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

… and innumerable fantastic evasions of the law.’⁴⁹ The age range (especially during that first year, when the official upper limit of sixty-five was not rigidly enforced) was remarkable, with raw adolescents mixing with seasoned veterans. One unit contained an elderly storyteller who claimed to have been nursed by Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, but, as this would have made him at least 104 years old by the time of the current war, the detail seems dubious. The real doyen is generally accepted to have been the sprightly octogenarian Alexander Taylor, an ex-company sergeant major in the Black Watch, who had first seen action in the Sudan during 1884–5, and had gone on to serve in South Africa and Flanders before finally answering Eden’s call, deliberately misremembering his date of birth, picking up a pitchfork and marching proudly off to help guard his local gasworks.⁵⁰

      Old soldiers such as Taylor were simply grateful for the chance, once again, to take part, but there were other veterans who were impatient not only to take part but also to take over. ‘The Home Guard,’ wrote George Orwell (then of the Primrose Hill platoon), ‘is the most anti-Fascist body existing in England at this moment, and at the same time is an astonishing phenomenon, a sort of People’s Army officered by Blimps.’⁵¹ The character of Colonel Blimp – the round-eyed, ruddy-faced, reactionary old windbag with the walrus moustache who regularly lectured the nation (‘Gad, sir … ’) from the confines of David Low’s satirical cartoons⁵² – had long been laughed at; now, in the flesh, he had to be lived with. It made sense for the Home Guard to make full use of the most experienced military men in its midst, and it was therefore no surprise that its earliest administrative appointments were weighted towards retired middle-and senior-ranking officers. Not all of the old grandees could serve in higher appointments – an East Sussex company had to accommodate no fewer than six retired generals, while one squad in Kensington-Belgravia consisted of eight former field-rank officers and one token civilian.⁵³ The War Office privately acknowledged that it was inevitable that problems would be caused by ‘the masses of retired officers who have joined up, who are all registering hard and say they know much better than anyone else how everything should be done’.⁵⁴ The urgent need for class to cohabit with class had led to a quelling of old conflicts. The presence of these haughty, hoary ex-officers, however, ensured that they would never be cancelled entirely. In one Devon village unit, for example, a fight broke out between a retired Army captain who, it was alleged, had ‘roped in his pals of like kind’, and a young man who had ‘asked why he hadn’t been invited to join’ and had been informed that he did not measure up to the required social standards.⁵⁵ The novelist A. G. Street noted how the most snobbish of old soldiers would turn up for training ‘clad in their old regimentals, pleading that the issue uniform did not fit’, and would make men ‘almost mutinous’ by regularly flaunting the full regalia of a distinguished military past:

      [I]n some cases it would seem that winning the war was a trivial thing compared with the really important one of always establishing rank and position. So they disobeyed orders and wore their old uniforms, just to prove to everybody that once they had been colonels. In fact, some of them, if given a choice between a heaven minus all class distinctions and a hell that insisted on them, would definitely prefer the latter.⁵⁶

      The War Office, straining to strike the right diplomatic note, took steps to settle things down. ‘Though this is a deeply united country,’ said Sir Edward Grigg, ‘it is immensely various; and the Home Guard reflects its almost infinite variety of habit and type. The home-bred quality must not be impaired in order to secure the uniformity and organisation which are necessary for armed forces of other sorts. We want the Home Guard to have a military status as unimpeachable as that of any Corps or Regiment … But we do not want it to be trained or strained beyond its powers as a voluntary spare-time Force.’⁵⁷ On 6 November 1940, it was announced in the House of Commons that the Home Guard, ‘which has hitherto been largely provisional in character’, was to be given ‘a firmer and more permanent shape’; it was now, like the Regular Army, to have commissioned officers and NCOs, a fixed organisation, systematic training and better uniforms (battledress, trench-capes, soft service caps and steel helmets) and weapons (automatic rifles, machine guns and grenades).⁵⁸ On 19 November, Grigg announced that, as ‘there had been criticism’ of some of the early appointments, all existing and future officers would now have to go before an independent selection board, which would ignore each man’s ‘political, business [and] social affiliations’ and consider only his ability ‘to command the confidence of all ranks under the special circumstances and conditions of the locality concerned’. Likening the force to ‘a lusty infant … strong of constitution, powerful of lung and avid, like all healthy infants, for supplies’, he promised to remain attentive to its needs. ‘It is Britain incarnate,’ he declared, ‘an epitome of British character in its gift for comradeship in trouble, its resourcefulness at need, its deep love of its own land, and its surging anger at the thought that any invader should set foot on our soil.’ No one, Grigg insisted, wanted the Home Guard to lose the ‘free and easy, home-spun, moorland, village-green, workshop or pithead character [that was] essential to its strength and happiness’, but it had grown so fast – ‘like a mustard tree’ – that it now required ‘sympathetic attention to its needs and difficulties’ in order for it to become truly ‘efficient in its own way as a voluntary, auxiliary, part-time Force’.⁵⁹

      Now that the Home Guard had won the War Office’s attention it was determined never to lose it. ‘They are a troublesome and querulous party,’ moaned General Pownall to his diary. ‘There is mighty little pleasing them, and the minority is always noisy.’⁶⁰ This constant carping was in fact their one reliable weapon. ‘The Home Guard always groused,’ acknowledged one former member. ‘Grousing is a useful vent for what otherwise might become a disruptive pressure of opinion. And in the Home Guard it was almost always directed to a justifiable purpose – the attainment of higher efficiency. “Give us more and better arms, equipment, instruction, practice, drill, field exercises, range-firing, anything and everything which will make us better soldiers”: that formed the burden of most Home Guard grousing.’⁶¹ Whenever prominent volunteers did not trust the War Office to act upon some particular request, they would simply go straight to the top and appeal directly to the ever-sympathetic Churchill. Pownall was well aware of which way the wind was blowing: ‘The H.G. are voters first and soldiers afterwards,’ he observed. ‘What they think they need, if they say so loudly enough, they will get.’⁶²

      Pownall had never been happy in his onerous role as the Home Guard’s Inspector-General. In October, Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Eastwood⁶³ – a younger man championed by Churchill – took over the Home Guard and the changes continued to come. In November, Eastwood was ‘upgraded’ to the new position of Director-General and handed a more powerful directorate within the War Office.⁶⁴ The first half of 1941 saw a marked tightening-up of Home Guard organisation, as well as far more active involvement by regulars in administration and training. The first anniversary of the force was marked in May with a morale-boosting message of congratulation from King George VI, who also invited volunteers from various London units to stand on sentry duty at Buckingham Palace.⁶⁵ In November, it was announced that conscription would be introduced in order to keep the Home Guard up to strength. Under the National Service (No. 2) Act, all male civilians aged between eighteen and fifty-one could, from January 1942, be ordered