Few Britons could resist the powerful rhetoric of Winston Churchill, whose words to the House of Commons in June 1940 (Churchill 1989) called upon all men, women, and children to do their utmost to serve the war effort. During the worst of the bombings, from 1940 to 1941, in what came to be known as “the blitz,” London and its populace were transformed. J. B. Priestly noted that “for once, [we] felt free, companionable, even—except while waiting for the explosions—lighthearted.” Fear, anxiety, the sense of struggle, or so the story goes, pulled Londoners together and united them in a sense of camaraderie that broke down centuries-old class barriers (Ziegler 1995, 165–166).

Among the commonly accepted myths of the British participation in the Second World War was this one—perpetuated by British authorities and some later historians—that all classes and all people were united in common cause against the enemy. While true on some levels, the picture of an island nation joined in communal sacrifice during the “People's War” masks the underlying societal anxieties that muffled differences of opinion and threatened those who did not adopt accepted notions of patriotism. Vera Brittain, writing at a key point during the world conflict, noted that the Nazi invasions of Europe “produced a rising clamour against unpopular minorities throughout England,” and that “both government and people are temporarily seized by a panic of suspicion” (Brittain 1941, 33). In his examination of the twentieth-century manifestations of British nationalism, Patrick Wright, for one, noted that exclusionary impulses, emerging under the threat of foreign invasion, were linked to subtle but prevalent patterns of anti-Semitism prior to and during the war years (Wright 1985).