Exercise 4.2 The British Landscape during World War II

The exercise is to read a short part of John Taylor's book, available from the OCA reading resources.

There was a paradox that the quintessential English (as it was very much a southern English model that was evinced) village and countryside was paraded as the substance of what we were fighting for: the preservation of a dreamy world where peace reigned among the lanes and fields and villages, yet the countryside was stripped of meaning (signs removed or blacked out so as to confuse the enemy in case of invasion) and travel restricted to refugees, evacuees and the military.

 The public's view of the landscape was appealed to by editors by considering the continuity of the past; the Romantic love of the scenery; and nineteenth century moves towards social reform. The views presented were no longer 'pretty; but functional, for example photographing children evacuated from mining areas to experience the beauty of the Lake District.

Comparisons would be made between the enforced, militaristic obsequious way of life in Germany and the genial, leisurely and individual way of life of the British. The Englishman's home was his castle.

The article chimes with the chapter There Always Was an England in Jeremy Paxman's The English. Paxman alludes also to the establishment's archetypal view of the English landscape, almost as a surrogate for the characteristics that are to be emphasised: agreeability, independence, tolerance, leisurely, relaxed. He points out that while soldiers in WWII marched off singing: 

There'll always be an England

While there's a country lane

Wherever there's a cottage small

Beside a field of grain 

that the same was true 30 years earlier as loved ones shared letters reminding themselves that they too were fighting for a way of life personified by the characteristics of rustic England. Rupert Brooke's The Soldier says it all:

 IF I should die, think only this of me:
    That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
    In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
    Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
    Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
    A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
        Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
    And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
        In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

The irony is that England (in particular) was very urbanized even by WW1 and there is certain irony that no-one thought that Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, never mind London, were worth preserving despite the town and city being the far more likely home of troops. The irony increased in the WWII as it was the cities that were under attack from German bombers as it was the factories therein that supplied the Allied war effort. Our romantic notion of what needed to be preserved was far removed from what was actually required to beat the enemy. 

140 years earlier, Wordsworth romanticised a famous urban landscape thus:

 Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Tellingly, it was the peace, the openness, the proximity of urban icons to the fields and sky that Wordsworth noted rather than eliciting any intrinsic beauty of the cityscape.