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.In such circumstances anecdotalevidence is rarely tested, and ostensibly authoritative documentarysources assumed to be reliable; careful qualification is at a premium.Historiographical debate may not be ignored, but the reputation ofthe author, and the overall quality of the text, gives credence andcredibility to her/his exposition and explanation.Consequently, keytexts take their place in the pantheon of scholarship, granted thehallowed status of recommended reading by tutors happy to see thissecondary (tertiary?) literature digested by their students and then alltoo often incautiously regurgitated in other words, at whatever 146 THE CITY OF COVENTRYlevel, from undergraduate to post-doctoral, perpetuating a version ofevents which is for all intents and purposes an unchallengedorthodoxy.Two examples will suffice.In the highly readable,rightly prize-winning Never Again: Britain 1945-51, Peter Hennessydescribed the burning cities of 1940 with characteristic humanity andimagination (what did wartime Walthamstow smell like?).Whiletempering his judgement with a reminder that, the spirit of the Blitzcould and did prevail even in the most shattered circumstances , henevertheless depicted Southampton as broken in spirit.This hadbeen the conclusion of the Bishop of Winchester in early December,his tour of the port s devastated parishes revealing that morale hascollapsed& and everywhere there was fear. Dr Garbett s oft-quotedappraisal of the situation derives from Tom Harrisson s LivingThrough the Blitz.With Charles Madge, and to a lesser extentHumphrey Jennings, Harrisson had been the driving force behindMass Observation (MO), an organisation which in 1940 was onlythree years old and yet was a key source of information and advicefor the Home Intelligence Division within the Ministry ofInformation.The reliability of MO reports, not least with regard toSouthampton, will be considered at greater length.At present sufficeit to say that the methodology underpinning the observersintelligence gathering was seriously flawed if it existed at all.Drawing heavily upon Harrisson s personal experience as projectdirector, and with extensive use of the MO archive, Living Throughthe Blitz is an admirable, informative, and genuinely illuminatingbook.But the frequency with which it is quoted gives the impressionthat here is the definitive text, which it quite clearly is not.To be fairto Harrisson, over three decades later he did endeavour to qualify anyjudgement made at the time ( The strongest feeling in Southamptontoday is the feeling that Southampton is finished. ), offering a moremeasured conclusion, which Hennessy quoted at length in NeverAgain.Nevertheless, the overall image of Southampton in theaftermath of Blitz weekend , with ferocious attacks on successivenights (30 November and 1 December 1940), remains negative.Atleast Hennessy noted Harrisson s retrospective view that, even ifthere was a prevailing sense of Southampton being finished , thesame did not necessarily apply to many local residents, even thosekeenest to seek shelter in the surrounding countryside.While MarkDonnelly was similarly cautious in his succinct account of Britain in CODA REMEMBERING THE BLITZ 147the Second World War, Robert Mackay s rival textbook stated baldlythat in both Coventry and Southampton there was a similar failureof civic leadership.Without a hint of extenuating circumstances,Mackay painted an unflattering picture of traumatised city dwellersflooding out in to the rural hinterland although, to be fair, the term trekking , which, as we shall see, still retains pejorativeconnotations, was used in a wholly neutral fashion.6At the end of the day Mackay s depiction of the Blitz may belargely accurate, but selective use of a solitary source, namelyHarrisson s MO reports minus the retrospective commentary, doespresent a very crude picture of a highly complex sequence of events.In such circumstances it is understandable why communitiesboasting a proud civic culture take umbrage at the perpetuation of anunqualified, too often uncontested, negative image.It is actuallyvery easy to perpetuate a set of only partially correct or at worstwholly erroneous assumptions, and here I must confess my ownguilt: for too long the general impression I gave my students was thaton the whole local government in Coventry had responded prettywell to the Blitz, in contrast to generally inept crisis management inSouthampton.One possible explanation, I suggested, was that thestrength and organisation of the Coventry Labour Party, particularlyafter it embarked on thirty years of municipal control in 1937, wassuch as to ensure a relatively resilient response to the cataclysmicraid of 14-15 November 1940; perhaps the much looser politicalmachine of Southampton s governing Ratepayers Party,notwithstanding the towering presence of Alderman Sir SidneyKimber, undermined the efficiency of the emergency administrationfollowing the first heavy raid, on 23 November 1940.This analysisrevealed a lot more about me, not least my place of birth and politicalleanings, than it did about the comparative performances of eachlocal authority in the maelstrom of 1940-41.The first embarrassingly late - seeds of doubt were sown when AndrewMotion s biography of Philip Larkin revealed that Sidney, the poet sfather, was an open admirer of Hitler pre-war, and that, despite beingTown Clerk, with the first bombs he quickly vacated the familyhome for temporary accommodation in Warwick
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Tematy
IndexLensman 02 Smith, E E 'Doc' First Lensman
Złota Dynastia 05 Smith Karen Rose Serce ze złota
Sharon J. Smith The Young Activist's Guide to Building a Green Movement and Changing the World (2011)
Quinn Julia Kwartet Smythe Smith 03 Wszystkie nasze pocałunki
Smith, EE Doc Family D'Alembert 05 Appointment at Bloodstar
Smith Lisa Jane ÂŒwiat nocy 01 Dotyk Wampira(2)
Christina Smith [A Moon's Glo Riley's Secret (epub)
Smith Lisa Jane Tajemny kršg 1 Inicjacja. Zakładniczka
Stephanie Morris [Smith Sister's Triology 01] Better Late Than Never
Signs Wolf Granite Lake Wolves 01