Pre-war Britain was a very different country

The values and qualities that once seemed to define Britishness will die with the wartime generation

I’ve just spent several years in the virtual company of the men and women of the war-time Royal Air Force, researching my latest book. The experience has left me with one overwhelming impression: if the past is another country, then the Britain of 1939-1945 is pretty much the antipodean opposite of the land we inhabit today. Not only did they do things differently there. They thought and felt in a way that bears little relation to the way we do now. Whether that makes us better or worse I leave up to you.

But what seems clear to me is that, in the space of less than a century, the British character has undergone a complete transformation. At the heart of the change is a fundamental shift in outlook, brought about by the switch in our dominant concerns from the collective to the particular and the triumph of the interests of the individual over those of the group.

In my book, I set out to define the spirit of the wartime RAF – its heart and soul. The story is told as much as possible through the testimony of those who served, male and female, at all levels. What is immediately striking is the deep sense of duty they all felt towards their country, whatever their politics or place in the social order.

Less than a generation earlier, their fathers and uncles had fought a terrible and pointless-seeming war, and in the Thirties pacifist feeling reached an all-time high. Yet off they went again, grudgingly perhaps, but with no fuss, to another conflict that was not of their making, united by a barely articulated assumption that Britain was essentially a good place with values that were worth dying for.

The men who led them were accorded a degree of respect they would never receive today. The competence of politicians might be questioned but not their motives, and the blunders of the top brass were treated with remarkable charity. In contemporary letters and diaries, there is a general reluctance to blame and an almost total absence of the vituperation that seethes in current public discourse.

In the face of death, upper lips rarely quivered. “It’s a bit tough to see fellows wiped off one by one,” wrote pilot George Barclay to his sister during the Battle of Britain. “But it’s remarkable how hardened one gets to people not coming back.”

Understatement was a fetish and boastfulness held in contempt. Officials sending aces on propaganda tours of aircraft factories complained that their work was made harder by the airmen’s fear of being thought to be “shooting a line”. It all feels a very long way from the licenced self-regard and emotional extravagance of today.

Pervading much of the testimony is a touching pleasure in small things that now seems innocent. A trip to the flicks or a plate of fish and chips were treats to be savoured. When boy met girl, proceedings usually moved slowly and a first kiss was a big deal.

The evidence suggests that to a remarkable degree wartime Britons lived up to the Continental caricature of Britishness: stoical, emotionally reticent and coolly patriotic. Of course, things were more complicated. Amid the testimony can be glimpsed the outlines of the different Britain that would emerge from the peace. In the RAF in particular, the automatic deference that authority had taken as its due before the war was under challenge. A senior officer sent on a tour of bases to report on discipline was alarmed by the “factory spirit” he discovered, with superiors being treated “rather as foremen of works”.

Sexual mores were changing. Increasingly the young looked to America for its entertainment and styles, on colourful display thanks to the Yank invasion. There would be no going back to pre-war monochrome. At the top, in the General Election of 1945, the mutual civility that had distinguished the coalition government crumbled and, led by Churchill, partisan insults flew.

The war finished a long chapter in British history. It marked the end of the Empire and the start of a steady loss of wealth and power. It was also the moment when a deep-rooted strain of Britishness began to wither. Dutiful, self-effacing and humble – the wartime generation will all be gone soon, and their values with them. We are going to miss them.

Patrick Bishop is the author of ‘Air Force Blue: The RAF In World War Two’, published this week