| Chapter : | Introduction |
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this is yours, the question (sometimes implied, sometimes explicit) runs, then what are you doing to ensure it remains in good order to be passed on to your descendants? In such a climate, to call for conservation is to a large extent to call for reform of the existing system and mentality.
If these issues come to the fore in the 1930s, they assume greater urgency and relevance with the outbreak of World War II, which required a mobilisation of the people unlike anything seen before. Whereas the carnage of the Great War’s trenches had occurred overseas in France and Belgium, it was clear that the coming war would, in some way, be much more domestic in its impact. The fear of enemy bombing raids had long been incorporated into governmental planning, and it was grimly expected that such raids would entail massive destruction of the country’s fabric and considerable loss of life. When this threat was matched in mid-1940 with the prospect of actual invasion, the situation became desperate. If people were to be made ready for a struggle with the might of Hitler’s Reich, it was surely necessary to utilise the full force of the propaganda machine.
In this case, much of the propaganda had already been written. For most of the previous decade men and women had been encouraged to celebrate and take possession of England as both a leisure activity and a sacred trust. It was but a short step to channel those feelings into a wartime goal. Even the preservationist sentiments had a part to play, for now England was threatened with an enemy more pervasive than suburban sprawl, one that placed the country’s historic fabric in greater jeopardy than ever before. It was fitting that the civilian army of Local Defence Volunteers, founded in 1940 in immediate response to the invasion threat, should so swiftly find themselves renamed the Home Guard, for what was at stake was nothing less than the continued existence of anything that an English man or woman could consider home.
As the tide of war turned in the Allies’ favour, and as victory over Nazi Germany came to seem not just possible but probable, the rhetoric of the government’s message returned to this blend of preservation and reform. People were encouraged to defend England as though it were indeed