Keep Calm and Carry On? It’s a slogan we’ve lifted from our wartime past and adopted for the economic withering we face today. Despite the fact that it appears the poster itself was never actually issued to a Go To It ! Britain back in 1940, it brings alive a familiar past we think we know even as we peer into that historical distance with quizzical eyes.
Was Britain really braced for Nazi invasion, back then, during that long-ago summer ? The distance of time, the Euro and the pronouncements of Angela Merkel, all make that prospect now seem almost incredible. Were England’s farmers really thumbing the edges of their scythes and gazing up hopefully at the dusk sky whilst the Miss Marples of that world peeped out from behind lace curtains looking for Nuns in jackboots ? It seems, most evidently, that they were.
It was only later, after the invasion scare was over, that we learned the Minister responsible for urging the nation to keep calm was actually walking around with his own suicide draught in his pocket. Called his ‘ little bodkin’, Harold Nicholson had asked his local GP to arrange a little something he and his wife could take when Hitler’s Fallschirmjager came a-calling.
A member of that same government, Dr Hugh Dalton, actually went around his own Ministry of Economic Warfare taking an inventory to see how many shotguns and cartridges his staff could muster between them. Were they really going to crouch down behind ministerial desks and sell their lives dearly as they peppered the Master Race with buckshot ? Indeed, so they were.
And yet, even as Britain poured most of its beaches into sandbags and braced itself for the invasion that never came, Whitehall still busied itself, as it always had, with the politics of inter-service rivalry and the business of political favouritism and self-advancement: Hugh Dalton’s early days as head of the newly-created and top secret Special Operations Executive could have been made immeasurably easier if a little of the vitriol expanded on resentment and jealously at his newly-acquired responsibilities had been spent on constructive co-operation in what was then Britain’s hour of desperate need.
Instead Dalton and SOE were left to find their own path forward despite the implacable dislike of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) , the wilful obstructionism of The Admiralty and the bland, disdainful superiority of the Foreign Office.
It was to take more than a poster advocating national unity to help SOE stand on its own two feet. Some things, it seems, never change...