English Journeys: National and Cultural Identity in 1930s and 19 ...

theirs and to consider ways in which the nation could—and should—be reformed in order to make it worthy of survival. Thus the slogan “Your Britain: Fight for it Now” became a sign not simply of a preservationist, heritage-centred ideal in which the country’s largely unchanging material and social fabric was read as its true essence (a view that the immense upheavals of wartime had done so much to dispel) but of a reformist mentality that looked hard at the country and saw not only what held it together but also those areas in which the socioeconomic bonds were in need of repair. To be truly invested in the continuing life of England was to be a reformer as well as a conservator, and when the immediate defence work was over in 1945, there was a great desire to begin the process of reform that would make the country deserving in every way of the victory that it had earned. Juliet Gardiner, in her recent study of the effect of the Blitz on Britain’s national life, wrote that if the intense bombing campaign was met with “endurance” and “defiance,” there was also, “arising out of that, a sense of entitlement: that a nation that had been exhorted to ‘take it’ could reasonably expect, when the war was finally over, to ‘get [some of] it’ in terms of greater equality, more employment, better housing, education and life chances in general.”⁴ That the process of renewal did not work out quite as many of its most ardent supporters had hoped and that the constraints of postwar austerity left the nation somewhat short of its wartime promise are perhaps the final ironies explored in this book, ironies that some of the figures discussed here were themselves quick to notice.

With the 1942 publication of Sir William Beveridge’s proposals for a more inclusive system of state-funded social care, the possibility of a truly reborn nation emerging from the rubble of war must have seemed tantalisingly close. Those causes so often lamented in the 1930s—urban decay, long-term unemployment, poor health and housing—were suddenly caught in the state’s reforming gaze, and from this renewed sense of public purpose would come, it was promised, a nation more egalitarian than its prewar predecessor, which had itself been consigned to the back pages of history by the Labour Party’s landslide victory in the 1945 General Election as the victorious and almost universally idolised