Abstract
In 2020, the British nation experienced horrific mass death, grief, and bereavement on a scale unknown to recent generations. Lucy Noakes’ new book, Dying for the Nation: Death, Grief and Bereavement in Wartime Britain, provides a timely, poignant insight into how an earlier generation coped with their own challenges of abrupt loss and emotional suffering during the dark days of the Second World War.
Oddly, despite a flourishing scholarship on social and cultural histories of dying in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Britain, very little has been written about death in Britain during the Second World War. Yet, Noakes points out that from a global perspective, and taking into account the numbers who died as a consequence of the war’s legacies of disease, homelessness, wounds, and hunger, the Second World War resulted in the deaths of more people than any other war in recorded history (p. 7). Within early twenty-first century British cultural memories of the war, however, little space has been made for representations of death, grief, or bereavement. Interminable and seemingly bombproof ‘Myth of the Blitz’ and ‘Dunkirk Spirit’ narratives continue to emphasize themes of unity, steadfastness, decency, and good humour at the expense of the very real trauma and loss that war brings. A refreshing addition to the field, this new social and cultural history of Britain during the Second World War places death and grief at the very heart of the nation at war.
Dying for the Nation advances new and important understandings of the emotional culture of death in wartime Britain. In particular, it establishes a rich sense of how this culture emerged out of the wreckage of the First World War. Several early chapters map profound shifts in grieving, mourning and burial practices, and emotional codes through which grief could be expressed and communicated in British society throughout the First World War and interwar periods. The main body of Dying for the Nation painstakingly connects these developments with the ways in which the demands of total war shaped a distinctive British ‘emotional economy’ between 1939 and 1945. The final chapter carries this story forward, tracing ways in which postwar society was allocated distinctive spaces and times for grieving, remembering, and commemorating the dead at a local and national level. Noakes’ analysis of both the making and afterlife of emotional culture in Second World War Britain ‘bookends’ this research beautifully and is a really exciting highlight of the book.
Three seams of intersecting core arguments run throughout Dying for the Nation. First, in a democracy fighting a ‘total’ war, maintaining the consent of the people was critical to sustaining the war effort. The state assumed responsibility for managing the dead through naming, burying (if possible) and honouring those who had sacrificed their lives. Noakes establishes the fundamental political importance of the dead as evidence of the state’s overall duties of care and respect for its citizens: ‘If badly managed, death was bad for morale; if managed well, the dead could continue to work for the war effort’. (p. 8). Second, the book places the ‘ordinary’ dead at the heart of the war effort. Interpreting the deaths of ‘ordinary’ British men, women, and children through a prism of shared national values of steadfastness and courage offered the public a valuable mechanism of coping with the demise of loved ones. Third, the Second World War is positioned here as central to the development of a specific ‘emotional economy’ that emphasized values of restraint and stoicism and deliberately asked citizens to self-manage articulation of grief in the wider service of the national war effort.
Drawing upon a wide range of official papers and cultural representations of death, grief, and bereavement in films, newspapers, magazines, and fiction, alongside intimate personal testimonies in diaries, letters, and memoirs, Noakes highlights a revealing disconnect between representations of what people were encouraged to feel and what they actually felt in wartime. An impressive scope of research encompasses the emotions of parents who lost children on the SS City of Benares, military personnel grieving the loss of comrades, relatives wondering how to mourn loved ones who went missing at sea, and the complicated feelings of individuals and communities as the shadows of impending bereavement gathered ever closer in the late 1930s. A rich and multi-dimensional analysis of how war, death, and grief pervaded the lives of individuals and societies throughout the first half of the twentieth century is thus proffered here. Reading Dying for the Nation as 2020 draws to a painful close, it strikes me that there is much that may be gained from this thoughtful book in terms of understanding our own emotional codes and management of grief and loss in this last appalling year. Overall, Noakes’ new book is a pleasure to read and a real gift to anyone who teaches or researches the social and cultural history of Britain and the Second World War.