Dad’s Army: The Story of a Very British Comedy. Graham McCann

– to appoint Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pown-all as Inspector-General of the LDV (‘a nice thing to take over,’ he grumbled as he contemplated this ‘rare dog’s dinner’).³⁰ Pownall’s mission – and he had no choice but to accept it – was to turn the LDV into a well-organised, well-trained and effective fighting force. During the next two months, he duly attempted to rationalise the administration, speed up the supply of uniforms and guns, oversee the establishment of more appropriate methods of training and generally see to it that the force fitted as neatly as possible within the overall strategy for the conduct of the war.

      If Pownall was prepared to do everything that seemed necessary to make the members of the LDV look like proper soldiers, then it soon became evident that Winston Churchill was equally determined to ensure that they felt like proper soldiers. Ever since he had replaced the broken-spirited Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister on 10 May, Churchill’s energy and attention had, understandably, been diverted into other areas, but by the middle of June he had begun to involve himself more directly in the affairs of the LDV. There was something inevitable about the way in which he proceeded to impose his formidable personality on this fledgling force: it was, for him, a tailor-made enterprise – a proud, worthy, One Nation, volunteer army of ordinary Britons united in their determination to defend their homes and defeat the invader. It was, to a romantic such as Churchill, an irresistible enterprise. He had to make it his.

      On 22 June he asked the War Office to prepare for him a concise summary of the current LDV position.³¹ After considering its contents for a number of days, he came to the conclusion that one of the main problems with the force was its name. On 26 June he wrote a note to Eden, informing the Secretary of State for War that he did not ‘think much of the name Local Defence Volunteers for your very large new force’ – the word ‘local’, he explained, was ‘uninspiring’ – and he made it clear that he believed that it should be changed.³² Ever the shrewd populist, Churchill was right: the official title had signally failed to strike the right chord, and from the moment of its inception the force had been saddled with a number of nicknames – ‘Parashots’, ‘Parashooters’, ‘Parapotters’, ‘Fencibles’ – by the press,³³ and a variety of unflattering epithets – ‘the Look, Duck and Vanish Brigade’, ‘the Long Dentured Veterans’, ‘the Last Desperate Venture’ – by the more sardonic sections of the public.³⁴ Herbert Morrison, the Home Secretary, argued that a better name would be ‘Town Guard’ or ‘Civic Guard’, but Churchill bridled at the suggestion, exclaiming that such names struck him as sounding ‘too similar to the wild men of the French Revolution’. No, he declared, he had another, a better, name in mind for the LDV: his name, ‘Home Guard’.³⁵

      Eden was far from keen, protesting that the term LDV ‘has now passed into current military jargon’, and that a million armbands bearing these initials had already been manufactured. ‘On the whole,’ he concluded, ‘I should prefer to hold by our existing name.’³⁶ Duff Cooper, the Minister of Information, agreed with Eden, complaining that not only would a name change prove too costly, but also that the adoption of a new name whose initials were HG ‘would suggest association with the Horse Guards or Mr Wells’.³⁷ Churchill was angered by such insolence: he was, after all, Prime Minister, and an astonishingly popular prime minister at that (the latest polls had revealed that, in spite of various setbacks, a remarkable 88 per cent of respondents continued to express confidence in his leadership),³⁸ and he had grown accustomed to getting his own way.³⁹ On 6 July he sent a curt note to Cooper, informing him in no uncertain terms that ‘I am going to have the name “Home Guard” adopted, and I hope you will, when notified, get the Press to put it across.’⁴⁰ The War Office, however, continued to resist, and General Pownall, while acknowledging, grudgingly, that ‘“Home Guard” rolls better off the tongue and makes a better headline’, was similarly obstructive, regarding the proposal as a ‘pure Winstonian’ publicity manoeuvre which would end up costing, by his estimation, around £40,000. He confided to his diary that the Prime Minister ‘could well have left things alone!’⁴¹

      Churchill chose simply to ignore the objections, making a point of mentioning his preferred new name whenever and wherever he had occasion either to meet or to speak about the LDV. On 14 July, for example, he seized on the opportunity to broadcast the name to the nation, referring in passing to the existence ‘behind the Regular Army’ of ‘more than a million of the LDV, or, as they are much better called, the Home Guard’.⁴² Further resistance was futile. Churchill, as one of his colleagues freely conceded, possessed ‘a quite extraordinary capacity … for expressing in Elizabethan English the sentiments of the public’,⁴³ and there could only be one winner in this, or any other, war of words. On 22 July, Eden, after another awkward meeting with Churchill, wrote despairingly in his diary: ‘We discussed LDV. He was still determined to change the name to Home Guard. I told him that neither officers nor men wanted the change, but he insisted.’⁴⁴

      Churchill had won. On 23 July 1940, the Local Defence Volunteers officially became the Home Guard.⁴⁵ From this moment on, the force would bear an unmistakable Churchillian signature. Sturdy, patriotic, loyal and dependable, the Home Guard, just like its spiritual leader, had ‘nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’, but was determined to achieve victory ‘however long and hard the road may be’.⁴⁶ The LDV appealed to the head, the Home Guard to the heart. Writers, drawn in by its rich composition, found it an easy force to eulogise and, in some cases, romanticise. C. Day Lewis, for example, wrote a lyrical account of how he had helped ‘to guard the star-lit village’,⁴⁷ while J. B. Priestley, in one of his regular BBC broadcasts, likened the first night that he shared on guard with ‘a parson, a bailiff, a builder, farmers and farm labourers’ to ‘one of those rich chapters of Thomas Hardy’s fiction in which his rustics meet in the gathering darkness of some Wessex hillside’:

      I think the countryman knows, without being told, that we hold our lives here, as we hold our farms, upon certain terms. One of those terms is that while wars still continue, while one nation is ready to hurl its armed men at another, you must if necessary stand up and fight for your own. And this decision comes from the natural piety of simple but sane men. Such men, you will notice, are happier now than the men who have lost that natural piety.

      Well, as we talked on our post on the hilltop, we watched the dusk deepen in the valleys below, when our women-folk listened to the news as they knitted by the hearth, and we remembered that these were our homes and that now at any time they might be blazing ruins, and that half-crazy German youths, in whose empty eyes the idea of honour and glory seems to include every form of beastliness, might soon be let loose down there.⁴⁸

      There was nothing but society in the Home Guard. For the more retiring or aloof of individuals, moving straight from a pinched and hidebound privacy to a bold and busy community, the first rush of novelty proved acute. The poet John Lehmann set off to his local headquarters cradling ‘a volume of poems or a novel by Conrad’, but it was not long before he found himself listening intently instead ‘to dramatic detail of the more intimate side of village life that had been shrewdly and silently absorbed by the carpenter or builder in the course of their