Coronavirus and the Myth of the Blitz Spirit

Yes, I’m afraid the time has come. This blog is about to talk about the ‘C’ word. No, not that one. The one that there’s currently no escaping from: Coronavirus. Understandably, we’re hearing a lot about it at the moment and I appreciate that, for some of you, the world of bloggerdom is a means of escape from the reality of the world, but I can’t ignore the fact that the current pandemic is going hand in hand at the moment, in the UK at least, with a hoary old cliched stereotype that I want to address here.

Because surely I can’t be the only one who rolls their eyes whenever the phrase ‘blitz spirit’ is wheeled out by the Tories or the mainstream media of late can I? This fabrication of a wartime that never actually existed (the now beloved ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster was never actually displayed during the 1939-’45 conflict remember) is not the thing that is going to get us through the crisis of Covid-19. Only effective, quick-thinking government, cogent and clear information, the widespread release of testing kits for all households (not just the House of Windsor), diligent, sensible action from the general public and a potential vaccine can do that.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to dispute the fact that the generation who endured WWII was a stoic and courageous one and what was expected of them was huge in relation to what is expected of us, which is little more than staying indoors on your sofa all day. But let’s be honest now and let’s pick apart the ‘fake news’ of the so-called ‘blitz spirit’.

You would have to be particularly stupid or wholly ignorant of human emotion (basically, a Tory then) to presume that the realities of being bombed night after night or, in the case of children, being evacuated into safer, rural areas away from your family, didn’t have a deep psychological effect. The Mental Stability of Hull was a report commissioned by government and undertaken by psychiatrists and psychologists to assess the mental stability of the residents of the heavily bombed East Yorkshire port. It was, to my knowledge, the only report of its kind and the study subsequently showed that many survivors of the Luftwaffe’s nightly bombing raids had developed extreme mental instability and psychosomatic problems. These presented themselves as peptic ulcers, loss of bodily functions, persistent and uncontrollable weeping and tremors, severe headaches and chronic dizziness, all brought on by acute nervous collapse. Many of the male residents of Hull sought solace in alcohol, which of course brought about its own problems in the long term.

But what did the government of the day do with the findings from the report? They hushed it all up. Weakness, they argued, could lead to pessimism and surrender. Focusing instead on more positive examples of stoicism and resolve, the British Propaganda unit went into overdrive, producing the famous London Can Take It! and spreading stories of an indefatigable ‘blitz spirit’ in which, beaten but not cowed, major cities up and down the British isles continued with their daily business. There’s a famous photograph of a milkman, picking his way through the debris of a devastating Luftwaffe raid, determined to deliver the milk to the homes left standing. It’s stirring stuff…but it’s also a lie. The milkman pictured was nothing of the sort; he was in fact the photographer’s assistant, who had donned the uniform to stage the shot and keep the spirits of those on the home front up and more, to remain, ‘civilised’.

Let’s face some brutal facts about the blitz. Civilisation went out the window. As is often the case with war, the ’39-’45 conflict brought about a sharp increase in crime (a 57% rise in fact) and empty and bombed out homes were routinely raided by looters, with even dead bodies lying strewn upon the rubble stripped of their valuables. Hoarders and stockpilers were as rife during the war as they are proving to be today, as indeed were profiteers; those who seek to sell on hand sanitisers and loo rolls today have much in common with the black market spivs of the ration-era 1940s. One story I remember an old Liverpudlian woman tell me a few years ago was about a bombing raid that took out a cold store warehouse that was (hitherto unknown to local residents) stockpiling meat during rationing. As the flames took hold, the tantalising scent of roasting pork filled the air, bringing scores of starving scousers to the scene. The police and home guard had to be called to forcible return them to their homes.

And make no mistake either, the government of WWII were just as lethargic, disorganised or downright callous as the present Conservative government have proven to be. Boris Johnson’s shocking admission that “many will lose loved ones before their time” was a mask-slipping moment (made before the public showed they would not stand for his half-baked and unheard of ‘herd immunity’ without vaccination plan; requiring a U-turn borne of a hastily assembled myth, still perpetuated by the Tory cronies within the BBC, such as Laura soddin’ Kuenssberg, that “the science changed”: reader, it didn’t) that brought to mind his own personal hero, Winston Churchill’s lack of empathy for the electorate. As I have previously mentioned elsewhere in this blog, Churchill had no appetite for the London’s underground system being open to citizens seeking sanctuary from the blitz, as his private secretary, John Colville, noted in his diary at the time, the Prime Minister had no qualms about using a disused underground station as a refuge himself, but was “thinking on authoritarian lines about shelters and talks about forcibly preventing people from going into the underground.” Yes, Churchill was all for keeping the working classes out of the underground, by force if need be.

The ‘blitz spirit’ is something being spoken about by government to try and bring out the best in the general public during a time of crisis, a kind of ‘don’t shame your grandparents – keep calm and carry on’. And I’m fine with that, to a point. I want people to behave fittingly, but I want people to realise that that it’s ridiculous to try and compare yourself to an attitude from seventy+ years ago that actually, never really existed. People are arseholes. We are seeing that right now yes, but we saw it during WWII as well. We have seen that in the stupid insistence of continuing to go outside because they selfishly believe that their actions and desires are more important than others, or because they’re ‘not sick’ (not now maybe, no). We have seen it in the stockpiling of foodstuffs and loo roll.

But, are these people really to blame? Can we really expect anything less from a society who has, for decades now, bee told to look after number one, to pull up the drawer bridge because ‘this island is full up’. As one recent social media post has it, the people panicking over bog rolls right now are the same who criticised refugees fleeing their war torn countries, for not having ‘the balls’. Our society shouldn’t be measuring up to the mythical actions that Boris Johnson et al are invoking about the blitz, they should be measuring themselves up to thee actions of the Syrian refugees they have previously condemned and were loathe to welcome to these shores.

But you know what too? It’s OK to not ‘keep calm and carry on’. It’s only right that we feel scared and anxious about what is going on out there right now, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I worry that the current recycling of the ‘blitz spirit’ myth is simply a continuation of the disgusting ‘man up’ attitude that a lot of the right wing seem to place so much store in. I am fed up to the back teeth of the current generational war that sees right-leaning baby boomers sneeringly dismiss their grandchildren’s generation as ultra-sensitive ‘snowflakes’. Their fear, their concern, is every bit as valid as anyone else’s and I doubt that Boris Johnson, with his ready-to-deploy arsenal ‘girly swot’ and ‘big girl’s blouse’ insults, could entertain such a notion. So please, remember the real truths about the blitz; remember that people did struggle with their emotions, with their mental health and their anxieties and that they were quite right to. It’s only natural to feel afraid, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, but remember you are not alone in feeling that way and that it’s solidarity that will get us through this.