Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the … · Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the ... 1 Eric Hobsbawm,OnHistory ... seems a pity to use Hobsbawm as a spokesman

Cultural and Social History 2004 1 65ndash93

Culture and ComposureCreating Narratives of the

Gendered Self in Oral HistoryInterviews

Penny SummereldUniversity of Manchester

The cultural approach to oral history suggests that narrators draw on publicdiscourses in constructing accounts of their pasts for their audiences As wellas endeavouring to compose memory stories they seek composure or per-sonal equanimity from the practice of narration But how does gender inter-sect with these processes and what happens when public discourses havelittle to offer on a particular aspect of the past This article investigates thesequestions through oral history accounts of experiences in Britain in theSecond World War It explores the relationship to personal narratives ofcultural silences concerning for example civilian men and combatantwomen and concludes that the achievement of composure is problematicin the face of lost histories Cultural and Social History 2004 1 65ndash93

Debates about oral history since the 1970s have been conducted fromthree intellectual angles which one could characterize as the tra-ditional the social historical and the cultural From the traditional per-spective oral history is profoundly unreliable compared with the docu-mentary evidence that has been seen as the proper source for historicalwriting Traditionalists would agree with Eric Hobsbawmrsquos dismissallsquomost oral history today is personal memory which is a remarkably slip-pery medium for preserving factsrsquo1 The problems suggested are that

Address for correspondence Penny Summereld School of History University of Man-chester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL UKE-mail pennysummereldmanacuk1 Eric Hobsbawm On History (Weidenfeld and Nicolson London 1997) p 206 It

seems a pity to use Hobsbawm as a spokesman for the traditional critics in view ofhis otherwise innovatory approach to historical sources including the use of imagesand his recent publication of his own autobiography But although critics werevociferous at conferences and seminars in the 1970s and 1980s few appear to haveexpressed their views in print See Alistair Thomson lsquoUnreliable Memories The Useand Abuse of Oral Historyrsquo in W Lamond (ed) Historical Controversies (UniversityCollege Press London 1998)

Oacute The Social History Society 2004 1011911478003804cs0005oa

66 Penny Summereld

interviewees are prone to misremembering and exaggeration that thepresence of the interviewer may stimulate such aws and that oralhistory is lsquoanecdotalrsquo and unrepresentative of anyone beyond the indi-vidual2

Social historians particularly those committed to the history of neg-lected groups such as working-class people women and black peoplehave responded vigorously to such criticisms The case for oral historylay in its powerful recovery role in that it could rescue for the historicalrecord the lives of social groups for whom other kinds of records weresparse or non-existent or in which the angle of vision was only that ofthose in power (such as policy-makers the police or other authorities)Social historians led by Paul Thompson have argued that traditionallyfavoured documentary sources were just as problematic as oral sourcesthat memory was not as fallible as was suggested and that careful meth-odology could correct some of the other problems Thus writtensources were shown to have problems of bias and omission it couldbe demonstrated that long-term memory and the recall of repeatedand habitual events were relatively reliable triangulation with othertypes of data could address issues of inaccuracy and creating a largesample dealt with the problems of anecdotalism and representa-tiveness3

The cultural approach to history raised another set of complexissues This approach suggested that prevailing discursive constructionsof the past lsquocontaminatersquo memory in the sense that they overlay it withlater accounts and interpretations of the period of history to which amemory relates to such an extent that it is impossible for anyone toremember what they did and what they thought at the time indepen-dently of this lsquopatina of historical postscripts and rewritingsrsquo Forexample a History Workshop editorial of 1979 stated lsquoThe difculty liesin the fact that memory does not constitute pure recall the memoryof any particular event is refracted through layer upon layer of sub-sequent experience and through the in uence of the dominantandor local and speci c ideologyrsquo4 This kind of thinking took cul-tural historians in the direction of studying the discourses culturalconstructs or ideologies that shape consciousness and behaviour

2 See Paul Thompson The Voice of the Past Oral History ( rst published 1978 3rd ednOxford University Press Oxford 2000) pp 77ndash81 on the lsquonature of the oppositionrsquoto oral history

3 Thompson Voice of the Past especially ch 4 lsquoEvidencersquo Trevor Lummis Listening toHistory The Authenticity of Oral Evidence (Hutchinson London 1987) especially part3 lsquoAssessing the Interviewsrsquo

4 lsquoEditorialrsquo History Workshop 8 (1979) p iii See also Denise Riley War in the NurseryTheories of the Child and Mother (Virago London 1983) p 191 and Richard Johnsonet al (eds) Making Histories Studies in History-Writing and Politics (HutchinsonLondon 1982) ch 6 lsquoPopular Memory Theory Politics Methodrsquo where theproblem is posed more positively lsquoWhat is interesting about the forms of oral-historical witness or autobiography are not just the nuggets of ldquofactrdquo about the pastbut the whole way in which popular memories are constructed and reconstructed aspart of a contemporary consciousnessrsquo (p 219)

Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)

Culture and Composure Creating Narratives 67

rather than accepting that oral history rendered lsquovoices that speak forthemselvesrsquo Post-structuralism has been intimately connected with thedevelopment of cultural history and part of the post-structuralist argu-ment is that historians who claim that accounts of lived experiencegive access to social reality falsely separate discourse and experienceexperience cannot exist outside discourse agency cannot exist inde-pendently of language5

The response of a number of historians to the idea that memorycannot be independent of cultural in uences but is shaped or evenconstructed by them has been to see this not as an insurmountableproblem but as an inevitability that needs analysing The starting pointof the cultural approach to oral history is to accept that people do notsimply remember what happened to them but make sense of the sub-ject matter they recall by interpreting it Understanding is integral tomemory and like any other knowledge it is constructed from the lan-guage and concepts available to the person remembering The chal-lenge for the historian is to understand the cultural ingredients thatgo into accounts of a remembered and interpreted past Or to put itanother way the oral historian needs to understand not only the narra-tive offered but also the meanings invested in it and their discursiveorigins6

This article seeks to re ect upon and develop the cultural approachIt begins by introducing the theory of culture and memory and theconcept of lsquocomposurersquo It then discusses the ways in which genderas a major social and cultural differentiator intersects with both cul-ture and memory in oral history7 Using Britain in the Second WorldWar as a site of study it explores both the relationship of gender topublic discourses of the war and men and womenrsquos take-up of suchdiscourses in telling their life stories It draws on two recent oral historyprojects on gender training and employment in the 1940s and on

5 Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (RoutledgeLondon 1990) p 147 Joan W Scott lsquoExperiencersquo in J Butler and JW ScottFeminists Theorize the Political (Routledge London 1992) p 34

6 Publications by historians who have responded in this way include Michael FrischlsquoOral History and Hard Times A Review Essayrsquo (1972) republished in Rob Perksand Al Thomson (eds) The Oral History Reader (Routledge London 1998) Ronald JGrele lsquoMovement without Aim Methodological and Theoretical Problems in OralHistoryrsquo in RJ Grele (ed) Envelopes of Sound (Precedent Chicago 1975) LuisaPasserini lsquoIntroductionrsquo in L Passerini (ed) Memory and Totalitarianism (OxfordUniversity Press Oxford 1992) Alessandro Portelli The Death of Luigi Trastulli andOther Stories Form and Meaning in Oral History (SUNY Press Albany 1991) PennySummereld Reconstructing Womenrsquos Wartime Lives Discourse and Subjectivity in OralHistories of the Second World War (Manchester University Press Manchester 1998)especially ch 1 Alistair Thomson Anzac Memories Living with the Legend (OxfordUniversity Press Australia Melbourne 1994) especially Introduction and Appendix1

7 Leydesdorff Passerini and Thompson argue that lsquooral historians have noted thegendered nature of memory from very early onrsquo but for reasons which they explorehad by 1996 done little to follow up these insights lsquoIntroductionrsquo to S LeydesdorffL Passerini and P Thompson (eds) Gender and Memory (Oxford Oxford UniversityPress 1996) pp 2 4


68 Penny Summereld

men women and home defence in wartime8 It focuses on misremem-bering and difculties of narration on the salience of the anecdote tooral history accounts and on the problems for composure of cul-tural silences

Theorists of cultural or popular memory and the life story arguethat the discourses of especially popular culture inform personal andlocally told life stories in that narrators draw on generalized publicversions of the aspects of the lives that they are talking about to con-struct their own particular personal accounts This process of life-storytelling is crucial to the construction of the subject ndash in reproducingthe self as a social identity we necessarily draw upon public renderingsA vivid example of this interchange comes from Al Thomsonrsquos workHe found that Australian and New Zealand veterans of the First WorldWar described scenes from the lm Gallipoli as if they were accountsof their own experiences in battle in the First World War The lmhad been released shortly before Thomson undertook his oral historyresearch and it gave powerful expression to enduring notions of Aus-tralian masculinity and national identity In borrowing from it Thom-sonrsquos interviewees constructed themselves as a speci c type of soldierthe loyal and patriotic yet devil-may-care lsquodiggerrsquo of the lsquoAnzac legendrsquoeven though this involved subordinating painful personal memoriesthat did not t the stereotype9

On the other hand it cannot be the case that such public imagescome from nowhere It has been argued that there is a lsquocultural circuitrsquoat work Privately and locally told stories of experience are picked upand enter public discourse in myriad ways including word of mouthnewspaper reporting television interviewing lm-script research andso on They are adapted glossed and elaborated and become woveninto the generalized public form of those stories which changes overtime the public account of past events does not stand still Such ver-sions given expression in lms such as Gallipoli tend in turn lsquoto de neand to limit imaginative possibilitiesrsquo for the private and local telling

8 Economic and Social Research Council Project R000 23 2048 lsquoGender Training andEmployment 1939ndash1950rsquo principal investigator Penny Summereld (henceforthESRC Project) Leverhulme Trust Research Project F185AK lsquoThe Gendering ofBritish National Defence 1939ndash1945 The Case of the Home Guardrsquo award holderPenny Summereld (henceforth Leverhulme Project) I should like to acknowledgethe contributions of the research associates who worked with me on these projectsNicole Crockett (ESRC Project) and Corinna Peniston-Bird (Leverhulme Project) Ishould also like to thank the women and men interviewed for their involvement andfor permission to quote from their interviews The main publication arising from theESRC Project was Summereld Reconstructing Womenrsquos Wartime Lives

9 Thomson Anzac Memories p 8 passim See also his lsquoAnzac Memories PuttingPopular Memory Theory into Practice in Australiarsquo Oral History 18 2 (1990) pp 25ndash31 The lm Gallipoli directed by Peter Weir was released in 1981 and is anaccount of male bonding nationalistic fervour and the waste of war featuringreconstructions of the First World War battlefront at Gallipoli in Turkey Thomsonundertook his interviews from 1982 to 1987



of experiences10 But these discursive formulations are inevitably selec-tive they omit some dimensions and emphasize others and they arelikely to contain contradictory conceptualizations of experience andidentity all of which make problematic the construction of subjec-tivities from them

The concept of lsquocomposurersquo refers to the process by which subjec-tivities are constructed in life-story telling Graham Dawson in his bookSoldier Heroes elaborates the double meaning of the term to charac-terize life-story telling Composure occurs when a teller composes astory about him- or herself so here composure refers to the compositionof the narrative It also refers to the way in which a narrator seeks asense of lsquocomposurersquo from constituting themselves as the subject oftheir story Dawsonrsquos theory suggests that life-story telling involves anendeavour to achieve the state of being calm and in control of oneselfthat is the pursuit of personal equanimity or psychic comfort Therelationship of composure to cultural representations is that publicdiscourses are inevitably drawn upon in the composition of a storyabout the self And they are drawn upon in such a way as to producea version of the self that the teller can live with in relative psychicease Gerontologists and sociolinguists who study reminiscence and thetelling of life stories suggest that the pursuit of coherence underliesthe achievement of composure in this sense They emphasize too thatthe quest is never nally accomplished Life stories are constantlyrevised in a continuing search for meaning11

There is a further aspect to composure The telling of a life story isnot usually done alone but particularly in the case of a life storyelicited through oral history it is narrated to an audience An inter-subjective relationship is established between the narrator and theaudience whether it is a casual one of friends or relatives or a moreformally composed one such as a group of schoolchildren or an oralhistorian The social recognition offered by the audience lsquoexercises adetermining in uence upon the way a narrative may be told andtherefore upon the kind of composure that it makes possiblersquo12 Sopublic and personal stories are not used indiscriminately A selectionis made by the teller who constructs a narrative about him- or herselfin pursuit of psychic comfort and satisfaction and in the hope of elicit-ing recognition and af rmation from his or her audience But com-posure may not always be achieved A particular terrain of memory orline of enquiry or an uncomprehending and unsympathetic responsefrom an audience may produce discomposure that is personal dis-

10 Graham Dawson Soldier Heroes British Adventure Empire and the Imagining ofMasculinities (Routledge London 1994) p 25

11 Charlotte Linde Life Stories the Creation of Coherence (Oxford University Press Oxford1993) Peter Coleman lsquoAgeing and Life History The Meaning of Reminiscence inLate Lifersquo in S Dex (ed) Life and Work History Analyses Qualitative and QuantitativeDevelopments (Routledge London 1991)

12 Dawson Soldier Heroes p 23


70 Penny Summereld

equilibrium manifest in confusion anger self-contradiction dis-comfort and difculties of sustaining a narrative13

To sum up so far culture understood as public discourse has arelationship to composure a term with the double meaning of thecomposition of a story about the self and the pursuit of personal equa-nimity In oral history composure in this dual sense occurs (or failsto occur) through an intersubjective process We shall now explorehow gender as a key constructor of social difference within powerrelations identities and cultural meanings intersects with cultureand composure

Feminist theorists have argued that public discourses concerningfemininity are particularly complex with consequences for theiruptake by women seeking to compose themselves as feminine subjectsAs Bronwen Davies argues lsquoThe discourses through which the subjectposition ldquowomanrdquo is constituted are multiple and contradictory Instriving to successfully constitute herself within her allocated gendercategory each woman takes on the desires made relevant within thosecontradictory discourses She is however never able to achieveunequivocal success at being a womanrsquo14 The contradictory characterof the discourses constituting lsquowomanrsquo is particularly visible in the con-text of Britain in the Second World War In wartime rhetoric the effortof the entire people had to be mobilized behind this total war Butfor women this meant a number of requirements that were in tensionthey had both to lsquodo their bitrsquo for the war effort outside the home andto be at home caring for children and watching and waiting for theirmenfolk to return from the front And there were limits on militaryparticipation most notably at the boundary between non-combatantand combatant roles Wartime lms about the personal changesexperienced by women during the war explored these tensions Theyinclude most famously two lms made in 1943 Millions Like Us abouta young woman called up into a wartime munitions factory and TheGentle Sex about seven women who joined the Auxiliary Territorial Ser-vice and became gunners and lorry drivers Both these wartime recruit-ment lms vividly evoked the mobility and agency independent of fam-ily constraints required of young women in wartime in the industrialand the military spheres However both lms ultimately emphasizedcontinuity with traditional values concerning womenrsquos roles eventhough they envisaged the possibility of a world of greater equalitybetween the sexes and more lsquomodernrsquo forms of marriage and mother-hood than before Few post-war lms depicted wartime women exceptas wives and sweethearts in subsidiary roles Those with plots which

13 Penny Summereld lsquoDiscomposing the Subject Intersubjectivities in Oral Historyrsquoin T Cosslett C Lury and P Summereld (eds) Feminism and Autobiography TextsTheories Methods (Routledge London 2000) pp 93ndash108

14 Bronwen Davies lsquoWomenrsquos Subjectivity and Feminist Storiesrsquo in C Ellis and MGFlaherty (eds) Investigating Subjectivity Research on Lived Experience (Sage London1992) p 55



were dependent on female agency such as the 1950s lms Odette andCarve her Name with Pride about women secret agents in France sooneror later subordinated the wartime objectives that gave these womenexceptional roles to personal ones related to romance and marriageThe same is true of more recent lms including Yanks (1979) LandGirls (1997) and Charlotte Gray (2002)

Feminist theorists argue that the power of dominant masculinity tode ne the parameters of identity and behaviour possible to women aslsquoothersrsquo and hence to regulate them has contributed historically tothe conceptualization of the special fragility of feminine subjectivitiesBut studies of masculinity suggest that the construction of male identitywithin discourses of masculinity is also fractured and insecure15 In theparticular context of the Second World War tensions around mascu-linity focused on the different wartime identities available to men mostobviously at a time of intensive military mobilization the tensionbetween combatants and non-combatants Servicemen particularlythose on lsquoactive servicersquo close to battle were represented as occupyinga higher point in the masculine hierarchy than servicemen serving asground staff or in areas remote from action who were in turn moreesteemed than civilian men While British wartime images of comba-tants emphasized youth patriotism and muscular virility either imagesof civilian men were comical or they strained to establish a parallelbetween the male worker and the ghter as in an of cial posterentitled lsquoCombined Operations Include Yoursquo which depicted a gunnerand a factory worker in the same posture one ring a gun and theother operating a piece of machinery16 Wartime and post-war lmsabout the Second World War rarely if ever featured young civilian menapart from those en route for or returning from the forces Examplesinclude 1940s lms such as 49th Parallel (1941) and In Which We Serve(1942) 1950s lms such as The Dam Busters (1954) The Colditz Story(1954) and Reach for the Sky (1956) through The Great Escape (1962)Yanks (1979) Hope and Glory (1987) to Saving Private Ryan (1998)Post-war television series on wartime themes tended to send up civilianmen in wartime A case in point is Dadrsquos Army (1968ndash77) to which weshall return later This BBC comedy series depicted the men of theHome Guard either as callow youths or as lsquopast itrsquo while celebratingthe values for which their organization stood Within wartime tradeunion and labour movement literature as Sonya Rose has shown thevigour and virility of men in occupations such as steel making engin-

15 Robert W Connell Masculinities (Polity Cambridge 1995) David HJ MorganlsquoTheater of War Combat the Military and Masculinitiesrsquo in Harry Brod and MichaelKaufman (eds) Theorizing Masculinities (Sage London 1994) pp 165ndash82 DawsonSoldier Heroes Michael Roper lsquoRe-remembering the Soldier Hero the Psychic andSocial Construction of Memory in Personal Narratives of the Great Warrsquo HistoryWorkshop Journal 50 (2000) pp 181ndash204

16 JD Cantwell Images of War British Posters 1939ndash45 (HMSO London 1989) plate 44lsquoCombined Operations Include Yoursquo


72 Penny Summereld

eering and dock work was depicted and celebrated17 But in morewidely accessible public media both during and after the war a cul-tural veil hung over the presence of the young t civilian male on thehome front and with it his manhood

What is the relationship between such wartime and post-war rep-resentations and oral history An example of a remarkably frank tellingof the tension between what a man felt he was supposed to be in war-time according to contemporary culture and what he was comes fromthe research project on men women and home defence referred toabove18 The Home Guard a volunteer force set up in 1940 to protectBritain from invasion was unusual in the way it straddled the civilianand military spheres Civilian men joined it to do a few hoursrsquo militaryservice each week under the command at a distance of the regulararmy Had there been an invasion members of the Home Guard wouldhave been mobilized as full-time military personnel19 Yet the men ofthe Home Guard were not seen as proper soldiers A man interviewedabout his experiences in the Home Guard explained that lsquoyou couldnrsquotpretend to be a soldier you were Home Guardrsquo20 However this inter-viewee lsquoChristopher Redmondrsquo composed a story of using his mem-bership of the Home Guard as a disguise by which to pass as a ser-viceman such was his desire as a young man in wartime for the identityof soldier and the enhanced social and sexual prestige it conferred

Redmond was an engineering draughtsman which was a lsquoreservedoccupationrsquo meaning that he was not allowed to join the armedforces21 He was dismayed about this A temporary solution was for himto become a member of the Home Guard in which lsquoI was issued witha proper uniform and I looked like a soldierrsquo22 Nevertheless a mem-ber of the Home Guard was not considered a proper soldier and in

17 Sonya Rose Which Peoplersquos War National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain(Oxford University Press Oxford 2003) ch 5

18 The Leverhulme Project involved the collection by me and a research associateCorinna Peniston-Bird of thirty interviews with men and women who had beeninvolved in the Home Guard in the Second World War Interviewees eitherresponded to notices placed in popular magazines or were identied throughcontacts They signed a form giving permission for use to be made of the interviewin research and publication stating their preference for their name or for apseudonym to be used in the archiving and publication of the interview

19 The standard works on the Home Guard are Charles Graves The Home Guard ofBritain (Hutchinson London 1943) Norman Longmate The Real Dadrsquos Army TheStory of the Home Guard (Arrow London 1974) SP Mackenzie The Home Guard AMilitary and Political History (Oxford University Press Oxford 1995)

20 Leverhulme Project Christopher Redmond (pseud) interviewed by CorinnaPeniston-Bird (CP-B) 13 March 2000 text unit 244 (lsquoText unitsrsquo are paragraphnumbers introduced to transcripts by the software package used for indexing)

21 The Ministry of Labour used the Schedule of Reserved Occupations to try to balancethe competing demands of civilian industries and the armed forces for workers inparticular trades and skills It was constantly revised during the war adding to theproblems of public understanding See P Inman Labour in the Munitions Industries(HMSO London 1957) pp 35 52 67 135 HMD Parker Manpower A Study ofWar-time Policy and Administration (HMSO London 1957) pp 158ndash60

22 Leverhulme Project Christopher Redmond (pseud) interviewed by CP-B 13 March2000 text unit 72



his local community the difference between the part-time Home Guardliving at home and the full-time serviceman posted away from homewas well known Christopher Redmond managed to get a place on aspecial training course in engineering designed to create a pool ofmen quali ed for speci c trades in the forces This took him awayfrom home just as if he like most other men of his age had beencalled up Nevertheless during the two-year period of training heremained a civilian This led him and fellow trainees into a subterfugein which the Home Guard uniform was vitally important (Figure 1)

I told you earlier that you wanted to be in uniform hellip when we wentinto the er joined the Home Guard and we of course had uniformsand we had on here we had Home Guard we had a little stripwhich said Home Guard which had been I donrsquot know sewn orprinted or what Home Guard and you were issued well you wereissued these and you had to sew them on here Well what some ofthe lads started to do and I soon cottoned on to this was when wewent home for our holidays our break our leave um went homein uniform you see hellip I do remember that when we went homeon leave what we did was to take our Home Guard off the nightbefore we were going take our Home Guard off get a razor bladeand take it off and then and then and off our overcoats you seeAnd then off wersquod go23

In Christopher Redmondrsquos memory this pretence was both lsquoquite goodfunrsquo and lsquoridiculousrsquo but he had a cogent explanation for it

Figure 1 A Home Guard shoulder badge of the sort that Redmond was forever unpickingand restitchingSource courtesy of Kingrsquos Own Royal Regiment Museum Lancaster with special thanksto Peter Donnelly Assistant Curator



74 Penny Summereld

we sort of pretended an awful lot I think we were sort of masquerad-ing as something that we werenrsquot quite because it was terriblyimportant to us to you know to be recognised as one of the er wewere ghting for our country and so on and so forth24

In other words the appearance of being in the military was vital to hissense of himself ndash his sense of composure ndash as a wartime man Thisremained an important reference point for him Over fty years laterhe could not talk about his wartime experiences without recalling andexplaining his relationship to the male military archetype Butintersubjectivity worked to enable him to make a confessional accountIn the year 2000 when the link between manliness and military patriot-ism was weaker in Britain especially for younger people than it wasin the Second World War Redmond composed a story for a womaninterviewer in her early thirties about the lengths to which he went toachieve at least the appearance of military masculinity in wartime Healso expressed a justi cation for the subterfuge that drew on the cul-tural gure of the modern warrior Yet there was evidently potentialfor discomposure in this confession This interviewee was one of asmall number who asked for a pseudonym to be used in anything pub-lished about him

The relationship of womenrsquos memories to public discourse is also aswe have seen complicated Feminist theorists suggest not only thatdiscourses of femininity are multiple and contradictory but that thecreation of public discourses takes place within male norms of actionand control which locate women within a disadvantaged subject pos-ition When womenrsquos experience conforms to the feminine normsprevalent in a social context ndash for example marriage wife and mother-hood ndash women may nd a place for their memories within public dis-course but as Kathryn Anderson and Dana Jack explain when theirexperiences deviate from those norms it can be more difcult25 Thuswomen interviewed for the project on gender training and employ-ment in Britain in the 1940s referred to earlier spoke of their frus-tration that their wartime experiences of contributing to the militaryand industrial war effort in relatively lsquomasculinersquo roles were routinelyomitted from public accounts of war As a result audiences for theirreminiscences tended to laugh at disbelieve or ignore them and theyfound it difcult to compose their accounts For example lsquoHelena Bal-fourrsquo described how as a member of a local social club in Motherwellshe was asked to speak to the members about her wartime experiencesShe had been a domestic servant before the war and a post of ce clerkafterwards but she was called up for work in an aircraft factory during


25 Kathryn Anderson and Dana Jack lsquoLearning to Listen Interview Techniques andAnalysesrsquo in SB Gluck and D Patai (eds) Womenrsquos Words The Feminist Practice of OralHistory (Routledge London 1991) pp 11ndash26



the war and she started to talk about this However the reactions ofa group of men at the club to her statement lsquoI was an aircraft tterrsquomade it hard for her to go on

Well you see they just all giggled and laughed and I said lsquoyou seethatrsquos the same reaction that I get from my grandson from my fam-ily or anybody else that hasnrsquot lived you know through thesethingsrsquo I said lsquothey think itrsquos a huge jokersquo And I said lsquoI was a verygood tterrsquo

I think it irritates me slightly that they think women canrsquot do thatkind of job ndash I drew them up But you see I think young peopleshould really nd out about these things you know26

A similar account of unreceptive audiences for her wartime remi-niscences both within the family and more publicly was given by awoman who worked as a wireless-telegraphist in the Womenrsquos RoyalNaval Service known as the Wrens during the war lsquoKatharine Hughesrsquohad been a high-class dressmaker pre-war and worked as a receptionistand later a caterer after the war She said

And even now when I talked to my granddaughter about it youknow lsquoI donrsquot believe it Nan did you used to do this did you usedto do thatrsquo Only you know even my son I sometimes say some-thing well he laughs lsquoNo not you Katie you couldnrsquot do this youcouldnrsquot do thatrsquo

Itrsquos only since the war when Irsquove read things and Irsquove thoughtlsquoOh Godrsquo you know lsquothey donrsquot realise what women didrsquo Theyrsquoretalking about now what the Wrens do but they donrsquot talk aboutwhat the Wrens used to do before27

Both women referred not only to the ignorance of their speci c localaudiences but also to the absence of public knowledge of womenrsquoswartime accomplishments and their desire for their personal memor-ies to nd a place in public discourse

The historical fact that women worked in wartime as aircraft ttersas wireless-telegraphists and in other occupations that they had notcommonly done before from crane-driving to tree-felling was notunknown in public discourse from 1945 to 200028 But womenrsquos experi-

26 ESRC Project Helena Balfour (pseud) interviewed by Nicole Crockett (NC) 28 Feb1992 text units 364 368

27 ESRC Project Katharine Hughes (pseud) interviewed by NC 22 Nov 1991 textunits 246 330

28 Popular productions on women in wartime increased in number under the stimulusof second-wave feminism in the 1970s and 1980s They include in the 1970s bookssuch as Susan Briggs Keep Smiling Through (Weidenfeld and Nicolson London1975) and Alan Jenkins The Forties (Book Club Associates London 1977) both ofwhich refer to women and war work rather incidentally In 1980 a documentary lmabout the sexual and racial discrimination experienced by North American womenduring and after the war The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter directed by ConnieFields was released in the USA and subsequently in Britain In the 1980s there weretelevision documentaries such as Channel 4rsquos series Peoplersquos War (broadcast 1985ndash6)which had an episode on lsquoThe Womenrsquos Warrsquo and popular books such as Pam


76 Penny Summereld

ences of involvement in war on the Home Front tended to be omittedfrom constructions of wartime national identity because they did notinvolve military activity the de ning signi er of the nation in wartimeand one that was branded lsquomalersquo Legends about men are typically notlsquoaccuratersquo or lsquocompletersquo as we have seen in the case of the privilegingof men in combat roles and the resulting omission from public dis-course of men in reserved occupations such as engineering such asChristopher Redmond But equivalent public accounts about womenin wartime have been even less readily available leading to the silen-cing of womenrsquos experience that Helena Balfour and KatharineHughes experienced What happened when womenrsquos activities in theSecond World War did involve combat The transgression of the gen-der boundary represented by womenrsquos involvement in combat isdepicted in the lms about women secret agents referred to aboveOdette (1950) and Carve her Name with Pride (1958) But it is shownin these lms as extraordinary justi ed by the exceptional need forclandestine operations in occupied countries in which women couldmore easily pass undetected than men Even in these lms womenrsquosrecourse to the use of weapons was only a last resort necessitated byself-defence and in order to protect the resistance organization withwhich they were working Furthermore such transgressive action tookplace well away from the home front

Womenrsquos participation in the Home Guard is a case in point of theabsence from public representations of womenrsquos home-front involve-ment in combatant military activity The little-known history of womenin the Home Guard is in brief as follows Women were involved inthe war effort in Britain in a great many ways in industry commercegovernment on the land and as auxiliaries to the armed forces29 Theywere however of cially excluded from the Home Guard from 1940to 1943 The reason for their exclusion by the War Ofce is clouded

Schweitzer Lorraine Hilton and Jane Moss (eds) What Did You Do in the War MumWomen Recall their Wartime Work (Age Exchange London 1985) and Jane Waller andMichael Vaughan-Rees Women in Wartime the Role of Womenrsquos Magazines 1939ndash1945(Macdonald Optima London 1987) as well as the more rmly research-based Out ofthe Cage Womenrsquos Experiences in Two World Wars by Gail Braybon and PennySummereld (Pandora London 1987) In spite of the increased attention to thesubject authors of popular pictorial books on women in wartime were stillcomplaining about media neglect in the 1990s For example Anne Valery in Talkingabout the War (Michael Joseph London 1991) explained that she lsquotried hard tointerest the television stations in a documentary or drama seriesrsquo about the AuxiliaryTerritorial Service on the occasion of its ftieth anniversary in 1988 lsquoNo one wasinterested and the double anniversary of an army that served its country in peaceand in war passed without comment It was as if we had never existed Yet anequivalent anniversary of say the Fleet Air Arm would have been celebrated in thepress on radio and in televisionrsquo (p 87) A similar tone characterizes BetteAnderson We Just Got On With It British Women in World War Two (PictonChippenham 1994)

29 See Dorothy Sheridan Wartime Women An Anthology of Womenrsquos Wartime Writing forMass-Observation 1937ndash45 (Macmillan London 1990) Penny Summereld WomenWorkers in the Second World War Production and Patriarchy in Conict (RoutledgeLondon 1989) Summereld Reconstructing Womenrsquos Wartime Lives



in obfuscation but basically it was not seen as appropriate for womento be members of a force that had to be armed in order to ful l itsfunction However numerous women at the time challenged this ideataking up as ungendered the rhetoric that in a national emergency allthose capable of using rearms to defend their country had a duty todo so Led by the Labour MP Dr Edith Summerskill they formed anorganization called the Womenrsquos Home Defence which was not strictlylegal since it was an armed force giving military training outside theauthority of the Crown The organization produced a badge for itsmembers a deep-red metal shield with gold edging divided into foursegments by virtue of crossed ri es with the letters W H and D pos-itioned in three of the segments and a revolver in the fourth TheWHD was hounded by the authorities who tried to prevent its involve-ment with the Home Guard particularly in the matter of arms trainingIn spite of such prohibitions however and effectively in de ance ofthem the WHD was invited to co-operate with the Home Guard bynumerous local commanding of cers some of whom gave the womenweapons training (see Figure 2)30

Eventually in April 1943 after three years of refusal the governmentgave permission for a limited number of older women to join theHome Guard directly as lsquoNominated Womenrsquo later renamed lsquoWomen

Figure 2 A member of the local Home Guard gives rie instruction to a member of theWatford Womanrsquos Home Defence UnitSource Imperial War Museum Photographic Department HU 36 277 no date courtesyof the Imperial War Museum

30 See Penny Summereld lsquoldquoShe Wants a Gun Not a Dishclothrdquo Gender Service andCitizenship in Britain in the Second World Warrsquo in GJ DeGroot and C Peniston-Bird A Soldier and a Woman Sexual Integration in the Military (Pearson EducationHarlow England) pp 119ndash34


78 Penny Summereld

Home Guard Auxiliariesrsquo They were to assist it with a constrainedrange of lsquofemininersquo functions namely driving catering and clericalwork but were to have no uniforms no weapons and no arms trainingand to receive no public recognition They were issued with no morethan a plastic badge This was about the size of an old penny anddepicted the letters lsquoHGrsquo in a grey-gold roundel

The lack of public recognition at the time was perpetuated after thewar Women Home Guard Auxiliaries were not entitled to the war ser-vice medals which male members of the Home Guard received andwere not of cially commemorated alongside the male Home Guardin for example Remembrance Day parades31 As we shall discuss inmore depth shortly women Home Guards did not appear in wartimeor post-war lms and did not feature except in one dismissive episode(out of 80) of Dadrsquos Army the popular television comedy series referredto earlier which celebrated and gently mocked the men of the HomeGuard The silence about the legitimate Women Home Guard Auxili-aries went even deeper as far as the non-legitimate Womenrsquos HomeDefence was concerned The rst oral history interview with a womanundertaken as part of the project on home defence revealed a glaringcontradiction The controversial existence of the Womenrsquos HomeDefence is documented in War Ofce les available at the Public Rec-ord Ofce which were researched as part of the project But JeanneGale Sharp who produced material evidence of her membership ofthe Womenrsquos Home Defence in the shape of her WHD badge did notremember joining the WHD but lsquorememberedrsquo that she had belongedto the more publicly recognized Home Guard A similar confusionrecurred in other interviews where it was reinforced for some womenby the fact that they possessed both the WHD and the HG badges Theirownership of the two badges arose because they were working with theHome Guard before April 1943 as badge-wearing members of theWHD and continued to do so afterwards although now on an of cialfooting as Women Home Guard Auxiliaries In this capacity theyreceived the HG badge32 Jeanne Gale Sharprsquos misremembering wasparticularly striking

JGS This is one of my treasured possessions Thatrsquos itPS Irsquom sure WHDJGS Yes Womenrsquos Home Division not GuardPS RightJGS Um I found out We were always called Womenrsquos Home Guard

but um I realise that theyrsquove put Division on that

31 lsquoWe Regret to Inform You that We Canrsquot Give You a Medal ndash Because Yoursquore aWomanrsquo Stockport Express 8 December 1999 pp 6ndash7

32 In a press photograph of a Womenrsquos Home Defence group in Wallasey nearLiverpool on the occasion of their lsquostand-downrsquo in December 1944 about half ofthe women are wearing both badges Birkenhead Central Library Wirral ArchivesYPX75 13592 Wallasey Womenrsquos Home Guard Unit



PS Right itrsquos got crossed ri es and um and a revolverJGS Yes and we were taught how to shoot those you see33

This rst interview alerted the interviewer to the possibility that theboundary between the WHD and the Home Guard was not as clearcut at the time as womenrsquos formal exclusion from the Home Guardsuggested it would have been something that further research boreout Jeanne Gale Sharprsquos interpretation of the badge was signi cantShe believed that as a Woman Home Guard she had been given abadge stating that she was in a lsquoWomenrsquos Home Divisionrsquo of the HomeGuard which suggested that she remembered nothing of the WomenrsquosHome Defence Rather than disturb the rapport developing in theearly stages of the interview by challenging this memory the inter-viewer waited for the recurrence of the subject of the history of womenin the Home Guard in which Jeanne Gale Sharp was deeply interestedJeanne had a collection of letters from women who had responded toa small piece she had placed in the personal column of Saga the maga-zine of an organization for the over- fties requesting wartime WomenHome Guards to write to her in support of her campaign for a placefor them in the remembrance parades held on Armistice Day AsJeanne Gale Sharp and the interviewer went over these letters togetherthe Womenrsquos Home Defence came up again and at this point theinterviewer contributed some information about it to which JeanneGale Sharp was receptive (lsquoit makes you wonder doesnrsquot itrsquo)34 Sheremembered Dr Edith Summerskillrsquos involvement in the HomeGuard35 but had not realized what Summerskill had faced in terms ofof cial opposition

In spite of her misremembering of the organization to which shebelonged Jeanne Gale Sharp told a uent story about her experienceswith the Home Guard The account was structured by two key culturalreference points the ideological purpose of the Second World Warand menrsquos prejudices concerning womenrsquos wartime roles as in lsquoMenare so so chauvinistic arenrsquot they about things Apparently we didnothing wersquove nothing to do with the warrsquo36 Jeannersquos account of herrecruitment is representative of her narrative as a whole and also helpsto explain why she remembered no distinction between the HomeGuard and the organization to which she in fact belonged Jeanneaged about 16 in 1942 was working as a civil defence messenger buthad spare time in the evenings and at weekends She was living at the

33 Leverhulme Project Jeanne Gale Sharp interviewed by Penny Summereld (APS) 8Jan 1998 text units 113ndash125

34 Leverhulme Project Jeanne Gale Sharp interviewed by APS 8 Jan 1998 text unit987


36 Leverhulme Project Jeanne Gale Sharp interviewed by APS 8 Jan 1998 text unit 57


80 Penny Summereld

house of a woman doctor in Oxford for whom her mother was work-ing as a housekeeper

this young vet lived further down the road and was a friend of thedoctorrsquos and she came I suppose she came to see the doctor oneday and was absolutely desperate And the doctor said lsquoWell askJeanne my house-keeperrsquos daughter ask her if shersquod like to comeand help you because any port in a storm I know she is fond ofanimals she is very good with my dog and so onrsquo And so she didAnd I think I must have known her for only a matter of weeks whenshe came round and she said lsquoWersquore going torsquo ndash this is typicallyClaire ndash lsquoWersquore going to join the Home Guard you and I wersquove gotto do somethingrsquo And Churchill had said lsquoWersquore going to ght inthe streets and the beachesrsquo and so forth And lsquowersquore going to joinrsquom I want torsquo I think she had done a bit of shooting probably youknow grouse shooting or something Anyway lsquowersquore going to jointhat and wersquore going to sign up tonight So Irsquoll be ready Irsquoll takeyoursquo she had a car she had a bit of petrol too lsquoAnd Irsquoll take youtonight to itrsquo And I canrsquot remember exactly where it was hellip Abing-don Road I think off the Abingdon Road a eld And there wereall these Home Guard men and they were going to teach us how toshoot because we were members And I was given well I supposegiven probably had to buy it knowing them I was given this badge[the WHD badge]37

Jeanne was taught to shoot a 303 ri e lsquowhich had a kick like a bullrsquoas well as to load a machine-gun and plant lsquosticky bombsrsquo and she hadvivid memories of her involvement in Home Guard exercises38 Butshe nally left in disillusion feeling that she was inadequately trainedand underused by the men of the Home Guard who insisted on segre-gating the women and requiring them to do rst aid work for whichthey were given no preparation Confronted with a real casualty duringan exercise Jeanne decided it would be better to spend her time learn-ing what to do in such a situation and left the Home Guard for theRed Cross39

Jeanne Gale Sharprsquos account was colourful and expressive full ofanecdotes that were animated by dialogue and peppered with state-ments indicating her strong point of view She evidently enjoyed tellingit suggesting that it gave her the dual satisfactions of lsquocomposurersquoHowever a number of other women had considerable difculty com-posing a narrative of their membership of the Home Guard orWomenrsquos Home Defence The problem was not that there was a short-


38 Leverhulme Project Jeanne Gale Sharp interviewed by APS 8 Jan 1998 text units741ndash9 239

39 Leverhulme Project Jeanne Gale Sharp interviewed by APS 8 Jan 1998 text units239ndash59



age of life-story material on which they could draw but that their narra-tives persistently glanced off the Home Guard to concentrate in depthon other life experiences during and after the war For example lsquoEllenBaxterrsquo talked for an hour mainly about her marriage family and workin the 1960s and 1970s before the interviewer managed to focus theinterview on its ostensible subject her participation in the HomeGuard during the war During the rst hour Ellen Baxterrsquos only refer-ence to the Home Guard was extremely brief concerning her parentsrsquoanxieties about her safety during the London blitz when she returnedhome late at night from dances lsquoor from the Home Guardrsquo40

In the second hour the interviewer was more persistent aboutaddressing the topic of the Home Guard Ellen Baxter was willing totalk about it but broke off from the easy discursive style she used inthe rst hour of the interview to read from notes she had preparedpreviously These gave brief details of her recruitment and training asfollows She joined after being told on call-up that she was in a reservedoccupation and so could not go into the Womenrsquos Royal Naval Serviceas she had hoped but had to remain a pay-roll clerk at London Trans-port Her father ran the lsquoMenrsquos Home Guardrsquo at Hammersmith TrolleyBus Depot and wishing to lsquodo her bitrsquo Ellen made enquiries aboutand enrolled in the lsquoWomenrsquos Home Guardrsquo which her member ofparliament Edith Summerskill was organizing locally With friendsshe trained in physical education and ri e practice and learned tothrow mortar bombs use Morse code and load machine-guns She alsotook charge of the refreshment van at the ri e range used by theHome Guard and helped with of ce work41 Ellen Baxter had bothbadges Womenrsquos Home Defence with its crossed ri es and the of cialHome Guard badge of the Womenrsquos Home Guard Auxiliary

Ellenrsquos story was fascinating but very brief When she was encouragedto enlarge on each aspect she shifted the account onto other topicsin the telling of which she regained her narrative facility free of hernotes Speci cally these topics were the wartime and post-war lives ofwomen friends (now dead) some of whom had also been members ofthe Womenrsquos Home Defence life in Ellenrsquos wartime of ce her fatherand other men of the Home Guard ageing health and the pleasuresof going down lsquomemory lanersquo narrow escapes in the blitz and themeaning for the lsquoyounger generationrsquo of not having shared wartimeexperiences The account of her experiences in the Home Guard wasboth fragmented and de ected In spite of her declared pleasure inreminiscence it did not offer her the equivalent satisfactions of com-posure as these other aspects of her life story Yet when Ellen Baxterreturned the transcript of the taped interview sent to her for correc-tion she crossed through all the sections about her family and working

40 Leverhulme Project Ellen Baxter interviewed by APS 30 July 1998 text unit 12441 Leverhulme Project Ellen Baxter interviewed by APS 30 July 1998 text units 382ndash

92


82 Penny Summereld

life on which she had spoken so freely On the release form enclosedseeking permission to quote from her interview in talks and publi-cations she stated that she wished her name to be used lsquoonly re HomeGuard and wartime experiencesrsquo42 Ellenrsquos response to the transcriptsuggests that she understood that the purpose of the interview was toelicit an account of the Home Guard and not of her life as a wholeBut the Home Guard story was not one she had found easy to tellwhereas she had composed the story of the rest of her life vividly andreadily We shall seek explanations for Ellenrsquos difculties of nar-ration shortly

Another such fragmented and de ected account of the HomeGuard was told by a woman who like Ellen was very different fromJeanne Gale Sharp but was known by the same rst name JeanneTownend After a hesitant beginning to the interview consisting ofshort answers to questions about her personal biography and her par-ents this Jeanne explained that she lsquohad a good timersquo in the warbecause of the soldiers billeted round Goole Before making any refer-ence to her involvement in the Home Guard she said lsquoI eventuallybecame involved with the French airforce which were at ElvingtonYorkrsquo43 The salience of this remark became evident later in the inter-view As far as the Home Guard was concerned she explained that shewas drawn in by her father a sh merchant town councillor and atone time mayor of Goole who lsquomore or less initiatedrsquo the Home Guardthere She told a story of accepting the role he offered her as hisdaughter Just as she went with him to deliver sh to the local armycamps she accompanied him to Home Guard meetings lsquoHe would begoing down in the car so I would go with himrsquo44 A brief account oflearning Morse code and of her badge (the of cial round HomeGuard one) and uniform led to memories of the names of other girlsinvolved and who they married which in turn led back to her involve-ment with the Free French airmen at Elvington She explained thatshe formed a deep attachment to one airman in particular RogerHer cousin married another of the Frenchmen suggesting that eventhough Jeanne was young a permanent relationship was a possibilityBut Roger disappeared after his return to France at the end of thewar Jeanne spoke of her belief that he was killed in Morocco and herdesire but inability to obtain con rmation45 This account was the long-est and most uent of the interview so far It led to the confession thatshe had permanently changed the spelling and pronunciation of hername from the English lsquoJeanrsquo to the French lsquoJeannersquo as a result of her

42 A pseudonym has therefore been used in this article since there are references tothe sections on which lsquoEllenrsquo did not wish to be quoted

43 Leverhulme Project Jeanne Townend interviewed by APS 3 April 1998 text unit105





relationship with Roger She reminisced about going (underage) topubs with him and recalled the fountain at Elvington under whichthe French airmen sobered up after a few drinks46 Later in the inter-view she referred to her familyrsquos approval of Roger and to her distressat his disappearance lsquoI was heartbroken at the time the weepingand weepingrsquo47

In comparison to Jeannersquos key narrative of her lsquogood timersquo in thewar her memories of the Home Guard were sketchy but both theRoger story and any nascent Home Guard story were de ected by theinclusion in the interviewrsquos intersubjective dynamics of her husbandwho was present in the room He had also been in the Home Guardalthough in another town and long before he knew Jeanne Joiningthe interview from a position as audience at Jeannersquos request in orderto con rm a point of view he talked uently about his own HomeGuard and army experiences48 His intervention reinforced the sensethat the Home Guard was a male story belonging to Jeannersquos fatherand husband and that the wartime story that Jeanne had to offer andthat connected her as a young woman of 17 or 18 with world eventswas her romantic affair with a Frenchman in temporary exile Inresponse to her transcript Jeanne signed the release form without res-ervations indicating her wish for her name to be used in relation tothe interview But in her accompanying letter she suggested that therehad been a failure of composure lsquoDid we really make such a hash ofit our diction seems poor seems disjointedrsquo49

Why did Ellen Baxter and Jeanne Townend apparently have difculty recalling Home Guard memories and composing them into con-tinuous narratives integral to the rest of their life stories Possibleanswers relate to memory trauma and culture Ellen and Jeanne maysimply have been able to remember little about this particular aspectof their lives as young women in wartime Jeanne Townend hinted thatthis was so although whether she was referring speci cally to theHome Guard or to the war as a whole was unclear lsquoItrsquos just a smallincident in your life isnrsquot it reallyrsquo50 However the fact that bothwomen volunteered to be interviewed suggests that they thought theywould be able to remember more Further information about how theycame to be included in the project reinforces this Both of themresponded to the piece placed in Saga by Jeanne Gale Sharp whopassed their contact details on to me Ellen Baxter and JeanneTownend had evidently not forgotten their roles in the Home Guard

46 Leverhulme Project Jeanne Townend interviewed by APS 3 April 1998 text units275ndash371


48 Leverhulme Project Jeanne Townend interviewed by APS 3 April 1998 text units428ndash742 and 1036ndash1171

49 Letter from Jeanne Townend to APS 27 June 199850 Leverhulme Project Jeanne Townend interviewed by APS 3 April 1998 text unit 19


84 Penny Summereld

and agreed with Jeanne Gale Sharp that it was important for them tobe commemorated

A completely different theory is that there was something traumaticabout the memories which caused the women unconsciously torepress them even though they professed to want to remember51

While it is possible that experiences on the one hand of danger andon the other hand of social particularly parental disapproval mightcause memories to be repressed neither seems to apply in these casesEllen Baxter referred cheerfully if brie y to the hazardous businessof learning to use weapons and evoked the horrors of the Londonbombing quite casually A more obviously traumatic event in her lifewas the pivotal drama of her narrative the sudden death of her hus-band in 1969 Ellen could not apparently talk about her past withoutreference to this shocking event but it had no direct connection withthe Home Guard and the war and it by no means completely preoccu-pied her as an unresolved trauma might do52 Jeanne Townend didnot avoid giving an account of the upsetting disappearance of her FreeFrench lover following his return to France towards the end of thewar She also spoke of her insouciance about the bombing of Hull(shared by the elderly aunt she visited there) Furthermore thesewomen did not apparently encounter parental disapproval as a resultof joining the unof cial WHD or the Home Guard In both cases theirfathers were involved in the Home Guard but as male authority guresthey did not police the gender boundary as some wartime fathers did53

They supported and in Jeanne Townendrsquos case encouraged theirdaughtersrsquo involvement

It is however possible that even though these fathers were notobstructive their paternal role in relation to the Home Guard and tothe young womenrsquos lives more generally was an impediment to Ellenrsquosand Jeannersquos recall of the experience of Home Guard membershipJeanne told a story of accepting a part paternally imposed on her asa youthful feminine subordinate Home Guard membership was as

51 See Thompson Voice of the Past ch 4 lsquoMemory and the Selfrsquo Kim Lacy RobertsSelma Leydesdorff and Graham Dawson (eds) Trauma and Life Stories (RoutledgeLondon 1999) especially Introduction

52 Thompson Voice of the Past p 181 refers to lsquorepeating the same story of shock andhorrorrsquo as one of the lsquowarning signalsrsquo of psychic disturbance of which an oralhistorian should be aware Ellenrsquos account of her husbandrsquos sudden early deathdominated the rst part of the interview but it did not have this unresolved andobsessive quality She also talked about many other aspects of her past The point isthat the Home Guard was not one of them

53 See for example the response of David Robertson MP for Streatham to a MissB Gooch who wrote to him requesting support for the WHD unit in the area Herefused his support but stated lsquolet me assure you that I hold no old fashioned viewsabout women I am the father of daughters and I am most anxious that womenshould go out into the world in all kinds of occasions which are congenial anduseful to the community But I am opposed to women ghtingrsquo According to himwomen should be nurses in wartime rather than members of the Home GuardPublic Record Of ce Kew (PRO) WO 329423 Mr D Robertson to Miss B Gooch2 Oct 1942



much the product of her daughterly position in the family as of herrelationship to the state the nation and the war effort or her beliefs inwomenrsquos rights and responsibilities for all her patriotic and idealisticappearance A wartime photograph of her as a Woman Home Guardshows her proudly wearing a military uniform (Figure 3) Such uni-forms were not provided by the state and their supply to WomenHome Guards was outlawed54 Jeannersquos battledress and trousers wereobtained by her father Jeanne explained lsquoprobably my father had

Figure 3 Jeanne Townend in her Womenrsquos Home Guard uniform 1943ndash4Source courtesy of Jeanne Townend

54 Hansard Parliamentary Debates 388 (20 Apr 1943) 1532ndash3 oral answers(announcement of scheme for nominated women in Home Guard)


86 Penny Summereld

had asked for it rsquocause we used to do manoeuvres and marching andI suppose really you needed itrsquo55 As a town mayor and Home Guardlieutenant he was we may suppose a loyal citizen but he acted inde ance of the ban on uniforming Women Home Guards presumablybecause the inclusion of uniformed women in his Home Guard unitmet his own objectives His imposition of those objectives may havehad unwelcome aspects for Jeanne that obstructed her construction ofa coherent account but she did not refer to them Ellen Baxter didnot talk about her fatherrsquos views of womenrsquos membership of the HomeGuard (She explained that his company at Hammersmith Trolley BusDepot was separate from the Hammersmith Womenrsquos Home Guardthat she joined) But her memories of him as an enthusiast who tookthe family gramophone and records to his parades for the men topractise marching to suggest that he would not have regarded it asoffensive for his daughter to follow in his footsteps However Ellendid experience a major rift with her father an Irish Catholic after thewar She spoke at length of the difculties she encountered with himwhen she decided to marry a Protestant something he would not coun-tenance and which she did without his support It is not implausiblethat the association of Home Guard membership with emotionallyfraught memories of her father may have had an inhibiting effect eventhough the marriage took place after the war and Ellenrsquos relationshipwith her future husband had nothing to do with her membership ofthe Home Guard

These psychodynamic possibilities are speculative and by no meanspersuasive A cultural explanation of the difculties of narrative com-posure may however provide a more convincing account thaninability for psychological reasons to remember During the war theHome Guard was a common topic in three genres of cultural pro-duction lm cartoons and ction It featured in some examples as nomore than part of the setting The Home Guard was a wartime pres-ence readily recognizable to audiences and hence for authors artistsscriptwriters and directors a convenient signi er of the British wareffort as in the lms Went the Day Well (1942) This Above All (1942)Millions Like Us (1943) Mrs Miniver (1942) and A Canterbury Tale(1944) In other wartime cultural productions however the HomeGuard took centre stage It was crucial to the plot of ction such asKeep the Home Guard Turning by Compton Mackenzie (1943) and thethrillers Home Guard Mystery by Belton Cobb (1941) and Murder in theHome Guard by Ruth Adam (1942) both crime novels And it was thesubject of several wartime plays as well as the popular George Formby lm Get Cracking (1943) Newspaper cartoonists such as Emett Illing-worth Giles and Joseph Lee regularly featured the Local Defence Vol-

55 Leverhulme Project Jeanne Townend interviewed by APS 3 Apr 1998 text unit 251



unteers and the Home Guard56 In all these representations whetherserious or comic the Home Guard gured as a military organizationlocated on the home front that brought together civilian men withina structure that offered opportunities for the effective or ineffectiveuse of arms the acceptance or de ance of rank and discipline andthe af rmation or rejection of loyalty patriotism and engagement withthe British war effort While female characters occupied importantroles women were not depicted as Home Guard members57

After the Second World War there was a dearth of representationsof the Home Guard apart from those in lms about the war broughtout in the 1940s (such as Whisky Galore the 1949 lm version of thenovel Keep the Home Guard Turning) until the advent of the enormouslypopular television series Dadrsquos Army The 80 episodes of this situationcomedy were rst broadcast from 1968 to 1977 Women playedimportant comic roles as wives and girlfriends in the series (forexample Mrs Fox the busty sweetheart of Jones the butcher MavisPike Sergeant Wilsonrsquos mistress and mother of Frank Pike the lsquostupidboyrsquo of the platoon and the heard-but-not-seen Elizabeth wife of Cap-tain Mainwaring) But women as Home Guard members did not fea-ture except in one episode In lsquoMumrsquos Armyrsquo (1970) the recruitmentof Women Home Guard Auxiliaries ndash and Mainwaringrsquos surprisingdevelopment of a romantic passion for one of them ndash placed in jeop-ardy not only Mainwaringrsquos leadership but the future of theWalmington-on-Sea Home Guard as a whole (and the Dadrsquos Armyseries) The woman Home Guard saved the situation by leaving townbut the message of the episode was that women had no place in theHome Guard which was rightly an exclusively (if comically) mascu-line enterprise58

The absence of cultural constructions of womenrsquos involvement inthe Home Guard meant that models of participation ndash equivalent forexample to those provided by the lm Gallipoli for Anzac involvementin the First World War and by Dadrsquos Army for menrsquos Home Guardexperiences ndash simply did not exist for women The cultural explanationof the difculties of narrative composition is that memories of theHome Guard did not form part of a past that could be composed intoa coherent whole and told to an interviewer because culture and mem-ory did not mutually inform each other Without such a cultural frameof reference telling was fragmented and de ected within the interview

56 See Corinna Peniston-Bird and Penny Summereld lsquoldquoHey Yoursquore Deadrdquo TheMultiple Uses of Humour in Representations of British National Defence in theSecond World Warrsquo Journal of European Studies 31 (2001) pp 413ndash35

57 See Peniston-Bird and Summereld lsquoldquoHey Yoursquore Deadrdquorsquo pp 430ndash32 for a singleambiguous exception

58 Graham McCann Dadrsquos Army The Story of a Classic Television Show (Fourth EstateLondon 2001) pp 114ndash15 Penny Summereld and Corinna Peniston-Bird lsquoWomenin the Firing Line the Home Guard and the Defence of Gender Boundaries inBritain in the Second World Warrsquo Womenrsquos History Review 9 2 (2000) pp 243ndash4Some of the ideas developed here are foreshadowed in the last section of this article


88 Penny Summereld

context in spite of a sympathetic and interested audience Memoriesof the Home Guard were not composed into versions of the tellerrsquospast that could be shared and that contributed to the narratorrsquos senseof composure or personal equanimity Aspects of their life stories thatwere more rmly embedded in cultural representations of femininitysuch as Jeanne Townendrsquos romantic affair and Ellen Baxterrsquos widow-hood were more conducive to composure As another womanexplained about her memory of participating in the Home Guard lsquoitsort of fades away I think more of bringing up my children and mygrandchildren um with my husbandrsquo59 In spite of these womenrsquos wil-ling participation in the oral history project the interviews edgedtowards discomposure

Why on the other hand was Jeanne Gale Sharp able to tell such a uent and complete narrative Extending the cultural perspective itis possible to argue that she had access to a discourse of femininepatriotism which provided her with a language in which to talk abouther membership of the Home Guard She placed herself within a nar-rative framework characteristic of wartime cultural productions suchas the lm The Gentle Sex in which women heroically took their placealongside military men to bear the dangers and responsibilities of warA sense of equal wartime citizenship to which gender was irrelevantinformed these narratives As Jeanne Gale Sharp explained more thanonce lsquoChurchill said we must ght them in the ditches so we thoughtwe shouldrsquo and lsquowe were quite prepared to give our lives for itrsquo60

However her account was permeated by disillusion about the HomeGuard because of muddle and inefciency within its ranks (the lsquoDadrsquosArmyrsquo image) and also because of the circumscribed terms on whichwomen were permitted to serve their prejudicial treatment by maleHome Guards and by the authorities and the lack of recognition ofthe womenrsquos sincerity in joining Two ingredients combined in heraccount the patriotic version of the role and responsibility of the war-time citizen and an understanding informed in part by post-seventiesfeminism of the ways in which gender relations in wartime as at othertimes worked against women Jeanne Gale Sharp had an acute senseof the silencing of the history of women and home defence Forexample she answered the question lsquoDo you think that the women inthe Home Guard werenrsquot recognizedrsquo as follows

JGS No um I mean they quietly and conveniently forgot about usand sat on what they knew didnrsquot they I mean itrsquos a wonderthat anything any records were left anywhere and therersquosnothing therersquos no book being written on it I mean sure theremust have been a book written about it but itrsquos not been pub-

59 Leverhulme Project Audrey Simpson interviewed by CP-B 28 July 1999 text unit741

60 Leverhulme Project Jeanne Gale Sharp record of telephone conversation with APS31 Dec 1997 interviewed by APS 8 Jan 1998 text unit 185



lished and um museums and all that sort of thing I meanpeople up here say lsquoWell there wasnrsquot onersquo and I say lsquoOh yesthere was because I was in itrsquo you know

PS [laughter] YesJGS But lsquoOh norsquo and if you talk to any men about it they think itrsquos

a HUGE joke huge joke61

Like the woman tter and the wireless-telegraphy operator quotedearlier Jeanne Gale Sharp found that audiences for her reminiscenceswere unreceptive and tended to ridicule her As the quotation abovesuggests she had a strong sense of the historiographical as well as thecultural silence concerning women in the Home Guard She was par-ticularly incensed by the omission of women from a television docu-mentary about the Home Guard broadcast in 1998 as part of Channel4rsquos Secret History series for which she (and the author) had been con-sulted by the producer The documentary stressed the unfortunate lossof male lives in the Home Guard due to mistakes and poor trainingbut it included nothing about the history of womenrsquos contested mem-bership62 In the terms of this analysis Jeanne Gale Sharprsquos testimonyabout womenrsquos role in the Home Guard proved unable to get roundthe sharp curve of the cultural circuit and enter the historical discourseconcerning wartime home defence constructed in television even withthe backing of a university-based historian

Anecdotes featured in Jeanne Gale Sharprsquos account including theone quoted above explaining how she was recruited and anotherabout the disastrous Home Guard exercise that persuaded her to leaveA cultural approach to oral history can recuperate the anecdote con-demned by traditional historians as no more than an unrepresentativeand inaccurate yarn by regarding it as a well-established cultural formthat bears certain types of meaning63 Anecdotes function as narrativesnapshots that is as amusing or dramatic accounts of single incidentsconcerning the narrator andor others They encapsulate succinctlythe world being described and its personal and impersonal meaningsThe snapshot depends for its success largely on the recognition bythe audience of the subject matter that is encapsulated The form wasavailable to Jeanne Gale Sharp because her reference points were pub-lic discursive constructions the meanings of the Second World Warwartime possibilities for women to serve as equals with men the frus-tration of this outcome by the disadvantageous position in which men


62 lsquoSecret History Dadrsquos Armyrsquo directed and produced by Bernadette OrsquoFarrellChannel 4 8 June 1998

63 TG Ashplant lsquoAnecdotes as Narrative Resource in Working-Class Life StoriesParody Dramatization and Sequencersquo in M Chamberlain and P Thompson (eds)Narrative and Genre (Routledge London 1998) pp 99ndash113


90 Penny Summereld

have historically placed women She rightly assumed that her inter-viewer would recognize and sympathize with these angles of vision

Women who remembered being in the Home Guard but who didnot share Gale Sharprsquos strong interpretative framework did not in themain produce anecdotes A surprising exception however was EllenBaxter whose otherwise de ected account we discussed above It waspunctuated by a single very vivid anecdote which she had also writtendown in her notes

Er we all felt we were doing our bit It was quite funny I had towear ndash I can only wink with that eye I canrsquot wink with that And ofcourse when we used to have to do our ri e duties I had to havean eye-shield on because I couldnrsquot wink And I put here ndash it wasquite funny ndash I had to wear an eye-shield on my left eye as I couldnrsquotwink This caused a great deal of amusement They said I wouldhave to tell the Germans to wait while I put my eye-shield on64

Ellen Baxterrsquos single anecdote may have caught as far as she was con-cerned the essence of her Home Guard experiences It lsquosaid it allrsquorequiring no further narrative elaboration It spoke of her valour as awoman in joining the WHD and learning to use a ri e alongside themen of the Home Guard It also spoke of the meaning of the wareffort The punch-line is a good example of ironic British wartimehumour concerning both the enemy (who of course could not beexpected to wait) and British defence capability (reliant on defenderswho could not wink) The snapshot contained the possibility thatEllenrsquos membership was a futile (if sincerely meant) gesture and thatby implication so too was the formation of the Home Guard as a wholeBy 1998 when the interview took place it was clear that Britain wasnot saved from invasion in the Second World War by the Home Guardbut by a combination of the Royal Air Force Hitlerrsquos ambitions onother fronts and an aggregation of Allied forces that by 1944ndash45 out-weighed those of the Germans

Men interviewed about their Home Guard experiences in contrastto women used anecdotes extensively In the main they addressedthree themes all rmly located in British popular culture lsquoDavid andGoliathrsquo stories about the potential effectiveness (or otherwise) of theHome Guard against the German enemy tales of the Home Guardrsquos(competitive) relationship with the British army and accounts of theHome Guard as a site in which men individually or collectively endeav-oured to outwit their female signi cant others One anecdote from thelast category stands for many and is included because this kind of storyoffered an interpretation of the meaning for men of belonging to theHome Guard George Nicholson joined his fatherrsquos Home Guard unitat the age of 17 but left after a year when he was called up into the

64 Leverhulme Project Ellen Baxter interviewed by APS 30 July 1998 text unit 384



Navy He came home periodically on leave to nd that his father wasoften absent on Home Guard exercises

And I come home one Saturday morning said to me motherlsquowherersquos fatherrsquo lsquoFishingrsquo I said lsquoHersquos whatrsquo He never went shingin his life She says lsquoWell him and Bill Smith hellip have borrowed yourgear the rods and what not and they have gone to the HomeGuard shingrsquo Now of course it was near the end of the war thisSo anyway I had a chat to me mother cup of tea and what not Igot the bus to Stamford Bridge where the battle was ndash battle alright[laugh] I could hear them singing before I got there and I wentalong the river bank and I pulled one or two rods up no bait onthem Anyway I walked in the pub that was it oh dear me [laugh]He would never have caught owt there65

George Nicholson also told the story in a letter adding a punch-linelsquoWhen I got home my mother asked if they had caught anything Ithought to myself only you and a few more wivesrsquo66 In this snapshotthe Home Guard was a club shaped by drinking culture and based inthe public house from both of which women were excluded it was amasculine enterprise pursued in male space

The reasons for the silence concerning women in the Home Guardinclude this gendered dimension of cultural memory represented inpopular portrayals of the Home Guard in wartime (Get Cracking) aswell as long after the war (Dadrsquos Army) and fed by the cultural circuitbetween personal and collective memory But the reasons for silenceare also political and historiographical In wartime as we have seenthe formation of the WHD and the recruitment of women by HomeGuard units went against of cial policy which was opposed to the arm-ing of women and their inclusion in the Home Guard The of cialresponse to the womenrsquos campaign was to treat it as a nuisance butnot to draw attention to it by for example initiating prosecutionsagainst WHD and HG units for their breaches of the rules67 Ratherof cialdom attempted to bury the existence of women in the HomeGuard under a blanket of silence After the war the gender-blindorientation of historical discourse ensured that little serious attentionwas paid to the issue Historians of the Home Guard who noticed itfollowed the government line that women were creating unwelcometrouble for home defence policy-makers They did not question thegender norms on which this policy was based and were not interestedin the issue of womenrsquos exclusion or in womenrsquos agency in defying thetaboo behind it68

65 Leverhulme Project George Nicholson interviewed by CP-B 18 May 2000 text units953ndash65

66 Leverhulme Project letter from George Nicholson 15 Dec 199967 PRO WO 329423 memorandum by Bovenschen 22 April 194268 See for example Longmate The Real Dadrsquos Army and Mackenzie The Home Guard

Exceptions include a brief reference by Di Parkin in her article rsquoWomen in theArmed Services 1940ndash5rsquo in R Samuel (ed) Patriotism The Making and Unmaking of


92 Penny Summereld

Within public discourse concerning men and the Home Guard thestory of menrsquos involvement is not a simple one In popular culturesome of its dimensions have been relatively overlooked notably theinclusion in its ranks of young t men in reserved occupations andalso its growing proximity to the army expressed in joint training exer-cises and in its role in the pre-training of young men under conscrip-tion age for the armed forces Popular representations have also omit-ted the rival ideological conceptualizations of the force that werecurrent during the war the democratic anti-fascist citizensrsquo army ver-sus the adjunct of the British army69 Historians have not emphasizedsuch aspects because they have hitherto been preoccupied with a dif-ferent set of historical questions namely whether the Home Guard wasthe product primarily of political decisions concerning morale ratherthan military ones concerning the defence of Britain70 The resultinginterpretation has been that the Home Guard was unnecessary in mili-tary terms and was less a serious defence force than a wasteful jokeHistorians as well as television scriptwriters have stressed what waslaughable or scandalous rather than what was functional or ideologicalabout the Home Guard

Nevertheless in contrast to the case of womenrsquos involvement thereis a recognized history of the male Home Guard albeit consisting ofnumerous stories and interpretations which has been relayed throughhistorical writing and popular culture There is in short a HomeGuard legend available to men who engage in composing their mem-ories of the Home Guard which is simply not available to women Sowhile there are some things men lsquoknowrsquo that are not in the of cialsources and some things they nd hard to tell because those thingsare either absent from or muted in popular representations the pro-cess of composure with respect to experiences in the Home Guard isnot as problematic for men as it is for women

Let us conclude with some re ections on the relation of culture tocomposure more generally Ordinary people who have memories thatdo not t publicly available accounts have difculty nding words andconcepts with which to compose their memories whether in anecdotalsnapshots or extended narratives If they cannot draw on an appropri-

British National Identity vol 2 Nations Within Nations (Routledge London 1989) pp163ndash4 and of course the recent work arising from the Leverhulme Project referredto above Summereld lsquoldquoShe Wants a Gun Not a Dishclothrdquorsquo Summereld andPeniston-Bird lsquoWomen in the Firing Linersquo Peniston-Bird and Summereld lsquoldquoHeyYoursquore Deadrdquorsquo

69 Tom Wintringham John Langdon-Davies and others on the left in the Second WorldWar believed that the peoplersquos militias and international brigades of the SpanishCivil War constituted a model guided by which the Home Guard could become apopular democratic civilian army that would not only repel invasion but would bethe harbinger of far-reaching social and political change See for exampleWintringhamrsquos articles in Picture Post lsquoThe Lessons of Spainrsquo 15 June 1940 pp 9ndash24lsquoArm the Citizensrsquo 29 June 1940 pp 9ndash21 lsquoThe Home Guard Can Fightrsquo 21 Sept1940 pp 9ndash17

70 See for example Mackenzie Home Guard



ate public account their response is to seek to justify their deviationor to press their memories into alternative frameworks or to be ableto express their stories only in fragmentary and de ected accountsAudiences for these memories-outside-discourse may not facilitate nar-ration because they cannot recognize the subject they ignore the storyor treat it as a joke The cultural approach to oral history stresses theimportance of the relationship between public discourse and the recalland recounting of experience It implies that oral history has a lsquorecov-eryrsquo role of a special sort This involves the legitimation that oral historycan give to memories of experiences that have not been legendizedor that run counter to public discourse But the oral historian cannotsolve all the problems of cultural silence Some silences are so pro-found that they constitute lsquowounds in the tissue of memoryrsquo71 and cre-ate gaps in what can be recalled and told There is no comfortableresolution of this dilemma Oral historians may be able to contributeto the process of recuperation but interviews are as likely to stimulatediscomposure as composure unless or until lost histories gain a placewithin the dominant culture

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Scripting Historiesseminar series at the Centre for Historical Research University of Lim-erick in December 2002 I should like to thank the participants fortheir lively and stimulating response I should also like to thank OliverFulton for his constructive criticisms and to acknowledge the specialnature of the research collaboration with Corinna Peniston-Bird onthe Home Guard project Obviously I take nal responsibility for theideas and arguments presented here

71 Luisa Passerini lsquoIntroductionrsquo to Memory and Totalitarianism p 13


66 Penny Summereld

interviewees are prone to misremembering and exaggeration that thepresence of the interviewer may stimulate such aws and that oralhistory is lsquoanecdotalrsquo and unrepresentative of anyone beyond the indi-vidual2

Social historians particularly those committed to the history of neg-lected groups such as working-class people women and black peoplehave responded vigorously to such criticisms The case for oral historylay in its powerful recovery role in that it could rescue for the historicalrecord the lives of social groups for whom other kinds of records weresparse or non-existent or in which the angle of vision was only that ofthose in power (such as policy-makers the police or other authorities)Social historians led by Paul Thompson have argued that traditionallyfavoured documentary sources were just as problematic as oral sourcesthat memory was not as fallible as was suggested and that careful meth-odology could correct some of the other problems Thus writtensources were shown to have problems of bias and omission it couldbe demonstrated that long-term memory and the recall of repeatedand habitual events were relatively reliable triangulation with othertypes of data could address issues of inaccuracy and creating a largesample dealt with the problems of anecdotalism and representa-tiveness3

The cultural approach to history raised another set of complexissues This approach suggested that prevailing discursive constructionsof the past lsquocontaminatersquo memory in the sense that they overlay it withlater accounts and interpretations of the period of history to which amemory relates to such an extent that it is impossible for anyone toremember what they did and what they thought at the time indepen-dently of this lsquopatina of historical postscripts and rewritingsrsquo Forexample a History Workshop editorial of 1979 stated lsquoThe difculty liesin the fact that memory does not constitute pure recall the memoryof any particular event is refracted through layer upon layer of sub-sequent experience and through the in uence of the dominantandor local and speci c ideologyrsquo4 This kind of thinking took cul-tural historians in the direction of studying the discourses culturalconstructs or ideologies that shape consciousness and behaviour

2 See Paul Thompson The Voice of the Past Oral History ( rst published 1978 3rd ednOxford University Press Oxford 2000) pp 77ndash81 on the lsquonature of the oppositionrsquoto oral history

3 Thompson Voice of the Past especially ch 4 lsquoEvidencersquo Trevor Lummis Listening toHistory The Authenticity of Oral Evidence (Hutchinson London 1987) especially part3 lsquoAssessing the Interviewsrsquo

4 lsquoEditorialrsquo History Workshop 8 (1979) p iii See also Denise Riley War in the NurseryTheories of the Child and Mother (Virago London 1983) p 191 and Richard Johnsonet al (eds) Making Histories Studies in History-Writing and Politics (HutchinsonLondon 1982) ch 6 lsquoPopular Memory Theory Politics Methodrsquo where theproblem is posed more positively lsquoWhat is interesting about the forms of oral-historical witness or autobiography are not just the nuggets of ldquofactrdquo about the pastbut the whole way in which popular memories are constructed and reconstructed aspart of a contemporary consciousnessrsquo (p 219)










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Acknowledgements




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Acknowledgements











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Acknowledgements




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Acknowledgements




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Acknowledgements




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Acknowledgements













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Acknowledgements




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Acknowledgements









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Acknowledgements




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Acknowledgements













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Acknowledgements









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Acknowledgements












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Documents

Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the … · Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the ... 1 Eric Hobsbawm,OnHistory ... seems a pity to use Hobsbawm as a spokesman