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  We want large numbers of such men in Great Britain, who are British subjects, between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five, to come forward now and offer their services in order to make assurance [that an invasion will be repelled] doubly sure. The name of the new Force which is now to be raised will be ‘The Local Defence Volunteers’. This name describes its duties in three words … This is … a spare-time job, so there will be no need for any volunteer to abandon his present occupation … When on duty you will form part of the armed forces … You will not be paid, but you will receive uniform and will be armed … In order to volunteer, what you have to do is to give in your name at your local police station and then, as and when we want you, we will let you know … Here, then, is the opportunity for which so many of you have been waiting. Your loyal help, added to the arrangements which already exist, will make and keep our country safe.3

  Now there could be no turning back: eight months into the war, and four days after the commencement of Germany’s offensive in the West, Britain was set to launch the largest, most quixotic and, in a way, least militaristic volunteer army in its history.4

  The government, in truth, had never been keen on its formation, believing, to begin with, that such a force would find itself with far too little to do, and then later fearing that it might find itself trying to do far too much. There was one prominent political figure, however, who had supported the idea right from the start: Winston Churchill. On 8 October 1939, Churchill – then newly installed as First Lord of the Admiralty – had written to Sir Samuel Hoare, the Lord Privy Seal, with a proposal:

  Why do we not form a Home Guard of half-a-million men over forty (if they like to volunteer) and put all our elder stars at the head and in the structure of these new formations? Let these five hundred thousand men come along and push the young and active out of all their home billets. If uniforms are lacking, a brassard would suffice, and I am assured there are plenty of rifles at any rate.5

  Nothing came of the suggestion, however, as the military’s chiefs of staff were of the opinion that any danger of invasion or raids was slight so long as sufficient naval and air forces were guarding the sea approaches to Britain, and, as all of the belligerents settled into the six-month stalemate that came to be known as the ‘Phoney War’,6 it seemed as if Churchill’s notion of an army of ageing amateurs had been left to die a quiet death. Then, quite suddenly, things changed: on 9 April 1940, the Allies were startled by the first in a series of sudden and strikingly effective enemy thrusts when German units moved in to occupy Denmark and Norway; barely a month later, as the Allies were still struggling to come up with a suitable response to the events in Scandinavia, the main offensive began in earnest when Germany took control of both The Netherlands and Belgium. These developments transformed the public mood; now that it appeared possible that most, if not all, of the Channel coastline might soon be under German occupation, the prospect of England being invaded suddenly seemed startlingly real.

  Anxiety swiftly took the place of apathy. There were fears of a fifth column, and fears of airborne landings. Facts may have been scarce but there was an abundance of rumours, and soon newspapers were full of speculation regarding the possibility that enemy agents were already operating inside the nation. The intelligence division of the Ministry of Information, which had been set up to monitor civilian opinion and morale, noted that such talk of espionage and sabotage was causing widespread unease, and ‘the situation in a few places has become slightly hysterical’.7 The prospect of parachute landings was, if anything, the source of even greater anxiety. The Home Office distributed a distinctly unsettling circular to the public informing them that ‘German parachutists may land disguised as British policemen and Air Raid Wardens’,8 and The Times ran a sobering editorial warning its readers that these enemy paratroopers ‘might speak English quite well. Some might be sent over in civilian dress to act as spies. The general public must be alert.’9

  Something, clearly, had to be done, and, whatever it was, it had to be done quickly. The government had initially been reluctant to contemplate any policy which involved ordinary citizens being allowed to take matters into their own hands instead of relying on the orthodox forces of security and public order – namely, the Army and the police – but it soon found itself placed under mounting pressure from both Parliament and press to do precisely that.10 When reports started to reach the War Office concerning the appearance up and down the country of ‘bands of civilians … arming themselves with shotguns’,11 the time had arrived for a serious rethink. Without pausing to determine whether its ultimate goal was to sustain or suppress this burgeoning grass-roots activism, the War Office proceeded to improvise some plans and, as one observer put it, evoked ‘a new army out of nothingness’.12

  On Sunday, 12 May, at a hastily arranged meeting, a way forward was agreed. A breathless succession of ad hoc decisions followed throughout the next day until, at 8 p.m., all of the essential details had been assembled and readied for dispatch. It was originally intended that the first news of the novel force would be broadcast on the wireless 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 voluntee
rs 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

  The despised denims would be replaced during the autumn by ordinary Army battledress, yet the distribution of the new outfits proved almost as shambolic as that of the old. Whereas the denims had seemingly been designed for exceptionally well-upholstered figures, the battledress appeared to have been intended for ‘men of lamp-post silhouettes’, and it was not long before local tailors were busy carrying out covert conversions of two ‘thin’ suits into one to fit the somewhat fuller figure.25

  The wait for weapons was almost as long and, if anything, even more frustrating. While the War Office dithered, the new recruits, determined to equip themselves with something that resembled a firearm, again proceeded to improvise: an Essex unit, for example, made use of some old fowling-pieces, blunderbusses and cutlasses. One Lancashire battalion raided Manchester’s Belle Vue Zoo in order to take possession of some antique Snyder rifles, while another commandeered fifty Martini-Henry carbines from a Lancaster Boys’ Brigade unit (much to the latter’s annoyance), and a third acquired an impressive supply of six-foot spears. In Shropshire, a cache of rusty Crimean War cavalry carbines were returned to active service; and in London, fifty ancient Lee-Enfield rifles (used most recently by chorus boys in a patriotic tableaux) were liberated from the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.26 By the end of May the War Office had managed to purchase 75,000 First World War-vintage Ross rifles from Canada and 500,000 well-worn. 300 Springfield and Remington P14 and P17 rifles from the United States, but neither of these orders would arrive before late June or early July, so, in the meantime, recruits were advised to make do with ‘this thing they developed in Finland, called the “Molotov cocktail’”, which, they were assured, would prove most useful in the event of an invasion by enemy tanks.27

  The LDV seemed destined during the sterner days of that first summer to remain dogged by such delays and diversions. The rank and file grew resentful, the public sceptical and the press scornful.28 It was high time, argued the critics, that these amateur soldiers were taken seriously by professional strategists. Finally, in the middle of June, the beleaguered War Office deemed it prudent – in the light of plans for more than one hundred MPs to make a formal protest about its conduct29 – to appoint Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pown-all as Inspector-General of the LDV (‘a nice thing to take over,’ he grumbled as he contemplated this ‘rare dog’s dinner’).30 Pownall’s mission – and he had no choice but to accept it – was to turn the LDV into a well-organised, well-trained and effective fighting force. During the next two months, he duly attempted to rationalise the administration, speed up the supply of uniforms and guns, oversee the establishment of more appropriate methods of training and generally see to it that the force fitted as neatly as possible within the overall strategy for the conduct of the war.

  If Pownall was prepared to do everything that seemed necessary to make the members of the LDV look like proper soldiers, then it soon became evident that Winston Churchill was equally determined to ensure that they felt like proper soldiers. Ever since he had replaced the broken-spirited Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister on 10 May, Churchill’s energy and attention had, understandably, been diverted into other areas, but by the middle of June he had begun to involve himself more directly in the affairs of the LDV. There was something inevitable about the way in which he proceeded to impose his formidable personality on this fledgling force: it was, for him, a tailor-made enterprise – a proud, worthy, One Nation, volunteer army of ordinary Britons united in their determination to defend their homes and defeat the invader. It was, to a romantic such as Churchill, an irresistible enterprise. He had to make it his.<
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  On 22 June he asked the War Office to prepare for him a concise summary of the current LDV position.31 After considering its contents for a number of days, he came to the conclusion that one of the main problems with the force was its name. On 26 June he wrote a note to Eden, informing the Secretary of State for War that he did not ‘think much of the name Local Defence Volunteers for your very large new force’ – the word ‘local’, he explained, was ‘uninspiring’ – and he made it clear that he believed that it should be changed.32 Ever the shrewd populist, Churchill was right: the official title had signally failed to strike the right chord, and from the moment of its inception the force had been saddled with a number of nicknames – ‘Parashots’, ‘Parashooters’, ‘Parapotters’, ‘Fencibles’ – by the press,33 and a variety of unflattering epithets – ‘the Look, Duck and Vanish Brigade’, ‘the Long Dentured Veterans’, ‘the Last Desperate Venture’ – by the more sardonic sections of the public.34 Herbert Morrison, the Home Secretary, argued that a better name would be ‘Town Guard’ or ‘Civic Guard’, but Churchill bridled at the suggestion, exclaiming that such names struck him as sounding ‘too similar to the wild men of the French Revolution’. No, he declared, he had another, a better, name in mind for the LDV: his name, ‘Home Guard’.35

  Eden was far from keen, protesting that the term LDV ‘has now passed into current military jargon’, and that a million armbands bearing these initials had already been manufactured. ‘On the whole,’ he concluded, ‘I should prefer to hold by our existing name.’36 Duff Cooper, the Minister of Information, agreed with Eden, complaining that not only would a name change prove too costly, but also that the adoption of a new name whose initials were HG ‘would suggest association with the Horse Guards or Mr Wells’.37 Churchill was angered by such insolence: he was, after all, Prime Minister, and an astonishingly popular prime minister at that (the latest polls had revealed that, in spite of various setbacks, a remarkable 88 per cent of respondents continued to express confidence in his leadership),38 and he had grown accustomed to getting his own way.39 On 6 July he sent a curt note to Cooper, informing him in no uncertain terms that ‘I am going to have the name “Home Guard” adopted, and I hope you will, when notified, get the Press to put it across.’40 The War Office, however, continued to resist, and General Pownall, while acknowledging, grudgingly, that ‘“Home Guard” rolls better off the tongue and makes a better headline’, was similarly obstructive, regarding the proposal as a ‘pure Winstonian’ publicity manoeuvre which would end up costing, by his estimation, around £40,000. He confided to his diary that the Prime Minister ‘could well have left things alone!’41