Dad’s Army: The Story of a Very British Comedy. Graham McCann
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duties each month. Once recruited, they could not leave before reaching the age of sixty-five (although existing volunteers had the right to resign before the new law took effect on 17 February 1942).66 This influx of ‘directed men’67 – the opprobrious term ‘conscript’ was avoided – changed the character of the organisation still further, erasing the last traces of the old LDV, moving beyond the original Corinthian esprit de corps and accelerating the transformation of an awkward political after-thought into an integral and well-regarded part of active Home Defence.
Some problems, however, proved more obdurate than others. One of these, as far as the men at the War Office were concerned, was women. Back in June 1940, the government – concerned, it was suggested, that other key voluntary organisations, such as the Women’s Voluntary Service, might in future be deprived of personnel due to increased ‘competition for a dwindling source of supply’68 – had ruled that ‘women cannot be enrolled in the L.D.V.’.69 The decision did nothing to deter the more determined of campaigners, such as the redoubtable Labour MP Edith Summerskill, who proceeded to form her own lobby group, Women’s Home Defence, and argued her case so persuasively and passionately that some of Whitehall’s frailest males branded her an ‘Amazonian’.70 In spite of the fact that Churchill agreed with Summerskill, and in spite of the fact that thousands of women had been contributing to the force from the very beginning as clerks, typists, telephonists, cooks and messengers, the War Office would hold out until April 1943, when, having exhausted all excuses, it finally agreed to relent and permit women to serve, in a limited capacity, as ‘Women’s Home Guard Auxiliaries’.71 ‘It was generally felt,’ recalled one Home Guard officer, ‘that these conditions should have been more generous and that women should have been treated with more consideration. To mention one grievance, they were not issued with uniforms and this, according to rumour, was for some political reason. They were without steel helmets and service respirators, although at “Action Stations” they worked alongside with, and [were] exposed to the same risks as, the men.’72
Weapons, or rather the scarcity of them, represented another persistent problem. Ever since the massive loss of weapons and equipment at Dunkirk, the production of standard military munitions had been fully taken up by the urgent needs of the regulars and nothing could be spared for the part-time force. Spirits did rise in 1941 when the Thompson (or ‘tommy’) sub-machine gun, a formidable weapon familiar to every film-goer from endless gangster movies, was issued, but soon fell again when it was promptly withdrawn and redistributed to the Commandos. Aside from a limited supply of outdated rifles, the Home Guard had to make do with bayonets, a variety of hazardous home-made grenades – such as the Woolworth or Thermos bomb (described by one disenchanted veteran as ‘just a lump of gelignite in a biscuit tin’)73 and the Sticky bomb (a glass flask filled with nitroglycerine and squeezed inside an adhesive-coated sock – ‘when throwing it, it was wise not to brush it against your clothes, for there it was liable to stick firmly, and blow up the thrower instead of the enemy objective’).74 Then there was the Sten gun, a cheaply-made but relatively effective weapon which was only made available at a gun-to-man ratio of one to four. It was summed up by one distinctly underwhelmed recuit as ‘a spout, a handle, and a tin box’.75 There were also such strange and cumbersome contraptions as the Northover projector, which cost under £10 to produce, fired grenades with the aid of a toy pistol cap and a black powder charge, and was likened by one volunteer to ‘a large drainpipe mounted on twin legs’.76 The most despised of all these weapons was, without any doubt, the pike. Although cheeky youths were known to cry out ‘Gadzooks!’ whenever pike-bearing Home Guards marched by, the 1940s version – consisting of a long metal gas-pipe with a spare bayonet spot-welded in one end – bore scant resemblance to its ancient forebears. Journalists dismissed them immediately as ‘worse than useless’ and ‘demoralising’,77 politicians criticised them as ‘an insult’,78 and incredulous quartermasters put them swiftly into storage. The frustration never faded: too many men, for too long a time, found themselves still unfamiliar with firearms.
A third abiding problem was red tape. In spite of the countless War Office assurances to the contrary, the Home Guard grew increasingly bureaucratic. ‘[T]oo much instructional paper – printed, cyclostyled, or typewritten – was produced and circulated,’ recalled one volunteer. ‘There seemed to be a paragraph and subparagraph to cover every tiniest event which could possibly happen, not only to every man, but to every buckle and bootlace. In consequence, the administration of Home Guard units tended to follow the placid, careful, and elaborate course of civil service routine, and many a man felt encouraged to take shelter behind an appropriate regulation rather than think and act for himself.’79 The more that the living reality of war seemed obscured by its paper description, the more enraged the most recalcitrant souls, such as George Orwell, became. ‘After two years,’ he wrote, ‘no real training has been done, no specialised tactics worked out, no battle positions fixed upon, no fortifications built – all this owing to endless changes of plan and complete vagueness as to what we are supposed to be aiming at … Nothing ever happens except continuous dithering, resulting in progressive disillusionment all round. The best one can hope is that it is much the same on the other side.’80
In spite of its myriad imperfections, however, the Home Guard went on to make a genuine difference. Ever since the start of the Blitz in September 1940, it had come to be valued not just, nor perhaps even primarily, as an anti-invasion force but also, and increasingly, as a vital contributor to civil defence – locating and extinguishing incendiary bombs, clearing rubble, guarding damaged banks, pubs and shops, directing traffic, assisting in rescue work, first aid and fire-fighting, and generally making itself useful in crisis situations. Tales of incompetence – often comic, occasionally tragic – would, inevitably, be told and retold (such as the time a bemused platoon from the 1st Berkshire Battalion mistook a distant cow’s swishing tail for some kind of inscrutable ‘dot-dash movement of a flag’, or the occasion when a Liverpool unit’s bid to train on a patch of waste land was thwarted by a gang of small boys who protested that ‘we was playing ‘ere first’),81 but the stories of compassion and courage were legion.82 One Buckinghamshire platoon, it was reported, ‘accommodated, fed and slept in their guardroom approximately 250 mothers and children turned out of their homes through time bombs. Half a dozen tired men of the night guard received and fed the refugees out of their rations, and then with umbrella and bowler hat went to town to do a “day’s work”.’83 Communities were comforted, spirits were lifted, and lives were saved.
For all its invaluable versatility, however, the self-image of the Home Guard remained resolutely that of a fighting force, so as the fears of invasion started to fade, the feelings of redundancy started to form, and it became increasingly necessary for the government to find ways of reassuring the Home Guard that it still meant something, and still mattered. In May 1942, for example, its second anniversary was marked by a host of measures intended to bolster its self-esteem: a day of parades and field-craft demonstrations – ‘Home Guard Sunday’ – was held. Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Paget, the Commander of the British Home Forces, paid public tribute both to the progress that the Home Guard had made, and to the ‘spirit of service and self-sacrifice’ shown by its members;84