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Half the battle: civilian morale in Britain during the Second World War

2003; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 41; Issue: 02 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5860/choice.41-1149

1943-5975

Robert S. MacKay,

Health and Conflict Studies

By morale, we mean primarily not only determination to carry on, but also determination to carry on with the utmost energy, a determination based on a realization of the facts of life and with it a readiness for many minor and some major sacrifices, including, if necessary, the sacrifice of life itself.Good morale means hard and persistent work, means optimum production, maximum unity, reasonable awareness of the true situation, and absence of complacency and confidence which are not based on fact. 4 While this definition still gives prominence to attitudes and feelings it has been noticeably enlarged to encompass behaviour.In October 1941 Home Intelligence showed signs that it, too, was updating its thinking along the same lines.Its director, Stephen Taylor, in a memorandum entitled 'Home Morale and Public Opinion', wrote that morale must be 'ultimately measured not by what a person thinks or says, but by what he does and how he does it'. 5 What the timing of these revisions suggests is that understanding was simply being informed by experience.In 1939 the watchers were proceeding from first principles; by 1941 they were living in the middle of a huge laboratory with field-test material on every hand.Academic psychologists likewise needed the test of war itself to sort out their ideas on civilian morale.It was not until 1943, therefore, that J. T. MacCurdy wrote that although morale required 'a capacity to endure tribulation undismayed', this capacity was 'meaningless, or at least ineffective, unless it promotes action'. 6anford and Conrad came to exactly the same conclusion: [morale] 'is of value only insofar as it facilitates or promotes favourable action'. 7 By the third year of the war, then, there was agreement among contemporaries that morale was a composite of attitude and behaviour.If knowledge of the state of civilian morale was sought, therefore, it required more than getting people to respond to surveys and having agents report on what people were talking about in public houses.In this respect there is no great gap between what the morale watchers were looking at and what a historian today would want to examine.The historian approaching the official and semi-official record can do so with a definition of civilian morale that embraces both attitudes and behaviour and that might be set out as follows:Clubs and the Workers' Educational Association.During the spring of 1940 other sources were added: police duty room reports collated and sent on by chief constables; the BBC, through its Listener Research unit, which collated the replies of its nationwide subject panels to questionnaires it sent out periodically; the British Institute of Public Opinion, which from 1937 under the name of the Gallup Polls produced soundings of public opinion on a variety of subjects, using modern social research techniques such as individual interviews and balanced samples of at least 1000 respondents; branch managers of W. H. Smith; managers of Granada cinemas; officials of political parties, voluntary societies, the London Passenger Transport Board and the Citizens' Advice Bureaux.In addition Postal Censorship, which examined up to 200,000 letters a week, made regular reports on public attitudes and morale; and Telephone censorship sent in reports based on its official eavesdropping.Finally, the Ministry set up a statistical survey unit, known as the Wartime Social Survey, and put it under the supervision of the London School of Economics.The material from all these sources was read by two Home Intelligence assessors, who summarized them in a report.This was the basis for a final version produced after discussion with the assessors, by the head of the division, Mary Adams.From 18 May until the end of September 1940 Home Intelligence produced daily reports on public opinion and mood, thereafter changing to weekly reports.Much of the raw data received at Home Intelligence was by its nature impressionistic rather than 'scientific' in a social research sense.Nevertheless, in quantity and range it was impressive, and the historian is bound to conclude that in its distilled form it was unlikely to be very far from the truth; among the jostling hubbub of individual testimonies its composite voice is indispensable.Mass-Observation, too, qualifies for the label 'indispensable'.This privately-run social reporting organization was started in 1936 by the poet and journalist Charles Madge, the anthropologist Tom Harrisson and the documentary film maker Humphrey Jennings.It employed a nationwide panel of 1,500 voluntary observers, 150 diarists and smaller groups of trained full-timers to report on a wide range of individual and group habits and opinions, outlining its purpose as 'ascertaining the facts as accurately as possible; developing and improving the methods of ascertaining these facts;