self-identification. These are, after all, the memoria technica of the human mind and the human experience. As Freedman writes:

   Cultural forms are the means by which people know history (speech, radio,
   film, newspaper account), present history (narrative, epic, saga), and
   commemorate history (parade, pageant, festival, ritual). To study cultural
   forms as they have served political and historical events (stories of
   national heroes, songs of resistance fighters) is to take an important
   first step, but to take no other is to further the view that cultural forms
   are the eternal handmaidens of life, secondary to the great events of
   history that sweep by us like soldiers on parade (p. 13).

This is the crux of the matter and still represents the gulf between some historians and folklorists. Although she does not refer to the recent work of crucial commentators such as Pierre Nora, Jay Winter, Alistair Thomson, Angela Gaffney, and the late Raphael Samuel, who explore similar ground, Freedman has much in common with these approaches: "Cultural representations," she writes, "are not the secondary phenomenon that surround history, not the chaff to be examined once the wheat has been consumed. Instead, they are the raw material out of which history--our understanding and interpretation of the past--is formed" (p. 13).

She shows that the unifying ideology of wartime London, constructed from a variety of different individual and collective responses from government down to people themselves, was the civic pride of carrying on--photographs of cheery milkmen delivering the morning "pinta" against a cityscape of rubble and destruction, of the dome on St Paul's against the glare of fires, searchlights and anti-aircraft barrages, of London traffic skirting round great bomb craters, were encapsulated in the Ministry of Information Film Ordinary People: London Carries On. From where did this ideology spring? Was it simple national propaganda? Ranging over a variety of sources from King George VI's Christmas broadcast to broadcasts from the East End, she shows that the nation was united by being "all in the front line and danger together" (p. 57). As one of her informants puts it, "once the bombs came down it was different, all us British were in, everyone else was out" (p. 62).