A Broken Silence: Remembrance of the War Dead in Interwar and Second World War Britain.

Lucy Noakes: A Broken Silence: Remembrance of the War Dead in Interwar and Second

World War Britain.

When the social survey organisation Mass Observation was founded in 1937, one of its first

actions was to ask its panellists to record their experiences of, and feelings about, Armistice

Day. These illustrate both the uniform nature of remembrance ceremonies and the public

performance of emotions that was an integral part of these ceremonies, but also the diverse

range of subjective responses to these acts of commemoration. For some, the annual

anniversary of the armistice provided a means by which a public re-affirming of their

personal grief continued to act as a form of consolation and as an important stage in the

mourning process. For others, it was an unwelcome reminder of their loss; demands that they

publicly ‘remember’ their dead acting as a block to this mourning process. For still others it

was simply a public performance; one that it was important to be seen to participate in, but

which had little personal resonance. While interwar Britain may have been, as David

Cannadine has argued, ‘more obsessed with death than any other period in recent history’, it

was also a nation in which remembrance of the dead of the First World War, and the

mobilisation of this memory in the early years of the Second World War, was deeply

divisive. This paper examines the changing and contested nature of remembrance in the late

1930s and the early years of the Second World War, exploring the extent to which

the ‘broken silence’ of 1937, when the ceremony at Whitehall was disrupted by a lone

protestor, reflected a deeper divide in the range of emotional and political responses to

Armistice Day in 1930s Britain.