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British Humour and the Second World War: ‘Keep Smiling Through’
No full textThis book skilfully combines cutting-edge historical research by leading and emerging researchers in the field to investigate the utilization of British humour during the Second World War as well as its legacy in British popular culture.
Juliette Pattinson and Linsey Robb bring together case studies that address a variety of situations in which humour was generated, including wartime jokes, films, radio, cartoons and private drawings, as well as post-war recollections, museum exhibitions and television comedy. By adopting an original interpretative framework of various wartime and post-war sites, this books opens up the possibility for a more variegated, richer analysis of Britain's wartime experience and its place thereafter in the cultural imagination.
Through the lens of humour, this book promises to add critical nuance to our understanding of the functioning of British wartime society. Covering sources such as The British Cartoon Archive, BBC World War II People's War Archive and The Ministry of Information, and including analysis of the lasting role of comedy in Britain's memories and depictions of the war, the result is a rich addition to existing literature of use to students and scholars studying the cultural history of war
Men, Masculinities and Male Culture in the Second World War
No full textThis edited collection brings together cutting-edge research on British masculinities and male culture, considering the myriad ways British men experienced, understood and remembered their exploits during the Second World War, as active combatants, prisoners and as civilian workers. It examines male identities, roles and representations in the armed forces, with particular focus on the RAF, army, volunteers for dangerous duties and prisoners of war, and on the home front, with case studies of reserved occupations and Bletchley Park, and examines the ways such roles have been remembered in post-war years in memoirs, film and memorials. As such this analysis of previously underexplored male experiences makes a major contribution to the historiography of Britain in the Second World War, as well as to socio-cultural history, cultural studies and gender studies
'I couldn't get a parrot, dear, so I bought a wren!': the British Cartoon Archive and wartime visual culture
No full textCommemorating Invisible Men : Reserved Occupations in Bronze and Stone
No full textThis chapter explores the emphases and omissions in the commemoration of British men on the home front in the Second World War, then and now. The materiality of memorials is considered against the historical theorisation of the construction of the People’s War, and the impact of the war on gender identities. The men who worked and survived on the home front constitute a highly diverse group, challenging to commemorative practices because of the multiplicity of roles encompassed, but also because of their relationship to military masculinity, and to women in both civilian and auxiliary occupations. This chapter thus explores the overt and covert hierarchies of war and challenges the existing models of the gender order in wartime to argue that the explanation for the invisibility of the civilian male at war and in subsequent commemoration must be sought in fuzzy not fixed gender boundaries
‘Bright chaps for hush-hush jobs’:masculinity, class and civilians in uniform at Bletchley Park
Get PDFDuring the Second World War the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), headquartered at the now famous Bletchley Park, was tasked with collecting, deciphering and reading Axis wireless communications traffic. Agency recruitment and management strategies were heavily coloured by internal, dominant notions of masculinity, which revolved around class and gender based assumptions within wider British society. Many men were drawn from Britain’s ancient universities in the inter-war period and masculinity in the agency was decidedly civilian character by 1939. However, a rapid wartime influx of military men posed a significant challenge to this internal masculine culture. The result was that GC&CS developed its own peculiar, wartime hierarchy of masculinity, a hybrid of the competing notions derived from its primary sources of recruitment
‘Divided between ITMA and a sense of terror’ : Humour and Remembering the War for the BBC People’s War Archive
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Taking “the jagged edges off”: British Naval Humour during the Second World War
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