When the United States joined the Second World War there was concern, at the highest levels of UK government, about resisting US-style racial segregation on British soil. Britain’s racism operated very differently and there was a concern that allowing the US’s particularly crude form of exclusion in the UK would aggravate colonial visitors and soldiers. At one stage it was seriously suggested, by the future prime minister Harold Macmillan among others, that black soldiers under British command wear Union Jack badges, so Americans could distinguish between those they might discriminate against and those they should leave to the British.
When the secretary of state for dominion affairs, Viscount Cranborne, complained that one of his black staff had been refused entry to a restaurant on the insistence of white Americans, Winston Churchill replied: “That’s all right: if he takes his banjo with him they’ll think he’s one of the band.”
But the one place British and American racial fault lines met was miscegenation. In July 1942 the chief constable of Oxford insisted: “Every step must be taken to stop British women misconducting themselves with coloured troops, if for no other reason than that we do not desire to have a certain proportion of the population semi-coloured, in rural districts, in this country in the future.” Herbert Morrison, the Labour home secretary through the war years and Peter Mandelson’s grandfather, expressed his fears about the “procreation of half-caste children” predicting that they would represent a “difficult social problem”.
Steve McQueen’s latest film, Blitz, is told largely through the eyes of one of those “social problems” – a nine-year-old mixed-race boy from Stepney called George Hanway (Elliott Heffernan). It is set over three nights in September 1940 (before the Americans joined the war), during the intensive bombing campaign commonly referred to as the Blitz. George’s father, Marcus, who is from Grenada, is deported before George is born, having been arrested after defending himself against a racist attack. George’s mother, a white English woman, Rita Hanway (Saoirse Ronan), raises George alone along with her father, Gerald (the Jam’s Paul Weller).
The story unfolds as Rita grudgingly evacuates a reluctant and deeply resentful George for his safety and then follows two arcs. One sees George, a wilful, shy and resourceful child, leap from the train taking him to the countryside only to spend the next two nights trying to find his way back to his mum. Along the way he joins another group of child absconders on a train, and is taken care of by a Yoruba warden named Ife (Benjamin Clémentine, another musician) from the Gold Coast. He finds himself conscripted by a gang of thieving villains, and becomes an accidental hero, saving several people from drowning in an underground shelter.
The other story arc sees Rita at work in the munitions factory, singing on the BBC for a radio programme aimed at keeping up morale by showcasing talented people from the factory floor, going for a night out with her workmates, volunteering at a shelter run by a Jewish socialist and finally, on hearing that George has absconded, searching for her son.
And the whole time the bombs keep coming: huge parcels of death and destruction, swivelling from the night sky to land, falling indiscriminately and delivering fire, misery, terror and chaos to a fearful capital.
Almost 80 years after its end, the Second World War remains central to Western patriotic myths. America has its Greatest Generation and Rosie the Riveter; Russia still refers to it as the Great Patriotic War. The nostalgia inherent in these “narratives” has currency today. (When Ukraine occupied the Russian town of Sudzha this summer the Kremlin was quick to conjure the hurts of the Second World War.) Britain is no different in this regard, which is why Rishi Sunak leaving the D-Day commemoration early became such an issue during the election.
The Blitz is a potent element of our myth. Short for the German Blitzkrieg (lightning war) it evokes an iconic episode in British history, combining resilience, unity, patriotism and camaraderie all rolled up in a single “spirit”. Invoked by the Brexit campaign as the means by which we might endure whatever hardships came as a result of leaving the European Union, its champions in that case failed to grasp that this was also a moment of national terror inflicted on the country from the outside – we didn’t vote to be bombed.
With the Nazis occupying most of Europe, from France to Poland, and determined to reduce London to rubble, the Americans remained on the sidelines and defeat was still a very real possibility. “On the afternoon of 7 September [1940], with Göring watching from the cliffs of the Pas de Calais, the Luftwaffe sent over a thousand aircraft in a massive attack,” writes Antony Beevor in The Second World War. “The smoke from the fierce fires caused by incendiaries guided the following waves of bombers to the target area.”
The film certainly gives a sense of that mood: the rush to the shelters, Eastenders singing “Show Me the Way to Go Home” while the ground above them shakes, only to emerge to survey the devastation of their homes and communities. The women (who could not obtain stockings, as nylon production was redirected into the war effort) painting the seams of tights on their bare legs before going out for the night. The foreman exhorting munitions factory workers to redouble their efforts for “our boys”.
But it also stress tests that sense of national esprit de corps in the face of both pre-existing and emerging conflicts, suggesting that the Second Word War was not simply a time of uncomplicated national unity. The Nazis may have presented the country with a morally straightforward enemy to unite against – and the bombs forced people to shelter, regardless of their differences. But the differences that, over the previous 20 years, had galvanised the Suffragettes to fight for the vote, the unions to go on general strike, and the Irish and several Caribbean colonies to varying degrees of insurrection, had not gone away. Winston Churchill may have been a war hero, but at the first chance the electorate had to kick him out, they did so emphatically.
During the Second World War, Sonya Rose argues in Which People’s War?, British people recognised on an almost primal level that “we are all in this together” against the Nazis. But “once who the ‘we’ is, and what ‘together’ means, are specified, the singularity of that identity is exposed as being false… they did not agree as to what it meant to be British, or what it meant to be a citizen… The pull to unity was haunted by the spectre of division and difference.”
The issue of racism is peppered throughout Blitz, from casual insults launched at George in the street and whispered comments about Rita in the pub (“She’s damaged goods now she’s got that monkey to look after”) to a confrontation between a white couple and a Sikh family in a shelter – not to mention the incident that gets Marcus deported. In a moment, arguably overladen with symbolism, Ife comes across George while the boy is staring at images of Africa and India in the Empire Arcade.
Women, now more able to work, particularly at a time when many of the men are away, were less reliant on parents, husbands or boyfriends for money and had more financial, social and sexual agency. One summary from Mass Observation, a national survey studying the everyday lives of British people, which ran from shortly before the war to shortly afterwards, stated: “Many girls [aged 16-18] today are leading more or less adult lives; they work in factories and offices, doing jobs with much responsibility. As a corollary to this new responsibility they demand the right to live adult lives in their spare time.” When a sailor offers to buy Rita’s friend a drink, she tells him she has her own money and can buy her own (in pursuit of potential romance, she subsequently relents).
In one of a handful of musical interludes in the film there is a brief break from the tribulations of working-class life to see the high society at play – quaffing champagne in fancy threads and fine humour as they dance to a jazz band. But, in the words of the 17th-century poet and dramatist James Shirley, death is a leveller:
The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against Fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings
We revisit the scene after the bombs have dropped to see the club turned into a huge morgue, the rich dead where they sat in all their finery only to have their corpses mocked and robbed by the villains who have effectively kidnapped George.
But it is in those moments when gender and class intersect on the factory floor that we see “the spectre of division and difference” become most apparent and vividly portrayed. Female workers are in a constant state of insubordination to the male foreman: one raises her arse to him after he chides them for slacking; when Rita discovers George is missing she walks out during the middle of a shift telling him to “stick your job up your jacksie”. The moment she finishes her song live on the BBC, a few of her fellow workers jump on stage, grab the mic, decry the lack of air-raid shelters and start a chant to open up the Underground, leaving the upper-class BBC presenter livid and the foreman embarrassed.
This is a feature film, not a documentary. There is a spine of truth to most of the plot points: the government was initially reluctant to endorse people taking shelter in the Underground, but they went anyway; at least one station was flooded due to bombing; there were gangs of looters and gang robbers. As such it is best understood within the tradition of Andrea Levy’s Small Island or Caryl Phillips’ Crossing the River: gentle, if unmistakeable, interventions that seek to recalibrate our nostalgia without indicting it. Blitz is not as strident in its message as Rachid Bouchareb’s Indigènes – about North African soldiers helping to liberate France – but is more inclusive and critical in its meaning than the depictions of wartime Britain that we are used to.
There is plenty of material here for the film critics, who have been comparing Blitz (with lukewarm appreciation) to McQueen’s previous films. But there will be precious little for the culture warriors who prefer the popular myth of communal belonging that withstood diversity and conflict – though that will not stop them defending nostalgia from the impurities of plurality and critique. Blitz not only stress tests the fragility of Britain’s national identity, but interrogates our appetite to review our historical imagination through a different lens.
“Blitz” is in cinemas now. Gary Younge discusses national identity and the Second World War on this week’s Culture podcast with Tom Gatti. Listen to that here.
[See also: Is American conservatism over?]
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This article appears in the 30 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, American Horror Story