Dad’s Army: The Story of a Very British Comedy. Graham McCann

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ by the man most responsible for the shape it was set to take – namely, General Sir Walter Kirke, Commander-in-Chief of the Home Forces – but Anthony Eden, recognising an early opportunity to impose his presence upon the public’s consciousness, decided that he should be the one to address the nation on this subject. As he sat down on that Tuesday evening and faced the microphone, he had two aims in mind: the first was to demonstrate that the government was responsive to popular opinion, and the second was to promote a policy which he hoped would curb any public propensity for spontaneity. He succeeded in doing the former, but the latter would prove far harder to accomplish.¹³

      Before Eden’s broadcast had concluded, police stations up and down the country found themselves deluged with eager volunteers. On the Kent coast, the most threatened area, men were still queuing at midnight. Early the following morning the lines once again began to form, and throughout the rest of the day they grew longer and longer. Over the country as a whole 250,000 men – equal in number to the peacetime Regular Army – registered their names within the first twenty-four hours. One of those responsible for enrolling the applicants in Birmingham recalled his experience:

      The weather was sweltering and we were allotted the small decontamination room in the police station yard … Applicants seemed to form a never-ending stream. They started to queue up as soon as they could leave their work and by 11 p.m. there were still scores of them waiting to enrol. Every night we worked until the small hours of the morning, trying to get some sort of shape into the organisation in preparation for the next day’s rush. Within a few days the platoon was three or four hundred strong and it seemed that if every police station [in the city] were experiencing the same influx, all the male population of Birmingham would be enrolled within a week or two.¹⁴

      Form lagged behind content. The Local Defence Volunteers was launched without any staff, or funds, or premises of its own. An air of edgy amateurism accompanied its inception. No registration forms had been printed, so the police were simply instructed to ask each prospective new recruit four basic questions:

      (a) Are you familiar with firearms?

      (b) Occupation?

      (c) What military experience have you?

      (d) Are you prepared to serve away from your home?¹⁵

      The applicants, noted the novelist Ernest Raymond, received a less than fulsome welcome:

      The uniformed policeman behind his desk sighed as he said, ‘We can take your name and address. That’s all.’ A detective-inspector in mufti, whom I knew, explained this absence of fervour. ‘You’re about the hundred-and-fiftieth who’s come in so far, Mr Raymond, and it’s not yet half past nine. Ten per cent of ’em may be some use to Mr Eden but, lor’ luv-a-duck, we’ve had ’em stumping in more or less on crutches. We’ve taken their names but this is going to be Alexander’s rag-time army.’

      As I passed out through the sandbags I met three more volunteers about to file in through the crack. I knew them all. One was an elderly gentleman-farmer who’d brought his sporting gun … Another had his hunting dog with him … All explained that they were ‘joining up’ … so I prepared them for the worst, I said, ‘Well, don’t expect any welcome in there. They don’t love us. And get it over quickly. I rather suspected that if I stayed around too long, I’d be arrested for loitering.’¹⁶

      What momentum the fledgling LDV was able to gather originated from its untended but irrepressible new members. Eden’s initial message had asked merely for men to sign up and then wait (‘we will let you know’), but the first wave of volunteers, desperate to help frustrate the enemy’s knavish tricks, were in no mood to sit idly by. Like actors who had passed an audition for a play that had yet to be written, they gathered together and improvised. No later than a day after the call had come, the new men of the LDV had armed themselves with everything from antique shotguns and sabres to stout sticks and packets of pepper and, without waiting for official instructions, had started going out on patrol.

      Membership continued to grow at a remarkably rapid rate: by the end of May the total number of volunteers had risen to between 300,000 and 400,000, and by the end of the following month it would exceed 1,400,000 – around 1,200,000 more than any of the War Office mandarins had anticipated.¹⁷ Order did not need to be restored: it had yet to be created. A rough-and-ready administrative structure was duly scrambled into place,¹⁸ and Sir Edward Grigg (the joint Under-Secretary of State for War and the man to whom Eden had handed responsibility for the day-to-day running of the LDV) spelled out ‘the three main purposes for which the Local Defence Volunteers are wanted’:

      First, observation and information. We want the earliest possible information, either from observation posts or from patrols as to landings. The second purpose is to help, in the very earliest stages, in preventing movement by these enemy parties landed from the air, by blocking roads, by denying them access to means of movement, motors and so on, and by seeing that they are hemmed in as completely as possible from the moment they land. Their third purpose is to assist in patrolling and protecting vulnerable spots, of which there is a great number everywhere, particularly in certain parts of the country where the demands for local guard duties are really greater than the present forces can meet.¹⁹

      Grigg then proceeded to cloud his clarification by adding that, ‘I do not want to suggest that it is the duty of the War Office to issue instructions in detail as to how these Local Defence Volunteers should be used … If we started giving instructions in detail the whole organisation would be at once tied up in voluminous red tape. Their general function is far better left at the discretion of the local commands.’²⁰ Such cautious guidance, though welcomed as better than nothing, did little, in itself, to lift morale. Deeds were needed, not words. The two tangible things most keenly anticipated by the Volunteers were still not forthcoming: uniforms and weapons.

      Eden had stated quite clearly on 14 May that the LDV would ‘receive uniform and will be armed’. The following day, however, the War Office intervened to point out that for the time being only armbands bearing the stencilled initials ‘LDV’ would be available until a sufficient number of khaki denim two-piece overalls and extra field service caps could be manufactured (and no mention at all was made of any imminent issuing of weapons).²¹ A few enterprising individuals took matters into their own hands and fashioned their own versions of the LDV uniform: Sir Montague Burton, Leeds’s famous ‘popular’ tailor, promptly turned out 1,500 sets of well-cut battledress made from officers’ quality barathea cloth. The vast majority, however, were left to soldier on in civilian clothes amid fears that, with only a humble armband to identify them, they might end up being shot by invading Germans as francs tireurs.22 Eventually, after weeks of waiting,²³ official uniforms began arriving, but in some places the denims came without the caps while in other places the caps came without the denims. One commanding officer reflected on the sartorial chaos:

      The issue of denim clothing forms a memorable epoch in [the history of the LDV]. If a prize had been offered for the designer of garments that would caricature the human form and present it in its sloppiest and most slovenly aspect, the artist who conceived the … denim was in a class apart. Though marked with different size numbers, it was always a toss-up whether a man resembled an expectant mother or an attenuated scarecrow.²⁴

СКАЧАТЬ