Listening to Britain’s wartime voices

Revealing the secrets of Home Intelligence

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The book, “Listening to Britain: Home Intelligence Reports on Britain's Finest Hour, May-September 1940” was the brainchild of Dr Paul Addison, Honorary Fellow, and Dr Jeremy Crang, Senior Lecturer, in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology.

The researchers realised that daily ‘morale’ reports from the epic summer and autumn of 1940 provided an unparalleled insight into the mood of the British people during the period described by Churchill as their 'finest hour'.

Although previous scholars had quoted brief extracts from the reports, they had not been made available to the wider public.

When published, they had quite an impact.

Challenging the myth

The finest hour of which Churchill spoke was a Britain in which men and women from all walks of life came together to defy the Germans as the fate of the nation hung in the balance.

What Addison and Crang’s book revealed was more streetwise.

The reports, compiled by the Ministry of Information’s Home Intelligence department, were based on a wide range of sources. These included investigations by the Wartime Social Survey, questionnaires completed by Citizens’ Advice Bureaux and the Brewers' Society, postal censorship returns, telephone intercepts and accounts produced by a network of doctors, shopkeepers, publicans, clergymen and shop stewards on the views expressed by those they met.

Reality revealed

Although the reports confirm a stubborn belief in ultimate victory, constant public pressure for more effective prosecution of the war and a powerful sense of national consciousness, other views emerged.

British voices of the time were also quarrelsome and complaining, highly critical of government and military officialdom, suspicious of ‘outsiders’ and susceptible to anxiety and defeatism.

Changing popular conceptions

When published in 2010, the reports, complete with Addison and Crang’s historical commentary, won critical and popular acclaim.

“Listening to Britain” was widely discussed in the media, including the BBC’s prestigious Today programme and informed a Channel 5 documentary, Secrets of the Blitz, in which Crang provided expert commentary.

As one magazine put it, “Events recorded in this book seem to have been forgotten less because they are irrelevant to our historical narrative than because they flatly contradict it.

“It therefore comes as something of a shock to read that Britain - a country one is accustomed to thinking of as a scourge of wartime fascists and their racism - was not immune to moments of bigotry itself, and in all social strata.” (The Tablet)

The Daily Mail hailed Secrets of the Blitz as: “an untold story of great interest, revealed for the first time”. The Times and the Telegraph called it “deeply emotional”, “a deeply moving and important story”.

Impacting on green policy

In 2011, “Listening to Britain” was a source of evidence for a report which became the centrepiece of the Green party’s 'New Home Front' initiative - a policy campaign which aims to harness the lessons of Britain's wartime past to mobilise the nation, and the coalition government, to confront the challenges of climate change and energy supply.

Further information

“Listening to Britain” is now available in paperback and on Kindle.