I happened to catch the last episode of Ian Hislop’s series about the British Stiff Upper Lip on BBC2 last week which gave us the story behind the popular slogan that recently swept the nation.
As civilians ran from air raids, there was not much evidence of managing to keep calm in the 1936 HG Wells’ motion picture ’Things To Come’ in which an unnamed enemy is attacking an unspecified city.
But everyone knew it was really meant to symbolise London and the Germans and, in April 1939 a specially commissioned team of therapists warned that air attacks at home could inundate the health facilities with panicked people.
But what actually happened was rather different.
Stanley Baldwin’s Government advised the populace to draw on their own reserves. And with customary British understatement, they felt that the most effective way way to avoid civil chaos was to stick up posters.
The first: Your courage, resolution and cheerfulness will bring us victory.
and then the second: Freedom is in peril, defend it with all your might.
We don’t know who actually came up with the words ’Keep calm and carry on’ but this evocation of centuries of stiff upper lip was a third poster which was never actually utilised.
In the propaganda master plan, it was only intended to be used in the event of a disastrous airstrike or the invasion of Britain.
In 1940, the Battle of Britain saw the nightly air siege of London begin.
But the Londoners showed how well they could deal with it and our propaganda machine was in full swing.
A renowned iconic picture from the second World War was taken in October 1940 showing a flattened city with a milkman delivering through the wreckage with bold cheerfulness.
In fact, it’s really the photographer’s assistant, not a milkman. The image is an impressive mixture of fact and fiction. People felt a need to identify with it and were invited to aspire to the idyll.
The British philosophy is that you need to get on with life and carry on regardless - through loss, panic, exasperation. It’s what we do.
But the pre war fears of mass hysteria did not happen and that courageous, unflinching Blitz Spirit endures to this day.
Not everybody could possibly have acted as if they were acting in a Noel Coward film and indeed there was a widespread black market operating underneath the surface, but huge numbers of people did acquire strength from the stiff upper lip as a national characteristic.
