Alan Allport won the 2021 HWA Non-fiction Crown Award for Britain at Bay, a fresh take on the Second World War which “changed our perspective, not just on Britain in the war but on British national identity and the way that we deploy history more generally,” as Clare Mulley, who chaired the judging panel, commented. Historia spoke to Alan about World War Two, writing history, and what he hopes people will take away from reading his book.
The HWA Non-fiction Crown celebrates the best in historical non-fiction writing. What does winning mean to you?
It’s a tremendous honour. Partly because of the quality of the other books which were shortlisted. And partly because my hope for Britain at Bay was to produce a book which would deliver a solid scholarly argument while also being accessible and interesting to the general reader. We academics don’t always do a great job of explaining our ideas to the public and prizes like the HWA Crown awards encourage us to do better!
An obvious question, but I’ll ask it: why do we need another history of Britain during the Second World War?
Clearly, it’s not a subject which has lacked for authors in the past. Yet it’s surprising how much of the quite basic story of the war remains vague or unknown to the general public. The ‘greatest hits’ of the war are endlessly retold – the Battle of Britain, D-Day, and so on – yet very important stories remain obscure.
For example, how many people know that Britain invaded Iran in 1941? An event which had enormous ramifications for the future of the Middle East – and is certainly well-remembered in that part of the world itself – yet we’ve almost totally forgotten about it. It was stories like that I wanted to illuminate as well as the better-known ones.
Britain at Bay is the first of two books on the subject from you. Why did you choose to end it in September 1941?
Well, it would be slightly disingenuous not to admit that the book stops there partly because I had to stop somewhere! But September 1941 does provide a useful midpoint at which to pause to reflect on where the story has reached and where it’s going.
It’s the anniversary of the second year of war. Already much has changed. Britain is now fighting in alliance with one partner, the USSR, and is about to acquire another even more powerful one, the United States.
But the war is also about to expand disastrously into South East Asia. In the second half of the war the issue will be less about avoiding total defeat than about shaping what victory will look like, both for Britain as an international imperial power and domestically as a nation seeking a new contract between government and the people.
Why do you think we’re still so fascinated by the Second World War?
The Second World War remains the reference point so many people turn to when they want to try to understand modern life and modern problems. And why not? It was arguably the biggest event ever – it certainly had consequences that continue to reverberate today in everything from party political life at home to global events overseas.
It also contains within it the panoramic sweep of human experience – glory and tragedy; beauty and horror. Life was lived at the extremes during the war and I think people still can’t help but wonder, “what would I have done had I been there?”
Why is now the time for your book to be published?
I began writing the book a year before Brexit and five years before the covid pandemic, so I can’t claim any special prescience in that regard. But it’s interesting how these enormous public dramas have cast new light on historical events.
Much of Britain at Bay is about the UK’s troubled but intimate relationship with continental Europe. It’s also about the relationship between ordinary people and government in times of crisis.
‘Blitz spirit’ has been invoked over and over again to interpret the experience and controversy of lockdown, so it’s more important than ever to look back and try to understand what actually happened in 1940 and how and why people behaved as they did to get a better sense of what we should expect today.
How do you approach research – and how do you know when you’ve done enough?
One of the main problems of writing a large synthetic work on a contemporary subject is trying to decide what you’re not going to write about, oddly. If you try to include everything and read everything not only will you never get finished but the result will probably be an incomprehensible jumble anyway. So I try to map out a structure for a book like Britain at Bay by deciding what are the stories that absolutely need telling and the arguments that absolutely must be made, and building around them.
There are a lot of very good wartime topics that simply had to be omitted or treated very briefly either because I didn’t feel I had anything new to say about them or simply because I couldn’t make them fit. The good thing about a two-book sequence however is that you get to double-back. So, for instance, Britain at Bay doesn’t have much to say about wartime India. But I will be dealing with India’s war in much more detail in the second volume because it’s impossible to understand the latter part of Britain’s war without it.
Did your research for Britain at Bay turn up anything unexpected?
I think one of the things that surprised me most was what learning more about Neville Chamberlain, Britain’s first wartime Prime Minister. Chamberlain is often treated as a naïve dupe or a pantomime villain when compared to his successor Winston Churchill. He is blamed for the disasters that occur in the first year of the war particularly.
Trying to understand Chamberlain and why he did what he did gave me a new understanding of the man which I tried to lay out in the book.
From a purely personal perspective he was not the most likeable historical figure. And he certainly made many mistakes. But I also think he doesn’t get enough credit for making tough, realistic decisions in very difficult circumstances and for laying the foundation for Britain’s ultimate success in the war.
What myths are we telling ourselves about the early part of the Second World War these days?
I describe the ‘Shire Folk’ myth in the introduction to the book which is the way that the British imagine themselves to have been rather like Tolkien’s Hobbits in 1939 – a simple, naïve, well-meaning, gentle, unmilitary people who just wanted to be left to get on with their own lives in peace. Which is a bit hard to square with a country which controlled one quarter of the world’s land surface and which was a military superpower! The Shire Folk myth is flattering and also useful because it seems to explain away early defeats in the war.
But the British were not Hobbits in the 1930s – neither so innocent nor, frankly, so nice. The UK was a powerful country with powerful allies which in many ways possessed huge advantages over the Axis powers.
So why things went so badly in 1940 is a complicated story involving many decisions made (some of them by lauded heroes such as Churchill) which is worth delving into in some detail.
If there were one thing you hope readers will take away from your book, what would it be?
I suppose it would be that ‘history’ is not ‘the past’ – history is the way we try to understand and interpret and make stories from the past. The past is unchanging; history is not. People were arguing about the history of the Second World War even while it was still going on and there never has been nor ever will be one fixed satisfactory interpretation of what happened and what lessons, if any, we should derive from it.
So it’s a natural and healthy thing to return to the events of the war periodically to look afresh at them and try to glean new things and inspect old stories from a new perspective.
And, just for fun, if you could time travel for a day, what time and place would you go to?
If I had not been a 20th-century historian I would have dearly loved to have studied the 11th century and so my dream Tardis trip would be to Hastings in 1066 to see what happened with my own eyes. So long as it was just for one day, mind. For all its problems, there is no point in history I would want to live in permanently other than this one!
Britain at Bay by Alan Allport was published by Profile Books on 3 September, 2020.
See more about the three books which won HWA Crown Awards in 2021.
The winners of the 2022 HWA Crowns will be announced on 23 November, 2022 with the longlists released on 21 September and the shortlists on 25 October.
You might enjoy some of Historia’s other features relating to the Second World War, such as:
Don’t mention the war! by Keith Lowe
How WWI veterans saved Britain’s treasures in WWII by Caroline Shenton
The women agents behind the D-Day invasion by Mara Timon
The Remarkable Women of WW2 by Clare Harvey
A different kind of WWII resistance by Deborah Swift
John F Kennedy, the ambassador’s second son by Susan Ronald
The Minister for Illusion: Goebbels and the German film industry by Catherine Hokin
Down the rabbit hole – to kill Hitler by Eric Lee
Images:
- Photo of Alan Allport supplied by Profile Books
- President Franklin D Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill after Divine Service on board HMS Prince Of Wales by LC Priest, August 1941: Imperial War Museums IWM Non-Commercial Licence ©IWM A 4816
- Neighbours chatting as normal despite the restrictions of their gas masks during a practice drill: Imperial War Museums IWM Non-Commercial Licence ©IWM HU 36137
- Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, makes a brief speech announcing “Peace in our Time” on his arrival at Heston Airport after his meeting with Hitler at Munich, 30 September 1938: Imperial War Museums IWM Non-Commercial Licence ©IWM D 2239
- The Village Street, Kersey, Suffolk from The Cottages and the Village Life of Rural England by PH Ditchfield, 1912: Flickr (public domain)
