Contemporary Accounts

A fuller picture of how Manchester print journalism functioned in the face of the Blitz is drawn by comparing what appeared in newsprint to other, sometimes private, contemporary accounts. Interviews with senior journalists of the time were impossible because the nature of the call-up meant that only those who were older than fighting age or unfit for service remained in the UK to make the key decisions concerning newspaper content.⁵⁰ Paper shortages imposed by war rationing may have contributed to the relatively few memos that were available, but the distinctive

editorial structure, in UK national newspaper terms, of the Manchester Guardian where decisions had to be relayed between Cross Street, Manchester, and the London office meant there was important correspondence.⁵¹

As Crozier was the editor in chief of the Manchester Guardian and set editorial policy, memos to and from him and his responses to readers’ letters are examined in detail. The Guardian Archive has his correspondence from 1932 to his death in 1944 but as the focus of this study is the period from December 1940 to February 1941 and the censorship framework was erected from the moment war was declared, greatest attention is paid to the period from the beginning of 1939 to the end of 1941. This allowed scrutiny of every one of his memos, many of them routine or mundane, but also containing responses to key moments, including Hitler’s

occupation of Czechoslovakia, the countdown to conflict and the frequent

interventions of the censor in the opening months of the war. The period in the 12

50 Calder, People’s War, p. 505.

51 Guardian Archive.

months after the Manchester Blitz also allowed time for Crozier and his staff to reflect on the Manchester Guardian’s coverage in what was a vital moment in the city’s history. Importantly for this thesis, the two-year examination period provides prime examples of self-censorship by Crozier.

The editor’s memos were complemented by the study of the correspondence of the London editor James Bone and the newspaper’s war correspondent Evelyn Montague, representing the most important actors in the Manchester Guardian’s coverage of the war in 1940 and 1941. This correspondence is sparse – there is only one surviving memo from Bone to Crozier written during the war – and there were similar limitations regarding Haley’s correspondence. Although he was editor of the Manchester Evening News, his appointment as general manager for the newspaper group meant his memos largely related to logistics rather than editorial policy. A typical memo to him from Crozier was:

Our three drivers who will be taking the papers to the stations ought to have some head protection if possible. I know the great difficulty of getting steel helmets, but is it possible that there may be three ARP officials in the office who could do without helmets better than drivers? I should say that these drivers merit head protection almost more than anyone else.⁵²

Other memos involving Haley referred to paper shortages, distribution difficulties and such like. Nevertheless, elsewhere in the archive, there are later memos beyond 1941 where Crozier referred to interventions from the censor and to verbal conversations in the offices of the Manchester Guardian. These, in conjunction with the more

pertinent material from Crozier et al, not only gave contemporary views but also revealed occasions when reports were spiked (rejected) or altered because of

government or self-censorship. Biographies and autobiographies of journalists, editors and proprietors were also studied, although the latter could not be considered

52 Guardian Archive, Crozier to Haley, 20 September 1940.

impartial and were always written with the benefit of hindsight. ‘This is not history;

this is my case,’ Winston Churchill said when he described his account of 1939-45, The Second World War.⁵³

Other contemporary accounts from non-journalists were studied.

Consideration was given to conducting a series of semi-structured interviews with people who had been alive during Manchester’s Blitz. Historians of the Holocaust have used oral history to radically shift perceptions, but, while the dreadful events in concentration camps would be burned on memories, the sharpness of recollections of more mundane day-to-day existence might be questionable in people who would be aged at least 85 now. There is also a doubt about the value of the views of people who would have been children or in their teens at the time and who may well have been sheltered from the grimmest news and darkest feelings by their parents. They would also have lacked an adult perception of the reporting in their newspapers. Instead, a variety of documentary sources, including contemporary written material, were examined, testing the accuracy of newspapers’ representation of popular morale and the extent to which editors and journalists correctly judged the popular mood in the way they reported the Manchester Blitz. This process was completed partly through the study of archive material at the Mass Observation Project, based at the University of Sussex, which has contemporary reports from diarists in Manchester. These were relatively short engagements and virtually everything the diarists wrote pertinent to their collection of material and the city’s reaction to the Blitz is included in this thesis.⁵⁴ There is also a small archive of Mancunian recollections at Stockport Library, Greater Manchester, which have been published on-line by the BBC as part of its WW2 People’s War compilation. These recollections were compiled more than

53 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, VIII, Never Despair: 1945-65, 2nd edn (London: Heinemann, 1967), p. 315; Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War (London: Cassell, 1952).

54 Mass Observation, University of Sussex.

60 years after the event, with all the potential for memory to be airbrushed by nostalgia that time span can imply, and while many revealed the usual narrative of fortitude, they also contained a significant number of accounts that suggested there were more complex responses that spoke of fear, anger and the questioning of whether continuing to wage war against Hitler was worth the suffering.⁵⁵

Finally, there was a series of weekly reports compiled, via the resources of Home Intelligence, by the Ministry of Information and distributed to the War Cabinet.

These are also to be found at the University of Sussex and, importantly for this thesis, included a report on the morale of the Manchester public conducted in January 1941, just days after the Christmas Blitz.⁵⁶ This is used extensively as it is an official document that would have been read by the Cabinet or officials close to it and the team of government reporters would have had no obvious reason to be biased. This report also included an appendix in which a Mancunian gave a detailed account of her reaction to the destruction. Again, virtually all her report is included in the thesis. The archive also includes a Home Intelligence report on the press written in May 1940 that monitored the public’s trust in their newspapers, why they read them and the demographics of the reading public. This report is also used extensively.

The research findings from this study, showing that popular perceptions of the time frequently countered the accepted version of British attitudes to the Blitz,

particularly the Home Intelligence report on Manchester’s morale referred to above, are compared to analysis of the selected contemporary newspapers in order to produce overall answers to the key questions at the heart of the thesis. Particular attention is given to newspaper reports with headlines that appeared to provide negative case

55 BBC, People’s War <http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar> [accessed 25-31 May 2008].

56 Mass Observation, FR 538.

analysis but, even though they hinted at criticism of the authorities in the aftermath of the Manchester Blitz, the copy below did not back up these headlines.