Abstract
Between 1939 and 1945 the British were at war — not just in a country that was technically going through a period of hostilities; not at war merely in some distant land familiar only from cigarette and picture postcards; not just at war with the honour of the nation at stake as in South Africa in 1899; not even at war as when the rolling boom of distant gunfire could be heard from the South Downs in 1915, or as when civilians scanned ever-lengthening casualty lists and dreaded the arrival of telegrams in 1917. From 1939 to 1945 the British were at war, as a people and as a nation, as they had never been before.
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Notes and References
See, for example, Angus Calder, The People’s War (London, 1969),
Susan Briggs, Keep Smiling Through (London, 1975),
and Charles Whiting, Britain Under Fire (London, 1986).
Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914–45 (Oxford, 1980).
Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale (London, 1979) pp. 12–108;
Tom Harrisson, Living Through the Blitz (London, 1976) pp. 22–4.
Ian Colvin, Vansittart in Office (London, 1965) p. 276.
Lord Hailsham, The door wherein I went (London, 1975) p. 116.
Hugh Dalton, Hitler’s War (London, 1940) p. 10.
George Orwell, Collected Essays, Letters and Journalism (London, 1970) II, p. 84.
Asa Briggs, The BBC: the first fifty years (London, 1985) pp. 176–237.
Philip Ziegler, Mountbatten (London, 1985).
Susan Briggs, Keep Smiling Through (op. cit.) pp. 19–36; Arthur Marwick, Britain in a Century of Total War (London, 1970) pp. 266–8;
C. Jackson, Who will take our children? (London, 1985).
Angus Calder and Dorothy Sheridan, Speak for yourself (London, 1984) pp. 101–6.
Anthony Howard, ‘We are the masters now’, in M. Sissons and P. French (eds), The Age of Austerity (London, 1964) p. 33.
Joanna Mack and Steve Humphreys, London at war (London, 1985) p. 120.
R. Coupland (ed.), The war speeches of William Pitt the Younger (London, 1940).
Robert Hewison, Under Fire (London, 1979) pp. 154–5.
Tom Hopkinson, Picture Post (London, 1984) p. 141.
Noël Coward, The Lyrics of Noël Coward (London, 1978) pp. 269–70.
Paul Addison, The Road to 1945 (London, 1975).
J. Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI (London, 1958) p. 653.
R. A. Chapman, Leadership in the British civil service (London, 1984).
Ian Christie (ed.) Powell, Pressburger and Others (London, 1978) pp. 105–21.
Introduction to Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution (London, 1928).
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© 1988 Philip M. Taylor
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Ramsden, J. (1988). British Society in the Second World War. In: Taylor, P.M. (eds) Britain and the Cinema in the Second World War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19317-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19317-2_2
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