October 2010 Guest Editor Juliet Gardiner on The People's War...
Although Angus Calder’s The People’s War was published in 1969, it remains a magisterial work, an eminently readable and moving account of Britain’s Home Front that advances the view that the post war welfare state was the just entitlement for those who had ‘taken it’ during the Second World War.
The 1939-45 conflict was, for Britain, a total war ; no section of society remained untouched by military conscription, air raids, the shipping crisis and the war economy. This book not only states the great events and the leading figures, but also the oddities and the banalities of daily life, and in particular the parts played by ordinary people: air raid wardens and Home Guards, factory workers and farmers, housewives and pacifists. Above all, the book reveals how, in those six years, the British people came closer to discarding their social conventions than at any time since Cromwell's republic.
'Startlingly original when it first came out in 1969, this book has now become a classic. It gives a detailed, lively, humorous account of the British Home Front in the world war against Nazi Germany. Historians have accepted its conclusions; it is simple, clear and complete, the best sort of social history.' (Kirkus UK)
