Coupons, Clothing and Class: The Rationing of Dress in Ireland, 1942–1948

Costume ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Orla Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
General Population ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
World War ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
Irish Context ◽  
Second World

This paper will explore how clothes rationing impacted upon the population of Ireland during the Second World War and how the restrictions were encountered by the general population. It allows for a reconsideration of the period with particular reference to notions of respectability and class, and how these were manifested in dress and fashion. It will also examine the concept of Dublin as a destination, both during and after the war, for the purchase of Irish manufactures and clothing types which remained scarce in Britain and on continental Europe. It will draw upon a diverse range of sources including the espionage reports provided to Winston Churchill by the Anglo-Irish writer, Elizabeth Bowen, contemporary fiction, memoirs, travelogues, government papers, newspaper reports and advertisements. These vivid accounts will reveal much about a period which has received little consideration from dress historians within the Irish context.

Elizabeth Bowen and Eudora Welty: Selected Correspondence

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-161
Author(s):  
Allan Hepburn
Keyword(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
Gustave Flaubert ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Eudora Welty ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
World War ◽  
Comprehensive Theory ◽  
Second World

Over her career, Elizabeth Bowen published ten novels, yet she left no comprehensive theory of the novel. This essay draws especially upon ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’ (1945), ‘The Technique of the Novel’ (1953), and ‘Truth and Fiction’ (1956), as well as opinions that Bowen expressed in her weekly book columns for The Tatler, to formulate her key perceptions of, and rules for, writing a novel. Bowen defined her ideas by drawing upon the empirical evidence of novels by Elizabeth Taylor, Olivia Manning, H.E. Bates, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and numerous others. She gave particular thought to ‘situation’, by which she means the central problematic or the crux of the story. The situation precedes and fuels plot. The Second World War, Bowen claimed in her essays and reviews, had a decisive influence on heroism and contemporary fiction by heightening its scale and its repertory of situations.

The Heroic Today: Elizabeth Bowen and the Technique of the Novel

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-71
Author(s):  
Allan Hepburn
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Gustave Flaubert ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
World War ◽  
Comprehensive Theory ◽  
Second World

Over her career, Elizabeth Bowen published ten novels, yet she left no comprehensive theory of the novel. This essay draws especially upon ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’ (1945), ‘The Technique of the Novel’ (1953), and ‘Truth and Fiction’ (1956), as well as opinions that Bowen expressed in her weekly book columns for The Tatler, to formulate her key perceptions of, and rules for, writing a novel. Bowen defined her ideas by drawing upon the empirical evidence of novels by Elizabeth Taylor, Olivia Manning, H.E. Bates, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and numerous others. She gave particular thought to ‘situation’, by which she means the central problematic or the crux of the story. The situation precedes and fuels plot. The Second World War, Bowen claimed in her essays and reviews, had a decisive influence on heroism and contemporary fiction by heightening its scale and its repertory of situations.

Urban commemoration and literature in post-Soviet L'viv: a comparative analysis with the Polish experience

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 637-654 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uilleam Blacker
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
Polish Experience ◽  
The City ◽  
Second World

This article analyzes how the Poles and Jews who disappeared from the western Ukrainian city of L'viv as a result of the Second World War are remembered in the city today. It examines a range of commemorative practices, from monuments and museums to themed cafes and literature, and analyzes how these practices interact to produce competing mnemonic narratives. In this respect, the article argues for an understanding of the city as a complex text consisting of a diverse range of mutually interdependent mnemonic media produced by a range of actors. The article focuses in particular on the ways in which Ukrainian nationalist narratives interact with the memory of the city's “lost others.” The article also seeks to understand L'viv‘s memory culture through comparison with a range of Polish cities that have faced similar problems with commemorating vanished communities, but have witnessed a deeper recognition of these communities than has been the case in L'viv. The article proposes reasons for the divergences between the memory cultures of L'viv and that found in Polish cities, and attempts to outline the gradual processes by which L'viv‘s Polish and Jewish pasts might become more widely integrated into the city's memory culture.

Food, the Emergency and the lower-class Irish body, c.1939–45

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryce Evans
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Export Market ◽  
World War ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
Market Disruption ◽  
Irish Government ◽  
Trade War ◽  
Second World

The ending of the Anglo-Irish Economic War (1932-8) is often represented as a watershed in British-Irish relations. However, it was soon followed by renewed trade hostility. Between 1940 and 1945, Winston Churchill subjected Ireland to an economic squeeze: the price of Irish neutrality in the Second World War. While the length of this trade war has generally been overlooked by historians, the effect of this ‘long’ Economic War on Irish public health has been similarly disregarded. This contribution argues that the Anglo-Irish economic war resulted in the mass slaughter of Irish herds due to the removal of the British export market. Market disruption had a significant knock-on effect on Irish public health, particularly in the countryside. Similarly, the British economic squeeze of the Second World War ensured that Ireland’s agricultural economy was denied fertilisers, feed, chemicals and tractors; modern productive aids that are essential to food production. The Irish government infamously introduced the ‘black loaf’ as wheat production wheat stalled, causing fears of a second Famine. Aggravated by a belatedly introduced rationing system, public health suffered.

The Clear and Present Danger

Worldview ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-24
Author(s):  
J. W. Fulbright
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
Clear And Present Danger ◽  
Second World

It is one of the perversities of human nature that people have a far greater capacity for enduring disasters than for preventing them, even when the danger is plain and imminent. Winston Churchill, for all his prescience and eloquence, was powerless to prevent the Second World War: He wrote in 1936 of an England “decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.” The question for us today is whether, we can succeed where Churchill failed—a tall order Indeed— by preventing disaster so as not to have to endure it.

The Womanpower Problem in Britain during the Second World War

1984 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 925-945 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold L. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Women Studies ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
The Status ◽  
War Effort ◽  
The Government ◽  
Second World ◽  
Status Of Women

At the national women's conference convened by the government in September 1943 Winston Churchill assured the women delegates that the contribution to the war effort by British women had ‘definitely altered those social and sex balances which years of convention had established’. His belief that the war had brought about profound changes in the status of women was shared by contemporary authors attempting to evaluate the effect of the war on British women. Studies written near the end of the war by Margaret Goldsmith and Gertrude Williams refer to a wartime ‘revolution’ in the position of women. Both authors defined this revolution primarily in terms of the changed position of women workers.

Marking Time: The British Danseur and the Second World War

2005 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Eliot
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
World War ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
British Nationalism ◽  
Second World ◽  
Marking Time

Few Britons could resist the powerful rhetoric of Winston Churchill, whose words to the House of Commons in June 1940 (Churchill 1989) called upon all men, women, and children to do their utmost to serve the war effort. During the worst of the bombings, from 1940 to 1941, in what came to be known as “the blitz,” London and its populace were transformed. J. B. Priestly noted that “for once, [we] felt free, companionable, even—except while waiting for the explosions—lighthearted.” Fear, anxiety, the sense of struggle, or so the story goes, pulled Londoners together and united them in a sense of camaraderie that broke down centuries-old class barriers (Ziegler 1995, 165–166).Among the commonly accepted myths of the British participation in the Second World War was this one—perpetuated by British authorities and some later historians—that all classes and all people were united in common cause against the enemy. While true on some levels, the picture of an island nation joined in communal sacrifice during the “People's War” masks the underlying societal anxieties that muffled differences of opinion and threatened those who did not adopt accepted notions of patriotism. Vera Brittain, writing at a key point during the world conflict, noted that the Nazi invasions of Europe “produced a rising clamour against unpopular minorities throughout England,” and that “both government and people are temporarily seized by a panic of suspicion” (Brittain 1941, 33). In his examination of the twentieth-century manifestations of British nationalism, Patrick Wright, for one, noted that exclusionary impulses, emerging under the threat of foreign invasion, were linked to subtle but prevalent patterns of anti-Semitism prior to and during the war years (Wright 1985).

A Thousand Years of History

2020 ◽  
pp. 7-28
Author(s):  
Stephen Wall
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
European Community ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Political Life ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
World War ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
National Institutions ◽  
Second World

Joining the European Community would, in the words of Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, be ‘the end of a thousand years of history’. Britain, as an island, was set apart from continental Europe both geographically, politically, and psychologically. It had fought off invasion and fought continental wars to prevent the formation of too-dominant continental alliances. But Britain’s economic and political life was inextricably bound up with that of the continent and its own monarchical dynasties were sometimes more foreign than domestic in origin. The English Reformation was a key definer of national identity and resistance to continental encroachment. The Second World War entrenched British confidence in the UK’s national institutions, which had stood against tyranny, by comparison with those on the continent that had been disgraced or destroyed. After the Second World War, Winston Churchill played a key role in the vision that became the European Community but he wanted to be ‘with’ it, not ‘of’ it.

The Victorian Countryside a Hundred Years On

Rural History ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-251
Author(s):  
DAVID R. STEAD
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Neolithic Period ◽  
World War ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second World

Volume VII of The Agrarian History of England and Wales completes a major publishing event. In 1956 R. H. Tawney chaired a meeting launching a series of eight volumes surveying the history of the English and Welsh countrysides from the Neolithic period to the beginning of the Second World War. The first, volume IV covering the years 1500 through 1640, appeared in 1967. This, the last and by far the largest book in the sequence, crowns the earlier achievements. Running to over 2,300 pages and published in two parts, volume VII is approximately twice the size – and price – of its immediate predecessors. If the physical presence of the book is impressive, the same comment applies to its content, elegantly edited by E. J. T. Collins, which covers a diverse range of topics, from King Edward potatoes to military underpants.

“Is Your Journey Really Necessary?”: Going Nowhere in Late Modernist London

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1600-1613 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Mackay
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
World War ◽  
Massive Scale ◽  
Mere Existence ◽  
The City ◽  
Modernist Fiction ◽  
Second World

This essay discusses civilian relations to space in the Second World War, focusing on late modernist fiction about wartime London. In novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Patrick Hamilton, and James Hanley, the modernist city has ceased to be the site of expansive, cosmopolitan opportunity it was for writers of the 1920s: permitting civilian death on a massive scale, the city is newly imagined as an anteroom to a brutal common death. Enforced immobility and coerced collectivity find expression in a recursive, subjectivist form that mimics the claustrophobic entrapments these novels describe. A pervasive sense that the mere existence of other people jeopardized one's own points to the limits of familiar stories about civilian solidarity in wartime.

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