War Torn Manchester, its newspapers and the Luftwaffe’s Christmas Blitz of 1940 By Guy Hodgson 1 CONTENTS PREFACE XX ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS XX INTRODUCTION XX PART I CHAPTER 1: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 1. ‘A JUMBLED-UP NONDESCRIPT PLACE’ X 2. THE CHRISTMAS BLITZ X CHAPTER 2: THE PRESS AND THE MYTHOLOGY AND THE BLITZ 1. ‘HARLOTS OF DEMOCRACY’ XX 2. CREATION OF THE MYTH XX CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY 1. APPROACHING THE SOURCES XX 2. NEWSPAPER PRODUCTION XX 3. DISSEMINATION XX 4. THE AUDIENCE XX 5. LIMITS OF THE RESEARCH XX PART II CHAPTER 4: THE NEWSPAPERS 1. PUTTING ON THE BATTLE DRESS XX 2. THE EDITORS XX 3. ‘SERIOUS AGAIN IN THE MORNING’ XX CHAPTER 5: CENSORSHIP 1. A BARRAGE OF D NOTICES XX 2. ‘NO HELP TO THE ENEMY BUT ARE THEY ANY USE TO US?’ XX 3. GUIDANCE TO EDITORS XX 4. FIT TO PRINT: CENSORSHIP AND THE MANCHESTER BLITZ XX 5. SELF CENSORSHIP AT THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN XX CHAPTER 6: PROPAGANDA AND THE MANAGEMENT OF OPINION 1. THE FIRST WORLD WAR MODEL XX 2. BEFORE THE MANCHESTER BLITZ XX 3. THE BLITZ EDITIONS XX 4. THE POST-BLITZ EDITIONS XX 5. ‘NO ONE DARE REPORT THE TEARS’ XX CHAPTER 7: ALL IN THIS TOGETHER? 1. THE SOCIAL DIVIDE XX 2. CRIME AND NEWSPAPER COVERAGE OF THE COURTS XX 2 4. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR XX 5. A TEMPLATE OF CHEERFULNESS XX CHAPTER 8: THE AFTERMATH OF CHRISTMAS 1940 1. OBSERVING THE MASSES XX 3. REPORT ON MANCHESTER AND LIVERPOOL XX 4. CONTEMPORARY REACTION XX 5. LOOKING BACK ON MANCHESTER’S BLITZ XX 6. LINGERING SUSPICION AND RUMOURS XX CHAPTER 9: ESCAPE AND THE MOVING NEWS AGENDA 1. SATISFYING THE AUDIENCE? XX 2. ENTERTAINING THE MASSES XX 3. WAR AND NON-WAR NEWS XX 4. PICCADILLY, MANCHESTER, OR PICCADILLY LONDON? XX 5. THE TIMES, DAILY MIRROR AND SALFORD CITY REPORTER XX CHAPTER 10: ‘USELESS TO BUY NEWSPAPERS’ 1. THE FRONT LINE XX 2. FINAL WORD XX BIBLIOGRAPHY XX APPENDICES 1. NEWSPAPER CIRCULATIONS XX 2. QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE NEWSPAPERS XX 3. NATIONAL NEWSPAPERS PRINTING IN MANCHESTER IN 1940 XX 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book owes its roots to a PhD studied at the University of Chester between 2008 and 2013. With thanks to my supervisors, Dr Michael Huggins and Professor Peter Gaunt, colleagues Michael Nally, Brendan O’Sullivan, Bernard Pratt, Dr Simon Roberts, Dr Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova, and the staff of Manchester Central and John Rylands Libraries. For Sheila, Josie and Alexandra. 4 PREFACE The role of the British press in the Second World War is frequently overlooked, which is a surprising omission given that, from the outset, newspapers were the main form of communication between the government and its people – a position that would be matched by radio during the conflict.1 Furthermore, Anderson has argued that the printing press was one of the key factors in the creation of nationhood as an ‘imagined community’, an essential prerequisite in the conducting of war on an industrial and national scale.2 He wrote: Regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.3 In more recent times, Gillespie argued that the earliest newspapers connected dispersed people to national discourses and the ‘mass ritual and ceremony of newspaper reading’ contributed to the construction of ideas of national community.4 The mythology of 1939-45 was either invented by Fleet Street or considerably advanced by it: the ‘triumph’ of Dunkirk was born in newspaper offices; the ‘few’ of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz spirit were pieces of Churchillian rhetoric that were embellished and given impetus by news pages. Yet, as Bingham observed: ‘Historians have, in fact, generally been reluctant to examine the press for insights into the past.’5 This book seeks to partly redress the balance by analysing Manchester’s newspapers before and after the city’s Christmas Blitz of 1940. This is 1 Martin Conboy, Journalism in Britain: A Historical Introduction (London: Sage, 2011), p. 26. 2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 3rd edn (London: Verso, 2006), pp. 5-7. 3 Ibid, p. 7. 4 Marie Gillespie, ‘Transnational Communications and Diaspora Communities’ in Ethnic Minorities and the Media, ed. by Simon Cottle (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000), 164- 78 (p. 167). 5 Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), p. 1. 5 predominantly a qualitative study, which has taken an interpretative and contextual approach to the newspaper headlines and copy, involving analysis of all sections, including news and non-news pages, editorials and readers’ letters. Quantitative methods have not been entirely neglected, however, and they are used to measure the proportion of war against non-war reports, the amount of coverage given to lighter items such as entertainment and sport, and to monitor news agendas. War, generally, is good news for newspapers. What is being reported has an increased significance, readers have a greater stake in what appears in print and, correspondingly, circulations rise, as they did for national and local newspapers between 1939 and 1945. Boyd-Barrett wrote: Classic warfare is the epitome of a ‘good story’, high in tension and drama, with complex main plots and sub-plots played out within traditional binary oppositions of aggressor and victim, winner and loser. While expensive to cover, warfare is commercially rewarding for the media, since its threat and unfolding ignite insatiable audience appetite for news.6 The effect of war on journalism, rather than the economics of journalism, is more complex. Webster stated that the media are needed for more than reporting acceptable news from the battlefield: ‘They are also central players in justifying war itself… especially so in democratic regimes.’7 The role of marshalling and maintaining morale on one’s own side, and attacking the opponent’s, ‘munitions of the mind’ ensured that journalists faced a dilemma in the Second World War if they wished to observe the military in action and record the first draft of history. 8 Knightley asked: If doing that as objectively and as truthfully as possible means writing and broadcasting stories damaging to their nation’s war effort, what are correspondents to do? Does the journalist within the correspondent prevail? Or 6 Oliver Boyd-Barrett, ‘Understanding the Second Casualty’, in Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime, ed. by S. Allan and B. Zelizer (London: Routledge, 2004), 25-42 (p. 26). 7 Frank Webster, ‘Information Warfare in an Age of Globalization’ in War and the Media, ed. ed. by Daya Kishan Thussu and Des Freedman (London: Sage, 2003), 57-69 (p. 65). 8 Susan L. Carruthers, The Media At War (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 55. 6 the patriot? And what if reporting patriotically involves telling lies? Is that journalism or propaganda?9 This is a question that is fundamental to this book: was the imperative for journalists between 1939 and 1945 to support the war effort in a ‘deliberate and systematic attempt to shape opinions’ or to hold the authorities to account?10 And if they did the latter would they be helping or hindering the fight against Adolf Hitler? This book will examine how Manchester’s newspapers came to terms with that dilemma, even if it was never resolved. 9 Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq, 5th edn (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), p. xi. 10 Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion, 5th edn (London: Sage, 2012), p. 289. 7 Introduction The author John Steinbeck was not complimentary when he reviewed the work of journalists in the Second World War. ‘We were all part of the war effort,’ he wrote. ‘We went along with it, and not only that, we abetted it.’ He added: ‘I don’t mean the correspondents were liars… It is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.’11 Steinbeck was a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune from June to December 1943 and in this relatively short time, his work followed that of other reporters in avoiding writing about the reality of war and, instead, he subscribed to an idealised view of the Allied war effort in which ‘our’ people were eternally stoic, ‘our’ soldiers impeccably brave and ‘our’ bombers unerringly accurate. British journalists were in the vanguard of that effort and several academics, such as Calder, Knightley, Curran and Seaton, noted that the writing of the myth of the war against Hitler began from the moment Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain formally announced the opening of hostilities on BBC radio on 3 September 1939.12 It encompassed, among what appear often to be other rose-tinted visions, Dunkirk, ‘we’re all in this together’, the ‘few’ of the Battle of Britain, genial Uncle Joe Stalin and, perhaps the most potent of all, the Blitz Spirit. This book will help bring a further understanding of the British press and the experience of bombing during the Second World War. It will examine the myth of that Blitz Spirit that has become so engrained in the UK’s popular perception that, 75 11 John Steinbeck, Once There was a War (New York: Viking, 1958), cited in Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 285. 12 Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz, (London: Cape, 1991); Knightley, First Casualty; J.